Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

He put down the receiver, his air nowhere near as confident as his telephone voice.

‘Another owner full of doubt. Load of rats. Half of them are thinking of leaving without waiting to see if the ship will sink. Half of them, as well, haven’t paid their last month’s bills.’

‘Has Seb?’ asked Holly.

Bobby shook his head.

‘He’s got a cheek, then.’

‘That wretched paragraph reached him by post yesterday: just the Intimate Details column. A clipping, he said, not the whole paper. In an ordinary brown envelope, typed. From London, like the others.’

‘Did all the owners get a clipping?’ I asked.

‘It looks like it. Most of them have been on the phone. I haven’t exactly rung the rest to ask.’

We sat around for a while, and I borrowed the telephone to pick up my messages from the answering machine in the cottage, and to call in return a couple of trainers who’d offered rides during the week, and to talk to a couple of jockeys who lived in Newmarket, asking for a lift down to Plumpton in Sussex for racing the next day. Two of them were already going together, they said, and would take me.

‘Will you come back here?’ Holly said, when all was fixed.

I looked at the anxiety in her face and the lack of opposition in Bobby’s. I wouldn’t have expected him to want me even in the first place, but it seemed I was wrong.

‘Stay,’ he said briefly, but with invitation, not grudge.

‘I haven’t been much help.’

‘We feel better,’ Holly said, ‘with you here.’

I didn’t much want to stay because of practical considerations. I was due to ride in Devon on the Tuesday, and one reason I preferred to live in Lambourn, not Newmarket, was that from Lambourn one could drive to every racecourse in England and return home on the same day. Lambourn was central.

I said apologetically, ‘I’ll have to get a lift back to Lambourn from Plumpton, because I need my car to go to Devon on Tuesday. When I get back to Lambourn on Tuesday evening, we’ll see how things are here.’

Holly said, ‘All right’ dispiritedly, not attempting to persuade.

I looked at her downcast face, more beautiful, as often, in sorrow than in joy. A thought came unexpectedly into my head and I said without reflection, ‘Holly, are you pregnant?’

Bobby was dumbstruck.

Holly gave me a piercing look from the light brown eyes in which I read both alarm and stimulation.

‘Why did you say that?’ Bobby demanded.

‘I don’t know.’

‘She’s only a short while overdue. We haven’t had any tests done yet,’ Bobby said; and to Holly, ‘You must have told him.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ She shook her head. ‘But I was thinking just then how happy I was first thing on Friday, when I woke up feeling sick. I was thinking how ironic it would be. All those months of trying, and the first time it may really have happened, we are in such trouble that the very last thing we need is a baby.’

Bobby frowned. ‘You must have told him,’ he repeated, and he sounded definitely upset, almost as if he were jealous.

‘Well, no, I didn’t,’ Holly said uncertainly.

‘On the way back here yesterday,’ he insisted.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Forget I said it. What does it matter?’

Bobby looked at me with resentment and then more forgivingly at Holly, as if some thought had struck him. ‘Is this the sort of thing you meant,’ he said doubtfully, ‘when you told me once about you and Kit reading each other’s minds when you were kids?’

She reluctantly nodded. ‘We haven’t done it for years, though.’

‘It doesn’t happen nowadays,’ I agreed. ‘I mean, this was just a once-off. A throw-back. I don’t suppose it will happen again.’

And if it did happen again, I thought, I would be more careful what I said. Stray thoughts would be sieved.

I understood Bobby’s jealousy perfectly well because I had felt it myself, extraordinarily strongly, when Holly first told me she had fallen in love. The jealousy had been quickly overlaid by a more normal dismay when she’d confessed just who it was she’d set her heart on, but I still remembered the sharpness of not wanting to share her, not wanting my status as her closest friend to be usurped by a stranger.

I’d been slightly shocked at my jealousy and done a fair amount of soul-searching, never before having questioned my feelings for my sister: and I’d made the reassuring but also rueful discovery that she could sleep with Bobby all she liked and leave me undisturbed: it was the mental intimacy I minded losing.

There had been sexual adventures of my own, of course, both before and after her marriage, but they had been shortlived affairs with no deep involvement, nothing anywhere approaching Holly’s commitment to Bobby. Plenty of time, I thought, and maybe, one of these days; and platitudes like that.

Bobby made at least a show of believing that telepathy between me and Holly wouldn’t happen again, although both she and I, giving each other the merest flick of a glance, guessed differently. If we chose to tune in, so to speak, the old habit would come back.

The three of us spent the evening trying not to return over and over to the central questions of who and why, and in the end went wearily to bed without any possible answers. I lay down again in jeans, jersey and socks in case Graves should return, but I reckoned that if he’d ever planned it, he had had second thoughts.

I was wrong.

The bell woke me with a clatter at three-thirty-five in the morning, and I was into my shoes, out of the house and running down the drive, in the strategy that Bobby and I had discussed the night before, almost before it stopped ringing.

Out of the open gateway, turn left; and sure enough, on a stretch of roadside grass that sometimes accommodated gypsies, stood the wherewithal for shifting horses. A car, this time, towing a two-horse trailer. A trailer with its rear ramp lowered; ready, but not yet loaded.

I ran straight up to the car and yanked open the driver’s door, but there was no one inside to be taken by surprise. Just keys in the ignition; unbelievable.

I lifted up the trailer’s ramp and bolted it shut, then climbed into the car, started up, and drove a couple of hundred yards to a side road. I turned into there, parked a short way along, left the keys in the ignition as before, and sprinted back to Bobby’s yard.

The scene was almost a repeat of the time before, at least as far as the lights, the shouting and obscenity went. Bobby and Jermyn Graves were standing outside the empty box where the alarm had been rigged and had all but come to blows. A thin boy of perhaps sixteen stood a short distance away, holding a large carrier bag, shifting from foot to foot and looking unhappy.

‘Give me my property,’ Graves yelled. ‘This is stealing.’

‘No, it’s not,’ I said in his ear. ‘Stealing is an intention permanently to deprive.’

‘What?’ He swung round to glare at me. ‘You again!’

‘If you’re talking law,’ I said, ‘it is within the law to withhold property upon which money is owed, until the debt is discharged.’

‘I’ll ruin you,’ he said vindictively. ‘I’ll ruin you both.’

‘Be sensible, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘You’re in the wrong.’

‘Who the shit cares. I won’t have some pipsqueak jockey and some bankrupt little trainer get the better of me, I’ll tell you that.’

The attendant boy said nervously, ‘Uncle...’

‘You shut up,’ Graves snapped.

The boy dropped the carrier and fell over his feet picking it up.

‘Go away, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘Calm down. Think it over. Come and fetch your horses when your cheque’s been cleared, and that’ll be the end of it.’