by Dick Francis
‘What do you think, then?’
He was silent.
‘We do have to go,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘So we have to work out what it was that Mason asked, and not ask it.’
‘This Rammileese,’ Chico said. ‘What’s he like?’
‘I haven’t met him, myself, but I’ve heard of him. He’s a farmer who’s made a packet out of crooked dealings in horses. The Jockey Club won’t have him as a registered owner, and most racecourses don’t let him through the gates. He’ll try to bribe anyone from the Senior Steward to the scrubbers, and where he can’t bribe, he threatens.’
‘Oh, jolly.’
‘Two jockeys and a trainer, not so long ago, lost their licences for taking his bribes. One of the jockeys got the sack from his stable and he’s so broke he’s hanging around outside the racecourse gates begging for handouts.’
‘Is that the one I saw you talking to, a while ago?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And how much did you give him?’
‘Never you mind.’
‘You’re a pushover, Sid.’
‘A case of “but-for-the-grace-of-God”,’ I said.
‘Oh, sure. I could see you taking bribes from a crooked horse dealer. Most likely thing on earth.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘what we’re trying to find out is not whether Peter Rammileese is manipulating four racehorses, which he is, but whether Eddy Keith knows it, and is keeping quiet.’
‘Right.’ We sped deeper into rural Kent, and then he said, ‘You know why we’ve had such good results, on the whole, since we’ve been together on this job?’
‘Why, then?’
‘It’s because all the villains know you. I mean, they know you by sight, most of them. So when they see you poking around on their patch, they get the heebies, and start doing silly things like setting the heavies on us, and then we see them loud and clear, and what they’re up to, which we wouldn’t have done if they’d sat tight.’
I sighed and said ‘I guess so,’ and thought about Trevor Deansgate; thought and tried not to. Without any hands one couldn’t drive a car … Just don’t think about it, I told myself. Just keep your mind off it, it’s a one way trip into jellyfish.
I swung round another corner too fast and collected a sideways look from Chico, but no comment.
‘Look at the map,’ I said. ‘Do something useful.’
We found the house of Peter Rammileese without much trouble, and pulled into the yard of a small farm that looked as if the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells had rolled round it like a sea, leaving it isolated and incongruous. There was a large white farmhouse, three storeys high, and a modern wooden stable block, and a long, extra large barn. Nothing significantly prosperous about the place, but no nettles either.
No one about. I put the brake on as we rolled to a stop, and we got out of the car.
‘Front door?’ Chico said.
‘Back door, for farms.’
We had taken only five or six steps in that direction, however, when a small boy ran into the yard from a doorway in the barn, and came over to us, breathlessly.
‘Did you bring the ambulance?’
His eyes looked past me, to my car, and his face puckered into agitation and disappointment. He was about seven, dressed in jodhpurs and T-shirt, and he had been crying.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘I rang for the ambulance … A long time ago.’
‘We might help,’ I said.
‘It’s Mum,’ he said. ‘She’s lying in there, and she won’t wake up.’
‘Come on, you show us.’
He was a sturdy little boy, brown-haired and brown-eyed and very frightened. He ran towards the barn, and we followed without wasting time. Once through the door we could see that it wasn’t an ordinary barn, but an indoor riding school, a totally enclosed area of about twenty metres wide by thirty-five long, lit by windows in the roof. The floor, wall to wall, was covered with a thick layer of tan-coloured wood chippings, springy and quiet for horses to work on.
There was a pony and a horse careering about; and, in danger from their hooves, a crumpled female figure lying on the ground.
Chico and I went over to her fast. She was young, on her side, face half downwards; unconscious, but not, I thought, deeply. Her breathing was shallow and her skin had whitened in a mottled fashion under her make-up, but the pulse in her wrist was strong and regular. The crash helmet which hadn’t saved her lay several feet away on the floor.
‘Go and ring again,’ I said to Chico.
‘Shouldn’t we move her?’
‘No … in case she’s broken anything. You can do a lot of damage moving people too much when they’re unconscious.’
‘You should know.’ He turned away and ran off towards the house.
‘Is she all right?’ the boy said anxiously. ‘Bingo started bucking and she fell off, and I think he kicked her head.’
‘Bingo is the horse?’
‘His saddle slipped,’ he said: and Bingo, with the saddle down under his belly was still bucking and kicking like a rodeo.
‘What’s your name?’ I said.
‘Mark.’
‘Well, Mark, as far as I can see, your Mum is going to be all right, and you’re a brave little boy.’
‘I’m six,’ he said, as if that wasn’t so little.
The worst of the fright had died out of his eyes, now that he had help. I knelt on the ground beside his mother and smoothed the brown hair away from her forehead. She made a small moaning sound, and her eyelids fluttered. She was perceptibly nearer the surface, even in the short time we’d been there.
‘I thought she was dying,’ the boy said. ‘We had a rabbit a little time ago … he panted and shut his eyes, and we couldn’t wake him up again, and he died.’
‘Your Mum will wake up again.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, Mark, I’m sure.’
He seemed deeply reassured, and told me readily that the pony was called Sooty, and was his own, and that his Dad was away until tomorrow morning, and there was only his Mum there, and him, and she’d been schooling Bingo because she was selling him to a girl for show-jumping.
Chico came back and said the ambulance was on its way. The boy, cheering up enormously, said we ought to catch the horses because they were cantering about and the reins were all loose, and if the saddles and bridles got broken his Dad would be bloody angry.
Both Chico and I laughed at the adult words, seriously spoken. While he and Mark stood guard over the patient, I caught the horses one by one, with the aid of a few horse-nuts which Mark produced from his pockets, and tied their reins to tethering rings in the walls. Bingo, once the agitating girths were undone and the saddle off, stood quietly enough, and Mark darted briefly away from his mother to give his own pony some brisk encouraging slaps and some more horse-nuts.
. Chico said the emergency service had indeed had a call from a child fifteen minutes earlier, but he’d hung up before they could ask him where he lived.
‘Don’t tell him,’ I said.
‘You’re a softie.’
‘He’s a brave little kid.’
‘Not bad for a little bleeder. While you were catching the bucking bronco he told he his Dad gets bloody angry pretty often.’ He looked down at the still unconscious girl. ‘You really reckon she’s OK, do you?’
‘She’ll come out of it. It’s a matter of waiting.’
The ambulance came in due course, but Mark’s anxiety reappeared, strongly, when the men loaded his mother into the van and prepared to depart. He wanted to go with her, and the men wouldn’t take him on his own. She was stirring and mumbling, and it distressed him.
I said to Chico, ‘Drive him to the hospital … Follow the ambulance. He needs to see her wide awake and speaking to him. I’ll take a look round in the house. His Dad’s away until tomorrow.’
‘Convenient,’ he said sardonically. He
collected Mark into the Scimitar, and drove away down the road, and I could see their heads talking to each other, through the rear window.
I went through the open back door with the confidence of the invited. Nothing difficult about entering a tiger’s cage while the tiger was out.
It was an old house filled with brash new opulent furnishings, which I found overpowering. Lush loud carpets, huge stereo equipment, a lamp standard of a golden nymph and deep armchairs covered in black and khaki zigzags. Sitting and dining rooms shining and tidy, with no sign that a small boy lived there. Kitchen uncluttered, hygienic surfaces wiped clean. Study …
The positively aggressive tidiness of the study made me pause and consider. No horse trader that I’d ever come across had kept his books and papers in such neat rectangular stacks; and the ledgers themselves, when I opened them, contained up-to-the-minute entries.
I looked into drawers and filing cabinets, being extremely careful to leave everything squared up after me, but there was nothing there except the outward show of honesty. Not a single drawer or cupboard was locked. It was almost, I thought with cynicism, as if the whole thing were stage dressing, orchestrated to confound any invasion of tax snoopers. The real records, if he kept any, were probably somewhere outside, in a biscuit tin, in a hole in the ground.
I went upstairs. Mark’s room was unmistakable, but all the toys were in boxes, and all the clothes in drawers. There were three unoccupied bedrooms with the outlines of folded blankets showing under covers, and a suite of bedroom, dressing room and bathroom furnished with the same expense and tidiness as downstairs.
An oval dark red bath with taps like gilt dolphins. A huge bed with a bright brocade cover clashing with wall-to-wall jazz on the floor. No clutter on the curvaceous cream and gold dressing table, no brushes on any surface in the dressing room.
Mark’s mum’s clothes were fur and glitter and breeches and jackets. Mark’s dad’s clothes, thorn-proof tweeds, vicuna overcoat, a dozen or more suits, none of them hand-made, all seemingly bought because they were expensive. Handfuls of illicit cash, I thought, and nothing much to do with it. Peter Rammileese, it seemed, was crooked by nature and not by necessity.
The same incredible tidiness extended through every drawer and every shelf, and even into the soiled linen basket where a pair of pyjamas were neatly folded.
I went through the pockets of his suits, but he had left nothing at all in them. There were no pieces of paper of any sort anywhere in the dressing room.
Frustrated, I went up to the third floor, where there were six rooms, one containing a variety of empty suitcases, and the others, nothing at all.
No one, I thought on the way down again, lived so excessively carefully if they had nothing to hide; which was scarcely evidence to offer in court. The present life of the Rammileese family was an expensive vacuum, and of the past there was no sign at all. No souvenirs, no old books, not even any photographs except a recent one of Mark on his pony, taken outside in the yard.
I was looking round the outbuildings when Chico came back. There were no animals except seven horses in the stable and the two in the covered school. No sign of farming in progress. No rosettes in the tack room, just a lot more tidiness and the smell of saddle-soap. I went out to meet Chico and ask what he had done with Mark.
‘The nurses are stuffing him with jam butties and trying to ring his Dad. Mum is awake and talking. How did you get on? Do you want to drive?’
‘No, you drive.’ I sat in beside him. ‘That house is the most suspicious case of no history I’ve ever seen.’
‘Like that, eh?’
‘Mm. And not a chance of finding any link with Eddy Keith.’
‘Wasted journey, then,’ he said.
‘Lucky for Mark.’
‘Yeah. Good little bleeder, that Told me he’s going to be a furniture moving man when he grows up.’ Chico looked across at me and grinned. ‘Seems he’s moved house three times that he can remember.’
10
Chico and I spent most of Saturday separately traipsing around all the London addresses on the M list of wax names, and met at six o’clock, footsore and thirsty, at a pub we both knew in Fulham.
‘We never ought to have done it on a Saturday, and a holiday weekend at that,’ Chico said.
‘No.’ I agreed.
Chico watched the beer sliding mouth-wateringly into the glass. ‘More than half of them were out.’
‘Mine too. Nearly all.’
‘And the ones that were in were watching the racing or the wrestling or groping their girl-friends, and didn’t want to know.’
We carried his beer and my whisky over to a small table, drank deeply, and compared notes. Chico had finally pinned down four people, and I only two, but the results were there, all the same.
All six, whatever other mailing lists they had confessed to, had been in regular happy receipt of Antiques for All.
‘That’s it, then,’ Chico said. ‘Conclusive.’ He leaned back against the wall, luxuriously relaxing. ‘We can’t do any more until Tuesday. Everything’s shut.’
‘Are you busy tomorrow?’
‘Have a heart. The girl in Wembley.’ He looked at his watch and swallowed the rest of the beer. ‘And so long, Sid boy, or I’ll be late. She doesn’t like me sweaty.’
He grinned and departed, and I more slowly finished my drink and went home.
Wandered about. Changed the batteries. Ate some cornflakes. Got out the form books and looked up the syndicated horses. Highly variable form: races lost at short odds and won at long. All the signs of steady and expert fixing. I yawned. It went on all the time.
I pottered some more, restlessly, sorely missing the peace that usually filled me in that place, when I was alone. Undressed, put on a bathrobe, pulled off the arm. Tried to watch the television: couldn’t concentrate. Switched it off.
I usually pulled the arm off after I’d put the bathrobe on because that way I didn’t have to look at the bit of me that remained below the left elbow. I could come to terms with the fact of it but still not really the sight, though it was neat enough and not horrific, as the messed up hand had been. I dare say it was senseless to be faintly repelled, but I was. I hated anyone except the limb man to see it; even Chico. I was ashamed of it, and that too was illogical. People without handicaps never understood that ashamed feeling, and nor had I, until the day soon after the original injury when I’d blushed crimson because I’d had to ask someone to cut up my food. There had been many times after that when I’d gone hungry rather than ask. Not having to ask, ever, since I’d had the electronic hand, had been a psychological release of soul-saving proportions.
The new hand had meant, too, a return to full normal human status. No one treated me as an idiot, or with the pity which in the past had made me cringe. No one made allowances any more, or got themselves tongue-tied with trying not to say the wrong thing. The days of the useless deformity seemed in retrospect an unbearable nightmare. I was often quite grateful to the villain who had set me free.
With one hand, I was a self-sufficient man.
Without any …
Oh God, I thought. Don’t think about it. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Hamlet, however, didn’t have the same problems.
I got through the night, and the next morning, and the afternoon, but at around six I gave up and got in the car, and drove to Aynsford.
If Jenny was there, I thought, easing up the back drive and stopping quietly in the yard outside the kitchen, I would just turn right round and go back to London, and at least the driving would have occupied the time. But no one seemed to be about, and I walked into the house from the side door which had a long passage into the house.
Charles was in the small sitting room that he called the wardroom, sitting alone, sorting out his much-loved collection of fishing flies.
He looked up. No surprise. No effusive welcome. No fuss. Yet I’d never gone there before without invitation.
&n
bsp; ‘Hallo,’ he said.
‘Hallo.’
I stood there, and he looked at me, and waited.
‘I wanted some company,’ I said.
He squinted at a dry fly; ‘Did you bring an overnight bag?’
I nodded.
He pointed to the drinks tray. ‘Help yourself. And pour me a pink gin, will you? Ice in the kitchen.’
I fetched him his drink, and my own, and sat in an armchair.
‘Come to tell me?’ he said.
‘No.’
He smiled. ‘Supper then? And chess.’
We ate, and played two games. He won the first easily, and told me to pay attention. The second, after an hour and a half, was a draw. ‘That’s better,’ he said.
The peace I hadn’t been able to find on my own came slowly back with Charles, even though I knew it had more to do with the ease I felt with him personally, and the timelessness of his vast old house, than with a real resolution of the destruction within. In any case, for the first time in ten days, I slept soundly for hours.
At breakfast we discussed the day ahead. He himself was going to the steeplechase meeting at Towcester, forty-five minutes northwards, to act as a Steward, an honorary job that he enjoyed. I told him about John Viking and the balloon race, and also about the visits to the M people, and Antiques for All, and he smiled with his own familiar mixture of satisfaction and amusement, as if I were some creation of his that was coming up to expectations. It was he who had originally driven me to becoming an investigator. Whenever I got anything right he took the credit for it himself.
‘Did Mrs Cross tell you about the telephone call?’ he said, buttering toast. Mrs Cross was his housekeeper, quiet, effective and kind.
‘What telephone call?’
‘Someone rang here about seven this morning, asking if you were here. Mrs Cross said you were asleep and could she take a message, but whoever it was said he would ring later.’
‘Was it Chico? He might guess I’d come here, if he couldn’t get me in the flat.’
‘Mrs Cross said he didn’t give a name.’
I shrugged and reached for the coffee pot. ‘It can’t have been urgent, or he’d have told her to wake me up.’
