by Dick Francis
“I’ve read the notes,” Carey said.
“What notes?”
“Ken prudently asked his friend here to attend and take detailed notes of the whole procedure. There’s no room for doubt. From start to finish the operation was impeccable.”
“Oh.” Lees looked momentarily balked. “Well, I need to see my property.”
“Certainly,” Carey said pacifically. “Come this way.”
He took the owner out of the front door into the car park and turned left towards the stable. Ken and I followed, but halfway there I put my hand briefly on his arm and slowed him down a pace or two, to leave a gap wide enough for privacy.
“What is it?” Ken asked.
“Don’t trust Wynn Lees.”
“Why not? I mean, he’s obnoxious, that’s all.”
“No, not all. Don’t trust him. And don’t tell him what you found in the horse’s gut.”
“Why ever not?”
“In case he already knows.”
Ken gave me a stare of total astonishment but by then we were approaching the mare’s box and within earshot of Lees himself.
Lees was as shocked by the mare’s appearance as Ken had predicted but Carey tried to reassure him, and Belinda, who was still there, slapped the mare’s rump energetically and told him the old girl was doing fine. Lees shrugged a couple of times and displayed none of the joy he should have felt at the life preserved. Not a good dissimulator, I thought. No good for the Foreign Office.
“Will the foal be born normally?” he asked.
Carey said, “Ken?” and Ken gave it as his opinion that he couldn’t see any reason why not.
“Only a very skillful surgeon,” Carey said, “could have performed such an operation successfully so late in the gestation period.”
Ken showed no embarrassment at the accolade. He knew his worth. False modesty didn’t occur to him. His great fear earlier had been that he had somehow taken leave of his ability, and I guessed he had satisfactorily demonstrated to himself, as well as to Carey, that he hadn’t. To me, of course, his impressive performance had indicated something quite different, but then I had by training a nasty suspicious mind.
“I expect the mare’s insured,” I said neutrally.
I got swift glances from all three men, but it was Lees’s attention that sharpened on my presence.
“Who did you say you were?” he demanded. “It’s none of your business if she’s insured.”
“No, of course not,” I agreed. “Just a random thought.”
Carey said to me in mild rebuke, “You can’t put a price on a Rainbow Quest foal,” and Lees opened his mouth, thought better of it and closed it again.
Instead he said to Ken, “Did you find any reason for the colic?”
I didn’t look at Ken. After the briefest of pauses he said, “Colic’s usually caused by a kink in the gut. If it persists, as it did in this case, you have to operate to straighten it. Sometimes, like in your mare, the gut’s so badly knotted that the twisted piece is literally dying, and you have to cut it out.”
“It says in the notes,” Carey nodded, “ ‘Twisted portion of gut removed.’”
The notes had ended with the mare’s reawakening. I hadn’t recorded the discovery of the needle and thread, meaning to add it later and not by then believing anyway that the notes were of great importance, once the mare had lived.
“What did you do with the excised bit?” Carey asked.
“It’s in refrigeration,” Ken said, “in case anyone wanted to see it.”
“Revolting!” Lees exclaimed. “Throw it away.”
Carey nodded his assent and Ken promised nothing one way or the other.
Wynn Lees turned away from the box and, in what I interpreted as acceptance of things as they were, asked Carey to supervise the mare’s convalescence.
Ken said nothing. Carey gave him an apprehensive glance and appeared grateful for his restraint. He told Lees that Ken, of course, was in charge of the mare but that he, Carey, would be available for consultation at all times. Lees still gave Ken an intense darkling look, transferring the end of it to me. I gave him back a grade-one benign blandness and with satisfaction watched him shrug and write me off as of no significance.
He took his leave of Carey with minimum effusiveness, ignored Ken altogether, acted as if he hadn’t seen Belinda in the first place and marched across to drive away in a polished Roller.
Carey watched the departure with an unreadable expression of his own and, thanking Ken for his forbearance, took Belinda off towards the Portakabin. She went, looking back a few times over her shoulder in disapproval, not liking Ken to form even a transient link with anyone but herself. She would spend a miserable life, I thought, if she tried to build too many stockades.
Ken, unaware, said, “Why don’t you trust Mr. Lees?”
“He acts as if he wanted the mare dead.”
Ken said slowly, “You could look at it that way, I suppose. Do you mean . . . for the insurance?”
“Can’t tell. It sounded as if he had insured the mare, but it would be a matter of which did he need most, the insurance money or the livestock.”
“The mare and foal,” Ken said without hesitation, as they would have been his own absolute priority. “And he doesn’t need the money, he was driving a Rolls, don’t forget. I can’t believe anyone would deliberately scheme to kill a horse by feeding it something to block its gut, because that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“You’re not that naive,” I said.
“Then I don’t want to believe it.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s true,” he said thoughtfully, “that I’ve never known a horse to swallow a needle before.”
“Could you get a horse to swallow anything if it didn’t want to?”
“Oh yes. Pack it in something round and slippery that would dissolve in the stomach or beyond, and then practically throw it down the horse’s gullet, feeding some nuts or something very desirable to the animal immediately after. They used to give medicines that way. Horses can’t vomit. Once they’ve swallowed something, it’s for keeps.”
“Our Mr. Lees,” I said, “never dreamt that his wife would wake up and OK the op.”
“No.” Ken smiled. “That was a shock, wasn’t it? She sounded far from having taken a sleeping pill. I’m pretty sure she had a man with her. I heard his voice.”
We enjoyed the thought of Lees the cuckold: serve him right.
Ken yawned and said that as he was technically off duty he would go home for food and sleep. “On call tonight, free tomorrow afternoon. I’ve promised to take Belinda to the races tomorrow. Care to come?”
“Belinda wouldn’t want me.”
“What? Rubbish. See if Vicky and Greg would come too. Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare and all that, just up their street. We could all go in my car. Why not? It’s settled.” He smiled and yawned again. “I like Vicky. Great old girl. I’ve drawn a winner in the mother-in-law stakes, don’t you think?”
“You have,” I agreed.
“Bloody lucky. Greg’s unreal, though. Clothes, not much else.”
Rather a good summing up, I thought. “He can sing,” I said.
“So can blackbirds.” Ken’s eyes glimmered. “We’ll never come to blows, Greg and I, but I can’t take him down to the pub for a jar.”
“Talking of jars . . .”
Ken looked at his watch and yawned. “They’ll still be open. What about it? Pie and a pint?”
“You’re on.”
This civilized plan however was delayed by a fireman in full gear who came ambling round the corner to ask if the boss was around as they wanted to show him something “out front.”
Ken fetched Carey from the Portakabin and the three of us trudged after the firemen back up the driveway I’d run down the night before. I put my hand on the brick sidewall in passing: it was still warm to hot but no longer barbecue.
The scene “out fron
t” was reasonably orderly, with most vehicles parked out on the road and the car parking space given only to one police car and one large glittering fire appliance. There were also six firemen in fireproof suits and three or four policemen in navy blue with checked bands on their peaked hats.
Seeing Carey Hewett arrive, one of the firemen came to meet him, followed immediately by a policeman. A small amount of handshaking took place, followed by an equal amount of head-shaking as a prelude to the news that in the firemen’s professional opinion, the fire had been set.
Carey looked blank.
“Arson,” the fireman said bluntly.
“I understand,” Carey said, “but I just can’t believe it. What makes you think so?”
The fireman explained in a healthy Gloucestershire voice that it was still too hot in there—he gestured to the gutted walls—to look at everything carefully, but they had found some big bottles of cleaning fluid. Spot remover, that sort of thing.
This time not only Carey looked blank.
“Highly inflammable,” the fireman explained. “It always says so on the bottle.”
“I expect we’d have spot remover,” Carey said dazedly, “but I’ve no idea what’s in the cleaning cupboard.”
“Ah, but this was three bottles, all empty. And you know what? If our chum had simply smashed the bottles to get at the contents, we might not have noticed, but these bottles had no caps on. And they weren’t in any cupboard, we found them because they were in the big front room, which, according to one of your young ladies, was where the two secretaries worked, and what mostly burned in there was paper, which doesn’t hold the heat so much. A bit of the roof fell at an angle against the wall in there, which gave us access, luckily.”
“I don’t follow you,” Carey said.
The fireman gave the knowing look of one often confronted by villainy.
“We’re experts, see, sir, at fires. Our chum made a common mistake in not screwing the caps back on. You’d be surprised how many times we find petrol cans with no caps. Firebugs are always in such a hurry they forget the caps. Then there’s the paint. You were having the place painted inside, right? And some of the woodwork was being varnished?”
Carey nodded.
“Well, sir, there’s paint tins in there with the lids off, same with pots of varnish, and good workmen don’t leave empties about and certainly they don’t leave lids off pots that’ve got paint in still.”
Carey said bemusedly, “Someone said tins of paint had exploded.”
“It looks like it.” The fireman nodded. “But as far as we can tell just now, those tins were all together, like, where the painters stored them, not lying round in your office.”
“In my office?” Carey repeated. “Do you mean in my own office? I don’t understand.”
“Your young lady drew a plan for us.” The fireman put a hand inside his tunic and brought out a tattered paper, holding it open for Carey to peer at. “Isn’t that where your own office was? In the front left-hand corner?”
Carey studied it for a few seconds, through his glasses. “Yes, that’s about right. I suppose ... is there any chance of anything being left in there to salvage?”
The fireman shook his head. “Not a lot.”
Carey said forlornly, “I was making some notes for a book.”
The fireman observed a decent interval of silence in face of such a disaster and then said they would know more by the next day, when they’d been able to sift the rubble, but meanwhile they’d have to inform Carey’s insurers that arson was suspected.
“We’re insured against arson,” Carey said dully. “We can rebuild and restock, but no amount of insurance can bring back my records. All those years of work ...”
He broke off, looking tired and depressed. It wasn’t his life’s work, exactly, that had gone up in smoke, but the evidence of it had. I tried to imagine what a void like that would be like, but no one could, really, who hadn’t suffered it.
Carey, the elder statesman of the practice, looked gray, spent and sad, standing dispiritedly in the small chilly breeze that had sprung up to ruffle our hair and sting in our noses.
5
The journey to Stratford-upon-Avon races was short enough for Belinda to remain civil, even if not cordial, in my direction. She made no more remarks about my presence being unnecessary and seemed temporarily to have accepted that I would be part of the scenery for as long as I stayed around; and I’d been at pains to mention that I’d have to be reporting for work in London pretty soon.
“When?” Ken asked bluntly.
“I’ll have to phone on Monday. They’ll give me a date then.”
“I was hoping ...” He stopped for a moment, glanced at me over his shoulder and went on, “How about a spot of detective work?”
“What about?” Belinda asked.
“This and that.”
“Ken!” She was reasonably exasperated. “If you mean the things that have been going wrong in the practice, well, Peter can’t begin to understand them in veterinary terms, can he? Far less explain them.”
“There was the fire, dear,” Vicky murmured.
“Yes, Mother, but the police will see to that.”
Belinda, sitting in the front passenger seat next to Ken, had come dressed in a chestnut leather skirt, big white sweater, knee-high boots and leather overcoat. She looked slender and pretty, her hair falling free to her shoulders, her mouth softened with color. Ken patted her knee from time to time in appreciation.
I sat between Vicky and Greg in a bit of a crush in the back, uneasily rubbing hams with Greg and receiving mildly coquettish knee contacts from Vicky. She herself wore intense red to dramatize her white hair, and apart from a small bandage on her ear, seemed back to normal in vitality, though complaining she kept going to sleep when you wouldn’t expect.
I checked on the mare’s health; Belinda knowledgeably answered my inquiry. “No sign of reflux, so we removed the stomach tube last night. This morning she’s eating hay and drinking normally. So far, perfect.” She gave Ken an admiring glance, confident in her love.
Ken himself looked slightly less haunted, as if he’d put the worst of the anxieties on hold, and appeared determined that his passengers should enjoy the day, to the extent of making a slow sightseeing detour through Stratford with glimpses of the theater and swans and a plethora of black-and-white Tudor timbering, some of it actually genuine.
Inside the racecourse, the five of us split naturally apart, Greg and Vicky going off in search of lunch, leaving me on my own to wander about and enjoy the first steeplechase meeting I’d been to in years.
Cheltenham racecourse had been my childhood play-ground, my familiar backyard. My mother’s “help with secretarial work” had been full-time employment in the racecourse manager’s office: her pay our livelihood. In school holidays, while she labored at her desk, I was allowed by the manager to go almost everywhere on the course and in the buildings, “as long as he isn’t a nuisance” being the only proviso. As being a nuisance meant instant banishment to my grandmother (a tyrant) to spend endless boring days under her beady eye in her musty little bungalow, I endeavored to be the opposite of a nuisance with fervent diligence, and on the whole succeeded.
Race days had been magic (and the cause of my truancy) and until John Darwin came along I had taken it for granted that one day I would be one of the jockeys rocketing over the jumps. I stood beside the fences entranced while the great horses thundered through the birch; I listened to the jockeys cursing during races and practiced the words myself under the bedclothes; I read sporting newspapers, watched meetings on the box, knew the names and fortunes of every steeplechase horse, trainer and jockey in the business; fantasized eternally about being top jockey and winning all the top races, particularly the big one at home, the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Two minor impediments damped the realistic prospects, though not the dreams. First, I had no pony of my own and could only snatch infrequent opportunities to ride at a
ll, still less put in the concentrated practice I needed and longed for. Second, I faced the implacable determination of my mother that I shouldn’t achieve my aim.
“It’s in my blood,” I protested at ten, having just come across that exciting-sounding phrase. “You can’t say it isn’t.”
“It may be in your blood, but look where it got your father.”
It had got my father into his grave. The man who’d sired me, whom I knew only from photographs, had been a jockey over jumps for one short year. Four winners to the good, he had ridden out as usual one morning with the string of horses, trotting along the road to the exercise gallops. His mount, they said, had shied at a bird flying out of a hedge: he himself was flung out of the saddle and into the path of a passing car and was already dead when the other lads dismounted to help him.
There were no headlines, none of the fuss that would have happened had he been killed in a race. My mother still kept the small paragraph from the local paper, yellowed by age, which gave the briefest details. “Paul Perry, 21, aspiring jump jockey, died last Tuesday morning on Baydon Road, Lambourn, as a result of an accident involving the racehorse he was riding and a passing car. Neither the horse nor the driver was injured. Perry leaves a widow and an infant son.”
The widow, barely twenty herself, was sustained through months to come by the charitable Injured Jockeys’ Fund, a marvelous organization that eventually found for her, a trained secretary, the job at Cheltenham racecourse. Very appropriate, everyone said: a neat and useful solution. The Perry kid—myself—could grow up in his father’s footsteps, in his father’s world.
The benign thinking behind all this washed over me at the time without my realizing how much I owed to it, but it wasn’t until I returned to England as Peter Darwin to try for Oxford that I understood why my memories of early childhood were chiefly happy. Whenever I gave anything to charity from then on, it was to the Injured Jockeys’ Fund.
At Stratford, coming back to my long-dead father’s world after a gap of twenty years, it seemed in some ways as if time itself had stood still. Up on the number boards many of the jockeys’ names were as they’d always been, yet these had to be the sons and daughters of the pack I’d idolized. In the race card, the same thing with trainers, though in this case, as I progressively discovered, many were indeed the same old brigade.