by Dick Francis
Misha said that he himself was Mikhail Alexeevich Tarevsky. Mikhail, son of Alexei. And Alyosha was the affectionate form of Alexei. Misha was certain Hans Kramer had said, ‘It is Alyosha. Es ist Alyosha.’
I looked unseeingly over the sodden racecourse.
‘Ask Misha,’ I said slowly, ‘if he can describe any of the people who were with Kramer before he staggered and fell down. Ask if he remembers if any of them was carrying anything, or doing anything, which did not fit in to the normal scene. Ask if anyone gave Kramer anything to eat or drink.’
Stephen stared. ‘But it was a heart attack.’
‘There might have been,’ I said mildly, ‘contributive factors. A shock. An argument. An accidental blow. An allergy. A sting from a wasp.’
‘Oh, I see.’ He asked the alarming questions as if they were indeed harmless. Misha answered straightforwardly, taking them the same way.
‘Misha says,’ Stephen reported, ‘that he did not know any of the people round Hans Kramer, except that he had seen them at the trials that day and the day before. The Russians are not allowed to mix with the other grooms and competitors, so he had not spoken to them. He himself had seen nothing which could have given anybody a heart attack, but of course he had not been watching closely. But he couldn’t remember any argument, or blow, or wasp. He couldn’t remember for certain whether Hans Kramer had eaten or drunk anything, but he didn’t think so.’
‘Well,’ I said, pondering, ‘was there anyone there who Misha considers could have been Alyosha?’
The answer to that was that he didn’t really think so, because when Hans Kramer was saying that name he was not saying it to anyone, except perhaps to the English girl, but she couldn’t have been Alyosha, because it was a man’s name.’
The cold was creeping back. If Misha knew any more, I didn’t know how to unlock it.
I said, ‘Please thank Misha for his very intelligent help, and tell Mr Kropotkin how much I value his assistance in letting me speak to Misha in this way.’
The compliments were received as due, and Kropotkin, Stephen and I began to walk off the track, back towards the main stable area and the road beyond. Misha, leading the horse, followed a few paces behind us.
As we passed the opening between the two rows of stable blocks, the green wooden horse box, whose engine had been grumbling away in the background all the while we had been talking, suddenly revved up into a shattering roar.
Misha’s horse reared with fright, and Misha cried out. Automatically I turned back to help him. Misha, facing me, was tugging downwards on the reins, with the chestnut rearing yet again above him, and the horse’s bunched quarters were, so to speak, staring me in the face.
As I came towards him, Misha’s gaze slid over me and fastened on something behind my back. His eyes opened wide in fear. He yelled something to me in Russian, and then he simply dropped the reins and ran.
7
From a purely reflex action I grabbed the reins which he had left dangling to the ground and at the same time glanced back over my shoulder.
The time to death looked like three seconds.
The towering top of the green horse box blotted out the sky. The engine accelerated to a scream. I could remember the pattern of the radiator grill for ever after. Six tons unladen weight, I thought. One had time, I found, for the most useless thoughts. Thoughts could be measured in fizzing ten-thousandths of a second. Action took a little longer.
I grabbed the horse’s mane with my left hand and the front of the saddle with my right, and half-jumped, half-hauled myself on to his back.
The horse was terrified already by the noise and the proximity of the horse box, but horses don’t altogether understand about the necessity of removing themselves pronto from under the wheels of thundering juggernauts. Frightened horses, on the whole, are more apt to run into the paths of vehicles, than away.
Horses, on the other hand, are immensely receptive of human emotions, especially when the human is on their back, and scared out of his wits. The chestnut unerringly got the unadulterated message of fear, and bolted.
From a standing start a fit horse can beat most cars over a hundred yards, but the horse box was a long way from standing. The chestnut’s blast-off kept him merely a few yards ahead of the crushing green killer roaring on our heels.
If the horse had had the right sort of sense he would have darted away to left or right down some narrow cranny where the horse box couldn’t follow. Instead, he galloped ahead in a straight true line, making disaster easy.
It was of only moderate help that I was still grasping a section of rein. Owing to the fact of Misha having taken the reins over the horse’s head to lead him, they were not now neatly to hand, with each rein leading tidily to its own side of the bit: they were both on the left side and came from below the horse’s mouth. Since horses are normally steered by pulling the bit upwards against the mouth’s sensitive corners, any urgent instructions had little chance of getting through. There were also the difficulties that my feet were not in the stirrups, I was wearing a heavy overcoat, and my fur hat was tipping forward over my spectacles. The chestnut took his own line and burst out on to the open spaces of the track.
He swerved instinctively to the right, which was the way he always trained, and his quarters thrust him onwards with the vigour of a full-blown stampede. His hurtling feet set up clouds of spray behind us, and it was while I was wondering how long he could keep up the pace and hoping it was for ever, that I first thought that perhaps the sound of the motor had diminished.
Too good to be true, I thought. On the straight and level, a horse box could go faster than a horse; perhaps it was in overdrive and simply made less noise that way.
I risked a look over my shoulder, and my spirits went up as swiftly as a helium balloon. The horse box had given up the chase. It was turning on the track, and going back the way it had come.
‘Glory Be’, I thought, and ‘Allelujah’, and ‘Oh noble beast’; jumbled thanks to the horse and his putative maker.
There was still the problem of getting the noble beast to stop. Panic had infected him easily. Non-panic was not getting through.
My hat fell completely off. Speed drove cold air through my hair, and stung my ears. The drizzle misted my glasses. Heavy double-breasted close-buttoned overcoats were definitely bad news on bolters. Flapping trousers never reassured any horse. I thought that if I didn’t do something about the pedals and steering I could very well ignominiously fall off: and what would Mr Kropotkin have to say if I let his Olympic horse go loose?
Little by little, a vestige of control returned to the proceedings. It was after all a mile-long, left-hand circuit, and the one way I had a chance of influencing our direction was to the left. Constant pressure on the reins pulled the chestnut’s head all the time towards the inner rails, and, once I’d managed to put my feet in the stirrups, pressure from my right knee did the same. Some soothing exhortations like ‘Whoa there, boy, whoa there you old beauty’ also seemed to help; even if the words were English, the tone and intention were identical.
Somewhere on the home stretch in front of the stands the steam went out of the flight, and in a few strides after that, he was walking. I patted his neck and made further conversation, and after a bit, he stood still.
This time, unlike after his training canter, he showed great signs of exertion, taking in breaths in gusts through his nostrils, and heaving out his ribs to inflate his lungs. I brushed the wet off my glasses, and undid a couple of buttons on my coat.
‘There you are, then, chum,’ I said. ‘You’re a good old boy, my old fellow,’ and patted his neck some more.
He shifted only a little while I cautiously leaned far forward to his ears, and put my arms right round under his chin, and brought the reins back over his head. It seemed to me that he was almost relieved to have his headgear returned to its normal riding configuration, because he trotted off along the track again at my signal with all the sweetness of a ho
rse well-schooled in dressage.
Kropotkin had come a little way out to meet us, but no man walked far on that sticky dirt from choice, and he was back by the stable entrance when the chestnut and I completed the circuit.
Kropotkin showed considerable emotion, which was not surprisingly all for his horse. After I had dismounted and handed the reins to a stunned-looking Misha, he rumbled away in basso profundo, anxiously feeling each leg and standing back to assess the overall damage. Finally he spoke at some length to Stephen, and waved an arm in a gesture which was neither anger nor apology, but perhaps somewhere between the two.
‘Mr Kropotkin says,’ Stephen relayed, ‘that he doesn’t know what the horse box was doing here today. It is one of the horse boxes which take the Olympic horses, when they travel. Mr Kropotkin had not ordered a box to come to the track. They are always parked beside the stables he is in charge of, across the road. He is sure that none of the drivers would drive so badly in a stable area. He cannot understand how you and the horse came to be in the way when the horse box prepared to leave the stables.’ Stephen’s eyebrows were rising. ‘I say,’ he said dubiously, ‘you weren’t in its way. The bloody thing drove straight at you.’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Tell Mr Kropotkin that I quite understand what he is saying. Tell him I regret having stood in the way of the horse box. Tell him that I am glad the horse is unharmed, and that I see no reason why I should need to mention this morning’s happenings to any other person.’
Stephen stared. ‘You learn fast.’
‘Tell him what I said.’
Stephen obliged. Kropotkin’s manner lost so much tension that I only then realised quite the extent of his anxiety. He even went so far as to produce a definite lightening of the features: almost a smile. He also said something about which Stephen seemed less doubtful.
‘He says you ride like a Cossack. Is that a compliment?’
‘Near enough.’
Kropotkin spoke again, and Stephen translated.
‘Mr Kropotkin says he will give you any further help he can, if you ask.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I said.
‘Friend,’ the deep voice said in its slow heavy English. ‘You ride good.’
I pushed my glasses hard against the bridge of my nose and thought murderous thoughts about the people who had stopped me racing.
Stephen and I trudged about half a mile to where Kropotkin had said there was a taxi rank.
‘I thought you’d be one for rushing off to the police,’ Stephen said.
‘No.’ I picked some of the dirt off my fur hat, which someone had retrieved. ‘Not this trip.’
‘Not this country,’ he said. ‘If you complain to the fuzz here, you as likely as not surface in clink.’
I gave up cleanliness in favour of a warm head. ‘Hughes-Beckett would have a fit.’
‘All the same,’ Stephen said, ‘whatever Kropotkin may say, that horse box was trying to kill you.’
‘Or Misha. Or the horse,’ I said, untying the ear-flaps.
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Did you see the driver?’ I asked.
‘Yes and no. He had one of those balaclava things on under a fur hat with the earflaps down. Everything covered except his eyes.’
‘He took a hell of a risk,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But then, he darned near succeeded.’
‘You take it incredibly calmly,’ Stephen said.
‘Would you prefer screaming hysterics?’
‘I guess not.’
‘There’s a taxi.’ I waved, and the green-grey saloon swerved our way and slowed. We piled aboard.
‘I’ve never seen anyone jump on a horse like you did,’ Stephen said, as we set off to the Intourist. ‘One second on the ground, the next, galloping.’
‘You never know what you can do until Nemesis breathes down your neck.’
‘You look,’ Stephen said, ‘like one of those useless la-di-dahs in the tele-ads, and you perform…’ Words failed him.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Depressing, isn’t it?’
He laughed. ‘And by the way… Misha gave me a telephone number.’ He put a hand in a pocket and brought out a crumpled scrap of paper. ‘He gave it to me while Kropotkin was chasing after you on the track. He says he wants to tell you something without Kropotkin knowing.’
‘Does the taxi driver speak English?’ I asked.
Stephen looked only faintly and transiently alarmed. ‘They never do,’ he said. ‘You could tell them they stink like untreated sewage and they wouldn’t turn a hair. Just try it.’
I tried it.
The taxi driver didn’t turn a hair.
On the principle of turning up where and when expected, I arrived on time for lunch in the Intourist dining-room. The soup and the blinis were all right, and the ice-cream with blackcurrant jam was fine, but the meat with its attendant teaspoonfuls of chopped carrot, chopped lettuce, and inch-long chips went across the table to Frank.
‘You’ll fade away,’ said Mrs Wilkinson, without too much concern. ‘Don’t you like meat?’
‘I grow it,’ I said. ‘Beef, that is. On a farm. So I suppose I get too fussy over stuff like this.’
Mrs Wilkinson looked at me doubtfully. ‘I would never have guessed you worked on a farm.’
‘Er… well, I do. But it’s my own… passed down from my father.’
‘Can you milk a cow?’ Frank said, with a hint of challenge.
‘Yes,’ I said mildly. ‘Milk. Plough. The lot.’
He gave me a sharp look from over my chips, but in fact I spoke the truth. I had started learning the practical side of farming from about the age of two, and had emerged from agricultural college twenty years later with the technology. Since then, under Government sponsorship, I’d done some work on the interacting chemistry of land and food, and had set aside some experimental acres for research. After racing, this work had been my chief interest… and from now on, I supposed, my only one.
Mrs Wilkinson said disapprovingly, ‘You don’t keep calves in those nasty crate things, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I never do like to think of all the poor animals being killed, when I buy the weekend chops.’
‘How were the Economic Achievements?’
‘We saw a space capsule.’ She launched into a grudgingly admiring outline of the exhibition. ‘Pity we don’t have one in England,’ she said. ‘Exhibition like that, I mean. Permanent. Blowing our own trumpet for a change, like.’
‘Did you go?’ I asked Frank.
‘No.’ He shook his head, munching. ‘Been before, of course.’
He didn’t say where he had been instead. I hadn’t noticed him following Stephen and me, but he might have done. If he had, what had he seen?
‘Tomorrow we’re going to Zagorsk,’ Mrs Wilkinson said.
‘Where’s that?’ I asked, watching Frank chew and learning nothing from his face.
‘A lot of churches, I think,’ she said vaguely. ‘We’re going in a bus, with visas, because it’s out of Moscow.’
I glanced at her as she sat beside me, divining a note of disappointment in her voice. She was a short woman, solid, late fifties, with the well-intentioned face of the bulk of the English population. An equally typical shrewdness lived inside and poked its nose out occasionally in tellingly direct remarks. The more I saw of Mrs Wilkinson, the more I saw to respect.
Opposite her, next to Frank, Mr Wilkinson ate his lunch and as usual said nothing. I had gathered he had come on the trip to please his wife, and would as soon be at home with a pint and Manchester United.
‘Quite a few people are going to the Bolshoi this evening, to the ballet,’ said Mrs Wilkinson a little wistfully. ‘But Dad doesn’t like that sort of thing, do you, Dad?’
Dad shook his head.
Mrs Wilkinson said in a lower voice to me, confidingly, ‘He doesn’t like those things the men wear. Those tights. You know, showing all the muscles of their behinds�
� and those things in front.’
‘Cod-pieces,’ I said, straight-faced.
‘What?’ She looked embarrassed, as if I’d used too strong a swear-word for her shock-threshold.
‘That’s what they’re called. Those things which disguise the outlines of nature.’
‘Oh.’ She was relieved. ‘It would be much nicer if they wore tunics, that’s what I think. Then they wouldn’t be so obvious. And you could concentrate on the dancing.’
Mr Wilkinson muttered something which might or might not have been ‘Poncing about’, and filled his mouth with icecream.
Mrs Wilkinson looked as if she’d heard that before, and instead said to me, ‘Did you see your horses?’
Frank’s concentration on food skipped a beat.
‘They were great,’ I said, and enlarged for two minutes on the turn-out and the training exercise. There was nothing else in Frank’s reactions to say he knew I was giving an incomplete account, but then I supposed if there had been, he would have been bad at his job.
Natasha drifted up purposefully to complicate my life.
‘We have been lucky,’ she said earnestly. ‘We have a ticket for you in a box at the Bolshoi tomorrow evening, for the opera.’
I caught Mr Wilkinson’s eye, with its message of sardonic sympathy, as I started feebly to thank her.
‘It is The Queen of Spades,’ Natasha said firmly.
‘Er…’ I said.
‘Everyone enjoys the opera at the Bolshoi,’ she said. ‘There is no better opera in the world.’
‘How splendid,’ I said. ‘I will look forward to it.’
She began to look approving and I seized the moment to say I would be going out with friends for the evening, and not to expect me in for dinner. She tried very delicately to lead me into saying exactly where I was going, but as at that moment I didn’t actually know, except that it was anywhere for some decent grub, she was out of luck.
‘And this afternoon…’ I said, forestalling her, ‘the Lenin museum.’
She brightened a good deal. At last, she was no doubt thinking, I was behaving as a good tourist should.