by Dick Francis
I blinked. ‘Who are you quoting?’ I asked.
‘Myself,’ she said loftily, and then more probably added, ‘Mummy too. And Gervase.’
It had Gervase’s thuggish style stamped all over it.
Donald and Helen looked distinctly interested in the proposal. Ferdinand and Debs had of course heard it before.
‘Gervase thinks it’s the best solution,’ Ferdinand said, nodding.
I doubted very much that Malcolm would agree, but said only, ‘I’ll pass on your message next time he gets in touch with me.’
‘But Joyce is sure you know where he is,’ Donald objected.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘Do you know that Lucy and Edwin are here too?’
They were satisfactorily diverted, looking over their shoulders to see if they could spot them in the growing crowds.
‘Didn’t Joyce tell you she was sending so many of you here?’ I asked generally, and it was Ferdinand, sideways, his face turned away, who answered.
‘She told Serena to come here. She told Serena to tell me, which she did, so we came together. I didn’t know about Donald and Helen or Lucy and Edwin. I expect she wanted to embarrass you.’
His eyes swivelled momentarily to my face, wanting to see my reaction. I don’t suppose my face showed any. Joyce might call me ‘darling’ with regularity but could be woundingly unkind at the same time, and I’d had a lifetime to grow armour.
Ferdinand happened to be standing next to me. I said on impulse into his ear, ‘Ferdinand, who killed Moira?’
He stopped looking for Lucy and Edwin and transferred his attention abruptly and wholly to me. I could see calculations going on in the pause before he answered, but I had no decoder for his thoughts. He was the most naturally congenial to me of all my brothers, yet the others were open books compared with him. He was secretive, as perhaps I was myself. He had wanted to build his own kitchen-wall hidey-hole when I’d built mine, only Malcolm had said we must share, that one was enough. Ferdinand had sulked and shunned me for a while, and smirked at Gervase’s dead rats. I wondered to what extent people remained the same as they’d been when very young: whether it was safe to assume they hadn’t basically changed, to believe that if one could peel back the layers of living one would come to the known child. I wanted Ferdinand to be as I had known him at ten, eleven, twelve — a boy dedicated to riding a bicycle while standing on his head on the saddle — and not in a million years a murderer.
‘I don’t know who killed Moira,’ he said finally. ‘Alicia says you did. She told the police it had to be you.’
‘I couldn’t have.’
‘She says the police could break your alibi if they really tried.’
I knew that they had really tried: they’d checked every separate five minutes of my day, and their manner and their suspicions had been disturbing.
‘And what do you think?’ I asked curiously.
His eyelids flickered. ‘Alicia says …’
I said abruptly, ‘Your mother says too damned much. Can’t you think for yourself?’
He was offended, as he would be. He hooked his arms through those of Debs and Serena and made an announcement. ‘We three are going to have a drink and a sandwich. If you fall off and kill yourself, no one will miss you.’
I smiled at him, though his tone had held no joke.
‘And don’t be so bloody forgiving,’ he said.
He whirled the girls away from me and marched them off. I wondered how he’d got the day off from work, though I supposed most people could if they tried. He was a statistician, studying to be an actuary in his insurance company. What were the probabilities, I wondered, of a thirty-two-year-old statistician whose wife had purple fingernails being present when his brother broke his neck at Sandown Park?
Donald and Helen said that they too would run a sandwich to earth (Donald’s words) and Helen added earnestly that she would care that I finished the race safely, whatever Ferdinand said.
‘Thanks,’ I said, hoping I could believe her, and went back into the changing-room for an interval of thought.
Lucy and Edwin might leave before the end of the afternoon, and so might Donald and Helen, but Ferdinand wouldn’t. He liked going racing. He’d said on one mellow occasion that he’d have been quite happy being a bookmaker; he was lightning fast at working out relative odds.
The problem of how to extract Malcolm unseen from the racecourse didn’t end, either, with those members of the family I’d talked to. If they were all so certain I knew where Malcolm was, one of the others, more cunning, could be hiding behind trees, waiting to follow me when I left.
There were hundreds of trees in Sandown Park.
The first race came and went, and in due course I went out to partner Young Higgins in the second.
Jo as usual had red cheeks from pleasure and hope. George was being gruffly businesslike, also as usual, telling me to be especially careful at the difficult first fence and to go easy up the hill past the stands the first time.
I put Malcolm out of my mind, and also murder, and it wasn’t difficult. The sky was a clear distant blue, the air crisp with the coming of autumn. The leaves on all those trees were yellowing, and the track lay waiting, green and springy, with the wide fences beckoning to be flown. Simple things; and out there one came starkly face to face with oneself, which I mostly found more exhilarating than frightening. So far, anyway.
Jo said, ‘Only eight runners, just a perfect number,’ and George said, as he always did, ‘Don’t lie too far back coming round the last long bend.’
I said I would try not to.
Jo’s eyes were sparkling like a child’s in her sixty-year-old face, and I marvelled that she had never in all that time lost the thrill of expectation in moments like these. There might be villains at every level in horse racing, but there were also people like Jo and George whose goodness and goodwill shone out like searchlights, who made the sport overall good fun and wholesome.
Life and death might be serious in the real world, but life and death on a fast steeplechaser on a Friday afternoon in the autumn sunshine was a lighthearted toss-up, an act of health on a sick planet.
I fastened the strap of my helmet, was thrown up on Young Higgins and rode him out onto the track. Perhaps if I’d been a professional and ridden up to ten times as often I would have lost the swelling joy that that moment always gave me: one couldn’t grin like a maniac, even to oneself, at a procession of bread-and-butter rides on cold days, sharp tracks, bad horses.
Young Higgins was living up to his name, bouncing on his toes and tossing his head in high spirits. We lined up with the seven others, all of whose riders 1 happened to know from many past similar occasions. Amateurs came in all guises: there was a mother, an aunt and a grandfather riding that afternoon, besides a journalist, an earl’s son, a lieutenant-colonel, a show-jumper and myself. From the stands, only a keen eye could have told one from the other without the guidance of our colours, and that was what amateur racing was all about: the equality, the levelling anonymity of the starting gate.
The tapes went up and we set off with three miles to go, almost two whole circuits, twenty-two jumps and an uphill run to the winning post.
The aunt’s horse, too strong for her, took hold of the proceedings and opened up an emphatic lead, which no one else bothered to cut down. The aunt’s horse rushed into the difficult downhill first fence and blundered over it, which taught him a lesson and let his rider recover control, and for about a mile after that there were no dramatic excitements. The first race I’d ever ridden in had seemed to pass in a whirling heaving flurry leaving me breathless and exhausted, but time had stretched out with experience until one could watch and think and even talk.
‘Give me room, blast you,’ shouted the lieutenant-colonel on one side of me.
‘Nice day,’ said the earl’s son chattily on the other, always a clown who enlivened his surroundings.
‘Shift your arse! yelled the mother to her horse, giv
ing him a crack round that part of his anatomy. She was a good rider, hated slow horses, hated not to win, weighed a muscular ten stone and was scornful of the show-jumper, whom she had accused often of incompetence.
The show-jumper, it was true, liked to set his horse right carefully before jumps, as in the show-ring, and hadn’t managed to speed up in the several steeplechase races he’d ridden so far. He wasn’t in consequence someone to follow into a fence and I avoided him whenever possible.
The journalist was the best jockey in the race, a professional in all but status, and the grandfather was the worst but full of splendid reckless courage. More or less in a bunch, the whole lot of us came round the bottom bend and tackled the last three jumps of the first circuit. The aunt was still in front, then came the lieutenant-colonel, myself and the earl’s son in a row, then the mother just behind, with the show-jumper and the grand-father beside her. I couldn’t see the journalist: somewhere in the rear, no doubt, biding his wily time.
The lieutenant-colonel’s mount made a proper hash of the last of the three fences, jogging both of his rider’s feet out of the irons and tipping the military backside into the air somewhere in the region of the horse’s mane. Landing alongside and gathering my reins, I saw that the lieutenant-colonel’s balance was hopelessly progressing down the horse’s galloping shoulder as he fought without success to pull himself back into the saddle.
I put out an arm, grasped his jersey and yanked him upwards and backwards, shifting his disastrous centre of gravity into a more manageable place and leaving him slowing and bumping in my wake as he sat down solidly in the saddle, trying to put his feet back into his flying stirrups, which was never very easy at thirty miles an hour.
He had breathing space to collect things going up the hill, though, as we all did, and we swept round the top bend and down to the difficult fence again with not much change in order from the first time.
Someone had once long ago pulled me back into the saddle in that same way: it was fairly common in jump racing. Someone had also once tipped me straight into the air with an upward wrench of my heel, but that was another story. The lieutenant-colonel was saying ‘Thanks’ and also ‘Move over, you’re crowding me,’ more or less in the same breath.
After crossing the water jump for the second time over on the far side of the track, the show-jumper made a spurt to the front and then slowed almost to a standstill on landing over the next fence, having jumped especially pedantically, and the aunt crashed into the back of him with some singularly un-aunt-like language.
‘Lovely lady,’ said the earl’s son, appreciatively, as we passed the debacle. ‘How are you going yourself?’
‘Not bad,’ 1 said. ‘How are you?’
We jumped the last of the seven far-side fences together and in front, and put all our energies into staying there round the long last bend and over the three last fences. I could hear horses thudding behind me and the mother’s voice exhorting her slowcoach. Approaching the Pond fence, I could sense the earl’s son’s horse beginning to tire, I could see that precious winning post far ahead and the way to it clear, and for at least a few moments I thought I might win. But then the lieutenant-colonel reappeared fast at my elbow, still shouting for room, and between the last two fences, as I’d feared he would, the journalist materialised from the outback and made it look easy, and Young Higgins tired into Middle-Aged Higgins on the hill.
He and I finished third, which wasn’t too bad, with the earl’s son, persevering, not far away fourth.
‘A nice afternoon out,’ he said happily as we trotted back together, and I looked at the lights in his eyes and saw it was the same for him as for me, a high that one couldn’t put into words, an adventure of body and spirit that made of dismounting and walking on the ground a literal coming down to earth.
Jo was pleased enough, patting Young Higgins hard. ‘Ran a great race, didn’t you, old boy? Jumped like a stag.’
‘You’d have been second,’ said George, who had good binoculars, ‘if you’d let the lieutenant-colonel fall off.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I said, unbuckling the griths, ‘there were a lot of hooves down there.’
George smiled. ‘Don’t forget to weigh in.’ (He said it every time.) ‘Come for a drink in the Owners’ bar when you’ve changed.’
I accepted. It was part of the ritual, part of the bargain. They liked to re-live Young Higgins’ outing fence for fence in return for having given me the ride. They were still standing in the unsaddling enclosure talking to friends when I went out again in street clothes, and with welcoming smiles waved me into their group. None of my own family being in sight, I went with them without problems and, over glasses of Jo’s favourite brandy and ginger ale, earned my afternoon’s fun by describing it.
I returned to the weighing-room area afterwards and found that not only were all the same family members still on the racecourse, but that they had coalesced into an angry swarm and had been joined by one of the queen bees herself, my mother Joyce.
Joyce, in fur and a green hat, was a rinsed blonde with greenish eyes behind contact lenses which seldom missed a trick in life as in cards. Dismayed but blank-faced, I gave her a dutiful peck on her smooth cheek which, it seemed, she was in no mood to receive.
‘Darling,’ she said, the syllables sizzling with displeasure, ‘did you or did you not send that weasel Norman West to check up on my whereabouts last Friday?’
‘Er,’ I said.
‘Did you or did you not send him sniffing round Vivien on the same errand?’
‘Well,’ I said, half smiling, ‘I wouldn’t have put it as crudely, but I suppose so, yes.’
The battery of eyes from the others was as friendly as napalm.
‘Why?’ Joyce snapped.
‘Didn’t Norman West tell you?’
She said impatiently, ‘He said something nonsensical about Malcolm being attacked. I told him if Malcolm had been attacked, I would have heard of it.’
‘Malcolm was very nearly killed,’ I said flatly. ‘He and I asked Norman West to make sure that none of you could have done it.’
Joyce demanded to be told what had happened to Malcolm, and I told her. She and all the others listened with open mouths and every evidence of shock, and if there was knowledge, not ignorance, behind any of the horrified eyes, I couldn’t discern it.
‘Poor Daddy!’ Serena exclaimed. ‘How beastly.’
‘A matter for the police,’ Donald said forcefully.
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised they haven’t been to see all of you already, as they did when Moira died.’
Edwin said, with a shake of the head, ‘How near, how near,’ and then, hearing the regret in his voice as clearly as I did, added hurriedly, ‘What a blessing he woke up.’
‘When the police make their enquiries,’ I said, ‘they don’t exactly report the results to Malcolm. He wants to make sure for himself that none of the family was at Quantum last Friday afternoon. If you cooperate with Norman West when he gets to you, you’ll set Malcolm’s mind at rest.’
‘And what if we can’t prove where we were?’ Debs asked.
‘Or even remember?’ Lucy said.
‘Malcolm will have to live with it,’ Joyce said crisply.
‘Living with it would present him less problem,’ I said dryly, ‘It’s dying he wants to avoid.’
They stared at me in silence. The reality of Moira’s murder had been to them, I guessed, as to me, a slow-burning fuse, with seemingly no bad consequences at first, but with accelerating worries as time passed. Perhaps they, as I had done, had clung to the motiveless-intruder-from-outside theory at first because the alternative was surely unthinkable, but in the weeks since then, they must at least have begun to wonder. The fuse would heat soon into active suspicions, I saw, which might tear apart and finally scatter for ever the fragile family fabric.
Would I mind, I thought? Not if I still had Malcolm… and perhaps Ferdinand… and Joyce… and maybe Lucy, or Thomas
… Serena… would I care if I never again laid eyes on Gervase?
The answer, surprisingly enough, was yes, I would mind. Imperfect, quarrelsome, ramshackle as it was, the family were origins and framework, the geography of living. Moira, ungrieved, was already rewriting that map, and if her murderer remained for ever undiscovered, if Malcolm himself — I couldn’t think of it — were killed, there would be no healing, no reforming, no telephone network for information, no contact, just a lot of severed galaxies moving inexorably apart.
The big bang, I thought, still lay ahead. The trick was to smother the fuse before the explosion, and that was all very well, but where was the burning point, and how long had we got?
‘Buy me a drink, darling,’ Joyce commanded. ‘We’re in deep trouble.’
She began to move off, but the others showed no signs of following. I looked at the seven faces all expressing varying degrees of anxiety and saw them already begin to move slightly away from each other, not one cohesive group, but Donald and Helen as a couple, Lucy and Edwin, a pair, and Ferdinand, Debs and Serena, the youngest trio.
Til tell Malcolm your fears,’ I said. ‘And your needs.’
‘Oh yes, please do,’ Helen said intensely.
‘And Gervase’s plan,’ Ferdinand added.
‘Do come on, darling,’ Joyce said peremptorily over her shoulder. ‘Which way is the bar?’
‘Run along, little brother,’ Lucy said with irony. Serena said, ‘Mumsie’s waiting,’ and Debs fairly tittered. I thought of sticking my toes in and making Joyce come back, but what did it matter? I could put up with the jibes, I’d survived them for years, and I understood what prompted them. I shrugged ruefully and went after Joyce, and could feel the pitying smiles on the back of my neck.
I steered Joyce into the busy Members’ bar which had a buffet table along one side with salads and breads and a large man in chef’s clothes carving from turkeys, haunches of beef and hams on the bone. I was hungry after riding and offered Joyce food, but she waved away the suggestion as frivolity. I bought her instead a large vodka and tonic with a plain ginger ale for myself, and we found spare seats at a table in a far corner where, after the merest glance around to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard among the general hubbub, she leaned forward until the brim of the green hat was practically touching my forehead and launched into her inquisition.
