by Dick Francis
‘Long story.’
‘Hm. Will your man get us some coffee?’
‘Ask him… he’ll be in the workshop. Intercom over there.’ I nodded towards the far door and wished I hadn’t. My whole brain felt like a bruise.
Charlie talked to Owen on the intercom and Owen came up with his ultra polite face and messed around with filters in the kitchen.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Charlie asked.
‘Knocked out, drunk and…’ I stopped.
‘And what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You need a doctor.’
‘I saw a police surgeon. Or rather… he saw me.’
‘You can’t see the state of your eyes,’ Charlie said seriously. ‘And whether you like it or not, I’m getting you a doctor.’ He went away to the kitchen to consult Owen and I heard the extension bell there tinkling as he kept his promise. He came back.
‘What’s wrong with my eyes?’
‘Pinpoint pupils and glassy daze.’
‘Charming.’
Owen brought the coffee, which smelled fine, but I found I could scarcely drink it. Both men looked at me with what I could only call concern.
‘How did you get like this?’ Charlie asked.
‘Shall I go, sir?’ Owen said politely.
‘No. Sit down, Owen. You may as well know too…’ He sat comfortably in a small armchair, neither perching on the front nor lolling at ease in the depths. The compromise of Owen’s attitude to me was what made him above price, his calm understanding that although I paid for work done, we each retained equal dignity in the transaction. I had employed him for less than a year: I hoped he would stay till he dropped.
‘I went down to Jody Leeds’ stable, last night, after dark,’ I said. ‘I had no right at all to be there. Jody and two other men found me in one of the boxes looking at a horse. There was a bit of a struggle and I banged my head… on the manger, I think… and got knocked out.’
I stopped for breath. My audience said nothing at all.
‘When I woke up, I was sitting on a pavement in Soho, dead drunk.’
‘Impossible,’ Charlie said.
‘No. It happened. The police scooped me up, as they apparently do to all drunks littering the footpaths. I spent the remains of the night in a cell and got fined five pounds, and here I am.’
There was a long pause.
Charlie cleared his throat. ‘Er… various questions arise.’
‘They do indeed.’
Owen said calmly, ‘The car, sir. Where did you leave the car?’ The car was his especial love, polished and cared for like silver.
I told him exactly where I’d parked it. Also that I no longer had its keys. Nor the keys to the flat or the workshop, for that matter.
Both Charlie and Owen showed alarm and agreed between themselves that the first thing Owen would do, even before fetching the car, would be to change all my locks.
‘I made those locks,’ I protested.
‘Do you want Jody walking in here while you’re asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Then Owen changes the locks.’
I didn’t demur any more. I’d been thinking of a new form of lock for some time, but hadn’t actually made it. I would soon, though. I would patent it and make it as a toy for kids to lock up their secrets, and maybe in twenty years time half the doors in the country would be keeping out burglars that way. My lock didn’t need keys or electronics, and couldn’t be picked. It stood there, clear and sharp in my mind, with all its working parts meshing neatly.
‘Are you all right?’ Charlie said abruptly.
‘What?’
‘For a moment you looked…’ He stopped and didn’t finish the sentence.
‘I’m not dying, if that’s what you think. It’s just that I’ve an idea for a new sort of lock.’
Charlie’s attention sharpened as quickly as it had at Sandown.
‘Revolutionary?’ he asked hopefully.
I smiled inside. The word was apt in more ways than one, as some of the lock’s works would revolve.
‘You might say so,’ I agreed.
‘Don’t forget… my bank.’
‘I won’t.’
‘No one but you would be inventing things when he’s half dead.’
‘I may look half dead,’ I said, ‘but I’m not.’ I might feel half dead, too, I thought, but it would all pass.
The door bell rang sharply.
‘If it’s anyone but the doctor,’ Charlie told Owen, ‘tell them our friend is out.’
Owen nodded briefly and went downstairs, but when he came back he brought not the doctor but a visitor less expected and more welcome.
‘Miss Ward, sir.’
She was through the door before he had the words out, blowing in like a gust of fresh air, her face as smooth and clean and her clothes as well-groomed as mine were dirty and squalid. She looked like life itself on two legs, her vitality lighting the room.
‘Steven!’
She stopped dead a few feet from the sofa, staring down. She glanced at Charlie and at Owen. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘Rough night on the tiles,’ I said. ‘D’you mind if I don’t get up?’
‘How do you do?’ Charlie said politely. ‘I am Charlie Canterfield. Friend of Steven’s.’ He shook hands with her.
‘Alexandra Ward,’ she replied, looking bemused.
‘You’ve met,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘In Walton Street.’
They looked at each other and realised what I meant. Charlie began to tell Allie how I had arrived in this sorry state and Owen went out shopping for locks. I lay on the sofa and drifted. The whole morning seemed disjointed and jerky to me, as if my thought processes were tripping over cracks.
Allie pulled up a squashy leather stool and sat beside me, which brought recovery nearer. She put her hand on mine. Better still.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said.
I sighed. Couldn’t have everything.
‘Have you forgotten I’m going home this evening?’
‘I have not,’ I said. ‘Though it looks now as though I’ll have to withdraw my offer of driving you to the airport. I don’t think I’m fit. No car, for another thing.’
‘That’s actually what I came for.’ She hesitated. ‘I have to keep peace with my sister…’ She stopped, leaving a world of family tensions hovering unspoken. ‘I came to say goodbye.’
‘What sort of goodbye?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Goodbye for now,’ I said, ‘or goodbye for ever?’
‘Which would you like?’
Charlie chuckled. ‘Now there’s a double-edged question if I ever heard one.’
‘You’re not supposed to be listening,’ she said with mock severity.
‘Goodbye for now,’ I said.
‘All right.’ She smiled the flashing smile. ‘Suits me.’
Charlie wandered round the room looking at things but showed no signs of going. Allie disregarded him. She stroked my hair back from my forehead and kissed me gently. I can’t say I minded.
After a while the doctor came. Charlie went down to let him in and apparently briefed him on the way up. He and Allie retired to the kitchen where I heard them making more coffee.
The doctor helped me remove all clothes except underpants. I’d have been much happier left alone. He tapped my joints for reflexes, peered through lights into my eyes and ears and prodded my many sore spots. Then he sat on the stool Allie had brought, and pinched his nose.
‘Concussion,’ he said. ‘Go to bed for a week.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I protested.
‘Best,’ he said succinctly.
‘But the jump jockeys get concussion one minute and ride winners the next.’
‘The jump jockeys are bloody fools.’ He surveyed me morosely. ‘If you’d been a jump jockey I’d say you’d been trampled by a field of horses.’
‘But as I
’m not?’
‘Has someone been beating you?’
It wasn’t the sort of question somehow that one expected one’s doctor to ask. Certainly not as matter-of-factly as this.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You must do.’
‘I agree it feels a bit like it, but if they did, I was unconscious.’
‘With something big and blunt,’ he added. ‘They’re large bruises.’ He pointed to several extensive reddening patches on my thighs, arms and trunk.
‘A boot?’ I said.
He looked at me soberly. ‘You’ve considered the possibility?’
‘Forced on me.’
He smiled. ‘Your friend, the one who let me in, told me you say you got drunk also while unconscious.’
‘Yes. Tube down the throat?’ I suggested.
‘Tell me the time factors.’
I did, as nearly as I could. He shook his head dubiously. ‘I wouldn’t have thought pouring neat alcohol straight into the stomach would produce that amount of intoxication so quickly. It takes quite a while for a large quantity of alcohol to be absorbed into the bloodstream through the stomach wall.’ He pondered, thinking aloud. ‘Two hundred and ninety milligrammes… and you were maybe unconscious from the bang on the head for two hours or a little more. Hm.’
He leaned forward, picked up my left forearm and peered at it closely, front and back. Then he did the same thing with the right, and found what he was looking for.
‘There,’ he exclaimed. ‘See that? The mark of a needle. Straight into the vein. They’ve tried to disguise it by a blow on top to bruise all the surrounding tissue. In a few more hours the needle mark will be invisible.’
‘Anaesthetic?’ I said dubiously.
‘My dear fellow. No. Probably gin.’
‘Gin!’
‘Why not? Straight into the bloodstream. Much more efficient than a tube to the stomach. Much quicker results. Deadly, really. And less effort, on the whole.’
‘But… how? You can’t harness a gin bottle to a hypodermic.’
He grinned. ‘No, no. You’d set up a drip. Sterile glucose saline drip. Standard stuff. You can buy it in plastic bags from any chemist. Pour three quarters of a pint of gin into one bag of solution, and drip it straight into the vein.’
‘But, how long would that take?’
‘Oh, about an hour. Frightful shock to the system.’
I thought about it. If it had been done that way I had been transported to London with gin dripping into my blood for most of the journey. There hadn’t been time to do it first and set off after.
‘Suppose I’d started to come round?’ I asked.
‘Lucky you didn’t, I dare say. Nothing to stop someone bashing you back to sleep, as far as I can see.’
‘You take it very calmly,’ I said.
‘So do you. And it’s interesting, don’t you think?’
‘Oh very,’ I said dryly.
7
Charlie and Allie stayed for lunch, which meant that they cooked omelettes for themselves and found some reasonable cheese to follow. Out in the kitchen Charlie seemed to have been filling in gaps because when they carried their trays into the sitting-room it was clear that Allie knew all that Charlie did.
‘Do you feel like eating?’ Charlie asked.
‘I do not.’
‘Drink?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Sorry.’
The body rids itself of alcohol very slowly, the doctor had said. Only at a rate of ten milligrammes per hour. There was no way of hastening the process and nothing much to be done about hangovers except endure them. People who normally drank little suffered worst, he said, because their bodies had no tolerance. Too bad, he’d said, smiling about it.
Two hundred and ninety milligrammes came into the paralytic bracket. Twenty-nine hours to be rid of it. I’d lived through about ten so far. No wonder I felt so awful.
Round a mouthful of omelette Charlie said, ‘What are you going to do about all this?’ He waved his fork from my heels to my head, still prostrate on the sofa.
‘Would you suggest going to the police?’ I asked neutrally.
‘Er…’
‘Exactly. The very same police who gave me hospitality last night and know for a certainty that I was so drunk that anything I might complain of could be explained away as an alcoholic delusion.’
‘Do you think that’s why Jody and Ganser Mays did it?’
‘Why else? And I suppose I should be grateful that all they did was discredit me, not bump me right off altogether.’
Allie looked horrified, which was nice. Charlie was more prosaic.
‘Bodies are notoriously difficult to get rid of,’ he said. ‘I would say that Jody and Ganser Mays made a rapid assessment and reckoned that dumping you drunk in London was a lot less dangerous than murder.’
‘There was another man as well,’ I said, and described my friend with sun glasses and muscles.
‘Ever seen him before?’ Charlie asked.
‘No, never.’
‘The brawn of the organisation?’
‘Maybe he has brain, too. Can’t tell.’
‘One thing is sure,’ Charlie said, ‘If the plan was to discredit you, your little escapade will be known all round the racecourse by tomorrow afternoon.’
How gloomy, I thought. I was sure he was right. It would make going to the races more uninviting than ever.
Allie said, ‘I guess you won’t like it, but if I were trying to drag your name through the mud I’d have made sure there was a gossip columnist in court this morning.’
‘Oh hell.’ Worse and worse.
‘Are you just going to lie there,’ Charlie said, ‘and let them crow?’
‘He’s got a problem,’ Allie said with a smile. ‘How come he was wandering around Jody’s stable at that time anyway?’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Now that’s the nub of the matter, I agree. And if I tell you, you must both promise me on your souls that you will not repeat it.’
‘Are you serious?’ Allie said in surprise.
‘You don’t sound it,’ Charlie commented.
‘I am, though. Deadly serious. Will you promise?’
‘You play with too many toys. It’s childish.’
‘Many civil servants swear an oath of secrecy.’
‘Oh all right,’ Charlie said in exasperation. ‘On my soul.’
‘And on mine,’ Allie said lightheartedly. ‘Now do get on with it.’
‘I own a horse called Energise,’ I said. They both nodded. They knew. ‘I spent half an hour alone with him in a crashed horsebox at Sandown.’ They both nodded again. ‘Then I sent him to Rupert Ramsey and last Sunday morning I spent half an hour alone with him again.
‘So what?’ Charlie said.
‘So the horse at Rupert Ramsey’s is not Energise.’
Charlie sat bolt upright so quickly that his omelette plate fell on the carpet. He bent down, feeling around for bits of egg with his astounded face turned up to mine.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Definitely. He’s very like him, and if I hadn’t spent all that time in the crashed horsebox I would never have known the difference. Owners often don’t know which their horse is. It’s a standing joke. But I learnt Energise that day at Sandown. So when I visited Rupert Ramsey’s I knew he had a different horse.’
‘So,’ said Charlie slowly, ‘you went to Jody’s stable last night to see if Energise was still there.’
‘Yes.’
‘And is he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Absolutely certain?’
‘Positive. He has a slightly Arab nose, a nick near the tip of his left ear, a bald spot about the size of a twopenny piece on his shoulder. He was in box number thirteen.’
‘Is that where they found you?’
‘No. You remember, Allie, that we went to Newmarket?’
‘How could I forget?’
‘Do you remember Hermes?’
>
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Was that the chestnut?’
‘That’s right. Well, I went to Trevor Kennet’s stable that day with you because I wanted to see if I could tell whether the Hermes he had was the Hermes Jody had had… if you see what I mean.’
‘And was he?’ she said, fascinated.
‘I couldn’t tell. I found I didn’t know Hermes well enough and anyway if Jody did switch Hermes he probably did it before his last two races last summer, because the horse did no good at all in those and trailed in at the back of the field.’
‘Good God,’ Charlie said. ‘And did you find Hermes at Jody’s place too?’
‘I don’t know. There were three chestnuts there. No markings, same as Hermes. All much alike. I couldn’t tell if any of them was Hermes. But it was in one of the chestnut’s boxes that Jody and the others found me, and they were certainly alarmed as well as angry.’
‘But what would he get out of it?’ Allie asked.
‘He owns some horses himself,’ I said. ‘Trainers often do. They run them in their own names, then if they’re any good, they sell them at a profit, probably to owners who already have horses in the stable.’
‘You mean…’ she said, ‘that he sent a horse he owned himself to Rupert Ramsey and kept Energise. Then when Energise wins another big race he’ll sell him to one of the people he trains for, for a nice fat sum, and keep on training him himself?’
‘That’s about it.’
‘Wow.’
‘I’m not so absolutely sure,’ I said with a sardonic smile, ‘that he hasn’t in the past sold me my own horse back after swopping it with one of his own.’
‘Je-sus,’ Charlie said.
‘I had two bay fillies I couldn’t tell apart. The first one won for a while, then turned sour. I sold her on Jody’s advice and bought the second, which was one of his own. She started winning straight away.’
‘How are you going to prove it?’ Allie said.
‘I don’t see how you can,’ said Charlie. ‘Especially not after this drinking charge.’
We all three contemplated the situation in silence.
‘Gee, dammit,’ said Allie finally and explosively. ‘I just don’t see why that guy should be allowed to rob you and make people despise you and get away with it.’
‘Give me time,’ I said mildly, ‘and he won’t.’