by Dick Francis
The husband said with difficulty, “Jenkins found the foot by the gate, beside the water trough.”
His wife went on. “Jenkins told us that Ellis had done . a program a few months ago about a pony’s foot being cut off and the children being so devastated. So we wrote to Ellis about our colt and Ellis telephoned at once to say how awful for us. He couldn’t have been nicer. Dear Ellis. But there wasn’t anything he could do, of course, except sympathize.”
“No,” I agreed, and I felt only the faintest twitch of surprise that Ellis hadn’t mentioned the York colt when I’d been talking to him less than a week earlier about Rachel Ferns.
3
Back in London I met Kevin Mills, the journalist from The Pump, at lunchtime in the same pub as before.
“It’s time for both barrels,” I said.
He swigged his double gin. “What have you discovered?”
I outlined the rest of the pattern, beyond what he’d told me about two-year-old colts on moonlit nights. One chop from something like a machete. Always the off-fore foot. Always near a water trough. No insurance. And always just after a major local race meeting: the Gold Cup Festival at Cheltenham; the Grand National at Liverpool; the Spring Meeting at York.
“And this Saturday, two days from now,” I said levelly, “we have the Derby.”
He put his glass down slowly, and after a full silent minute said, “What about the kid’s pony?”
I shrugged resignedly. “It was the first that we know of.”
“And it doesn’t fit the pattern. Not a two-year-old colt, was he? And no major race meeting, was there?”
“The severed foot was by the water trough. The off-fore foot. Moon in the right quarter. One chop. No insurance.”
He frowned, thinking. “Tell you what,” he said eventually, “it’s worth a warning. I’m not a sports writer, as you know, but I’ll get the message into the paper somewhere. ‘Don’t leave your two-year-old colts unguarded in open fields during and after the Epsom meeting.’ I don’t think I can do more than that.”
“It might be enough.”
“Yeah. If all the owners of colts read The Pump.”
“It will be the talk of the racecourse.. I’ll arrange that.”
“On Derby Day?” He looked skeptical. “Still, it will be better than nothing.” He drank again. “What we really need to do is catch the bugger red-handed.”
We gloomily contemplated that impossibility. Roughly fifteen thousand thoroughbred foals were born each year in the British Isles. Half would be colts. Many of those at two would already be in training for flat racing, tucked away safely in stables; but that still left a host unattended out of doors. By June, also, yearling colts, growing fast, could be mistaken at night for two-year-olds.
Nothing was safe from a determined vandal.
Kevin Mills went away to write his column and I traveled on to Kent to report to my clients.
“Have you found out who?” Linda demanded.
“Not yet.”
We sat by the sitting-room window again, watching Rachel push Pegotty in his buggy around the lawn, and I told her about the three colts and their shattered owners.
“Three more,” Linda repeated numbly. “In March, April and May? And Silverboy in February?”
“That’s right.”
“And what about now? This month ... June?”
I explained about the warning to be printed in The Pump.
“I’m not going to tell Rachel about the other three,” Linda said. “She wakes up screaming as it is.”
“I inquired into other injured horses all over England,” I said, “but they were all hurt differently from each other. I think ... well ... that there are several different people involved. And I don’t think the thugs that blinded and cut the ponies round here had anything to do with Silverboy.”
Linda protested. “But they must have done! There couldn’t be two lots of vandals.”
“I think there were.”
She watched Rachel and Pegotty, the habitual tears not far away. Rachel was tickling the baby to make him laugh.
“I’d do anything to save my daughter,” Linda said. “The doctor said that if only she’d had several sisters, one of them might have had the right tissue type. Joe—Rachel’s father—is half Asian. It seems harder to find a match. So I had the baby. I had Pegotty five months ago.” She wiped her eyes. “Joe has his new wife and he wouldn’t sleep with me again, not even for Rachel. So he donated sperm and I had artificial insemination, and it worked at once. It seemed an omen ... and I had the baby... but he doesn’t match Rachel.... There was only ever one chance in four that he would have the same tissue type. and antigens.... I hoped and prayed ... but he doesn’t.” She gulped, her throat closing. “So I have Pegotty ... he’s Peter, really, but we call him Pegotty ... but Joe won’t bond with him ... and we still can’t find a match anywhere for Rachel, and there isn’t much time for me to try with another baby ... and Joe won‘t, anyway. His wife objects ... and he didn’t want to do it the first time.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Joe’s wife goes on and on about Joe having to pay child support for Pegotty ... and now she’s pregnant herself.”
Life, I thought, brought unlimited and complicated cruelties.
“Joe isn’t mean,” Linda said. “He loves Rachel and he bought her the pony and he keeps us comfortable, but his wife says I could have six children without getting a match....” Her voice wavered and stopped, and after a while she said, “I don’t know why I burdened you with all that. You’re so easy to talk to.”
“And interested.”
She nodded, sniffing and blowing her nose. “Go out and talk to Rachel. I told her you were coming back today. She liked you.”
Obediently I went out into the garden and gravely shook hands with Rachel, and we sat side by side on a garden bench like two old buddies.
Though still warm, the golden days of early June were graying and growing damp: good for roses, perhaps, but not for the Derby.
I apologized that I hadn’t yet found out who had attacked Silverboy.
“But you will in the end, won’t you?”
“I hope so,” I said.
She nodded. “I told Daddy yesterday that I was sure you would.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. He took me out in his car. He does that sometimes, when Didi goes to London to do shopping.”
“Is Didi his wife?”
Rachel’s nose wrinkled in a grimace, but she made no audible judgment. She said, “Daddy says someone chopped your hand off, just like Silverboy.”
She regarded me gravely, awaiting confirmation.
“Er,” I said, unnerved, “not exactly like Silverboy.”
“Daddy says the man who did it was sent to prison, but he’s out again now on parole.”
“Do you know what ‘on parole’ means?” I asked curiously.
“Yes. Daddy told me.”
“Your daddy knows a lot.”
“Yes, but is it true that someone chopped your hand off?”
“Does it matter to you?”
“Yes, it does,” she said. “I was thinking about it in bed last night. I have awful dreams. I tried to stay awake because I didn’t want to go to sleep and dream about you having your hand chopped off.”
She was trying to be grown up and calm, but I could feel screaming hysteria too near the surface; so, stifling my own permanent reluctance to talk about it, I gave her an abbreviated account of what had happened.
“I was a jockey,” I began.
“Yes, I know. Daddy said you were the champion for years.”
“Well, one day my horse fell in a race, and while I was on the ground another horse landed over a jump straight onto my wrist and ... um ... tore it apart. It got stitched up, but I couldn’t use my hand much. I had to stop being a jockey, and I started doing what I do now, which is finding out things, like who hurt Silverboy.”
She nodded.
“Well, I found out something that an extremely nasty man didn’t want me to know, and he ... er ... he hit my bad wrist and broke it again, and that time the doctors couldn’t stitch it up, so they decided that I’d be better off with a useful plastic hand instead of the useless old one.”
“So he didn’t really ...not really chop it off. Not like with an axe or anything?”
“No. So don’t waste dreams on it.”
She smiled with quiet relief and, as she was sitting on my left, put her right hand down delicately but without hesitation on the replacement parts. She stroked the tough plastic, unfeeling skin and looked up with surprise at my eyes.
“It isn’t warm,” she said.
“Well, it isn’t cold, either.”
She laughed with uncomplicated fun. “How does it work?”
“I tell it what to do,” I said simply. “I send a message from my brain down my arm saying open thumb from fingers, or close thumb to fingers, to grip things, and the messages reach very sensitive terminals called electrodes, which are inside the plastic and against my skin.” I paused, but she didn’t say she didn’t understand. I said, “My real arm ends about there”—I pointed—“and the plastic arm goes up round my elbow. The electrodes are up in my forearm, there, against my skin. They feel my muscles trying to move. That’s how they work.”
“Is the plastic arm tied on or anything?”
“No. It just fits tightly and stays on by itself. It was specially made to fit me.”
Like all children she took marvels for granted, although to me, even though by then I’d had the false arm for nearly three years, the concept of nerve messages moving machinery was still extraordinary.
“There are three electrodes,” I said. “One for opening the hand, one for closing, and one for turning the wrist.”
“Do electrodes work on electricity?” It puzzled her. “I mean, you’re not plugged into the wall, or anything?”
“You’re a clever girl,” I told her. “It works on a special sort of battery which slots into the outside above where I wear my watch. I charge up the batteries on a charger which is plugged into the wall.”
She looked at me assessingly. “It must be pretty useful to have that hand.”
“It’s brilliant,” I agreed.
“Daddy says Ellis Quint told him that you can’t tell you have a plastic hand unless you touch it.”
I asked, surprised, “Does your daddy know Ellis Quint?”
She nodded composedly. “They go to the same place to play squash. He helped Daddy buy Silverboy. He was really really sorry when he found out it was Silverboy himself that he was making his program about.”
“Yes, he would be.”
“I wish...,” she began, looking down at my hand, “I do wish Silverboy could have had a new foot ... with electrodes and a battery.”
I said prosaically, “He might have been able to have a false foot fitted, but he wouldn’t have been able to trot or canter, or jump. He wouldn’t have been happy just limping around.”
She rubbed her own fingers over the plastic ones, not convinced.
I said, “Where did you keep Silverboy?”
“The other side of that fence at the end of the garden.” She pointed. “You can’t see it from here because of those trees. We have to go through the house and out and down the lane.”
“Will you show me?”
There was a moment of drawing back, then she said, “I’ll take you if I can hold your hand on the way.”
“Of course.” I stood up and held out my real, warm, normal arm.
“No...” She shook her head, standing up also. “I mean, can I hold this hand that you can’t feel?”
It seemed to matter to her that I wasn’t whole; that I would understand someone ill, without hair.
I said lightly, “You can hold which hand you like.” She nodded, then pushed Pegotty into the house, and matter-of-factly told Linda she was taking me down to the field to show me where Silverboy had lived. Linda gave me a wild look but let us go, so the bald-headed child and the one-handed man walked in odd companionship down a short lane and leaned against a five-barred gate across the end.
The field was a lush paddock of little more than an acre, the grass growing strongly, uneaten. A nearby standing pipe with an ordinary tap on it stood ready to fill an ordinary galvanized water trough. The ground around the trough was churned up, the grass growing more sparsely, as always happened around troughs in fields.
“I don’t want to go in,” Rachel said, turning her head away.
“We don’t need to.”
“His foot was by the trough,” she said jerkily, “I mean ... you could see blood... and white bones.”
“Don’t talk about it.” I pulled her with me and walked back along the lane, afraid I should never have asked her to show me.
She gripped my unfeeling hand in both of hers, slowing me down.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It was a long time ago. It’s all right now when I’m awake.”
“Good.”
“I don’t like going to sleep.”
The desperation of that statement was an open appeal, and had to be addressed.
I stopped walking before we reached the door of the house. I said, “I don’t usually tell anyone this, but I’ll tell you. I still sometimes have bad dreams about my hand. I dream I can clap with two hands. I dream I’m still a jockey. I dream about my smashed wrist. Rotten dreams can’t be helped. They’re awful when they happen. I don’t know how to stop them. But one does wake up.”
“And then you have leukemia ... or a plastic arm.”
“Life’s a bugger,” I said.
She put her hand over her mouth and, in a fast release of tension, she giggled. “Mum won’t let me say that.”
“Say it into your pillow.”
“Do you?”
“Pretty often.”
We went on into the house and Rachel again pushed Pegotty into the garden. I stayed in the sitting room with Linda and watched through the window.
“Was she all right?” Linda asked anxiously.
“She’s a very brave child.”
Linda wept.
I said, “Did you hear anything at all the night Silverboy was attacked?”
“Everyone asks that. I’d have said if I had.”
“No car engines?”
“The police said they must have stopped the car in the road and walked down the lane. My bedroom window doesn’t face the lane, nor does Rachel’s. But that lane doesn’t go anywhere except to the field. As you saw, it’s only a track really, it ends at the gate.”
“Could anyone see Silverboy from the road?”
“Yes, the police asked that. You could see him come to drink. You can see the water trough from the road, if you know where to look. The police say the thugs must have been out all over this part of Kent looking for unguarded ponies like Silverboy. Whatever you say about two-year-olds, Silverboy must have been done by thugs. Why don’t you ask the police?”
“If you wholeheartedly believed the police, you wouldn’t have asked me for help.”
“Joe just telephoned,” she confessed, wailing, “and he says that calling you in to help is a waste of money.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
I said, “You’re paying me by the day, plus expenses. I can stop right now, if you like.”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She wiped her eyes, undecided, and said, “Rachel dreams that Silverboy is standing in the field and he’s glowing bright and beautiful in the moonlight. He’s shining, she says. And there’s a dark mass of monsters oozing down the lane ... ‘oozing’ is what she says ... and they are shapeless and devils and they’re going to kill Silverboy. She says she is trying to run fast to warn him, and she can’t get through the monsters, they clutch at her like cobwebs. She can’t get through them and they reach Silverboy and smother his light, and all his hair falls out, and she wakes up and screams. It
’s always the same nightmare. I thought if you could find out who cut the poor thing’s foot off, the monsters would have names and faces and would be in the papers, and Rachel would know who they were and stop thinking they’re lumps that ooze without eyes and won’t let her through.”
After a pause, I said, “Give me another week.”
She turned away from me sharply and, crossing to a desk, wrote me a check. “For two weeks, one gone, one ahead.”
I looked at the amount. “That’s more than we agreed on.”
“Whatever Joe says, I want you to go on trying.”
I gave her tentatively a small kiss on the cheek. She smiled, her eyes still dark and wet. “I’ll pay anything for Rachel,” she said.
I drove slowly back to London thinking of the cynical old ex-policeman who had taught me the basics of investigation. “There are two cardinal rules in this trade,” he said. “One. Never believe everything a client tells you, and always believe they could have told you more if you’d asked the right questions. And two. Never, never get emotionally involved with your client.”
Which was all very well, except when your client was a bright, truthful nine-year-old fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of lymphoblasts.
I bought a take-out curry on the way home and ate it before spending the evening on overdue paperwork.
I much preferred the active side of the job, but clients wanted, and deserved, and paid for, detailed accounts of what I’d done on their behalf, preferably with results they liked. With the typed recital of work done, I sent also my final bill, adding a list of itemized expenses supported by receipts. I almost always played fair, even with clients I didn’t like: investigators had been known to charge for seven days’ work when, with a little application, they could have finished the job in three. I didn’t want that sort of reputation. Speed succeeded in my new occupation as essentially as in my old.
Besides bathroom and kitchen, my pleasant (and frankly, expensive) apartment consisted of three rooms: bedroom, big sunny sitting room and a third, smaller room that I used as an office. I had no secretary or helper; no one read the secrets I uncovered except the client and me, and whatever the client did with the information he’d paid for was normally his or her own business. Privacy was what drove many people to consult me, and privacy was what they got.