Banker

by Dick Francis

  I thought over what he’d told me while in the distance the horses lined up and set off on their three mile steeplechase.

  ‘I was sort of mad,’ he said. ‘I can’t really understand it now. I mean, I wouldn’t go around trying to kill people. I really wouldn’t. It seems like I was a different person.’

  Adolescence, I thought, and not for the first time, could be hell.

  ‘I took Mum’s knife out of the kitchen,’ he said. ‘She never could think where it had gone.’

  I wondered if the police still had it; with Ricky’s fingerprints on file.

  ‘I didn’t know there would be so many people at Ascot,’ he said. ‘And so many gates into the course. Much more than Newmarket. I was getting frantic because I thought I wouldn’t find him. I meant to do it earlier, see, when he arrived. I was out on the road, running up and down the pavement, mad, you know, really, looking for him and feeling the knife kind of burning in my sleeve, like I was burning in my mind… and I saw his head, all those curls, crossing the road, and I ran, but I was too late, he’d gone inside, through the gate.’

  ‘And then,’ I suggested. ‘You simply waited for him to come out?’

  He nodded. ‘There were lots of people around. No one took any notice. I reckoned he’d come up that path from the station, and that was the way he would go back. It didn’t seem long, the waiting. Went in a flash.’

  The horses came over the next fence down the course like a multi-coloured wave and thundered towards the one where we were standing. The ground trembled from the thud of the hooves, the air rang with the curses of jockeys, the half-ton equine bodies brushed through the birch, the sweat and the effort and the speed filled eyes and ears and mind with pounding wonder and then were gone, flying away, leaving the silence. I had walked down several times before to watch from the fences, both there and on other tracks, and the fierce fast excitement had never grown stale.

  ‘Who is it who owns Indian Silk now?’ I asked.

  ‘A Mr Chacksworth, comes from Birmingham,’ Ricky answered. ‘You see him at the races sometimes, slobbering all over Indian Silk. But it wasn’t him that bought him from Dad. He bought him later, when he was all right again. Paid a proper price for him, so we heard. Made it all the worse.’

  A sad and miserable tale, all of it.

  ‘Who bought the horse from your father?’ I said.

  ‘I never met him… his name was Smith. Some funny first name. Can’t remember.’

  Smith. Friend of Calder’s.

  ‘Could it,’ I asked, surprised, ‘have been Dissdale Smith?’

  ‘Yeah. That sounds like it. How do you know?’

  ‘He was there that day at Ascot,’ I said. ‘There on the pavement, right beside Calder Jackson.’

  ‘Was he?’ Ricky looked disconcerted. ‘He was a dead liar, you know, all that talk about nice fields.’

  ‘Who tells the truth,’ I said, ‘when buying or selling horses ?’

  The runners were round again on the far side of the track, racing hard now on the second circuit.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Ricky said. ‘About me, like? You won’t tell Mum and Dad. You won’t, will you?’

  I looked directly at the boy-man, seeing the continuing anxiety but no longer the first panic-stricken fear. He seemed to sense now that I would very likely not drag him into court, but he wasn’t sure of much else.

  ‘Perhaps they should know,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ His agitation rose quickly. ‘They’ve had so much trouble and I would have made it so much worse if you hadn’t stopped me, and afterwards I used to wake up sweating at what it would have done to them; and the only good thing was that I did learn that you can’t put things right by killing people, you can only make things terrible for your family.’

  After a long pause I said ‘All right. I won’t tell them.’ And heaven help me, I thought, if he ever attacked anyone again because he thought he could always get away with it.

  The relief seemed to affect him almost as much as the anxiety. He blinked several times and turned his head away to where the race was again coming round into the straight with this time an all-out effort to the winning post. There was again the rise and fall of the field over the distant fences but now the one wave had split into separate components, the runners coming home not in a bunch but a procession.

  I watched again the fierce surprising speed of horse and jockey jumping at close quarters and wished with some regret that I could have ridden like that: but like Alec I was wishing too late, even strong and healthy and thirty-three.

  The horses galloped off towards the cheers on the grandstand and Ricky and I began a slow walk in their wake. He seemed quiet and composed in the aftermath of confession, the soul’s evacuation giving him ease.

  ‘What do you feel nowadays about Calder Jackson?’ I asked.

  He produced a lop-sided smile. ‘Nothing much. That’s what’s so crazy. I mean, it wasn’t his fault Dad was so stubborn.’

  I digested this. ‘You mean,’ I said. ‘That you think your father should have sent him the horse himself?’

  ‘Yes, I reckon he should’ve, like Mum wanted. But he said it was rubbish and too expensive, and you don’t know my Dad but when he makes his mind up he just gets fighting angry if anyone tries to argue, and he shouts at her, and it isn’t fair.’

  ‘If your father had sent the horse to Calder Jackson, I suppose he would still own it,’ I said thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, he would, and don’t think he doesn’t know it, of course he does, but it’s as much as anyone’s life’s worth to say it.’

  We trudged back over the thick grass, and I asked him how Calder or Dissdale had known that Indian Silk was ill.

  He shrugged. ‘It was in the papers. He’d been favourite for the King George VI on Boxing Day, but of course he didn’t run, and the press found out why.’

  We came again to the gate into the grandstand enclosure and went through it, and I asked where he lived.

  ‘Exning,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Near Newmarket. Just outside.’ He looked at me with slightly renewed apprehension. ‘You meant it, didn’t you, about not telling?’

  ‘I meant it,’ I said. ‘Only…’ I frowned a little, thinking of the hot-house effect of his living with his parents.

  ‘Only what?’ he asked.

  I tried a different tack. ‘What are you doing now? Are you still at school?’

  ‘No, I left once I’d passed those exams. I really needed them, like. You can’t get a half-way decent job without those bits of paper these days.’

  ‘You’re not working for your father, then?’

  He must have heard the faint relief in my voice because for the first time he fully smiled. ‘No, I reckon it wouldn’t be good for his temper, and anyway I don’t want to be a trainer, one long worry, if you ask me.’

  ‘What do you do, then?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m learning electrical engineering in a firm near Cambridge. An apprentice, like.’ He smiled again. ‘But not with horses, not me.’ He shook his head ruefully and delivered his young-solomon judgement of life. ‘Break your heart, horses do.’

  NOVEMBER

  To my great delight the cartoonist came up trumps, his twenty animated films being shown on television every weeknight for a month in the best time-slot for that sort of humour, seven in the evening, when older children were still up and the parents home from work. The nation sat up and giggled, and the cartoonist telephoned breathlessly to ask for a bigger loan.

  ‘I do need a proper studio, not this converted warehouse. And more animators, and designers, and recordists, and equipment.’

  ‘All right,’ I said into the first gap. ‘Draw up your requirements and come and see me.’

  ‘Do you realise,’ he said, as if he himself had difficulty, ‘That they’ll take as many films as I can make? No limit. They said just go on making them for years and years… they said please go on making them.�
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  ‘I’m very glad,’ I said sincerely.

  ‘You gave me faith in myself,’ he said. ‘You’ll never believe it, but you did. I’d been turned down so often, and I was getting depressed, but when you lent me the money to start it was like being uncorked. The ideas just rushed out.’

  ‘And are they still rushing?’

  ‘Oh sure. I’ve got the next twenty films roughed out in drawings already and we’re working on those, and now I’m starting on the batch after that.’

  ‘It’s terrific,’ I said.

  ‘It sure is. Brother, life’s amazing.’ He put down his receiver and left me smiling into space.

  ‘The cartoonist?’ Gordon said.

  I nodded. ‘Going up like a rocket.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ There was warmth and genuine pleasure in his voice. Such a generous man, I thought: so impossible to do him harm.

  ‘He looks like turning into a major industry,’ I said.

  ‘Disney, Hanna Barbera, eat your hearts out,’ Alec said from across the room.

  ‘Good business for the bank.’ Gordon beamed. ‘Henry will be pleased.’

  Pleasing Henry, indeed, was the aim of us all.

  ‘You must admit, Tim,’ Alec said, ‘That you’re a fairish rocket yourself… so what’s the secret?’

  ‘Light the blue paper and retire immediately,’ I said good humouredly, and he balled a page of jottings to throw at me, and missed.

  At mid-morning he went out as customary for the six copies of What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t and having distributed five was presently sitting back in his chair reading our own with relish.

  Ekaterin’s had been thankfully absent from the probing columns ever since the five-per-cent business, but it appeared chat some of our colleagues along the road weren’t so fortunate.

  ‘Did you know,’ Alec said conversationally, ‘That some of our investment manager chums down on the corner have set up a nice little fiddle on the side, accepting pay-offs from brokers in return for steering business their way?’

  ‘How do you know?’ Gordon asked, looking up from a ledger.

  Alec lifted the paper. ‘The gospel according to this dicky bird.’

  ‘Gospel meaning good news,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be so damned erudite.’ He grinned at me with mischief and went back to reading aloud, ‘Contrary to popular belief the general run of so-called managers in merchant banks are not in the princely bracket.’ He looked up briefly. ‘You can say that again.’ He went on, ‘We hear that four of the investment managers in this establishment have been cosily supplementing their middle-incomes by steering fund money to three stockbrokers in particular. Names will be revealed in our next issue. Watch this space.’

  ‘It’s happened before,’ Gordon said philosophically. ‘And will happen again. The temptation is always there.’ He frowned. ‘All the same, I’m surprised their senior managers and the directors haven’t spotted it.’

  ‘They’ll have spotted it now,’ Alec said.

  ‘So they will.’

  ‘It would be pretty easy,’ I said musingly, ‘To set up a computer programme to do the spotting for Ekaterin’s, in case we should ever find the pestilence cropping up here.’

  ‘Would it?’ Gordon asked.

  ‘Mm. Just a central programme to record every deal in the Investment Department with each stockbroker, with running totals, easy to see. Anything hugely unexpected could be investigated.’

  ‘But that’s a vast job, surely,’ Gordon said.

  I shook my head. ‘I doubt it. I could get our tame programmer to have a go, if you like.’

  ‘We’ll put it to the others. See what they say.’

  ‘There will be screeches from Investment Management,’ Alec said. ‘Cries of outraged virtue.’

  ‘Guards them against innuendo like this, though,’ Gordon said, pointing to What’s Going On Where…

  The board agreed, and in consequence I spent another two days with the programmer, building dykes against future leaks.

  Gordon these days seemed no worse, his illness not having progressed in any visible way. There was no means of knowing how he felt, as he never said and hated to be asked, but on the few times I’d seen Judith since the day at Easter, she had said he was as well as could be hoped for.

  The best of those times had been a Sunday in July when Pen had given a lunch party in her house in Clapham; it was supposed to have been a lunch-in-the-garden party, but like so much that summer was frustrated by chilly winds. Inside was to me much better, as Pen had written place-cards for her long refectory table and put me next to Judith, with Gordon on her right hand.

  The other guests remained a blur, most of them being doctors of some sort or another, or pharmacists like herself. Judith and I made polite noises to the faces on either side of us but spent most of the time talking to each other, carrying on two conversations at once, one with voice, one with eyes; both satisfactory.

  When the main party had broken up and gone, Gordon and Judith and I stayed to supper, first helping Pen clear up from what she described as ‘repaying so many dinners at one go’.

  It had been a day when natural opportunities for touching people abounded, when kisses and hugs of greeting had been appropriate and could be warm, when all the world could watch and see nothing between Judith and me but an enduring and peaceful friendship: a day when I longed to have her for myself worse than ever.

  Since then I’d seen her only twice, and both times when she’d come to the bank to collect Gordon before they went on to other events. On each of these times I’d managed at least five minutes with her, stiffly circumspect, Gordon’s colleague being polite until Gordon himself was ready to leave.

  It wasn’t usual for wives to come to the bank: husbands normally joined them at wherever they were going. Judith said, the second time, ‘I won’t do this often. I just wanted to see you, if you were around.’

  ‘Always here,’ I said.

  She nodded. She was looking as fresh and poised as ever, wearing a neat blue coat with pearls showing. The brown hair was glossy, the eyes bright, the soft mouth half smiling, the glamour born in her and unconscious.

  ‘I get… well… thirsty, sometimes,’ she said.

  ‘Permanent state with me,’ I said lightly.

  She swallowed. ‘Just for a moment or two…’

  We were standing in the entrance hall, not touching, waiting for Gordon.

  ‘Just to see you…’ She seemed uncertain that I understood, but I did.

  ‘It’s the same for me,’ I assured her. ‘I sometimes think of going to Clapham and waiting around just to see you walk down the street to the bakers. Just to see you, even for seconds.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  ‘I don’t go, though. You might send Gordon to buy the bread.’

  She laughed a small laugh, a fitting size for the bank; and he came, hurrying, struggling into his overcoat. I sprang to help him and he said to her, ‘Sorry, darling, got held up on the telephone, you know how it is.’

  ‘I’ve been perfectly happy,’ she said, kissing him, ‘talking to Tim.’

  ‘Splendid. Splendid. Are we ready then?’

  They went off to their evening smiling and waving and leaving me to hunger futilely for this and that.

  In the office one day in November Gordon said ‘How about you coming over to lunch on Sunday? Judith was saying it’s ages since she saw you properly.’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘Pen’s coming, Judith said.’

  Pen, my friend; my chaperone.

  ‘Great,’ I said positively. ‘Lovely.’

  Gordon nodded contentedly and said it was a shame we couldn’t all have a repeat of last Christmas, he and Judith had enjoyed it so much. They were going this year to his son and daughter-in-law in Edinburgh, a visit long promised; to his son by his first long-dead wife, and his grandchildren, twin boys of seven.

  ‘You’ll have fun,’ I said regretfully. />
  ‘They’re noisy little brutes.’

  His telephone rang, and mine also, and moneylending proceeded. I would be dutiful, I thought, and spend Christmas with my mother in Jersey, as she wanted, and we would laugh and play backgammon, and I would sadden her as usual by bringing no girl-friend, no prospective producer of little brutes.

  ‘Why, my love,’ she’d said to me once a few years earlier in near despair, ‘do you take out these perfectly presentable girls and never marry them?’

  ‘There’s always something I don’t want to spend my life with.’

  ‘But you do sleep with them?’

  ‘Yes, darling, I do.’

  ‘You’re too choosy.’

  ‘I expect so,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t had a single one that’s lasted,’ she complained. ‘Everyone else’s sons manage to have live-in girl friends, sometimes going on for years even if they don’t marry, so why can’t you?’

  I’d smiled at the encouragement to what would once have been called sin, and kissed her, and told her I preferred living alone, but that one day I’d find the perfect girl to love for ever; and it hadn’t even fleetingly occurred to me that when I found her she would be married to someone else.

  Sunday came and I went to Clapham: bitter-sweet hours, as ever.

  Over lunch I told them tentatively that I’d seen the boy who had tried to kill Calder, and they reacted as strongly as I’d expected, Gordon saying, ‘You’ve told the police, of course,’ and Judith adding ‘He’s dangerous, Tim.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t think so. I hope not.’ I smiled wryly and told them all about Ricky Barnet and Indian Silk, and the pressure which had led to the try at stabbing. ‘I don’t think he’ll do anything like that again. He’s grown so far away from it already that he feels a different person.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ Gordon said.