Break In

by Dick Francis

  I walked along to number 14, carrying the video camera in its bag. Pressed the bell push. Waited.

  Everywhere was quiet, and no one answered the door. After two or three more unsuccessful attempts at knocking and ringing I went to the door of the right-hand neighbour and tried there.

  An old lady answered, round, bright-eyed, interested.

  ‘They walked round to the shop,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know how long they’ll be?’

  ‘They take their time.’

  ‘How would I know them?’ I asked.

  ‘The Major has white hair and walks with a stick. Lucy will be wearing a fishing hat, I should think. And if you’re thinking of carrying their groceries home for them, young man, you’ll be welcomed. But don’t try to sell them encyclopaedias or life insurance. You’ll be wasting your time.’

  ‘I’m not selling,’ I assured her.

  ‘Then the shop is past the car park and down the lane to the left.’ She gave me a sharp little nod and retreated behind her lavender door, and I went where she’d directed.

  I found the easily recognisable Perrysides on the point of emerging from the tiny village stores, each of them carrying a basket and moving extremely slowly. I walked up to them without haste and asked if I could perhaps help.

  ‘Decent of you,’ said the Major gruffly, holding out his basket.

  ‘What are you selling?’ Lucy Perryside said suspiciously, relinquishing hers. ‘Whatever it is, we’re not buying.’

  The baskets weren’t heavy: the contents looked meagre.

  ‘I’m not selling,’ I said, turning to walk with them at the snail’s pace apparently dictated by the Major’s shaky legs. ‘Would the name Fielding mean anything to you?’

  They shook their heads.

  Lucy under the battered tweed fishing hat had a thin imperious-looking face, heavily wrinkled with age but firm as to mouth. She spoke with clear upper-class diction and held her back ramrod straight as if in defiance of the onslaughts of time. Lucy Perryside, in various guises and various centuries, had pitched pride against bloody adversity and come through unbent.

  ‘My name is Kit Fielding,’ I said. ‘My grandfather trains horses in Newmarket.’

  The Major stopped altogether. ‘Fielding. Yes. I remember. We don’t like to talk about racing. Better keep off the subject, there’s a good chap.’

  I nodded slightly and we moved on as before, along the cold little lane with the bare trees fuzzy with the foreboding of drizzle; after a while Lucy said, ‘That’s why he came, Clement, to talk about racing.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked the Major apprehensively.

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

  This time, however, he went on walking, with, it seemed to me, resignation; and I had an intense sense of the disappointments and downward adjustments he had made, swallowing his pain and behaving with dignity, civil in the face of disasters.

  ‘Are you a journalist?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘No… a jockey.’

  She gave me a sweeping glance from head to foot. ‘You’re too big for a jockey.’

  ‘Steeplechasing,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded. ‘We didn’t have jumpers.’

  ‘I’m making a film,’ I said. ‘It’s about hard luck stories in racing. And I wondered if you would help with one segment. For a fee, of course.’

  They glanced at each other, searching each other’s reactions, and in their private language apparently decided not to turn down the offer without listening.

  ‘What would we have to do?’ Lucy asked prosaically.

  ‘Just talk. Talk to my camera.’ I indicated the bag I was carrying along with the baskets. ‘It wouldn’t be difficult.’

  ‘Subject?’ the Major asked, and before I could tell him he sighed and said, ‘Metavane?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  They faced up to it as to a firing squad, and Lucy said eventually, ‘For a fee. Very well.’

  I mentioned an amount. They made no audible comment, but it was clear from their nods of acceptance that it was enough, that it was a relief, that they badly needed the money.

  We made our slow progress across the car park and down the path and through their bright blue front door, and at their gestured invitation I brought out the camera and fed in a tape.

  They grouped themselves naturally side by side on the sofa whose chintz cover had been patched here and there with different fabrics. They sat in a room unexpectedly spacious, facing large sliding windows which let out on to a tiny secluded paved area where in summer they could sit in the sun. There was a bedroom, Lucy said, and a kitchen and a bathroom, and they were comfortable, as I could see.

  I could see that their furniture, although sparse, was antique, and that apart from that it looked as if everything saleable had been sold.

  I adjusted the camera in the way I’d been taught and balanced it on a pile of books on a table, kneeling behind it to see through the viewfinder.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll ask you questions. Would you just look into the camera lens while you talk?’

  They nodded. She took his hand: to give courage, I thought, rather than to receive.

  I started the camera silently recording and said, ‘Major, would you tell me how you came to buy Metavane?’

  The Major swallowed and blinked, looking distinguished but unhappy.

  ‘Major,’ I repeated persuasively, ‘please do tell me how you bought Metavane?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘I er… we… always had a horse, now and then. One at a time. Couldn’t afford more, do you see? But loved them.’ He paused. ‘We asked our trainer… he was called Allardeck… to buy us a yearling at the sales. Not too expensive, don’t you know. Not more than ten thousand. That was always the limit. But at that price we’d had a lot of fun, a lot of good times. A few thousand for a horse every four or five years, and the training fees. Comfortably off, do you see.’

  ‘Go on, Major,’ I said warmly as he stopped. ‘You’re doing absolutely fine.’

  He swallowed. ‘Allardeck bought us a colt that we liked very much. Not brilliant to look at, rather small, but good blood lines. Our sort of horse. We were delighted. He was broken in during the winter and during the spring he began to grow fast. Allardeck said we shouldn’t race him then until the autumn, and of course we took his advice.’ He paused. ‘During the summer he developed splendidly and Allardeck told us he was very speedy and that we might have a really good one on our hands if all went well.’

  The ancient memory of those heady days lit a faint glow in the eyes, and I saw the Major as he must have been then, full of boyish enthusiasm, inoffensively proud.

  ‘And then, Major, what happened next?’

  The light faded and disappeared. He shrugged. He said, ‘Had a bit of bad luck, don’t you know.’

  He seemed at a loss to know how much to say, but Lucy, having contracted for gain, proved to have fewer inhibitions.

  ‘Clement was a member of Lloyd’s,’ she said. ‘He was in one of those syndicates which crashed… many racing people were, do you remember? He was called upon, of course, to make good his share of the losses.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and indeed I did. Underwriting insurance was fine as long as one never actually had to pay out.

  ‘A hundred and ninety-three thousand pounds,’ the Major said heavily, as if the shock was still starkly fresh, ‘over and above my Lloyd’s deposit, which was another twenty-five. Lloyd’s took that, of course, straight away. And it was a bad time to sell shares. The market was down. We cast about, do you see, to know what to do.’ He paused gloomily, then went on, ‘Our house was already mortgaged. Financial advisors, you understand, had always told us it was best to mortgage one’s house and use the money for investments. But the investments had gone badly down… some of them never recovered.’

  The flesh on his old face drooped at the memory of failure. Lucy looked at him anxiously, protectively stroking his hand with one finger.

 
‘It does no good to dwell on it,’ she said uneasily. ‘I’ll tell you what happened. Allardeck got to hear of our problems and said his son Maynard could help us, he understood finance. We’d met Maynard once or twice and he’d been charming. So he came to our house and said if we liked, as we were such old owners of his father, he would lend us whatever we needed. The bank had agreed to advance us fifty thousand on the security of our shares, but that still left a hundred and forty. Am I boring you?’

  ‘No, you are not,’ I said with emphasis. ‘Please go on.’

  She sighed. ‘Metavane was going to run in about six weeks and I suppose we were clutching at straws, we hoped he would win. We needed it so badly. We didn’t want to have to sell him unraced for whatever we could get. If he won he would be worth very much more. So we were overwhelmed by Maynard’s offer. It solved all our problems. We accepted. We were overjoyed. We banked his cheque and Clement paid off his losses at Lloyd’s.’

  Sardonic bitterness tugged at the corners of her mouth, but her neck was still stretched high.

  ‘Was Maynard charging you interest?’ I asked.

  ‘Very low,’ the Major said. ‘Five per cent. Damned good of him, we thought.’ The downward curve of his mouth matched his wife’s. ‘We knew it would be a struggle, but we were sure we would get back on our feet somehow. Economise, do you see. Sell things. Pay him back gradually. Sell Metavane, when he’d won.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Nothing much for about five weeks,’ Lucy said. ‘Then Maynard came to our house again in a terrible state and told us he had two very bad pieces of news for us. He said he would have to call in some of the money he had just lent us as he was in difficulties himself, and almost worse, his father had asked him to tell us that Metavane had lamed himself out at exercise so badly that the vet said he wouldn’t be fit to run before the end of the season. It was late September by then. We’d counted on him running in October. We were absolutely, completely shattered, because of course we couldn’t afford any longer to pay training fees for six months until racing started again in March, and worse than that, a lame unraced two-year-old at the end of the season isn’t worth much. We wouldn’t be able to sell him for even what we’d paid for him.’

  She paused, staring wretchedly back to the heartbreak.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  She sighed. ‘Maynard offered to take Metavane off our hands.’

  ‘Is that how he put it?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Take him off our hands is what he said. He said moreover he would knock ten thousand off our debt, just as if the colt was still worth that much. But, he said, he desperately needed some cash, and couldn’t we possibly raise a hundred thousand for him at once.’ She looked at me bleakly. ‘We simply couldn’t. We went through it all with him, explaining. He could see that we couldn’t pay him without borrowing from a moneylender at a huge interest and he said in no way would he let us do that. He was understanding and charming and looked so worried that in the end we found ourselves comforting him in his troubles, and assuring him we’d do everything humanly possible to repay him as soon as we could.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then he said we’d better make it all legal, so we signed papers transferring ownership of Metavane to him. He changed the amount we owed him from a hundred and forty to a hundred and thirty thousand, and we signed a banker’s order to pay him regularly month by month. We were all unhappy, but it seemed the best that could be done.’

  ‘You let him have Metavane without contingencies?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t ask for extra relief on your debt if the horse turned out well?’

  Lucy shook her head wearily. ‘We didn’t think about contingencies. Who thinks about contingencies for a lame horse?’

  ‘Maynard said he would have to put our interest payments up to ten per cent,’ the Major said. ‘He kept apologising, said he felt embarrassed.’

  ‘Perhaps he was,’ I said.

  Lucy nodded. ‘Embarrassed at his own wickedness. He went away leaving us utterly miserable, but it was nothing to what we felt two weeks later. Metavane ran in a two-year-old race at Newmarket and won by three lengths. We couldn’t believe it. We saw the result in the paper. We telephoned Allardeck at once. And I suppose you’ll have guessed what he said?’

  I half nodded.

  ‘He said he couldn’t think why we thought Metavane was lame. He wasn’t. He never had been. He had been working brilliantly of late on the Heath.’

  TWELVE

  ‘You hadn’t thought, I suppose,’ I said gently, ‘to ask to see the vet’s report? Or even to check with Allardeck?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘We took Maynard’s word.’

  The Major nodded heavily. ‘Trusted him. Allardeck’s son, do you see.’

  Lucy said, ‘We protested vigorously, of course, that May-nard had told us a deliberate lie, and Maynard said he hadn’t. He just denied he’d ever told us Metavane wouldn’t run before spring. Took our breath away. Clement complained to the Jockey Club, and got nowhere. Maynard charmed them too. Told them we had misunderstood. The Stewards were very cool to Clement. And do you know what I think? I think Maynard told them we were trying to screw yet more money out of him, when he’d been so generous as to help us out of a dreadful hole.’

  They were both beginning to look distressed and I had a few twinges of conscience of my own. But I said, ‘Please tell me the state of your debt now, and how much Maynard shared with you out of his winnings and the syndication of Metavane as a stallion.’

  They both stared.

  The Major said as if surprised, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘How do you mean, nothing?’

  ‘He didn’t give us a farthing.’

  ‘He syndicated the horse for several millions,’ I said.

  The Major nodded. ‘We read about it.’

  ‘I wrote to him,’ Lucy said, her cheeks slightly pink. ‘I asked him to at least release us from what we owed him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He didn’t answer.’

  ‘Lucy wrote twice,’ the Major said uncomfortably. ‘The second time, she sent it special delivery, to be handed to him personally, so we know he must have received it.’

  ‘He didn’t reply,’ Lucy said.

  ‘We borrowed the money and that’s that,’ the Major said with resignation. ‘Repayments and interest take most of our income, and I don’t think we will ever finish.’

  Lucy stroked his hand openly. ‘We are both eighty-two, you see,’ she said.

  ‘And no children?’ I asked.

  ‘No children,’ Lucy said regretfully, it wasn’t to be.’

  I packed away the camera, thanking them and giving them the cash I’d collected for paying Bobby’s lads, proceeds of cashing one of Bobby’s cheques with my valet at Newbury. My valet, a walking bank, had found the service routine and had agreed to bring cash for the other cheques to Towcester.

  The Major and Lucy accepted the money with some embarrassment but more relief, and I wondered if they had feared I might not actually pay them once I’d got what I wanted. They’d learned in a hard school.

  I looked at my watch and asked if I could make a quick credit card call on their telephone. They nodded in unison, and I got through to the manager where I banked.

  ‘John,’ I said.

  ‘Kit.’

  ‘Look, I’m in a hurry, on my way to ride at Towcester, but I ve been thinking… It’s true, isn’t it, that money can be paid into my account without my knowing?’

  ‘Yes, by direct transfer from another bank, like your riding fees. But you’d see it on your next statement.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘except for my riding fees, could you see to it that nothing gets paid in? If anything else arrives, can you refuse to put it into my account?’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but why?’

  ‘Someone offered me a bribe last night,’ I said, it felt too much like a set-up. I don’t want to find I’ve bee
n sneakily paid by a back door for something I don’t intend to do. I don’t want to find myself trying to tell the Stewards I didn’t take the money.’

  He said after a short pause, is this one of your intuitions?’

  ‘I just thought I’d take precautions.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All right. If anything comes, I’ll check with you before crediting your account.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Until further notice.’

  ‘And perhaps you would drop me a line putting your instructions in writing? Then you would be wholly safe, if it came to the Stewards.’

  ‘I do not know,’ I said, ‘what I would do without you.’

  I said goodbye to the Perrysides and drove away, reflecting that it was their own total lack of sensible precautions which had crystallised in me the thought that I should prudently take my own.

  They should have insured in the first place against a catastrophic loss at Lloyd’s and they should have brought in an independent vet to examine Metavane. It was easy to see these things after the event. The trick for survival was to imagine them before.

  Towcester was a deep-country course, all rolling green hills sixty miles to the north-west of London. I drove there with my mind on anything except the horses ahead.

  Mostly I thought about precautions.

  With me in the car, besides my overnight bag, I had the tapes of Maynard, the tape of the Perrysides, the video camera and a small hold-all of Holly’s containing the jackets and other belongings of Jay Erskine and Owen Watts. Without all those things I would not be able to get any sort of compensation or future for Bobby and Holly, and it occurred to me that I should make sure that no one stole them.

  Sam Leggatt or anyone else at the Flag would see that repossessing the journalists’ belongings would be a lot cheaper and less painful than coughing up cash and printing and distributing humble apologies.