Dick Francis - 10 lb Penalty

“The whip’s office is what gives you the thumbs-up for advancement towards the ministerial level.”

“And their thumbs are up for you?”

“Well... so far... yes.”

“Minister of what?” I asked, disbelievingly. “Surely you’re too young?”

“The really forward boys are on their way by twenty-two. At thirty-eight, I’m old.”

“I don’t like politics.”

“I can’t ride races,” he said.

To have the whip withdrawn, he explained, meant the virtual end to a political career. If getting elected was the first giant step, then winning the whip’s approval was the second. When the newly elected member for Hoopwestern was shortly appointed as undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, it was apparently a signal to the whole fabric of government that a bright, fast-moving comet had risen over the horizon.

I went to listen to his maiden speech, sitting inconspicuously in the gallery. He spoke about lightbulbs and had the whole House laughing, and Hoopwestern’s share of the illumination market soared.

I met him for dinner after his speech, when he was again in the high exaltation of post-performance spirits.

“I suppose you haven’t been back to Hoopwestern?” he said.

“Well, no.”

“I have, of course. Leonard Kitchens is in trouble.”

“Who?”

“Leonard...”

“Oh, yes. Yes, the unbalanced mustache. What sort of trouble?”

“The police now have a rifle which may be the one fired at us that evening.”

“By the police,” I asked as he paused, “do you mean Joe the policeman whose mother drives a school bus?”

“Joe whose mother drives a school bus is actually Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, and yes, he’s now received from The Sleeping Dragon a very badly rusted .22 rifle. It seems that after the trees shed their leaves the guttering ’round the roof of the hotel got choked with them, as happens most years, and rainwater overflowed instead of draining down the pipes as it should, so they sent a man up a ladder to clear out the leaves, and they found it wasn’t just leaves clogging the guttering, it was the .22 rifle.”

“But what’s that got to do with Leonard Kitchens?”

My father ate peppered steak, rare, with spinach.

“Leonard Kitchens is the nurseryman who festoons The Sleeping Dragon with all those baskets of geraniums.”

“But...” I objected.

“Apparently in a broom cupboard on that bedroom level he keeps a sort of cart with things for looking after the baskets. Shears, a long-spouted watering can, fertilizer. They think he could have hidden the gun in the cart. If you stand on a chair by the window you can reach up far enough outside to put a rifle up in the gutter. And someone did put a gun up there.”

I frowned over my food.

“You know what people are like,” my father said. “Someone says, ‘I suppose Leonard Kitchens could have put the rifle in the gutter, he’s always in and out of the hotel,’ and the next person drops the ‘I suppose’ and repeats the rest as a fact.”

“What does Leonard Kitchens himself say?”

“Of course, he says it wasn’t his gun and he didn’t put it in the gutter, and he says no one can prove he did.”

“That’s what guilty people always say,” I observed.

“Yes, but it’s true, no one can prove he ever had the gun. No one has come forward to connect him to rifles in any way.”

“What does Mrs. Kitchens say?”

“Leonard’s wife is doing him no good at all. She goes around saying her husband was so besotted with Orinda Nagle that he would do anything, including shooting me in the back, to get me out of Orinda’s way. Joe Duke asked her if she had ever seen a rifle in her husband’s possession, and instead of saying no, as any sensible woman would, she said he had a garden shed full of junk, and it was possible he had anything lying around in there.”

“Did Joe by any chance search the shed? I mean, did he have a look around to see if Leonard had any bullets?”

“Joe couldn’t get a warrant to search, as there were no real grounds for suspicion. Also, as I suppose you know, it’s quite easy to buy high-velocity bullets, and even easier to throw them away. There’s no chance of telling that it was indeed that rifle that was used because, even if you could remove all the rust, there is no bullet to match it to, as the one from the whatnot finally got lost altogether in the fire. No one ever found any cartridge cases in the hotel, either.”

My father continued with his steak. Putting down his knife and fork, he said, “I took the Range Rover to Basil Rudd’s garage and had him dismantle the engine for a thorough check of the oil system. There was nothing in the sump except oil. It was actually extremely unprofessional for that mechanic — Terry, I think he is — to push the substitute plug up into the sump, but Basil Rudd won’t hear a word against him, and I suppose there was no harm done.”

“There might have been,” I said. I thought for a moment and asked, “I suppose Leonard Kitchens isn’t accused of being in possession of candles?”

“You may laugh,” my father said, “but in the shop at his garden center, where they sell plastic gnomes and things, they do have table centerpieces with candles and ribboned bows and stuff.”

“You can buy candles anywhere,” I said. “And what about the fire? Was that Leonard Kitchens, too?”

“He was there,” my father reminded me, and I remembered Mrs. Kitchens saying her Leonard liked a good fire.

“Did the firemen ever find out how that fire started?”

My father shook his head. “They didn’t at the time. Some of them are now saying unofficially that it could have been started with candles. Leonard Kitchens fiercely denies he had anything to do with it.”

“What do you think yourself?”

My father drank some wine. He was trying to indoctrinate me into liking burgundy, but to his disgust, I still liked Diet Coke better.

He said, “I think Leonard Kitchens is fanatical enough to do almost anything. It’s easy enough to think of him as a bit of a silly ass, with that out-of-proportion mustache, but it’s people with obsessions who do the real harm in the world, and if he still has a grudge against me, I want him where I can see him.”

I did my best with the wine, but I didn’t really like it.

“There’s no point in his arranging accidents for you anymore, now that you’re elected.”

My father sighed. “With people like Kitchens you can’t be sure that good sense will be in control.”

I stayed with him that night in his Canary Wharf apartment by the Thames. His big windows looked down the wide river, where once a flourish of cranes had been busy with shipping, though he himself couldn’t remember “the Docks” except as a long-ago political lever. His old office (he ran his investment-consultant business from home) gave him a two-mile walk along the Embankment to his new office in Whitehall, a leg-stretching that was clearly keeping him muscularly fit. He blazed with vigor and excitement. Even though he was my father, I felt both energized and overwhelmed by his vitality.

In a way, I deeply loved him.

In a way I felt wholly incapable of ever equaling his mental force or his determination. It took me years to realize that I didn’t have to.

On the morning after his maiden speech I caught the early train from Paddington to Exeter, clicketing along the rails from reflected fame to anonymity.

In Exeter, one of eight thousand residential students, I coasted through university life without attracting much attention, and absorbed reams of calculus, linear algebra, actuarial science and distribution theory towards a bachelor of science degree in mathematics with accounting: and as a short language course came with the package I also learned French, increasing my vocabulary from piste and écurie (“track” and “stable”) to law and order.