Bonecrack

by Dick Francis

  I would be gone from there soon; and Enso had gone, and Alessandro. When my father came back it would be as if the last three months had never happened. He and Etty and Margaret would go on as they had been before; and I would read about the familiar horses in the newspapers.

  I didn’t yet know what I would do. Certainly I had grown to like my father’s job, and maybe I could start a stable of my own, somewhere else. I wouldn’t go back to antiques, and I knew by then that I wasn’t going to work any more for Russell Arletti.

  Build a new empire, Gillie had said.

  Well, maybe I would.

  I looked in at Archangel, now no longer guarded by men, dogs and electronics. The big brown colt lifted his head from his manger and turned on me an enquiring eye. I smiled at him involuntarily. He still showed the effects of his hard race the day before, but he was sturdy and sound, and there was a very good chance he would give the merchant banker his Derby.

  I stifled a sigh and went indoors, and heard the telephone ringing in the office.

  Owners often telephoned on Sunday evenings, but it wasn’t an owner, it was the hospital.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ the voice said several times at the other end. ‘We’ve been trying to reach you for some hours now. Very sorry. Very sorry.’

  ‘But he can’t be dead,’ I said stupidly. ‘He was all right when I left him. I was with him this afternoon, and he was all right.’

  ‘Just after you left,’ they said. ‘Within half an hour.’

  ‘But how?’ My mind couldn’t grasp it. ‘He only had a broken leg … and that had mended.’

  Would I like to talk to the doctor in charge, they said. Yes, I would.

  ‘He was all right when I left him,’ I protested. ‘In fact he was yelling for a bedpan.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Well,’ said a high-pitched voice loaded with professional sympathy. ‘That’s … er … that’s a very common preliminary to a pulmonary embolus. Calling for a bedpan … very typical. But do rest assured, Mr Griffon, your father died very quickly. Within a few seconds. Yes, indeed.’

  ‘What’, I said, with a feeling of complete unreality, ‘is a pulmonary embolus?’

  ‘Blood clot,’ he said promptly. ‘Unfortunately not uncommon in elderly people who have been bedridden for some time. And your father’s fracture … well, it’s tragic, tragic, but not uncommon. I’m afraid. Death sitting up, some people say. Very quick, Mr Griffon. Very quick. There was nothing we could do, do believe me.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  But it was impossible, I thought. He couldn’t be dead. I had been talking to him just that afternoon …

  The hospital would like instructions, they delicately said.

  I would send someone from Newmarket, I said vaguely. An undertaker from Newmarket, to fetch him home.

  Monday I spent in endless chat. Talked to the police. Talked to the Jockey Club. Talked to a dozen or so owners who telephoned to ask what was going to happen to their horses.

  Talked and talked.

  Margaret dealt with the relentless pressure as calmly as she did with Susie and her friend. And Susie’s friend, she said, had incidentally reported that Alessandro had not left his room since the police took him there on Saturday morning. He hadn’t eaten anything, and he wouldn’t talk to anyone except to tell them to go away. Susie’s chum’s mum said it was all very well, but Alessandro never had any money, and his bill had only been paid up to the previous Saturday, and they were thinking of asking him to go.

  ‘Tell Susie’s chum’s mum that Alessandro has money here, and also that in Switzerland he will be rich.’

  ‘Will do,’ she said, and rang the Forbury Inn at once.

  Etty took charge of both lots out at exercise, and somehow or other the right runners got dispatched to Bath. Vic Young went in charge of them and said later that the apprentice who had the ride on Pullitzer instead of Alessandro was no effing good.

  To the police I told the whole of what had occurred on Saturday morning, but nothing of what had occurred before it. Enso had recently arrived in England, I said, and had developed this extraordinary fixation. There was no reason for them not to accept this abbreviated version, and nothing to be gained by telling them more.

  Down at the Jockey Club I had a lengthy session with a committee of Members and a couple of Stewards left over on purpose from the Guineas meeting, and the outcome of that was equally peaceful.

  After that I told Margaret to let all enquiring owners know that I would be staying on at Rowley Lodge for the rest of the season, and they could leave or remove their horses as they wished.

  ‘Are you really?’ she said. ‘Are you staying?’

  ‘Not much else to do, is there?’ I said. But we were both smiling.

  ‘Ever since you told that lie about not being able to find anyone to take over, when you had John Bredon lined up all the time, ever since then I’ve known you liked it here.’

  I didn’t disillusion her.

  ‘I’m glad you’re staying,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s very disloyal to your father, as he only died yesterday, but I have much preferred working for you.’

  I was not so autocratic, that was all. She would have worked efficiently for anyone.

  Before she left at three, she said that none of the owners who had so far telephoned were going to remove their horses; and that included Archangel’s merchant banker.

  When she had gone I wrote to my solicitors in London and asked them to send back to me at Newmarket the package I had instructed them to open in case of my sudden death.

  After that I swallowed a couple of codeines and wondered how soon everything would stop aching, and from five to six-thirty I walked round at evening stables with Etty.

  We passed by Lancat’s empty box.

  ‘Damn that Alex,’ Etty said, but with a retrospective anger. The past was past. Tomorrow’s races were all that mattered. Tomorrow at Chester. She talked of plans ahead. She was contented, fulfilled, and busy. The transition from my father to me had been too gradual to need any sudden adjustment now.

  I left her supervising the evening feeds for the horses as usual, and walked back towards the house. Something made me look up along the drive, and there, motionless and only half visible against the tree trunks, stood Alessandro.

  It was as if he had got halfway down the drive before his courage deserted him. I walked without haste out of the yard and went to meet him.

  Strain had aged him so that he now looked nearer forty than eighteen. Bones stood out sharply under his skin, and there was little in the black eyes except no hope at all.

  ‘I came,’ he started. ‘I need … I mean, you said, at the beginning, that I could have half the money I earned racing … Can I still … have it?’

  ‘You can,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

  He swallowed. ‘I am sorry to come. I had to come. To ask you about the money.’

  ‘You can have it now,’ I said. ‘Come along into the office.’

  I half turned away from him but he didn’t move.

  ‘No. I … can’t.’

  ‘I’ll send it along to the Forbury Inn for you,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Do you have any plans?’ I asked him.

  The shadows in his face if anything deepened.

  ‘No.’

  He visibly gathered every shred of resolution, clamped his teeth together, and asked me the question which was tearing him to shreds.

  ‘When will I be warned off?’

  Neil Griffon was a nut, as Gillie had said.

  ‘You won’t be warned off,’ I told him. ‘I talked to the Jockey Club this morning. I told them that you shouldn’t lose your licence because your father had gone mad, and they saw that point of view. You may not of course like it that I stressed your father’s insanity, but it was the best I could do.’

  ‘But …’ he said in bewilderment, and then in realization, ‘Didn’t you tell them about Moonrock and Indigo … and about
your shoulder?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t understand … why you didn’t.’

  ‘I don’t see any point in revenging myself on you for what your father did.’

  ‘But … he only did it … in the beginning … because I asked.’

  ‘Alessandro,’ I said, ‘just how many fathers would do as he did? How many fathers, if their sons said they wanted to ride Archangel in the Derby, would go as far as murder to achieve it?’

  After a long pause, he said, ‘He was mad, then. He really was.’ It was clearly no comfort.

  ‘He was ill,’ I said. ‘That illness he had after you were born. It affected his brain.’

  ‘Then I … will not …?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t inherit it. You’re as sane as anyone. As sane as you care to be.’

  ‘As I care to be,’ he repeated vaguely. His thoughts were turned inward. I didn’t hurry him. I waited most patiently, because what he cared to be was the final throw in the game.

  ‘I care to be a jockey,’ he said faintly. ‘To be a good one.’

  I took a breath. ‘You are free to ride races anywhere you like,’ I said. ‘Anywhere in the world.’

  He stared at me with a face from which all the arrogance had gone. He didn’t look the same boy as the one who had come from Switzerland three months ago, and in fact he wasn’t. All of his values had been turned upside-down, and the world as he had known it had come to an end.

  To defeat the father, I had changed the son. Changed him at first only as a solution to a problem, but later also because the emerging product was worth it. It seemed a waste, somehow, to let him go. I said abruptly, ‘You can stay on at Rowley Lodge, if you like.’

  Something shattered somewhere inside him, like a glass breaking. When he turned away I could have sworn that against all probability there were tears in his eyes.

  He took four paces, and stopped.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  He turned round. The tears had drained back into the ducts, as they do in the young.

  ‘What as?’ he said apprehensively, looking for snags.

  ‘Stable jockey,’ I said. ‘Second to Tommy.’

  He walked six more paces away down the drive as if his ankles were springs.

  ‘Come back,’ I called. ‘What about tomorrow?’

  He looked over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be here to ride out.’

  Three more bouncing steps.

  ‘You won’t,’ I shouted. ‘You get a good sleep and a good breakfast and be here at eleven. We’re flying over to Chester.’

  ‘Chester?’ He turned and shouted in surprise, and went two more steps, backwards.

  ‘Clip Clop,’ I yelled. ‘Ever heard of him?’

  ‘Yes,’ he yelled back, and the laughter took him uncontrollably, and he turned and ran away down the drive, leaping into the air as if he were six.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 1971 by Michael Joseph Ltd

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194228-5