by Dick Francis
‘You wouldn’t have a record of it?’
‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘Why don’t you ask Oldfield himself, if you need to know?’
I sighed. ‘How many times did he give you information?’ I asked.
‘He told me the names of about five horses altogether, I should think. Three of them won, and I sent him the money on those occasions.’
‘You didn’t know it was Oldfield selling you tips, did you?’ I asked.
‘It depends what you mean by “know”,’ he said. ‘I had a pretty good idea. Who else could it have been? But I suppose I didn’t actually “know” until Axminster said “I hear you’ve been buying information from my jockey,’ and I agreed that I had.’
‘So you wouldn’t have told anyone before that that it was Oldfield who was selling you tips?’
‘Of course not.’
‘No one at all?’ I pressed.
‘No, certainly not.’ He gave me a hard stare. ‘You don’t broadcast things like that, not in my business, and especially if you aren’t dead sure of your facts. Just what is all this about?’
‘Well …’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry to have misled you, Mr Lubbock, but I am not really in the market for information. I’m just trying to unstick a bit of the mud that was thrown at Grant Oldfield.’
To my surprise he gave a fat chuckle and knocked half an inch of ash off the cigar.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘if you’d agreed to tip me off I’d have been looking for the catch? There’s some jockeys you can square, and some you can’t, and in my line you get an instinct for which are which. Now you …’ he jabbed the cigar in my direction … ‘you aren’t the type.’
‘Thanks,’ I murmured.
‘And more fool you,’ he said nodding. ‘It’s not illegal.’
I grinned.
‘Mr Lubbock,’ I said, ‘Oldfield was not Robinson, but his career and his health were broken up because you and Mr Axminster were led to believe that he was.’
He stroked his moustache with his thumb and forefinger of his left hand, wondering.
I went on, ‘Oldfield has now given up all thought of riding again, but it would still mean a great deal to him to have his name cleared. Will you help to do it?’
‘How?’ he said.
‘Would you just write a statement to the effect that you saw no evidence at any time to support your guess that in paying Robinson, you were really paying Oldfield, and that at no time before James Axminster approached you did you speak of your suspicions as to Robinson’s identity.’
‘Is that all?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘It can’t do any harm. But I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. No one but a jockey would go to all that trouble to hide his identity. No one would bother, if his job didn’t depend on not being found out. Still, I’ll write what you ask.’
He unscrewed a pen, took a sheet of hotel writing paper and in a decisive hand wrote the statement I had suggested. He signed it, and added the date and read it through.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Though I can’t see what good it will do.’
I read what he had written and folded the paper, and put it in my wallet.
‘Someone told Mr Axminster that Oldfield was selling you information,’ I said. ‘If you hadn’t told anyone at all – who knew?’
‘Oh.’ His eyes opened. ‘I see, yes, I see. Robinson knew. But Oldfield would never have let on … so Oldfield was not Robinson.’
‘That’s about it,’ I agreed, standing up. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Lubbock, for your help.’
‘Any time.’ He waved the diminishing cigar, smiling broadly. ‘See you at the races.’
Sixteen
On Tuesday morning I bought a copy of the Horse and Hound and spent a good while telephoning to a few of the people who had advertised their hunters for sale. With three of them I made appointments to view the animal in question in two days’ time.
Next I rang up one of the farmers I rode for and persuaded him to lend me his Land-Rover and trailer on Thursday afternoon.
Then, having borrowed a tape measure out of Joanna’s work-box – she was out at a rehearsal – I drove the hired car down to James’s stables. I found him sitting in his office dealing with his paper work. The fire, newly lit in the grate, was making little headway against the raw chill in the air, and outside in the yard the lads looked frozen as they scurried about doing up their horses after the second morning exercise.
‘No racing again today,’ James remarked. ‘Still, we’ve been extraordinarily lucky this winter up to now.’
He stood up and rubbed his hands, and held them out to the inadequate fire. ‘Some of the owners have telephoned,’ he said. ‘They’re willing to have you back. I told them …,’ and his lower teeth gleamed as he looked at me from under his eyebrows, ‘… that I was satisfied with your riding, and that you would be on Template in the Gold Cup.’
‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Do you mean it?’
‘Yes.’ The glimmer deepened in his eyes.
‘But … Pip …’ I said.
‘I’ve explained to Pip,’ he said, ‘that I can’t take you off the horse when you’ve won both the King Chase and the Midwinter on him. And Pip agrees. I have arranged with him that he starts again the week after Cheltenham, which will give him time to get a few races in before the Grand National. He’ll be riding my runner in that – the horse he rode last year.’
‘It finished sixth,’ I said, remembering.
‘Yes, that’s right. Now, I’ve enough horses to keep both Pip and you fairly busy, and no doubt you’ll get outside rides as well. It should work out all right for both of you.’
‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ I said.
‘Thank yourself,’ he said sardonically. ‘You earned it.’ He bent down and put another lump of coal on the fire.
‘James,’ I said, ‘will you write something down for me?’
‘Write? Oh, you’ll get a contract for next season, the same as Pip.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said awkwardly. ‘It’s quite different … would you just write down that it was Maurice Kemp-Lore who told you that Oldfield was selling information about your horses, and that he said he had learned it from Lubbock?’
‘Write it down?’
‘Yes. Please,’ I said.
‘I don’t see …’ He gave me an intent look and shrugged. ‘Oh, very well then.’ He sat down at his desk, took a sheet of paper headed with his name and address, and wrote what I had asked.
‘Signature and date?’ he said.
‘Yes, please.’
He blotted the page. ‘What good will that do?’ he said, handing it to me.
I took Mr Lubbock’s paper out of my wallet and showed it to him. He read it through three times.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘It’s incredible. Suppose I had checked carefully with Lubbock? What a risk Maurice took.’
‘It wasn’t so big a risk,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have thought of questioning what he put forward as a friendly warning. Anyway, it worked. Grant got the sack.’
‘I’m sorry for that,’ James said slowly. ‘I wish there was something I could do about it.’
‘Write to Grant and explain,’ I suggested. ‘He would appreciate it more than anything in the world.’
‘I’ll do that,’ he agreed, making a note.
‘On Saturday morning,’ I said, taking back Lubbock’s statement and putting it with his in my wallet, ‘these little documents will arrive with a plop on the Senior Steward’s doormat. Of course they aren’t conclusive enough to base any legal proceedings on, but they should be enough to kick friend Kemp-Lore off his pedestal.’
‘I should say you were right.’ He looked at me gravely, and then said, ‘Why wait until Saturday?’
‘I … er … I won’t be ready until then,’ I said evasively.
He didn’t pursue it. We walked out into the yard together and looked
in on some of the horses, James giving instructions, criticism and praise – in that order – to the hurrying lads. I realised how used I had grown to the efficiency and prosperity of his organisation, and how much it meant to me to be a part of it.
We walked slowly along one row of boxes, and James went into the tack-room at the end to talk to Sid about the cancellation of the following day’s racing. Unexpectedly I stopped dead on the threshold. I didn’t want to go in. I knew it was stupid, but it made no difference. Parts of me were still too sore.
The harness hook hung quietly from the centre of the ceiling, with a couple of dirty bridles swinging harmlessly on two of its curving arms. I turned my back on it and looked out across the tidy yard, and wondered if I would ever again see one without remembering.
Up in the rolling, grassy hills a mile or so away from his stable, James owned an old deserted keeper’s cottage. In the past it had been the home allotted to the man who looked after the gallops, James had told me once on a journey to the races, but as it had no electricity, no piped water and no sanitation, the new groundsman preferred, not unnaturally, to live in comfort in the village below and go up the hill to work on a motor-bike.
The old cottage lay down an overgrown lane leading off a public but little used secondary road which led nowhere except up and along the side of the hill and down again to join the main road four miles further on. It served only two farms and one private house, and because of its quietness it was a regular route for the Axminster horses on roadwork days.
After leaving James I drove up to the cottage. I had not seen it at close quarters before, only a glimpse of its blank end wall from the end of the lane as I rode by. I now found it was a four-roomed bungalow, set in a small fenced garden with a narrow path leading from the gate to the front door. The neglected grass had been cropped short by sheep. There was one window to each room, two facing the front and two the back.
Getting in without a key presented no difficulty as most of the glass in the windows was broken; and opening one, I climbed in. The whole place smelt of fungus and rot, though faintly, as if the decay were only warming up for future onslaught. The walls and floorboards were still in good condition, and only one of the rooms was damp. I found that all four rooms opened on to a small central hall inside the front entrance; and as I made my tour I reflected that it could not have been more convenient if I had designed it myself.
I let myself out of the front door, and walking round to the back I took out Joanna’s inch tape and measured the window frame; three feet high, four feet wide. Then I returned to the front, counted the number of broken panes of glass, and measured one of them. That done, I returned to James and asked him to lend me the cottage for a few days to store some things in for which there was no room at my digs.
‘As long as you like,’ he agreed absently, busy with paper work.
‘May I mend some of the windows, and put on a new lock, to make it more secure?’ I asked.
‘Help yourself,’ he said. ‘Do what you like.’
I thanked him, and drove into Newbury, and at a builders’ merchants waited while they made me up an order of ten panes of glass, enough putty to put them in with, several pieces of water pipe cut to a specified length, a bucket, some screws, a stout padlock, a bag of cement, a pot of green paint, a putty knife, a screw driver, a cement trowel and a paint brush. Loaded to the axles with that lot I returned to the cottage.
I painted the weather-beaten front door and left it open to dry, reflecting that no one could blame a keeper, or his wife for that matter, for not wanting to live in that lonely, inconvenient cul-de-sac.
I went into one of the back rooms and knocked out all the panes of glass which still remained in their little oblong frames. Then, outside in the garden, I mixed a good quantity of cement, using water from the rain butt, and fixed six three-foot lengths of water pipe upright in a row across the window. That done, I went round into the hall, and on the doorpost and door of the same room screwed firmly home the fittings for the padlock. On the inside of the door I unscrewed the handle and removed it.
The final job was replacing the glass in the front windows, and it took me longest to do, chipping out all the old putty and squeezing on the new; but at last it was done, and with its whole windows and fresh green door the cottage already looked more cheerful and welcoming.
I smiled to myself. I retrieved the car from where I had parked it inconspicuously behind some bushes, and drove back to London.
The Scots doctor was drinking gin with Joanna when I let myself in.
‘Oh no,’ I said unceremoniously.
‘Oh yes, laddie,’ he said. ‘You were supposed to come and see me yesterday, remember.’
‘I was busy,’ I said.
‘I’ll just take a look at those wrists, if you don’t mind,’ he said, putting down the gin and standing up purposefully.
I sighed and sat down at the table, and he unwrapped the bandages. There was blood on them again.
‘I thought I told you to take it easy,’ he said sternly. ‘How do you expect them to heal? What have you been doing?’
I could have said ‘Screwing in screws, chipping out putty and mixing cement,’ but instead I rather unco-operatively muttered, ‘Nothing.’
Irritated, he slapped a new dressing on with unnecessary force and I winced. He snorted; but he was gentler with the second one.
‘All right,’ he said, finishing them off. ‘Now, rest them a bit this time. And come and see me on Friday.’
‘Saturday,’ I said. ‘I won’t be in London on Friday.’
‘Saturday morning, then. And mind you come.’ He picked up his glass, tossed off the gin, and said a friendly good night exclusively to Joanna.
She came back laughing from seeing him out. ‘He isn’t usually so unsympathetic,’ she said. ‘But I think he suspects you were engaged in some sort of sadistic, disgusting orgy last week, as you wouldn’t tell him how you got like that.’
‘And he’s dead right,’ I said morosely. He had stirred up my wrists properly, and they hadn’t been too good to start with, after my labours at the cottage.
For the third night I went to bed on the sofa and lay awake in the darkness, listening to Joanna’s soft sleeping breath. Every day she hesitantly asked me if I would like to stay another night in her flat, and as I had no intention of leaving while there was any chance of thawing her resistance, I accepted promptly each time, even though I was progressively finding that no bread would have been more restful. Half a loaf, in the shape of Joanna padding familiarly in and out of the bathroom in a pretty dressing-gown and going to bed five yards away, was decidedly unsatisfying. But I could easily have escaped and gone to a non-tantalising sleep in my own bed in my family’s flat half a mile away; if I didn’t, it was my own fault, and I pointed this out to her when every morning she remorsefully apologised for being unfair.
On Wednesday morning I went to a large photographic agency and asked to see a picture of Maurice Kemp-Lore’s sister Alice. I was given a bundle of photographs to choose from, varying from Alice front-view in spotted organza at a Hunt Ball to Alice back-view winning over the last fence in a point to point. Alice was a striking girl, with dark hair, high cheek-bones, small fierce eyes, and a tight aggressive mouth. A girl to avoid, as far as I was concerned. I bought a copy of a waist-length photograph which showed her watching some hunter trials, dressed in a hacking jacket and head-scarf.
Leaving the agency, I went to the city offices of my parents’ accountants, and talked ‘our Mr Stuart’ in the records department into letting me use first a typewriter and then his photocopying machine.
On plain typing paper I wrote a bald account of Kemp-Lore’s actions against Grant Oldfield, remarking that as a result of Axminster’s relying on the apparent disinterestedness of Kemp-Lore’s accusation, Oldfield had lost his job, had subsequently suffered great distress of mind, and had undergone three months’ treatment in a mental hospital.
I made ten copies
of this statement and then on the photocopier printed ten copies each of the statements from Lubbock and James. I thanked ‘our Mr Stuart’ profusely and returned to Joanna’s mews.
When I got back I showed her the photograph of Alice Kemp-Lore, and explained who she was.
‘But,’ said Joanna, ‘she isn’t a bit like her brother. It can’t have been her that the ticket-collector saw at Cheltenham.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was Kemp-Lore himself. Could you draw me a picture of him wearing a head-scarf?’
She found a piece of cartridge paper and with concentration made a recognisable likeness in charcoal of the face I now unwillingly saw in dreams.
‘I’ve only seen him on television,’ she said. ‘It isn’t very good.’ She began to sketch in a head-scarf, adding with a few strokes an impression of a curl of hair over the forehead. Then, putting her head on one side and considering her work, she emphasized the lips so that they looked dark and full.
‘Lipstick,’ she murmured, explaining. ‘How about clothes?’ Her charcoal hovered over the neck.
‘Jodhpurs and hacking jacket,’ I said. ‘The only clothes which look equally right on men and women.’
‘Crumbs,’ she said, staring at me. ‘It was easy, wasn’t it? On with head-scarf and lipstick, and exit the immediately recognisable Kemp-Lore.’
I nodded. ‘Except that he still reminded people of himself.’
She drew a collar and tie and the shoulders of a jacket with revers. The portrait grew into a likeness of a pretty girl dressed for riding. It made my skin crawl.
I found Joanna’s eyes regarding me sympathetically.
‘You can hardly bear to look at him, can you?’ she said. ‘And you talk in your sleep.’
I rolled up the picture, bounced it on the top of her head, and said lightly, ‘Then I’ll buy you some ear plugs.’
‘He was taking a big risk, all the same, pretending to be a girl,’ she said, smiling.
‘I don’t suppose he did it a minute longer than he had to,’ I agreed. ‘Just long enough to get from Timberley to Cheltenham without being recognised.’