The Race (7 page)

There was ‘lumey’ and ‘dog’, the kind of short and simple words that even younger kids would easily learn to recognise. But there was also ‘raceday’ and ‘champion’ and ‘dear prudence’, words and phrases Lumey might well have heard spoken but was unlikely to have seen written down. Even with my limited knowledge of kids, the spelling seemed advanced for a four-year-old. Dear Prudence was the name of a puppy sired by Limlasker just the year before. Del said she was a talented dog but highly strung, and they were still looking for the right runner for her.

It was weird, to see her name spelled out on the floor like that. It was even weirder knowing that Lumey had been sitting right there, in her favourite place over by the window, playing with her tiles, making the peculiarly sweet little humming noises she used to make, most likely Just a couple of hours earlier everything had been normal. Thinking about it made my guts ache.

We went into the den and Del shut the door, pushing hard to make sure it was closed properly. As soon as we were sitting down I asked him what the hell was going on.

“Why aren’t the cops here?” I said.

“We can’t call the cops,” Del said. He made the same irritated sighing noise he’d made outside. “If we call the cops the people who’ve taken Lumey will most likely kill her.”

“What planet are you on, Derrick? You tell me Lumey’s missing. Claudia’s going off her trolley out there and you’re stuck on your arse doing nothing.” I looked around the room. There were empty DVD cases and stacks of paper everywhere. The place was a mess.

I never called him Derrick unless I was really pissed off with him and both of us knew it.

“Listen,” he said, in that calm, calculating voice he always used when he was playing for time. “There’s stuff you should know.”

“From where I’m sitting that would seem to be the understatement of the century.”

“Hold your rag, Jen, this isn’t helping. You’ve got to calm down.” He leaned forward in his chair, his scrawny arse balanced on the edge of the seat, arms folded across his knees. “For a start, I know that Lumey’s okay.”

“What do you mean, you know?” I was listening now. I knew we were getting to the heart of things. Everything I’d said until then was just a warm up, my way of telling my brother I was frightened and upset. The thing is, I knew Del, and I knew from the moment I came up the drive and there were no cop cars that there was more to this business than first appeared. I understood that Del had sent Claudia away because he wanted to tell me stuff he didn’t want her finding out, either because it was dangerous or because he knew he was in the wrong. Knowing my brother it was probably both.

“I had a phone call about an hour ago. I know who’s done this and I know what they want. I can give them what they want, so there’s nothing to worry about. What I need you to do is convince Cee of that. Everything will be all right, so long as we sit tight and play ball. No one knows, no one gets hurt – simple as that.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said, but it was a token protest, my own play for time. I looked Del straight in the face and it was only then that I saw how scared he was really, how scared for his daughter. He was hiding it well and I believed he was telling me the truth about the phone call but he was still scared. Because he knew he was not in control, because he knew as well as I did that he was in the kind of situation where things can go wrong in less than a second.

Because he knew that Lumey was alone and probably terrified.

His eyes were like pinpricks: hard, green water. He looked as if he wanted to kill the world.

“What have you done, Del?” I said. “I’m saying nothing to Claudia until you tell me the truth.” I spoke more gently this time, but I felt certain he would know from my tone that I meant business.

“Okay, okay.” He shifted around on the edge of his seat. He really did look awful, worse than Claudia in a way because Claudia was just frightened, whereas Del also knew he was responsible for what was happening. I wanted to go to him, hug him, tell him we’d sort this shit out together the way we always had. I couldn’t do that, though. I knew that if I let him see I felt sorry for him there was a danger he would spin me a line, that he would tell me the story that suited him, rather than the story that was true.

I made myself hold back. It sounds cruel, but I had to, for Lumey’s sake.

“I lost something that belongs to someone else,” Del said. “Something that’s worth a lot of money. They want their money back, that’s all.”

~*~

Del had been running glass. It wasn’t just a one-off, either, it had been going on for years. He’d been using yard winnings to purchase large consignments of the drug through a gang who had a contact in one of the facilities where the medical-grade stuff was produced. He’d then sold it on to another group in London for a considerable mark-up. The glass was transported in canisters of fertilizer via the tramway. It was a foolproof system, so Del said – or at least it had been.

“Last week’s consignment was intercepted,” he said. “Either the cops got wind of it somehow, or they’ve known for ages and this is just their way of letting us know they want a piece of the action. Fuck knows. Only I was intending to pay off the supply guys with the proceeds from this lot and now that plan’s scuppered. Which leaves the supply guys in the red with someone else. I don’t give a shit about their problem, frankly, except that they’ve pulled this stunt with Lumey to twist my arm.”

My heart sank. I knew at once that Del was right, that there was no way we could get the police involved. Not because of the glass – that was the least of it – but because of the supply people. If they found out we’d shopped them to the cops they’d come after Del and kill him. They’d kill Lumey too, of course, dump her body out in the marshes without a second thought.

The police were a lost cause anyway. Everyone knew the glass trade in Sapphire was out of control.

“Can’t you borrow the money from Gra? I’m sure he’d tide you over.”

Del laughed, a hard, bitter sound without a trace of humour. “Have you any idea how much I owe? Clearly not. You might as well suggest we go digging for treasure.” He leaned back in his seat. “Anyway, stuff that, I don’t want Gra involved. I can sort this thing myself – I’ve got it all worked out. You know it’s the Delawarr Triple in just over a fortnight? I know this guy who’ll bet big for a share of the proceeds, and by big I mean big enough to pay him off and the suppliers too. We finalize our account with the supply guys, they return Lumey by close of business. Job done.”

He was grinning now, just a little, with the look of a wolf circling a sheep pen. He was pleased with his plan, I could see that, happy as a cow in clover.

So far as I was concerned it sounded insane.

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” I said. “You have to win the race first.”

“We’ll win,” he said. He sounded abstracted, as if the race result were a minor technicality and his mind had already moved on to more important matters. “I’m going to run Limlasker.”

I gaped at him – I think my mouth really did fall open. I honestly considered the possibility that he might have gone crazy.

“You’re living in cloud cuckoo land, Del.”

“No,” he said. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

What it came down to was this: Del was proposing to bet his daughter’s life on a sodding dog race.

~*~

The Delawarr Triple is the biggest event in the racing calendar. It takes place in the third Saturday in June, just before the really hot weather starts to kick in. The stadium is always packed. It’s a 1,100-metre race over hurdles, with the preliminary heats and the quarter- and semi-finals taking place throughout the course of the day. Victory in the Delawarr earns the winner ten full championship points, as well as a mighty winner’s purse of 10,000 shillings. There’s a lot of excitement surrounding the race, a lot of intrigue and rumour during the build-up, and of course a lot of money changes hands. I can’t remember a single year when there wasn’t some betting or doping scandal.

Occasionally dogs are stolen or killed. I remember one year there was a suicide, an out-of-towner who blew his brains out with a shotgun down on the seafront.

He lost his house in a bet, apparently. It happens.

Del had always been nervous around the Delawarr. He usually had a dog or two running and he usually made the semis at least but he had never run Limlasker. He said it was because Lim did better over flat but that was just a get-out. Lim had won his best races over flat, that was true, but he was a good hurdler. He’d won races all the way up to 900 metres.

The truth was that Del had never forgotten the business with Marley Struts. Struts had been a very young, very talented runner and Del’s special protégé. There was a lot of buzz around him and by the evening before the race he was the odds-on favourite. But half an hour before he ran his first heat, Struts was taken outside the ground by some jocks on speed and beaten senseless. He suffered a hairline fracture of the skull and ended up having to have his implant removed. A year later Struts tracked down the people who did it and killed one of them with a crowbar. He’s in prison now, serving life for murder. None of this was Del’s fault, but he took it hard.

The real reason Del had never run Limlasker in the Delawarr Triple was because he was afraid something might happen to him. He tended to run younger dogs, dogs that would benefit from the exposure but without attracting too much attention. Marley Struts had attracted attention, and look what happened.

Limlasker was seven years old now and about to turn eight. He was an old dog, by any standards. He and Tash were still winning races, but Del already had another dog – a nine-month-old bitch named Clearview Princess, Limlasker’s granddaughter – picked out for Tash for when Lim retired. Limlasker would run one more season at the most.

It would be unusual for any dog of his age to run the Delawarr. It’s true that some of the great champions have been five years old or more but they’ve always been dogs with a track record in that particular race. Red Kestrel was six when she won, but she’d been competing in the Delawarr for three previous seasons and placing higher each time. It was a race she wanted to win, anyone could see that.

Limlasker though – so far as the Delawarr was concerned, he was both a veteran and a novice, not a good combination. When Del told me he was planning to run him I thought he’d gone nuts.

But after from my comment about cloud cuckoo land I kept my mouth shut. What else could I do? Del obviously meant to do this, and nothing I or anyone else could say would make any difference.

~*~

We sat Claudia down and talked to her. I did most of the talking, actually – I guess Del thought she’d be more likely to swallow our story if it came from me. We told her Lumey was safe, that she was being held as collateral against a business loan, that it was all a bit of a mix up and Lumey would be returned to us in a couple of weeks.

If anyone asked she was to say Lumey was in Folkestone, visiting her grandma. On no account was she to speak to the police.

“There’s nothing to worry about, honestly,” I said. Claudia blinked at me. Her eyes were shiny and kind of glazed over. It was like she’d been drugged. I felt lower than a louse, but what choice did I have? What I had said was not a lie exactly, and even if I went against my brother and told her everything, what good would it do? The facts of the situation wouldn’t change, and knowing the truth would only make Claudia feel worse.

We all had our jobs to do. Del’s was to juggle hand grenades, mine was to convince him he could perform a miracle. Claudia’s was to shut up and keep out of the way.

The sooner we all got on with them, the better.

“Why not do something special for Lumey, for when she comes home?” I said to Claudia. “You could redecorate her bedroom. I’ll help you choose the colours if you like.”

I felt like a right idiot, suggesting that, but I thought it might help Claudia to have something concrete to focus on, and it did.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a while, actually,” she said. She was looking a little brighter, a bit less like a zombie on Valium, and I really started to believe that if we could only create a safe space for Claudia to live inside for the next week or so we might just come through this. I guess Del’s madness was catching.

I agreed to stay for supper, and to come over to the Cowshed the following afternoon to help Claudia decide on a theme for Lumey’s new decor.

Del was looking at me like I was some kind of genius. I wanted to thump him.

I didn’t get home until after eleven. I felt exhausted, wiped out, but the idea of sleep seemed impossible. I paced around my apartment, pulling down blinds and checking doors, and all the time there was this horrible little voice inside my head, whispering to me all the terrible things that could be happening to Lumey at that very moment.

If she was even still alive, that was.

I did the only thing I knew that would help. I unwrapped the package of blue leather I’d bought at Romer’s and spread it flesh side up on my workroom table. I stroked it gently, stretching it just a little with the tips of my fingers to test its strength. I flattened my palm against the downy underside, its texture so soft and so pliable I already knew how the needle would feel going in. Smooth and sweet as a silver spoon through a jar of honey. I opened the computer file with Kiwit’s measurements, the photographs I had taken of her hands and arms, both front view and back. Not all gantiers bother with photos, but I have always found them essential because they help me imagine.

Angela Kiwit had very strong forearms. In isolation from the rest of her body, you might easily mistake them for a man’s. The long hands with the tapering fingers did not quite match them.

For me, all hands are beautiful, the most complex and fascinating part of the human body. I spent some time studying those photographs, and at some point all thoughts of Claudia and Del and Lumey leaked silently away. I made a cup of tea and drank it. I thought about making a start on drawing the pattern but suddenly realised how tired I was – tired enough, finally, to sleep.