Bonecrack

by Dick Francis

  He listened to me with desperation. He knew he had ridden badly, and made no attempt to justify himself. All he said, when I had finished, was, ‘Can I ride Archangel in the Guineas?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  His black eyes burned in his distressed face.

  ‘Please,’ he said with intensity, ‘please say I can ride him. I beg you.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ It was an entreaty; but I wouldn’t and couldn’t give him what he wanted.

  ‘If your father will give you anything you ask,’ I said slowly. ‘Ask him to go back to Switzerland and leave you alone.’

  It was he then who shook his head, but helplessly, not in disagreement.

  ‘Please,’ he said again, but without any hope in his voice, ‘I must … ride Archangel. My father believes that you are going to let me, even though I told him you wouldn’t … I am so afraid that if you don’t, he really will destroy the stable … and then I will not be able to race again … and I can’t … bear …’ He limped to a stop.

  ‘Tell him,’ I suggested without emphasis, ‘that if he destroys the stable you will hate him for ever.’

  He looked at me numbly. ‘I think I would,’ he said.

  ‘Then tell him so, before he does it.’

  ‘I’ll …’ He swallowed. ‘I’ll try.’

  He didn’t turn up to ride out the next morning, the first he had missed since his bump on the head. Etty suggested it was time some of the other apprentices had more chances than the very few I had given them, and indicated that their earlier ill-feeling towards Alessandro had all returned with interest.

  I agreed with her for the sake of peace, and drove off for my Sunday visit south.

  My father was bearing the stable’s successes with fortitude and finding some comfort in its losses. He did however genuinely seem to want Archangel to win the Guineas, and told me he had had long telephone talks with Tommy Hoylake about how it should be ridden.

  He said that his assistant trainer was finally showing signs of coming out of his coma, though the doctors feared irreparable brain damage. He thought he would have to find a replacement.

  His own leg also was mending properly at last, he said. He hoped to be home in time for the Derby; and he wouldn’t be needing me after that.

  The hours spent with Gillie were the usual oasis of peace and amusement, and bedtime was even more satisfactory than usual.

  Most of the newspapers that day carried summings-up of the Guineas, with varying assessments of Archangel’s chances. They all agreed that Hoylake’s big-race temperament was a considerable asset.

  I wondered if Enso read the English papers.

  I hoped he didn’t.

  There were to be no race meetings for the next two days, not until Ascot and Catterick on Wednesday, followed by the Newmarket Guineas meeting on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

  Monday morning, Alessandro appeared on leaden feet with charcoal shadows round his eyes, and said his father was practically raving because Tommy Hoylake was still down to ride Archangel.

  ‘I told him,’ he said, ‘that you wouldn’t let me ride him. I told him I understood why you wouldn’t. I told him I would never forgive him if he did any more harm here. But he doesn’t really listen. I don’t know … he’s different, somehow. Not how he used to be.’

  But Enso, I imagined, was what he had always been. It was Alessandro himself who had changed.

  I said merely, ‘Stop fretting over it and bend your mind to a couple of races you had better win for your own sake.’

  ‘What?’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Wake up, you silly nit. You’re throwing away all you’ve worked so hard for. It soon won’t matter a damn if you’re warned off for life, you’re riding so atrociously you won’t get any rides anyway.’

  He blinked, and the old fury made a temporary comeback. ‘You will not speak to me like that.’

  ‘Want to bet?’

  ‘Oh …’ he said in exasperation. ‘You and my father, you tear me apart.’

  ‘You’ll have to choose your own life,’ I said matter of-factly. ‘And if it still includes being a jockey, mind you win at Catterick. I’m running Buckram there in the apprentice race, and I should give one of the other lads the chance, but I’m putting you up again, and if you don’t win they will likely lynch you.’

  The ghost of the arrogant lift of the nose did its best. His heart was no longer in it.

  ‘And on Thursday, here at Newmarket, you can ride Lancat in the Heath Handicap. It’s a straight mile, for three-year-olds only, and I reckon he should win it, on his Teesside form. So get cracking, study those races and know approximately what the opposition might do. And you bloody well win them both. Understand?’

  He gave me a long stare in which there was all of the old intensity but none of the old hostility.

  ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘I understand I am to bloody well win them both.’ A faint smile rose and died in his eyes over the first attempt at a joke I had ever heard him make.

  Etty was tight-lipped and angry over Buckram. My father would not approve, she said; and another private report was clearly on its way.

  I sent Vic Young up to Catterick and went myself with three other horses to Ascot, telling myself that I was in duty bound to escort the owners at the bigger meeting, and that it had nothing to do with wanting to avoid Enso.

  Out on the Heath during the wait at the bottom of Side Hill for two other stables to complete their canters, I discussed with Alessandro the tactics he proposed using. Apart from the shadows which persisted round his eyes he seemed to have regained some of his former race-day icy calm. It had yet to survive a long drive in his father’s company, but it was a hopeful sign.

  Buckram finished second. I felt distinctly disappointed when I saw his name on the ‘Results from Other Meetings’ board at Ascot, but when I got back to Rowley Lodge Vic Young was just returning with Buckram, and he was, for him, enthusiastic.

  ‘He rode a good race,’ he said, nodding. ‘Intelligent, you might say. Not his fault he got beat. Not like those stinking efforts last week. He didn’t look the same boy, not at all.’

  The boy walked into the Newmarket parade ring the following afternoon with all the inward-looking self-possession I could want.

  ‘It’s a straight mile,’ I said. ‘Don’t get tempted by the optical illusion that the winning post is much nearer than it really is. You’ll know where you are by the furlong posts. Don’t pick him up until you’ve passed the one with two on it, by the bushes, even if you think it looks wrong.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he said seriously. And he didn’t.

  He rode a copybook race, cool, well paced, unflustered. From looking boxed-in two furlongs out he suddenly sprinted through a split-second opening and reached the winning post an extended length ahead of his nearest rival. With his 5 lb apprentice allowance and his Teesside form he had carried a lot of public money, and he earned his cheers.

  When he slid down from Lancat in the winner’s unsaddling enclosure he gave me again the warm rare smile, and I reckoned that as well as too much weight and too much arrogance, he was going to kick the worst problem of too much father.

  But his focus shifted to somewhere behind me and the smile changed and disintegrated, first into a deprecating smirk and then into plain apprehension.

  I turned round.

  Enso stood inside the small white-railed enclosure.

  Enso, staring at me with the towering venom of the dispossessed.

  I stared back. Nothing else to do. But for the first time, I feared I couldn’t contain him.

  For the first time, I was afraid.

  I dare say it was asking for trouble to work at the desk in the oak room after I’d seen round the stables and poured myself a modest Scotch. But this time it was a fine light evening on the last day in April, not midnight in a freezing February.

  The door opened with an aggressive crash and Enso walked through it with h
is two men behind him, the stony-faced familiar Carlo and another with a long nose, small mouth and no evidence of loving kindness.

  Enso was accompanied by his gun, and the gun was accompanied by its silencer.

  ‘Stand up,’ he said.

  I slowly stood.

  He waved the gun towards the door.

  ‘Come,’ he said.

  I didn’t move.

  The gun steadied on the central area of my chest. He handled the wicked-looking thing as coolly, as familiarly, as a toothbrush.

  ‘I am close to killing you,’ he said in such a way that I saw no reason not to believe him. ‘If you do not come at once, you will go nowhere.’

  This time there were no little jokes about only killing people if they insisted. But I remembered; and I didn’t insist. I moved out from behind the desk and walked woodenly towards the door.

  Enso moved back to let me pass, too far away from me for me to jump him. But with the two now barefaced helpers at hand, I would have had no chance at all if I had tried.

  Across the large central hall of Rowley Lodge the main front door stood open. Outside, through the lobby and the further doors, stood a Mercedes. Not Alessandro’s. This one was maroon, and a size larger.

  I was invited inside it. The American ex-rubber-face drove. Enso sat on my right side in the back, and Carlo on the left. Enso held the gun in his right hand, balancing the silencer on his rounded knee, and his fingers never relaxed. I could feel the angry tension in all his muscles whenever the moving car swayed his weight against me.

  The American drove the Mercedes northwards along the Norwich road, but only for a short distance. Just past the Limekilns and before the bridge over the railway line he swung off to the left into a small wood, and stopped as soon as the car was no longer in plain sight of the road.

  He had stopped on one of the regular and often highly populated walking grounds. The only snag was that as all horses had to be off the Heath by four o’clock every afternoon, there was unlikely to be anyone at that hour along there to help.

  ‘Out,’ Enso said economically; and I did as he said.

  There was a short pause while the American, who seemed to be known as Cal to his friends, walked around to the back of the car and opened the boot. From it he took first a canvas grip, which he handed to Carlo. Next he produced a long darkish grey gaberdine raincoat, which he put on although the weather was as good as the forecast. Finally he picked out with loving care a Lee Enfield 303.

  Protruding from its underside was a magazine for ten bullets. He very deliberately worked the bolt to bring the first of them into the breech. Then he pulled back the short lever which locked the firing mechanism in the safety position.

  I looked at the massive rifle which he handled so carefully yet with such accustomed precision. It was a gun to frighten with as much as to kill, though from what I knew of it, a bullet from it would blow a man to pieces at a hundred yards, would pierce the brick walls of an average house like butter, would penetrate fifteen feet into sand and if unimpeded would carry accurately for five miles. Compared with a shotgun, which wasn’t reliably lethal at a range of more than thirty yards, the Lee Enfield 303 was a dambuster to a peashooter. Compared with the silenced pistol, which couldn’t be counted on even as far as a shotgun, it gave making a dash for it over the Heath as much chance of success as a tortoise in the Olympics.

  I raised my eyes from the source of those unprofitable thoughts and met the unwinking gaze of its owner. He was obscurely amused, enjoying the effect his pet had had on me. I had never as far as I knew met an assassin before; but without any doubt, I knew then.

  ‘Walk along there,’ Enso said, pointing with his pistol up the walking ground. So I walked, thinking that a Lee Enfield made a lot of noise, and that someone would hear, if they shot me with it. The only thing was, the bullet travelled one and half times as fast as sound, so that you’d be dead before you heard the bang.

  Cal had calmly put the big gun under the long raincoat and was carrying it upright with his hand through what was clearly a slit, not a pocket. From even a very short distance away, one would not have known he had it with him.

  Not that there was anyone to see. My gloomiest assessments were quite right: we emerged from the little wood on to the narrow end of the Railway Land, and there wasn’t a horse or rider in sight.

  Across the field, alongside the railway, there was a fence made of wooden posts with a wooden top rail and plain wire strands below. There were a few bushes bursting green round about, and a calm peaceful late-spring evening sunshine touching everything with red gold.

  When we reached the fence, Enso said to stop.

  I stopped.

  ‘Fasten him up,’ he said to Carlo and Cal; and he himself stayed quietly pointing his pistol at me while Cal laid his deadly treasure flat on the ground and Carlo unzipped the canvas hold-all.

  From it he produced nothing more forbidding than two narrow leather belts, with buckles. He gave one of them to Cal, and without allowing me the slightest hope of escape, they turned my back towards the fence and each fastened one of my wrists to the top wooden rail.

  It didn’t seem much. It wasn’t even uncomfortable, as the rail was barely more than waist high. It just seemed professional, as I couldn’t even turn my hands inside the straps, let alone slide them out.

  They stepped away, behind Enso, and the sunlight threw my shadow on the ground in front of me … Just a man leaning against a fence on an evening stroll.

  Away in the distance on my left I could see the cars going over the railway bridge on the Norwich road, and further still, down towards Newmarket on my right, there were glimpses of the traffic in and out of the town.

  The town, the whole area, was bursting with thousands of visitors to the Guineas meeting. They might as well have been at the South Pole. From where I stood, there wasn’t a soul within screaming distance.

  Just Enso and Carlo and Cal.

  I had watched Cal in his efforts on my right wrist, but it seemed to me shortly after they had finished that it was Carlo who had been rougher.

  I turned my head and understood why I thought so. He had somehow turned my arm over the top of the rail and strapped it so that my palm was half facing backwards. I could feel the strain taking shape right up through my shoulder and I thought at first he had done it by accident.

  Then with unwelcome clarity I remembered what Dainsee had said: the easiest way to break a bone is to twist it, to put it under stress.

  Oh Christ, I thought: and my mind cringed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I said, ‘I thought this sort of thing went out with the Middle Ages.’

  Enso was not in the mood for flippant comment.

  Enso was stoking himself up into a proper fury.

  ‘I hear everywhere today on the racecourse that Tommy Hoylake is going to win the Two Thousand Guineas on Archangel. Everywhere, Tommy Hoylake, Tommy Hoylake.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You will correct that. You will tell the newspapers that it is to be Alessandro. You will let Alessandro ride Archangel on Saturday.’

  Slowly I said, ‘Even if I wanted to, I could not put Alessandro on the horse. The owner will not have it.’

  ‘You must find a way,’ Enso said. ‘There is to be no more of this blocking of my orders, no more of these tactics of producing unsurmountable reasons why you are not able to do as I say. This time, you will do it. This time you will work out how you can do it, not how you cannot.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Also you will not entice my son away from me.’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Liar.’ The hatred flared up like magnesium and his voice rose half an octave. ‘Everything Alessandro says is Neil Griffon this and Neil Griffon that and Neil Griffon says, and I have heard your name so much that I could cut … your … throat.’ He was almost shouting as he bit out the last three words. His hands were shaking, and the gun barrel wavered round its target. I could
feel the muscles tighten involuntarily in my stomach, and my wrists jump uselessly against the straps.

  He took a step nearer and his voice was loud and high.

  ‘What my son wants, I will give him. I … I … will give him. I will give him what he wants.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, and reflected that comprehending the situation went no way at all towards getting me out of it.

  ‘There is no one who does not do as I say,’ he shouted. ‘No one. When Enso Rivera tells people to do things, they do them.’

  Whatever I said was as likely to enrage as to calm him, so I said nothing at all. He took a further step near me, until I could see the glint of gold-capped back teeth and smell the sweet heavy scent of his after-shave.

  ‘You too,’ he said. ‘You will do what I say. There is no one who can boast he disobeyed Enso Rivera. There is no one alive who has disobeyed Enso Rivera.’ The pistol moved in his grasp and Cal picked up his Lee Enfield, and it was quite clear what had become of the disobedient.

  ‘You would be dead now,’ he said. ‘And I want to kill you.’ He thrust his head forward on his short neck, the strong nose standing out like a beak and the black eyes as dangerous as napalm. ‘But my son … my son says he will hate me for ever if I kill you … And for that I want to kill you more than I have ever wanted to kill anyone …’

  He took another step and rested the silencer against my thin wool sweater shirt, with my heart thumping away only a couple of inches below it. I was afraid he would risk it, afraid he would calculate that Alessandro would in time get over the loss of his racing career, afraid he would believe that things would somehow go back and be the same as on the day his son casually said, ‘I want to ride Archangel in the Derby.’

  I was afraid.

  But Enso didn’t pull the trigger. He said, as if the one followed inexorably from the other, as I suppose in way it did, ‘So I will not kill you … but I will make you do what I say. I cannot afford for you not to do what I say. I am going to make you …’