by Dick Francis
He blinked.
‘Henri Nanterre,’ I reminded him, ‘has a spy right in this house.’
‘Go and break your neck.’
I smiled and went away, and caught the train to Devon. I might be a fool, I thought, entrusting Danielle to Litsi, but she needed to be safe, and one short ride in my Mercedes, Litsi driving, was unlikely to decide things one way or another.
For all the speed and risks of the job, jump jockeys were seldom killed: it was more dangerous, for instance, to clean windows for a living. All the same, there were occasional days when one ended in hospital, always at frustrating and inconvenient moments. I wouldn’t say that I rode exactly carefully that day at Newton Abbot, but it was certainly without the reckless fury of the past two weeks.
Maybe she would finally come back to me, maybe she wouldn’t: I had a better chance right under her eyes than two hundred miles away in traction.
The chief topic of conversation all afternoon on the racecourse as far as I was concerned was the killing of Cascade and Cotopaxi. I read accounts in the sports pages of two papers on the train and saw two others in the changing room, all more speculation and bold headlines than hard fact. I was besieged by curious and sympathetic questions from anyone I talked to, but could add little except that yes, I had seen them in their boxes, and yes, of course the princess was upset, and yes, I would be looking for another ride in the Grand National.
Dusty, from his thunderstorm expression, was putting up with much the same barrage. He was slightly mollified when one of the princess’s runners won, greeted by applause and cheers that spoke of her public popularity. The Clerk of the Course and the Chairman of the Board of Directors called me into the directors’ room, not to complain of my riding but to commiserate, asking me to pass on their regrets to the princess and to Wykeham. They clapped me gruffly on the shoulder and gave me champagne, and it was all a long way from Maynard Allardeck.
I caught the return train on schedule, dined on a railway sandwich, and was back at Eaton Square before nine. I had to get Dawson to let me in because the lock had indeed been changed, and I went up to the sitting room, opening the door there on the princess, Litsi, and Beatrice Bunt, all sitting immobile in private separate silences, as if they were covered by vacuum bell jars and couldn’t hear each other speak.
‘Good evening,’ I said, my voice sounding loud.
Beatrice Bunt jumped because I’d spoken behind her. The princess’s expression changed from blank to welcoming, and Litsi came alive as if one had waved a wand over a waxwork.
‘You’re back!’ he said. ‘Thank God for that at least.’
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
None of them was quite ready to say.
‘Is Danielle all right?’ I said.
The princess looked surprised. ‘Yes, of course. Thomas drove her to work.’ She was sitting on a sofa, her back straight, her head high, every muscle on the defensive and no ease anywhere. ‘Come over here,’ she patted the cushions beside her, ‘and tell me how my horses ran.’
It was her refuge, I knew, from unpleasant reality: she’d talked of her runners in the direst of moments in the past, clinging to a rock in a tilting world.
I sat beside her, willingly playing the game.
‘Bernina was on the top of her form, and won her hurdle race. She seems to like it in Devon, that’s the third time she’s won down there.’
‘Tell me about her race,’ the princess said, looking both pleased and in some inner way still disorientated, and I told her about the race without anything in her expression changing. I glanced at Litsi and saw that he was listening in the same detached way, and at Beatrice, who appeared not to be listening at all.
I passed on the messages of sympathy from the directors, and said how pleased the crowd had been that she’d had a winner.
‘How kind,’ she murmured.
‘What’s happened?’ I said again.
It was Litsi who eventually answered. ‘Henri Nanterre telephoned here about an hour ago. He wanted to speak to Roland, but Roland refused, so he asked for me by name.’
My eyebrows rose.
‘He said he knew my name as one of the three others who had to sign business directives with Roland. He said Danielle and the princess were the others: his notary had remembered.’
I frowned. ‘I suppose he might have remembered if someone had told him the names … he might have recognised them.’
Litsi nodded. ‘Henri Nanterre said that his notary had left his briefcase in Roland’s sitting room. In the briefcase could be found a form of contract with spaces at the bottom for signatures and witnesses. He says all four of us are to sign this form in the presence of his notary, in a place that he will designate. He said he would telephone each morning until everyone was ready to agree.’
‘Or else?’ I said.
‘He mentioned,’ Litsi said evenly, ‘that it would be a shame for the princess to lose more of her horses needlessly, and that young women out alone at night were always at risk.’ He paused, one eyebrow lifting ironically. ‘He said that princes weren’t immune from accidents, and that a certain jockey, if he wished to stay healthy, should remove himself from the household and mind his own business.’
‘His exact words?’ I asked interestedly.
Litsi shook his head. ‘He spoke in French.’
‘We have asked Beatrice,’ the princess said with brittle veneer politeness, ‘if she has spoken with Henri Nanterre since her arrival in this house on Sunday, but she tells us she doesn’t know where he is.’
I looked at Beatrice, who stared implacably back. It wasn’t necessary to know where someone actually was if he had a telephone number, but there seemed to be no point in making her upgrade the evasion into a straightforward lie, which the boldness in her eyes assured me we would get.
The princess said that her husband had asked to talk to me on my return, and suggested that I might go at this point. I went, sensing the three of them stiffening back into their bell jars, and upstairs knocked on Roland de Brescou’s door.
He bade me come in and sit down, and asked with nicely feigned interest about my day’s fortunes. I said Bernina had won and he said ‘Good’ absentmindedly, while he arranged in his thoughts what to say next. He was looking, I thought, not so physically frail as on Friday and Saturday, but not as determined either.
‘It is going to take time to arrange my retirement,’ he said, ‘and as soon as I make any positive moves, Henri Nanterre will find out. Gerald Greening thinks that when he does find out, he will demand I withdraw my intention, under pain of more and more threats and vicious actions.’ He paused. ‘Has Litsi told you about Nanterre’s telephone call?’
‘Yes, Monsieur.’
‘The horses … Danielle … my wife … Litsi… yourself … I cannot leave you all open to harm. Gerald Greening advises now that I sign the contract, and then as soon as Nanterre gets his firearms approval, I can sell all my interest in the business. Nanterre will have to agree. I shall make it a condition before signing. Everyone will guess I have sold because of the guns … some at least of my reputation may be salvaged.’ A spasm of distress twisted his mouth. ‘It is of the greatest conceivable personal disgrace that I sign this contract, but I see no other way.’
He fell silent but with an implied question, as if inviting my comment; and after a short pause I gave it.
‘Don’t sign, Monsieur,’ I said.
He looked at me consideringly, with the first vestige of a smile.
‘Litsi said you would say that,’ he said.
‘Did he? And what did Litsi himself say?’
‘What would you think?’
‘Don’t sign,’ I said.
‘You and Litsi.’ Again the fugitive smile. ‘So different. So alike. He described you as – and these are his words, not mine – “a tough devil with brains”, and he said I should give you and him time to think of a way of deterring Nanterre permanently. He said that only if both of you fai
led and admitted failure should I think of signing.’
‘And … did you agree?’
‘If you yourself wish it, I will agree.’
A commitment of positive action, I thought, was a lot different from raising defences; but I thought of the horses, and the princess, and Danielle, and really there was no question.
‘I wish it,’ I said.
‘Very well … but I do hope nothing appalling will happen.’
I said we would try our best to prevent it, and asked if he would mind having a guard in the house every day during John Grundy’s off-duty hours.
‘A guard?’ he frowned.
‘Not in your rooms, Monsieur. Moving about. You would hardly notice him, but we’d give you a walkie-talkie so you could call him if you needed. And may we also install a telephone which records what’s said?’
He lifted a thin hand an inch and let it fall back on the arm of the wheelchair.
‘Do what you think best,’ he said, and then, with an almost mischievous smile, the only glimpse I’d ever had of the lighter side within, he asked ‘Has Beatrice got you out of the bamboo room yet?’
‘No, Monsieur,’ I said cheerfully.
‘She was up here this morning demanding I move you,’ he said, the smile lingering. ‘She insists also that I allow Nanterre to run the business as he thinks best, but truly I don’t know which of her purposes obsesses her most. She switched from one to the other within the same sentence.’ He paused. ‘If you can defeat my sister,’ he said, ‘Nanterre should be easy.’
By the following mid-morning, I’d been out to buy a recording telephone, and the guard had been installed, in the unconventional form of a springy twenty-year-old who had learned karate in the cradle.
Beatrice predictably disapproved, both of his looks and his presence, particularly as he nearly knocked her over on one of the landings, by proving he could run from the basement to the attic faster than the lift could travel the same distance.
He told me his name was Sammy (this week), and he was deeply impressed by the princess, whom he called ‘Your Regal Highness’, to her discreet and friendly amusement.
‘Are you sure…?’ she said to me tentatively, when he wasn’t listening.
‘He comes with the very highest references,’ I assured her. ‘His employer promised he could kick a pistol out of anyone’s hand before it was fired.’
Sammy’s slightly poltergeist spirits seemed to cheer her greatly, and with firmness she announced that all of us, of course including Beatrice, should go to Ascot races. Lunch was already ordered there, and Sammy would guard her husband: she behaved with the gaiety sometimes induced by risk-taking, which to Litsi and Danielle at least proved infectious.
Beatrice, glowering, complained she didn’t like horse racing. Her opinion of me had dropped as low as the Marianas Trench since she’d discovered I was a professional jockey. ‘He’s the help,’ I overheard her saying in outrage to the princess. ‘Surely there are some rooms in the attic’
The ‘attic’, as it happened, was an unused nursery suite, cold and draped in dust-sheets, as I’d discovered on my night prowls. The room I could realistically have expected to have been given lay beside the rose room, sharing the rose room’s bathroom, but it, too, was palely shrouded.
‘I didn’t know you were coming, Beatrice, dear,’ the princess reminded her. ‘And he’s Danielle’s fiancé.’
‘But really …’
She did go to the races, though, albeit with ill grace, presumably on the premise that even if she gained access again to her brother, and even if she wore him to exhaustion, she couldn’t make him sign the contract, because first, he didn’t have it (it was now in Litsi’s room in case she took the bamboo room by force) and second, his three co-signers couldn’t be similarly coerced. Litsi had carefully told her, after Nanterre’s telephone call and before my return from Devon, that the contract form was missing.
‘Where is it?’ she had demanded.
‘My dear Beatrice,’ Litsi had said blandly, ‘I have no idea. The notary’s briefcase is still in the hall awaiting collection, but there is no paper of any sort in it.’
And it was after he’d told me of this exchange, before we’d gone to bed on the previous evening, that I’d taken the paper downstairs for his safe-keeping.
Beatrice went to Ascot with the princess in the Rolls; Danielle and Litsi came with me.
Danielle, subdued, sat in the back. She had been quiet when I’d fetched her during the night, shivering now and again from her thoughts, even though the car had been warm. I told her about Nanterre’s telephone call and also about her uncle’s agreement with Litsi and me, and although her eyes looked huge with worry, all she’d said was, ‘Please be careful. Both of you … be careful.’
At Ascot, it was with unmixed feelings of jealousy that I watched Litsi take her away in the direction of the princess’s lunch while I peeled off, as one might say, to the office.
I had four races to ride; one for the princess, two others for Wykeham, one for a Lambourn trainer. Dusty was in a bad mood, Maynard Allardeck had again turned up as a Steward, and the tree of my favourite lightweight saddle, my valet told me, had disintegrated. Apart from that it was bitterly cold, and apart from that I had somehow gained another pound, probably via the railway sandwich.
Wykeham’s first runner was a four-year-old ex-Flat racer out for his first experience over hurdles, and although I’d schooled him a few times over practice jumps on Wykeham’s gallops, I hadn’t been able to teach him courage. He went round the whole way letting me know he hated it, and I had difficulty thinking of anything encouraging to say to his owners afterwards. A horse that didn’t like racing was a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of emotion: better to sell him quick and try again. I put it as tactfully as possible, but the owners shook their heads doubtfully and said they would ask Wykeham.
The second of Wykeham’s runners finished nowhere also, not from unwillingness, as he was kind-hearted and sure-footed, but from being nowhere near fast enough against the opposition.
I went out for the princess’s race with a low joie de vivre rating, a feeling not cured by seeing Danielle walk into the parade ring holding onto Litsi’s arm and laughing.
The princess, who had been in the ring first, after seeing her horse saddled, followed my gaze and gently tapped my arm.
‘She’s in a muddle,’ she said distinctly. ‘Give her time.’
I looked at the princess’s blue eyes, half hidden as usual behind reticent lashes. She must have felt very strongly that I needed advice, or she wouldn’t have given it.
I said, ‘All right,’ with an unloosened jaw, and she briefly nodded, turning to greet the others.
‘Where’s Beatrice?’ she asked, looking in vain behind them. ‘Didn’t she come down?’
‘She said it was too cold. She stayed up in the box,’ Litsi said: and to me, he added, ‘Do we put our money on?’
Col, the princess’s runner, was stalking round in his navy blue gold-crested rug, looking bored. He was a horse of limited enthusiasm, difficult to ride because if he reached the front too soon he would lose interest and stop, and if one left the final run too late and got beaten, one looked and felt a fool.
‘Don’t back him,’ I said. It was that sort of day.
‘Yes, back him,’ the princess said simultaneously.
‘Frightfully helpful,’ Litsi commented, amused.
Col was a bright chestnut with a white blaze down his nose and three white socks. As with most of the horses Wykeham was particularly hoping to win with at Cheltenham, Col probably wouldn’t reach his absolute pinnacle of fitness until the National Hunt Festival in another two weeks, but he should be ready enough for Ascot, a slightly less testing track.
At Cheltenham, he was entered for the Gold Cup, the top event of the meeting, and although not a hot fancy, as Coto-paxi had been for the Grand National, he had a realistic chance of being placed.
‘Do your bes
t,’ the princess said, as she often did, and as usual I said yes, I would. Dusty gave me a leg-up and I cantered Col down to the start trying to wind up a bit of life-force for us both. A gloomy jockey on a bored horse might as well go straight back to the stable.
By the time we started, I was telling him we were out there to do a job of work, and to take a little pride in it, talking to myself as much as him; and by the third of the twenty-two fences, there were some faint stirrings in both of us of the ebb turning to flood.
Most of the art of jump racing lay in presenting a horse at a fence so that he could cross it without slowing. Col was one of the comparatively rare sort that could judge distances on his own, leaving his jockey free to worry about tactics, but he would never quicken unless one insisted, and had no personal competitive drive.
I’d ridden and won on him often and understood his needs, and knew that by the end I’d have to dredge up the one wild burst of all-out urging which might wake up his phlegmatic soul.
I dare say that from the stands nothing looked wrong. Even though to me Col seemed to be plodding, his plod was respectably fast. We travelled most of the three miles in fourth or fifth place and came up into third on the last bend when two of the early leaders tired.
There were three fences still to go, with the two hundred and forty yard run-in after. One of the horses ahead was still chock-full of running: it was his speed Col would have to exceed. The jockey on the other already had his whip up and was no doubt feeling the first ominous warning that the steam was running out of the boiler. I gave Col the smallest of pulls to steady him in third place for the first of the three fences in the straight. This he jumped cleanly and was going equally well within himself as we crossed the next, passing that jockey with his whip up before we reached the last.
Too much daylight, I thought. He liked ideally to jump the last with two or three others still close ahead. He jumped the last with a tremendous leap, though, and it was no problem after all to stoke up the will-win spirit and tell him that now … now … was the time.