Straight (21 page)

“I’m surprised he gave you a weapon like that,” I said mildly. “Aren’t they illegal? And him a magistrate.”

“I’m a magistrate too,” she said unexpectedly. “That’s how we originally met, at a magistrate’s conference. I’ve not inquired into the legality of kiyogas. If I were prosecuted for carrying and using an offensive weapon, well, that would be much preferable to being a victim of the appalling assaults that come before us every week.”

“Where did he get it?” I asked curiously.

“America.”

“Do you have it with you here?”

She nodded and touched her handbag. “It’s second nature, now.”

She must have been thirty years younger than her husband, I thought inconsequently, and I knew what she felt about him. I didn’t know whether or not I liked her, but I did recognize there was a weird sort of intimacy between us and that I didn’t resent it.

The jockeys came out and stood around with the owners in little groups. Nicholas Loder was there with the man he’d come in with, a thickset powerful-looking man in a dark suit, the pink cardboard Club badge fluttering from his lapel.

“Dozen Roses,” I said, watching Loder talking to the owner and his jockey, “was he named for you?”

“Oh, God,” she said, disconcerted. “How ever ... ?”

I said, “I put your roses on the coffin for the service.”

“Oh ...” she murmured with difficulty, her throat closing, her mouth twisting, “I ... I can’t ...”

“Tell me how York University came to be putting its name to a race.” I made it sound conversational, to give her composure time.

She swallowed, fighting for control, steadying her breathing. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I can’t even mourn for him except inside; can’t let it show to anyone except you, and it sweeps over me, I can’t help it.” She paused and answered my unimportant question. “The Clerk of the Course wanted to involve the city. Some of the bigwigs of the University were against joining in, but Henry persuaded them. He and I have always come here to meetings now and then. We both like it, for a day out with friends.”

“Your husband doesn’t actually lecture at the University, does he?”

“Oh no, he’s just a figurehead. He’s chairman of a fair number of things in York. A public figure here.”

Vulnerable to scandal, I thought: as she was herself, and Greville also. She and he must have been unwaveringly discreet.

“How long since you first met Greville?” I asked noncommittally.

“Four years.” She paused. “Four marvelous years. Not enough.”

The jockeys swung up onto the horses and moved away to go out onto the course. Nicholas Loder and his owner, busily talking, went off to the stands.

“May I watch the race with you?” Clarissa said. “Do you mind?”

“I was going to watch from the grass.” I glanced down apologetically at the crutches. “It’s easier.”

“I don’t mind the grass.”

So we stood side by side on the grass in front of the grandstand and she said, “Whenever we could be together, he bought twelve red roses. It just ... well ...” She stopped, swallowing again hard.

“Mm,” I said. I thought of the ashes and the red rose tree and decided to tell her about that another time. It had been for him, anyway, not for her.

Nicholas Loder’s two-year-old won the sprint at a convincing clip and I caught a glimpse of the owner afterward looking heavily satisfied but unsmiling. Hardly a jolly character, I thought.

Clarissa went off to join her husband for the University race and after that, during their speeches and presentations, I went in search of Dozen Roses who was being led round in the pre-parade ring before being taken into a box or a stall to have his saddle put on.

Dozen Roses looked docile to dozy, I thought. An unremarkable bay, he had none of the looks or presence of Datepalm, nor the ‘chaser’s alert interest in his surroundings. He was a good performer, of that there was no question, but he didn’t at that moment give an impression of going to be a “trot-up” within half an hour, and he was vaguely not what I’d expected. Was this the colt that on the video tapes had won his last three races full of verve? Was this the young buck who had tried to mount a filly at the starting gate at Newmarket Park?

No, I saw with a sense of shock, he was not. I peered under his belly more closely, as it was sometimes difficult to tell, but there seemed to be no doubt that he had lost the essential tackle; that he had in fact been gelded.

I was stunned, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or be furious. It explained so much: the loss of form when he had his mind on procreation rather than racing, and the return to speed once the temptation was removed. It explained why the Stewards hadn’t called Loder in to justify the difference in running: horses very often did better after the operation.

I unfolded my race-card at Dozen Roses’ race, and there, sure enough, against his name stood not c for colt or
h
for horse, but
g
for gelding.

Nicholas Loder’s voice, vibrating with fury, spoke from not far behind me, “That horse is not your horse. Keep away from him.”

I turned. Loder was advancing fast with Dozen Roses’ saddle over his arm and full-blown rage in his face. The heavily unjoyful owner, still for some reason in tow, was watching the proceedings with puzzlement.

“Mine or not, I’m entitled to look at him,” I said. “And look at him I darned well have, and either he is not Dozen Roses or you have gelded him against my brother’s express wishes.”

His mouth opened and snapped shut.

“What’s the matter, Nick?” the owner said. “Who is this?”

Loder failed to introduce us. Instead he said to me vehemently, “You can’t do anything about it. I have an Authority to Act. I am the registered agent for this horse and what I decide is none of your business.”

“My brother refused to have any of his horses gelded. You knew it well. You disobeyed him because you were sure he wouldn’t find out, as he never went to the races.”

He glared at me. He was aware that if I lodged a formal complaint he would be in a good deal of trouble, and I thought he was certainly afraid that as my brother’s executor I could and quite likely would do just that. Even if I only talked about it to others, it could do him damage: it was the sort of tidbit the hungry racing press would pounce on for a giggle, and the owners of all the princely colts in his prestigious stable would get cold feet that the same might happen to their own property without their knowledge or consent.

He had understood all that, I thought, in the moment I’d told him on the telephone that it was I who would be inheriting Dozen Roses. He’d known that if I ever saw the horse I would realize at once what had been done. No wonder he’d lost his lower resonances.

“Greville was a fool,” he said angrily. “The horse has done much better since he was cut.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, “but it’s not the point.”

“How much do you want, then?” he demanded roughly.

My own turn, I thought, to gape like a fish. I said feebly, “It’s not a matter of money.”

“Everything is,” he declared. “Name your price and get out of my way.”

I glanced at the attendant owner who looked more phlegmatic than riveted, but might remember and repeat this conversation, and I said merely, “We’ll discuss it later, OK?” and hitched myself away from them without aggression.

Behind me the owner was saying, “What was that all about, Nick?” and I heard Loder reply, “Nothing, Rollo. Don’t worry about it,” and when I looked back a few seconds later I saw both of them stalking off toward the saddling boxes followed by Dozen Roses in the grasp of his lad.

Despite Nicholas Loder’s anxious rage, or maybe because of it, I came down on the side of amusement. I would myself have had the horse gelded several months before the trainer had done it out of no doubt unbearable frustration: Greville had been pigheaded on the subject from both misplaced sympathy and not knowing enough about horses. I thought I would make peace with Loder that evening on the telephone, whatever the outcome of the race, as I certainly didn’t want a fight on my hands for so rocky a cause. Talk about the roots of war, I thought wryly: there had been sillier reasons for bloody strife in history than the castration of a thoroughbred.

At York some of the saddling boxes were open to public view, some were furnished with doors. Nicholas Loder seemed to favor the privacy and took Dozen Roses inside away from my eyes.

Harley and Martha Ostermeyer, coming to see the horses saddled, were full of beaming anticipation. They had backed the winner of the University Trophy and had wagered all the proceeds on my, that was to say, my brother’s horse.

“You won’t get much return,” I warned them. “It’s favorite.”

“We know that, dear,” Martha said happily, looking around. “Where is he? Which one?”

“He’s inside that box,” I pointed, “being saddled.”

“Harley and I have had a marvelous idea,” she said sweetly, her eyes sparkling.

“Now, Martha,” Harley said. He sounded faintly alarmed as if Martha’s marvelous ideas weren’t always the best possible news.

“We want you to dine with us when we get back to London,” she finished.

Harley relaxed, relieved. “Yes. Hope you can.” He clearly meant that this particular marvelous idea was passable, even welcome. “London at weekends is a graveyard.”

With a twitching of an inward grin I accepted my role as graveyard alleviator and, in the general good cause of cementing Ostermeyer-Shandy-Franklin relations, said I would be very pleased to stay to dinner. Martha and Harley expressed such gratification as to make me wonder whether when they were alone they bored each other to silence.

Dozen Roses emerged from his box with his saddle on and was led along toward the parade ring. He walked well, I thought, his good straight hocks encouraging lengthy strides, and he also seemed to have woken up a good deal, now that the excitement was at hand.

In the horse’s wake hurried Nicholas Loder and his friend Rollo, and it was because they were crowding him, I thought, that Dozen Roses swung round on his leading rein and pulled backward from his lad, and in straightening up again hit the Rollo man a hefty buffet with his rump and knocked him to his knees.

Martha with instinctive kindness rushed forward to help him, but he floundered to his feet with a curse that made her blink. All the same she bent and picked up a thing like a blue rubber ball which had fallen out of his jacket and held it toward him, saying “You dropped this, I think.”

He ungraciously snatched it from her, gave her an unnecessarily fierce stare as if she’d frightened the horse into knocking him over, which she certainly hadn’t, and hurried into the parade ring after Nicholas Loder. He, looking back and seeing me still there, reacted with another show of fury.

“What perfectly hornd people,” Martha said, making a face. “Did you hear what that man said? Disgusting! Fancy saying it aloud!”

Dear Martha, I thought, that word was everyday coinage on racecourses. The nicest people used it: it made no one a villain. She was brushing dust off her gloves fastidiously as if getting rid of contamination and I half expected her to go up to Rollo and in the tradition of the indomitable American female to tell him to wash his mouth out with soap.

Harley had meanwhile picked something else up off the grass and was looking at it helplessly. “He dropped this too,” he said. “I think.”

Martha peered at his hands and took the object out of them.

“Oh, yes,” she said with recognition, “that’s the other half of the baster. You’d better have it, Derek, then you can give it back to that obnoxious friend of your trainer, if you want to.”

I frowned at what she’d given me, which was a rigid plastic tube, semitransparent, about an inch in diameter, nine inches long, open at one end and narrowing to half the width at the other.

“A baster,” Martha said again. “For basting meat when it’s roasting. You know them, don’t you? You press the bulb thing and release it to suck up the juices which you then squirt over the meat.”

I nodded. I knew what a baster was.

“What an extraordinary thing to take to the races,” Martha said wonderingly.

“Mm,” I agreed. “He seems an odd sort of man altogether.” I tucked the plastic tube into an inside jacket pocket, from which its nozzle end protruded a couple of inches, and we went first to see Dozen Roses joined with his jockey in the parade ring and then up onto the stands to watch him race.

The jockey was Loder’s chief stable jockey, as able as any, as honest as most. The stable money was definitely on the horse, I thought, watching the forecast odds on the information board change from 2/1 on to 5/2 on. When a gambling stable didn’t put its money up front, the whisper went round and the price eased dramatically. The whisper where it mattered that day had to be saying that Loader was in earnest about the “trot-up,” and Alfie’s base imputation would have to wait for another occasion.

Perhaps as a result of his year-by-year successes, Loder’s stable always, it was well-known in the racing world, attracted as owners serious gamblers whose satisfaction was more in winning money than in winning races; and that wasn’t the truism it seemed, because in steeplechasing the owners tended to want to win the races more than the money. Steeplechasing owners only occasionally made a profit overall and realistically expected to have to pay for their pleasure.

Wondering if the Rollo man was one of the big Loder gamblers, I flicked back the pages of the race-card and looked up his name beside the horse of his that had won the sprint. Owner, Mr. T. Rollway, the card read. Rollo for short to his friends. Never heard of him, I thought, and wondered if Greville had.

Dozen Roses cantered down to the start with at least as much energy and enthusiasm as any of the seven other runners and was fed into the stalls without fuss. He’d been striding out well, I thought, and taking a good hold of the bit. An old hand at the game by now, of course, as I was also, I thought dryly.