by Dick Francis
‘You’re having us on,’ Luke-John said.
Derry shook his head. ‘Uhuh. I don’t just sit here with my eyes shut, you know. I read the newspapers.’
‘I think,’ I said suddenly, ‘I will fetch my typewriter.’
‘Where is it?’
Over my shoulder on the way back to the door I said, ‘Being cleaned.’
This time the typewriter was ready. I collected it and went further along the street, to Bert’s paper. Up in the lift, to Bert’s department. Across the busy floor to the Sports Desk. Full stop beside the assistant sports editor, a constant racegoer, a long-known bar pal.
‘Ty! What’s the opposition doing here?’
‘Bert Checkov,’ I said.
We discussed him for a while. The assistant sports editor was hiding something. It showed in half looks, unfinished gestures, an unsuccessfully smothered embarrassment. He said he was shocked, shattered, terribly distressed by Bert’s death. He said everyone on the paper would miss him, the paper would miss him, they all felt his death was a great loss. He was lying.
I didn’t pursue it. Could I, I asked tentatively, have a look at Bert’s clippings book? I would very much like to re-read some of his articles.
The assistant sports editor said kindly that I had little to learn from Bert Checkov or anyone else for that matter, but to go ahead. While he got back to work I sorted out the records racks at the side of the room and eventually found three brown paper clippings books with Bert’s work stuck into the pages.
I took my typewriter out of its carrying case and left it lying on an inconspicuous shelf. The three clippings books went into the carrying case, though 1 had to squeeze to get it shut, and I walked quietly and unchallenged out of the building with my smuggled goods.
Luke-John and Derry goggled at the books of cuttings.
‘How on earth did you get them out? And why on earth do you want them?’
‘Derry,’ I said, ‘can now set about proving that Bert always tipped non-starters in big races.’
‘You’re crazy,’ Luke-John said incredulously.
‘No’ I said regretfully. ‘If I’m right, the Blaze is on the edge of the sort of scandal it thrives on. A circulation explosion. And all by courtesy of the sports section.’
Luke-John’s interest sharpened instantly from nil to needles.
‘Don’t waste time then, Derry. If Ty says there’s a scandal, there’s a scandal.’
Derry gave me a sidelong look. ‘Our truffle hound on the scent, eh?’ He took his feet off the desk and resignedly got to work checking what Bert had forecast against what had actually happened. More and more form books and racing calendars were brought out, and Derry’s written lists slowly grew.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Here it is, just as I said. These books cover the last three years. Up till eighteen months ago he tipped runners and non-runners in about the same proportion as the rest of us poor slobs. Then he went all out suddenly for horses which didn’t run when it came to the point. All in big races, which had ante-post betting.’ He looked puzzled. ‘It can’t be just coincidence, I do see that. But I don’t see the point.’
‘Ty?’ said Luke-John.
I shrugged. ‘Someone has been working a fiddle.’
‘Bert wouldn’t.’ His voice said it was unthinkable.
‘I’d better take these books back before they miss them,’ I said, packing them again into the typewriter case.
‘Ty!’ Luke-John sounded exasperated.
‘I’ll tell you when I come back.’ I said.
There was no denunciation at Bert’s office. I returned the books to their shelf and retrieved my typewriter, and thanked the assistant sports editor for his kindness.
‘You still here? I thought you’d gone.’ He waved a friendly hand. ‘Any time.’
‘All right,’ said Luke-John truculently when I got back to the Blaze. ‘I won’t believe Bert Checkov was party to any fiddle.’
‘He sold his soul,’ I said plainly, ‘Like he told me not to.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘He sold his column. He wrote what he was told to write.’
‘Not Bert. He was a newspaper man, one of the old school.’
I considered him. His thin face looked obstinate and pugnacious. Loyalty to an old friend was running very strong.
‘Well then,’ I said slowly, ‘Bert wrote what he was forced to write.’
A good deal of the Morton tension subsided and changed course. He wouldn’t help to uncover a scandal an old friend was responsible for, but he’d go the whole way to open up one he’d been the victim of.
‘Clever beast,’ said Derry under his breath.
‘Who forced him?’ Luke-John said.
‘I don’t know. Not yet. It might be possible to find out.’
‘And why?’
‘That’s much easier. Someone has been making an ante-post book on a certainty. What Bert was doing … being forced to do … was persuading the public to part with their money.’
They both looked contemplative. I started again, explaining more fully. ‘Say a villain takes up book-making. It can happen, you know.’
Derry grinned. ‘Say one villain hits on a jolly scheme for making illegal gains in a fool-proof way with very little effort. He only works it on big races which have ante-post betting, because he needs at least three weeks to rake in enough to make it worth the risk. He chooses a suitable horse, and he forces Bert to tip it for all his column’s worth. Right? So the public put their money on, and our villain sticks to every penny that comes his way. No need to cover himself against losses. He knows there won’t be any. He knows he isn’t going to have to pay out on that horse. He knows it’s going to be scratched at or after the four day forfeits. Very nice fiddle.’
After a short silence Derry said, ‘How does he know?’
‘Ah well,’ I said, shrugging, ‘That’s another thing we’ll have to find out.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Luke-John said sceptically. ‘All that just because Bert tipped a few non-starters.’
Derry looked dubiously at the lists he had made. ‘There were too many non-starters. There really were.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But you can’t have worked out all that just from what I said, from just that simple casual remark …’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘There was something else, of course. It was something Bert himself said, last Friday, when I walked back with him from lunch. He wanted to give me a piece of advice.’
‘That’s right,’ Derry said. ‘He never came out with it.’
‘Yes he did. He did indeed. With great seriousness. He told me not to sell my soul. Not to sell my column.’
‘No,’ Luke-John said.
‘He said “First they buy you and then they blackmail you”.’
Luke-John said ‘No,’ again automatically.
‘He was very drunk,’ I said. ‘Much worse than usual. He called the advice he was giving me his famous last words. He went up in the lift with a half-bottle of whisky, he walked right across his office, he drank from the bottle and without a pause he fell straight out of the window.’
Luke-John put his freckled fingers on his thin mouth and when he spoke his voice was low, protesting and thick, ‘No … my God’.
After leaving the Blaze I collected the van and drove down to a racing stable in Berkshire to interview the girl who looked after the best known horse in the Lamplighter.
Zig Zag was a household name, a steeplechaser of immense reputation and popularity, automatic headline material: but any day the cracks would begin to show, since he would be turning eleven on January the first. The Lamplighter, to my mind, would be his last bow as grand old man before the younger brigade shouldered him out. Until Bert Checkov had rammed home the telling difference in weights, Zig Zag, even allotted a punitive twelve stone ten pounds, had been the automatic choice for ante-post favourite.
His girl groom was earnest and devoted to him. In
her twenties, unsophisticated, of middling intelligence, Sandy Willis’s every sentence was packed with pithy stable language which she used unself-consciously and which contrasted touchingly with her essential innocence. She showed me Zig Zag with proprietary pride and could recite, and did, his every race from the day he was foaled. She had looked after him always, she said, .ever since he came into the yard as a leggy untried three year old. She didn’t know what she’d do when he was retired, racing wouldn’t be the same without him somehow.
I offered to drive her into Newbury to have tea in a café or an hotel, but she said no, thank you, she wouldn’t have time because the evening work started at four. Leaning against the door of Zig Zag’s box she told me about her life, hesitantly at first, and then in a rush. Her parents didn’t get on, she said. There were always rows at home, so she’d cleared out pretty soon after leaving school, glad to get away, her old man was so mean with the housekeeping and her Mum did nothing but screech, nag, nag, at him mostly but at her too and her two kid sisters, right draggy the whole thing was, and she hoped Zig Zag would be racing at Kempton on Boxing Day so she’d have a good excuse not to go home for Christmas. She loved her work, she loved Zig Zag, the racing world was the tops, and no, she wasn’t in any hurry to get married, there were always boys around if she wanted them and honestly whoever would swop Zig Zag for a load of draggy housework, especially if it turned out like her Mum and Dad …
She agreed with a giggle to have her photograph taken if Zig Zag could be in the picture too, and said she hoped that Tally magazine would send her a free copy.
‘Of course,’ I assured her, and decided to charge all free copies against expenses.
When I left her I walked down through the yard and called on the trainer, whom I saw almost every time I went racing. A businesslike man in his fifties, with no airs and few illusions.
‘Come in, Ty,’ he said. ‘Did you find Sandy Willis?’
‘Thank you, yes. She was very helpful.’
‘She’s one of my best lads.’ He waved me to an armchair and poured some oak coloured tea out of a silver pot. ‘Sugar?’ I shook my head. ‘Not much in the upstairs department, but her horses are always jumping out of their skins.’
‘A spot of transferred mother love,’ I agreed. I tasted the tea. My tongue winced at the strength of the tannin. Norton Fox poured himself another cup and took three deep swallows.
‘If I write her up for Tally,’ I said, ‘You won’t do the dirty on me and take Zig Zag out of the Lamplighter at the last minute?’
‘I don’t plan to.’
‘Twelve stone ten is a prohibitive weight,’ I suggested.
‘He’s won with twelve thirteen.’ He shrugged. ‘He’ll never come down the handicap.’
‘As a matter of interest,’ I said, ‘What happened to Brevity just before the Champion Hurdle?’
Norton clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘You can rely on it, Zig Zag will not be taken out at the last minute. At least, not for no reason, like Brevity.’
‘He was favourite, wasn’t he?’ I knew he was, I’d checked carefully from Derry’s list. ‘What exactly happened?’
‘I’ve never been so furious about anything.’ The eight month old grievance was still vivid in his voice. ‘I trained that horse to the minute. To the minute. We always had the Champion Hurdle as his main target. He couldn’t have been more fit. He was ready to run for his life. And then what? Do you know what? I declared him at the four day stage, and the owner, the owner, mark you, went and telephoned Weatherbys two days later and cancelled the declaration. Took the horse out of the race. I ask you! And on top of that, he hadn’t even the courtesy, or the nerve probably, to tell me what he’d done, and the first I knew of it was when Brevity wasn’t in the overnight list of runners. Of course I couldn’t believe it and rang up Weatherbys in a fury and they told me old Dembley himself had struck his horse out. And I still don’t know why. I had the most God almighty row with him about it and all he would say was that he had decided not to run, and that was that. He never once gave me a reason. Not one, after all that planning and all that work. I told him to take his horses away, I was so angry. I mean, how can you train for a man who’s going to do that to you? It’s impossible.’
‘Who trains for him now?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘No one. He sold all three of his horses, including Brevity. He said he’d had enough of racing, he was finished with it.’
‘You wouldn’t still have his address?’ I asked.
‘Look here, Ty, you’re not putting all that in your wretched paper.’
‘No,’ I assured him. ‘Just one day I might write an article on owners who’ve sold out.’
‘Well … yes, I still have it.’ He copied the address from a ledger and handed it to me. ‘Don’t cause any trouble.’
‘Not for you,’ I said. Trouble was always Luke-John’s aim, and often mine. The only difference was that I was careful my friends shouldn’t be on the receiving end. Luke-John had no such difficulties. He counted no one, to that extent, a friend.
Mrs Woodward and Elizabeth were watching the news on television when I got back. Mrs Woodward took a quick look at her watch and made an unsuccessful attempt at hiding her disappointment. I had beaten her to six o’clock by thirty seconds. She charged overtime by the half hour, and was a shade over businesslike about it. I never got a free five minutes: five past six and it would have cost me the full half hour. I understood that it wasn’t sheer miserliness. She was a widow whose teenage son had a yearning to be a doctor, and as far as I could see it would be mainly Tyrone who put him through medical school.
The time-keeping war was conducted with maximum politeness and without acknowledgement that it existed. I simply synchronised our two clocks and my watch with the B.B.C. time signal every morning, and paid up with a smile when I was late. Mrs Woodward gave me a warmer welcome at ten past six than at ten to, but never arrived a minute after nine-thirty in the mornings. Neither of us had let on to Elizabeth how acutely the clock was watched.
Mrs Woodward was spare and strong, with a little of her native Lancashire in her voice and a lot in her character. She had dark hair going grey, rich brown eyes, and a determined jaw line which had seen her through a jilting fiancé and a work-shy husband. Unfailingly gentle to Elizabeth, she had never yet run out of patience, except with the vacuum cleaner, which occasionally regurgitated where it should have sucked.
In our flat she wore white nylon overalls which she knew raised her status to nurse from home help in the eyes of visitors, and I saw no reason to think any worse of her for it. She took off the overall and hung it up, and I helped her into the dark blue coat she had been wearing every single day for at least three years.
‘Night, Mr Tyrone. Night, luv,’ she said, as she always said. And as always I thanked her for coming, and said I’d see her in the morning.
‘Did you have a good day?’ Elizabeth asked, when I kissed her forehead. Her voice sounded tired. The Spirashell tugged her chest up and down in a steady rhythm, and she could only speak easily on the outgoing breaths.
‘I went to see a girl about a horse,’ I said, smiling, and told her briefly about Sandy Willis and Zig Zag. She liked to know a little of what I’d been doing, but her interest always flagged pretty soon, and after so many years I could tell the exact instant by the microscopic relaxation in her eye muscles. She rarely said she was tired and had had enough of anything because she was afraid I would think her complaining and querulous and find her too much of a burden altogether. I couldn’t persuade her to say flatly ‘Stop, I’m tired.’ She agreed each time I mentioned it that she would, and she never did.
‘I’ve seen three of the people for the Tally article,’ I said. ‘Owners, owner-trainer, and stable girl. I’m afraid after supper I’d better make a start on the writing. Will you be all right watching television?’
‘Of course …’ She gave me the sweet brilliant smile which made every chore for her possible. O
ccasionally I spotted her manufacturing it artificially, but no amount of reassurance seemed able to convince her that she needn’t perform tricks for me, that I wouldn’t shove her back into hospital if she lost her temper, that I didn’t need her to be angelic, that she was safe with me, and loved, and, in fact, very much wanted.
‘Like a drink?’ I said.
‘Love one.’
I poured us both a J and B with Malvern Water, and took hers over and fastened it into a holder I’d rigged up, with the bent drinking straw near to her mouth. Using that she could drink in her own time, and a lot less got spilt on the sheets. I tasted appreciatively the pale fine Scotch, slumping into the big armchair beside her bed, sloughing off the day’s travelling with a comfortable feeling of being at home. The pump’s steady soft thumping had its usual soporific effect. It sent most of our visitors fast asleep.
We watched a brain-packed quiz game on television and companionably answered most of the questions wrong. After that I went into the kitchen and looked at what Mrs Woodward had put out for supper. Plaice coated with bread crumbs, a bag of frozen chips, one lemon. Stewed apples, custard. Cheddar cheese, square crackers. The Woodward views on food didn’t entirely coincide with my own. Stifling thoughts of underdone steak I cooked the chips in oil and the plaice in butter, and left mine to keep hot while I helped Elizabeth. Even with the new pulley gadget some foods were difficult: the plaice broke up too easily and her wrist got tired, and we ended up with me feeding her as usual.
While I washed the dishes I made coffee in mugs, fixed Elizabeth’s into the holder, and took mine with my typewriter into the little room which would have been a child’s bedroom if we’d ever had a child.
The Tally article came along slowly, its price tag reproaching me for every sloppy phrase. The Huntersons, the Ronceys, Sandy Willis. Dissect without hurting, probe but leave whole. Far easier, I thought resignedly, to pick them to bits. Good for Tally’s sales too. Bad for the conscience, lousy for the Huntersons, the Ronceys, Sandy Willis. To tell all so that the victim liked it … this was what took the time.