by Dick Francis
Red-face day for Steven Scott (35), wealthy racehorse owner, who was scooped by police from a Soho gutter early yesterday. At Marlborough Street Court, Scott, looking rough and crumpled, pleaded guilty to a charge of drunk and incapable. Save your sympathy. Race-followers will remember Scott recently dumped Jody Leeds (28), trainer of all his winners, without a second’s notice.
I looked through my own two dailies and the Sporting Life. They all carried the story and in much the same vein, even if without the tabloid heat. Smug satisfaction that the kicker-of-underdogs had himself bitten the dust.
It was fair to assume that the story had been sent to every newspaper and that most of them had used it. Even though I’d expected it, I didn’t like it. Not a bit.
‘It’s bloody unfair,’ Owen said, reading the piece in the Life.
I looked at him with surprise. His usually non-committal face was screwed into frustrated anger and I wondered if his expression was a mirror-image of my own.
‘Kind of you to care.’
‘Can’t help it, sir.’ The features returned more or less to normal, but with an effort. ‘Anything I can do, sir?’
‘Fetch the car?’
He brightened a little. ‘Right away.’
His brightness was short-lived because after half an hour he came back white-faced and angrier than I would have thought possible.
‘Sir!’
‘What is it?’
‘The car, sir. The car.’
His manner said it all. He stammered with fury over the details. The nearside front wing was crumpled beyond repair. Headlights smashed. Hub cap missing. Bonnet dented. All the paintwork on the nearside scratched and scored down to the metal. Nearside door a complete right-off. Windows smashed, handle torn away.
‘It looks as if it was driven against a brick wall, sir. Something like that.’
I thought coldly of the nearside of Jody’s horsebox, identically damaged. My car had been smashed for vengeance.
‘Were the keys in it?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t locked. Couldn’t be, with one lock broken. I looked for your wallet, like you said, but it wasn’t there. None of your things, sir.’
‘Is the car drivable?’
He calmed down a little. ‘Yes, the engine’s all right. It must have been going all right when it was driven into Leicester Square. It looks a proper wreck, but it must be going all right, otherwise how could they have got it there?’
‘That’s something, anyway.’
‘I left it in the pound, sir. It’ll have to go back to the coach builders, and they might as well fetch it from there.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed. I imagined he couldn’t have borne to have driven a crumbed car through London; he was justly proud of his driving.
Owen took his tangled emotions down to the workshop and I dealt with mine upstairs. The fresh blight Jody had laid on my life was all due to my own action in creeping into his stable by night. Had it been worth it, I wondered. I’d paid a fairly appalling price for a half-minute’s view of Energise: but at least I now knew Jody had swapped him. It was a fact, not a guess.
I spent the whole morning on the telephone straightening out the chaos. Organising car repairs and arranging a hired substitute. Telling my bank manager and about ten assorted others that I had lost my cheque book and credit cards. Assuring various enquiring relatives, who had all of course read the papers, that I was neither in jail nor dipsomaniac. Listening to a shrill lady, whose call inched in somehow, telling me it was disgusting for the rich to get drunk in gutters. I asked her if it was okay for the poor, and if it was, why should they have more rights than I. Fair’s fair, I said. Long live equality. She called me a rude word and rang off. It was the only bright spot of the day.
Last of all I called Rupert Ramsey.
‘What do you mean, you don’t want Energise to run?’ His voice sounded almost as surprised as Jody’s at Sandown.
‘I thought,’ I said diffidently, ‘that he might need more time. You said yourself he needed building up. Well, it’s only a week or so to that Christmas race and I don’t want him to run below his best.’
Relief distinctly took the place of surprise at the other end of the wire.
‘If you feel like that, fine,’ he said. ‘To be honest, the horse has been a little disappointing on the gallops. I gave him a bit of fast work yesterday upsides a hurdler he should have made mincemeat of, and he couldn’t even lie up with him. I’m a bit worried about him. I’m sorry not to be able to give you better news.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘If you’ll just keep him and do your best, that’ll be fine with me. But don’t run him anywhere. I don’t mind waiting. I just don’t want him raced.’
‘You made your point.’ The smile came down the wire with the words. ‘What about the other two?’
‘I’ll leave them to your judgement. Nothing Ferryboat does will disappoint me, but I’d like to bet on Dial whenever you say he’s ready.’
‘He’s ready now. He’s entered at Newbury in a fortnight. He should run very well there, I think.’
‘Great,’ I said.
‘Will you be coming?’ There was a load of meaning in the question. He too had read the papers.
‘Depends on the state of my courage,’ I said flippantly. ‘Tell you nearer the day.’
In the event, I went.
Most people’s memories were short and I received no larger slice than I expected of the cold shoulder. Christmas had come and gone, leaving perhaps a trace of goodwill to all men even if they had been beastly to poor Jody Leeds and got themselves fined for drunkenness. I collected more amused sniggers than active disapproval, except of course from Quintus Leeds, who went out of his way to vent himself of his dislike. He told me again that I would certainly never be elected to the Jockey Club. Over his dead body, he said. He and Jody were both addicted to the phrase.
I was in truth sorry about the Jockey Club. Whatever one thought of it, it was still a sort of recognition to be asked to become a member. Racing’s freedom of the city: along those lines. If I had meekly allowed Jody to carry on robbing, I would have been in. As I hadn’t, I was out. Sour joke.
Dial made up for a lot by winning the four-year-old hurdle by a length, and not even Quintus telling everyone it was solely due to Jody’s groundwork could dim my pleasure in seeing him sprint to the post.
Rupert Ramsey, patting Dial’s steaming sides, sounded all the same apologetic.
‘Energise isn’t his old self yet, I’m afraid.’
Truer than you know, I thought. I said only, ‘Never mind. Don’t run him.’
He said doubtfully, ‘He’s entered for the Champion Hurdle. I don’t know if it’s worth leaving him in at the next forfeit stage.’
‘Don’t take him out,’ I said with haste. ‘I mean… I don’t mind paying the extra entrance fee. There’s always hope that he’ll come right.’
‘Ye-es.’ He was unconvinced, as well he might be. ‘As you like, of course.’
I nodded. ‘Drink?’ I suggested.
‘A quick one then. I’ve some other runners.’
He gulped his scotch in friendly fashion, refused a refill, and cantered away to the saddling boxes. I wandered alone to a higher point in the stands and looked idly over the cold windy racecourse.
During the past fortnight I’d been unable to work out just which horse was doubling for Energise. Nothing on Jody’s list of horses-in-training seemed to match. Near-black horses were rarer than most, and none on his list were both the right colour and the right age. The changeling at Rupert’s couldn’t be faulted on colour, age, height, or general conformation. Jody, I imagined, hadn’t just happened to have him lying around: he would have had to have searched for him diligently. How, I wondered vaguely, would one set about buying a ringer? One could hardly drift about asking if anyone knew of a spitting image at bargain prices.
My wandering gaze jolted to a full stop. Down among the crowds among the
rows of bookmakers’ stands I was sure I had seen a familiar pair of sun glasses.
The afternoon was grey. The sky threatened snow and the wind searched every crevice between body and soul. Not a day, one would have thought, for needing to fend off dazzle to the eyes.
There they were again. Sitting securely on the nose of a man with heavy shoulders. No cloth cap, though. A trilby. No raincoat; sheepskin.
I lifted my race glasses for a closer look. He had his back towards me with his head slightly turned to the left. I could see a quarter profile of one cheek and the tinted glasses which showed plainly as he looked down to a race card.
Mousey brown hair, medium length. Hands in pigskin gloves. Brownish tweed trousers. Binoculars slung over one shoulder. A typical racegoer among a thousand others. Except for those sun specs.
I willed him to turn round. Instead he moved away, his back still towards me, until he was lost in the throng. Impossible to know without getting closer.
I spent the whole of the rest of the afternoon looking for a man, any man, wearing sun glasses, but the only thing I saw in shades was an actress dodging her public.
Inevitably, at one stage, I came face to face with Jody.
Newbury was his local meeting and he was running three horses, so I had been certain he would be there. A week earlier I had shrunk so much from seeing him that I had wanted to duck going, but in the end I had seen that it was essential. Somehow or other I had to convince him that I had forgotten most of my nocturnal visit, that the crack on the head and concussion had between them wiped the memory slate clean.
I couldn’t afford for him to be certain I had seen and recognised Energise and knew about the swap. I couldn’t afford it for exactly the same reason that I had failed to go to the police. For the same reason that I had quite seriously sworn Charlie and Allie to secrecy.
Given a choice of prosecution for fraud and getting rid of the evidence, Jody would have jettisoned the evidence faster than sight. Energise would have been dead and dogmeat long before an arrest.
The thought that Jody had already killed him was one I tried continually to put out of my head. I reasoned that he couldn’t be sure I’d seen the horse, or recognised him even if I had. They had found me down one end of the line of boxes: they couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t started at that far end and was working back. They couldn’t really be sure I had been actually searching for a ringer, or even that I suspected one. They didn’t know for certain why I’d been in the yard.
Energise was valuable, too valuable to destroy in needless panic. I guessed, and I hoped, that they wouldn’t kill him unless they had to. Why else would they have gone to such trouble to make sure my word would be doubted. Transporting me to London and making me drunk had given them ample time to whisk Energise to a safer place, and I was sure that if I’d gone belting back there at once with the police I would have been met by incredulous wide-eyed innocence.
‘Come in, come in, search where you like,’ Jody would have said.
No Energise anywhere to be seen.
‘Of course, if you were drunk, you dreamt it all, no doubt.’
End of investigation, and end of Energise, because after that it would have been too risky to keep him.
Whereas if I could convince Jody I knew nothing, he would keep Energise alive and somehow or other I might get him back.
I accidentally bumped into him outside the weighing room. We both half-turned to each other to apologise, and recognition froze the words in our mouths.
Jody’s eyes turned stormy and I suppose mine also.
‘Get out of my bloody way,’ he said.
‘Look, Jody,’ I said, ‘I want your help.’
‘I’m as likely to help you as kiss your arse.’
I ignored that and put on a bit of puzzle. ‘Did I, or didn’t I, come to your stables a fortnight ago?’
He was suddenly a great deal less violent, a great deal more attentive.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I know it’s stupid… but somehow or other I got drunk and collected concussion from an almighty bang on the head, and I thought… it seemed to me, that the evening before, I’d set out to visit you, though with things as they are between us I can’t for the life of me think why. So what I want to know is, did I arrive at your place, or didn’t I?’
He gave me a straight narrow-eyed stare.
‘If you came, I never saw you,’ he said.
I looked down at the ground as if disconsolate and shook my head. ‘I can’t understand it. In the ordinary way I never drink much. I’ve been trying to puzzle it out ever since, but I can’t remember anything between about six one evening and waking up in a police station next morning with a frightful headache and a lot of bruises. I wondered if you could tell me what I’d done in between, because as far as I’m concerned it’s a blank.’
I could almost feel the procession of emotions flowing out of him. Surprise, elation, relief and a feeling that this was a totally unexpected piece of luck.
He felt confident enough to return to abuse.
‘Why the bloody hell should you have wanted to visit me? You couldn’t get shot of me fast enough.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said glumly. ‘I suppose you didn’t ring me up and ask me…’
‘You’re so right I didn’t. And don’t you come hanging round. I’ve had a bellyful of you and I wouldn’t have you back if you crawled.’
He scowled, turned away and strode off, and only because I knew what he must really be thinking could I discern the twist of satisfied smile that he couldn’t entirely hide. He left me in much the same state. If he was warning me so emphatically to stay away from his stables there was the best of chances that Energise was back there, alive and well.
I watched his sturdy backview threading through the crowd, with people smiling at him as he passed. Everyone’s idea of a bright young trainer going places. My idea of a ruthless little crook.
At Christmas I had written to Allie in code four.
“Which is the first night you could have dinner with me and where? I enclose twenty dollars for cab fare home.”
On the morning after Newbury races I received her reply, also in groups of five letters, but not in code four. She had jumbled her answer ingeniously enough for it to take me two minutes to unravel it. Very short messages were always the worst, and this was brief indeed.
“January fifth in Miami.”
I laughed aloud. And she had kept the twenty bucks.
The Racing Calendar came in the same post. I took it and a cup of coffee over to the big window on the balcony and sat in an armchair there to read. The sky over the Zoo in Regent’s Park looked as heavy and grey as the day before, thick with the threat of snow. Down by the canal the bare branches of trees traced tangled black lines across the brown water and grassy banks, and the ribbon traffic as usual shattered the illusion of rural peace. I enjoyed this view of life which, like my work, was a compromise between old primitive roots and new glossy technology. Contentment, I thought, lay in being succoured by the first and cosseted by the second. If I’d had a pagan god, it would have been electricity, which sprang from the skies and galvanised machines. Mysterious lethal force of nature, harnessed and insulated and delivered on tap. My welder-uncle had made electricity seem a living person to me as a child. “Electricity will catch you if you don’t look out.” He said it as a warning; and I thought of Electricity as a fiery monster hiding in the wires and waiting to pounce.
The stiff yellowish pages of the Racing Calendar crackled familiarly as I opened their double spread and folded them back. The Calendar, racing’s official weekly publication, contained lists of horses entered for forthcoming races, pages and pages of them, four columns to a page. The name of each horse was accompanied by the name of its owner and trainer, and also by its age and the weight it would have to carry if it ran.
With pencil in hand to act as insurance against skipping a line with the eye, I began painstakingly, as I had the pr
evious week and the week before that, to check the name, owner, and trainer of every horse entered in hurdle races.
Grapevine (Mrs R. Wantage) B. Fritwell
..
6
11
11
Pirate Boy (Lord Dresden) A. G. Barnes
..
10
11
4
Hopfield (Mr Paul Hatheleigh) K. Poundsgate
5
11
2
There were reams of them. I finished the Worcester entries with a sigh. Three hundred and sixty-eight down for one novice hurdle and three hundred and forty-nine for another, and not one of them what I was looking for.
My coffee was nearly cold. I drank it anyway and got on with the races scheduled for Taunton.
Hundreds more names, but nothing.
Ascot, nothing. Newcastle, nothing. Warwick, Teesside, Plumpton, Doncaster, nothing.
I put the Calendar down for a bit and went out onto the balcony for some air. Fiercely cold air, slicing down to the lungs. Primeval arctic air carrying city gunge: the mixture as before. Over in the Park the zoo creatures were quiet, sheltering in warmed houses. They always made more noise in the summer.
Return to the task.
Huntingdon, Market Rasen, Stratford on Avon… I sighed before starting Stratford and checked how many more still lay ahead. Nottingham, Carlisle and Wetherby. I was in for another wasted morning, no doubt.
Turned back to Stratford, and there it was.
I blinked and looked again carefully, as if the name would vanish if I took my eyes off it.
Half way down among sixty-four entries for the Shakespeare Novice Hurdle.
Padellic (Mr J. Leeds) J. Leeds .. .. .. ..
5
10
7
Padellic.
It was the first time the name had appeared in association with Jody. I knew the names of all his usual horses well, and what I had been searching for was a new one, an unknown. Owned, if my theories were right, by Jody himself. And here it was.
Nothing in the Calendar to show Padellic’s colour or markings. I fairly sprinted over to the shelf where I kept a few form books and looked him up in every index.