by Dick Francis
‘Could you take on twenty thousand pounds?’ He said it casually, conversationally.
The short answer to that was ‘Yes’; but instead, after a moment’s stillness, I said ‘Australian, or English?’
His mouth curled down at the corners and his eyes narrowed. He was amused.
‘English. Of course,’ he said ironically.
I said nothing. I simply looked at him. As if reading my thoughts he sat down in an arm-chair, crossed his legs comfortably, and said ‘I’ll tell you what you would do with it, if you like. You would pay the fees of the medical school your sister Belinda has set her heart on. You would send your younger sister Helen to art school, as she wants. You would put enough aside for your thirteen-year-old brother Philip to become a lawyer, if he is still of the same mind when he grows up. You could employ more labour here, instead of working yourself into an early grave feeding, clothing, and paying school fees for your family.’
I suppose I should have been prepared for him to be thorough, but I felt a surge of anger that he should have pried so very intimately into my affairs. However, since the time when an angry retort had cost me the sale of a yearling who broke his leg the following week, I had learned to keep my tongue still whatever the provocation.
‘I also have had two girls and a boy to educate,’ he said. ‘I know what it is costing you. My elder daughter is at university, and the twin boy and girl have recently left school.’
When I again said nothing, he continued, ‘You were born in England, and were brought to Australia when you were a child. Your father, Howard Roke, was a barrister, a good one. He and your mother were drowned together in a sailing accident when you were eighteen. Since then you have supported yourself and your sisters and brother by horse dealing and breeding. I understand that you had intended to follow your father into the law, but instead used the money he left to set up business here, in what had been your holiday house. You have done well at it. The horses you sell have a reputation for being well broken in and beautifully mannered. You are thorough, and you are respected.’
He looked up at me, smiling. I stood stiffly. I could see there was still more to come.
He said ‘Your headmaster at Geelong says you had a brain and are wasting it. Your bank manager says you spend little on yourself. Your doctor says you haven’t had a holiday since you settled here nine years ago except for a month you spent in hospital once with a broken leg. Your pastor says you never go to church, and he takes a poor view of it.’ He drank slowly.
Many doors, it seemed, were open to determined earls.
‘And finally,’ he added, with a lop-sided smile, ‘the bar keeper of the Golden Platypus in Perlooma says he’d trust you with his sister, in spite of your good looks.’
‘And what were your conclusions, after all that?’ I asked, my resentment a little better under control.
‘That you are a dull, laborious prig,’ he said pleasantly.
I relaxed at that, and laughed, and sat down.
‘Quite right,’ I agreed.
‘On the other hand, everyone says you do keep on with something once you start it, and you are used to hard physical work. You know so much about horses that you could do a stable lad’s job with your eyes shut standing on your head.’
‘The whole idea is screwy,’ I said, sighing. ‘It wouldn’t work, not with me, or Arthur Simmons, or anybody. It just isn’t feasible. There are hundreds of training stables in Britain, aren’t there? You could live in them for months and hear nothing, while the dopers got strenuously to work all around you.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. There are surprisingly few dishonest lads, far fewer than you or most people would imagine. A lad known to be corruptible would attract all sorts of crooks like an unguarded goldmine. All our man would have to do would be to make sure that the word was well spread that he was open to offers. He’d get them, no doubt of it.’
‘But would he get the ones you want? I very much doubt it.’
‘To me it seems a good enough chance to be worth taking. Frankly, any chance is worth taking, the way things are. We have tried everything else. And we have failed. We have failed in spite of exhaustive questioning of everyone connected with the affected horses. The police say they cannot help us. As we cannot analyse the drug being used, we can give them nothing to work on. We employed a firm of private investigators. They got nowhere at all. Direct action has achieved absolutely nothing. Indirect action cannot achieve less. I am willing to gamble twenty thousand pounds that with you it can achieve more. Will you do it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and cursed my weakness. I should have said, ‘No, certainly not.’
He pounced on it, leaning forward and talking more rapidly, every word full of passionate conviction. ‘Can I make you understand how concerned my colleagues and I are over these undetectable cases of doping? I own several racehorses – mostly steeplechasers – and my family for generations have been lovers and supporters of racing… The health of the sport means more to me, and people like me, than I can possibly say… and for the second time in three years it is being seriously threatened. During the last big wave of doping there were satirical jokes in the papers and on television, and we simply cannot afford to have it happen again. So far we have been able to stifle comment because the cases are still fairly widely spaced – it is well over a year since the first – and if anyone enquires we merely report that the tests were negative. But we must identify this new dope before there is a widespread increase in its use. Otherwise it will become a worse menace to racing than anything which has happened before. If dozens of undetectably doped winners start turning up, public faith will be destroyed altogether, and steeplechasing will suffer damage which it will take years to recover from, if it ever does. There is much more at stake than a pleasant pastime. Racing is an industry employing thousands of people… and not the least of them are stud owners like you. The collapse of public support would mean a great deal of hardship.
‘You may think that I have offered you an extraordinarily large sum of money to come over and see if you can help us, but I am a rich man, and, believe me, the continuance of racing is worth a great deal more than that to me. My horses won nearly that amount in prize money last season, and if it can buy a chance of wiping out this threat I will spend it gladly.’
‘You are much more vehement today,’ I said slowly, ‘than you were yesterday.’
He sat back. ‘Yesterday I didn’t need to convince you. But I felt just the same.’
‘There must be someone in England who can dig out the information you want,’ I protested. ‘People who know the ins and outs of your racing. I know nothing at all. I left your country when I was nine. I’d be useless. It’s impossible.’
That’s better, I approved myself. That’s much firmer.
He looked down at his glass, and spoke as if with reluctance. ‘Well… we did approach someone in England… A racing journalist, actually. Very good nose for news; very discreet, too; we thought he was just the chap. Unfortunately he dug away without success for some weeks. And then he was killed in a car crash, poor fellow.’
‘Why not try someone else?’ I persisted.
‘It was only in June that he died, during steeple-chasing’s summer recess. The new season started in August and it was not until after that that we thought of the stable lad idea, with all its difficulties.’
‘Try a farmer’s son,’ I suggested. ‘Country accent, knowledge of horses… the lot.’
He shook his head. ‘England is too small. Send a fanner’s son to walk a horse round the parade ring at the races, and what he was doing would soon be no secret. Too many people would recognise him, and ask questions.’
‘A farm worker’s son, then, with a high I.Q.’
‘Do we hold an exam?’ he said sourly.
There was a pause, and he looked up from his glass. His face was solemn, almost severe.
‘Well?’ he said.
I meant to s
ay ‘No’, firmly. What I actually said was again T don’t know.’
‘What can I say to persuade you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know tomorrow.’
‘Very well.’ He stood up, declined my offer of a meal, and went away as he had come, the strength of his personality flowing out of him like heat. The house felt empty when I went back from seeing him off.
The full moon blazed in the black sky, and through a gap in the hills behind me Mount Kosciusko distantly stretched its blunt snow-capped summit into the light. I sat on a rock high up on the mountain, looking down on my home.
There lay the lagoon, the big pasture paddocks stretching away to the bush, the tidy white-railed small paddocks near the house, the silvery roof of the foaling boxes, the solid bulk of the stable block, the bunk-house, the long low graceful shape of the dwelling house with a glitter of moonlight in the big window at the end.
There lay my prison.
It hadn’t been bad at first. There were no relations to take care of us, and I had found it satisfying to disappoint the people who said I couldn’t earn enough to keep three small children, Belinda and Helen and Philip, with me. I liked horses, I always had, and from the beginning the business went fairly well. We all ate, anyway, and I even convinced myself that the law was not really my vocation after all.
My parents had planned to send Belinda and Helen to Frensham, and when the time came, they went. I dare say I could have found a cheaper school, but I had to try to give them what I had had… and that was why Philip was away at Geelong. The business had grown progressively, but so had the school fees and the mens’ wages and the maintenance costs. I was caught in a sort of upward spiral, and too much depended on my being able to keep on going. The leg I had broken in a steeplechase when I was twenty-two had caused the worst financial crisis of the whole nine years: and I had had no choice but to give up doing anything so risky.
I didn’t grudge the unending labour. I was very fond of my sisters and brother. I had no regrets at all that I had done what I had. But the feeling that I had built a prosperous trap for myself had slowly eaten away the earlier contentment I had found in providing for them.
In another eight or ten years they would all be grown, educated and married, and my job would be done. In another ten years I would be thirty-seven. Perhaps I too would be married by then, and have some children of my own, and send them to Frensham and Geelong… For more than four years I had done my best to stifle a longing to escape. It was easier when they were at home in the holidays, with the house ringing with their noise and Philip’s carpentry all over the place and the girls’ frillies hanging to dry in the bathroom. In the summer we rode or swam in the lagoon (the lake, as my English parents called it) and in the winter we ski-ed on the mountains. They were very good company and never took anything they had for granted. Nor, now that they were growing up, did they seem to be suffering from any form of teenage rebellions. They were, in fact, thoroughly rewarding.
It usually hit me about a week after they had gone back to school, this fierce aching desperation to be free. Free for a good long while: to go further than the round of horse sales, further than the occasional quick trip to Sidney or Melbourne or Cooma.
To have something else to remember but the procession of profitable days, something else to see besides the beauty with which I was surrounded. I had been so busy stuffing worms down my fellow nestlings’ throats that I had never stretched my wings.
Telling myself that these thoughts were useless, that they were self-pity, that my unhappiness was unreasonable, did no good at all. I continued at night to sink into head-holding miseries of depression, and kept these moods out of my days – and my balance sheets – only by working to my limit.
When Lord October came the children had been back at school for eleven days, and I was sleeping badly. That may be why I was sitting on a mountain side at four o’clock in the morning trying to decide whether or not to take a peculiar job as a stable lad on the other side of the world. The door of the cage had been opened for me, all right. But the tit-bit that had been dangled to tempt me out seemed suspiciously large.
Twenty thousand English pounds… A great deal of money. But then he couldn’t know of my restless state of mind, and he might think that a smaller sum would make no impression. (What, I wondered, had he been prepared to pay Arthur?)
On the other hand, there was the racing journalist who had died in a car crash… If October or his colleagues had the slightest doubt it was an accident, that too would explain the size of his offer, as conscience money. Throughout my youth, owing to my father’s profession, I had learned a good deal about crime and criminals, and I knew too much to dismiss the idea of an organised accident as fantastic nonsense.
I had inherited my father’s bent for orderliness and truth and had grown up appreciating the logic of his mind, though I had often thought him too ruthless with innocent witnesses in court. My own view had always been that justice should be done and that my father did the world no good by getting the guilty acquitted. I would never make a barrister, he said, if I thought like that. I’d better be a policeman, instead.
England, I thought. Twenty thousand pounds. Detection. To be honest, the urgency with which October viewed the situation had not infected me. English racing was on the other side of the world. I knew no one engaged in it. I cared frankly little whether it had a good or a bad reputation. If I went it would be no altruistic crusade: I would be going only because the adventure appealed to me, because it looked amusing and a challenge, because it beckoned me like a siren to fling responsibility to the wind and cut the self-imposed shackles off my wilting spirit.
Common sense said that the whole idea was crazy, that the Earl of October was an irresponsible nut, that I hadn’t any right to leave my family to fend for themselves while I went gallivanting round the world, and that the only possible course open to me was to stay where I was, and learn to be content.
Common sense lost.
Chapter 2
Nine days later I flew to England in a Boeing 707.
I slept soundly for most of the thirty-six hours from Sydney to Darwin, from Darwin to Singapore, Rangoon and Calcutta, from Calcutta to Karachi and Damascus, and from Damascus to Dusseldorf and London Airport.
Behind me I left a crowded week into which I had packed months of paper-work and a host of practical arrangements. Part of the difficulty was that I didn’t know how long I would be away, but I reckoned that if I hadn’t done the job in six months I wouldn’t be able to do it at all, and made that a basis for my plans.
The head stud-groom was to have full charge of the training and sale of the horses already on the place, but not to buy or breed any more. A firm of contractors agreed to see to the general maintenance of the land and buildings. The woman currently cooking for the lads who lived in the bunk-house assured me that she would look after the family when they came back for the long Christmas summer holiday from December to February.
I arranged with the bank manager that I should send post-dated cheques for the next term’s school fees and for the fodder and tack for the horses, and I wrote a pile for the head groom to cash one at a time for the men’s food and wages. October assured me that ‘my fee’ would be transferred to my account without delay.
‘If I don’t succeed, you shall have your money back, less what it has cost me to be away,’ I told him.
He shook his head, but I insisted; and in the end we compromised. I was to have ten thousand outright, and the other half if my mission were successful.
I took October to my solicitors and had the rather unusual appointment shaped into a dryly-worded legal contract, to which, with a wry smile, he put his signature alongside mine.
His amusement, however, disappeared abruptly when, as we left, I asked him to insure my life.
‘I don’t think I can,’ he said, frowning.
‘Because I would be… uninsurable?’ I asked.
/> He didn’t answer.
‘I have signed a contract,’ I pointed out. ‘Do you think I did it with my eyes shut?’
‘It was your idea.’ He looked troubled. ‘I won’t hold you to it.’
‘What really happened to the journalist?’ I asked.
He shook his head and didn’t meet my eyes. ‘I don’t know. It looked like an accident. It almost certainly was an accident. He went off the road at night on a bend on the Yorkshire moors. The car caught fire as it rolled down into the valley. He hadn’t a hope. He was a nice chap…’
‘It won’t deter me if you have any reason for thinking it was not an accident,’ I said seriously, ‘but you must be frank. If it was not an accident, he must have made a lot of progress… he must have found out something pretty vital… it would be important to me to know where he had gone and what he had been doing during the days before he died.’
‘Did you think about all this before you agreed to accept my proposition?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He smiled as if a load had been lifted from him. ‘By God, Mr Roke, the more I see of you the more thankful I am I stopped for lunch in Perlooma and went to look for Arthur Simmons. Well… Tommy Stapleton – the journalist – was a good driver, but I suppose accidents can happen to anyone. It was a Sunday early in June. Monday, really. He died about two o’clock at night. A local man said the road was normal in appearance at one-thirty, and at two-thirty a couple going home from a party saw the broken railings on the bend and stopped to look. The car was still smouldering: they could see the red glow of it in the valley, and they drove on into the nearest town to report it.
‘The police think Stapleton went to sleep at the wheel. Easy enough to do. But they couldn’t find out where he had been between leaving the house of some friends at five o’clock, and arriving on the Yorkshire moors. The journey would have taken him only about an hour, which left nine hours unaccounted for. No one ever came forward to say he’d spent the evening with them, though the story was in most of the papers. I believe it was suggested he could have been with another man’s wife… someone who had a good reason for keeping quiet. Anyway, the whole thing was treated as a straightforward accident.
