Дик Фрэнсис - Bolt

‘Yes, straight away. He’s in the corner box still, in the next courtyard.’

‘The insurers aren’t going to like this,’ Robin said, looking down at the dead horse. ‘With the first two, it might have been just bad luck that they were two good ones, but three...’ he shrugged. ‘Not my problem, of course.’

‘How did he know where to find them?’ I said, as much to myself as to Robin and Wykeham. ‘Is this Col’s usual box?’

‘Yes,’ Wykeham said. ‘I suppose now I’ll have to change them all around, but it does disrupt the stable...’

‘Abseil,’ I said, ‘is he all right?’

‘Who?’

‘Yesterday’s winner.’

Wykeham’s doubts cleared. ‘Oh, yes, he’s all right.’

Abseil was as easy to recognise as the others, I thought. Not chestnut, not nearly black like Cascade, but grey, with a black mane and tail.

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

‘In the last courtyard, near the house.’

Although I was down at Wykeham’s fairly often, it was always to do the schooling, for which we would drive up to the Downs, where I would ride relays of the horses over jumps, teaching them. I almost never rode the horses in or out of the yard, and although I knew where some of the horses lived, like Cotopaxi, I wasn’t sure of them all.

I put a hand down to touch Col’s foreleg, and felt its rigidity, its chill. The foreleg that had saved us from disaster at Ascot, that had borne all his weight.

‘I’ll have to tell the princess,’ Wykeham said unhappily. ‘Unless you would, Kit?’

‘Yes, I’ll tell her,’ I said. ‘At Sandown.’

He nodded vaguely. ‘What are we running?’ he said.

‘Helikon for the princess, and three others.’

‘Dusty has the list, of course.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

Wykeham took a long look again at the dead splendour on the peat.

‘I’d kill the shit who did that,’ he said, ‘with his own damned bolt.’

Robin sighed and closed the stable doors, saying he would arrange for the carcass to be collected, if Wykeham liked.

Wykeham silently nodded, and we all walked out of the courtyard and made our way to Wykeham’s house, where Robin went off to telephone in the office. The dog-handler was still in the kitchen, restive but chastened, with his dog, a black Doberman, lying on the floor and yawning at his feet.

‘Tell Kit Fielding what you told me,’ Wykeham said.

The dog-handler, in a navy blue battle-dress uniform, was middle-aged and running to fat. His voice was defensively belligerent and his intelligence middling, and I wished I’d had the speedy Sammy here in his place. I sat at the table across from him and asked how he’d missed the visitor who had shot Col.

‘I couldn’t help it, could I?’ he said. ‘Not with those bombs going off.’

‘What bombs?’ I glanced at Wykeham, who’d clearly heard about the bombs before. ‘What bombs, for God’s sake?’

The dog-handler had a moustache which he groomed frequently with a thumb and forefinger, working outwards from the nose.

‘Well, how was I to know they wasn’t proper bombs?’ he said. ‘They made enough noise.’

‘Just start,’ I said, ‘at the beginning. Start with when you came on duty. And er... have you been here any other nights?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Monday to Friday, five nights.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Describe last night.’

‘I come on duty sevenish, when the head lad’s finished the feeding. I make a base here in the kitchen and do a recce every half hour. Standard procedure.’

‘How long do the recces take?’

‘Fifteen minutes, maybe more. It’s bitter cold these nights.’

‘And you go into all the courtyards?’

‘Never miss a one,’ he said piously.

‘And where else?’

‘Look in the hay barn, tack room, feed shed, round the back where the tractor is, and the harrow, muck-heap, the lot.’

‘Go on, then,’ I said, ‘how many recces had you done when the bombs went off?’

He worked it out on his fingers. ‘Nine, say. The head lad had been in for a quick look round last thing, like he does, and everything was quiet. So I comes back here for a bit of a warm, and goes out again half eleven, I should say. I start on the rounds, and there’s this almighty bang and crashing round the back. So I went off there with Ranger...’ he looked down at his dog. ‘Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Stands to reason.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where exactly, round the back?’

‘I couldn’t see at first because there isn’t much light round there, and there was this strong smell of burning, got right down your throat, and then another one went off not ten feet away. Nearly burst my eardrums.’

‘Where were the bombs?’ I said again.

‘The first one was round the back of the muck-heap. I found what was left of it with my torch, after.’

‘But you don’t use your torch all the time?’

‘You don’t need to in the courtyards. Most of them have lights in.’

‘Mm. OK. Where was the second one?’

‘Under the harrow.’

Wykeham, like many trainers, used the harrow occasionally for raking his paddocks, keeping them in good shape.

‘Did it blow up the harrow?’ I said, frowning.

‘No, see, they weren’t that sort of bomb.’

‘What other sort is there?’

‘It went off through the harrow with a huge shower of sparks. Golden sparks, all over. Little burning sparks. Some of them fell on me... They were fireworks. I found the empty boxes. They said “bomb” on them, where they weren’t burned.’

‘Where are they now,’ I asked.

‘Where they went off. I didn’t touch them, except to kick them over to read what was on the side.’

‘So what was your dog doing all this time?’

The dog-handler looked disillusioned. ‘I had him on the leash. I always do, of course. He didn’t like the bangs or the sparks or the smell. He’s supposed to be trained to ignore gun shots, but he didn’t like the fireworks. He was barking fit to bust, and trying to run off.’

‘He was trying to run in a different direction, but you stopped him?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Maybe he was trying to run after the man who shot the horse.’

The dog-handler’s mouth opened and snapped shut. He smoothed his moustache several times and grew noticeably more aggressive. ‘Ranger was barking at the bombs,’ he said.

I nodded. It was too late for it to matter.

‘And I suppose,’ I said, ‘that you didn’t hear any other bangs in the distance... you didn’t hear the shot?’

‘No, I didn’t. My ears were ringing and Ranger was kicking up a racket.’

‘So what did you do next?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I thought it was some of those lads who work here. Proper little monkeys. So I just went on with the patrols, regular like. There wasn’t anything wrong... it didn’t look like it, that’s to say.’

I turned to Wykeham, who had been gloomily listening. ‘Didn’t you hear the fireworks?’ I asked.

‘No, I was asleep.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘I don’t sleep very well... I can’t seem to sleep at all these days without sleeping pills. We’d had four quiet nights and I’d been awake most of those, so... last night I took a pill.’

I sighed. If Wykeham had been awake, he would anyway have gone towards the commotion and nothing would have been different.

I said to the dog-handler, ‘You were here on Wednesday, when you had the prowler?’

‘Yes, I was. Ranger was whining but I couldn’t find anyone.’

Nanterre, I thought, had come to the stable on Wednesday night, intending to kill, and had been thwarted by the dog’s presence: and he’d come back two nights later with his diversions.