by Dick Francis
“How long have you had it?” he said.
“Three weeks.”
“You can’t use it.” There was a faint tremor of triumph in the statement. “You’d be in trouble yourself.”
“How did you know I’d got it?” I said.
He blinked. The mouth tightened. He said slowly, “I heard you had George Millace’s . . .”
“George Millace’s what?”
“Files.”
“Ah,” I said. “Nice anonymous word, files. How did you hear I had them? Who from?”
“Ivor,” he said. “And Dana. Separately.”
“Will you tell me?”
He thought it over, giving me a blank inspection, and then said grudgingly. “Ivor was too angry to be discreet. He said too much about you—such as poisonous creep. He said you were fifty times worse than George Millace. And Dana, another night, she said did I know you had copies of some blackmailing letters George Millace had sent, and were using them. She asked if I could help her to get hers back.”
I smiled in my turn. “What did you say?”
“I said I couldn’t help her.”
“When you talked to them,” I said, “was it in gaming clubs?”
“It was.”
“Are they your gaming clubs?”
“None of your business,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “why not tell me?”
He said after a pause, “I have two partners. Four gaming clubs. The clientele in general don’t know I’m a proprietor. I move around. I play. I listen. Does that answer your question?”
I nodded. “Yes, thank you. Are those goons your goons?”
“I employ them,” he said austerely, “as chuckers out. Not to smash up women and jockeys.”
“A little moonlighting, was it? On the side?”
He didn’t answer directly. “I have been expecting,” he said, “that you would demand something from me if you had that letter. Something more than answers.”
I thought of the letter, which I knew word for word:
Dear Victor Briggs,
I am sure you will be interested to know that I have the following information. You did on five separate occasions during the past six months conspire with a bookmaker to defraud the betting public by arranging that your odds-on favorites should not win their races.
There followed a list of the five races, complete with the sums Victor had received from his bookmaker friend. The letter continued:
I hold a signed affidavit from the bookmaker in question.
As you see, all five of these horses were ridden by Philip Nore, who certainly knew what he was doing.
I could send this affidavit to the Jockey Club, in which case you would both be warned off. I will telephone you soon, however, with an alternative suggestion.
The letter had been sent more than three years earlier. For three years Victor Briggs had run his horses straight. When George Millace died, a week to the day, Victor Briggs had gone back to the old game. Had gone back to find that his vulnerable jockey was no longer reliable.
“I didn’t want to do anything about the letter,” I said. “I didn’t mean to tell you I had it. Not until now.”
“Why not? You wanted to ride to win. You could have used it to make me agree. You’d been told you’d lose your job anyway if you wouldn’t ride as I wanted. You knew I couldn’t face being warned off. Yet you didn’t use the letter for that. Why not?”
“I wanted to make you run the horses straight for their own sakes.”
He gave me another of the long uninformative stares.
“I’ll tell you,” he said at last. “Yesterday I added up all the prize money I’d won since Daylight’s race at Sandown. All those seconds and thirds, as well as Sharpener’s wins. I added up my winnings from betting, win and place. I made more money in the past month with you riding straight than I did with you stepping off Daylight.” He paused, waiting for a reaction, but, catching it from him, I simply stared back. “I’ve seen,” he went on, “that you weren’t going to ride any more crooked races. I’ve understood that. I know you’ve changed. You’re a different person. Older. Stronger. If you go on riding for me, I won’t ask you again to lose a race.” He paused once more. “Is that enough? Is that what you want to hear?”
I looked away from him, out across the windy landscape.
“Yes.”
After a bit he said, “George Millace didn’t demand money, you know. At least . . .”
“A donation to the Injured Jockeys?”
“You know the lot, don’t you?”
“I’ve learned,” I said. “George wasn’t interested in extorting money for himself. He extorted—” I searched for the word “—frustration.”
“From how many?”
“Seven, that I know of. Probably eight, if you ask your bookmaker.”
He was astonished.
“George Millace,” I said, “enjoyed making people cringe. He did it to everybody in a mild way. To people he could catch out doing wrong, he did it with gusto. He had alternative suggestions for everyone—disclosure, or do what George wanted. And what George wanted, in general, was to frustrate. To stop Ivor den Relgan’s power play. To stop Dana taking drugs. To stop other people doing other things.”
“To stop me,” Victor said with a hint of dry humor, “from being warned off.” He nodded. “You’re right, of course. When George Millace telephoned, I was expecting a straight blackmail. Then he said all I had to do was behave myself. Those were his words. As long as you behave, Victor, he said, nothing will happen. He called me Victor. I’d never met him. Knew who he was, of course, but that was all. Victor, he said, as if I were a little pet dog, as long as we’re a good boy, nothing will happen. But if I suspect anything, Victor, he said, I’ll follow Philip Nore around with my motorized telephotos until I have him bang to rights, and then Victor, you’ll both be for the chop.”
“Do you remember word for word what he said, after all this time?” I asked, surprised.
“I recorded him. I was expecting his calls. I wanted evidence of blackmail. All I got was a moral lecture and a suggestion that I give a thousand pounds to the Injured Jockeys’ Fund.”
“And was that all? Forever?”
“He used to wink at me at the races,” Victor said.
I laughed.
“Yes, very funny,” he said. “Is that the lot?”
“Not really. There’s something you could do for me, if you would. Something you know, and could tell me. Something you could tell me in future.”
“What is it?”
“About Dana’s drugs.”
“Stupid girl. She won’t listen.”
“She will soon. She’s still saveable. And besides her . . .”
I told him what I wanted. He listened acutely. When I’d finished I got the twitch of a throttled smile.
“Beside you,” he said, “George Millace was a beginner.”
Victor drove off in his car and I walked back to Lambourn over the Downs.
An odd man, I thought. I’d learned more about him in half an hour than I had in seven years, and still knew next to nothing. He had given me what I’d wanted, though. Given it freely. Given me my job without strings for as long as I liked, and help in another matter just as important. It hadn’t all been, I thought, because of my having that letter.
Going home in the wind, out on the bare hills, I thought of the way things had happened during the past few weeks. Not about George and his bombshells, but of Jeremy and Amanda.
Because of Jeremy’s persistence, I’d looked for Amanda, and because of looking for Amanda I had now met a grandmother, an uncle, a sister. I knew something at least of my father. I had a feeling of origin that I hadn’t had before.
I had people. I had people like everyone else had. Not necessarily loving or praiseworthy or successful, but there. I hadn’t wanted them, but now that I had them they sat quietly in the mind like foundation stones.
Because of looking for Am
anda I had found Samantha, and with her a feeling of continuity, of belonging. I saw the pattern of my childhood in a different perspective, not as a chopped up kaleidoscope, but as a curve. I knew a place where I’d been, and a woman who’d known me, and they seemed to lead smoothly now towards Charlie.
I no longer floated on the tide.
I had roots.
I reached the point on the hill from where I could see down to the cottage, the brow that I looked up to from the sitting room windows. I stopped there. I could see most of Lambourn, stretched out. Could see Harold’s house and the yard. Could see the whole row of cottages, with mine in the center.
I’d belonged in that village, been part of it, breathed its intrigues for seven years. Been happy, miserable, normal. It was what I’d called home. But now in mind and spirit I was leaving that place, and soon would in body as well. I would live somewhere else, with Clare. I would be a photographer.
The future lay inside me; waiting, accepted. One day fairly soon I’d walk into it.
I would race, I thought, until the end of the season. Five or six more months. Then in May or June, when summer came, I’d hang up my boots: retire, as every jockey had to, some time or other. I would tell Harold soon, to give him time to find someone else for the autumn. I’d enjoy what was left, and maybe have a last chance at the Grand National. Anything might happen. One never knew.
I still had the appetite, still the physique. Better to go, I supposed, before both of them crumbled.
I went on down the hill without any regrets.
21
Clare came down on the train two days later to sort out what photographs she wanted from the filing cabinet: to make a portfolio, she said. Now that she was my agent, she’d be rustling up business. I laughed. It was serious, she said.
I had no races that day. I’d arranged to fetch Jeremy from the hospital and take him home, and to have Clare come with me all the way. I’d also telephoned to Lance Kinship to say I’d had his reprints ready for ages, and hadn’t seen him, and would he like me to drop them in as I was practically going past his house.
That would be fine, he said. Afternoon, earlyish, I suggested, and he said “Right” and left the “t” off. And I’d like to ask you something, I said. “Oh? All right. Anything you like.”
Jeremy looked a great deal better, without the gray clammy skin of Sunday. We helped him into the back of my car and tucked a rug around him, which he plucked off indignantly, saying he was no aged invalid but a perfectly viable solicitor.
“And incidentally,” he said. “My uncle came down here yesterday. Bad news for you, I’m afraid. Old Mrs. Nore died during Monday night.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“Well, you knew,” Jeremy said. “Only a matter of time.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“My uncle brought two letters for me to give to you. They’re in my suitcase somewhere. Fish them out, before we start.”
I fished them out, and we sat in the hospital parking lot while I read them.
One was a letter. The other was a copy of her will.
Jeremy said, “My uncle said he was called out urgently to the nursing home on Monday morning. Your grandmother wanted to make her will, and the doctor there told my uncle there wasn’t much time.”
“Do you know what’s in it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “My uncle just said she was a stubborn old woman to the last.”
I unfolded the typewritten sheets.
I, Lavinia Nore, being of sound mind, do hereby revoke all previous wills . . .
There was a good deal of legal guff and some complicated pension arrangements for an old cook and gardener, and then the two final fairly simple paragraphs.
“. . . Half the residue of my estate to my son James Nore . . .” “. . . Half the residue of my estate to my grandson Philip Nore, to be his absolutely, with no strings or steel hawsers attached.”
“What’s the matter?” Clare said. “You look so grim.”
“The old witch has defeated me.”
I opened the other envelope. Inside there was a letter in shaky handwriting, with no beginning, and no end.
It said:
I think you did find Amanda, and didn’t tell me because it would have given me no pleasure.
Is she a nun?
You can do what you like with my money. If it makes you vomit, as you once said . . . then VOMIT.
Or give it to my genes.
Rotten roses.
I handed the will and the letter to Clare and Jeremy, who read them in silence. We sat there for a while, thinking, and then Clare folded up the letter, put it in its envelope, and handed it back to me.
“What will you do?” she said.
“I don’t know. See that Amanda never starves, I suppose. Look after her, somehow. Apart from that . . .”
“Enjoy it,” Jeremy said. “The old woman loved you.”
I listened to the irony of his voice and wondered if it was true. Love or hate. Love and hate. Perhaps she’d felt both at once when she’d made that will.
We drove from Swindon towards St. Albans, making a short detour to deliver Lance Kinship’s reprints.
“Sorry about this,” I said. “But it won’t take long.”
They didn’t seem to mind. We found the house without much trouble. Typical Kinship country, fake Georgian, large grandiose front, pillared gateway, meager drive.
I picked the packet of photographs out of the trunk of the car, and rang the front doorbell.
Lance opened the door himself, dressed today not in country gent togs but in white jeans, espadrilles and a red and white horizontally striped T-shirt. International film-director gear, I diagnosed. All he needed was the megaphone.
“Come inside,” he said. “I’ll pay you for these.”
“OK. Can’t be long though, with my friends waiting.”
He looked briefly towards my car, where Clare and Jeremy’s interested faces showed in the windows, and went indoors with me following. He led the way into a large sitting room with expanses of parquet and too much black-lacquered furniture. Chrome and glass tables and art deco lamps.
I gave him the packet of pictures.
“You’d better look at them,” I said. “To make sure they’re all right.”
He shrugged. “Why shouldn’t they be?” All the same, he opened the envelope and pulled out the contents.
The top picture showed him looking straight at the camera in his country gent clothes; glasses, trilby hat, air of bossy authority.
“Turn it over,” I said.
With raised eyebrows he did so, and read what Mrs. Jackson had written: This is the tax assessor . . .
The change in him from one instant to the next was like one person leaving and another entering the same skin. He shed the bumptiously sure-of-himself phony; slid into a mess of unstable ill will. The gaudy clothes which had fitted one character seemed grotesque on the other, like gift wrap around a handgrenade. I saw the Lance Kinship I’d only suspected existed. Not the faintly ridiculous poseur pretending to be what he wasn’t, but the tangled psychotic who would do anything at all to preserve the outward show.
It was in his very inadequacy, I supposed, that the true danger lay. In his estrangement from reality. In his theatrical turn of mind, which had allowed him to see murder as a solution to problems.
“Before you say anything,” I said, “you’d better look at the other things in that envelope.”
With angry fingers he sorted them out. The regular reprints and also the black-and-white glossy reproductions of Dana den Relgan’s drugs list and the letter I’d found on the diazo paper.
They were for him a fundamental disaster.
He let the pictures of the great film producer fall to the ground around him like ten-by-eight colored leaves, and stood holding the three black-and-white sheets in visible horror.
“She said—” he said hoarsely “—she swore you didn’t have it. She swore you didn’t know wha
t she was talking about.”
“She was talking about the drugs you supplied her with. Complete with dates and prices. That list which you hold, which is recognizably in her handwriting, for all that it was originally written on cellophane. And of course, as you see, your name appears on it liberally.”
“I’ll kill you,” he said.
“No, you won’t. You’ve missed your chance. It’s too late now. If the gas had killed me you would have been all right, but it didn’t.”
He didn’t say, “What gas?” He said, “It all went wrong. But it didn’t matter. I thought it didn’t matter.” He looked down helplessly at the black-and-white prints.
“You thought it didn’t matter because you heard from Dana den Relgan that I didn’t have the list. And if I didn’t have the list, then I didn’t have the letter. Whatever else I’d had from George Millace, I didn’t after all have the list and the letter. Is that what you thought? So if I didn’t have them, there was no more need to kill me. Was that it?”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s far too late to do it now,” I said, “because there are extra prints of those pages all over the place. Another copy of that picture of you, identified by Mrs. Jackson. Bank, solicitors, several friends, all have instructions about taking everything to the police if any accidental death should befall me. You’ve a positive interest in keeping me alive from now on.”
The implication of what I was saying only slowly sank in. He looked from my face to the photographs and back again several times, doubtfully.
“George Millace’s letter—” he said.
I nodded. George’s letter, handwritten, read:
Dear Lance Kinship,
I have received from Dana den Relgan a most interesting list of drugs supplied to her by you over the past few months. I am sure I understand correctly that you are a regular dealer in such illegal substances.
It appears to be all too well known in certain circles that in return for being invited to places which please your ego, you will, so to speak, pay for your pleasure with gifts of marijuana, heroin and cocaine.