by Dick Francis
I picked up the empty bottle and took it out to the dustbin. Then I cooked some scrambled eggs and sat down at the kitchen table to eat, and over coffee and aspirin and a sore head put up a reasonable fight against depression.
There was much to be thankful for. I owned outright the house and stable yard and ten acres of paddocks, and after two years’ slog I was beginning to make it as an agent. On the debit side I had a busted marriage, a brother who lived off my earnings because he couldn’t keep a job,and a feeling that Frizzy Hair was only the tip of an iceberg.
I fetched a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote three names.
Pauli Teksa.
Hairdresser.
Lady Roscommon (Madge).
None looked a winner in the villainy stakes.
For good measure I added Kerry Sanders, Nicol Brevett, Constantine Brevett and two smiley thugs. Shake that lot together and what did we get? A right little ambush by someone who knew my weakest spot.
I spent the evening trying by telephone to find a replacement for Hearse Puller. Not easy. Trainers with horses the owners might sell were not keen to lose them from their yards, and I could give no guarantee that Nicol Brevett would leave his horse with its present trainer. Bound by Kerry Sanders, I could not even mention his name.
I reread the Ascot Sale catalogue for the following day but there was still nothing suitable, and finally with a sigh offered my custom to a bloodstock dealer called Ronnie North, who said he knew of a possible horse which he could get if I would play ball.
‘How much?’ I said.
‘Five hundred.’
He meant that he would sell me the horse for a price. I would then charge Kerry Sanders five hundred pounds more… and hand the five hundred over to North.
‘Too much,’ I said. ‘If you get me a good one for two thousand I’ll give you a hundred.’
‘Nuts.’
‘A hundred and fifty.’ I knew he would probably acquire the horse for maybe fifteen hundred pounds, and sell it to me for double: he always considered he had wasted his time if he made less than one hundred per cent profit. Squeezing a large chunk more from my client was just icing on the cake.
‘And,’ I said, ‘Before we go any further, I want to know about it.’
‘Do me a favour.’
He was afraid that if I knew who owned the horse I would go direct to the source, and cut him out altogether. I wouldn’t have done that, but he would, and he judged me by himself.
I said, ‘If you buy it and I don’t like it, I won’t take it.’
‘It’s what you want,’ he said. ‘You can trust me.’
I could perhaps trust his judgement of a horse, though that was absolutely all. If the horse hadn’t been for Nicol Brevett I might have taken a chance and bought blind, but in this case I could not afford to.
‘I have to O.K. it first.’
‘Then no deal,’ he said succinctly and disconnected.
I chewed the end of my pencil and thought about the bloodstock jungle which I had entered with such innocence two years earlier. It had been naive to imagine that all it took to be a bloodstock agent was a thorough knowledge of horses, an intimate relationship with the stud book, hundreds of acquaintances in the racing industry and a reasonable head for business. Initial surprise at the fiddles I saw all around me had long since passed from revulsion to cynicism, and I had grown a thick skin of self-preservation. I thought that sometimes it was difficult to perceive the honest course, and more difficult still to stick to it, when what I saw as dishonesty was so much the general climate.
I understood, after two years, that dishonesty was much a matter of opinion. There were no absolutes. A deal I thought scandalous might seem eminently reasonable to others. Ronnie North saw nothing wrong at all in milking the market for every possible penny: and moreover he was likeable to meet.
The telephone rang. I picked up the receiver.
‘Jonah?’
He was back, as I’d thought he might be.
‘The horse is River God. You have it for three thousand five hundred with five hundred on top.’
‘I’ll call you back.’
I looked up the River God form and consulted a jockey who’d ridden it a few times, and finally dialled Ronnie North.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Subject to a vet’s report, River God will do well.’
He said with elaborate resignation, ‘I told you, you can trust me.’
‘Yeah. I’ll give you two thousand five hundred.’
‘Three thousand,’ he said. ‘And that’s rock bottom. With five hundred to come.’
‘One fifty,’ I said positively, and compromised at a hundred more.
River God, my jockey friend had said, belonged to a farmer in Devon who had bought it unbroken at three years old as a point-to-point prospect for his son. Between them they’d done a poor job of the breaking and now the son couldn’t control the result. ‘He’s a ride for a pro,’ said my informant, ‘But he’s quite fast and a natural jumper, and they haven’t managed to cock that up.’
I stood up, stretched, and as it was by then half past ten, decided to tell Kerry Sanders in the morning. The room I used as an office, lined with book shelves and fitted cupboards, was half functional, half sitting-room, and mostly what I thought of as home. It had a lightish brown carpet, red woollen curtains and leather armchairs, and one big window which looked out to the stable yard. When I had tidied away the books and papers I’d been using I switched off the powerful desk lamp and stood by the window, looking out from darkness to moonlight.
Everything was quiet out there, the three lodgers patiently waiting for their aeroplane from Gatwick Airport five miles down the road. They should have been gone a week since and the overseas customers were sending irritable cables, but the shipping agents muttered on about unavoidable delays and kept saying the day after tomorrow.
‘The day after tomorrow never comes,’ I said, but they didn’t think it funny.
I used the yard as a staging post and seldom kept horses there more than a night or two. They were a tie, because I looked after them myself, and I did that because until recently I had not been earning enough to think of employing anyone else.
In my first year in the business I had negotiated fifty sales, and in my second ninety three, and during the past three months I had been almost constantly busy. Given a bit of luck, I thought, like, say, buying a Derby winner for five thousand as a yearling… just some such impossible bit of luck… I might yet achieve tax problems.
I left the office and went to the sitting-room. My brother Crispin was still where I’d left him, face down, snoring, spark out. I fetched a rug and draped it over him, knowing he wouldn’t wake for hours, and that when he did he would be in his usual violent hangover temper, spewing out his bitter resentments like untreated effluent.
We had been orphaned when I was sixteen and he seventeen, first by a riding accident which killed our mother, and then three months later by a blood clot in Father. Abruptly, almost from one week to the next, our lives changed to the roots. We had been brought up in comfort in a house in the country, with horses to ride and a cook and gardener and stablemen to do the work. We went to expensive boarding schools and thought it natural, and holidayed on grouse moors in Scotland.
The glitter had by no means been founded on gold. Solicitors gravely told us that our parent had mortgaged all he possessed, had borrowed on his life assurance, had sold the family treasures and was only a Degas sketch away from bankruptcy. He had, it appeared, been living on the brink of disaster for several years, always finding a last minute goody to send to Sotheby’s. When his debts had been paid and house, horses, cook, gardener, stablemen and all had vanished into limbo, Crispin and I, without close relatives, were left with no home to go to and precisely one hundred and forty-three pounds each.
The school had been understanding but not to the point of keeping us without fees. We had finished the Easter term, but that was that.
It had affected Crispin
more than me. He had been aiming for university and the law and could not bring himself to settle for the generously offered Articles in the grave solicitor’s office. My more practical nature saved me from such torments. I faced prosaically the fact that from now on I would need to work to eat, totted up my assets which proved to be a thin body, good health and a certain facility on horseback, and got myself a job as a stable lad.
Crispin had been furious with me but I’d been happy. I was not academic. Stable life, after the confines of school, had been a marvellous freedom. I never regretted what I’d lost.
I left him snoring and went upstairs to bed, thinking about our different fates. Crispin had tried stockbroking and insurance and felt he had not been appreciated, and I, in becoming a jockey, had found total fulfilment. I always reckoned I’d had by far the best of it and didn’t begrudge anything I could do to compensate.
My bedroom like the office looked out to the yard, and except when it was freezing I slept with the window open. At twelve thirty I woke from the depths with the sudden instant awareness of the subconscious hitting the alarm switch.
I lay tinglingly awake, listening at full stretch, not knowing what I’d heard but sure that it was wrong.
Then unmistakably it came again. The scrape of a hoof on a hard surface. The clop of horse shoes where they had no business to be at that time of night.
I flung back the duvet and jumped to the window.
No movement down there in the moonlit yard. Just a yawning black oblong which should have been filled by a firmly closed stable door.
I cursed with a sinking heart. The most valuable of my lodgers, all seventy thousand pounds worth, was out loose on the dangerous roads of Surrey.
3
He wasn’t comprehensively insured, because his new owner had jibbed at the high premium. He wasn’t finally paid for, because of a complicated currency transfer. I had had to guarantee the money to the vendor when I didn’t actually have it, and if I didn’t get that two-year-old back fast and unscratched the financial hot waters would close over my head. The foreign buyer was a ruthless man who would stop his cheque if the horse were damaged and my own insurers wouldn’t pay up for anything less than death, and reluctantly at that.
Sweater, jeans, boots went on at high speed and I ran downstairs fumbling to do up the buckles of the strap which anchored my shoulder. In the sitting-room Crispin still snored. I shook him, calling his name. No response. The stupor persisted.
I stopped in the office to telephone the local police.
‘If anyone reports a horse in their back garden, it’s mine.’
‘Very good,’ said a voice. ‘Saves time to know.’
Out in the yard there was no sound. The two-year-old had been already on the road when I woke, because it was metal on tarmac I’d heard, not the soft familiar scrunch on weedy gravel.
No sound on the road. It lay empty in the moonlight for as far as I could see.
He could be peacefully grazing the verge a few yards beyond my sight.
He could be halfway to the express line of the electric railway or on the dual carriageway to Brighton or on the main runway at the airport.
He could be crashing down rabbit holes in the local scrubby woodland.
I sweated in the cold night air. Seventy thousand bloody pounds I didn’t have and couldn’t raise.
Looking for a loose horse at night by car had high built-in failure factors. One couldn’t hear his movements and with his dark coat one could hit him as soon as see him. One could startle him into panic, into crashing through a fence, tearing himself on barbed wire, skidding to his knees, damaging beyond repair the slender bones and tendons of his legs.
I hurried back through the yard, picked up a bridle and a halter from the tackroom, and ran on out to the nearest paddock. There somewhere in the dim dappled light was the pensioned-off steeplechaser I used as a hack. Dozing on his feet and dreaming of long past Gold Cups.
Climbing the rails I whistled to him in a trill through my teeth, the sound he responded to when he felt like it.
‘Come on, boy,’ I called. ‘Come here you bugger, for God’s sweet sake.’ Come. Just come. But the field looked empty.
I whistled again, despairing.
He ambled over with all the urgency of a museum. Sniffed at my fingers. Resignedly allowed me to put on his bridle. Even stood moderately still when I led him to the gate and used it as usual as a mounting block. Jogging on his bare back, I trotted him through the yard, and at the gate let him choose his own direction.
Left lay the main roads and right the woods. He chose the right, but as I urged him on I wondered if he had gone that way because I subconsciously wanted it. Horses, highly telepathic, needed little steering.
If the two-year-old were in the woods he wasn’t under the wheels of a twenty ton lorry. If he were in the woods he could be calmly eating leaves from the branches and not sticking his feet down rabbit holes….
After half a mile, where the narrow road began to wind upward and the tangle of beech and bramble and evergreen grew thicker, I reined in my ‘chaser, stood him still, and listened.
Nothing. Only the faint sound of moving air, hardly as much as a rustle. My mount waited, uninterested and unexcited. He would have known if the two-year-old had been near. He was telling me indirectly that he wasn’t.
I went back, trotting him fast on the softer verge. Past the stable gate, where he wanted to turn in. Down the road to the village and across the moonlit green.
I tried to comfort myself with the thought that horses didn’t usually go far when they got loose from their stable. Only as far as the nearest succulent grass. They wandered and stopped, wandered and stopped, and only if something frightened them would they decamp at a gallop. The trouble was they were so easily frightened.
There was grass enough on the village green, but no two-year-old. I stopped again on the far side, listening.
Nothing.
Worried and dry mouthed I went on towards the junction with the main road, where the village swept abruptly out into the three-lane double highway of the A23.
How could I, I thought, how could I have been so stupid as not to bolt the stable door. I couldn’t remember not doing it, but then I couldn’t remember doing it either. It was one of those routine actions one did automatically. I couldn’t imagine not flicking the bolt when I left the box. I’d been doing it all my working life. I was not insured against my own negligence. How could I possibly… how could I ever… have been stupid enough not to bolt that door?
Even after midnight there was too much traffic on the Brighton road. Definitely not a place for horses.
I reined in again, and almost immediately my ‘chaser lifted his head, pricked his ears, and whinnied. He twisted to the right, towards the oncoming headlights, and whinnied again. Somewhere out of sight he could hear or sense another horse, and not for the first time I envied that extra-human perception.
Hurrying, I set off southwards along the green edge, hoping against hope that it was the right horse ahead and not a lay-by full of gypsy ponies.
In the distance there was suddenly a horrific screech of tyres, some wildly scything headlights, a sickening bang and a crash of breaking glass.
My mount let out a whinny that was more a shriek. His rider felt sick.
Oh God, I thought. Oh dear God.
I slowed to a walk and found I was trembling. There were shouts ahead and cars pulling up, and I rubbed my hand over my face and wished I didn’t have to face the next bit. Not the next hour, the next day or the next year.
Then, unbelievably, a shape detached itself from the jumble of light and dark ahead. A shape moving very fast, straight towards me, and clattering.
Hooves drummed on the hard surface with the abandon of hysteria. The two-year-old raced past at a forty-mile-an-hour full-stretched gallop, going as if the Triple Crown depended on it.
Swamped with relief that at least he was still undamaged, and blotting out fears for
the car which had crashed, I swung my ‘chaser round and set off in pursuit.
It was an unequal contest: an ageing jumper against a hot-blooded sprinter. But my anxiety was spur enough for my mount. He was infected by it and aroused, and achieved a pace that was madness on that sort of surface.
The two-year-old, sensing us behind him, could have taken up the challenge and raced harder, but in fact he seemed to be reassured, not galvanised by the approach of another horse, and although he showed no sign of stopping he allowed me gradually to move alongside.
I came up on his outside, with him on my left. He had worn no headcollar in the stable and although I had brought a halter it would have taken a circus stunt man to put it on at such a gallop, let alone an unfit ex-jockey with three fused vertebrae and a shoulder which came apart with one good tug.
We were nearly back to the fork in the village. Straight ahead lay a major roundabout with crossing traffic, and the thought of causing a second accident was too appalling. Whatever the risk to the two-year-old, he had simply got to be directed into the village.
I squeezed my ‘chaser to the left until my leg was brushing the younger horse’s straining side, and I kicked my toe gently into his ribs. I did it three or four times to give him the message, and then when we came to the fork kicked him most insistently and pulled my own mount quite sharply onto him, leaning to the left.
The two-year-old veered into the fork without losing his balance and as positively as if he had been ridden. He fled ahead again into the village, no doubt because once off the main road I had instinctively slowed down. One couldn’t take the narrow bends flat out.
The two-year-old discovered it the hard way. He skidded round the corner to the green, fought to keep his feet under him, struck sparks from his scrabbling shoes, tripped over the six inch high edge of the turf, and fell sprawling in a flurry of legs. Dismounting and grabbing the ‘chaser’s reins I ran towards the prostrate heap. My knees felt wobbly. He couldn’t, I prayed, have torn a tendon here on the soft green grass, with so much agonising danger all behind him.
He couldn’t.
