Whip Hand

by Dick Francis

  ‘I have to be in London at four o’clock,’ I said.

  Louise said, ‘When are you going to the police about Nicky?’

  ‘I’ll come back here on Thursday, day after tomorrow, to pick up the photos. I’ll do it then.’ I reflected. ‘Give that lady in Bristol two more happy days.’

  ‘Poor thing.’

  ‘Will I see you, Thursday?’ I said.

  ‘Unless you’re blind.’

  Chico was propping up the Portman Square building with a look of resignation, as if he’d been there for hours. He shifted his shoulder off the stonework at my on-foot approach and said ‘Took your time, didn’t you?’

  The car park was full.’

  From one hand he dangled the black cassette recorder we used occasionally, and he was otherwise wearing jeans and a sports shirt and no jacket. The hot weather, far from vanishing, had settled in on an almost stationary high pressure system, and I was also in shirtsleeves, though with a tie on, and a jacket over my arm. On the third floor all the windows were open, the street noises coming up sharply, and Sir Thomas Ullaston, sitting behind his big desk, had dealt with the day in pale blue shirting with white stripes.

  ‘Come in, Sid,’ he said, seeing me appear in his open doorway. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said, shaking hands. ‘This is Chico Barnes, who works with me.’

  He shook Chico’s hand. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now you’re here, we’ll get Lucas Wainwright and the others along.’ He pressed an intercom button and spoke to his secretary. ‘And bring some more chairs, would you?’

  The office slowly filled up with more people than I’d expected, but all of whom I knew at least to talk to. The top administrative brass in full force, about six of them, all urbane worldly men, the people who really ran racing. Chico looked at them slightly nervously as if at an alien breed, and seemed to be relieved when a table was provided for him to put the recorder on. He sat with the table between himself and the room, like a barrier. I fished into my jacket for the cassette I’d brought, and gave it to him.

  Lucas Wainwright came with Eddy Keith on his heels: Eddy looking coldly out of the genial face; big bluff Eddy whose warmth for me was slowly dying.

  ‘Well, Sid,’ Sir Thomas said. ‘Here we all are. Now, on the telephone yesterday you told me you had discovered how Tri-Nitro had been nobbled for the Guineas, and as you see … we are all very interested.’ He smiled. ‘So fire away.’

  I made my own manner match theirs: calm and dispassionate, as if Trevor Deansgate’s threat wasn’t anywhere in my mind, instead of continually flashing through it like stabs.

  ‘I’ve … er … put it all on to tape,’ I said. ‘You’ll hear two voices. The other is Ken Armadale, from the Equine Research. I asked him to clarify the veterinary details, which are his province, not mine.’

  The well-brushed heads nodded. Eddy Keith merely stared. I glanced at Chico, who pressed the start button, and my own voice, disembodied, spoke loudly into a wholly attentive silence.

  ‘This is Sid Halley, at the Equine Research Establishment, on Monday, May fourteenth …’

  I listened to the flat sentences, spelling it out. The identical symptoms in four horses, the lost races, the bad hearts. My request, via Lucas Wainwright to be informed if any of the three still alive should die. The post-mortem on Gleaner, with Ken Armadale repeating in greater detail my own simpler account. His voice explaining, again after me, how horses had come to be infected by a disease of pigs. His voice saying, ‘I found active live germs in the lesions on Gleaner’s heart valves, and also in the blood taken from Zingaloo …’ and my voice continuing, ‘A mutant strain of the disease was produced at the Tierson Vaccine Laboratory at Cambridge in the following manner …’

  It wasn’t the easiest of procedures to understand, but I watched the faces and saw that they did, particularly by the time Ken Armadale had gone through it all again, confirming what I’d said.

  ‘As to motive and opportunity,’ my voice said, ‘we come to a man called Trevor Deansgate …’

  Sir Thomas’s head snapped back from its forward, listening posture, and he stared at me bleakly from across the room. Remembering, no doubt, that he had entertained Trevor Deansgate in the Stewards’ box at Chester. Remembering perhaps that he had brought me and Trevor Deansgate there face to face.

  Among the other listeners the name had created an almost equal stir. All of them either knew him or knew of him: the big up-and coming influence among the bookmakers, the powerful man shouldering his way into top-rank social acceptance. They knew Trevor Deansgate, and their faces were shocked.

  ‘The real name of Trevor Deansgate is Trevor Shummuck,’ my voice said. ‘There is a research worker at the vaccine laboratory called Barry Shummuck, who is his brother. The two brothers, on friendly terms, have been seen together at the laboratories on several occasions …’

  Oh God, I thought My voice went on, and I listened in snatches. I’ve really done it. There’s no going back.

  ‘… This is the laboratory where the mutant strain originally arose … unlikely after all this time for there to be any of it any where else …

  ‘Trevor Deansgate owns a horse which George Caspar trains. Trevor Deansgate is on good terms with Caspar … watches the morning gallops and goes to breakfast. Trevor Deansgate stood to make a fortune if he knew in advance that the over-winter favourites for the Guineas and the Derby couldn’t win. Trevor Deansgate had the means – the disease; the motive – money; and the opportunity – entry into Caspar’s well-guarded stable. It would seem, therefore, that there are grounds for investigating his activities further.’

  My voice stopped, and after a minute or two Chico switched off the recorder. Looking slightly dazed himself, he ejected the cassette and laid it carefully on the table.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ Sir Thomas said, but not as if he didn’t believe it ‘What do you think, Lucas?’

  Lucas Wainwright cleared his throat. ‘I think we should congratulate Sid on an exceptional piece of work.’

  Except for Eddy Keith, they agreed with him and did so, to my embarrassment, and I thought it generous of him to have said it at all, considering the Security themselves had done negative dope tests and left it at that But then the Security, I reflected, hadn’t had Rosemary Caspar visiting them in false curls and hysteria: and they hadn’t had the benefit of Trevor Deansgate revealing himself to them as a villain before they even positively suspected him, threatening vile things if they didn’t leave him alone.

  As Chico had said, our successes had stirred up the enemy to the point where they were likely to clobber us before we knew why.

  Eddy Keith sat with his head very still, watching me. I looked back at him, probably with much the same deceptively blank outer expression. Whatever he was thinking, I couldn’t read. What I thought about was breaking into his office, and if he could read that he was clairvoyant.

  Sir Thomas and the administrators, consulting among themselves, raised their heads to listen when Lucas Wainwright asked a question.

  ‘Do you really think, Sid, that Deansgate infected those horses himself?’ He seemed to think it unlikely. ‘Surely he couldn’t produce a syringe anywhere near any of those horses, let alone all four.’

  ‘I did think,’ I said, ‘that it might have been someone else … like a work jockey, or even a vet …’ Inky Poole and Brothersmith, I thought, would have had me for slander if they could have heard. ‘… But there’s a way almost anyone could do it.’

  I dipped again into my jacket and produced the packet containing the needle attached to the pea-sized bladder. I gave the packet to Sir Thomas, who opened it, tipping the contents on to his desk.

  They all looked. Understood. Were convinced.

  ‘He’d be more likely to do it himself if he could,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t want to risk anyone else knowing, and perhaps having a hold over him.’

  ‘It amazes me,’ Sir Thomas said with appare
nt genuineness, ‘how you work these things out, Sid.’

  ‘But I …’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘We all know what you’re going to say. At heart you’re still a jockey.’

  There seemed to be a long pause. Then I said. ‘Sir, you’re wrong. This …’ I pointed to the cassette, ‘is what I am now. And from now on.’

  His face sobered into a long frowning look in which it seemed that he was reassessing his whole view of me, as so many others had recently done. It was to him, as to Rosemary, that I still appeared as a jockey, but to myself, no longer. When he spoke again his voice was an octave lower, and thoughtful.

  ‘We’ve taken you too lightly.’ He paused. ‘I did mean what I said to you at Chester about being a positive force for good in racing, but I also see that I thought of it as something of an unexpected joke.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Lucas Wainwright said briskly. ‘It’s been increasingly clear what Sid has become.’ He was tired of the subject and waiting as usual to spur on to the next thing. ‘Do you have any plans, Sid, as to what to do next?’

  ‘Talk to the Caspars,’ I said. ‘I thought I might drive up there tomorrow.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Lucas said. ‘You won’t mind if I come? It’s a matter for the Security Service now, of course.’

  ‘And for the police, in due course,’ said Sir Thomas, with a touch of gloom. He saw all public prosecutions for racing-based crimes as sources of disgrace to the whole industry, and was inclined to let people get away with things, if prosecuting them would involve a damaging scandal. I tended to agree with him, to the point of doing the same myself, but only if privately one could fix it so that the offence wouldn’t be repeated.

  ‘If you’re coming, Commander,’ I said to Lucas Wainwright, ‘perhaps you could make an appointment with them. They may be going to York. I was simply going to turn up at Newmarket early and trust to luck, but you won’t want to do that.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ he said crisply. ‘I’ll telephone straight away.’

  He bustled off to his own office, and I put the cassette into its small plastic box and handed it to Sir Thomas.

  ‘I put it on tape because it’s complicated, and you might want to hear it again.’

  ‘You’re so right, Sid,’ said one of the administrators, ruefully. ‘All that about pigeons …!’

  Lucas Wainwright came back. ‘The Caspars are at York, but went by air-taxi and are returning tonight. George Caspar wants to see his horses work, in the morning, before flying back to York. I told his secretary chap that it was of the utmost importance I see Caspar, so we’re due there at eleven. Suit you, Sid?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’

  ‘Pick me up here, then, at nine?’

  I nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ll be in my office, checking the mail.’

  Eddy Keith gave me a final blank stare and without a word removed himself from the room.

  Sir Thomas and all the administrators shook my hand and also Chico’s; and going down in the lift Chico said, ‘They’ll be kissing you next.’

  ‘It won’t last.’

  We walked back to where I had left the Scimitar, which was where I shouldn’t have. There was a parking ticket under the wiper blade. There would be.

  ‘Are you going back to the flat?’ Chico said, folding himself into the passenger’s seat.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You still think those boot men …?’

  ‘Trevor Deansgate.’ I said.

  Chico’s face melted into half-mocking comprehension.

  ‘Afraid he’ll duff you up?’

  ‘He’ll know by now … from his brother,’ I shivered internally from a strong flash of the persistent horrors.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ It didn’t worry him. ‘Look, I brought that begging letter for you …’ He dug into a trouser pocket and produced a much-folded and slightly grubby sheet of paper. I eyed it disgustedly, reading it through. Exactly the same as the ones Jenny had sent, except signed with a flourish ‘Elizabeth More’, and headed with the Clifton address.

  ‘Do you realize they may have to produce this filthy bit of paper in court?’

  ‘Been in my pocket, hasn’t it?’ he said defensively.

  ‘What else’ve you got in there? Potting compost?’

  He took the letter from me and put it in the glove box, and let down the window.

  ‘Hot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mm.’

  I wound down my own side window, and started the car, and drove him back to his place in Finchley Road.

  ‘I’ll stay in the same hotel,’ I said. ‘And look … come to Newmarket with me tomorrow.’

  ‘Sure, if you want. What for?’

  I shrugged, making light of it. ‘Bodyguard.’

  He was surprised. He said wonderingly, ‘You can’t really be afraid of him … this Deansgate … are you?’

  I shifted in my seat a bit, and sighed.

  ‘I guess so,’ I said.

  17

  I talked to Ken Armadale in the early evening. He wanted to know how my session with the Jockey Club had gone, but more than that he sounded smugly self-satisfied, and not without reason.

  ‘That erysipelas strain has been made immune to practically every antibiotic in the book,’ he said. ‘Very thorough. But I reckon there’s an obscure little bunch he won’t have bothered with, because no one would think of pumping them into horses. Rare, they are, and expensive. All the signs I have here are that they would work. Anyway, I’ve tracked some down.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Where?’

  ‘In London, at one of the teaching hospitals. I’ve talked with the pharmacist there, and he’s promised to pack some in a box and leave it at the reception desk for you to collect. It will have Halley on it.’

  ‘Ken, you’re terrific.’

  ‘I’ve had to mortgage my soul, to get it.’

  I picked up the parcel in the morning and arrived at Portman Square to find Chico again waiting on the doorstep. Lucas Wainwright came down from his office and said he would drive us in his car, if we liked, and I thought of all the touring around I’d been doing for the past fortnight, and accepted gratefully. We left the Scimitar in the car park which had been full the day before, a temporary open-air affair in a cleared building site and set off to Newmarket in a large, air-conditioned Mercedes.

  ‘It’s too darned hot,’ Lucas said, switching on the refrigeration. ‘Wrong time of year.’

  He had come tidily dressed in a suit, which Chico and I hadn’t: jeans and sports shirts and not a jacket between us.

  ‘Nice car, this,’ Chico said admiringly.

  ‘You used to have a Merc, Sid, didn’t you?’ Lucas said.

  I said yes, and we talked about cars half the way to Suffolk.

  Lucas drove well but as impatiently as he did everything else. A pepper and salt man. I thought, sitting beside him. Brown and grey speckled hair, brownish grey eyes, with flecks in the iris. Brown and grey checked shirt, with a nondescript tie. Pepper and salt in his manner, in his speech patterns, in all his behaviour.

  He said, as in the end he was bound to, ‘How are you getting on with the syndicates?’

  Chico, sitting in the back seat, made a noise between a laugh and a snort.

  ‘Er …’ I said. ‘Pity you asked, really.’

  ‘Like that, is it?’ Lucas said, frowning.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘There is very clearly something going on, but we haven’t come up with much more than rumour and hearsay.’ I paused. ‘Any chance of us collecting expenses?’

  He was grimly amused. ‘I suppose I could put it under the heading of general assistance to the Jockey Club. Can’t see the administrators quibbling, after yesterday.’

  Chico gave me a thumbs up sign from behind Lucas’s head, and I thought I would pile it on a bit while the climate was favourable, and recover what I’d paid to Jacksy.

  ‘Do you want us to go on trying?’ I said.


  ‘Definitely.’ He nodded positively. ‘Very much so.’

  We reached Newmarket in good time and came to a smooth halt in George Caspar’s well-tended driveway.

  There were no other cars there; certainly not Trevor Deansgate’s Jaguar. On that day he should be in the normal course of things at York, attending to his bookmaking business. I had no faith that he was.

  George, expecting Lucas, was not at all pleased ‘to see me, and Rosemary, coming downstairs and spotting me in the hall, charged across the parquet and rugs with shrill disapproval.

  ‘Get out,’ she said. ‘How dare you come here?’

  Two spots of colour flamed in her cheeks, and she looked almost as if she was going to try to throw me out bodily.

  ‘No, no, I say.’ Lucas Wainwright said, writhing as usual with naval embarrassment in the face of immodest female behaviour. ‘George, make your wife listen to what we’ve come to tell you.’

  Rosemary was persuaded, with a ramrod stiff back, to perch on a chair in her elegant drawing room, while Chico and I sat lazily in armchairs, and Lucas Wainwright did the talking, this time, about pig disease and bad hearts.

  The Caspars listened in growing bewilderment and dismay, and when Lucas mentioned ‘Trevor Deansgate’ George stood up and began striding about in agitation.

  ‘It isn’t possible,’ he said. ‘Not Trevor. He’s a friend.’

  ‘Did you let him near Tri-Nitro, after that last training gallop?’ I said.

  George’s face gave the answer.

  ‘Sunday morning,’ Rosemary said, in a hard cold voice. ‘He came on the Sunday. He often does. He and George walked round the yard.’ She paused. ‘Trevor likes slapping horses. Slaps their rumps. Some people do that. Some people pat necks. Some people pull ears. Trevor slaps rumps.’

  Lucas said. ‘In due course, George, you’ll have to give evidence in court.’

  ‘I’m going to look a damned fool, aren’t I?’ he said sourly. ‘Filling my yard with guards and taking Deansgate in myself.’