by Dick Francis
‘Can’t you act without that silly old buffer?’ he said.
‘He is a very experienced Queen’s Counsel,’ I replied.
‘I don’t care if he’s the Queen herself in drag,’ he said, ‘I would much rather have you defending me in court.’
‘Steve,’ I said seriously. ‘I’m not altogether sure it would make much difference who defended you in court at the moment.’ I paused while my underlying meaning sank in.
‘I didn’t do it,’ he said finally. ‘I tell you. I didn’t bloody do it. Why will no one believe me?’
‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘But we need something to make the jury believe you, and there’s nothing. The evidence is quite compelling. There’s the blood in your car and on your boots, and the fact that the pitchfork was also yours doesn’t help. And everyone knows you hated Barlow. Those betting receipts and your lack of any sort of alibi are going to hold considerable sway with the jury.’
‘There must be something you can do,’ he said rather forlornly.
‘I haven’t given up hope yet,’ I said, trying to sound more optimistic than I felt. ‘The evidence is either circumstantial or can be explained away. When the prosecution finish presenting their case, I will make a submission to the judge that you have no case to answer. But I think it’s unlikely that he or she will agree and, with nothing new turning up, I fear that things may not go well.’
‘So what’s the down side?’ he said.
‘In what way?’ I said.
‘How long if I get convicted?’
‘How long a sentence?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, irritated. ‘How long until I get an appeal? Until something comes up to show I didn’t do it.’
‘There’s no guarantee you would get an appeal,’ I said. ‘It would have to be either because there is a question of law, say a ruling or the summing up by the trial judge was considered questionable or biased, or if new evidence has appeared in the case. Either way it would be quite some time. Appeals against short sentences are heard more quickly than those for longer ones. It’s not much good waiting two years for an appeal against a three-year sentence, you’d already be out. But life…’
‘Life?’ Steve said loudly, interrupting me.
‘Murder carries a life sentence,’ I said. ‘Mandatory. But life doesn’t actually mean life in most cases.’
‘Oh God,’ he said resting his forehead on his hand. ‘I’ll go bloody mad if I have to stay in here much longer.’
The private hire silver Mercedes was waiting for me outside the prison and it pulled up to the main gate when I appeared. Bob, the driver, stepped out to hold the door for me as I clambered awkwardly into the back seat. Then he carefully placed the crutches in the boot. I could get quite used to this, I thought.
‘Back to London, sir?’ Bob asked.
‘Not yet,’ I said, and I gave him directions to our next stop.
Sandeman was eating from his manger when I went in to see him. He looked casually in my direction, blew hard down his nostrils and then went back to concentrating on his oats. I hobbled over to him and slapped him down his neck with the palm of my hand while feeding him an apple from my pocket.
‘Hello, old boy,’ I said to him as I fondled his ears and rubbed his neck. He put his head down against me and pushed me playfully.
‘Whoa,’ I said amused. ‘Careful, my old boy, I’m not yet able to play.’ I slapped him again a couple of times and left him in peace.
‘He’s doing well,’ said Paul Newington at the door, from where he’d watched the exchange. ‘We’ve started walking him around the village every morning, and he has even trotted a bit round the paddock on a lunge. Still too early to put any weight on that back, of course, but he doesn’t seem to be in any pain.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘He looks well.’
‘Plenty of time for Kit to brush his coat.’ Kit was the stable lad that ‘did’ for Sandeman.
‘Will he ever be able to race again?’ I asked Paul. I had asked him that several times before on the telephone and he’d always been rather noncommittal in his answer.
‘I suspect he could,’ he said. ‘But he’s thirteen now and he would quite likely not be fit enough to run before he becomes fourteen.’ All horses in the northern hemisphere became a year older on 1 January, irrespective of the actual day on which they were born. In the south the date was, for some reason I had never worked out, not 1 July as one would expect, but a month later on 1 August.
‘Are you saying he’d be too old?’ I asked.
‘Racehorses can race at that age,’ he said. ‘I looked it up on the internet. The oldest ever winner was eighteen, but that was over two hundred years ago.’
We stood there leaning on the lower half of the stable door, looking at my dear old horse.
‘I’m not saying he couldn’t get back to fitness,’ Paul went on. ‘I’m just not sure it would be cost effective, or even if it’s fair on the old boy.’
‘You think it’s time to retire him?’ I was miserable. Retiring Sandeman from the racecourse would be tantamount to retiring myself from race riding. I knew that I was too old to start again with a new horse.
‘I do,’ he said bluntly. ‘And I do realize that it would quite likely mean that you wouldn’t have a horse with me again.’
‘But what would we do with him?’ I asked forlornly.
‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, ‘but I am in need of a new hack. And that’s not, I promise, the reason I think you should retire Sandeman.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But what about old Debenture?’
Debenture had been Paul’s hack for almost as long as I could remember and Paul rode him up to the gallops every morning to watch his horses work.
‘He’s too old now,’ said Paul. ‘It’s time to put him out to grass. Every time I’ve got on him recently I’ve feared he’s about to collapse under me.’
‘So you’d replace him with Sandeman?’ I asked.
‘I would like to, if Sandeman recovers sufficiently,’ he said. ‘And I think he probably will, if his progress so far is anything to go by.’
‘Well, I suppose that would be fine by me,’ I said. ‘But can he go on living in this stable?’
‘Geoffrey, you are far too sentimental,’ he said, laughing. ‘No way. He’ll have to live in the dog kennel.’ He laughed loudly, mostly at my expense. ‘Of course he can stay here and Kit will continue to look after him.’
‘Can I still ride him?’ I asked.
‘Geoffrey,’ he said laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘You don’t want to ride him as a hack. I would simply walk him through the village at the head of the string and then I’d sit on him as I watched the other horses, before he walked back here. If you really want to ride out, you can ride one of the others.’
‘Do you mean that?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘And I won’t even make you pay training fees for the privilege. Come any time you like, as long as you stay reasonably fit, and light. I won’t let you if you go over twelve stone.’
‘I have absolutely no intention of doing that,’ I said.
‘That’s what all those fat ex-jockeys said.’ He laughed.
Sandeman finished his lunch and came over to the stable door for another apple from my pocket. I rubbed his ears and massaged his neck. If only he could talk, I thought yet again, he could tell me what he wanted.
‘Well, old boy,’ I said to him. ‘Seems like you and I have run our last race. Welcome to old age.’
‘We’ll look after him,’ said Paul, stroking Sandeman’s nose.
I didn’t doubt it, but somehow this felt like a defining moment in my life. Gone, abruptly and unexpectedly, were the days of excitement and adrenalin that I had coveted for so long. My racing days had been what I had lived for. When one was past, I spent my time working but with half an eye on the calendar to show me when I was next due to weigh out and hear the familiar call for ‘jockeys’. B
ut suddenly, this minute, I was no longer an injured jockey on the road to recovery and my next ride. I had become, here and now, an ex-jockey, and I was very aware of having lost something. There was an emptiness in me as if a part of my soul had been surgically excised.
‘Are you OK?’ said Paul, as if he, too, was aware of the significance of the moment.
‘Fine,’ I said to him with a smile. But I wasn’t really fine. Inside I was hurting.
‘You’ll just have to get a new hobby,’ Paul said.
But riding races had never felt like a hobby to me. It had been what I had lived for, especially these past seven years. It really was time to get a new life, and now I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
I stayed for a leisurely lunch with Paul and Laura and then Bob drove me further west to Uffington and the Radcliffe Foaling Centre. I had called ahead and spoken to the manager, Larry Clayton, who seemed bored with his job and quite keen to show a visitor around the place.
The tyres of the Mercedes crunched over the gravel as we drove slowly up the driveway and pulled up in front of a new looking red-brick single-storey building to the side of the main house. ‘Visitors Report Here’ ordered a smartly painted notice stuck into the grass verge. So I did.
‘It’s very quiet at this time of the year,’ said Larry Clayton as we sat in his office. ‘Most of the mares and foals are gone by now.’
‘Where to?’ I asked.
‘Back to their owners for the summer, most of them,’ he said. ‘Some have gone to Ireland. A few of the mares have gone back into training. I don’t really know.’ And it sounded like he didn’t really care.
‘So when’s your busy time?’ I asked.
‘January to April,’ he said. ‘That’s when most of them are born. Absolutely crazy here in February and March. Foals dropping every five minutes.’
‘How many?’ I asked.
‘Too many,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘About a hundred, and they want to double that next year.’
‘Is that more than in the past?’ I said.
‘Dunno,’ he said putting his feet up on his desk. ‘My first year here. But I think it must be. The Radcliffes built more foaling boxes last summer, and these offices. I think it was pretty small fry before then.’
I looked at his feet on the desk. He was wearing badly scuffed cowboy boots under tight blue jeans with a check-pattern open-necked shirt. I wondered if the Radcliffes knew that their manager was so casual with their guests. I had picked up some of their marketing material stacked upright in a rack in the reception area on my way in. It was a well produced large glossy brochure with plenty of impressive facts and figures about the equine care provided for the expectant mothers, and a smiling picture on the front of Roger and Deborah Radcliffe standing together next to some mares and foals in a paddock.
‘Are they at home?’ I asked Larry, indicating the picture. ‘I didn’t get an answer on their home phone when I called them yesterday.’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘They are in Kentucky for the sales and the Derby. Not back until next week.’
‘Can I have a look round?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ he said, lifting both his feet together off the desk. ‘Not much to see.’
We walked around the new complex of foaling boxes and other stalls, each angle covered by a closed-circuit television camera.
‘How many staff do you have?’ I asked.
‘About a dozen in the high season but only a couple now,’ he said. ‘We have an onsite delivery team who are on constant standby when we’re foaling. But they’ve gone now. We only have a few horses here at the moment and they mostly belong to the Radcliffes. Two of them are mares that dropped in early March and their foals will be fully weaned by the end of July, ready for the sales.’
We walked past the rows of deserted stables and looked into the new foaling boxes. They had hard concrete floors devoid of the soft cushion of straw that would be laid down for the arrival of a new foal, possibly a new superstar like Peninsula.
‘Where was Peninsula foaled?’ I asked.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Here somewhere. But lots has changed.’
‘Do you know if the stud groom still works here?’ I asked. ‘The one who helped with Peninsula.’
‘No idea,’ he said again. ‘Do you know who it was? Stud grooms come and go round here like wet Sundays.’
‘Have you ever heard of anyone called Julian Trent?’ I asked him.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Should I?’
I decided that it really hadn’t been a very helpful excursion. In fact, the whole day had been rather disappointing so far from start to finish. I could only hope that it would get better.
Bob dropped me back at Ranelagh Avenue around quarter to eight and, in spite of the bright spring evening light, I asked him to wait while I made it up the steps to the front door and then safely inside it.
But he had driven away before I realized that there was something very wrong. I was about half-way up the stairs when I first heard the sound of running water where there shouldn’t have been.
It was running through the light fitting in the ceiling of my sitting room onto the floor below. It wasn’t just a trickle, more of a torrent. And that wasn’t the only problem. My home had been well and truly trashed.
I made my way as quickly as possible up to the top floor to turn off the water only to discover that doing so was not going to be that easy. The washbasin in the second bathroom had been torn completely away from its fittings and the water was jetting out of a hole in the wall left by a broken pipe. The stream was adding to the inch depth that already existed on the bathroom floor and which was spreading across the landing and down the top few steps like a waterfall.
Where, I wondered, was the stop cock?
I carefully descended the wet stairs again and used the telephone to call my downstairs neighbours to ask for help. There was no answer. There wouldn’t be. It was Wednesday and they were always out late on Wednesdays, organizing a badminton evening class at the school where they both taught. I had become quite acquainted with their routine since I had needed to call on their assistance over the past six weeks. They would have stayed on at the school after lessons and would usually be back by nine, unless they stopped for some dinner on the way home, in which case it would be ten or even half past. By then, I thought, their lower floor, set as it was below ground level, might be more akin to an indoor swimming pool than a kitchen.
I sat on the torn arm of my sofa and looked about me. Everything that could have been broken had been. My brand-new expensive large flat-screen plasma television would show no pictures ever again. Angela’s collection of Royal Worcester figurines was no more, and the kitchen floor was littered deep with broken crockery and glass.
I looked at the phone in my hand. At least that was working, so I used it to dial 999 and I asked the emergency operator for the police.
They promised to try and send someone as soon as possible but it didn’t sound to me like it was an urgent case in their eyes. No one was hurt or imminently dying, they said, so I would have to wait. So I thumbed through a sopping copy of Yellow Pages to find an emergency plumbing service and promised them a big bonus to get here as soon as humanly possible. I was still speaking to them when the ceiling around the light fitting, which had been bulging alarmingly, decided to give up the struggle and collapsed with a crash. A huge mass of water suddenly fell into the centre of my sitting room and spread out towards my open-plan kitchen area like a mini tidal wave. I lifted my feet as it passed me by. The plumbing company promised that someone was already on the way.
I hobbled around my house inspecting the damage. There was almost nothing left that was usable. Everything had been broken or sliced through with what must have been a box cutter or a Stanley knife. My leather sofa would surely be unrepairable with so many cuts through the hide, all of which showed white from the stuffing beneath. A mirror that had hung this morning on my sitting-room wall now lay smashed amongst
the remains of a glass-and-brass coffee table, and an original oil painting of a coastal landscape by a successful artist friend was impaled over the back of a dining chair.
Upstairs in my bedroom the mattress had also received the box-cutter treatment and so had most of the clothes hanging in my wardrobe. This had been a prolonged and determined assault on my belongings of which almost nothing had survived. Worst of all was that the perpetrator, and I had little doubt as to who was responsible, had smashed the glass and twisted to destruction the silver frame that had stood on the dressing table, and had then torn the photograph of Angela into dozens of tiny pieces.
I stood there looking at these confetti remains and felt not grief for my dead wife, but raging anger that her image had been so violated.
The telephone rang. How was it, I wondered, that he hadn’t broken that too?
I found out. ‘I told you that you’d regret it,’ Julian Trent said down the wire, his voice full of menace.
‘Fuck off, you little creep,’ I said and I slammed down the receiver.
The phone rang again almost immediately and I snatched it up.
‘I said to fuck off,’ I shouted into the mouthpiece.
There was a pause. ‘Geoffrey, is that you?’ Eleanor sounded hesitant.
‘Oh God. I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘I should hope so,’ she said with slight admonishment. ‘I called because I have some good news for you.’
I could do with some.
‘I’ve found a copy of the photo of Millie with the foal.’
CHAPTER 13
It took the emergency plumbers forty-five minutes to arrive at Ranelagh Avenue, by which time not only had the ceiling in my sitting room collapsed but also two ceilings below. I know because I heard about it at full volume from my neighbours when they arrived home at five past nine. It was a shame, I thought, that they had decided not to eat out. They wouldn’t be able to produce much of a dinner in the flood. Only when they came upstairs and saw the state of my place did they understand that it hadn’t been a simple thing like leaving a tap running or overflowing a bath.
