Straight (22 page)

I’d ridden in several Flat races in my teens as an amateur, learning that the hardest and most surprising thing about the unrelenting Flat race crouch over the withers was the way it cramped one’s lungs and affected one’s breathing. The first few times I’d almost fallen off at the finish from lack of oxygen. A long time ago, I thought, watching the gates fly open in the distance and the colors spill out, long ago when I was young and it all lay ahead.

If I could find Greville’s diamonds, I thought, I would in due course be able to buy a good big yard in Lambourn and start training free of a mortgage and on a decent scale, providing of course I could get owners to send me horses, and I had no longer any doubt that one of these years, when my body packed up mending fast, as everyone’s did in the end, that I would be content with the new life, even though the consuming passion I still felt for race-riding couldn’t be replaced by anything tamer.

Dozen Roses was running with the pack, all seven bunched after the first three furlongs, flying along the far side of the track at more than cruising speed but with acceleration still in reserve.

If I didn’t find Greville’s diamonds, I thought, I would just scrape together whatever I could and borrow the rest, and still buy a place and set my hand to the future. But not yet, not yet.

Dozen Roses and the others swung left-handed into the long bend round the far end of the track, the bunch coming apart as the curve element hit them. Turning into the straight five furlongs from the winning post, Dozen Roses was in fourth place and making not much progress. I wanted him quite suddenly to win and was surprised by the strength of the feeling; I wanted him to win for Greville, who wouldn’t care anyway, and perhaps also for Clarissa, who would. Sentimental fool, I told myself. Anyway, when the crowd started yelling home their fancy I yelled for mine also, and I’d never done that before as far as I could remember.

There was not going to be a trot-up, whatever Nicholas Loder might have thought. Dozen Roses was visibly struggling as he took second place at a searing speed a furlong from home and he wouldn’t have got the race at all if the horse half a length in front, equally extended and equally exhausted, hadn’t veered from a straight line at the last moment and bumped into him.

“Oh dear,” Martha exclaimed sadly, as the two horses passed the winning post. “Second. Oh well, never mind.”

“He’ll get the race on an objection,” I said. “Which I suppose is better than nothing. Your winnings are safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain,” I said, and almost immediately the loudspeakers were announcing “Stewards’ inquiry.”

More slowly than I would have liked to be able to manage, the three of us descended to the area outside the weighing room where the horse that was not my horse stood in the place for the unsaddling of the second, a net rug over his back and steam flowing from his sweating skin. He was moving about restlessly, as horses often do after an all-out effort, and his lad was holding tight to the reins, trying to calm him.

“He ran a great race,” I said to Martha, and she said, “Did he, dear?”

“He didn’t give up. That’s really what matters.”

Of Nicholas Loder there was no sign: probably inside the Stewards’ room putting forward his complaint. The Stewards would show themselves the views from the side camera and the head-on camera, and at any moment now...

“Result of the Stewards’ inquiry,” said the loudspeakers. “Placing of first and second reversed.” Hardly justice, but inevitable: the faster horse had lost. Nicholas Loder came out of the weighing room and saw me standing with the Ostermeyers, but before I could utter even the first conciliatory words like, “Well done,” he’d given me a sick look and hurried off in the opposite direction. No Rollo in his shadow, I noticed.

Martha, Harley and I returned to the luncheon room for the University’s tea where the Knightwoods were being gracious hosts and Clarissa, at the sight of me, developed renewed trouble with the tear glands. I left the Ostermeyers taking cups and saucers from a waitress and drifted across to her side.

“So silly,” she said crossly, blinking hard as she of fered me a sandwich. “But wasn’t he great?”

“He was.”

“I wish...” She stopped. I wished it too. No need at all to put it into words. But Greville never went to the races.

“I go to London fairly often,” she said. “May I phone you when I’m there?”

“Yes, if you like.” I wrote my home number on my race-card and handed it to her. “I live in Berkshire,” I said, “not in Greville’s house.”

She met my eyes, hers full of confusion.

“I’m not Greville,” I said.

“My dear chap,” said her husband boomingly, coming to a halt beside us, “delighted your horse finally won. Though, of course, not technically your horse, what?”

“No, sir.”

He was shrewd enough, I thought, looking at the intelligent eyes amid the bonhomie. Not easy to fool. I wondered fleetingly if he’d ever suspected his wife had a lover, even if he hadn’t known who. I thought that if he had known who, he wouldn’t have asked me to lunch.

He chuckled. “The professor says you tipped him three winners.”

“A miracle.”

“He’s very impressed.” He looked at me benignly. “Join us at any time, my dear chap.” It was the sort of vague invitation, not meant to be accepted, that was a mild seal of approval, in its way.

“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded, knowing he’d been understood.

Martha Ostermeyer gushed up to say how marvelous the whole day had been, and gradually from then on, as such things always do, the University party evaporated.

I shook Clarissa’s outstretched hand in farewell, and also her husband’s, who stood beside her. They looked good together, and settled, a fine couple on the surface.

“We’ll see you again,” she said to me, and I wondered if it were only I who could hear her smothered desperation.

“Yes,” I said positively. “Of course.”

“My dear chap,” her husband said. “Any time.”

Harley, Martha and I left the racecourse and climbed into the Daimler, Simms following Brad’s routine of stowing the crutches.

Martha said reproachfully, “Your ankle’s broken, not twisted. One of the guests told us. I said you’d ridden a gallop for us on Wednesday and they couldn’t believe it.”

“It’s practically mended,” I said weakly.

“But you won’t be able to ride Datepalm in that race next Saturday, will you?”

“Not really. No.”

She sighed. “You’re very naughty. We’ll simply have to wait until you’re ready.”

I gave her a fast smile of intense gratitude. There weren’t many owners who would have dreamed of waiting. No trainer would; they couldn’t afford to. Milo was currently putting up one of my arch-rivals on the horses I usually rode, and I just hoped I would get all of them back once I was fit. That was the main trouble with injuries, not the injury itself but losing one’s mounts to other jockeys. Permanently, sometimes, if they won.

“And now,” Martha said as we set off south toward London, “I have had another simply marvelous idea, and Harley agrees with me.”

I glanced back to Harley who was sitting behind Simms. He was nodding indulgently. No anxiety this time.

“We think,” she said happily, “that we’ll buy Dozen Roses and send him to Milo to train for jumping. That is,” she laughed, “if your brother’s executor will sell him to us.”

“Martha!” I was dumbstruck and used her Christian name without thinking, though I’d called her Mrs. Ostermeyer before, when I’d called her anything.

“There,” she said, gratified at my reaction, “I told you it was a marvelous idea. What do you say?”

“My brother’s executor is speechless.”

“But you will sell him?”

“I certainly will.”

“Then let’s use the car phone to call Milo and tell him.” She was full of high good spirits and in no mood for waiting, but when she reached Milo he apparently didn’t immediately catch fire. She handed the phone to me with a frown, saying, “He wants to talk to you.”

“Milo,” I said, “what’s the trouble?”

“That horse is an entire. They don’t jump well.”

“He’s a gelding,” I assured him.

“You told me your brother wouldn’t ever have it done.”

“Nicholas Loder did it without permission.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No,” I said. “Anyway the horse got the race today on a Stewards’ inquiry but he ran gamely, and he’s fit.”

“Has he ever jumped?”

“I shouldn’t think so. But I’ll teach him.”

“All right then. Put me back to Martha.”

“Don’t go away when she’s finished. I want another word.”

I handed the phone to Martha who listened and spoke with a return to enthusiasm, and eventually I talked to Milo again.

“Why,” I asked, “would one of Nicholas Loder’s owners carry a baster about at the races?”

“A what?”

“Baster. Thing that’s really for cooking. You’ve got one. You use it as an inhaler for the horses.”

“Simple and effective.”

He used it, I reflected, on the rare occasions when it was the best way to give some sort of medication to a horse. One dissolved or diluted the medicine in water and filled the rubber bulb of the baster with it. Then one fitted the tube onto that, slid the tube up the horse’s nostril, and squeezed the bulb sharply. The liquid came out in a vigorous spray straight onto the mucous membranes and from there passed immediately into the bloodstream. One could puff out dry powder with the same result. It was the fastest way of getting some drugs to act.

“At the races?” Milo was saying. “An owner?”

“That’s right. His horse won the five-furlong sprint.”

“He’d have to be mad. They dope test two horses in every race, as you know. Nearly always the winner, and another at random. No owner is going to pump drugs into his horse at the races.”

“I don’t know that he did. He had a baster with him, that’s all.”

“Did you tell the Stewards?”

“No, I didn’t. Nicholas Loder was with his owner and he would have exploded as he was angry with me already for spotting Dozen Roses’ alteration.”

Milo laughed. “So that was what all the heat was about this past week?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Will you kick up a storm?”

“Probably not.”

“You’re too soft,” he said, “and oh yes, I almost forgot. There was a phone message for you. Wait a tick. I wrote it down.” He went away for a bit and returned. “Here you are. Something about your brother’s diamonds.” He sounded doubtful. “Is that right?”

“Yes. What about them?”

He must have heard the urgency in my voice because he said, “It’s nothing much. Just that someone had been trying to call you last night and all day today, but I said you’d slept in London and gone to York.”

“Who was it?”

“He didn’t say. Just said that he had some info for you. Then he hummed and hahed and said if I talked to you would I tell you he would telephone your brother’s house, in case you went there, at about ten tonight, or later. Or it might have been a she. Difficult to tell. One of those middle-range voices. I said I didn’t know if you would be speaking to me, but I’d tell you if I could.”

“Well, thanks.”

“I’m not a message service,” he said testily. “Why don’t you switch on your answer phone like everyone else?”

“I do sometimes.”

“Not enough.”

I switched off the phone with a smile and wondered who’d been trying to reach me. It had to be someone who knew Greville had bought diamonds. It might even be Annette, I thought: her voice had a mid-range quality.

I would have liked to have gone to Greville’s house as soon as we got back to London, but I couldn’t exactly renege on the dinner after Martha’s truly marvelous idea, so the three of us ate together as planned and I tried to please them as much as they’d pleased me.

Martha announced yet another marvelous idea during dinner. She and Harley would get Simms or another of the car firm’s chauffeurs to drive us all down to Lambourn the next day to take Milo out to lunch, so that they could see Datepalm again before they went back to the States on Tuesday. They could drop me at my house afterward, and then go on to visit a castle in Dorset they’d missed last time around. Harley looked resigned. It was Martha, I saw, who always made the decisions, which was maybe why the repressed side of him needed to lash out sometimes at car-park attendants who boxed him in.

Milo, again on the telephone, told me he’d do practically anything to please the Ostermeyers, definitely including Sunday lunch. He also said that my informant had rung again and he had told him/her that I’d got the message.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you tomorrow.”

I thanked the Ostermeyers inadequately for everything and went to Greville’s house by taxi. I did think of asking the taxi driver to stay, like Brad, until I’d reconnoitered, but the house was quiet and dark behind the impregnable grilles, and I thought the taxi driver would think me a fool or a coward or both, so I paid him off and, fishing out the keys, opened the gate in the hedge and went up the path until the lights blazed on and the dog started barking..

Everyone can make mistakes.

I
didn’t get as far as the steps up to the front door. A dark figure, dimly glimpsed in the floodlight’s glare, came launching itself at me from behind in a cannonball rugger tackle and when I reached the ground something very hard hit my head.

I had no sensation of blacking out or of time passing. One moment I was awake, and the next moment I was awake also, or so it seemed, but I knew in a dim way that there had been an interval.

I didn’t know where I was except that I was lying facedown on grass. I’d woken up concussed on grass several times in my life, but never before in the dark. They couldn’t have all gone home from the races, I thought, and left me alone out on the course all night.