Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

Lord Vaughnley, incongruous in tweed jacket, dress trousers, stiff shirt and white tie, stood at the shoulder of a coatless man seated at a central table, both of them intent on the newspaper before them. Around them, in many bays half separated from each other by shoulder-high partitions, were clumps of three or four desks, each bay inhabited by telephones, typewriters, potted plants and people in a faint but continuous state of agitation.

‘What do you want?’ someone said to me brusquely as I hovered, and when I said Lord Vaughnley, he merely pointed. Accordingly I walked over to the centre of the activity and said neutrally to Lord Vaughnley, ‘Excuse me...’

He raised his eyes but not his head. ‘Ah yes, my dear chap, be with you directly,’ he said, and lowered the eyes again, intently scanning what I saw to be tomorrow’s front page, freshly printed.

I waited with interest while he finished, looking around at a functional scene which I guessed hadn’t changed much since the days of that rumbustious giant, the first Lord Vaughnley. Desks and equipment had no doubt come and gone, but from the brown floor to the yellowing cream walls the overall impression was of a working permanence, slightly old-fashioned.

The present Lord Vaughnley finished reading, stretched himself upwards and patted the shirt-sleeved shoulder of the seated man, who was, I discovered later, that big white chief, the editor.

‘Strong stuff, Marty. Well done.’

The seated man nodded and went on reading. Lord Vaughnley said to me, ‘Rose Quince is here. You might like to meet her.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I would.’

‘Over here.’ He set off towards one of the bays, the lair, it proved, of the lady of the rattlesnake tongue who could nevertheless write sense, and who had written that day’s judgment on Maynard.

‘Rose,’ said the paper’s proprietor, ‘take care of Kit Fielding, won’t you?’ and the redoubtable Rose Quince assured him that yes, she would.

‘Files,’ Lord Vaughnley said. ‘Whatever he wants to see, show him.’

‘Right.’

To me he said, ‘We have a box at Ascot. The Towncrier has, I mean. I understand from the princess that you’ll be riding there this Friday and Saturday. No point, I suppose, my dear chap, in asking you to lunch with me on Saturday, which is the day I’ll be there, but do come up for a drink when you’ve finished. You’ll always be welcome.’

I said I’d be glad to.

‘Good. Good. My wife will be delighted. You’ll be in good hands with Rose, now. She was born in Fleet Street the same as I was, her father was Conn Quince who edited the old Chronicle ; she knows more of what goes on than the Street itself. She’ll give you the gen, won’t you, Rose?’

Rose, who looked to me to be bristling with reservations, agreed again that yes, she would; and Lord Vaughnley, with the nod of a man who knows he’s done well, went away and left me to her serpent mercies.

She did not, it is true, have Medusa snakes growing out of her head, but whoever had named her Rose couldn’t have foreseen its incongruity.

A rose she was not. A tiger-lily, more like. She was tall and very thin and fifteen to twenty years older than myself. Her artfully tousled and abundant hair was dark but streaked throughout with blonde, the aim having clearly been two contrasting colours, not overall tortoiseshell. The expertly painted sallow face could never have been pretty but was strongly good-looking, the nose masculine, the eyes noticeably pale blue; and from several feet away one could smell her sweet and heavy scent.

A quantity of bracelets, rings and necklaces decorated the ultimate in fashionable outlines, complemented by a heavy bossed and buckled belt round the hips, and I wondered if the general overstatement was a sort of stockade to frighten off the encroachment of the next generation of writers, a battlement against time.

If it was, I knew how she felt. Every jump jockey over thirty felt threatened by the rising nineteen-year-olds who would supplant them sooner or later. Every jockey, every champion had to prove race by race that he was as good as he’d ever been, and it was tough at the top only because of those hungry to take over one’s saddle. I didn’t need bangles, but I pulled out grey hairs when they appeared.

Rose Quince looked me up and down critically and said, ‘Big for a jockey, aren’t you?’ which was hardly original, as most people I met said the same.

‘Big enough.’

Her voice had an edge to it more than an accent, and was as positive as her appearance.

‘And your sister is married to Maynard Allardeck’s son.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘The source of Daddy’s disapproval.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s wrong with her? Was she a whore?’

‘No, a Capulet.’

Rose took barely three seconds to comprehend, then she shook her head in self-disgust.

‘I missed an angle,’ she said.

‘Just as well.’

She narrowed her eyes and looked at me with her head tilted.

‘I watched the Towncrier Trophy on television last Saturday,’ she said. ‘It would more or less have been treason not to.’ She let her gaze wander around my shoulders. ‘Left it a bit late, didn’t you?’

‘Probably.’

She looked back to my face. ‘No excuses?’

‘We won.’

‘Yes, dammit, after you’d given everyone cardiac arrest. Did you realise that half the people in this building had their pay packets on you?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘The Sports Desk told us you couldn’t lose.’

‘Bunty Ireland?’

‘Precisely, Bunty Ireland. He thinks the sun shines out of your arse.’ She shook an armful of baubles to express dismissal of Bunty’s opinions. ‘No jockey is that smart.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Could we talk about Maynard?’

Her dark eyebrows rose. ‘On first name terms, are you?’

‘Maynard Allardeck.’

‘A prize shit.’

‘Olympic gold.’

She smiled, showing well-disciplined teeth. ‘You read nothing in the paper, buddy boy. Do you want to see the tape?’

‘What tape?’

‘The tape of How’s Trade . It’s still here, downstairs. If you want to see it, now’s the time.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Right. Come along. I’ve got the unexpurgated version, the one they cut from to make the programme. Ready for the rough stuff? It’s dynamite.’

She had acquired, it appeared, both the ten-minute edition which had been broadcast as well as the half-hour original.

‘Did you see the programme on the box?’ Rose said.

I shook my head.

‘You’d better see that first, then.’

She had taken me to a small room which contained a semi-circle of comfortable chairs grouped in front of a television set. To each side of the set various makes of video machine sat on tables, with connecting cables snaking about in apparent disorder.

‘We get brought or sent unsolicited tapes of things that have happened,’ Rose explained casually. ‘All sorts of tapes. Loch Ness monsters by the pailful. Mostly rubbish, but you never know. We’ve had a scoop or sixteen this way. The big white chief swears by it. Then we record things ourselves. Some of our reporters like to interview with video cameras, as I do sometimes. You get the flavour back fresh if you don’t write the piece for a week or so.’

While she talked she connected a couple of wandering cable ends to the back of the television set and switched everything on. Her every movement was accompanied by metallic clinks and jingles, and her lily scent filled the room. She picked up a tape cassette which had been lying on the table behind one of the video machines and fed it into the slot.