Dick Francis - Enquiry

I looked down the room at Jack, a huddled defeated figure with nervous eyes and an anxious forehead. He was picking at the tablecloth with his ringers, folding it into senseless little pleats. He didn’t look like a villain. No hardened criminal. Just a tenacious little man with a fixed idea, to make up to dear Grace for being what he was.

Nothing was more useless than sending him to prison, and nothing could do him more harm: yet that, I imagined, was where he would go. Putting his body in a little cage wouldn’t straighten the kinks in his mind. The system, for men like him, was screwy.

He stood up slowly and walked unsteadily towards us.

‘I suppose,’ he said without much emotion, ‘That you are going to get the police. I was wondering... please... don’t tell them about the club... I won’t say Lord Gowery goes there... I won’t tell anybody ever... I never really wanted to... it wouldn’t have done any good, would it? I mean, it wouldn’t have kept those horses in my yard... wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference... So do you think anyone need know about... the club?’

‘No,’ said Ferth with well disguised relief. ‘They need not.’

A faint smile set up a rival set of creases to the lines of anxiety. ‘Thank you.’ The smile faded away. The lost look deepened. ‘How long... do you think I’ll get?’

Ferth moved uncomfortably. ‘No point in worrying about that until you have to.’

‘You could probably halve it,’ I said.

‘How?’ He was pathetically hopeful. I flung him the rope.

‘By giving evidence at another trial I have in mind, and taking David Oakley down with you.’

Yesterday I rode Breadwinner in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

A horse of raw talent with more future than past. A shambling washy chestnut carrying his head low. No one’s idea of equine beauty.

Old Strepson watched him slop round the parade ring and said with a sigh, ‘He looks half asleep.’

‘Hughes will wake him up,’ Cranfield said condescendingly.

Cranfield stood in the chill March sunshine making his usual good stab at arrogance. The mean calculating lines round his mouth seemed to have deepened during the past month, and his manner to me was if anything more distant, more master-servant, than ever before. Roberta said she had told him that I had in some way managed to get our licences back, but he saw no reason to believe her and preferred the thought of divine intervention.

Old Strepson said conversationally, ‘Kelly says Breadwinner was a late foal and a late developer, and won’t reach his true strength until about this time next year.’

Cranfield gave me a mouth-tightening mind-your-own-business glare, and didn’t seem to realise that I’d given him an alibi if the horse didn’t win and built him up into one heck of a good trainer if it did. Whatever low opinion Cranfield held of me, I reciprocated it in full.

Further along the parade ring stood a silent little group of Kessel, Pat Nikita, and their stable jockey, Al Roach. They were engaged in running poor old Squelch, and their interest lay not so fiercely in winning as in finishing at all costs in front of Breadwinner. Kessel himself radiated so much hatred that I thought it was probably giving him a headache. Hating did that. The day I found it out, I gave up hating.

Grace’s hatred-headache must have been unbearable...

Grace’s recovery was still uncertain. Ferth had somehow wangled the best available psychiatrist on to her case, and had also arranged for him to see Jack. Outside the weighing room when I had arrived, he had jerked his head for me to join him, and told me what the psychiatrist had reported.

‘He says Jack is sane according to legal standards, and will have to stand trial. He wouldn’t commit himself about Grace’s chances. He did say, though, that from all points of view their enforced separation was a godsend. He said he thought their only chance of leading fairly normal lives in the future was to make the separation total and permanent. He said a return to the same circumstances could mean a repeat of the whole cycle.’

I looked at Ferth gloomily. ‘What a cold, sad, depressing solution.’

‘You never know,’ he said optimistically, ‘Once they get over it, they might both feel... well... released.’

I smiled at him. He said abruptly, ‘Your outlook is catching, dammit... How about that dinner?’

‘Any time,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow, then? Eight o’clock. The Caprice, round the corner from the Ritz... The food’s better there than at my club.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘And you can tell me how the police are getting on with David Oakley...’

I’d had the Birmingham police on my telephone and doorstep for much of the past week. They had almost fallen on my neck and sobbed when I first went to them with enough to make an accusation stick, and had later promised to deliver to me, framed, one of the first fruits of their search warrant: a note from Cranfield to Jack Roxford dated two years earlier, thanking him for not bidding him up at an auction after a selling race and enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds. Across the bottom of the page Cranfield had written:

‘As agreed. Thanks. D.C.’

It was the note Oakley had photographed in my flat.

Supplied by Roxford, who had suggested the photograph.

Kept by Oakley, as a hold over Roxford.

The police also told me that Jack Roxford had drawn six hundred pounds in new notes out of his bank during the two weeks before the Enquiry, and David Oakley had paid three hundred of the same notes into his own account five days later.

Clever, slippery Mr Oakley had been heard to remark that he regretted not having slaughtered Kelly Hughes.

The bell rang for the jockeys to mount, and Cranfleld and old Strepson and I walked over to where Breadwinner waited.

The one jockey missing from the day’s proceedings was Charlie West, whose licence had been suspended for the rest of the season. And it was only thanks to Hughes’ intervention, Ferth had told him forcefully, that he hadn’t got his deserts and been warned off for life. Whether Charlie West would feel an atom of gratitude was another matter.

I swung up easily on to Breadwinner and fitted my right foot carefully into the stirrup. A compromise between me and the orthopod had seen the plaster off seven days previously, but the great surgeon’s kind parting words had been, ‘You haven’t given that leg enough time and if it dislocates again it’s your own bloody fault.’

I had told him that I couldn’t afford to have Cranfield engage another jockey for Breadwinner with all the horse’s future races at stake. Old Strepson was the grateful type who didn’t dislodge a jockey who had won for him, and if some other jockey won the Gold Cup on Breadwinner I would lose the mount for life: and it was only this argument which had grudgingly brought out the saw.

I gathered up the reins and walked the horse quietly round the ring while everyone sorted themselves out into the right order for the parade down the course. Apart from the Grand National, the Cheltenham Gold Cup was the biggest steeplechase of the year. In prestige, probably the greatest of all. All the stars turned out for it, meeting each other on level terms. Bad horses hadn’t a hope.

There were nine runners. Breadwinner was the youngest, Squelch the most experienced, and a bad tempered grey called Ironclad, the favourite.

Al Roach, uninfected by Kessel, lined up beside me at the start and gave me his usual wide friendly Irish grin. ‘Now Kelly my bhoy,’ he said, ‘Tell me how you ride this little fellow, now.’

‘You want to be warned off?’ I said.

He chuckled. ‘What’s the owner got against you, Kelly me bhoy?’