Knock Down

by Dick Francis

  ‘It will be too late in a minute,’ I said.

  She came to a decision. ‘Nicol Brevett, then.’

  ‘Jeez,’ I said.

  ‘Buy it then. Don’t just stand there.’

  ‘All done?’ said the auctioneer. ‘Selling at two thousand eight hundred. Selling once… all done then?’

  I took a breath and waved my catalogue.

  ‘Three thousand… New bidder. Thank you sir… Against you in front. Can I make it three thousand two?’

  As often happens when a fresh bidder comes in at the last moment the two contestants soon gave up, and the gavel came down at three thousand four.

  ‘Sold to Jonah Dereham.’

  Jiminy Bell was staring at me slit-eyed from the other side of the ring.

  ‘What’s that in dollars?’ said my client.

  ‘About seven thousand five hundred.’

  We left the wooden shelter and she raised the umbrella again although the drizzle had all but ceased.

  ‘More than I authorised you to spend,’ she said, without great complaint. ‘And your commission on top, I guess?’

  ‘Five per cent,’ I nodded.

  ‘Ah well… In the States you wouldn’t buy a three-legged polo pony for that money.’ She gave me a small smile as nicely judged as a tip and decided to walk on to wait in my car while I completed the paper work and arranged for the onward transport of Hearse Puller. He was to be stabled for the night in my own back yard and delivered to his new owner on the birthday morning.

  Nicol Brevett… A surprise like a wasp at the honey, harmless unless you touched it on the stinging side.

  He was a hard forceful young man who put his riding cards on the table and dared the professionals to trump them. His obsessive will to win led him into ruthlessness, rudeness and rows. His temper flared like a flame thrower. No one could deny his talent, but where most of his colleagues won friends and races, Nicol Brevett just won races.

  Hearse Puller was within his scope as a rider and if I were lucky they would have a good season together in novice chases: and I thought I would need to be lucky because of Brevett senior, whose weight could be felt all over the Turf.

  My respect for Kerry Sanders rose several notches. Any woman who could interest Constantine Brevett to the point of matrimony had to be of a sophistication to put Fabergé eggs to shame, and I could well understand her coyness about naming him. If any announcements concerning him were to be made he would want to make them himself.

  Constantine covered with velvet the granite core which showed in rocky outcrops in his son, and from brief racecourse meetings over the past few years I knew his social manners to be concentrated essence of old-boy network. The actions which spoke truer had repeatedly left a wake of smaller operatives who sadly wished they had never been flattered by his attention. I didn’t know exactly what his business was, only that he dealt in property and thought in millions, and was now trying to build up the best collection of horses in the country. I had guessed it was being best that interested him more than the actual horses.

  When I was ready to leave the Sales the best thing of the day was due to come up in the ring, so it seemed that everyone was flocking in one direction to watch it while I went in the other towards the cars. I could see Kerry Sanders sitting waiting, her head turned towards me behind the rain-speckled glass. Two men were leaning on the car beside mine, cupping their hands over matches while they lit cigarettes.

  When I passed them, one of them picked up some sort of bar from the bonnet of the car and hit me a crunching blow on the head.

  Dazed and astonished I staggered and sagged and saw all those stars they print in comic strips. Vaguely I heard Kerry Sanders shouting and opening the door of my car, but when the world stopped whirling a little I saw that she was still sitting inside. Door shut, window open. Her expression as much outrage as fright.

  One of the men clutched my right arm which probably stopped me falling flat on my face. The other calmly stood and watched. I leaned against the car next to mine and weakly tried to make sense of it.

  ‘Muggers,’ Kerry Sanders said scathingly. I thought she said ‘buggers’ with which I agreed, but finally understood what she meant.

  ‘Four pounds,’ I said. ‘Only got four pounds.’ It came out as a mumble. Indistinct.

  ‘We don’t want your money. We want your horse.’

  Dead silence. They shouldn’t have hit my head so hard if they wanted sense.

  Kerry Sanders made things no clearer. ‘I’ve already told you once,’ she said icily, ‘That I intend to keep him.’

  ‘You told us, but we don’t believe you.’

  The one doing the talking was a large cheerful man with a bouncer’s biceps and frizzy mouse-brown hair standing round his head like a halo.

  ‘A fair profit, I offered you,’ he said to Kerry. ‘Can’t say fairer than that, now can I, darlin’.’

  ‘What the hell,’ I said thickly, ‘is going on?’

  ‘See now,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Three thousand six. Can’t say fairer than that.’

  Kerry Sanders said no.

  Frizzy Hair turned his reasonable smile on me.

  ‘Look now, lover boy, you and the lady is going to sell us the horse. Now we might as well do it civilised like. So give her some of your expensive advice and we’ll be on our way.’

  ‘Buy some other horse,’ I said. Still a mumble.

  ‘We haven’t got all afternoon, lover boy. Three thousand six. Take it.’

  ‘Or leave it,’ I said automatically.

  Kerry Sanders almost laughed.

  Frizzy Hair dug into an inner pocket and produced wads of cash. Peeling a few notes away from one packet he threw the bulk of it through the car window onto Kerry Sanders’ lap, followed by three closely taped packets which he didn’t count. The lady promptly threw the whole lot out again and it lay there in the mud of the car park, lucre getting suitably filthy.

  The haze in my head began to clear and my buckling knees to straighten. Immediately, sensing the change, Frizzy Hair shed the friendly persuader image in favour of extortionist, grade one.

  ‘Let’s forget the games,’ he said. ‘I want that horse and I’m going to get it. See?’

  He unzipped the front of my rain-proof jacket.

  I made a mild attempt at freeing myself from the other man’s grasp, but my co-ordination was still shot to pieces. The net result was nothing except a fresh whirling sensation inside my skull, and I’d been knocked out often enough in the past to know that the time of profitable action was still a quarter of an hour ahead.

  Under my jacket I wore a sweater, and under that a shirt. Frizzy Hair slid his hand up between these two layers until his fingers encountered the webbing strap I wore across my chest. He smiled with nasty satisfaction, yanked up the sweater, found the buckle on the strap, and undid it.

  ‘Now you see, don’t you, lover boy,’ he said, ‘How I’m going to get that horse?’

  2

  I sat in the driving seat of my car leaning my head against the window. Kerry Sanders sat beside me with the muddy packets of money on her expensive suede lap and unadulterated exasperation in her manner.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t just sit there and watch them putting you through a wringer,’ she said crossly. ‘Someone had to get you out of that fix, didn’t they?’

  I said nothing. She had stepped out of the car and picked up the money and told the thugs to leave me alone. She said they could have the goddam horse and much good might it do them. She had not tried screaming for help or running away or anything equally constructive, but had acted on the great modern dictum that you became less of a hospital case if you gave in to threats of violence right away.

  ‘You looked as grey as death,’ she said. ‘What did you expect me to do? Sit and applaud?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘What’s the matter with your goddam arm, anyway?’

  ‘It dislocates,’ I said. ‘The shoulder dislocates.’<
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  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Oh no. Not often. Only if it gets into one certain position. Then it falls apart, which is very boring. I wear the strap to prevent that happening.’

  ‘It isn’t dislocated now, is it?’

  ‘No.’ I smiled involuntarily. I tended not to be able to sit comfortably in cars whenever it went out.

  ‘Thanks to you,’ I added.

  ‘As long as you realise.’

  ‘Mm.’

  They had taken the certificate of sale out of my pocket and had made Kerry Sanders write a receipt for the cash. Then they had simply walked away towards the centre of operations to claim their prize. Kerry Sanders had not felt like trying to stop them and I had still hardly been able to put one foot in front of the other with any certainty, and the one sure thing on that unsure afternoon was that Frizzy Hair and his pal would waste no time in driving off with Hearse Puller to destinations unknown. No one would question their right to the horse. Rapid post-sale sales were common.

  ‘Why?’ she said for the twentieth time. ‘Why did they want that goddam horse? Why that one?’

  ‘I absolutely don’t know.’

  She sat fidgeting.

  ‘You said you’d be able to drive by four.’

  I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Five past.

  ‘Right.’ I removed my head from the window and gave it a small tentative shake. Reasonable order seemed to have returned in that department so I started the engine and turned out towards London. She made a rapid assessment of my ability to drive and relaxed a shade after we had gone half a mile without hitting anything. At that point grievance took over from shock.

  ‘I’m going to complain,’ she said with vigour.

  ‘Good idea. Who to?’

  ‘Who to?’ She sounded surprised. ‘To the auctioneers, of course.’

  ‘They’ll commiserate and do nothing.’

  ‘Of course they will. They’ll have to.’

  I knew they wouldn’t. I said so.

  She turned to look at me. ‘The Jockey Club, then. The racing authorities.’

  ‘They have no control… no jurisdiction… over the Sales.’

  ‘Who does, then?’

  ‘No one.’

  Her voice sharpened with frustration. ‘We’ll tell the police.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘The Ascot police?’

  ‘All right.’

  So I stopped at the police station and we told our story. Statements were taken and signed and no doubt filed as soon as we left, because as an overworked sergeant tiredly pointed out, we had not been robbed. A bang on the head, very nasty, very reprehensible, a lot of it about. But my wallet hadn’t been stolen, had it? Not even my watch? And these rough customers had actually given Mrs Sanders a profit of two hundred pounds. Where was the crime in that, might one ask?

  We drove away, me in resignation, Kerry Sanders in a boiling fury.

  ‘I will not be pushed around,’ she exploded. ‘Someone… someone has got to do something.’

  ‘Mr Brevett?’ I suggested.

  She gave me one of her sharp glances and noticeably cooled her voice.

  ‘I don’t want him bothered with this.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  We drove ten miles in thoughtful silence. She said eventually, ‘Can you find me another horse by Friday?’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘Try, then.’

  ‘If I succeed can you guarantee that no one else will knock me on the head and pinch it?’

  ‘For a man who’s supposed to be tough,’ she said, ‘You’re soft.’

  This dampening opinion led to a further five miles of silence. Then she said, ‘You didn’t know those two men, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But they knew you. They knew about your shoulder.’

  ‘They did indeed.’

  ‘You’d thought of that, had you?’ She sounded disappointed.

  ‘Mm,’ I said.

  I steered with care through the London traffic and stopped outside the Berkeley Hotel, where she was staying.

  ‘Come in for a drink,’ she said. ‘You look as if you could use one.’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Aw, c’mon,’ she said. ‘I won’t eat you.’

  I smiled. ‘All right.’

  Her suite looked out over Hyde Park with groups of riding school ponies trotting in the Row and knots of household cavalry practising for state occasions. Late afternoon sunshine slanted into the lilac and blue sitting-room and made prisms of the ice-cubes in our glasses.

  She protested over my choice.

  ‘Are you sure you want Perrier?’ she said.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘When I said come up for a drink, I meant… a drink.’

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ I said reasonably. ‘And a touch concussed. And I’m driving.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her manner changed subtly. ‘I understand,’ she said.

  I sat down without being asked. It was all very well having had extensive experience of bangs on the head, but this had been the first for three years and the interval had not improved my speed of recovery.

  She gave me a disillusioned glance and took off her beautiful muddied coat. Underneath she wore the sort of simplicity only the rich could afford on the sort of shape that was beyond price. She enjoyed quietly my silent appreciation and took it naturally as the most commonplace courtesy.

  ‘Now look,’ she said. ‘You haven’t said a goddam thing about what happened this afternoon. Now what I’d like is for you to tell me just what you think those men were up to, back there.’

  I drank the fizzy water and fractionally shook my head.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you must have ideas,’ she protested.

  ‘No…’ I paused. ‘Did you tell anyone you were going to Ascot Sales? Did you mention me? Did you mention Hearse Puller?’

  ‘Hey, now,’ she said, ‘It was you they were after, not me.’

  ‘How do we know?’

  ‘Well… your shoulder.’

  ‘Your horse.’

  She moved restlessly across the room, threw the coat over a chair and came back. The slim boots had dirty water marks round the edges of the uppers which looked incongruous against the pale mauve carpet.

  ‘I told maybe three people,’ she said. ‘Pauli Teksa was the first.’

  I nodded. Pauli Teksa was the American who had given Kerry Sanders my name.

  ‘Pauli said you were an honest bloodstock agent and therefore as rare as fine Sundays.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Then,’ she said pensively, ‘I told the guy who fixes my hair.’

  ‘Who what?’

  ‘Hairdresser,’ she said. ‘Right downstairs here in the hotel.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I had lunch with Madge yesterday… Lady Ros-common. Just a friend.’

  She sat down suddenly opposite in an armchair with a blue and white chintz cover. A large gin and french had brought sharp colour to her cheeks and a lessening in her slightly dictatorial manner. I had the impression that for the first time she was considering me as a man instead of as an employee who had fallen down (more or less literally) on the job.

  ‘Do you want to take your coat off?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ I said.

  ‘Well then… Do you want more of that goddam water?’

  ‘Please.’

  She refilled my glass, brought it back, sat down.

  ‘Don’t you ever drink?’ she said.

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘Alcoholic?’ she said sympathetically.

  I thought it odd of her to ask such a personal question, but I smiled, and said, ‘No.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Nearly all the non-drinkers I know are reformed alcoholics.’

  ‘I admire them,’ I said. ‘But no. I was hooked on coke at six. Never graduated.’

  ‘Oh.’ She seemed to lose interest in me. She said,
‘I am on the committee of a private hospital back home.’

  ‘Which dries out drunks?’

  She didn’t care for the bluntness. ‘We treat people with a problem. Yes.’

  ‘Successfully?’

  She sighed. ‘Some.’

  I stood up. ‘You can’t win them all.’ I put the empty glass on a side-table and went ahead of her to the door.

  ‘You’ll let me know if you find another horse?’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘And if you have any thoughts about those two men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I drove slowly home and put the car in the garage in the stable yard. The three racehorses there moved around restlessly in their boxes, mutely complaining because I was two hours late with their evening feed. They were horses in transit, waiting to be shipped by air to foreign buyers; not my horses but very much my responsibility.

  I talked to them and fondled their muzzles, and straigh tened their boxes and gave them food and water and rugs against the October night, and finally, tiredly, took my own throbbing head into the house.

  There was no wife there waiting with a smiling face and a hot tempting dinner. There was, however, my brother.

  His car was in the garage next to mine, and there were no lights anywhere in the house. I walked into the kitchen, flicked the switch, washed my hands under the hot tap in the sink, and wished with all my heart that I could off-load my drinking problem on to Kerry Sanders and her do-good hospital.

  He was in the dark sittingroom, snoring. Light revealed him lying face down on the sofa with the empty Scotch bottle on the carpet near his dangling hand.

  He didn’t drink often. He tried very hard, and he was mostly the reason I stayed off it, because if I came home with alcohol on my breath he would smell it across the room, and it made him restless. It was no hardship for me, just a social nuisance, as Kerry Sanders was by no means alone in concluding that non-drinkers were ex-alcoholics. One had to drink to prove one wasn’t, like natural bachelors making an effort with girls.

  We were not twins, though much alike. He was a year older, an inch shorter, better looking and not so dark. People had mistaken us for each other continually when we had been young, but less so now at thirty-four and thirty-five.