Дик Фрэнсис - Knock Down

‘I’m not really surprised,’ she said, and that at least was true.

‘You’d be amazed the number of people who try to drink before we test them.’

‘Do they really?’ She sounded tired, and as if evasive tactics had never come into her orbit. The police packed up their notes and their bottle kit, gave me a lecture about letting animals get loose, and in their own good time went away.

Sophie Randolph gave me the beginnings of a smile.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

She slept in my bed and I slept in Crispin’s, and Crispin slept on, unknowing, on the sofa.

She had been stitched up neatly by the doctor but had been more concerned that he should take care of her dress. She had insisted that he unpick the seam of her sleeve rather than rip the material to get to her wound, and I had smiled at the meticulous way he had snipped through the tiny threads to please her.

‘My arm will mend itself,’ she explained. ‘But the dress won’t, and it was expensive.’

The cut, once revealed, had been jagged and deep, with fragments of glass embedded. She watched with interest while he anaesthetized it locally and worked on the repairs, and by the end I was wondering just what it would take to smash up such practised self-command.

The morning found her pale and shaky but still basically unruffled. I had been going to tell her to stay in bed but when I came in at eight thirty after feeding and mucking out the lodgers she was already down in the kitchen. Sitting at the table, wearing my dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. There were dark smudges round her eyes and most of the thirty-two years were showing in her skin. I thought that very probably her bandaged arm was hurting.

She looked up calmly when I came in.

‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Like some coffee?’

‘Very much.’

I made it in the filter pot. ‘I was going to bring it to you upstairs,’ I said.

‘I didn’t sleep too well.’

‘Not madly surprising.’

‘I heard you out in the yard. Saw you from the window, and thought I might as well come down.’

‘How about some toast?’ I asked.

She said yes to the toast and yes also to three strips of crispy bacon to go with it. While I cooked she looked round the workmanlike kitchen and finally asked the hovering question. ‘Are you married?’

‘Divorced.’

‘Some years ago, I would guess.’

I grinned. ‘Quite right.’ Married, repented, divorced, and in no hurry to make another mistake.

‘Can you lend me any clothes I won’t look ridiculous in?’

‘Oh... a jersey. Jeans. Would that do?’

‘Lovely with silver shoes,’ she said.

I sat down beside her to drink my coffee. She had a face more pleasant than positively beautiful, a matter of colouring and expression more than bone structure. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were brownish blonde, eyes hazel, mouth softly pink without lipstick.

Her composure, I began to understand, was not aggressive. It was just that she gave no one any chance to patronise or diminish her because she was female. Understandable if some men didn’t like it. But her colleagues, I thought, must find it restful.

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘about my horse.’

‘So you damn well ought to be.’ But there was none of the rancour she would have been entitled to.

‘What can I do to make amends?’

‘Are you offering a chauffeur service?’

‘By all means,’ I said.

She munched the toast and bacon. ‘Well... I’ll need to see about getting my car towed away. What’s left of it. Then I’d be grateful if you could drive me to Gatwick Airport.’

‘Do you work there, then?’ I asked, surprised.

‘No. At Heathrow. But I can hire a car at Gatwick. Special discount... goes with the job.’

She was using her right hand to cut the toast with, and I saw her wince.

‘Do you have to work today?’ I asked.

‘Nothing wrong with my voice,’ she said. ‘But probably not. I’m on stand-by from four this afternoon for twelve hours. That means I just have to be home in my fiat, ready to take over at an hour’s notice in case anyone is ill or doesn’t turn up.’

‘And what are the chances?’

‘Of working? Not high. Most stand-bys are just a bore.’

She drank her coffee left handed.

‘And you?’ she asked. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a bloodstock agent.’

She wrinkled her forehead. ‘I have an aunt who says all bloodstock agents are crooks.’

I smiled. ‘The big firms wouldn’t thank her for that.’

‘Do you work for a firm?’

I shook my head. ‘On my own.’

She finished the toast and fished a packet of cigarettes out of my dressing-gown pocket.

‘At least you smoke,’ she said, flicking my lighter. ‘I found these in your bedroom... I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Take what you like,’ I said.

She looked at me levelly and with a glint of amusement.

‘I’ll give you something instead. That man in the Rover, do you remember him?’

‘Who could fail to!’

‘He was doing about forty until I tried to pass him. When I was level with him he speeded up.’

‘One of those.’

She nodded. ‘One of those. So I put my foot down and passed him and he didn’t like it. He kept weaving around close behind me and flashing his headlights and generally behaving like an idiot. If he hadn’t been distracting me I might have seen your horse a fraction sooner. The crash was just as much his fault as your horse’s.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you too.’

We smiled at each other, and all the possibilities suddenly rose up like question marks, there in the kitchen over the crumbs of toast.

Into this subtle moment Crispin barged with the sensitivity of a tank. The kitchen door crashed open and in he came, crumpled, unshaven, ill and swearing.

‘Where the bloody hell have you hidden the whiskey?’

Sophie looked at him with predictable calm. Crispin didn’t seem to notice she was there.

‘Jonah, you vicious sod, I’ll cut your bloody throat if you don’t give it back at bloody once.’ It was his tragedy that he was more than half serious.

‘You finished it last night,’ I said. ‘The empty bottle’s in the dustbin.’

‘I did no such bloody thing. If you’ve poured it down the drain I’ll bloody strangle you.’

‘You poured it down your throat,’ I said. ‘And you’d better have some coffee.’

‘Stuff your effing coffee.’ He strode furiously round the kitchen, wrenching open cupboards and peering inside. ‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where have you put it, you stinking little stable boy?’

He picked up a bag of sugar and threw it on the floor. The paper burst and the crystals scattered in a frosty swathe. He pulled several tins out to look behind them, dropping them instead of putting them back.

‘Jonah, I’ll kill you,’ he said.

I heated him some coffee and put the mug on the table. A packet of rice and another of cornflakes joined the mess on the floor.

He gave up the search with a furious slam of a cupboard door, sat down at the table and stretched for his coffee. His hand was shaking as if he were ninety.

He seemed to see Sophie for the first time. His gaze started at her waist and slowly travelled up to her face.

‘Who the bloody hell are you?’

‘Sophie Randolph,’ she said politely.

He squinted at her. ‘Jonah’s bloody popsy.’

He swung round to me, a movement which upset his semi-circular canals and brought on an obvious wave of nausea. I hoped urgently he was not going to vomit, as on other vile occasions in the past.

‘You lecherous bastard,’ he said. ‘All you had to do was ask me to go out. I’d have gone out. You didn’t have to get me drunk.’