by Dick Francis
‘Could he know about the colic?’ Luke-John asked.
We decided after picking it over that as he was trying to lay off he probably couldn’t. Luke-John rang back to his bookmaker friend and advised him to take as much of the Boston money as he could.
‘And after that,’ he said gloomily, as he put down the receiver, ‘every other bloody horse will fall, and Tiddely Pom will win.’
Derry and I went down to Heathbury Park together on the race train. The racecourse and the sponsors of the Lamplighter had been smiled on by the day. Clear, sunny, still, frosty: a perfect December morning. Derry said that fine weather was sure to bring out a big crowd, and that he thought Zig Zag would win. He said he thought I looked ill. I said he should have seen me yesterday. We completed the journey in our usual relationship of tolerant acceptance and I wondered inconsequentially why it had never solidified into friendship.
He was right on the first count. Heathbury Park was bursting at the seams. I went first to Willie Ondroy’s office beside the weighing-room and found a scattered queue of people wanting a word with him, but he caught my eye across the throng and waved a beckoning hand.
‘Hey,’ he said, swinging round in his chair to talk to me behind his shoulder. ‘Your wretched horse has caused me more bother … that Victor Roncey, he’s a bloody pain in the neck.’
‘What’s he been doing?’
‘He arrived at ten this morning all set to blow his top if the horse arrived a minute after twelve and when he found he was there already he blew his top anyway and said he should have been told.’
‘Not the easiest of characters,’ I agreed.
‘Anyway, that’s only the half of it. The gate-man rang me at about eight this morning to say there was a man persistently trying to get in. He’d offered him a bribe and then increased it and had tried to slip in unnoticed while he, the gate-man, was having an argument with one of the stable lads. So I nipped over from my house for a reccy, and there was this short stout individual walking along the back of the stable block looking for an unguarded way in. I marched him round to the front and the gate-man said that was the same merchant, so I asked him who he was and what he wanted. He wouldn’t answer. Said he hadn’t committed any crime. I let him go. Nothing else to do.’
‘Pity.’
‘Wait a minute. My racecourse manager came towards us as the man walked away, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘What’s Charlie Boston doing here?’
‘What?’
‘Ah. I thought he might mean something to you. But he was extraordinarily clumsy, if he was after Tiddely Pom.’
‘No brains and no brawn,’ I agreed.
He looked at me accusingly. ‘If Charlie Boston was the sum total of the threat to Tiddely Pom, haven’t you been over-doing the melodrama a bit?’
I said dryly, ‘Read the next thrilling instalment in the Blaze.’
He laughed and turned back decisively to his impatient queue. I wandered out into the paddock, thinking of Charlie Boston and his futile attempt to reach the horse. Charlie Boston who thought with his muscles. With other people’s muscles, come to that. Having his boys on the sick list and Vjoersterod and Ross on the dead, he was as naked and vulnerable as an opened oyster.
He might also be desperate. If he was trying to lay off fifty thousand pounds, he had stood to lose at least ten times that – upwards of half a million – if Tiddely Pom won. A nosedive of epic proportions. A prospect to induce panic and recklessness in ever-increasing intensity as the time of the race drew near.
I decided that Roncey should share the care of his horse’s safety, and began looking out for him in the throng. I walked round the corner with my eyes scanning sideways and nearly bumped into someone standing by the Results-at-other-Meetings notice board. The apology was half way to my tongue before I realised who it was.
Gail.
I saw the pleasure which came first into her eyes, and the uncertainty afterwards. Very likely I was showing her exactly the same feeling. Very likely she, like me, felt a thudding shock at meeting. Yet if I’d considered it at all, it was perfectly reasonable that she should come to see her uncle’s horse run in the Lamplighter.
‘Ty?’ she said tentatively, with a ton less than her usual poise.
‘Surprise, surprise.’ It sounded more flippant than I felt.
‘I thought I might see you,’ she said. Her smooth black hair shone in the sun and the light lay along the bronze lines of her face, touching them with gold. The mouth I had kissed was a rosy pink. The body I had liked naked was covered with a turquoise coat. A week today, I thought numbly. A week today I left her in bed.
‘Are Harry and Sarah here?’ I said. Social chat. Hide the wound which hadn’t even begun to form scar tissue. I’d no right to be wounded in the first place. My own fault. Couldn’t complain.
‘They’re in the bar,’ she said. Where else?
‘Would you like a drink?’
She shook her head. ‘I want to … to explain. I see that you know … I have to explain.’
‘No need. A cup of coffee, perhaps?’
‘Just listen.’
I could feel the rigidity in all my muscles and realised it extended even into my mouth and jaw. With a conscious effort I loosened them and relaxed.
‘All right.’
‘Did she … I mean, is she going to divorce you?’
‘No.’
‘Ohhhh.’ It was a long sigh. ‘Then I’m sorry if I got you into trouble with her. But why did she have you followed if she didn’t want to divorce you?’
I stared at her. The wound half healed in an instant.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said.
I took a deep breath. ‘Tell me what happened after I left you. Tell me about the man who followed me.’
‘He came up and spoke to me in the street just outside the hotel.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He puzzled me a bit. I mean, he seemed too … I don’t know … civilised, I suppose is the word, to be a private detective. His clothes were made for him, for instance. He had an accent of some sort and a yellowish skin. Tall. About forty, I should think.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said your wife wanted a divorce and he was working on it. He asked me for … concrete evidence.’
‘A bill from the hotel?’
She nodded, not meeting my eyes. ‘I agreed to go in again and ask for one.’
‘Why, Gail?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Did he pay you for it?’
‘God, Ty,’ she said explosively. ‘Why not? I needed the money. I’d only met you three times and you were just as bad as me, living with your wife just because she was rich.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, how much?’
‘He offered me fifty pounds and when I’d got used to the idea that he was ready to pay I told him to think again, with all your wife’s money she could afford more than that for her freedom.’
‘And then what?’
‘He said … if I could give him full and substantial facts, he could raise the payment considerably.’ After a pause, in a mixture of defiance and shame, she added, ‘He agreed to a thousand pounds, in the end.’
I gave a gasp which was half a laugh.
‘Didn’t your wife tell you?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘He surely didn’t have that much money on him? Did he give you a cheque?’
‘No. He met me later, outside the Art School, and gave me a brown carrier bag … Beautiful new notes, in bundles. I gave him the bill I’d got, and told him … everything I could.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Why did he pay so much, if she doesn’t want a divorce?’ When I didn’t answer at once she went on, ‘It wasn’t really only the money … I thought if she wanted to divorce you, why the hell should I stop her. You said you wouldn’t leave her, but if she sort of left you, then you would be free, and maybe we could have more than a few Sundays …’
I
thought that one day I might appreciate the irony of it.
I said, ‘It wasn’t my wife who paid you that money. It was the man himself. He wasn’t collecting evidence for a divorce, but evidence to blackmail me with.’
‘Ohh.’ It was a moan. ‘Oh no, Ty. Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ Her eyes widened suddenly. ‘You must have thought … I suppose you thought … that I sold you out for that.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ I apologised. ‘I should have known better.’
‘That makes us quits, then.’ All her poise came back at one bound. She said, with some concern but less emotional disturbance, ‘How much did he take you for?’
‘He didn’t want money. He wanted me to write my column in the Blaze every week according to his instructions.’
‘How extraordinary. Well, that’s easy enough.’
‘Would you design dresses to dictation by threat?’
‘Oh.’
‘Exactly. Oh. So I told my wife about you myself. I had to.’
‘What … what did she say?’
‘She was upset,’ I said briefly. ‘I said I wouldn’t be seeing you again. There’ll be no divorce.’
She slowly shrugged her shoulders. ‘So that’s that.’
I looked away from her, trying not to mind so appallingly much that that was that. Tomorrow was Sunday. Tomorrow was Sunday and I could be on my own, and there was nothing on earth that I wanted so much as to see her again in her smooth warm skin and hold her close and tight in the half dark …
She said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose if that man was a blackmailer it explains why I thought he was so nasty.’
‘Nasty? He was usually fantastically polite.’
‘He spoke to me as if I’d crawled out of the cracks. I wouldn’t have put up with it … except for the money.’
‘Poor Gail,’ I said sympathetically. ‘He was South African.’
She took in the implication and her eyes were furious. ‘That explains it. A beastly Afrikaner. I wish I’d never agreed.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I interrupted. ‘Be glad you cost him so much.’
She calmed down and laughed. ‘I’ve never even been to Africa. I didn’t recognise his accent or give it a thought. Stupid, isn’t it?’
A man in a check tweed suit came and asked us to move as he wanted to read the notices on the board behind us. We walked three or four steps away, and paused again.
‘I suppose I’ll see you sometimes at the races,’ she said.
‘I suppose so.’
She looked closely at my face and said, ‘If you really feel like that, why … why don’t you leave her?’
‘I can’t.’
‘But we could … you want to be with me. I know you do. Money isn’t everything.’
I smiled twistedly. I did after all mean something to her, if she could ever say that.
‘I’ll see you sometimes,’ I repeated emptily. ‘At the races.’
17
I caught Victor Roncey coming out of the luncheon room and told him that the danger to Tiddely Pom was by no means over.
‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ he said squashingly.
‘He’s here thanks to us,’ I reminded him. ‘And there are still two hours to the race.’
‘What do you expect me to do? Hold his hand?’
‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ I said flatly.
There was the usual struggle between aggressive independence and reasonable agreement. He said grudgingly, ‘Peter can sit outside his box over in the stables.’
‘Where is Peter now?’
He waved a hand behind him. ‘Finishing lunch.’
‘You’ll have to take him in yourself, if he hasn’t got a stable lad’s pass.’
He grumbled and agreed, and went back to fetch his son. I walked over to the stables with them and checked with the man on the gate who said he’d had the usual number of people trying to get in, but not the man he’d turned away in the morning. Wing Commander Ondroy had told him to sling that man in the storeroom and lock him in, if he came sniffing round again.
I smiled appreciatively and went in with Roncey to look at the horse. He stood patiently in his box, propped on one hip, resting a rear leg. When we opened the door he turned his head lazily and directed on us an unexcited eye. A picture of a racehorse not on his toes, not strung up by the occasion, not looking ready to win Lamplighter Gold Cups.
‘Is he always like this before a race?’ I said. ‘He looks doped.’
Roncey gave me a horrified glance and hurried to his horse’s head. He looked in his mouth and eyes, felt his neck and legs and kicked open and studied a small pile of droppings. Finally he shook his head.
‘No dope that I can see. No signs of it.’
‘He never has nerves,’ Peter observed. ‘He isn’t bred for it.’
He looked bred for a milk cart. I refrained from saying so. I walked back into the paddock with Roncey and got him to agree to saddle up his horse in the stables, not in the saddling boxes, if the Stewards would allow it.
The Stewards, who included Eric Youll, didn’t hesitate. They said only that Tiddely Pom would have to walk the three stipulated times round the parade ring for the public to see him before the jockey mounted, but were willing for him to walk six feet in from the rails and be led and guarded by Peter and myself.
‘All a waste of time,’ Roncey muttered. ‘No one will try anything here.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ I said. ‘You’d try anything if you stood to lose half a million you hadn’t got.’
I watched the first two races from the Press Box and spent the time in between aimlessly wandering about in the crowd trying to convince myself that I wasn’t really looking out for another glimpse of Gail.
I didn’t see her. I did see Dermot Finnegan. The little Irish jockey walked in front of me and gave me a huge gap-toothed grin. I took in, as I was supposed to, that he was dressed in colours, ready to ride in a race. The front of his jacket was carefully unbuttoned. I added up the purple star on the pink and white horizontal stripes and he laughed when he saw my astonishment.
‘Be Jasus, and I’m almost as staggered as yourself,’ he said. ‘But there it is, I’ve got my big chance on the Guvnor’s first string and if I make a mess of it may God have mercy on my soul because I won’t.’
‘You won’t make a mess of it.’
‘We’ll see,’ he said cheerfully. ‘That was a grand job you made of me in Tally, now. Thank you for that. I took that when it came and showed it to the Guvnor but he’d already seen it, he told me. And you know I wouldn’t be certain that it wasn’t the magazine that put him in mind of putting me up on Rockville, when the other two fellows got hurt on Thursday. So thank you for that, too.’
When I told Derry about it in the Press Box during the second race he merely shrugged. ‘Of course he’s riding Rockville. Don’t you read the papers?’
‘Not yesterday.’
‘Oh. Well yes, he’s got as much as he can chew this time. Rockville’s a difficult customer, even with the best of jockeys, and our Dermot isn’t that.’ He was busy polishing the lenses of his race glasses. ‘Luke-John’s bookmaker friend must have accepted a good deal of Boston’s fifty thousand, because the price on Tiddely Pom has come crashing down like an express lift from 100 to 8 to only 4 to 1. That’s a stupid price for a horse like Tiddely Pom, but there you are.’
I did a small sum. If Boston had taken bets at 10 or 12 to 1 and had only been able to lay them off at 4 to 1, that left him a large gap of 6 or 8 to 1. If Tiddely Pom won, that would be the rate at which he would have to pay: which added up still to more than a quarter of a million pounds and meant that he would have to sell off the string of betting shops to pay his debts. Dumb Charlie Boston, trying to play with the big boys and getting squeezed like a toothpaste tube.
There was no sign of him in the paddock. Roncey saddled his horse in the stables and brought him straight into the parade ring very shortly before the time for the jockeys to mount. Peter
led him round and I walked along by his quarters: but no one leaned over the rails to squirt him with acid. No one tried anything at all.
‘Told you so,’ Roncey muttered. ‘All this fuss.’ He put up his jockey, slapped Tiddely Pom’s rump, and hurried off to get a good position on the trainers’ stand. Peter led the horse out on to the course and let him go, and Tiddely Pom cantered off unconcernedly with the long lolloping stride so at variance with his looks. I sighed with relief and went up to join Derry in the Press Box to watch the race.
‘Tiddely Pom’s favourite,’ he said. ‘Then Zig Zag, then Rockville. Zig Zag should have it in his pocket.’ He put his race glasses to his eyes and studied the horses milling round at the start. I hadn’t taken my own glasses as I’d found the carrying strap pressed too heavily on tender spots. I felt lost without them, like a snail without antennae. The start for the Lamplighter was a quarter of a mile down the course from the stands. I concentrated on sorting out the colours with only force four success.
Derry exclaimed suddenly, ‘What the devil …’
‘Tiddely Pom,’ I said fearfully. Not now. Not at the very post. I should have foreseen … should have stationed someone down there … But it was so public. So many people walked down there to watch the start. Anyone who tried to harm a horse there would have a hundred witnesses.
‘There’s someone hanging on to his reins. No, he’s been pulled off. Great God …’ Derry started laughing incredulously. ‘I can’t believe it. I simply can’t believe it.’
‘What’s happening?’ I said urgently. All I could see was a row of peacefully lining up horses, which miraculously included Tiddely Pom, and some sort of commotion going on in the crowd on the far side of the rails.
‘It’s Madge … Madge Roncey. It must be. No one else looks like that … She’s rolling about on the grass with a fat little man … struggling. She pulled him away from Tiddely Pom … Arms and legs are flying all over the place …’ He stopped, laughing too much. ‘The boys are with her … they’re all piling on to the poor little man in a sort of rugger scrum …’
‘It’s a pound to a penny the poor little man is Charlie Boston,’ I said grimly. ‘And if it’s Madge and not the Blaze who’s saved the day, we’ll never hear the end of it from Victor Roncey.’