by Dick Francis
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you must be very proud of him.’
The smile wobbled. I walked back down their garden path, climbed into the car, and drove away.
Round one slightly farcically to the opposition.
Two miles away from the village I stopped the car in a farm gateway and thought it over. Charlie West had been a great deal more scared of me than I would have supposed, even allowing for the fact that I was a couple of sizes bigger and a fair amount stronger. Maybe Charlie was as much afraid of my fury as of my fists. He almost seemed to have been expecting that I would attempt some sort of retaliation, and certainly after what he had done, he had a right to. All the same, he still represented my quickest and easiest route to who, if not to why.
After a while I started up again and drove on into the nearest town. Remembered I hadn’t eaten all day, put away some rather good cold beef at three-thirty in a homemade café geared more to cake and scones, dozed in the car, waited until dark, and finally drove back again to Charlie’s village.
There were lights on in several rooms of his cottage. The Wests were at home. I turned the car and retracked about a hundred yards, stopping half on and half off a grassy verge. Climbed out. Stood up.
Plan of attack: vague. I had had some idea of ringing the front door bell, disappearing, and waiting for either Charlie or his dolly wife to take one incautious step outside to investigate. Instead, unexpected allies materialised in the shape of one small boy and one large dog.
The boy had a torch, and was talking to his dog, who paused to dirty up the roadside five yards ahead.
‘What the hell d’you think you were at, you bloody great nit, scoffing our Mum’s stewing steak? Gor blimey mate, don’t you ever learn nothing? Tomorrow’s dinner gone down your useless big gullet and our Dad will give us both a belting this time I shouldn’t wonder, not just you, you senseless rotten idiot. Time you knew the bloody difference between me Mum’s stewing steak and dog meat, it is straight, though come to think of it there isn’t all that difference, ’specially as maybe your eyes don’t look at things the same. Do they? I damn well wish you could talk, mate.’
I clicked shut the door of the car and startled him, and he swung round with the torch searching wildly. The beam caught me and steadied on my face.
The boy said, ‘You come near me and I’ll set my dog on you.’ The dog, however, was still squatting and showed no enthusiasm.
‘I’ll stay right here, then,’ I said amicably, leaning back against the car. ‘I only want to know who lives in that cottage over there, where the lights are.’
‘How do I know? We only come to live here the day before yesterday.’
‘Great… I mean, that must be great for you, moving.’
‘Yeah. Sure. You stay there, then. I’m going now.’ He beckoned to the dog. The dog was still busy.
‘How would it be if you could offer your Mum the price of the stewing steak? Maybe she wouldn’t tell your Dad, then, and neither you nor the dog would get a belting.’
‘Our Mum says we mustn’t talk to strange men.’
‘Hm. Well, never mind then. Off you go.’
‘I’ll go when I’m ready,’ he said belligerently. A natural born rebel. About nine years old, I guessed.
‘What would I have to do for it?’ he said, after a pause.
‘Nothing much. Just ring the front door bell of that cottage and tell whoever answers that you can’t stop your dog eating the crocuses they’ve got growing all along the front there. Then when they come out to see, just nip off home as fast as your dog can stagger.’
It appealed to him. ‘Steak probably costs a good bit,’ he said.
‘Probably.’ I dug into my pocket and came up with a small fistful of pennies and silver. ‘This should leave a bit over.’
‘He doesn’t really have to eat the crocuses, does he?’
‘No.’
‘O.K. then.’ Once his mind was made up he was jaunty and efficient. He shovelled my small change into his pocket, marched up to Charlie’s front door, and told Mrs West, who cautiously answered it, that she was losing her crocuses. She scolded him all the way down the path, and while she was bending down to search for the damage, my accomplice quietly vanished. Before Mrs West exactly realised she had been misled I had stepped briskly through her front door and shut her out of her own house.
When I opened the sitting-room door Charlie said, without lifting his eyes from a racing paper, ‘It wasn’t him again, then.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘It was.’
Charlie’s immature face crumpled into a revolting state of fear and Mrs West leaned on the door bell. I shut the sitting-room door behind me to cut out some of the din.
‘What are you so afraid of?’ I said loudly.
‘Well… you…’
‘And so you damn well ought to be,’ I agreed. I took a step towards him and he shrank back into his armchair. He was brave enough on a horse, which made this abject cringing all the more unexpected, and all the more unpleasant. I took another step. He fought his way into the upholstery.
Mrs West gave the door bell a rest.
‘Why did you do it?’ I said.
He shook his head dumbly, and pulled his feet up on to the chair seat in the classic womb position. Wishful regression to the first and only place where the world couldn’t reach him.
‘Charlie, I came here for some answers, and you’re going to give them to me.’
Mrs West’s furious face appeared at the window and she started rapping hard enough to break the glass. With one eye on her husband to prevent him making another bolt for it, I stepped over and undid the latch.
‘Get out of here,’ she shouted. ‘Go on, get out.’
‘You get in. Through here, I’m not opening the door.’
‘I’ll fetch the police.’
‘Do what you like. I only want to talk to your worm of a husband. Get in or stay out, but shut up.’
She did anything but. Once she was in the room it took another twenty minutes of fruitless slanging before I could ask Charlie a single question without her loud voice obliterating any chance of an answer.
Charlie himself tired of it first and told her to stop, but at least her belligerence had given him a breathing space. He put his feet down on the floor again and said it was no use asking those questions, he didn’t know the answers.
‘You must do. Unless you told those lies about me out of sheer personal spite.’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
‘Then I’ll tell you something, you little louse. I’m going to find out who put you up to it. I’m going to stir everything up until I find out, and then I’m going to raise such a stink about being framed that sulphur will smell like sweet peas by comparison, and you, Master Charlie West, you will find yourself without a licence, not me, and even if you get it back you’ll never live down the contempt everyone will feel for you.’
‘Don’t you talk to my Charlie like that!’
‘Your Charlie is a vicious little liar who would sell you too for fifty pounds.’
‘It wasn’t fifty,’ she snapped triumphantly. ‘It was five hundred.’
Charlie yelled at her and I came as near to hitting him as the distance between my clenched teeth. Five hundred pounds. He’d lied my licence away for a handout that would have insulted a tout.
‘That does it,’ I said. ‘And now you tell me who paid you.’
The girl wife started to look as frightened as Charlie, and it didn’t occur to me then that my anger had flooded through that little room like a tidal wave.
Charlie stuttered, ‘I d .. d .. don’t know.’
I took a pace towards him and he scrambled out of his chair and took refuge behind it.
‘K .. k.. keep away from me. I don’t know. I don’t know.’
‘That isn’t good enough.’
‘He really doesn’t know,’ the girl wailed. ‘He really does
n’t.’
‘He does,’ I repeated furiously.
The girl began to cry. Charlie seemed to be on the verge of copying her.
‘I never saw… never saw the bloke. He telephoned.’
‘And how did he pay you?’
‘In two… in two packages. In one pound notes. A hundred of them came the day before the Enquiry, and I was to get…’ His voice trailed away.
‘You were to get the other four hundred if I was warned off?’
He nodded, a fractional jerk. His head was tucked into his shoulders, as if to avoid a blow.
‘And have you?’
‘What?’
‘Have you had it yet? The other four hundred?’
His eyes widened, and he spoke in jerks. ‘No… but… of course… it… will… come.’
‘Of course it won’t,’ I said brutally. ‘You stupid treacherous little ninny.’ My voice sounded thick, and each word came out separately and loaded with fury.
Both of the Wests were trembling, and the girl’s eye makeup was beginning to run down her cheeks.
‘What did he sound like, this man on the telephone?’
‘Just… just a man,’ Charlie said.
‘And did it occur to you to ask why he wanted me warned off?’
‘I said… you hadn’t done anything to harm me… and he said… you never know… supposing one day he does…’
Charlie shrank still further under my astounded glare.
‘Anyway… five hundred quid… I don’t earn as much as you, you know.’ For the first time there was a tinge of spite in his voice, and I knew that in truth jealousy had been a factor, that he hadn’t in fact done it entirely for the money. He’d got his kicks, too.
‘You’re only twenty,’ I said. ‘What exactly do you expect?’
But Charlie expected everything, always, to be run entirely for the best interests of Charlie West.
I said, ‘And you’ll be wise to spend that money carefully, because, believe me, it’s going to be the most expensive hundred quid you’ve ever earned.’
‘Kelly…’ He was half way to entreaty. Jealous, greedy, dishonest and afraid. I felt not the remotest flicker of compassion for him, only a widening anger that the motives behind his lies were so small.
‘And when you lose your licence for this, and I’ll see that you do, you’ll have plenty of time to understand that it serves you right.’
The raw revenge in my voice made a desert of their little home. They both stood there dumbly with wide miserable eyes, too broken up to raise another word. The girl’s beige mouth hung slackly open, mascara half way to her chin, long hair straggling in wisps across her face and round her shoulders. She looked sixteen. A child. So did Charlie. The worst vandals are always childish.
I turned away from them and walked out of their cottage, and my anger changed into immense depression on the drive home.
CHAPTER SIX
At two o’clock in the morning the rage I’d unleashed on the Wests looked worse and worse.
To start with, it had achieved nothing helpful. I’d known before I went there that Charlie must have had a reason for lying about me at the Enquiry. I now knew the reason to be five hundred pounds. Marvellous. A useless scrap of information out of a blizzard of emotion.
Lash out when you’re hurt… I’d done that, all right. Poured out on them the roaring bitterness I’d smothered under a civilised front ever since Monday.
Nor had I given Charlie any reason to do me any good in future. Very much the reverse. He wasn’t going to be contrite and eager to make amends. When he’d recovered himself he’d be sullen and vindictive.
I’d been taught the pattern over and over. Country A plays an isolated shabby trick. Country B is outraged and exacts revenge. Country A is forced to express apologies and meekly back down, but thoroughly resents it. Country A now holds a permanent grudge, and harms Country B whenever possible. One of the classic variations in the history of politics and aggression. Also applicable to individuals.
To have known about the pitfalls and jumped in regardless was a mite galling. It just showed how easily good sense lost out to anger. It also showed me that I wasn’t going to get results that way. A crash course in detection would have been handy. Failing that, I’d have to start taking stock of things coolly, instead of charging straight off again towards the easiest looking target, and making another mess of it.
Cool stock-taking…
Charlie West hadn’t wanted to see me because he had a guilty conscience. It followed that everyone else who had a guilty conscience wouldn’t want to see me. Even if they didn’t actually sprint off across the fields, they would all do their best to avoid my reaching them. I was going to have to become adept – and fast – at entering their lives when their backs were turned.
If Charlie West didn’t know who had paid him, and I believed that he didn’t, it followed that perhaps no one else who had lied knew who had persuaded them to. Perhaps it had all been done on the telephone. Long distance leverage. Impersonal and undiscoverable.
Perhaps I had set myself an impossible task and I should give up the whole idea and emigrate to Australia.
Except that they had racing in Australia, and I wouldn’t be able to go. The banishment covered the world. Warned off. Warned off.
Oh God.
All right, so maybe I did let the self pity catch up with me for a while. But I was privately alone in my bed in the dark, and I’d jeered myself out of it by morning.
Looking about as ragged as I felt, I got up at six and pointed the Lotus’s smooth nose towards London, N.W.7, Mill Hill.
Since I could see no one at the races I had to catch them at home, and in the case of George Newtonnards, bookmaker, home proved to be a sprawling pink-washed ranch-type bungalow in a prosperous suburban road. At eight thirty a.m. I hoped to find him at breakfast, but in fact he was opening his garage door when I arrived. I parked squarely across the entrance to his drive, which was hardly likely to make me popular, and he came striding down towards me to tell me to move.
I climbed out of the car. When he saw who it was, he stopped dead. I walked up the drive to meet him, shivering a little in the raw east wind and regretting I wasn’t snug inside a fur collared jacket like his.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said sharply.
‘I would be very grateful if you would just tell me one or two things…’
‘I haven’t time.’ He was easy, self assured, dealing with a small sized nuisance. ‘And nothing I can say will help you. Move your car, please.’
‘Certainly… Could you tell me how it was that you came to be asked to give evidence against Mr Cranfield?’
‘How it was…? He looked slightly surprised. ‘I received an official letter, requiring me to attend.’
‘Well, why? I mean, how did the Stewards know about Mr Cranfield’s bet on Cherry Pie? Did you write and tell them?’
He gave me a cool stare. ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘That you are maintaining you were framed.’
‘News travels.’
A faint smile. ‘News always travels – towards me. An accurate information service is the basis of good bookmaking.’
‘How did the Stewards know about Mr Cranfield’s bet?’
‘Mm. Well, yes, that I don’t know.’
‘Who, besides you, knew that you believed that Cranfield had backed Cherry Pie?’
‘He did back him.’
‘Well, who besides you knew that he had?’
‘I haven’t time for this.’
‘I’ll be happy to move my car… in a minute or two.’
His annoyed glare gradually softened round the edges into a half amused acceptance. A very smooth civilised man, George Newtonnards.
‘Very well. I told a few of the lads… other bookmakers, that is. I was angry about it, see? Letting myself be taken to the cleaners like that. Me, at my age, I should know better. So maybe one of them passed on the word to the Stewards, knowing the Enquiry was com
ing up. But no, I didn’t do it myself.’
‘Could you guess which one might have done? I mean, do you know of anyone who has a grudge against Cranfield?’
‘Can’t think of one.’ He shrugged. ‘No more than against any other trainer who tries it on.’
‘Tries it on?’ I echoed, surprised. ‘But he doesn’t.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I ride them,’ I protested. ‘I should know.’
‘Yes,’ he said sarcastically. ‘You should. Don’t come the naive bit with me, chum. Your friend Chris Smith, him with the cracked skull, he’s a proper artist at strangulation, wouldn’t you say? Same as you are. A fine pair, the two of you.’
‘You believe I pulled Squelch, then?’
‘Stands to reason.’
‘All the same, I didn’t.’
‘Tell it to the Marines.’ A thought struck him. ‘I don’t know any bookmakers who have a grudge against Cranfield, but I sure know one who has a grudge against you. A whopping great life-sized grudge. One time, he was almost coming after you with a chopper. You got in his way proper, mate, you did indeed.’
‘How? And who?’
‘You and Chris Smith, you were riding two for Cranfield… about six months ago, it was… right at the beginning of the season anyway… in a novice ’chase at Fontwell. Remember? There was a big holiday crowd in from the south coast because it was a bit chilly that day for lying on the beach… anyway, there was a big crowd all primed with holiday money… and there were you and Chris Smith on these two horses, and the public fancying both of them, and Pelican Jobberson asked you which was off, and you said you hadn’t an earthly on yours, so he rakes in the cash on you and doesn’t bother to balance his book, and then you go and ride a hell of a finish and win by a neck, when you could have lost instead without the slightest trouble. Pelican went spare and swore he’d be even with you when he got the chance.’
‘I believed what I told him,’ I said. ‘It was that horse’s first attempt over fences. No one could have predicted he’d have been good enough to win.’
‘Then why did you?’
‘The owner wanted to, if possible.’
‘Did he bet on it?’