Дик Фрэнсис - Field of 13

In the winner’s unsaddling enclosure Gypsy Joe and Red Millbrook smiled faintly at each other as if they had joined a private brotherhood. Gypsy Joe knew he’d found his man. Red Millbrook embraced his future.

Up on the stands the two passed-over stable jockeys watched the race and the win with increasing rage. One of them would normally have been on the horse, and he — Davey Rockman — felt his fury thoroughly justified.

Gypsy Joe was a rough customer to work for (Davey Rockman considered), but his horses ran often, were well schooled, and had kept him — Davey — in luxury and girlfriends for the past five years. Davey Rockman’s appetite for women, once the scandal of the racecourse, had long been accepted as the norm; and conversely ‘The Rock’s’ dark good looks were known powerfully to attract anything female. Davey Rockman’s anger at the loss of the money he would have earned by winning the big prestigious race was minor compared with the insult to his sexual pride.

It didn’t once occur to him that had he, and not the usurper Red Millbrook, been riding the horse, it might not have won.

Nigel Tape, the stable’s regular second-string jockey, burned with loyal resentment on ‘The Rock’s’ behalf. Nigel Tape, destined never himself to shine as a star, habitually basked in his position of side-kick to ‘The Rock’, always echoing the same frustrations, the same triumphs, the same unrealistic gripes. He felt all of Davey Rockman’s legitimate indignation at having been replaced, and magnified the umbrage to vindictive proportions. Davey ‘The Rock’ felt flattered by Nigel Tape’s almost fanatical devotion and didn’t see its dangers.

On the Monday after the April Gold Cup, Gypsy Joe surveyed the glowering faces of his two long-term jockeys as they drove into his stable-yard for the morning exercise and training session.

He said to them flatly, in businesslike tones, ‘As you’ve probably realised, Red Millbrook will be my first retained jockey from now on. You, Davey, have the option of staying on here as schooling jockey, which you’re good at, and riding the occasional race, or of course if you prefer it you can try for chief stable jockey with a different trainer.’

Davey Rockman listened in bitter silence. His status as Gypsy Joe’s first jockey had been comfortably high in the jump-racing world. The demotion the trainer was handing out not only meant a severe permanent drop in face and in income, but also the virtual end of his attractiveness to skirts. He habitually used the power of his position to dominate women. He liked to slap them about a bit and make them beg for passion. He felt superior. He strode about often in his jockey boots, counting them a symbol of virility.

Finding a job with comparable standing was hardly an option: there weren’t enough good stable-jockey jobs to go round. Davey Rockman looked straight at Gypsy Joe’s uncaring determination to downgrade him and felt the first surge of murderous hate.

Nigel Tape asked aggressively, ‘What about me, then?’

‘You can go on as before,’ the trainer told him.

‘Picking up crumbs? It’s not fair.’

‘Life is never fair,’ Gypsy Joe said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

Gypsy Joe’s ancient instincts proved spectacularly right. Red Millbrook and Gypsy Joe’s horses galvanised each other on track after track while the main part of the jump-racing programme waned towards summer. The cheers for one win barely died away before they rose for another. The owners of the horses were ecstatic: new owners offered horses every day. By the time the next ten-month-long season warmed up in August, the trainer had rented a lot of extra stabling and the jockey was whistling to himself in happy fulfilment as he drove his car from success to success. Through September and October and November it seemed he could do no wrong. He led the jockeys’ list.

His parents became reconciled to his ‘tart’ness and boasted about him instead, but his two elder sisters, unmarried, grew jealous of his fame. He still lived in the family house in London which his sophisticated mother much preferred to clomping round weekend fields and battling mildew in a damp old cottage. Red settled for her London comfort while planning to buy a house of his own with his winnings, though not one necessarily on Gypsy Joe’s doorstep. The lives of jockey and trainer remained as separate as before their partnership had fused at Sandown, but the vibrations between them remained unchanged. They smiled always the same understanding smile, but they never drank together.

Red Millbrook — friendly, uncomplicated, generous-hearted — mixed little with the other jockeys, who tended to be in awe of his dazzling skill, and he cheerfully ignored the ill-will he saw blazing in Davey Rockman’s eyes, and the identical copycat resentment in Nigel Tape’s. Owing to the multiplication of the horses in the stable, Davey Rockman, Red Millbrook blithely reflected, still rode a fair amount of races, even if not on the winning cream of the string, and even if not with the same stunned and genuflecting coverage in the press. It wasn’t his fault, he assured himself, that Gypsy Joe had singled him out and given him such a great and satisfying opportunity.

He was unaware that it was the disastrous collapse of his vigorous sex life that most infuriated The Rock; and The Rock on his part failed to realise that it was his bitter constant grumbling that put women off. For the first time in his life girls flocked round Red Millbrook, who thought their approaches amusing: and his amusement further inflamed his seething dispossessed rival.

In December, when Davey Rockman broke some small bones in his foot in a racing fall, Red Millbrook sent him a message of sympathy. The Rock thought it an insult and didn’t reply.

Red Millbrook kept his car in the London street outside his parents’ house and drove from there each day to wherever he was due to race. Normally he set off northwards on a road which took him through tall black railings into the grassy expanse of Hyde Park. There were paths there and clumps of evergreen bushes, and benches for the rest of tired walkers. Also there were several sets of traffic lights, both to aid pedestrians crossing and to allow traffic to turn right in a complicated pattern. Almost always one of the sets of lights would be red against Red Millbrook. Patiently he would wait for the green while his radio filled the car with music.

On one Friday morning in December, while he waited, humming, at the stop light, a man approached his stationary car and tapped on the passenger side window. He was dressed as a tourist and carried a large street map, to which he hopefully pointed.

Red Millbrook pressed a button and obligingly opened the electrically-controlled window. The tourist advanced the map politely into the car.

‘Excuse me,’ said the tourist, ‘which way to Buckingham Palace, please?’

He had a foreign accent, Red Millbrook thought fleetingly. French, perhaps. The jockey leaned towards the window and bent his head over the map.

‘You go—’ he said.

Emil Jacques Guirlande shot him.

Truth to tell, Emil Jacques enjoyed killing.

He took pride in being able to bring death so quickly and cleanly that his prey hadn’t even a suspicion of the need for fear. Emil Jacques considered he would have failed his own high standards if ever he’d seen eyes widen with desperate fright or heard just the beginning of a piteous plea. Some assassins might take pleasure in their victims’ terror: Emil Jacques, for a murderer, was kind.

Red Millbrook had looked exclusively at the map held half open in Emil Jacques’ left hand. He hadn’t had time to see the Browning 9mm pistol with its efficient long silencer slide smoothly out from within the map’s lower folds. Emil’s right hand had a speed and sweetness of touch with a gun that no magician could have bettered.