Dick Francis - For Kicks

Humber sent him to Ascot sales in July, where he was bought by his present trainer for two hundred and sixty guineas.

"Investigations re Superman at Stafford yesterday are all so far uninformative; dope analyses have still to be completed but there is little hope they will show anything. The veterinary surgeon at the course was as convinced as you apparently were that this is another " joker", and made a thorough examination of the horse's skin. There were no visible punctures except the ones he made himself giving the horse sedation.

"Superman was apparently in a normal condition before the race. His jockey reports all normal until the last fence, when the horse seemed to suffer a sort of convulsion, and ejected him from the saddle.

"Further enquiries re Rudyard revealed he was bought four winters ago by P. J. Adams of Tellbridge, Northumberland, and sold again within a short time at Ascot. Transistor was bought by Adams at Doncaster three years ago, sold Newmarket Dispersal Sales three months later.

"Enquiries re thirty consecutive five pound notes reveal they were issued by Barclays Bank, Birmingham New Street branch, to a man called Lewis Greenfield, who corresponds exactly to your description of the man who approached you in Slaw. Proceedings against Greenfield and T. N. Tarleton are in hand, but will be held in abeyance until after your main task is completed.

"Your report on Bimmo Bognor is noted, but as you say, the buying of stable information is not a punishable offence in law. No proceedings are at present contemplated, but warning that a spy system is in operation will be given privately to certain trainers."

I tore the page up and scattered it in the litter basket, then went back to the motor-cycle and put it through its paces down the Al to Catterick. It handled well, and I enjoyed the speed and found it quite true that it would still do a hundred.

At Catterick that Saturday Humber's head travelling-lad rose like a trout to the fly.

Inskip had sent two runners, one of which was looked after by Paddy;

and up on the lads' stand before the second race I saw the sharp little Irishman and Humber's head lad talking earnestly together. I was afraid that Paddy might relent towards me enough to say something in my favour, but I needn't have worried. He put my mind at rest himself.

"You're a bloody young fool," he said, looking me over from my unkempt head to my grubby toes.

"And you've only got what you deserve. That man of Humber's was asking me about you, why you got the kick from Inskip's, and I told him the real reason, not all that eye-wash about messing about with his nibs' daughter."

"What real reason?" I asked, surprised.

His mouth twisted in contempt.

"People talk, you know. You don't think they keep their traps shut, when there's a good bit of gossip going round? You don't think that Grits didn't tell me how you got drunk at Cheltenham and blew your mouth off about Inskip's? And what you said at Bristol about being willing to put the finger on a horse's box in the yard, well, that got round to me too. And thick as thieves with that crook Soupy, you were, as well. And there was that time when we all put our wages on Sparking Plug and he didn't go a yard… I'd lay any money that was your doing. So I told Humber's man he would be a fool to take you on. You're poison, Clan, and I reckon any stable is better off without you, and I told him so."

"Thanks."

"You can ride," said Paddy disgustedly, "I'll say that for you. And it's an utter bloody waste. You'll never get a job with a decent stable again, it would be like putting a rotten apple into a box of good ones."

"Did you say all that to Humber's man?"

"I told him no decent stable would take you on," he nodded.

"And if you ask me it bloody well serves you right." He turned his back on me and walked away.

I sighed, and told myself I should be pleased that Paddy believed me such a black character.

Humber's head travelling-lad spoke to me in the paddock between the last two races.

"Hey, you," he said, catching my arm.

"I hear you're looking for a job."

"That's right."

"I might be able to put you in the way of something. Good pay, better than most."

"Whose stable?" I asked.

"And how much?"

"Sixteen quid a week."

"Sounds good," I admitted.

"Where?"

"Where I work. For Mr. Humber. Up in Durham."

"Humber," I repeated sourly.

"Well, you want a job, don't you? Of course if you are so well off you can do without a job, that's different." He sneered at my un prosperous appearance.

"I need a job," I muttered.

"Well, then?"

"He might not have me," I said bitterly.

"Like some others I could mention."

"He will if I put in a word for you, we're short of a lad just now.

There's another meeting here next Wednesday. I'll put in a word for you before that and if it is OK you can see Mr. Humber on Wednesday and he'll tell you whether he'll have you or not. "

"Why not ask him now?" I said.

"No. You wait till Wednesday."

"All right," I said grudgingly.

"If I've got to."

I could almost see him thinking that by Wednesday I would be just that much hungrier, just that much more anxious to take any job that was offered and less likely to be frightened off by rumours of bad conditions.

I had spent all the bookmaker's two hundred, as well as half of the money I had earned at Inskip's, on my Italian jaunt (of which I regretted not one penny), and after paying for the motor-cycle and the succession of dingy lodgings I had almost nothing left of October's original two hundred. He had not suggested giving me any more for expenses, and I was not going to ask him for any:

but I judged that the other half of my Inskip pay could be spent how I liked, and I dispatched nearly all of it in the following three days on a motor-cycle trip to Edinburgh, walking round and enjoying the city and thinking myself the oddest tourist in Scotland.

On Tuesday evening, when Hogmanay was in full swing, I braved the head waiter of L'Aperitif, who to his eternal credit treated me with beautifully self-controlled politeness, but quite reasonably checked, before he gave me a little table in a corner, that I had enough money to pay the bill. Impervious to scandalized looks from better dressed diners, I slowly ate, with Humber's establishment in mind, a perfect and enormous dinner of lobster, duck bigarade, lemon souffle, and brie, and drank most of a bottle of Chateau Leauville Lescases 1948.

With which extravagant farewell to being my own master I rode down the Al to Catterick on New Year's Day and in good spirits engaged myself to the worst stable in the country.

Rumour had hardly done Hedley Humber justice. The discomfort in which the lads were expected to live was so methodically devised that I had been there only one day before I came to the conclusion that its sole purpose was to discourage anyone from staying too long. I discovered that only the head lad and the head travelling-lad, who both lived out in Posset, had worked in the yard for more than three months, and that the average time it took for an ordinary lad to decide that sixteen pounds a week was not enough was eight to ten weeks.

This meant that none of the stable hands except the two head lads knew what had happened to Superman the previous summer, because none of them had been there at the time. And caution told me that the only reason the two top men stayed was because they knew what was going on, and that if I asked them about Superman I might find myself following smartly in Tommy Stapleton's footsteps.

I had heard all about the squalor of the living quarters at some stables, and I was aware also that some lads deserved no better some I knew of had broken up and burned their chairs rather than go outside and fetch coal, and others had stacked their dirty dishes in the lavatory and pulled the chain to do the washing up. But even granted that Humber only employed the dregs, his arrangements were very nearly inhuman.