by Dick Francis
‘Now, Sid,’ RP fully restored, ‘I need you to find out something for me.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said.
‘I’ll pay you proper rates. I want you to find out why my horses aren’t winning when they should be.’
It was something I was regularly asked to do. I inwardly sighed. Most owners think their horses should be winning more often than they do. It’s a matter of ‘I paid good brass for the damn thing so why doesn’t it start repaying?’
‘I think,’ he went on, ‘my jockey and trainer are stopping them.’
That was what they all thought.
‘Move them to another trainer.’ I was doing myself out of a commission.
‘It’s not as simple as that, young man. I tell you, my horses are not just not winning when they should, they’re running to orders that aren’t mine. I feel I’m being used and I don’t like it.’ I could suddenly see the real Jonny Enstone beneath the Savile Row exterior: powerful, determined, even dangerous.
‘I’m in racing because I like to win,’ he emphasised the word. ‘It’s not the money that’s important, it’s the winning.’
Why was it, I thought, that it was always those with plenty of it who believed that money was not important. To the hard-up punter, a place bet on a long-priced runner-up was much better than an ultra short-priced winner.
Peter returned with a fresh glass of champagne for his father as a peace offering, their earlier little spat obviously forgiven.
‘Thanks, Peter,’ said Lord Enstone. He took a sip of the golden fluid.
‘Who trains your horses?’ I asked. ‘And who rides them?’
‘Bill Burton and Huw Walker.’
I stayed to watch the Gold Cup from Lord Enstone’s box. The balcony was heaving with bodies pressed up against the front rail as everyone strove to get a view of the supreme challenge for a steeplechaser, three and a quarter miles over 22 fences, all horses carrying the same weight. The winner of the Cheltenham Gold Cup was a true champion.
I had ridden eight times in this race and I knew all too well the nervous anticipation being experienced by the jockeys as they paraded in front of the packed grandstands. This was one of only two or three really big jump races in the year that put the winning horse and jockey into the history books. For a horse to win this race more than once was the stuff of dreams. Winning it three times put the animal into the legend category.
Oven Cleaner, in spite of his name, was aiming to join the legends.
He was a big grey horse and I watched him canter down to the start with the others. I wondered if I would ever stop being envious of those doing what I still longed to do. I had not been born to the saddle and had never sat on a horse until I was sixteen when my widowed mother, dying herself of kidney cancer, had taken me to be apprenticed to a Newmarket trainer simply because I was very small for my age and I would soon be an orphan. But I had taken to riding like the proverbial duck to water. I found the bond between horse and rider exhilarating, especially when I realised that I could read their minds. When I discovered that they could also read mine, I knew I was part of a winning combination.
And so it had been until it all fell apart. A jockey feels a horse not through his feet in the stirrups nor through his arse on the saddle but through his hands on the reins connecting like power cables to the horse’s mouth, transmitting commands and data in both directions. With only one hand, it was like a battery with only one end. Useless — no circuit, no transmission, no data, no go. At least, no go fast, which is what racehorses and jockeys are supposed to do.
I watched the field of the best steeplechasers in the world gallop past the stands on the first circuit and positively ached to be amongst them. It had been ten years but it felt like only yesterday that I had been.
Oven Cleaner cleaned up. In his trademark manner, he looked to all to have left his run too late but, to a deafening roar from his tens of thousands of faithful supporters, he charged up the hill to win by a whisker.
The crowd went wild, cheering and shouting and even throwing their soggy hats into the air. The big grey nodded his head in approval as he took the applause on the walk to the winner’s unsaddling enclosure. He was a hero and he knew it. Grown men cried with joy and hugged their neighbours whether they knew them or not. The only unhappy faces were the bookies who would lose a fortune. Oven Cleaner was a national icon, and housewives had bet the housekeeping and children had loaded their pocket money on his nose. ‘The Cleaner’, as he was affectionately known, was a god amongst racehorses.
The cheering rose to a new height as the legend was led into the unsaddling enclosure by his euphoric lady owner.
Then the legend died.
Tears of joy turned to tears of despair as the much loved champion suddenly stumbled and collapsed onto the grass, pulling down his owner and pinning her leg under his half-ton bulk. The crowd fell silent, save for a group of celebrating punters at the back still unaware of the unfolding tragedy. The screams of the horse’s owner, her ankle trapped and crushed, eventually cut through to them too, and they were hushed.
Oven Cleaner had given his all. His heart, so strong in carrying him up the Cheltenham hill to victory, had failed him in his moment of triumph.
Willing hands managed to free the poor owner but she refused to leave for medical treatment on her broken ankle, cradling the horse’s head in her lap and crying the inconsolable tears of the bereaved.
I watched a vet examine the animal. He placed a stethoscope to the grey-haired chest and listened for a few seconds. He stood up, pursed his lips and shook his head. No paramedics, no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, no defibrillator pads, no cardiac massage, just a shake of the head.
A team of men hurried in with green canvas screens that they set up around the still steaming bulk. No screens, I thought, for the poor human victim who had died on the same spot not three hours before. But the screens were not really necessary. Whereas, earlier, the crowd had grown to watch the human drama, now they turned away, not wanting to witness the sad end of such a dear friend.
Deep gloom descended on the racecourse. It was not helped by an objection from the clerk of the scales because Oven Cleaner’s jockey had failed to weigh in.
‘How could I?’ he protested. ‘My bleeding saddle is still on the bleeding horse halfway to the bleeding glue factory.’
The ‘bleeding saddle’ in question had, in fact, been removed by the trainer when the horse had collapsed and had been placed out of sight under the cloth-covered table used for the presentations of the trophies. An uncommon amount of good sense broke out when it was agreed by the Stewards that the jockey, finally reunited with his saddle, could weigh in late.
I wondered what the rule would have been if the jockey had died instead of the horse. Could his lifeless corpse be carried to the scales? Dead weight. I smiled at the thought and received some stern looks for being so cheerful at a time of national mourning.
The fourth race on Gold Cup day is the Foxhunter Steeple Chase, often referred to as the amateur riders’ gold cup. The favourite won but returned to almost silent grandstands. The will to cheer had gone out of the crowd, which politely applauded the winner’s return.
‘Where’s that bloody jockey of mine?’ Bill Burton was asking anyone and everyone outside the weighing room.
‘Huw Walker?’ I asked as Bill hurried towards me.
‘Bloody unreliable bastard, that’s what he is. Gone bloody AWOL. Have you seen him, Sid?’ I shook my head. ‘He’s due to ride Leaded Light in the next but I can’t find him. I’ll have to declare another jockey.’ He went back inside to change his declaration.
Leaded Light was beaten into second place in a close finish that should have had the crowd on their feet shouting. Such was the mood that the jockey on the winner didn’t even look happy at having won. Many of the crowd had already departed and I, too, decided I’d had enough. I opted to wait for Charles at his car in the hope that he would also want to leave before the last race.
I was making my way past the rows of outside broadcast TV vans when a wide-eyed young woman came stumbling towards me. She was unable to speak but she pointed down the gap between two of the vans.
She had found Huw Walker.
He sat leaned up against the wheel of one of the vans looking at me with an expression of surprise. Except that his staring eyes were not seeing and never would again.
He was still wearing his riding clothes, breeches, lightweight riding boots and a thin white roll-neck top worn under a blue anorak to keep out the rain and the March chill. His anorak hung open so that I could clearly see the three closely grouped bullet wounds in the middle of his chest showing red against the white cotton. I knew what one bullet could do to a man’s guts as I had myself once carelessly been on the receiving end, but these three were closer to the heart and there seemed little doubt as to the cause of death.
CHAPTER 3
Charles and I didn’t arrive back at Aynsford until after midnight.
As is so often the case, the police ran roughshod over everything with no care for people’s feelings and, it seemed, with little or no common sense.
They cancelled the last race of the day and closed the racecourse, refusing to let anyone leave, not even those in the central enclosure who didn’t have access to where Huw Walker had been found. Totally ill equipped to interview nearly sixty thousand people, they relented in the end and allowed the wet, angry and frustrated multitude to make their ways to the car parks and home but not before it was very dark and very cold.
In a way, I felt sorry for the policemen. They had no idea how to deal with a crowd of racegoers in shock and grief over a horse. Surely, they said, you are more concerned about the murder of a jockey than the death of an animal?
‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ said one man standing near me. ‘All jockeys are bent, anyway. Got what he deserved, I reckon.’ Sadly, it was a common view. If it wins, it’s all the horse’s doing. If it loses, blame the pilot.
I didn’t get away quite so easily as I was a material witness and I reluctantly agreed to go to their hastily established incident room in one of the now vacated restaurants to give a statement. I pointed out that I hadn’t actually been the first to find poor Huw. However, the young woman who had was so shocked that she had been sedated by a doctor. She was asleep and unable to speak to the police. Lucky her.
Huw had been seen in the jockeys’ changing room before the Gold Cup but not after it. Bill Burton had been looking for him less than an hour later.
By the time they had set up their interview area and got round to asking me, it was clear they had received reports of the shouting match between trainer and jockey after Candlestick’s victory in the first. Bill Burton, it appeared, was already their prime suspect.
I pointed out to Detective Chief Inspector Carlisle of Gloucestershire CID that Huw had obviously been killed by an expert assassin who must have brought a gun with him to the races for the purpose and that Bill Burton couldn’t have magically produced a shooter out of thin air just because he had had a tiff with his jockey following the first race.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘maybe that’s what we are meant to think while, meantime, Burton had planned it all along.’
Yes, I had spoken to Huw Walker earlier in the day.
No, he didn’t say anything to me that could be of use to the police.
Yes, I had seen Huw Walker and Bill Burton together after the first race.
No, I didn’t know why anyone would want him dead.
Yes, I would contact them again if I thought of anything else which might be important.
I remembered the message on my London telephone and decided not to mention it. I wanted to listen to it first and the remote access system on my answer machine was broken.
The following morning, all the national dailies ran the ecstasy and agony of Oven Cleaner on their front pages. The Times ran the story over the first three pages with graphic photographs of his victory and the subsequent disaster.
Only on page seven was there a report of the discovery, late in the afternoon, of the body of jockey Huw Walker by Sid Halley, ex-champion jockey and now private detective. Even this item referred to the sad demise of the equine hero and, at first glance, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the two were connected. Somehow the impression was given that Walker’s death was a bizarre after-effect of the great horse’s passing, as if the jockey had killed himself in grief even though he had not himself ridden The Cleaner to victory. There was no mention of the three bullet wounds in Huw’s chest. As any one of the three would have been instantly fatal, the police, at least, were not treating his death as suicide.
The Racing Post went even further, with an eight-page spread of Oven Cleaner’s career and an obituary to rival that of a prime minister.
‘It was only a bloody horse,’ declared Charles over his breakfast. ‘Like that memorial in London for the animals in war. Ridiculous sentimental rubbish.’
‘Come on, Charles,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen you almost in tears over your dogs when they die. Same thing.’
‘Poppycock!’ But he knew it was true. ‘When are you off?’ he asked, changing the subject.
‘After breakfast. I have some reports to write.’
‘Come again. Come as often as you like. I like having you here and I miss you when you’re gone.’
I was surprised, but pleased. He had initially detested his daughter marrying a jockey. Not a suitable match, he’d thought, for the daughter of an admiral. A game of chess, which I had won, had been the catalyst to an enduring friendship that had survived the break-up of my marriage, had survived the destruction of my racing career, and had been instrumental in the blossoming of my new life out of the saddle. Charles was not one to show his emotions openly; command in the services was lonely and one had to learn to be emotionally robust in the face of junior officers.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I enjoy being here and I will come again soon.’
We both knew that I tended to come to Aynsford only when I was in trouble or when I was depressed, or both. Aynsford had become my sanctuary and my therapy. It was my rock in the turbulent waters I had chosen as my home.
I left promptly after breakfast and drove home to London along a relatively empty M40. The rain beat relentlessly on the roof of my Audi as I made my way round Hyde Park Corner and into Belgravia. I lived in a fourth-floor flat in Ebury Street near Victoria Station and, after five years, it was beginning to feel like home. Not least because I did not live there on my own.
Who Sid Halley was presently ‘screwing’, the secret I kept from Chris Beecher, was Marina van der Meer, a Dutch beauty, a natural blonde with brains, and a member of a team of chemists at the Cancer Research UK laboratories in Lincoln’s Inn Fields searching for the Holy Grail — a simple blood test to find cancers long before any symptoms appear. Earlier detection, she said, leads to easier cure.
When I arrived at noon she was sitting in our large bed, wearing a fluffy pink towelling robe and reading the Saturday papers.
‘Well, well, quite the little Sherlock Holmes!’ She pointed to a picture of me in the Telegraph. It was the one they often used of me, smiling broadly as I received a racing trophy. That photo was now more than ten years old and pre the flecks of grey that were now appearing at my temples. I didn’t mind.
‘It says here that you discovered the body. I bet Colonel Mustard did it in the conservatory with the lead piping.’ Her English was perfect with a faint hint of accent, more a rising and lowering of inflection than a specific style of pronunciation. Music to my ears.
‘Well, he might have done, but he must have melted the lead piping into bullets first.’
‘It doesn’t say he was shot.’ She looked surprised and tapped the paper. ‘It even gives the impression it was natural causes or suicide.’
‘Difficult to shoot yourself three times in the heart. The police kept that gem to themselves and I didn’t tell the Press either.’
‘Wow!’
‘What are you still doing in bed, anyway?’ I asked, lying down beside her on the duvet. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Fancy working up an appetite?’ I grinned.
‘I thought you’d never ask.’ She giggled and shrugged the robe off her slender shoulders.
Chris Beecher, eat your heart out.
We lay in bed for much of the afternoon, watching the racing on the television while I should have been writing up reports for clients. We decided against a walk to St James’s Park because of the incessant rain but, eventually, did huddle under an umbrella and make our way to dinner at Santini, the Italian restaurant on the corner. Marina had chicken while I chose Dover sole, off the bone.
We contentedly shared a bottle of Chablis and caught up on the week.
‘Tell me more about the jockey who was killed,’ Marina asked.
‘He was nice enough,’ I said. ‘In fact, I spoke with him earlier.’ I remembered Huw’s message still sitting unheard on my machine.
‘He won the first race,’ I said. But I wondered if he should have. Had he been told to lose? Was that why he’d died? Surely not. That killing was expertly carried out. It was an assassination. As I had told the police, someone had to have come to the races with the wherewithal to commit murder in his pocket. Metal detectors were not usual at the entrances to racecourses, although Aintree used them after the Grand National was postponed one year due to a bomb scare.
The rain had stopped by the time we walked back to the flat hand in hand — her left, my right — dodging the puddles and laughing out loud. This was why I never took Marina to the races. This was a different world, one in which I could relax and act like a teenager, one in which I was increasingly happy and near to the point where I would seek to make it permanent. We stopped and kissed at least four times during the short fifty-yard stroll and went straight back to bed.
