Field of Thirteen

by Dick Francis

  Vivi, deciding that they should use a half-bred unregistered throw-out as their entry to the sales, had bought one from a knacker’s yard for peanuts; a bay with a white star, common as dirt. There would be bound to be one a bit like him at the sales, she’d said. They would swap him for anything great that came after him in the catalogue; and, sure enough, number 189 had been perfect.

  Vivi, planning ahead, would send Jim up north in the spring with all their savings to buy a cheap thoroughbred two-year-old, a bay with a white star, that looked at any rate passable. Then Jim would get the vet to fill in the new horse’s markings certificate which would match its foal certificate in the registry; and Jim Turner, racehorse trainer, would have in his stable a bay with a white star checked and registered and free to race.

  Jim and Vivi knew, as the Director did, that young horses changed as they grew older, like children into men, so that there would be little chance of anyone recognising the aristocrat by sight. It could race for ever in its new identity, and no one would ever know. Vivi couldn’t see how anything could go wrong, and never thought of the long-term tenacity of the Director, who was already pondering wearisome sporadic whorl-checks of white-starred bays for years to come.

  ‘In the summer,’ Vivi said, ‘we’ll smarten the place up a bit. Lick of paint. Tubs of flowers. Then in autumn when the colt starts winning and people take notice, we’ll have a place new owners won’t mind coming to.’

  Jim nodded. Vivi could do it. She was real bright, Vivi was.

  ‘And you’ll be on the map right enough, Jim Turner, and none of those snooty cows of trainers’ wives will look down on us ever again.’

  There was a sudden metallic clatter just outside the back door and, immediately intensely alarmed, they both stood up jerkily and went outside.

  A shambling, untidy figure stood there, with his hands fumbling through the household refuse in their dustbin, turning already to back away.

  ‘It’s a tramp!’ Vivi said disbelievingly. ‘Stealing our rubbish.’

  ‘Get off,’ Jim said, advancing roughly. ‘Go on, get off.’

  The tramp retreated a few steps, very slowly.

  Jim Turner dived back into his kitchen and snatched up the shot-gun with which he deterred rabbits.

  ‘Go on,’ he shouted, coming out again and pointing the barrels. ‘Clear off and don’t come back. I don’t want muck like you round here. Bugger off.’

  The tramp went slowly away towards the road, and the Turners, righteously reassured, returned to their warm kitchen.

  The landowner spent the afternoon regretting what he’d done in the morning. It was not a good day, he belatedly realised, for turning a man out of his home, even if his home was a hole in the ground.

  When they’d pulled the nest to pieces, the two council workers and himself, he had found in the ruins a plastic bag full of cigarette ends. He wasn’t an imaginative man, but it came to him that everything the tramp had, his home and his comforts, he had taken away. He had looked up at the sullen sky, and shivered.

  During the afternoon he walked lengthily round his land, half looking for the tramp, to quieten his own conscience; but it was almost with surprise that he finally saw him walking towards him along one of his boundary roads.

  The tramp shambled slowly, and he was not alone. At his shoulder, as slowly following, came a horse.

  The tramp stopped, and the horse also. The tramp held out a horse cube on a grimy palm, and the horse ate it.

  The landowner looked in puzzlement at the two of them, the filthy man and the well-groomed horse in its tidy rug.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ said the landowner, pointing.

  ‘Found it. In the road.’ The tramp’s voice was hoarse from disuse, but the words were clear. They were also not true.

  ‘Look,’ said the landowner awkwardly, ‘you can build that house of yours again, if you like. Stay for a few days. How’s that?’

  The tramp considered it but shook his head, knowing that he couldn’t stay, because of the horse. He had freed the horse from its stable and taken it with him. They would call him a thief and arrest him. In his past he had compulsively absconded from institutions, from children’s homes and then the army, and if he couldn’t face the walls of a doss house, still less could he face a cell in the nick. Cold and hunger and freedom, yes. Warmth and food and a locked door, no.

  He turned away, gesturing unmistakably to the landowner to take the horse, to put his hand on its head-collar and do what was right. Automatically, almost, the landowner did so.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, as the tramp retreated. ‘Look… take these.’ He pulled from his pocket a packet of cigarettes and held them out. ‘Take them… please.’

  Hesitating, the tramp went back and accepted the gift, nodding his acknowledgement of something given, something received. Then again he turned away and set off down the road, and the long-threatened snow began to fall in big single floating flakes, obliterating his shaggy outline in the dying afternoon.

  Where will he go? the landowner wondered uncomfortably: and the tramp thought without anxiety that he would walk all night through the snow to keep warm, and in the morning he would find shelter, and eat, as usual, what others of their plenty had thrown away. The tramp’s earlier festering anger, which had flared up and focused on Jim Turner, had by now burnt away, and all he felt, as he put distance safely behind him, was his normal overwhelming desire to be alone.

  The landowner looked at the horse and the white star on its forehead, and shook his head sardonically at the thought which came to him. All the same, when he’d shut the horse into a stable behind his house, he fished out the day before yesterday’s newspapers, and looked at the tabloid’s headline ‘Find the Bright Star’ and at the foal certificate facsimile in the ‘serious’ daily. And then he tentatively telephoned the police.

  ‘Found a horse, have you, sir?’ said a cheerful sergeant’s voice robustly. ‘And you’re not the only one, I’ll tell you that. There’s horses all over the village, here. Some fool opened all the boxes at Jim Turner’s place and let them all out. It might be a tramp. Turner says he chased one out of his yard earlier. We’re looking for that one as lived on your land. But it’s dark and it’s snowing and I’m short of men, of course, as today’s Christmas Eve.’

  Christmas Eve.

  The landowner felt first a burst of irritation with the tramp, and then, like a stab, understood that he wouldn’t have set loose the horses if he hadn’t been turned out of his own home at Christmas. He decided not to tell the sergeant that he’d seen the tramp with the horse now in his own stable, nor which way the tramp had gone.

  ‘I’ll tell Jim Turner to come and fetch that horse, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘He’ll be glad to have it back. In a proper tizzy, he is.’

  ‘Er…’ said the landowner, slowly, not wanting to be thought a fool, ‘I don’t know if you’ve read the papers about that stolen horse, sergeant, but I think instead of returning this one to Jim Turner immediately, we might try that “phone at any time” number for reaching the Director of the Racecourse Security Service.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose that the Director believes in Christmas miracles, but the horse I have here in my stable is a young bay colt with a bright white star on his forehead… and whorls in all the right places…’

  COLLISION COURSE

  No murder here. No blood.

  PREJUDICE, sure, and PRIDE, OK, but this isn’t Austen Bonnet and Bennet land; this is today’s out-of-work newspaper editor versus a brash operator putting his foot in it.

  With a mug of strong black coffee at his elbow the editor of the Cotswold Voice sat at his desk in his shirt sleeves and read the splashy column that would lead the newspaper’s racing pages the next day, unless he vetoed it. The words were a blur. His mind spun from being sacked.

  Twice a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays, from uninspiring factory-type premises on an industrial park west of Oxford, the Cotswold Voice fed a stream of lively newsprint into the to
wns and villages along the Cotswold hills.

  On Tuesdays the slant was towards news, comment and interpretation and on Saturday to sport, fashion and general knowledge competitions. Something for everyone, the paper announced. Something for mums, dads, kids and aunties. Births, deaths and ‘wanted’ ads. Lots of verve. Horoscopes, scandal… All a succulent worm for a hawk.

  The present editor of the Cotswold Voice, twenty-nine years old when he’d been surprisingly appointed, had in four short years doubled the paper’s circulation while himself being reasonably mistaken for the office gofer.

  Short and thin, he had exceptionally sharp eyesight, acute hearing and a sense of smell that could distinguish oil on the north wind and sheep on the west. His accent was a mixture of Berkshire, Wiltshire and the University of Cambridge. He could read at light-speed, his brain a sponge. He’d been christened Absalom Elvis da Vinci Williams, and he could lose his cool like a bolt of lightning. His staff, who recognised power when they felt it, walked round him warily, and at his bidding called him Bill.

  The editor – Absalom Elvis et cetera Williams – scanned the racing pages’ leader over again. Concentrate, he told himself. Don’t leave with a whimper.

  He read:

  ‘Coronary cases, don’t read on. Others, give your valves aerobic work-outs while couch-potatoing it Saturdays p.m. Snap a can. Feet up? Down to the start, and they’re off!’

  The work was technically perfect; neat typing, double spacing, an impeccable paper print-out of a computer disc. This racing correspondent never scattered his pages with messy amendments.

  A wade through another couple of florid paragraphs encouraging heart-thumping indolence finally revealed the core of the guff to be advice on buying shares in syndicated racehorses.

  Bill Williams frowned. Syndicated racehorses were hardly hot news. What made this spiel different was that the meat of it explained that the syndicated horses, when acquired, would not be sent to an established trainer, but would form the nucleus of a new stable with a new trainer, one Dennis Kinser.

  The Voice assured its readers the scheme was an exciting financial prospect. Buy, buy, and – er – buy.

  The editor picked up the pulse-stirring article and walked unhurriedly down the lengthy editorial floor to where his chief racing writer awaited a verdict. The whole busy room was noticeably quiet owing to the editor, during his first weeks in office, having had the last of the crash-tinkle tap-tap typewriters pensioned off and the squeaky functional vinyl flooring covered in dark blue sound-absorbing carpet tiles. The frenetic hyper-activity common to newspapers had died with the clatter, but productivity had nevertheless soared. The older hands yearned for a return to noise.

  The editor sat on a rolling stool drawn up beside the racing writer’s desk and, floating the typed pages in front of him, asked without belligerence, ‘What’s all this really about?’

  ‘Well… syndicates.’ The racing writer, lazy, middle-aged, heavily moustached, showed more energy on the page than off it.

  ‘This Dennis Kinser,’ the editor asked, ‘have you yourself met him?’

  ‘Well… no.’

  ‘Where did you get the story?’

  ‘From the agent who’s putting the syndicates together.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No. He phoned.’

  The editor drew a blue-pencil line through the multiple advice to buy and buy, and initialled the rest of the column for publication. There was little of more pressing interest: it was August, the month of newspaper and racing doldrums.

  ‘Follow up the story,’ he said. ‘Do a personality piece on Dennis Kinser. Get a picture. If there are no bigger stories and no one scoops you, we’ll run it next Saturday.’

  ‘What if he’s a fraud?’

  ‘Frauds are news,’ the editor said. ‘Be sure of the facts.’

  The racing writer winced, watching the editor walk away. Bone idle, the racing writer had once written a cuttingly satirical ‘eye-witness’ account of a much looked forward to parade of champions that had in fact been cancelled by heavy rain. The editor’s fury had frightened the racing writer into diarrhoea and the shakes. This time, he morosely supposed, he would actually have to get off his backside and track down the wannabe trainer. (The racing writer thought in journalese, much as he wrote.) The only bright area on his constricted horizon was that after next Saturday the editor would be out on holiday for a week. The racing writer could get away with much sloppier reporting, he cosily reflected, when the sharp little blue-pencil bastard wasn’t creeping around demanding actual physical work. The racing writer liked to gather his information via the telephone, sitting down. He picked up the receiver and talked to the syndicate-arranging agent.

  Bill Williams went back to his desk and drank his left-over lukewarm coffee, his thoughts as stark and black as the liquid. The Voice had belonged to a dynasty whose kindly head had recently died. The descendants, wanting to divide the cash, had sold their biggest asset to a multi-faceted company as just one more local rag in their commercial chain. Individualism the new men did not want. Maximum profit, they did. As far as possible, their array of provincial papers would all speak economically as one. Consequently, they would appoint their own rubber-stamp editor for the Voice. It was fortunate that ex-editor Williams was due for a week off. He could clear his desk and not come back.

  Bill Williams had known the dynasty family would one day-sell and that he would move on. He’d known there was a new-brutality abroad in the cut-throat newspaper world. Knowing hadn’t prepared him for the abruptness, the ferocity, or the total lack of even a shred of courtesy from any side. There had been no handshakes, no apology, certainly no good wishes, simply a blunt dismissal message among his private e-mail.

  From the general peace in the long room he realised that the new owners had so far told no one else about the change of regime. It suited him fine. His last three issues – Saturday, Tuesday and Saturday – would be the best he could do. And after that…

  Toughening his mind, he pulled onto his screen the names of all newspapers published in London, together with their owners. He had served his time in the provinces – like the horses going up and down on the outside ring of a roundabout, and he reckoned he had earned a hand on the levers. If he didn’t tell the ringmasters he was free out there and willing, he thought, mixing his metaphors cheerfully, how would they know?

  He phoned and wrote letters and e-mail and sent copies of the Voice all over the place. His CV was impressive, but the ringmasters seemingly were deaf.

  From a conglomerate known for treating their journalist staff badly, he did at least get one firm offer to meet. Dinner for four at a place of Williams’ choosing. Outside London, they stipulated. Williams to pay.

  It was by then Thursday of his last week at the Voice. Once the Saturday paper was on the street, he would be done. Philosophically he accepted the conglomerate’s reverse invitation and made a booking for a table in a restaurant beside the River Thames south of Oxford. His food column writer had raved about the place for a month.

  The Voice’s racing writer, after a series of telephone enquiries, had finally located the hopeful Dennis Kinser and, not yet aware that the ‘blue-pencilling bastard’ of an editor would be chasing him no more after Saturday, he had actually stirred himself to drive sixty miles for a face-to-face enlightenment.

  When he tried, the racing writer’s assessment of people and horses tended to be stingingly accurate, which was why Bill Williams put up with him. The racing writer saw faults and said so, and was often enough proved right.

  He saw faults in Dennis Kinser that others might have thought virtues, the first of them being overweening confidence in himself. Kinser’s aim in life began at reigning as champion trainer: after that, the world.

  The racing writer listened to the cockiness with weary disillusion and made shorthand notes on spiral-bound pages as if tape-recorders hadn’t been invented. He would have described Kinser as an envy-driven bumpt
ious self-important snake-oil salesman had he not been sure the little blue-pencil devil would let him get away only with ‘ambitious’.

  Dennis Kinser at thirty had developed a game-plan for his life which involved a swift future shinny up the celebrity ladder to a first-name clap-on-the-shoulder familiarity with any well-known achiever. He would pay restrained respect to every inherited title. He would do favours that required favours in return. He needed a first public toehold for this upward mobility and the Cotswold Voice sports pages’ leading article would give it to him.

  He told the racing writer with faintly defiant pride that as he’d been too heavily built to make it to the top as a jump jockey he had spent six years as a stable-lad, ‘doing his two’ and living in squalor in a hostel.

  ‘Was that part of the game-plan?’ the racing writer asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Kinser said, lying.

  The racing writer wrote on his notepad, ‘The time to make friends with this guy is now.’ He said, ‘What do you intend to do next?’

  Kinser told him exhaustively. He would beguile the owners of the horses he’d looked after to send him some to train. Their horses had won, he would smilingly assure them, because of his knowledgeable care. Then he would publicise and glamorise the syndicates and welcome all part-owners warmly. He would be given a trainer’s licence because he’d completed all three of the British Racing School’s official courses – in horse, business and people management.

  ‘Top class manipulator’ the racing writer noted and in the evening wrote one of his very best pieces for the Voice, giving Kinser the benefit of the self-made doubt.

  Bill Williams, still the editor on the next day, Friday, walked down the quiet editorial floor carrying the sparkling pages and sincerely complimented his racing writer. Then he called his staff together and unemotionally told them that a different editor would be running the paper from Sunday.

  Bill Williams, whose odd-ball father had burdened him with Absalom, Elvis and da Vinci, had spent his council house and comprehensive school years hiding his brains in order not to be bullied. His teachers declared him puzzlingly dumb: not stupid themselves, they saw flashes of stifled brilliance and went into an ‘I thought so all along’ mode when A. E. da V. Williams, insisting against their moderating advice on aiming for the top and trying for Cambridge, had won scholarships all over the place with a subsequent clutch of Firsts and Doctorates in his fist.