Longshot

by Dick Francis

  “Disappointment! Huh!” She sniffed hard. “I loved the beast. I mean, I even ironed his shirts for him. We were lovers for ages and he dumped me from one minute to the next. And now Mackie’s having a baby.” Her eyes filled with tears again, and I saw it was the raw ache for motherhood, that fierce instinct which could cause such unassuageable pain, that grieved her at least as much as the loss of the man.

  “Do you know what?” Dee-Dee said with misery. “That louse didn’t want a child until after we were married. After. He never meant to marry me, I know it now, but I waited for his sake ... and I wasted ... three years . . .” She gulped, a sob escaping. “I’ll tell you, I’ll take anyone now. I don’t need a wedding ring. I want a child.”

  Her voice died in a forlorn pining wail, a keen of mourning. With a hunger that strong she could make dreadful decisions, but who could tell which would be better for her to be in the end, reckless or barren. Either way, there would be regrets.

  She dried her eyes, blew her nose again and shook herself as if straightening her emotions by force, and when I next looked in on her she was typing away collectedly in her usual self-contained manner as if our conversation had never taken place.

  ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON Detective Chief Inspector Doone sent his men to search the whole area where the bones had been discovered. He told them to look for shoes, also for anything else man-made. They could use metal detectors. They should look under dead leaves. They were to mark on the map where each artifact was found, and also tag the artifact, being careful not to destroy evidence.

  This was now a murder investigation, he reminded them.

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING when we came in from first lot Sam Yaeger was again in the kitchen.

  This time he came not in his car but with a borrowed pickup truck in which he proposed to collect some Burma teak that Perkin had acquired for him at trade discount.

  “Sam has a boat,” Tremayne told me dryly. “An old wreck that he’s slowly turning into a palace fit for a harem.”

  Sam Yaeger grinned cheerfully and made no denials. “It’s already sold, or as good as,” he told me. “Every jockey’s got to have an eye to the bloody future. I buy clapped-out antique boats and make them better than new. I sold the last one to one of those sodding newspaper moguls. They’ll pay the earth for good stuff. No fiberglass crap.”

  Life was full of surprises, I thought.

  “Where do you keep the boat?” I asked, making toast.

  “Maidenhead. On the Thames. I bought a bankrupt boatyard there a while back. It looks a right shambles but a bit of dilapidation’s a good thing. Bloody thieves think there’s nothing bloody worth stealing. Better than a Rottweiler, is a bit of squalor.”

  “So I suppose,” Tremayne said, “that you’re taking the wood to the boatyard on your way to the races.”

  Sam looked at me in mock amazement. “Don’t know how he works these things out, do you?”

  “That’ll do, Sam,” Tremayne said, and one could see just where he drew the line between what he would take from Sam Yaeger, and what not. He began to discuss the horses he would be running at Windsor races that afternoon, telling Sam that “Bluecheesecake is better, not worse, for the layoff,” and “Give Just the Thing an easy if you feel her wavering. I don’t want her ruined while she’s still green.”

  “Right,” Sam said, concentrating. “What about Cashless? Do I ride him in front again?”

  “What do you think?”

  “He likes it better. He just got beat by faster horses, last time.”

  “Go off in front, then.”

  “Right.”

  “Nolan rides Telebiddy in the amateur race,” Tremayne said. “Unless the Jockey Club puts a stop to it.”

  Sam scowled but spoke no evil. Tremayne told him what he would be riding on the morrow at Towcester and said he’d have no runners at all on Friday.

  “Saturday I’m sending five or six to Chepstow. You’ll go there. So will I. With luck, Nolan rides Fiona’s horse in the Wilfred Johnstone Hunter ’Chase at Sandown. Maybe Mackie will go to Sandown; we’ll have to see.”

  Dee-Dee came in composedly for her coffee and as before sat next to Sam. Sam might be a constant seducer, I thought, looking at them, but he wouldn’t want to leave a trail of paternity problems. Dee-Dee might get him into bed but not into fatherhood. Bad luck, try again.

  Tremayne gave Dee-Dee instructions about engaging transport for Saturday, which she memorized as usual.

  “Remember to phone through the entries for Ludlow and Wincanton. I’ll decide on the Newbury entries this morning before I go to Windsor.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “Pack the colors for Windsor.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “Phone the saddler about collecting those exercise sheets for repair.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “Right, then. That’s about it.” He turned to me. “We’ll leave for Windsor at twelve-thirty.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  He went up to the Downs to watch the second lot, driving the newly acquired Land-Rover. Sam Yaeger took the pickup around to Perkin’s half of the house and loaded up his teak. Dee-Dee took her coffee into the office and I made a determined attempt to sort each year’s clippings into order of significance, the most newsworthy on top.

  AT ABOUT THAT time, Detective Chief Inspector Doone went into the formerly unused office that had been dubbed “Incident Room” for the bones investigation and laid out on a trestle table the bits and pieces that his men had gleaned from the woodland.

  There were the clothes found originally, now drying out in the centrally heated air. There was also a pair of well-worn and misshapen sneakers, still sodden, which might once have been white.

  Apart from those, there were four old empty and dirty soft drink cans, a heavily rusted toy fire-engine, a pair of broken sunglasses, a puckered leather belt with split stitches, a gin bottle, a blue plastic comb uncorrupted by time, a well-chewed rubber ball, a gold-plated ball-point pen, a pink lipstick, chocolate bar wrappers, a pitted garden spade and a broken dog collar.

  Detective Chief Inspector Doone walked broodingly around the table, staring at the haul from all angles.

  “Speak to me, girl,” he said. “Tell me who you are.”

  The clothes and the shoes made no answer.

  He called in his men and told them to go back to the woods and widen the search, and he himself, as he had the day before, went through his lists of missing persons, trying to make a match.

  He knew it was possible the young woman had been a far stranger to the area but thought it more likely that she was within fifty miles of her home. They usually were, these victims. He decided automatically to beam in on the locally lost.

  He had a list of twelve persistent adolescent runaways: all possibles. A list of four defaulters from youth custody. A short list of two missing prostitutes. A list of six missing for “various reasons.”

  One of those was Angela Brickell. The reason given was: “Probably doped a racehorse in her charge. Skipped out.”

  Doone’s attention passed over her and fastened thoughtfully on the wayward daughter of a politician. Reason for being missing: “Mixed with bad crowd. Unmanageable.”

  It might do his stalled career a bit of good, Doone reckoned, if it turned out to be her.

  9

  Tremayne told me that the only place that he couldn’t take me on Windsor racecourse was into the Holy of Holies, the weighing room. Everywhere else, he said, I should stay by his side. He wouldn’t forever be looking back to make sure I was with him: I was to provide my own glue.

  Accordingly I followed him doggedly, at times at a run. Where he paused briefly to talk to other people he introduced me as a friend, John Kendall, not as Boswell. He left me to sort out for myself the information bombarding me from all sides, rarely offering explanations, and I could see that explanations would have been a burden for him when he was so busy. His four runners, as it happened, were in four consecutive ra
ces. He took me for a quick sandwich and a drink soon after our arrival on the racecourse and from then on began a darting progress: into the weighing room to fetch his jockey’s saddle and weight cloth containing the correct amount of lead, off at a trot to the saddling boxes to do up the girths himself and straighten the tack to send the horse out looking good, into the parade ring to join the owners and give last-minute orders to the jockey, off up to the stands to watch the horse run, down again to the unsaddling areas, hoping to greet a winner, otherwise to listen to the why-not story from the jockey, and then off to the weighing room to pick up another saddle and weight cloth to start all over again.

  Nolan was there, anxiously asking if Tremayne had received any thumbs-down from the Jockey Club.

  “No,” Tremayne said. “Have you?”

  “Not an effing peep.”

  “You ride, then,” Tremayne said. “And don’t ask questions. Don’t invite a no. They’ll tell you quick enough if they want you off. Apply your mind to winning. Telebiddy’s owners are here with their betting money burning holes in their pockets, so deliver the goods, eh?”

  “Tell them I want a better effing present than last time.”

  “Win the race first,” Tremayne said.

  He made one of his dives into the weighing room, leaving me outside with Nolan, who had come dressed to stifle criticism. All the same he complained to me bitterly that the effing media had snapped him coming through the main gate and he could do without their sodding attentions, the obscene so and sos.

  The filth of Nolan’s language tended to wash over one, I found: the brain tended finally to filter it out.

  Much the same could be said about Sam Yaeger, who slouched up beside us and annoyed Nolan by patting him on the back. Sam, too, was transformed by tidiness and I gradually observed that several of the jockeys arrived and departed from the racecourse dressed for the boardroom. Their working clothes might be pink, purple and the stuff of fantasy but they were saying they were businessmen first.

  The physical impact of each of them, Nolan and Sam, was diluted and dissipated by the open air that incidentally was still as cold as their relationship.

  “Go easy on Bluecheesecake,” Nolan said. “I don’t want him effing loused up before the Kim Muir at Cheltenham.”

  Sam answered, “I’m not nannying any sodding amatem.”

  “The Kim Muir is his main effing target”

  “Eff his bloody target.”

  Did anyone ever grow up? I wondered. The school play-ground had a lot to answer for.

  Away from each other, as I discovered during the afternoon, they were assured, sensible and supremely expert.

  Sam made no concessions on Bluecheesecake. Through a spare pair of Tremayne’s binoculars I watched his gold cap from start to finish, seeing the smooth pattern of his progress along the rails, staying in third or fourth place while others surged forward and fell back on his outside.

  The steeplechase course at Windsor proved to be a winding figure-of-eight, which meant that tactics were important. At times one saw the runners from head-on; difficult to tell who was actually in front. Coming around the last of several bends, Bluecheesecake made a mess of one head-on-view fence, his nose going down to the ground, Sam’s back wholly visible from shoulders down to bottom up. Tremayne beside me let go of a Nolan-strength curse, but both horse and jockey righted themselves miraculously without falling and lost, Sam said afterwards, no more than three or four lengths.

  Perhaps because of having to make up for those lengths in limited time before the winning post, Sam, having given his mount precious extra seconds for recovery of balance, rode over the last two fences with what even I could see was total disregard for his own safety and pressed Bluecheesecake unceremoniously for every ounce of effort.

  Tremayne put down his glasses and watched the rocketing finish almost impassively, giving no more than a satisfied grunt when in the last few strides Bluecheesecake’s nose showed decisively in front.

  Before the cheers had died Tremayne had set off at a run to the winner’s enclosure with me in pursuit, and after he’d received his due congratulations, inspected his excited sweating breathless charge for cuts and damage (none) and talked briefly to the press, he followed Sam into the weighing room to fetch the saddle again for Just the Thing.

  When he came out he was escorted by Nolan, who fell into step beside him complaining ferociously that Sam had given Bluecheesecake a viciously hard race and spoiled his, Nolan’s, chances at Cheltenham.

  “Cheltenham is six weeks off,” Tremayne said calmly. “Plenty of time.”

  Nolan repeated his gripe.

  Tremayne said with amazing patience, “Sam did exactly right. Go and do the same on Telebiddy.”

  Nolan stalked away still looking more furious than was sensible in his position and Tremayne allowed himself a sigh but no comment. He took a lot more from Nolan, I reflected, than he would allow from Sam, even though it seemed to me that he liked Sam better. A lot of things were involved there: status, accent, connections; all the signal flags of class.

  Sam rode Just the Thing in the next event, a hurdle race, with inconspicuous gallantry, providing the green mare with a clear view of the jumps and urging her on at the end to give her a good idea of what was expected. She finished a respectable third to Tremayne’s almost tangible pleasure: and it was fascinating to me to have heard the plans beforehand and see them put into exact effect.

  While Tremayne was on his way from weighing room to saddling boxes for Telebiddy in the next race he handed me an envelope and asked me to put the contents for him on the Tote; Telebiddy, all to win.

  “I don’t like people to see me bet,” he said, “because for one thing it shows them I’m pretty confident, so they put their money on too, and it shortens the odds. I usually bet by phone with a bookmaker, but today I wanted to judge the state of the ground first. It can be treacherous, after snow. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Not at all.”

  He nodded and hurried off, and I made my way to the Tote windows and disposed of enough to keep me in food for a year. Small, as in Tremayne’s “small bet,” was a relative term, I saw.

  I joined him in the parade ring and asked if he wanted the tickets.

  “No. If he wins, collect for me, will you?”

  “OK.”

  Nolan was talking to the owners, exercising his best charm and moderating his language. In jockey’s clothes he still looked chunky, strong and powerfully arrogant, but the swagger seemed to stop the moment he sat on the horse. Then professionalism took over and he was concentrated, quiet and neat in the saddle.

  I tagged along behind Tremayne and the owners and from the stands watched Nolan give a display of razor-sharp competence that made most of the other amateurs look like Sunday drivers.

  He saved countable seconds over the fences, his mount gaining lengths by always seeming to take off at the right spot. Judgment, not luck. The courage that Mackie loved was still there, unmistakable.

  The owners, mother and daughter, were tremblers. They weren’t entirely white and near to dying, but from what they said the betting money was out of their pockets and on the horse in a big way and there was a good deal of lip- and knuckle-biting from off to finish.

  Nolan, as if determined to outride Sam Yaeger, hurled himself over the last three fences and won by ten lengths pulling up. Tremayne let out a deep breath and the owners hugged each other, hugged Tremayne and stopped shaking.

  “You could give Nolan a good cash present for that,” Tremayne said bluntly.

  The owners thought Nolan would be embarrassed if they gave him such a present.

  “Give it to me, to give to him. No embarrassment.”

  The owners said they’d better run down and lead in their winner, which they did.

  “Stingy cats,” Tremayne said in my ear as we watched them fuss over the horse and have their picture taken.

  “Won’t they really give Nolan anything?” I asked.
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br />   “It’s against the rules, and they know it. Amateurs aren’t supposed to be given money for winning. Nolan will have backed the horse anyway, he always does with a hot chance like this. And I get one-hundred-percent commitment from my jockey.” His voice was dry with humor. “I often think the Jockey Club has it wrong, not letting professional jockeys bet on their own mounts.”

  He returned to the weighing room to fetch Sam’s saddle and weight cloth for Cashless, and I went off to the Tote and collected his Telebiddy winnings, which approximately equaled his stake. Nolan, it appeared, had been riding the hot favorite.

  When I commented on it to Tremayne in the parade ring as we watched Cashless being led around, he told me that Nolan’s presence on any horse shortened its odds, and Telebiddy had won twice for him already this season. It was a wonder, Tremayne said, that the Tote had paid evens: he’d expected less of a return. I would do him a favor, he added, if I would give him his winnings on the way home, not in public, so I walked around with a small fortune I had no hope of repaying if I lost it, keeping it clutched in my lefthand trousers pocket.

  We went up to the stands for the race and watched Cashless set off in front as expected, a position he easily held until right where it mattered, the last fifty yards. Then three jockeys who had been waiting behind him stepped on the accelerator, and although Cashless didn’t in any way give up, the three others passed him.

  Tremayne shrugged. “Too bad.”

  “Will you run him in front again next time?” I asked, as we went down off the stands.

  “I expect so. We’ve tried keeping him back and he runs worse. He’s one-paced in a finish, that’s his trouble. He’s game enough, but it’s hard to find races he can win.”

  We reached the parade ring, where the unsuccessful runners were being unsaddled. Sam, looping girths over his arm, gave Tremayne a rueful smile and said Cashless had done his best.

  “I saw,” Tremayne agreed. “Can’t be helped.” We watched Sam walk off towards the weighing room, and Tremayne remarked thoughtfully that he might try Cashless in an amateur race, and see what Nolan could do.