by Dick Francis
But he said at once, ‘Yes, I am. Has he had another fall?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘but could you please come and take a look at him?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘He … er … he was knocked out at the races.’
‘Half a mo,’ he said and went back into the house, reappearing with his medical bag and another piece of cake. ‘Can you run me down there? Save me getting my car out again for those few yards.’
We went out to the Mini-Cooper and as soon as he sat in it he made a remark about the broken back window, not unreasonably, since gusts of December wind blowing through it were freezing our necks. I told him that Grant had smashed it and explained how I had come to bring him home.
He listened in silence, licking the cream as it oozed out of the side of the cake. Then he said, ‘Why did he attack you?’
‘He seems to believe I took his job.’
‘And did you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He lost it months before it was offered to me’.
‘Are you a jockey too, then?’ he asked, looking at me curiously, and I nodded and told him my name. He said his was Parnell. I started the car and drove the few hundred yards back to Grant’s house. It was still in complete darkness.
‘I left him here not ten minutes ago,’ I said as we went up the path to the front door. The small front garden was ragged and uncared for, with rotting dead leaves and mournful grass-grown flower beds dimly visible in the light from the street lamp. We rang the bell. It sounded shrilly in the house, but produced no other results. We rang again. The doctor finished his cake and licked his fingers.
There was a faint rustle in the darkness of the patch of garden. The doctor unclipped from his breast pocket the pen-shaped torch he normally used for peering into eyes and down throats, and directed its tiny beam round the bordering privet hedge. It revealed first some pathetic rose bushes choked with last summer’s unmown grass; but in the corner where the hedge dividing the garden from the next door one met the hedge bordering the road, the pin point of light steadied on the hunched shape of a man.
We went over to him. He was sitting on the ground, huddling back into the hedge, with his knees drawn up to his chin and his head resting on his folded arms.
‘Come along old chap,’ said the doctor encouragingly, and half-helped, half-pulled him to his feet. He felt in Grant’s pockets, found a bunch of keys, and handed them to me. I went over and unlocked the front door and turned on the lights in the hall. The doctor guided Grant through the hall and into the first room we came to, which happened to be a dining-room. Everything in it was covered with a thick layer of dust.
Grant collapsed in a heap on a dining chair and laid his head down on the dirty table. The doctor examined him, feeling his pulse, lifting up his eyelid and running both hands round the thick neck and the base of the skull. Grant moved irritably when Parnell’s fingers touched the place where I had hit him and he said crossly, ‘Go away, go away.’
Parnell stepped back a pace and sucked his teeth. ‘There’s nothing physically wrong with him as far as I can see, except for what is going to be a stiff neck. We’d better get him into bed and I’ll give him something to keep him quiet, and in the morning I’ll arrange for him to see someone who can sort out his troubles for him. You’d better give me a ring during the evening if there’s any change in his condition.’
‘I?’ I said, ‘I’m not staying here all evening …’
‘Oh yes, I think so, don’t you?’ he said cheerfully, his eyes shining sardonically in his round face. ‘Who else? All night too, if you don’t mind. After all, you hit him.’
‘Yes, but,’ I protested, ‘that’s not what’s the matter with him.’
‘Never mind. You cared enough to bring him home and to fetch me. Be a good chap and finish the job. I do really think someone ought to stay here all night … someone strong enough to deal with him in a crisis. It’s not a job for elderly female relatives, even if we could rake one up so late in the day.’
Put like that, it was difficult to refuse. We took Grant upstairs, balancing his thick-set body between us as he stumbled up the treads. His bedroom was filthy. Dirty tangled sheets and blankets were piled in heaps on the unmade bed, dust lay thick on every surface, and soiled clothes were scattered over the floor and hung sordidly over chairs. The whole room smelled of sour sweat.
‘We’d better put him somewhere else,’ I said, switching on lights and opening all the other doors on the small landing. One door led into a bathroom whose squalor defied description. Another opened on to a linen cupboard which still contained a few sheets in a neat pile, and the last revealed an empty bedroom with bright pink rosebuds on the walls. Grant stood blinking on the landing while I fetched some sheets and made up the bed for him. There were no clean pyjamas. Doctor Parnell undressed Grant as far as his underpants and socks and made him get into the fresh bed. Then he went downstairs and returned with a glass of water, wearing so disgusted an expression that I knew without being told what state the kitchen must be in.
Opening his case, he shook two capsules on to his hand and told Grant to swallow them, which he docilely did. Grant at this time seemed as if he were sleep-walking; he was only a shell, his personality a blank. It was disturbing, but on the other hand it made the business of putting him to bed much easier than it might have been.
Parnell looked at his watch. ‘I’m late for surgery,’ he said as Grant lay back on his pillow and shut his eyes. ‘Those pills ought to keep him quiet for a bit. Give him two more when he wakes up.’ He handed me a small bottle. ‘You know where to find me if you want me,’ he added with a callous grin. ‘Have a good night.’
I spent a miserable evening and dined off a pint of milk I found on the back doorstep. Nothing else in the stinking kitchen was any longer edible. There were no books and no radio to be found, and to pass the hours I made an effort to clean up some of the mess, but what that dreadful house really needed was a breezy spring day, lashings of disinfectant, and an army of strong-minded charwomen.
Several times I went softly in to see how Grant was doing, but he slept peacefully, flat on his back, until midnight. I found him then with his eyes open, but when I went close to him there was no recognition in them. He was still in a withdrawn blank state and he obediently, without a word, swallowed the capsules when I offered them to him. I waited until his eyes had closed again, then I locked his door and went downstairs and eventually fell uneasily asleep myself, wrapped in a travelling rug on a too short sofa. There was no sound from Grant all night, and when I went up to him at six in the morning he was still sleeping quietly.
Dr Parnell at least had the decency to release me at an early hour, arriving with a middle-aged male nurse at 7.30 in the freezing dawn. He had also brought a basket packed by his wife, containing eggs, bacon, bread, milk and coffee, and from his medical bag he produced a powerful battery razor.
‘All mod. cons,’ he said cheerfully, his round face beaming.
So I went back to the races washed, shaved and fed. But, thinking of the husk of a man I left behind me, not in a happy frame of mind.
Seven
‘The trouble is, there’s such a shortage of jockeys just now,’ said James Axminster.
We were on our way to Sandown, discussing whom he should engage to ride for him the following week when he would be sending horses to two different places on the same day.
‘You’d almost think there was a hoodoo on the whole tribe,’ he said, expertly swinging his large car between a wobbly girl cyclist and an oncoming pantechnicon. ‘Art shot himself, Pip’s broken his leg, Grant’s had a breakdown. Two or three others are out with more ordinary things like busted collar bones, and at least four quite useful chaps took that wretched Ballerton’s misguided advice and are now churning out car bodies on assembly lines. There’s Peter Cloony … but I’ve heard he’s very unreliable and might not turn up in time; and Danny Higgs bets too much, they say, and Ingerso
ll doesn’t always try, so I’ve been told …’
He slowed down while a mother pushed a perambulator and three small children untidily across the road in front of us, and went on talking. ‘Every time I think I’ve found a good up-and-coming jockey I seem to hear something to his disadvantage. With you, it was that film, the one they showed on that television programme. It was shocking, wasn’t it? I watched it and thought, my God, what have I done, asking this clod to ride for me, however will I explain it away to the owners.’ He grinned. ‘I was on the point of ringing them all up and assuring them you’d not be on their horses after all. Luckily for you I remembered the way you had already ridden for me and I watched the rest of the programme first, and when it had finished I had changed my mind. I had even begun to think I had perhaps struck oil in annexing you. Nothing that has happened since,’ he glanced at me sideways, smiling, ‘has led me to alter that opinion.’
I smiled back. In the weeks since Pip broke his leg I had come to know him well, and liked him better with every day that passed. Not only was he a superb craftsman at his job and a tireless worker, but he was reliable in other ways. He was never moody: one did not have to approach him circumspectly every time to see if he were in a good or bad humour because he was always the same, neither boisterous or irritable, just reasonable and receptive. He said directly what he thought, so that one never had to search for innuendoes or suspect hidden sarcasm and it made any relationship with him stable and free from worry. He was, on the other hand, in many ways thoroughly selfish. Unless it were a strictly business matter, his own comfort and convenience came first, second and third, and he would do a favour for someone else only if it caused him absolutely no personal sacrifice of time or effort. Even this was often a blessing to his stable lads since it was typical of him, if the occasion arose, to give them a generous travelling allowance out of his own pocket to visit their homes, rather than go five miles out of his way to drop them on their doorsteps.
He had seemed from the first to be as satisfied with my company as I was with his, and had quite soon told me to drop the ‘sir’ and stick to ‘James.’ Later the same week as he drove us back from Birmingham races, we passed some brightly lit posters advertising a concert which was to be held there that evening.
‘Conductor, Sir Trelawny Finn,’ he read aloud, the enormous lettering catching his eye. ‘No relation, I suppose,’ he said jokingly.
‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he’s my uncle,’ I said.
There was a dead silence. Then he said, ‘And Caspar Finn?’
‘My father.’ A pause.
‘Anyone else?’
‘Dame Olivia Cottin is my mother,’ I said, matter-of-factly.
‘Good God,’ he said explosively.
I grinned.
‘You keep it very quiet,’ he said.
‘It’s really the other way round,’ I said cheerfully. ‘They like to keep me quiet. A jockey in the family is a disgrace to them, you see. It embarrasses them. They don’t like the connection to be noticed.’
‘All the same,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it explains quite a lot about you that I had begun to wonder about. Where you got that air of confidence from … and why you’ve said so little about yourself.’
I said, smiling, ‘I’d be very glad … James … if you’d not let my parentage loose in the weighing-room, as a favour to them.’
He had said he would not, and he had kept his word, but he had accepted me more firmly as a friend from then on. So when he ran through the reported shortcomings of Peter Cloony, Danny Higgs and Tick-Tock, it was with some confidence that I said, ‘You seem to have heard a great many rumours. Do you know all these things for a fact?’
‘For a fact?’ he repeated, surprised. ‘Well, Peter Cloony definitely missed two races a few weeks back because he was late. That’s a fact.’
I told him about Peter’s atrocious luck in twice finding a vehicle stuck across the mouth of the narrow lane from his village to the main road. ‘As far as I know,’ I said, ‘he hasn’t been late since then. His reputation for lateness seems to be built mainly on those two days.’
‘I’ve heard several times that he can’t be trusted to turn up,’ said James obstinately.
‘Who from?’ I asked curiously.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Corin Kellar for one. And of course Johnson who employs him. Ballerton too, though it’s against my better judgment to pay too much attention to what he says. It’s common knowledge though.’
‘How about Danny Higgs, then?’ I said. Danny was an irrepressible cockney, tiny in size, but ferociously brave.
‘He bets too heavily,’ James said positively.
‘Who says so?’ I asked. I knew Danny broke the regulations by backing horses, but from what he said in the changing-room, it was only in amounts of five or ten pounds, which would cause few trainers to look askance at him.
‘Who says? I … er … Corin,’ he finished lamely. ‘Corin, come to think of it, has told me so several times. He says he never puts him up because of it.’
‘And Tick-Tock?’ I said. ‘Who says Ingersoll doesn’t always try?’
He didn’t answer at once. Then he said, ‘Why shouldn’t I believe what Corin says? He has no axe to grind. He’s an excellent trainer, but he depends as we all do on securing good jockeys. He certainly wouldn’t deny himself the use of people like Cloony or Higgs if he didn’t have a good reason.’
I thought for a few moments, and then said, ‘I know it’s really none of my business, but would you mind very much telling me why you dropped Grant Oldfield? He told me himself that it was something to do with a message, but he wouldn’t explain what.’ I refrained from mentioning that he had been semiconscious at the time.
‘A message? Oh yes, he passed on the message, I couldn’t have that.’
I still looked mystified. Axminster squeezed through the traffic lights on the amber and glanced sideways at me.
‘The message,’ he said impatiently, ‘you know, the news. He was passing on the news. If we had a fancied runner he would tip off a professional backer. The owner of the horse didn’t get good odds to his money because the professional was there before him and spoiled the market. Three of my owners were very angry about it – no fun for them having to take two or three to one when they had expected sixes or sevens. So Grant had to go. It was a pity; he was a strong jockey, just what I needed.’
‘How did you discover it was Grant passing on the information?’
‘Maurice Kemp-Lore found out while he was working on one of those programmes of his. Something to do with how professional backers work, I think it was, and he found out about Grant more or less by accident. He told me very apologetically, and just said it would be wiser not to let Grant know too much. But you can’t work properly with a jockey and keep secrets from him, it’s a hopeless set-up.’
‘What did Grant say when you sacked him?’ I asked.
‘He denied the whole thing very indignantly. But of course he would. No jockey would ever confess to selling information if he wanted another trainer to take him on.’
‘Did you talk to the professional backer in question?’ I asked.
‘Yes I did, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to believe it, you see. But it was open and shut. I had to press him a bit, because it didn’t reflect well on him, but Lubbock, the professional, did admit that Grant had been tipping him off over the telephone, and that he had been paying him ever since he had started to ride for me.’
It seemed conclusive enough, but I had an elusive feeling that I had missed something, somewhere.
I changed the subject. ‘Going back to Art,’ I said, ‘why was he always having rows with Corin?’
‘I don’t really know,’ James said reflectively. ‘I heard Corin say once or twice that Art didn’t ride to orders. Perhaps it was that.’ He neatly passed two slow lorries on a roundabout, and glanced at me again. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘It seems to me sometim
es that there is too much of a pattern,’ I said. ‘Too many jockeys are affected by rumours. You said yourself that there seems to be a hoodoo on the whole tribe.’
‘I didn’t mean it seriously,’ he protested. ‘You’re imagining things. And as for rumours, what rumour made Art kill himself or broke Pip’s leg, or made Grant sell information? Rumour didn’t make Cloony late either.’
‘Danny Higgs doesn’t bet heavily,’ I said, feeling I was fighting a rearguard action, ‘and Ingersoll rides as honestly as anyone.’
‘You can’t know about Higgs,’ he pointed out, ‘and Ingersoll, let me remind you, was called in before the stewards last week for easing his mount out of third place. John Ballerton owned the horse and he was very annoyed about it, he told me so himself.’
I sighed. Tick-Tock’s version was that since Corin had told him not to overwork the horse, which was not fully fit, he had decided that he ought not to drive the horse too hard just for the sake of finishing third. Better to save the horse’s energy for winning next time, he had thought, adopting a view commonly held and acted on by at least half the jockeys and trainers engaged in the sport: but owners and members of the public who had backed the horse for a place were liable to disagree. After the enquiry, changing with the wind as usual, Corin had been heard condemning Tick-Tock for his action.
‘I may be quite wrong about it all,’ I said slowly, ‘I hope so. Only …’
‘Only?’ he prompted as I paused.
‘Only,’ I finished lightly, ‘if you ever hear any rumours about me, will you remember what I think … and make utterly sure they’re true before you believe them?’
‘All right,’ he said, humouring me. ‘I think it’s nonsense, but all right, I’ll agree to that.’ He drove in silence for a while, and then said with an impatient shake of his big head, ‘No one stands to gain anything by trying to ruin jockeys. It’s nonsense. Pointless.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Pointless.’
We changed the subject.
Christmas came, and during the week before it, when there was no racing, I spent several days in Kensington. My parents greeted me with their usual friendly detachment and left me to my own devices. They were both preoccupied with crowded Christmas schedules, and my mother also spent each morning working at her piano on a new concerto which was to have its first performance in the New Year. She started daily at seven punctually, and played with short interruptions for coffee and thought until twelve-thirty. I awoke as so often during my life to the sound of warming up chromatics and wrist loosening arpeggios, and lay lazily in bed listening to her pick her way phrase by phrase through a dissonant modern score, repeating and repeating each section until she was satisfied she knew it, until the notes flowed easily in their intended order.