by Dick Francis
I paid to go in and bought a race-card. One of Nerissa’s constant failures, I saw, was due to have another go later in the afternoon.
Newmarket was Newmarket the world over. Stands, cards, horses, bookmakers; atmosphere of bustle and purpose; air of tradition and order. All were much the same. I wandered across to the parade ring, where the runners for the first race were already walking round. Same little clumps of owners and trainers standing in hopeful conversations in the middle. Same earnest racegoers leaning on the rails and studying the wares.
Differences were small. The horses, to English eyes, looked slightly smaller-framed and had very upright fetlocks, and they were led round, not by white stable lads in their own darkish clothes, but by black stable-boys in long white coats.
On the principle of only backing horses I knew something about, I kept my rands in my pocket. The jockeys in their bright silks came out and mounted, the runners went away down the track and scurried back, hooves rattling on the bone-dry ground, and I strolled down from the stands to search for and identify Nerissa’s trainer, Greville Arknold. He had a runner in the following race, and somewhere he would be found, saddling it up.
In the event, I hardly had to look. On my way to the saddling boxes, a young man touched me on the arm.
‘I say,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you Edward Lincoln?’
I nodded and half smiled, and kept on walking.
‘Guess I’d better introduce myself. Danilo Cavesey. I believe you know my aunt.’
That stopped me, all right. I put out my hand, and he shook it warmly.
‘I heard you were coming, of course. Aunt Nerissa cabled Greville you were on your way out here for some film premiere, and would he look out for you at the races. So I was kind of expecting you, you see.’
His accent was a slow Californian drawl full of lazy warmth. It was instantly clear why Nerissa had liked him: his sun-tanned, good-looking face, his open, pleasant expression, his clean, casual, blond-brown hair, all were in the best tradition of American youth.
‘She didn’t say you were in South Africa,’ I commented, surprised.
‘Well, no.’ He wrinkled his nose disarmingly. ‘I don’t believe she knows. I only flew out here a few days ago, on a vacation. Say, how is the old girl? She wasn’t all that sprightly when I last visited with her.’
He was smiling happily. He didn’t know.
I said, ‘She’s pretty ill, I’m afraid.’
‘Is that so? I’m sure sorry to hear that. I must write her, tell her I’m out here, tell her I’m taking a look-see into the state of the horses.’
‘The state of the horses?’ I echoed.
‘Oh sure. Aunt Nerissa’s horses out here are not running good. Stinking bad, to be accurate.’ He grinned cheerfully. ‘I shouldn’t bet on number eight in the fourth race, if you want to die rich.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘She did mention to me that they were not doing so well just now.’
‘I’ll bet she did. They wouldn’t win if you gave them ten minutes start and nobbled the others.’
‘Is there any reason for it, do you know?’
‘Search me,’ he shrugged. ‘Greville’s real chewed up about it. Says he hasn’t had anything like this happen before.’
‘Not a virus?’ I suggested.
‘Can’t be. Otherwise all the others would get it too, not just Aunt Nerissa’s. We’ve been talking it over, you see. Greville just hasn’t an idea.’
‘I’d like to meet him,’ I said casually.
‘Oh sure. Yes, indeed. But say, why don’t we get out of this wind and have ourselves a beer or something? Greville has this starter right now, but he’ll be happy to see us later on.’
‘All right,’ I agreed, and we went and had ourselves the beer. Danilo was right: the south wind was cold and spring was still a hint and a memory.
Danilo, I judged, was about twenty years old. He had bright blue eyes and blond-brown eyelashes, and his teeth were California-straight. He had the untouched air of one to whom the rigours of life had not yet happened; a boy not necessarily spoilt, but to whom much had been given.
He was at Berkeley University studying Political Science, he said, with one more year to do. ‘This time next summer I’ll be all through with college…’
‘What do you plan to do after that?’ I asked, making conversation.
There was a flash of amusement in the blue eyes. ‘Oh, I guess I’ll have to think of something, but I’ve nothing lined up right now.’
The future could take care of itself, I thought, and reflected that for golden boys like Danilo it usually did.
We watched the next race together. Greville’s starter finished third, close up.
‘Too bad,’ Danilo sighed. ‘I just had it on the nose, not across the boards.’
‘Did you lose much?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘I guess not. Just a few rand.’
Rands came just under two to the pound sterling, or about two and a half to the dollar. He couldn’t have done himself much harm.
We walked down from the stands and over towards the unsaddling enclosures. ‘Do you know something?’ he said. ‘You’re not a bit what I expected.’
‘In what way?’ I asked, smiling.
‘Oh, I guess… For a big movie star, I expected some sort of, well, presence. You know?’
‘Off the screen, movie actors are as dim as anyone else.’
He glanced at me suspiciously, but I wasn’t laughing at him. I meant it. He had a much more naturally luminous personality than I had. I might have been an inch or two taller, an inch or two broader across the shoulders, but the plus factor has nothing to do with size.
The man stalking round the horse which had finished third, peering judiciously at its legs and running a probing hand along its loin, was a burly thickset man with an air of dissatisfaction.
‘That’s Greville,’ Danilo nodded, following my gaze.
The trainer spoke briefly to a woman Danilo identified to me as the horse’s owner. His manner, from twenty feet away, looked brusque and far from conciliatory. I knew trainers had to grow hard skins if they were to stay sane: one could not for ever be apologising to owners if their horses got beaten, one had to make them realise that regardless of the oats and exercise crammed into them, maybe other people’s horses could actually run faster: but Greville Arknold appeared plainly disagreeable.
After a while the horses were led away and the crowd thinned out. Arknold listened, with a pinched mouth and a stubborn backward tilt of the head, to what looked almost like apologies from the woman owner. She came to a stop, got no melting response from him, shrugged, turned slowly, and walked away.
Arknold’s gaze rose from down his nose and fastened on Danilo. He stared for a moment, then raised his eyebrows questioningly. Danilo very slightly jerked his head in my direction, and Arknold transferred his attention to me.
Again the slow appraisal. Then he came across.
Danilo introduced us with an air of what fun it was for us to know each other. A mutual privilege.
Great.
I didn’t take to Greville Arknold, neither then nor ever after. Yet he was pleasant enough to me: smiled, shook hands, said he was glad to meet me, said that Mrs Cavesey had cabled to say I might be coming to the races, and to look after me if I did.
He had a flat-sounding Afrikaaner accent, and like many South Africans he was, I discovered later, trilingual in English, Afrikaans and Zulu. He had a face formed of thick slabs of flesh, lips so thin that they hardly existed, the scars of old acne over his chin and down his neck, and a bristly ginger moustache one inch by two below his nose. And for all the smiling and the welcoming chat, he had cold eyes.
‘Your horse ran well just then,’ I suggested conversationally.
The recent anger reappeared at once in his manner. ‘That stupid woman insisted that her horse ran today when I wanted to run it Saturday instead. He had a hard race at Turffontein last Saturday. He needed another
three days’ rest.’
‘She looked as if she were apologising,’ I said.
‘]a. She was. Too late, of course. She should have had more sense. Decent colt, that. Would have won on Saturday. No sense. Owners always ought to do what a trainer says. They pay for expert knowledge, don’t they? So they always ought to do what the experts say.’
I smiled vaguely, non-committally. As an owner myself, even of only one moderate steeplechasing gelding, I disagreed with him about always. Sometimes, even usually, yes. But always, no. I knew of at least one Grand National winner which would never have gone to the start if the owner had paid attention to the trainer’s advice.
‘I see Mrs Cavesey has a runner in the fourth,’ I said.
The dogmatic look faded to be replaced by a slight frown.
‘Ja,’ Arknold said. ‘I expect she may have mentioned to you that her horses are not doing well.’
‘She told me you had no idea why,’ I nodded.
He shook his head. ‘I cannot understand it. They get the same treatment as all the others. Same food, same exercise, everything. They are not ill. I have had a veterinarian examine them, several times. It is worrying. Very.’
‘It must be,’ I agreed sympathetically.
‘And dope tests!’ he said. ‘We must have had a hundred dope tests. All negative, the whole lot.’
‘Do they look fit?’ I asked. ‘I mean, would you expect them to do better, from the way they look?’
‘See for yourself.’ He shrugged. ‘That is… I don’t know how much of a judge of a horse you are…’
‘Bound to be a pretty good one, I’d say,’ said Danilo positively. ‘After all, it’s no secret his old man was a stable hand.’
‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Then perhaps you would like to see round the stables? Maybe you could even come up with some suggestion about Mrs Cavesey’s string, you never know.’
The irony in his voice made it clear that he thought that impossible. Which meant that either he really did not know what was the matter with the horses, or he did know, but was absolutely certain that I would not find out.
‘I’d like to see the stables very much,’ I said.
‘Good. Then you shall. How about tomorrow evening? Walk round with me, at evening stables. Four thirty?’
I nodded.
‘That’s fixed then. And you, Danilo. Do you want to come as well?’
‘That would be just fine, Greville. I sure would like that.’
So it was settled; and Danilo said he would come and pick me up at the Iguana Rock himself.
Chink, Nerissa’s runner in the fourth race, looked good enough in the parade ring, with a healthy bloom on his coat and muscles looking strong and free and loose. There wasn’t a great deal of substance about him, but he had an intelligent head and strong, well-placed shoulders. Nerissa’s sister Portia had given twenty-five thousand rand for him as a yearling on the strength of his breeding, and he had won only one race, his first, way back in April.
‘What do you think of him, Link?’ Danilo asked, leaning his hip against the parade ring rail.
‘He looks fit enough,’ I said.
‘Yeah. They all do, Greville says.’
Chink was being led round by two stable lads, one each side. Nothing wrong with Arknold’s security arrangements.
Because of the upright fetlocks I found it hard to judge the degree of spring in Chink’s stride. All the horses looked to me as if they were standing on their toes, a condition I imagined was caused by living from birth on hard dry ground. Certainly he went down to the post moving no more scratchily than the others, and he lined up in the stalls and bounded out of them with no trouble. I watched every step of his journey through my Zeiss eight by fifties.
He took the first half mile without apparent effort, lying about sixth, nice and handy, just behind the leading bunch. When they turned into the straight for home, the leaders quickened, but Chink didn’t. I saw the head of the jockey bob and the rest of his body become energetically busy trying to keep the horse going: but when a jockey has to work like that on a horse a long way out, he might as well not bother. Chink had run out of steam, and the best rider in the world could have done nothing about that.
I put down my race glasses. The winner fought a ding-dong, the crowd roared, and Chink returned unsung, unbacked, unwatched, and a good thirty lengths later.
With Danilo I went down to where he was being unsaddled, and joined Greville Arknold in his aura of perplexed gloom.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You saw for yourself.’
‘I did,’ I agreed.
Chink was sweating and looked tired. He stood still, with drooping head, as if he felt the disgrace.
‘What do you think?’ Arknold asked.
I silently shook my head. He had in fact looked plainly like a slow horse, yet on his breeding, and the fast time of the race he had won, he should not be.
He and the other ten could not all have bad hearts, or bad teeth, or blood disorders, all undetected. Not after those thorough veterinary investigations. And not all of them. It was impossible.
They had not all been ridden every time by the same jockey. There were, I had discovered from Nerissa’s racing papers, very few jockeys in South Africa compared with England: only thirteen jockeys and twenty-two apprentices riding on the Natal tracks near Durban, the supposed centre of the sport.
There were four main racing areas; the Johannesburg tracks in the Transvaal, the Pietermaritzburg-Durban tracks in Natal, the Port Elizabeth tracks in the Eastern Cape, and the Cape Town tracks in Cape Province. Various ones of Nerissa’s horses had been to all four areas, had been ridden by the local bunch of jockeys, and had turned in the same results.
Fast until May, dead slow from June onwards.
The fact that they moved around meant that it probably could not be attributed to something in their base quarters.
No illness. No dope. No fixed address. No common jockey.
All of which pointed to one solution. One source of disaster.
The trainer himself.
It was easy enough for a trainer to make sure a horse of his didn’t win, if he had a mind to. He merely had to give it too severe an exercise gallop too soon before a race. Enough races had in sober fact been lost that way by accident for it to be impossible to prove that anyone had done it on purpose.
Trainers seldom nobbled their own horses because they had demonstrably more to gain if they won. But it looked to me as if it had to be Arknold who was responsible, even if the method he was using turned out to be the simplest in the world.
I thought the solution to Nerissa’s problem lay in transferring her string to a different trainer.
I thought I might just as well go straight home and tell her so.
Two nasty snags.
I was committed to a premiere two weeks off.
And I might guess who and how, about the horses.
But I had no idea why.
Chapter Five
The ladies and gentlemen of the Press (or in other words a partially shaven, polo-neck sweatered, elaborately casual and uninformed mob) yawned to their feet when I reached the Dettrick Room in Randfontein House within ticking distance of half past eleven.
Clifford Wenkins had met me in the hall, twittering as before, and with wetter than ever palms. We rode up in the lift together, with him explaining to me exactly whom he had asked, and who had come. Interviewers from two radio programmes. He hoped I wouldn’t mind? They would be happy just to tape my answers to their questions. Just into a microphone. If I didn’t mind? And then there were the dailies, the weeklies, the ladies’ magazines, and one or two people who had flown up especially from Cape Town and Durban.
I wished I hadn’t suggested it. Too late to run away.
The only thing to do, I thought, as the lift hissed to a halt and the doors slid open, was to put on a sort of performance. To act.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said to Wenkins.
He s
topped with me outside the lift as the doors shut again behind us.
‘What is it?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Nothing. I just need a few seconds, before we go in.’
He didn’t understand, though what I was doing was not a process by any means confined to professional actors. Girding up the loins, the Bible called it. Getting the adrenalin on the move. Making the heart beat faster. Shifting the mental gears into top. Politicians could do it in three seconds flat.
‘O.K.,’ I said.
He sighed with relief, walked across the hallway, and opened a heavy polished door opposite.
We went in.
They unfolded themselves from sofas and carpet, pushed themselves tiredly off the walls, stubbed out one or two cigarettes and went on puffing at others.
‘Hi,’ said one of the men: and the others, like a sort of jungle pack, watched and waited. He was one of those who had been at the airport. He had no reason, as none of them had, to believe I would now be any different.
‘Hullo,’ I said.
Well, I could always do it, if I really wanted to. Almost every well trained actor can.
I watched them loosen, saw the tiredness go out of their manner and the smile creep into their eyes. They wouldn’t now chew me to bits in their columns, even if they still came across with those carefully sharpened questions they all had ready in their notebooks.
The man who had said hi, their apparently natural leader, put out his hand to be shaken, and said, ‘I’m Roderick Hodge of the Rand Daily Star. Features Editor.’
Late thirties, but trying to ignore the passage of time: young hair-cut, young clothes, young affectation of speech. A certain panache about him, but also some of the ruthless cynicism of experienced journalists.
I shook his hand and smiled at him as a friend. I needed him to be one.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Unless you are all in a hurry, why don’t we sit down again, and then you can all ask whatever you like, perhaps in groups, and maybe I can move around a bit, and then everyone might have more time for things than if I just sort of stand here in front of you.’
They thought that was all right. No one was in much of a hurry, they said. Roderick said dryly that no one would go before the booze started flowing, and the atmosphere started mellowing nicely into an all-pals-together trade meeting.