Come to Grief (8 page)

“Sid,” he said heartily, “the warning will be in the paper tomorrow. You’ve done your best. Stop agitating.”

“Great,” I said, “but could you do something else? Something that could come innocently from
The Pump,
but would raise all sorts of reverberations if I asked directly myself.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as ask Topline Foods for a list of the guests they entertained at a sponsors’ lunch at Aintree the day before the National.”

“What the
hell
for?”

“Will you do it?”

He said, “What are you up to?”

“The scoop is still yours. Exclusive.”

“I don’t know why I trust you.”

“It pays off,” I said, smiling.

“It had better.” He put down his receiver with a crash, but I knew he would do what I asked.

It was Friday morning. At Epsom that day they would be running the Coronation Cup and also the Oaks, the fillies’ equivalent of the Derby. It was also lightly raining: a weak warm front, it seemed, was slowly blighting southern England.

Racecourses still drew me as if I were tethered to them with bungee elastic, but before setting out I telephoned the woman whose colt’s foot had been amputated during the night after the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

“I’m sorry to bother you again, but would you mind a few more questions?”

“Not if you can catch the bastards.”

“Well ... was the two-year-old alone in his field?”

“Yes he was. It was only a paddock. Railed, of course. We kept him in the paddock nearest to the house, that’s what is so infuriating. We had two old hacks turned out in the field beyond him, but the vandals left them untouched.”

“And,” I said neutrally, “how many people knew the colt was accessible? And how accessible was he?”

“Sid,” she exclaimed, “don’t think we haven’t racked our brains. The trouble is, all our friends knew about him. We were excited about his prospects. And then, at the Cheltenham meeting, we had been talking to people about
trainers.
Old Gunners, who used to train for us in the past, has died, of course, and we don’t like that uppity assistant of his that’s taken over the stable, so we were asking around, you see.”

“Yeah. And did you decide on a trainer?”

“We did, but, of course ...”

“Such a bloody shame,” I sympathized. “Who did you decide on?”

She mentioned a first-class man. “Several people said that with him we couldn’t go wrong.”

“No.” I mentally sighed, and asked obliquely, “What did you especially enjoy about the festival meeting?”

“The Queen came,” she said promptly. “I had thick, warm boots on, and I nearly fell over them, curtseying.” She laughed. “And oh, also, I suppose you do know you’re in the Hall of Fame there?”

“It’s an honor,” I said. “They gave me an engraved glass goblet that I can see across the room right now from where I’m sitting.”

“Well, we were standing in front of that big exhibit they’ve put together of your life, and we were reading the captions, and dear Ellis Quint stopped beside us and put his arm round my shoulders and said that our Sid was a pretty great guy, all in all.”

Oh
shit,
I thought.

Her warm smile was audible down the line. “We’ve known Ellis for years, of course. He used to ride our horses in amateur races. So he called in at our house for a drink on his way home after the Gold Cup. Such a
lovely
day.” She sighed. “And then those
bastards...
You will catch them, won’t you, Sid?”

“If I can,” I said.

I left a whole lot of the boxes empty on my chart, and drove to Epsom Downs, spirits as gray as the skies. The bars were crowded. Umbrellas dripped. The brave colors of June dresses hid under drabber raincoats, and only the geraniums looked happy.

I walked damply to the parade ring before the two-year-old colts’ six-furlong race and thoughtfully watched all the off-fore feet plink down lightheartedly. The young, spindly bones of those forelegs thrust thousand-pound bodies forward at sprinting speeds near forty miles an hour. I had mostly raced on the older, mature horses of steeplechasing, half a ton in weight, slightly slower, capable of four miles and thirty jumps from start to finish, but still on legs scarcely thicker than a big man’s wrist.

The anatomy of a horse’s foreleg consisted, from the shoulder down, of forearm, knee, cannon bone, fetlock joint (also known as the ankle), pastern bone, and hoof. The angry Lancashire farmer’s colored photograph had shown the amputation to have been effected straight through the narrowest part of the whole leg, just at the base of the fetlock joint, where the pastern emerged from it. In effect, the whole pastern and the hoof had been cut off.

Horses had very fast instincts for danger and were easily scared. Young horses seldom stood still. Yet one single chop had done the job each time. Why had all those poor animals stood quietly white the deed was done? None of them had squealed loud enough to alert his owner.

I went up on the stands and watched the two-year-olds set off from the spur away to the left at the top of the hill; watched them swoop down like a flock of star lings round Tattenham Comer, and sort themselves out into winner and losers along the straight with its deceptively difficult camber that could tilt a horse towards the rails if his jockey was inexperienced.

I watched, and I sighed. Five long years had passed since I’d ridden my last race. Would regret, I wondered, ever fade?

“Why so pensive, Sid lad?” asked an elderly trainer, grasping my elbow. “A scotch and water for your thoughts!” He steered me around towards the nearest bar and I went with him unprotestingly, as custom came my way quite often in that casual manner. He was great with horses and famously mean with his money.

“I hear you’re damned expensive,” he began inoffensively, handing me a glass. “What will you charge me for a day’s work?”

I told him.

“Too damned much. Do it for nothing, for old times’ sake.”

I added, smiling, “How many horses do you train for nothing?”

“That’s different.”

“How many races would you have asked me to ride for nothing?”

“Oh, all
right,
then. I’ll pay your damned fee. The fact is, I think I’m being
had,
and I want you to find out.”

It seemed he had received a glowing testimonial from the present employer of a chauffeur/houseman/handyman who’d applied for a job he’d advertised. He wanted to know if it was worth bringing the man up for an interview.

“She,” he said, “his employer is a woman. I phoned her when I got the letter, to check the reference, you see. She couldn’t have been more complimentary about the man if she’d tried, but ... I don’t know ... She was too complimentary, if you see what I mean.”

“You mean you think she might be glad to see the back of him?”

“You don’t hang about, Sid. That’s exactly what I mean.”

He gave me the testimonial letter of fluorescent praise.

“No problem,” I said, reading it. “One day’s fee, plus travel expenses. I’ll phone you, then send you a written report.”

“You still
look
like a jockey,” he complained. “You’re a damned sight more expensive on your feet.”

I smiled, put the letter away in a pocket, drank his scotch and applauded the string of winners he’d had recently, cheering him up before separating him from his cash.

I drifted around pleasurably but unprofitably for the rest of the day, slept thankfully without nightmares and found on a dry and sunny Derby Day morning that my friendly
Pump
reporter had really done his stuff.

“Lock up your colts,” he directed in the paper. “You’ve heard of foot fetishists? This is one beyond belief.”

He outlined in succinct paragraphs the similarities in “the affair of the four severed fetlocks” and pointed out that on that very night after the Derby—the biggest race of all—there would be moonlight enough at three A.M. for flashlights to be unnecessary. All two-year-old colts should, like Cinderella, be safe indoors by midnight. “And if ...,” he finished with a flourish, “... you should spy anyone creeping through the fields armed with a machete, phone ex-jockey turned gumshoe Sid Halley, who provided the information gathered here and can be reached via
The Pump‘
s special hotline. Phone
The Pump!
Save the colts! Halley to the rescue!”

I couldn’t imagine how he had got that last bit—including a telephone number—past any editor, but I needn’t have worried about spreading the message on the racecourse. No one spoke to me about anything else all afternoon.

 

I phoned
The Pump
myself and reached someone eventually who told me that Kevin Mills had gone to a train crash; sorry.

“Damn,” I said. “So how are you rerouting calls about colts to me? I didn’t arrange this. How will it work?”

“Hold on.”

I held on. A different voice came back.

“As Kevin isn’t available, we’re rerouting all Halley hotline calls to this number,” he said, and he read out my own Pont Square number.

“Where’s your bloody Mills? I’ll wring his neck.”

“Gone to the train crash. Before he left he gave us this number for reaching you. He said you would want to know at once about any colts.”

That was true enough—but hell’s bloody bells, I thought, I could have set it up better if he’d warned me.

I watched the Derby with inattention. An outsider won.

Ellis teased me about the piece in
The Pump.

“Hotline Halley,” he said, laughing and clapping me on the shoulder, tall and deeply friendly and wiping out in a flash the incredulous doubts I’d been having about him. “It’s an extraordinary coincidence, Sid, but I actually saw one of those colts. Alive, of course. I was staying with some chums from York, and after we’d gone home someone vandalized their colt. Such fun people. They didn’t deserve anything like that.”

“No one does.”

“True.”

“The really puzzling thing is motive,” I said. “I went to see all the owners. None of the colts was insured. Nor was Rachel Fems’s pony, of course.”

He said interestedly, “Did you think it was an insurance scam?”

“It jumps to mind, doesn’t it? Theoretically it’s possible to insure a horse and collect the lucre without the owner knowing anything about it. It’s been done. But if that’s what this is all about, perhaps someone in an insurance company somewhere will see the piece in The Pump and connect a couple of things. Come to think of it,” I finished slowly, “I might send a copy to every likely insurance company’s board of directors, asking, and warning them.”

“Good idea,” he said. “Does insurance and so on really take the place of racing? It sounds a pretty dull life for you, after what we used to do.”

“Does television replace it for you?”

“Not a hope.” He laughed. “Danger is addictive, wouldn’t you say? The only dangerous job in television is reporting wars and—have you noticed?—the same few war reporters get out there all the time, talking with their earnest, committed faces about this or that month’s little dust-up, while bullets fly and chip off bits of stone in the background to prove how brave they are.”

“You’re jealous.” I smiled.

“I get sodding bored sometimes with being a chat-show celebrity, even if it’s nice being liked. Don’t you ache for speed?”

“Every day,” I said.

“You’re about the only person who understands me. No one else can see that fame’s no substitute for danger.”

“It depends what you risk.”

Hands, I thought. One could risk hands.

“Good luck, Hotline,” Ellis said.

It was the owners of two-year-old colts that had the good luck. My telephone jammed and rang nonstop all evening and all night when I got home after the Derby, but the calls were all from people enjoying their shivers and jumping at shadows. The moonlight shone on quiet fields, and no animal, whether colt or two-year-old thoroughbred or children’s pony, lost a foot.

In the days that followed, interest and expectation dimmed and died. It was twelve days after the Derby, on the last night of the Royal Ascot meeting, that the screaming heebie-jeebies re-awoke.

On the Monday after the Derby, I trailed off on the one-day dig into the overblown reference and, without talking to the lady-employer herself (which would clearly have been counterproductive) , I uncovered enough to phone the tight-fisted trainer with sound advice.

“She wants to get rid of him without risk of being accused of unfair dismissal,” I said. “He steals small things from her house which pass through a couple of hands and turn up in the local antique shop. She can’t prove they were hers. The antique shop owner is whining about his innocence. The lady has apparently said she won’t try to prosecute her houseman if he gets the heck out. Her testimonial is part of the bargain. The houseman is a regular in the local betting shop, and gambles heavily on horses. Do you want to employ him?”

“Like hell.”

“The report I’ll write and send to you,” I told him, “will say only, ‘Work done on recruitment of staff.’ You can claim tax relief on it.”

He laughed dryly: “Anytime you want a reference,” he said, pleased, “I’ll write you an affidavit.”

“You never know,” I said, “and thanks.”

I had phoned the report from the car park of a motorway service station on my way home late in the dusky evening, but it was when I reached Pont Square that the day grew doubly dark. There was a two-page fax waiting on my machine and I read it standing in the sitting room with all thoughts of a friendly glass of scotch evaporating into disbelief and the onset of misery.

The pages were from Kevin Mills. “I don’t know why you want this list of the great and good,” he wrote, “but for what it’s worth and because I promised, here is a list of the guests entertained by Topline Foods at lunch at Aintree on the day before the Grand National.”