by Dick Francis
He could repudiate a signature obtained under threat. He could retract, kick up a fuss, could say, ‘I couldn’t help it.’ The guns might not then be made, but his health would deteriorate and his name could be rubble. Better to prevent than to rescue, I thought, and wondered what I’d overlooked.
Hillsborough felt dull in my hands and I knew going down to the start that he wouldn’t do much good. There were none of the signals that horses feeling well and ready to race give, and although I tried to jolly him along once we’d started, he was as sluggish as a cold engine.
He met most of the fences right but lost ground on landing through not setting off again fast, and when I tried to make him quicken after the last he either couldn’t or wouldn’t, and lost two places to faster finishers, trailing in eighth of the twelve runners.
It couldn’t be helped: one can’t win them all. I was irritated, though, when an official came to the changing room afterwards and said the Stewards wanted to see me immediately, and I followed him to the Stewards’ Room with more seethe than resignation, and there, as expected, was Maynard Allardeck, sitting at a table with two others, looking as impartial and reasonable as a saint. The Stewards said they wanted to know why my well-backed mount had run so badly. They said they were of the opinion that I hadn’t ridden the horse out fully or attempted to win, and would I please give them an explanation.
Maynard was almost certainly the instigator, but not the spokesman. One of the others, a man I respected, had said for openers, ‘Mr Fielding, explain the poor showing of Hillsborough.’
He had himself ridden as an amateur in days gone by, and I told him straightforwardly that my horse had seemed not to be feeling well and hadn’t been enjoying himself. He had been flat-footed even going down to the start and during the race I’d thought once or twice of pulling him up altogether.
The Steward glanced at Allardeck, and said to me, ‘Why didn’t you use your whip after the last fence?’
The phrase ‘flogging a dead horse’ drifted almost irresistibly into my mind but I said only, ‘I gave him a lot of signals to quicken, but he couldn’t. Beating him wouldn’t have made any difference.’
‘You appeared to be giving him an easy ride,’ he said, but without the aggression of conviction. ‘What’s your explanation?’
Giving a horse an easy ride was an euphemism for ‘not trying to win’, or, even worse, for ‘trying not to win’, a loss-of-licence matter. I said with some force, ‘Princess Casilia’s horses, Mr Harlow’s horses, are always doing their best. Hillsborough was doing his best, but he was having an off day.’
There was a shade of amusement in the Steward’s eyes. He knew, as everyone in racing knew, how things stood between Allardecks and Fieldings; Stewards’ enquiries had for half a century sorted out the fiery accusations flung at Maynard’s father by my grandfather, and at my grandfather by Maynard’s father, both of them training Flat racers in Newmarket. The only new twist to the old battle was the recent Allardeck presence on the power side of the table, no doubt highly funny to all but myself.
‘We note your explanation,’ the Steward said dryly, and told me I could go.
I went without looking directly at Maynard. Twice in two days I’d wriggled off his hooks, and I didn’t want him to think I was gloating. I went back fast to the changing room to exchange the princess’s colours for those of another owner and to weigh out, but even so I was late into the parade ring for the next race (and one could be fined for that also).
I walked in hurriedly to join the one hopeful little group without a jockey, and saw, thirty feet away, Henri Nanterre.
FIVE
He was standing in another group of owners, trainer and jockey, and was looking my way as if he’d been watching my arrival.
Unwelcome as he was, however, I had to postpone thoughts of him on account of the excited questions of the tubby enthusiastic couple whose dreams I was supposed to make come true within the next ten minutes; and anyway, the princess, I hoped, was safely surrounded upstairs.
The Dream, so named, had been a winner on the Flat and was having his first run over hurdles. He proved to be fast, all right, but he hadn’t learned the knack of jumping: he rattled the first three flights ominously and put his feet straight through the fourth, and that was as far as we went. The Dream galloped away loose in fright, I picked myself up undamaged from the grass and waited resignedly for wheels to roll along to pick me up. One had to expect a fall every ten or eleven rides, and mostly they were easy, like that, producing a bruise at worst. The bad ones turned up perhaps twice a year, always unexpected.
I checked in with the doctor, as one had to after every fall, and while changing for the next race made time to talk to the jockey from the group with Nanterre: Jamie Fingall, long a colleague, one of the crowd.
‘French guy with the beaky nose? Yeah, well, the guvnor introduced him but I didn’t pay much attention. He owns horses in France, something like that.’
‘Um … Was he with your guvnor, or with the owners?’
‘With the owners, but it sounded to me like the guvnor was trying to sweet talk the Frenchie into sending him a horse over here.’
‘Thanks, then.’
‘Be my guest.’
Jamie Fingall’s guvnor, Basil Clutter, trained in Lambourn about a mile down the road from my house, but there wasn’t time to seek him out before the next race, the three mile ’chase, and after that I had to change again and go out to meet the princess in the parade ring, where Kinley was already stalking round.
As before, she was well guarded and seemed almost to be enjoying it, and I didn’t know whether or not to alarm her with news of Nanterre. In the end, I said only to Thomas, ‘The frog is here. Stay close to her,’ and he gave a sketchy thumbs-up, and looked determined. Thomas looking determined, I thought, would deter Attila the Hun.
Kinley made up for an otherwise disgusting afternoon, sending my spirits soaring from depths to dizzy heights.
The rapport between us, established almost instantly during his first hurdle race the previous November, had deepened in three succeeding outings so that by February he seemed to know in advance what I wanted him to do, as I knew what he wanted to do before he did it. The result was racing at its sublime best, an unexplainable synthesis at a primitive level and undoubtedly a shared joy.
Kinley jumped hurdles with a surge that had almost left me behind the first time I felt it, and even though every time since I’d know what was going to happen, I hadn’t outgrown the surprise. The first hurdle left me gasping as usual, and by the end I reckoned we’d stolen twenty clean lengths in the air. He won jauntily and at a canter and I hoped Wykeham, watching on the box, would think it ‘a nice ride’ and forgive me Cascade. Maynard Allardeck, I grimly thought, walking Kinley back along the path to the unsaddling enclosure, could find no vestige of an excuse that time to carp or cavil, and I realised that he and Kinley and Nanterre between them had at least stopped me brooding over Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian and Raphael.
The princess had her best stars to her blue eyes, looking as if guns weren’t invented. I slid to the ground and we smiled in shared triumph, and I refrained with an effort from hugging her.
‘He’s ready for Cheltenham,’ she said, sticking out a glove to pat lightly the dark hide. ‘He’s as good as Sir Ken.’
Sir Ken had been an all-time star in the nineteen fifties, winning three Champion Hurdles and numerous other top hurdling events. Owning a horse like Sir Ken was the ultimate for many who’d seen him, and the princess, who had, had referred to him often.
‘He has a long way to go,’ I said, unbuckling the girths. ‘He’s still so young.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said happily. ‘But …’ She stopped abruptly, with a gasp. I looked at her and saw her eyes widen as she looked with horror above my right shoulder, and I whipped round fast to see what was there.
Henri Nanterre was there, staring at her.
I stood between them. Thomas and the friends w
ere behind her, more occupied with avoiding Kinley’s lighthearted hooves than guarding their charge in the safest and most public of places.
Henri Nanterre momentarily transferred his gaze to my face and then, with shock, stared at me with his mouth opening.
I’d thought in the parade ring that since he’d been watching me, he’d found out who I was, but realised in that second that he’d thought of me then simply as the princess’s jockey. He was confounded, it seemed, to identify me from the evening before.
‘You’re …’ he said, for once at a loss for loud words. ‘You …’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’
He recovered with a snap from his surprise, narrowed his eyes at the princess, and said distinctly, ‘Jockeys can have accidents.’
‘So can people who carry guns,’ I said. ‘Is that what you came to say?’
It appeared, actually, that it more or less was.
‘Go away,’ I said, much as he’d said it to me a day earlier up in the box, and to my complete astonishment, he went.
‘Hey,’ Thomas said agitatedly, ‘that was … that was … wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it was,’ I said, looping the girths round my saddle. ‘Now you know what he looks like.’
‘Madam!’ Thomas said penitently. ‘Where did he come from?’
‘I didn’t see,’ she said, slightly breathless. ‘He was just in there.’
‘Fella moves like an eel,’ one of her friends said; and certainly there had been a sort of gliding speed to his departure.
‘Well, my dears,’ the princess said to her friends, laughing a trifle shakily, ‘let’s go up and celebrate this lovely win. And Kit, come up soon.’
‘Yes, Princess.’
I weighed in and, as it was my last ride of the day, changed into street clothes. After that, I made a detour over to the saddling boxes because Basil Clutter, as Jamie had told me, would be there, saddling up his runner for the last race.
Trainers in those places never had time to talk, but he did manage an answer or two, grudgingly, while he settled weight cloth, number cloth and saddle onto his restless charge’s back.
‘Frenchman? Nanterre, yes. Owns horses in France, trained by Villon. Industrialist of some sort. Where’s he staying? How should I know? Ask the Roquevilles, he was with them. Roquevilles? Look, stop asking questions, ring me tonight, right?’
‘Right,’ I said, sighing, and left him sponging out his horse’s mouth so he should look clean and well-groomed before the public. Basil Clutter was hard-working and always bustling, saving money by doing Dusty’s job, being his own travelling head lad.
I went up to the princess’s box, drank tea with lemon, and re-lived for her and the friends the glories of Kinley’s jumping. When it was time to go she said, ‘You will come back with me, won’t you?’ as if it were natural for me to do so, and I said, ‘Yes, certainly,’ as if I thought so too.
I picked up from my still parked car the overnight bag I habitually carried with me for contingencies, and we travelled without much trouble back to Eaton Square where I telephoned to Wykeham from the bamboo room. He was pleased, he said, about Kinley, but annoyed about Hillsborough. Dusty had told him I’d made no show and been hauled in by the Stewards for it, and what did I think I was doing, getting into trouble two days in a row?
I could strangle Dusty, I thought, and told Wykeham what I’d told the Stewards. ‘They accepted the explanation,’ I said. ‘Maynard Allardeck was one of them, and he’s after me whatever I do.’
‘Yes, I suppose he is.’ He cheered up a good deal and even chuckled, ‘Bookmakers are taking bets on when – not whether – he’ll get you suspended.’
‘Very funny,’ I said, not amused. ‘I’m still at Eaton Square, if you want me.’
‘Are you?’ he said. ‘All right then. Goodnight, Kit.’
‘Goodnight, Wykeham.’
I got through next to Basil Clutter, who told me the Roquevilles’ number, and I caught the Roquevilles on their return from Newbury.
No, Bernard Roqueville said, he didn’t know where Henri Nanterre was staying. Yes, he knew him, but not well. He’d met him in Paris at the races, at Longchamp, and Nanterre had renewed the acquaintanceship by inviting him and his wife for a drink at Newbury. Why was I interested, he asked.
I said I was hoping to locate Nanterre while he was in England. Bernard Roqueville regretted he couldn’t help, and that was that.
A short lead going nowhere, I thought resignedly, putting down the receiver. Maybe the police would have better luck, although I feared that finding someone to give him a finger-wagging for waving an empty gun at a foreign princess wouldn’t exactly bring them out steaming in a full-scale manhunt.
I went downstairs to the sitting room and discussed Hillsborough’s fall from grace over a drink with the princess, and later in the evening she, Roland de Brescou and I ate dinner together in the dining room, served by Dawson; and I thought only about twenty times of the Florentine Banquet up north.
It wasn’t until after ten, saying goodnight, that she spoke about Nanterre.
‘He said, didn’t he, that jockeys have accidents.’
‘That’s what he said. And so they do, pretty often.’
‘That wasn’t what he meant.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘I couldn’t forgive myself if because of us you came to harm.’
‘That’s what he’s counting on. But I’ll take my chance, and so will Thomas.’ And privately I thought that if her husband hadn’t cracked instantly with a gun to his wife’s head, he was unlikely to bend because of a whole barrage pointed at ours.
She said, remembering with a shiver, ‘Accidents would happen to those I liked … and employed.’
‘It’s only noise. He won’t do anything,’ I said encouragingly, and she said quietly that she hoped not, and went to bed.
I wandered again round the big house, checking its defences, and wondered again what I’d overlooked.
In the morning, I found out.
I was already awake at seven when the intercom buzzed, and when I answered, a sleepy-voiced Dawson asked me to pick up the ordinary telephone as there was an in-coming call for me. I picked up the receiver and found it was Wykeham on the line.
Racing stables wake early on Sundays, as on other days, and I was used to Wykeham’s dawn thoughts, as he woke always by five. His voice that day, however, was as incoherently agitated as I’d ever heard it, and at first I wondered wildly what sins I might have committed in my sleep.
‘D … did you hear what what I s … said?’ he stuttered. ‘Two of them! T … two of the p … princess’s horses are d … dead.’
‘Two?’ I said, sitting bolt upright in bed and feeling cold. ‘How? I mean … which two?’
‘They’re dead in their boxes. Stiff. They’ve been dead for hours …’
‘Which two?’ I said again, fearfully.
There was a silence at the other end. He had difficulty remembering their names at the best of times, and I could imagine that at that moment a whole roll-call of long-gone heroes was fumbling on his tongue.
‘The two,’ he said in the end, ‘that ran on Friday.’
I felt numb.
‘Are you there?’ he demanded.
‘Yes … Do you mean … Cascade … and Cotopaxi?’
He couldn’t mean it, I thought. It couldn’t be true. Not Cotopaxi … not before the Grand National.
‘Cascade,’ he said. ‘Cotopaxi.’
Oh no … ‘How?’ I said.
‘I’ve got the vet coming,’ he said. ‘Got him out of bed. I don’t know how. That’s his job. But two! One might die, I’ve known it happen, but not two … Tell the princess, Kit.’
‘That’s your job,’ I protested.
‘No, no, you’re there … Break it to her. Better than on the phone. They’re like children to her.’
People she liked … Jesus Christ.
‘What about Kinley?’ I aske
d urgently.
‘What?’
‘Kinley … yesterday’s hurdle winner.’
‘Oh, yes, him. He’s all right. We checked all the others when we found these two. Their boxes were next to each other, I expect you remember … Tell the princess soon, Kit, won’t you? We’ll have to move these horses out. She’ll have to say what she wants done with the carcasses. Though if they’re poisoned …’
‘Do you think they’re poisoned?’ I said.
‘Don’t know. Tell her now, Kit.’ He put his receiver down with a crash, and I replaced mine feeling I would burst with ineffectual anger.
To kill her horses! If Henri Nanterre had been there at that moment, I would have stuffed his plastic gun down his loud-voiced throat. Cascade and Cotopaxi … people I knew, had known for years. I grieved for them as for friends.
Dawson agreed that his wife would wake the princess and tell her I had some sad news of one of her horses, and would wait for her in the sitting room. I dressed and went down there, and presently she came, without make-up and with anxious eyes.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Which one?’
When I told her it was two, and which two, I watched her horror turn to horrified speculation.
‘Oh no, he couldn’t,’ she exclaimed. ‘You don’t think, do you …’
‘If he has,’ I said, ‘he’ll wish he hadn’t.’
She decided that we should go down to Wykeham’s stable immediately, and wouldn’t be deterred when I tried to persuade her not to.
‘Of course, I must go. Poor Wykeham, he’ll need comforting. I should feel wrong if I didn’t go.’
Wykeham needed comforting less than she did, but by eight-thirty we were on the road, the princess in lipstick and Thomas placidly uncomplaining about the loss of his free day. My offer of driving the Rolls instead of him had been turned down like an improper suggestion.