Silks

by Dick Francis

  ‘Give me some damn room,’ I shouted at the jockey ahead, more in hope than expectation. Amazingly, he pulled slightly away from the rail and I sailed up on his inside.

  ‘Thanks,’ I called to him as I drew alongside him on his right. A fresh faced, big eyed young amateur grimaced back at me. That was the difference, I thought, between how I was when I started and how I was now. These days I would never give a rival room even if he shouted at me all day. Racing was all about winning and one didn’t win very often by being too courteous to the opposition. Not that I would purposefully baulk someone by cutting across them, although I had often been so treated by several of my colleagues. Some jockeys could be sweetness and light in the changing room both before and after the race, but vicious and ruthless in between. It was their job. Amateurs, in particular, should expect no favours from professionals.

  Two horses fell at the next fence, the one with the drop. Both animals pitched forward on landing, going down on their knees and sending their riders sprawling onto the grass. One of the jockeys was the young man who had given me room up his inside. Phew, I thought, that was close. Thank goodness he hadn’t fallen right in front of me. Being ‘brought down’ by tripping over another already prostrate horse was one of the worst ways of losing.

  The remaining seventeen of us were becoming well spread out as we turned into the back straight for the second and last time. Sandeman was still going well beneath me and I kicked on hard into the first of the seven fences. He positively flew across the birch and gained at least a length on the two still in front.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ I shouted at him.

  The tempo had now really quickened to a full-out gallop and I could hear some of those behind having problems keeping up.

  ‘Pick up your effing feet,’ shouted one jockey at his horse as it dropped its back legs into the water.

  ‘Tell your sodding horse to jump straight,’ shouted another as he was almost put through the wings of the first of the Railway fences.

  We swung into the final long sweeping turn with just four having a realistic chance. I was still on the inside next to the white plastic rail and so the others had to go further to get round me. Kick, push, kick, push, my hands and heels were working overtime as we straightened for the Pond fence. Sande-man was just in front and another great leap from him took the others briefly out of sight behind me.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ I shouted at him again, this time with diminished breath. ‘Come on.’

  We were tiring but so were the others. Three miles in bottomless going is a huge test of stamina. But who would tire the most? Me, I feared. My fatigued legs would no longer provide the necessary kicks to Sandeman’s belly and I could barely summon up the energy to give him a slap of encouragement with my whip.

  We still had our nose just in front as we took off at the second last but Sandeman hit the top of the fence and landed almost stationary on all four feet at once. Bugger. Two other horses came past us as if we were going backwards and I thought all was lost. But Sandeman had other ideas and set off in pursuit. By the last fence we were back alongside the others and the three of us jumped it line abreast.

  Even though the three horses landed over the last together, both the others made it to the winning post ahead of us, their jockeys riding determined finishes while I was so tired that hanging on was about as much as I could do. We finished third, which was more to do with my lack of stamina rather than Sandeman’s. I had clearly been spending too much of my time sitting on my backside in courtrooms and it showed. Three miles through the undulating Sandown mud had been just a bit too far. My pre-race apprehension hadn’t turned to joy, more to exhaustion.

  I slithered off Sandeman’s back in the unsaddling enclosure and nearly sat down on the grass, so jelly-like were my legs.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Paul, the trainer, asked concerned.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, trying to undo the girths. ‘Just a little out of puff.’

  ‘I need to get you up on the gallops too,’ he said. ‘No good having a fit horse if the damn jockey sits there like a sack of potatoes.’ It was a harsh assessment but probably fair. Paul had invested heavily on Sandeman to win in more ways than one. He gently brushed me aside, undid the buckle with ease and passed me the saddle.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. It was a good job I was paying the training fees.

  Somehow I made it to the scales to be weighed in, and then back into the jockeys’ changing room, where I sat down heavily on the bench and wondered if it was time to call it a day. Time to give up this race-riding malarkey before I did myself a proper injury. To date I had been very lucky, with only a few bumps and bruises plus one broken collarbone in fourteen years of racing. But, I thought, if I were to continue for another year I would have to become fitter than this or I might come to some serious harm. I leaned back wearily against the cream-painted wall and closed my eyes.

  Only when the valets began to pack up the equipment into their large wicker baskets did I realize that the last race had already been run and I was almost alone in the changing room, and still I was not changed.

  I stood up slowly and peeled off my lightweight riding strip, picked up my towel and went into the showers.

  Scot Barlow was half sitting, half lying on the tiled floor, leaning up against the wall with a stream of water falling from the shower head onto his legs. He had a small trickle of blood coming from his right nostril and his eyes were puffy and closed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked going over to him and touching his shoulder.

  His eyes opened a little and he looked up at me but with no warmth in his expression.

  ‘Sod off,’ he said.

  Charming, I thought. ‘Just trying to help,’ I said.

  ‘Bloody amateurs,’ he replied. ‘Take away our livelihoods, you do.’

  I ignored him and washed my hair.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ he shouted in full Scottish lilt. ‘I said people like you take away my livelihood. I should be paid to let the likes of you ride races.’

  I thought of trying to tell him that I had ridden in a race reserved only for amateurs and he wouldn’t have been allowed to ride in it anyway. But it would probably have been a waste of time and he clearly wasn’t in the mood for serious debate. I went on ignoring him and finished my shower, the warmth helping to return some strength to my aching muscles. Barlow continued to sit where he was. The bleeding from his nose had gradually stopped and the blood was washed away by the water.

  I went back into the main changing room, dressed and packed up my stuff. The professional jockeys all used the valets to look after their equipment. Each night their riding clothes were washed and dried, their riding boots polished and their saddles soaped ready for the next day’s racing. For me, who rode only about once a fortnight and often more infrequently than that, the services of a valet were unnecessary and counter-productive. I stuffed my dirty things in a bag ready to take home to the washer-drier in the corner of my kitchen.

  I was soon ready to go and there was still no sign of Scot Barlow. Everyone else had gone home so I went and again looked into the showers. He was still sitting there, in the same place as before.

  ‘Do you need any help?’ I asked. I assumed he must have had a fall during the afternoon and that his face was sore from using it on the ground as a brake.

  ‘Sod off,’ he said again. ‘I don’t need your help. You’re as bad as he is.’

  ‘Bad as who is?’ I asked.

  ‘Your bloody friend,’ he said.

  ‘What friend?’ I asked him.

  ‘Steve bloody Mitchell, of course,’ he said. ‘Who else do you think did this?’ He held a hand up to his face.

  ‘What?’ I said, astounded. ‘Steve Mitchell did this to you? But why?’

  ‘You’d better ask him that,’ he said. ‘And not the first time, either.’

  ‘You should tell someone,’ I said, but I could see that he couldn’t. Not with his reputation.

  ‘Don’t
be daft,’ he said. ‘Now you piss off home like a good little amateur. And keep your bloody mouth shut.’ He turned away from me and wiped a hand over his face.

  I wondered what I should do. Should I tell the few officials left in the weighing room that he was there so they didn’t lock him in? Should I go and fetch one of the ambulance staff? Or should I go and find a policeman to report an assault?

  In the end I did nothing, except collect my gear and go home.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ someone said loudly in the clerks’ room as I walked in on Monday morning.

  Such language in chambers was rare, and rarer still was such language from Sir James Horley QC, the Head of Chambers, and therefore nominally my boss. Sir James was standing in front of the clerks’ desks reading from a piece of paper.

  ‘What don’t you… believe?’ I asked him, deciding at the last moment not to repeat his profanity.

  ‘This,’ he said, waving the paper towards me.

  I walked over and took the paper. It was a printout of an e-mail. It was headed CASE COLLAPSES AGAINST JULIAN TRENT.

  Oh fuck indeed, I thought. I didn’t believe it either.

  ‘You defended him the first time round,’ Sir James said. It was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I remembered it all too well. ‘Open-and-shut case. Guilty as sin. How he got a retrial on appeal I’ll never know.’

  ‘That damn solicitor,’ said Sir James. ‘And now he’s got off completely.’ He took back the piece of paper and reread the short passage on it. ‘Case dismissed for lack of evidence, it says here.’

  More like for lack of witnesses prepared to give their evidence, I thought. They were afraid of getting beaten up.

  I had taken a special interest in the appeal against Julian Trent’s conviction in spite of no longer acting for the little thug. That damn solicitor, as Sir James had called him, was one of the Crown Prosecution team who had admitted cajoling members of the original trial jury to produce a guilty verdict. Three members of the jury had been to the police to report the incident, and all three had subsequently given evidence at the appeal hearing stating that they had been approached independently by the same solicitor. Why he’d done it, I couldn’t understand, as the evidence in the case had been overwhelming. But the Appeal Court judges had had little choice but to order a retrial.

  The episode had cost the solicitor his job, his reputation and, ultimately, his professional qualification to practise. There had been a minor scandal in the corridors of the Law Society. But at least the appeal judges had had the good sense to keep young Julian remanded in jail pending the new proceedings.

  Now, it seemed, he would be walking free, his conviction and lengthy prison sentence being mere distant memories.

  I recalled the last thing he had said to me in the cells under the Old Bailey courtroom last March. It was not a happy memory. It was customary for defence counsel to visit their client after the verdict, win or lose, but this had not been a normal visit.

  ‘I’ll get even with you, you spineless bastard,’ he’d shouted at me with venom as I had entered the cell.

  I presumed he thought that his conviction was my fault because I had refused to threaten the witnesses with violence as he had wanted me to do.

  ‘You’d better watch your back,’ he’d gone on menacingly. ‘One day soon I’ll creep up on you and you’ll never see it coming.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck now rose up and I instinctively turned round as if to find him right here in chambers. At the time of his conviction I had been exceedingly thankful to leave him in the custody of the prison officers and I deeply wished he still was. Over the years I had been threatened by some others of my less affable clients, but there was something about Julian Trent that frightened me badly, very badly indeed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Sir James was looking at me with his head slightly inclined.

  ‘Fine,’ I said with a slightly croaky voice. I cleared my throat. ‘Perfectly fine, thank you, Sir James.’

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

  Perhaps I had. Was it me? Would I be a ghost when Julian Trent came a-calling?

  I shook my head. ‘Just remembering the original trial,’ I said.

  ‘The whole thing is fishy if you ask me,’ he said in his rather pompous manner.

  ‘And is anyone asking you?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Sir James.

  ‘You seem well acquainted with the case, and the result is clearly important to you.’ Sir James had never sworn before in my hearing. ‘I didn’t realize that anyone from these chambers was acting.’

  ‘They aren’t,’ he said.

  Sir James Horley QC, as Head of Chambers, had his finger on all that was going on within these walls. He knew about every case in which barristers from ‘his’ chambers were acting, whether on the prosecution side or the defence. He had a reputation for it. But equally, he knew nothing, nor cared little, about cases where ‘his’ team were not involved. At least, that was the impression he usually wanted to give.

  ‘So why the interest in this case?’ I asked.

  ‘Do I need a reason?’ he asked, somewhat defensively.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t need a reason, but my question remains, why the interest?’

  ‘Don’t you cross-examine me,’ he retorted.

  Sir James had a bit of a reputation amongst the junior barristers for enjoying throwing his superior status around. The position of Head of Chambers was not quite what it might appear. It was mostly an honorary title often held by the most senior member, the QC of longest standing rather than necessarily the most eminent. All of the forty-five or so barristers in these chambers were self-employed. The main purpose of us coming together in chambers was to allow us to pool those services we all needed, the clerks, the offices, the library, meeting rooms and so on. Each of us remained responsible for acquiring our own work from our own clients, although the clerks were important in the allocation of a new client to someone with the appropriate expertise. But one thing our Head of Chambers certainly did not do was to share out the work amongst his juniors. Sir James had never been known to share anything if he could keep it all to himself.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said as a way of finishing the discussion on the matter. He would tell me if he wanted to, or not if that was his choice. My questioning would not sway the matter one way or another. Sir James was like the most unhelpful courtroom witness who has his own agenda about what evidence he will give and the direction of counsel’s questioning will make no difference. Perhaps it takes an obdurate man to break down another of similar character, which was why Sir James Horley was one of the greatest advocates in the land.

  ‘I was advising the judge in the case,’ he said. So he did want to tell me after all. He was now showing off, I thought ungraciously.

  ‘Oh,’ I said noncommittally. I, too, could play his little game. I turned away to collect some letters from the pigeonhole behind me marked MR G. MASON. It was one of an array of wooden boxes each about twelve inches square lining one wall of the clerks’ room. There were ten such spaces in each of six horizontal rows, open to the front, with each having a neatly printed label in a brass surround at the top showing the owner’s name. They were not, of course, arranged in alphabetical order, which would have made finding someone else’s box nice and easy; they were arranged in order of seniority, with Sir James’s pigeonhole at the top right nearest the door. Consequently, our clutch of QCs had their boxes at eye-level while the juniors were below, even if the ‘junior’ had been called to the Bar long before the most recent QC and was easily old enough to be his father. Those juniors most recently called and those doing pupillage had almost to prostrate themselves on the floor to see what had been deposited in the deeper recesses of their boxes. I assumed that the whole plan was aimed at ensuring that the juniors did not forget their place. No doubt, if and when I myse
lf made it to the lofty heights of being a QC, I would think that the system was ideal. Becoming a Queen’s Counsel implied real status and was meant to be reserved for only the very best of the profession. Every barrister wanted to be a QC, but only ten per cent or so actually made it.

  ‘The case hung on the question of intimidation,’ Sir James said to my back, continuing our conversation.

  It didn’t surprise me. Julian Trent had intimidated me. I lifted a pile of papers from my box and turned back.

  ‘The judge in the case and I were at law school together,’ he went on. ‘Known each other for forty years.’ He gazed up as if remembering his lost youth. ‘Anyway,’ he said, looking back down at me, ‘the problem with the new trial was that the prosecution witnesses now either refused to give evidence at all or said something completely opposite to what they had said before. It was clear that they had been intimidated.’

  Intimidation in the legal system was rife and a major obstacle to criminal justice. We all had to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

  I stood patiently and waited through a silence as Sir James appeared to decide if he would continue or not. Having decided in the affirmative, he went on. ‘So the judge wanted some advice as to whether the initial statements from witnesses taken by the police at the time of the incident could be read out in court as evidence without the prosecution calling the individuals concerned.’

  I knew that Sir James had been a recorder for many years and that meant he sat as a Crown Court judge for up to thirty days per year. It was the first step to becoming a full-time judge and most senior practising QCs were or had been recorders. It was not uncommon for sitting judges to seek advice from them, and vice versa.

  ‘And what advice did you give him?’ I asked him.

  ‘Her, actually,’ he said. ‘Dorothy McGee. I advised her that such evidence could be admissible provided the witness was called, even if the witness was now declared as being hostile to the Crown’s case. However, it seemed that all the witnesses in the case had changed their tune, including the victim of the beating and his family, who now claimed that the event didn’t happen in the first place and that the injuries were due to him falling down some stairs. Do they really think we are stupid or something?’ He was getting quite cross. ‘I advised her to press on with the case. I told her that it is essential to justice that such intimidation cannot be seen to succeed and I was sure the jury would agree and convict.’