SIXTEEN
‘Why,’ I said, ‘did your certain person allow you to show these letters to me?’
‘Ah.’ Eric Olderjohn joined his fingers together in a steeple and studied them for a while. ‘Why do you think?’
‘I would suppose,’ I said, ‘he might think it possible I would stir up a few ponds, get a few muddy answers, without him having to do it himself.’
Eric Olderjohn switched his attention from his hands to my face. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘He would like to know for sure Maynard Allardeck isn’t just the victim of a hate campaign, for instance. He wants to do him justice. To put him back on the list, perhaps, for a knighthood next time around, in the summer.’
‘He wants proof?’ I asked.
‘Can you supply it?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘What are you planning to do,’ he asked with dry humour, ‘when you have to give up race-riding?’
‘Jump off a cliff, I dare say.’
I stood up, and he also. I thanked him sincerely for the trouble he’d taken. He said he would expect me to win again on his horse next time out. Do my best, I said, and took a last appreciative glance round his bower of a sitting room before making my way back to the hotel.
Lord Vaughnley, I thought.
On 1 October he had recommended Maynard for a knighthood. By the end of that month or the beginning of November there had been a tap on Bobby’s telephone.
The tap had been installed by Jay Erskine, who had listened for two weeks and then written the articles in the Flag.
Jay Erskine had once worked for Lord Vaughnley, as crime reporter on the Toumcrier.
But if Lord Vaughnley had got Jay Erskine to attack Maynard Allardeck, why was Nestor Pollgate so aggressive?
Because he didn’t want to have to pay compensation, or to admit his paper had done wrong.
Well… perhaps.
I went round in circles and came back always to the central and unexpected question: Was it really Lord Vaughnley who had prompted the attacks, and if so, why?
From my hotel room I telephoned Rose Quince’s home, catching her again soon after she had come in.
‘Bill?’ she said. ‘Civil Service charity? Oh, sure, he’s a patron of dozens of things. All sorts. Keeps him in touch, he says.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘When you wrote that piece about Maynard Allardeck, did he suggest it?’
‘Who? Bill? Yes, sure he did. He put the clippings from the Flag on my desk and said it looked my sort of thing. I may know him from way back, but he’s still the ultimate boss. When he wants something written, it gets written. Martin, our big white chief, always agrees to that.’
‘And, er, how did you get on to the How’s Trade interview? I mean, did you see the programme when it was broadcast?’
‘Do me a favour. Of course not.’ She paused. ‘Bill suggested I try the television company, to ask for a private re-run.’
‘Which you did.’
‘Yes, of course. Look,’ she demanded, ‘what’s all this about? Bill often suggests subjects to me. There’s nothing strange in it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Sleep well, Rose.’
‘And goodnight to you, too.’
I slept soundly and long, and early in the morning took the video camera and drove to Purfleet along the flat lands just north of the Thames estuary. The rains of the day before had drawn away, leaving the sky washed and pale, and there were seagulls wheeling high over the low-tide mud.
I asked in about twenty places, post office and shops, before I found anyone who had heard of Purfleet Electronics, but was finally pointed towards someone who had worked there. ‘You want George Tarker… he owned it,’ he said.
Following a few further instructions from helpful locals, I eventually pulled up beside a shabby old wooden boatshed optimistically emblazoned with a sign-board saying ‘George Tarker Repairs All’.
Out of the car and walking across the pot-holed entrance yard to the door one could see that the sign had once had a bottom half, which had split off and was lying propped against the wall, and which read ‘Boats and Marine Equipment’.
With a sinking feeling of having come entirely to the wrong place I pushed open the rickety door and stepped straight into the untidiest office in the world, a place where every surface and every shelf was covered with unidentifiable lumps of ships’ hardware in advanced age, and where every patch of wall was occupied by ancient calendars, posters, bills and instructions, all attached not by drawing pins but by nails.
In a sagging old chair, oblivious to the mess, sat an elderly grey-bearded man with his feet up on a desk, reading a newspaper and drinking from a cup.
‘Mr Tarker?’ I said.
‘That’s me.’ He lowered the paper, looking at me critically from over the soles of his shoes. ‘What do you want repaired?’ He looked towards the bag I was carrying, which contained the camera. ‘A bit off a boat?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve come to the wrong place,’ I said. ‘I was looking for Mr George Tarker who used to own Purfleet Electronics.’
He put his cup down carefully on the desk, and his feet on the floor. He was old, I saw, from an inner weariness as much as from age: it lay in the sag of his shoulders and the droop of his eyes and shouted from the disarray of everything around him.
‘That George Tarker was my son,’ he said.
Was.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Do you want anything repaired, or don’t you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to talk about Maynard Allardeck.’
The cheeks fell inwards into shadowed hollows and the eyes seemed to recede darkly into the sockets. He had scattered grey hair, uncombed, and below the short beard, in the thin neck inside the unbuttoned and tieless shirt, the tendons tightened and began to quiver.
‘I don’t want to distress you,’ I said: but I had. ‘I’m making a Him about the damage Maynard Allardeck has done to many people’s lives. I hoped you… I hoped your son… might help me.’ I gestured vaguely with one hand. ‘I know it wouldn’t sway you one way or another, but I’m offering a fee.’
He was silent, staring at my face but seeing, I thought, another scene altogether, looking back into memory and finding it almost past bearing. The strain in his face deepened to the point when I did actively regret having come.
‘Will it destroy him, your film?’ he said huskily.
‘In some ways, yes.’
‘He deserves hellfire and damnation.’
I took the video camera out of its bag and showed it to him, explaining about talking straight at the lens.
‘Will you tell me what happened to your son?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I will.’
I balanced the camera on a heap of junk and started it running; and with few direct questions from me he repeated in essence the familiar story. Maynard had come smiling to the rescue in a temporary cash crisis caused by a rapid expansion of the business. He had lent at low rates, but at the last and worst moment demanded to be repaid; had taken over the firm and ousted George Tarker, and after a while had stripped the assets, sold the freehold and put the workforce on the dole.
‘Charming,’ George Tarker said. ‘That’s what he was. Like a con man, right to the end. Reasonable. Friendly. Then he was gone, and everything with him. My son’s business, gone. He started it when he was only eighteen and worked and worked… and after twenty-three years it was growing too fast.’
The gaunt face stared starkly into the lens, and water stood in the corner of each eye.
‘My son George… my only child… he blamed himself for everything… for all his workers losing their jobs. He began to drink. He knew such a lot about electricity.’ The tears spilled over the lower eyelids and rolled down the lined cheeks to be lost in the beard. ‘My son wired himself up… and hit the switch…’
The voice stopped as if with the jolt that had stopped his son’s heart. I found it unbearable. I wished with an intensity of pity that I hadn’t come. I turned off the camera and stood there in silence, not knowing how to apologise for such an intrusion.
He brushed the tears away with the back of his hand. ‘Two years ago, just over,’ he said. ‘He was a good man, you know, my son George. That Allardeck… just destroyed him.’
I offered him the same amount that I’d given the Perrysides, setting it down in front of him on the desk. He stared at the flat bunch of banknotes for a while, and then pushed it towards me.
‘I didn’t tell you for money,’ he said. ‘You take it back. I told you for George.’
I hesitated.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it. Doesn’t feel right. Any time you have a boat, you pay me then for repairs.’
‘All right,’ I said.
He nodded and watched while I picked up the notes.
‘You make your film good,’ he said. ‘Make it for George.’
‘Yes,’ I said; and he was still sitting there, staring with pain into the past, when I left.
I went to Ascot with the same precautions as before, leaving the Mercedes down in the town and walking into the racecourse from the opposite direction to the jockeys’ official car park. No one that I could see took any notice of my arrival, beyond the gatemen with their usual good mornings.
I had rides in the first five of the six races; two for the princess, two others for Wykeham, one for the Lambourn trainer. Dusty reported Wykeham to have a crippling migraine headache which would keep him at home watching on television. Icefall, Dusty said, should zoom in, and all the lads had staked their wages. Dusty’s manner to me was as usual a mixture of deference and truculence, a double attitude I had long ago sorted into components: I might do the actual winning for the stable, but the fitness of the horses was the gift of the lads in the yard, and I wasn’t to forget it. Dusty and I had worked together for ten years in a truce founded on mutual need, active friendship being neither sought nor necessary. He said the guv’nor wanted me to give the princess and the other owners his regrets about his headache. I’d tell them, I said.
I rode one of Wykeham’s horses in the first race with negligible results, and came third in the second race, for the Lambourn trainer. The third race was Icefall for the princess, and she and Danielle were both waiting in the parade ring, rosily lunched and sparkling-eyed, when I went out there to greet them.
‘Wykeham sends his regrets,’ I said.
‘The poor man.’ The princess believed in the migraines as little as I did, but was willing to pretend. ‘Will we give him a win to console him?’
‘I’m afraid he expects it.’
We watched Icefall walk round, grey and well muscled under his coroneted rug, more compact than his full brother Icicle.
‘I schooled him last week,’ I said. ‘Wykeham says he’s come on a ton since then. So there’s hope.’
‘Hope!’ Danielle said. ‘He’s hot favourite.’
‘Odds on,’ nodded the princess. ‘It never makes one feel better.’
She and I exchanged glances of acknowledgement of the extra pressure that came with too much expectation, and when I went off to mount she said only, ‘Get round safely, that’s all.’
Icefall at six was at the top of his hurdling form with a string of successes behind him, and his race on that day was a much publicised, much sponsored two-mile event which had cut up, as big-prize races tended occasionally to do, into no more than six runners: Icefall at the top of the handicap, the other five at the bottom, the centre block having decided to duck out for less taxing contests.
Icefall was an easy horse to ride, as willing as his brother and naturally courageous, and the only foreseeable problem was the amount of weight he carried in relation to the others: twenty pounds and more. Wykeham never liked his horses to be front runners and had tried to dissuade me sometimes from running Icefall in that way; but the horse positively preferred it and let me know it at every start, and even with the weights so much against us, when the tapes went up we were there where he wanted to be, setting the pace.
I’d learned in my teens from an American flat-race jockey how to start a clock in my head, to judge the speed of each section of the race against the clock, and to judge how fast I could go in each section in order to finish at or near the horse’s own best time for the distance.
Icefall’s best time for two miles at Ascot at almost the same weights on the same sort of wet ground was three minutes forty-eight seconds, and I set out to take him to the finish line in precisely that period, and at a more or less even speed the whole way.
It seemed to the crowd on the stands, I was told afterwards, that I’d set off too fast, that some of the lightweights would definitely catch me; but I’d looked up their times also in the form book, and none of them had ever completed two miles as fast as I aimed to.
All Icefall had to do was jump with perfection, and that he did, informing me of his joy in mid-air at every hurdle. The lightweights never came near us, and we finished ahead, without slackening, by eight lengths, a margin that would do Icefall’s handicap no good at all next time out.
Maybe, I thought, pulling up and patting the grey neck hugely, it would have been better for the future not to have won by so far, but the present was what mattered, and with those weights one couldn’t take risks.
The princess was flushed and laughing and delighted, and as usual intensified my own pleasure in winning. Victories for glum and grumbling owners were never so sweet.
‘My friends say it’s sacrilege,’ she said, ‘for a top-weight to set off so fast and try to make all the running after rain like yesterday’s. They were pitying me up in the box, telling me you were mad.’
I smiled at her, unbuckling my saddle. ‘When he jumps like today, he can run this course even on wet gound in three minutes forty-eight seconds. That’s what we did, more or less.’
Her eyes widened. ‘You planned it! You didn’t tell me. I didn’t expect you to go off so fast, even though he likes it in front.’
‘If he’d made a hash of any of the hurdles, I’d have looked a right idiot.’ I patted the grey neck over and over. ‘He understands racing,’ I said. ‘He’s a great horse to ride. Very generous. He enjoys it.’
‘You talk as if horses were people,’ Danielle said, standing behind her aunt, listening.
‘Yes, they are,’ I said. ‘Not human, but individuals, all different.’
I took the saddle in and sat on the scales, and changed into other colours and weighed out again for the next race. Then put the princess’s colours back on, on top of the others, and went out bareheaded for the sponsors’ presentations.
Lord Vaughnley was among the crowd round the sponsors’ table of prizes, and he came straight over to me when I went out.
‘My dear chap, what a race! I thought you’d gone off your rocker, I’m sorry to say. Now, you are coming to our box, aren’t you? Like we agreed?’
He was a puzzle. His grey eyes smiled blandly in the big face, full of friendliness, empty of guile.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you. After the fifth race, when I’ll have finished for the day, if that’s all right?’
Lady Vaughnley appeared at his elbow, reinforcing the invitation. ‘Delighted to have you. Do come.’
The princess, overhearing, said, ‘Come along to me after,’ taking my compliance for granted, not expecting an answer. Did you know,’ she said with humour, ‘the time Icefall took?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Three minutes forty-nine seconds.’
‘We were one second late.’
‘Yes, indeed. Next time, go faster.’
Lady Vaughnley looked at her in astonishment. ‘How can you say that?’ she protested, and then understood it was merely a joke. ‘Oh. For a moment…’
The princess patted her arm consolingly, and I watched Danielle, on the far side of the green-baized pot-laden table, talking to the sponsors as to the winning habit born. She turned her head and looked straight at me, and I felt the tingle of that visual connection run right down my spine. She’s beautiful, I thought. I want her in bed.
It seemed that she had broken off in the middle of whatever she was saying. The sponsor spoke to her enquiringly. She looked at him blankly, and then with another glance at me seemed to sort out her thoughts and answer whatever he’d asked.
I looked down at the trophies, afraid that my feelings were naked. I had two races and a lot of box-talk to get through before we could be in any real way together, and the memory of her kisses was no help.
The presentations were made, the princess and the others melted away, and I pealed off the princess’s colours and went out and rode another winner for Wykeham, scrambling home that time by a neck, all elbows, no elegance, practically throwing the horse ahead of himself, hard on him, squeezing him, making him stretch beyond where he thought he could go.
‘Bloody hell,’ said his owner, in the winners’ unsaddling area. ‘Bloody hell, I’d not like you on my back.’ He seemed pleased enough all the same, a Sussex farmer, big and forthright, surrounded by chattering friends. ‘You’re a bloody demon, lad, that’s what you are. Hard as bloody nails. He’ll know he’s had a race, I’ll tell you.’
‘Yes, well, Mr Davis, he can take it, he’s tough, he’d not thank you to be soft. Like his owner, wouldn’t you say, Mr Davis?’
He gave a great guffaw and clapped me largely on the shoulder, and I went and weighed in, and changed into the princess’s colours again for the fifth race.
The princess’s runner, Allegheny, was the second of her only two mares (Bernina being the other), as the princess, perhaps because of her own femininity, had a definite preference for male horses. Not as temperamental as Bernina, Allegheny was a friendly old pudding, running moderately well always but without fire. I’d tried to get Wykeham to persuade the princess to sell her but he wouldn’t: Princess Casilia, he said, knew her own mind.
Allegheny’s seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, also-rans never seemed to disappoint her. It wasn’t essential to her, he said, for all her children to be stars.
Allegheny and I set off amicably but as usual my attempts to jolly her into joie de vivre got little response. We turned into the straight for the first time lying fourth, going easily, approaching a plain fence, meeting it right, launching into the air, landing, accelerating away…
In one of her hind legs a suspensory ligament tore apart at the fetlock, and Allegheny went lame in three strides, all rhythm gone; like driving a car on a suddenly flat tyre. I pulled her up and jumped off her back, and walked her a few paces to make sure she hadn’t broken a bone.
Just the tendon, I thought in relief. Bad enough, but not a death sentence. Losing a horse to the bolt of a humane killer upset everyone for days. Wykeham had wept sometimes for dead horses, and I also, and the princess. One couldn’t help it, sometimes.
The vet sped round in his car, looked her over and pronounced her fit to walk, so I led her back up the course, her head nodding every time she put the injured foot to the ground. The princess and Danielle came down anxiously to the unsaddling area and Dusty assured them the guv’nor would get a vet to Allegheny as soon as soon.
‘What do you think?’ the princess asked me in depression, as Dusty and the mare’s lad led her, nodding, away.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, you do. Tell me.’
The princess’s eyes were deep blue. I said, ‘She’ll be a year off the racecourse, at least.’
She sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘You could patch her up,’ I said, ‘and sell her as a brood mare. She’s got good blood lines. She could breed in the spring.’
‘Oh!’ She seemed pleased. ‘I’m fond of her, you know.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I do begin to see,’ Danielle said, ‘what racing is all about.’
My neighbour and the Lambourn fellow jockey having come up trumps in the matter of a suitcase of clothes, I went up to Lord Vaughnley’s box in a change for the better. I appeared to have chosen, though, the doldrums of time between events when everyone had gone down to look at the horses or to bet, and not yet returned to watch the race.
There was only one person in there, standing nervously beside the table now laid for tea, shifting from foot to foot: and I was surprised to see it was Hugh Vaughnley, Lord Vaughnley’s son.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘No one’s here… I’ll come back.’
‘Don’t go.’
His voice was urgent. I looked at him curiously, thinking of the family row which had so clearly been in operation on the previous Saturday, seeing only trouble still in the usually cheerful face. Much thinner than his father, more like his mother in build, he had neat features well placed, two disarming dimples, and youth still in the indecision of his mouth. Around nineteen, I thought. Maybe twenty. Not more.
‘I… er…’ he said. ‘Do stay. I want someone here, to be honest, when they come back.’
‘Do you?’
‘Er…’ he said. ‘They don’t know I’m here. I mean… Dad might be furious, and he can’t be, can he, in front of strangers? That’s why I came here, to the races. I mean, I know you’re not a stranger, but you know what I mean.’
‘Your mother will surely be glad to see you.’
He swallowed. ‘I hate quarrelling with them. I can’t bear it. To be honest, Dad threw me out almost a month ago. He’s making me live with Saul Bradley, and I can’t bear it much longer, I want to go home.’
‘He threw you out?’ I must have sounded as surprised as I felt. ‘You always seemed such a solid family. Does he think you should stand on your own two feet? Something like that?’
‘Nothing like that. I just wish it was. I did something… I didn’t know he’d be so desperately angry… not really…’
I didn’t want to hear what it was, with so much else on my mind.
‘Drugs?’ I said, without sympathy.
‘What?’
‘Did you take drugs?’
I saw from his face that it hadn’t been that. He was simply bewildered by the suggestion.
‘I mean,’ he said plaintively, ‘he thought so much of him. He said so. I mean, I thought he approved of him.’
‘Who?’ I said.
He looked over my shoulder however and didn’t answer, a fresh wave of anxiety blotting out all else.
I turned. Lord and Lady Vaughnley had come through the door from the passage and were advancing towards us. I saw their expressions with clarity when they caught sight of their son. Lady Vaughnley’s face lifted into a spontaneous uncomplicated smile.
Lord Vaughnley looked from his son to myself, and his reaction wasn’t forgiveness, apathy, irritation or even anger.
It was alarm. It was horror.