by Dick Francis
October himself, accompanied by his retriever, came up on to the moor in a Land Rover to see the horses work. Saturday morning, I had found, was the busiest training day of the week as far as gallops were concerned, and as he was usually in Yorkshire at the week-end he made a point of coming out to watch.
Inskip had us circling round at the top of the hill while he paired off the horses and told their riders what to do.
To me he said, ‘Dan; three-quarter speed gallop. Your horse is running on Wednesday. Don’t over-do him but we want to see how he goes.’ He directed one of the stable’s most distinguished animals to accompany me.
When he had finished giving his orders he cantered off along the broad sweep of green turf which stretched through the moorland scrub, and October drove slowly in his wake. We continued circling until the two men reached the other end of the gallops about a mile and a half away up the gently curved, gently rising track.
‘O.K.’ said Wally to the first pair. ‘Off you go.’
The two horses set off together, fairly steadily at first and then at an increasing pace until they had passed Inskip and October, when they slowed and pulled up.
‘Next two,’ Wally called.
We were ready, and set off without more ado. I had bred, broken and rebroken uncountable race-horses in Australia, but Sparking Plug was the only good one I had so far ridden in England, and I was interested to see how he compared. Of course he was a hurdler, while I was more used to flat racers, but this made no difference, I found: and he had a bad mouth which I itched to do something about, but there was nothing wrong with his action. Balanced and collected, he sped smoothly up the gallop, keeping pace effortlessly with the star performer beside him, and though, as ordered, we went only three-quarters speed at our fastest, it was quite clear that Sparking Plug was fit and ready for his approaching race.
I was so interested in what I was doing that it was not until I had reined in – not too easy with that mouth – and began to walk back, that I realised I had forgotten all about messing up the way I rode. I groaned inwardly, exasperated with myself: I would never do what I had come to England for if I could so little keep my mind on the job.
I stopped with the horse who had accompanied Sparking Plug in front of October and Inskip, for them to have a look at the horses and see how much they were blowing. Sparking Plug’s ribs moved easily: he was scarcely out of breath. The two men nodded, and I and the other lad slid off the horses and began walking them round while they cooled down.
Up from the far end of the gallop came the other horses, pair by pair, and finally a bunch of those who were not due to gallop but only to canter. When everyone had worked, most of the lads remounted and we all began to walk back down the gallop towards the track to the stable. Leading my horse on foot I set off last in the string, with October’s eldest daughter riding immediately in front of me and effectively cutting me off from the chat of the lads ahead. She was looking about her at the rolling vistas of moor, and not bothering to keep her animal close on the heels of the one in front, so that by the time we entered the track there was a ten yard gap ahead of her.
As she passed a scrubby gorse bush a bird flew out of it with a squawk and flapping wings, and the girl’s horse whipped round and up in alarm. She stayed on with a remarkable effort of balance, pulling herself back up into the saddle from somewhere below the horse’s right ear, but under her thrust the stirrup leather broke apart at the bottom, and the stirrup iron itself clanged to the ground.
I stopped and picked up the iron, but it was impossible to put it back on the broken leather.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘What a nuisance.’
She slid off her horse. ‘I might as well walk the rest of the way.’
I took her rein and began to lead both of the horses, but she stopped me, and took her own back again.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but I can quite well lead him myself.’ The track was wide at that point, and she began to walk down the hill beside me.
On closer inspection she was not a bit like her sister Patricia. She had smooth silver blonde hair under a blue head scarf, fair eye lashes, direct grey eyes, a firm friendly mouth, and a composure which gave her an air of graceful reserve. We walked in easy silence for some way.
‘Isn’t it a gorgeous morning,’ she said eventually.
‘Gorgeous,’ I agreed, ‘But cold.’ The English always talk about the weather, I thought: and a fine day in November is so rare as to be remarked on. It would be hotting up for summer, at home…
‘Have you been with the stable long?’ she asked, a little further on.
‘Only about ten days.’
‘And do you like it here?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s a well run stable…’
‘Mr Inskip would be delighted to hear you say so,’ she said in a dry voice.
I glanced at her, but she was looking ahead down the track, and smiling.
After another hundred yards she said, ‘What horse is that that you were riding? I don’t think that I have seen him before, either.’
‘He only came on Wednesday…’ I told her the little I knew about Sparking Plug’s history, capabilities and prospects.
She nodded. ‘It will be nice for you if he can win some races. Rewarding, after your work for him here.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, surprised that she should think like that.
We reached the last stretch to the stable.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said pleasantly, ‘but I don’t know your name.’
‘Daniel Roke,’ I said: and I wondered why to her alone of all the people who had asked me that question in the last ten days it had seemed proper to give a whole answer.
‘Thank you,’ she paused: then having thought, continued in a calm voice which I realised with wry pleasure was designed to put me at my ease, ‘Lord October is my father. I’m Elinor Tarren.’
We had reached the stable gate. I stood back to let her go first, which she acknowledged with a friendly but impersonal smile, and she led her horse away across the yard towards its own box. A thoroughly nice girl, I thought briefly, buckling down to the task of brushing the sweat off Sparking Plug, washing his feet, brushing out his mane and tail, sponging out his eyes and mouth, putting his straw bed straight, fetching his hay and water, and then repeating the whole process with the horse that Patricia had ridden. Patricia, I thought, grinning, was not a nice girl at all.
When I went in to breakfast in the cottage Mrs Allnut gave me a letter which had just arrived for me. The envelope, postmarked in London the day before, contained a sheet of plain paper with a single sentence typed on it.
‘Mr Stanley will be at Victoria Falls three p.m. Sunday.’
I stuffed the letter into my pocket, laughing into my porridge.
There was a heavy drizzle falling when I walked up beside the stream the following afternoon. I reached the gully before October, and waited for him with the rain drops finding ways to trickle down my neck. He came down the hill with his dog as before, telling me that his car was parked above us on the little used road.
‘But we’d better talk here, if you can stand the wet,’ he finished, ‘in case anyone saw us together in the car, and wondered.’
‘I can stand the wet,’ I assured him, smiling.
‘Good… well, how have you been getting on?’
I told him how well I thought of Beckett’s new horse and the opportunities it would give me.
He nodded, ‘Roddy Beckett was famous in the war for the speed and accuracy with which he got supplies moved about. No one ever got the wrong ammunition or all left boots when he was in charge.’
I said ‘I’ve sown a few seeds of doubts about my honesty, here and there, but I’ll be able to do more of that this week at Bristol, and also next week-end, at Burndale. I’m going there on Sunday to play in a darts match.’
‘They’ve had several cases of doping in that village in the past,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You might get a n
ibble, there.’
‘It would be useful…’
‘Have you found the form books helpful?’ he asked, ‘have you given those eleven horses any more thought?’
‘I’ve thought of little else,’ I said, ‘and it seems just possible, perhaps it’s only a slight chance, but it does just seem possible that you might be able to make a dope test on the next horse in the sequence before he runs in a race. That is to say, always providing that there is going to be another horse in the sequence… and I don’t see why not, as the people responsible have got away with it for so long.’
He looked at me with some excitement, the rain dripping off the down-turned brim of his hat.
‘You’ve found something?’
‘No, not really. It’s only a statistical indication. But it’s more than even money, I think, that the next horse will win a selling chase at Kelso, Sedgefield, Ludlow, Stafford or Haydock.’ I explained my reasons for expecting this, and went on, ‘It should be possible to arrange for wholesale saliva samples to be taken before all the selling chases on those particular tracks – it can’t be more than one race at each two-day meeting – and they can throw the samples away without going to the expense of testing them if no… er… joker turns up in the pack.’
‘It’s a tall order,’ he said slowly, ‘but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be done, if it will prove anything.’
‘The analysts might find something useful in the results.’
‘Yes. And I suppose even if they didn’t, it would be a great step forward for us to be able to be on the lookout for a joker, instead of just being mystified when one appeared. Why on earth,’ he shook his head in exasperation, ‘didn’t we think of this months ago? It seems such an obvious way to approach the problem, now that you have done it.’
‘I expect it is because I am the first person really to be given all the collected information all at once, and deliberately search for a connecting factor. All the other investigations seemed to have been done from the other end, so to speak, by trying to find out in each case separately who had access to the horse, who fed him, who saddled him, and so on.’
He nodded gloomily.
‘There’s one other thing,’ I said. ‘The lab chaps told you that as they couldn’t find a dope you should look for something mechanical… do you know whether the horses’ skins were investigated as closely as the jockeys and their kit? It occurred to me the other evening that I could throw a dart with an absolute certainty of hitting a horse’s flank, and any good shot could plant a pellet in the same place. Things like that would sting like a hornet… enough to make any horse shift along faster.’
‘As far as I know, none of the horses showed any signs of that sort of thing, but I’ll make sure. And by the way, I asked the analysts whether horses’ bodies could break drugs down into harmless substances, and they said it was impossible.’
‘Well, that clears the decks a bit, if nothing else.’
‘Yes.’ He whistled to his dog, who was quartering the far side of the gully. ‘After next week, when you’ll be away at Burndale, we had better meet here at this time every Sunday afternoon to discuss progress. You will know if I’m away, because I won’t be here for the Saturday gallops. Incidentally, your horsemanship stuck out a mile on Sparking Plug yesterday. And I thought we agreed that you had better not make too good an impression. On top of which,’ he added, smiling faintly, ‘Inskip says you are a quick and conscientious worker.’
‘Heck… I’ll be getting a good reference if I don’t watch out.’
‘Too right you will,’ he agreed, copying my accent sardonically. ‘How do you like being a stable lad?’
‘It has its moments… Your daughters are very beautiful’
He grinned, ‘Yes: and thank you for helping Elinor. She told me you were most obliging.’
‘I did nothing.’
‘Patty is a bit of a handful,’ he said, reflectively, ‘I wish she’d decide what sort of a job she’d like to do. She knows I don’t want her to go on as she has during her season, never-ending parties and staying out till dawn… well, that’s not your worry, Mr Roke.’
We shook hands as usual, and he trudged off up the hill. It was still drizzling mournfully as I went down.
Sparking Plug duly made the 250 mile journey south to Bristol, and I went with him. The racecourse was some way out of the city, and the horse box driver told me, when we stopped for a meal on the way, that the whole of the stable block had been newly rebuilt there after fire had gutted it.
Certainly the loose boxes were clean and snug, but it was the new sleeping quarters that the lads were in ecstasies about. The hostel was a surprise to me too. It consisted mainly of a recreation room and two long dormitories with about thirty beds in each, made up with clean sheets and fluffy blue blankets. There was a wall light over each bed, polyvinyl tiled flooring, under-floor heating, modern showers in the washroom and a hot room for drying wet clothes. The whole place was warm and light, with colour schemes which were clearly the work of a professional.
‘Ye gods, we’re in the ruddy Hilton,’ said one cheerful boy, coming to a halt beside me just through the dormitory door and slinging his canvas grip on to an unoccupied bed.
‘You haven’t seen the half of it,’ said a bony long-wristed boy in a shrunken blue jersey, ‘up that end of the passage there’s a ruddy great canteen with decent chairs and a telly and a ping pong table and all.’
‘Other voices joined in.
‘It’s as good as Newbury.’
‘Easily.’
‘Better than Ascot, I’d say.’
Heads nodded.
‘They have bunk beds at Ascot, not singles, like this.’
The hostels at Newbury and Ascot were, it appeared, the most comfortable in the country.
‘Anyone would think the bosses had suddenly cottoned on to the fact that we’re human,’ said a sharp faced lad, in a belligerent, rabble-raising voice.
‘It’s a far cry from the bug-ridden doss houses of the old days,’ nodded a desiccated, elderly little man with a face like a shrunken apple. ‘But a fellow told me the lads have it good like this in America all the time.’
‘They know if they don’t start treating us decent they soon won’t get anyone to do the dirty work,’ said the rabble-raiser. ‘Things are changing.’
‘They treat us decent enough where I come from,’ I said, putting my things on an empty bed next to his and nerving myself to be natural, casual, unremarkable. I felt much more self-conscious than I had at Slaw, where at least I knew the job inside out and had been able to feel my way cautiously into a normal relationship with the other lads. But here I had only two nights, and if I were to do any good at all I had got to direct the talk towards what I wanted to hear.
The form books were by now as clear to me as a primer, and for a fortnight I had listened acutely and concentrated on soaking in as much racing jargon as I could, but I was still doubtful whether I would understand everything I heard at Bristol and also afraid that I would make some utterly incongruous impossible mistake in what I said myself.
‘And where do you come from?’ asked the cheerful boy, giving me a cursory looking over.
‘Lord October’s,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, Inskip’s, you mean? You’re a long way from home…’
‘Inskip’s may be all right,’ said the rabble-raiser, as if he regretted it. ‘But there are some places where they still treat us like mats to wipe their feet on, and don’t reckon that we’ve got a right to a bit of sun, same as everyone else.’
‘Yeah,’ said the raw-boned boy seriously. ‘I heard that at one place they practically starve the lads and knock them about if they don’t work hard enough, and they all have to do about four or five horses each because they can’t keep anyone in the yard for more than five minutes!’
I said idly ‘Where’s that, just so I know where to avoid, if I ever move on from Inskip’s?’
‘Up your part of the country…’ he
said doubtfully. ‘I think.’
‘No, further north, in Durham…’ another boy chimed in, a slender, pretty boy with soft down still growing on his cheeks.
‘You know about it too, then?’
He nodded. ‘Not that it matters, only a raving nit would take a job there. It’s a blooming sweat shop, a hundred years out of date. All they get are riff-raff that no one else will have.’
‘It wants exposing,’ said the rabble-raiser belligerently. ‘Who runs this place?’
‘Bloke called Humber,’ said the pretty boy, ‘he couldn’t train ivy up a wall… and he has about as many winners as tits on a billiard ball… You see his head travelling lad at the meetings sometimes, trying to pressgang people to go and work there, and getting the brush off, right and proper.’
‘Someone ought to do something,’ said the rabble-raiser automatically: and I guessed that this was his usual refrain: ‘someone ought to do something’; but not, when it came to the point, himself.
There was a general drift into the canteen, where the food proved to be good, unlimited, and free. A proposal to move on to a pub came to nothing when it was discovered both that the nearest was nearly two (busless) miles away and that the bright warm canteen had some crates of beer under its counter.
It was easy enough to get the lads started on the subject of doping, and they seemed prepared to discuss it endlessly. None of the twenty odd there had ever, as far as they would admit, given ‘anything’ to a horse, but they all knew someone who knew someone who had. I drank my beer and listened and looked interested, which I was.
‘… nobbled him with a squirt of acid as he walked out of the bleeding paddock…’
‘… gave it such a whacking dollop of stopping powder that it died in its box in the morning…’
‘Seven rubber bands came out in the droppings…’
‘… overdosed him so much that he never even tried to jump the first fence: blind, he was, stone blind…’