For Kicks

by Dick Francis

  ‘Did you hear what they said before that? When they first got there, and you looked out and saw them?’

  This troubled him. He sat up and forgot to keep his place.

  ‘I didn’t want the boss to know I was still there, see? I ought to have finished that hunter a good bit before then.’

  ‘Yes. Well, you’re all right. They didn’t catch you.’

  He grinned and shook his head.

  ‘What did they say?’ I prompted.

  ‘They were cross about Mickey. They said they would get on with the next one at once.’

  ‘The next what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did they say anything else?’

  He screwed up his thin little face. He wanted to please me, and I knew this expression meant he was thinking his hardest.

  ‘Mr Adams said you had been with Mickey too long, and the boss said yes it was a bad… a bad… um… oh, yes… risk, and you had better leave, and Mr Adams said yes, get on with that as quick as you can and we’ll do the next one as soon as he’s gone.’ He opened his eyes wide in triumph at this sustained effort.

  ‘Say that again,’ I said. ‘The last bit, that’s all.’

  One thing Jerry could do, from long practice with the comics, was to learn by heart through his ears.

  Obediently he repeated, ‘Mr Adams said get on with that as quick as you can and we’ll do the next one as soon as he’s gone.’

  ‘What do you want most on earth?’ I asked.

  He looked surprised and then thoughtful, and finally a dreamy look spread over his face.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘A train,’ he said. ‘One you wind up. You know. And rails and things. And a signal.’ He fell silent in rapture.

  ‘You shall have them,’ I said. ‘As soon as I can get them.’

  His mouth opened.

  I said, ‘Jerry, I’m leaving here. You can’t stay when Mr Adams starts bashing you, can you? So I’ll have to go. But I’ll send you the train. I won’t forget, I promise.’

  The evening dragged away as so many others had done, and we climbed the ladder to our unyeilding beds, where I lay on my back in the dark with my hands laced behind my head and thought about Humber’s stick crashing down somewhere on my body in the morning. Rather like going to the dentist for a drilling, I thought ruefully: the anticipation was worse than the event. I sighed, and went to sleep.

  Operation Eviction continued as much as expected, the next day.

  When I was unsaddling Dobbin after the second exercise Humber walked into the box behind me and his stick landed with a thud across my back.

  I let go of the saddle – which fell on a pile of fresh droppings – and swung round.

  ‘What did I do wrong, sir?’ I said, in an aggrieved voice. I thought I might as well make it difficult for him, but he had an answer ready.

  ‘Cass tells me you were late back at work last Saturday afternoon. And pick up that saddle. What do you think you’re doing, dropping it in that dirt?’

  He stood with his legs planted firmly apart, his eyes judging his distance.

  Well, all right, I thought. One more, and that’s enough.

  I turned round and picked up the saddle. I already had it in my arms and was straightening up when he hit me again, more or less in the same place, but much harder. The breath hissed through my teeth.

  I threw the saddle down again in the dirt and shouted at him. ‘I’m leaving. I’m off. Right now.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said coldly, with perceptible satisfaction. ‘Go and pack. Your cards will be waiting for you in the office.’ He turned on his heel and slowly limped away, his purpose successfully concluded.

  How frigid he was, I thought. Unemotional, sexless and calculating. Impossible to think of him loving, or being loved, or feeling pity, or grief, or any sort of fear.

  I arched my back, grimacing, and decided to leave Dobbin’s saddle where it was, in the dirt. A nice touch, I thought. In character, to the bitter end.

  Chapter 15

  I took the polythene sheeting off the motor-cycle and coasted gently out of the yard. All the lads were out exercising the third lot, with yet more to be ridden when they got back; and even while I was wondering how five of them were possibly going to cope with thirty horses, I met a shifty-looking boy trudging slowly up the road to Humber’s with a kit bag slung over his shoulder. More flotsam. If he had known what he was going to, he would have walked more slowly still.

  I biked to Clavering, a dreary mining town of mean back-to-back terraced streets jazzed up with chromium and glass in the shopping centre, and telephoned to October’s London house.

  Terence answered. Lord October, he said, was in Germany, where his firm were opening a new factory.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘Saturday morning, I think. He went last Sunday, for a week.’

  ‘Is he going to Slaw for the week-end?’

  ‘I think so. He said something about flying back to Manchester, and he’s given me no instructions for anything here.’

  ‘Can you find the addresses and telephone numbers of Colonel Beckett and Sir Stuart Macclesfield for me?’

  ‘Hang on a moment.’ There was fluttering of pages, and Terence told me the numbers and addresses. I wrote them down and thanked him.

  ‘Your clothes are still here, sir,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I grinned. ‘I’ll be along to fetch them quite soon, I think.’

  We rang off, and I tried Beckett’s number. A dry, precise voice told me that Colonel Beckett was out, but that he would be dining at his Club at nine, and could be reached then. Sir Stuart Macclesfield, it transpired, was in a nursing home recovering from pneumonia. I had hoped to be able to summon some help in keeping a watch on Humber’s yard so that when the horse-box left with Kandersteg on board it could be followed. It looked, however, as though I would have to do it myself, as I could visualise the local police neither believing my story nor providing anyone to assist me.

  Armed with a rug and a pair of good binoculars bought in a pawn shop, and also with a pork pie, slabs of chocolate, a bottle of vichy water, and some sheets of foolscap paper, I rode the motor-cycle back through Posset and out along the road which crossed the top of the valley in which Humber’s stables lay. Stopping at the point I had marked on my previous excursion, I wheeled the cycle a few yards down into the scrubby heathland, and found a position where I was off the sky line, more or less out of sight from passing cars, and also able to look down into Humber’s yard through the binoculars. It was one o’clock, and there was nothing happening there.

  I unbuckled the suitcase from the carrier and used it as a seat, settling myself to stay there for a long time. Even if I could reach Beckett on the telephone at nine, he wouldn’t be able to rustle up reinforcements much before the next morning.

  There was, meanwhile, a report to make, a fuller, more formal, more explanatory affair than the notes scribbled in Posset’s post office. I took out the foolscap paper and wrote, on and off, for most of the afternoon, punctuating my work by frequent glances through the binoculars. But nothing took place down at Humber’s except the normal routine of the stable.

  I began…

  ‘To The Earl of October.

  Sir Stuart Macclesfield.

  Colonel Roderick Beckett.

  Sirs,

  The following is a summary of the facts which have so far come to light during my investigations on your behalf, together with some deductions which it seems reasonable to make from them.

  Paul James Adams and Hedley Humber started collaborating in a scheme for ensuring winners about four years ago, when Adams bought the Manor House and came to live at Tellbridge, Northumberland.

  Adams (in my admittedly untrained opinion) has a psychopathic personality, in that he impulsively gives himself pleasure and pursues his own ends without any consideration for other people or much apparent anxiety about the consequences to himself. His intelligence seems to be ab
ove average, and it is he who gives the orders. I believe it is fairly common for psychopaths to be aggressive swindlers: it might be enlightening to dig up his life history.

  Humber, though dominated by Adams, is not as irresponsible. He is cold and controlled at all times. I have never seen him genuinely angry (he uses anger as a weapon) and everything he does seems to be thought out and calculated. Whereas Adams may be mentally abnormal, Humber seems to be simply wicked. His comparative sanity may act as a brake on Adams, and have prevented their discovery before this.

  Jud Wilson, the head travelling lad, and Cass, the head lad, are both involved, but only to the extent of being hired subordinates. Neither of them does as much stable work as their jobs would normally entail, but they are well paid. Both own big cars of less than a year old.

  Adams’ and Humber’s scheme is based on the fact that horses learn by association and connect noises to events. Like Pavlov’s dogs who would come to the sound of a bell because they had been taught it meant feeding time, horses hearing the feed trolley rattling across a stable yard know very well that their food is on the way.

  If a horse is accustomed to a certain consequence following closely upon a certain noise, he automatically expects the consequence whenever he hears the noise. He reacts to the noise in anticipation of what is to come.

  If something frightening were substituted – if, for instance, the rattle of the feed trolley were followed always by a thrashing and no food – the horse would soon begin to fear the noise, because of what it portended.

  Fear is the stimulant which Adams and Humber have used. The appearance of all the apparently “doped” horses after they had won – the staring, rolling eyes and the heavy sweat – was consistent with their having been in a state of terror.

  Fear strongly stimulates the adrenal glands, so that they flood the bloodstream with adrenalin: and the effect of extra adrenalin, as of course you know, is to release the upsurge of energy needed to deal with the situation, either by fighting back or by running away. Running, in this case. At top speed, in panic.

  The laboratory reports stated that the samples taken from all the original eleven horses showed a high adrenalin content, but that this was not significant because horses vary enormously, some always producing more adrenalin than others. I, however, think that it was significant that the adrenalin counts of those eleven horses were uniformly higher than average.

  The noise which triggered off their fear is the high note of the sort of silent whistle normally used for training dogs. Horses can hear it well, though to human ears it is faint: this fact makes it ideal for the purpose, as a more obtrusive sound (a football rattle, for instance) would soon have been spotted. Humber keeps a dog whistle in the drinks compartment of his Bentley.

  I do not yet know for sure how Adams and Humber frighten the horses, but I can make a guess.

  For a fortnight I looked after a horse known in the yard as Mickey (registered name, Starlamp) who had been given the treatment. In Mickey’s case, it was a disaster. He returned from three days’ absence with large raw patches on his fore legs and in a completely unhinged mental state.

  The wounds on his legs were explained by the head lad as having been caused by the application of a blister. But there was no blister paste to be seen, and I think they were ordinary burns caused by some sort of naked flame. Horses are more afraid of fire than of anything else, and it seems probable to me that it is expectation of being burnt that Adams and Humber have harnessed to the sound of a dog whistle.

  I blew a dog whistle to discover its effect on Mickey. It was less than three weeks after the association had been planted, and he reacted violently and unmistakably. If you care to, you can repeat this trial on Six-Ply; but give him room to bolt in safety.

  Adams and Humber chose horses which looked promising throughout their racing careers but had never won on account of running out of steam or guts at the last fence; and there are of course any number of horses like this. They bought them cheaply one at a time from auction sales or out of selling races, instilled into them a noise-fear association, and quietly sold them again. Often, far from losing on the deal, they made a profit (c.f. past histories of horses collected by officer cadets).

  Having sold a horse with such a built-in accelerator, Adams and Humber then waited for it to run in a selling chase at one of five courses: Sedgefield, Haydock, Ludlow, Kelso and Stafford. They seem to have been prepared to wait indefinitely for this combination of place and event to occur, and in fact it has only occurred twelve times (eleven winners and Superman) since the first case twenty months ago.

  These courses were chosen, I imagine, because their extra long run-in gave the most room for the panic to take effect. The horses were often lying fourth or fifth when landing over the last fence, and needed time to overhaul the leaders. If a horse were too hopelessly behind, Adams and Humber could just have left the whistle un-blown, forfeited their stake money, and waited for another day.

  Selling chases were preferred, I think, because horses are less likely to fall in them, and because of the good possibility of the winners changing hands yet again immediately afterwards.

  At first sight it looks as if it would have been safer to have applied this scheme to Flat racing: but Flat racers do not seem to change hands so often, which would lessen the confusion. Then again Humber has never held a Flat licence, and probably can’t get one.

  None of the horses has been galvanised twice, the reason probably being that having once discovered they were not burnt after hearing the whistle they would be less likely to expect to be again. Their reaction would no longer be reliable enough to gamble on.

  All the eleven horses won at very long odds, varying from 10–1 to 50–1, and Adams and Humber must have spread their bets thinly enough to raise no comment. I do not know how much Adams won on each race, but the least Humber made was seventeen hundred pounds, and the most was four thousand five hundred.

  Details of all the processed horses, successful and unsuccessful, are recorded in a blue ledger at present to be found at the back of the third drawer down in the centre one of three green filing cabinets in Humber’s stable office.

  Basically, as you see, it is a simple plan. All they do is make a horse associate fire with a dog whistle, and then blow a whistle as he lands over the last fence.

  No drugs, no mechanical contrivances, no help needed from owner, trainer or jockey. There was only a slight risk of Adams and Humber being found out, because their connection with the horses was so obscure and distant.

  Stapleton, however, suspected them, and I am certain in my own mind that they killed him, although there is no supporting evidence.

  They believe now that they are safe and undetected: and they intend, during the next few days, to plant fear in a horse called Kandersteg. I have left Humber’s employ, and am writing this while keeping a watch on the yard. I propose to follow the horse box when Kandersteg leaves in it, and discover where and how the heat is applied.’

  I stopped writing and picked up the binoculars. The lads were bustling about doing evening stables and I enjoyed not being down there among them.

  It was too soon, I thought, to expect Humber to start on Kandersteg, however much of a hurry he and Adams were in. They couldn’t have known for certain that I would depart before lunch, or even that day, and they were bound to let my dust settle before making a move. On the other hand I couldn’t risk missing them. Even the two miles to the telephone in Posset made ringing up Beckett a worrying prospect. It would take no longer for Kandersteg to be loaded up and carted off than for me to locate Beckett in his Club. Mickey-Starlamp had been both removed and brought back in daylight, and it might be that Humber never moved any horses about by night. But I couldn’t be sure. I bit the end of my pen in indecision. Finally, deciding not to telephone, I added a postscript to the report.

  ‘I would very much appreciate some help in this watch, because if it continues for several days I could easily miss the horse
box through falling asleep. I can be found two miles out of Posset on the Hexham road, at the head of the valley which Humber’s stables lie in.’

  I added the time, the date, and signed my name. Then I folded the report into an envelope, and addressed it to Colonel Beckett.

  I raced down to Posset to put the letter in the box outside the post office. Four miles. I was away for just under six minutes. It was lucky, I think, that I met no traffic on either part of the trip. I skidded to a worried halt at the top of the hill, but all appeared normal down in the stables. I wheeled the motor-cycle off the road again, down to where I had been before, and took a long look through the binoculars.

  It was beginning to get dark and lights were on in nearly all the boxes, shining out into the yard. The dark looming bulk of Humber’s house, which lay nearest to me, shut off from my sight his brick office and all the top end of the yard, but I had a sideways view of the closed doors of the horse box garage, and I could see straight into the far end row of boxes, of which the fourth from the left was occupied by Kandersteg.

  And there he was, a pale washy chestnut, moving across and catching the light as Bert tossed his straw to make him comfortable for the night. I sighed with relief, and sat down again to watch.

  The routine work went on, untroubled, unchanged. I watched Humber, leaning on his stick, make his slow inspection round the yard, and absent-mindedly rubbed the bruises he had given me that morning. One by one the doors were shut and the lights went out until only a single window glowed yellow, the last window along the right hand row of boxes, the window of the lads’ kitchen. I put down the binoculars, and got to my feet and stretched.

  As always on the moors the air was on the move. It wasn’t a wind, scarcely a breeze, more like a cold current flowing round whatever it found in its path. To break its chilling persistence on my back I constructed a rough barricade of the motor-cycle with a bank of brushwood on its roadward, moorward side. In the lea of this shelter I sat on the suitcase, wrapped myself in the rug, and was tolerably warm and comfortable.