by Dick Francis
Charles gave me a glass of fino, Toby looked me up and down as if I’d come straight from a pig sty, and Jenny said she had been talking to Louise on the telephone.
‘We thought you had run away. You left the flat two hours ago.’
‘Sid doesn’t run away,’ Charles said, as if stating a fact.
‘Limps, then,’ Jenny said.
Toby sneered at me over his glass: the male in possession enjoying his small gloat over the dispossessed. I wondered if he really understood the extent of Jenny’s attachment to Nicholas Ashe, or if knowing, he didn’t care.
I sipped the sherry: a thin dry taste, suitable to the occasion. Vinegar might have been better.
‘Where did you buy all that polish from?’ I said.
‘I don’t remember.’ She spoke distinctly, spacing out the syllables, wilfully obstructive.
‘Jenny!’ Charles protested.
I sighed. ‘Charles, the police have the invoices, which will have the name and address of the polish firm on them. Can you ask your friend Oliver Quayle to ask the police for the information, and send it to me.’
‘Certainly,’ he said.
‘I cannot see,’ Jenny said in the same sort of voice, ‘that knowing who supplied the wax will make the slightest difference one way or the other.’
It appeared that Charles privately agreed with her. I didn’t explain. There was a good chance, anyway, that they were right.
‘Louise said you were prying for ages.’
‘I liked her,’ I said mildly.
Jenny’s nose, as always, gave away her displeasure. ‘She’s out of your class, Sid,’ she said.
‘In what way?’
‘Brains, darling.’
Charles said smoothly, ‘More sherry, anyone?’ and decanter in hand, began refilling glasses. To me, he said, ‘I believe Louise took a first at Cambridge in mathematics. I have played her at chess … you would beat her with ease.’
‘A Grand Master,’ Jenny said, ‘can be obsessional and stupid and have a persecution complex.’
Lunch came and went in the same sort of atmosphere, and afterwards I went upstairs to put my few things into my suitcase. While I was doing it Jenny came in to the room and stood watching me.
‘You don’t use that hand much,’ she said.
I didn’t answer.
‘I don’t know why you bother with it.’
‘Stop it, Jenny.’
‘If you’d done as I asked, and given up racing, you wouldn’t have lost it.’
‘Probably not.’
‘You’d have a hand, not half an arm … not a stump.’
I threw my spongebag with too much force into the suitcase.
‘Racing first. Always racing. Dedication and winning and glory. And me nowhere. It serves you right. We’d still have been married … you’d still have your hand … if you’d have given up your precious racing when I wanted you to. Being champion jockey meant more to you than I did.’
‘We’ve said all this a dozen times,’ I said.
‘Now you’ve got nothing. Nothing at all. I hope you’re satisfied.’
The battery charger stood on a chest of drawers, with two batteries in it She pulled the plug out of the mains socket and threw the whole thing on the bed. The batteries fell out and lay on the bedspread haphazardly with the charger and its flex.
‘It’s disgusting,’ she said, looking at it. ‘It revolts me.’
‘I’ve got used to it.’ More or less, anyway.
‘You don’t seem to care.’
I said nothing. I cared, all right.
‘Do you enjoy being crippled, Sid?’
Enjoy… Jesus Christ.
She walked to the door and left me looking down at the charger. I felt more than saw her pause there, and wondered numbly what else there was left that she could say.
Her voice reached me quite clearly across the room.
‘Nick has a knife in his sock.’
I turned my head fast. She looked both defiant and expectant. ‘Is that true?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Adolescent,’ I said.
She was annoyed. ‘And what’s so mature about hurtling around on horses and knowing … knowing… that pain and broken bones are going to happen?’
‘You never think they will.’
‘And you’re always wrong.’
‘I don’t do it any more.’
‘But you would if you could.’
There was no answer to that, because we both knew it was true.
‘And look at you,’ Jenny said. ‘When you have to stop racing, do you look around for a nice quiet job in stock-broking, which you know about, and start to lead a normal life? No, you damned well don’t. You go straight into something which lands you up in fights and beatings and hectic scrambles. You can’t live without danger, Sid. You’re addicted. You may think you aren’t, but it’s like a drug. If you just imagine yourself working in an office, nine to five, and commuting like any sensible man, you’ll see what I mean.’
I thought about it, silently.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘In an office, you’d die.’
‘And what’s so safe about a knife in the sock?’ I said. ‘I was a jockey when we met. You knew what it entailed.’
‘Not from the inside. Not all those terrible bruises, and no food and no drink, and no damned sex half the time.’
‘Did he show you the knife, or did you just see it?’
‘What does it matter?’
‘Is he adolescent … or truly dangerous?’
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘You’d prefer him dangerous.’
‘Not for your sake.’
‘Well … I saw it. In a little sheath, strapped to his leg. And he made a joke about it.’
‘But you told me,’ I said. ‘So was it a warning?’
She seemed suddenly unsure and disconcerted, and after a moment or two simply frowned and walked away down the passage.
If it marked the first crack in her indulgence towards her precious Nicky, so much the better.
I picked Chico up on Tuesday morning and drove north to Newmarket. A windy day, bright, showery, rather cold.
‘How did you get on with the wife, then?’
He had met her once and had described her as unforgettable, the overtones in his voice giving the word several meanings.
‘She’s in trouble,’ I said.
‘Pregnant?’
‘There are other forms of trouble, you know.’
‘Really?’
I told him about the fraud, and about Ashe, and his knife.
‘Gone and landed herself in a whoopsy,’ Chico said.
‘Face down.’
‘And for dusting her off, do we get a fee?’
I looked at him sideways.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I thought so. Working for nothing again, aren’t we? Good job you’re well-oiled, Sid, mate, when it comes to my wages. What is it this year? You made a fortune in anything since Christmas?’
‘Silver, mostly. And cocoa. Bought and sold.’
‘Cocoa?’ He was incredulous.
‘Beans,’ I said. ‘Chocolate.’
‘Nutty bars?’
‘No, not the nuts. They’re risky.’
‘I don’t know how you find the time.’
‘It takes as long as chatting up barmaids.’
‘What do you want with all that money, anyway?’
‘It’s a habit,’ I said. ‘Like eating.’
Amicably we drew nearer to Newmarket, consulted the map, asked a couple of locals, and finally arrived at the incredibly well-kept stud farm of Henry Thrace.
‘Sound out the lads,’ I said, and Chico said ‘Sure’, and we stepped out of the car on to weedless gravel. I left him to it and went in search of Henry Thrace, who was reported by a cleaning lady at the front door of the house to be ‘down there on the right, in his office’. Down there he was, in an armchair, fast asleep.
My arrival
woke him, and he came alive with the instant awareness of people used to broken nights. A youngish man, very smooth, a world away from rough, tough, wily Tom Garvey. With Thrace, according to predigested opinion, breeding was strictly big business: handling the mares could be left to lower mortals. His first words, however, didn’t match the image.
‘Sorry. Been up half the night … Er, who are you, exactly? Do we have an appointment?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I just hoped to see you. My name’s Sid Halley.’
‘Is it? Any relation to … Good Lord. You’re him.’
‘I’m him.’
‘What can I do for you? Want some coffee?’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Mrs Evans will get us some.’
‘Don’t bother, unless …’
‘No. Fire away.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes do? I’ve got a meeting in Newmarket.’
‘It’s very vague, really,’ I said. ‘I just came to inquire into the general health and so on of two of the stallions you’ve got here.’
‘Oh. Which two?’
‘Gleaner,’ I said. ‘And Zingaloo.’
We went through the business of why did I want to know, and why should he tell me, but finally, like Tom Garvey, he shrugged and said I might as well know.
‘I suppose I shouldn’t say it, but you wouldn’t want to advise a client to buy shares in either of them,’ he said, taking for granted this was really the purpose of my visit. ‘They might have difficulty in covering their full quota of mares, both of them, although they’re only four.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘They’ve both got bad hearts. They get exhausted with too much exercise.’
‘Both?’
‘That’s right. That’s what stopped them racing as three-year-olds. And I reckon they’ve got worse since then.’
‘Somebody mentioned Gleaner was lame,’ I said.
Henry Thrace looked resigned. ‘He’s developed arthritis recently. You can’t keep a damn thing to yourself in this town.’ An alarm clock made a clamour on his desk. He reached over and switched it off. ‘Time to go, I’m afraid.’ He yawned. ‘I hardly take my clothes off at this time of the year.’ He took a battery razor out of his desk drawer, and attacked his beard. ‘Is that everything then, Sid?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
Chico pulled the car door shut, and we drove away towards the town.
‘Bad hearts,’ he said.
‘Bad hearts.’
‘Proper epidemic, isn’t it?’
‘Let’s ask Brothersmith the vet.’
Chico read out the address, in Middleton Road.
‘Yes, I know it. It was old Follett’s place. He was our old vet, still alive when I was here.’
Chico grinned. ‘Funny somehow to think of you being a snotty little apprentice with the head lad chasing you.’
‘And chilblains.’
‘Makes you seem almost human.’
I had spent five years in Newmarket, from sixteen to twenty-one. Learning to ride, learning to race, learning to live. My old guv’nor had been a good one, and because I saw every day his wife, his lifestyle, and his administrative ability, I’d slowly changed from a boy from the backstreets into something more cosmopolitan. He had shown me how to manage the money I’d begun earning in large quantities, and how not to be corrupted by it; and when he turned me loose I found he’d given me the status that went with having been taught in his stable. I’d been lucky in my guv’nor, and lucky to be for a long time at the top of the career I loved; and if one day the luck had run out it was too damned bad.
‘Takes you back, does it?’ Chico said.
‘Yeah.’
We drove across the wide Heath and past the racecourse towards the town. There weren’t many horses about: a late morning string, in the distance, going home. I swung the car round familiar corners and pulled up outside the vet’s.
Mr Brothersmith was out.
If it was urgent, Mr Brothersmith could be found seeing to a horse in a stable along Bury Road. Otherwise he would be home to his lunch, probably, in half an hour. We said thank you, and sat in the car, and waited.
‘We’ve got another job,’ I said. ‘Checking on syndicates.’
‘I thought the Jockey Club always did it themselves.’
‘Yes, they do. The job we’ve got is to check on the man from the Jockey Club who checks on the syndicates.’
Chico digested it. ‘Tricky, that.’
‘Without him knowing.’
‘Oh yes?’
I nodded. ‘Ex-Superintendent Eddy Keith.’
Chico’s mouth fell open. ‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’
‘But he’s the fuzz. The Jockey Club fuzz.’
I passed on Lucas Wainwright’s doubts, and Chico said Lucas Wainwright must have got it wrong. The job, I pointed out mildly, was to find out whether he had or not.
‘And how do we do that?’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
‘It’s you that’s supposed to be the brains of this outfit.’
A muddy Range Rover came along Middleton Road and turned into Brothersmith’s entrance. As one, Chico and I removed ourselves from the Scimitar, and went towards the tweed-jacketed man jumping down from his buggy.
‘Mr Brothersmith?’
‘Yes? What’s the trouble?’
He was young and harassed, and kept looking over his shoulder, as if something was chasing him. Time, perhaps, I thought. Or lack of it.
‘Could you spare us a few minutes?’ I said. ‘This is Chico Barnes, and I’m Sid Halley. It’s just a few questions …’
His brain took in the name and his gaze switched immediately towards my hands, fastening finally on the left.
‘Aren’t you the man with the myoelectric prosthesis?’
‘Er … yes.’ I said.
‘Come in, then. Can I look at it?’
He turned away and strode purposefully towards the side door of the house. I stood still and wished we were anywhere else.
‘Come on, Sid,’ Chico said, following him. He looked back and stopped. ‘Give the man what he wants, Sid, and maybe he’ll do the same for us.’
Payment in kind, I thought: and I didn’t like the price. Unwillingly I followed Chico into what turned out to be Brothersmith’s surgery.
He asked a lot of questions in a fairly clinical manner, and I answered him in impersonal tones learned from the limb centre.
‘Can you rotate the wrist?’ he said at length.
‘Yes, a little.’ I showed him. ‘There’s a sort of cup inside there which fits over the end of my arm, with another electrode to pick up the impulses for turning.’
I knew he wanted me to take the arm off and show him properly, but I wouldn’t have done it, and perhaps he saw there was no point in asking.
‘It fits very tightly over your elbow,’ he said, delicately feeling round the gripping edges.
‘So as not to fall off.’
He nodded intently. ‘Is it easy to put on and remove?’
‘Talcum powder,’ I said economically.
Chico’s mouth opened, and shut again as he caught my don’t-say-it stare, and he didn’t tell Brothersmith that removal was often a distinct bore.
‘Thinking of fitting one to a horse?’ Chico said.
Brothersmith raised his still-harassed face and answered him seriously. ‘Technically it looks perfectly possible, but it’s doubtful if one could train a horse to activate the electrodes, and it would be difficult to justify the expense.’
‘It was only a joke,’ Chico said faintly.
‘Oh? Oh, I see. But it isn’t unknown, you know, for a horse to have a false foot fitted. I was reading the other day about a successful prosthesis fitted to the fore-limb of a valuable broodmare. She was subsequently covered, and produced a live foal.’
‘Ah,’ Chico said. ‘Now that’s what we’ve come about. A broodmare. Only this one died.’
Brothersmith deta
ched his attention reluctantly from false limbs and transferred it to horses with bad hearts.
‘Bethesda,’ I said, rolling down my sleeve and buttoning the cuff.
‘Bethesda?’ He wrinkled his forehead and turned the harassed look into one of anxiety. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t recall …’
‘She was a filly with George Caspar,’ I said. ‘Beat everything as a two-year-old, and couldn’t run at three because of a heart murmur. She was sent to stud, but her heart packed up when she was foaling.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said, adding sorrow to the anxiety. ‘What a pity. But I say, I’m so sorry, but I treat so many horses, and I often don’t know their names. Is there a question of insurance in this, or negligence, even? Because I assure you …’
‘No,’ I said reassuringly, ‘nothing like that. Can you remember, then, treating Gleaner and Zingaloo?’
‘Yes, of course. Those two. Wretched shame for George Caspar. So disappointing.’
‘Tell us about them.’
‘Nothing much to tell, really. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that they were both so good as two-year-olds. Probably that was the cause of their troubles, if the truth were told.’
‘How do you mean?’ I said.
His nervous tensions escaped in small jerks of his head as he brought forth some unflattering opinions. ‘Well, one hesitates to say so, of course, to top trainers like Caspar, but it is all too easy to strain a two-year-old’s heart, and if they are good two-year-olds they run in top races, and the pressure to win may be terrific, because of stud values and everything, and a jockey, riding strictly to orders, mind you, may press a game youngster so hard that although it wins it is also more or less ruined for the future.’
‘Gleaner won the Doncaster Futurity in the mud,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I saw it. It was a very hard race.’
‘That’s right,’ Brothersmith said. ‘I checked him thoroughly afterwards, though. The trouble didn’t start at once. In fact, it didn’t show at all, until he ran in the Guineas. He came in from that in a state of complete exhaustion. First of all we thought it was the virus but then after a few days we got this very irregular heart beat, and then it was obvious what was the matter.’
‘What virus?’ I said.
‘Let’s see … The evening of the Guineas he had a very slight fever, as if he were in for equine ’flu, or some such. But it didn’t develop. So it wasn’t that. It was his heart, all right But we couldn’t have foreseen it.’