She was silent for a few moments as she absorbed the enormity of what I’d said.
“Are you absolutely sure it’s what you want?”
“No,” I said, “I’m not absolutely sure. But I know I hate what I’ve got.” I held up my left forearm and its plastic attachment. “Anything would be better than this thing.”
“There’s a risk with any surgery,” Marina said.
“I know there is, but I’m pretty healthy, and I’m not decrepit just yet. I wouldn’t think twice about it if I needed surgery for anything else.”
“How about the drugs? You’ll have to take them for the rest of your life to prevent rejection. What are the side effects?”
I’d almost forgotten that I was married to someone with a doctorate in molecular biology.
“Dr. Bryant told me that the drugs are getting better all the time and any side effects are generally slight. Some people don’t have any at all.”
“How slight?” she asked. “And how many people do have substantial side effects? And what are they?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling like a miscreant schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework.
“Well, I think you should ask.”
“Let’s do it now.”
I called Harry the Hands, using the direct number printed at the top of his letter, and was quite surprised to find him in his office.
“I didn’t really think you’d be there on Good Friday.”
“I’m on call, and accidents don’t stop happening just because it’s a bank holiday. I’ve been in the operating room much of the night, trying to save the hand of a young farmer who foolishly got it stuck in an electric chain hoist.”
“And did you save it?” I asked.
“Of course. Well, I think so. Time will tell.” I could hear him yawning. “Now, Sid, how can I help?”
“My wife has some questions for you.”
“Fire away.”
I let Marina talk with him, using the speakerphone so I could hear both sides of the conversation. Every time Marina raised some argument against, Harry was able to counter with a convincing response.
As I listened, I realized how desperately I wanted Harry to win each point. I suppose it was an indicator of how much I yearned for the transplant.
“OK, then,” said Marina eventually, “it’s Sid’s call.”
“Are you sure you’re happy?” I said to her.
“Yes, if you are.”
“OK,” I said. “Harry, let’s get going.”
“Not quite so fast,” he replied through the speaker. “We have to do some paperwork first, and you will also need another assessment with an independent psychiatrist, but I think that will be a formality. Perhaps you could come to see me at the hospital sometime next week?”
“Sure,” I said. “How about Monday?”
Did I sound too eager?
“That’s Easter Monday, and I won’t be on call,” he said. “How about two o’clock on Wednesday? I’ll need to get a psychiatrist, and mornings never seem to be a good time for shrinks.”
“Wednesday at two is fine by me,” I said. “How quickly after that is it all likely to happen?”
“Well,” he said, “that depends on how long it takes to find the donor. It could be a week or it might be a year or even more. Nobody knows. We will need a telephone number at which you can always be contacted, day or night, the moment a suitable hand does become available.”
And in the meantime, I thought, hope for rain and careless motorcyclists.
• • •
JUDY HAMMOND called again at six o’clock.
“Bob still won’t tell me what is going on, but he has agreed to talk to you,” she said. “But not on the telephone. He doesn’t trust it. Can you come over to our place?”
Did I trust Robert Price any more than he trusted the telephone?
“No,” I said. “I can’t, not tonight. Tell him to go and use a pay phone if he thinks his is bugged.”
“How about yours?” she said.
The police had long stopped listening in to my telephone calls. Did I think anyone else had taken over?
“I’ll take the chance if he will.”
“I’ll talk to him,” she said. “But I’ve had to threaten to leave him to get him this far.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said wistfully, “so am I. And I’m not sure things can ever be the same again.”
She was blaming me. I could hear it in her voice. But she needed to look closer to home to find the real culprit.
“And, Judy,” I said firmly, “I don’t want to speak to him if he’s been in contact with Billy McCusker.”
“He hasn’t,” Judy replied confidently.
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s even more afraid of Billy McCusker than he is of you, or of the police.”
And so he should be, I thought. “Then get him to call me.”
“I’ll try,” Judy said.
• • •
ROBERT PRICE called me an hour later from a public-phone box in Wantage.
“I don’t trust the phones,” he said, “not with all that hacking stuff. You go to a phone box and call me back at this number.” He gave me the number of the box he was in.
“Robert,” I said, “you’re being overdramatic.”
“If you want me to answer any questions, you’ll have to go and phone me from somewhere else other than your home.”
“OK,” I said. “Wait there. I’ll call you in ten minutes.”
Much to Marina’s irritation, I drove the Range Rover over to Aynsford to use Charles’s phone.
“What do you want?” Robert asked aggressively, answering at the first ring. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”
“Happily,” I said, “but not if you’re fixing races.”
“Who says I am?”
“Come on, Robert,” I said. “We both know you are, so stop playing around. Was it McCusker’s idea?”
“Oh God,” he said. “What a mess.”
“So help me sort it out. Tell me about Maine Visit in the handicap hurdle at Newbury on Hennessy day.” It was the first of the three horses that he’d ridden in Sir Richard’s suspect races.
“What about him?” he asked. “I just made sure he didn’t win. He didn’t have much chance anyway.”
I realized that that was what they all said, as if, in some way, it diminished their guilt. Even if it wasn’t true.
“Was that the first horse you ever stopped for him?”
“No,” he said without elaboration.
“So what was?”
There was a long pause.
“Robert?”
“Summer Nights,” he said.
I could hardly believe it. Summer Nights was the best horse in Brian Hammond’s yard, probably his best horse ever. Winner of one Cheltenham Gold Cup as well as two King George VI chases, Summer Nights was a true star in the world of steeplechasing.
“When?” I asked.
He sighed audibly down the line.
“In the Newton Gold Cup at Ascot two years ago.”
“He must surely have started favorite,” I said.
“He did. Odds-on in a field of only four.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“We plowed through the last open ditch on the way up from Swinley Bottom, and I immediately pulled him up and jumped off as if he was hurt.”
I vaguely remembered seeing it on the television at the time.
“But why did you plow through the fence? Summer Nights is the best jumper there is.”
“I asked him for a big stride, far too big. Poor old Summer didn’t know what to do. Confused, he was, but he did as I asked. He tried to clear it, but it was too
far even for him, and it was much further than I’d realized. I was shit scared that I’d really hurt him, but he was fine.”
“Didn’t anyone suspect?”
“No. Summer and I were close up but still at the back of the field, and we were racing directly towards the TV cameras at that point. All anyone saw was Summer plowing through the fence from head-on. No one saw that I’d stood him so far off. And, anyway, everyone was more concerned that he was hurt.”
“But why?” I asked.
There was another long pause.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“Tell me anyway.”
“I met McCusker about three or four years ago. He approached me, asking for information. At first, I told him to get lost, but . . .” He paused again. “He offered me money. All he wanted was to know if any of the horses in the Hammond yard were slightly off-color or particularly well—you know, that sort of thing.”
“You knew he was a bookmaker?”
“Yes. Of course.”
For a jockey to communicate such insider information to a bookmaker—or to anyone else, for that matter—was strictly against the Rules of Racing, and Robert Price knew that too. The penalty was disqualification from the sport for up to five years.
“How much did he pay you?” I asked.
“A couple of hundred each time—not much. But I desperately needed the money. I’d just bought my cottage, and I had a nasty fall at Wincanton. Broke my leg. Sidelined for four months, all through the winter, and I was having real trouble paying the mortgage.”
As McCusker would have probably worked out.
“Are you still selling information to him?”
“He’s a right bastard, let me tell you. He’s screwed me good and proper.”
“How?” I asked with encouragement.
“Bloody fixed me, didn’t he? After the first few times, when he sent me the cash, he said he didn’t like putting banknotes in the mail so he wanted to hand them over in person. He set up a meeting in a multistory parking lot in Oxford. He handed over a brown envelope of cash, and he insisted I count it there and then. I must be bloody naïve or something. Next thing I know, one of those memory-card things arrives at my place with a video on it of me taking the money. All in bloody Technicolor. You could see him handing over an envelope, then me counting the cash—all in tenners, it was—and then I stuff the bulging envelope into my coat pocket, shake his hand and walk off out of the picture. You could see everything, except, of course, McCusker’s back is towards the camera all the time so it doesn’t show his face, only mine—and in glorious close-up.”
“So what happened next?” I asked.
“He told me he wanted me to stop Summer Nights in the Newton the following Saturday or he would send the video to the BHA. I told him it was ridiculous. I couldn’t stop old Summer because there was such a small field, and the other runners weren’t up to much. But he told me to find a way. Fall off, if you have to, he said, but make sure you don’t win.” He paused. “Bloody desperate, I was, in the race, I can tell you. Summer is so sure-footed, he didn’t even stumble or peck or anything, and I couldn’t just roll off the side for no reason, now could I? He was traveling so well, and I was getting desperate. That’s when I decided to stand him off the open ditch.”
“Have you stopped him any other times?” I asked.
“No. But I live in fear of McCusker asking again.”
“How many horses have you stopped altogether?”
“A few. Too many.” Robert sounded thoroughly miserable. “Sid, I’m going to lose my license, aren’t I?”
Probably, I thought.
How often, I wondered, did just a tiny little bit of temptation turn into a runaway train, spiraling out of control towards destruction? Quite a number if Billy McCusker was involved.
“Why did you tell McCusker that I was asking you questions?”
“Because I was scared,” he said.
I hadn’t been entirely sure it had been him, but now I was.
“How did you tell him?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How did you tell McCusker that I was asking you questions? Did you phone him, or what?”
“Yeah, I phoned him.”
“So what’s his number?”
He didn’t want to tell me, but I wasn’t completely against using threatening tactics myself.
“I’m sure Judy Hammond would love to hear that her father’s stable jockey is stopping his horses from winning,” I said menacingly. “Or that the health of the star horse in his yard was placed in jeopardy by being deliberately stood too far off a fence.”
“She wouldn’t believe you,” Robert said.
“Oh, I think she might,” I replied. “I rode for her father too, you know. And, anyway, are you prepared to take the risk?”
“Bastard,” he said with feeling.
“What’s McCusker’s number?” I asked again.
He told me.
It was a cell number beginning 07. I scribbled it down on the notepad on Charles’s desk, hoping that McCusker hadn’t changed it. It was the first piece in the jigsaw of me getting to him rather than the other way around.
“How often do you call him?”
“Never,” he said. “Well, almost never. Not now. But he gave me that number right at the beginning so I could phone him with any information. I still had the number in my contacts list, so I called it after you’d been at my cottage last week.”
“And McCusker himself answered?”
“He sure did. After only one ring.”
• • •
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Invoice won the Victor Ludorum Chase at Sandown by four lengths without so much as breaking into a sweat, taking the lead coming up to the last fence and striding away to the winning post unchallenged.
I watched it on the television with Saskia in the living room.
“Did you ever win that race, Daddy?” she asked.
“No, darling,” I said. “But I won lots of other races at that racetrack.”
“Can I learn to ride?” Sassy asked.
“Of course, darling,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mommy about it.”
But I knew that Mommy wasn’t very keen on the idea. I’d suggested two or three times over the years that we might buy a pony for Saskia, but it had always come to nothing. Marina was desperately worried that Saskia would get hurt as I had.
Mommy had always been “risk-averse.” I supposed it was something to do with her work in researching cancers.
In contrast, Daddy had always been “risk-inclined,” kicking horses hard into fences when it would have been much safer to take a slight, steadying pull.
Who dares, wins—and all that stuff.
As true for jockeys as for the Special Air Service.
16
On Wednesday morning Saskia went back to school after the Easter break, and I took the train from Banbury to London for my two o’clock appointment with Harry the Hands at Queen Mary’s Hospital, and also with the psychiatrist, one Dr. Tristram Spakeman, a bow-tied eccentric who seemed to me to have caught a touch of madness from his patients.
“Do you ever worry about dying?” he asked me by way of introduction.
“Yes,” I said, “all the time. But I’m not obsessive about it.”
He hummed and made some notes in a spiral-bound notebook. Perhaps he thought that he should be the one deciding if I was obsessed or not.
“Would you describe yourself as a normal person?” he asked.
What should I say? I didn’t think I was that normal, but, then again, I was hardly abnormal either.
“Pretty normal,” I said. “I have two eyes and two ears, which is normal, but only one hand, which isn’t.” And, thankfully, my black eye from the Towcester racetrack parking lot had almost completel
y faded away.
“Does it worry you that you only have one hand?”
“No,” I said. “Worry is too strong a word. I’d say it frustrates me.”
“Are you easily frustrated?”
I felt like saying that I was frustrated by his questions but decided against it.
“Quite easily, I suppose.”
“Do my questions frustrate you?”
Wow!
“A bit.”
“Yes,” he said, “I’d think they would frustrate me too. But they have to be asked.” He smiled at me in a slightly unnerving way. “Now, Sid . . . is it all right if I call you Sid?”
“You can call me what you like,” I said. I looked down at his business card in my hand. “Shall I call you Tristram?”
“I’ve been called worse,” he said, smiling again. “Now, Sid, tell me about your parents.”
“Now, Tristram,” I replied, mocking him slightly, “what have my parents got to do with me having a hand transplant?”
“I’m trying to get to know you better,” he said, “so I can make a reasoned analysis of your mental state.”
“My mental state is fine,” I said, “and my parents had little to do with it. My father was killed in an accident before I was born, and my mother died of cancer when I was sixteen.”
“Do you miss them?” he asked.
“I don’t miss my father because I never knew him. But, yes, I suppose I do miss my mother. I wish she could have been alive to see my daughter.”
“Did you cry when she died?”
“Buckets,” I said. “But I got over it, like everyone who loses their mother.”
“Some people never get over it,” the doctor said. “A lot of depression is grief-related.”
“But I’m not depressed,” I said.
“No.” He made another note in his book.
He went on asking me questions for nearly an hour, and I began to like him more as the time progressed. He had me talking about all sorts of things I wouldn’t have imagined: dreams, hopes for the future, fears, even what I thought about when I was driving the car.
Seemingly, the only topics we didn’t discuss were race fixing and Billy McCusker.
“Right,” the doctor said at length. “That will do.”
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