Banker

OCTOBER

Summer had come, summer had gone, sodden, cold and unloved. It had been overcast and windy during Royal Ascot week and Gordon and I, clamped to our telephones and pondering our options, had looked at the sullen sky and hardly minded that this year Dissdale hadn’t needed to sell half-shares in his box.
Only with the autumn, far too late, had days of sunshine returned, and it was on a bright golden Saturday that I took the race train to Newbury to see the mixed meeting of two jump races and four flat.
Ursula Young was there, standing near the weighing room when I walked in from the station and earnestly reading her racecard.
‘Hello,’ she said when I greeted her. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. How’s the money-lending?’
‘Profitable,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘Are you here for anything special?’
‘No. Just fresh air and a flutter.’
‘I’m supposed to meet a client.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Time for a quick sandwich, though. Are you on?’
I was on, and bought her and myself a thin pallid slice of tasteless white meat between two thick pallid tasteless slices of soggy-crusted bread, the whole wrapped up in cardboard and celophane and costing a fortune.
Ursula ate it in disgust. ‘They used to serve proper luscious sandwiches, thick, juicy handmade affairs which came in a whole stack. I can’t stand all this repulsive hygiene.’ The rubbish from the sandwiches indeed littered most of the tables around us… ‘Every so-called advance is a retreat from excellence,’ she said, dogmatic as ever.
I totally agreed with her and we chewed in joyless accord.
‘How’s trade with you?’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘Fair. The cream of the yearlings are going for huge prices. They’ve all got high reserves on them because they’ve cost so much to produce – stallion fees and the cost of keeping the mare and foal to start with, let alone vet’s fees and all the incidentals. My sort of clients on the whole settle for a second, third or fourth rank, and many a good horse, mind you, has come from the bargain counter.’
I smiled at the automatic sales pitch. ‘Talking of vets,’ I said, is the Pargetter murder still unsolved?’
She nodded regretfully. ‘I was talking to his poor wife in Newmarket last week. We met in the street. She’s only half the girl she was, poor thing, no life in her. She said she asked the police recently if they were still even trying, and they assured her they were, but she doesn’t believe it. It’s been so long, nine months, and if they hadn’t any leads to start with, how can they possibly have any now? She’s very depressed, it’s dreadful.’
I made sympathetic murmurs, and Ursula went on, ‘The only good thing you could say is that he’d taken out decent life insurance and paid off the mortgage on their house, so at least she and the children aren’t penniless as well. She was telling me how he’d been very careful in those ways, and she burst into tears, poor girl.’
Ursula looked as if the encounter had distressed her also.
‘Have another whisky-mac,’ I suggested. ‘To cheer you up.’
She looked at her watch. ‘All right. You get it, but I’ll pay. My turn.’
Over the second drink, in a voice of philosophical irritation, she told me about the client she was presently due to meet, a small-time trainer of steeplechasers. ‘He’s such a fool to himself,’ she said. ‘He makes hasty decisions, acts on impulse, and then when things go wrong he feels victimised and cheated and gets angry. Yet he can be perfectly nice when he likes.’
I wasn’t especially interested in the touchy trainer, but when I went outside again with Ursula he spotted her from a short distance away and practically pounced on her arm.
‘There you are,’ he said, as if she’d had no right to be anywhere but at his side. ‘I’ve been looking all over.’
‘It’s only just time,’ she said mildly.
He brushed that aside, a short wiry intense man of about forty with a pork-pie hat above a weatherbeaten face.
‘I wanted you to see him before he’s saddled,’ he said. ‘Do come on, Ursula. Come and look at his conformation.’
She opened her mouth to say something to me but he almost forcefully dragged her off, holding her sleeve and talking rapidly into her ear. She gave me an apologetic look of long-suffering and departed in the direction of the pre-parade ring, where the horses for the first race were being led round by their lads before going off to the saddling boxes.
I didn’t follow but climbed onto the steps of the main parade ring, round which walked several of the runners already saddled. The last of the field to appear some time later was accompanied by the pork-pie hat, and also Ursula, and for something to do I looked the horse up in the racecard.
Zoomalong, five-year-old gelding, trained by F. Barnet.
F. Barnet continued his dissertation into Ursula’s ear, aiming his words from approximately six inches away, which I would have found irritating but which she bore without flinching. According to the flickering numbers on the Tote board Zoomalong had a medium chance in the opinion of the public, so for interest I put a medium stake on him to finish in the first three.
I didn’t see Ursula or F. Barnet during the race, but Zoomalong zoomed along quite nicely to finish third, and I walked down from the stands towards the unsaddling enclosure to watch the patting-on-the-back post-race routine.
F. Barnet was there, still talking to Ursula and pointing out parts of his now sweating and stamping charge. Ursula nodded non-committally, her own eyes knowledgeably raking the gelding from stem to stern, a neat competent good looking fifty in a rust-coloured coat and brown velvet beret.
Eventually the horses were led away and the whole cycle of excitement began slowly to regenerate towards the second race.
Without in the least meaning to I again found myself standing near Ursula, and this time she introduced me to the pork-pie hat, who had temporarily stopped talking.
‘This is Fred Barnet,’ she said. ‘And his wife Susan.’ A rounded motherly person in blue. ‘And their son, Ricky.’ A boy taller than his father, dark-haired, pleasant-faced.
I shook hands with all three, and it was while I was still touching the son that Ursula in her clear voice said my name, ‘Tim Ekaterin.’
The boy’s hand jumped in mine as if my flesh had burned him. I was astonished, and then I looked at his whitening skin, at the suddenly frightened dark eyes, at the stiffening of the body, at the rising panic: and I wouldn’t have known him if he hadn’t reacted in that way.
‘What’s the matter, Ricky?’ his mother said, puzzled.
He said ‘Nothing’ hoarsely and looked around for escape, but all too clearly he knew I knew exactly who he was now and could always find him however far he ran.
‘What do you think, then, Ursula?’ Fred Barnet demanded, returning to the business in hand. ‘Will you buy him? Can I count on you?’
Ursula said she would have to consult her client.
‘But he was third,’ Fred Barnet insisted. ‘A good third.… In that company, a pretty good showing. And he’ll win, I’m telling you. He’ll win.’
‘I’ll tell my client all about him. I can’t say fairer than that.’
‘But you do like him, don’t you? Look, Ursula, he’s a good sort, easy to handle, just right for an amateur…’ He went on for a while in this vein while his wife listened with a sort of aimless beam meaning nothing at all.
To the son, under cover of his father’s hard sell, I quietly said, ‘I want to talk to you, and if you run away from me now I’ll be telephoning the police.’
He gave me a sick look and stood still.
‘We’ll walk down the course together to watch the next race,’ I said. ‘We won’t be interrupted there. And you can tell me why. And then we’ll see.’
It was easy enough for him to drop back unnoticed from his parents, who were still concentrating on Ursula, and he came with me through the gate and out across the track itself to the centre of the racecourse, stumbling slightly as if not in command of his feet. We walked down towards the last fence, and he told me why he’d tried to kill Calder Jackson.
‘It doesn’t seem real, not now, it doesn’t really,’ he said first. A young voice, slightly sloppy accent, full of strain.
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
‘Seventeen.’
I hadn’t been so far out, I thought, fifteen months ago.
‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ he said explosively, sounding faintly aggrieved at the twist of fate. ‘I mean, the papers said you worked in a bank.’
‘So I do. And I go racing.’ I paused. ‘You remembered my name.’
‘Yeah. Could hardly forget it, could I? All over the papers.’
We went a few yards in silence. ‘Go on,’ I said.
He made a convulsive gesture of frustrated despair. ‘All right. But if I tell you, you won’t tell them, will you, not Mum and Dad?’
I glanced at him, but from his troubled face it was clear that he meant exactly what he’d said: it wasn’t my telling the police he minded most, but my telling his parents.
‘Just get on with it,’ I said.
He sighed. ‘Well, we had this horse. Dad did. He’d bought it as a yearling and ran it as a two-year-old and at three, but it was a jumper really, and it turned out to be good.’ He paused. ‘Indian Silk, that’s what it was called.’
I frowned. ‘But Indian Silk… didn’t that win at Cheltenham this year, in March?’
He nodded. ‘The Gold Cup. The very top. He’s only seven now and he’s bound to be brilliant for years.’ The voice was bitter with a sort of resigned, stifled anger.
‘But he doesn’t any longer belong to your father?’
‘No, he doesn’t.’ More bitterness, very sharp.
‘Go on, then,’ I said.
He swallowed and took his time, but eventually he said, ‘Two years ago this month, when Indian Silk was five, like, he won the Hermitage ’Chase very easily here at Newbury, and everyone was tipping him for the Gold Cup last year, though Dad was saying he was still on the young side and to give him time. See, Dad was that proud of that horse. The best he’d ever trained, and it was his own, not someone else’s. Don’t know if you can understand that.’
‘I do understand it,’ I said.
He gave a split-second glance at my face. ‘Well, Indian Silk got sick,’ he said. ‘I mean, there was nothing you could put your finger on. He just lost his speed. He couldn’t even gallop properly at home, couldn’t beat the other horses in Dad’s yard that he’d been running rings round all year. Dad couldn’t run him in races. He could hardly train him. And the vet couldn’t find out what was wrong with him. They took blood tests and all sorts, and they gave him antibiotics and purges, and they thought it might be worms or something, but it wasn’t.’
We had reached the last fence, and stood there on the rough grass beside it while in twos and threes other enthusiasts straggled down from the grandstand towards us to watch the horses in action at close quarters.
‘I was at school a lot of the time, see,’ Ricky said. ‘I was home every night of course but I was taking exams and had a lot of homework and I didn’t really want to take much notice of Indian Silk getting so bad or anything. I mean, Dad does go on a bit, and I suppose I thought the horse just had the virus or something and would get better. But he just got slowly worse and one day Mum was crying.’ He stopped suddenly, as if that part was the worst. ‘I hadn’t seen a grown up cry before,’ he said. ‘Suppose you’ll think it funny, but it upset me something awful.’
‘I don’t think it funny,’ I said.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, seeming to gather confidence, ‘It got so that Indian Silk was so weak he could barely walk down the road and he wasn’t eating, and Dad was in real despair because there wasn’t nothing anyone could do, and Mum couldn’t bear the thought of him going to the knackers, and then some guy telephoned and offered to buy him.’
To buy a sick horse?’ I said, surprised.
‘I don’t think Dad was going to tell him just how bad he was. Well, I mean, at that point Indian Silk was worth just what the knackers would pay for his carcass, which wasn’t much, and this man was offering nearly twice that. But the man said he knew Indian Silk couldn’t race any more but he’d like to give him a good home in a nice field for as long as necessary, and it meant that Dad didn’t have the expense of any more vets’ bills and he and Mum didn’t have to watch Indian Silk just getting worse and worse, and Mum wouldn’t have to think of him going to the knackers for dog meat, so they let him go.’
The horses for the second race came out onto the course and galloped down past us, the jockeys’ colours bright in the sun.
‘And then what?’ I said.
‘Then nothing happened for weeks and we were getting over it, like, and then someone told Dad that Indian Silk was back in training and looking fine, and he couldn’t believe it.’
‘When was that?’ I asked.
‘It was last year, just before… before Ascot.’
A small crowd gathered on the landing side of the fence, and I drew him away down the course a bit further, to where the horses would set themselves right to take off.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘My exams were coming up,’ he said. ‘And I mean, they were important, they were going to affect my whole life, see?’
I nodded.
‘Then Dad found that the man who’d bought Indian Silk hadn’t put him in any field, he’d sent him straight down the road to Calder Jackson.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘And there was this man saying Calder Jackson had the gift of healing, some sort of magic, and had simply touched Indian Silk and made him well. I ask you… And Dad was in a frightful state because someone had suggested he should send the horse there, to Calder Jackson, while he was so bad, of course, and Dad had said don’t be so ridiculous it was all a lot of rubbish. And then Mum was saying he should have listened to her, because she’d said why not try it, it couldn’t do any harm, and he wouldn’t do it, and they were having rows, and she was crying…’ He gulped for air, the story now pouring out faster almost than he could speak. ‘And I wasn’t getting any work done with it all going on, they weren’t ever talking about anything else, and I took the first exam and just sat there and couldn’t do it, and I knew I’d failed and I was going to fail them all because I couldn’t concentrate… and then there was Calder Jackson one evening talking on television, saying he’d got a friend of his to buy a dying horse, because the people who owned it would just have let it die because they didn’t believe in healers, like a lot of people, and he hoped the horse would be great again some day, like before, thanks to him, and I knew he was talking about Indian Silk. And he said he was going to Ascot on that Thursday… and there was Dad screaming that Calder Jackson had stolen the horse away, it was all a filthy swindle, which of course it wasn’t, but at the time I believed him… and it all got so that I hated Calder Jackson so much that I couldn’t think straight. I mean, I thought he was the reason Mum was crying and I was failing my exams and Dad had lost the only really top horse he’d have in his whole life, and I just wanted to kill him.’
The bed-rock words were out, and the flood suddenly stopped, leaving the echo of them on the October air.
‘And did you fail your exams?’ I asked, after a moment.
‘Yeah. Most of them. But I took them again at Christmas and got good passes.’ He shook his head, speaking more slowly, more quietly. ‘I was glad even that night that you’d stopped me stabbing him. I mean… I’d have thrown my whole life away, I could see it afterwards, and all for nothing, because Dad wasn’t going to get the horse back whatever I did, because it was a legal sale, like.’
I thought over what he’d told me while in the distance the horses lined up and set off on their three mile steeplechase.
‘I was sort of mad,’ he said. ‘I can’t really understand it now. I mean, I wouldn’t go around trying to kill people. I really wouldn’t. It seems like I was a different person.’
Adolescence, I thought, and not for the first time, could be hell.
‘I took Mum’s knife out of the kitchen,’ he said. ‘She never could think where it had gone.’
I wondered if the police still had it; with Ricky’s fingerprints on file.
‘I didn’t know there would be so many people at Ascot,’ he said. ‘And so many gates into the course. Much more than Newmarket. I was getting frantic because I thought I wouldn’t find him. I meant to do it earlier, see, when he arrived. I was out on the road, running up and down the pavement, mad, you know, really, looking for him and feeling the knife kind of burning in my sleeve, like I was burning in my mind… and I saw his head, all those curls, crossing the road, and I ran, but I was too late, he’d gone inside, through the gate.’
‘And then,’ I suggested. ‘You simply waited for him to come out?’
He nodded. ‘There were lots of people around. No one took any notice. I reckoned he’d come up that path from the station, and that was the way he would go back. It didn’t seem long, the waiting. Went in a flash.’
The horses came over the next fence down the course like a multi-coloured wave and thundered towards the one where we were standing. The ground trembled from the thud of the hooves, the air rang with the curses of jockeys, the half-ton equine bodies brushed through the birch, the sweat and the effort and the speed filled eyes and ears and mind with pounding wonder and then were gone, flying away, leaving the silence. I had walked down several times before to watch from the fences, both there and on other tracks, and the fierce fast excitement had never grown stale.
‘Who is it who owns Indian Silk now?’ I asked.
‘A Mr Chacksworth, comes from Birmingham,’ Ricky answered. ‘You see him at the races sometimes, slobbering all over Indian Silk. But it wasn’t him that bought him from Dad. He bought him later, when he was all right again. Paid a proper price for him, so we heard. Made it all the worse.’
A sad and miserable tale, all of it.
‘Who bought the horse from your father?’ I said.
‘I never met him… his name was Smith. Some funny first name. Can’t remember.’
Smith. Friend of Calder’s.
‘Could it,’ I asked, surprised, ‘have been Dissdale Smith?’
‘Yeah. That sounds like it. How do you know?’
‘He was there that day at Ascot,’ I said. ‘There on the pavement, right beside Calder Jackson.’
‘Was he?’ Ricky looked disconcerted. ‘He was a dead liar, you know, all that talk about nice fields.’
‘Who tells the truth,’ I said, ‘when buying or selling horses ?’
The runners were round again on the far side of the track, racing hard now on the second circuit.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ricky said. ‘About me, like? You won’t tell Mum and Dad. You won’t, will you?’
I looked directly at the boy-man, seeing the continuing anxiety but no longer the first panic-stricken fear. He seemed to sense now that I would very likely not drag him into court, but he wasn’t sure of much else.
‘Perhaps they should know,’ I said.
‘No!’ His agitation rose quickly. ‘They’ve had so much trouble and I would have made it so much worse if you hadn’t stopped me, and afterwards I used to wake up sweating at what it would have done to them; and the only good thing was that I did learn that you can’t put things right by killing people, you can only make things terrible for your family.’
After a long pause I said ‘All right. I won’t tell them.’ And heaven help me, I thought, if he ever attacked anyone again because he thought he could always get away with it.
The relief seemed to affect him almost as much as the anxiety. He blinked several times and turned his head away to where the race was again coming round into the straight with this time an all-out effort to the winning post. There was again the rise and fall of the field over the distant fences but now the one wave had split into separate components, the runners coming home not in a bunch but a procession.
I watched again the fierce surprising speed of horse and jockey jumping at close quarters and wished with some regret that I could have ridden like that: but like Alec I was wishing too late, even strong and healthy and thirty-three.
The horses galloped off towards the cheers on the grandstand and Ricky and I began a slow walk in their wake. He seemed quiet and composed in the aftermath of confession, the soul’s evacuation giving him ease.
‘What do you feel nowadays about Calder Jackson?’ I asked.
He produced a lop-sided smile. ‘Nothing much. That’s what’s so crazy. I mean, it wasn’t his fault Dad was so stubborn.’
I digested this. ‘You mean,’ I said. ‘That you think your father should have sent him the horse himself?’
‘Yes, I reckon he should’ve, like Mum wanted. But he said it was rubbish and too expensive, and you don’t know my Dad but when he makes his mind up he just gets fighting angry if anyone tries to argue, and he shouts at her, and it isn’t fair.’
‘If your father had sent the horse to Calder Jackson, I suppose he would still own it,’ I said thoughtfully.
‘Yes, he would, and don’t think he doesn’t know it, of course he does, but it’s as much as anyone’s life’s worth to say it.’
We trudged back over the thick grass, and I asked him how Calder or Dissdale had known that Indian Silk was ill.
He shrugged. ‘It was in the papers. He’d been favourite for the King George VI on Boxing Day, but of course he didn’t run, and the press found out why.’
We came again to the gate into the grandstand enclosure and went through it, and I asked where he lived.
‘Exning,’ he said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Newmarket. Just outside.’ He looked at me with slightly renewed apprehension. ‘You meant it, didn’t you, about not telling?’
‘I meant it,’ I said. ‘Only…’ I frowned a little, thinking of the hot-house effect of his living with his parents.
‘Only what?’ he asked.
I tried a different tack. ‘What are you doing now? Are you still at school?’
‘No, I left once I’d passed those exams. I really needed them, like. You can’t get a half-way decent job without those bits of paper these days.’
‘You’re not working for your father, then?’
He must have heard the faint relief in my voice because for the first time he fully smiled. ‘No, I reckon it wouldn’t be good for his temper, and anyway I don’t want to be a trainer, one long worry, if you ask me.’
‘What do you do, then?’ I asked.
‘I’m learning electrical engineering in a firm near Cambridge. An apprentice, like.’ He smiled again. ‘But not with horses, not me.’ He shook his head ruefully and delivered his young-solomon judgement of life. ‘Break your heart, horses do.’