Дик Фрэнсис - High Stakes

‘Come in, come in, search where you like,’ Jody would have said.

No Energise anywhere to be seen.

‘Of course, if you were drunk, you dreamt it all, no doubt.’

End of investigation, and end of Energise, because after that it would have been too risky to keep him.

Whereas if I could convince Jody I knew nothing, he would keep Energise alive and somehow or other I might get him back.

I accidentally bumped into him outside the weighing room. We both half-turned to each other to apologise, and recognition froze the words in our mouths.

Jody’s eyes turned stormy and I suppose mine also.

‘Get out of my bloody way,’ he said.

‘Look, Jody,’ I said, ‘I want your help.’

‘I’m as likely to help you as kiss your arse.’

I ignored that and put on a bit of puzzle. ‘Did I, or didn’t I, come to your stables a fortnight ago?’

He was suddenly a great deal less violent, a great deal more attentive.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I know it’s stupid... but somehow or other I got drunk and collected concussion from an almighty bang on the head, and I thought... it seemed to me, that the evening before, I’d set out to visit you, though with things as they are between us I can’t for the life of me think why. So what I want to know is, did I arrive at your place, or didn’t I?’

He gave me a straight narrow-eyed stare.

‘If you came, I never saw you,’ he said.

I looked down at the ground as if disconsolate and shook my head. ‘I can’t understand it. In the ordinary way I never drink much. I’ve been trying to puzzle it out ever since, but I can’t remember anything between about six one evening and waking up in a police station next morning with a frightful headache and a lot of bruises. I wondered if you could tell me what I’d done in between, because as far as I’m concerned it’s a blank.’

I could almost feel the procession of emotions flowing out of him. Surprise, elation, relief and a feeling that this was a totally unexpected piece of luck.

He felt confident enough to return to abuse.

‘Why the bloody hell should you have wanted to visit me? You couldn’t get shot of me fast enough.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said glumly. ‘I suppose you didn’t ring me up and ask me...’

‘You’re so right I didn’t. And don’t you come hanging round. I’ve had a bellyful of you and I wouldn’t have you back if you crawled.’

He scowled, turned away and strode off, and only because I knew what he must really be thinking could I discern the twist of satisfied smile that he couldn’t entirely hide. He left me in much the same state. If he was warning me so emphatically to stay away from his stables there was the best of chances that Energise was back there, alive and well.

I watched his sturdy backview threading through the crowd, with people smiling at him as he passed. Everyone’s idea of a bright young trainer going places. My idea of a ruthless little crook.

At Christmas I had written to Allie in code four.

“Which is the first night you could have dinner with me and where? I enclose twenty dollars for cab fare home.”

On the morning after Newbury races I received her reply, also in groups of five letters, but not in code four. She had jumbled her answer ingeniously enough for it to take me two minutes to unravel it. Very short messages were always the worst, and this was brief indeed.

“January fifth in Miami.”

I laughed aloud. And she had kept the twenty bucks.

The Racing Calendar came in the same post. I took it and a cup of coffee over to the big window on the balcony and sat in an armchair there to read. The sky over the Zoo in Regent’s Park looked as heavy and grey as the day before, thick with the threat of snow. Down by the canal the bare branches of trees traced tangled black lines across the brown water and grassy banks, and the ribbon traffic as usual shattered the illusion of rural peace. I enjoyed this view of life which, like my work, was a compromise between old primitive roots and new glossy technology. Contentment, I thought, lay in being succoured by the first and cosseted by the second. If I’d had a pagan god, it would have been electricity, which sprang from the skies and galvanised machines. Mysterious lethal force of nature, harnessed and insulated and delivered on tap. My welder-uncle had made electricity seem a living person to me as a child. “Electricity will catch you if you don’t look out.” He said it as a warning; and I thought of Electricity as a fiery monster hiding in the wires and waiting to pounce.

The stiff yellowish pages of the Racing Calendar crackled familiarly as I opened their double spread and folded them back. The Calendar , racing’s official weekly publication, contained lists of horses entered for forthcoming races, pages and pages of them, four columns to a page. The name of each horse was accompanied by the name of its owner and trainer, and also by its age and the weight it would have to carry if it ran.

With pencil in hand to act as insurance against skipping a line with the eye, I began painstakingly, as I had the previous week and the week before that, to check the name, owner, and trainer of every horse entered in hurdle races.

Grapevine (Mrs R. Wantage) B. Fritwell     6 11 11

Pirate Boy (Lord Dresden) A. G. Barnes     10 11 4

Hopfield (Mr Paul Hatheleigh) K. Poundsgate   5 11 2

There were reams of them. I finished the Worcester entries with a sigh. Three hundred and sixty-eight down for one novice hurdle and three hundred and forty-nine for another, and not one of them what I was looking for.

My coffee was nearly cold. I drank it anyway and got on with the races scheduled for Taunton.

Hundreds more names, but nothing.

Ascot, nothing. Newcastle, nothing. Warwick, Teesside, Plumpton, Doncaster, nothing.

I put the Calendar down for a bit and went out onto the balcony for some air. Fiercely cold air, slicing down to the lungs. Primeval arctic air carrying city gunge: the mixture as before. Over in the Park the zoo creatures were quiet, sheltering in warmed houses. They always made more noise in the summer.

Return to the task.

Huntingdon, Market Rasen, Stratford on Avon... I sighed before starting Stratford and checked how many more still lay ahead. Nottingham, Carlisle and Wetherby. I was in for another wasted morning, no doubt.

Turned back to Stratford, and there it was.

I blinked and looked again carefully, as if the name would vanish if I took my eyes off it.

Half way down among sixty-four entries for the Shakespeare Novice Hurdle.

Padellic (Mr J. Leeds) J. Leeds      5 10 7

Padellic.

It was the first time the name had appeared in association with Jody. I knew the names of all his usual horses well, and what I had been searching for was a new one, an unknown. Owned, if my theories were right, by Jody himself. And here it was.

Nothing in the Calendar to show Padellic’s colour or markings. I fairly sprinted over to the shelf where I kept a few form books and looked him up in every index.

Little doubt, I thought. He was listed as a black or brown gelding, five years old, a half-bred by a thorough-bred sire out of a hunter mare. He had been trained by a man I’d never heard of and he had run three times in four-year-old hurdles without being placed.

I telephoned to the trainer at once, introducing myself as a Mr Robinson trying to buy a cheap novice.

‘Padellic?’ he said in a forthright Birmingham accent. ‘I got shot of that bugger round October time. No bloody good. Couldn’t run fast enough to keep warm. Is he up for sale again? Can’t say as I’m surprised. He’s a right case of the slows, that one.’