Straight (7 page)

“I won’t forget,” I said, “and I truly am grateful.”

 

Brad drove to a chemist’s, took my prescription in, waited for it to be dispensed, and finished the ten miles home, parking outside my door.

“Same time tomorrow morning?” I asked. “Back to London?”

“Yerss.”

“I’d be in trouble without you,” I said, climbing out with his help. He gave me a brief haunted glance and handed me the crutches. “You drive great,” I said.

He was embarrassed, but also pleased. Nowhere near a smile, of course, but a definite twitch in the cheeks. He turned away, ducking my gaze, and set off doggedly toward his mother.

I let myself into the house and regretted the embargo on a large scotch. Instead, with June’s lunchtime sandwich a distant memory, I refueled with sardines on toast and ice cream after, which more or less reflected my habitual laziness about cooking.

Then, aligned with icepacks along the sofa, I telephoned to the man in Newmarket who trained Greville’s two racehorses.

He picked up the receiver as if he’d been waiting for it to ring.

“Yes?” he said. “What are they offering?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “Is that Nicholas Loder?”

“What? Who are you?” He was brusque and impatient, then took a second look at things and with more honey said, “I beg your pardon, I was expecting someone else. I’m Loder, yes, who am I talking to?”

“Greville Franklin’s brother.”

“Oh, yes?”

It meant nothing to him immediately. I pictured him as I knew him, more by sight than face to face, a big light-haired man in his forties with enormous presence and self-esteem to match. Undoubtedly a good-to-great trainer, but in television interviews occasionally overbearing and condescending to the interviewer, as I’d heard he could be also to his owners. Greville kept his horses with him because the original horse he’d taken as a bad debt had been in that stable. Nicholas Loder had bought Greville all his subsequent horses and done notably well with them, and Greville had assured me that he got on well with the man by telephone, and that he was perfectly friendly.

The last time I’d spoken to Greville myself on the telephone he’d been talking of buying another two-year-old, saying that Loder would get him one at the October sales, perhaps.

I explained to Loder that Greville had died and after the first sympathetic exclamations of dismay he reacted as I would have expected, not as if missing a close friend but on a practical business level.

“It won’t affect the running of his horses,” he said. “They’re owned in any case by the Saxony Franklin company, not by Greville himself. I can run the horses still in the company name. I have the company’s Authority to Act. There should be no problem.”

“I’m afraid there may be,” I began.

“No, no. Dozen Roses runs on Saturday at York. In with a great chance. I informed Greville of it only a few days ago. He always wanted to know when they were running, though he never went to see them.”

“The problem is,” I said, “about my being his brother. He has left the Saxony Franklin company to me.”

The size of the problem suddenly revealed itself to him forcibly. “You’re not his brother, Derek Franklin? That brother? The jockey?”

“Yes. So ... could you find out from Weatherby’s whether the horses can still run while the estate is subject to probate?”

“My God,” he said weakly.

Professional jockeys, as we both knew well, were not allowed to own runners in races. They could own other horses such as brood mares, foals, stallions, hacks, hunters, show-horses, but they couldn’t run them.

“Can you find out?” I asked again.

“I will.” He sounded exasperated. “Dozen Roses should trot up on Saturday.”

Dozen Roses was currently the better of Greville’s two horses whose fortunes I followed regularly in the newspapers and on television. A triple winner as a three-year-old, he had been disappointing at four, but in the current year, as a five-year-old, he had regained all his old form and had scored three times in the past few weeks. A “trot-up” on Saturday was a reasonable expectation.

Loder said, “If Weatherby’s gives the thumbs-down to the horse running, will you sell it? I’ll find a buyer by Saturday, among my owners.”

I listened to the urgency in his voice and wondered whether Dozen Roses was more than just another trot-up, of which season by season he had many. He sounded a lot more fussed over than seemed normal.

“I don’t know whether I can sell before probate,” I said. “You’d better find that out too.”

“But if you can, will you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, puzzled. “Let’s wait and see, first.”

“You won’t be able to hang on to him, you know,” he said forcefully. “He’s got another season in him. He’s still worth a good bit. But unless you do something like turn in your license, you won’t be able to run him, and he’s not worth turning in your license for. It’s not as if he were favorite for the Derby.”

“I’ll decide during the week.”

“But you’re not thinking of turning in your license, are you?” He sounded almost alarmed. “Didn’t I read in the paper that you’re on the injured list but hope to be back racing well before Christmas?”

“You did read that, yes.”

“Well, then.” The relief was as indefinable as the alarm, but came clear down the wires. I didn’t understand any of it. He shouldn’t have been so worried.

“Perhaps Saxony Franklin could lease the horse to someone,” I said.

“Oh. Ah. To me?” He sounded as if it were the perfect solution.

“I don’t know,” I said cautiously. “We’ll have to find out.”

I realized that I didn’t totally trust him, and it wasn’t a doubt I’d have felt before the phone call. He was one of the top five Flat race trainers in the country, automatically held to be reliable because of his rock-solid success.

“When Greville came to see his horses,” I asked, “did he ever bring anyone with him? I’m trying to reach people he knew, to tell them of his death.”

“He never came here to see his horses. I hardly knew him personally myself, except on the telephone.”

“Well, his funeral is on Friday at Ipswich,” I said. “What if I called in at Newmarket that day, as I’ll be over your way, to see you and the horses and complete any paperwork that’s necessary?”

“No,” he said instantly, Then, softening it, “I always discourage owners from visiting. They disrupt the stable routine. I can’t make any exceptions. If I need you to sign anything I’ll arrange it another way.”

“All right,” I agreed mildly, not crowding him into corners. “I’ll wait to hear from you about what Weatherby’s decides.”

He said he would get in touch and abruptly disconnected, leaving me thinking that on the subject of his behavior I didn’t know the questions let alone the answers.

Perhaps I had been imagining things: but I knew I hadn’t. One could often hear more nuances in someone’s voice on the telephone than one could face to face. When people were relaxed, the lower vibration of their voices came over the wires undisturbed; under stress, the lower vibrations disappeared because the vocal cords involuntarily tightened. After Loder had discovered I would be inheriting Dozen Roses, there had been no lower vibrations at all.

 

Shelving the enigma, I pondered the persisting difficulty of informing Greville’s friends. They had to exist, no one lived in a vacuum; but if it had been the other way round, I supposed that Greville would have had the same trouble. He hadn’t known my friends either. Our worlds had scarcely touched except briefly when we met, and then we had talked a bit about horses, a bit about gadgets, a bit about the world in general and any interesting current events.

He’d lived alone, as I did. He’d told me nothing about any love life. He’d said merely, “Bad luck” when three years earlier I’d remarked that my live-in girlfriend had gone to live-in somewhere else. It didn’t matter, I said. It had been a mutual agreement, a natural ending. I’d asked him once about his long-ago divorced wife. “She remarried. Haven’t seen her since,” was all he’d said.

If it had been I who had died, I thought, he would have told the world I worked in: he’d have told, perhaps, the trainer I mostly rode for, and maybe the racing papers. So I should tell his world: tell the semiprecious stone fraternity. Annette could do it, regardless of the absence of Greville’s address book, because of June’s computer. The computer made more and more nonsense of the break-in. I came back to the same conviction: Something else had been stolen, and I didn’t know what.

I remembered at about that point that I did have Greville’s pocket diary, even if his desk diary had lost October, so I went and fetched it from the bedroom where I’d left it the night before. I thought I might find friends’ names and phone numbers in the addresses section at the back, but he had been frugal in that department as everywhere else in the slim brown book. I turned the pages, which were mostly unused, seeing only short entries like “R arrives from Brazil” and “B in Paris” and “Buy citrine for P.”

In March I was brought up short. Because it was a racing diary, the race meetings to be held on each day of the year were listed under the day’s date. I came to Thursday, March 16, which listed “Cheltenham.” The word
Cheltenham
had been ringed with a ballpoint pen, and Greville had written “Gold Cup” in the day’s space; and then, with a different pen, he had added the words “Derek won it!!”

It brought me to sudden tears. I couldn’t help it.

I longed for him to be alive so I could get to know him better. I wept for the lost opportunities, the time wasted. I longed to know the brother who had cared what I did, who had noted in his almost empty diary that I’d won one of the top races of the year.

T
here were only three telephone numbers in the addresses section at the back, all identified merely by initials. One, NL, was Nicholas Loder’s. I tried the other two, which were London numbers, and got no reply.

Scattered through the rest of the diary were three more numbers. Two of them proved to be restaurants in full evening flood, and I wrote down their names, recognizing one of them as the place I’d last dined with Greville, two or three months back. On July 25, presumably, as that was the date on which he’d written the number. It had been an Indian restaurant, I remembered, and we had eaten ultra-hot curry.

Sighing, I turned the pages and tried a number occurring on September 2, about five weeks earlier. It wasn’t a London number, but I didn’t recognize the code. I listened to the bell ringing continuously at the other end and had resigned myself to another blank when someone lifted the distant receiver and in a low breathy voice said, “Hello?”

“Hello,” I replied. “I’m ringing on behalf of Greville Franklin.”

“Who?”

“Greville Franklin.” I spoke the words slowly and clearly.

“Just a moment.”

There was a long uninformative silence and then someone else clattered on sharp heels up to the receiver and decisively spoke, her voice high and angry.

“How dare you!” she said. “Don’t ever do this again. I will not have your name spoken in this house.”

She put the receiver down with a crash before I could utter a word, and I sat bemusedly looking at my own telephone and feeling as if I’d swallowed a wasp.

Whoever she was, I thought wryly, she wouldn’t want to send flowers to the funeral, though she might have been gladdened by the death. I wondered what on earth Greville could have done to raise such a storm, but that was the trouble, I didn’t know him well enough to make a good guess.

Thankful on the whole that there weren’t any more numbers to be tried, I looked again at what few entries he had made, more out of curiosity than looking for helpful facts.

He had noted the days on which his horses had run, again only with initials. DR, Dozen Roses, appeared most, each time with a number following, like 300 at 8s, which I took to mean the amounts he’d wagered at what odds. Below the numbers he had put each time another number inside a circle which, when I compared them with the form book, were revealed as the placings of the horse at the finish. Its last three appearances, all with 1 in the circle, seemed to have netted Greville respectively 500 at 14s, 500 at 5s, 1000 at 6/4. The trot-up scheduled for Saturday, I thought, would be likely to be at odds on.

Greville’s second horse, Gemstones, appearing simply as G, had run six times, winning only once but profitably; 500 at 100/6.

All in all, I thought, a moderate betting pattern for an owner. He had made, I calculated, a useful profit overall, more than most owners achieved. With his prize money in addition to offset both the training fees and the capital cost of buying the horses in the first place, I guessed that he had come out comfortably ahead, and it was in the business sense, I supposed, that owning horses had chiefly pleased him.

I flicked casually forward to the end of the book and in the last few pages headed “Notes” came across a lot of doodling and then a list of numbers.

The doodling was the sort one does while listening on the telephone, a lot of boxes and zigzags, haphazard and criss-crossed with lines of shading. On the page facing, there was an equation: CZ =
C
× 1.7. I supposed it had been of sparkling clarity to Greville, but of no use to me.

Overleaf I found the sort of numbers list I kept in my own diary: passport, bank account, national insurance. After those, in small capital letters farther down the page, was the single word DEREK. Another jolt, seeing it again in his writing.

I wondered briefly whether, from its placing, Greville had used my name as some sort of mnemonic, or whether it was just another doodle: there was no way of telling. With a sigh I riffled back through the pages and came to something I’d looked at before, a lightly penciled entry for the day before his death. Second time around, it meant just as little.