by Dick Francis
‘If we win the Lincoln,’ I said. ‘You can have a raise.’
‘Thanks very much.’ A touch of irony. ‘I hear the Sporting Life doesn’t think much of my chances.’
I signed three of the letters and started reading the fourth. ‘Does Alessandro often call in?’ I asked casually.
‘First time he’s done it.’
‘What did he want?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think he wanted anything, particularly. He said he was going past, and just came in.’
‘What did you talk about?’
She looked surprised at the question but answered without comment.
‘I asked him if he liked the Forbury Inn and he said he did, it was much more comfortable than a house his father had rented on the outskirts of Cambridge. He said anyway his father had given up that house now and gone back home to do some business.’ She paused, thinking back, the memory of his company making her eyes smile, and I reflected that the house at Cambridge must have been where the rubber-faces took me, and that there was now no point in speculating more about it.
‘I asked him if he had always liked riding horses and he said yes, and I asked him what his ambitions were and he said to win the Derby and be Champion Jockey, and I said that there wasn’t an apprentice born who didn’t want that.’
I turned my head to glance at her. ‘He said he wanted to be Champion Jockey?’
‘That’s right.’
I stared gloomily down at my shoes. The skirmish had been a battle, the battle was in danger of becoming war, and now it looked as if hostilities could crackle on for months. Escalation seemed to be setting in in a big way.
‘Did he’, I asked, ‘ask you anything?’
‘No. At least … yes, I suppose he did.’ She seemed surprised, thinking about it.
‘What?’
‘He asked if you or your father owned any of the horses … I told him your father had half shares in some of them, and he said did he own any of them outright. I said Buckram was the only one … and he said …’ She frowned, concentrating, ‘He said he supposed it would be insured like the others, and I said it wasn’t, actually, because Mr Griffon had cut back on his premiums this year, so he’d better be extra careful with it on the roads …’ She suddenly sounded anxious. ‘There wasn’t any harm in telling him, was there? I mean, I didn’t think there was anything secret about Mr Griffon owning Buckram.’
‘There isn’t,’ I said comfortingly. ‘It runs in his name, for a start. It’s public knowledge that he owns it.’
She looked relieved and the lingering smile crept back round her eyes, and I didn’t tell her that it was the bit about insurance that I found disturbing.
One of the firms I had advised in their troubles were assemblers of electronic equipment. Since they had in fact reorganized themselves from top to bottom and were now delighting their shareholders, I rang up their chief executive and asked for help for myself.
Urgently, I said. In fact, today. And it was half past three already.
A sharp ‘phew’ followed by some tongue clicking, and the offer came. If I would drive towards Coventry, their Mr Wallis would meet me at Kettering. He would bring what I wanted with him, and explain how I was to install it, and would that do?
It would do very well indeed, I said: and did the chief executive happen to be in need of half a racehorse?
He laughed. On the salary cut I had persuaded him to take? I must be joking, he said.
Our Mr Wallis, all of nineteen, met me in a businesslike truck and blinded me with science. He repeated the instructions clearly and twice, and then obviously doubted whether I could carry them out. To him the vagaries of the photoelectric effect were home ground, but he also realized that to the average fool they were not. He went over it again to make sure I understood.
‘What is your position with the firm?’ I asked in the end.
‘Deputy Sales Manager,’ he said happily, ‘and they tell me I have you to thank.’
I quite easily, after the lecture, installed the early warning system at Rowley Lodge: basically a photoelectric cell linked to an alarm buzzer. After dark, when everything was quiet, I hid the necessary ultra-violet light source in the flowering plant in a tub which stood against the end wall of the four outside boxes, and the cell itself I camouflaged in a rose bush outside the office window. The cable from this led through the office window, across the lobby and into the owner’s room, with a switch box handy to the sofa.
Soon after I had finished rigging it, Etty walked into the yard from her cottage for her usual last look round before going to bed, and the buzzer rasped out loud and clear. Too loud, I thought. A silent intruder might just hear it. I put a cushion over it, and the muffled buzz sounded like a bumble bee caught in a drawer.
I switched the noise off. When Etty left the yard it started again immediately. Hurrah for the Deputy Sales Manager, I thought, and slept in the owner’s room with my head on the cushion.
No one came.
Stiffly at six o’clock I got up and rolled up the cable, and collected and stowed all the gear in a cupboard in the owners’ room; and when the first of the lads ambled yawning into the yard, I headed directly to the coffee pot.
Tuesday night, no one came.
Wednesday, Margaret mentioned that Susie’s friend had reported two Swiss phone calls, one outgoing by Alessandro, one incoming to the chauffeur.
Etty, more anxious than ever with the Lincoln only three days away, was snapping at the lads, and Alessandro stayed behind after second exercise and asked me if I had reconsidered and would put him up on Pease Pudding in place of Tommy Hoylake.
We were outside, in the yard, with the late morning bustle going on all around. Alessandro looked tense and hollow-eyed.
‘You must know I can’t,’ I said reasonably.
‘My father says I am to tell you that you must.’
I slowly shook my head. ‘For your own sake, you shouldn’t. If you rode it, you would make a fool of yourself. Is that what your father wants?’
‘He says I must insist.’ He was adamant.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’ve insisted. But Tommy Hoylake is going to ride.’
‘But you must do what my father says,’ he protested.
I smiled at him faintly, but didn’t answer, and he did not seem to know what to say next.
‘Next week, though,’ I said matter-of-factly, ‘you can ride Buckram in a race at Aintree. I entered him there especially for you. He won first time out last year, so he should have a fair chance again this time.’
He just stared; didn’t even blink. If there was anything to be given away, he didn’t give it.
At three o’clock Thursday morning the buzzer went off with enthusiasm three inches from my ear drum and I nearly fell off the sofa. I switched off the noise and got to my feet, and took a look into the yard through the owners’ room window.
Moving quickly through the moonless night went one single small light, very faint, directed at the ground. Then, as I watched, it swung round, paused on some of the boxes in bay four and settled inexorably on the one which housed Buckram.
Treacherous little bastard, I thought. Finding out which horse he could kill without the owner wailing a complaint; an uninsured horse, in order to kick Rowley Lodge the harder in the financial groin.
Telling him Buckram might win him a race hadn’t stopped him. Treacherous, callous little bastard …
I was out through the ready left-ajar doors and down the yard, moving silently on rubber shoes. I heard the bolts drawn quietly back and the doors squeak on their hinges, and homed in on the small flickering light with far from charitable intentions.
No point in wasting time. I swept my hand down on the switch and flooded Buckram’s box with a hundred watts.
I took in at a glance the syringe held in a stunned second of suspended animation in the gloved hand, and noticed the truncheon lying on the straw just inside the door.
It wasn’t Alessandro. Too heavy.
Too tall. The figure turning purposefully towards me, dressed in black from neck to foot, was one of the rubber-faces.
In his rubber face.
Chapter Ten
This time I didn’t waste my precious advantage. I sprang straight at him and chopped with all my strength at the wrist of the hand that held the syringe.
A direct hit. The hand flew backwards, the fingers opened, and the syringe spun away through the air.
I kicked his shin and punched him in the stomach, and when his head came forward I grabbed hold of it and swung him with a crash against the wall.
Buckram kicked up a fuss and stamped around loose, as rubber-face had not attempted to put the head-collar on. When rubber-face rushed at me with jabbing fists I caught hold of his clothes and threw him against Buckram, who snapped at him with his teeth.
A muffled sound came through the rubber, which I declined to interpret as an appeal for peace. Once away from the horse he came at me again, shoulders hunched, head down, arms stretching forwards. I stepped straight into his grasp, ignored a bash in my short ribs, put my arm tight round his neck, and banged his head on the nearest wall. The legs turned to latex to match the face, and the lids palely shut inside the eyeholes. I gave him another small crack against the wall to remove any lingering doubts, and stood back a pace. He lay feebly in the angle between floor and wall, one hand twisting slowly forwards and backwards across the straw.
I tied up Buckram, who by some miracle had not pushed his way out of the unbolted door and roused the neighbourhood, and in stepping away from the tethering ring nearly put my foot right down on the scattered syringe. It lay under the manger, in the straw, and had survived undamaged through the rumpus.
Picking it up I tossed it lightly in my hand and decided that the gifts of the gods should not be wasted. Pulling up the sleeve of rubber-face’s black jersey, I pushed the needle firmly into his arm and gave him the benefit of half the contents. Prudence, not compassion, stopped me from squirting in the lot: it might be that what the syringe held was a flattener for a horse but curtains for a man, and murdering was not going to help.
I pulled off rubber-face’s rubber face. Underneath it was Carlo. Surprise, surprise.
The prizes of war now amounted to one rubber mask, one half-empty syringe, and one bone-breaking truncheon. After a slight pause for thought I wiped my fingerprints off the syringe, removed Carlo’s gloves, and planted his all over it; both hands. A similar liberal sprinkling went on to the truncheon: then, using the gloves to hold them with, I took the two incriminating articles up to the house and hid them temporarily in a lacquered box under a dust-sheet in one of the ten unused bedrooms.
From the window on the stairs on the way down I caught an impression of a large pale shape in the drive near the gate. Went to look, to make sure. No mistake: the Mercedes.
Back in Buckram’s box, Carlo slept peacefully, totally out. I felt his pulse, which was slow but regular, and looked at my watch. Not yet three thirty. Extraordinary.
Carrying Carlo to the car looked too much of a chore, so I went and fetched the car to Carlo. The engine started with a click and a purr, and made too little noise in the yard even to disturb the horses. Leaving the engine running I opened both rear doors and lugged Carlo in backwards. I had intended to do him the courtesy of the back seat, since he had done as much for me, but he fell limply to the floor. I bent his knees up, as he lay on his back, and gently shut him in.
As far as I could tell no one saw our arrival at the Forbury Inn. I parked the Mercedes next to the other cars near the front door, switched off the engine and the side lights, and quietly went away.
By the time I had walked the near mile home, collected the rubber mask from Buckram’s box, dismantled the electronic eye and stowed it in the cupboard, it was too late to bother with going to bed. I slept for an hour or so more on the sofa and woke up feeling dead tired and not a bit full of energy for the first day of the races.
Alessandro arrived late, on foot, and worried.
I watched him, first through the office window and then from the owners’ room, as he made his way down into the yard. He hovered in indecision in bay four, and with curiosity overcoming caution, made a crablike traverse over to Buckram’s box. He unbolted the top half of the door, looked inside, and then bolted the door again. Unable from a distance to read his reaction, I walked out of the house into his sight without appearing to take any notice of him.
He removed himself smartly from bay four and pretended to be looking for Etty in bay three, but finally his uncertainty got the better of him and he turned to come and meet me.
‘Do you know where Carlo is?’ he asked without preamble.
‘Where would you expect him to be?’ I said.
He blinked. ‘In his room … I knock on his door when I am ready … but he wasn’t there. Have you … have you seen him?’
‘At four o’clock this morning,’ I said casually, ‘he was fast asleep in the back of your car. I imagine he is still there.’
He turned his head away as if I’d punched him.
‘He came, then,’ he said, and sounded hopeless.
‘He came,’ I agreed.
‘But you didn’t … I mean … kill him?’
‘I’m not your father,’ I said astringently. ‘Carlo got injected with some stuff he brought for Buckram.’
His head snapped back and his eyes held a fury that was for once not totally directed at me.
‘I told him not to come,’ he said angrily. ‘I told him not to.’
‘Because Buckram could win for you next week?’
‘Yes … no … You confuse me.’
‘But he disregarded you,’ I suggested, ‘and obeyed your father?’
‘I told him not to come,’ he repeated.
‘He wouldn’t dare disobey your father,’ I said drily.
‘No one disobeys my father,’ he stated automatically and then looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Except you,’ he said.
‘The knack with your father’, I explained, ‘is to disobey within the area where retaliation becomes progressively less profitable, and to widen that area at every opportunity.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ll explain it to you on the way to Doncaster,’ I said.
‘I am not coming with you,’ he said stiffly. ‘Carlo will drive me in my own car.’
‘He’ll be in no shape to. If you want to go to the races I think you’ll find you either have to drive yourself or come with me.’
He gave me an angry stare and didn’t admit he couldn’t drive. But he couldn’t resist the attraction of the races, either, and I had counted on it.
‘Very well, I will come with you.’
After we had ridden back from Racecourse side with the first lot I told him to talk to Margaret in the office while I changed into race-going clothes, and then I drove him up to the Forbury Inn for him to do the same.
He bounded out of the Jensen almost before it stopped rolling and wrenched open one of the Mercedes’ rear doors. Inside the car a hunched figure sitting on the back seat showed that Carlo was at least partially awake, if not a hundred per cent receptive of the Italian torrent of abuse breaking over him.
I tapped Alessandro on the back and when he momentarily stopped cursing, said, ‘If he feels anything like I did after similar treatment, he will not be taking much notice. Why don’t you do something constructive, like getting ready to go to the races?’
‘I’ll do what I please,’ he said fiercely, but the next minute it appeared that what pleased him was to change for the races.
While he was indoors, Carlo made one or two remarks in Italian which stretched my knowledge of the language too far. The gist, however, was clear. Something to do with my ancestors.
Alessandro reappeared wearing the dark suit he had first arrived in, which was now a full size too large. It make him look even thinner, and a good deal younger, and almost harmless. I reminded myself sharply that a lowered guard i
nvited the uppercut, and jerked my head for him to get into the Jensen.
When he had closed the door, I spoke to Carlo through the open window of the Mercedes. ‘Can you hear what I say?’ I said. ‘Are you listening?’
He raised his head with an effort and gave me a look which showed that he was, even if he didn’t want to.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now, take this in. Alessandro is coming with me to the races. Before I bring him back, I intend to telephone to the stables to make quite sure that no damage of any kind has been done there … that all the horses are alive and well. If you have any idea of going back today to finish off what you didn’t do last night, you can drop it. Because if you do any damage you will not get Alessandro back tonight … or for many nights … and I cannot think that Enso Rivera would be very pleased with you.’
He looked as furious as his sorry state would let him.
‘You understand?’ I said.
‘Yes.’ He closed his eyes and groaned. I left him to it with reprehensible satisfaction.
‘What did you say to Carlo?’ Alessandro demanded as I swept him away down the drive.
‘Told him to spend the day in bed.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Words to that effect.’
He looked suspiciously at the beginnings of a smile I didn’t bother to repress, and then, crossly, straight ahead through the windscreen.
After ten silent miles I said, ‘I’ve written a letter to your father. I’d like you to send it to him.’
‘What letter?’
I took an envelope out of my inner pocket and handed it to him.
‘I want to read it,’ he stated aggressively.
‘Go ahead. It isn’t stuck. I thought I would save you the trouble.’
He compressed his mouth and pulled out the letter.
He read:
Enso Rivera,
The following points are for your consideration.
1. While Alessandro stays, and wishes to stay, at Rowley Lodge, the stable cannot be destroyed.
Following any form or degree of destruction, or of attempted destruction, of the stables, the Jockey Club will immediately be informed of everything that has passed, with the result that Alessandro would be banned for life from riding races anywhere in the world.