Bonecrack

by Dick Francis

  2. Tommy Hoylake.

  Should any harm of any description come to Tommy Hoylake, or to any other jockey employed by the stable, the information will be laid, and Alessandro will ride no more races.

  3. Moonrock, Indigo and Buckram.

  Should any further attempts be made to injure or kill any of the horses at Rowley Lodge, information will be laid, and Alessandro will ride no more races.

  4. The information which would be laid consists at present of a full account of all pertinent events, together with (a) the two model horses and their handwritten labels; (b) the results of an analysis done at the Equine Research Establishment on a blood sample taken from Indigo, showing the presence of the anaesthetic promazine; (c) X-ray pictures of the fracture to Indigo’s near foreleg; (d) one rubber mask, worn by Carlo; (e) one hypodermic syringe containing traces of anaesthetic, and (f) one truncheon, both bearing Carlo’s fingerprints.

  These items are all lodged with a solicitor, who has instructions for their use in the event of my death.

  Bear in mind that the case against you and your son does not have to be proved in a court of law, but only to the satisfaction of the Stewards of the Jockey Club. It is they who take away jockeys’ licences.

  If no further damage is done or attempted at Rowley Lodge, I will agree on my part to give Alessandro every reasonable opportunity of becoming a proficient and successful jockey.

  He read the letter through twice. Then he slowly folded it and put it back in the envelope.

  ‘He won’t like it,’ he said. ‘He never lets anyone threaten him.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have tried threatening me,’ I said mildly.

  ‘He thought it would be your father … and old people frighten more easily, my father says.’

  I took my eyes off the road for two seconds to glance at him. He was no more disturbed by what he had just said than when he had said his father would kill me. Frightening and murdering had been the background to his childhood, and he still seemed to consider them normal.

  ‘Do you really have all those things?’ he asked. ‘The blood test result … and the syringe?’

  ‘I do indeed.’

  ‘But Carlo always wears gloves …’ He stopped.

  ‘He was careless,’ I said.

  He brooded over it. ‘If my father makes Carlo break any more horses’ legs, will you really get me warned off?’

  ‘I certainly will.’

  ‘But after that you would have no way of stopping him from destroying the stables in revenge.’

  ‘Would he do that?’ I asked. ‘Would he bother?’

  Alessandro gave me a pitying, superior smile. ‘My father would be revenged if someone ate the cream cake he wanted.’

  ‘So you approve of vengeance?’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It wouldn’t get you back your licence,’ I pointed out, ‘and anyway I doubt whether he could actually do it, because there would then be no bar to police protection and the loudest possible publicity.’

  He said stubbornly, ‘There wouldn’t be any risk at all if you would agree to my riding Pease Pudding and Archangel.’

  ‘It never was possible for you to ride them without any experience, and if you’d had any sense you would have known it.’

  The haughty look flooded back, but diluted from the first time I’d seen it.

  ‘So,’ I went on, ‘although there’s always a risk in opposing extortion, in some cases it is the only thing to do. And starting from there, it’s just a matter of finding ways of opposing that don’t land you in the morgue empty-handed.’

  There was another long pause while we skirted Grantham and Newark. It started raining. I switched on the wipers and the blades clicked like metronomes over the glass.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Alessandro said glumly, ‘as if you and my father have been engaged in some sort of power struggle, with me being the pawn that both of you push around.’

  I smiled, surprised both at his perception and that he should have said it aloud.

  ‘That’s right,’ I agreed, ‘that’s how it’s been from the beginning.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like it.’

  ‘It only happened because of you. And if you give up the idea of being a jockey, it will all stop.’

  ‘But I want to be a jockey,’ he said, as if that were the end of it. And as far as his doting father was concerned, it was. The beginning of it, and the end of it.

  Ten wet miles further on, he said, ‘You tried to get rid of me, when I came.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Do you still want me to leave?’

  ‘Would you?’ I sounded hopeful.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I twisted my mouth. ‘No,’ he said again, ‘because between you, you and my father have made it impossible for me to go to any other stable and start again.’

  Another long pause. ‘And anyway,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to go to any other stable. I want to stay at Rowley Lodge.’

  ‘And be Champion Jockey?’ I murmured.

  ‘I only told Margaret …’ he began sharply, and then put a couple of things together. ‘She told you I asked about Buckram,’ he said bitterly. ‘And that’s how you caught Carlo.’

  In justice to Margaret I said, ‘She wouldn’t have told me if I hadn’t directly asked her what you wanted.’

  ‘You don’t trust me,’ he complained.

  ‘Well, no,’ I said ironically. ‘I would be a fool to.’

  The rain fell more heavily against the windscreen. We stopped at a red light in Bawtry and waited while a lollipop man shepherded half a school across in front of us.

  ‘That bit in your letter about helping me to be a good jockey … do you mean it?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said. ‘You ride well enough at home. Better than I expected, to be honest.’

  ‘I told you …’ he began, lifting the arching nose.

  ‘That you were brilliant,’ I finished, nodding. ‘So you did.’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me.’ The ready fury boiled up.

  ‘All you’ve got to do is win a few races, keep your head, show a judgement of pace and an appreciation of tactics, and stop relying on your father.’

  He was unpacified. ‘It is natural to rely on one’s father,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘I ran away from mine when I was sixteen.’

  He turned his head. I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was both surprised and unimpressed.

  ‘Obviously he did not, like mine, give you everything you wanted.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘I wanted freedom.’

  I judged that freedom was the one thing that Enso wouldn’t give his son for the asking: the obsessively generous were often possessive as well. There was no hint of freedom in the fact that Alessandro carried no money, couldn’t drive, and had Carlo around to supervise and report on every move. But then freedom didn’t seem to be high on Alessandro’s list of desirables. The perks of serfdom were habit-forming, and sweet.

  I spent most of the afternoon meeting the people who knew my father: other trainers, jockeys, officials and some of the owners. They were all without exception helpful and informative, so that by the end of the day I had learned what I would be expected (and just as importantly, not expected) to do in connection with Pease Pudding for the Lincoln.

  Tommy Hoylake, with an expansive grin, put it succinctly. ‘Declare it, saddle it, watch it win, and stick around in case of objections.’

  ‘Do you think we have any chance?’

  ‘Oh, must have,’ he said. ‘It’s an open race, anything could win. Lap of the gods, you know. Lap of the gods.’ By which I gathered that he still hadn’t made up his mind about the trial, whether Lancat was good or Pease Pudding bad.

  I drove Alessandro back to Newmarket and asked how he had got on. As his expression whenever I had caught sight of him during the afternoon had been a mixture of envy and pride, I knew without him telling me that he had been both titillated to be recog
nizable as a jockey, because of his size, and enraged that a swarm of others should have started the season without him. The look he had given the boy who had won the apprentice race would have frightened a rattlesnake.

  ‘I cannot wait until next Wednesday,’ he said. ‘I wish to begin tomorrow.’

  ‘We have no runners before next Wednesday,’ I said calmly.

  ‘Pease Pudding.’ He was fierce. ‘On Saturday.’

  ‘We’ve been through all that.’

  ‘I wish to ride him.’

  ‘No.’

  He seethed away in the passenger seat. The actual sight and sound and smell of the races had excited him to the pitch where he could scarcely keep still. The approach to reasonableness which had been made on the way up had all blown away in the squally wind on Doncaster’s Town Moor, and the first half of the journey back was a complete waste, as far as I was concerned. Finally, though, the extreme tenseness left him, and he slumped back in his seat in some species of gloom.

  At that stage, I said, ‘What sort of race do you think you should ride on Pullitzer?’

  His spine straightened again instantly and he answered with the same directness as he had after the trial.

  ‘I looked up his last year’s form,’ he said. ‘Pullitzer was consistent, he came third or fourth or sixth, mostly. He was always near the front for most of the race but then faded out in the last furlong. Next Wednesday at Catterick it is seven furlongs. It says in the book that the low numbers are the best to draw, so I would hope for one of those. Then I will try to get away well at the start and take a position next to the rails, or with only one other horse inside me, and I will not go too fast, but not too slow either. I will try to stay not farther back than two and a half lengths behind the leading horse, but I will not try to get to the front until right near the end. The last sixty yards, I think. And I will try to be in front only about fifteen yards before the winning post. I think he does not race his best if he is in front, so he mustn’t be in front very long.’

  To say I was surprised is to get nowhere near the queer excitement which rose sharply and unexpectedly in my brain. I’d had years of practice in sorting the genuine from the phoney, and what Alessandro had said rang of pure sterling.

  ‘OK,’ I said casually. ‘That sounds all right. You ride him just like that. And how about Buckram … you’ll be riding him in the apprentice race at Liverpool the day after Pullitzer. Also you can ride Lancat at Teesside two days later, on the Saturday.’

  ‘I’ll look them up, and think about them,’ he said seriously.

  ‘Don’t bother with Lancat’s form,’ I reminded him. ‘He was no good as a two-year-old. Work from what you learned during the trial.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  His eagerness had come back, but more purposefully, more controlled. I understood to some degree his hunger to make a start: he was reaching out to race riding as a starving man to bread, and nothing would deflect him. I found, moreover, that I no longer needed to deflect him, that what I had said about helping him to become a jockey was more true than I had known when I had written it.

  As far as Enso was concerned, and as far as Alessandro was concerned, they were both still forcing me to give him opportunities against my will. It privately and sardonically began to amuse me that I was beginning to give him opportunities because I wanted to.

  The battle was about to shift to different ground. I thought about Enso, and about the way he regarded his son … and I could see at last how to make him retract his threats. But it seemed to me that very likely the future would be more dangerous than the past.

  Chapter Eleven

  Every evening during the week before the Lincoln I spent hours answering the telephone. One owner after another rang up, and without exception sounded depressed. This, I discovered, after the fourth in a row had said in more or less identical words, ‘Can’t expect much with your father chained to his bed,’ was because the invalid in question had been extremely busy on the blower himself.

  He had rung them all up, apologized for my presence, told them to expect nothing, and promised them that everything would be restored to normal as soon as he got back. He had also told his co-owner of Pease Pudding, a Major Barnette, that in his opinion the horse was not fit to run; and it had taken me half an hour of my very best persuasive tongue to convince the Major that as my father hadn’t seen the horse for the past six weeks, he didn’t actually know.

  Looking into his activities more closely, I found that my father had also written privately every week to Etty for progress reports and had told her not to tell me she was sending them. I practically bullied this last gem out of her on the morning before the Lincoln, having cottoned on to what was happening only through mentioning that my father had told all the owners the horses were unfit. Something guilty in her expression had given her away, but she fended off my bitterness by claiming that she hadn’t actually said they were unfit: that was just the way my father had chosen to interpret things.

  I went into the office and asked Margaret if my father had telephoned or written to her for private reports. She looked embarrassed and said that he had.

  When I spoke about race tactics to Tommy Hoylake that Friday, he said not to worry, my father had rung him up and given him his instructions.

  ‘And what were they?’ I asked, with a great deal more restraint than I was feeling.

  ‘Oh … just to keep in touch with the field and not drop out of the back door when he blows up.’

  ‘Um … If he hadn’t rung you up, how would you have planned to ride?’ I said.

  ‘Keep him well up all the time,’ he said promptly. ‘When he’s fit, he’s one of those horses who likes to make the others try to catch him. I’d pick him up two furlongs out, take him to the front, and just pray he’d stay there.’

  ‘Ride him like that, then,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a hundred pounds on him, and I don’t usually bet.’

  His mouth opened in astonishment. ‘But your father …’

  ‘Promise you’ll ride the horse to win,’ I said pleasantly, ‘or I’ll put someone else up.’

  I was insulting him. No one ever suggested replacing Tommy Hoylake. He looked uncertainly at my open expression and came to the conclusion that because of my inexperience I didn’t realize the enormity of what I’d said.

  He shrugged. ‘All right. I’ll give it a whril. Though what your father will say …’

  My father had not finished saying, not by six or more calls, mostly, it appeared, to the Press. Three papers on the morning of the Lincoln quoted his opinion that Pease Pudding had no chance. He’d have me in before the Stewards, I grimly reflected, if the horse did any good.

  Among all this telephonic activity he rang me only once. Although the overpowering bossiness had not returned to his voice, he sounded stilted and displeased, and I gathered that the champagne truce had barely seen me out of the door.

  He rang on the Thursday evening after I got back from Doncaster, and I told him how helpful everyone had been.

  ‘Hmph,’ he said, ‘I’ll ring the Clerk of the Course tomorrow, and ask him to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Have you entirely cornered the telephone trolley?’ I asked.

  ‘Telephone trolley? Could never get hold of it for long enough. Too many people asking for it all the time. No, no. I told them I needed my own private extension, here in this room, and after a lot of fuss and delay they fixed one up. I insisted, of course, that I had a business to run.’

  ‘And you insisted often?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said without humour, and I knew from long experience that the hospital had had as much chance as an egg under a steamroller.

  ‘The horses aren’t as backward as you think,’ I told him. ‘You don’t really need to be so pessimistic.’

  ‘You’re no judge of a horse,’ he said dogmatically; and it was the day after that that he talked to the Press.

  Major Barnette gloomed away in the parade ring a
nd poured scorn and pity on my hefty bet.

  ‘Your father told me not to throw good money after bad,’ he said. ‘And I can’t think why I let you persuade me to run.’

  ‘You can have fifty of my hundred, if you like.’ I offered it with the noblest of intentions, but he took it as a sign that I wanted to get rid of some of my losses.

  ‘Certainly not,’ he said resentfully.

  He was a spare, elderly man of middle height, who stood at the slightest provocation upon his dignity. Sign of basic failure, I diagnosed uncharitably, and remembered the old adage that some owners were harder to train than their horses.

  The twenty-nine runners for the Lincoln were stalking long-leggedly round the parade ring, with all the other owners and trainers standing about in considering groups. Strong, cold northwest winds had blown the clouds away and the sun shone brazenly from a brilliant high blue sky. When the jockeys trickled through the crowd and emerged in a sunburst into the parade ring their glossy colours gleamed and reflected the light like children’s toys.

  The old–young figure of Tommy Hoylake in bright green bounced towards us with a carefree aura of play-it-as-it-comes, which did nothing to persuade Major Barnette that his half share of the horse would run well.

  ‘Look,’ he said heavily to Tommy, ‘just don’t get tailed off. If it looks as if you will be, pull up and jump off, for God’s sake, and pretend the horse is lame or the saddle’s slipped. Anything you like, but don’t let it get around that the horse is no good, or its stud value will sink like a stone.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll actually be tailed off, sir,’ Tommy said judiciously, and cast an enquiring glance up at me.

  ‘Just ride him as you suggested,’ I said, ‘and don’t leave it all in the lap of the gods.’

  He grinned. Hopped on the horse. Flicked his cap to Major Barnette. Went on his light-hearted way.

  The Major didn’t want to watch the race with me, which suited me fine. My mouth felt dry. Suppose after all that my father was right … that I couldn’t tell a fit horse from a letterbox, and that he in his hospital bed was a better judge. Fair enough, if the horse ran stinkingly badly I would acknowledge my mistake and do a salutary spot of grovelling.