Bolt

FIFTEEN

He put the receiver down immediately, without telling me what had happened, and when I instantly rang back there was no reply. With appalling foreboding, I flung on some clothes, sprinted round to the car, did very cursory checks on it, and drove fast through the almost empty streets towards Sussex.
Wykeham had sounded near disintegration, shock and age trembling ominously in his voice. By the time I reached him, they had been joined by anger, which filled and shook him with impotent fire.
He was standing in the parking space with Robin Curtiss, the vet, when I drove in.
‘What’s happened?’ I said, getting out of the car.
Robin made a helpless gesture with his hands and Wykeham said with fury. ‘C … Come and look.’
I followed him into the courtyard next to the one which had held Cascade and Cotopaxi. Wykeham, shaky on his knees but straight backed with emotion, went across to one of the closed doors and put his hand flat on it.
‘In there,’ he said.
The box door was closed but not bolted. Not bolted, because the horse inside wasn’t going to escape.
I pulled the doors open, the upper and the lower, and saw the body lying on the peat.
Bright chestnut, three white socks, white blaze.
It was Col.
Speechlessly I turned to Wykeham and Robin, feeling all of Wykeham’s rage and a lot of private despair. Nanterre was too quick on his feet, and it wouldn’t take much more for Roland de Brescou to crumble.
‘It’s the same as before,’ Robin said. ‘The bolt.’ He bent down, lifted the chestnut forelock, showed me the mark on the white blaze. ‘There’s a lot of oil in the wound … the gun’s been oiled since last time.’ He let go of the forelock and straightened. ‘The horse is stone cold. It was done early, I should say before midnight.’
Col… gallant at Ascot, getting ready for Cheltenham, for the Gold Cup.
‘Where was the patrol?’ I said, at last finding my voice.
‘He was here,’ Wykeham said. ‘In the stable, I mean, not in the courtyard.’
‘He’s gone, I suppose.’
‘No, I told him to wait for you. He’s in the kitchen.’
‘Col,’ I said, ‘is the only one … isn’t he?’
Robin nodded. ‘Something to be thankful for.’
Not much, I thought. Cotopaxi and Col had been two of the princess’s three best horses, and it could be no coincidence that they’d been targeted.
‘Kinley,’ I said to Wykeham. ‘You did check Kinley, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, straight away. He’s in the corner box still, in the next courtyard.’
‘The insurers aren’t going to like this,’ Robin said, looking down at the dead horse. ‘With the first two, it might have been just bad luck that they were two good ones, but three …’ he shrugged. ‘Not my problem, of course.’
‘How did he know where to find them?’ I said, as much to myself as to Robin and Wykeham. ‘Is this Col’s usual box?’
‘Yes,’ Wykeham said. ‘I suppose now I’ll have to change them all around, but it does disrupt the stable …’
‘Abseil,’ I said, ‘is he all right?’
‘Who?’
‘Yesterday’s winner.’
Wykeham’s doubts cleared. ‘Oh, yes, he’s all right.’
Abseil was as easy to recognise as the others, I thought. Not chestnut, not nearly black like Cascade, but grey, with a black mane and tail.
‘Where is he?’ I asked.
‘In the last courtyard, near the house.’
Although I was down at Wykeham’s fairly often, it was always to do the schooling, for which we would drive up to the Downs, where I would ride relays of the horses over jumps, teaching them. I almost never rode the horses in or out of the yard, and although I knew where some of the horses lived, like Cotopaxi, I wasn’t sure of them all.
I put a hand down to touch Col’s foreleg, and felt its rigidity, its chill. The foreleg that had saved us from disaster at Ascot, that had borne all his weight.
‘I’ll have to tell the princess,’ Wykeham said unhappily. ‘Unless you would, Kit?’
‘Yes, I’ll tell her,’ I said. ‘At Sandown.’
He nodded vaguely. ‘What are we running?’ he said.
‘Helikon for the princess, and three others.’
‘Dusty has the list, of course.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Wykeham took a long look again at the dead splendour on the peat.
‘I’d kill the shit who did that,’ he said, ‘with his own damned bolt.’
Robin sighed and closed the stable doors, saying he would arrange for the carcass to be collected, if Wykeham liked.
Wykeham silently nodded, and we all walked out of the courtyard and made our way to Wykeham’s house, where Robin went off to telephone in the office. The dog-handler was still in the kitchen, restive but chastened, with his dog, a black Dobermann, lying on the floor and yawning at his feet.
‘Tell Kit Fielding what you told me,’ Wykeham said.
The dog-handler, in a navy blue battle-dress uniform, was middle-aged and running to fat. His voice was defensively belligerent and his intelligence middling, and I wished I’d had the speedy Sammy here in his place. I sat at the table across from him and asked how he’d missed the visitor who had shot Col.
‘I couldn’t help it, could I?’ he said. ‘Not with those bombs going off.’
‘What bombs?’ I glanced at Wykeham, who’d clearly heard about the bombs before. ‘What bombs, for God’s sake?’
The dog-handler had a moustache which he groomed frequently with a thumb and forefinger, working outwards from the nose.
‘Well, how was I to know they wasn’t proper bombs?’ he said. ‘They made enough noise.’
‘Just start,’ I said, ‘at the beginning. Start with when you came on duty. And er … have you been here any other nights?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Monday to Friday, five nights.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Describe last night.’
‘I come on duty sevenish, when the head lad’s finished the feeding. I make a base here in the kitchen and do a recce every half hour. Standard procedure.’
‘How long do the recces take?’
‘Fifteen minutes, maybe more. It’s bitter cold these nights.’
‘And you go into all the courtyards?’
‘Never miss a one,’ he said piously.
‘And where else?’
‘Look in the hay barn, tack room, feed shed, round the back where the tractor is, and the harrow, muck-heap, the lot.’
‘Go on, then,’ I said, ‘how many recces had you done when the bombs went off?’
He worked it out on his fingers. ‘Nine, say. The head lad had been in for a quick look round last thing, like he does, and everything was quiet. So I comes back here for a bit of a warm, and goes out again half eleven, I should say. I start on the rounds, and there’s this almighty bang and crashing round the back. So I went off there with Ranger …’ he looked down at his dog. ‘Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Stands to reason.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where exactly, round the back?’
‘I couldn’t see at first because there isn’t much light round there, and there was this strong smell of burning, got right down your throat, and then another one went off not ten feet away. Nearly burst my eardrums.’
‘Where were the bombs?’ I said again.
‘The first one was round the back of the muck-heap. I found what was left of it with my torch, after.’
‘But you don’t use your torch all the time?’
‘You don’t need to in the courtyards. Most of them have lights in.’
‘Mm. OK. Where was the second one?’
‘Under the harrow.’
Wykeham, like many trainers, used the harrow occasionally for raking his paddocks, keeping them in good shape.
‘Did it blow up the harrow?’ I said, frowning.
‘No, see, they weren’t that sort of bomb.’
‘What other sort is there?’
‘It went off through the harrow with a huge shower of sparks. Golden sparks, all over. Little burning sparks. Some of them fell on me … They were fireworks. I found the empty boxes. They said “bomb” on them, where they weren’t burned.’
‘Where are they now,’ I asked.
‘Where they went off. I didn’t touch them, except to kick them over to read what was on the side.’
‘So what was your dog doing all this time?’
The dog-handler looked disillusioned. ‘I had him on the leash. I always do, of course. He didn’t like the bangs or the sparks or the smell. He’s supposed to be trained to ignore gun shots, but he didn’t like the fireworks. He was barking fit to bust, and trying to run off.’
‘He was trying to run in a different direction, but you stopped him?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Maybe he was trying to run after the man who shot the horse.’
The dog-handler’s mouth opened and snapped shut. He smoothed his moustache several times and grew noticeably more aggressive. ‘Ranger was barking at the bombs,’ he said.
I nodded. It was too late for it to matter.
‘And I suppose,’ I said, ‘that you didn’t hear any other bangs in the distance … you didn’t hear the shot?’
‘No, I didn’t. My ears were ringing and Ranger was kicking up a racket.’
‘So what did you do next?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I thought it was some of those lads who work here. Proper little monkeys. So I just went on with the patrols, regular like. There wasn’t anything wrong … it didn’t look like it, that’s to say.’
I turned to Wykeham, who had been gloomily listening. ‘Didn’t you hear the fireworks?’ I asked.
‘No, I was asleep.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘I don’t sleep very well … I can’t seem to sleep at all these days without sleeping pills. We’d had four quiet nights and I’d been awake most of those, so … last night I took a pill.’
I sighed. If Wykeham had been awake, he would anyway have gone towards the commotion and nothing would have been different.
I said to the dog-handler, ‘You were here on Wednesday, when you had the prowler?’
‘Yes, I was. Ranger was whining but I couldn’t find anyone.’
Nanterre, I thought, had come to the stable on Wednesday night, intending to kill, and had been thwarted by the dog’s presence: and he’d come back two nights later with his diversions.
He must have been at Ascot, I supposed, and learned what Col looked like, but I hadn’t seen him, as I hadn’t seen him at Bradbury either: but among large crowds on racecourses, especially while I was busy, that wasn’t extraordinary.
I looked down at Ranger, wondering about his responses.
‘When people arrive here,’ I asked, ‘like I did a short while ago, how does Ranger behave?’
‘He gets up and goes to the door and whines a bit. He’s a quiet dog, mostly. Doesn’t bark. That’s why I knew it was the bombs he was barking at.’
‘Well, er, during your spells in the kitchen, what would you be doing?’
‘Making a cuppa. Eating. Relieving myself. Reading. Watching the telly.’ He smoothed his moustache, not liking me or my questions. ‘I don’t doze off, if that’s what you mean.’
It was what I meant, and obviously what he’d done, at some point or another. During four long quiet cold nights I supposed it was understandable, if not excusable.
‘Over the weekend,’ I said to Wykeham, ‘we’ll have double and treble patrols. Constant.’
He nodded. ‘Have to.’
‘Have you told the police yet?’
‘Not yet. Soon, though.’ He looked with disgust at the dog-handler. ‘They’ll want to hear what you’ve said.’
The dog-handler however stood up, announced it was an hour after he should have left and if the police wanted him they could reach him through his firm. He, he said, was going to bed.
Wykeham morosely watched him go and said, ‘What the hell is going on, Kit? The princess knows who killed them all, and so do you. So tell me.’
It wasn’t fair, I thought, for him not to know, so I told him the outline: a man was trying to extract a signature from Roland de Brescou by attacking his family wherever he could.
‘But that’s… terrorism.’ Wykeham used the word at arm’s length, as if its very existence affronted him.
‘In a small way,’ I said.
‘Small?’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you call three dead great horses small?’
I didn’t. It made me sick and angry to think of them. It was small on a world scale of terrorism, but rooted in the same wicked conviction that the path to attaining one’s end lay in slaughtering the innocent.
I stirred. ‘Show me where all the princess’s horses are,’ I suggested to Wykeham, and together we went out again into the cold air and made the rounds of the courtyards.
Cascade’s and Cotopaxi’s boxes were still empty, and no others of the princess’s horses had been in the first courtyard. In the second had been only Col. In the one beyond that, Hillsborough and Berina, with Kinley in the deep corner box there.
About a third of the stable’s inmates were out at exercise on the Downs, and while we were leaving Kinley’s yard, they came clattering back, filling the whole place with noise and movement, the lads dismounting and leading their horses into the boxes. Wykeham and I sorted our way round as the lads brushed down their charges, tidied the bedding, filled the buckets, brought hay to the racks, propped their saddles outside the boxes, bolted the doors and went off to their breakfasts.
I saw all the old friends in their quarters; among them North Face, Dhaulagiri, Icicle and Icefall, and young Helikon, the four-year-old hurdler going to Sandown that afternoon. Wykeham got half of their names right, waiting for me to prompt him on the others. He unerringly knew their careers, though, and their personalities; they were real to him in a way that needed no name tags. His secretary was adept at sorting out what he intended when he wrote down his lists of entries to races.
In the last courtyard we came to Abseil and opened the top half of his door. Abseil came towards the opening daylight and put his head out enquiringly. I rubbed his grey nose and upper lip with my hand and put my head next to his and breathed out gently like a reversed sniff into his nostril. He rubbed his nose a couple of times against my cheek and then lifted his head away, the greeting done. Wykeham paid no attention. Wykeham talked to horses that way himself, when they were that sort of horse. With some, one would never do it, one could get one’s nose bitten off.
Wykeham gave Abseil a carrot from a deep pocket, and closed him back into his twilight.
Wykeham slapped his hand on the next box along. ‘That’s Kinley’s box usually. It’s empty now. I don’t like keeping him in that corner box, it’s dark and boring for him.’
‘It won’t be for much longer, I hope,’ I said, and suggested going round to see the ‘bombs’.
Wykeham had seen them earlier, and pointed them out to me, and as expected they were the bottom parts of cardboard containers, each four inches square in shape, the top parts burned away. They were both the same, with gaudy red and yellow pictured flames still visible on the singed surfaces, and the words GOLDEN BOMB in jazzy letters on the one under the harrow.
‘We’d better leave them there for the police,’ I said.
Wykeham agreed, but he said fireworks would convince the police even more that it was the work of boys.
We went back into the house, where Wykeham telephoned the police and received a promise of attention, and I got through to Dawson, asking him to tell the princess I was down at Wykeham’s and would go to Sandown from there.
Wykeham and I had breakfast and drove up to the Downs in his big-wheeled pick-up to see the second lot exercise, and under the wide cold windy sky he surprised me by saying apropos of nothing special that he was thinking of taking another assistant. He’d had assistants in the past, I’d heard, who’d never lasted long, but there hadn’t been one there in my time.
‘Are you?’ I said. ‘I thought you couldn’t stand assistants.’
‘They never knew anything,’ he said. ‘But I’m getting old … It’ll have to be someone the princess likes. Someone you get on with, too. So if you think of anyone, let me know. I don’t know who’s around so much these days.’
‘All right,’ I said, but with misgivings. Wykeham, for all his odd mental quirks, was irreplaceable. ‘You’re not going to retire, are you?’
‘No, I’m not. Never. I wouldn’t mind dying up here, watching my horses.’ He laughed suddenly, in his eyes a flash of the vigour that had been there always not so long ago, when he’d been a titan. ‘I’ve had a great life, you know. One of the best.’
‘Stick around,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Maybe next year,’ he said, ‘we’ll win the Grand National.’
Wykeham’s four runners at Sandown were in the first three races and the fifth, and I didn’t see the princess until she came down to the parade ring for Helikon’s race, which was the third on the card.
Beatrice was with her, and also Litsi, and also Danielle, who after the faintest of greetings was busy blanking me out, it seemed, by looking carefully at the circling horses. The fact that she was there, that she was still trying, was something, I supposed.
‘Good morning,’ the princess said, when I bowed to her. ‘Dawson said Wykeham telephoned early … again.’ There was a shade of apprehension in her face, which abruptly deepened at what she read in my own.
She walked a little away from her family, and I followed.
‘Again?’ she said, not wanting to believe it. ‘Which ones?’
‘One,’ I said. ‘Col.’
She absorbed the shock with a long blink.
‘The same way … as before?’ she said.
‘Yes. With the bolt.’
‘My poor horse.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I will not tell my husband,’ she said. ‘Please tell none of them, Kit.’
‘It will be in the newspapers tomorrow or on Monday,’ I said, ‘probably worse than before.’
‘Oh …’ The prospect affected her almost as much as Col’s death. ‘I will not add to the pressure on my husband,’ she said fiercely. ‘He cannot sign this wretched contract. He will die, you know, if he does. He will not survive the disgrace in his own mind. He will wish to die … as all these years, although his condition is such a trial to him, he has wished to live.’ She made a small gesture with her gloved hand. ‘He is … very dear to me, Kit.’
I heard in my memory my grandmother saying, ‘I love the old bugger, Kit,’ of my pugnacious grandfather, an equal declaration of passion for a man not obviously lovable.
That the princess should have made it was astonishing, but not as impossible as before the advent of Nanterre. A great deal, I saw, had changed between us in the last eight days.
To save his honour, to save his life, to save their life together … My God, I thought, what a burden. She needed Superman, not me.
‘Don’t tell him about Col,’ she said again.
‘No, I won’t.’
Her gaze rested on Beatrice.
‘I won’t tell other people,’ I said. ‘But it may not stay a secret on the racecourse. Dusty and the lads who came with Wykeham’s horses all know, and they’ll tell other lads … it’ll spread, I’m afraid.’
She nodded slightly, unhappily, and switched her attention from Beatrice to Helikon, who happened to be passing. She watched him for several seconds, turning her head after him as he went.
‘What do you think of him?’ she asked, her defence mechanism switching on smoothly. ‘What shall I expect?’
‘He’s still a bit hot-headed,’ I said, ‘but if I can settle him, he should run well.’
‘But not another Kinley?’ she suggested.
‘Not so far.’
‘Do your best …’
I said as usual that I would, and we rejoined the others as if all we’d been talking about was her hurdler.
‘Have you noticed who’s still staring?’ Danielle said, and I answered that indeed I had, those eyes followed me everywhere.
‘Doesn’t it get on your nerves?’ Danielle asked.
‘What nerves?’ Litsi said.
‘Are you talking about Mr Allardeck?’ Beatrice demanded. ‘I can’t think why you don’t like him. He looks perfectly darling.’
The perfectly darling man was projecting his implacable thoughts my way from a distance signalling unmistakable invasion of psychological territory, and I thought uneasily again about the state of mind that was compelling him to do it. The evil eye, I thought: and no shield from it that I could see.
The time came to mount, and hot-headed Helikon and I went out onto the track. He was nervous as well as impetuous; not a joy to ride. I tried to get him to relax on the way to the start, but as usual it was like trying to relax a coil of barbed wire. The princess had bought him as a yearling and had great hopes for him, but although he jumped well enough, neither Wykeham nor I had been able to straighten out his kinks.
There were twenty or more runners, and Helikon and I set off near the front because if he were bumped in the pack he’d be frightened into stopping; yet I also had to keep a tight hold, as he could take charge and decamp.
He went through the routine of head-tossing against the restraint, but I had him anchored and running fairly well, and by the third flight of hurdles I thought the worst was over, we could now settle a little and design a passable race.
It wasn’t his day. At the fourth flight the horse nearest ahead put his foot through the obstacle and went down with a crash, slithering along the ground on his side. Helikon fell over him, going down fast, pitching me off: and I didn’t actually see the subsequent course of events all that clearly, though it was a pile-up worthy of a fog on a motorway. Five horses, I found afterwards, hit the deck at that jump. One of them seemed to land smack on top of me; not frightfully good for one’s health.