by Dick Francis
Finding a job with comparable standing was hardly an option: there weren’t enough good stable-jockey jobs to go round. Davey Rockman looked straight at Gypsy Joe’s uncaring determination to downgrade him and felt the first surge of murderous hate.
Nigel Tape asked aggressively, ‘What about me, then?’
‘You can go on as before,’ the trainer told him.
‘Picking up crumbs? It’s not fair.’
‘Life is never fair,’ Gypsy Joe said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’
Gypsy Joe’s ancient instincts proved spectacularly right. Red Millbrook and Gypsy Joe’s horses galvanised each other on track after track while the main part of the jump-racing programme waned towards summer. The cheers for one win barely died away before they rose for another. The owners of the horses were ecstatic: new owners offered horses every day. By the time the next ten-month-long season warmed up in August, the trainer had rented a lot of extra stabling and the jockey was whistling to himself in happy fulfilment as he drove his car from success to success. Through September and October and November it seemed he could do no wrong. He led the jockeys’ list.
His parents became reconciled to his ‘tart’ness and boasted about him instead, but his two elder sisters, unmarried, grew jealous of his fame. He still lived in the family house in London which his sophisticated mother much preferred to clomping round weekend fields and battling mildew in a damp old cottage. Red settled for her London comfort while planning to buy a house of his own with his winnings, though not one necessarily on Gypsy Joe’s doorstep. The lives of jockey and trainer remained as separate as before their partnership had fused at Sandown, but the vibrations between them remained unchanged. They smiled always the same understanding smile, but they never drank together.
Red Millbrook – friendly, uncomplicated, generous-hearted – mixed little with the other jockeys, who tended to be in awe of his dazzling skill, and he cheerfully ignored the ill-will he saw blazing in Davey Rockman’s eyes, and the identical copycat resentment in Nigel Tape’s. Owing to the multiplication of the horses in the stable, Davey Rockman, Red Millbrook blithely reflected, still rode a fair amount of races, even if not on the winning cream of the string, and even if not with the same stunned and genuflecting coverage in the press. It wasn’t his fault, he assured himself, that Gypsy Joe had singled him out and given him such a great and satisfying opportunity.
He was unaware that it was the disastrous collapse of his vigorous sex life that most infuriated The Rock; and The Rock on his part failed to realise that it was his bitter constant grumbling that put women off. For the first time in his life girls flocked round Red Millbrook, who thought their approaches amusing: and his amusement further inflamed his seething dispossessed rival.
In December, when Davey Rockman broke some small bones in his foot in a racing fall, Red Millbrook sent him a message of sympathy. The Rock thought it an insult and didn’t reply.
Red Millbrook kept his car in the London street outside his parents’ house and drove from there each day to wherever he was due to race. Normally he set off northwards on a road which took him through tall black railings into the grassy expanse of Hyde Park. There were paths there and clumps of evergreen bushes, and benches for the rest of tired walkers. Also there were several sets of traffic lights, both to aid pedestrians crossing and to allow traffic to turn right in a complicated pattern. Almost always one of the sets of lights would be red against Red Millbrook. Patiently he would wait for the green while his radio filled the car with music.
On one Friday morning in December, while he waited, humming, at the stop light, a man approached his stationary car and tapped on the passenger side window. He was dressed as a tourist and carried a large street map, to which he hopefully pointed.
Red Millbrook pressed a button and obligingly opened the electrically-controlled window. The tourist advanced the map politely into the car.
‘Excuse me,’ said the tourist, ‘which way to Buckingham Palace, please?’
He had a foreign accent, Red Millbrook thought fleetingly. French, perhaps. The jockey leaned towards the window and bent his head over the map.
‘You go–’ he said.
Emil Jacques Guirlande shot him.
Truth to tell, Emil Jacques enjoyed killing.
He took pride in being able to bring death so quickly and cleanly that his prey hadn’t even a suspicion of the need for fear. Emil Jacques considered he would have failed his own high standards if ever he’d seen eyes widen with desperate fright or heard just the beginning of a piteous plea. Some assassins might take pleasure in their victims’ terror: Emil Jacques, for a murderer, was kind.
Red Millbrook had looked exclusively at the map held half open in Emil Jacques’ left hand. He hadn’t had time to see the Browning 9mm pistol with its efficient long silencer slide smoothly out from within the map’s lower folds. Emil’s right hand had a speed and sweetness of touch with a gun that no magician could have bettered.
The fire-hot bullet instantly destroyed Red Millbrook’s brain. He felt nothing, knew nothing, made no sound. The faint ‘phut’ of the Browning lost its identity in the beat of the radio’s music.
Without hesitation Emil Jacques withdrew his map, the pistol again hidden in its folds. He made a gesture of thanks in case of onlookers and walked casually away.
He went unhurriedly along a path and round a clump of bushes, and he had gone quite a long way when he heard car horns blaring behind him. The red lights, he knew, had turned to green, but one car was unmoving, obstructing the traffic. By the time irate drivers had discovered the blood and skull splinters and had screamed with hysterics, Emil Jacques was leaving the park to rejoin his car; and by the time the Metropolitan Police were hurriedly setting up an incident room to investigate the crime, Emil Jacques, driving carefully, was halfway to Dover on his way back to France.
Not bad, he thought. Not bad in the end, though it had been difficult to set up.
In late October, when he’d been offered the job, he had made his usual unarmed reconnaissance, had learned the pattern of life of his target and had noted the opportunity presented by the multiple traffic lights at the one particular entrance to Hyde Park. With a stopwatch, he’d driven over and over his target’s normal daily route until he knew to the second the maximum and minimum times a car might have to stand and wait for red to turn green. Red Millbrook left home at varying times but almost always took the Park way to avoid traffic. Once in every four days or fewer, he was stopped by the lights. Every time the lights stopped him, he sat defenceless before them in his car. Killing him there was wholly possible, Emil Jacques decided, if he were quick.
He practised at home with map and gun through his own car window until he could bring off the attack routine within seconds. He then accepted the offered proposition and in November, when he had received his agreed up-front payment, he crossed from Dieppe to Newhaven (for a change) and drove through customs with his hand-gun suitcase declared and cleared.
Almost at once things went wrong. Red Millbrook left London and went to Scotland for a two-day race meeting at Ayr, afterwards dawdling southwards, staying with friends and owners while he rode them winners all over the north. Emil Jacques fretted helplessly in London and felt vulnerable, and when Red Millbrook did finally return to his parents’ house, the weather turned brutal with gales and hailstorms and long bursts of rain; the sort of weather no tourist would walk about in, asking directions with a map.
Finally Emil Jacques read a racing newspaper carefully, and with the help of his English-French dictionary, realised that the promised ill-health alibi of his customer was no longer secure. Uneasily aware also that the small hotel’s receptionist was beginning to want to flirt with the quiet guest with the French accent, Emil Jacques aborted his mission entirely and cautiously went home.
It was three weeks later, when the weather was cold but sunny on a Friday morning in December, that Red Millbrook stopped at the traffic lights and died.
The outrage that shook the racing world surprised Emil Jacques in France. He hadn’t realised how intensely the British people revered their sporting heroes, and he was unexpectedly shaken to hear that he (the assassin) would be lynched (at least) if found. A fund was being set up, contributed to in a flood of sentiment at every racecourse gate, offering a tempting price on the killer’s head.
Emil Jacques Guirlande sat at his customary inconspicuous corner table in the café near his apartment and painstakingly, word by word, translated the eulogies paid to the dead young prodigy in the English racing press. Emil Jacques pursed his lips and suppressed regret.
The patron, a bulky man with a bulging apron and heavy moustache, paused at Emil Jacques’ side and added his own opinion. ‘Only a devil,’ he said, pointing at Red Millbrook’s attractive picture, ‘would kill such a splendid fellow.’ He sighed at the villainy of the world, adding, ‘and there’s a letter for you, Monsieur.’ He gave Emil Jacques a conspiratorial leer and a nudge in the ribs and produced an envelope from beside the till. The patron believed the letters he occasionally passed to his most constant customer were notes of assignation made secretly by sex-starved ladies looking for fun.
Emil Jacques always accepted the letters with a wink, never disillusioning his host: and in this way, at the end of a three-cutoff go-between chain he received messages and sent them. The envelope that evening duly delivered the remainder of the agreed price for the Millbrook job: no wise man or woman ever risked withholding what they owed to a killer.
It could have been expected that the sharp Metropolitan Police Force superintendent in charge of finding Red Millbrook’s murderer would never attain soul-mate heights with Gypsy Joe Smith. Gypsy Joe was a man of instinct with a great accountant. Instinct won the races, the accountant made his client rich. Gypsy Joe operated on a deep level of intuition. The policeman and the accountant worked on fact and logical deduction.
The superintendent thought all racing people to be halfway crooks and Gypsy Joe held the same belief about the police. The superintendent took a sceptical view of Gypsy Joe’s intense and genuine grief. Gypsy Joe wondered how such a thick-brained super had reached that rank.
They engaged like bulls in Gypsy Joe’s stable office, fiercely attended also by a local high-ranking detective who seemed chiefly concerned about ‘patch’.
‘Who cares whose patch he died on,’ Gypsy Joe bellowed. ‘Put your stupid heads together and find out who did it.’
Separately and finally the two high-rankers did put their not-so-stupid heads together, but without any sudden blaze of enlightenment. They extensively interviewed the two women who’d stopped at the lights behind Red Millbrook’s car, and who’d tooted at him when the lights went green, and had gone to yell at him, and had found his slumped bloody body and would never sleep dreamlessly again.
They had seen no one, they said. They had been talking. There weren’t many people in Hyde Park. It was winter.
Emil Jacques had left no clues in Red Millbrook’s car: no fingerprints, no fibres, no hairs. The bullet, hopefully dug out of the chassis, matched nothing on anyone’s record, nor ever would. Careful Emil Jacques never killed anyone with a gun he’d used for the purpose before. For all of everyone’s efforts, the case remained unsolved.
The Metropolitan Police superintendent changed his mind about Gypsv Joe and unwillingly began to respect him. This was the man, he realised, standing with him in his windy stable yard, who was least likely in the world to have harmed the dead jockey, and that being so, he could ask his help. He didn’t believe in second sight or fortune telling, but really one never knew.… And Gypsy Joe had plucked Red Millbrook out of the air: had seen his undeveloped genius and given it springing life. Supposing… well, just supposing the gypsy’s insight could do what good detection methods couldn’t.
The superintendent shook his head to free himself from such fancies and said pragmatically, ‘I’ve asked around, you know. It seems most of the jockeys were screwed up with envy of Red Millbrook and the bookmakers hoped he’d break his neck, but that’s different from actually killing.’ He paused. ‘I’m told the person who hated him most was his second fiddle, David Rock-man, your former number one.’
‘He couldn’t have done it,’ Gypsy Joe asserted gloomily. ‘His alibi’s perfect.’
‘He couldn’t have done it,’ the superintendent nodded, ‘because at the relevant time he was hobbling round the hospital here on crutches, getting physiotherapy for his broken foot.’
‘And his glued-on trusty, Nigel Tape, couldn’t have done it either, because he was here under my very eyes, riding my horses on the exercise gallops when Red…’ Gypsy Joe stopped short, his throat constricting. The waste and destruction of the soaring talent he’d set free on his horses brought Gypsy Joe daily nearer to tears than he would have thought possible. He knew he would never find another Red Millbrook: a match like that to his horses happened only once in a trainer’s lifetime.
When the superintendent had gone, Gypsy Joe’s hatred for Red Millbrook’s killer continued to burn like a slow relentless furnace in his dark gypsy soul. He would know, he thought. One day, in the unexplained way that things became clear to him, he would know who’d killed Red Millbrook, and he would know what to do.
His horses, meanwhile, had to run in their intended races. The owners telephoned demanding it. Life had to go on. Davey Rockman’s fractured foot mended like magic and Gypsy Joe, with misgivings he didn’t wholly understand, allowed his former number one to retake his earlier place.
The horses missed Red Millbrook. They won races, but not joyously in droves. The glory days were over. Some racegoers cheered; some wept. Gypsy Joe despaired.
It was at the memorial service for Red Millbrook’s life that The Rock made his revealing mistake. In the church, oblivious to Gypsy Joe standing grimly and unsuspected behind him, Davey Rockman turned his head to Nigel Tape and smirked.
Gypsy Joe saw first the evil in the curve of the sneering lips, and felt pierced only with simple disgust. But by evening and through the night the deeper knowledge that he sought arrived.
In the morning he telephoned the Metropolitan Police superintendent.
‘A paid murderer?’ the super repeated doubtfully. ‘Contract killers are very rare, you know. It’s unlikely that this is one.’ He thought to himself that most murders were domestic – family affairs – impulsive, and he knew most were solved. Often drugs were the dynamics of unexplained deaths, but not this time, he didn’t think. There was no smell of it. And no suggestion of political assassination, which was normally flamboyant and led to arrest, either on the scene itself, or soon after.
‘Which leaves you where?’ asked Gypsy Joe.
‘Looking at the currents inside the Millbrook family. We think the young man knew his killer. We think whoever shot him tapped on the window and the young man, recognising the person, lowered the window to talk. The sisters are no sweet cookies…’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Gypsy Joe was positive. ‘The Millbrook family didn’t kill him. I saw violent destructive hatred in Davey Rock man’s eyes at yesterday’s memorial service. You are underestimating the violence of hate. Nearly everyone does. I saw him gloat over Red’s death. I’m certain he had him killed. I’ll go after him and stir things up.’
The superintendent, doubting and believing in turns, not sure after all that gypsy insight could be relied on, told his informant weakly, ‘Take care, then, there’s a murderer about.’
Gypsy Joe took the warning seriously but walked his big frame and his outsize personality into the path of everyone he thought might show him a line to crime. No one exactly gave him directions to an assassin but at length, when his quest had become the talk of every racecourse, someone with a snigger told him to look under his own nose. Nigel Tape, he eventually discovered, had a brother who’d once done time for receiving stolen cars. Hardly helpful, he thought. A pussy-cat when he was looking for a lion.
With nothing therefor
e but implacable suspicion to fuel him, Gypsy Joe began asking Davey ‘The Rock’ questions. Endless needling questions, on and on and day by day.
‘How did you find a killer? Who did you ask?’
‘How did you pay him? Did you send him a cheque?’
‘He’ll blackmail you, won’t he? He’ll want more and more.’
On and on.
He shredded Davey Rockman’s nerves, but kept on offering him rides in races The questions tormented The Rock, but he needed the fees. His hands began shaking. Gypsy Joe, everywhere, accused in his ear, ‘Murderer.’
‘I didn’t do it,’ The Rock yelled, frantic.
Gypsy Joe, regardless, repeated ‘Murderer’ again and again, and allowed his jockey no peace.
Davey Rockman and Nigel Tape went to Warwick races together, Nigel Tape driving his own leased car and hoping The Rock would pay his share of the petrol. Gone were the days, it seemed, when The Rock grandiosely paid all of their joint expenses as a matter of course. The Rock, Nigel Tape morosely considered, wasn’t any longer the hero he’d worshipped all these years.
The Rock’s saturnine good looks had rapidly lost their taut appeal since the smooth tanned skin on his jaw and cheekbones had loosened and greyed. The bravado of the riding boots no longer strode with self-confident near-arrogance from weighing-room to parade ring. The maestro no longer masterfully slapped his calf with his riding whip. Onlookers used to the swagger of pre-Red Millbrook days hardly recognised the dimmed round-shouldered slinker as the wolf of the tracks, the sexual predator that had set alarmed mothers scurrying protectively after their chicks.
The Rock, under Gypsy Joe’s pitiless barrage, had more than halfway crumbled.
‘He’s sure I did it,’ The Rock moaned. ‘He never leaves me alone five minutes. He wants to know who killed his precious boy and I can scream and scream that I don’t know and he just goes on asking.’