Дик Фрэнсис: High Stakes

I looked at my friend and saw a man who had robbed me. Deeply disturbing. The ultimate in rejection.

Jody Leeds looked back at me, half smiling, still disbelieving.

‘You’re what?’

‘Taking my horses away,’ I said.

‘But... I’m your trainer.’ He sounded bewildered. Owners, his voice and expression protested, never deserted their trainers. It simply wasn’t done. Only the eccentric or the ruthless shifted their horses from stable to stable, and I had shown no signs of being either.

We stood outside the weighing room of Sandown Park racecourse on a cold windy day with people scurrying past us carrying out saddles and number cloths for the next steeplechase. Jody hunched his shoulders inside his sheepskin coat and shook his bare head. The wind blew straight brown hair in streaks across his eyes and he pulled them impatiently away.

‘Come on, Steven,’ he said. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No.’

Jody was short, stocky, twenty-eight, hardworking, clever, competent and popular. He had been my constant adviser since I had bought my first racehorses three years earlier, and right from the beginning he had robbed me round the clock and smiled while doing it.

‘You’re crazy,’ he said, ‘I’ve just won you a race.’

We stood, indeed, on the patch of turf where winners were unsaddled: where Energise, my newest and glossiest hurdler, had recently decanted his smiling jockey, had stamped and steamed and tossed his head with pride and accepted the crowd’s applause as simply his due.

The race he had won had not been important, but the way he had won it had been in the star-making class. The sight of him sprinting up the hill to the winning post, a dark brown streak of rhythm, had given me a rare bursting feeling of admiration, of joy... probably even of love. Energise was beautiful and courageous and chock-full of will to win and it was because he had won, and won in that fashion, that my hovering intention to break with Jody had hardened into action.

I should, I suppose, have chosen a better time and place.

‘I picked out Energise for you at the Sales,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘And all your other winners.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I moved into bigger stables because of you.’

I nodded briefly.

‘Well... You can’t let me down now.’

Disbelief had given way to anger. His bright blue eyes sharpened to belligerence and the muscles tightened round his mouth.

‘I’m taking the horses away,’ I repeated. ‘And we’ll start with Energise. You can leave him here when you go home.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘No.’

‘Where’s he going then?’

I actually had no idea. I said, ‘I’ll make all the arrangements. Just leave him in the stable here and go home without him.’

‘You’ve no right to do this.’ Full-scale anger blazed in his eyes. ‘You’re a bloody rotten shit.’

But I had every right. He knew it and I knew it. Every owner had the right at any time to withdraw his custom if he were dissatisfied with his trainer. The fact that the right was seldom exercised was beside the point.

Jody was rigid with fury. ‘I am taking that horse home with me and nothing is going to stop me.’

His very intensity stoked up in me an answering determination that he should not. I shook my head decisively. I said, ‘No, Jody. The horse stays here.’

‘Over my dead body.’

His body, alive, quivered with pugnaciousness.

‘As of this moment,’ I said, ‘I’m cancelling your authority to act on my behalf, and I’m going straight into the weighing room to make that clear to all the authorities who need to know.’

He glared. ‘You owe me money,’ he said. ‘You can’t take your horses away until you’ve paid.’

I paid my bills with him on the nail every month and owed him only for the current few weeks. I pulled my cheque book out of my pocket and unclipped my pen.

‘I’ll give you a cheque right now.’

‘No you bloody well won’t.’

He snatched the whole cheque book out of my hand and ripped it in two. Then in the same movement he threw the pieces over his shoulder, and all the loose halves of the cheques scattered in the wind. Faces turned our way in astonishment and the eyes of the Press came sharply to life. I couldn’t have chosen anywhere more public for what was developing into a first class row.

Jody looked around him. Looked at the men with notebooks. Saw his allies.

His anger grew mean.

‘You’ll be sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll chew you into little bits.’

The face that five minutes earlier had smiled with cheerful decisive friendliness had gone for good. Even if I now retracted and apologised, the old relationship could not be re-established. Confidence, like Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put together again.

His fierce opposition had driven me further than I had originally meant. All the same I still had the same objective, even if I had to fight harder to achieve it.

‘Whatever you do,’ I said, ‘you won’t keep my horses.’

‘You’re ruining me,’ Jody shouted.

The Press advanced a step or two.

Jody cast a quick eye at them. Maliciousness flooded through him and twisted his features with spite. ‘You big rich bastards don’t give a damn who you hurt.’

I turned abruptly away from him and went into the weighing room, and there carried out my promise to disown him officially as my trainer. I signed forms cancelling his authority to act for me, and for good measure also included a separate handwritten note to say that I had expressly forbidden him to remove Energise from Sandown Park. No one denied I had the right: there was just an element of coolness towards one who was so vehemently and precipitately ridding himself of the services of the man who had ten minutes ago given him a winner.

I didn’t tell them that it had taken a very long time for the mug to face the fact that he was being conned. I didn’t tell them how I had thrust the first suspicions away as disloyalty and had made every possible allowance before being reluctantly convinced.

I didn’t tell them either that the reason for my determination now lay squarely in Jody’s first reaction to my saying I was removing my horses.

Because he hadn’t, not then or afterwards, asked the one natural question.

He hadn’t asked why .

When I left the weighing room, both Jody and the Press had gone from the unsaddling enclosure. Racegoers were hurrying towards the stands to watch the imminent steeplechase, the richest event of the afternoon, and even the officials with whom I’d just been dealing were dashing off with the same intent.

I had no appetite for the race. Decided, instead, to go down to the racecourse stables and ask the gatekeeper there to make sure Energise didn’t vanish in a puff of smoke. But as the gatekeeper was there to prevent villainous strangers walking in , not any bona fide racehorses walking out , I wasn’t sure how much use he would be, even if he agreed to help.

He was sitting in his sentry box, a middle-aged sturdy figure in a navy blue serge uniform with brass buttons. Various lists on clip-boards hung on hooks on the walls, alongside an electric heater fighting a losing battle against the December chill.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I want to ask you about my horse...’

‘Can’t come in here,’ he interrupted bossily. ‘No owners allowed in without trainers.’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I just want to make sure my horse stays here.’

‘What horse is that?’

He was adept at interrupting, like many people in small positions of power. He blew on his fingers and looked at me over them without politeness.