‘I won’t forget this,’ he assured me viciously. ‘You’ll regret you meddled with me, I’ll see to that.’
Bobby had succeeded in unloading Graves’s first horse and was leading it across to its stable, while the lad and the driver closed the ramp and bolted it shut.
‘Off you go, then, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘Come back in the daytime and telephone first.’
He gave me a bullish stare and then suddenly went into the same routine as earlier: pursed his mouth, narrowed his eyes and abruptly quietened his rage. I had guessed, the first time, watching him write his cheque without further histrionics, that he had decided he might as well write it because he would tell his bank not to cash it.
It looked very much now as if he were planning something else. The question was, what?
I watched him walk calmly over to the horsebox and wave an impatient hand at the lad and the driver, telling them to get on board. Then he himself climbed clumsily up into the cab after them and slammed the door.
The engine started. The heavy vehicle throbbed, shuddered, and rolled away slowly out of the yard, Graves looking steadfastly ahead as if blinkered.
I detached myself from the stable door and walked across towards Bobby.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Be my guest.’
He looked round. ‘All quiet. Let’s go in. It’s cold.’
‘Mm.’
We walked two steps and I stopped.
‘What is it?’ Bobby asked, turning.
‘Graves,’ I said. ‘He went too meekly.’
‘He couldn’t have done much else.’
‘He could have gone shouting and kicking and uttering last-minute threats.’
‘I don’t know what you’re worrying about. We’ve got his cheque and we’ve got his horses… er, thanks to you.’
His horses.
The breath in my lungs went out in a whoosh, steaming in a vanishing plume against the night sky.
‘Bobby,’ I said, ‘have you any empty boxes?’
‘Yes, there are some in the fillies’ yard.’ He was puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘We might just put Graves’s horses in them, don’t you think?’
‘You mean… he might come back?’ Bobby shook his head. ‘I’d hear him. I heard him before, though I admit that was lucky because we should have been out at a party, but we were too worried about things to go.’
‘Could Graves have known you would be out?’ I asked.
He looked startled. ‘Yes, I suppose he could. The invitation is on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. He came in there last Sunday for a drink. Anyway, I’d hear a horsebox coming back. Couldn’t miss it.’
‘And if it parked at three in the morning on that strip of grass along from your gate, and the horses were led out in rubber boots to deaden the noise of their hooves?’
Bobby looked nonplussed. ‘But he wouldn’t. Not all that. Would he?’
‘He was planning something. It showed.’
‘All right,’ Bobby said. ‘We’ll move them.’
On my way back to fetch the horse I’d been guarding I reflected that Bobby was uncommonly amenable to advice. He usually considered any suggestion from me to be criticism of himself and defensively found sixteen reasons for not doing what I’d mentioned: or at least not until I was well out of sight and wouldn’t know. This evening things were different. Bobby had to be very worried indeed.
We walked Graves’s horses round to Bobby’s second yard behind the main quadrangle and installed them there in two empty boxes, which happened (all to the good, I thought) not to be side by side.
‘Does Graves know his horses by sight?’ I asked Bobby; which was not by any means a stupid question, as many owners didn’t.
‘I don’t know,’ he said dubiously. ‘It’s never come up.’
‘In other words,’ I said, ‘he always knows them because they’re where he expects to see them?’
‘Yes. I should think so. But it’s not certain. He might know them better than I think.’
‘Well… in that case, how about rigging some sort of alarm?’
Bobby didn’t say certainly not, it wasn’t necessary, he said, ‘Where?’
Incredible.
‘On one of the boxes they are normally in,’ I said.
‘Yes. I see. Yes.’ He paused. ‘What sort of alarm? I haven’t any electric gadgets here. If I need any special tight security before a big race I hire a man with a dog.’
I did a quick mental review of his house and its contents. Saucepan lids? Metal trays? Something to make a noise.
‘The bell,’ I said. ‘Your old school bell.’
‘In the study.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll fetch it.’
Bobby’s study contained shelves of tidily arranged mementoes of his blameless early life: cricket caps, silver cups won at school sports, team photographs, a rugger ball… and the hand bell which as a prefect he had rung noisily through his House to send the younger boys to bed. Bobby had been the sort of steadfast team-spirited boy that made the British public school system work: that he had emerged complacent and slightly pompous was probably owing to his many good qualities being manifest to all, including himself.
‘Bring a hammer,’ I said. ‘And some staples if you have any. Nails, if not. And some heavy-duty string.’
‘Right.’
He went away and in due course returned carrying the bell quietly by its clapper in one hand and a tool-box in the other. Between us we installed the bell as near to Bobby’s house as possible and rigged it in such a way that a good tug to the string tied to its handle would send it toppling and jangling. Then we led the string through a long line of staples to the usual home of one of Graves’s horses, and fastened the end of it out of sight to the top of the closed door.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Go into the house. I’ll open this door and you see if you can hear the bell.’
He nodded and went away, and after a fair interval I opened the stable door. The bell fell with a satisfying clamour and Bobby came back saying it would wake the dead. We returned it to its precarious pre-toppling position and with rare accord walked together into the house.
There had been Fieldings and there had been Allardecks in racing further back than anyone could remember: two families with some land and some money and a bitter mutual persisting hatred.
There had been a Fielding and an Allardeck knifing each other for favour with King Charles II when he held court not in London but in Newmarket, thereby making foreign ambassadors travel wearily north-east by coach to present their credentials.
There had been an Allardeck who had wagered three hundred sovereigns on a two-horse race on Queen Anne’s own racecourse on Ascot Heath and lost his money to a Fielding, who had been killed and robbed before he reached home.
There had been a Mr Allardeck in the Regency years who had challenged a Mr Fielding to a cross-country contest over fearsome jumps, the winner to take the other’s horse. Mr Allardeck (who lost) accused Mr Fielding (an easy victor) of taking a cheating short cut, and the dispute went to pistols at dawn, when they each shot carefully at the other and died of their wounds.
There had been a Victorian gentleman rider named Fielding with a wild moustache and a wilder reputation, and an Allardeck who had fallen off, drunk, at the start of the Grand National. Fielding accused Allardeck of being a coward, Allardeck accused Fielding of seducing his (Allardeck’s) sister. Both charges were true: and those two settled their differences by fisticuffs on Newmarket Heath, Fielding half killing the (again) drunk and frightened Allardeck.
By Edwardian times the two families were inextricably locked into inherited hostility and would accuse each other of anything handy. A particularly aggressive Fielding had bought an estate next door to the Allardecks on purpose to irritate, and bitter boundary disputes led to confrontations with shotguns and (more tamely) writs.
Bobby’s great-grandfather burned down Great-grandfather Fielding’s hay-barn (Great-grandfather Fielding havi
ng built it where it most spoiled the Allardecks’ view) only to find his favourite hunter shot dead in its field a week later.
Bobby’s grandfather and Grandfather Fielding had naturally been brought up to hate each other, the feud in their case extending later to bitter professional rivalry, as each (being a second son and not likely to inherit the family estate) had decided to set up as a licensed racehorse trainer. They each bought training stables in Newmarket and paid their lads to spy and report on the other. They cockily crowed when their horses won and seethed when the other’s did, and, if coming first and second in the same race, lodged objections against each other almost as a matter of course.
Holly and I, being brought up in Grandfather Fielding’s tempestuous household, were duly indoctrinated with the premise that all Allardecks were villainous madmen (or worse) who were to be cut dead at all times in Newmarket High Street.
Bobby and I, I dare say, each having been taught from birth to detest the other, might in our turn have come to fists or fire, were it not for my father dying, and Bobby’s father leaving Newmarket with his family and going off into property and commodities. Not that Bobby’s father, Maynard, could bear even the mention of the word Fielding: and the reason he was not speaking to Bobby (as truthfully noted in Intimate Details) was because Bobby Allardeck had dared, despite a promise of disinheritance, to defy his father’s fury and walk up the aisle with Holly Fielding.
When Holly was thirteen her one absolute heroine had been Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. She learned almost the whole play by heart, but Juliet’s part particularly, and became hopelessly romantic about the dead young lovers uniting the warring families of Montague and Capulet. Bobby Allardeck, I reckoned, was her Romeo, and she had been powerfully predisposed to fall in love with him, even if he hadn’t been, as he was, tall, fair-haired and good-looking.
They had met by chance (or did she seek him out?) in London after several years of not seeing each other, and within a month were inseparable. The marriage had succeeded in its secret purpose to the extent that Bobby and I were now almost always polite to each other and that our children, if we had any, could, if they would, be friends.
Bobby and Holly had returned to Newmarket, Bobby hoping to take over as trainer in his by then ailing grandfather’s yard, but the quarrelsome old man, calling his grandson a traitor to the family, had made him pay full market price for the property, and had then died, not leaving him a penny.
Bobby’s current financial troubles were not simple. His house and yard (such small part of it as was free from mortgage) would as a matter of course be held by the bank as security for the extra loans they’d made him for the buying of yearlings. If the bank called in the loans, he and Holly would be left with no home, no livelihood, and an extremely bleak future.
As in many racing houses, a great deal of life went on in the kitchen, which in Holly and Bobby’s case was typically furnished with a long dining table and a good number of comfortable chairs. A friendly room, with a lot of light pine, warmly lit and welcoming. When Bobby and I went in from the yard Holly was whisking eggs in a bowl and frying chopped onions and green peppers in a large pan.
‘Smells good,’ I said.
‘I was starving.’ She poured the eggs over the onions and peppers. ‘We must all be.’
We ate the omelette with hot french bread and wine and talked of nothing much until we had finished.
Then Holly, making coffee, said, ‘How did you get Jermyn Graves to go?’
‘Jermyn? Is that his name? I told him if he stopped the cheque Bobby would put him on the forfeit list.’
And don’t think I haven’t thought of it,’ Bobby said. ‘But of course it’s a dead loss from our point of view really.’
I nodded. The Jockey Club would refrain from putting an owner on the forfeit list if he (or she) paid all training fees which had been owing for three months or more. Unfortunately, though, the forfeit list leverage applied to basic training fees only, and not to vets’ or blacksmiths’ fees or to the cost of transporting horses to racemeetings. Bobby had had to pay out for all those things already for Graves’s horses, and putting the owner on the forfeit list wouldn’t get them reimbursed.
‘Why is he in such a hurry to take his horses away?’ I asked.
‘He’s just using our troubles as an excuse,’ Holly said.
Bobby nodded. ‘He’s done something like this to at least two other trainers. All young and trying to get going, like us. He runs up big bills and then one day the trainer comes home and finds the horses gone. Then Graves pays the bare training fees to avoid the forfeit list, and the trainer’s left with no horses as security and all the difficulties and expense of going to court to try to get what he’s owed, and of course it’s seldom worth it, and Graves gets away with it.’
‘Why did you accept his horses in the first place?’ I said.
‘We didn’t know about him, then,’ Holly said gloomily. ‘And we’re not exactly going to turn away people who ask us to take two horses, are we?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Anyway,’ Holly said, ‘Jermyn’s just another blow. The worst crisis is the feed-merchant.’
‘Give him Graves’s cheque,’ I said.
Holly looked pleased but Bobby said dubiously, ‘Our accountant doesn’t like us doing that sort of thing.’
‘Yeah, but your accountant hasn’t got thirty hungry horses on his doorstep staring at him reproachfully.’
‘Twenty-nine, really,’ Holly said.
‘Twenty-seven,’ Bobby sighed, ‘when Graves’s have gone.’
‘Does that include the three unsold yearlings?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
I rubbed my nose. Twenty-four paying inmates were basically a perfectly viable proposition, even if in his grandfather’s day there had been nearer forty. They were, moreover, just about to enter their annual rest period (as Bobby trained only on the Flat) and would no longer be incurring the higher expenses of the season.
Conversely they could not until the following March win any prize money, but then nor would they be losing any bets.
Winter, in flat-racing stables, was time for equilibrium, for holidays, for repainting, and for breaking in the yearlings, sold or not.
‘Apart from the unsold yearlings, how much do you owe?’ I asked.
I didn’t think Bobby would tell me, but after a pause, reluctantly, he did.
I winced.
‘But we can pay everything,’ Holly said. ‘At our own pace. We always do.’
Bobby nodded.
‘And it’s so unfair about the yearlings,’ my sister said passionately. ‘One of our owners told Bobby to go up to fifty thousand to get one particular yearling, and Bobby did, and now the owner’s telephoned to say he’s very sorry he can’t afford it after all; he just hasn’t got the money. And if we send it back to the next sale, we’ll make a loss. It’s always that way. People will think there’s something wrong with it.’
‘I’ll probably be able to syndicate it,’ Bobby said. ‘Sell twelve equal shares. But it takes time to do that.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘surely the bank will give you time.’
‘The bank manager’s panic-stricken by that damned newspaper.’
‘Did someone deliver it to him too?’ I asked.
Holly said gloomily, ‘Someone did.’
I told Bobby what Lord Vaughnley had said about the Flag’s informant being someone local with a grudge.
‘Yes, but who?’ Bobby said. ‘We really haven’t any enemies.’ He gave me a sidelong look in which humour was definitely surfacing. ‘Once upon a time it would have been a Fielding.’
‘Too true.’
‘Grandfather!’ Holly said. ‘It couldn’t be him, could it? He’s never forgiven me, but surely… he wouldn’t?’
We thought of the obstinate old curmudgeon who still trained a yardful of horses half a mile away and bellowed at his luckless lads on the Heath every morning. He was still, at eighty-two, a
wiry, vigorous, cunningly intelligent plotter whose chief regret these days was that Bobby’s grandfather was no longer alive to be outsmarted.
It was true that Grandfather Fielding had been as outraged as Grandfather Allardeck by the unthinkable nuptials, but the man who brought us up had loved us in his own testy way, and I couldn’t believe he would actively try to destroy his granddaughter’s future. Not unless old age was warping him into malice, as it sadly could sometimes.
‘I’ll go and ask him,’ I said.
‘Tonight?’ Holly looked at the clock. ‘He’ll be in bed. He goes so early.’
‘In the morning.’
‘I don’t want it to be him,’ Holly said.
‘Nor do I.’
We sat over the coffee for a while, and at length I said, ‘Make a list of all the people who you know had the Flag delivered to them with that paragraph marked, and I’ll go and call on some of them tomorrow. All I can get to on a Sunday.’
‘What for?’ Bobby said. ‘They won’t change their minds. I’ve tried. They just say they want their money at once. People believe what they read in newspapers. Even when it’s all lies, they believe it.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘But apart from telling them again that they’ll be paid OK I’ll ask them if any of them saw the paper being delivered. Ask them what time it came. Get a picture of what actually went on.’
‘All right,’ Holly said. ‘We’ll make the list.’
‘And after that,’ I said, ‘work out who could possibly know who you deal with. Who could have written the same list. Unless, of course,’ I reflected, ‘dozens of other people who you don’t owe money to got the paper delivered to them as well.’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Holly said. ‘We never thought of that.’
‘We’ll find out tomorrow.’
Bobby yawned. ‘Scarcely slept last night,’ he said.
‘Yes. Holly told me.’
There was suddenly a loud clanging from outside, a fierce and urgent alarm, enough to reawaken all the horses, if not the dead.
‘God!’ Bobby leapt to his feet, crashing his chair over backwards. ‘He came back!’