by Dick Francis
Martin Retsov nodded unwillingly and committed them both to the enterprise. Half an hour later when they pulled up in a dark side road he had succeeded in thrusting his soul’s shadows back into their closet and was approaching the next half-hour with cool, calm practicality.
They stepped quietly from the car and let down the ramp of the trailer. The night closed around them – small sounds, light sighing wind, stars showing in sparkling bunches between greyly drifting clouds. Traffic on the high road half a mile away swept past now and then, more a matter of flashing lights than of noise. Martin Retsov waited for his eyes to grow used to the dark, then he put his hand lightly on the young man’s arm.
‘This way,’ he said. His voice was a gentle whisper and when he moved his feet were soundless on the grass verge. Johnnie Duke followed him, marvelling at the big man’s silence and easy speed.
‘Where are we?’ Johnnie whispered. ‘Whose horses are we taking?’
‘Never you mind.’
They came to a gate, padlocked. The bolt cutter made it easy. They slid through into the field. Martin Retsov whistled gently in the dark, a seductive gypsy trill in the teeth.
He pulled out a handful of Thoroughbred horse nuts and called persuasively into the blackness ahead.
‘Come on, then, girl. Come on.’
There was a soft warm whinny and movement somewhere out beyond sight. Then they came, slowly, enquiringly, moving towards this human voice. They ate the nuts held out to them and made no fuss when the two men took hold of their head-collars.
‘You go ahead,’ Martin Retsov said softly to Johnnie Duke. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
They went sweetly, the two great mares big with four-legged assets. Out of the gate and down the road to the transport. Easy as ever, thought Martin Retsov, once you knew what to take. Johnnie Duke led his mare into the trailer and fastened her there.
And that was when the nightmare began again. That was when the lights shone out, blinding Martin Retsov’s adjusted sight. That was when the man stepped out to confront him. The same man. The face from the dreams. The same callous face, dark clothes, high-rank insignia.
‘Martin Retsov,’ he was saying, ‘I arrest you…’
Martin Retsov was not listening. He was thinking wildly that it simply couldn’t be true. This particular client would never betray him. Never.
The police took the mare from his unresisting charge and put handcuffs round Martin Retsov’s wrists.
‘How did you get here?’ he asked blankly.
‘We’ve been looking for you for three years,’ said the policeman with smug satisfaction. ‘A few weeks ago we found you. But we had no conclusive evidence against you, so we’ve been keeping you in sight ever since.’
Johnnie Duke came out of the trailer, and Martin Retsov thought it was hard on the boy, being caught on his first job. The cold policeman walked over to him, looking pleased.
He brought out no handcuffs. He patted Johnnie on the shoulder.
‘Well done, Sergeant Duke,’ he said.
CARROT FOR A CHESTNUT
Out of the blue in 1970 I was invited by the prestigious American magazine Sports Illustrated to write a short story for them – length and subject matter to be my own choice. I hadn’t at that time ever attempted a short story but the result, Carrot for a Chestnut, must have seemed OK to their editors, because they invited me to stay in Lexington with the Sports Illustrated team assembled there to cover the 1972 Kentucky Derby. I was commissioned to write a Derby-day story for the Kentucky Derby issue the following year.
Chick stood and sweated with the carrot in his hand. His head seemed-to be floating and he couldn’t feel his feet on the ground, and the pulse thudded massively in his ear. A clammy green pain shivered in his gut.
Treachery was making him sick.
The time: fifty minutes before sunrise. The morning: cold. The raw swirling wind was clearing its throat for a fiercer blow, and a heavy layer of nimbo-stratus was fighting every inch of the way against the hint of light. In the neat box stalls round the stable-yard the dozing horses struck a random hoof against a wooden wall, rattled a tethering chain, sneezed the hay dust out of a moist black nostril.
Chick was late. Two hours late. He’d been told to give the carrot to the lanky chestnut at four o’clock in the morning, but at four o’clock in the morning it had been pouring with rain -hard, slanting rain that soaked a man to the skin in one minute flat, and Chick had reckoned it would be too difficult explaining away a soaking at four o’clock in the morning. Chick had reckoned it would be better to wait until the rain stopped, it couldn’t make any difference. Four o’clock, six o’clock, what the hell. Chick always knew better than anyone else.
Chick was a thin, disgruntled nineteen-year-old who always felt the world owed him more than he got. He had been a bad-tempered, argumentative child and an aggressively rebellious adolescent. The resulting snarling habit of mind was precisely what was now hindering his success as an adult. Not that Chick would have agreed, of course. Chick never agreed with anyone if he could help it. Always knew better, did Chick.
He was unprepared for the severity of the physical symptoms of fear. His usual attitude towards any form of authority was scorn (and authority had not so far actually belted him one across his sulky mouth). Horses had never scared him because he had been born to the saddle and had grown up mastering everything on four legs with contemptuous ease. He believed in his heart that no one could really ride better than he could. He was wrong.
He looked apprehensively over his shoulder, and the shifting pain in his stomach sharply intensified. He had a fierce urge to defecate. That simply couldn’t happen, he thought wildly. He’d heard about people’s bowels getting loose with fear. He hadn’t believed it. It couldn’t happen. Now, all of a sudden, he feared it could. He tightened all his muscles desperately, and the spasm slowly passed. It left fresh sweat standing out all over his skin and no saliva in his mouth.
The house was dark. Upstairs, behind the black open window with the pale curtain flapping in the spartan air, slept Arthur Morrison, trainer of the forty-three racehorses in the stables below. Morrison habitually slept lightly. His ears were sharper than half a dozen guard dogs’, his stable-hands said.
Chick forced himself to turn his head away, to walk in view of that window, to take the ten exposed steps down to the chestnut’s stall.
If the guv’nor woke up and saw him… Gawd, he thought furiously, he hadn’t expected it to be like this. Just a lousy walk down the yard to give a carrot to the gangly chestnut. Guilt and fear and treachery. They bypassed his sneering mind and erupted through his nerves instead.
He couldn’t see anything wrong with the carrot. It hadn’t been cut in half and hollowed out and packed with drugs and tied together again. He’d tried pulling the thick end out like a plug, and that hadn’t worked either. The carrot just looked like any old carrot, any old carrot you’d watch your Ma chop up to put in a stew. Any old carrot you’d give to any old horse. Not a very young, succulent carrot or a very aged carrot, knotted and woody. Just any old ordinary carrot.
But strangers didn’t proposition you to give any old carrot to one special horse in the middle of the night. They didn’t give you more than you earned in half a year when you said you’d do it. Any old carrot didn’t come wrapped carefully alone in a polythene bag inside an empty cheese-biscuit packet, given to you by a stranger in a car park after dark in a town six miles from the stables. You didn’t give any old carrot in the middle of the night to a chestnut who was due to start favourite in a high-class steeplechase eleven hours later.
Chick was getting dizzy with holding his breath by the time he’d completed the ten tiptoed steps to the chestnut’s stall. Trying not to cough, not to groan, not to let out the strangling tension in a sob, he curled his sweating fingers around the bolt and began the job of easing it out, inch by frightening inch, from its socket.
By day, he slammed the bolts open and shut with a
smart practised flick. His body shook in the darkness with the strain of moving by fractions.
The bolt came free with the tiniest of grating noises, and the top half of the split door swung slowly outwards. No squeaks from the hinges, only the whisper of metal on metal. Chick drew in a long breath like a painful, trickling, smothered gasp and let it out between clamped teeth. His stomach lurched again, threateningly. He took another quick, appalled grip on himself and thrust his arm in a panic through the dark, open space.
Inside the stall, the chestnut was asleep, dozing on his feet. The changing swirl of air from the opening door moved the sensitive hairs around his muzzle and raised his mental state from semiconsciousness to inquisitiveness. He could smell the carrot. He could also smell the man: smell the fear in the man’s sweat.
‘Come on,’ Chick whispered desperately. ‘Come on, then, boy.’
The horse moved his nose around towards the carrot and finally, reluctantly, his feet. He took the carrot indifferently from the man’s trembling palm, whiffling it in with his black mobile lips, scrunching it languidly with large rotations of jaw. When he had swallowed all the pulped-up bits, he poked his muzzle forward for more. But there was no more, just the lighter square of sky darkening again as the door swung shut, just the faint sounds of the bolt going back, just the fading smell of the man and the passing taste of carrot. Presently he forgot about it and turned slowly round again so that his hindquarters were towards the door, because he usually stood that way, and after a minute or two he blinked slowly, rested his near hind leg lazily on the point of the hoof and lapsed back into twilight mindlessness.
Down in his stomach the liquid narcotic compound with which the carrot had been injected to saturation gradually filtered out of the digesting carrot cells and began to be absorbed into the bloodstream. The process was slow and progressive. And it had started two hours late.
Arthur Morrison stood in his stable-yard watching his men load the chestnut into the motor horsebox that was to take him to the races. He was eyeing the proceedings with an expression that was critical from habit and bore little relation to the satisfaction in his mind. The chestnut was the best horse in his stable: a frequent winner, popular with the public, a source of prestige as well as revenue. The big steeplechase at Cheltenham had been tailor-made for him from the day its conditions had been published, and Morrison was adept at producing a horse in peak condition for a particular race. No one seriously considered that the chestnut would be beaten. The newspapers had tipped it to a man and the bookmakers were fighting shy at 6–4 on. Morrison allowed himself a glimmer of warmth in the eyes and a twitch of smile to the lips as the men clipped shut the heavy doors of the horsebox and drove it out of the yard.
These physical signs were unusual. The face he normally wore was a compound of concentration and disapproval in roughly equal proportions. Both qualities contributed considerably to his success as a racehorse trainer and to his unpopularity as a person, a fact Morrison himself was well aware of. He didn’t in the least care that almost no one liked him. He valued success and respect much more highly than love and held in incredulous contempt all those who did not.
Across the yard Chick was watching the horsebox drive away, his usual scowl in place. Morrison frowned irritably. The boy was a pest, he thought. Always grousing, always impertinent, always trying to scrounge up more money. Morrison didn’t believe in boys having life made too easy: a little hardship was good for the soul. Where Morrison and Chick radically differed was the point at which each thought hardship began.
Chick spotted the frown and watched Morrison fearfully, his guilt pressing on him like a rock. He couldn’t know, he thought frantically. He couldn’t even suspect there was anything wrong with the horse or he wouldn’t have let him go off to the races. The horse had looked all right, too. Absolutely his normal self. Perhaps there had been nothing wrong with the carrot… Perhaps it had been the wrong carrot, even… Chick glanced around uneasily and knew very well he was fooling himself. The horse might look all right but he wasn’t.
Arthur Morrison saddled up his horse at the races, and Chick watched him from ten nervous paces away, trying to hide in the eager crowd that pushed forward for a close view of the favourite. There was a larger admiring crowd outside the chestnut’s saddling stall than for any of the other seven runners, and the bookmakers had shortened their odds. Behind Morrison’s concentrated expression an itch of worry was growing insistent. He pulled the girth tight and adjusted the buckles automatically, acknowledging to himself that his former satisfaction had changed to anxiety. The horse was not himself. There were no lively stamping feet, no playful nips from the teeth, no response to the crowd; this was a horse that usually played to the public like a film star. He couldn’t be feeling well, and if he wasn’t feeling well he wouldn’t win. Morrison tightened his mouth. If the horse were not well enough to win, he would prefer him not to run at all. To be beaten at odds-on would be a disgrace. A defeat on too large a scale. A loss of face. Particularly as Morrison’s own eldest son Toddy was to be the jockey. The newspapers would tear them both to pieces.
Morrison came to a decision and sent for the vet.
The rules of jump racing in England stated quite clearly that if a horse had been declared a runner in a race, only the say-so of a veterinary surgeon was sufficient grounds for withdrawing him during the last three-quarters of an hour before post time. The Cheltenham racecourse veterinary surgeon came and looked at the chestnut and, after consulting with Morrison, led it off to a more private stall and took its temperature.
‘His temperature’s normal,’ the vet assured Morrison.
‘I don’t like the look of him.’
‘I can’t find anything wrong.’
‘He’s not well,’ Morrison insisted.
The vet pursed his lips and shook his head. There was nothing obviously wrong with the horse, and he knew he would be in trouble himself if he allowed Morrison to withdraw so hot a favourite on such slender grounds. Not only that, this was the third application for withdrawal he’d had to consider that afternoon. He had refused both the others, and the chestnut was certainly in no worse a state.
‘He’ll have to run,’ the vet said positively, making up his mind.
Morrison was furious and went raging off to find a steward, who came and looked at the chestnut and listened to the vet and confirmed that the horse would have to run whether Morrison liked it or not. Unless, that was, Morrison cared to involve the horse’s absent owner in paying a heavy fine?
With a face of granite Morrison resaddled the chestnut, and a stable-lad led him out into the parade ring, where most of the waiting public cheered and a few wiser ones looked closely and hurried off to hedge their bets.
With a shiver of dismay, Chick saw the horse reappear and for the first time regretted what he’d done. That stupid vet, he thought violently. He can’t see what’s under his bloody nose, he couldn’t see a barn at ten paces. Anything that happened from then on was the vet’s fault, Chick thought. The vet’s responsibility, absolutely. The man was a criminal menace, letting a horse run in a steeplechase with dope coming out of its eyeballs.
Toddy Morrison had joined his father in the parade ring and together they were watching with worried expressions as the chestnut plodded lethargically around the oval walking track. Toddy was a strong, stocky professional jockey in his late twenties with an infectious grin and a generous view of life that represented a direct rejection of his father’s. He had inherited the same strength of mind but had used it to leave home at eighteen to ride races for other trainers, and had only consented to ride for his father when he could dictate his own terms. Arthur Morrison, in consequence, respected him deeply. Between them they had won a lot of races.
Chick didn’t actually dislike Toddy Morrison, even though, as he saw it, Toddy stood in his way. Occasionally Arthur let Chick ride a race if Toddy had something better or couldn’t make the weight. Chick had to share these scraps from Toddy’s t
able with two or three other lads in the yard who were, though he didn’t believe it, as good as he was in the saddle. But though the envy curdled around inside him and the snide remarks came out sharp and sour as vinegar, he had never actually come to hate Toddy. There was something about Toddy that you couldn’t hate, however good the reason. Chick hadn’t given thought to the fact that it would be Toddy who would have to deal with the effects of the carrot. He had seen no further than his own pocket. He wished now that it had been some other jockey. Anyone but Toddy.
The conviction suddenly crystallised in Chick’s mind as he looked at Toddy and Morrison standing there worried in the parade ring that he had never believed the chestnut would actually start in the race. The stranger, Chick said to himself, had distinctly told him the horse would be too sick to start. I wouldn’t have done it, else, Chick thought virtuously. I wouldn’t have done it. It’s bloody dangerous, riding a doped steeplechaser. I wouldn’t have done that to Toddy. It’s not my fault he’s going to ride a doped steeplechaser, it’s that vet’s fault for not seeing. It’s that stranger’s fault, he told me distinctly the horse wouldn’t be fit to start…
Chick remembered with an unpleasant jerk that he’d been two hours late with the carrot. Maybe if he’d been on time the drug would have come out more and the vet would have seen…
Chick jettisoned this unbearable theory instantly on the grounds that no one can tell how seriously any particular horse will react to a drug or how quickly it will work, and he repeated to himself the comforting self-delusion that the stranger had promised him the horse wouldn’t even start – though the stranger had not in fact said any such thing. The stranger, who was at the races, was entirely satisfied with the way things were going and was on the point of making a great deal of money.
The bell rang for the jockeys to mount. Chick bunched his hands in his pockets and tried not to visualise what could happen to a rider going over jumps at thirty miles an hour on a doped horse. Chick’s body began playing him tricks again: he could feel the sweat trickling down his back and the pulse had come back in his ears.