The Horse With My Name

by Bateman

  ‘That’s okay. I understand.’ I was still holding her hand. I gave it another little squeeze and added, ‘There will be food, won’t there?’

  She fixed me with a look as steady and unnerving as any I have ever experienced. Her voice, when it came, had shed any pretence of gentility; it was dragged all the way back from the darkest ghetto in West Belfast. ‘Corky told me you were a smart cunt. Just don’t try it with me, okay? I’ve enough shite to put up with.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, meekly.

  Just as abruptly, she softened again. ‘There will be buns,’ she said, ‘but they’re for the kids, okay?’

  She’d said it was a house, but it was more like a mansion. Anything that has wings but doesn’t fly qualifies as a mansion in my book. (Or, indeed, as a chicken.) There was a long driveway, tended lawns, a tennis court, an outdoor swimming pool, a garage bigger than most houses, ivy, sprinklers, white doves and a pair of spaniels. Out back, there were stables. There were mourners of course – some of the journos, but not many, the rest seemed to be relatives of hers, and when I spoke to them they knew little or nothing about Mark Corkery.

  I went through the books in the library, largely antiquarian, and scoffed buns. There weren’t that many kids to eat them and it would have been a shame to let them go to waste. They were little sponge efforts with soft white icing on top like my mother used to make. Patricia had fancied herself a dab hand in the kitchen, but her butterfly buns reminded me more of moths. Still, I was prepared to put up with them if she came back to me.

  By mid afternoon I still hadn’t set eyes on the girlfriend, even though the stragglers were leaving. It crossed my mind that I might have the wrong house, but eventually she struggled through a door carrying a tray of dishes and stopped when she saw that I was looking through her kitchen cupboards.

  ‘Can I help you with something?’

  I closed them quickly. ‘Just looking.’

  ‘Do you always make yourself this much at home?’

  ‘Just with friends.’ She smiled and let me take the tray off her. I said, ‘I’ll wash, you dry,’ but she waved me away, said there was a woman who came in. She left the dishes by the sink then led me back through into the main lounge. I was pleased to see that the last of the mourners had departed. There were things I needed to know, but as we stood at the window and watched the last car descend the driveway, I couldn’t think of one of them. She spotted a half-drunk glass of whiskey by the window and lifted it. She sniffed it, took a sip, then nodded down towards the gates. ‘Well thank Christ they’re gone. Never heard so much nonsense.’

  I scouted along the windowsill for a glass for myself and managed to find one. I turned the scarlet lipstick marks on it away from me as I drank. I made a mental note that this wasn’t for pleasure. It was research. It was work. It was almost certainly one hundred per cent Polish vodka. ‘What do you mean . . .?’ I began.

  ‘Oh . . .’ She waved her hands again, although she was careful not to spill a drop. ‘Hardly a one of them knew him really, those that did thought he was a low-life. Y’know, a gambler, as a breed they get rather bad PR. But I tell you, he was one of the finest I ever knew, and I knew most of them, believe you me. Do you gamble, Mr Starkey . . .?’

  ‘It’s more of a steady stroll.’

  She gave me a resigned kind of a smile, but passed no comment. ‘I’ve been gambling all of my life. As you must suspect, I was not actually born to all of this . . .’ She raised her glass to our surroundings. ‘The Falls Road, outside toilet and a change of floorboards every few months when the Brits used to tear the place apart looking for arms.’

  ‘Arms, legs . . . did they ever find any?’

  ‘No, of course not. My dad had no time for any of that cak. He was a greyhound man, least he was at the start. Didn’t keep them. Just liked a wee flutter. Used to be I’d go with him most nights: Dunmore on a Saturday, Celtic Park on a Monday . . . of course they’re gone now, thank God, used to freeze your balls off standing there . . .’ She smiled sadly. ‘Used to be great. Y’know, me only ten or eleven but m’dad and I discussing the form together, him taking me seriously . . . that was a great feeling. So good.’

  ‘Your mum?’

  ‘Dead. Heart attack. Only twenty-eight when . . . Anyway, me and Dad, we moved on to horses then. Never betting much, never losing much, never winning much, just enough to keep us going. I remember it was such fun. Most people would be happy just going down to the bookies, studying the form in the paper, putting their dole on, but not us, no; we had to be there, see them in the flesh, make our call then. So off we’d go in our beat-up wee Anglia, down to Fairyhouse or Leopardstown, or across on the ferry to Cheltenham, Aintree, y’know, the big ones, hundreds of little ones as well. We’d bunk up at some B and B, get up early in the morning, watch them gallop . . .’ She trailed off. ‘Sorry. This Is Your Life.’

  ‘No. It’s okay. Go on. I still don’t know how you got from that . . . to this.’

  ‘Luck. Love. I was getting on for sixteen and I fell for a jockey. Local lad we used to meet on the ferry going over . . . You remember Vincent McPeake?’

  ‘I don’t remember a jockey called––’

  ‘Well he never really set the world on fire in the saddle. But out of it: now my Vincie was a man who could work magic with horses. He studied it hard, mind, and those early years there wasn’t much money about, but he studied at the horseshoes of the masters and when the right time came he went for it: he got some financial backing, he got a licence out of Lambourn and off we went. Ten years we were, building up our stable. We’d one hundred horses at the height of it – eighty of them two-year-olds, would you believe that?’

  ‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t mean any––’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It was just so great. I still remember our first winner. Bought Vain Glorious as a yearling. She won seven hundred and fifty pounds at some obscure race in Scotland, but we were off. The final year, oh the final year – our horses won seventy-five races on the flat, home and abroad. And then came Royal Tapestry.’

  ‘I think I remember some––’

  ‘Now that was a filly and a half . . .’ She stopped, staring into nothingness or the garden. Then she slowly raised her free hand and pressed the tips of her fingers against the window. Her knuckles and joints began to redden with the pressure. For a moment I feared that the glass would give way, but she abruptly dropped her hand and focused her attention on the moist prints she had left behind. When she spoke, her voice had hardened again. ‘Royal Tapestry. We Republicans should have known better than to trust anything with Royal in its name . . . She was a beauty, and she ran like the bloody wind. We’d been successful before, but she was to be our first real crack at one of the classics . . .’

  ‘The . . .?’

  She let out a little sigh. ‘Oh . . . Mister Starkey . . . what I have planned for you, and you just don’t know anything, do you?’

  ‘I . . . Plan? . . . Well no, not much.’

  ‘There are five classic flat races – the Two Thousand Guineas, the One Thousand, the Oaks, the Derby and the St Leger. We’d Royal in mind for the Derby and there were a lot of people reckoned she had what it took. Except one day, out for a gallop, she just had a buck and a kick along the way and she managed to shatter her shoulder. And that did for her. Believe me, they just don’t break that bone. We had to put her down.’

  ‘Sad. But surely one horse––’

  ‘Ah but there’s more. There was an inquiry. There was such a buzz about her for the Derby that they had to know what had happened, and what do you know but they found dope in her. Don’t ask me how. Vincie would never have dreamed of stooping to doping. I know that from the bottom of my heart. And doping that horse! It would only have messed her up, she was that perfect. Yet in its grand wisdom the Jockey Club dragged Vincie in and took his licence off him. Took his life off him. He appealed of course, but they’re such a tight little Mafia that Vincie knew they weren’t going to give it back to hi
m. He’d become too successful too quickly. They were jealous. They wanted to . . . Oh fuck.’ There was a tear in the corner of her eye. I offered her a napkin sitting becrumbed on the sill where she’d lifted her drink. ‘With no licence, no income, things were hard, but Vincie was convinced our appeal would work. The night before we were due to go up for it he went out to check on what horses we had left. When he didn’t come back after a while I went out to see what was keeping him. Found him hanging from a rafter.’ She took a deep breath. She fixed moist blue eyes on me. ‘It all just got too much for him. Affected his head. I mean, you have to be off your trolley to hang yourself before the verdict, don’t you?’

  I shrugged. It wasn’t the place to say Unless you know you’re guilty. ‘How did . . .?’

  ‘How did it go? Well of course they gave him his licence back. And it wasn’t ironic if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just twisting the knife a little further. Believe you me, if he’d turned up, they would have burned that flaming licence in front of him. They had it in for Vincie, no two ways about it.’

  We sat silently for several minutes. On first hearing, I found it difficult to believe that there could have been such a vendetta against her husband. The Jockey Club was, as far as I could determine, a highly regarded and much-revered body. Why stoop to . . . Well, it didn’t matter. I was here to pay my respects and find out what had happened, not to take on the great British racing establishment. I noticed a half-bottle of whiskey sitting on a table on the other side of the room. I nipped across and retrieved it. I poured her another glass, then a smaller one for myself. I was pacing myself, like a thoroughbred.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said.

  ‘Cheers.’ We clinked glasses.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you applied for a licence, took over the training, reared a stable of winners and retired to this mansion on the profits.’

  ‘What?’ She laughed. ‘I don’t think so. We were bankrupt – I was bankrupt. I was closed down almost before he was the full six foot under. The bailiffs came in, I was lucky to get out with the shirt on my back.’

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘I came home on the ferry, same ferry my dad and I used to get, same ferry me and Vincent met on. Except there was I coming home without a penny in my pocket, husband dead, father dying, back on to a little terrace on the Falls like none of it had ever happened, except the neighbours gave me a hard time for having picked up an English accent along the way. Though I soon lost it again, as you can tell.’

  ‘I . . . yes . . . but I don’t understand . . . There must have been some colossal pay-out on the insurance . . .’

  ‘They don’t pay out on suicides. There was nothing.’

  My hands were in the air, waving vaguely about, but meaning the room, the wings, the stables, the tennis courts. ‘But all this . . . how on earth did you manage to . . .?’

  She laughed suddenly. ‘This . . . ! This isn’t mine . . . it’s Corkey’s.’

  ‘Corkey’s!’

  ‘I told you he was one of the finest gamblers I ever met. He won it on a horse.’

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  ‘Exactly. And the house used to belong to a guy called Geordie McClean.’

  5

  She led me up the stairs and into a bedroom.

  Well, I say bedroom on the understanding that most rooms that are upstairs in a house are generally referred to as bedrooms no matter what activity takes place within. This one was large. The curtains were closed. There was no bed. There were several television sets, all of them switched on and all of them showing different channels of racing. There were three computers set up. From each came a steady bleep . . . bleep . . . bleep of messages arriving via e-mail. Across the room there were two fax machines, both of them in the midst of reveiving data. She sat down in one of two large leather executive chairs and swivelled round to face the computers. Then she tapped the arm of the other one and I joined her. She glanced across.

  ‘That’s where Corkery used to sit.’

  ‘Ah.’ I shifted a little. ‘This . . . all this, it’s like NASA.’

  ‘Well, not quite. The nerve centre. Where all the whispers converge. Wouldn’t Geordie McClean just love to see this?’ She gave a sweet little laugh. ‘I take it you’re like Corkery then, most of youse are. Journalists, I mean. Can ferret wonderful stories out of people, but new technology scares the shite out of you.’

  ‘You might say that.’

  ‘Mark, God rest his soul, was a people person. He acted on the tip-offs, he chased the leads, he was the man on the ground. I handled this end of it.’ She patted the side of the computer sitting on the desk before her. ‘We track practically every race meeting in the world, all of the bloodstock sales, we have an inside track on every stable, every trainer, every jockey . . . Look . . .’ She pushed her wheeled chair across the floor to the fax machines and ripped a sheet off the first. I followed. ‘Let’s see what we have . . . Here’s a jockey, Davey Scott . . . failed a random drugs test at Uttoxeter in 1997, Jockey Club took his licence away, soon afterwards he announced he was going back to the building trade . . . and this is a fax from an insider at the Victoria Racing Club in Australia reckons the young fella applying for a licence there under the name of Rodney Carstairs might be one and the same as our man . . . Could be, we’ll make some enquiries, or we’ll just post it on our page . . .’

  ‘What if you’re wrong?’

  ‘It’s all in how you phrase it. The Horse Whisperer merely remarks on the astonishing similarity between two jockeys, nothing libellous about that.’ She moved to the next machine and tore off another page. ‘Okay. Here we go. How much do you reckon a hundredth of a second would be worth at one of the top two-year-old sales in the States, eh?’

  ‘Worth? I . . .’

  ‘Could be as much as two hundred thousand dollars. See, we’ve been following this lovely wee chestnut for a while, he was clocked in at 21.61 seconds over a quarter of a mile during the pre-sale breezes. He goes up for sale in Pomona in California, tomorrow, could make his owners two million off a hundred grand investment. Except this guy . . .’ and she waved the fax, ’reckons he has video evidence of an electrical device being used to speed her up, caught it on tape falling from the jockey’s hand after he’d pulled her up. Of course when he went to check it was gone . . . still, we might put that out on the Whisperer and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a million wiped off her price by tomorrow. Now do you see why a lot of the bad guys out there don’t like us?’

  ‘I don’t even like you, and I don’t know a thoroughbred from a donkey.’

  She smiled widely. ‘Of course you like us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘I know. I keep saying that. It’s hard to . . . Okay. Me.’

  I couldn’t quite picture the two of them in bed, but I could certainly see them working together on the Horse Whisperer.

  ‘I like to think we’ve done a lot of good, Dan. Occasionally we get it wrong, but ninety per cent of the time I reckon we’re right on the nose. And if we can make racing – hell, the world – a better place, sure isn’t it worth it?’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  ‘Good, I’m glad you feel that way, Dan. Because I want you to become the Horse Whisperer.’

  We went back downstairs. A troop of cleaners had arrived and were setting about cleaning up the mess. As we passed through the house two of them were trying to evict a mourner who’d locked himself in one of the toilets and was refusing to come out. One was calling through the door, ‘Now, Jimmy, just turn the key,’ but Jimmy was intent on completing what sounded like a rendition of ‘The Star of County Down’. I wasn’t sure because he was banging his foot against the door and pulling on the chain in time to his wailing. At the sound of our footsteps on the tiled hallway the cleaners turned and looked helplessly towards us. My host wasn’t the least bit fazed by it. ‘Just leave him,’ she said.

  ‘But Missus, there’s a powerful smell of boke . . .’

  ‘Then le
t him stew in it, then give him a mop the instant he comes out.’

  We walked back through the kitchen and out into the cobbled yard behind. The two spaniels I’d spotted earlier basked in the late afternoon sun. She led me across to the stables. She introduced me to half a dozen horses. Brown ones. I patted them and made there’s a good fella sounds.

  ‘Have you ever even been on a horse, Dan?’

  ‘Only in my dreams. When I was about eight. Cowboy stuff. But my wife rides all the time.’

  ‘Really? What stable?’

  ‘Oh, she’s not faithful to any particular one.’ I patted a nose, and decided to get off the subject. She’d moved on to first name terms somewhere between NASA and the stables, while I was thus far too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even know her surname. ‘Tell me about Corkery and Geordie McClean,’ I said. ‘I’m not really following what . . . I mean, Geordie was trying to shut down the Horse Whisperer thing, but he didn’t know that it was Mark who was running it . . .’

  ‘And me . . .’

  ‘Sorry. Of course . . .’

  ‘Yes he was. And if he wasn’t getting anywhere with the law, then why not without it?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Dan. Look, if we discount the freak accident theory, then Mark was killed because someone found out he was involved in the Horse Whisperer, and the one who’s been our sworn enemy these last few months has been Geordie McClean. If you add in that McClean also had a grudge against him because he won this house off him in a bet, then everything points to him being involved.’

  I patted some more horse. ‘I know. But I also know Geordie. He’s slippery, but I wouldn’t say that he’d be up to murder.’

  ‘Nobody’s a murderer until they commit the deed. And I’m quite sure he didn’t drop the car himself. He might have sent someone, he might just have given a hint and somebody did it for him. He mightn’t even have meant for him to die. But he was involved. I know he was involved. Every bit of my body screams that he was involved. Either it was because of the house, or the Horse Whisperer, or both, but he’s the man.’