Nerve

by Dick Francis

  ‘Of course he will,’ I said. ‘He’s a good jockey.’

  ‘The trainers don’t seem to think so,’ she said despairingly. ‘Ever since he lost his regular job, he’s barely had one ride a week. We can’t live on it, how could we? If things don’t change very soon, he’s going to give up racing and try something else. But he only cares for horses and racing … it will break his heart if he has to leave it.’

  She had taken me into the sitting-room. It was as bare as before. Barer. The rented television set had gone. In its place stood a baby’s cot, a wickerwork basket affair on a metal stand. I went over and looked down at the tiny baby, only a small bump under the mound of blankets. He was asleep. I made admiring remarks about what I could see of him, and his mother’s face momentarily livened up with pleasure.

  She insisted on making us a cup of tea, and I had to wait until the question of no milk, no sugar, no biscuits had all been settled before asking her what I really wanted to know.

  I said, ‘That Jaguar – the one which blocked the lane and made Peter late – who did it belong to?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘It was very odd. No one came to move it away and it stayed across the lane all that morning. In the end the police arranged for it to be towed away. I know Peter asked the police who owned it, because he wanted to tell the man just what his filthy Jaguar had cost him, but they said they hadn’t yet traced him.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know where the Jaguar is now?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know if it is still there,’ she said, ‘but it used to be outside the big garage beside Timberley Station. They’re the only garage round here with a breakdown truck, and they were the ones who towed it away.’

  I thanked her and stood up, and she came out to the car with me to say good-bye. I had spent some time going through the form book adding up the number of races Peter had ridden during the past few weeks, and I knew how little he had earned. I had brought with me a big box of groceries, butter, eggs, cheese, and so on, and a stack of tins, and also a string of plastic ducks for the baby. This collection I carried back into the bungalow and dumped on the kitchen table, ignoring her surprised protest as she followed me in.

  I grinned. ‘They are too heavy to take back. You’ll have to make the best of it.’

  She began to cry.

  ‘Cheer up,’ I said, ‘things will get better soon. But meanwhile, don’t you think the bungalow is too cold for a baby? I read somewhere that some babies die every winter from breathing freezing air, even though they may be as warmly wrapped up as yours is.’

  She looked at me aghast, tears trickling down her cheeks.

  ‘You ought to heat that room a little, and especially keep it warm all night too, if he sleeps in there,’ I said.

  ‘But I can’t,’ she said jerkily, ‘the payments on the bungalow take nearly all we have … we can’t afford a fire, except just in the evenings. Is it really true about the babies dying?’

  She was frightened.

  ‘Yes, quite true,’ I said. I took a sealed envelope out of my pocket and gave it to her. ‘This is a present for the baby. Warmth. It’s not a fortune, but it will pay your electricity bills for a while, and buy some coal if you want it. There’s likely to be a lot of cold weather coming, so you must promise to spend most of it on keeping warm.’

  ‘I promise,’ she said faintly.

  ‘Good.’ I smiled at her as she wiped her eyes, and I went back to the car and drove away up the lane.

  The garage at Timberley Station was a modernised affair with the front all snowy plaster and the back, when I walked round there, of badly pointed cheap brickwork. The elderly abandoned Jaguar stood there, tucked away between the burnt-out remains of a Standard 8 and a pile of old tyres. I went back to the front of the garage to talk to the man in charge, and I asked him if I could buy the car.

  ‘Sorry, sir, no can do,’ he said breezily. He was a dapper thirtyish man with no oil on his hands.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look good for anything but the scrap heap.’

  ‘I can’t sell it to you because I don’t know who it belongs to,’ he said regretfully, ‘but,’ he brightened, ‘it’s been here so long now that it might be mine after all … like unclaimed lost property. I’ll ask the police.’

  With a bit of prompting he told me all about the Jaguar being stuck across the lane and how his firm had fetched it.

  I said, ‘But someone must have seen the driver after he left the car?’

  ‘The police think he must have got a lift, and then decided the car wasn’t worth coming back for. But it’s in good enough order. And it wasn’t hot … stolen, I mean.’

  ‘What’s it worth,’ I asked.

  ‘To you, sir,’ he smiled glossily, ‘I’d have let it go for a hundred pounds.’

  A hundred. I parted from him and strolled out on to the forecourt. Was it worth a hundred to Kemp-Lore I wondered, to ruin Peter Cloony? Was his obsessive hatred of jockeys so fierce? But then a hundred to Kemp-Lore, I reflected, was probably a lot less than a hundred to me.

  Timberley railway station (six stopping trains a day and twenty-two expresses) lay on my left. I stood and considered it. The station was nearly four miles from the top of the lane leading to Peter’s village; say an hour’s quick walk. Peter had found the Jaguar across the lane at eleven o’clock, and it had to have been jammed in position only seconds before he came up the hill, as his had been the first car to be obstructed. I had a vivid mental picture of Kemp-Lore parked in the gateway where the lane began to curve downwards, watching Peter’s house through binoculars, seeing him go out and get into his car and start on his way to the races. There wouldn’t have been much time to force the Jaguar into position, lock its door and disappear before Peter got there. Not much time: but enough.

  And then? The one tremendous disadvantage Kemp-Lore had to overcome, I thought, was his own fame. His face was so well known to almost the entire British population that he could not hope to move about the country inconspicuously, and wherever he went he would be noticed and remembered. Surely, I thought, in this sparsely populated area, it should be possible to find someone who had seen him.

  As I was there anyway, I started with the station. Outside, I looked up the times of the stopping trains. There was, I found, a down train at twelve-thirty but no up train until five o’clock. The only other trains ran early in the morning and later in the evening. The booking office was shut. I found the clerk-ticket-collector-porter nodding over a hot stove and a racing paper in the parcels office. A large basket of hens squawked noisily in a corner as I walked in, and he woke with a jerk and told me the next train was due in one hour and ten minutes.

  I got him talking via the racing news, but there was nothing to learn. Maurice Kemp-Lore had never (more’s the pity he said) caught a train at Timberley. If it had happened when he was off-duty, he’d have heard about it all right. And yes, he said, he’d been on duty the day they’d fetched the Jaguar down to the garage. Disgusting that. Shouldn’t be allowed, people being rich enough to chuck their old cars in the ditch like cigarette ends.

  I asked him if the station had been busy that day: if there had been a lot of passengers catching the midday train.

  ‘A lot of passengers?’ he repeated scornfully. ‘Never more than three or four, excepting Cheltenham race days …’

  ‘I was just wondering,’ I said idly, ‘whether the chap who left his Jaguar behind could have caught a train from here that morning?’

  ‘Not from here, he didn’t,’ the railway man said positively. ‘Because, same as usual, all the people who caught the train were ladies.’

  ‘Ladies?’

  ‘Yeh, women. Shopping in Cheltenham. We haven’t had a man catch the midday – excepting race days of course – since young Simpkins from the garage got sent home with chickenpox last summer. Bit of a joke it is round here, see, the midday.’

  I gave him a hot tip for Birmingham that afternoon (which won, I
was glad to see later) and left him busily putting a call through to his bookmaker on the government’s telephone bill.

  Timberley village pub, nearly empty, had never been stirred, they told me regretfully, by the flashing presence of Maurice Kemp-Lore.

  The two transport cafés along the main road hadn’t heard of any of their chaps giving him a lift.

  None of the garages within ten miles had seen him ever.

  The local taxi service had never driven him. He had never caught a bus on the country route.

  It wasn’t hard at each place to work conversation round to Kemp-Lore, but it was never quick. By the time a friendly bus conductor had told me, over a cigarette at the Cheltenham terminus, that none of his mates had ever had such a famous man on board because they’d never have kept quiet about it (look how Bill went on for days and days when Dennis Compton took a tenpenny single), it was seven o’clock in the evening.

  If I hadn’t been so utterly, unreasonably sure that it was Kemp-Lore who had abandoned the Jaguar, I would have admitted that if no one had seen him, then he hadn’t been there. As it was, I was depressed by the failure of my search, but not convinced that there was nothing to search for.

  The army tank carrier that had blocked Peter’s and my way to Cheltenham was there accidentally: that much was clear. But Peter had got into such trouble for being late that a weapon was put straight into the hand of his enemy. He had only had to make Peter late again, and to spread his little rumours, and the deed was done. No confidence, no rides, no career for Cloony.

  I found I still hoped by perseverance to dig something up, so I booked a room in a hotel in Cheltenham, and spent the evening in a cinema to take my mind off food. On the telephone Tick-Tock sounded more resigned than angry to hear that he would be car-less yet again. He asked how I was getting on, and when I reported no progress, he said, ‘If you’re right about our friend, he’s as sly and cunning as all get out. You won’t find his tracks too easily.’

  Without much hope I went down in the morning to the Cheltenham railway station and sorted out, after a little difficulty with old time-sheets and the passing of a pound note, the man who had collected the tickets from the passengers on the stopping train from Timberley on the day the Jaguar was abandoned.

  He was willing enough, but he too had never seen Kemp-Lore, except on television; though he hesitated while he said so.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, sir, I’ve never seen him, but I think I’ve seen his sister.’

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked.

  ‘Very like him, of course, sir, or I wouldn’t have known who she was. And she had riding clothes on. You know – jodhpurs, I think they’re called. And a scarf over her head. Pretty she looked, very pretty. I couldn’t think who she was for a bit, and then it came to me, afterwards like. I didn’t talk to her, see? I just took her ticket when she went through the barrier, that’s all. I remember taking her ticket.’

  ‘When was it that you saw her?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t say. I don’t rightly know when it was. Before Christmas though, some time before Christmas, I’m certain of that.’

  He flipped the pound I gave him expertly into an inner pocket. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you indeed,’ he said.

  I dressed and shaved with particular care on the Thursday morning as, I supposed, a sort of barrier against the reception I knew I was going to meet. It was six days since I had been racing, six days in which my shortcomings and the shreds of my riding reputation would have been brought up, pawed over and discarded. Life moved fast in the changing-room: today was important, tomorrow more so; but yesterday was dead. I belonged to yesterday. I was ancient news.

  Even my valet was surprised to see me, although I had written to say I was coming.

  ‘You are riding today then?’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you wanted to sell your saddle … there’s a boy just starting who needs one.’

  ‘I’ll keep it a bit longer,’ I said. ‘I’m riding Turniptop in the fourth. Mr Axminster’s colours.’

  It was a strange day. As I no longer felt that I deserved the pitying glances to which I was treated, I found that they had, to a great extent, ceased to trouble me, and I even watched with fair equanimity the success of two of my ex-mounts in the first two races. The only thing I worried about was whether or not James would have both sugar lumps in his pocket and willingness in his heart.

  He was so busy with his other runners that I did not exchange more than a few words with him during the first part of the afternoon, and when I went out into the parade ring to join him for Turniptop’s race, he was standing alone, thoughtfully gazing into the distance.

  ‘Maurice Kemp-Lore’s here,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I saw him.’

  ‘He has given sugar to several horses already.’

  ‘What?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘I have asked quite a few people … Maurice has been feeding sugar to any number of horses during the past few weeks, not only to the ones you have ridden.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said weakly. Cunning as all get out, Tick-Tock had said.

  ‘None of the horses you rode were picked for the regulation dope test,’ said James, ‘but some of the other horses Maurice gave sugar to were tested. All negative.’

  ‘He only gave doped sugar to my mounts. The rest were camouflage, and he was damn lucky that the horses I rode weren’t tested,’ I said. It sounded improbable, but I was sure of it.

  James shook his head.

  ‘Did you …?’ I began without much hope, ‘Did he … Kemp-Lore … try to give Turniptop any sugar?’

  James compressed his lips and stared into the middle distance. I positively held my breath.

  ‘He did come into the saddling box,’ he said grudgingly. ‘He admired the horse’s coat.’

  Turniptop ambled past glowing with good health, but before James could say any more one of the Stewards came over to talk to him, and I had no chance to find out about the sugar before it was time to mount and go out for the race.

  I knew by the second fence that whether Kemp-Lore had fed him sugar or not, Turniptop was not doped. The leaden sluggishness which had afflicted my last twenty-eight mounts and which I had been forced to believe was due to my own deficiency had lifted like a spent thunder-cloud.

  Turniptop leapt and sprang and surged, pulling like a a train and doing his damnedest to run away with me. I could have shouted aloud with relief. He was an untidy jumper with more enthusiasm than judgment, a style which had brought him no especial grief over hurdles; but now, in his first steeplechase, he showed signs of treating fences with the same disrespect. It wouldn’t really do: there’s a world of difference between a single-thickness, easily-knocked-down hurdle and a three-foot-wide fence, solidly built of birch twigs, particularly when an open ditch lies in front of it. But Turniptop did not want to be steadied. He was eager. He was rash.

  With things as they were, and with James to be convinced, I must admit that my mood matched Turniptop’s exactly. We infected each other with recklessness. We took some indefensible risks, and we got away with them.

  I kept him continually on the rails, squeezing forward into tiny openings and letting him take all the bumps that came his way. When he met a fence dead right he gained lengths over it, and when he met one wrong he scrambled through and found a foot to land on somehow. It was more like a roller-coaster ride than the sensible, well-judged race James had indicated, but it taught the tough-minded Turniptop just as much about getting himself out of trouble as going round quietly on the outside would have done.

  Coming into the second-to-last fence, I was afraid we would win. Afraid, because I knew James wanted to sell the horse, and if he had already won a novice chase he would not be as valuable as if he had not. An apparent paradox: but Turniptop, young and still green, showed great promise. Too early a win would disqualify him from entering a string of good novice ’chases in the following season.

/>   It would be far, far better, I knew, to come second. To have shown what he could do but not actually to have won would have put hundreds on his value. But we had run too fierce a race, and at the second-last the disaster of winning seemed unavoidable. There was only one other tiring horse alongside, and I could hear no others on my tail.

  Turniptop rose, or rather fell to the occasion. In spite of my urging him to put in another stride, he took off far too soon and landed with his hind feet tangled hopelessly in the birch. His forelegs buckled under the strain and he went down on to his knees, with my chin resting on his right ear and my hands touching each other round his throat. Even then his indomitable sense of balance rescued him, and he staggered back on to his feet with a terrific upthrust of his shoulders, tipping me back into the saddle, and, tossing his head as if in disgust, he set off again towards the winning-post. The horse which had been alongside was now safely ahead, and two that had been behind me had jumped past, so that we came into the last fence in fourth position.

  I had lost my irons in the debacle and couldn’t get my feet into them again in time to jump, so we went over the last with them dangling and clanking in the air. I collected him together and squeezed with my legs, and Turniptop, game to the end, accelerated past two of the horses ahead and flashed into second place four strides from the post.

  James waited for me to dismount in the unsaddling enclosure with a face from which all expression had studiously been wiped. Poker-faced to match, I slid from the saddle.

  ‘Don’t ever ride a race like that for me again,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I agreed. I undid the girth buckles and took my saddle over my arm, and at last looked into his eyes.

  They gleamed, narrowed and inscrutable. He said, ‘You proved your point. But you could have killed my horse doing it.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘And yourself,’ he added, implying that that was less important.

  I shook my head, smiling faintly. ‘Not a chance,’ I said.