Break In

by Dick Francis

  She was close enough to hug and I had no insight at all into what she was thinking. A brick wall between minds. Disconcerting.

  She looked with friendliness but nothing else into my face, and the only thing I was sure of was that she didn’t feel as I did about a little uninhibited love-making on the spot.

  She asked if I would like to see the library and I said yes please: and the library turned out to be not books but rows and rows of recorded tapes, past years of news stories forgotten but waiting like bombs in the dark, records of things said, undeniable.

  ‘Mostly used for obituaries,’ Danielle said. ‘Reactivated scandals. Things like that.’

  We returned to her news desk, where over the next hour I sat and listened to the progress of events. (Devil-Boy had arrived at the stage door, fit, well and fully made-up in a blaze of technicolor lights to the gratified hysterics of a streetful of fans) and met Danielle’s working companions, the bureau chief, Joe the editor, the gaunt transmitter expert, two spare cameramen and a bored and unallocated female talent. About sixty people altogether worked for the bureau, Danielle said, but of course never all at one time. The day shift, from ten to six-thirty, was much bigger: in the daytime there were two to do her job.

  At one o’clock Ed Cervano telephoned to say they’d gotten a whole load of spectacular shots of the oil fire but the blaze was now under control and the story was as dead as tomorrow’s ashes.

  ‘Bring back the tapes anyway,’ Danielle said. ‘We don’t have any oil fire stock shots in the library.’

  She put down the receiver resignedly. ‘So it goes.’

  The crew from the royal gala returned noisily bearing Devil-Boy’s capers themselves, and at the same time a delivery man brought a stock of morning newspapers to put on Danielle’s desk for her to look through for possible stories. The Daily Flag, as it happened, lay on top, and I opened it at Intimate Details to re-read Leggatt’s words.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Danielle asked.

  I pointed. She read the apology and blinked.

  ‘I didn’t think you stood a chance,’ she said frankly. ‘Did they agree to the compensation also?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘They’ll have to,’ she said. ‘They’ve practically admitted liability.’

  I shook my head. ‘British courts don’t award huge damages for libel. It’s doubtful whether Bobby would actually win if he sued, and even if he won, unless the Flag was ordered to pay his costs, which also isn’t certain, he simply couldn’t afford the lawyers’ fees.’

  She gazed at me. ‘Back home you don’t pay the lawyers unless you win. Then the lawyers take their slice of the damages. Forty per cent, sometimes.’

  ‘It’s not like that here.’

  Here, I thought numbly, one bargained with threats. On the one side: I’ll get your wrist slapped by the Press Council, I‘II get questions asked in Parliament, I’ll see your ex-convict journalist back in the dock. And on the other, I’ll slice your tendons, I’ll lose you your jockey’s licence for taking bribes, I’ll put you in prison. Reviled, dishonoured, and with publicity, disgraced.

  Catch me first, I thought.

  FIFTEEN

  I watched Joe the editor, dark-skinned and with rapid fingers, sort his way through a mass of noisy peacock footage, clicking his tongue as a sort of commentary to himself, punctuating the lifted sections he was stringing together to make the most flamboyant impact. Kaleidoscope arrival of Devil-Boy, earlier entrance of royals, wriggling release of new incomprehensible song.

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ he said, running through the finished sequence. ‘Maybe they’ll use it all, maybe they won’t.’

  ‘It looks good to me.’

  ‘Thirty seconds is a long news item.’ He took the spooled tape from the machine, put it into an already labelled box and handed it to the gaunt transmitter man, who was waiting to take it away. ‘Danielle says you want to learn to edit, so what do you want to know?’

  ‘Er… what these machines will do, for a start.’

  ‘Quite a lot.’ He fluttered his dark fingers over the banks of controls, barely touching them. ‘They’ll take any size tape, any make, and record on any other. You can bring the sound up, cut it out, transpose it, superimpose any sounds you like. You can put the sound from one tape on to the pictures of another, you can cut two tapes together so that it looks as if the people are talking to each other when they were recorded hours and miles apart, you can tell lies and goddam lies and put a false face on truth.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘That about covers it.’

  He showed me how to achieve some of his effects, but his speed confounded me.

  ‘Have you got an actual tape you want to edit?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Yes, but I want to add to it first, if I can.’

  He looked at me assessingly, a poised black man of perhaps my own age with a touch of humour in the eyes but a rarely smiling mouth. I felt untidy in my anorak beside his neat suit and cream shirt; also battered and sweaty and dim. It had been, I thought ruefully, too long a day.

  ‘Danielle says you’re OK,’ he said surprisingly. ‘I don’t see why you can’t ask the chief to rent you the use of this room some night we’re not busy. You tell me what you want, and I’ll edit your tapes for you, if you like.’

  ‘Joe’s a nice guy,’ Danielle said, stretching lazily beside me in the rented Mercedes on her way home. ‘Sure, if he said he’d edit your tape, he means it. He gets bored. He waited three hours tonight for the Devil-Boy slot. He loves editing. Has a passion for it. He wants to work in movies. He’ll enjoy doing your tape.’

  The bureau chief, solicited, had proved equally generous. ‘If Joe’s using the machines, go ahead.’ He’d looked over to where Danielle was eyes down marking paragraphs in the morning papers. ‘I had New York on the line this evening congratulating me on the upswing of our output recently. That’s her doing. She says you’re OK, you’re OK.’

  For her too it had been a long day.

  ‘Towcester,’ she said, yawning, ‘seems light years back.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘What did Princess Casilia say after you went in, when you got back to Eaton Square?’

  Danielle looked at me with amusement. ‘In the hall she told me that good manners were a sign of strength, and in the drawing room she asked if I thought you would really be fit for Ascot.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked, faintly alarmed.

  ‘I said yes, you would.’

  I relaxed. That’s all right, then.’

  ‘I did not say,’ Danielle said mildly, ‘that you were insane, but only that you didn’t appear to notice when you’d been injured. Aunt Casilia said she thought this to be fairly typical of steeplechase jockeys.’

  ‘I do notice,’ I said.

  ‘But?’

  ‘Well… if I don’t race, I don’t earn. Almost worse, if I miss a race on a horse and it wins, the happy owner may put up that winning jockey the next time, so I can lose not just the one fee but maybe the rides on that horse for ever.’

  She looked almost disappointed. ‘So it’s purely economic, this refusal to look filleted ribs in the face?’

  ‘At least half.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘What you feel for your job. What Joe feels for his. Much the same.’

  She nodded, and after a pause said, ‘Aunt Casilia wouldn’t do that, though. Keep another jockey on, after you were fit again.’

  ‘No, she never has. But your aunt is special.’

  ‘She said,’ Danielle said reflectively, ‘that I wasn’t to think of you as a jockey.’

  ‘But I am.’

  ‘That’s what she said this morning on the way to Towcester.’

  ‘Did she explain what she meant?’

  ‘No. I asked her. She said something vague about essences.’ She yawned. ‘Anyway, this evening she told Uncle Roland all about those horrid men with knives, as she put it, and although he was scandalise
d and said she shouldn’t get involved in such sordid brawls, she seemed quite serene and unaffected. She may look like porcelain, but she’s quite tough. The more I get to know her, the more, to be honest, I adore her.’

  The road from Chiswick to Eaton Square, clogged by day with stop–go traffic, was at two-fifteen in the morning regrettably empty. Red lights turned green at our approach and even sticking rigidly to the speed limit didn’t much seem to lengthen the journey. We slid to a halt outside the princess’s house far too soon.

  Neither of us made a move to spring at once out of the car: we sat rather for a moment letting the day die in peace.

  I said, ‘I’ll see you then, on Saturday.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed for no clear reason. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ she half laughed. ‘I suppose I meant… Saturday’s some way off.’

  I took her hand. She let it lie in mine, passive, waiting.

  ‘We might have,’ I said, ‘a lot of Saturdays.’

  ‘Yes, we might.’

  I leaned over and kissed her mouth, tasting her pink lipstick, feeling her breath on my cheek, sensing the tremble somewhere in her body. She neither drew back nor clutched forward, but kissed as I’d kissed, as an announcement, as a promise perhaps; as an invitation.

  I sat away from her and smiled into her eyes, and then got out of the car and went round to open her door.

  We stood briefly together on the pavement.

  ‘Where are you sleeping?’ she said. ‘It’s so late.’

  ‘In a hotel.’

  ‘Near here?’

  ‘Less than a mile.’

  ‘Good… you won’t have far to drive.’

  ‘No distance.’

  ‘Goodnight, then,’ she said.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  We kissed again, as before. Then, laughing, she turned away, walked across the pavement and let herself through the princess’s porticoed front door with a latchkey: and I drove away thinking that if the princess had disapproved of her jockey making approaches to her niece, she would by now have let both of us know.

  I slept like the dead for five hours, then rolled stiffly out of bed, blinked blearily at the heavy cold rain making a mess of the day, and pointed the Mercedes towards Bletchley.

  The Golden Lion was warm and alive with the smells of breakfast, and I ate there while the desk processed my bill. Then I telephoned the AA for news of my car (ready Monday) and to Holly to check that the marked Flag copies had been delivered as promised (which they had: the feed-merchant had telephoned) and after that I packed all my gear into the car and headed straight back towards the hotel I’d slept in.

  No problem, they said helpfully at reception, I could retain my present room for as long as I wanted, and yes, certainly, I could leave items in the strongroom for safe-keeping.

  Upstairs I put Jay Erskine’s Press Club pass and Owen

  Watts’s credit cards into an envelope and wrote ‘URGENT DELIVER TO MR LEGGATT IMMEDIATELY’ in large letters on the outside. Then I put the video recordings and all of the journalists’ other possessions, except their jackets, into one of the hotel’s laundry bags, rolling it into a neat bundle which downstairs was fastened with sticky-tape and labelled before vanishing into the vault.

  After that I drove to Fleet Street, parked where I shouldn’t, ran through the rain to leave the envelope for Sam Leggatt at the Flag front desk, fielded the car from under the nose of a traffic warden, and went lightheartedly to Ascot.

  It was a rotten afternoon there in many ways. Sleet fell almost ceaselessly, needle-sharp, ice-cold and slanting, soaking every jockey to the skin before the start and proving a blinding hazard thereafter. Goggles were useless, caked with flying mud; gloves slipped wetly on the reins; racing boots clung clammily to waterlogged feet. A day for gritting one’s teeth and getting round safely, for meeting fences exactly right and not slithering along on one’s nose on landing. Raw November at its worst.

  The crowd was sparse, deterred before it started out by the visible downpour and the drenching forecast, and the few people standing in the open were huddled inside dripping coats looking like mushrooms with their umbrellas.

  Holly and Bobby both came but wouldn’t stay, arriving after I’d won the first race more by luck than inspiration, and leaving before the second. They took the money out of the money-belt, which I returned to the valet with thanks.

  Holly hugged me. ‘Three people telephoned, after I’d talked to you, to say they were pleased about the apology,’ she said. ‘They’re offering credit again. It’s made all the difference.’

  ‘Take care how you go with running up bills,’ I said.

  ‘Of course we will. The bank manager haunts us.’

  I said to Bobby, ‘I borrowed some of that money. I’ll repay it next week.’

  ‘It’s all yours, really.’ He spoke calmly in friendship, but the life-force was again at a low ebb. No vigour. Too much apathy. Not what was needed.

  Holly looked frozen and was shivering. ‘Keep the baby warm,’ I said. ‘Go into the trainers’ bar.’

  ‘We’re going home.’ She kissed enter me with cold lips. ‘We would stay to watch you, but I feel sick. I feel sick most of the time. It’s the pits.’

  Bobby put his arm round her protectively and took her away under a large umbrella, both of them leaning head down against the icy wind, and I felt depressed for them, and thought also of the risks that lay ahead, before they could be safe.

  The princess had invited to her box the friends of hers that I cared for least, a quartet of aristocrats from her old country, and as always when they were there I saw little of her. With two of them she came in red oilskins down to the parade ring before the first of her two runners, smiling cheerfully through the freezing rain and asking what I thought of her chances, and with the other two she repeated the enquiry an hour and a half later.

  In each case I said, ‘Reasonable.’ The first runner finished reasonably fourth, the second runner, second. Neither time did she come down to the unsaddling enclosure, for which one couldn’t blame her, and nor did I go up to her box, partly because it was a perfunctory routine when those friends were there, but mostly on account of crashing to the ground on the far side of the course in the last race. By the time I got in and changed, she would be gone.

  Oh well, I thought dimly, scraping myself up; six rides, one winner, one second, one fourth, two also-rans, one fall. You can’t win four every day, old son. And nothing broken. Even the stitches had survived without leaking. I waited in the blowing sleet for the car to pick me up, and took off my helmet to let the water run through my hair, embracing in a way the wild day, feeling at home. Winter and horses, the old song in the blood.

  There was no fruit cake left in the changing room.

  ‘Rotten buggers,’ I said.

  ‘But you never eat cake,’ my valet said, heaving off my sodden boots.

  ‘Every so often,’ I said, ‘like on freezing wet Fridays after a fall in the last race.’

  ‘There’s some tea still. It’s hot.’

  I drank the tea, feeling the warmth slide down, heating from inside. There was always tea and fruit cake in the changing rooms; instant energy, instant comfort. Everyone ate cake now and then.

  An official put his head through the door: someone to see you, he said.

  I pulled on a shirt and shoes and went out to the door from the weighing room to the outside world. No one all day had appeared with a banker’s draft from Pollgate, and I suppose I went out with an incredulous flicker of hope. Hope soon extinguished. It was only Dusty, huddled in the weighing room doorway, blue of face, eyes watering with cold.

  ‘Is the horse all right?’ I asked. ‘I heard you caught him.’

  ‘Yes. Useless bugger. What about you?’

  ‘No damage. I got passed by the doctor. I’ll be riding tomorrow.’

  ‘Right, I’ll tell the guv’nor. We’ll be off, then. So
long.’

  ‘So long.’

  He scurried away into the leaden early dusk, a small dedicated man who liked to check for himself after I’d fallen that I was in good enough shape to do his charges justice next time out. He had been known to advise Wykeham to stand me down. Wykeham had been known to take the advice. Passing Dusty was sometimes harder than passing the medics.

  I showered and dressed and left the racecourse via the cheaper enclosures, walking from there into the darkening town, where I’d left the rented Mercedes in a public parking place in the morning. Maybe it was unlikely that a repeat ambush would be set in the nearly deserted jockeys’ car park long after the last race, but I was taking no chances. I climbed unmolested into the Mercedes and drove in safety to London.

  There in my comfortable bolthole I again made additions to my astronomical phone bill, arranging first for my obliging neighbour to go into my cottage in the morning and pack one of my suits and some shirts and other things into a suitcase.

  ‘Of course I will, Kit dear, but I thought you’d be back here for sure tonight, after riding at Ascot.’

  ‘Staying with friends,’ I said. ‘I’ll get someone to pick up the suitcase from your place tomorrow morning to take it to Ascot. Would that be all right?’

  ‘Of course, dear.’

  I persuaded another jockey who lived in Lambourn to collect the case and bring it with him, and he said sure he would, if he remembered.

  I telephoned Wykeham when I judged he’d be indoors after his evening tour of the horses and told him his winner had been steadfast, the princess’s two as good as could be hoped for, and one of the also-rans disappointing.

  And Dusty says you made a clear balls-up of the hurdle down by Swinley Bottom in the last.’

  Yeah,’ I said. ‘If Dusty can see clearly half a mile through driving sleet in poor light he’s got better eyesight than I thought.’

  ‘Er…’ Wykeham said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The one in front fell. Mine went down over him. He wouldn’t have won, if that’s any consolation. He was beginning to tire already, and he was hating the weather.’

  Wykeham grunted assent. ‘He’s a sun-lover, true-bred. Kit, tomorrow there’s Inchcape for the princess in the big race and he’s in grand form, jumping out of his skin, improved a mile since you saw him last week.’