by Dick Francis
Books by Dick Francis
THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography)
DEAD CERT
NERVE
FOR KICKS
ODDS AGAINST
FLYING FINISH
BLOOD SPORT
FORFEIT
ENQUIRY
RAT RACE
BONECRACK
SMOKESCREEN
SLAY-RIDE
KNOCK DOWN
HIGH STAKES
IN THE FRAME
RISK
TRIAL RUN
WHIP HAND
REFLEX
TWICE SHY
BANKER
THE DANGER
PROOF
BREAK IN
LESTER: The Official Biography
BOLT
HOT MONEY
THE EDGE
STRAIGHT
LONGSHOT
COMEBACK
DRIVING FORCE
DECIDER
WILD HORSES
COME TO GRIEF
TO THE HILT
10-lb PENALTY
FIELD OF 13
Dick Francis
MICHAEL JOSEPH
LONDON
MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD
Published by the Penguin Group
27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Viking Penguin Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in Great Britain 1998
Second impression September 1998
Third impression September 1998
Fourth impression December 1998
Fifth impression December 1998
Sixth impression December 1998
Copyright © Dick Francis 1998
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-14-192960-6
My thanks to a whole host of researchers:
MARY
MERRICK FELIX
JOCELYN
ANDREW
JEFFREY JENNY
LAWYERS GALORE
PROLOGUE
Notes on the Racecard
Tell me a story, and tell it strong and quick.
Tell it so I go to sleep at bedtime. No bloody corpses, no horrors, no hung, drawn and quartered heroes.
Can’t promise that there won’t be any deaths. Still, bodies were not my brief.
Amuse, enthuse, raise the protest, sink the fearsome terror. Pull wide a window, watch the play within. Close the curtains. Try the next house, look into the fridge there, tumble its ice cubes down sleepy necks.
Thirteen assorted flavours. Recipes second to size. Never mind the contents, feel the length. Three thousand best words, here please, and eight thousand or so there. Newspapers and magazines like to cut the tale to fit the space. (Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the game.) So some of the excursions are longer and some are short. Some have tight belts, others float.
Some date from way back, some are recent. Meet a few old friends here. See if new acquaintances shake hands.
If one has to be plain, eight of these thirteen stories were originally commissioned by various publications who kindly dictated only length, not content. The other five stories are new, their length – and content – my choice.
When the field of thirteen runners were assembled and ready to parade to the start, there arose as in all of life the question, ‘Who Goes First?’ Should the book lead off with the first story written? Did primogeniture rule?
Leave it to chance, we said in the end, so we held an impromptu draw.
‘We’, in this instance, meant four of us gathered contentedly for a before-lunch drink. ‘We’ are my wife Mary, my son Felix, my literary agent Andrew Hewson and myself.
We wrote the titles of the thirteen stories on thirteen sticky-back labels and folded them up carefully, and put them into a splendid glass champagne cooler that had been given to my wife and me by Phyllis and Victor Grann as a house-warming present for our apartment beside the Caribbean Sea. (Mrs Phyllis Grann is the President of PenguinPutnam Inc., who publish D. Francis in the USA.)
The four of us took turns to stir the folded labels in the cooler and pick one out.
Each choice was unfolded, read, and sticky-backed in order onto a board. Thirteen labels… three picks each, with the thirteenth and last left to me.
We drew lightheartedly. To be honest, we thought we’d want to fiddle around with the result. But to our amazement it came out pretty well as we would have chosen, so we left it unchanged.
The stories appear in Field of 13 exactly in the order that their titles came out of the champagne cooler… and yes, after that, we put champagne into the cooler… and drank to the Draw… what else would one expect?
THE DRAW
RAID AT KINGDOM HILL
DEAD ON RED
SONG FOR MONA
BRIGHT WHITE STAR
COLLISION COURSE
NIGHTMARE
CARROT FOR A CHESTNUT
THE GIFT
SPRING FEVER
BLIND CHANCE
CORKSCREW
THE DAY OF THE LOSERS
HAIG’S DEATH
RAID AT KINGDOM HILL
Time has an uncanny way of laughing at fiction. The goings-on of a bomb-scare at Kingdom Hill – an imaginary racecourse – were invented for the summer entertainment of readers of The Times newspaper in 1975. Years later the major fantasy was put into fact: a bomb hoax halted the running of the 1997 Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree.
There has been a great change in security and the value of money since Tricksy Wilcox had his brainwave. At Kingdom Hill and throughout Field Of 13, money and usages have been millenniumised.
Thursday afternoon, Tricksy Wilcox scratched his armpit absent-mindedly and decided Claypits wasn’t worth backing in the 2.30. Tricksy Wilcox sprawled in the sagging armchair with a half-drunk can of beer within comforting reach and a huge colour television bringing him the blow-by-blow from the opening race of the three-day meeting at Kingdom Hill. Only mugs, he reflected complacently, would be putting in a nine to five stint in the sort of July heatwave that would have done justice to the Sahara. Sensible guys like himself sat around at home with the windows open and their shirts off, letting their beards grow while the sticky afternoon waned towards evening.
In winter Tricksy was of the opinion that only mugs struggled to travel to work through snow and sleet, while sensible guys stayed warm in front of the TV, betting on the jumpers; and in spring there was rain, and in the autumn, fog. Tricksy at thirty-four had brought unemployment to a fine art and considered the idea of a full honest day’s work to be a joke. It was Tricksy’s wife who went out in all weathers to her job in the supermarket, Tricksy’s wife who paid the rent on the council flat and left the exact money for the milkman. Eleven years of Tricksy had left her cheerful, unresentful, and practical. She had waited without emotion through his two nine-month spells in prison and accepted that one day would find him back there. Her dad had been in and out all her childhood
. She felt at home with the minor criminal mind.
Tricksy watched Claypits win the 2.30 with insulting ease and drank down his dented self-esteem with the last of the beer. Nothing he bloody touched, he thought gloomily, was any bloody good these days. He was distinctly short of the readies and had once or twice had to cut down on necessities like drink and fags. What he wanted, now, was a nice little wheeze, a nice little tickle, to con a lot of unsuspecting mugs into opening their wallets. The scarce ticket racket, now that had done him proud for years, until the coppers nicked him with a stack of forged duplicates in his pocket at Wimbledon. And tourists were too fly by half these days, you couldn’t sell them subscriptions to non-existent porn magazines, let alone London Bridge.
He could never afterwards work out exactly what gave him the great Bandwagon idea. One minute he was peacefully watching the 3 o’clock at Kingdom Hill, and the next he was flooded with a breathtaking, wild and unholy glee.
He laughed aloud. He slapped his thigh. He stood up and jigged about, unable to bear the audacity of his thoughts sitting down. ‘Oh Moses,’ he said, gulping for air. ‘Money for old rope. Kingdom Hill, here I come.’
Tricksy Wilcox was not the most intelligent of men.
Friday morning, Major Kevin Cawdor-Jones, Manager of Kingdom Hill Racecourse, took his briefcase to the routine meeting of the Executive Committee, most of whom detested each other. Owned and run by a small private company constantly engaged in boardroom wars, the racecourse suffered from the results of spiteful internecine decisions and never made the profit it could have done.
The appointment of Cawdor-Jones was typical of the mismanagement. Third on the list of possibles, and far less able than one and two, he had been chosen solely to side-step the bitter deadlock between the pro one line-up and the pro two. Kingdom Hill in consequence had acquired a mediocre administrator; and the squabbling executives usually managed to thwart his more sensible suggestions.
As a soldier Cawdor-Jones had been impulsive, rashly courageous, and easygoing, qualities which had ensured that he had not been given the essential promotion to Colonel. As a man he was lazy and likeable, and as a manager, soft.
The Friday meeting as usual wasted little time in coming to blows.
‘Massive step-up of security,’ repeated Bellamy, positively. ‘Number one priority. Starting at once. Today.’
Thin and sharp featured, Bellamy glared aggressively round the table, and Roskin as usual with drawling voice opposed him.
‘Security costs money, my dear Bellamy.’
Roskin spoke patronisingly, knowing that nothing infuriated Bellamy more. Bellamy’s face darkened with fury, and the security of the racecourse, like so much else, was left to the outcome of a personal quarrel.
Bellamy insisted, ‘We need bigger barriers, specialised extra locks on all internal doors and double the number of police. Work must start at once.’
‘Race crowds are not hooligans, my dear Bellamy.’
Cawdor-Jones inwardly groaned. He found it tedious enough already, on non-race days, to make his tours of inspection, and he was inclined anyway not to stick punctiliously to the safeguards that already existed. Bigger barriers between enclosures would mean he could no longer climb over or through, but would have to walk the long way round. More locks meant more keys, more time-wasting, more nuisance. And all presumably for the sake of frustrating the very few scroungers who tried to cross from a cheaper to a dearer enclosure without paying. He thought he would very much prefer the status quo.
The tempers rose around him, and the voices also. He waited resignedly for a gap. ‘Er…’ he said, clearing his throat.
The heated pro-Bellamy faction and the sneering pro-Roskin clique both turned towards him hopefully. Cawdor-Jones was their mutual let-out; except, that was, when his solution was genuinely constructive, when they both vetoed it because they wished they had thought of it themselves.
‘A lot of extra security would mean more work for our staff,’ he said diffidently. ‘We might have to take on an extra man or two to cope with it… and after the big initial outlay there would always be maintenance… and… er… well, what real harm can anyone do to a racecourse?’
This weak oil stilled the waters enough for both sides to begin their retreat with their positions and opinions intact.
‘You have a point about the staff,’ Bellamy conceded begrudgingly, knowing that two extra men would cost a great deal more than locks, and that the racecourse couldn’t afford them, ‘but I still maintain that tighter security is essential and very much overdue.’
Cawdor-Jones, in his easygoing way, privately disagreed. Nothing had ever happened to date. Why should anything ever happen in future?
The discussion grumbled on for half an hour, and nothing at all was done.
Friday afternoon, Tricksy Wilcox went to the races having pinched half of his wife’s holiday fund from the best teapot. The trip was a recce to spy out the land, and Tricksy, walking around with his greedy eyes wide open, couldn’t stop himself chuckling. It did occur to him once or twice that his light-hearted single-handed approach was a waste: the big boys would have had it all planned to a second and would have set their sights high in their humourless way. But Tricksy was a loner who avoided gang life on the grounds that it was too much like hard work; bossed around all the time, and with no pension rights into the bargain.
He downed half pints of beer at various bars and wagered smallish amounts on the Tote. He looked at the horses in the parade ring and identified those jockeys whose faces he knew from TV, and he attentively watched the races. At the end of the afternoon, with modest winnings keeping him solvent, he chuckled his way home.
Friday afternoon, Mrs Angelisa Ludville sold two Tote tickets to Tricksy Wilcox, and hundreds to other people whom she knew as little. Her mind was not on her job, but on the worrying pile of unpaid bills on her bookshelf at home. Life had treated her unkindly since her fiftieth birthday, robbing her of her looks, because of worry, and her husband, because of a blonde. Deserted, divorced and childless, she could nevertheless have adapted contentedly to life alone had it not been for the drastic drop in comfort. Natural optimism and good humour were gradually draining away in the constant grinding struggle to make shortening ends meet.
Angelisa Ludville eyed longingly the money she took through her Tote window. Wads of the stuff passed through her hands each working day, and only a fraction of what the public wasted on gambling would, she felt, solve all her problems handsomely. But honesty was a lifetime habit; and, besides, stealing from the Tote was impossible. The takings for each race were collected and checked immediately. Theft would be instantly revealed. Angelisa sighed and tried to resign herself to the imminent cutting off of her telephone.
Saturday morning, Tricksy Wilcox dressed himself carefully for the job in hand. His wife, had she not been stacking baked beans in the supermarket, would have advised against the fluorescent orange socks. Tricksy, seeing his image in the bedroom mirror only as far down as the knees, was confident that the dark suit, dim tie and brown felt trilby gave him the look of a proper race-going gent. He had even, without reluctance, cut two inches off his hair, and removed a flourishing moustache. Complete with outsize binoculars case slung over his shoulder, he smirked at his transformation with approval and set out with a light step to catch the train to Kingdom Hill.
On the racecourse Major Kevin Cawdor-Jones made his race-day round of inspection with his usual lack of thoroughness. Slipshod holes in his management resulted also in the police contingent arriving half an hour late and under strength; and not enough racecards had been ordered from the printers.
‘Not to worry,’ said Cawdor-Jones, shrugging it all off easily.
Mrs Angelisa Ludville travelled to the course in the Tote’s own coach, along with fifty colleagues. She looked out of the window at the passing suburbs and thought gloomily about the price of electricity.
Saturday afternoon at 2.30 she was immersed in the routine of is
suing tickets and taking money, concentrating on her work and feeling reasonably happy. She tidied her cash drawer ready for the 3 o’clock, the biggest race of the day. The extra long queues would be forming soon outside, and speed and efficiency in serving the punters was not only her job but, indeed, her pride.
At 2.55 Cawdor-Jones was in his office next to the weighing-room trying to sort out a muddle over the casual workers’ pay. At 2.57 the telephone at his elbow rang for about the twentieth time in the past two hours and he picked up the receiver with his mind still on the disputed hourly rates due to the stickers-back of kicked-up chunks of turf.
‘Cawdor-Jones,’ he said automatically.
A man with an Irish accent began speaking quietly.
‘What?’ said Cawdor-Jones. ‘Speak up, can’t you? There’s too much noise here… I can’t hear you.’
The man with the Irish accent repeated his message with the same soft half-whisper.
‘What?’ said Cawdor-Jones. But his caller had rung off.
‘Oh my God,’ said Cawdor-Jones, and stretched a hand to the switch which connected him to the internal broadcasting system. He glanced urgently at the clock. Its hands clicked round to 2.59, and at that moment the fourteen runners for the 3 o’clock were being led into the starting stalls.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Cawdor-Jones, his voice reverberating from every loudspeaker on the racecourse. ‘We have been warned that a bomb has been planted somewhere in the stands. Would you please all leave at once and go over into the centre of the course while the police arrange a search.’
The moment of general shock lasted less than a second: then the huge race crowd streamed like a river down from the steps, up from the tunnels, out of the doors, running, pelting, elbowing towards the safety of the open spaces on the far side of the track.
Bars emptied dramatically with half-full glasses overturned and smashed in the panic. The Tote queues melted instantaneously and the ticket sellers followed them helter-skelter. The stewards vacated their high box at a dignified downhill rush and the racing press pell-melled to the exit without hanging round to alert their papers. City editors could wait half an hour. Bombs wouldn’t.