Blood Sport

by Dick Francis

  ‘Well, what did you think of the place?’

  ‘The horses all looked very well. The stallions especially.’

  ‘So would you, if all you had to do was …’ she began, and then stopped and shrugged. ‘So would you.’

  Apart from an occasional ‘bloody’ which crept in from habit, that was the last of her verbal squibs for the day. But my lack of scandalized reaction didn’t have the same effect on her drinking, and she kept up a slow but steady intake right through dusk and dinner. Her mental brakes remained half on, half off, as before.

  Over thick slices of rare beef she said, ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head.

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been married at all.’

  ‘Are you queer?’ she asked, as simply as if she’d said, ‘Are you comfortable?’

  I smiled slightly. ‘No.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you married?’

  ‘I haven’t found anyone who will marry me.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You must have women lying down for you in droves.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing.’

  She looked at me broodingly over the rim of her glass. ‘So you live all alone?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No parents?’

  ‘They’re both dead,’ I said. ‘And I’ve no brothers, no sisters, no uncles, aunts, or cousins.’ I smiled. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Stay the night.’

  She said it abruptly, as if it came from a deeper level than her fairly harmless interrogation, and there was an element of surprise and alarm on her face afterwards.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said matter-of-factly, ‘but I can’t.’

  She looked at me without expression for about ten seconds.

  I have a mother,’ she said. ‘And sisters, and brothers, and dozens of relations. And a husband, and a son, and all this.’ She waved a hand around the millionaire bracket walls. ‘I have everything.’ Her eyes filled with tears, but she went on looking straight across the table, without blinking.

  ‘I have … bloody … everything.’

  Chapter Six

  There was an envelope from Walt in my room at the motel containing a short note and a list.

  Gene,

  This is all the drivers came up with. I think it’s safe to bet that they actually did see these vehicles. The top three, they both remembered. The others, only one of them remembered. No horse vans, though.

  Walt

  The list read:

  ‘Impala, lilac, two years old, California number plates. Passengers included a fat child who made faces out of the rear window. Both days.

  Grey station wagon trailing a load of furniture. Both days.

  Dark green Ford Mustang, Nevada plates. Young couple, no description. The horse van drivers remember this one because they were discussing whether the Mustang was a good car or not. Second day only.

  White convertible: young woman with blond hair wound on rollers. Second day only.

  Army green pick-up truck with white lettering on the doors. Second day only.

  The pick-up, one of the drivers thinks, was probably on Inter-state 70, after Zanesville and before they turned off south. He doesn’t remember clearly.’

  I read the list through three times while I dressed. The load of furniture looked the most promising, but none of it exactly inspired.

  Walt, driving to the airport in the morning, damped even the furniture.

  ‘It was only one of those Snail Express trailers.’

  ‘Like the U-Haul,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. “Carry your house on your back, but let us take the weight”,’ he said, quoting the Snail Express advertising slogan. ‘The drivers said it wasn’t big enough to put a horse in.’

  There were furniture trailers of all sizes all over the country: people moving house hired one at their old home, loaded up, and drove off to the new, maybe six states away. There they unloaded and simply left the trailer in a local depot, from where the haulage firm hired it to the next removing client. The bright orange U-Haul trailers and the aluminium and blue ones of the Snail Express were as frequent on the roads as the Greyhound buses.

  ‘How about the pick-up?’ I asked.

  ‘Much too small for a horse,’ Walt said gloomily.

  He came back with me to New York and rubbed his thumb continuously over the finger pads while I went through the file we had made on the case.

  There was a batch of photographs of the missing horse, mostly taken from stud book advertisements, by the look of them. Not a very remarkable creature on paper, I thought.

  Sam Hengelman had sent his two most careful drivers to fetch Chrysalis. He had had a call from Mrs Teller informing him of the date fixed for the horse to fly over, and also a cable from England when he was on his way. Hengelman had telephoned Kennedy Airport and been told the horses would be through the twenty-four hour immigration regulations at noon, Tuesday. He had sent the van as soon as he got the cable, on Sunday. There was, he agreed, a system like the U-Haul in operation among horse vans, to avoid the need for long empty journeys, but some folks liked personal service, and Mr Teller was one of them.

  The Buttress Life Insurance covered transport. Sam Hengelman had not had to take out a policy for the trip, and neither stood to lose nor gain from the hi-jacking.

  Both drivers had clean records going way back.

  Both grooms had been in their present jobs for more than three years. One of them came from Midway Farm; the other from another farm which had a horse coming in on the same trip.

  An interview with Mrs Eunice Teller had produced no helpful information.

  I shut the folder with a smile, and gave it back to Walt.

  ‘How about checking with Snail Express, on the off-chance?’

  He looked sceptical. ‘The drivers said the trailer wasn’t high enough.’

  ‘They’re used to thinking in terms of ordinary horse vans. And they were looking down, from their cab. You could squeeze a racehorse into a box about seven feet by four, by six feet high, if you were ruthless enough. Find out how many trailers that size or larger Snail Express had out last Monday or Tuesday, which might conceivably have been on the turnpike.’

  ‘All right,’ he said expressionlessly. ‘If you say so.’

  With the time lag working in reverse it was 3 AM Thursday morning when I landed at Heathrow, and 12 before I walked into Dave Teller’s room in a Reading hospital. Flaming June had come and gone: it was raining again.

  If one discounted the ropes, pulleys, slings, and plaster suspending his leg in mid air, the patient looked healthy enough. He greeted me without fuss, the direct eyes steady and bright.

  ‘Tiring trip?’

  ‘So so.’

  ‘You’ve eaten?’ He waved vaguely at a collection of chocolates and grapes.

  ‘I had breakfast over Ireland, at two o’clock.’

  He laughed, eased himself on the pillows, and stretched out a hand for a cigarette.

  ‘How’s my wife?’

  ‘Very well.’

  He lit his cigarette and flicked shut the lighter.

  ‘What was she doing, when you called?’ His apprehension was pretty well concealed.

  ‘Sunbathing. Swimming. There’s a heatwave coast to coast.’

  A couple of muscles relaxed in his forearm and he inhaled deeply. ‘She gave you a drink … I hope?’

  ‘Sure. And a swim. And I stayed to dinner.’

  He looked at me directly for some time without speaking. Then he said merely, ‘A good one?’

  ‘Very, thank you. And I saw your horses. Chub Lodovski showed me round.’

  He talked much more naturally about the horses: no problems there.

  ‘I hear you’re moving to California,’ I said, after a while.

  The tenseness instantly came back; the small giveaway tightening of eye, neck, and respiratory muscles that I looked for every day in my job,
and couldn’t be blind to in my friends.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, tapping off ash. ‘Eunice loves the ocean, and in Kentucky we’re as far from it as can be … and of course, the horse breeding business in California is every bit as profitable. We will do very well out there, I’ve no doubt.’

  Eunice would take her problems right along with her, I thought: though with a bit of luck they would recede for a year or two. Perhaps Teller considered the upheaval worth it.

  ‘What’s the new place like?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s good land, pretty well irrigated. And the stable and general layout are as good as Midway. Better even, in some respects. It’s Davis L. Davis’s old place.’

  I looked blank, and he explained. ‘Made his money out of roadside hamburger stands. Well, he died early this year, and last month they held a dispersal sale of his brood mares and stallions, to divide up his estate for inheritance. I put in a bid for the farm to his executors before I came over here this time, and they wrote me a week or so back to say they’re accepting it. The contracts are in hand right now, but I don’t foresee any difficulties. I’m sure glad to have got it settled at last.’

  ‘At last?’

  ‘Been looking for a farm in southern California for over a year now, but there were too many snags to most of them. Eunice and I took a trip over in March of this year, and we saw the Davis farm then, and liked it. So …’ He waggled his fingers to finish the sentence.

  The door opened and Keeble came in, mild spectacles reflecting the pallid light from the window, eyes blinking rapidly, and the usual patch of bristle growing grey where he had short-sightedly missed with the razor. He said hellos all round and settled himself comfortably into the spare armchair.

  ‘Well, how’s it with the States?’ he said: and I told them everything Walt had told me. They thought it over for a while in silence.

  ‘So what do you think now?’ Keeble said.

  I glanced doubtfully at Teller, but he tapped ash off his cigarette and remarked simply, ‘Sim says you were convinced I was pushed into the river on purpose. I guess what he’s asking you is, have you changed your mind?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  Keeble and Teller looked at each other. Then Teller said, sighing, ‘We’ve come up with one or two things which makes it almost certain you are right.’

  Keeble nodded. ‘I went to Dave’s hotel in London to collect his luggage and pay his bill, and explained where he was if anyone wanted him. The young man at the reception desk asked me if the lady journalist from Stud and Stable had found Dave all right on Saturday. She had, he said, been most insistent, owing to a deadline on the magazine, and he had given her my address and telephone number, which Dave had left with him in case he was wanted hurriedly in connection with Chrysalis.’

  ‘And that’, I remarked, ‘is how boy and girl knew where to find you.’

  ‘Quite,’ Keeble agreed. ‘From the house to the river was no doubt a simple piece of following. Incidentally, I checked with Stud and Stable. They didn’t want Dave, and their deadline is the first day of each month.’

  ‘Nice,’ I said.

  Keeble took an envelope from his pocket and fished out some three by three inch black-and-white photographs. ‘There are Peter’s snaps,’ he said. ‘Take a look.’

  I took them from him and looked. The ducks had come out splendidly; better than one of Lynnie, who had been moving. The picnic lunch was there, and the Flying Linnet in Marsh Lock, and one of Dave Teller standing on the bows, and a rather grim one of myself staring down into the water. There was one of the four men fallen in a heap in the punt at the hotel where we’d had our morning drinks, and another, taken with the photographer’s back to the river, of Keeble, Joan, Dave, Lynnie, and myself sitting round the little table under the sun umbrella, with glasses in our hands.

  Keeble waited without blinking. With this in mind I started through the pile again, and found what he had seen. I looked up at him. He nodded, and from an inside pocket produced a magnifying lens, which he threw over to me. With the help of that, the two figures were clear. A girl with long hair and white trousers, a young man with pale trousers and a check shirt, standing side by side in the background of the photograph of us all drinking at the pub.

  ‘It’s them,’ I nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ Keeble agreed. ‘They were there in the morning. So I’ll grant you they could have followed us by car from Henley … you can see the river from several places along that road … and also that they saw Dave standing on the bows when we left Henley and when we left the pub. And possibly also when we arrived at the pub, and at Marsh Lock. They would know there was a good chance of him being there again when we came back through Harbour.’

  I smiled. ‘And the five feet which was missing from the punt’s mooring rope had been used to tie it securely to the Danger post while they waited for us.’

  ‘I agree,’ Keeble said. ‘We took that punt right out of the water after you’d gone on Monday, and we found that the cleat for the stern rope had been unscrewed from the stern, and screwed on again under the water line at the bow end.’

  ‘So both mooring points were at one end,’ Teller said. ‘The safe rope was under water all the time, hidden by the punt itself and the girl’s body and arms. And, of course, we weren’t looking for anything like that at the time, so we’d never have seen it.’

  Keeble finished it. ‘Once they’d got the visible rope safely in Joan’s hands, and we were all looking anxiously for you and Dave to surface, the girl had only to pull some sort of quick release knot, and the punt was free. So I’ll agree, Gene, that that was an accident which could be staged, and was staged, and you were right and I was wrong. Which, I seem to remember vaguely, has happened once or twice before.’

  He smiled at me with irony, and I reflected that there were few superior officers who would say that sort of thing so utterly ungrudgingly.

  A nurse clattered in with Teller’s lunch, which proved to be chicken salad and tinned mandarin oranges. The patient poured the oranges on to the salad and ate the combined course with resignation.

  ‘The food is lousy,’ he said mildly. ‘I’ve forgotten what a good steak looks like.’

  We watched him eat without envy, and I asked Keeble if he’d had any results with the handkerchief.

  ‘Only negative ones. None of the Yogi Bear concessionists in this country imported it. They say, from the material and the sort of paint used for the bear, that it was probably made in Japan. And some of them had doubts it was done by the Hanna-Barbera artists. Not well enough drawn, they said.’

  ‘I’ll take it back to the States and try there,’ I said. ‘After all, boy and girl were almost certainly American.’

  Teller raised his eyebrows with his mouth full.

  ‘The boy shouted “Can you help us, sir,” and that “sir” comes a great deal more commonly from Americans, than from the English. Also, the boatman said their accent was “same as on the telly” and there’s as much American as English on our television.’

  ‘The same argument might apply to public schoolboys,’ Keeble said casually. ‘But they were Americans, I agree.’

  ‘So all we need to know now, apart from who were they,’ I said to Teller, ‘is why they wanted you dead.’

  No one had any constructive ideas on that point. Teller drank his coffee and a maid in a green overall came to take the tray.

  ‘You’re guarding against them having another go?’ I said to Keeble, watching the maid’s back disappear through the door.

  Keeble followed my eyes. ‘All precautions,’ he nodded. ‘The works. I got the Radnor-Halley Agency. Only the best for Dave!’

  ‘They won’t let me open any packages,’ Teller complained. ‘I think they take them outside, dunk them in a bucket, and wait for the ticking to start. And the only chocolates I have were bought by Sim personally. You’d never believe the half of what goes on in here.’

  I laughed. ‘It’s when you get out of here you’ll n
otice it.’

  ‘He’ll stay here till you’ve wrapped it up,’ remarked Keeble; and he wasn’t joking.

  I stared. ‘I’m in anti-infiltration, remember? Not the CID.’

  ‘Oh sure. But the same motivation, I imagine. Just let your hunter instincts loose … and tell us what you plan to do next.’

  I stood up restlessly and went to the window, still raining. Two nurses ran from one building to another, clutching capes around them and skitting mud up the backs of their stockings. Useful people, nurses. Needed people. Constructive, compassionate, tough people …

  ‘Well?’ said Keeble, behind me.

  I turned round and leaned against the wall. ‘How’s the exchequer?’

  Teller answered, ‘Look, Gene, I’ve enough to launch a minor space programme. And as I said before, if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be here at all. So spend what you need to, and I’ll pick up the chits.’

  ‘Right … then I think it would be best to let the Radnor-Halley Agency deal with anything which crops up here … I suppose they did the handkerchief inquiry?’

  Keeble nodded.

  ‘And I’ll go back to the States tomorrow. I can’t believe the attempted murder isn’t tied in with the horse theft, so the springboard for everything must be in America. Unless some Irish fanatic disapproves of you skimming off the cream of British bloodstock!’

  ‘Is Chrysalis Irish, then?’ Keeble asked seriously.

  ‘Irish-bred dam,’ I said. ‘That’s all. His sire was Purple Emperor, in the Read Stud at Newmarket.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Teller asked, surprised.

  ‘I looked it up,’ I said briefly. ‘Also his markings. And that is important.’ I paused. ‘Whoever took Allyx and Chrysalis knew a lot about horses. Allyx was one of six stallions loose in a paddock at night. Chrysalis was one of five horses in a horse box. Yet each time the right horse was singled out for removal. We have to believe it was the right horse, not just chance, because each time it was by far the most valuable one of the collection which disappeared. Well … Chrysalis is a dark bay with no distinguishing marks. No socks, no blaze, no star. One colour all over. And Allyx was exactly the same. There are literally thousands of horses like that.’