Books by Dick Francis
THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography)
DEAD CERT
NERVE
FOR KICKS
ODDS AGAINST
FLYING FINISH
BLOOD SPORT
FORFEIT
ENQUIRY
RAT RACE
BONECRACK
SMOKESCREEN
SLAY-RIDE
KNOCK DOWN
HIGH STAKES
IN THE FRAME
RISK
TRIAL RUN
WHIP HAND
REFLEX
TWICE SHY
BANKER
THE DANGER
PROOF
BREAK IN
LESTER: The Official Biography
BOLT
HOT MONEY
THE EDGE
STRAIGHT
LONGSHOT
COMEBACK
DRIVING FORCE
DECIDER
WILD HORSES
COME TO GRIEF
TO THE HILT
10-lb PENALTY
FIELD OF THIRTEEN
SECOND WIND
SHATTERED
DICK FRANCIS
Proof
THE DICK FRANCIS LIBRARY
Michael Joseph
London
MICHAEL JOSEPH
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in Great Britain September 1984
Second impression November 1984
Third impression December 1984
Fourth impression January 1985
Fifth impression September 1991
Sixth impression July 2000
Seventh impression January 2003
Copyright © Dick Francis, 1984
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-14-192948-4
My thanks to
MARGARET GILES
of
PANGBOURNE WINES
who taught me her business
and to
BARRY MACKANESS
and
my brother-in-law
DICK YORKE,
wineshippers
and to
LEN LIVINGSTONE-LEARMONTH
long-time friend.
ONE
Agony is socially unacceptable. One is not supposed to weep. Particularly is one not supposed to weep when one is moderately presentable and thirty-two. When one’s wife has been dead for six months and everyone else has done grieving.
Ah well, they say: he’ll get over it. There’s always another pretty lady. Time’s a great healer, they say. He’ll marry again one day, they say.
No doubt they’re right.
But oh dear God… the emptiness in my house. The devastating, weary, ultimate loneliness. The silence where there used to be laughter, the cold hearth that used to leap with fire for my return, the permanent blank in my bed.
Six months into unremitting ache I felt that my own immediate death would be no great disaster. Half of myself had gone; the fulfilled joyful investment of six years’ loving, gone into darkness. What was left simply suffered… and looked normal.
Habit kept me checking both ways when I crossed the road; and meanwhile I tended my shop and sold my wines, and smiled and smiled and smiled at the customers.
TWO
Customers came in all possible shapes, from the school children who bought crisps and cola because I was near the bus stop, to the sergeants’ mess of the local barracks: from pensioners saving for apologetic half bottles of gin to the knowledgeably lavish laying down port. Customers came once a year and daily, with ignorance and expertise, for happiness and comfort, in gloom and insobriety. Customers ranged from syrup to bitters, like their drinks.
My foremost customer, one Sunday morning that cold October, was a racehorse trainer splashing unstinted fizz over a hundred or so guests in his more or less annual celebration of the Flat races his stable had won during the passing season. Each autumn as his name came high on the winners’ list he gave thanks by inviting his owners, his jockeys, his ramifications of friends to share his satisfaction for joys past and to look forward and make plans for starting all over again the following spring.
Each September he would telephone in his perpetual state of rush. Tony? Three weeks on Sunday, right? Just the usual, in the tent. You’ll do the glasses? And sale or return, of course, right?’
‘Right,’ I would say, and he’d be gone before I could draw breath. It would be his wife Flora who later came to the shop smilingly with details.
Accordingly on that Sunday I drove to his place at ten o’clock and parked as close as I could to the large once-white marquee rising tautly from his back lawn. He came bustling out of his house the moment I stopped, as if he’d been looking out for me, which perhaps he had: Jack Hawthorn, maybe sixty, short, plump and shrewd.
‘Tony. Well done.’ He patted me lightly on the shoulder,his usual greeting, as he habitually avoided the social custom of shaking hands. Not, as I had originally guessed, because he feared to catch other people’s contagious germs but because, as an acid racing lady had enlightened me, he had ‘a grip like a defrosting jellyfish’ and hated to see people rub their palms on their clothes after touching him.
‘A good day for it,’ I said.
He glanced briefly at the clear sky. ‘We need rain. The ground’s like concrete.’ Racehorse trainers, like farmers, were never satisfied with the weather. ‘Did you bring any soft drinks? The Sheik’s coming, with his whole teetotal entourage. Forgot to tell you.’
I nodded. ‘Champagne, soft drinks and a box of oddments.’
‘Good. Right. I’ll leave you to it. The waitresses will be here at eleven, guests at twelve. And you’ll stay yourself, of course? My guest, naturally. I take it for granted.’
‘Your secretary sent me an invitation.’
‘Did he? Good heavens. How efficient. Right then. Anything you want, come and find me.’
I nodded and he hurried away, taking his life as usual at a trot. Notwithstanding the secretary, a somewhat languid man with a supercilious nose and an indefatigable capacity for accurate detailed work, Jack never quite caught up with what he wanted to do. Flora, his placid wife, had told me, ‘It’s Jimmy (the secretary) who enters the horses for the races, Jimmy who sends out the bills, Jimmy who runs all the paperwork single-handed, and Jack never so much as has to pick up a postage stamp. It’s habit, all this rushing. Just habit.’ But she’d spoken fondly, as everyone did, more or less, of Jack Hawthorn: and maybe it was actually the staccato energy of the man which communicated to his horses and set them wi
nning.
He always invited me to his celebrations, either formally or not, partly no doubt so that I should be on the spot to solve any booze-flow problems immediately, but also because I had myself been born into a section of the racing world and was still considered part of it, despite my inexplicable defection into retail liquor.
‘Not his father’s son,’ was how the uncharitable put it. Or more plainly, ‘Lacks the family guts.’
My father, a soldier, had won both the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Gold Cup, dashing as valiantly into steeplechase fences as he had into enemy territory. His bravery on all battlefields had been awe-inspiring, and he died from a broken neck on Sandown Park racecourse when I was eleven, and watching.
He had been forty-seven at the time and remained, of course, at that age in the racing world’s memory, a tall, straight, laughing, reckless man, untouched, it still seemed to me, by the world’s woes. No matter that he was not an ideal shape for jockeyship, he had resolutely followed in the wake of his own father, my grandfather, a distant Titan who had finished second one year in the Grand National before covering himself with military glory in World War One. My grandfather’s Victoria Cross lay beside my father’s DSO in the display case I had inherited. It was their dash, their flair, their dare-devilment that they had not passed on.
‘Are you going to grow up like your father, then?’ had been said to me in friendly, expectant fashion countless times through my childhood, and it had only slowly dawned on everyone, as on me, that no, I wasn’t. I learned to ride, but without distinction. I went to Wellington, the school for soldiers’ sons, but not in turn to Sandhurst to put on uniform myself. My mother too often said, ‘Never mind, dear,’ suffering many disappointments nobly; and I developed deep powerful feelings of inferiority, which still lingered, defying common sense.
Only with Emma had they retreated to insignificance, but now that she had gone, faint but persistent, they were back. A discarded habit of mind insidiously creeping into unguarded corners. Miserable.
Jimmy, the secretary, never helped. He sauntered out of the house, hands in pockets, and watched as I lugged three galvanised wash tubs from the rear of my van.
‘What are those for?’ he said. He couldn’t help looking down that nose, I supposed, as he topped six feet four. It was just that his tone of voice matched.
‘Ice,’ I said.
He said, ‘Oh,’ or rather ‘Ay-oh,’ as a dipthong.
I carried the tubs into the tent, which contained a row of trestle tables with tablecloths near one end and clusters of potted chrysanthemums round the bases of the two main supporting poles. The living grass of the lawn had been covered with serviceable fawn matting, and bunches of red and gold ribbons decorated the streaky greyish canvas walls at regular intervals. In one far corner stood a blower-heater, unlit. The day was marginally not cold enough. The tent was almost festive. Almost. Jack and Flora, and who could blame them, never wasted good cash on unnecessaries.
There was no tremble in the air. No shudder. No premonition at all of the horror soon to happen there. All was quiet and peaceful; expectant certainly, but benign. I remembered it particularly, after.
Jimmy continued to watch while I carted in a case of champagne and unpacked the bottles, standing them upright in one of the tubs on the floor by the tent wall behind the tables. I didn’t actually have to do this part of the job, but for Jack Hawthorn, somehow, it was easy to give service beyond contract.
I was working in shirtsleeves, warmed by a pale blue V-necked sleeveless pullover (typical racing world clothes) with my jacket waiting in the van for the metamorphosis to guest. Jimmy was understatedly resplendent in thin fawn polo-necked sweater under a navy blue blazer; plain brass buttons, no crests, no pretentions. That was the trouble. If he’d had any pretentions I could perhaps have despised him instead of suspecting it was the other way round.
I fetched a second box of champagne and began unpacking it. Jimmy bent from his great height and picked up one of the bottles, staring at the foil and the label as if he’d never seen such things before.
‘What’s this muck?’ he said. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s the real thing,’ I said mildly. ‘It comes from Epernay.’
‘So I see.’
‘Flora’s choice,’ I said.
He said ‘Ah-oh’ in complete understanding and put the bottle back. I fetched ice cubes in large black plastic bags and poured them over and round the standing bottles.
‘Did you bring any scotch?’ he asked.
‘Front seat of the van.’
He strolled off on the search and came back with an unopened bottle.
‘Glass?’ he enquired.
For reply I went out to the van and fetched a box containing sixty.
‘Help yourself.’
Without comment he opened the box, which I’d set on a table, and removed one of the all-purpose goblets.
‘Is this ice drinkable?’ he said dubiously.
‘Pure tap water.’
He put ice and whisky in the glass and sipped the result.
‘Very prickly this morning, aren’t you?’ he said.
I glanced at him, surprised. ‘Sorry.’
‘Someone knocked off a whole load of this stuff in Scotland yesterday, did you know?’
‘Champagne?’
‘No. Scotch.’
I shrugged. ‘Well… it happens.’
I fetched a third case and unpacked the bottles. Jimmy watched, clinking his ice.
‘How much do you know about whisky, Tony?’ he said.
‘Well… some.’
‘Would you know one from another?’
‘I’m better at wine.’ I straightened from filling the second tub. ‘Why?’
‘Would you know for certain,’ he said with a bad stab at casualness, ‘if you asked for a malt and got sold an ordinary standard, like this?’ He raised his glass, nodding to it.
‘They taste quite different.’
He relaxed slightly, betraying an inner tension I hadn’t until then been aware of. ‘Could you tell one malt from another?’
I looked at him assessingly. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Could you?’ He was insistent.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not this morning. Not to name them. I’d have to practise. Maybe then. Maybe not.’
‘But… if you learned one particular taste, could you pick it out again from a row of samples? Or say if it wasn’t there?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. I looked at him, waiting, but he was taking his own troubled time, consulting some inner opinion. Shrugging, I went to fetch more ice, pouring it into the second tub, and then carried in and ripped open the fourth case of champagne.
‘It’s very awkward,’ he said suddenly.
‘What is?’
‘I wish you’d stop fiddling with those bottles and listen to me.’
His voice was a mixture of petulance and anxiety, and I slowly straightened from putting bottles into the third tub and took notice.
Tell me, then,’ I said.
He was older than me by a few years, and our acquaintanceship had mostly been limited to my visits to the Hawthorn house, both as drinks supplier and as occasional guest. His usual manner to me had been fairly civil but without warmth, as no doubt mine to him. He was the third son of the fourth son of a racehorse-owning earl, which gave him an aristocratic name but no fortune, and his job with Jack Hawthorn resulted directly, it was said, from lack of enough brain to excel in the City. It was a judgment I would have been content to accept were it not for Flora’s admiration of him, but I hadn’t cared enough one way or the other to give it much thought.
‘One of Jack’s owners has a restaurant,’ he said. ‘The Silver Moondance, near Reading. Not aimed at top class. Dinner dances. A singer sometimes. Mass market.’ His voice was fastidious but without scorn: stating a fact, not an attitude.
I waited non-committally.
‘He invited Jack and Flora a
nd myself to dinner there last week.’
‘Decent of him,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ Jimmy looked at me down the nose. ‘Quite.’ He paused slightly. ‘The food was all right, but the drinks… Look, Tony, Larry Trent is one of Jack’s good owners. He has five horses here. Pays his bills on the nail. I don’t want to upset him… but what it says on the label of at least one of the bottles in his restaurant is not what they pour out of it.’
He spoke with pained disgust, at which I almost smiled.
‘That’s not actually unusual,’ I said.
‘But it’s illegal.’ He was indignant.
‘Sure it’s illegal. Are you certain?’
‘Yes. Well yes, I think so. But I wondered if perhaps, before I said anything to Larry Trent, you could taste their stuff? I mean, suppose his staff are ripping him off? I mean, er… he could be prosecuted, couldn’t he?’
I said, ‘Why didn’t you mention it to him that evening, while you were there?’
Jimmy looked startled. ‘But we were his guests! It would have been terribly bad form. Surely you can see that.’
‘Hm,’ I said dryly. ‘Then why don’t you just tell him now, and privately, what you thought about his drinks? He might be grateful. He would certainly be warned. Anyway, I can’t see him whisking his five horses away in a huff.’
Jimmy made a pained noise and drank some scotch. ‘I mentioned this to Jack. He said I must be mistaken. But I’m not, you know. I’m pretty sure I’m not.’
I considered him.
‘Why does it bother you so much?’ I asked.
‘What?’ He was surprised. ‘Well, I say, a fraud’s a fraud, isn’t it? It annoys one.’
‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘What were these drinks supposed to be?’
‘I thought the wine wasn’t much, considering its label, but you know how it is, you don’t suspect anything… but there was the Laphroaig.’