He shrugged. ‘What is important to you is not how I would do it, but how to prevent me from doing it. And that, of course, is comparatively simple.’
‘Just run the horses to your instructions?’ I suggested neutrally. ‘Just lose to order?’
A spasm of renewed anger twisted the chubby features and the gun came six inches off his knee. The hand holding it relaxed slowly, and he put it down again.
‘I am not’, he said heavily, ‘a petty crook.’
But you do, I thought, rise to an insult, even to one that was not intended, and one day, if the game went on long enough, that could give me an advantage.
‘I apologize,’ I said without sarcasm. ‘But those rubber masks are not top level.’
He glanced up in irritation at the two figures standing behind me. ‘The masks are their own choice. They feel safer if they cannot be recognized.’
Like highwaymen, I thought: who swung in the end.
‘You may run your horses as you like. You are free to choose entirely … save in one special thing.’
I made no comment. He shrugged, and went on.
‘You will employ someone who I will send you.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ He stared at me unwinkingly. ‘You will employ this person. If you do not, I will destroy the stable.’
‘That’s lunacy,’ I insisted. ‘It’s pointless.’
‘No, it is not,’ he said. ‘Furthermore, you will tell no one that you are being forced to employ this person. You will assert that it is your own wish. You will particularly not complain to the police, either about tonight, or about anything else which may happen. Should you act in any way to discredit this person, or to get him evicted from your stables, your whole business will be destroyed.’ He paused. ‘Do you understand? If you act in any way against this person, your father will have nothing to return to, when he leaves the hospital.’
After a short, intense silence, I asked, ‘In what capacity do you want this person to work for me?’
He answered with care. ‘He will ride the horses,’ he said. ‘He is a jockey.’
I could feel the twitch round my eyes. He saw it, too. The first time he had really reached me.
It was out of the question. He would not need to tell me every time he wanted a race lost. He had simply to tell this man.
‘We don’t need a jockey,’ I said. ‘We already have Tommy Hoylake.’
‘Your new jockey will gradually take his place.’
Tommy Hoylake was the second best jockey in Britain and among the top dozen in the world. No one could take his place.
‘The owners wouldn’t agree,’ I said.
‘You will persuade them.’
‘Impossible.’
‘The future existence of your stable depends on it.’
There was another longish pause. One of the rubber-faces shifted on his feet and sighed as if from boredom, but the fat man seemed to be in no hurry. Perhaps he understood very well that I was getting colder and more uncomfortable minute by minute. I would have asked him to untie my hands if I hadn’t been sure he would count himself one up when he refused.
Finally I said, ‘Equipped with your jockey, the stable would have no future existence anyway.’
He shrugged. ‘It may suffer a little, perhaps, but it will survive.’
‘It is unacceptable,’ I said.
He blinked. His hand moved the gun gently to and fro across his well-filled trouser leg.
He said, ‘I see that you do not entirely understand the position. I told you that you could leave here upon certain conditions.’ His flat tone made the insane sound reasonable. ‘They are, that you employ a certain jockey, and that you do not seek aid from anyone, including the police. Should you break either of these agreements the stable will be destroyed. But …’ He spoke more slowly, and with emphasis, ‘… If you do not agree to these conditions in the first place, you will not be freed.’
I said nothing.
‘Do you understand?’
I sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘Not a petty crook, I think you said.’
His nostrils flared. ‘I am a manipulator.’
‘And a murderer.’
‘I never murder unless the victim insists.’
I stared at him. He was laughing inside at his own jolly joke, the fun creeping out in little twitches to his lips and tiny snorts of breath.
This victim, I supposed, was not going to insist. He was welcome to his amusement.
I moved my shoulders slightly, trying to ease them. He watched attentively and offered nothing.
‘Who then’, I said, ‘is this jockey?’
He hesitated.
‘He is eighteen,’ he said.
‘Eighteen …’
He nodded. ‘You will give him the good horses to ride. He will ride Archangel in the Derby.’
Impossible. Totally impossible. I looked at the gun lying so quiet on the expensive tailoring. I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
When he next spoke there was the satisfaction of victory in his voice alongside the careful non-accent.
‘He will arrive at the stable tomorrow. You will hire him. He has not yet much experience in races. You will see he gets it.’
An inexperienced rider on Archangel … ludicrous. So ludicrous, in fact, that he had used abduction and the threat of murder to make it clear he meant it seriously.
‘His name is Alessandro Rivera,’ he said.
After an interval for consideration, he added the rest of it.
‘He is my son.’
Chapter Two
When I next woke up I was lying face down on the bare floor of the oak-panelled room in Rowley Lodge. Too many bare boards everywhere. Not my night.
Facts oozed back gradually. I felt woolly, cold, semi-conscious, anaesthetized …
Anaesthetized.
For the return journey they had had the courtesy not to hit my head. The fat man had nodded to the American rubber-face, but instead of flourishing the truncheon he had given me a sort of quick pricking thump in the upper arm. After that we had waited around for about a quarter of an hour during which no one said anything at all, and then quite suddenly I had lost consciousness. I remembered not a flicker of the journey home.
Creaking and groaning I tested all articulated parts. Everything present, correct, and in working order. More or less, that is, because having clanked to my feet it became advisable to sit down again in the chair by the desk. I put my elbows on the desk and my head in my hands, and let time pass.
Outside, the beginnings of a damp dawn were turning the sky to grey flannel. There was ice round the edges of the windows, where condensed warm air had frozen solid. The cold went through to my bones.
In the brain department things were just as chilly. I remembered all too clearly that Alessandro Rivera was that day to make his presence felt. Perhaps he would take after his father, I thought tiredly, and would be so overweight that the whole dilemma would fold its horns and quietly steal away. On the other hand, if not, why should his father use a sledgehammer to crack a peanut? Why not simply apprentice his son in the normal way? Because he wasn’t normal, because his son wouldn’t be a normal apprentice, and because no normal apprentice would expect to start his career on a Derby favourite.
I wondered how my father would now be reacting, had he not been slung up in traction with a complicated fracture of tibia and fibula. He would not, for certain, be feeling as battered as I was, because he would, with supreme dignity, have gone quietly. But he would none the less have also been facing the same vital questions: which were, firstly, did the fat man seriously intend to destroy the stable if his son did not get the job, and secondly, how could he do it.
And the answer to both was a king-sized blank.
It wasn’t my stable to risk. They were not my six million pounds’ worth of horses. They were not my livelihood, nor my life’s work.
I could not ask
my father to decide for himself: he was not well enough to be told, let alone to reason out the pros and cons.
I could not now transfer the stable to anyone else, because passing this situation to a stranger would be like handing him a grenade with the pin out.
I was already due back at my own job and was late for my next assignment, and I had only stop-gapped at the stable at all because my father’s capable assistant, who had been driving the Rolls when the lorry jackknifed into it, was now lying in the same hospital in a coma.
All of which added up to a fair-sized problem. But then problems, I reflected ironically, were my business. The problems of sick business were my business.
Nothing at that moment looked sicker than my prospects at Rowley Lodge.
Shivering violently, I removed myself bit by bit from the desk and chair, went out to the kitchen, and made myself some coffee. Drank it. Moderate improvement only.
Inched upstairs to the bathroom. Scraped off the night’s whiskers and dispassionately observed the dried blood down one cheek. Washed it off. Gun-barrel graze, dry and already healing.
Outside, through the leafless trees, I could see the lights of the traffic thundering as usual up and down Bury Road. These drivers in their warm moving boxes, they were in another world altogether, a world where abduction and extortion were something that only happened to others. Incredible to think that I had in fact joined the others.
Wincing from an all-over feeling of soreness, I looked at my smudge-eyed reflection and wondered how long I would go on doing what the fat man had told me to. Saplings who bent before the storm lived to grow into oaks.
Long live oaks.
I swallowed some aspirins, stopped shivering, tried to marshal a bit more sense into my shaky wits, and struggled into jodhpurs, boots, two more pullovers, and a windproof jacket. Whatever had happened that night, or whatever might happen in the future, there were still those eighty-five six million quids’ worth downstairs waiting to be seen to.
They were housed in a yard that had been an inspiration of spacious design when it was built in 1870 and which still, a hundred-plus years later, worked as an effective unit. Originally there had been two blocks facing each other, each block consisting of three bays, and each bay being made up to ten boxes. Across the far end, forming a wall joining the two blocks, were a large feed-store room, a pair of double gates, and an equally large tack room. The gates had originally led into a field, but early on in his career, when success struck him, my father had built on two more bays, which formed another small enclosed yard of twenty-five boxes. More double gates opened from these, now, into a small railed paddock.
Four final boxes had been built facing towards Bury Road, on to the outside of the short west wall at the end of the north block. It was in the furthest of these four boxes that a full-blown disaster had just been discovered.
My appearance through the door which led directly from the house to the yard galvanized the group which had been clustered round the outside boxes into returning into the main yard and advancing in ragged but purposeful formation. I could see I was not going to like their news. Waited in irritation to hear it. Crises, on that particular morning, were far from welcome.
‘It’s Moonrock, sir,’ said one of the lads anxiously. ‘Got cast in his box, and broke his leg.’
‘All right,’ I said abruptly. ‘Get back to your own horses, then. It’s nearly time to pull out.’
‘Yessir,’ they said, and scattered reluctantly round the yard to their charges, looking back over their shoulders.
‘Damn and bloody hell,’ I said aloud, but I can’t say it did much good. Moonrock was my father’s hack, a pensioned-off star-class steeplechaser of which he was uncharacteristically fond. The least valuable inmate of the yard in many terms, but the one he would be most upset to lose. The others were also insured. No one, though, could insure against painful emotion.
I plodded round to the box. The elderly lad who looked after him was standing at the door with the light from inside falling across the deep worried wrinkles in his tortoise skin and turning them to crevasses. He looked round towards me at my step. The crevasses shifted and changed like a kaleidoscope.
‘Ain’t no good, sir. He’s broke his hock.’
Nodding, and wishing I hadn’t, I reached the door and went in. The old horse was standing up, tied in his usual place by his head-collar. At first sight there was nothing wrong with him: he turned his head towards me and pricked his ears, his liquid black eyes showing nothing but his customary curiosity. Five years in headline limelight had given him the sort of presence which only intelligent highly successful horses seem to develop: a sort of consciousness of their own greatness. He knew more about life and about racing than any of the golden youngsters round in the main yard. He was fifteen years old and had been a friend of my father’s for five.
The hind leg on his near side, towards me, was perfect. He bore his weight on it. The off-hind looked slightly tucked up.
He had been sweating: there were great dark patches on his neck and flanks; but he looked calm enough at that moment. Pieces of straw were caught in his coat, which was unusually dusty.
Soothing him with her hand, and talking to him in a common-sense voice, was my father’s head stable hand, Etty Craig. She looked up at me with regret on her pleasant weather-beaten face.
‘I’ve sent for the vet, Mr Neil.’
‘Of all damn things,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Poor old fellow. You’d think he’d know better, after all these years.’
I made a sympathetic noise, went in and fondled the moist black muzzle, and took as good a look at his hind leg as I could without moving him. There was absolutely no doubt: the hock joint was out of shape.
Horses occasionally rolled around on their backs in the straw in their boxes. Sometimes they rolled over with too little room and wedged their legs against the wall, then thrashed around to get free. Most injuries from getting cast were grazes and strains, but it was possible for a horse to twist or lash out with a leg strongly enough to break it. Incredibly bad luck when it happened, which luckily wasn’t often.
‘He was still lying down when George came in to muck him out,’ Etty said. ‘He got some of the lads to come and pull the old fellow into the centre of the box. He was a bit slow, George says, standing up. And then of course they could see he couldn’t walk.’
‘Bloody shame,’ George said, nodding in agreement.
I sighed. ‘Nothing we can do, Etty.’
‘No, Mr Neil.’
She called me Mr Neil religiously during working hours, though I’d been plain Neil to her in my childhood. Better for discipline in the yard, she said to me once, and on matters of discipline I would never contradict her. There had been quite a stir in Newmarket when my father had promoted her to head lad, but as he had explained to her at the time, she was loyal, she was knowledgeable, she would stand no nonsense from anyone, she deserved it from seniority alone, and had she been a man the job would have been hers automatically. He had decided, as he was a just and logical person, that her sex was immaterial. She became the only female head lad in Newmarket, where girl lads were rare anyway, and the stable had flourished through all the six years of her reign.
I remembered the days when her parents used to turn up at the stables and accuse my father of ruining her life. I had been about ten when she first came to the yard, and she was nineteen and had been privately educated at an expensive boarding school. Her parents with increasing bitterness had arrived and complained that the stable was spoiling her chances of a nice suitable marriage; but Etty had never wanted marriage. If she had ever experimented with sex she had not made a public mess of it, and I thought it likely that she had found the whole process uninteresting. She seemed to like males well enough, but she treated them as she did her horses, with brisk friendliness, immense understanding and cool unsentimentality.
Since my father’s accident she had to all intents been in complete char
ge. The fact that I had been granted a temporary licence to hold the fort made mine the official say-so, but both Etty and I knew I would be lost without her.
It occurred to me, as I watched her capable hands moving quietly across Moonrock’s bay hide, that the fat man might find me a pushover, but as an apprentice his son Alessandro was going to run into considerable difficulties with Miss Henrietta Craig.
‘You better go out with the string, Etty,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay and wait for the vet.’
‘Right,’ she said, and I guessed she had been on the point of suggesting it herself. As a distribution of labour it was only sense, as the horses were well along in their preparation for the coming racing season, and she knew better than I what each should be doing.
She beckoned to George to come and hold Moonrock’s head-collar and keep him soothed. To me she said, stepping out of the box, ‘What about this frost? It seems to me it may be thawing.’
‘Take the horses over to Warren Hill and use your own judgement about whether to canter.’
She nodded. ‘Right.’ She looked back at Moonrock and a momentary softness twisted her mouth. ‘Mr Griffon will be sorry.’
‘I won’t tell him yet.’
‘No.’ She gave me a small businesslike smile and then walked off into the yard, a short neat figure, hardy and competent.
Moonrock would be quiet enough with George. I followed Etty back into the main yard and watched the horses pull out: thirty-three of them in the first lot. The lads led their charges out of the boxes, jumped up into the saddles, and rode away down the yard, through the first double gates, across the lower yard, and out through the far gates into the collecting paddock beyond. The sky lightened moment by moment and I thought Etty was probably right about the thaw.
After ten minutes or so, when she had sorted them out as she wanted them, the horses moved away out beyond the paddock, through the trees and the boundary fence and straight out on to the Heath.
Before the last of them had gone there was a rushing scrunch in the drive behind me and the vet halted his dusty Land Rover with a spray of gravel. Leaping out with his bag he said breathlessly, ‘Every bloody horse on the Heath this morning has got colic or ingrowing toenails … You must be Neil Griffon … sorry about your father … Etty says it’s old Moonrock … still in the same box?’ Without drawing breath he turned on his heel and strode along the outside boxes. Young, chubby, purposeful, he was not the vet I had expected. The man I knew was an older version, slower, twinkly, just as chubby, and given to rubbing his jaw while he thought things over.