by Dick Francis
It was not the flat-out searching gallop they would hold on the following Saturday morning over a long smooth surface like the Limekilns. Up the incline of Warren Hill a fast canter was testing enough. Tri-Nitro took the whole thing without a hint of effort, and breasted the top as if he could go up there six times more without noticing.
Impressive, I thought. The Press, clearly agreeing, were scribbling in their notebooks. Trevor Deansgate looked thoughtful, as well he might, and George Caspar, coming down the hill and reining in near us, looked almost smugly satisfied. The Guineas, one felt, were in the bag.
After they had done their work the horses walked down the hill to join the still circling string where the work riders changed on to fresh mounts and set off again up to the top. Tri-Nitro got back his lad with the olive-green husky and the red scarf, and eventually the whole lot of them set off home.
‘That’s that, then,’ George said. ‘All set, Trevor? Breakfast?’
They nodded farewells to me and set off, one in the car, one on the horse. I had eyes mostly, however, for Inky Poole, who had been four times up the hill and was walking off a shade morosely to a parked car.
‘Inky,’ I said, coming up behind him, ‘the gallop on Tri-Nitro … that was great.’
He looked at me sourly. ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’
‘I’m not from the press.’
‘I know who you are. Saw you racing. Who hasn’t?’ Unfriendly: almost a sneer. ‘What do you want?’
‘How does Tri-Nitro compare with Gleaner, this time last year?’
He fished the car keys out of a zipper pocket in his anorak, and fitted one into the lock. What I could see of his face looked obstinately unhelpful.
‘Did Gleaner, a week before the Guineas, give you the same sort of feel?’ I said.
‘I’m not talking to you.’
‘How about Zingaloo?’ I said. ‘Or Bethesda?’
He opened his car door and slid down into the driving seat, taking out time to give me a hostile glare.
‘Piss off,’ he said. Slammed the door. Stabbed the ignition key into the dashboard and forcefully drove away.
Chico had arisen to breakfast but was sitting in the pub’s dining room holding his head.
‘Don’t look so healthy,’ he said when I joined him.
‘Bacon and eggs,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’ll have. Or kippers, perhaps. And strawberry jam.’
He groaned.
‘I’m going back to London,’ I said. ‘But would you mind staying here?’ I brought the camera out of my pocket. ‘Take the film out of that and get it developed. Overnight if possible. There’s some pictures of Tri-Nitro and Inky Poole on there. We might find them helpful, you never know.’
‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to ring up the Comprehensive and tell them that my black belt’s at the cleaners.’
I laughed. ‘There were some girls riding in George Caspar’s string this morning,’ I said. ‘See what you can do.’
‘That’s beyond the call of duty.’ But his eye seemed suddenly brighter. ‘What am I asking?’
‘Things like who saddles Tri-Nitro for exercise gallops, and what’s the routine from now until next Wednesday, and whether anything nasty is stirring in the jungle.’
‘What about you, then?’
‘I’ll be back Friday night,’ I said. ‘In time for the gallops on Saturday. They’re bound to gallop Tri-Nitro on Saturday. A strong work-out, to bring him to a peak.’
‘Do you really think anything dodgy’s going on?’ Chico said.
‘A toss-up. I just don’t know. I’d better ring Rosemary.’
I went through the Mr Barnes routine again and Rosemary came on the line sounding as agitated as ever.
‘I can’t talk. We’ve people here for breakfast.’
‘Just listen, then,’ I said. ‘Try to persuade George to vary his routine, when he gallops Tri-Nitro on Saturday. Put up a different jockey, for instance. Not Inky Poole.’
‘You don’t think …’ her voice was high, and broke off.
‘I don’t know at all,’ I said. ‘But if George changed everything about, there’d be less chance of skulduggery. Routine is the robber’s best friend.’
‘What? Oh yes. All right. I’ll try. What about you?’
‘I’ll be out watching the gallop. After that, I’ll stick around, until after the Guineas is safely over. But I wish you’d let me talk to George.’
‘No. He’d be livid. I’ll have to go now.’ The receiver went down with a rattle which spoke of still unsteady hands, and I feared that George might be right about his wife being neurotic.
Charles and I met as usual at the Cavendish the following day, and sat in the upstairs bar’s armchairs.
‘You look happier,’ he said, ‘than I’ve seen you since …’ he gestured to my arm, with his glass. ‘Released in spirit. Not your usual stoical self.’
‘I’ve been in Newmarket,’ I said. ‘Watched the gallops, yesterday morning.’
‘I would have thought …’ he stopped.
‘That I’d be eaten by jealousy?’ I said. ‘So would I. But I enjoyed it.’
‘Good.’
‘I’m going up again tomorrow night and staying until after the Guineas next Wednesday.’
‘And lunch, next Thursday?’
I smiled and bought him a large pink gin. ‘I’ll be back for that.’
In due course we ate scallops one-handedly in a wine and cheese sauce, and he gave me the news of Jenny.
‘Oliver Quayle sent the address you asked for, for the polish.’ He took a paper from his breast pocket and handed it over. ‘Oliver is worried. He says the police are actively pursuing their inquiries, and Jenny is almost certain to be charged.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know. Oliver doesn’t know. Sometimes these things take weeks, but not always. And when they charge her, Oliver says, she will have to appear in a magistrates’ court, and they are certain to refer the case to the Crown Court, as so much money is involved. They’ll give her bail, or course.’
‘Bail!’
‘Oliver says she is unfortunately very likely to be convicted, but that if it is stressed that she acted as she did under the influence of Nicholas Ashe, she’ll probably get some sympathy from the judge and a conditional discharge.’
‘Even if he isn’t found?’
‘Yes. But of course if he is found, and charged, and found guilty, Jenny would with luck escape a conviction altogether.’
I took a deep breath that was half a sigh.
‘Have to find him then, won’t we?’ I said.
‘How?’
‘Well … I spent a lot of Monday, and all of this morning, looking through a box of letters. They came from the people who sent money, and ordered wax. Eighteen hundred of them, or thereabouts.’
‘How do they help?’
‘I’ve started sorting them into alphabetical order, and making a list.’ He frowned sceptically, but I went on. ‘The interesting thing is that all the surnames start with the letters L, M, N, and O. None from A to K, and none from P to Z.’
‘I don’t see …’
‘They might be part of a mailing list,’ I said. ‘Like for a catalogue. Or even for a charity. There must be thousands of mailing lists, but this one certainly did produce the required results, so it wasn’t a mailing list for dog licence reminders, for example.’
‘That seems reasonable,’ he said drily.
‘I thought I’d get all the names into order and then see if anyone, like Christie’s or Sotheby’s, say – because of the polish angle – has a mailing list which matches. A long shot, I know, but there’s just a chance.’
‘I could help you,’ he said.
‘It’s a boring job.’
‘She’s my daughter.’
‘All right then. I’d like it.’
I finished the scallops and sat back in my chair, and drank Charles’s good cold white wine.
He said
he would stay overnight in his club and come to my flat in the morning to help with the sorting, and I gave him a spare key to get in with, in case I should be out for a newspaper or cigarettes when he came. He lit a cigar and watched me through the smoke. ‘What did Jenny say to you upstairs after lunch on Sunday?’
I looked at him briefly. ‘Nothing much.’
‘She was moody all day, afterwards. She even snapped at Toby.’ He smiled. ‘Toby protested, and Jenny said, “At least Sid didn’t whine.”’ He paused. ‘I gathered that she’d been giving you a particularly rough mauling, and was feeling guilty.’
‘It wouldn’t be guilt. With luck, it was misgivings about Ashe.’
‘And not before time.’
From the Cavendish I went to the Portman Square headquarters of the Jockey Club, to keep an appointment made that morning on the telephone by Lucas Wainwright. Unofficial my task for him might be, but official enough for him to ask me to his office. Ex-Superintendent Eddy Keith, it transpired, had gone to Yorkshire to look into a positive doping test, and no one else was going to wonder much at my visit.
‘I’ve got all the files for you,’ Lucas said. ‘Eddy’s reports on the syndicates, and some notes on the rogues he OK’d.’
‘I’ll make a start then,’ I said. ‘Can I take them away, or do you want me to look at them here?’
‘Here, if you would,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to draw my secretary’s attention to them by letting them out or getting them xeroxed, as she works for Eddy too. and I know she admires him. She would tell him. You’d better copy down what you need.’
‘Right,’ I said.
He gave me a table to one side of his room, and a comfortable chair, and a bright light, and for an hour or so I read and made notes. At his own desk he did some desultory pen-pushing and rustled a few papers, but in the end it was clear that it was only a pretence of being busy. He wasn’t so much waiting for me to finish as generally uneasy.
I looked up from my writing. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘The … matter?’
‘Something’s troubling you.’
He hesitated. ‘Have you done all you want?’ he said, nodding at my work.
‘Only about half,’ I said. ‘Can you give me another hour?’
‘Yes, but … Look, I’ll have to be fair with you. There’s something you’ll have to know.’
‘What sort of thing?’
Lucas, who was normally urbane even when in a hurry, and whose naval habits of thought I understood from long practice with my Admiral father-in-law, was showing signs of embarrassment. The things that acutely embarrassed naval officers were collisions between warships and quaysides, ladies visiting the crew’s mess deck with the crew present and at ease, and dishonourable conduct among gentlemen. It couldn’t be the first two; so where were we with the third?
‘I have not perhaps given you all the facts,’ he said.
‘Go on, then.’
‘I did send someone else to check on two of the syndicates, some time ago. Six months ago.’ He fiddled with some paper-clips, no longer looking in my direction. ‘Before Eddy checked them.’
‘With what result?’
‘Ah. Yes.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The man I sent – his name’s Mason – we never received his report because he was attacked in the street before he could write it.’
Attacked in the street … ‘What sort of attack?’ I said. ‘And who attacked him?’
He shook his head. ‘Nobody knows who attacked him. He was found on the pavement by some passer-by, who called the police.’
‘Well … have you asked him – Mason?’ But I guessed at something of the answer, if not all of it.
‘He’s, er, never really recovered,’ Lucas said regretfully. ‘His head, it seemed, had been repeatedly kicked, as well as his body. There was a good deal of brain damage. He’s still in an institution. He always will be. He’s a vegetable … and he’s blind.’
I bit the end of the pencil with which I’d been making notes. ‘Was he robbed?’ I said.
‘His wallet was missing. But not his watch.’ His face was worried.
‘So it might have been a straightforward mugging?’
‘Yes … except that the police treated it as intended homicide, because of the number and target of the boot marks.’
He sat back in his chair as if he’d got rid of an unwelcome burden. Honour among gentlemen … honour satisfied.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Which two syndicates was he checking?’
‘The first two that you have there.’
‘And do you think any of the people on them – the undesirables – are the sort to kick their way out of trouble?’
He said unhappily, ‘They might be.’
‘And am I,’ I said carefully, ‘investigating the possible corruption of Eddy Keith, or Mason’s semi-murder?’
After a pause, he said, ‘Perhaps both.’
There was a long silence. Finally I said, ‘You do realize that by sending me notes at the races and meeting me in the tearoom and bringing me here, you haven’t left much doubt that I’m working for you?’
‘But it could be at anything.’
I said gloomily, ‘Not when I turn up on the syndicates’ doorsteps.’
‘I’d quite understand,’ he said, ‘if, in view of what I’ve said, you wanted to … er …’
So would I, I thought. I would understand that I didn’t want my head kicked in. But then what I’d told Jenny was true: one never thought it would happen. And you’re always wrong, she’d said.
I sighed. ‘You’d better tell me about Mason. Where he went, and who he saw. Anything you can think of.’
‘It’s practically nothing. He went off in the ordinary way and the next we heard was he’d been attacked. The police couldn’t trace where he’d been, and all the syndicate people swore they’d never seen him. The case isn’t closed, of course, but after six months it’s got no sort of priority.’
We talked it over for a while, and I spent another hour after that writing notes. I left the Jockey Club premises at a quarter to six, to go back to the flat; and I didn’t get there.
7
I went home in a taxi and paid it off outside the entrance to the flats, yet not exactly outside. because a dark car was squarely parked there on the double yellow lines, which was a towing-away place.
I scarcely looked at the car, which was my mistake, because as I reached it and turned away towards the entrance its nearside doors opened and spilled out the worst sort of trouble.
Two men in dark clothes grabbed me. One hit me dizzyingly on the head with something hard and the other flung what I later found was a kind of lasso of thick rope over my arms and chest and pulled it tight. They both bundled me into the back of the car where one of them for good measure tied a dark piece of cloth over my dazed half-shut eyes.
‘Keys,’ a voice said. ‘Quick. No one saw us.’
I felt them fumbling in my pockets. There was a clink as they found what they were looking for. I began to come back into focus, so to speak, and to struggle, which was a reflex action but all the same another mistake.
The cloth over my eyes was reinforced by a sickly-smelling wad over my nose and mouth. Anaesthetic fumes made a nonsense of consciousness, and the last thing I thought was that if I was going the way of Mason they hadn’t wasted any time.
I was aware, first of all, that I was lying on straw.
Straw, as in stable. Rustling when I tried to move. Hearing, as always, had returned first.
I had been concussed a few times over the years, in racing falls. I thought for a while that I must have come off a horse, though I couldn’t remember which, or where I’d been riding.
Funny.
The unwelcome news came back with a rush. I had not been racing. I had one hand. I had been abducted in daylight from a London street. I was lying on my back on some straw, blindfolded, with a rope tied tight round my chest, above the elbows, fastening my upper
arms against my body. I was lying on the knot. I didn’t know why I was there … and had no great faith in the future.
Damn, damn, damn.
My feet were tethered to some immovable object. It was black dark, even round the edges of the blindfold. I sat up and tried to get some part of me disentangled; a lot of effort and no results.
Ages later there was a tramp of footsteps outside on a gritty surface, and the creak of a wooden door, and sudden light on the sides of my nose.
‘Stop trying, Mr Halley,’ a voice said. ‘You won’t undo those knots with one hand.’
I stopped trying. There was no point in going on.
‘A spot of overkill,’ he said, enjoying himself. ‘Ropes and anaesthetic and blackjack and blindfold. Well, I did tell them of course, to be careful, and not to get within hitting distance of that tin arm. A villain I know has very nasty things to say about you hitting him with what he didn’t expect.’
I knew the voice. Undertones of Manchester, overtones of all the way up the social ladder. The confidence of power.
Trevor Deansgate.
Last seen on the gallops at Newmarket, looking for Tri-Nitro in the string, and identifying him because he knew the work jockey, which most people didn’t. Deansgate, going to George Caspar’s for breakfast. Bookmaker Trevor Deansgate had been a question mark, a possibility, someone to be assessed, looked into. Something I would have done, and hadn’t done yet.
‘Take the blindfold off,’ he said. ‘I want him to see me.’
Fingers took their time over untying the tight piece of cloth. When it fell away, the light was temporarily dazzling; but the first thing I saw was the double barrel of a shotgun pointing my way.
‘Guns too,’ I said sourly.