by Dick Francis
‘As to where he had been during the days before… we did find out, discreetly. He’d done nothing and been nowhere that he didn’t normally do in the course of his job. He’d come up from the London offices of his newspaper on the Thursday, gone to Bogside races on the Friday and Saturday, stayed with friends near Hexham, Northumberland, over the week-end, and, as I said, left them at five on Sunday, to drive back to London. They said he had been his normal charming self the whole time.
‘We, that is, the other two Stewards and I – asked the Yorkshire police to let us see anything they salvaged from the car, but there was nothing of any interest to us. His leather briefcase was found undamaged half-way down the hillside, near one of the rear doors which had been wrenched off during the somersaulting, but there was nothing in it besides the usual form books and racing papers. We looked carefully. He lived with his mother and sister – he was unmarried – and they let us search their house for anything he might have written down for us. There was nothing. We also contacted the sports editor of his paper and asked to see any possessions he had left in his office. There were only a few personal oddments and an envelope containing some press cuttings about doping. We kept that. You can see them when you get to England. But I’m afraid they will be no use to you. They were very fragmentary.’
‘I see,’ I said. We walked along the street to where our two cars were parked, his hired blue Holden, and my white utility. Standing beside the two dusty vehicles I remarked, ‘You want to believe it was an accident… I think you want to believe it very much.’
He nodded soberly. ‘It is appallingly disturbing to think anything else. If it weren’t for those nine missing hours one would have no doubt at all.’
I shrugged. ‘He could have spent them in dozens of harmless ways. In a bar. Having dinner. In a cinema. Picking up a girl.’
‘Yes, he could,’ he said. But the doubt remained, both in his mind and mine.
He was to drive the hired Holden back to Sydney the following day and fly to England. He shook hands with me in the street and gave me his address in London, where I was to meet him again. With the door open and with one foot in the car he said, ‘I suppose it would be part of your… er… procedure… to appear as a slightly, shall we say, unreliable type of stable lad, so that the crooked element would take to you?’
‘Definitely,’ I grinned.
‘Then, if I might suggest it, it would be a good idea for you to grow a couple of sideburns. It’s surprising what a lot of distrust can be caused by an inch of extra hair in front of the ears!’
I laughed. ‘A good idea.’
‘And don’t bring many clothes,’ he added. ‘I’ll fix you up with British stuff suitable for your new character.’
‘All right.’
He slid down behind the wheel.
‘Au revoir, then, Mr Roke.’
‘Au revoir, Lord October,’ I said.
After he had gone, and without his persuasive force at my elbow, what I was planning to do seemed less sensible than ever. But then I was tired to death of being sensible. I went on working from dawn to midnight to clear the decks, and found myself waking each morning with impatience to be on my way.
Two days before I was due to leave I flew down to Gee-long to say goodbye to Philip and explain to his headmaster that I was going to Europe for a while; I didn’t know exactly how long. I came back via Frensham to see my sisters, both of whom exclaimed at once over the dark patches of stubble which were already giving my face the required ‘unreliable’ appearance.
‘For heaven’s sake shave them off,’ said Belinda. They’re far too sexy. Most of the seniors are crazy about you already and if they see you like that you’ll be mobbed.’
‘That sounds delicious,’ I said, grinning at them affectionately.
Helen, nearly sixteen, was fair and gentle and as graceful as the flowers she liked to draw. She was the most dependent of the three, and had suffered worst from not having a mother.
‘Do you mean,’ she said anxiously, ‘that you will be away the whole summer?’ She looked as if Mount Kosciusko had crumbled.
‘You’ll be all right. You’re nearly grown up now,’ I teased her.
‘But the holidays will be so dull.’
‘Ask some friends to stay, then.’
‘Oh!’ Her face cleared. ‘Can we? Yes. That would be fun.’
She kissed me more happily goodbye, and went back to her lessons.
My eldest sister and I understood each other very well, and to her alone, knowing I owed it to her, I told the real purpose of my ‘holiday’. She was upset, which I had not expected.
‘Dearest Dan,’ she said, twining her arm in mine and sniffing to stop herself crying, ‘I know that bringing us up has been a grind for you, and if for once you want to do something for your own sake, we ought to be glad, only please do be careful. We do… we do want you back.’
‘I’ll come back,’ I promised helplessly, lending her my handkerchief. ‘I’ll come back.’
The taxi from the air terminal brought me through a tree-filled square to the Earl of October’s London house in a grey drizzle which in no way matched my spirits. Light-hearted, that was me. Springs in my heels.
In answer to my ring the elegant black door was opened by a friendly-faced manservant who took my grip from my hand and said that as his lordship was expecting me he would take me up at once. ‘Up’ turned out to be a crimson-walled drawing-room on the first floor where round an electric heater in an Adam fireplace three men stood with glasses in their hands. Three men standing easily, their heads turned towards the opening door. Three men radiating as one the authority I had been aware of in October. They were the ruling triumvirate of National Hunt racing. Big guns. Established and entrenched behind a hundred years of traditional power. They weren’t taking the affair as effervescently as I was.
‘Mr Roke, my lord,’ said the manservant, showing me in.
October came across the room to me and shook hands.
‘Good trip?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
He turned towards the other men. ‘My two co-Stewards arranged to be here to welcome you.’
‘My name is Macclesfield,’ said the taller of them, an elderly stooping man with riotous white hair. He leaned forward and held out a sinewy hand. ‘I am most interested to meet you, Mr Roke.’ He had a hawk-eyed piercing stare.
‘And this is Colonel Beckett.’ He gestured to the third man, a slender ill-looking person who shook hands also, but with a weak limp grasp. All three of them paused and looked at me as if I had come from outer space.
‘I am at your disposal,’ I said politely.
‘Yes… well, we may as well get straight down to business,’ said October, directing me to a hide-covered armchair. ‘But a drink first?’
‘Thank you.’
He gave me a glass of the smoothest whisky I’d ever tasted, and they all sat down.
‘My horses,’ October began, speaking easily, conversationally, ‘are trained in the stable block adjoining my house in Yorkshire. I do not train them myself, because I am away too often on business. A man named Inskip holds the licence – a public licence – and apart from my own horses he trains several for my friends. At present there are about thirty-five horses in the yard, of which eleven are my own. We think it would be best if you started work as a lad in my stable, and then you can move on somewhere else when you think it is necessary. Clear so far?’
I nodded.
He went on, ‘Inskip is an honest man, but unfortunately he’s also a bit of a talker, and we consider it essential for your success that he should not have any reason to chatter about the way you joined the stable. The hiring of lads is always left to him, so it will have to be he, not I, who hires you.
‘In order to make certain that we are short-handed – so that your application for work will be immediately accepted – Colonel Beckett and Sir Stuart Macclesfield are each sending three young horses to the stables two days from no
w. The horses are no good, I may say, but they’re the best we could do in the time.’
They all smiled. And well they might. I began to admire their staff work.
‘In four days, when everyone is beginning to feel overworked, you will arrive in the yard and offer your services. All right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here is a reference.’ He handed me an envelope. ‘It is from a woman cousin of mine in Cornwall who keeps a couple of hunters. I have arranged that if Inskip checks with her she will give you a clean bill. You can’t appear too doubtful in character to begin with, you see, or Inskip will not employ you.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘Inskip will ask you for your insurance card and an income tax form which you would normally have brought on from your last job. Here they are.’ He gave them to me. ‘The insurance card is stamped up to date and is no problem as it will not be queried in any way until next May, by which time we hope there will be no more need for it. The income tax situation is more difficult, but we have constructed the form so that the address on the part which Inskip has to send off to the Inland Revenue people when he engages you is illegible. Any amount of natural-looking confusion should arise from that; and the fact that you were not working in Cornwall should be safely concealed.’
‘I see,’ I said. And I was impressed, as well.
Sir Stuart Macclesfield cleared his throat and Colonel Beckett pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
‘About this dope,’ I said, ‘you told me your analysts couldn’t identify it, but you didn’t give me any details. What is it that makes you positive it is being used?’
October glanced at Macclesfield, who said in his slow rasping elderly voice, ‘When a horse comes in from a race frothing at the mouth with his eyes popping out and his body drenched in sweat, one naturally suspects that he has been given a stimulant of some kind. Dopers usually run into trouble with stimulants, since it is difficult to judge the dosage needed to get a horse to win without arousing suspicion. If you had seen any of these particular horses we have tested, you would have sworn that they had been given a big overdose. But the test results were always negative.’
‘What do your pharmacists say?’ I asked.
Beckett said sardonically, ‘Word for word? It’s blasphemous.’
I grinned. ‘The gist.’
Beckett said, ‘They simply say there isn’t a dope they can’t identify.’
‘How about adrenalin?’ I asked.
The Stewards exchanged glances, and Beckett said, ‘Most of the horses concerned did have a fairly high adrenalin count, but you can’t tell from one analysis whether that is normal for that particular horse or not. Horses vary tremendously in the amount of adrenalin they produce naturally, and you would have to test them before and after several races to establish their normal output, and also at various stages of their training. Only when you know their normal levels could you say whether any extra had been pumped into them. From the practical point of view… adrenalin can’t be given by mouth, as I expect you know. It has to be injected, and it works instantaneously. These horses were all calm and cool when they went to the starting gate. Horses which have been stimulated with adrenalin are pepped up at that point. In addition to that, a horse often shows at once that he has had a subcutaneous adrenalin injection because the hairs for some way round the site of the puncture stand up on end and give the game away. Only an injection straight into the jugular vein is really foolproof; but it is a very tricky process, and we are quite certain that it was not done in these cases.’
‘The lab chaps,’ said October, ‘told us to look out for something mechanical. All sorts of things have been tried in the past, you see. Electric shocks, for instance. Jockeys used to have saddles or whips made with batteries concealed in them so that they could run bursts of current into the horses they were riding and galvanize them into winning. The horses’ own sweat acted as a splendid conductor. We went into all that sort of thing very thoroughly indeed, and we are firmly of the opinion that none of the jockeys involved carried anything out of the ordinary in any of their equipment.’
‘We have collected all our notes, all the lab notes, dozens of press cuttings, and anything else we thought could be of the slightest help,’ said Macclesfield, pointing to three boxes of files which lay in a pile on a table by my elbow.
‘And you have four days to read them and think about them,’ added October, smiling faintly. ‘There is a room ready for you here, and my man will look after you. I am sorry I cannot be with you, but I have to return to Yorkshire tonight.’
Beckett looked at his watch and rose slowly. ‘I must be going, Edward.’ To me, with a glance as alive and shrewd as his physique was failing, he said, ‘You’ll do. And make it fairly snappy, will you? Time’s against us.’
I thought October looked relieved. I was sure of it when Macclesfield shook my hand again and rasped, ‘Now that you’re actually here the whole scheme suddenly seems more possible… Mr Roke, I sincerely wish you every success.’
October went down to the street door with them, and came back and looked at me across the crimson room.
‘They are sold on you, Mr Roke, I am glad to say.’
Upstairs in the luxurious deep-green carpeted, brass bedsteaded guest room where I slept for the next four nights I found the manservant had unpacked the few clothes I had brought with me and put them tidily on the shelves of a heavy Edwardian wardrobe. On the floor beside my own canvas and leather grip stood a cheap fibre suitcase with rust-marked locks. Amused, I explored its contents. On top there was a thick sealed envelope with my name on it. I slit it open and found it was packed with five-pound notes; forty of them, and an accompanying slip which read ‘Bread for throwing on waters.’ I laughed aloud.
Under the envelope October had provided everything from under-clothes to washing things, jodhpur boots to rainproof, jeans to pyjamas.
Another note from him was tucked into the neck of a black leather jacket.
‘This jacket completes what sideburns begin. Wearing both, you won’t have any character to speak of. They are regulation dress for delinquents! Good luck.’
I eyed the jodhpur boots. They were second-hand and needed polishing, but to my surprise, when I slid my feet into them, they were a good fit. I took them off and tried on a violently pointed pair of black walking shoes. Horrible, but they fitted comfortably also, and I kept them on to get my feet (and eyes) used to them.
The three box files, which I had carried up with me after October had left for Yorkshire, were stacked on a low table next to a small arm-chair, and with a feeling that there was no more time to waste I sat down, opened the first of them, and began to read.
Because I went painstakingly slowly through every word, it took me two days to finish all the papers in those boxes. And at the end of it found myself staring at the carpet without a helpful idea in my head. There were accounts, some in typescript, some in longhand, of interviews the Stewards had held with the trainers, jockeys, head travelling-lads, stable lads, blacksmiths and veterinary surgeons connected with the eleven horses suspected of being doped. There was a lengthy report from a firm of private investigators who had interviewed dozens of stable lads in ‘places of refreshment’, and got nowhere. A memo ten pages long from a bookmaker went into copious details of the market which had been made on the horses concerned: but the last sentence summed it up: ‘We can trace no one person or syndicate which has won consistently on these horses, and therefore conclude that if any one person or syndicate is involved, their betting was done on the Tote.’ Further down the box I found a letter from Tote Investors Ltd., saying that not one of their credit clients had backed all the horses concerned, but that of course they had no check on cash betting at racecourses.
The second box contained eleven laboratory reports of analyses made on urine and saliva samples. The first report referred to a horse called Charcoal and was dated eighteen months earlier. The last gav
e details of tests made on a horse called Rudyard as recently as September, when October was in Australia.
The word ‘negative’ had been written in a neat hand at the end of each report.
The press had had a lot of trouble dodging the laws of libel. The clippings from daily papers in the third box contained such sentences as ‘Charcoal displayed a totally uncharacteristic turn of foot,’ and ‘In the unsaddling enclosure Rudyard appeared to be considerably excited by his success.’
There were fewer references to Charcoal and the following three horses, but at that point someone had employed a news-gathering agency: the last seven cases were documented by clippings from several daily, evening, local and sporting papers.
At the bottom of the clippings I came across a medium sized manilla envelope. On it was written ‘Received from Sports Editor, Daily Scope, June 10th’. This, I realized, was the packet of cuttings collected by Stapleton, the unfortunate journalist, and I opened the envelope with much curiosity. But to my great disappointment, because I badly needed some help, all the clippings except three were duplicates of those I had already read.
Of these three, one was a personality piece on the woman owner of Charcoal, one was an account of a horse (not one of the eleven) going berserk and killing a woman on June 3rd in the paddock at Cartmel, Lancashire, and the third was a long article from a racing weekly discussing famous cases of doping, how they had been discovered and how dealt with. I read this attentively, with minimum results.
After all this unfruitful concentration I spent the whole of the next day wandering round London, breathing in the city’s fumes with a heady feeling of liberation, asking the way frequently and listening carefully to the voices which replied.
In the matter of my accent I thought October had been too hopeful, because two people, before midday, commented on my being Australian. My parents had retained their Englishness until their deaths, but at nine I had found it prudent not to be ‘different’ at school, and had adopted the speech of my new country from that age. I could no longer shed it, even if I had wanted to, but if it was to sound like cockney English, it would clearly have to be modified.