Outside Chance

by Lyndon Stacey

  The Mitsubishi’s wheels had barely stopped turning when the door of the lads’ cottage opened and he could see Mikey looking out.

  ‘You were watching for me.’ Ben crunched across the frosty gravel to meet him. The afternoon’s clouds had disappeared and it was a clear, starlit night.

  ‘Actually there’s a buzzer that goes off when the gate’s opened at night. Ricey says it’s better than having it locked because people will always find a way in if they’re determined, and this way we know they’re coming.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Ben agreed. ‘Where do you want to talk, in or out?’

  ‘You can come in. There’s only me and Davy here. They kept Les in for the night ’cos he was still wheezing. Ricey and Bess are over at the house and Caterpillar’s on holiday.’

  ‘Caterpillar?’ Ben queried, momentarily distracted. He followed Mikey into the kitchen; a blue-and-white-tiled room with pine units, a large pine table, and a state of tolerable tidiness that Ben suspected was entirely due to Bess’s presence in the cottage.

  ‘Yeah, he’s new. You haven’t met him yet. We call him Caterpillar ’cos he’s got this huge moustache. Ricey says it’s a relic from the seventies.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You’re not making coffee are you? I could murder a cup. It was a long drive. Talking of which …?’

  ‘Yeah … look, I’m really not supposed to say anything.’ Mikey busied himself with filling the kettle and finding mugs, his golden blond fringe flopping into his eyes as it habitually did. At five foot seven he was fully six inches shorter than Ben, taking after his mother rather than the Copperfield side of the family. He had inherited his colouring from her, too, and had dark-lashed, brilliant-blue eyes that had the girls in raptures; the shame of it was that he was far too shy to appreciate his luck. Ben was a true Copperfield, tall and fairly lean, with mid-brown hair – at present short and a little spiky – that curled if it was allowed to grow, and eyes that couldn’t make up their mind if they were green or grey.

  ‘But you already have said something. You can’t just expect me to forget it,’ Ben pointed out reasonably. ‘Come on, you know you can trust me. I won’t tell anyone if it would get you into trouble.’

  ‘I know, but … ’

  ‘Mikey. I’ve just driven over a hundred miles to get here because I was worried about you. I’m not about to turn round and go away without finding out what’s going on. Why all the lights everywhere? I could see the main house was all lit up as I came over the hill. And why are Ian and Bess over there now? You can’t tell me that’s normal at midnight. You’ve been to hospital; Les is still there. So who were these men you were talking about? Come on. You’re not being very fair. Something happened on the way home, didn’t it? Was there an accident? Has one of the horses been hurt? What?’

  ‘Not hurt, exactly,’ Mikey responded reluctantly.

  ‘Then what?’ Ben was trying very hard to keep his frustration under control.

  Mikey was stirring the coffee, his lower lip caught between his teeth and his brow creased with the agony of his indecision.

  Ben tried again. ‘Okay, if not hurt, then … did you lose one somehow?’ He read Mikey’s stricken expression. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? No! My God, you’ve had one stolen! Which one? Not Cajun King?’

  Mikey didn’t try to deny it. ‘Yes. But you mustn’t tell anyone. The Guvnor would kill me.’

  ‘No, of course I won’t.’ Ben’s mind was buzzing with this new development. Cajun King: strong ante-post favourite for the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Castle Ridge’s great hope for National Hunt glory. Stolen. Or kidnapped, perhaps? He instantly thought of Shergar. ‘Where and how did they do it?’ he asked.

  ‘It was a checkpoint. They pretended to be immigration officials.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘They had guns. They threatened Ricey and the others, then tied them up.’ Mikey handed Ben a mug of exceedingly milky coffee and they both sat down at the table.

  ‘So where were you? In the back?’

  ‘Yeah, I was in the luton, asleep. Nigel – our other driver – has got a bed up there, over the cab. I went up there after racing and I’d been there ever since. I didn’t even wake up when we set off for home.’

  That didn’t surprise Ben. Mikey had a remarkable propensity for taking catnaps as and when he felt like it, regardless of where he was or what was going on.

  ‘So where was this?’

  ‘About twenty minutes after we’d left the racecourse, in a lay-by on the side of a dual carriageway, Ricey says.’

  ‘But … you’d have thought someone would’ve seen what was going on and called the police.’

  ‘Ricey says it was all over in a minute or two, and then they drove the box away. They took it to some private land where they could transfer the horse to another lorry.’

  ‘And you slept through it all.’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know anything about it until they drove down this bumpy track and I woke up.’ Now he’d started, Mikey seemed eager to tell the whole story. ‘We stopped, and then I could hear these men’s voices calling to one another, and someone opened the back. I knew it wasn’t Ricey ’cos he always thumps on the roof of the cab first, when we stop, to wake me up – and anyway, their voices sounded … different. Not from round here.’

  ‘Well, you weren’t “round here” when it happened,’ Ben reminded him. ‘But you mean they had some kind of accent?’ He knew it wasn’t any earthly good asking Mikey what kind of accent it had been. The boy was hopeless in that department. He could recognise an accent again once he’d heard it, but he couldn’t tell South African from Geordie, or Indian from Scots, and if he didn’t know he had a tendency to guess, to try and please you.

  ‘Yeah. Could have been Welsh, maybe.’

  ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘Well, I could hear these men in with the horses, so I stayed hidden.’ Mikey looked down at his coffee, shamefaced.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ Ben said, adding without irony, ‘Best thing to do.’

  Mikey looked unhappy. ‘Davy says I should have done something.’

  ‘Well, Davy’s a moron,’ Ben observed. ‘What the hell could you have done on your own? Nothing; and there was no point at all in getting yourself hurt, or tied up like the others. You did the right thing.’

  ‘Is that what you’d have done?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I thought it was the best thing,’ Mikey stated, growing in confidence now that Ben had approved his actions.

  ‘So what happened then? Could you hear what they were saying?’

  ‘Not really. There were two of them in the back of the lorry but they didn’t say a lot, really. Just talking to the horses as they got them out. And then the other lorry turned up.’

  ‘They got all the horses out?’

  ‘Yes. They took them all out of the box and let them go. I heard them chasing the others away.’

  ‘Playing for time, I suppose,’ Ben said. ‘So they transferred Cajun King to the other lorry and drove off. What then? Did you call the police?’

  ‘Well, I was going to, but as soon as I got down from the luton I found Ricey and the others all tied up, so I got some scissors from the grooming kit and cut them free. Then we found a note stuck to the dashboard. It said that nobody was to call the police or King would be killed.’

  ‘And what did Ian – er, Ricey do then?’

  ‘He said he was going to call the Guvnor but we were in a valley and he couldn’t get a signal on his mobile, so we decided to try and catch the horses first.’

  ‘And you found them all right?’

  Mikey nodded. ‘One of them was hanging round the lorry and the other two weren’t far away.’

  ‘And then you came home.’

  ‘Well, we were going to, but on the way Les started to have an asthma attack, so we had to take him to hospital.’

  ‘So when did you ring Truman?’

  ‘When we got back to
the main road. Ricey told him …’ Hearing the sound of the outside door opening, Mikey broke off and looked anxiously at Ben.

  Before Ben could say anything voices were heard, one of which announced, ‘They’re in here,’ and then the kitchen door swung inwards to reveal a thin-faced, mousey-haired youngster, full of self-importance. ‘Mikey and his journalist brother. I told you.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Davy. You can go now. We’ll call you if we need you.’ The second speaker was a diminutive man in his late fifties, with thinning grey hair and pronounced crow’s feet at the corners of his shrewd grey eyes.

  Ian Rice – Ricey – was Castle Ridge’s travelling head lad, responsible for the well-being of the horses when they left the yard to go racing. Ben had met him a couple of times before, on visits to see Mikey, and liked him a lot. He was quiet – both with animals and people – efficient, and very patient with Mikey.

  ‘Hello, Ian.’ Ben could see two much bulkier figures looming behind him, and it only took a glance to recognise them as policemen, even though they wore plain clothes. His work had brought him into contact with the police on numerous occasions and he had developed an unerring eye for members of the constabulary, in whatever guise they chose to appear.

  ‘Ben; the Guvnor – that is, Mr Truman – would like to see you over at the house, if you’ve got a minute,’ Rice told him.

  ‘Is it in the nature of a summons?’

  ‘It is, rather,’ he said apologetically. ‘As I’m sure Mikey’s told you, we’ve got a bit of a crisis on our hands.’

  ‘Yeah, Mikey’s told me, but don’t be too hard on him,’ Ben said, getting to his feet. ‘He didn’t want to tell me. I’m afraid I prised it out of him.’

  ‘I’m not in trouble, am I?’ Mikey glanced from Ben to Rice, and back.

  ‘No, no, you’re not in trouble, Mikey.’ One of the police officers stepped into the room. ‘We just need to ask you a few questions, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll stay with him,’ Rice told Ben quietly, as he moved towards the door.

  In the narrow hall, the second policeman blocked his way. ‘You wouldn’t be thinking of using your mobile phone between here and the house, would you?’ he enquired.

  Ben looked down at the hand that was preventing his forward movement and after a moment it was removed.

  ‘I hadn’t been,’ he said.

  ‘All the same, perhaps I’ll just come with you.’

  Ben sighed. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ He reached into his inside pocket and withdrew the tiny, metal-cased phone. ‘You look after this for me, and I’ll find my own way over. I think I can manage.’

  Following the cinder path that led from the cottage to the main house, Ben thought over what he’d learned, and reflected wryly that it was typical that when the scoop of a lifetime fell into his lap, he should be honour-bound to keep it to himself.

  Castle Ridge House – home of racehorse owner, trainer and self-made millionaire Eddie Truman – was an imposing edifice, built less than five years previously in red brick, with concrete pillars flanking its glossy, white double doors. It sat on a natural plateau, on the site of the far smaller manor house it had replaced, and had everything a rags-to-riches businessman could have wished for; including an indoor swimming pool, garaging for eight cars, an adjoining tennis court, and a conservatory that could have housed a modest bungalow.

  Ben had seen it several times in the daylight and, privately, he thought it vulgar.

  Crossing the pea-shingle drive, he counted six cars drawn up in front of the mock-Georgian façade. None of them were obviously police vehicles but, under the blaze of the halogen lights, Ben could see only one that bore the personalised number-plates with which all Eddie Truman’s cars were fitted.

  A door at the side of the house stood ajar, a thin sliver of light escaping to lay a line down the path; at his approach it opened fully and a feminine figure stood silhouetted in the aperture.

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Good. Come on in. Mr Truman’s waiting for you in the study.’

  Ben stepped into the hall where the speaker was revealed as a pretty female in her late twenties, with big, dark eyes and glossy, shoulder-length, brown hair. Bess Wainwright, one of the two PAs at Castle Ridge, and the one who shared Mikey’s cottage. Ben followed her through the quarry-tiled back hall, along a corridor and across an inner hall to a white panelled door with brass fittings. There, after knocking briefly, she leaned in to announce Ben’s presence before ushering him through.

  There were three men in the room that Ben entered: two who were unknown to him but almost certainly policemen, and one seated at the desk, whom he recognised from newspaper photographs and TV racing coverage as Eddie Truman.

  Even when he was seated you could tell he was a big man, and Ben knew, from the way he dwarfed interviewers, that he must be well over six foot tall. Square shoulders and a square-jawed freckled face added to the impression of bulk, and the fingers that tapped impatiently on the desk were short and spatulate. Hair that had once been bright ginger was fading now that he was in his fifties, greying at the temples and decidedly thin on top, but it was still easy to see why the trainer had picked up the nickname of ‘Red’ Truman.

  ‘Ah, come in, Mr Copperfield. Take a seat.’ Truman’s voice held a rich Yorkshire burr, apparently the one part of his background that he had not tried to hide. ‘Gentlemen, this is Ben Copperfield – Michael’s brother; Ben, this is DI Ford and DS Hancock. Doubtless you already know why they’re here.’

  Ben inclined his head, sat in a buttoned leather wing-chair, and waited, taking in the overstated opulence of his surroundings with an interested glance. Chairs, desk, footstool and window seat were all finished in red leather; all fittings were of burnished bronze, including the fireplace surround; and several art deco maidens held glass lampshades aloft at strategic points in the room. One wall supported shelves of expensive, leather-bound books from floor to ceiling, but none of the spines bore any signs of use. Tassels were very much in favour on cushions, gold velvet curtains and a bell pull, and there was enough mahogany in evidence to have laid waste to a small rainforest. Ben had no doubt that it was real. For someone who had spent a sizeable number of his student days protesting against various environmental crimes, it was a sad sight.

  ‘I’m not going to mince my words, Ben – may I call you that?’ Truman began. ‘I was deeply disturbed to find that you were here and talking to Mikey. I suppose he contacted you and asked you to come – it would be too much to suppose your appearance was a coincidence.’

  ‘Yes, he called me. He was, understandably, very upset, but he didn’t tell me why. It was my decision to come and see him. I was worried.’

  DS Hancock cleared his throat. ‘Mr Copperfield, we understand you’re a journalist. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘What paper do you work for?’

  ‘I’m freelance.’

  ‘May I ask you what you’re working on at the moment?’

  ‘You can ask …’ Hancock’s attitude was putting Ben’s back up.

  ‘Obviously your brother has already told you what’s going on.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re thinking this is the scoop of the century …’

  Hancock had two millimetres of dark hair and the eyes of a cynic. Plain clothes for him were black jeans, a black turtleneck and a tailored black leather jacket. Ben felt that, had he not been a police officer, he would have worn an earring.

  ‘I could more or less name my price,’ he agreed.

  Hancock glared at him, plainly squaring up for a confrontation, but his superior stepped into the breach.

  ‘But you won’t, will you, Mr Copperfield? You’re intelligent enough to understand that this is a delicate situation in which inappropriate publicity could be disastrous, and you have conscience enough to put moral duty before monetary gain.’

  ‘Do I indeed?�
�� Ben regarded the DI through narrowed eyes. ‘That’s pretty analytical. Are you always that quick to form an opinion, or have we met before?’

  ‘Neither. I just remembered a certain journalist called Ben Copperfield who was instrumental in exposing the Goodwood betting scandal a couple of years ago.’ He smiled. ‘That was good work.’

  Somewhere in his forties, Ford could not have been many years older than his colleague, but nature had taken the controlling hand in his hair loss, leaving him with a thick brown fringe circling a completely bald pate. Slightly overweight, he presented an avuncular air, but his rank alone would suggest that there was a sharp mind behind the genial appearance.

  Ben acknowledged the praise with a slight inclination of his head. The Goodwood affair had started out as a simple reporting assignment, but he had caught the whiff of corruption and, anticipating a diversion from what was becoming a fairly monotonous string of jobs, he’d jumped into the investigation with what, in hindsight, could be described as rather foolhardy zeal.

  ‘A journo is a journo, as far as I’m concerned,’ Hancock persisted.

  ‘Oh, I think Ben will toe the line,’ Truman interjected confidently. ‘After all, he wouldn’t want to do anything that might jeopardise Mikey’s career.’

  Ben frowned at the trainer. ‘I’m sure you didn’t intend that to sound like a threat,’ he remarked softly.

  ‘Of course he didn’t,’ Ford cut in. ‘Look, let me propose a deal. For better or worse, Ben already has part of the picture, so I suggest we fill him in on what we know so far. Ben will undertake not to breathe a word of it to any outside party, in return for which we grant him exclusive rights to the story, as and when it’s safe to print it. What do you say?’ He looked hopefully from Ben to Truman.

  Ben nodded, keeping his eagerness hidden. ‘That seems fair.’

  ‘Truman?’

  ‘Well, if you say he’s to be trusted, I’ll go along with that. But if the whole story is splashed over the morning papers tomorrow, I’ll hold you personally accountable,’ Truman promised, the expression on his heavy featured face giving weight to the warning.