Bonecrack

by Dick Francis

  Lancat swerved of his own volition towards Lucky Lindsay and took up the race … a born and bred competitor bent even in exhaustion on getting his head in front.

  Ten yards, ten feet … and closing.

  Alessandro was several lengths ahead of the two horses he had started out with. Several lengths ahead, all on his own.

  Lancat reached Lucky Lindsay at an angle and threw up his head to avoid a collision … and Alessandro turned his face to me in wide astonishment … and although I had meant to tell him to jump off and lie flat on the ground until his father succeeded in finding Carlo and Cal, it didn’t happen quite like that.

  Lancat half rose up into the air and threw me, twisting, on to Lucky Lindsay, and I put my right arm out round Alessandro and scooped him off, and we fell like that down on to the grass. And Lancat fell too, and lay across our feet, because brave, fast, determined Lancat wasn’t going anywhere any more.

  Half of Lancat’s neck was torn away, and his blood and his life ran out on to the bright green turf.

  Alessandro tried to twist out of my grasp and stand up.

  ‘Lie still,’ I said fiercely. ‘Just do as I say, and lie still.’

  ‘I’m hurt,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘I have hurt my leg,’ he protested.

  ‘You’ll have a hole in your heart if you stand up.’

  ‘You are mad,’ he said.

  ‘Look at Lancat … What do you think is wrong with him? Do you think he is lying there for fun?’ I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice, and I didn’t try. ‘Cal did that. Cal and his big bloody rifle. They came out here to shoot Tommy Hoylake, and you rode Lucky Lindsay instead, and they couldn’t tell the difference, which should please you … and if you stand up now they’ll have another go.’

  He lay still. Speechless. And quite, quite still.

  I rolled away from him and stuffed my fist against my teeth, for if the truth were told I was hurting far more than I would have believed possible. Him and his damn bloody father … the free sharp ends of collar-bone were carving new and unplanned routes for themselves through several protesting sets of tissue.

  A fair amount of fuss was developing around us. When the ring of shocked spectators had grown solid and thick enough I let him get up, but he only got as far as his knees beside Lancat, and there were smears of the horse’s blood on his jodhpurs and jersey.

  ‘Lancat …’ he said hopelessly, with a sort of death in his voice. He looked across at me as a couple of helpful onlookers hauled me to my feet, and the despair on his face was bottomless and total.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why did he do it?’

  I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. He already knew.

  ‘I hate him,’ he said.

  The people around us began to ask questions but neither Alessandro nor I answered them.

  From somewhere away to our right there was another loud unmistakable crack. I and half the gathering crowd involuntarily ducked, but the bullet would already have reached us if it had been coming our way.

  One crack, then silence. The echoes died quickly over Waterhall, but they shivered for ever through Alessandro’s life.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Enso had found Carlo and Cal hidden in a clump of bushes near the Boy’s Grave crossroads.

  We found them there too, when we walked along to the end of the Line gallop to flag down a passing motorist to take Etty quickly into Newmarket. Etty, who had arrived frantic up the Gallop, had at first like all the other onlookers taken it for granted that the shooting had been an accident. A stray bullet loosed off by someone being criminally careless with a gun.

  I watched the doubt appear on her face when she realized that my transport had been Lancat and not the Land Rover, but I just asked her matter-of-factly to buzz down to Newmarket and ring up the dead horse removers, then to drive herself back. She sent Andy off with instructions to the rest of the string, and the first car that came along stopped to pick her up.

  Alessandro walked off the training ground into the road with a stunned, stony face, and came towards me. He was leading Lucky Lindsay, which someone had caught, but as automatically as if unaware he was there. Three or four paces away, he stopped.

  ‘What am I to do?’ he said. His voice was without hope or anxiety. Lifeless. I didn’t answer immediately, and it was then that we heard the noise.

  A low distressed voice calling unintelligibly.

  Startled, I walked along the road a little and through a thin belt of bushes, and there I found them.

  Three of them. Enso and Carlo and Cal.

  It was Cal who had called out. He was the only one capable of it. Carlo lay sprawled on his back with his eyes open to the sun and a splash of drying scarlet trickling from a hole in his forehead.

  Cal had a wider, wetter, spreading stain over the front of his shirt. His breath was shallow and quick, and calling out loud enough to be found had used up most of his energy.

  The Lee Enfield lay across his legs. His hand moved convulsively towards the butt, but he no longer had the strength to pick it up.

  And Enso … Cal had shot Enso with the Lee Enfield at a range of about six feet. It wasn’t so much the bullet itself, but the shock wave of its velocity: at that short distance it had dug an entrance as large as a plate.

  The force of it had flung Enso backwards, against a tree. He sat there now at the foot of it with the silenced pistol still in his hand and his head sunk forward on his chest. There was a soul-sickening mess where his paunch had been, and his back was indissoluble from the bark.

  I would have stopped Alessandro seeing, but I didn’t hear him come. I heard only the moan beside me, and I turned abruptly to see the nausea spring out in sweat on his face.

  For Cal his appearance there was macabre.

  ‘You …’ he said. ‘You … are dead.’

  Alessandro merely stared at him, too shocked to understand, too shocked to speak.

  Cal’s eyes opened wide and his voice grew stronger with a burst of futile anger.

  ‘He said … I had killed you. Killed his son. He was … out of his senses. He said … I should have known it was you …’ He coughed, and frothy blood slid over his lower lip.

  ‘You did shoot at Alessandro,’ I said. ‘But you hit a horse.’

  Cal said with visibly diminishing strength, ‘He shot Carlo … and he shot me … so I let him have it … the son of a bitch … he was out … of his senses …’

  The voice stopped. There was nothing anyone could do for him, and presently, imperceptibly, he died.

  He died where he had lain in wait for Tommy Hoylake. When I knelt beside him to feel his pulse, and lifted my head to look along the Gallop, there in front of me was the view he had had: a clear sight of the advancing horses, from through the sparse low branches of a concealing bush. The dark shape of Lancat lay like a hump on the grass three hundred yards away, and another batch of horses, uncaring, were sweeping round the far bend and turning towards me.

  An easy shot, it had been, for a marksman. He hadn’t bothered even with a telescopic sight. At that range, with a Lee Enfield, one didn’t need one. One didn’t need to be of pinpoint accuracy: anywhere on the head or trunk would do the trick. I sighed. If he had used a telescopic sight, he would probably have realized that what he was aiming at was Alessandro.

  I stood up. Clumsily, painfully, wishing I hadn’t got down.

  Alessandro hadn’t fainted. Hadn’t been sick. The sweat had dried on his face, and he was looking steadfastly at his father.

  When I moved towards him he turned, but he needed two or three attempts before he could get his throat to work.

  He managed it, finally. His voice was strained; different; hoarse: and what he said was as good an epitaph as any.

  ‘He gave me everything,’ he said.

  We went back to the road, where Alessandro had tethered Lucky Lindsay to a fence. The colt had his head down to the grass, undisturbed. />
  Neither of us said anything at all.

  Etty clattered up in the Land Rover, and I got her to turn it round and take me straight down to the town.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ I said to Alessandro, but he stared silently at nothing, with eyes that had seen too much.

  When I went back, it was with the police. Etty stayed behind at Rowley Lodge to see to the stables, because it was, still, and incredibly, Guineas day, and we had Archangel to look to. Also, in the town, I made a detour to the doctor, where I bypassed an outraged queue waiting in his surgery, and got him to put the ends of my collar-bone back into alignment. After that it was a bit more bearable, though nothing still to raise flags about.

  I spent most of the morning up at the crossroads. Answered some questions and didn’t answer others. Alessandro listened to me telling the highest up of the police who had arrived from Cambridge that Enso had appeared to me to be unbalanced.

  The police surgeon was sceptical of a layman’s opinion.

  ‘In what way?’ he said without deference.

  I paused to consider. ‘You could look for spiro-chaetes,’ I said, and his eyes widened abruptly before he disappeared back into the bushes.

  They were considerate to Alessandro. He sat on somebody’s raincoat on the grass at the side of the road, and later on the police surgeon gave him a sedative.

  It was an injection, and Alessandro didn’t want it. They wouldn’t pay attention to his objections, and when the needle went into his arm I found him staring fixedly at my face. He knew that I too was thinking about too many other injections; about myself, and Carlo, and Moonrock and Indigo and Buckram. Too many needles. Too much death.

  The drug didn’t put him out, just made him look even more dazed than before. The police decided he should go back to the Forbury Inn and sleep, and steered him towards one of their cars.

  He stopped in front of me before he reached it, and gazed at me in awe from hollow dark sockets in a grey gaunt face.

  ‘Look at the flowers,’ he said. ‘On the Boy’s Grave.’

  When he had gone I walked over to the raincoat where he had been sitting, close to the little mound.

  There were pale yellow polyanthus, and blue forget-me-nots coming into flower round the edge: and all the centre was filled with pansies. Dark purple velvet pansies, shining black in the sun.

  It was cynical of me to wonder if he could have planted them himself.

  Enso was in the mortuary and Alessandro was asleep when Archangel and Tommy Hoylake won the Guineas.

  Not what they had planned.

  A heaviness like thunder persisted with me all afternoon, even though there was by then no reason for it. The defeat of Enso no longer directed half my actions, but I found it impossible in one bound to throw off his influence. It was not until then that I understood how intense it had become.

  What I should have felt was relief that the stable was safe. What I did feel was depression.

  The merchant banker, Archangel’s owner, was practically incandescent with happiness. He glowed in the unsaddling enclosure and joked with the Press in shaky pride.

  ‘Well done, my boy, well done indeed,’ he said to me, to Tommy, and to Archangel impartially, and looked ready to embrace us all.

  ‘And now, my boy, now for the Derby, eh?’

  ‘Now for the Derby,’ I nodded, and wondered how soon my father would be back at Rowley Lodge.

  I went to see him, the next day.

  He was looking even more forbidding than usual because he had heard all about the multiple murders on the gallops. He blamed me for letting anything like that happen. It saved him, I reflected sourly, from having to say anything nice about Archangel.

  ‘You should never have taken on that apprentice.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘The Jockey Club will be seriously displeased.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The man must have been mad.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Absolutely mad to think he could get his son to ride Archangel by killing Tommy Hoylake.’

  I had had to tell the police something, and I had told them that. It had seemed enough.

  ‘Obsessed,’ I agreed.

  ‘Surely you must have noticed it before? Surely he gave some sign?’

  ‘I suppose he did,’ I agreed neutrally.

  ‘Then surely you should have been able to stop him.’

  ‘I did stop him … in a way.’

  ‘Not very efficiently,’ he complained.

  ‘No,’ I said patiently, and thought that the only one who had stopped Enso efficiently and finally had been Cal.

  ‘What’s the matter with your arm?’

  ‘Broke my collar-bone,’ I said.

  ‘Hard luck.’

  He looked down at his still-suspended leg, almost but not quite saying aloud that a collar-bone was chicken feed compared with what he had endured. What was more, he was right.

  ‘How soon will you be out?’ I asked.

  He answered in a smug satisfaction tinged with undisguisable malice. ‘Sooner than you’d like, perhaps.’

  ‘I couldn’t wish you to stay here,’ I protested.

  He looked faintly taken aback: faintly ashamed.

  ‘No … well … They say not long now.’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ I said, and tried to mean it.

  ‘Don’t do any more work with Archangel. And I see from the Calendar that you have made entries on your own. I don’t want you to do that. I am perfectly capable of deciding where my horses should run.’

  ‘As you say,’ I said mildly, and with surprisingly little pleasure realized that I now no longer had any reason for amending his plans.

  ‘Tell Etty that she did very well with Archangel.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘In fact, I have.’

  The corners of his mouth turned down. ‘Tell her that I said so.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Nothing much, after all, had changed between us. He was still what I had run away from at sixteen, and it would take me a lot less time to leave him again. I couldn’t possibly have stayed on as his assistant, even if he had asked me to.

  ‘He gave me everything,’ Alessandro had said of his father. I would have said of mine that he gave me not very much. And I felt for him something that Alessandro had never through love or hate felt for his.

  I felt … apathy.

  ‘Go away, now,’ he said. ‘And on your way out, find a nurse. I need a bedpan. They take half an hour, sometimes, if I ring the bell. And I want it now, at once.’

  The driver of the car I had hired in Newmarket was quite happy to include Hampstead in the itinerary.

  ‘A couple of hours?’ I suggested, when I had hauled myself out on to the pavement outside the flat.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’s somewhere open for tea, even on Sunday.’ He drove off hopefully, optimistic soul that he was.

  Gillie said she had lost three pounds, she was painting the bathroom sludge green, and how did I propose to make love to her looking like a washed-out edition of a terminal consumptive.

  ‘I don’t’, I said, ‘propose.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said wisely. ‘All men have their limits.’

  ‘And just change that description to looking like a racehorse trainer who has just won his first Classic.’

  She opened her mouth and obviously was not going to come across with the necessary compliment.

  ‘OK,’ I interrupted resignedly. ‘So it wasn’t me. Everyone else, but not me. I do so agree. Wholeheartedly.’

  ‘Self-pity is disgusting,’ she said.

  ‘Mm.’ I sat gingerly down in a blue armchair, put my head back, and shut my eyes. Didn’t get much sympathy for that, either.

  ‘So you collected the bruises,’ she observed.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Silly old you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want some tea?’

  ‘No thank you,’ I
said politely. ‘No sympathy, no tea.’

  She laughed. ‘Brandy, then?’

  ‘If you have some.’

  She had enough for the cares of the world to retreat a pace: and she came across, in the end, with her own brand of fellow-feeling.

  ‘Don’t wince,’ she said, ‘when I kiss you.’

  ‘Don’t kiss so damned hard.’

  After a bit she said, ‘Is this shoulder the lot? Or will there be more to come?’

  ‘It’s the lot,’ I said, and told her all that had happened. Edited, and flippantly; but more or less all.

  ‘And does your own dear dad know all about this?’

  ‘Heaven forbid,’ I said.

  ‘But he will, won’t he? When you get this Alessandro warned off? And then he will understand how much he owes you?’

  ‘I don’t want him to understand,’ I said. ‘He would loathe it.’

  ‘Charming fellow, your dad.’

  ‘He is what he is,’ I said.

  ‘And was Enso what he was?’

  I smiled lopsidedly. ‘Same principle, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re a nut, Neil Griffon.’

  I couldn’t dispute it.

  ‘How long before he gets out of hospital?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He hopes to be on his feet soon. Then a week or two for physiotherapy and walking practice with crutches, or whatever. He expects to be home before the Derby.’

  ‘What will you do then?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘But he’ll be three weeks at least, and leverage no longer applies … so would you still like to come to Rowley Lodge?’

  ‘Um,’ she said, considering. ‘There’s a three-year-old Nigerian girl I’m supposed to be settling with a family in Dorset …’

  I felt very tired. ‘Never mind, then.’

  ‘I could come on Wednesday.’

  When I got back to Newmarket I walked round the yard before I went indoors. It all lay peacefully in the soft light of sundown, the beginning of dusk. The bricks looked rosy and warm, the shrubs were out in flower, and behind the green painted doors the six million quids’ worth were safely chomping on their evening oats. Peace in all the bays, winners in many of the boxes, and an air of prosperity and timelessness over the whole.