Odds against sh-1

by Dick Francis

  FIVE

  Two days later I went back through the porticoed columned doorway of Hunt Radnor Associates, a lot more alive than when I last came out.

  I got a big hullo from the girl on the switchboard, went up the curving staircase very nearly whistling, and was greeted by a barrage of ribald remarks from the Racing Section. What most surprised me was the feeling I had of coming home: I had never thought of myself as really belonging to the agency before, even though down at Aynsford I had realised that I very much didn’t want to leave it. A bit late, that discovery. The skids were probably under me already.

  Chico grinned widely. ‘So you made it.’

  ‘Well… Yes.’

  ‘I mean, back here to the grindstone.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But,’ he cast a rolling eye at the clock, ‘late as usual.’

  ‘Go stuff yourself,’ I said.

  Chico threw out an arm to the smiling department. ‘Our Sid is back, his normal charming bloody self. Work in the agency can now begin.’

  ‘I see I still haven’t got a desk,’ I observed, looking round. No desk. No roots. No real job. As ever.

  ‘Sit on Dolly’s, she’s kept it dusted for you.’

  Dolly looked at Chico, smiling, the mother-hunger showing too vividly in her great blue eyes. She might be the second best head of department the agency possessed, with a cross-referencing filing-index mind like a computer, she might be a powerful, large, self-assured woman of forty-odd with a couple of marriages behind her and an ever hopeful old bachelor at her heels, but she still counted her life a wasteland because her body couldn’t produce children. Dolly was a terrific worker, overflowing with intensely female vitality, excellent drinking company, and very, very sad.

  Chico didn’t want to be mothered. He was prickly about mothers. All of them in general, not just those who abandoned their tots in push-chairs at police stations near Barnes Bridge. He jollied Dolly along and deftly avoided her tentative maternal invitations.

  I hitched a hip on to a long accustomed spot on the edge of Dolly’s desk, and swung my leg.

  ‘Well, Dolly my love, how’s the sleuthing trade?’ I said.

  ‘What we need,’ she said with mock tartness, ‘is a bit more work from you and a lot less lip.’

  ‘Give me a job, then.’

  ‘Ah, now.’ She pondered. ‘You could…’ she began, then stopped. ‘Well, no… perhaps not. And it had better be Chico who goes to Lambourn; some trainer there wants a doubtful lad checked on…’

  ‘So there’s nothing for me?’

  ‘Er… well…’ said Dolly. ‘No.’ She had said no a hundred times before. She had never once said yes.

  I made a face at her, picked up her telephone, pressed the right button, and got through to Radnor’s secretary.

  ‘Joanie? This is Sid Halley. Yes… back from Beyond, that’s it. Is the old man busy? I’d like a word with him.’

  ‘Big deal,’ said Chico.

  Joanie’s prim voice said, ‘He’s got a client with him just now. When she’s gone I’ll ask him, and ring you back.’

  ‘O.K.’ I put down the receiver.

  Dolly raised her eyebrows. As head of the department she was my immediate boss, and in asking direct for a session with Radnor I was blowing agency protocol a raspberry. But I was certain that her constant refusal to give me anything useful to do was a direct order from Radnor. If I wanted the drain unblocked I would have to go and pull out the plug. Or go on my knees to stay at all.

  ‘Dolly, love, I’m tired of kicking my heels. Even against your well-worn desk, though the view from here is ravishing.’ She was wearing, as she often did, a cross-over cream silk shirt: it crossed over at a point which on a young girl would have caused a riot. On Dolly it still looked pretty potent, owing to the generosity of nature and the disposal of her arrangements.

  ‘Are you chucking it in?’ said Chico, coming to the point.

  ‘It depends on the old man,’ I said. ‘He may be chucking me out.’

  There was a brief, thoughtful silence in the department. They all knew very well how little I did. How little I had been content to do. Dolly looked blank, which wasn’t helpful.

  Jones-boy clattered in with a tray of impeccable unchipped tea mugs. He was sixteen; noisy, rude, anarchistic, callous, and probably the most efficient office boy in London. His hair grew robustly nearly down to his shoulders, wavy and fanatically clean, dipping slightly in an expensive styling at the back. From behind he looked like a girl, which never disconcerted him. From in front his bony, acned face proclaimed him unprepossessingly male. He spent half his pay packet and his Sundays in Carnaby Street and the other half on week nights chasing girls. According to him, he caught them. No girls had so far appeared in the office to corroborate his story.

  Under the pink shirt beat a stony heart; inside the sprouting head hung a big ‘So What?’ Yet it was because this amusing, ambitious, unsocial creature invariably arrived well before his due hour to get his office arrangements ready for the day that he had found me before I died. There was a moral there, somewhere.

  He gave me a look. ‘The corpse has returned, I see.’

  ‘Thanks to you,’ I said idly, but he knew I meant it. He didn’t care, though.

  He said, ‘Your blood and stuff ran through a crack in the linoleum and soaked the wood underneath. The old man was wondering if it would start dry rot or something.’

  ‘Jones-boy,’ protested Dolly, looking sick. ‘Get the hell out of here, and shut up.’

  The telephone rang on her desk. She picked it up and listened, said, ‘All right,’ and disconnected.

  ‘The old man wants to see you. Right away.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I stood up.

  ‘The flipping boot?’ asked Jones-boy interestedly.

  ‘Keep your snotty nose out,’ said Chico.

  ‘And balls to you…’

  I went out smiling, hearing Dolly start to deal once again with the running dog fight Chico and Jones-boy never tired of. Downstairs, across the hall, into Joanie’s little office and through into Radnor’s.

  He was standing by the window, watching the traffic doing its nut in the Cromwell Road. This room, where the clients poured out their troubles, was restfully painted a quiet grey, carpeted and curtained in crimson and furnished with comfortable arm-chairs, handy little tables with ashtrays, pictures on the walls, ornaments, and vases of flowers. Apart from Radnor’s small desk in the corner, it looked like an ordinary sitting-room, and indeed everyone believed that he had bought the room intact with the lease, so much was it what one would expect to find in a graceful, six-storeyed, late Victorian town house. Radnor had a theory that people exaggerated and distorted facts less in such peaceful surroundings than in the formality of a more orthodox office.

  ‘Come in, Sid,’ he said. He didn’t move from the window, so I joined him there. He shook hands.

  ‘Are you sure you’re fit enough to be here? You haven’t been as long as I expected. Even knowing you…’ he smiled slightly, with watching eyes.

  I said I was all right. He remarked on the weather, the rush-hour and the political situation, and finally worked round to the point we both knew was at issue.

  ‘So, Sid, I suppose you’ll be looking around a bit now?’

  Laid on the line, I thought.

  ‘If I wanted to stay here…’

  ‘If? Hm, I don’t know.’ He shook his head very slightly.

  ‘Not on the same terms, I agree.’

  ‘I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out.’ He sounded genuinely regretful, but he wasn’t making it easy.

  I said with careful calm. ‘You’ve paid me for nothing for two years. Well, give me a chance now to earn what I’ve had. I don’t really want to leave.’

  He lifted his head slightly like a pointer to a scent, but he said nothing. I ploughed on.

  ‘I’ll work for you for nothing, to make up for it. But only if it’s real, decent work. No more sitting around. It w
ould drive me mad.’

  He gave me a hard stare and let out a long breath like a sigh.

  ‘Good God. At last,’ he said. ‘And it took a bullet to do it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sid, have you ever seen a zombie wake up?’

  ‘No,’ I said ruefully, understanding him. ‘It hasn’t been as bad as that?’

  He shrugged one shoulder. ‘I saw you racing, don’t forget. You notice when a fire goes out. We’ve had the pleasant, flippant ashes drifting round this office, that’s all.’ He smiled deprecatingly at his flight of fancy: he enjoyed making pictures of words. It wasted a lot of office time, on the whole.

  ‘Consider me alight again, then,’ I grinned. ‘And I’ve brought a puzzle back with me. I want very much to sort it out.’

  ‘A long story?’

  ‘Fairly, yes.’

  ‘We’d better sit down, then.’

  He waved me to an arm-chair, sank into one himself, and prepared to listen with the stillness and concentration which sent him time and time again to the core of a problem.

  I told him about Kraye’s dealing in racecourses. Both what I knew and what I guessed. When at length I finished he said calmly, ‘Where did you get hold of this?’

  ‘My father-in-law, Charles Roland, tossed it at me while I was staying with him last week-end. He had Kraye as a house guest.’ The subtle old fox, I thought, throwing me in at the deep end: making me wake up and swim.

  ‘And Roland got it from where?’

  ‘The Clerk of the Course at Seabury told him that the directors were worried about too much share movement, that it was Kraye who got control of Dunstable, and they were afraid he was at it again.’

  ‘But the rest, what you’ve just told me, is your own supposition?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Based on your appraisal of Kraye over one week-end?’

  ‘Partly on what he showed me of his character, yes. Partly on what I read of his papers…’ With some hesitation I told him about my snooping and the photography. ‘… The rest, I suppose, a hunch.’

  ‘Hmm. It needs checking… Have you brought the films with you?’

  I nodded, took them out of my pocket, and put them on the little table beside me.

  ‘I’ll get them developed.’ He drummed his fingers lightly on the arm of the chair, thinking. Then, as if having made a decision, said more briskly, ‘Well, the first thing we need is a client.’

  ‘A client?’ I echoed absent-mindedly.

  ‘Of course. What else? We are not the police. We work strictly for profit. Ratepayers don’t pay the overheads and salaries in this agency. The clients do.’

  ‘Oh… yes, of course.’

  ‘The most likely client in this case is either Seabury Racecourse executive, or perhaps the National Hunt Committee. I think I should sound out the Senior Steward first, in either case. No harm in starting at the top.’

  ‘He might prefer to try the police,’ I said, ‘free.’

  ‘My dear Sid, the one thing people want when they employ private investigators is privacy. They pay for privacy. When the police investigate something, everyone knows about it. When we do, they don’t. That’s why we sometimes get criminal cases when it would undoubtedly be cheaper to go to the police.’

  ‘I see. So you’ll try the Senior Steward…’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘You will.’

  ‘I?’

  ‘Naturally. It’s your case.’

  ‘But it’s your agency… he is used to negotiating with you.’

  ‘You know him too,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I used to ride for him, and that puts me on a bad footing for this sort of thing. I’m a jockey to him, an ex-jockey. He won’t take me seriously.’

  Radnor shrugged a shoulder. ‘If you want to take on Kraye, you need a client. Go and get one.’

  I knew very well that he never sent even senior operatives, let alone inexperienced ones, to arrange or angle for an assignment, so that for several moments I couldn’t really believe that he intended me to go. But he said nothing else, and eventually I stood up and went towards the door.

  ‘Sandown Races are on today,’ I said tentatively. ‘He’s sure to be there.’

  ‘A good opportunity.’ He looked straight ahead, not at me.

  ‘I’ll try it, then.’

  ‘Right.’

  He wasn’t letting me off. But then he hadn’t kicked me out either. I went through the door and shut it behind me, and while I was still hesitating in disbelief I heard him inside the room give a sudden guffaw, a short, sharp, loud, triumphant snort of laughter.

  I walked back to my flat, collected the car, and drove down to Sandown. It was a pleasant day, dry, sunny, and warm for November, just right for drawing a good crowd for steeple-chasing.

  I turned in through the racecourse gates, spirits lifting, parked the car (a Mercedes S.L.230 with automatic gears, power assisted steering, and a strip on the back saying NO HAND SIGNALS), and walked round to join the crowd outside the weighing room door. I could no longer go through it. It had been one of the hardest things to get used to, the fact that all the changing rooms and weighing rooms which had been my second homes for fourteen years were completely barred to me from the day I rode my last race. You didn’t lose just a job when you handed in your jockey’s licence, you lost a way of life.

  There were a lot of people to talk to at Sandown, and as I hadn’t been racing for six weeks I had a good deal of gossip to catch up on. No one seemed to know about the shooting, which was fine by me, and I didn’t tell them. I immersed myself very happily in the racecourse atmosphere and for an hour Kraye retreated slightly into the background.

  Not that I didn’t keep an eye on my purpose, but until the third race the Senior Steward, Viscount Hagbourne, was never out of a conversation long enough for me to catch him.

  Although I had ridden for him for years and had found him undemanding and fair, he was in most respects still a stranger. An aloof, distant man, he seemed to find it difficult to make ordinary human contacts, and unfortunately he had not proved a great success as Senior Steward. He gave the impression, not of power in himself, but of looking over his shoulder at power behind: I’d have said he was afraid of incurring the disapproval of the little knot of rigidly determined men who in fact ruled racing themselves, regardless of who might be in office at the time. Lord Hagbourne postponed making decisions until it was almost too late to make them, and there was still a danger after that that he would change his mind. But all the same he was the front man until his year of office ended, and with him I had to deal.

  At length I fielded him neatly as he turned away from the Clerk of the Course and forestalled a trainer who was advancing upon him with a grievance. Lord Hagbourne, with one of his rare moments of humour, deliberately turned his back on the grievance and consequently greeted me with more warmth than usual.

  ‘Sid, nice to see you. Where have you been lately?’

  ‘Holidays,’ I explained succinctly. ‘Look, sir, can I have a talk with you after the races? There’s something I want to discuss urgently.’

  ‘No time like the present,’ he said, one eye on the grievance. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘No, sir. It needs time and all your attention.’

  ‘Hm?’ The grievance was turning away. ‘Not today, Sid, I have to get home. What is it? Tell me now.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about the takeover bid for Seabury Racecourse.’

  He looked at me, startled. ‘You want…?’

  ‘That’s right. It can’t be said out here where you will be needed at any moment by someone else. If you could just manage twenty minutes at the end of the afternoon…?’

  ‘Er… what is your connection with Seabury?’

  ‘None in particular, sir. I don’t know if you remember, but I’ve been connected’ (a precise way of putting it) ‘with Hunt Radnor Associates for the last two years. Various… er… facts about Seabury have come our way and Mr
Radnor thought you might be interested. I am here as his representative.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Very well, Sid, come to the Stewards’ tea room after the last. If I’m not there, wait for me. Right?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  I walked down the slope and then up the iron staircase to the jockeys’ box in the stand, smiling at myself. Representative. A nice big important word. It covered anything from an ambassador down. Commercial travellers had rechristened themselves with its rolling syllables years ago… they had done it because of the jokes, of course. It didn’t sound the same, somehow, starting off with ‘Did you hear the one about the representative who stopped at a lonely farmhouse…?’ Rodent officers, garbage disposal and sanitary staff: pretty new names for rat-catchers, dustmen and road sweepers. So why not for me?

  ‘Only idiots laugh at nothing,’ said a voice in my ear. ‘What the hell are you looking so pleased about all of a sudden? And where the blazes have you been this last month?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve missed me?’ I grinned, not needing to look round. We went together through the door of the high-up jockeys’ box, two of a kind, and stood looking out over the splendid racecourse.

  ‘Best view in Europe.’ He sighed. Mark Witney, thirty-eight years old, racehorse trainer. He had a face battered like a boxer’s from too many racing falls and in the two years since he hung up his boots and stopped wasting he had put on all of three stone. A fat, ugly man. We had a host of memories in common, a host of hard ridden races. I liked him a lot.

  ‘How’s things?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, fair, fair. They’ll be a damn sight better if that animal of mine wins the fifth.’

  ‘He must have a good chance.’

  ‘He’s a damn certainty, boy. A certainty. If he doesn’t fall over his god-damned legs. Clumsiest sod this side of Hades.’ He lifted his race glasses and looked at the number board. ‘I see poor old Charlie can’t do the weight again on that thing of Bob’s… That boy of Plumtree’s is getting a lot of riding now. What do you think of him?’

  ‘He takes too many risks,’ I said. ‘He’ll break his neck.’

  ‘Look who’s talking… No, seriously, I’m considering taking him on. What do you think?’ He lowered his glasses. ‘I need someone available regularly from now on and all the ones I’d choose are already tied up.’