Дик Фрэнсис - Knock Down

‘Well... Polyprint was a one-off, see. You couldn’t work that again. He only did it because he realised Nestegg had tetanus and would die pretty quickly if he wasn’t treated and even maybe if he was. See, tetanus isn’t that common. You couldn’t have two die of it on journeys when they were heavily insured, even if you could infect them on purpose, which you can’t. Vic walked that horse around all night to keep it moving and fed it a bucketful of tranquillisers so that it looked all right when it was loaded on to the plane at Gatwick. But to get another one to die on a journey you’d have to fix some sort of accident. The insurance people would be dead suspicious, and even if they paid up they might afterwards refuse to insure you altogether and you couldn’t risk that, see. But the thing about this expert chap was that nearly everything he suggested was legal. Vic said it was like property development and land speculation. You could make a great deal of money without breaking the law if you knew how to set about it.’

The police were understandably sour about my assertion that I had fallen on the pitchfork by accident and that Fynedale was as innocent of assault as a bunch of violets. They argued and I insisted, and half an hour later Fynedale stood outside on the pavement shivering in the wind.

‘Thanks,’ he said briefly. He looked shrunken and depressed.

He huddled inside his jacket, turned on his heel, and walked away up the street to the railway station. The carrot hair was a receding orange blob against the dead copper leaves of a beech hedge.

Sophie was waiting by the kerb, sitting in the driving seat of my car. I opened the passenger side door and slid in beside her.

‘Will you drive?’ I said.

‘If you like.’

I nodded.

‘You look bushed,’ she said. She started the engine, shifted the gears, and edged out into the road.

‘Couldn’t beat Muhammed AH right now.’

She smiled. ‘How did it go?’

‘Like a torrent, once he’d started.’

‘What did you learn?’

I thought, trying to put everything into its right order. Sophie drove carefully, flicking glances across, waiting for an answer.

I said, ‘Vic swindled an insurance company very neatly, about three years ago. Some time after that someone who Fynedale calls an expert sought Vic out and suggested a sort of alliance, in which Vic would extort money in various more or less legal ways and pay a proportion of it to the expert. I imagine this expert guessed Vic had swindled the insurance and was therefore a good prospect for a whole career of legal robbery.’

‘There’s no such thing as legal robbery.’

I smiled. ‘How about wealth taxes?’

‘That’s different.’

‘Taking by law is legal robbery.’

‘Ah well... go on about Vic.’

‘Vic and the expert started redistributing wealth in no uncertain terms, chiefly into their own pockets but with enough pickings to entice six or seven other agents into the ring.’

‘Fynedale?’ Sophie said.

‘Yes. Especially Fynedale, as he knew about the original insurance swindle. It just seems to have been my bad luck that I started being an agent at about the time Vic and the expert were warming things up. Pauli Teksa had a theory that Vic and his friends wanted me out of the way because I was a threat to their monopoly, and from what Fynedale says I should think he might have been right, though I thought it was nonsense when he suggested it.’

I yawned. Sophie drove smoothly, as controlled at the wheel as everywhere else. She had taken off the fur-lined hood, and the silver blonde hair fell gently to her shoulders. Her profile was calm, efficient, content. I thought that probably I did love her, and would for a long time. I also guessed that however often I might ask her to marry me, in the end she would not. The longer and better I knew her, the more I realised that she was by nature truly solitary. Lovers she might take, but a bustling family life would be alien and disruptive. I understood why her four years with the pilot had been a success: it was because of his continual long absences, not in spite of them. I understood her lack of even the memory of inconsolable grief. His death had merely left her where she basically liked to be, which was alone.

‘Go on about Vic,’ she said.

‘Oh... well... They started this campaign of harassment. Compulsory purchase of Hearse Puller at Ascot. Sending Fred Smith down to my place to do what harm he could, which turned out to be giving Crispin whiskey and letting loose that road-hogging two-year-old. Arrang ing for me to buy and lose River God. When all that, and a few bits of intimidation from Vic himself, failed to work, they reckoned that burning my stable would do the trick.’

‘Their mistake.’

‘Yeah... well... they did it.’ I yawned again. ‘Fred Smith, now. Vic and the expert needed some muscle. Ronnie North knew Fred Smith. Vic must have asked Ronnie if he knew anyone suitable and Ronnie suggested Fred Smith.’

‘Bingo.’

‘Mm... You know something odd?’

‘What?’

‘The insurance company that Vic swindled was the one Crispin used to work for.’

Sophie made us tea in her flat. We sat side by side on the sofa, bodies casually touching in intimate friendship, sipping the hot reviving liquid.

‘I ought to sleep a bit,’ she said. ‘I’m on duty at eight.’

I looked at my watch. Four thirty, and darkening already towards the winter night. It had seemed a long day.

‘Shall I go?’

She smiled. ‘Depends how sore you are.’

‘Sex is a great anaesthetic.’

‘Nuts.’

We went to bed and put it fairly gently to the test, and certainly what I felt most was not the stab along my rib.

The pattern as before: sweet, intense, lingering, a vibration of subtle pleasure from head to foot. She breathed softly and slowly and smiled with her eyes, as close as my soul and as private as her own.

Eventually she said sleepily, ‘Do you always give girls what suits them best?’

I yawned contentedly. ‘What suits them best is best for me.’

‘The voice of experience...’ She smiled drowsily, drifting away.

We woke to the clatter of her alarm less than two hours later.

She stretched out a hand to shut it off, then rolled her head over on the pillow for a kiss.

‘Better than sleeping pills,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’d slept all night.’

She made coffee and rapid bacon and eggs, because to her it seemed time for breakfast, and in an organised hurry she offered her cheek in goodbye on the pavement and drove away to work.

I watched her rear lights out of sight. I remembered I had read somewhere that air traffic controllers had the highest divorce rates on earth.

Wilton Young came to Cheltenham races the following day in spite of the basic contempt he held for steeple-chasing because of is endemic shortage of brass. He came because the rival tycoon who was sponsoring the day’s big race had asked him, and the first person he saw at the pre-lunch reception was me.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said bluntly.

‘I was invited.’

‘Oh.’

He didn’t quite ask why, so I told him. ‘I rode a few winners for our host.’

He cast his mind back and gave a sudden remembering nod. ‘Ay. So you did.’

A waiter offered a silver tray with glasses of champagne. Wilton Young took one, tasted it with a grimace, and said he would tell me straight he would sooner have had a pint of bitter.

‘I’m afraid I may have some disappointing news for you,’ I said.

He looked immediately belligerent. ‘Exactly what?’

‘About Fynedale.’

‘Him!’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Any bad news about him is good news.’