Дик Фрэнсис - High Stakes

The wheels inside my head whirred with the same doubts as in the morning. Suppose I had been wrong. Suppose Jody didn’t come. Suppose he did come, but came unseen, and managed to steal the horse successfully.

Well... I’d planned for that, too. I checked for the hundredth time through the ifs. I tried to imagine what I hadn’t already imagined, see what I hadn’t seen, prepare for the unprepared. Rupert cast an amused glance or two at my abstracted expression and made no attempt to break it down.

The door bell rang sharply, three long insistent pushes.

I stood up faster than good manners.

‘Go on,’ Rupert said indulgently. ‘We’ll be right behind you, if you need us.’

I nodded and departed, and crossed the hall to open the front door. My man in a grey flannel suit stood outside, looking worried and holding a torch.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure. The other two arc patrolling the yard and I haven’t seen them for some time. And I think we have visitors, but they haven’t come in a horsebox.’

‘Did you see them? The visitors?’

‘No. Only their car. Hidden off the road in a patch of wild rhododendrons. At least... there is a car there which wasn’t there half an hour ago. What do you think?’

‘Better take a look,’ I said.

He nodded. I left the door of Rupert’s house ajar and we walked together towards the main gate. Just inside it stood the van which had brought the security guards, and outside, less than fifty yards along the road, we came to the car in the bushes, dimly seen even by torchlight.

‘It isn’t a car I recognise,’ I said. ‘Suppose it’s just a couple of lovers?’

‘They’d be inside it on a night like this, not out snogging in the freezing undergrowth.’

‘You’re right.’

‘Let’s take the rotor arm, to make sure.’

We lifted the bonnet and carefully removed the essential piece of electrics. Then, shining the torch as little as possible and going on grass whenever there was a choice, we hurried back towards the stable. The night was windy enough to swallow small sounds, dark enough to lose contact at five paces and cold enough to do structural damage to brass monkeys.

At the entrance to the yard we stopped to look and listen.

No lights. The dark heavy bulk of buildings was more sensed than seen against the heavily overcast sky.

No sounds except our own breath and the greater lungs of the wind. No sign of our other two guards.

‘What now?’

‘We’ll go and check the horse,’ I said.

We went into the main yard and skirted round its edges, which were paved with quieter concrete. The centre was an expanse of crunchy gravel, a giveaway even for cats.

Box fourteen had a chair outside it. A wooden kitchen chair planted prosaically with its back to the stable wall. No guard sat on it.

Quietly I slid back the bolts on the top half of the door and looked inside. There was a soft movement and the sound of a hoof rustling the straw. A second’s flash of torch showed the superb black shape patiently standing half-asleep in the dark, drowsing away the equine night.

I shut the door and made faint grating noises with the bolt.

‘He’s fine,’ I said. ‘Let’s see if we can find the others.’

He nodded. We finished the circuit of the main yard and started along the various branches, moving with caution and trying not to use the torch. I couldn’t stop the weird feeling growing that we were not the only couple groping about in the dark. I saw substance in shadows and reached out fearfully to touch objects which were not there, but only darker patches in the pervading black. We spent five or ten minutes feeling our way, listening, taking a few steps, listening, going on. We completed the tour of the outlying rows of boxes, and saw and heard nothing.

‘This is no good,’ I said quietly. ‘There isn’t a sign of them, and has it occurred to you that they are hiding from us, thinking we are the intruders?’

‘Just beginning to wonder.’

‘Let’s go back to the main yard.’

We turned and retraced our steps, taking this time a short cut through a narrow alleyway between two sections of boxes. I was in front, so it was I who practically tripped over the huddled bundle on the ground.

I switched on the torch. Saw the neat navy uniform and the blood glistening red on the forehead. Saw the shut eyes and the lax limbs of the man who should have been sitting on the empty kitchen chair.

‘Oh God,’ I said desperately, and thought I would never ever forgive myself. I knelt beside him and fumbled for his pulse.

‘He’s alive,’ said my friend in the grey flannel suit. He sounded reassuring and confident. ‘Look at him breathing. He’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

All I could see was a man who was injured because I’d stationed him in the path of danger. ‘I’ll get a doctor,’ I said, standing up.

‘What about the horse?’

‘Damn the horse. This is more important.’

‘I’ll stay here with him till you get back.’

I nodded and set off anxiously towards the house, shining the torch now without reservations. If permanent harm came to that man because of me...

I ran.

Burst in through Rupert’s front door and found him standing there in the hall talking to the lady magistrate and the colonel, who were apparently just about to leave. She was pulling a cape around her shoulders and Rupert was holding the colonel’s coat. They turned and stared at me like a frozen tableau.

‘My guard’s been attacked. Knocked out,’ I said. ‘Could you get him a doctor?’

‘Sure,’ Rupert said calmly. ‘Who attacked him?’

‘I didn’t see.’

‘Job for the police?’

‘Yes, please.’

He turned to the telephone, dialling briskly. ‘What about the horse?’

‘They didn’t come in a horsebox.’

We both digested implications while he got the rescue services on the move. The colonel and the magistrate stood immobile in the hall with their mouths half open and Rupert, putting down the telephone, gave them an authoritative glance.

‘Come out into the yard with us, will you?’ he said. ‘Just in case we need witnesses?’

They weren’t trained to disappear rapidly at the thought. When Rupert hurried out of the door with me at his heels they followed more slowly after.

Everything still looked entirely quiet outside.

‘He’s in a sort of alley between two blocks of boxes,’ I said.

‘I know where you mean,’ Rupert nodded. ‘But first we’ll just check on Energise.’

‘Later.’

‘No. Now. Why bash the guard if they weren’t after the horse?’

He made straight for the main yard, switched on all six external lights, and set off across the brightly illuminated gravel.

The effect was like a flourish of trumpets. Noise, light and movement filled the space where silence and dark had been total.

Both halves of the door of box fourteen swung open about a foot, and two dark figures catapulted through the gap.

‘Catch them!’ Rupert shouted.

There was only one way out of the yard, the broad entrance through which we had come. The two figures ran in curving paths towards the exit, one to one side of Rupert and me, one to the other.

Rupert rushed to intercept the smaller who was suddenly, as he turned his head to the light, recognisable as Jody.

I ran for the larger. Stretched out. Touched him.

He swung a heavy arm and threw out a hip and I literally bounced off him, stumbling and falling.

The muscles were rock hard. The sunglasses glittered.

The joker was ripping through the pack.

Jody and Rupert rolled on the gravel, one clutching, one punching, both swearing. I tried again at Muscles with the same useless results. He seemed to hesitate over going to Jody’s help, which was how I’d come to be able to reach him a second time, but finally decided on flight. By the time I was again staggering to my feet he was on his way to the exit with the throttle wide open.