by Dick Francis
I knew by sight all the jockeys and trainers and very many owners, because all one needed for that was eyes and race-cards, but also I knew a lot of their histories from long memory, as I’d spent much of my childhood and teens on racecourses, towed along by the elderly race-mad aunt who had brought me up. Through her knowledge and via her witty tongue I had become a veritable walking data bank; and then, at eighteen, after her death, I’d gone world-wandering for seven years. When I returned, I no longer looked like the unmatured youth I’d been, and the eyes of the people who had known me vaguely as a child slid over me without recognition.
I returned to England finally because at twenty-five I’d come into the inheritances from both my aunt and my father, and my trustees were wanting instructions. I had been in touch with them from time to time, and they had despatched funds to far-flung outposts fairly often, but when I walked into the hushed book-lined law office of the senior partner of Cornborough, Cross and George, old Clement Cornborough greeted me with a frown and stayed sitting down behind his desk.
‘You’re not … er …’ he said, looking over my shoulder for the one he’d expected.
‘Well … yes, I am. Tor Kelsey.’
‘Good Lord.’ He stood up slowly, leaning forward to extend a hand. ‘But you’ve changed. You … er …’
‘Taller, heavier and older,’ I said, nodding. Also sun-tanned, at that moment, from a spell in Mexico.
‘I’d … er … pencilled in lunch,’ he said doubtfully.
‘That would be fine,’ I said.
He took me to a similarly hushed restaurant full of other solicitors who nodded to him austerely. Over roast beef he told me that I would never have to work for a living (which I knew) and in the same breath asked what I was going to do with my life, a question I couldn’t answer. I’d spent seven years learning how to live, which was different, but I’d had no formal training in anything. I felt claustrophobic in offices and I was not academic. I understood machines and was quick with my hands. I had no overpowering ambitions. I wasn’t the entrepreneur my father had been, but nor would I squander the fortune he had left me.
‘What have you been doing?’ old Cornborough said, making conversation valiantly. ‘You’ve been to some interesting places, haven’t you?’
Travellers’ tales were pretty boring, I thought. It was always better to live it. ‘I mostly worked with horses,’ I said politely. ‘Australia, South America, United States, anywhere. Racehorses, polo ponies, a good deal in rodeos. Once in a circus.’
‘Good heavens.’
‘It’s not easy now, though, and getting harder, to work one’s passage. Too many countries won’t allow it. And I won’t go back to it. I’ve done enough. Grown out of it.’
‘So what next?’
‘Don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘Look around. I’m not getting in touch with my mother’s people, so don’t tell them I’m here.’
‘If you say so.’
My mother had come from an impoverished hunting family who were scandalised when at twenty she married a sixty-five-year-old giant of a Yorkshireman with an empire in second-hand car auctions and no relatives in Burke’s Peerage. They’d said it was because he showered her with horses, but it always sounded to me as if she’d been truly attracted. He at any rate was besotted with her, as his sister, my aunt, had often told me, and he’d seen no point in living after she was killed in a hunting accident, when I was two. He’d lasted three years and died of cancer, and because my mother’s family hadn’t wanted me, my aunt Viv Kelsey had taken me over and made my young life a delight.
To Aunt Viv, unmarried, I was the longed for child she’d had no chance of bearing. She must have been sixty when she took me, though I never thought of her as old. She was always young inside; and I missed her dreadfully when she died.
Millington’s voice said, ‘The car you are following … are you still following it?’
‘Still in sight.’
‘It’s registered to a Derry Welfram. Ever heard of him?’
‘No.’
Millington still had connections in the police force and seemed to get useful computerised information effortlessly.
‘His address is down as Parkway Mansions, Maida Vale, London,’ he said. ‘If you lose him, try there.’
‘Right.’
Derry Welfram obligingly drove straight to Parkway Mansions and others of Millington’s minions later made a positive identification. Millington tried a photograph of him on each of the witnesses with the unreliable memories and, as he described to me afterwards, ‘They both shit themselves with fear and stuttered they’d never seen the man, never, never.’ But they’d been so effectively frightened, both of them, that Millington could get nothing out of them at all.
Millington told me to follow Derry Welfram if I saw him again at the races, to see who else he talked to, which I’d been doing for about a month on the day the navy-suit fell on its buttons. Welfram had talked intensely to about ten people by then and proved he was comprehensively a bearer of bad news, leaving behind him a trail of shocked, shivering, hollow-eyed stares at unwelcome realities. And because I had an ingenious camera built into binoculars (and another that looked like a cigarette lighter) we had recognisable portraits of most of Welfram’s shattered contacts, though so far identifications for less than half. Millington’s men were working on it.
Millington had come to the conclusion that Welfram was a frightener hired to shake out bad debts: a rent-a-thug in general, not solely Filmer’s man. I had seen him speak to Filmer only once since the first occasion, which didn’t mean he hadn’t done so more often. There were usually race meetings at three or more different courses in England each day, and it was a toss-up, sometimes, to guess where either of the quarries would go. Filmer, moreover, went racing less often than Welfram, two or three times a week at most. Filmer had shares in a great many horses and usually went where they ran; and I checked their destinations every morning in the racing press.
The problem with Filmer was not what he did, but catching him doing it. At first sight, second sight, third sight he did nothing wrong. He bought racehorses, put them in training, went to watch them run, enjoyed all the pleasures of an owner. It was only gradually, over the ten years since Filmer had appeared on the scene, that there had been eyebrows raised, frowns of disbelief, mouths pursed in puzzlement.
Filmer bought horses occasionally at auction through an agent or a trainer but chiefly acquired them by deals struck in private, a perfectly proper procedure. Any owner was always at liberty to sell his horses to anyone else. The surprising thing about some of Filmer’s acquisitions was that no one would have expected the former owner to sell the horse at all.
I had been briefed about him by Millington during my first few weeks in the Service, but then only as someone to be generally aware of, not as a number one priority.
‘He leans on people,’ Millington said. ‘We’re sure of it, but we don’t know how. He’s much too fly to do anything where we can see him. Don’t think you’ll catch him handing out bunches of money for information, nothing crude like that. Look for people who’re nervous when he’s near, right?’
‘Right.’
I had spotted a few of those. Both of the trainers who trained his horses treated him with caution, and most of the jockeys who rode them shook his hand with their fingertips. The Press, who knew who wouldn’t answer questions, hardly bothered to ask them. A deferential decorative girlfriend jumped when he said jump, and the male companion frequently in attendance fairly scuttled. Yet there was nothing visibly boorish about his general manner at the races. He smiled at appropriate moments, nodded congratulations to other owners in the winners’ enclosures and patted his horses when they pleased him.
He was in person forty-eight, heavy, about five foot ten in height. Millington said the weight was mostly muscle, as Filmer spent time three days a week raising a sweat in a gym. Above the muscle there was a well-shaped head, large flat ears and thick black hair fl
ecked with grey. I hadn’t been near enough to see the colour of his eyes, but Millington had them down as greenish brown.
Rather to Millington’s annoyance I refused to follow Filmer about much. For one thing in the end he would have been certain to have spotted me, and for another it wasn’t necessary. Filmer was a creature of habit, moving from car to lunch to bookmaker to grandstand to paddock at foreseeable intervals. At each track he had a favourite place to watch the races from, a favourite vantage point overlooking the parade ring and a favourite bar where he drank lager mostly and plied the girlfriend with vodka. He rented a private box at two racecourses and was on the waiting list at several more, where his aim seemed to be seclusion rather than the lavish entertainment of friends.
He had been born on the Isle of Man, that tax-haven rock out of sight of England in the stormy Irish Sea, and had been brought up in a community stuffed with millionaires fleeing the fleecing taxes of the mainland. His father had been a wily fixer admired for fleecing the fled. Young Julius Apollo Filmer (his real name) had learned well and outstripped his father in rich pickings until he’d left home for wider shores; and that was the point, Millington said gloomily, at which they had lost him. Filmer had turned up on racecourses sixteen or so years later giving his occupation as ‘company director’ and maintaining a total silence about his source of considerable income.
During the run-up to the conspiracy trial, the police had done their best to unravel his background further, but Julius Apollo knew a thing or two about off-shore companies and had stayed comfortably ravelled. He still officially lived on the Isle of Man, though he was never there for long. During the Flat season he mostly divided his time between hotels in Newmarket and Paris, and in the winter he dropped entirely out of sight, as far as the Security Service was concerned. Steeple-chasing, the winter sport, never drew him.
During my first summer with the Service he had bought, to everyone’s surprise, one of the most promising two-year-olds in the country. Surprise, because the former owner, Ezra Gideon, was one of the natural aristocrats of racing, a much respected elderly and extremely wealthy man who lived for his horses and delighted in their successes. No one had been able to persuade him to say why he had parted with the best of his crop or for what price: he bore its subsequent high-flying autumn, its brilliant three-year-old season and its eventual multi-million pound syndication for stud with an unvaryingly stony expression.
After Filmer’s acquittal, Ezra Gideon had again sold him a two-year-old of great promise. The Jockey Club mandarins begged Gideon practically on their knees to tell them why. He said merely that it was a private arrangement: and since then he had not been seen on a racecourse.
On the day Derry Welfram died I drove homewards to London wondering yet again, as so many people had wondered so often, just what leverage Filmer had used on Gideon. Blackmailers had gone largely out of business since adultery and homosexuality had blown wide open, and one couldn’t see old-fashioned upright Ezra Gideon as one of the newly fashionable brands of transgressor, an insider-trader or an abuser of children. Yet without some overwhelming reason he would never have sold Filmer two such horses, denying himself what he most enjoyed in life.
Poor old man, I thought. Derry Welfram or someone like that had got to him, as to the witnesses, as to Paul Shacklebury dead in his ditch. Poor old man, too afraid of the consequences to let anyone help.
Before I reached home the telephone again purred in my car and I picked up the receiver to hear Millington’s voice.
‘The boss wants to see you,’ he said. ‘This evening at eight, usual place. Any problem?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there. Do you know … er … why?’
‘I should think,’ Millington said, ‘because Ezra Gideon has shot himself.’
CHAPTER TWO
The boss, Brigadier Valentine Catto, Director of Security to the Jockey Club, was short, spare, and a commanding officer from his polished toecaps to the thinning blond hair on his crown. He had all the organisational skills needed to rise high in the army, and he was intelligent and unhurried and listened attentively to what he was told.
His motto, often repeated, was ‘Thought before action: if you’ve got time.’
I met him first on a day when old Clement Cornborough asked me again to lunch to discuss in detail, as he said, the winding up of the Trust he’d administered on my behalf for twenty years. A small celebration, he said. At his club.
His club turned out to be the Hobbs Sandwich Club, near the Oval cricket ground, a Victorian mini-mansion with a darkly opulent bar and club rooms, their oak panelled walls decorated with endless pictures of gentlemen in small cricket caps, large white flannels and (quite often) side-whiskers.
The Hobbs Sandwich, he said, leading the way through stained glass panelled doors, was named for two great Surrey cricketers from between the wars, Sir Jack Hobbs, one of the few cricketers ever knighted, and Andrew Sandham, who had scored one hundred and seven centuries in first class cricket. Long before I was born, he said.
I hadn’t played cricket since distant days at school, nor liked it particularly even then: Clement Cornborough proved to be a lifelong fanatic.
He introduced me in the bar to an equal fanatic, his friend Val Catto who then joined us for lunch. Not a word about my Trust was spoken. The two of them talked cricket solidly for fifteen minutes and then the friend Catto began asking questions about my life. It dawned on me uneasily after a while that I was being interviewed, though I didn’t know for what; and I learned afterwards that in conversation one day during the tea interval of a cricket match Catto had lamented to Cornborough that what he really needed was someone who knew the racing scene intimately, but whom the racing scene didn’t know in return. An eyes and ears man. A silent, unknown investigator. A fly on racing’s wall that no one would notice. Such a person, they had sighed together, was unlikely to be found. And that when a few weeks later I walked into Cornborough’s office (or at least by the time I left it) the lawyer had suffered a brainwave which he passed on to his friend Val.
The Hobbs Sandwich lunch (of anything but sandwiches) had lasted through a good chunk of the afternoon, and by the end of it I had a job. I hadn’t taken a lot of persuading, as it seemed interesting to me from the start. A month’s trial on both sides, Brigadier Catto said, and mentioned a salary that had Cornborough smiling broadly.
‘What’s so funny?’ the Brigadier asked. ‘That’s normal. We pay most of our men that at the start.’
‘I forgot to mention it. Tor here is … um …’ He paused, perhaps wondering whether finishing the sentence came under the heading of breaking a client’s right to confidentiality, because after a short while he went on, ‘He’d better tell you himself.’
‘I accept the salary,’ I said.
‘What have you not told me?’ Catto asked, suddenly very much the boss, his eyes not exactly suspicious but unsmiling: and I saw that I was not binding myself to some slightly eccentric friendly cricket nut, but to the purposeful, powerful man who had commanded a brigade and was currently keeping horseracing honest. I was not going to be playing a game, he was meaning, and if I thought so we would go no further.
I said wryly, ‘I have a private income after tax of about twenty times the salary you’re offering, but I’ll take your money all the same, sir, and I’ll work for it.’
He listened to the underlying declaration of commitment and good faith, and after a long pause he smiled briefly and nodded.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘When can you start?’
I had started the next day at Epsom races, relearning the characters, reawakening sleeping memories, hearing Aunt Viv’s bright voice in my ear about as clearly as if she were alive. ‘There’s Paddy Fredericks. Did I tell you he used to be married to Betsy who’s now Mrs Glove-binder? Brad Glovebinder used to have horses with Paddy Fredericks but when he pinched Betsy, he took his horses away too … no justice in the world. Hello Paddy, how are things? This is my nephew T
orquil, as I expect you remember, you’ve met him often enough. Well done with your winner, Paddy …’ and Paddy had taken us off for a drink, buying me a coke.
I came face to face unexpectedly with the trainer Paddy Fredericks that first day at Epsom and he hadn’t known me. There hadn’t been a pause or a flicker. Aunt Viv had been dead nearly eight years and I had changed too much; and I had been reassured from that early moment that my weird new non-identity was going to work.
On the grounds that racing villains made it their business to know the Security Service comprehensively by sight, Brigadier Catto said that if he ever wanted to speak to me himself, it would never be on a racecourse but always in the bar of the Hobbs Sandwich, and so it had been for the past three years. He and Clement Cornborough had sponsored me for full membership of the club and encouraged me to go there occasionally on other days on my own, and although I’d thought the Brigadier’s passion for secrecy a shade obsessive I had fallen in with his wishes and come to enjoy it, even if I’d learned a lot more about cricket than I really wanted to.
On the night of Derry Welfram’s death, I walked into the bar at ten to eight and ordered a glass of Burgundy and a couple of beef sandwiches which came promptly because of the post-cricket-season absence of a hundred devotees discussing leg-breaks and insider politics at the tops of their voices. There were still a good number of customers, but from late September to the middle of April one could talk all night without laryngitis the next day, and when the Brigadier arrived he greeted me audibly and cheerfully as a fellow member well met and began telling me his assessment of the Test team just assembled for the winter tour abroad.
‘They’ve disregarded Withers,’ he complained. ‘How are they ever going to get Balping out if they leave our best in-swinger biting his knuckles at home?’