High Stakes

by Dick Francis

  ‘Time?’

  ‘For thinking,’ I explained. ‘If a frontal assault would land me straight into a lawsuit for slander, which it would, I’ll have to come up with a sneaky scheme which will creep up on him from the rear.’

  Allie and Charlie looked at each other.

  Charlie said to her, ‘A lot of the things he’s invented as children’s toys get scaled up very usefully.’

  ‘As if Cockerell had made the first Hovercraft for the bath tub?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Charlie nodded at her with approval. ‘And I dare say it was a gentle-seeming man who thought up gunpowder.’

  She flashed a smiling look from him to me and then looked suddenly at her watch and got to her feet in a hurry.

  ‘Oh golly! I’m late. I should have gone an hour ago. My sister will be so mad. Steven…’

  Charlie looked at her resignedly and took the plates out to the kitchen. I shifted my lazy self off the sofa and stood up.

  ‘I wish you weren’t going,’ I said.

  ‘I really have to.’

  ‘Do you mind kissing an unshaven drunk?’

  It seemed she didn’t. It was the best we’d achieved.

  ‘The Atlantic has shrunk,’ I said, ‘since Columbus.’

  ‘Will you cross it?’

  ‘Swim, if necessary.’

  She briefly kissed my bristly cheek, laughed and went quickly. The room seemed darker and emptier. I wanted her back with a most unaccustomed fierceness. Girls had come and gone in my life and each time afterwards I had relapsed thankfully into singleness. Maybe at thirty-five, I thought fleetingly, what I wanted was a wife.

  Charlie returned from the kitchen carrying a cup and saucer.

  ‘Sit down before you fall down,’ he said. ‘You’re swaying about like the Empire State.’

  I sat on the sofa.

  ‘And drink this.’

  He had made a cup of tea, not strong, not weak, and with scarcely any milk. I took a couple of sips and thanked him.

  ‘Will you be all right if I go?’ he said. ‘I’ve an appointment.’

  ‘Of course, Charlie.’

  ‘Take care of your damned silly self.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He buttoned his overcoat, gave me a sympathetic wave and departed. Owen had long since finished changing the locks and had set off with a spare set of keys to fetch the car. I was alone in the flat. It seemed much quieter than usual.

  I drank the rest of the tea, leaned back against the cushions, and shut my eyes, sick and uncomfortable from head to foot. Damn Jody Leeds, I thought. Damn and blast him to hell.

  No wonder, I thought, that he had been so frantically determined to take Energise back with him from Sandown. He must already have had the substitute in his yard, waiting for a good moment to exchange them. When I’d said I wanted Energise to go elsewhere immediately he had been ready to go to any lengths to prevent it. I was pretty sure now that had Jody been driving the horsebox instead of Andy-Fred I would have ended up in hospital if not in the morgue.

  I thought about the passports which were the identity cards of British thoroughbreds. A blank passport form bore three stylised outlines of a horse, one from each side and one from head on. At the time when a foal was named, usually as a yearling or two-year-old, the veterinary surgeon attending the stable where he was being trained filled in his markings on the form and completed a written description alongside. The passport was then sent to the central racing authorities who stamped it, filed it and sent a photocopy back to the trainer.

  I had noticed from time to time that my horses had hardly a blaze, star or white sock between them. It had never struck me as significant. Thousands of horses had no markings. I had even preferred them without.

  The passports, once issued, were rarely used. As far as I knew, apart from travelling abroad, they were checked only once, which was on the day of the horse’s very first race; and that not out of suspicion, but simply to make sure the horse actually did match the vet’s description.

  I didn’t doubt that the horse now standing instead of Energise at Rupert Ramsey’s stable matched Energise’s passport in every way. Details like the shape of the nose, the slant of the stomach, the angle of the hock, wouldn’t be on it.

  I sighed and shifted a bit to relieve various aches. Didn’t succeed. Jody had been generous with his boots.

  I remembered with satisfaction the kick I’d landed in Ganser Mays’ stomach. But perhaps he too had taken revenge.

  It struck me suddenly that Jody wouldn’t have had to rely on Raymond Child to ride crooked races. Not every time, anyway. If he had a substitute horse of poor ability, all he had to do was send him instead of the good one whenever the race had to be lost.

  Racing history was packed with rumours of ringers, the good horses running in the names of the bad. Jody, I was sure, had simply reversed things and run bad horses in the names of good.

  Every horse I’d owned, when I looked back, had followed much the same pattern. There would be at first a patch of sporadic success, but with regular disasters every time I staked a bundle, and then a long tail-off with no success at all. It was highly likely that the no success was due to my now having the substitute, which was running way out of its class.

  It would explain why Ferryboat had run badly all autumn. Not because he resented Raymond Child’s whip, but because he wasn’t Ferryboat. Wrecker, too. And at least one of the three older horses I’d sent up north.

  Five at least, that made. Also the filly. Also the first two, now sold as flops. Eight. I reckoned I might still have the real Dial and I might still have the real Bubbleglass, because they were novices who had yet to prove their worth. But they too would have been matched, when they had.

  A systematic fraud. All it needed was a mug.

  I had been ignorantly happy. No owner expected to win all the time and there must have been many days when Jody’s disappointment too had been genuine. Even the best-laid bets went astray if the horses met faster opposition.

  The money I’d staked with Ganser Mays had been small change compared with the value of the horses.

  Impossible ever to work out just how many thousands had vanished from there. It was not only that the re-sale value of the substitutes after a string of bad races was low, but there was also the prize money the true horses might have won for me and even, in the case of Hermes, the possibility of stud fees. The real Hermes might have been good enough. The substitute would fail continually as a four-year-old and no one would want to breed from him. In every way, Jody had bled every penny he could.

  Energise…

  Anger deepened in me abruptly. For Energise I felt more admiration and affection than for any of the others. He wasn’t a matter of cash value. He was a person I’d got to know in a horsebox. One way or another I was going to get him back.

  I moved restlessly, standing up. Not wise. The headache I’d had all day began imitating a pile-driver. Whether it was still alcohol, or all concussion, it made little difference to the wretched end result. I went impatiently into the bedroom, put on a dressing-gown over shirt and trousers and lay down on the bed. The short December afternoon began to close in with creeping grey shadows and I reckoned it was twelve hours since Jody had dumped me in the street.

  I wondered whether the doctor was right about the gin dripping into my vein. The mark he had said was a needle prick had, as predicted, vanished into a larger area of bruising. I doubted whether it had ever been there. When one thought it over it seemed an unlikely method because of one simple snag; the improbability of Jody just happening to have a bag of saline lying around handy. Maybe it was true one could buy it from any chemist, but not in the middle of the night.

  The only all-night chemists were in London. Would there have been time to belt up the M4, buy the saline, and drip it in while parked in central London? Almost certainly not. And why bother? Any piece of rubber tubing down the throat would have done instead.

  I massaged my neck thoughtfull
y. No soreness around the tonsils. Didn’t prove anything either way.

  It was still less likely that Ganser Mays, on a visit to Jody, would be around with hypodermic and drip. My absolutely stinking luck, I reflected gloomily, that I had chosen to snoop around on one of the rare evenings Jody had not been to bed by ten thirty. I supposed that for all my care the flash of my torch had been visible from outside. I supposed that Jody had come out of his house to see off his guests and they’d spotted the wavering light.

  Ganser Mays. I detested him in quite a different way from Jody because I had never at any time liked him personally. I felt deeply betrayed by Jody, but the trust I’d given Ganser Mays had been a surface thing, a matter of simple expectation that he would behave with professional honour.

  From Bert Huggerneck’s description of the killing-off of one small bookmaking business it was probable Ganser Mays had as much professional honour as an octopus. His tentacles stretched out and clutched and sucked the victim dry. I had a vision of a whole crowd of desperate little men sitting on their office floors because the bailiffs had taken the furniture, sobbing with relief down their telephones while Ganser Mays offered to buy the albatross of their lease for peanuts: and another vision of the same crowd of little men getting drunk in dingy pubs, trying to obliterate the pain of seeing the bright new shop fronts glowing over the ashes of their closed books.

  Very likely the little men had been stupid. Very likely they should have had more sense than to believe even the most reliable-seeming information, even though the reliable-seeming information had in the past proved to be correct. Every good card-sharper knew that the victim who had been allowed to win to begin with would part with the most in the end.

  If on a minor level Ganser Mays had continually worked that trick on me, and others like me, then how much more had he stood to gain by entangling every vulnerable little firm he could find. He’d sucked the juices, discarded the husks, and grown fat.

  Proof, I thought, was impossible. The murmurs of wrong information could never be traced and the crowd of bankrupt little men probably thought of Ganser Mays as their saviour, not the architect of the skids.

  I imagined the sequence of events as seen by Jody and Ganser Mays when Energise ran at Sandown. To begin with, they must have decided that I should have a big bet and the horse would lose. Or even… that the substitute would run instead. Right up until the day before the race, that would have been the plan. Then I refused to bet. Persuasion failed. Quick council of war. I should be taught a lesson, to bet when my trainer said so. The horse… Energise himself… was to run to win.

  Fine. But Bert Huggerneck’s boss went off to Sandown expecting, positively knowing, that Energise would lose. The only people who could have told him so were Ganser Mays and Jody. Or perhaps Raymond Child. I thought it might be informative to find out just when Bert Hugger-neck’s boss had been given the news. I might get Bert to ask him.

  My memory wandered to Rupert Ramsey’s office and the bright green wool of Poppet Vine. She and her husband had started to bet with Ganser Mays and Felicity Leeds had engineered it. Did Felicity, I wondered sourly, know all about Jody’s plundering ways? I supposed that she must, because she knew all their horses. Lads might come and go, discouraged by having to work too hard, but Felicity rode out twice every morning and groomed and fed in the evenings. Felicity assuredly would know if a horse had been switched.

  She might be steering people to Ganser Mays out of loyalty, or for commission, or for some reason unguessed at; but everything I heard or learned seemed to make it certain that although Jody Leeds and Ganser Mays might benefit in separate ways, everything they did was a joint enterprise.

  There was also, I supposed, the third man, old muscle and sun glasses. The beef of the organisation. I didn’t think I would ever forget him: raincoat over heavy shoulders, cloth cap over forehead, sun glasses over eyes… almost a disguise. Yet I hadn’t known him. I was positive I’d never seen him anywhere before. So why had he needed a disguise at one-thirty in the morning when he hadn’t expected to be seen by me in the first place?

  All I knew of him was that at some point he had learned to box. That he was of sufficient standing in the trio to make his own decisions, because neither of the others had told him to hit me: he’d done it of his own accord. That Ganser Mays and Jody felt they needed his extra muscle, because neither of them was large, though Jody in his way was strong, in case any of the swindled victims cut up rough.

  The afternoon faded and became night. All I was doing, I thought, was sorting through the implications and explanations of what had happened. Nothing at all towards getting myself out of trouble and Jody in. When I tried to plan that, all I achieved was a blank.

  In the silence I clearly heard the sound of the street door opening. My heart jumped. Pulse raced again, as in the stable. Brain came sternly afterwards like a schoolmaster, telling me not to be so bloody silly.

  No one but Owen had the new keys. No one but Owen would be coming in. All the same I was relieved when the lights were switched on in the hall and I could hear his familiar tread on the stairs.

  He went into the dark sitting-room.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘In the bedroom,’ I called.

  He came into the doorway, silhouetted against the light in the passage.

  ‘Shall I turn the light on?’

  ‘No, don’t bother.’

  ‘Sir…’ His voice suddenly struck me as being odd. Uncertain. Or distressed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I couldn’t find the car.’ The words came out in a rush. The distress was evident.

  ‘Go and get yourself a stiff drink and come back and tell me about it.’

  He hesitated a fraction but went away to the sitting-room and clinked glasses. I fumbled around with an outstretched hand and switched on the bedside light. Squinted at my watch. Six-thirty. Allie would be at Heathrow, boarding her aeroplane, waving to her sister, flying away.

  Owen returned with two glasses, both containing scotch and water. He put one glass on my bedside table and interrupted politely when I opened my mouth to protest.

  ‘The hair of the dog. You know it works, sir.’

  ‘It just makes you drunker.’

  ‘But less queasy.’

  I waved towards my bedroom armchair and he sat in it easily as before, watching me with a worried expression. He held his glass carefully, but didn’t drink. With a sigh I propped myself on one elbow and led the way. The first sip tasted vile, the second passable, the third familiar.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What about the car?’

  Owen took a quick gulp from his glass. The worried expression intensified.

  ‘I went down to Newbury on the train and hired a taxi, like you said. We drove to where you showed me on the map, but the car didn’t seem to be there. So I got the taxi driver to go along every possible road leading away from Mr Leeds’ stable and I still couldn’t find it. The taxi driver got pretty ratty in the end. He said there wasn’t anywhere else to look. I got him to drive around in a larger area, but you said you’d walked from the car to the stables so it couldn’t have been more than a mile away, I thought.’

  ‘Half a mile, no further,’ I said.

  ‘Well, sir, the car just wasn’t there.’ He took another swig. ‘I didn’t really know what to do. I got the taxi to take me to the police in Newbury, but they knew nothing about it. They rang around two or three local nicks because I made a bit of a fuss, sir, but no one down there had seen hair or hide of it.’

  I thought a bit. ‘They had the keys, of course.’

  ‘Yes, I thought of that.’

  ‘So the car could be more or less anywhere by now.’

  He nodded unhappily.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll report it stolen. It’s bound to turn up somewhere. They aren’t ordinary car thieves. When you come to think of it we should have expected it to be gone, because if they were going to deny I had ever been in the stab
les last night they wouldn’t want my car found half a mile away.’

  ‘Do you mean they went out looking for it?’

  ‘They would know I hadn’t dropped in by parachute.’

  He smiled faintly and lowered the level in his glass to a spoonful.

  ‘Shall I get you something to eat, sir?’

  ‘I don’t feel…’

  ‘Better to eat. Really it is. I’ll pop out to the take-away.’ He put his glass down and departed before I could argue and came back in ten minutes with a wing of freshly roasted chicken.

  ‘Didn’t think you’d fancy the chips,’ he said. He put the plate beside me, fetched knife, fork and napkin, and drained his own glass.

  ‘Be going now, sir,’ he said, ‘if you’re all right.’

  8

  Whether it was Owen’s care or the natural course of events, I felt a great deal better in the morning. The face peering back at me from the bathroom mirror, though adorned now with two days’ stubble, had lost the grey look and the dizzy eyes. Even the bags underneath were retreating to normal.

  I shaved first and bathed after, and observed that at least twenty per cent of my skin was now showing bruise marks. I supposed I should have been glad I hadn’t been awake when I collected them. The bothersome aches they had set up the day before had more or less abated, and coffee and breakfast helped things along fine.

  The police were damping on the matter of stolen Lamborghinis. They took particulars with pessimism and said I might hear something in a week or so; then within half an hour they were back on the line bristling with irritation. My car had been towed away by colleagues the night before last because I’d parked it on a space reserved for taxis in Leicester Square. I could find it in the pound at Marble Arch and there would be a charge for towing.

  Owen arrived at nine with a long face and was hugely cheered when I told him about the car.

  ‘Have you seen the papers, sir?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He held out one of his own. ‘You’d better know,’ he said.

  I unfolded it. Allie had been right about the gossip columnist. The paragraph was short and sharp and left no one in any doubt.