Dick Francis - Enquiry

‘I thought you might not.’ He sighed and drank deeply. ‘Where did you get to yesterday?’

‘I called on people who didn’t want to see me.’

‘Any results?’

‘Not many.’ I told him briefly about Newtonnards and David Oakley, and about the hour I’d spent with Andrew Tring.

It was because the road home from Birmingham led near his village that I’d thought of Andrew Tring, and my first instinct anyway was to shy away from even the thought of him. Certainly visiting one of the Stewards who had helped to warn him off was not regulation behaviour for a disbarred jockey. If I hadn’t been fairly strongly annoyed with him I would have driven straight on.

He was disgusted with me for calling. He opened the door of his prosperous sprawling old manor house himself and had no chance of saying he was out.

‘Kelly! What are you doing here?’

‘Asking you for some explanation.’

‘I’ve nothing to say to you.’

‘You have indeed.’

He frowned. Natural good manners were only just preventing him from retreating and shutting the door in my face. ‘Come in then. Just for a few minutes.’

‘Thank you,’ I said without irony, and followed him into a nearby small room lined with books and containing a vast desk, three deep armchairs and a colour television set.

‘Now,’ he said, shutting the door and not offering the armchairs, ‘Why have you come?’

He was four years older than me, and about the same size. Still as trim as when he rode races, still outwardly the same man. Only the casual, long established changing-room friendliness seemed to have withered somewhere along the upward path from amateurship to Authority.

‘Andy,’ I said, ‘Do you really and honestly believe that that Squelch race was rigged?’

‘You were warned off,’ he said coldly.

‘That’s far from being the same thing as guilty.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘Then you’re stupid,’ I said bluntly. ‘As well as scared out of your tiny wits.’

‘That’s enough, Kelly. I don’t have to listen to this.’ He opened the door again and waited for me to leave. I didn’t. Short of throwing me out bodily he was going to have to put up with me a little longer. He gave me a furious stare and shut the door again.

I said more reasonably, ‘I’m sorry, Really, I’m sorry. It’s just that you rode against me for at least five years... I’d have thought you wouldn’t so easily believe I’d deliberately lose a race. I’ve never yet lost a race I could win.’

He was silent. He knew that I didn’t throw races. Anyone who rode regularly knew who would and who wouldn’t, and in spite of what Charlie West had said at the Enquiry, I was not an artist at stopping one because I hadn’t given it the practice.

‘There was that money,’ he said at last. He sounded disillusioned and discouraged.

‘I never had it. Oakley took it with him into my flat and photographed it there. All that so called evidence, the whole bloody Enquiry in fact, was as genuine as a lead sixpence.’

He gave me a long doubtful look. Then he said, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Stop saying I’m afraid,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m not afraid. I just can’t do anything about it, even if what you say is true.’

‘It is true... and maybe you don’t think you are afraid, but that’s definitely the impression you give. Or maybe... are you simply overawed? The new boy among the old powerful prefects. Is that it? Afraid of putting a foot wrong with them?’

‘Kelly!’ he protested; but it was the protest of a touched nerve.

I said unkindly, ‘You’re a gutless disappointment,’ and took a step towards his door. He didn’t move to open it for me. Instead he put up a hand to stop me, looking as angry as he had every right to.

‘That’s not fair. Just because I can’t help you...’

‘You could have done. At the Enquiry.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I do indeed. You found it easier to believe me guilty than to tell Gowery you had any doubts.’

‘It wasn’t as easy as you think.’

‘Thanks,’ I said ironically.

‘I don’t mean...’ he shook his head impatiently. ‘I mean, it wasn’t all as simple as you make out. When Gowery asked me to sit with him at the Enquiry I believed it was only going to be a formality, that both you and Cranfield had run the Lemonfizz genuinely and were surprised yourselves by the result. Colonel Midgley told me it was ridiculous having to hold the Enquiry at all, really. I never expected to be caught up in having to warn you off.’

‘Did you say,’ I said, ‘That Lord Gowery asked you to sit with him?’

‘Of course. That’s the normal procedure. The Stewards sitting at an Enquiry aren’t picked out of a hat...’

‘There isn’t any sort of rota?’

‘No. The Disciplinary Steward asks two colleagues to officiate with him... and that’s what put me on the spot, if you must know, because I didn’t want to say no to Lord Gowery...’ He stopped.

‘Go on,’ I urged without heat. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, because...’ He hesitated, then said slowly, ‘I suppose in a way I owe it to you... I’m sorry Kelly, desperately sorry, I do know you don’t usually rig races... I’m in an odd position with Gowery and it’s vitally important I keep in with him.’

I stifled my indignation. Andrew Ting’s eyes were looking inward and from his expression he didn’t very much like what he could see.

‘He owns the freehold of the land just north of Manchester where our main pottery is.’ Andrew Tring’s family fortunes were based not on fine porcelain but on smashable tea cups for institutions. His products were dropped by washers-up in schools and hospitals from Waterloo to Hongkong, and the pieces in the world’s dustbins were his perennial licence to print money.

He said, ‘There’s been some redevelopment round there and that land is suddenly worth about a quarter of a million. And our lease runs out in three years... We have been negotiating a new one, but the old one was for ninety-nine years and no one is keen to renew for that long... The ground rent is in any case going to be raised considerably, but if Gowery changes his mind and wants to sell that land for development, there’s nothing we can do about it. We only own the buildings... We’d lose the entire factory if he didn’t renew the lease... And we can only make cups and saucers so cheaply because our overheads are small... If we have to build or rent a new factory our prices will be less competitive and our world trade figures will slump. Gowery himself has the final say as to whether our lease will be renewed or not, and on what terms... so you see, Kelly, it’s not that I’m afraid of him... there’s so much more at stake... and he’s always a man to hold it against you if you argue with him.’

He stopped and looked at me gloomily. I looked gloomily back. The facts of life stared us stonily in the face.

‘So that’s that,’ I agreed. ‘You are quite right. You can’t help me. You couldn’t, right from the start. I’m glad you explained...’ I smiled at him twistedly, facing another dead end, the last of a profitless day.

‘I’m sorry, Kelly...’

‘Sure,’ I said.

Tony finished his fortified breakfast and said, ‘So there wasn’t anything sinister in Andy Tring’s lily-livered bit on Monday.’

‘It depends what you call sinister. But no, I suppose not.’

‘What’s left, then?’

‘Damn all,’ I said in depression.

‘You can’t give up,’ he protested.

‘Oh no. But I’ve learned one thing in learning nothing, and that is that I’m getting nowhere because I’m me. First thing Monday morning I’m going to hire me my own David Oakley.’