Дик Фрэнсис: Knock Down

‘Successfully?’

She sighed. ‘Some.’

I stood up. ‘You can’t win them all.’ I put the empty glass on a side-table and went ahead of her to the door.

‘You’ll let me know if you find another horse?’ she said.

I nodded.

‘And if you have any thoughts about those two men?’

‘Yes.’

I drove slowly home and put the car in the garage in the stable yard. The three racehorses there moved around restlessly in their boxes, mutely complaining because I was two hours late with their evening feed. They were horses in transit, waiting to be shipped by air to foreign buyers; not my horses but very much my responsibility.

I talked to them and fondled their muzzles, and straightened their boxes and gave them food and water and rugs against the October night, and finally, tiredly, took my own throbbing head into the house.

There was no wife there waiting with a smiling face and a hot tempting dinner. There was, however, my brother.

His car was in the garage next to mine, and there were no lights anywhere in the house. I walked into the kitchen, flicked the switch, washed my hands under the hot tap in the sink, and wished with all my heart that I could off-load my drinking problem on to Kerry Sanders and her do-good hospital.

He was in the dark sitting-room, snoring. Light revealed him lying face down on the sofa with the empty Scotch bottle on the carpet near his dangling hand.

He didn’t drink often. He tried very hard, and he was mostly the reason I stayed off it, because if I came home with alcohol on my breath he would smell it across the room, and it made him restless. It was no hardship for me, just a social nuisance, as Kerry Sanders was by no means alone in concluding that non-drinkers were ex-alcoholics. One had to drink to prove one wasn’t, like natural bachelors making an effort with girls.

We were not twins, though much alike. He was a year older, an inch shorter, better looking and not so dark. People had mistaken us for each other continually when we had been young, but less so now at thirty-four and thirty-five.

I picked up the empty bottle and took it out to the dustbin. Then I cooked some scrambled eggs and sat down at the kitchen table to eat, and over coffee and aspirin and a sore head put up a reasonable fight against depression.

There was much to be thankful for. I owned outright the house and stable yard and ten acres of paddocks, and after two years’ slog I was beginning to make it as an agent. On the debit side I had a busted marriage, a brother who lived off my earnings because he couldn’t keep a job,and a feeling that Frizzy Hair was only the tip of an iceberg.

I fetched a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote three names.

Pauli Teksa.

Hairdresser.

Lady Roscommon (Madge).

None looked a winner in the villainy stakes.

For good measure I added Kerry Sanders, Nicol Brevett, Constantine Brevett and two smiley thugs. Shake that lot together and what did we get? A right little ambush by someone who knew my weakest spot.

I spent the evening trying by telephone to find a replacement for Hearse Puller. Not easy. Trainers with horses the owners might sell were not keen to lose them from their yards, and I could give no guarantee that Nicol Brevett would leave his horse with its present trainer. Bound by Kerry Sanders, I could not even mention his name.

I reread the Ascot Sale catalogue for the following day but there was still nothing suitable, and finally with a sigh offered my custom to a bloodstock dealer called Ronnie North, who said he knew of a possible horse which he could get if I would play ball.

‘How much?’ I said.

‘Five hundred.’

He meant that he would sell me the horse for a price. I would then charge Kerry Sanders five hundred pounds more... and hand the five hundred over to North.

‘Too much,’ I said. ‘If you get me a good one for two thousand I’ll give you a hundred.’

‘Nuts.’

‘A hundred and fifty.’ I knew he would probably acquire the horse for maybe fifteen hundred pounds, and sell it to me for double: he always considered he had wasted his time if he made less than one hundred per cent profit. Squeezing a large chunk more from my client was just icing on the cake.

‘And,’ I said, ‘Before we go any further, I want to know about it.’

‘Do me a favour.’

He was afraid that if I knew who owned the horse I would go direct to the source, and cut him out altogether. I wouldn’t have done that, but he would, and he judged me by himself.

I said, ‘If you buy it and I don’t like it, I won’t take it.’

‘It’s what you want,’ he said. ‘You can trust me.’

I could perhaps trust his judgement of a horse, though that was absolutely all. If the horse hadn’t been for Nicol Brevett I might have taken a chance and bought blind, but in this case I could not afford to.

‘I have to O.K. it first.’

‘Then no deal,’ he said succinctly and disconnected.

I chewed the end of my pencil and thought about the bloodstock jungle which I had entered with such innocence two years earlier. It had been naive to imagine that all it took to be a bloodstock agent was a thorough knowledge of horses, an intimate relationship with the stud book, hundreds of acquaintances in the racing industry and a reasonable head for business. Initial surprise at the fiddles I saw all around me had long since passed from revulsion to cynicism, and I had grown a thick skin of self-preservation. I thought that sometimes it was difficult to perceive the honest course, and more difficult still to stick to it, when what I saw as dishonesty was so much the general climate.

I understood, after two years, that dishonesty was much a matter of opinion. There were no absolutes. A deal I thought scandalous might seem eminently reasonable to others. Ronnie North saw nothing wrong at all in milking the market for every possible penny: and moreover he was likeable to meet.

The telephone rang. I picked up the receiver.

‘Jonah?’

He was back, as I’d thought he might be.

‘The horse is River God. You have it for three thousand five hundred with five hundred on top.’

‘I’ll call you back.’

I looked up the River God form and consulted a jockey who’d ridden it a few times, and finally dialled Ronnie North.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Subject to a vet’s report, River God will do well.’

He said with elaborate resignation, ‘I told you, you can trust me.’

‘Yeah. I’ll give you two thousand five hundred.’

‘Three thousand,’ he said. ‘And that’s rock bottom. With five hundred to come.’

‘One fifty,’ I said positively, and compromised at a hundred more.

River God, my jockey friend had said, belonged to a farmer in Devon who had bought it unbroken at three years old as a point-to-point prospect for his son. Between them they’d done a poor job of the breaking and now the son couldn’t control the result. ‘He’s a ride for a pro,’ said my informant, ‘But he’s quite fast and a natural jumper, and they haven’t managed to cock that up.’

I stood up, stretched, and as it was by then half past ten, decided to tell Kerry Sanders in the morning. The room I used as an office, lined with book shelves and fitted cupboards, was half functional, half sitting-room, and mostly what I thought of as home. It had a lightish brown carpet, red woollen curtains and leather armchairs, and one big window which looked out to the stable yard. When I had tidied away the books and papers I’d been using I switched off the powerful desk lamp and stood by the window, looking out from darkness to moonlight.

Everything was quiet out there, the three lodgers patiently waiting for their aeroplane from Gatwick Airport five miles down the road. They should have been gone a week since and the overseas customers were sending irritable cables, but the shipping agents muttered on about unavoidable delays and kept saying the day after tomorrow.