Nerve

by Dick Francis

  Tick-Tock’s remarks about my carelessness with communal property trickled to a stop when he found my wrist-watch and wallet and the other things out of my pockets on the glove shelf, and my jacket and overcoat and a length of white nylon rope on the back seat.

  ‘Why the blazes,’ he said slowly, ‘did you leave your watch and your money and your coats here? It’s a wonder they weren’t pinched. And the car.’

  ‘It’s the north-east wind,’ I said solemnly. ‘Like the moon, you know. I always do mad things when there’s a north-east wind.’

  ‘North-east my aunt fanny.’ He grinned, picked up the coats, and transferred them to the waiting taxi. Then he surprisingly shovelled all my small belongings back into my trouser pockets, and put my watch into my gloved hand.

  ‘You may have fooled everyone else, mate,’ he said lightly, ‘but to me you have looked like death inefficiently warmed up all day, and it’s something to do with your maulers … the gloves are new … you don’t usually wear any. What happened?’

  ‘You work on it,’ I said amiably, getting back into the taxi. ‘If you haven’t anything better to do.’ I glanced across at his little hep-cat, and he laughed and flipped his hand, and went to help her into the Mini-Cooper.

  The taxi-driver, in a good mood because he had backed three winners, drove me back to Joanna’s mews without a single complaint about the roundabout journey. When I paid him and added a fat tip on top he said, ‘Were you on a winner, too, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Template.’

  ‘Funny thing that,’ he said. ‘I backed him myself, after what you said about not believing all you hear. You were quite right, weren’t you? That fellow Finn’s not washed up at all, not by a long chalk. He rode a hell of a race. I reckon he can carry my money again, any day.’ He shifted his gears gently, and drove off.

  Watching his tail-light bump away down the cobbled mews, I felt ridiculously happy and very much at peace. Winning the race had already been infinitely worth the cost, and the taxi-driver, not knowing who he was speaking to, had presented me with the bonus of learning that as far as the British racing public was concerned, I was back in business.

  Dead beat but contented, I leaned against Joanna’s doorpost and rang her bell.

  That wasn’t quite the end of the most exhausting twenty four hours of my life, however. My thoughtful cousin, anticipating correctly that I would refuse to turn out again to see a doctor, had imported one of her own. He was waiting there when I arrived, a blunt no-bedside-manner Scot with bushy eyebrows and three warts on his chin.

  To my urgent protests that I was in no state to withstand his ministrations, both he and Joanna turned deaf ears. They sat me in a chair, and off came my clothes again, the leather gloves and the silk racing ones I had not removed after riding, then the anorak, my father’s shirt and the racing under-jersey, also not returned to Mike, then the bits of lint Joanna had stuck on in the morning, and finally the blood-soaked bandages round my wrists. Towards the end of all this rather ruthless undressing, the room began spinning as Ascot had done, and I regrettably rolled off the chair on to the floor, closer to fainting than I had been the whole time.

  The Scotsman picked me up and put me back in the chair and told me to pull myself together and be a man.

  ‘You’ve only lost a wee bit of skin,’ he said sternly.

  I began to laugh weakly, which didn’t go down well, either. He was a joyless fellow. He compressed his mouth until the warts quivered when I shook my head to his enquiries and would not tell him what had happened to me. But he bound me up again comfortably enough and gave me some pain-killing pills which turned out to be very effective; and when he had gone I got into Joanna’s bed and sank thankfully into oblivion.

  Joanna worked at her painting most of the next day and when I surfaced finally at about four o’clock in the afternoon, she was singing quietly at her easel. Not the angular, spiky songs she specialised in, but a gaelic ballad in a minor key, soft and sad. I lay and listened with my eyes shut because I knew she would stop if she found me awake. Her voice was true, even at a level not much above a whisper, the result of well-exercised vocal cords and terrific breath control. A proper Finn, she is, I thought wryly. Nothing done by halves.

  She came to the end of the ballad, and afterwards began another. ‘I know where I’m going, and I know who’s going with me. I know who I love, but the dear knows who I’ll marry. Some say he’s black, but I say he’s bonny …’ She stopped abruptly and said quietly but forcefully, ‘Damn, damn and blast.’ I heard her throw down her palette and brushes and go into the kitchen.

  After a minute I sat up in bed and called to her, ‘Joanna.’

  ‘Yes?’ she shouted, without reappearing.

  ‘I’m starving,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ She gave a laugh which ended in a choke, and called, ‘All right. I’ll cook.’

  And cook she did; fried chicken with sweet corn and pineapple and bacon. While the preliminary smells wafted tantalisingly out of the kitchen I got up and put my clothes on, and stripped her bed. There were clean sheets in the drawer beneath, and I made it up again fresh and neat for her to get into.

  She carried a tray of plates and cutlery in from the kitchen and saw the bundle of dirty sheets and the smooth bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘The sofa isn’t good for you,’ I said. ‘You obviously haven’t slept well … and your eyes are red.’

  ‘That isn’t …’ she began, and thought better of it.

  ‘It isn’t lack of sleep?’ I finished.

  She shook her head. ‘Let’s eat.’

  ‘Then what’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Shut up and eat.’

  I did as I was told. I was hungry.

  She watched me finish every morsel. ‘You’re feeling better,’ she stated.

  ‘Oh, yes. Much. Thanks to you.’

  ‘And you are not sleeping here tonight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can try the sofa,’ she said mildly. ‘You might as well find out what I have endured for your sake.’ I didn’t answer at once, and she added compulsively, ‘I’d like you to stay, Rob. Stay.’

  I looked at her carefully. Was there the slightest chance. I wondered, that her gentle songs and her tears in the kitchen and now her reluctance to have me leave meant that she was at last finding the fact of our cousinship more troublesome than she was prepared for? I had always known that if she ever did come to love me as I wanted and also was not able to abandon her rigid prejudice against our blood relationship, it would very likely break her up. If that was what was happening to her, it was definitely not the time to walk out.

  ‘All right,’ I said smiling. ‘Thank you. I’ll stay. On the sofa.’

  She became suddenly animated and talkative, and told me in great detail how the race and the interview afterwards had appeared on television. Her voice was quick and light. ‘At the beginning of the programme he said he thought your name was a mistake on the number boards, because he had heard you weren’t there, and I began to worry that you had broken down on the way and hadn’t got there after all. But of course you had … and afterwards you looked like life-long buddies standing there with his arm round your shoulders and you smiling at him as if the sun shone out of his eyes. How did you manage it? But he was trying to needle you, wasn’t he? It seemed like it to me, but then that was perhaps because I knew …’ She stopped in mid-flow, and in an entirely different, sober tone of voice she said. ‘What are you going to do about him?’

  I told her. It took some time.

  She was shaken. ‘You can’t,’ she said.

  I smiled at her, but didn’t answer.

  She shivered. ‘He didn’t know what he was up against, when he picked on you.’

  ‘Will you help?’ I asked. Her help was essential.

  ‘Won’t you change your mind and go to the police?’ she said seriously.

  ‘No.’

  �
�But what you are planning … it’s cruel.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  ‘And complicated, and a lot of work, and expensive.’

  ‘Yes. Will you make that one telephone call for me?’

  She sighed and said, ‘You don’t think you’ll relent, once everything has stopped hurting?’

  ‘I’m quite certain,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, standing up and collecting the dirty dishes. She wouldn’t let me help her wash up, so I went over to the easel to see what she had been working at all day: and I was vaguely disturbed to find it was a portrait of my mother sitting at her piano.

  I was still looking at the picture when she came back.

  ‘It’s not very good, I’m afraid,’ she said, standing beside me. ‘Something seems to have gone wrong with the perspective of the piano.’

  ‘Does Mother know you’re doing it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said.

  ‘When did you start it?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ she said.

  There was a pause. Then I said, ‘It won’t do you any good to try to convince yourself your feelings for me are maternal.’

  She jerked in surprise.

  ‘I don’t want mothering,’ I said. ‘I want a wife.’

  ‘I can’t …’ she said, with a tight throat.

  I turned away from the picture, feeling that I had pressed her too far, too soon. Joanna abruptly picked up a turpentine-soaked rag and scrubbed at the still wet oils, wiping out all her work.

  ‘You see too much,’ she said. ‘More than I understood myself.’

  I grinned at her and after a moment, with an effort, she smiled back. She wiped her fingers on the rag, and hung it on the easel.

  ‘I’ll make that telephone call,’ she said. ‘You can go ahead with … with what you plan to do.’

  On the following morning, Monday, I hired a drive-yourself car and went to see Grant Oldfield.

  The hard overnight frost, which had caused the day’s racing to be cancelled, had covered the hedges and trees with sparkling rime, and I enjoyed the journey even though I expected a reception at the end of it as cold as the day.

  I stopped outside the gate, walked up the short path through the desolate garden, and rang the bell.

  It had only just struck me that the brass bell push was brightly polished when the door opened and a neat dark-haired young woman in a green wool dress looked at me enquiringly.

  ‘I came …’ I said. ‘I wanted to see … er … I wonder if you could tell me where I can find Grant Oldfield?’

  ‘Indoors,’ she said. ‘He lives here; I’m his wife. Just a minute, and I’ll get him. What name shall I say?’

  ‘Rob Finn,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said in surprise; and she smiled warmly. ‘Do come in. Grant will be so pleased to see you.’

  I doubted it, but I stepped into the narrow hall and she shut the door behind me. Everything was spotless and shining; it looked a different house from the one I remembered. She led the way to the kitchen and opened the door on to another area of dazzling cleanliness.

  Grant was sitting at a table, reading a newspaper. He glanced up as his wife went in, and when he saw me his face too creased into a smile of surprised welcome. He stood up. He was much thinner and older-looking, and shrunken in some indefinable inner way; but he was, or he was going to be soon, a whole man again.

  ‘How are you, Grant?’ I said inadequately, not understanding their friendliness.

  ‘I’m much better, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ve been home a fortnight now.’

  ‘He was in hospital,’ his wife explained. ‘They took him there the day after you brought him home. Dr Parnell wrote to me and told me Grant was ill and couldn’t help being how he was. So I came back.’ She smiled at Grant. ‘And everything’s going to be all right now. Grant’s got a job lined up too. He starts in two weeks, selling toys.’

  ‘Toys?’ I exclaimed. Of all incongruous things, I thought.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they thought it would be better for him to do something which had nothing to do with horses, so that he wouldn’t start brooding again.’

  ‘We’ve a lot to thank you for, Rob,’ Grant said.

  ‘Dr Parnell told me,’ his wife said, seeing my surprise, ‘that you would have been well within your rights if you’d handed him over to the police instead of bringing him here.’

  ‘I tried to kill you,’ Grant said in a wondering voice, as if he could no longer understand how he had felt. ‘I really tried to kill you, you know.’

  ‘Dr Parnell said if you’d been a different sort of person Grant could have ended up in a criminal lunatic asylum.’

  I said uncomfortably, ‘Dr Parnell appears to have been doing too much talking altogether.’

  ‘He wanted me to understand,’ she said, smiling, ‘that you had given Grant another chance, so I ought to give him another chance too.’

  ‘Would it bother you,’ I said to Grant, ‘if I asked you a question about how you lost your job with Axminster?’

  Mrs Oldfield moved protectively to his side. ‘Don’t bring it all back,’ she said anxiously, ‘all the resentment.’

  ‘It’s all right, love,’ Grant said, putting his arm round her waist. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I believe you were telling the truth when you told Axminster you had not sold information to that professional punter, Lubbock,’ I said. ‘But Lubbock did get information, and did pay for it. The question is, who was he actually handing over the money to, if he thought he was paying it to you?’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong, Rob,’ Grant said. ‘I went over and over it at the time, and I went to see Lubbock and got pretty angry with him …’ He smiled ruefully, ‘and Lubbock said that until James Axminster tackled him about it he hadn’t known for sure who he was buying information from. He had guessed it was me, he said. But he said I had given him the information over the telephone, and he had sent the payments to me in the name of Robinson, care of a Post Office in London. He didn’t believe I knew nothing about it, of course. He just thought I hadn’t covered myself well enough and was trying to wriggle out of trouble.’ There was a remarkable lack of bitterness in his voice; his spell in a mental hospital, or his illness itself, seemed to have changed his personality to the roots.

  ‘Can you give me Lubbock’s address?’ I asked.

  ‘He lives in Solihull,’ he said slowly, ‘I might know the house again, but I can’t remember the name of it, or the road.’

  ‘I’ll find it,’ I said.

  ‘Why do you want to?’ he asked.

  ‘Would it mean anything to you, if I happened to prove that you were telling the truth all along?’

  His face came suddenly alive from within. ‘I’ll say it would,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine what it was like, losing that job for something I didn’t do, and having no one believe in me any more.’

  I didn’t tell him that I knew exactly what it was like, only too well. I said, ‘I’ll do my best, then.’

  ‘But you won’t go back to racing?’ his wife said to him anxiously. ‘You won’t start all over again?’

  ‘No love. Don’t worry,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m going to enjoy selling toys. You never know, we might start a toy shop of our own, next year, when I’ve learned the business.’

  I drove the thirty miles to Solihull, looked up Lubbock in the telephone directory, and rang his number. A woman answered. She told me that he was not in, but if I wanted him urgently I would probably get hold of him at the Queen’s Hotel in Birmingham, as he was lunching there.

  Having lost my way twice in the one-way streets, I miraculously found a place to park outside the Queen’s, and went in. I wrote a note on the hotel writing-paper, asking Mr Lubbock, whom I did not know even by sight, if he would be so very kind as to give me a few minutes of his time. Sealing the note in an envelope, I asked the head porter if he would have one of the page-boys find Mr Lubbock and give it to him.

>   ‘He went into the dining-room with another gentleman a few minutes ago,’ he said. ‘Here, Dickie, take this note in to Mr Lubbock.’

  Dickie returned with an answer on the back of the note: Mr Lubbock would meet me in the lounge at two-fifteen.

  Mr Lubbock proved to be a plumpish, middle-aged man with a gingery moustache and a thin section of lank hair brushed across a balding skull. He accepted from me a large brandy and a fat cigar with such an air of surprised irony that I was in no doubt that he was used to buying these things for jockeys, and not the other way about.

  ‘I want to know about Grant Oldfield,’ I said, coming straight to the point.

  ‘Oldfield?’ he murmured, sucking flame down the cigar. ‘Oh yes, I remember, Oldfield.’ He gave me a sharp upward glance. ‘You … er … you still work for the same firm, don’t you? Do you want a deal, is that it? Well, I don’t see why not. I’ll give you the odds to a pony for every winner you put me on to. No one could say fairer than that.’

  ‘Is that what you paid Oldfield?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Did you give it to him personally?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But then he didn’t ask me personally. He fixed it up on the telephone. He was very secretive: said his name was Robinson, and asked me to pay him in uncrossed money orders, and to send them to a Post Office for him to collect.’

  ‘Which one?’ I asked.

  He took a swig at the brandy and gave me an assessing look. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘It sounds a good idea,’ I said casually.

  He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘Surely it’s unimportant which Post Office it was? Somewhere in a London suburb, I know, but I can’t remember where after all this time. N.E.7? N.12? Something like that.’