by Dick Francis
‘I suppose two months was what you wanted?’ he said.
‘Er… yes.’
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘They were talking of twenty-one days maximum before the meeting, and some wanted to bring in liquidators at once.’
I telephoned Oliver and told him. ‘For two months you don’t have to pay any interest or capital repayments, but this is only temporary, and it is a special, fairly unusual concession. I’m afraid, though, that if we can’t find a solution to Sand-castle’-S problem or come up with a cast-iron reason for the insurance company to pay out, the prognosis is not good.’
‘I understand,’ he said, his voice sounding calm. ‘I haven’t much hope, but thank you, all the same, for the respite – I will at least be able to finish the programmes for the other stallions, and keep all the foals here until they’re old enough to travel safely.’
‘Have you heard anything about Sandcastle?’
‘He’s been at the Research Establishment for a week, but so far they can’t find anything wrong with him. They don’t hold out much hope, I’d better tell you, of being able to prove anything one way or another about his sperm, even though they’re sending specimens to another laboratory, they say.’
‘They’ll do their best.’
‘Yes, I know. But… I walk around here as if this place no longer belongs to me. As if it isn’t mine. I know, inside, that I’m losing it. Don’t feel too badly, Tim. When it comes, I’ll be prepared.’
I put the receiver down not knowing whether such resignation was good because he would face whatever came without disintegration, or bad because he might be surrendering too soon. A great host of other troubles still lay ahead, mostly in the shape of breeders demanding the return of their stallion fees, and he needed energy to say that in most cases he couldn’t return them. The money had already been lodged with us, and the whole situation would have to be sorted out by lawyers.
The news of Sandcastle’s disgrace was so far only a doubtful murmur here and there, but when it all broke open with a screech it was, I suppose predictably, in What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t.
The bank’s six copies were read to rags before lunch on the day Alec fetched them, eyes lifting from the page with anything from fury to a wry smile.
Three short paragraphs headed ‘House on Sand’, said:
Build not your house on sand. Stake not your banking house on a Sandcastle.
The five million pounds advanced by a certain prestigious merchant bank for the purchase of the stallion Sandcastle now look like being washed away by the tide. Sadly, the investment has produced faulty stock, or in plain language, several deformed foals.
Speculation now abounds as to what the bank can do to minimise its losses, since Sandcastle himself must be considered as half a ton of highly priced dog-meat.
‘That’s done it,’ Gordon said, and I nodded: and the dailies, who always read What’s Going On as a prime news source, came up in the racing columns the next day with a more cautious approach, asking ‘Sandcastle’s Progeny Flawed?’ and saying things like ‘rumours have reached us’ and ‘we are reliably informed.’
Since our own home-grown leaker for once hadn’t mentioned the bank by name, none of the dailies did either, and for them of course the bank itself was unimportant compared with the implications of the news.
Oliver, in the next weekday issues, was reported as having been asked how many, precisely, of Sandcastle’s foals were deformed, and as having answered that he didn’t know. He had heard of some, certainly, yes. He had no further comment.
A day later still the papers began printing reports telephoned into them by the stud farms where Sandcastle’s scattered progeny had been foaled, and the tally of disasters mounted. Oliver was reported this time as having said the horse was at the Equine Research Establishment at Newmarket, and everything possible was being done.
‘It’s a mess,’ Henry said gloomily at lunch, and even the dissenting director had run out of insults, beyond saying four times that we were the laughing-stock of the City and it was all my fault.
‘Have they found out who killed Knowles’daughter?’ Val Fisher asked.
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘He says the police no longer come to the house.’
Val looked regretful. ‘Such a sadness for him, on top of the other.’
There were murmurs of sympathy and I didn’t think I’d spoil it by telling them what the police thought of Oliver’s lads.
That man Wyfold,’ Oliver had said on the telephone during one of our almost daily conversations, ‘he more or less said I was asking for trouble, having a young girl on the place with all those lads. What’s more, it seems many of them were half-way drunk that night, and with three pubs in the village they weren’t even all together and have no idea of who was where at what time, so one of Wyfold’s theories is that one of them jumped her and Dave and Sammy interrupted him. Alternatively Nigel did it. Alternatively some stranger walking down the road did it. Wyfold’s manner is downright abrasive but I’m past caring. He despises my discipline. He says I shouldn’t let my lads get drunk – as if anyone could stop them. They’re free men. It’s their business, not mine, what they do with their money and time on Sunday nights. I can only take action if they don’t turn up on Monday morning. And as for Nigel being paralytic!’ Words momentarily failed him. ‘How can Nigel possibly expect the lads to stay more or less sober if he gets like that? And he says he can’t remember anything that happened the night Ginnie died. Nothing at all. Total alcoholic black-out. He’s been very subdued since.’
The directors, I felt, would not be any more impressed than the Detective Chief Inspector with the general level of insobriety, and I wondered whether Nigel’s slackness with the lads in general had always stemmed from a knowledge of his own occasional weakness.
The police had found no weapon, Oliver said on another day. Wyfold had told him that there was no way of knowing what had been used to cause the depressed fracture at the base of her brain. Her hair over the fracture bore no traces of anything unexpected. The forensic surgeon was of the opinion that there had been a single very heavy blow. She would have been knocked unconscious instantly. She wouldn’t even have known. The period of apparent semi-consciousness had been illusory: parts of her brain would have functioned but she would not have been aware of anything at all.
‘I suppose it’s a mercy,’ Oliver said. ‘With some girls you hear of… how do their parents bear it?’
His wife, he said, had gone back to Canada. Ginnie’s death seemed not to have brought mother and father together, but to have made the separation complete.
‘The dog shampoo?’ Oliver repeated, when I asked. ‘Wyfold says that’s just what it was, they checked it. He asked Nigel and all the lads if it was theirs, if they’d used it for washing Squibs, but none of them had. He seems to think Ginnie may have seen it lying in the road and picked it up, or that she got into conversation over the gate with a man who gave her the shampoo for Squibs as a come-on and then killed her afterwards.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’d have taken the shampoo away again with him.’
‘Wyfold says not if he couldn’t find it, because of its being dark and her having hidden it to all intents and purposes under her skirt and two jumpers, and not if Dave and Sammy arrived at that point.’
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Wyfold says that particular shampoo isn’t on sale at all in England, it’s American, and there’s absolutely no way at all of tracing how it got here. There weren’t any fingerprints of any use; all a blur except a few of yours and mine.’
Another day he said, ‘Wyfold told me the hardest murders to solve were single blows on the head. He said the case would remain open, but they are busy again with another girl who was killed walking home from a dance, and this time she definitely is one of that dreadful series, poor child… I was lucky, Tim, you know, that Dave and Sa
mmy came back when they did.’
There came a fine May day in the office when Alec, deciding we needed some fresh air, opened one of the windows which looked down to the fountain. The fresh air duly entered but like a lion, not a lamb, and blew papers off all the desks.
‘That’s a hurricane,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake shut it.’
Alec closed off the gale and turned round with a grin. ‘Sorry and all that,’ he said.
We all left our chairs and bent down like gleaners to retrieve our scattered work, and during my search for page 3 of a long assessment of a proposed sports complex I came across a severe and unwelcome shock in the shape of a small pale blue sheet off a memo pad.
There were words pencilled on it and crossed out with a wavy line, with other words underneath.
Build your castle not on Sand was crossed out, and so was Sandcastle gone with the tide, and underneath was written Build not your house on Sand. Build not your banking house on a Sandcastle.
‘What’s that?’ Alec said quickly, seeing it in my hand and stretching out his own. ‘Let’s see.’
I shook my head and kept it in my own hand while I finished picking up the sportsdrome, and when order was restored throughout the office I said, ‘Come along to the interview room.’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now.’
We went into the only room on our floor where any real privacy was possible and I said without shilly-shallying, ‘This is your handwriting. Did you write the article in What’s Going On?’
He gave me a theatrical sigh and a tentative smile and a large shrug of the shoulders.
‘That’s just doodling,’ he said. ‘It means nothing.’
‘It means, for a start,’ I said, ‘that you shouldn’t have left it round the office.’
‘Didn’t know I had.’
‘Did you write the article?’
The blue eyes unrepentantly gleamed at me from behind the gold rims. ‘It’s a fair cop, I suppose.’
‘But Alec…’ I protested.
‘Yeah.’
‘And the others,’ I said, ‘Those other leaks, was that you?’
He sighed again, his mouth twisting.
‘Was it?’ I repeated, wanting above all things to hear him deny it.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘What harm did it do? Yes, all right, the stories did come from me. I wrote them myself, actually, like that one.’ He pointed to the memo paper in my hand. ‘And don’t give me any lectures on disloyalty because none of them did us any harm. Did us good, if anything.’
‘Alec…’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but just think, Tim, what did those pieces really do? They stirred everyone up, sure, and it was a laugh a minute to see all their faces, but what else? I’ve been thinking about it, I assure you. It wasn’t why I did it in the first place, that was just wanting to stir things, I’ll admit, but because of what I wrote we’ve now got much better security checks than we had before.’
I listened to him open-mouthed.
‘All that work you did with the computer, making us safer against frauds, that was because of what I wrote. And the Corporate Finance boys, they now go around with their mouths zipped up like suitcases so as not to spill the beans to the investment managers. I did good, do you see, not harm.’
I stood and looked at him, at the tight tow-coloured curls, the cream coloured freckled skin, the eyes that had laughed with me for eight years. I don’t want to lose you, I thought: I wish you hadn’t done it.
‘And what about this piece about Sandcastle? What good has that done?’ I said.
He half grinned. ‘Too soon to say.’
I looked at the damaging scrap in my hands and almost automatically shook my head.
‘You’re going to say,’ Alec said, ‘that I’ll have to leave.’
I looked up. His face was wholly calm.
‘I knew I’d have to leave if any of you ever found out.’
‘But don’t you care?’ I said frustratedly.
He smiled. ‘I don’t know. I’ll miss you, and that’s a fact. But as for the job… well, I told you, it’s not my whole life, like it is yours. I loved it, I grant you, when I came here. All I wanted was to be a merchant banker, it sounded great. But to be honest it was the glamour I suppose I wanted, and glamour never lasts once you’ve got used to something. I’m not a dedicated money-man at heart… and there’s honesty for you, I never thought I’d admit that, even to myself.’
‘But you do it well.’
‘Up to a point. We discussed all that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said helplessly.
‘Yeah, well, so am I in a way, and in a way I’m not. I’ve been dithering for ages, and now that it isn’t my choice I’m as much relieved as anything.’
‘But… what will you do?’
He gave a full cherubic smile. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll approve.’
‘What, then?’
‘What’s Going On,’ he said, ‘have offered me a whole-time job.’ He looked at my shattered expression. ‘I’ve written quite a bit for them, actually. About other things, of course, not us. But in most editions there’s something of mine, a paragraph or two or a whole column. They’ve asked me several times to go, so now I will.’
I thought back to all those days when Alec had bounded out for the six copies and spent his next hour chuckling. Alec, the gatherer of news, who knew all the gossip.
‘They get masses of information in,’ Alec said, ‘but they need someone to evaluate it all properly, and there aren’t so many merchant bankers looking for that sort of job.’
‘No,’ I said dryly. ‘I can imagine. For a start, won’t your salary be much less?’
‘A bit,’ he admitted, cheerfully. ‘But my iconoclastic spirit will survive.’
I moved restlessly, wishing things had been different.
‘I’ll resign from here,’ he said. ‘Make it easier.’
Rather gloomily I nodded. ‘And will you say why?’
He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘If you really want me to, yes,’ he said finally. ‘Otherwise not. You can tell them yourself, though, after I’ve gone, if you want to.’
‘You’re a damned fool,’ I said explosively, feeling the loss of him acutely. ‘The office will be bloody dull without you.’
He grinned, my long-time colleague, and pointed to the piece of memo paper. ‘I’ll send you pin-pricks now and then. You won’t forget me. Not a chance.’
Gordon, three days later, said to me in surprise, ‘Alec’s leaving, did you know?’
‘I knew he was thinking of it.’
‘But why? He’s good at his job, and he always seemed happy here.’
I explained that Alec had been unsettled for some time and felt he needed to change direction.
‘Amazing,’ Gordon said. ‘I tried to dissuade him, but he’s adamant. He’s going in four weeks.’
Alec, indeed, addressed his normal work with the bounce and zealousness of one about to be liberated, and for the rest of his stay in the office was better company than ever. Chains visibly dropped from his spirits, and I caught him several times scribbling speculatively on his memo pad with an anything but angelic grin.
Oliver had sent me at my request a list of all the breeders who had sent their mares to Sandcastle the previous year, and I spent two or three evenings on the telephone asking after those foals we didn’t know about. Oliver himself, when I’d asked him, said he frankly couldn’t face the task, and I didn’t in the least blame him: my enquiries brought forth an ear-burning amount of blasphemy.
The final count came to:
Five foals born outwardly perfect but dead within two weeks because of internal abnormalities.
One foal born with one eye. (Put down.)
Five foals born with deformed legs, deformation varying from a malformed hoof to the absent half-leg of Plus Factor’s colt. (All put down.)
Three foals born with part of one or both ears missing. (All still living.)
One foal born with no tail. (Still living.)
Two foals born with malformed mouths, the equivalent of human hare lip. (Both put down.)
One foal born with a grossly deformed head. (Foaled with heart-beat but couldn’t breathe; died at once.)
Apart from this horrifying tally, four mares who had been sent home as in foal had subsequently ‘slipped’ and were barren: one mare had failed to conceive at all; three mares had not yet foaled (breeders’ comments incendiary); and fourteen mares had produced live healthy foals with no defects of any sort.
I showed the list to Gordon and Henry, who went shockedly silent for a while as if in mourning for the superb racer they had so admired.’
‘There may be more to come,’ I said, not liking it. ‘Oliver says thirty mares covered by Sandcastle this year are definitely in foal. Some of those will be all right… and some may not.’
‘Isn’t there a test you can do to see if a baby is abnormal?’ Henry said. ‘Can’t they do that with the mares, and abort the deformed foals now, before they grow?’
I shook my head, ‘I asked Oliver that. He says amniocentesis – that’s what that process is called – isn’t possible with mares. Something to do with not being able to reach the target with a sterile needle because of all the intestines in the way.’
Henry listened with the distaste of the non-medical to these clinical realities. ‘What it means, I suppose,’ he said, ‘is that the owners of all of those thirty-one mares will have the foals aborted and demand their money back.’
‘I’d think so, yes.’
He shook his head regretfully. ‘So sad, isn’t it. Such a shame. Quite apart from the financial loss, a tragedy in racing terms.’
Oliver said on the telephone one morning, ‘Tim, I need to talk to you. Something’s happened.’
‘What?’ I said, with misgivings.
‘Someone has offered to buy Sandcastle.’
I sat in a mild state of shock, looking at Alec across the room sucking his pencil while he wrote his future.
‘Are you there?’ Oliver said.
