by Dick Francis
Wykeham’s establishment, an hour’s drive south of London, was outside a small village on a slope of the Sussex Downs. Sprawling and complex, it had been enlarged haphazardly at intervals over a century, and was attractive to owners because of its maze of unexpected little courtyards, with eight or ten boxes in each, and holly bushes in red-painted tubs. To the stable staff, the picturesque convolution meant a lot of fetching and carrying, a lot of time wasted.
The princess’s horses were spread through five of the courtyards, not filling any of them. Wykeham, like many trainers, preferred to scatter an owner’s horses about rather than to clump them all together, and Cascade and Cotopaxi, as it happened, had been the only two belonging to the princess to be housed in the courtyard nearest the entrance drive.
One had to park in a central area and walk through archways into the courtyards, and when he heard us arrive, Wykeham came out of the first courtyard to meet us.
He looked older by the week, I thought uneasily, watching him roguishly kiss the princess’s hand. He always half-flirted with her, with twinkling eyes and the remnants of a powerful old charm, but that morning he simply looked distracted, his white hair blowing when he removed his hat, his thin old hands shaking.
‘My dear Wykeham,’ the princess said, alarmed. ‘You look so cold.’
‘Come into the house,’ he said, moving that way. ‘That’s best.’
The princess hesitated. ‘Are my poor horses still here?’
He nodded miserably. ‘The vet’s with them.’
‘Then I think I’ll see them,’ she said simply, and walked firmly into the courtyard, Wykeham and I following, not trying to dissuade her.
The doors of two of the boxes stood open, the interiors beyond lit palely with electric light, although there was full daylight outside. All the other boxes were firmly closed, and Wykeham was saying, ‘We’ve just left the other horses here in their boxes. They don’t seem to be disturbed, because there’s no blood … that’s what would upset them, you know …’
The princess, only half listening, walked more slowly across to where her horses lay on the dark brown peat on the floor of their boxes, their bodies silent humps, all flashing speed gone.
They had died with their night rugs on, but either the vet or Wykeham or the lads had unbuckled those and rolled them back against the walls. We looked in silence at the dark revealed sheen of Cascade, and the snow-splashed chestnut of Cotopaxi.
Robin Curtiss, the tall and gangling boyish vet, had met the princess occasionally on other mornings, and me more often. Dressed in green protective overalls, he nodded to us both and excused himself from shaking hands, saying he would need to wash first.
The princess, acknowledging his greeting, asked at once and with composure, ‘Please tell me … how did they die?’
Robin Curtiss glanced at Wykeham and me, but neither of us would have tried to stop him answering, so he looked back to the princess and told her straight.
‘Ma’am, they were shot. They knew nothing about it. They were shot with a humane killer. With a bolt.’
SIX
Cascade was lying slantwise across the box, his head in shadow but not far from the door. Robin Curtiss stepped onto the peat and bent down, picking up the black forelock of hair which fell naturally forward from between the horse’s ears.
‘You can’t clearly see, ma’am, as he’s so dark, but there’s the spot, right under his forelock, where the bolt went in.’ He straightened up, dusting his fingers on a handkerchief. ‘Easy to miss,’ he said. ‘You can’t see what happened unless you’re looking for it.’
The princess turned away from her dead horse with a glitter of tears but a calm face. She stopped for a minute at the door of the next box, where Cotopaxi’s rump was nearest, his head virtually out of sight near the manger.
‘He’s the same,’ Robin Curtiss said. ‘Under the forelock, almost invisible. It was expert, ma’am. They didn’t suffer.’
She nodded, swallowing, then, unable to speak, put one hand on Wykeham’s arm and with the other waved towards the arch of the courtyard and Wykeham’s house beyond. Robin Curtiss and I watched them go and he sighed in sympathy.
‘Poor lady. It always takes them hard.’
‘They were murdered,’ I said. ‘That makes it harder.’
‘Yeah, they sure were murdered. Wykeham’s called the police, though I told him it wasn’t strictly necessary. The law’s very vague about killing animals. But with them belonging to Princess Casilia, I suppose he thought it best. And he’s in a tizzy about moving the bodies as soon as possible, but we don’t know where he stands with the insurance company … whether in a case like this, they have to be told first … and it’s Sunday …’ He stopped rambling and said more coherently, ‘You don’t often see wounds like these, nowadays.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Captive bullets are old hat. Almost no one uses them now.’
‘Captive bullets?’
‘The bolt. Called captive because the killing agent doesn’t fly free of the gun, but is retracted back into it. Surely you know that?’
‘Yes. I mean, I know the bolt retracts. I saw one, close to, years ago. I didn’t know they were old hat. What do you use now, then?’
‘You must have seen a horse put down,’ he said, astonished. ‘All those times, out on the course, when your mount breaks a leg …’
‘It’s only happened to me twice,’ I said. ‘And both times I took my saddle off and walked away.’
I found myself thinking about it, trying to explain. ‘One moment you’re in partnership with that big creature, and maybe you like him, and the next moment he’s going to die … So I’ve not wanted to stay to watch. It may be odd to you, especially as I was brought up in a racing stable, but I never have seen the gun actually put to the head, and I’ve always vaguely imagined it was shot from the side, like through a human temple.’
‘Well,’ he said, still surprised and mildly amused, ‘you’d better get educated. You of all people. Look,’ he said, ‘look at Cotopaxi’s head.’ He picked his way over the stiff chestnut legs until he could show me what he wanted. Cotopaxi’s eyes were half open and milky, and although Robin Curtiss was totally unmoved, to me it was still no everyday matter.
‘A horse’s brain is only the size of a bunched fist,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that?’
‘Yes, I know it’s small.’
He nodded. ‘Most of a horse’s head is empty space, all sinuses. The brain is up between the ears, at the top of the neck. The bone in that area is pretty solid. There’s only the one place where you can be sure a bolt will do the job.’ He picked up Cotopaxi’s forelock and pointed to a small disturbance of the pale hairs. ‘You take a line from the right ear to the left eye,’ he said, ‘and a line from the left ear to the right eye. Where the lines cross, that’s the best … more or less the only … place to aim. And see? The bolt went into Cotopaxi at that exact spot. It wasn’t any old haphazard job. Whoever did this knew exactly what to do.’
‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘now you’ve told me, I’d know what to do.’
‘Yes, but don’t forget, you have to get the angle right as well as the place. You have to aim straight at the spot where the spinal cord and the brain meet. Then the result’s instantaneous and, as you can see, there’s no blood.’
‘And meanwhile,’ I suggested ironically, ‘the horse is simply standing still letting all this happen?’
‘Funnily enough, most of them do. Even so, I’m told that for short people it’s difficult to get the hand up to the right angle at the right height.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I said. I looked down at the waste of the great racing spirit. I’d sat on that back, shared that mind, felt the fluid majesty of those muscles, enjoyed his triumphs, schooled him as a young horse, thrilled to his growing strengths. I would still walk away, I thought, if another time came.
I made my way back to the outside air and Robin Curtiss follo
wed me out, still matter-of-factly continuing my education.
‘Apart from the difficulty of hitting the right spot, the bolt has another disadvantage, which is that although it retracts at once, the horse begins to fall just as quick, and the hard skull bones tend to bend the bolt after a lot of use, and the gun no longer works.’
‘So now you use something else?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘A free bullet. I’ll show you, if you like. I’ve a pistol in my car.’
We walked unhurriedly out of the courtyard to where his car was parked not far from the princess’s Rolls. He unlocked the boot, and in there unlocked an attaché case, and from it produced a brown cloth which he unwrapped.
Inside lay an automatic Luger-type pistol, which looked ordinary except for its barrel. Instead of the straight narrow barrel one would expect, there was a wide bulbous affair with a slanted oval opening at the end.
‘This barrel sends the bullet out spinning in a spiral,’ he explained.
‘Any old bullet?’
‘It has to be the right calibre, but yes, any old bullet, and any old gun. That’s one big advantage, you can weld a barrel like this onto any pistol you like. Well … the bullet leaves the gun with a lot of short-range energy, but because it’s going in a spiral, almost any obstruction will stop it. So if you shoot a horse, the bullet will stop in its head. Mostly, that is.’ He smiled cheerfully. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to be so accurate, as with a bolt, because the wobbling bullet does a lot more damage.’
I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘How can you be so sure those two were killed with a bolt?’
‘Oh … with the free bullet you get powder burns at the entry, and also blood coming down the nose, and probably also from the mouth. Not much, sometimes, but it’s there, because of the widespread damage done inside, you see.’
‘Yes,’ I said, sighing, ‘I see.’ I watched him wrap up his gun again and said, ‘I suppose you have to have a licence for that.’
‘Sure. And for the captive bullet also.’
There must be thousands of humane killers about, I reflected. Every vet would have one. Every knackers’ yard. A great many sheep and cattle farmers. The huntsman of every pack of hounds. People dealing with police horses … the probabilities seemed endless.
‘So I suppose there are hundreds of the old bolt-types lying around, out of date and unused.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘under lock and key.’
‘Not last night.’
‘No.’
‘What time last night, would you say?’
He completed the stowing and locking away of his own pistol.
‘Early,’ he said positively. ‘Not much after midnight. I know it was a cold night, but both horses were stone cold this morning. No internal temperature. That takes hours … and they were found at half six.’ He grinned. ‘The knackermen don’t like fetching horses that have been dead that long. They have difficulty moving them when they’re stiff, and getting them out of the boxes is a right problem.’ He peeled off his overalls and put them in the boot. ‘There’ll have to be post-mortems. The insurance people insist on it.’ He closed the car boot and locked it. ‘We may as well go into the house.’
‘And leave them there?’ I gestured back towards the courtyard.
‘They’re not going anywhere,’ he said, but he went back and shut the boxes’ doors, in case, he said, any owners turned up for a nice Sunday look-round and had their sensibilities affronted. Robin’s own sensibilities had been sensibly dumped during week one of his veterinary training, I guessed, but he didn’t need a bedside manner to be a highly efficient minister to Wykeham’s jumpers.
We went into Wykeham’s house, ancient and rambling to match the yard, and found him and the princess consoling themselves with tea and memories, she at her most sustaining, he looking warmer and more in command, but puzzled.
He rose to his feet at our appearance and bustled me out of his sitting room making some flimsy remark about showing me where to make hot drinks, which I’d known for ten years.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, leading the way into the kitchen. ‘Why doesn’t she ask who killed them? It’s the first thing I’d want to know. She hasn’t mentioned it once. Just talks about the races in that way she has, and asking about the others. Why doesn’t she want to know who killed them?’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘She suspects she knows.’
‘What? For God’s sake then, Kit … who?’
I hesitated. He looked thin and shaky, with lines cut deep in the wrinkled old face, the dark freckles of age standing out starkly. ‘She’d have to tell you herself,’ I said, ‘but it’s something to do with her husband’s business. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you need worry about a traitor in your own camp. If she hasn’t told you who she thinks it is, she won’t tell anyone until she’s discussed it with her husband, and they might decide to say nothing even then, they hate publicity so much.’
‘There’s going to be publicity anyway,’ he said worriedly. ‘The ante-post co-favourite for the Grand National shot in his box … Even if we try, we can’t keep that out of the papers.’
I rattled about making fresh tea for Robin and myself, not relishing any more than he did the fuss lying ahead.
‘All the same,’ I said, ‘your main worry isn’t who. Your main worry is keeping all the others safe.’
‘Kit!’ He was totally appalled. ‘B … bloody hell, K … Kit.’ He was back to stuttering. ‘It w … won’t happen again.’
‘Well,’ I said temperately, but there was no way to soften it, ‘I’d say they’re all at risk. The whole lot of her horses. Not immediately, not today. But if the princess and her husband decide on one particular course of action, which they may do, then they’ll all be at risk, Kinley, perhaps, above all. So the thing to do is to apply our minds to defensive action.’
‘But Kit …’
‘Dog patrols,’ I said.
‘They’re expensive …’
‘The princess,’ I remarked, ‘is rich. Ask her. If she doesn’t like the expense, I’ll pay for them myself.’ Wykeham’s mouth opened and closed again when I pointed out, ‘I’ve already lost the best chance I ever had of winning the Grand National. Her horses mean almost as much to me as they do to her and to you, and I’m damned well not going to let anyone pick them off two by two. So you get the security people here by tonight, and make sure there’s someone about in the stable the whole time from now on, patrolling all the courtyards night and day.’
‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll fix it … If I knew who’d killed them, I’d kill him myself.’
It sounded extraordinary, said that way, without anger, more as an unexpected self-discovery. What I’d wished I could do in fury, he proposed as a sane course of action; but people say these things, not meaning them, and he wouldn’t have a mouse’s chance physically, I thought regretfully, against the hawk-like Nanterre.
Wykeham had been a Hercules in his youth, he’d told me, a power-house on legs with the joy of life pumping through his veins. ‘Joy of life,’ he’d said to me several times, ‘that’s what I have. That’s what you have. No one gets anywhere without it. Relish the struggle, that’s the way.’
He’d been an amateur jockey of note, and he’d dazzled and married the daughter of a mediumly successful trainer whose horses had started winning from the day Wykeham stepped into the yard. Now, fifty years on, with his strength gone, his wife dead and his own daughters grandmothers, he retained only the priceless ability to put the joy of life into his horses. He thought of little besides his horses, cared for little else, walked round at evening stables talking to each as a person, playing with some, admonishing others, coaxing a few, ignoring none.
I’d ridden for him from when I was nineteen, a fact he was apt to relate with complacency. ‘Spot ’em young,’ he’d told sundry owners. ‘That’s the thing. I’m good at that.’ And he’d steadfastly given me, I sometimes reflected, exactly what he gave his charges:
opportunity, trust and job-satisfaction.
He had trained a winner of the Grand National twice when I’d been at school, and in my time had come close, but it was only recently I’d realised how deeply he longed for a third slice of glory. The dead horse outside was for all of us a sickening, dragging, deflating disappointment.
‘Cotopaxi,’ he said intensely, for once getting the name right, ‘was the one I would have saved first in a fire.’
The princess and I travelled back to London without waiting for the police, the insurers or the slaughterer’s men. (‘So horrid, all of that.’)
I’d expected her to talk as usual chiefly about her horses, but it was of Wykeham, it seemed, that she was thinking.
‘Thirty-five years ago, before you were born,’ she said, ‘when I first went racing, Wykeham strode the scene like a Colossus. He was almost everything he says he was, a Hercules indeed. Powerful, successful, enormously attractive … Half the women swooning over him with their husbands spluttering …’ She smiled at this memory. ‘I suppose it’s hard for you to picture, Kit, knowing him only now, when he’s old, but he was a splendid man … he still is, of course. I felt privileged, long ago, when he agreed to train my horses.’
I glanced in fascination at her serene face. In the past, I’d seen her often with Wykeham at the races, always deferring to him, tapping him playfully on the arm. I hadn’t realised how much she must miss him now he stayed at home, how much she must regret the waning of such a titan.
A contemporary of my grandfather (and of Maynard Allardeck’s father), Wykeham had been already a legend to me when he’d offered me the job. I’d accepted, almost dazed, and I’d grown up fast, mature at twenty from the demands and responsibility he’d thrust on me. Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of horseflesh in my hands all the time, the success of the stable on my shoulders. He’d given me no allowances for youth, told me in no uncertain terms from the beginning that the whole enterprise rested finally on its jockey’s skill, cool head and commonsense, and told me if I didn’t measure up to what was needed, too bad, but bye bye.