by Dick Francis
‘Who are the two pals?’
He gulped a lot, but told me. One name meant nothing, but the other had appeared on all of Philip Friarly’s syndicates.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘On you go.’
‘The horses get trained by anyone who can turn them out looking nice for double the usual training fees and no questions asked. Then Rammileese works out what races they’re going to run in, and they’re all running way below their real class, see, so that when he says go, by Christ you’re on a flyer.’ He grinned. ‘Twenty times the riding fee, for a winner.’
It sounded a lot more than it was.
‘How often did you ride for him?’
‘One or two, most weeks.’
‘Will you do it again, when you get your licence back?’
He turned in his seat until his back was against the car’s door and spent a long time studying the half he could see of my face. His silence itself was an answer, but when we had travelled fully three miles he sighed deeply and said, finally, ‘Yes.’
As an act of trust, that was remarkable.
‘Tell me about the horses,’ I said, and he did, at some length. The names of some of them were a great surprise, and the careers of all of them as straightforward as Nicholas Ashe.
‘Tell me how you got your licence suspended,’ I said.
He had been riding for one of the amenable trainers, he said, only the trainer hadn’t had an amenable wife. ‘She had a bit of a spite on, so she shopped him with the Jockey Club. Wrote to Thomas Ullaston personally, I ask you. Of course, the whole bleeding lot of Stewards believed her, and suspended the lot of us, me, him, and the other jock who rides for him, poor sod, who never got a penny from Rammileese and wouldn’t know a backhander if it smacked him in the face.’
‘How come,’ I said casually, ‘that no one in the Jockey Club has found out about all these syndicates and done something positive about Rammileese?’
‘Good question.’
I glanced at him, hearing the doubt in his voice and seeing the frown. ‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Yeah … This is strictly a whisper, see, not even a rumour hardly, just something I heard …’ He paused, then he said, ‘I don’t reckon it’s true.’
‘Try me.’
‘One of the bookies … I was waiting about outside the gates at Kempton, see, and these two bookies came out, and one was saying that the bloke in the Security Service would smooth it over if the price was right.’ He stopped again, and went on, ‘One of the lads said I’d never have got suspended if that bitch of a trainer’s wife had sent her letter to the Security Service and not to the big white chief himself.’
‘Which of the lads said that?’
‘Yeah. Well, I can’t remember. And don’t look like that, Sid, I really can’t It was months ago. I mean, I didn’t even think about it until I heard the bookies at Kempton. I don’t reckon there could be anyone that bent in the Security Service, do you? I mean, not in the Jockey Club.’
His faith was touching, I thought, considering his present troubles, but in days gone by I would have thought he was right. Once plant the doubt, though, and one could see there were a lot of dirty misdeeds that Eddy Keith might have ignored in return for a tax-free gain. He had passed the four Friarly syndicates: and he might have done all of the twenty or more. He might even have put Rammileese’s two pals on the respectable owners’ list, knowing they weren’t. Somehow or other, I would have to find out.
‘Sid,’ Jacksy said. ‘Don’t you get me in bad with the brass. I’m not repeating what I just told you, not to no stewards.’
‘I won’t say you told me,’ I assured him. ‘Do you know those two bookies at Kempton?’
‘Not a chance. I mean, I don’t even know they were bookies. They just looked like them. I mean, I thought “bookies” when I saw them.’
So strong an impression was probably right, but not of much help; and Jacksy, altogether, had run dry. I dropped him where he wanted, at the outskirts of Watford, and the last thing he said was that if I was going after Rammileese to keep him, Jacksy, strictly out of it, like I’d promised.
I stayed in a hotel in London instead of the flat, and felt overcautious. Chico, however, when I telephoned, said it made sense. Breakfast, I suggested, and he said he’d be there.
He came, but without much hooray. He had trudged around all day visiting the people on the mailing list, but no one had received a begging letter from Ashe within the last month.
‘Tell you what, though,’ he said. ‘People beginning with A and B and right down to K have had wax in the past, so it’ll be the Ps and Rs that get done next time, which narrows the leg-work.’
‘Great,’ I said, meaning it.
‘I left sticky labels everywhere with your address on, and some of them said they’d let us know, if it came. But whether they’ll bother …’
‘It would only take one,’ I said.
‘That’s true.’
‘Feel like a spot of breaking and entering?’
‘Don’t see why not.’ He started on a huge order of scrambled eggs and sausages. ‘Where and what for?’
‘Er …’ I said. ‘This morning you do a recce. This evening, after office hours but before it gets dark, we drift along to Portman Square.’
Chico stopped chewing in mid-mouthful, and then carefully swallowed before saying, ‘By Portman Square, do you mean the Jockey Club?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Haven’t you noticed they let you in the front door?’
‘I want a quiet look-see that they don’t know about.’
He shrugged. ‘All right then. Meet you back here after the recce?’
I nodded. ‘The Admiral’s coming here for lunch. He went down to the wax factory yesterday.’
‘That should put a shine in his eyes.’
‘Oh very funny.’
While he finished the eggs and attacked the toast I told him most of what Jacksy had said about the syndicates, and also about rumours of kickbacks in high places.
‘And that’s what we’re looking for? Turning out Eddy Keith’s office to see what he didn’t do when he should’ve?’
‘You got it. Sir Thomas Ullaston – Senior Steward – says Eddy was along complaining to him about me seeing the files, and Lucas Wainwright can’t let me see them without Eddy’s secretary knowing, and she’s loyal to Eddy. So if I want to look, it has to be quiet.’ And would breaking into the Jockey Club, I wondered, be considered ‘absolutely diabolical’ if I were found out?
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I got the judo today, don’t forget.’
‘The little bleeders,’ I said, ‘are welcome.’
Charles came at twelve, sniffing the air of the unfamiliar surroundings like an unsettled dog.
‘I got your message from Mrs Cross,’ he said. ‘But why here? Why not the Cavendish, as usual?’
‘There’s someone I don’t want to meet,’ I said. ‘He won’t look for me here. Pink gin?’
‘A double.’
I ordered the drinks. He said, ‘Is that what it was, for those six days? Evasive action?’
I didn’t reply.
He looked at me quizzically. ‘I see it still hurts you, whatever it was.’
‘Leave it, Charles.’
He sighed and lit a cigar, sucking in smoke and eyeing me through the flame of the match. ‘So who don’t you want to meet?’
‘A man called Peter Rammileese. If anyone asks, you don’t know where I am.’
‘I seldom do.’ He smoked with enjoyment, filling his lungs and inspecting the burning ash as if it were precious. ‘Going off in balloons …’
I smiled. ‘I got offered the post of regular co-pilot to a madman.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ he said drily.
‘How did you get on with the wax?’
He wouldn’t tell me until after the drinks had come, and then he wasted a lot of time asking why I was drinking Perrier water and not whisky.
‘To keep
a clear head for burglary,’ I said truthfully, which he half believed and half didn’t.
‘The wax is made,’ he said finally, ‘in a sort of cottage industry flourishing next to a plant which processes honey.’
‘Beeswax!’ I said incredulously.
He nodded. ‘Beeswax, paraffin wax, and turpentine, that’s what’s in that polish.’ He smoked luxuriously, taking his time. ‘A charming woman there was most obliging. We spent a long time going back over the order books. People seldom ordered as much at a time as Jenny had done, and very few stipulated that the tins should be packed in white boxes for posting.’ His eyes gleamed over the cigar. ‘Tree people, all in the last year, to be exact.’
Three … Do you think … it was Nicholas Ashe, three times?’
‘Always about the same amount,’ he said, enjoying himself. ‘Different names and addresses, of course.’
‘Which you did bring away with you?’
‘Which I did.’ He pulled a folded paper out of an inner pocket ‘There you are.’
‘Got him,’ I said, with intense satisfaction. ‘He’s a fool.’
‘There was a policeman there on the same errand,’ Charles said. ‘e came just after I’d written out those names. It seems they really are looking for Ashe, themselves.’
‘Good. Er … did you tell them about the mailing list?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ He squinted at his glass, holding it up to the light, as if one pink gin were not the same as the next and he wanted to memorize the colour. ‘I would like it to be you who finds him first.’
‘Hm.’ I thought about that. ‘If you think Jenny will be grateful, you’ll be disappointed.’
‘But you’ll have got her off the hook.’
‘She would prefer it to be the police.’ She might even be nicer to me, I thought, if she was sure I had failed: and it wasn’t the sort of niceness I would want.
Chico telephoned during the afternoon.
‘What are you doing in your bedroom at this time of day?’ he demanded.
‘Watching Chester races on television.’
‘Stands to reason,’ he said resignedly. ‘Well, look, I’ve done the recce, and we can get in all right, but you’ll have to be through the main doors before four o’clock. I’ve scrubbed the little bleeders. Look, this is what you do. You go in through the front door, right as if you’d got pukka business. Now, in the hall there’s two lifts. One, that goes to a couple of businesses that are on the first and second floors, and as far as the third, which is all Jockey Club, as you know.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘When all the little workers and Stewards and such have gone home, they leave that lift at the third floor, with its doors open, so no one can use it. There’s a night porter, but after he’s seen to the lift he doesn’t do any rounds, he just stays downstairs. And oh yes, when he’s fixed the lift he goes down your actual stairs, locking a door across the stair-way at each landing, which makes three in all. Got it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. Now there’s another lift which goes to the top four floors of the building, and up there there’s eight flats, two on each floor, with people living in them. And between those floors and the Jockey Club below, there’s only one door locked across the stairway.’
‘I’m with you,’ I said.’
‘Right. Now I reckon the porter in the hall, or whatever you call him, he might just know you by sight, so he’d think it odd if you came after the offices were closed. So you’d better get there before, and go up in the lift to the flats, go right up to the top, and I’ll meet you there. It’s OK, there’s a sort of seat by a window, read a book or something.’
‘I’ll see you,’ I said.
I went in a taxi, armed with a plausible reason for my visit if I should meet anyone I knew in the hall: but in fact I saw no one, and stepped into the lift to the flats without any trouble. At the top, as Chico had said, there was a bench by a window, where I sat and thought unproductively for over an hour. No one came or went from either of the two flats. No one came up in the lift. The first time its doors opened, it brought Chico.
Chico was dressed in white overalls and carried a bag of tools. I gave him a sardonic head-to-foot inspection.
‘Well, you got to look the part,’ he said defensively. ‘I came here like this earlier, and when I left I told the chap I’d be back with spare parts. He just nodded when I walked in just now. When we go, I’ll keep him talking while you gumshoe out.’
‘If it’s the same chap.’
‘He goes off at eight. We better be finished before then.’
‘Was the Jockey Club lift still working?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Is the stairway door above the Jockey Club locked?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s go down there, then, so we can hear when the porter brings the lift up and leaves it.’
He nodded. We went through the door beside the lift, into the stair well, which was utilitarian, not plushy, and lit by electric lights, and just inside there dumped the clinking bag of tools. Four floors down we came to the locked door, and stood there, waiting.
The door was flat, made of some filling covered on the side on which we stood by a sheet of silvery metal. The keyhole proclaimed a mortice lock set into the depth of the door, the sort of barrier which took Chico about three minutes, usually, to negotiate.
As usual on these excursions, we had brought gloves. I thought back to one of the first times, when Chico had said, ‘One good thing about that hand of yours, it can’t leave any dabs.’ I wore a glove over it anyway, as being a lot less noticeable if we were ever casually seen where we shouldn’t be.
I had never got entirely used to breaking in, not to the point of not feeling my heart beat faster or my breath go shallow. Chico, for all his longer experience at the same game, gave himself away always by smoothing out the laughter lines round his eyes as the skin tautened over his cheekbones. We stood there waiting, the physical signs of stress with us, knowing the risks.
We heard the lift come up and stop. Held our breaths to see if it would go down again, but it didn’t Instead, we were electrified by the noise of someone unlocking the door we were standing behind. I caught a flash of Chico’s alarmed eyes as he leapt away from the lock and joined me on the hinge side, our backs pressed hard against the wall.
The door opened until it was touching my chest. The porter coughed and sniffed on the other side of the barrier, looking, I thought, up the stairs, checking that all was as it should be.
The door swung shut again, and the key clicked in the lock. I let a long-held breath out in a slow soundless whistle, and Chico gave me the sickly grin that came from semi-released tension.
We felt the faint thud through the fabric of the building as the door on the floor below us was shut and locked. Chico raised his eyebrows and I nodded, and he applied his bunch of lock-pickers to the problem. There was a faint scraping noise as he sorted his way into the mechanism, and then the application of some muscle, and finally his clearing look of satisfaction as the metal tongue retracted into the door.
We went through, taking the keys but leaving the door unlocked, and found ourselves in the familiar headquarters of British racing. Acres of carpet, comfortable chairs, polished wood furniture, and the scent of extinct cigars.
The Security Section had its own corridor of smaller workadays offices, and down there without difficulty we eased into Eddy Keith’s.
None of the internal doors seemed to be locked, and I supposed there was in fact little to steal, bar electric typewriters and other such trifles. Eddy Keith’s filing cabinets all slid open easily, and so did the drawers in his desk.
In the strong evening sunlight we sat and read the reports on the extra syndicates that Jacksy had told me of. Eleven horses whose names I had written down, when he’d gone, so as not to forget them. Eleven syndicates apparently checked and accepted by Eddy, with Rammileese’s two registered-owner pals appearing inexo
rably on all of them: and as with the previous four, headed by Philip Friarly, there was nothing in the files themselves to prove anything one way or the other. They were carefully, meticulously presented, openly ready for inspection.
There was one odd thing: the four Friarly files were all missing.
We looked through the desk. Eddy kept in it a few personal objects: a battery razor, indigestion tablets, a comb, and about sixteen packs of book matches, all from gambling clubs. Otherwise there was simple stationery, pens, a pocket calculator and a desk diary. His engagements, past and future, were merely down as the race meetings he was due to attend.
I looked at my watch. Seven forty-five. Chico nodded and began putting the files back neatly into their drawers. Frustrating, I thought. An absolute blank.
When we were ready to go I took a quick look into a filing cabinet marked ‘Personnel’ which contained slim factual files about everyone presently employed by the Jockey Club, and everyone receiving its pensions. I looked for a file marked ‘Mason’, but someone had taken that, too.
‘Coming?’ Chico said.
I nodded regretfully. We left Eddy’s office as we’d found it and went back to the door to the stairway. Nothing stirred. The headquarters of British racing lay wide open to intruders, who were having to go empty away.
14
On Friday afternoon, depressed on many accounts, I drove comparatively slowly to Newmarket.
The day itself was hot, the weather reportedly stoking up to the sort of intense heatwave one could get in May, promising a glorious summer that seldom materialized. I drove in shirtsleeves with the window open, and decided to go to Hawaii and lie on the beach for a while, like a thousand years.
Martin England was out in his stable yard when I got there, also in shirtsleeves and wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.
‘Sid!’ he said, seeming truly pleased. ‘Great. I’m just starting evening stables. You couldn’t have timed it better.’
