by Dick Francis
‘My bugger’ll beat yours with his eyes shut on Wednesday.’
‘You’ve got a ruddy hope…’
‘… Yours couldn’t run a snail to a close finish.’
‘… The jockey made a right muck of the start and never got in touch…’
‘… Fat as a pig and bloody obstinate as well.’
The easy chat ebbed and flowed while the air grew thick with cigarette smoke and the warmth of too many lungs breathing the same box of air. A game of darts between some inaccurate players was in progress in one corner, and the balls of bar billiards clicked in another. I lolled on a hard chair with my arm hooked over the back and watched Paddy and one of Granger’s lads engage in a needle match of dominoes. Horses, cars, football, boxing, films, the last local dance, and back to horses, always back to horses. I listened to it all and learned nothing except that these lads were mostly content with their lives, mostly good natured, mostly observant and mostly harmless.
‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ said a challenging voice in my ear.
I turned my head and looked up at him. ‘Yeah,’ I said languidly.
These were the only eyes I had seen in Yorkshire which held anything of the sort of guile I was looking for. I gave him back his stare until his lips curled in recognition that I was one of his kind.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Dan,’ I said, ‘and yours?’
‘Thomas Nathaniel Tarleton.’ He waited for some reaction, but I didn’t know what it ought to be.
‘T. N. T.’ said Paddy obligingly, looking up from his dominoes. ‘Soupy.’ His quick gaze flickered over both of us.
‘The high explosive kid himself,’ I murmured.
Soupy Tarleton smiled a small, carefully dangerous smile: to impress me, I gathered. He was about my own age and build, but much fairer, with the reddish skin which I had noticed so many Englishmen had. His light hazel eyes protruded slightly in their sockets, and he had grown a narrow moustache on the upper lip of his full, moist-looking mouth. On the little finger of his right hand he wore a heavy gold ring, and on his left wrist, an expensive wrist watch. His clothes were of good material, though distinctly sharp in cut, and the enviable fleece-lined quilted jacket he carried over his arm would have cost him three weeks’ pay.
He showed no signs of wanting to be friendly. After looking me over as thoroughly as I had him, he merely nodded, said ‘See you,’ and detached himself to go over and watch the bar billiards.
Grits brought a fresh half pint from the bar and settled himself on the bench next to Paddy.
‘You don’t want to trust Soupy,’ he told me confidentially, his raw boned unintelligent face full of kindness.
Paddy put down a double three, and looking round at us gave me a long, unsmiling scrutiny.
‘There’s no need to worry about Dan, Grits,’ he said. ‘He and Soupy, they’re alike. They’d go well in double harness. Birds of a feather, that’s what they are.’
‘But you said I wasn’t to trust Soupy,’ objected Grits, looking from one to the other of us with troubled eyes.
‘That’s right,’ said Paddy flatly. He put down a three-four and concentrated on his game.
Grits shifted six inches towards Paddy and gave me one puzzled, embarrassed glance. Then he found the inside of his beer mug suddenly intensely interesting and didn’t raise his eyes to mine again.
I think it was at that exact moment that the charade began to lose its light-heartedness. I liked Paddy and Grits, and for three days they had accepted me with casual good humour. I was not prepared for Paddy’s instant recognition that it was with Soupy that my real interest lay, nor for his immediate rejection of me on that account. It was a shock which I ought to have foreseen, and hadn’t: and it should have warned me what to expect in the future, but it didn’t.
Colonel Beckett’s staff work continued to be of the highest possible kind. Having committed himself to the offensive, he was prepared to back the attack with massive and immediate reinforcements: which is to say that as soon as he had heard from October that I was immobilized in the stable with three useless horses, he set about liberating me.
On Tuesday afternoon, when I had been with the stable for a week, Wally, the head lad, stopped me as I carried two buckets full of water across the yard.
‘That horse of yours in number seventeen is going tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to look sharp in the morning with your work, because you are to be ready to go with it at twelve-thirty. The horse box will take you to another racing stables, down near Nottingham. You are to leave this horse there and bring a new one back. Right?’
‘Right,’ I said. Wally’s manner was cool with me; but over the week-end I had made myself be reconciled to the knowledge that I had to go on inspiring a faint mistrust all round, even if I no longer much liked it when I succeeded.
Most of Sunday I had spent reading the form books, which the others in the cottage regarded as a perfectly natural activity; and in the evening, when they all went down to the pub, I did some pretty concentrated work with a pencil, making analyses of the eleven horses and their assisted wins. It was true, as I had discovered from the newspaper cuttings in London, that they all had different owners, trainers and jockeys: but it was not true that they had absolutely nothing in common. By the time I had sealed my notes into an envelope and put it with October’s notebook into the game bag under some form books, away from the inquiring gaze of the beer-happy returning lads, I was in possession of four unhelpful points of similarity.
First, the horses had all won selling chases – races where the winner was subsequently put up for auction. In the auctions three horses had been bought back by their owners, and the rest had been sold for modest sums.
Second, in all their racing lives all the horses had proved themselves to be capable of making a show in a race, but had either no strength or no guts when it came to a finish.
Third, none of them had won any races except the ones for which they were doped, though they had occasionally been placed on other occasions.
Fourth, none of them had won at odds of less than ten to one.
I learned both from October’s notes and from the form books that several of the horses had changed trainers more than once, but they were such moderate, unrewarding animals that this was only to be expected. I was also in possession of the useless information that the horses were all by different sires out of different dams, that they varied in age from five to eleven, and that they were not all of the same colour. Neither had they all won on the same course, though in this case they had not all won on different courses either; and geographically I had a vague idea that the courses concerned were all in the northern half of the country – Kelso, Haydock, Sedgefield, Stafford and Ludlow. I decided to check them on a map, to see if this was right, but there wasn’t one to be found chez Mrs Allnut.
I went to bed in the crowded little dormitory with the other lads’ beery breaths gradually overwhelming the usual mixed clean smells of boot polish and hair oil, and lost an argument about having the small sash window open more than four inches at the top. The lads all seemed to take their cue from Paddy, who was undoubtedly the most aware of them, and if Paddy declined to treat me as a friend, so would they: I realized that if I had insisted on having the window tight shut they would probably have opened it wide and given me all the air I wanted. Grinning ruefully in the dark I listened to the squeaking bed springs and their sleepy, gossiping giggles as they thumbed over the evening’s talk; and as I shifted to find a comfortable spot on the lumpy mattress I began to wonder what life was really like from the inside for the hands who lived in my own bunk house, back home.
Wednesday morning gave me my first taste of the biting Yorkshire wind, and one of the lads, as we scurried round the yard with shaking hands and running noses, cheerfully assured me that it could blow for six months solid, if it tried. I did my three horses at the double, but by the time the horse box took me and one of them out of the yard at twe
lve-thirty I had decided that if the gaps in my wardrobe were anything to go by, October’s big square house up the drive must have very efficient central heating.
About four miles up the road I pressed the bell which in most horse boxes connects the back compartment to the cab. The driver stopped obediently, and looked enquiringly at me when I walked along and climbed up into the cab beside him.
‘The horse is quiet,’ I said, ‘and it’s warmer here.’
He grinned and started off again, shouting over the noise of the engine. ‘I didn’t have you figured for the conscientious type, and I was damn right. That horse is going to be sold and has got to arrive in good condition… the boss would have a fit if he knew you were up in front.’
I had a pretty good idea the boss, meaning Inskip, wouldn’t be at all surprised; bosses, judging by myself, weren’t as naïve as all that.
‘The boss can stuff himself,’ I said unpleasantly.
I got a sidelong glance for that, and reflected that it was dead easy to give oneself a bad character if one put one’s mind to it. Horse box drivers went to race meetings in droves, and had no duties when they got there. They had time to gossip in the canteen, time all afternoon to wander about and wag their tongues. There was no telling what ears might hear that there was a possible chink in the honesty of the Inskip lads.
We stopped once on the way to eat in a transport café, and again a little further on for me to buy myself a couple of woollen shirts, a black sweater, some thick socks, woollen gloves and a knitted yachting cap like those the other lads had worn that bitter morning. The box driver, coming into the shop with me to buy some socks for himself, eyed my purchases and remarked that I seemed to have plenty of money. I grinned knowingly, and said it was easy to come by if you knew how; and I could see his doubts of me growing.
In mid-afternoon we rolled in to a racing stable in Leicestershire, and it was here that the scope of Beckett’s staff work became apparent. The horse I was to take back and subsequently care for was a useful hurdler just about to start his career as a novice ’chaser, and he had been sold to Colonel Beckett complete with all engagements. This meant, I learned from his former lad, who handed him over to me with considerable bitterness, that he could run in all the races for which his ex-owner had already entered him.
‘Where is he entered?’ I asked.
‘Oh, dozens of places, I think – Newbury, Cheltenham, Sandown, and so on, and he was going to start next week at Bristol.’ The lad’s face twisted with regret as he passed the halter rope into my hand. ‘I can’t think what on earth persuaded the Old Man to part with him. He’s a real daisy, and if I ever see him at the races not looking as good and well cared for as he does now, I’ll find you and beat the living daylights out of you, I will straight.’
I had already discovered how deeply attached racing lads became to the horses they looked after, and I understood that he meant what he said.
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
‘Sparking Plug… God awful name, he’s no plug… Hey, Sparks, old boy… hey, boy… hey, old fellow…’ He fondled the horse’s muzzle affectionately.
We loaded him into the horse box and this time I did stay where I ought to be, in the back, looking after him. If Beckett were prepared to give a fortune for the cause, as I guessed he must have done to get hold of such an ideal horse in so few days, I was going to take good care of it.
Before we started back I took a look at the road map in the cab, and found to my satisfaction that all the race courses in the country had been marked in on it in indian ink. I borrowed it at once, and spent the journey studying it. The courses where Sparking Plug’s lad had said he was entered were nearly all in the south. Overnight stops, as requested. I grinned.
The five race courses where the eleven horses had won were not, I found, all as far north as I had imagined. Ludlow and Stafford, in fact, could almost be considered southern, especially as I found I instinctively based my view of the whole country from Harrogate. The five courses seemed to bear no relation to each other on the map: far from presenting a tidy circle from which a centre might be deduced, they were all more or less in a curve from north east to south west, and I could find no significance in their location.
I spent the rest of the journey back as I spent most of my working hours, letting my mind drift over what I knew of the eleven horses, waiting for an idea to swim to the surface like a fish in a pool, waiting for the disconnected facts to sort themselves into a pattern. But I didn’t really expect this to happen yet, as I knew I had barely started, and even electronic computers won’t produce answers if they are not fed enough information.
On Friday night I went down to the pub in Slaw and beat Soupy at darts. He grunted, gestured to the bar billiards, and took an easy revenge. We then drank a half pint together, eyeing each other. Conversation between us was almost non-existent, nor was it necessary: and shortly I wandered back to watch the dart players. They were no better than the week before.
‘You beat Soupy, didn’t you Dan?’ one of them said.
I nodded, and immediately found a bunch of darts thrust into my hand.
‘If you can beat Soupy you must be in the team.’
‘What team?’ I asked.
‘The stable darts team. We play other stables, and have a sort of Yorkshire League. Sometimes we go to Middleham or Wetherby or Richmond or sometimes they come here. Soupy’s the best player in Granger’s team. Could you beat him again, do you think, or was it a fluke?’
I threw three darts at the board. They all landed in the twenty. For some unknown reason I had always been able to throw straight.
‘Cor,’ said the lads. ‘Go on.’
I threw three more: the twenty section got rather crowded.
‘You’re in the team, mate, and no nonsense,’ they said.
‘When’s the next match?’ I asked.
‘We had one here a fortnight ago. Next one’s next Sunday at Burndale, after the football. You can’t play football as well as darts, I suppose?’
I shook my head. ‘Only darts.’
I looked at the one dart still left in my hand. I could hit a scuttling rat with a stone; I had done it often when the men had found one round the corn bins and chased it out. I saw no reason why I couldn’t hit a galloping horse with a dart: it was a much bigger target.
‘Put that one in the bull,’ urged the lad beside me.
I put it in the bull. The lads yelled with glee.
‘We’ll win the league this season,’ they grinned. Grits grinned too. But Paddy didn’t.
Chapter 4
October’s son and daughters came home for the week-end, the elder girl in a scarlet T.R.4 which I grew to know well by sight as she drove in and out past the stables, and the twins more sedately, with their father. As all three were in the habit of riding out when they were at home Wally told me to saddle up two of my horses to go out with the first string on Saturday, Sparking Plug for me and the other for Lady Patricia Tarren.
Lady Patricia Tarren, as I discovered when I led out the horse in the half light of early dawn and held it for her to mount, was a raving beauty with a pale pink mouth and thick curly eyelashes which she knew very well how to use. She had tied a green head-scarf over her chestnut hair, and she wore a black and white harlequined ski-ing jacket to keep out the cold. She was carrying some bright green woollen gloves.
‘You’re new,’ she observed, looking up at me through the eyelashes. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Dan… Miss,’ I said. I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea what form of address an earl’s daughter was accustomed to. Wally’s instructions hadn’t stretched that far.
‘Well… give me a leg up, then.’
I stood beside her obediently, but as I leaned forward to help her she ran her bare hand over my head and around my neck, and took the lobe of my right ear between her fingers. She had sharp nails, and she dug them in. Her eyes were wide with challenge. I looked straight back. When I didn’
t move or say anything she presently giggled and let go and calmly put on her gloves. I gave her a leg up into the saddle and she bent down to gather the reins, and fluttered the fluffy lashes close to my face.
‘You’re quite a dish, aren’t you, Danny boy,’ she said, ‘with those googoo dark eyes.’
I couldn’t think of any answer to her which was at all consistent with my position. She laughed, nudged the horse’s flanks, and walked off down the yard. Her sister, mounting a horse held by Grits, looked from twenty yards away in the dim light to be much fairer in colouring and very nearly as beautiful. Heaven help October, I thought, with two like that to keep an eye on.
I turned to go and fetch Sparking Plug and found October’s eighteen-year-old son at my elbow. He was very like his father, but not yet as thick in body or as easily powerful in manner.
‘I shouldn’t pay too much attention to my twin sister,’ he said in a cool, bored voice, looking me up and down, ‘she is apt to tease.’ He nodded and strolled over to where his horse was waiting for him; and I gathered that what I had received was a warning off. If his sister behaved as provocatively with every male she met, he must have been used to delivering them.
Amused, I fetched Sparking Plug, mounted, and followed all the other horses out of the yard, up the lane, and on to the edge of the moor. As usual on a fine morning the air and the view were exhilarating. The sun was no more than a promise on the far distant horizon and there was a beginning-of-the-world quality in the light. I watched the shadowy shapes of the horses ahead of me curving round the hill with white plumes streaming from their nostrils in the frosty air. As the glittering rim of the sun expanded into full light the colours sprang out bright and clear, the browns of the jogging horses topped with the bright stripes of the lads’ ear-warming knitted caps and the jolly garments of October’s daughters.