Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

  I listened to some unexciting messages on my answering machine, typed a report on my secure word processor, printed it and put it ready for mailing. For reports and anything personal I used a computer system that wasn’t connected to any phone line. No one could in consequence tap into it and, as a precaution against thieves, I used unbreakable passwords. It was my second system that could theoretically be accessed; the one connected by modem to the big wide world of universal information. Any snooper was welcome to anything found there.

  On the subject of the management of secrecy, my cynical mentor had said, “Never, ever tell your right hand what your left hand is doing. Er ...,” he added, “whoops. Sorry, Sid.”

  “It’ll cost you a pint.”

  “And,” he went on later, drinking, “keep back-up copies of completed sensitive inquiries in a bank vault, and wipe the information from any computer systems in your office. If you use random passwords, and change them weekly, you should be safe enough while you’re actually working on something, but once you’ve finished, get the back-up to the bank and wipe the office computer, like I said.”

  “All right.”

  “Never forget,” he told me, “that the people you are investigating may go to violent lengths to stop you.”

  He had been right about that.

  “Never forget that you don’t have the same protection as the police do. You have to make your own protection. You have to be careful.”

  “Maybe I should look for another job.”

  “No, Sid,” he said earnestly, “you have a gift for this. You listen to what I tell you and you’ll do fine.”

  He had taught me for the two years I’d spent doing little but drift in the old Radnor detection agency after the end of my racing life and, for nearly three years since, I’d lived mostly by his precepts. But he was dead now, and Radnor himself also, and I had to look inward for wisdom, which could be a variable process, not always ultraproductive.

  I could try to comfort Rachel by telling her I had bad dreams also, but I could never have told her how vivid and liquefying they could be. That night, after I’d eased off the arm and showered and gone peacefully to bed, I fell asleep thinking of her, and descended after midnight into a familiar dungeon.

  It was always the same.

  I dreamed I was in a big dark space, and some people were coming to cut off both my hands.

  Both.

  They were making me wait, but they would come. There would be agony and humiliation and helplessness ... and no way out.

  I semi-awoke in shaking, sweating, heart-thudding terror and then realized with flooding relief that it wasn’t true, I was safe in my own bed—and then remembered that it had already half happened in fact, and also that I’d come within a fraction once of a villain’s shooting the remaining hand off. As soon as I was awake enough to be clear about the present actual not-too-bad state of affairs I slid back reassured into sleep, and that night the whole appalling nightmare cycled again ... and again.

  I forced myself to wake up properly, to sit up and get out of bed and make full consciousness take over. I stood under the shower again and let cool water run through my hair and down my body. I put on a terry cloth bathrobe and poured a glass of milk, and sat in an armchair in the sitting room with all the lights on.

  I looked at the space where a left hand had once been, and I looked at the strong whole right hand that held a glass, and I acknowledged that often, both waking as well as sleeping, I felt, and could not repress, stabs of savage, petrifying fear that one day it would indeed be both. The trick was not to let the fear show, nor to let it conquer, nor rule, my life.

  It was pointless to reflect that I’d brought the terrors on myself. I had chosen to be a jockey. I had chosen to go after violent crooks. I was at that moment actively seeking out someone who knew how to cut off a horse’s foot with one chop.

  My own equivalent of the off-fore held a glass of milk.

  I had to be mentally deranged.

  But then there were people like Rachel Ferns.

  In one way or another I had survived many torments, and much could have been avoided but for my own obstinate nature. I knew by then that whatever came along, I would deal with it. But that child had had her hair fall out and had found her beloved pony’s foot, and none of that was her fault. No nine-year-old mind could sleep sweetly under such assaults.

  Oh God, Rachel, I thought, I would dream your nightmares for you if I could.

  In the morning I made a working analysis in five columns of the Ferns pony and the three two-year-olds. The analysis took the form of a simple graph, ruled in boxes. Across the top of the page I wrote: Factors, Ferns, Cheltenham, Aintree, York, and down the left-hand column, Factors, I entered “date,” “name of owner,” “racing program,” “motive” and finally, “who knew of victim’s availability?” I found that although I could think of answers to that last question, I hadn’t the wish to write them in, and after a bit of indecision I phoned Kevin Mills at The Pump and, by persistence, reached him.

  “Sid,” he said heartily, “the warning will be in the paper tomorrow. You’ve done your best. Stop agitating.”

  “Great,” I said, “but could you do something else? Something that could come innocently from The Pump, but would raise all sorts of reverberations if I asked directly myself.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as ask Topline Foods for a list of the guests they entertained at a sponsors’ lunch at Aintree the day before the National.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Will you do it?”

  He said, “What are you up to?”

  “The scoop is still yours. Exclusive.”

  “I don’t know why I trust you.”

  “It pays off,” I said, smiling.

  “It had better.” He put down his receiver with a crash, but I knew he would do what I asked.

  It was Friday morning. At Epsom that day they would be running the Coronation Cup and also the Oaks, the fillies’ equivalent of the Derby. It was also lightly raining: a weak warm front, it seemed, was slowly blighting southern England.

  Racecourses still drew me as if I were tethered to them with bungee elastic, but before setting out I telephoned the woman whose colt’s foot had been amputated during the night after the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

  “I’m sorry to bother you again, but would you mind a few more questions?”

  “Not if you can catch the bastards.”

  “Well ... was the two-year-old alone in his field?”

  “Yes he was. It was only a paddock. Railed, of course. We kept him in the paddock nearest to the house, that’s what is so infuriating. We had two old hacks turned out in the field beyond him, but the vandals left them untouched.”

  “And,” I said neutrally, “how many people knew the colt was accessible? And how accessible was he?”

  “Sid,” she exclaimed, “don’t think we haven’t racked our brains. The trouble is, all our friends knew about him. We were excited about his prospects. And then, at the Cheltenham meeting, we had been talking to people about trainers. Old Gunners, who used to train for us in the past, has died, of course, and we don’t like that uppity assistant of his that’s taken over the stable, so we were asking around, you see.”

  “Yeah. And did you decide on a trainer?”

  “We did, but, of course ...”

  “Such a bloody shame,” I sympathized. “Who did you decide on?”

  She mentioned a first-class man. “Several people said that with him we couldn’t go wrong.”

  “No.” I mentally sighed, and asked obliquely, “What did you especially enjoy about the festival meeting?”

  “The Queen came,” she said promptly. “I had thick, warm boots on, and I nearly fell over them, curtseying.” She laughed. “And oh, also, I suppose you do know you’re in the Hall of Fame there?”

  “It’s an honor,” I said. “They gave me an engraved glass goblet that I can see across the room right now f
rom where I’m sitting.”

  “Well, we were standing in front of that big exhibit they’ve put together of your life, and we were reading the captions, and dear Ellis Quint stopped beside us and put his arm round my shoulders and said that our Sid was a pretty great guy, all in all.”

  Oh shit, I thought.

  Her warm smile was audible down the line. “We’ve known Ellis for years, of course. He used to ride our horses in amateur races. So he called in at our house for a drink on his way home after the Gold Cup. Such a lovely day.” She sighed. “And then those bastards... You will catch them, won’t you, Sid?”

  “If I can,” I said.

  I left a whole lot of the boxes empty on my chart, and drove to Epsom Downs, spirits as gray as the skies. The bars were crowded. Umbrellas dripped. The brave colors of June dresses hid under drabber raincoats, and only the geraniums looked happy.

  I walked damply to the parade ring before the two-year-old colts’ six-furlong race and thoughtfully watched all the off-fore feet plink down lightheartedly. The young, spindly bones of those forelegs thrust thousand-pound bodies forward at sprinting speeds near forty miles an hour. I had mostly raced on the older, mature horses of steeplechasing, half a ton in weight, slightly slower, capable of four miles and thirty jumps from start to finish, but still on legs scarcely thicker than a big man’s wrist.

  The anatomy of a horse’s foreleg consisted, from the shoulder down, of forearm, knee, cannon bone, fetlock joint (also known as the ankle), pastern bone, and hoof. The angry Lancashire farmer’s colored photograph had shown the amputation to have been effected straight through the narrowest part of the whole leg, just at the base of the fetlock joint, where the pastern emerged from it. In effect, the whole pastern and the hoof had been cut off.

  Horses had very fast instincts for danger and were easily scared. Young horses seldom stood still. Yet one single chop had done the job each time. Why had all those poor animals stood quietly white the deed was done? None of them had squealed loud enough to alert his owner.

  I went up on the stands and watched the two-year-olds set off from the spur away to the left at the top of the hill; watched them swoop down like a flock of star lings round Tattenham Comer, and sort themselves out into winner and losers along the straight with its deceptively difficult camber that could tilt a horse towards the rails if his jockey was inexperienced.

  I watched, and I sighed. Five long years had passed since I’d ridden my last race. Would regret, I wondered, ever fade?

  “Why so pensive, Sid lad?” asked an elderly trainer, grasping my elbow. “A scotch and water for your thoughts!” He steered me around towards the nearest bar and I went with him unprotestingly, as custom came my way quite often in that casual manner. He was great with horses and famously mean with his money.

  “I hear you’re damned expensive,” he began inoffensively, handing me a glass. “What will you charge me for a day’s work?”

  I told him.

  “Too damned much. Do it for nothing, for old times’ sake.”

  I added, smiling, “How many horses do you train for nothing?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How many races would you have asked me to ride for nothing?”

  “Oh, all right, then. I’ll pay your damned fee. The fact is, I think I’m being had, and I want you to find out.”

  It seemed he had received a glowing testimonial from the present employer of a chauffeur/houseman/handyman who’d applied for a job he’d advertised. He wanted to know if it was worth bringing the man up for an interview.

  “She,” he said, “his employer is a woman. I phoned her when I got the letter, to check the reference, you see. She couldn’t have been more complimentary about the man if she’d tried, but ... I don’t know ... She was too complimentary, if you see what I mean.”

  “You mean you think she might be glad to see the back of him?”

  “You don’t hang about, Sid. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  He gave me the testimonial letter of fluorescent praise.

  “No problem,” I said, reading it. “One day’s fee, plus travel expenses. I’ll phone you, then send you a written report.”

  “You still look like a jockey,” he complained. “You’re a damned sight more expensive on your feet.”

  I smiled, put the letter away in a pocket, drank his scotch and applauded the string of winners he’d had recently, cheering him up before separating him from his cash.

  I drifted around pleasurably but unprofitably for the rest of the day, slept thankfully without nightmares and found on a dry and sunny Derby Day morning that my friendly Pump reporter had really done his stuff.

  “Lock up your colts,” he directed in the paper. “You’ve heard of foot fetishists? This is one beyond belief.”

  He outlined in succinct paragraphs the similarities in “the affair of the four severed fetlocks” and pointed out that on that very night after the Derby—the biggest race of all—there would be moonlight enough at three A.M. for flashlights to be unnecessary. All two-year-old colts should, like Cinderella, be safe indoors by midnight. “And if ...,” he finished with a flourish, “... you should spy anyone creeping through the fields armed with a machete, phone ex-jockey turned gumshoe Sid Halley, who provided the information gathered here and can be reached via The Pump‘s special hotline. Phone The Pump! Save the colts! Halley to the rescue!”

  I couldn’t imagine how he had got that last bit—including a telephone number—past any editor, but I needn’t have worried about spreading the message on the racecourse. No one spoke to me about anything else all afternoon.

  I phoned The Pump myself and reached someone eventually who told me that Kevin Mills had gone to a train crash; sorry.

  “Damn,” I said. “So how are you rerouting calls about colts to me? I didn’t arrange this. How will it work?”

  “Hold on.”

  I held on. A different voice came back.

  “As Kevin isn’t available, we’re rerouting all Halley hotline calls to this number,” he said, and he read out my own Pont Square number.

  “Where’s your bloody Mills? I’ll wring his neck.”

  “Gone to the train crash. Before he left he gave us this number for reaching you. He said you would want to know at once about any colts.”

  That was true enough—but hell’s bloody bells, I thought, I could have set it up better if he’d warned me.

  I watched the Derby with inattention. An outsider won.

  Ellis teased me about the piece in The Pump.

  “Hotline Halley,” he said, laughing and clapping me on the shoulder, tall and deeply friendly and wiping out in a flash the incredulous doubts I’d been having about him. “It’s an extraordinary coincidence, Sid, but I actually saw one of those colts. Alive, of course. I was staying with some chums from York, and after we’d gone home someone vandalized their colt. Such fun people. They didn’t deserve anything like that.”

  “No one does.”

  “True.”

  “The really puzzling thing is motive,” I said. “I went to see all the owners. None of the colts was insured. Nor was Rachel Fems’s pony, of course.”

  He said interestedly, “Did you think it was an insurance scam?”

  “It jumps to mind, doesn’t it? Theoretically it’s possible to insure a horse and collect the lucre without the owner knowing anything about it. It’s been done. But if that’s what this is all about, perhaps someone in an insurance company somewhere will see the piece in The Pump and connect a couple of things. Come to think of it,” I finished slowly, “I might send a copy to every likely insurance company’s board of directors, asking, and warning them.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “Does insurance and so on really take the place of racing? It sounds a pretty dull life for you, after what we used to do.”

  “Does television replace it for you?”

  “Not a hope.” He laughed. “Danger is addictive, wouldn’t you say? The only dangero
us job in television is reporting wars and—have you noticed?—the same few war reporters get out there all the time, talking with their earnest, committed faces about this or that month’s little dust-up, while bullets fly and chip off bits of stone in the background to prove how brave they are.”

  “You’re jealous.” I smiled.

  “I get sodding bored sometimes with being a chat-show celebrity, even if it’s nice being liked. Don’t you ache for speed?”

  “Every day,” I said.

  “You’re about the only person who understands me. No one else can see that fame’s no substitute for danger.”

  “It depends what you risk.”

  Hands, I thought. One could risk hands.

  “Good luck, Hotline,” Ellis said.

  It was the owners of two-year-old colts that had the good luck. My telephone jammed and rang nonstop all evening and all night when I got home after the Derby, but the calls were all from people enjoying their shivers and jumping at shadows. The moonlight shone on quiet fields, and no animal, whether colt or two-year-old thoroughbred or children’s pony, lost a foot.

  In the days that followed, interest and expectation dimmed and died. It was twelve days after the Derby, on the last night of the Royal Ascot meeting, that the screaming heebie-jeebies re-awoke.

  4

  On the Monday after the Derby, I trailed off on the one-day dig into the overblown reference and, without talking to the lady-employer herself (which would clearly have been counterproductive) , I uncovered enough to phone the tight-fisted trainer with sound advice.

  “She wants to get rid of him without risk of being accused of unfair dismissal,” I said. “He steals small things from her house which pass through a couple of hands and turn up in the local antique shop. She can’t prove they were hers. The antique shop owner is whining about his innocence. The lady has apparently said she won’t try to prosecute her houseman if he gets the heck out. Her testimonial is part of the bargain. The houseman is a regular in the local betting shop, and gambles heavily on horses. Do you want to employ him?”