Banker

by Dick Francis

  ‘They’re not all like that,’ Oliver remarked prosaically, as Sandcastle slid out and backwards and brought his forelegs to earth with a jolt. ‘You’ve seen a good one.’

  I thanked him for letting me be there, and in truth I felt I understood more about horses then than I’d ever imagined I would.

  We walked back to the house with Oliver telling me that with the four stallions there were currently six, seven or eight matings a day in the breeding shed, Sundays included. The mind stuttered a bit at the thought of all that rampaging fertility, but that, after all, was what the bank’s five million pounds was all about. Rarely, I thought, had anyone seen Ekaterin’s money so fundamentally at work.

  We set off homewards fortified by tea, scones and whisky, with Oliver and Gordon at the end competing over who thanked whom most warmly. Ginnie gave me another but more composed hug and begged me to come again, and Judith kissed her and offered female succour if ever needed.

  ‘Nice child,’ she said as we drove away. ‘Growing up fast.’

  ‘Fifteen,’ I said.

  ‘Sixteen. She had a birthday last week.’

  ‘You got on well with her,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ She looked round at Pen and Gordon, who were again sitting in the back. ‘She told us about your little escapade here two months ago.’

  ‘She didn’t!’

  ‘She sure did,’ Pen said, smiling. ‘Why ever didn’t you say?’

  ‘I know why,’ Gordon said dryly. ‘He didn’t want it to be known in the office that the loan he’d recommended had very nearly fallen under a lorry.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Very much so,’ I admitted wryly. ‘Some of the board were against the whole thing anyway, and I’d have never heard the end of the horse getting out.’

  ‘What a coward,’ Pen said, chuckling.

  We pottered slowly back to Clapham through the stop-go end-of-Bank-Holiday traffic, and Judith and Pen voted it the best day they’d had since Ascot. Gordon dozed, I drove with relaxation and so we finally reached the tall gates by the common.

  I went in with them for supper as already arranged, but all of them, not only Gordon, were tired from the long day, and I didn’t stay late. Judith came out to the car to see me off and to shut the gates after I’d gone.

  We didn’t really talk. I held her in my arms, her head on my shoulder, my head on hers, close in the dark night, as far apart as planets.

  We stood away and I took her hand, lingering, not wanting all contact lost.

  ‘A great day,’ she said, and I said ‘Mm’, and kissed her very briefly.

  Got into the car and drove away.

  OCTOBER

  Summer had come, summer had gone, sodden, cold and unloved. It had been overcast and windy during Royal Ascot week and Gordon and I, clamped to our telephones and pondering our options, had looked at the sullen sky and hardly minded that this year Dissdale hadn’t needed to sell half-shares in his box.

  Only with the autumn, far too late, had days of sunshine returned, and it was on a bright golden Saturday that I took the race train to Newbury to see the mixed meeting of two jump races and four flat.

  Ursula Young was there, standing near the weighing room when I walked in from the station and earnestly reading her racecard.

  ‘Hello,’ she said when I greeted her. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. How’s the money-lending?’

  ‘Profitable,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘Are you here for anything special?’

  ‘No. Just fresh air and a flutter.’

  ‘I’m supposed to meet a client.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Time for a quick sandwich, though. Are you on?’

  I was on, and bought her and myself a thin pallid slice of tasteless white meat between two thick pallid tasteless slices of soggy-crusted bread, the whole wrapped up in cardboard and celophane and costing a fortune.

  Ursula ate it in disgust. ‘They used to serve proper luscious sandwiches, thick, juicy handmade affairs which came in a whole stack. I can’t stand all this repulsive hygiene.’ The rubbish from the sandwiches indeed littered most of the tables around us… ‘Every so-called advance is a retreat from excellence,’ she said, dogmatic as ever.

  I totally agreed with her and we chewed in joyless accord.

  ‘How’s trade with you?’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘Fair. The cream of the yearlings are going for huge prices. They’ve all got high reserves on them because they’ve cost so much to produce – stallion fees and the cost of keeping the mare and foal to start with, let alone vet’s fees and all the incidentals. My sort of clients on the whole settle for a second, third or fourth rank, and many a good horse, mind you, has come from the bargain counter.’

  I smiled at the automatic sales pitch. ‘Talking of vets,’ I said, is the Pargetter murder still unsolved?’

  She nodded regretfully. ‘I was talking to his poor wife in Newmarket last week. We met in the street. She’s only half the girl she was, poor thing, no life in her. She said she asked the police recently if they were still even trying, and they assured her they were, but she doesn’t believe it. It’s been so long, nine months, and if they hadn’t any leads to start with, how can they possibly have any now? She’s very depressed, it’s dreadful.’

  I made sympathetic murmurs, and Ursula went on, ‘The only good thing you could say is that he’d taken out decent life insurance and paid off the mortgage on their house, so at least she and the children aren’t penniless as well. She was telling me how he’d been very careful in those ways, and she burst into tears, poor girl.’

  Ursula looked as if the encounter had distressed her also.

  ‘Have another whisky-mac,’ I suggested. ‘To cheer you up.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘All right. You get it, but I’ll pay. My turn.’

  Over the second drink, in a voice of philosophical irritation, she told me about the client she was presently due to meet, a small-time trainer of steeplechasers. ‘He’s such a fool to himself,’ she said. ‘He makes hasty decisions, acts on impulse, and then when things go wrong he feels victimised and cheated and gets angry. Yet he can be perfectly nice when he likes.’

  I wasn’t especially interested in the touchy trainer, but when I went outside again with Ursula he spotted her from a short distance away and practically pounced on her arm.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, as if she’d had no right to be anywhere but at his side. ‘I’ve been looking all over.’

  ‘It’s only just time,’ she said mildly.

  He brushed that aside, a short wiry intense man of about forty with a pork-pie hat above a weatherbeaten face.

  ‘I wanted you to see him before he’s saddled,’ he said. ‘Do come on, Ursula. Come and look at his conformation.’

  She opened her mouth to say something to me but he almost forcefully dragged her off, holding her sleeve and talking rapidly into her ear. She gave me an apologetic look of long-suffering and departed in the direction of the pre-parade ring, where the horses for the first race were being led round by their lads before going off to the saddling boxes.

  I didn’t follow but climbed onto the steps of the main parade ring, round which walked several of the runners already saddled. The last of the field to appear some time later was accompanied by the pork-pie hat, and also Ursula, and for something to do I looked the horse up in the racecard.

  Zoomalong, five-year-old gelding, trained by F. Barnet.

  F. Barnet continued his dissertation into Ursula’s ear, aiming his words from approximately six inches away, which I would have found irritating but which she bore without flinching. According to the flickering numbers on the Tote board Zoomalong had a medium chance in the opinion of the public, so for interest I put a medium stake on him to finish in the first three.

  I didn’t see Ursula or F. Barnet during the race, but Zoomalong zoomed along quite nicely to finish third, and I walked down from the stands towards the unsaddling enclosure to wa
tch the patting-on-the-back post-race routine.

  F. Barnet was there, still talking to Ursula and pointing out parts of his now sweating and stamping charge. Ursula nodded non-committally, her own eyes knowledgeably raking the gelding from stem to stern, a neat competent good looking fifty in a rust-coloured coat and brown velvet beret.

  Eventually the horses were led away and the whole cycle of excitement began slowly to regenerate towards the second race.

  Without in the least meaning to I again found myself standing near Ursula, and this time she introduced me to the pork-pie hat, who had temporarily stopped talking.

  ‘This is Fred Barnet,’ she said. ‘And his wife Susan.’ A rounded motherly person in blue. ‘And their son, Ricky.’ A boy taller than his father, dark-haired, pleasant-faced.

  I shook hands with all three, and it was while I was still touching the son that Ursula in her clear voice said my name, ‘Tim Ekaterin.’

  The boy’s hand jumped in mine as if my flesh had burned him. I was astonished, and then I looked at his whitening skin, at the suddenly frightened dark eyes, at the stiffening of the body, at the rising panic: and I wouldn’t have known him if he hadn’t reacted in that way.

  ‘What’s the matter, Ricky?’ his mother said, puzzled.

  He said ‘Nothing’ hoarsely and looked around for escape, but all too clearly he knew I knew exactly who he was now and could always find him however far he ran.

  ‘What do you think, then, Ursula?’ Fred Barnet demanded, returning to the business in hand. ‘Will you buy him? Can I count on you?’

  Ursula said she would have to consult her client.

  ‘But he was third,’ Fred Barnet insisted. ‘A good third.… In that company, a pretty good showing. And he’ll win, I’m telling you. He’ll win.’

  ‘I’ll tell my client all about him. I can’t say fairer than that.’

  ‘But you do like him, don’t you? Look, Ursula, he’s a good sort, easy to handle, just right for an amateur…’ He went on for a while in this vein while his wife listened with a sort of aimless beam meaning nothing at all.

  To the son, under cover of his father’s hard sell, I quietly said, ‘I want to talk to you, and if you run away from me now I’ll be telephoning the police.’

  He gave me a sick look and stood still.

  ‘We’ll walk down the course together to watch the next race,’ I said. ‘We won’t be interrupted there. And you can tell me why. And then we’ll see.’

  It was easy enough for him to drop back unnoticed from his parents, who were still concentrating on Ursula, and he came with me through the gate and out across the track itself to the centre of the racecourse, stumbling slightly as if not in command of his feet. We walked down towards the last fence, and he told me why he’d tried to kill Calder Jackson.

  ‘It doesn’t seem real, not now, it doesn’t really,’ he said first. A young voice, slightly sloppy accent, full of strain.

  ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Seventeen.’

  I hadn’t been so far out, I thought, fifteen months ago.

  ‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ he said explosively, sounding faintly aggrieved at the twist of fate. ‘I mean, the papers said you worked in a bank.’

  ‘So I do. And I go racing.’ I paused. ‘You remembered my name.’

  ‘Yeah. Could hardly forget it, could I? All over the papers.’

  We went a few yards in silence. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  He made a convulsive gesture of frustrated despair. ‘All right. But if I tell you, you won’t tell them, will you, not Mum and Dad?’

  I glanced at him, but from his troubled face it was clear that he meant exactly what he’d said: it wasn’t my telling the police he minded most, but my telling his parents.

  ‘Just get on with it,’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘Well, we had this horse. Dad did. He’d bought it as a yearling and ran it as a two-year-old and at three, but it was a jumper really, and it turned out to be good.’ He paused. ‘Indian Silk, that’s what it was called.’

  I frowned. ‘But Indian Silk… didn’t that win at Cheltenham this year, in March?’

  He nodded. ‘The Gold Cup. The very top. He’s only seven now and he’s bound to be brilliant for years.’ The voice was bitter with a sort of resigned, stifled anger.

  ‘But he doesn’t any longer belong to your father?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t.’ More bitterness, very sharp.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I said.

  He swallowed and took his time, but eventually he said, ‘Two years ago this month, when Indian Silk was five, like, he won the Hermitage ’Chase very easily here at Newbury, and everyone was tipping him for the Gold Cup last year, though Dad was saying he was still on the young side and to give him time. See, Dad was that proud of that horse. The best he’d ever trained, and it was his own, not someone else’s. Don’t know if you can understand that.’

  ‘I do understand it,’ I said.

  He gave a split-second glance at my face. ‘Well, Indian Silk got sick,’ he said. ‘I mean, there was nothing you could put your finger on. He just lost his speed. He couldn’t even gallop properly at home, couldn’t beat the other horses in Dad’s yard that he’d been running rings round all year. Dad couldn’t run him in races. He could hardly train him. And the vet couldn’t find out what was wrong with him. They took blood tests and all sorts, and they gave him antibiotics and purges, and they thought it might be worms or something, but it wasn’t.’

  We had reached the last fence, and stood there on the rough grass beside it while in twos and threes other enthusiasts straggled down from the grandstand towards us to watch the horses in action at close quarters.

  ‘I was at school a lot of the time, see,’ Ricky said. ‘I was home every night of course but I was taking exams and had a lot of homework and I didn’t really want to take much notice of Indian Silk getting so bad or anything. I mean, Dad does go on a bit, and I suppose I thought the horse just had the virus or something and would get better. But he just got slowly worse and one day Mum was crying.’ He stopped suddenly, as if that part was the worst. ‘I hadn’t seen a grown up cry before,’ he said. ‘Suppose you’ll think it funny, but it upset me something awful.’

  ‘I don’t think it funny,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, seeming to gather confidence, ‘It got so that Indian Silk was so weak he could barely walk down the road and he wasn’t eating, and Dad was in real despair because there wasn’t nothing anyone could do, and Mum couldn’t bear the thought of him going to the knackers, and then some guy telephoned and offered to buy him.’

  To buy a sick horse?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘I don’t think Dad was going to tell him just how bad he was. Well, I mean, at that point Indian Silk was worth just what the knackers would pay for his carcass, which wasn’t much, and this man was offering nearly twice that. But the man said he knew Indian Silk couldn’t race any more but he’d like to give him a good home in a nice field for as long as necessary, and it meant that Dad didn’t have the expense of any more vets’ bills and he and Mum didn’t have to watch Indian Silk just getting worse and worse, and Mum wouldn’t have to think of him going to the knackers for dog meat, so they let him go.’

  The horses for the second race came out onto the course and galloped down past us, the jockeys’ colours bright in the sun.

  ‘And then what?’ I said.

  ‘Then nothing happened for weeks and we were getting over it, like, and then someone told Dad that Indian Silk was back in training and looking fine, and he couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘When was that?’ I asked.

  ‘It was last year, just before… before Ascot.’

  A small crowd gathered on the landing side of the fence, and I drew him away down the course a bit further, to where the horses would set themselves right to take off.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘My exams were coming up,’ he said. ‘And I mean, they wer
e important, they were going to affect my whole life, see?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then Dad found that the man who’d bought Indian Silk hadn’t put him in any field, he’d sent him straight down the road to Calder Jackson.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘And there was this man saying Calder Jackson had the gift of healing, some sort of magic, and had simply touched Indian Silk and made him well. I ask you… And Dad was in a frightful state because someone had suggested he should send the horse there, to Calder Jackson, while he was so bad, of course, and Dad had said don’t be so ridiculous it was all a lot of rubbish. And then Mum was saying he should have listened to her, because she’d said why not try it, it couldn’t do any harm, and he wouldn’t do it, and they were having rows, and she was crying…’ He gulped for air, the story now pouring out faster almost than he could speak. ‘And I wasn’t getting any work done with it all going on, they weren’t ever talking about anything else, and I took the first exam and just sat there and couldn’t do it, and I knew I’d failed and I was going to fail them all because I couldn’t concentrate… and then there was Calder Jackson one evening talking on television, saying he’d got a friend of his to buy a dying horse, because the people who owned it would just have let it die because they didn’t believe in healers, like a lot of people, and he hoped the horse would be great again some day, like before, thanks to him, and I knew he was talking about Indian Silk. And he said he was going to Ascot on that Thursday… and there was Dad screaming that Calder Jackson had stolen the horse away, it was all a filthy swindle, which of course it wasn’t, but at the time I believed him… and it all got so that I hated Calder Jackson so much that I couldn’t think straight. I mean, I thought he was the reason Mum was crying and I was failing my exams and Dad had lost the only really top horse he’d have in his whole life, and I just wanted to kill him.’

  The bed-rock words were out, and the flood suddenly stopped, leaving the echo of them on the October air.

  ‘And did you fail your exams?’ I asked, after a moment.

  ‘Yeah. Most of them. But I took them again at Christmas and got good passes.’ He shook his head, speaking more slowly, more quietly. ‘I was glad even that night that you’d stopped me stabbing him. I mean… I’d have thrown my whole life away, I could see it afterwards, and all for nothing, because Dad wasn’t going to get the horse back whatever I did, because it was a legal sale, like.’