by Dick Francis
‘I got Prince. A year old, he was then. I’d done a bit of dog handling in the army, and I trained Prince to be a proper fighter.’
‘You did, indeed,’ I said, looking at the dog who now lay peacefully in his box with his chin on his paws.
‘I took him round and showed him to some of the other victims of the protection racket,’ Thomkins went on, ‘and told them that if they’d get dogs too we’d chase off the taxi-drivers. Some of them didn’t realise the taxis were mixed up in it. They were too scared to open their eyes. Anyway, in the end a lot of them did get dogs and I helped to train them, but it’s difficult, the dog’s only got to obey one master, see, and I had to get them to obey someone else, not me. Still, they weren’t too bad. Not as good as Prince, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Kate.
The innkeeper looked at her suspiciously, but she was demurely piling sandwiches on to a plate.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘In the end I got some of the people with children to join in too. They bought alsatians or bull terriers, and we arranged a system for taking all the kiddies to school by car. Those regular walks to school laid them wide open to trouble, see? I hired a judo expert and his car to do nothing but ferry the children and their mothers about. We all club together to pay him. He’s expensive, of course, but nothing approaching the protection money.’
‘How splendid,’ said Kate warmly.
‘We’re beating them all right, but it isn’t all plain sailing yet. They smashed up the Cockleshell Café a fortnight ago, just round the corner from here. But we’ve got a system to deal with that, too, now. Several of us went round to help clear up the mess, and we all put something into the hat to pay for new tables and chairs. They’ve got an alsatian bitch at that café, and she’d come into season and they’d locked her in a bedroom. I ask you! Dogs are best,’ said the innkeeper, seriously.
Kate gave a snort of delight.
‘Have the taxi-drivers attacked any of you personally, or has it always been your property?’ I asked.
‘Apart from being hit on the head with my own bottle, you mean?’ The innkeeper pulled up his sleeve and showed us one end of a scar on his forearm. ‘That’s about seven inches long. Three of them jumped me one evening when I went out to post a letter. It was just after Prince had sent one of their fellows off, and silly like, I went out without him. It was only a step to the pillar box, see? A mistake though. They made a mess of me, but I got a good look at them. They told me I’d get the same again if I went to the police. But I rang the boys in blue right up, and told them the lot. It was a blond young brute who slashed my arm and my evidence got him six months,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘After that I was careful not to move a step without Prince, and they’ve never got near enough to have another go at me.’
‘How about the other victims?’ I asked.
‘Same as me,’ he said. ‘Three or four of them were beaten up and slashed with knives. After I’d got them dogs I persuaded some of them to tell the police. They’d had the worst of it by then, I thought, but they were still scared of giving evidence in court. The gang have never actually killed anyone, as far as I know. It wouldn’t be sense, anyhow, would it? A man can’t pay up if he’s dead.’
‘No,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘I suppose he can’t. They might reckon that one death would bring everyone else to heel, though.’
‘You needn’t think I haven’t that in my mind all the time,’ he said sombrely, ‘But there’s a deal of difference between six months for assault and a life sentence or a hanging, and I expect that’s what has stopped ’em. This isn’t Chicago after all, though you’d wonder sometimes.’
I said, ‘I suppose if they can’t get money from their old victims, the gang try “protecting” people who don’t know about your systems and your dogs…’
The innkeeper interrupted, ‘We’ve got a system for that, too. We put an advertisement in the Brighton paper every week telling anyone who has been threatened with Protection to write to a Box number and they will get help. It works a treat, I can tell you.’
Kate and I looked at him with genuine admiration.
‘They should have made you a general,’ said, ‘not a sergeant major.’
‘I’ve planned a few incidents in my time,’ he said modestly. ‘Those young lieutenants in the war, straight out of civvy street and rushed through an officer course, they were glad enough now and then for a suggestion from a regular.’ He stirred, ‘Well, how about a drink now?’
But Kate and I thanked him and excused ourselves, as it was already eight o’clock. Thomkins and I promised to let each other know how we fared in battle, and we parted on the best of terms. But I didn’t attempt to pat Prince.
Aunt Deb sat in the drawing-room tapping her foot. Kate apologised very prettily for our lateness, and Aunt Deb thawed. She and Kate were clearly deeply attached to each other.
During dinner it was to Uncle George that Kate addressed most of the account of our afternoon’s adventures. She told him amusingly and lightly about the wandering horse-box and made a rude joke about the Pavilion Plaza’s paste sandwiches, which drew a mild reproof from Aunt Deb to the effect that the Pavilion Plaza was the most hospitable of the Brighton hotels. I gave a fleeting thought to the flighty Mavis, whom I had suspected, perhaps unjustly, of dispensing her own brand of hospitality on the upper floors.
‘And then we had a drink in a darling little pub called The Blue Duck,’ said Kate, leaving out the telephone box and our walk through the Lanes. ‘I cut my hand there—’ she held it out complete with bandage, ‘—but not very badly of course, and we went into the kitchen to wash the blood off, and that’s what made us late. They had the most terrifying alsatian there that I’d ever seen in my life. He snarled a couple of times at Alan and made him shiver in his shoes like a jelly…’ she paused to eat a mouthful of roast lamb.
‘Do you not care for dogs, Mr York?’ said Aunt Deb, with a touch of disdain. She was devoted to her dachshund.
‘It depends,’ I said.
Kate said, ‘You don’t exactly fall in love with Prince. I expect they call him Prince because he’s black. The Black Prince. Anyway, he’s useful if any dog is. If I told you two dears what the man who keeps The Blue Duck told Alan and me about the skulduggery that goes on in respectable little old Brighton, you wouldn’t sleep sound in your beds.’
‘Then please don’t tell us, Kate dear,’ said Aunt Deb. ‘I have enough trouble with insomnia as it is.’
I looked at Uncle George to see how he liked being deprived of the end of the story, and saw him push his half-filled plate away with a gesture of revulsion, as if he were suddenly about to vomit.
He noticed I was watching, and with a wry smile said, ‘Indigestion, I’m afraid. Another of the boring nuisances of old age. We’re a couple of old crocks now, you know.’
He tried to raise a chuckle, but it was a poor affair. There was a tinge of grey in the pink cheeks, and fine beads of sweat had appeared on the already moist-looking skin. Something was deeply wrong in Uncle George’s world.
Aunt Deb looked very concerned about it, and as sheltering her from unpleasant realities was for him so old and ingrained a habit, he made a great effort to rally his resources. He took a sip of water and blotted his mouth on his napkin, and I saw the tremor in his chubby hands. But there was steel in the man under all that fat, and he cleared his throat and spoke normally enough.
He said, ‘It quite slipped my mind, Kate my dear, but while you were out Gregory rang up to talk to you about Heavens Above. I asked him how the horse was doing and he said it had something wrong with its leg and won’t be able to run on Thursday at Bristol as you planned.’
Kate looked disappointed. ‘Is he lame?’ she asked.
Uncle George said, ‘I could swear Gregory said the horse had thrown out a splint. He hadn’t broken any bones though, had he? Most peculiar.’ He was mystified, and so, I saw, was Kate.
‘Horses’ leg bones somet
imes grow knobs all of a sudden, and that is what a splint is,’ I said. ‘The leg is hot and tender while the splint is forming, but it usually lasts only two or three weeks. Heavens Above will be sound again after that.’
‘What a pest,’ said Kate. ‘I was so looking forward to Thursday. Will you be going to Bristol, Alan, now that my horse isn’t running?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m riding Palindrome there. Do try and come Kate, it would be lovely to see you.’ I spoke enthusiastically, which made Aunt Deb straighten her back and bend on me a look of renewed disapproval.
‘It is not good for a young gel’s reputation for her to be seen too often in the company of jockeys,’ she said.
At eleven o’clock, when Uncle George had locked the study door on his collection of trophies, and when Aunt Deb had swallowed her nightly quota of sleeping pills, Kate and I went out of the house to put her car away in the garage. We had left it in the drive in our haste before dinner.
The lights of the house, muted by curtains, took the blackness out of the night, so that I could still see Kate’s face as she walked beside me.
I opened the car door for her, but she paused before stepping in.
‘They’re getting old,’ she said, in a sad voice, ‘and I don’t know what I’d do without them.’
‘They’ll live for years yet,’ I said.
‘I hope so… Aunt Deb looks very tired sometimes, and Uncle George used to have so much more bounce. I think he’s worried about something now… and I’m afraid it’s Aunt Deb’s heart, though they haven’t said… They’d never tell me if there was anything wrong with them.’ She shivered.
I put my arms round her and kissed her. She smiled.
‘You’re a kind person, Alan.’
I didn’t feel kind. I wanted to throw her in the car and drive off with her at once to some wild and lonely hollow on the Downs for a purpose of which the cave men would thoroughly have approved. It was an effort for me to hold her lightly, and yet essential.
‘I love you, Kate,’ I said, and I controlled even my breathing.
‘No,’ she said, ‘Don’t say it. Please don’t say it.’ She traced my eyebrows with her finger. The dim light was reflected in her eyes as she looked at me, her body leaning gently against mine, her head held back.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know… I’m not sure… I’ve liked you kissing me and I like being with you. But love is so big a word. It’s too important. I’m… I’m not… ready…’
And there it was. Kate the beautiful, the brave, the friendly, was also Kate the unawakened. She was not aware yet of the fire that I perceived in her at every turn. It had been battened down from childhood by her Edwardian aunt, and how to release it without shocking her was a puzzle.
‘Love’s easy to learn,’ I said. ‘It’s like taking a risk. You set your mind on it and refuse to be afraid, and in no time you feel terrifically exhilarated and all your inhibitions fly out of the window.’
‘And you’re left holding the baby,’ said Kate, keeping her feet on the ground.
‘We could get married first,’ I said, smiling at her.
‘No. Dear Alan. No. Not yet.’ Then she said, almost in a whisper, ‘I’m so sorry.’
She got into the car and drove slowly round to the barn garage. I followed behind the car and helped her shut the big garage doors, and walked back with her to the house. On the doorstep she paused and squeezed my hand, and gave me a soft, brief, sisterly kiss.
I didn’t want it.
I didn’t feel at all like a brother.
TEN
On Tuesday it began to rain, cold slanting rain which lashed at the opening daffodils and covered the flowers with splashed up mud. The children went to school in shining black capes with sou’westers pulled down to their eyes and gum boots up to their knees. All that could be seen of William was his cherubic mouth with milk stains at the corners.
Scilla and I spent the day sorting out Bill’s clothes and personal belongings. She was far more composed than I would have expected, and seemed to have won through to an acceptance that he was gone and that life must be lived without him. Neither of us had mentioned, since it happened, the night she had spent in my bed, and I had become convinced that when she woke the next morning she had had no memory of it. Grief and drugs had played tricks with her mind.
We sorted Bill’s things into piles. The biggest section was to be saved for Henry and William, and into this pile Scilla put not only cuff links and studs and two gold watches, but dinner jackets and a morning suit and grey top hat. I teased her about it.
‘It isn’t silly,’ she said. ‘Henry will be needing them in ten years, if not before. He’ll be very glad to have them.’ And she added a hacking jacket and two new white silk shirts.
‘We might just as well put everything back into the cupboards and wait for Henry and William to grow,’ I said.
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ said Scilla, bequeathing to the little boys their father’s best riding breeches and his warmly-lined white mackintosh.
We finished the clothes, went downstairs to the cosy study, and turned our attention to Bill’s papers. His desk was full of them. He clearly hated to throw away old bills and letters, and in the bottom drawer we found a bundle of letters that Scilla had written to him before their marriage. She sat on the window seat reading them nostalgically while I sorted out the rest.
Bill had been methodical. The bills were clipped together in chronological order, and the letters were in boxes and files. There were some miscellaneous collections in the pigeon holes, and a pile of old, empty, used envelopes with day-to-day notes on the backs. They were reminders to himself, mostly, with messages like ‘Tell Simpson to mend fence in five acre field,’ and ‘Polly’s birthday Tuesday.’ I looked through them quickly, hovering them over the heap bound for the wastepaper basket.
I stopped suddenly. On one of them, in Bill’s loopy sprawling handwriting, was the name Clifford Tudor, and underneath, a telephone number and an address in Brighton.
‘Do you know anyone called Clifford Tudor?’ I asked Scilla.
‘Never heard of him,’ she said without looking up.
If Tudor had asked Bill to ride for him, as he had told me when I drove him from Plumpton to Brighton, it was perfectly natural for Bill to have his name and address. I turned the envelope over. It had come from a local tradesman, whose name was printed on the top left hand corner, and the postmark was date-stamped January, which meant that Bill had only recently acquired Tudor’s address.
I put the envelope in my pocket and went on sorting. After the old envelopes I started on the pigeon holes. There were old photographs and some pages the children had drawn and written on with straggly letters in their babyhood, address books, luggage labels, a birthday card, school reports, and various notebooks of different shapes and sizes.
‘You’d better look through these, Scilla,’ I said.
‘You look,’ she said, glancing up from her letters with a smile. ‘You can tell me what’s what, and I’ll look at them presently.’
Bill had had no secrets. The notebooks mainly contained his day-to-day expenses, jotted down to help his accountant at the annual reckoning. They went back some years. I found the latest, and leafed through it.
School fees, hay for the horses, a new garden hose, a repair to the Jaguar’s head-lamp in Bristol, a present for Scilla, a bet on Admiral, a donation to charity. And that was the end. After that came the blank pages which were not going to be filled up.
I looked again at the last entries. A bet on Admiral. Ten pounds to win, Bill had written. And the date was the day of his death. Whatever had been said to Bill about Admiral’s falling, he had taken it as a joke and had backed himself to win in spite of it. I would dearly have liked to know what the ‘joke’ had been. He had told Pete, whose mind was with the horses. He had not told Scilla, nor any of his friends as far as I could find out. Possibly he had thought it so unimportant that after
he spoke to Pete it had wholly slipped his mind.
I stacked up the notebooks and began on the last pigeon hole full of oddments. Among them were fifteen or twenty of the betting tickets issued by bookmakers at race meetings. As evidence of bets lost, they are usually torn up or thrown away by disappointed punters, not carefully preserved in a tidy desk.
‘Why did Bill keep these betting tickets?’ I asked Scilla.
‘Henry had a craze for them not long ago, don’t you remember?’ she said. ‘And after it wore off Bill still brought some home for him. I think he kept them in case William wanted to play bookmakers in his turn.’
I did remember. I had backed a lot of horses for halfpennies with Henry the bookmaker, the little shark. They never won.
The extra tickets Bill had saved for him were from several different bookmakers. It was part of Bill’s pleasure at the races to walk among the bookmakers’ stands in Tattersall’s and put his actual cash on at the best odds, instead of betting on credit with a bookmaker on the rails.
‘Do you want to keep them for William still?’ I asked.
‘May as well,’ said Scilla.
I put them back in the desk, and finished the job. It was late in the afternoon. We went into the drawing-room, stoked up the fire, and settled into armchairs.
She said, ‘Alan, I want to give you something which belonged to Bill. Now, don’t say anything until I’ve finished. I’ve been wondering what you’d like best, and I’m sure I’ve chosen right.’
She looked from me to the fire and held her hands out to warm them.
She said, ‘You are to have Admiral.’
‘No.’ I was definite.
‘Why not?’ She looked up, sounding disappointed.
‘Dearest Scilla, it’s far too much,’ I said. ‘I thought you meant something like a cigarette case, a keepsake. You can’t possibly give me Admiral. He’s worth thousands. You must sell him, or run him in your name if you want to keep him, but you can’t give him to me. It wouldn’t be fair to you or the children for me to have him.’
