Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

‘I was just taking a last look round,’ Nigel said. ‘Going home from the pub, like.’

Bobby nodded. Nigel, like most head-lads, took the welfare of the horses as a personal pride. Beyond duty, their horses could be as dear to head-lads as their own children, and seeing they were safely tucked up last thing at night was a parental urge that applied to both species.

‘Did you hear a bell ring?’ Holly said.

‘Yes.’ He wrinkled his forehead. ‘Near the house.’ He paused. ‘What was it?’

‘A new security system we’re trying out,’ Bobby said. ‘The bell rings to tell us someone’s moving about the yard.’

‘Oh?’ Nigel looked interested. ‘Works a treat then, doesn’t it?’

Work a treat the bell might, but no one came in the small hours to tug it again to its sentinel duty. I slept undisturbed in jeans and sweater, ready for battle but not called, and Bobby went out and disconnected the string before the lads arrived for work in the morning.

He and Holly had written out the list of Flag recipients, and after coffee, when it was light, I set off in Holly’s car to seek them out.

I went first, though, as it was Sunday and early, to every newsagent, both in the town and within a fair radius of the outskirts, asking if they had sold a lot of copies of the Flag to any one person two days ago, on Friday, or if anyone had arranged for many extra copies to be delivered on that morning.

The answer was a uniform negative. Sales of the Flag on Friday had been the same as Thursday, give or take. None of the shops, big or small, had ordered more copies than usual, they said, and no one had sold right out of the Flag . The boys had done their regular delivery rounds, nothing more.

Dead end to the first and easiest trail.

I went next to seek out the feed-merchant, who was not the one who supplied my grandfather. I had been struck at once, in fact, by the unfamiliarity of all the names of Bobby’s suppliers, though when one thought about it, it was probably only to be expected. Bobby, taking over from his grandfather, would continue to use his grandfather’s suppliers: and never, it seemed, had the lifelong antagonists used the same blacksmith, the same vet, the same anything. Each had always believed the other would spy on him, given the slightest opportunity. Each had been right.

No feed-merchant in Newmarket, with several thousand horses round about, would find it strange to have his doorbell rung on his theoretical day of rest. The feed-merchant who waved me into the brick office annexe to his house was young and polished; and in an expensive accent and with crispness he told me it was not good business to allow accounts to run on overdue, he had his own cash-flow to consider, and Allardeck’s credit had run out.

I handed him Jermyn Graves’s cheque, duly endorsed by Bobby on the back.

‘Ah,’ said the feed-merchant, brightening. ‘Why ever didn’t you say so?’

‘Bobby hoped you might wait, as usual.’

‘Sorry. No can do. Cash on delivery from now on.’

‘That cheque is for more than your account,’ I pointed out.

‘So it is. Right then. Bobby shall be supplied until this runs out.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and asked him if he had seen his copy of the Flag delivered.

‘No. Why?’

I explained why. ‘This was a large scale and deliberate act of spite. One tends to want to know who.’

‘Ah.’

I waited. He considered.

‘It must have been here fairly early Friday morning,’ he said finally. ‘And it was delivered here to the office, not to the house, as the papers usually are. I picked it up with the letters when I came in. Say about eight-thirty.’

‘And it was open at the gossip page with the paragraph outlined in red?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Didn’t you wonder who’d sent it?’

‘Not really...’ He frowned. ‘I thought someone was doing me a good turn.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Do you take the Flag usually?’

‘No, I don’t. The Times and the Sporting Life .’

I thanked him and left, and took Holly’s winnings to the plumber, who greeted me with satisfaction and gave me some of the same answers as the feed-merchant. The Flag had been inside his house on the front door mat by seven o’clock, and he hadn’t seen who brought it. Mr Allardeck owed him for some pipework done way back in the summer, and he would admit, he said, that he had telephoned and threatened him pretty strongly with a county court action if he didn’t pay up at once.

Did the plumber take the Flag usually?

Yes, he did. On Friday, he got two.

‘Together?’ I asked. ‘I mean, were they both there on the mat at seven?’

‘Yes. They were.’

‘Which was on top of the other?’

He shrugged, thought, and said, ‘As far as I remember, the one marked in red was underneath. Funny, I thought it was, that the boy had delivered two. Then I saw the paragraph, and I reckoned one of my neighbours was tipping me off.’

I said it was all very hard on Bobby.

‘Yes, well, I suppose so.’ He sniffed. ‘He’s not the only bad payer, by a long shot.’ He gave me the beginnings of a sardonic smile. ‘They pay up pretty quick when their pipes burst. Come a nice heavy freeze.’

I tried three more creditors on the list. Still unpaid, they were more brusque and less helpful, but an overall pattern held good. The marked papers had been delivered before the newsboys did their rounds and no one had seen who delivered them.

I went back to the largest of the newsagents and asked the earliest time their boys set out.

‘The papers reach us here by van at six. We sort them into the rounds, and the boys set off on their bicycles before six-thirty.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

They nodded. ‘Any time.’

Disturbed by the stealth and thoroughness of the operation I drove finally to see my grandfather in the house where I’d been brought up: a large brick-built place with gables like comic eyebrows peering down at a barbed-wire-topped boundary fence.

The yard was deserted when I drove in, all the horses in their boxes with the top doors closed against the cold. On the day after the last day of the Flat season, no one went out to gallop on the Heath. Hibernation, which my grandfather hated, was already setting in.

I found him in his stable office, typing letters with concentration, the result, I surmised, of the departure of yet another beleaguered secretary.

‘Kit!’ he said, glancing up momentarily. ‘I didn’t know you were coming. Sit down. Get a drink.’ He waved a thin hand. ‘I won’t be long. Damned secretary walked out. No consideration, none at all.’

I sat and watched while he hammered the keys with twice the force necessary, and felt the usual slightly exasperated affection for him, and the same admiration.

He loved horses beyond all else. He loved Grandmother next best and had gone very silent for a while the winter she’d died, the house eerily quiet after the years they’d spent shouting at each other. Within a few months he had begun shouting at Holly and me instead, and later, after we’d left, at the secretaries. He didn’t intend to be unkind. In an imperfect world he was a perfectionist irritated by minor incompetencies, which meant most of the time.

The typing stopped. He stood up, the same height as myself, white-haired, straight and trim in shirt, tie and excellently cut tweed jacket. Casual my grandfather was not, not in habits or manners or dress, and if he was obsessive by nature it was probably just that factor which had brought him notable success over almost sixty years.

‘There’s some cheese,’ he said, ‘for lunch. Are you staying tonight?’