by Dick Francis
As middle-age and a gentle paunch had crept up and overtaken him, Christopher Haig had begun at forty-two to wish that he had dared more, had crazily set off to fly round the world in a hot air balloon or spent a summer photographing penguins in Antarctica or had canoed up the Orinoco river to the Angel Falls. Instead, he had worked reliably day by day as an animal-feed consultant and, as the pinnacle of his suppressed urge to adventure, acted as the judge at race meetings.
He looked forward, on that particular Friday morning, to the bustle of the first half of the two-day Winchester Spring Meeting. He savoured his drive to Winchester racecourse from his home (an empty-feeling home now that his wife had run off with a raggle-taggle TV repair man), taking pleasure in the sunshine sparkling on the fresh green buds of regenerate trees. Happy enough without his wife (relieved, if the truth were told), he wondered how one actually set about dog-sledding in Alaska or driving across the vast red-dust wastes of Australia: could one’s every-day travel agent arrange it?
Meticulous by nature, he packed imaginary suitcases for his fantasy journeys, wondering if snow-shoes would glide over both powdery surfaces, and choosing audio books for the long nights. Dreams and daydreams plugged the empty spaces of a worthy working life.
He was one of the fifteen judges regularly called to decide the winner and placed horses of the races. As there were fifteen judges but not fifteen race meetings every day (there were seldom more than four except on public holidays), acting as judge was to Chris Haig a sporadic and unpredictable pleasure more than an occupation. He never knew long in advance to which meeting he might be sent: none of the judges officiated always on the same course.
Christopher Haig regretted the passing of the old days when the word of the judge was law: if the judge said ‘So and so’ had won the race, then he darned well had won it, even if halt the racegoers put ‘What d’ya macall’ in front. Nowadays the photo-finish camera gave unarguable short-head verdicts, which the judge did little more than announce. Fairer, Chris Haig acknowledged, but not much fun.
The photo-finish camera at Winchester races had been on the blink last time out, though the trouble (more pompously classified as a malfunction) had happened to another judge, not Christopher Haig. It had now not only reportedly been fixed but exhaustively tested. A pity, Haig reprehensibly thought.
Chris Haig parked his car (for the last time) in the ‘Officials only’ car park and made his way jauntily towards the weighing-room (the centre of officialdom), scattering ‘good mornings’ to gatemen and arriving jockeys as he passed.
The judge was feeling particularly well that day. He recognised in himself the awakening of nature’s year and, as often before, but more strongly this time, decided that as he could realistically look forward to thirty more years of life, he should change direction pretty soon. The urge was clear: the destination, still a mist. He would have been astounded to learn that it was already too late.
Christopher Haig was greeted as always with a smile by the stewards, the clerk of the course, the starter, the clerk of the scales and all the passing crowd of race organisers in the weighing-room. The judge was popular, not only because he did his job without mistakes, but for his effortless generosity, his good nature, and his calmness in a crisis. Those that thought him dull had no insight into the furnace of his private landscape. What if, he thought, I joined an oil-fire fighting unit?
Before each race the judge sat at a table near the scales and learned the colours worn by each jockey as he or she weighed out. He learned also the name of each horse and made sure the jockeys carried on their number cloths the corresponding numbers on the racecard. Chris Haig, after years of practice, was good and quick.
The first three races gave him no problems. There were no finishes close enough to need to be settled by photo, and he’d been able to pronounce the winners and placed horses firmly and with confidence. He was enjoying himself.
The fourth race, the Cloister Handicap Hurdle, was the big event of the day. Chris Haig carefully made sure he could identify each of the eleven runners at a glance: it was always a shocking disgrace for a judge to hesitate.
Number 1, he noted: Lilyglit, top weight.
Number 2, Fable.
Number 3, Storm Cone.
He continued down the list. The runners’ names were all familiar to him from other days, but the first three on the card for the Cloister Handicap were woven into his short future in ways he couldn’t have imagined.
Number 1. Lilyglit
At about the time earlier on that Friday morning when Christopher Haig shaved with the help of a bathroom mirror and dreamed his dreams, Wendy Billington Innes sat on her low comfortable dressing stool and stared at her reflection in her dressing-table’s triple-section looking-glass. She saw not the pale clear skin, the straight mid-brown hair nor the darkening shadows below her grey-blue eyes; she saw only worry and a disaster she didn’t understand and couldn’t deal with. An hour ago, she thought, life had seemed simple and secure.
There were four children upstairs with a resident nanny: three daughters and a yearling son. Downstairs there was a cook, a housekeeper, a manservant and, in the gatehouse of the estate, a chauffeur-gardener with his housemaid wife and daughter. Wendy Billington Innes managed her large staff with friendly appreciation so that they all lived together without friction. Raised in similar cosseted ease, she knew to a fraction the effort one could expect from each employee and, most importantly, what request would be considered a breathtaking insult.
The house itself was a grand relic of grander times: it allowed everyone comfortable room but was terminally afflicted with dry rot. One day soon, she had thought peacefully, she would move everyone to a new home.
She had brought to her marriage a heavy portfolio of stocks and bonds and, like her mother before her, had thankfully handed it to her husband for management.
At thirty-seven she had reached serenity, if not overwhelming happiness. She could admit to herself (but to no one else) that Jasper, her husband, had been sporadically unfaithful ever since their wedding but, depending on him for friendship, she chose to ignore the true reason for the occasional one-night absences from which he always returned in great good spirits, making her laugh as he loaded her with flowers and little presents. When he came home at dawn empty-handed, as he more often did, it meant only that he’d been gambling all night in his favourite gaming club. He was a good-natured useless man, almost universally liked.
At seven-forty five in the morning on the Friday of Winchester races, as she lay cosily awake, planning her day ahead, Wendy Billington Innes answered her bedside telephone and listened to the voice of the family’s accountant asking urgently to speak to Jasper.
Jasper’s side of the big four-poster bed was uninhabited but, as he often slept in his dressing-room next door when he came home late, his wife went unworriedly to wake him.
Flat sheets; no Jasper.
‘He isn’t here,’ his wife reported, returning to the phone. ‘He didn’t come home last night. You know what he’s like when he’s playing backgammon or blackjack. He’ll play all night.’ She excused his absence lightly, as she always did. ‘When he gets home, do you want me to give him a message?’
The accountant asked weakly, knowing the reply in advance, if Wendy – Mrs Innes – had read today’s financial columns in the newspapers. No, Mrs Innes had not.
Alarmed by then, Wendy Billington Innes demanded to know what was the matter and wished, when she heard the answer, that she hadn’t.
‘Basically,’ the accountant said with regret, ‘the firm of Stemmer Peabody has gone into receivership, which means… I find it difficult to tell you… but it means that Jasper’s fortune – and that of several other people – is, shall we say, severely compromised.’
Wendy said numbly, ‘What does “severely compromised” mean, exactly?’
‘It means that the financial manager to whom Jasper and others entrusted their affairs has pledged all their money as securi
ty for an enterprise and… er… has lost it.’
‘That can’t happen!’ Wendy protested.
‘I did warn him,’ the accountant said sadly, ‘but Jasper trusted the manager and signed papers giving him too much power.’
‘But there’s my money,’ Wendy exclaimed. ‘Even if Jasper has lost some of his, we can live on my money perfectly well.’
After an appalling pause, the bad news paralysed her.
‘Mrs Innes… Wendy… you gave Jasper total control of your affairs. You too, perhaps, signed away too much power. Your money has gone with his. I do hope we may be able to salvage enough so that you can live fairly comfortably, though not, of course, as you do now. There are the children’s trusts, things like that. I need to talk to him about his plans.’
When she could get her tongue to speak, Wendy asked, ‘Does Jasper know about this?’
‘He found out yesterday, when the news broke in the City. He is an honourable man. I’m told he’s been trying to raise money ever since, to pay off gambling debts. I know, for example, that he’s trying to sell his racehorse, Lilyglit.’
‘Lilyglit! He’d never do that! He worships that horse. He’s running today at Winchester.’
‘I’m afraid… in the future, Jasper won’t be able to afford to keep racehorses in training.’
Wendy Billington Innes couldn’t bear to ask what else he wouldn’t be able to afford.
Jasper Billington Innes had already been told. Like many in the past who had been dreadfully impoverished by their blameless involvement in the collapse of insurance syndicates at Lloyd’s of London, he was unable at first to understand the reason for, or the extent of, his losses.
He wasn’t stupid, though not very bright either. He had inherited significant wealth, but no brain for business. He had left ‘all that’ to the trusted fellow at Stemmer Peabody, a course of action that had led, the evening before, to an emergency meeting of others facing the same depth of Stemmer Peabody ruin. Women had been furious and weeping: men shouting or pale. Jasper Billington Innes had felt sick.
Honourable in most things, even in the avalanche of calamity, he saw it as an obligation to pay his private debts at once. He wrote cheques to his tailor and his wine-merchant, and to his plumber – not quite enough to clear the whole outstanding sum in each case, but more than enough to prove intent. He could afford his usual household expenses for one more month if he gave all the domestic staff notice at once. That left his heavy debts to his bookmaker and his gaming club proprietors, whose present relaxed behaviour patterns would fly out of the window on hearing the bad news.
All that remained to him of real value, he thought miserably, was his splendid fast hurdler, Lilyglit. His other three jumpers were old now, and worth little.
By midnight on Thursday, he had lost another mini-fortune at the tables, trying lucklessly to play his way out of catastrophe. At four o’clock in the morning, having won back some of his losses, he struck Lilyglit bargains with his gaming creditors that even they recognised as unwise panic measures. They had learned by then of his extreme adversity. They accepted his signature gravely though, and, as they liked him, sincerely wished him well.
Number 2. Fable
While Christopher Haig was shaving on Friday morning, the brothers Arkwright were out in their stable yard, seventy miles to the north, working on Fable, their runner in the Cloister Handicap Hurdle.
In the strengthening light of dawn they tidily plaited the horse’s mane and brushed out his tail, wrapping it tightly in a bandage so that it would look neat and tidy when let free. They painted his hooves with oil (cosmetically pleasing) and fed him a bowl of oats to give him stamina and warmth on the horsebox journey south.
Vernon Arkwright, jockey, and his ten-year older brother, Villiers, trainer, welcomed the farrier who came to change Fable’s all-purpose horseshoes to thin fast racing plates. The farrier took care that his nails didn’t prick the hooves: the Arkwrights had a known talent for retaliating with practical jokes.
The Arkwright brothers, Vernon and Villiers, were as bent as right angles: everyone knew it, but proof proved a vanishing commodity. Fable had reached number 2 in the handicap for the Cloister Hurdle by a zig-zag path of winning and losing as suspect as a ghost’s footprints. Both brothers had been hauled before the stewards to explain ‘discrepancies in running’. Both, with angelic hands on hearts, had declared horses not to be machines. On suspicion rather than evidence Villiers had been fined and Vernon given a short compulsory holiday. Both had publicly protested injured innocence and privately jumped with gleeful relief. The stewards longed to catch them properly and warn them off.
The horse’s owner, an Arkwright cousin, had confused the enquiry by backing his horse every time – win or lose – with the same amount of money. The horse’s owner had asked his jockey and trainer not to tell him what outcome to expect so that his joy or disappointment would be – and look – genuine.
Over the years, mostly with lesser horses than Fable, the conspiring trio of owner, trainer and jockey had salted away substantial tax-free harvests.
On the Friday of the Winchester Spring Meeting they were as a team still open to suggestions. They hadn’t decided whether Fable was out to win or lose. They doubted he was fast enough ever to beat Lilyglit, but, annoyingly, no one had so far bribed them to let him prove it. It looked disappointingly to the Ark-wrights as if Fable would have to perform to the best of his ability and try for second or third place money.
Such honesty ran against all the Arkwright instincts.
Number 3. Storm Cone
On the Friday morning of the Winchester Spring Meeting, two hours at least before Christopher Haig began shaving with concentration and dreaming his dreams in his bathroom, Moggie Reilly slid away from the sweat-slippery nakedness of the young woman in his embrace and put a hand palm downwards on his alarm clock to cut off its clamour.
Moggie Reilly’s head throbbed with hangover, his mouth dry and sticky in the aftermath of too carefree a mixture of drinks. Moggie Reilly, jump jockey, was due to perform at his athletic peak that afternoon at Winchester racecourse in two hurdle races and one three-mile steeplechase but, meanwhile, the trainer he rode for – John Chester – was expecting him to turn out for morning exercise at least sober enough to sit upright in his saddle.
Friday morning was work day, meaning that horses strengthened their muscles at a full training gallop. Old hands like Moggie Reilly – as lithe as a cat and all of twenty-four – could ride work half asleep. That Friday he squinted into his own bathroom mirror as he sought to revive his gums with a toothbrush and summoned up at least an echo of the lighthearted grin that had enticed a young woman between his sheets when she should have been safe in her own bed on the other side of the racing town of Lambourn.
Sarah Driffield: now there was a girl. There was Sarah Drif-field, undeniably in his bed. Undeniably, also, he hadn’t spent the few horizontal hours of his night in total inactivity. What a waste, he thought regretfully, that he could remember so little of it clearly.
When he’d pulled on his riding clothes and made a pot of strong coffee, Sarah Driffield was on her feet, dressed and saying, ‘Tell me I didn’t do this. My father will kill me. How the hell do I get home unseen?’
The inquisitive eyes of Lambourn awoke with the dawn. The tongues wagged universally by evening. Sarah Driffield, daughter of the reigning champion trainer, did not seek publicity concerning her unplanned escapade with the wickedly persuasive jockey who rode for John Chester, her father’s most threatening rival.
Grinning but awake to the problem, Moggie Reilly handed her the keys to his car with instructions not to move out until the horse population had trotted off to the training grounds. He told her where to leave the car and where to hide its key, and he himself jogged on foot through the town to John Chester’s stable, which did his hovering hangover minor good.
Sarah Driffield! His whole mind laughed.
It had all been due to a bi
rthday party they had both attended the evening before in The Stag, one of the Lambourn area’s best pubs. It had been due basically to the happy-go-lucky atmosphere throughout and specifically to the last round of drinks ordered by the host, that had mixed disastrously with earlier lager and whisky.
Tequila Slammers.
Never again, Moggie Reilly vowed. He seldom got drunk and hated hangovers. He remembered offering Sarah Driffield a lift home, but wasn’t clear how they had ended at his home, three and a half miles from The Stag, and not hers, barely one. In view of his alcoholic intake, Sarah Driffield had been driving.
Moggie Reilly, though within the top ten of jump jockeys, wouldn’t normally have looked on Sarah Driffield as possible kiss-and-cuddle material, admittedly on account of her father’s power, status and legendary fists. Percy Driffield’s well-known views on suitable company for his carefully educated nineteen-year-old only child excluded anybody who might hope to inherit his stable by marrying her. He was reported to have already frightened off shoals of minnows, and his daughter, no fool, used his universal disapproval as her umbrella against unwelcome advances. Which being so, jogged Moggie incredulously, which being so, how come the gorgeous Miss Driffield, the unofficial tiara-chosen Miss Lambourn, had climbed the Reilly stairs without protest?
John Chester observed the wince behind each step of his jockey’s arrival but did no more than shrug. The fast gallops got done to his satisfaction (all that mattered) and he offered a tactics-planning breakfast on his Winchester runners.
At shortly after eight-thirty, while Wendy Billington Innes, twenty miles away, still sat in frozen and helpless disbelief on her dressing stool, John Chester, bulky and aggressive, told his jockey that Storm Cone was to win the fourth race, the Cloister Hurdle, at all costs. Moggie must somehow achieve it.