Дик Фрэнсис - Banker

Her father, listening to the last of these remarks, added his own view. ‘They’re disorganized,’ he said. ‘No business sense. People liked their gypsy style for a while, but, as Ginnie says, they’ve no answer to Calder Jackson.’

‘How old are they?’ I asked, frowning.

Oliver Knowles shrugged. ‘Thirties. Going on forty. Hard to say.’

‘I suppose they don’t have a son of about sixteen, thin and intense, who hates Calder Jackson obsessively for ruining his parents’ business?’

‘What an extraordinary question,’ said Oliver Knowles, and Ginnie shook her head. ‘They’ve never had any children,’ she said. ‘Maggie can’t. She told me. They just lavish all that love on animals. It’s really grotty, what’s happening to them.’

It would have been so neat, I thought, if Calder Jackson’s would-be assassin had been a Watcherley son. Too neat, perhaps. But perhaps also there were others like the Watcherleys whose star had descended as Calder Jackson’s rose. I said, ‘Do you know of any other places, apart from this one and Calder Jackson’s, where people send their sick horses?’

‘I expect there are some,’ Ginnie said. ‘Bound to be.’

‘Sure to be,’ said Oliver Knowles, nodding. ‘But of course we don’t send away any horse which falls ill here. I have an excellent vet, great with mares, comes day or night in emergencies.’

We made the return journey, Oliver Knowles pointing out to me various mares and foals of interest and distributing carrots to any head within armshot. Foals at foot, foals in utero; the fertility cycle swelling again to fruition through the quiet winter, life growing steadily in the dark.

Ginnie went off to see to the horse she’d been riding and Nigel to finish his inspections in the main yard, leaving Oliver Knowles, the dog and myself to go into the house. Squibs, poor fellow, got no further than his basket in the mud room, but Knowles and I returned to the sitting room-office from which we’d started.

Thanks to my telephone calls of the morning I knew what the acquisition and management of Sandcastle would mean in the matter of taxation, and I’d also gone armed with sets of figures to cover the interest payable should the loan be approved. I found that I needed my knowledge not to instruct but to converse: Oliver Knowles was there before me.

‘I’ve done this often, of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to arrange finance for buildings, for fencing, for buying the three stallions you saw, and for another two before them. I’m used to repaying fairly substantial bank loans. This new venture is of course huge by comparison, but if I didn’t feel it was within my scope I assure you I shouldn’t be contemplating it.’ He gave me a brief charming smile. ‘I’m not a nut case, you know. I really do know my business.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘One can see.’

I told him that the maximum length of an Ekaterin loan (if one was forthcoming at all) would be five years, to which he merely nodded.

‘That basically means,’ I insisted, ‘That you’d have to receive getting on for eight million in that five years, even allowing for paying off some of the loan every year with consequently diminishing interest. It’s a great deal of money.... Are you sure you understand how much is involved?’

‘Of course I understand,’ he said. ‘Even allowing for interest payments and the ridiculously high insurance premiums on a horse like Sandcastle, I’d be able to repay the loan in five years. That’s the period I’ve used in planning.’

He spread out his sheets of neatly written calculations on his desk, pointing to each figure as he explained to me how he’d reached it. ‘A stallion fee of forty thousand pounds will cover it. His racing record justifies that figure, and I’ve been most carefully into the breeding of Sandcastle himself, as you can imagine. There is absolutely nothing in the family to alarm. No trace of hereditary illness or undesirable tendencies. He comes from a healthy blue-blooded line of winners, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t breed true.’ He gave me a photocopied genealogical table. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to advance a loan without getting an expert opinion on this. Please do take it with you.’

He gave me also some copies of his figures, and I packed them all into the brief case I’d taken with me.

‘Why don’t you consider halving your risk to twenty-one shares?’ I asked. ‘Sell nineteen. You’d still outvote the other owners — there’d be no chance of them whisking Sandcastle off somewhere else — and you’d be less stretched.’

With a smile he shook his head. ‘If I found for any reason that the repayments were causing me acute difficulty, I’d sell some shares as necessary. But I hope in five years time to own Sandcastle outright, and also as I told you to have attracted other stallions of that calibre, and to be numbered among the world’s top-ranking stud farms.’

His pleasant manner took away any suggestion of megalomania, and I could see nothing of that nature in him.

Ginnie came into the office carrying two mugs with slightly anxious diffidence.

‘I made some tea. Do you want some, Dad?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said immediately, before he could answer, and she looked almost painfully relieved. Oliver Knowles turned what had seemed like an incipient shake of the head into a nod, and Ginnie, handing over the mugs, said that if I wanted sugar she would go and fetch some. ‘And a spoon, I guess.’

‘My wife’s away,’ Oliver Knowles said abruptly.

‘No sugar,’ I said. ‘This is great.’

‘You won’t forget, Dad, will you, about me going back to school?’

‘Nigel will take you.’

‘He’s got visitors.’

‘Oh... all right.’ He looked at his watch. ‘In half an hour, then.’

Ginnie looked even more relieved, particularly as I could clearly sense the irritation he was suppressing. ‘The school run,’ he said as the door closed behind his daughter, ‘was one of the things my wife always did. Does...’ He shrugged. ‘She’s away indefinitely. You might as well know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Can’t be helped.’ He looked at the tea-mug in my hand. ‘I was going to offer you something stronger.’

‘This is fine.’

‘Ginnie comes home on four Sundays a term. She’s a boarder, of course.’ He paused. ‘She’s not yet used to her mother not being here. It’s bad for her, but there you are, life’s like that.’

‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said.

He gave me a glance in which I read both love for his daughter and a blindness to her needs. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘That you go anywhere near High Wycombe on your way home?’

‘Well,’ I said obligingly, ‘I could do.’

I consequently drove Ginnie back to her school, listening on the way to her views on the new headmistress’s compulsory jogging programme (‘all our bosoms flopping up and down, bloody uncomfortable and absolutely disgusting to look at’) and to her opinion of Nigel (‘Dad thinks the sun shines out of his you-know-what and I dare say he is pretty good with the mares, they all seem to flourish, but what the lads get up to behind his back is nobody’s business. They smoke in the feed sheds, I ask you! All that hay around... Nigel never notices. He’d make a rotten school prefect’) and to her outlook on life in general (‘I can’t wait to get out of school uniform and out of dormitories and being bossed around, and I’m no good at lessons; the whole thing’s a mess . Why has everything changed ? I used to be happy, or at least I wasn’t unhappy , which I mostly seem to be nowadays, and no, it isn’t because of Mum going away, or not especially, as she was never a lovey-dovey sort of mother, always telling me to eat with my mouth shut and so on... and you must be bored silly hearing all this.’)