by Dick Francis
A large figure in navy blue hurtled straight at him from the opposite direction and brought him down with a diving hug round the knees. The sunglasses flew off in a shiny arc and the two large figures lay in a writhing entwined mass, the blue uniform uppermost and holding his own. I went to his help and sat on Muscles’ ankles, crushing his feet sideways with no compunction at all. He screeched with pain and stopped struggling, but I fear I didn’t immediately stand up.
Jody wrenched himself free from Rupert and ran past me. The colonel, who with his lady had been watching the proceedings with astonishment, decided it was time for some soldierly action and elegantly stuck out his foot.
Jody tripped over and fell sprawling. The colonel put more energy into it, leant down and took hold of the collar of Jody’s coat. Rupert, rallying, came to his aid, and between them they too more or less sat on Jody, pinning him to the ground.
‘What now?’ Rupert panted.
‘Wait for the police,’ I said succinctly.
Muscles and Jody both heaved about a good deal at this plan but didn’t succeed in freeing themselves. Muscles complained that I’d broken his ankle. Jody, under the colonel’s professional ministrations, seemed to have difficulty saying anything at all. The colonel was in fact so single-handedly efficient that Rupert stood up and dusted himself down and looked at me speculatively.
I jerked my head in the direction of box fourteen, where the door still stood half open, showing only darkness within. He nodded slowly and went that way. Switched on the light. Stepped inside. He came back with a face of stone and three bitter words.
‘Energise is dead.’
15
Rupert fetched some rope with which he ignominiously tied Jody’s hands behind his back before he and the colonel let him get up, and the colonel held the free end of rope so that Jody was to all intents on a lead. Once up, Jody aimed a kick at the colonel and Rupert told him to stop unless he wanted his ankles tied as well.
Rupert and my man in blue uniform did a repeat job on Muscles, whose ankles were not in kicking shape and whose language raised eyebrows even on the lady magistrate, who had heard more than most.
The reason for Muscles’ ubiquitous sunglasses was at once apparent, now that one could see his face. He stood glowering like a bull, seething with impotent rage, hopping on one foot and pulling against the tethering rope which led back from his wrists to my man in blue. His eyelids, especially the lower, were grossly distorted, and even in the outside lighting looked bright pink with inflammation. One could pity his plight, which was clearly horrid.
‘I know you,’ Rupert said suddenly, looking at him closely. ‘What’s the matter with your eyes?’
‘Mind your own effing business.’
‘Macrahinish. That’s what your name is. Macrahinish.’
Muscles didn’t comment. Rupert turned to me. ‘Don’t you know him? Perhaps he was before your time. He’s a vet. A struck-off vet. Struck off the vets’ register and warned off the racecourse. And absolutely not allowed to set foot in a racing stable.’
Muscles-Macrahinish delivered himself of an unflattering opinion of racing in general and Rupert in particular.
Rupert said, ‘He was convicted of doping and fraud and served a term in jail. He ran a big doping ring and supplied all the drugs. He looks older and there’s something wrong with his eyes, but that’s who this is, all right. Macrahinish.’
I turned away from the group and walked over to the brightly lit loosebox. Swung the door wide. Looked inside.
My beautiful black horse lay flat on his side, legs straight, head flaccid on the straw. The liquid eye was dull and opaque, mocking the sheen which still lay on his coat, and he still had pieces of unchewed hay half in and half out of his mouth. There was no blood, and no visible wound. I went in and squatted beside him, and patted him sadly with anger and regret.
Jody and Macrahinish had been unwillingly propelled in my wake. I looked up to find them inside the box, with Rupert, the colonel, his wife, and the man in blue effectively blocking the doorway behind them.
‘How did you kill him?’ I asked, the bitterness apparent in my voice.
Macrahinish’s reply did not contain the relevant information.
I straightened up and in doing so caught sight of a flat brown attaché case half hidden in the straw by the horse’s tail. I bent down again and picked it up. The sight of it brought a sound and a squirm from Macrahinish, and he began to swear in earnest when I balanced it on the manger and unfastened the clips.
The case contained regular veterinarian equipment, neatly stowed in compartments. I touched only one thing, lifting it carefully out.
A plastic bag containing a clear liquid. A bag plainly proclaiming the contents to be sterile saline solution.
I held it out towards Jody and said, ‘You dripped alcohol straight into my veins.’
‘You were unconscious,’ he said disbelievingly.
‘Shut up, you stupid fool,’ Macrahinish screamed at him.
I smiled. ‘Not all the time. I remember nearly everything about that night.’
‘He said he didn’t,’ Jody said defensively to Macrahinish and was rewarded by a look from the swollen eyes which would have made a non-starter of Medusa.
‘I went to see if you still had Energise,’ I said. ‘And I found you had.’
‘You don’t know one horse from another,’ he sneered. ‘You’re just a mug. A blind greedy mug.’
‘So are you,’ I said. ‘The horse you’ve killed is not Energise.’
‘It is!’
‘Shut up,’ screamed Macrahinish in fury. ‘Keep your stupid sodding mouth shut.’
‘No,’ I said to Jody. ‘The horse you’ve killed is an American horse called Black Fire.’
Jody looked wildly down at the quiet body.
‘It damn well is Energise,’ he insisted. ‘I’d know him anywhere.’
‘Jesus,’ Macrahinish shouted. ‘I’ll cut your tongue out.’
Rupert said doubtfully to me, ‘Are you sure it’s not Energise?’
‘Positive.’
‘He’s just saying it to spite me,’ said Jody furiously. ‘I know it’s Energise. See that tiny bald patch on his shoulder? That’s Energise.’
Macrahinish, beyond speech, tried to attack him, tied hands and dicky ankle notwithstanding. Jody gave him a vague look, concentrating only on the horse.
‘You are saying,’ Rupert suggested, ‘that you came to kill Energise and that you’ve done it.’
‘Yes,’ said Jody triumphantly.
The word hung in the air, vibrating. No one said anything. Jody looked round at each watching face, at first with defiant angry pride, then with the first creeping of doubt, and finally with the realisation of what Macrahinish had been trying to tell him, that he should never have been drawn into admitting anything. The fire visibly died into glum and chilly embers.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ he said sullenly. ‘Macrahinish did. I didn’t want to kill him at all, but Macrahinish insisted.’
A police car arrived with two young and persistent constables who seemed to find nothing particularly odd in being called to the murder of a horse.
They wrote in their notebooks that five witnesses, including a magistrate, had heard Jody Leeds admit that he and a disbarred veterinary surgeon had broken into a racing stable after midnight with the intention of putting to death one of the horses. They noted that a horse was dead. Cause of death, unknown until an autopsy could be arranged.
Hard on their heels came Rupert’s doctor, an elderly man with a paternal manner. Yawning but uncomplaining, he accompanied me to find my security guard, who to my great relief was sitting on the ground with his head in his hands, awake and groaning healthily. We took him into Rupert’s office, where the doctor stuck a plaster on the dried wound on his forehead, gave him some tablets and told him to lay off work for a couple of days. He smiled weakly and said it depended if his boss would let him.
One of the young p
olicemen asked if he’d seen who had hit him.
‘Big man with sunglasses. He was creeping along behind me, holding a ruddy great chunk of wood. I heard something… I turned and shone my torch, and there he was. He swung at my head. Gave me a right crack, he did. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground.’
Reassured by his revival I went outside again to see what was happening.
The magistrate and the colonel seemed to have gone home, and Rupert was down in the yard talking to some of his own stable staff who had been woken by the noise.
Macrahinish was hopping about on one leg, accusing me of having broken the other and swearing he’d have me prosecuted for using undue force to protect my property. The elderly doctor phlegmatically examined the limb in question and said that in his opinion it was a sprain.
The police had rashly untied the Macrahinish wrists and were obviously relying on the leg injury to prevent escape. At the milder word sprain they produced handcuffs and invited Macrahinish to stick his arms out. He refused and resisted and because they, as I had done, underestimated both his strength and his violence, it took a hectic few minutes for them to make him secure.
‘Resisting arrest,’ they panted, writing it in the notebooks. ‘Attacking police officers in the course of their duty.’
Macrahinish’s sunglasses lay on the gravel in the main yard, where he had lost them in the first tackle. I walked down to where they shone in the light and picked them up. Then I took them slowly back to him and put them in his handcuffed hands.
He stared at me through the raw-looking eyelids. He said nothing. He put the sunglasses on, and his fingers were trembling.
‘Ectropion,’ said the doctor, as I walked away.
‘What?’ I said.
‘The condition of his eyes. Ectropion. Poor fellow.’
The police made no mistakes with Jody. He sat beside Macrahinish in the back of the police car with handcuffs on his wrists and the Arctic in his face. When the police went to close the doors ready to leave, he leant forwards and spoke to me through rigid lips.
‘You shit,’ he said.
Rupert invited the rest of my security firm indoors for warmth and coffee and in his office I introduced them to him.
‘My friend in grey flannel,’ I said, ‘is Charlie Canter-field. My big man in blue is Bert Huggerneck. My injured friend with the dried blood on his face is Owen Idris.’
Rupert shook hands with each and they grinned at him. He sensed immediately that there was more in their smiles than he would have expected, and he turned his enquiring gaze on me.
‘Which firm do they come from?’ he asked.
‘Charlie’s a merchant banker, Bert’s a bookies’ clerk, and Owen helps in my workshop.’
Charlie chuckled and said in his fruitiest Eton, ‘We also run a nice line in a census, if you should ever need one.’
Rupert shook his head helplessly and fetched brandy and glasses from a cupboard.
‘If I ask questions,’ he said, pouring lavishly, ‘will you answer them?’
‘If we can,’ I said.
‘That dead horse in the stable. Is it Energise?’
‘No. Like I said, it’s a horse I bought in the States called Black Fire.’
‘But the bald patch… Jody was so certain.’
‘I did that bald patch with a razor blade. The horses were extraordinarily alike, apart from that. Especially at night, because of being black. But there’s one certain way of identifying Black Fire. He has his American racing number tattoed inside his lip.’
‘Why did you bring him here?’
‘I didn’t want to risk the real Energise. Before I saw Black Fire in America I couldn’t see how to entice Jody safely. Afterwards, it was easier.’
‘But I didn’t get the impression earlier this evening,’ Rupert said pensively, ‘that you expected them to kill the horse.’
‘No… I didn’t know about Macrahinish. I mean, I didn’t know he was a vet, or that he could over-rule Jody. I expected Jody just to try to steal the horse and I wanted to catch him in the act. Catch him physically committing a positive criminal act which he couldn’t possibly explain away. I wanted to force the racing authorities, more than the police, to see that Jody was not the innocent little underdog they believed.’
Rupert thought it over. ‘Why didn’t you think he would kill him?’
‘Well… it did cross my mind, but on balance I thought it unlikely, because Energise is such a good horse. I thought Jody would want to hide him away somewhere so that he could make a profit on him later, even if he sold him as a point-to-pointer. Energise represents money, and Jody has never missed a trick in that direction.’
‘But Macrahinish wanted him dead,’ Rupert said.
I sighed. ‘I suppose he thought it safer.’
Rupert smiled. ‘You had put them in a terrible fix. They couldn’t risk you being satisfied with getting your horse back. They couldn’t be sure you couldn’t somehow prove they had stolen it originally. But if you no longer had it, you would have found it almost impossible to make allegations stick.’
‘That’s right,’ Charlie agreed. ‘That’s exactly what Steven thought.’
‘Also,’ I said, ‘Jody wouldn’t have been able to bear the thought of me getting the better of him. Apart from safety and profit, he would have taken Energise back simply for revenge.’
‘You know what?’ Charlie said, ‘it’s my guess that he probably put his entire bank balance on Padellic at Stratford, thinking it was Energise, and when Padellic turned up sixth he lost the lot. And that in itself is a tidy little motive for revenge.’
‘Here,’ Bert said appreciatively. ‘I wonder how much Ganser bleeding Mays is down the drain for! Makes you bleeding laugh, don’t it? There they all were, thinking they were backing a ringer, and we’d gone and put the real Padellic back where he belonged.’
‘Trained by Rupert,’ I murmured, ‘to do his best.’
Rupert looked at us one by one and shook his head. ‘You’re a lot of rogues.’
We drank our brandy and didn’t dispute it.
‘Where did the American horse come from?’ Rupert asked.
‘Miami.’
‘No… This morning.’
‘A quiet little stable in the country,’ I said. ‘We had him brought to the census point…’
‘And you should have bleeding seen him,’ Bert interrupted gleefully. ‘Our capitalist here, I mean. Whizzing those three horses in and out of horseboxes faster than the three card trick.’
‘I must say,’ Rupert said thoughtfully, ‘that I’ve wondered just how he managed it.’
‘He took bleeding Energise out of Jody’s box and put it in the empty stall of the trailer which brought Black Fire, Then he put Padellic where Energise had been, in Jody’s box. Then he put bleeding Black Fire where Padellic had been, in your box, that is. All three of them buzzing in a circle like a bleeding merry-go-round.’
Charlie said, smiling, ‘All change at the census. Padellic started from here and went to Stratford. Black Fire started from the country and came here. And Energise started from Jody’s…’ He stopped.
‘And went to where?’ Rupert asked.
I shook my head. ‘He’s safe, I promise you.’ Safe with Allie at Hantsford Manor, with Miss Johnston and Mrs Fairchild-Smith. ‘We’ll leave him where he is for a week or two.’
‘Yeah,’ Bert said, explaining. ‘Because, see, we’ve had Jody Leeds and that red-eyed hunk of muscle of his exploding all over us with temper-temper, but what about that other one? What about that other one we’ve kicked right where it hurts, eh? We don’t want to risk Energise getting the chop after all from Mr Squeezer bleeding Ganser down the bleeding drain Mays.’
16
Owen and I went back to London. I drove, with him sitting beside me fitfully dozing and pretending in between times that he didn’t have a headache.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I know what it feels like. You’ve got a proper thumper
and notwithstanding that snide crack to the doctor about your boss not letting you take a couple of days off, that’s what you’re going to get.’
He smiled.
‘I’m sorry about your head,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘How?’
‘Charlie said.’
I glanced across at him. His face in the glow from the dashboard looked peaceful and contented. ‘It’s been,’ he said drowsily, ‘a humdinger of a day.’
It was four in the morning when we reached the house and pulled into the driveway. He woke up slowly and shivered, his eyes fuzzy with fatigue.
‘You’re sleeping in my bed,’ I said,‘ and I’m taking the sofa.’ He opened his mouth. ‘Don’t argue,’ I added.
‘All right.’
I locked the car and we walked to the front door, and that’s where things went wrong.
The front door was not properly shut. Owen was too sleepy to realise at once, but my heart dropped to pavement level the instant I saw it.
Burglars, I thought dumbly. Today of all days.
I pushed the door open. Everything was quiet. There was little furniture in the hall and nothing looked disturbed. Upstairs, though, it would be like a blizzard…
‘What is it?’ said Owen, realising that something was wrong.
‘The workshop door,’ I said, pointing.
‘Oh no!’
That too was ajar, and there was no question of the intruder having used a key. The whole lock area was split, the raw wood showing in jagged layers up and down the jamb.
We walked along the carpeted passage, pushed the door wider, and took one step through on to concrete.
One step, and stopped dead.
The workshop was an area of complete devastation.
All the lights were on. All the cupboard doors and drawers were open, and everything which should have been in them was out and scattered and smashed. The work benches were overturned and the racks of tools were torn from their moorings and great chunks of plaster had been gouged out of the walls.
