Tip Off

by John Francome

‘Thanks.’ I fumbled for my diary to find Esmond Cobbold’s address. I dialled the old man’s number and listened to it ring a dozen times before, finally, it was answered. There was no mistaking Esmond’s wheezy old voice.

  ‘Esmond, it’s Simon Jeffries here.’

  ‘How are you, dear boy?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. Are you fit?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me that a glass or two of good claret doesn’t put right.’

  ‘Good, because I’m hoping you’ll agree to come down here for a few days.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Nester’s leg is playing up again.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then a sigh. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I saw you’d run him a couple of times recently.’

  ‘He was perfectly sound after both those races. I rode him out this morning and he was fine, straight as a die, but the head lad checked him this evening and his leg had really heated up.’

  ‘I could deal with it remotely, you know.’

  ‘I’d feel much happier if you could come here. And I’ve got two bottles of Margaux ’76 just waiting to be appreciated.’

  There was a chuckle at the other end of the line. ‘Devil,’ Esmond said. ‘Pick me up at Reading at . . .’ he paused while he consulted his timetable ‘. . . six-fifteen.’

  I could see this crisis dominating my thoughts and actions until it was resolved – just as other major preoccupations in my life were coming to a head. To myself, I cursed the bad timing. Outwardly, I excused myself from Derek and went to my car. From there I called Matt.

  ‘Do you need me yet?’

  I held my breath.

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ he drawled. ‘Everything’s under control. We’ve got our man in sight still.’

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘The one who came to see Lincoln, of course. We think we’ve seen him before somewhere. I’ve taken some digital shots and sent them down the line to the office. Could you get in there and see what you think? Or get Monica to e-mail them to wherever you are. Where are you, by the way?’

  ‘I’m at Derek de Morlay’s,’ I admitted. ‘There’s a bit of a problem with Nester’s leg.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake! You’re not still wasting time on that, are you?’

  ‘Matt, you know perfectly well that running him in the Champion Chase is a major deal for me.’

  I heard a long, self-righteous sigh. ‘Just make sure you’re ready to run when we need you.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Where are you now, anyway?’

  ‘This chap came by car; he’s got one of those small Rovers. He doesn’t strike me as very used to London traffic. But he’s got to Portman Square – we thought he might be going to the Jockey Club for some reason. He managed to park in the square but so far he’s still sitting in his car. He’s been there twenty minutes.’

  ‘But isn’t anyone waiting to see if Lincoln himself comes back?’

  ‘We checked with the owner of the building who lives on the ground floor. Lincoln was renting the flat. He’s gone, paid off two months’ rent he owed on Sunday and went with a ruck-sack through the back door, leaving nothing. That’s why we’re staying with this man. At the moment, he’s our best lead to Lincoln.’

  I went back into the de Morlays’ steamy kitchen where Julia was giving tea to the children.

  ‘I’m off to pick up Esmond. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to meeting him,’ she said. ‘I heard all about him from Emma after he’d been down last time.’

  I’d arranged that the old healer could stay in the de Morlays’ tiny spare room, so that he would be on the spot, and so, frankly, he wouldn’t have to rely on me to get him around over the next few days if I suddenly had to take off and do some work with Matt.

  I drove to the office first, where Jason was coping with admirable calm. He’d had David Dysart on the phone, demanding a progress report which he’d supplied; he’d had Harry Chapman on too, looking for me. And two more clients to whom we’d quoted for systematic security sweeps had accepted, which meant the speedy recruitment of another highly computer-literate member of staff.

  Monica had put on my desk two good clear shots of the man Matt and Larry were chasing.

  The first showed him standing outside a run-down red-brick terraced house. I assumed this was where Lincoln had disappeared on Thursday night. Judging from the scale of the building, this man was about five feet ten, dressed in a sheepskin coat and a flat tweed cap. He looked more like a retired civil servant than a conspirator in a horse-doping scandal. The close-up struck me at once as familiar. Narrow dark eyes looked out from under heavy brows on the worried face of a man in his mid-fifties.

  With a reference I couldn’t quite access nagging at the back of my mind, I logged into all our surveillance shots. It took less than five minutes to find him, with Tresidder, in one of the first batches I’d taken. But that wasn’t the connection that was still buzzing away, unidentified, at the back of my mind.

  Feeling I’d done something to earn my keep, I tried to get through to Matt. I couldn’t get a reply from his mobile. I looked at my watch and saw with a jolt that it was already 5.50. I ran down to my car and drove through the crawling rush-hour traffic to Reading station. On the way, I tried Matt again. The second time, I got him.

  ‘Bingo!’ I crowed.

  ‘You’ve found him?’

  ‘Yes. With Tresidder at Sandown.’

  ‘Are they talking?’

  ‘Difficult to tell in a still shot. Both their mouths are closed, but the fact is they’re standing side by side, and that’s way beyond the realms of coincidence, especially in a large crowd like there was that day. There’s no doubt they were together.’

  ‘Good!’ Matt said. ‘I knew he was worth watching. Have you got any idea who he is?’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere else, but I just can’t place him. What’s happened to him now?’

  ‘Nothing much. He hung around Portman Square, got out, had a coffee in the Churchill Hotel, then got back into his car and drove to Victoria. He’s booked into a small hotel there and I’ve left Larry to watch him.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I’ve got a meeting with Sara.’

  ‘A “meeting”?’ I laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ Matt grunted. ‘She’s giving me an up-date on the state of play at the bookie’s.’

  ‘Let me know what she says.’

  By this time I was almost at Reading station. I rang off, promising Matt that I’d be on standby.

  I parked and walked into the station in time to see the Cardiff train roll in. Esmond clambered down stiffly, clutching a leather Gladstone bag that might have been a hundred years old. He was wearing a dark brown tweed Ulster and a shapeless fishing hat. Once he was down, he turned and gave a hand to a young woman with whom he was carrying on an animated conversation. They were both still laughing when I walked up to greet my old friend.

  ‘Simon!’ he exclaimed with a broad smile on his handsome old face. ‘Meet Natasha from Cardiff. She’s an aromatherapist – we’ve been exchanging notes.’

  On closer inspection the girl looked more like a night club hostess. I grinned at her and at Esmond. ‘I hope he hasn’t been shocking you,’ I said to her, with a slight lift of one eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve been trying to shock him,’ she said with a giggle.

  They said goodbye to one another and I carried Esmond’s bag to the car while he talked about what an enjoyable journey he’d had. I couldn’t help smiling; I hoped I’d still be flirting with girls in trains when I was eighty-five.

  Once we were in the car, though, Esmond focused on his mission.

  ‘So, how bad is it?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say. There’s no visible sign of anything. There’s just heat there. But he’s obviously feeling it, that’s what’s worrying me.’

  Esmond asked for every detail of the animal’s condition, training progr
amme and general performance. He listened to my answers, nodding vaguely from time to time.

  ‘Do you think you can help?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘But I’ll do my best.’

  Esmond had originally come to treat Nester the day after the vet had taken X-rays of the horse’s broken pedal bone, when I’d first agreed to take him on from Emma.

  The vet’s view then was that the only way to save the horse was by drilling a hole through the outside of his hoof and screwing a metal plate to the bone. There would, he said, be no chance of his ever racing again, but at least he would enjoy a comfortable retirement.

  Esmond had taken another view – that the leg wouldn’t heal on its own simply because of the continual pressure from the horse standing on it. If the horse were human, he’d have been expected to lie on his back for a month.

  As it was, after he’d used his own special techniques, he’d dug a small pit in the stable floor by the door and rigged up a harness with an overhead brace, so that Nester could stand on three legs, with his injured foot resting lightly in the hole, on a cushion of foam. Starting with intervals of ten minutes, the harness was winched up to take the weight off Nester’s good leg. By the fourth day he was strong enough to stand for two hours without a break.

  Esmond had also insisted that the harness was arranged, with a hay net slung over the door, so that Nester had a good view over the top of his stable door and could keep an eye on everything that was going on out in the yard. Few horses would have stood so quietly for so long, but Nester was a perfect patient.

  After three weeks on a continuous course of homeopathic bone tablets and twenty-four-hour-a-day observation, he was able to begin putting some weight on the damaged foot. He had developed a lump around his girth, where the sheepskin-covered harness had taken most of the weight, but that had gone down within a few days of its being removed. Within eight weeks of the original operation, with Esmond’s meticulous care, Nester had been completely cured.

  Half an hour after we’d left Reading station, Esmond was back at work on Nester again.

  His method of identifying the epicentre of the trauma in an injured animal who couldn’t actually direct him straight to it was to dowse for it, like an ancient diviner of water. From a pocket in his well-worn moleskin waistcoat, he pulled an old gold fob chain, which he wrapped around his wrinkled thumb and dangled over the approximate area of Nester’s injury, passing it slowly from side to side.

  When the chain started to circle with dramatic suddenness and quite independently of any movement of his hand, Esmond knew he had located the precise spot. He looked up at me. ‘It’s not the old injury,’ he said quietly.

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved, or worried that something new had happened. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Not too serious. I’d say it was repairable. My guess is that somehow he’s trodden on something sharp.’

  Esmond was completely confident now of what he was dealing with and this, he said, made him a much more efficient healer. He asked us to stand quietly as far from the horse as possible while he calmed it, lulling it with his voice and a continual, steady stroking. It seemed that he almost hypnotised it into a state where it was prepared to stand, totally relaxed and oblivious to anything going on around it.

  Esmond knelt on one knee and lifted the animal’s damaged limb to rest it on the other. ‘I need to get all pressure off the joint,’ he explained in a whisper, as if the horse had gone to sleep.

  He raised the leg very gently with his left hand, checking all the time that Nester was in no discomfort. Then he raised his right hand and held it, palm down, a few inches over the point on the animal’s ankle where the chain had spun most vigorously.

  Transfixed, I watched him as hundreds of conflicting thoughts raced through my mind. All the time I was dreading the summons that might intrude on the magic at any moment, demanding my presence in the hunt that Matt was conducting in London.

  But Esmond stayed where he was, uninterrupted for a quarter of an hour, moving only very slightly now and again to ease the muscles in his old limbs. When he was ready, he took the horse’s joint in both hands and started to rub it, gently but firmly, like a physio at a football match. Only then did he glance up and look at any of us.

  I felt that the others – Derek, Julia and Sharon, Nester’s girl – were as convinced as I that the horse had been positively helped in some way, and yet Esmond had done little more than hold his hand above the animal’s limb. The old man gently placed the horse’s leg back on the ground, got to his feet with surprising agility and stood back.

  ‘Okay, there you are, old chap,’ he said. Taking Nester by his head collar, he led him from the stable and turned to Sharon, who was gazing apprehensively at her charge. ‘Could you walk him round the yard for us, please?’

  Still doubtful, the girl clipped a rope to the collar and set off at a brisk walk around the quadrangle. The horse moved quite evenly, showing no distress at the pressure on its damaged ankle.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Julia gasped.

  Esmond raised a hand. ‘Don’t get too excited. He’ll be quite numb, so he may not be feeling it for the moment, but he will again after a while. I imagine it’ll take quite a few sessions before it’s cured.’

  ‘It’s still amazing.’

  He shook his head again. ‘I haven’t achieved anything permanent yet, but given time I might. Then you can make a judgement.’

  In the house, over a supper of venison casserole and a bottle of Margaux, I was too nervous about Nester to talk much. But Julia was bursting to know how Esmond achieved the results he did.

  He was, as always, frank but vague in his answer. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t exactly know, but we all of us possess a personal electromagnetic field. A healer is able to bring his own into harmony with his patient’s and stabilise the interrupted flow around the trauma. That lets oxygen reach it more freely and speeds up the healing process. But, quite honestly, like acupuncture, the science of it’s still only half understood.’

  Derek, by nature more sceptical than his wife, shook his head in unwilling acceptance of the fact that Esmond had achieved the right diagnosis – with his watch chain – and the horse was undoubtedly mending.

  I left Esmond with the de Morlays who had already fallen completely under his spell. As I drove down the hill with my headlights reflecting off the rails of their tidy paddocks, I picked up my phone and dialled Ivydene.

  Emma answered. ‘Hi. What happened to you?’

  I told her about Nester, and Esmond’s visit.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she wailed in sympathy. ‘Is he going to be okay?’

  ‘Fingers crossed. Anyway, you can see him tomorrow.’

  ‘No, I can’t. There’s this King George EGM, and Frank wants me to come up in the morning to talk to him about it over breakfast before we go on to the meeting.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘But what are you doing now?’

  ‘I thought I might call in at Ivydene for a mug of hot chocolate or something, if His Lordship is out of the way.’

  ‘He is. Do come – but I can’t guarantee hot chocolate.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  My mobile started bleeping at me just after seven. I woke and opened my eyes. When I looked around me in a half-sleep, I didn’t recognise the curtains, the dressing table, the rug on the floor, or the white broderie anglaise bed-cover. But I did know the mop of auburn hair poking from underneath it beside me.

  I picked up my chirruping phone but remembered I was at Ivydene and tried to whisper. It came out as an ugly croak.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘God, you sound rough!’ Matt had obviously been up for some time.

  ‘Morning, Matt,’ I managed.

  ‘Right, get into gear. Our man’s already up, and it wasn’t just to feed his meter. He’s gone ten minutes ago, heading north-east – out of London, by the look of it. And I reckon if he’s made such an early start, he’s
got somewhere to go.’

  I agreed. ‘Okay. I’ll stay switched on and aim for the M25. If I haven’t heard from you, I’ll call you then.’

  ‘Good thinking. Tallyho!’ he bellowed in my ear. I clicked the phone off, shaking my head.

  I knew by now that it was best to leave Emma quietly at this stage in the day. I left her a few tender words on the back of an old petrol receipt, pulled on some clothes and set off.

  It was a crisp, brightening morning outside and by 7.20 I was heading back over the downs towards the rising sun and London.

  I was just half a mile from the junction of the M4 and M25 when the phone on the passenger seat bleeped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ah, there you are.’ The warm resonance of Esmond Cobbold’s voice was audible even through the airwaves and the miniature speaker of my phone.

  ‘Hell, Esmond. What’s happening?’ I asked, trying to refocus my attention.

  ‘I’ve just had another session with your horse. I wanted to let you know that there are definite signs of improvement.’

  Despite the pressures of my current mission, I felt a surge of relief that Esmond, normally restrained in his prognoses, was prepared to say that things were getting better.

  ‘Any idea how long it will be?’ I asked, thinking of Nester’s truncated training programme.

  I could almost hear him shrug his shoulders. ‘Impossible to say.’

  ‘Will he be able to run in . . .’

  ‘In the Queen Mum Chase? Maybe. He should be able to canter by tomorrow.’

  I thanked Esmond for letting me know there were at least signs of improvement, but when I’d put the phone down, I still couldn’t feel happy about it. With a sigh, I was turning my attention to leaving the M4 when my phone bleeped again.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Simon. We’re at the bottom of the M11.’ Matt’s voice carried an undertone of tension. ‘Our man’s got his foot down. Where are you?’

  I told him, and agreed to try to catch him up. ‘Anything from the others?’