by Dick Francis
Money. That was another thing. As from yesterday I had no income. The Welfare State didn’t pay unemployment benefits to the self-employed, as all jockeys remembered every snow-bound winter.
‘I’m going to find out,’ I said abruptly.
‘Find out what?’
‘Who framed us.’
‘Up the Marines,’ Tony said unsteadily. ‘Over the top, boys, Up and at ’em.’ He picked up the empty bottle and looked at it regretfully. ‘Time for bed, I guess. If you need any help with the campaign, count on my Welsh blood to the last clot.’
He made an unswerving line to the door, turned, and gave me a grimace of friendship worth having.
‘Don’t fall down the stairs,’ I said.
PART TWO
MARCH
CHAPTER FOUR
Roberta Cranfield looked magnificent in my sitting-room. I came back from buying whisky in the village and found her gracefully draped all over my restored Chippendale. The green velvet supported a lot of leg and a deep purple size ten wool dress, and her thick long hair the colour of dead beech leaves clashed dramatically with the curtains. Under the hair she had white skin, incredible eyebrows, amber eyes, photogenic cheekbones and a petulant mouth.
She was nineteen, and I didn’t like her.
‘Good morning.’ I said.
‘Your door was open.’
‘It’s a habit I’ll have to break.’
I peeled the tissue wrapping off the bottle and put it with the two chunky glasses on the small silver tray I had once won in a race sponsored by some sweet manufacturers. Troy weight, twenty-four ounces: but ruined by the inscription, K. HUGHES, WINNING JOCKEY, STARCHOCS SILVER STEEPLECHASE. Starchocs indeed. And I never ate chocolates. Couldn’t afford to, from the weight point of view.
She flapped her hand from a relaxed wrist, indicating the room.
‘This is all pretty lush.’
I wondered what she had come for. I said, ‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘Coffee and cannabis.’
‘You’ll have to go somewhere else.’
‘You’re very prickly.’
‘As a cactus,’ I agreed.
She gave me a half minute unblinking stare with her liquid eyes. Then she said, ‘I only said cannabis to jolt you.’
‘I’m not jolted.’
‘No. I can see that. Waste of effort.’
‘Coffee, then?’
‘Yes.’
I went into the kitchen and fixed up the percolator. The kitchen was white and brown and copper and yellow. The colours pleased me. Colours gave me the sort of mental food I imagined others got from music. I disliked too much music, loathed the type of stuff you couldn’t escape in restaurants and airliners, didn’t own a record player, and much preferred silence.
She followed me in from the sitting-room and looked around her with mild surprise.
‘Do all jockeys live like this?’
‘Naturally.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
She peered into the pine fronted cupboard I’d taken the coffee from.
‘Do you cook for yourself?’
‘Mostly.’
‘Recherché things like shashlik?’ An undercurrent of mockery.
‘Steaks.’
I poured the bubbling coffee into two mugs and offered her cream and sugar. She took the cream, generously, but not the sugar, and perched on a yellow topped stool. Her copper hair fitted the kitchen, too.
‘You seem to be taking it all right,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Being warned off.’
I didn’t answer.
‘A cactus,’ she said, ‘Isn’t in the same class.’
She drank the coffee slowly, in separate mouthfuls, watching me thoughtfully over the mug’s rim. I watched her back. Nearly my height, utterly self possessed, as cool as the stratosphere. I had seen her grow from a demanding child into a selfish fourteen-year-old, and from there into a difficult-to-please debutante and from there to a glossy imitation model girl heavily tinged with boredom. Over the eight years I had ridden for her father we had met briefly and spoken seldom, usually in parade rings and outside the weighing room, and on the occasions when she did speak to me she seemed to be aiming just over the top of my head.
‘You’re making it difficult,’ she said.
‘For you to say why you came?’
She nodded. ‘I thought I knew you. Now it seems I don’t.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Well… Father said you came from a farm cottage with pigs running in and out of the door.’
‘Father exaggerates.’
She lifted her chin to ward off the familiarity, a gesture I’d seen a hundred times in her and her brothers. A gesture copied from her parents.
‘Hens,’ I said, ‘Not pigs.’
She gave me an up-stage stare. I smiled at her faintly and refused to be reduced to the ranks. I watched the wheels tick over while she worked out how to approach a cactus, and gradually the chin came down.
‘Actual hens?’
Not bad at all. I could feel my own smile grow genuine.
‘Now and then.’
‘You don’t look like… I mean…’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I agreed. ‘And it’s high time you got rid of those chains.’
‘Chains? What are you talking about?’
‘The fetters in your mind. The iron bars in your soul.’
‘My mind is all right.’
‘You must be joking. It’s chock-a-block with ideas half a century out of date.’
‘I didn’t come here to…’ she began explosively, and then stopped.
‘You didn’t come here to be insulted,’ I said ironically.
‘Well, as you put it in that well worn hackneyed phrase, no, I didn’t. But I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘What did you come for?’
She hesitated. ‘I wanted you to help me.’
‘To do what?’
‘To… to cope with Father.’
I was surprised, first that Father needed coping with, and second that she needed help to do it.
‘What sort of help?’
‘He’s… he’s so shattered.’ Unexpectedly there were tears standing in her eyes. They embarrassed and angered her, and she blinked furiously so that I shouldn’t see. I admired the tears but not her reason for trying to hide them.
‘Here are you,’ she said in a rush, ‘Walking about as cool as you please and buying whisky and making coffee as if no screaming avalanche had poured down on you and smothered your life and made every thought an absolute bloody Hell, and maybe you don’t understand how anyone in that state needs help, and come to that I don’t understand why you don’t need help, but anyway. Father does.’
‘Not from me,’ I said mildly. ‘He doesn’t think enough of me to give it any value.’
She opened her mouth angrily and shut it again and took two deep controlling breaths. ‘And it looks as though he’s right.’
‘Ouch,’ I said ruefully. ‘What sort of help, then?’
‘I want you to come and talk to him.’
My talking to Cranfield seemed likely to be as therapeutic as applying itching powder to a baby. However she hadn’t left me much room for kidding myself that fruitlessness was a good reason for not trying.
‘When?’
‘Now… Unless you have anything else to do.’
‘No,’ I said carefully. ‘I haven’t.’
She made a face and an odd little gesture with her hands. ‘Will you come now, then… please?’
She herself seemed surprised about the real supplication in that ‘please’. I imagined that she had come expecting to instruct, not to ask.
‘All right.’
‘Great.’ She was suddenly very cool, very employer’s daughter again. She put her coffee mug on the draining board and started towards the door. ‘You had better follow me, in your car. It’s no good me taking you, you’l
l need your own car to come back in.’
‘That is so,’ I agreed.
She looked at me suspiciously, but decided not to pursue it. ‘My coat is in your bedroom.’
‘I’ll fetch it for you.’
‘Thank you.’
I walked across the sitting-room and into the bedroom. Her coat was lying on my bed in a heap. Black and white fur, in stripes going round. I picked it up and turned, and found she had followed me.
‘Thank you so much.’ She presented her back to me and put her arms in the coat-putting-on position. On went the coat. She swivelled slowly, buttoning up the front with shiny black saucers. ‘This flat really is fantastic. Who is your decorator?’
‘Chap called Kelly Hughes.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘I know the professional touch when I see it.’
‘Thank you.’
She raised the chin. ‘Oh well, if you won’t say…’
‘I would say. I did say. I did the flat myself. I’ve been whitewashing pigsties since I was six.’
She wasn’t quite sure whether to be amused or offended, and evaded it by changing the subject.
‘That picture… that’s your wife, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘I remember her,’ she said. ‘She was always so sweet to me. She seemed to know what I was feeling. I was really awfully sorry when she was killed.’
I looked at her in surprise. The people Rosalind had been sweetest to had invariably been unhappy. She had had a knack of sensing it, and of giving succour without being asked. I would not have thought of Roberta Cranfield as being unhappy, though I supposed from twelve to fifteen, when she had known Rosalind, she could have had her troubles.
‘She wasn’t bad, as wives go,’ I said flippantly, and Miss Cranfield disapproved of that, too.
We left the flat and this time I locked the door, though such horses as I’d had had already bolted. Roberta had parked her Sunbeam Alpine behind the stables and across the doors of the garage where I kept my Lotus. She backed and turned her car with aggressive poise, and I left a leisurely interval before I followed her through the gates, to avoid a competition all the eighteen miles to her home.
Cranfield lived in an early Victorian house in a hamlet four miles out of Lambourn. A country gentleman’s residence, estate agents would have called it: built before the Industrial Revolution had invaded Berkshire and equally impervious to the social revolution a hundred years later. Elegant, charming, timeless, it was a house I liked very much. Pity about the occupants.
I drove up the back drive as usual and parked alongside the stable yard. A horsebox was standing there with its ramp down, and one of the lads was leading a horse into it. Archie, the head lad, who had been helping, came across as soon as I climbed out of the car.
‘This is a God awful bloody business,’ he said. ‘It’s wicked, that’s what it is. Downright bloody wicked.’
‘The horses are going?’
‘Some owners have sent boxes already. All of them will be gone by the day after tomorrow.’ His weather-beaten face was a mixture of fury, frustration, and anxiety. ‘All the lads have got the sack. Even me. And the missus and I have just taken a mortgage on one of the new houses up the road. Chalet bungalow, just what she’d always set her heart on. Worked for years, she has, saving for it. Now she won’t stop crying. We moved in only a month ago, see? How do you think we’re going to keep up the payments? Took every pound we had, what with the deposit and the solicitors, and curtains and all. Nice little place, too, she’s got it looking real nice. And it isn’t as if the Guvnor really fiddled the blasted race. That Cherry Pie, anyone could see with half an eye he was going to be good some day. I mean, if the Guvnor had done it, like, somehow all this wouldn’t be so bad. I mean, if he deserved it, well serve him right, and I’d try and get a bit of compensation from him because we’re going to have a right job selling the house again, I’ll tell you, because there’s still two of them empty, they weren’t so easy to sell in the first place, being so far out of Lambourn… I’ll tell you straight, I wish to God we’d never moved out of the Guvnor’s cottage, dark and damp though it may be… George,’ he suddenly shouted at a lad swearing and tugging at a reluctant animal, ‘Don’t take it out on the horse, it isn’t his fault…’ He bustled across the yard and took the horse himself, immediately quietening it and leading it without trouble into the horsebox.
He was an excellent head lad, better than most, and a lot of Cranfield’s success was his doing. If he sold his house and got settled in another job, Cranfield wouldn’t get him back. The training licence might not be lost for ever, but the stable’s main prop would be.
I watched another lad lead a horse round to the waiting box. He too looked worried. His wife, I knew, was on the point of producing their first child.
Some of the lads wouldn’t care, of course. There were plenty of jobs going in racing stables, and one lot of digs were much the same as another. But they too would not come back. Nor would most of the horses, nor many of the owners. The stable wasn’t being suspended for a few months. It was being smashed.
Sick and seething with other people’s fury as well as my own, I walked down the short stretch of drive to the house. Roberta’s Alpine was parked outside the front door and she was standing beside it looking cross.
‘So there you are. I thought you’d ratted.’
‘I parked down by the yard.’
‘I can’t bear to go down there. Nor can Father. In fact, he won’t move out of his dressing-room. You’ll have to come upstairs to see him.’
She led the way through the front door and across thirty square yards of Persian rug. When we had reached the foot of the stairs the door of the library was flung open and Mrs Cranfield came through it. Mrs Cranfield always flung doors open, rather as if she suspected something reprehensible was going on behind them and she was intent on catching the sinners in the act. She was a plain woman who wore no makeup and dressed in droopy woollies. To me she had never talked about anything except horses, and I didn’t know whether she could. Her father was an Irish baron, which may have accounted for the marriage.
‘My father-in-law, Lord Coolihan…’ Cranfield was wont to say: and he was wont to say it far too often. I wondered whether, after Gowery, he was the tiniest bit discontented with the aristocracy.
‘Ah, there you are, Hughes,’ Mrs Cranfield said. ‘Roberta told me she was going to fetch you. Though what good you can do I cannot understand. After all, it was you who got us into the mess.’
‘I what?’
‘If you’d ridden a better race on Squelch, none of this would have happened.’
I bit back six answers and said nothing. If you were hurt enough you lashed out at the nearest object. Mrs Cranfield continued to lash.
‘Dexter was thoroughly shocked to hear that you had been in the habit of deliberately losing races.’
‘So was I,’ said dryly.
Roberta moved impatiently. ‘Mother, do stop it. Come along, Hughes. This way.’
I didn’t move. She went up three steps, paused, and looked back. ‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’
I shrugged. Whatever I was waiting for, I wouldn’t get it in that house. I followed her up the stairs, along a wide passage, and into her father’s dressing-room.
There was too much heavy mahogany furniture of a later period than the house, a faded-plum-coloured carpet, faded plum plush curtains, and a bed with an Indian cover.
On one side of the bed sat Dexter Cranfield, his back bent into a bow and his shoulders hunched round his ears. His hands rolled loosely on his knees, fingers curling, and he was staring immovably at the floor.
‘He sits like that for hours,’ Roberta said on a breath beside me. And, looking at him, I understood why she had needed help.
‘Father,’ she said, going over and touching his shoulder. ‘Kelly Hughes is here.’
Cranfield said, ‘Tell him to go and shoot himself.’
She saw the
twitch in my face, and from her expression thought that I minded, that I believed Cranfield too thought me the cause of all his troubles. On the whole I decided not to crystallise her fears by saying I thought Cranfield had said shoot because shoot was in his mind.
‘Hop it,’ I said, and jerked my head towards the door.
The chin went up like a reflex. Then she looked at the husk of her father, and back to me, whom she’d been to some trouble to bring, and most of the starch dissolved.
‘All right. I’ll be down in the library. Don’t go without… telling me.’
I shook my head, and she went collectedly out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
I walked to the window and looked at the view. Small fields trickling down into the valley. Trees all bent one way by the wind off the Downs. A row of pylons, a cluster of council house roofs. Not a horse in sight. The dressing-room was on the opposite side of the house to the stables.
‘Have you a gun?’ I asked.
No answer from the bed. I went over and sat down beside him. ‘Where is it?’
His eyes slid a fraction in my direction and then back. He had been looking past me. I got up and went to the table beside his bed, but there was nothing lethal on it, and nothing in the drawer.
I found it behind the high mahogany bedhead. A finely wrought Purdey more suitable for pheasants. Both barrels were loaded. I unloaded them.
‘Very messy,’ I remarked. ‘Very inconsiderate. And anyway, you didn’t mean to do it.’
I wasn’t at all sure about that, but there was no harm in trying to convince him.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said indifferently.
‘Telling you to snap out of it. There’s work to be done.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that.’
‘How, then?’
His head came up a little, just like Roberta’s. If I made him angry, he’d be half way back to his normal self. And I could go home.
‘It’s useless sitting up here sulking. It won’t achieve anything at all.’
‘Sulking?’ He was annoyed, but not enough.
‘Someone took our toys away. Very unfair. But nothing to be gained by grizzling in corners.’
