by Dick Francis
I shut the lid, and we locked the shed and went back into the house.
“You don’t really think,” Steve said doubtfully, “that the burglars were after Dad’s pictures? I mean, they stole all sorts of things. Mum’s rings, and his cufflinks, and her fur coat, and everything.”
“Yes . . . so they did.”
“Do you think I should mention to the police that all that stuff’s in the freezer? I’m sure Mum’s forgotten it’s there. We never gave it a thought.”
“You could talk it over with her,” I said. “See what she says.”
“Yes, that’s best.” He looked a shade more cheerful. “One good thing, she may have lost all the indexes and the dates and places saying where all the pictures were taken, but she has at least still got some of his best work. It hasn’t all gone. Not all of it.”
I helped him to get dressed and left soon afterwards, as he said he felt better, and looked it; and I took with me George Millace’s box of disasters, which Steve had said to throw in the garbage.
“But you don’t mind if I take it?” I said.
“Of course not. I know you like messing about with films, the same as he does . . . same as he did. He liked that old rubbish. Don’t know why. Take it, if you want, by all means.”
He came out into the drive and watched me stow the box in the trunk, alongside my two camera bags.
“You never go anywhere without a camera, do you?” he said. “Just like Dad.”
“I suppose not.”
“Dad said he felt naked without one.”
“It gets to be part of you.” I shut the trunk and locked it from long habit. “It’s your shield. Keeps you a step away from the world. Makes you an observer. Gives you an excuse not to feel.”
He looked extremely surprised that I should think such things, and so was I surprised, not that I’d thought them, but that I should have said them to him. I smiled to take the serious truth away and leave only an impression of satire, and Steve, photographer’s son, looked relieved.
I drove the hour from Ascot to Lambourn at a Sunday morning pace and found a large dark car standing outside my front door.
The cottage was one of a terrace of seven built in the Edwardian era for the not-so-rich and currently inhabited, apart from me, by a schoolteacher, a horsebox driver, a curate, a vet’s assistant, sundry wives and children, and two hostels-ful of stable lads. I was the only person living alone. It seemed almost indecent, among such a crowd, to have so much space to myself.
My house was in the center: two rooms upstairs, two down, with a modern kitchen stuck on at the back. A white-painted brick front, nothing fancy, facing straight out onto the road, with no room for a garden. A black door, needing paint. New aluminum window frames replacing the original wood, which had rotted away. Not impressive, but home.
I drove slowly past the visiting car and turned into the muddy drive at the end of the row, continuing around to the back and parking under the corrugated plastic roof of the carport next to the kitchen. As I went I caught a glimpse of a man getting hastily out of the car, and knew he had seen me; for my part I thought only that he had no business to be pursuing me on a Sunday.
I went through the house from the back and opened the front door. Jeremy Folk stood there, tall, thin, physically awkward, using earnest diffidence as a lever, as before.
“Don’t solicitors sleep on Sundays?” I said.
“Well, I say, I’m awfully sorry . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. “Come on in, then. How long have you been waiting?”
“Nothing to . . . ah . . . worry about.”
He stepped through the door with a hint of expectancy and took the immediate disappointment with a blink. I had rearranged the interior of the cottage so that what had once been the front parlor was now divided into an entrance hall and darkroom, and in the hall section there were only a filing cabinet and the window, which looked out to the street. White walls, white floor tiles; uninformative.
“This way,” I said, amused, and led him past the darkroom to what had once been the back kitchen but was now mostly bathroom and in part a continuation of the hall. Beyond lay the new kitchen, and to the left, the narrow stairs.
“Which do you want,” I said. “Coffee or talk?”
“Er . . . talk.”
“Up here, then.”
I went up the stairs, and he followed. I used one of the two original bedrooms as the sitting room, because it was the largest room in the house and had the best view of the Downs; the smaller room next to it was where I slept.
The sitting room had white walls, brown carpet, blue curtains, track lighting, bookshelves, sofa, low table and floor cushions. My guest looked around with small flickering glances, making assessments.
“Well?” I said neutrally.
“Er . . . that’s a nice picture.” He walked over to take a closer look at the only thing hanging on the wall, a view of pale yellow sunshine falling through some leafless silver birches onto snow. “It’s . . . er . . . a print?”
“It’s a photograph,” I said.
“Oh! Is it really? It looks like a painting.” He turned away and said, “Where would you live if you had a hundred thousand pounds?”
“I told her I didn’t want it.” I looked at the angular helpless way he was standing there, dressed that day not in working charcoal flannel but in a tweed jacket with decorative leather patches on the elbows. The brain under the silly ass act couldn’t be totally disguised, and I wondered vaguely whether he had developed that surface because he was embarrassed by his own acuteness.
“Sit down,” I said, gesturing to the sofa, and he folded his long legs as if I’d given him a gift. I sat on a beanbag floor cushion and said, “Why didn’t you mention the money when I saw you at Sandown?”
He seemed almost to wriggle. “I just . . . ah . . . thought I’d try you first on blood-stronger-than-water, don’t you know?”
“And if that failed, you’d try greed?”
“Sort of.”
“So that you would know what you were dealing with?”
He blinked.
“Look,” I sighed. “I do understand thoughts of one syllable, so why don’t you just . . . drop the act?”
His body relaxed for the first time into approximate naturalness and he gave me a small smile that was mostly in the eyes.
“It gets to be a habit,” he said.
“So I gathered.”
He cast a fresh look around the room, and I said, “All right, say what you’re thinking.”
He did so, without squirming and without apology. “You like to be alone. You’re emotionally cold. You don’t need props. And unless you took that photograph, you’ve no vanity.”
“I took it.”
“Tut tut.”
“Yes,” I said. “So what did you come for?”
“Well, obviously, to persuade you to do what you don’t want to.”
“To try to find the half-sister I didn’t know I had?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
After a very short pause into which I could imagine him packing a lot of pros and cons he said, “Mrs. Nore is insisting on leaving a fortune to someone who can’t be found. It is . . . unsatisfactory.”
“Why is she insisting?”
“I don’t know. She instructs my grandfather. She doesn’t take his advice. He’s old and he’s fed up with her, and so is my uncle, and they’ve shoved the whole mess onto me.”
“Three detectives couldn’t find Amanda.”
“They didn’t know where to look.”
“Nor do I,” I said.
He considered me. “You’d know.”
“No.”
“Do you know who your father is?” he said.
4
I sat with my head turned towards the window, looking out at the bare calm line of the Downs. A measurable silence passed. The Downs would be there forever.
I said, “I don’t want to get tangled up in a fam
ily I don’t feel I belong to. I don’t like their threads falling over me like a web. That old woman can’t claw me back just because she feels like it, after all these years.”
Jeremy Folk didn’t answer directly, and when he stood up some of the habitual gaucheness had come back into his movements, though not yet into his voice.
“I brought the reports we received from the three firms of detectives,” he said. “I’ll leave them with you.”
“No, don’t.”
“It’s useless,” he said. He looked again around the room. “I see quite plainly that you don’t want to be involved. But I’m afraid I’m going to plague you until you are.”
“Do your own dirty work.”
He smiled. “The dirty work was done about thirty years ago, wasn’t it? Before either of us was born. This is just the muck floating back on the tide.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
He pulled a long bulging envelope out of the inside pocket of his country tweed and put it carefully down on the table. “They’re not very long reports. You could just read them, couldn’t you?”
He didn’t expect an answer, or get one. He just moved vaguely towards the door to indicate that he was ready to leave, and I went downstairs with him and saw him out to his car.
“By the way,” he said, pausing awkwardly halfway into the driving seat, “Mrs. Nore really is dying. She has cancer of the spine. Nothing to be done. She’ll live maybe six weeks, or maybe six months. They can’t tell. So . . . er . . . no time to waste, don’t you know?”
I spent the bulk of the day contentedly in the darkroom, developing and printing the black-and-white shots of Mrs. Millace and her troubles. They came out clear and sharp so that one could actually read the papers on the floor, and I wondered casually just where the borderline fell between positive vanity and simple pleasure in a job efficiently done. Perhaps it had been vanity to mount and hang the silver birches . . . but apart from the content the large size of the print had been a technical problem, and it had all come out right . . . and what did a sculptor do, throw a sack over his best statue?
Jeremy Folk’s envelope stayed upstairs on the table where he’d put it; unopened, contents unread. I ate some tomatoes and cheese when I grew hungry, and cleared up the darkroom, and at six o’clock locked my doors and walked up the road to see Harold Osborne.
Sunday evenings he expected me for a drink, and each Sunday from six to seven we talked over what had happened in the past week and discussed plans for the week ahead. For all his unpredictable up-and-down moods Harold was a man of method, and he hated anything to interrupt these sessions, which he referred to as our military briefings. His wife during that hour answered the telephone and took messages for him to ring back, and they had once had a blazing row with me because she had burst in to say their dog had been run over and killed.
“You could have told me in twenty minutes,” he yelled. “Now how the hell am I going to concentrate on Philip’s orders for the Schweppes?”
“But the dog,” she wailed.
“Damn the dog.” He’d ranted at her for several minutes and then he’d gone out into the road and wept over the body of his mangled friend. Harold, I supposed, was everything I wasn’t: moody, emotional, flamboyant, full of rage and love and guile and gusto. Only in our basic belief in getting things right were we alike, and that tacit agreement let us work together in underlying peace. He might scream at me violently, but he didn’t expect me to mind, and because I knew him well, I didn’t. Other jockeys and trainers and several reporters had said to me often in varying degrees of exasperation or humor, “I don’t know how you put up with it,” and the answer was always the true one: “Easily.”
On that particular Sunday the sacrosanct hour had been interrupted before it could begin, because Harold had a visitor. I walked through his house from the stable entrance and went into the comfortable cluttered sitting room-office, and there in one of the armchairs was Victor Briggs.
“Philip!” Harold said, welcoming and smiling. “Pour yourself a drink. We’re just going to run through the videotape of yesterday. Sit down. Are you ready? I’ll switch on.”
Victor Briggs gave me several nods of approval and a handshake. No gloves, I thought. Cold pale dry hands with nothing aggressive in the grasp. Without the broad-brimmed hat he had thick glossy straight black hair which was receding slightly above the eyebrows to leave a center peak; and without the heavy navy overcoat, a plain dark suit. Indoors he still wore the close-guarded expression as if afraid his thoughts might show, but there was overall a distinct air of satisfaction. Not a smile, just an atmosphere.
I opened a can of Coca-Cola and poured some into a glass.
“Don’t you drink?” Victor Briggs asked.
“Champagne,” Harold said. “That’s what he drinks, don’t you, Philip?” He was in great good humor, his voice and presence amplifying the warm russet colors of the room, resonant as brass.
Harold’s reddish-brown hair sprang in wiry curls all over his head, as untamable as his nature. He was fifty-two at that time and looked ten years younger, a big burly six feet of active muscle commanded by a strong but ambiguous face, his features more rounded than hawkish.
He switched on the video machine and sat back in his armchair to watch Daylight’s debacle in the Sandown Pattern ’Chase, as pleased as if he’d won the Grand National. A good job no stewards were peering in, I thought. There was no mistaking the trainer’s joy in his horse’s failure.
The recording showed me on Daylight going down to the start, and lining up, and setting off: odds-on favorite at four to one on, said the commentator; only got to jump round to win. Immaculate leaps over the first two fences. Strong and steady up past the stands. Daylight just in the lead, dictating the pace, but all five runners closely bunched. Round the top bend, glued to the rails . . . faster downhill. The approach to the third fence . . . everything looking all right . . . and then the jump in the air and the stumbling landing, and the figure in red and blue silks going over the horse’s neck and down under the feet. A groaning roar from the crowd, and the commentator’s unemotional voice, “Daylight’s down at that fence, and now in the lead is Little Moth . . .”
The rest of the race rolled on into a plodding undistinguished finish, and then came a rerun of Daylight’s fall, with afterthought remarks from the commentator. “You can see the horse try to put in an extra stride, throwing Philip Nore forward. The horse’s head ducks on landing, giving his jockey no chance . . . poor Philip Nore clinging on . . . but hopeless . . . horse and jockey both unhurt.”
Harold stood up and switched the machine off. “Artistic,” he said, beaming down. “I’ve run through it twenty times. It’s impossible to tell.”
“No one suspected,” Victor Briggs said. “One of the stewards said to me ‘what rotten bad luck.’ ” There was a laugh somewhere inside Briggs, a laugh not quite breaking the surface but quivering in the chest. He picked up a large envelope, which had lain beside his gin and tonic, and held it out to me. “Here’s my thank you, Philip.”
I said matter-of-factly, “It’s kind of you, Mr. Briggs. But nothing’s changed. I don’t like to be paid for losing. I can’t help it.”
Victor Briggs put the envelope down again without comment, and it wasn’t he who was immediately angry, but Harold.
“Philip,” he said loudly, towering above me. “Don’t be such a bloody prig. There’s a great deal of money in that envelope. Victor’s being very generous. Take it and thank him, and shut up.”
“I’d . . . rather not.”
“I don’t care what you’d bloody rather. You’re not so squeamish when it comes to committing the crime, are you, it’s just the thirty pieces of silver you turn your pious nose up at. You make me sick. And you’ll take that bloody money if I have to ram it down your throat.”
“Well, you will,” I said.
“I will what?”
“Have to ram it down my throat.”
Victor Briggs a
ctually laughed, though when I glanced at him his mouth was tight shut as if the sound had escaped without his approval.
“And,” I said slowly, “I don’t want to do it any more.”
“You’ll do what you’re bloody told,” Harold said.
Victor Briggs rose purposefully to his feet, and the two of them, suddenly silent, stood looking down at me.
It seemed that a long time passed, and then Harold said in a quiet voice which held a great deal more threat than his shouting, “You’ll do what you’re told, Philip.”
I stood up in my turn. My mouth had gone dry, but I made my voice sound as neutral, as calm, as unprovoking as possible.
“Please . . . don’t ask me for a repeat of yesterday.”
Victor Briggs narrowed his eyes. “Did the horse hurt you? He trod on you . . . you can see it on the video.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that. It’s the losing. You know I hate it. I just . . . don’t want you to ask me . . . again.”
More silence.
“Look,” I said. “There are degrees. Of course I’ll give a horse an easy race if he isn’t a hundred per cent fit and a hard race would ruin him for next time out. Of course I’ll do that, it only makes sense. But no more like Daylight yesterday. I know I used to . . . but yesterday was the last.”
Harold said coldly, “You’d better go now, Philip. I’ll talk to you in the morning,” and I nodded, and left, and there were none of the warm handshakes which had greeted my arrival.
What would they do, I wondered. I walked in the windy dark down the road from Harold’s house to mine as I had on hundreds of Sundays, and wondered if it would be for the last time. If he wanted to he could put other jockeys up on his horses from that day onwards. He was under no obligation to give me rides. I was classed as self-employed, because I was paid per race by the owners, and not per week by the trainer; and there were no such things as “unfair dismissal” enquiries for the self-employed.