Crisis

by Felix Francis

  ASW always claimed that I’d look for an ulterior motive if my own grandmother asked me over for tea. And he was right.

  ‘I will bear what you have said in mind,’ he said. ‘Now, sir, please allow us to get on with our jobs.’

  ‘I’m doing my job, too,’ I said. ‘The Sheikh expects me to find out how and why his horses died.’

  ‘Leave it to the police,’ he replied. ‘We know what we’re doing.’

  Perhaps, I thought, but in my experience, the police rarely answered all the questions posed, only those where a crime might have been committed, and then not always those either. It was simply a matter of available resources and priorities.

  ‘Can I get into the house through here?’ I asked, pointing at the gate.

  ‘Not until we have finished our examination.’

  ‘But I went in here yesterday.’

  ‘As may be,’ he said. ‘But not today.’

  So I walked along the road and rang the front door bell.

  Maria answered the door in a pink dressing gown that hung open at the front revealing a pair of sexy cream silk pyjamas with the top two buttons undone.

  ‘Oh, hello, Harry,’ she said with a broad smile and glazed eyes. ‘Oliver’s out on the gallops. Do you want a drink?’

  I looked at my watch. It was twenty past eight in the morning.

  ‘Much too early for me,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Come on in.’ She threw the front door wide open with an extravagant gesture.

  ‘I’m actually looking for Ryan,’ I said, not at all sure that Maria wasn’t inviting me in for something more than just liquid refreshment.

  ‘He’s with Oliver.’

  ‘On Warren Hill?’ I asked.

  ‘No idea. One set of gallops or another. They’re all the bloody same to me. But they’ll both be back here for breakfast. I know that. Nine o’clock sharp. I’ll be in the doghouse if their toast’s not ready.’ She rolled her eyes and threw her hands up over her head, an action that made the dressing gown swing further open, revealing more cleavage than was good for me at this time of the morning.

  ‘I thought Oliver had retired,’ I said, keeping my eyes firmly on hers.

  She guffawed loudly.

  ‘If this is his idea of retirement, God help me. He works harder now than he ever did. He didn’t want to stop so young but Ryan had to quit riding so Oliver had his hand forced. Now he doesn’t trust Ryan not to make a total cock-up of the whole business.’

  ‘And has he?’ I asked.

  ‘Has he what?’

  ‘Made a total cock-up of the whole business?’

  She suddenly seemed to remember that she was speaking to the representative one of the business’s main racehorse owners.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said with a hollow laugh. ‘There have just been a few teething problems since Ryan took over. That’s all.’

  Five years is a long time for teething problems, I thought.

  A car went by on the road, hooting its horn at her. Maria pulled the dressing gown back round her tightly and waved a two-fingered response in its direction.

  ‘Well?’ she said to me, leaning back suggestively on the doorframe, ‘are you coming in or not?’

  ‘Not,’ I said firmly. ‘Which way is it to Warren Hill?’

  I walked down Bury Road, past the Severals trotting circles, towards the town centre.

  I’d been told in the hotel bar the previous evening that Newmarket was unique in England in having almost as many horse walks as roads, and that it was possible to ride from one side of the town to the other without ever having to walk on the tarmac.

  This wasn’t quite true as there were intersections where the equine traffic had to cross the mechanical variety, and one of these was at the end of Bury Road, where a line of cars was building up as string after string made their way to and from the training grounds.

  ‘How do I get to Warren Hill?’ I shouted to one of the mounted young men as he waited to cross the road. He was wearing a dark-blue puffer jacket and black riding helmet surmounted by a bright yellow cap adorned with a black pom-pom on the top, identical to all the others in the string.

  ‘That way,’ he said, pointing behind him. ‘Beyond Long Hill. We’ve just been there.’

  ‘I’m looking for Ryan Chadwick’s horses,’ I said.

  ‘Poor Ryan,’ he said with genuine distress. ‘What a damn shame about Prince of Troy.’

  ‘Any idea where I’ll find him?’

  ‘At the polytrack. His lads have light-blue caps and red pom-poms.’

  The cars stopped and he trotted his horse across and then down the horsewalk on the far side. I waved a thanks at him and looked around me. Sure enough, the strings of horses all had, within them, riders with the same cap colours, and each string was different from the others.

  As I walked towards Warren Hill, I seemed to be completely surrounded by horses, some on their way to their exercise and others on the way home again afterwards.

  Now the coloured caps and pom-poms made sense.

  With reportedly more than sixty racehorse trainers situated in and around Newmarket all using the same gallops, I would have never found Ryan Chadwick’s string without them.

  Horses have been trained on Newmarket Heath since at least the 1100s but it was the Stuart Kings of England in the seventeenth century that placed the town firmly on the map as the headquarters of the Thoroughbred racing and breeding industry.

  I’d looked up Newmarket on the internet.

  Exploits on the turf were not the only notable events in the history of the town. A royal palace once stood on what is now Newmarket High Street and, in March 1642, it was here that Charles I angrily rebuffed a deputation sent from Parliament demanding that he relinquish command of the country’s armed forces, an episode that effectively started the English Civil War and ultimately led to the king losing his head.

  That palace was torn down during the Cromwell years and, in keeping with the puritanical nature of the period, horse racing was banned as being ungodly.

  But, fortunately for the town, Charles II had inherited a love of the horse from his father and, when the monarchy was re-established in 1660, the king built a new palace and made Newmarket his second home, even installing Nell Gwynne, his mistress, in her own cottage that was supposedly connected directly to the King’s quarters via a secret underground passage. The cottage still stands on Palace Street although, sadly, the secret passage has long gone.

  Indeed, it was Charles II who instituted the first official races on the Heath, and Newmarket racecourse is today called the Rowley Mile in honour of the king’s own nickname, Old Rowley, taken from his favourite horse.

  However, none of this interesting but useless information made it any easier for me to find Ryan and Oliver Chadwick among the abundance of horseflesh at morning exercise on Warren Hill. Perhaps I should have waited at Castleton House Stables for the horses to come back.

  I was also beginning to wish that I’d brought my wellington boots rather than only my highly polished black leather shoes.

  It was while I was scraping another clod of heavy Heath mud from my instep that I noticed half a dozen light-blue caps with red pom-poms going past.

  ‘Ryan Chadwick?’ I asked one of them.

  ‘Up there,’ he replied, pointing up at Warren Hill where I could see a couple of figures standing to one side, about two-thirds of the way. ‘We’re just going to do one more canter past them and then we’re done. There’s another group behind us.’

  Sure enough, six more horses topped with light-blue capped and red pom-pommed riders were walking round in a tight circle to my right, waiting for their turn.

  One of the two men on the hill waved an arm above his head and the first six started their run up towards them. I followed more slowly, walking on the grass alongside the railed gallop.

  By the time I reached Ryan and Oliver, both sets of horses had gone past and the two men were packing away p
airs of binoculars into brown leather cases.

  ‘Morning!’ I shouted as I approached.

  ‘Hello, Harry,’ said Oliver, waving a hand but not really in a welcoming manner. However, he was happier to see me than his son, who just made a reluctant grunt as an acknowledgement of my presence.

  ‘I thought the horses would go faster,’ I said.

  ‘Just gentle canters today,’ said Oliver. ‘To maintain condition. We only do fast gallops twice a week – Wednesdays and Saturdays are the work days, unless they’re racing, of course. We aim to get the horses to peak fitness when they arrive on the racecourse. They’d never win a race if we tire them too much on the Heath.’

  I realised how little I knew about training athletes of any species and, it seemed, especially horses. I’d imagined they would run flat-out every day to build up their stamina.

  ‘Right,’ said Oliver decisively, clapping his hands together. ‘Time for breakfast. Are you coming?’

  He turned and marched off across the grass towards a Land Rover parked alongside the nearby road.

  ‘I actually wanted to have a private word with Ryan,’ I called after him.

  He stopped and came back to face me, his angry jutting jaw only about two feet away from mine. Ryan, meanwhile, just stood and stared at me in silence.

  ‘What about?’ Oliver demanded.

  ‘I spoke with the Sheikh this morning,’ I said.

  There was a visible drooping of Ryan’s shoulders as if he assumed it was more bad news. Things were clearly far from rosy in Ryan Chadwick’s world. And I reckoned it wasn’t only because of the fire.

  ‘So tell us what the Sheikh said,’ urged Oliver, clearly still agitated and apprehensive.

  I had tried once again to speak with Ryan alone but Oliver was having none of it, claiming strongly that he was as much a part of the business as his son and therefore had every right to know what the Sheikh had said.

  Hence, the three of us were sitting together round the kitchen table in Oliver’s house, drinking coffee and eating our way through a minor mountain of toast that had been left to keep warm on the side of the Aga, presumably by Maria, although there was no sign of her.

  I’d had a quick hotel breakfast at seven-thirty but I still managed to scoff down another couple of slices, with lashings of butter and marmalade. I was surprised how a morning on the gallops could give one an appetite. No wonder the Chadwicks ate afterwards rather than before.

  ‘The Sheikh sends his condolences to you both,’ I said.

  ‘What else?’ asked Ryan impatiently.

  ‘He wants to know why his horses died.’

  ‘We all bloody well want to know that,’ Oliver said, clearly irritated. ‘What else did he say? What about his other horses?’

  ‘He told me that he was moving two fillies from this yard to Declan’s.’

  I watched the two men very carefully, hoping to spot some unwary emotion. But they obviously had been expecting me to say this. There was not a flinch from either. They may both have been gritting their teeth internally but, if so, there was no visible external reaction.

  ‘It’s a good idea,’ Ryan said. ‘Declan is much better than me with young fillies. He nurtures them well.’

  You’re good, I thought.

  I almost believed that he was being sincere.

  Almost, but not quite.

  ‘What about the others?’ Oliver pressed urgently. ‘Is he going to move those as well?’

  ‘He says he is content to leave them here at Castleton House Stables.’

  There was an obvious lessening of tension in Oliver’s neck muscles and I realised that the six remaining Karim horses probably made a crucial difference between the stables staying afloat or going under.

  Our conversation was suspended by a knock on the kitchen door.

  ‘Come,’ shouted Oliver.

  The door opened slightly and a head full of tight red curls appeared through the crack.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, Mr Ryan,’ said a soft female voice. ‘It’s quarter to ten and we haven’t yet declared.’

  ‘Good God!’ Ryan said, leaping to his feet. ‘Well done, Janie. I’ll come and do it right now.’

  He rushed out towards the yard office.

  ‘Who’s Janie?’ I asked.

  ‘Yard secretary,’ Oliver said. ‘Been here for ever.’

  ‘She wasn’t here yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘She was. She came in early but I sent her home. She was distraught over the loss of the horses. She’s been with us since she was a teenager. I don’t think we could run the business now without her. Really efficient. She will have prepared the declarations on the computer. Ryan just has to confirm that everything’s correct and then send them online to Weatherbys before ten.’

  ‘Declarations for what?’ I asked.

  ‘To run a horse. We have to declare all runners by ten o’clock two days ahead of their races. So we are declaring today for those running on Thursday.’

  ‘Is that different from entries? Ryan said he had to do those yesterday.’

  Oliver almost managed to smother his irritation that I knew so little.

  ‘To declare a horse to run it must obviously be entered first. Entries close five days before most races but sometimes earlier, in particular for big races. For example, first entries for next month’s Derby closed almost eighteen months ago when the horses were still yearlings and hadn’t even run.’

  ‘But how do you know at that stage which ones will turn out to be any good?’

  ‘You don’t,’ Oliver said with a laugh. ‘So we entered them all just in case, even those that were still to be named. It’s only six hundred pounds a horse at that stage.’

  Amazing, I thought. Like paying a few hundred quid to put a newborn baby down for Eton or Harrow in the hope that, thirteen years later, he will be good enough to get in.

  Which, of course, was exactly what some people do.

  ‘It must be a disaster if you find you’ve developed a world-beater that you didn’t enter.’

  ‘I arrange with my owners to enter all their colts as a matter of course,’ said Oliver, ‘and most of their fillies too. You can make a late entry if you need to but it costs much more – eighty-five grand if you want to enter just the week before the race.’ He laughed again. ‘But worth it, of course, if you win.’

  If you win, I thought.

  Everything about life in Newmarket, it seemed, was about winning, and not just at the races.

  7

  Declan’s set-up was much more modest than that at Castleton House Stables. It was also on the other side of the town, on Hamilton Road near the Rowley Mile racecourse, so I arranged for the car to take me there just after eleven o’clock.

  Declan wasn’t expecting me and I made no effort to forewarn him of my arrival, instructing the driver to park on the driveway right in front of the house.

  However, it was Arabella who answered the front door, her make-up and hair immaculate. Just as yesterday.

  ‘Is Declan in?’ I asked her.

  ‘He’s in the shower,’ she replied. ‘Just back from riding out.’

  For some reason I was surprised.

  ‘He still rides, then?’

  ‘Of course he still rides. Most days.’ She sounded almost affronted that I would even ask. ‘He only gave up race-riding two years ago.’

  ‘Only I saw Ryan and Oliver on the gallops and they were in a Land Rover.’

  She grimaced as if even the mention of their names in this household was offensive.

  ‘Oliver is too old to ride now and Ryan has a bad knee. That’s what forced him to retire as a jockey.’ There was no sympathy in her tone, just a clipped statement of facts.

  ‘Why did Declan retire as a jockey?’ I asked.

  ‘He always wanted to train horses more than ride them. Most jockeys leave it too late. And, also, he got fed up of having to constantly starve himself to make the weights. Do you want to come in?’

  She
looked past me to the Mercedes and the driver, raising her eyebrows in question.

  ‘He’ll wait there,’ I said.

  I stepped into the galleried hallway and Arabella shut the door.

  ‘Coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Great.’

  She led the way across the parquet flooring of the hall into the kitchen. The house may have been slightly smaller than that of her father-in-law but it was tastefully furnished in pastels, and everything was spotless.

  There was a view from the kitchen window straight into the stable yard and, whereas the stable buildings themselves may have seen better days, they looked well cared for with several large pots of red geraniums adding colour at every corner.

  ‘Milk?’ Arabella asked.

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  She poured it in and handed me the steaming cup.

  ‘You have a lovely place here,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you. It’s not as big as Castleton House but at least it’s ours.’

  There was clear resentment in her tone. Jealousy towards Ryan was obviously alive and well and living in Hamilton Road.

  I decided not to duck the issue.

  ‘Have Ryan and Declan never got on?’

  She glanced at me sharply. ‘Who says they don’t get on?’

  I pursed my lips and looked at her. ‘Don’t take me for a fool,’ I said. ‘It’s pretty obvious. And I overheard him talking to you in Oliver’s kitchen yesterday before I came in.’

  She sighed. ‘That was the first time Ryan had spoken to me in five years. Not that he was very nice.’

  ‘So what were you doing there, then?’

  ‘God knows,’ she said. ‘Declan thought that we should, you know, after the fire and such, to show some support, but it wasn’t a good idea. We have nothing to do with them any more.’

  ‘Did you previously?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit, when the brothers were both riding. But not much even then. They are ultra-competitive – everyone is in racing – but Ryan always lorded it over Declan, claiming he was the better jockey simply because he rode more winners. But he had better horses to ride. Oliver thinks the sun shines out of Ryan’s arse, that he can do no wrong.’

  That’s not what Maria said, I thought, but decided not to say so.