"Bonecrack" - читать интересную книгу автора (Francis Dick)

CHAPTER TWO

When I next woke up I was lying face down on the bare floor of the oak panelled room in Rowley Lodge. Too many bare boards everywhere. Not my night.

Facts oozed back gradually. I felt woolly, cold, semi-conscious, anaesthetised-

Anaesthetised.

For the return journey they had had the courtesy not to hit my head. The fat man had nodded to the American rubber-face, but instead of flourishing the truncheon he had given me a sort of quick pricking thump in the upper arm. After that we had waited around for about a quarter of an hour during which no one said anything at all, and then quite suddenly I had lost consciousness. I remembered not a flicker of the journey home.

Creaking and groaning I tested all articulated parts. Everything present, correct, and in working order. More or less, that is, because having clanked to my feet it became advisable to sit down again in the chair by the desk. I put my elbows on the desk and my head in my hands, and let time pass.

Outside, the beginnings of a damp dawn were turning the sky to grey flannel. There was ice round the edges of the windows, where condensed warm air had frozen solid. The cold went through to my bones.

In the brain department things were just as chilly. I remembered all too clearly that Alessandro Rivera was that day to make his presence felt. Perhaps he would take after father, I thought tiredly, and would be so overweight that the whole dilemma would fold its horns and quietly steal away. On the other hand, if not, why should his father use a sledgehammer to crack a peanut. Why not simply apprentice his son in the normal way? Because he wasn't normal, because his son wouldn't be a normal apprentice, and because no normal apprentice would expect to start his career on a Derby favourite.

I wondered how my father would now be reacting, had he not been slung up in traction with a complicated fracture of tibia and fibula. He would not, for certain, be feeling as battered as I was, because he would, with supreme dignity, have gone quietly. But he would none the less have also been facing the same vital questions: which were, firstly, did the fat man seriously intend to destroy the stable if his son did not get the job, and secondly, how could he do it.

And the answer to both was a king-size blank.

It wasn't my stable to risk. They were not my six million pounds worth of horses. They were not my livelihood, nor my life's work.

I could not ask my father to decide for himself; he was not well enough to be told, let alone to reason out the pros and cons.

I could not now transfer the stable to anyone else, because passing this situation to a stranger would be like handing him a grenade with the pin out.

I was already due back at my own job and was late for my next assignment, and I had only stop-gapped at the stable at all because my father's capable assistant, who had been driving the Rolls when the lorry jack-knifed into it, was now lying in the same hospital in a coma.

All of which added up to a fair sized problem. But then problems, I reflected ironically, were my business. The problems of sick businesses were my business.

Nothing at that moment looked sicker than my prospects at Rowley Lodge.

Shivering violently, I removed myself bit by bit from the desk and chair, went out to the kitchen, and made myself some coffee. Drank it. Moderate improvement only.

Inched upstairs to the bathroom. Scraped off the night's whiskers and dispassionately observed the dried blood down one cheek. Washed it off. Gun barrel graze, dry and already healing.

Outside, through the leafless trees, I could see the lights of the traffic thundering as usual up and down Bury Road. These drivers in their warm moving boxes, they were in another world altogether, a world where abduction and extortion were something that only happened to others. Incredible to think that I had in fact joined the others.

Wincing from an all over feeling of soreness, I looked at my smudge-eyed reflection and wondered how long I would go on doing what the fat man had told me to. Saplings who bent before the storm lived to grow into oaks.

Long live oaks.

I swallowed some aspirins, stopped shivering, tried to marshal a bit more sense into my shaky wits, and struggled into jodhpurs, boots, two more pullovers, and a windproof jacket. Whatever had happened that night, or whatever might happen in the future, there were still those eighty-five six million quids worth downstairs waiting to be seen to.

They were housed in a yard that had been an inspiration of spacious design when it was built in 1870 and which still, a hundred-plus years later, worked as an effective unit. Originally there had been two blocks facing each other, each block consisting of three bays, and each bay being made up to ten boxes. Across the far end, forming a wall joining the two blocks, were a large feed-store room, a pair of double gates, and an equally large tack room. The gates had originally led into a field, but early on in his career, when success struck him, my father had built two more bays, which formed another small enclosed yard of twenty-five boxes. More double gates opened from these, now, into a small railed paddock.

Four final boxes had been built facing towards Bury Road, on to the outside of the short west wall at the end of the north block. It was in the furthest of these four boxes that a full blown disaster had just been discovered.

My appearance through the door which led directly from the house to the yard galvanised the group which had been clustered round the outside boxes into returning into the main yard and advancing in ragged but purposeful formation. I could see I was not going to like their news. Waited in irritation to hear it. Crises, on that particular morning, were far from welcome.

'It's Moonrock, sir,' said one of the lads anxiously, 'Got cast in his box, and broke his leg.'

'All right,' I said abruptly. 'Get back to your own horses, then. It's nearly time to pull out.'

'Yessir,' they said, and scattered reluctantly round the yard to their charges, looking back over their shoulders.

'Damn and bloody hell,' I said aloud, but I can't say it did much good. Moonrock was my father's hack, a pensioned-off star-class steeplechaser of which he was uncharacteristically fond. The least valuable inmate of the yard in many terms, but the one he would be most upset to lose. The others were also insured. No one, though, could insure against painful emotion.

I plodded round to the box. The elderly lad who looked after him was standing at the door with the light from inside falling across the deep worried wrinkles in his tortoise skin and turning them to crevases. He looked round towards me at my step. The crevasses shifted and changed like a kaleidoscope.

'Ain't no good, sir. He's broke his hock.'

Nodding, and wishing I hadn't, I reached the door and went in. The old horse was standing up, tied in his usual place by his head-collar. At first sight there was nothing wrong with him: he turned his head towards me and pricked his ears, his liquid black eyes showing nothing but his customary curiosity. Five years in headline limelight had given him the sort of presence which only intelligent, highly successful horses seem to develop; a sort of consciousness of their own greatness. He knew more about life and about racing than any of the golden youngsters round in the main yard. He was fifteen years old and had been a friend of my father's for five.

The hind leg on his near side, towards me, was perfect. He bore his weight on it. The off-hind looked slightly tucked up.

He had been sweating: there were great dark patches on his neck and flanks; but he looked calm enough at that moment. Pieces of straw were caught in his coat, which was unusually dusty.

Soothing him with her hand, and talking to him in a common sense voice, was my father's head stable hand, Etty Craig. She looked up at me with regret on her pleasant weather-beaten face.

'I've sent for the vet, Mr Neil.'

'Of all damn things,' I said.

She nodded. 'Poor old fellow. You'd think he'd know better, after all these years.'

I made a sympathetic noise, went in and fondled the moist black muzzle, and took as good a look at his hind leg as I could without moving him. There was absolutely no doubt: the hock joint was out of shape.

Horses occasionally rolled around on their backs in the straw in their boxes. Sometimes they rolled over with too little room and wedged their legs against the wall, then thrashed around to get free. Most injuries from getting cast were grazes and strains, but it was possible for a horse to twist or lash out with a leg strongly enough to break it. Incredibly bad luck when it happened, which luckily wasn't often.

'He was still lying down when George came in to muck him out,' Etty said. 'He got some of the lads to come and pull the old fellow into the centre of the box. He was a bit slow, George says, standing up. And then of course they could see he couldn't walk.'

'Bloody shame,' George said, nodding in agreement.

I sighed. 'Nothing we can do, Etty.'

'No, Mr Neil.'

She called me Mr Neil religiously during working hours, though I'd been plain Neil to her in my childhood. Better for discipline in the yard, she said to me once, and on matters of discipline I would never contradict her. There had been quite a stir in Newmarket when my father had promoted her to head lad, but as he had explained to her at the time, she was loyal, she was knowledgeable, she would stand no nonsense from anyone, she deserved it from seniority alone, and had she been a man the job would have been hers automatically. He had decided, as he was a just and logical person, that her sex was immaterial. She became the only female head lad in Newmarket, where girl lads anyway were rare, and the stable had flourished through all the six years of her reign.

I remembered the days when her parents used to turn up at the stables and accuse my father of ruining her life. I had been about ten when she first came to the yard, and she was nineteen and had been privately educated at an expensive boarding school. Her parents with increasing bitterness had arrived and complained that the stable was spoiling her chances of a nice suitable marriage; but Etty had never wanted marriage. If she had ever experimented with sex she had not made a public mess of it, and I thought it likely that she had found the whole process uninteresting. She seemed to like males well enough, but she treated them as she did her horses, with brisk friendliness, immense understanding, and cool unsentimentality.

Since my father's accident she had to all intents been in complete charge. The fact that I had been granted a temporary licence to hold the fort made mine the official say-so, but both Etty and I knew I would be lost without her.

It occurred to me, as I watched her capable hands moving quietly across Moonrock's bay hide, that the fat man might find me a pushover, but as an apprentice his son Alessandro was going to run into considerable difficulties with Miss Henrietta Craig.

'You better go out with the string, Etty,' I said. 'I'll stay and wait for the vet.'

'Right,' she said, and I guessed she had been on the point of suggesting it herself. As a distribution of labour it was only sense, as the horses were well along in their preparation for the coming racing season, and she knew better than I what each should be doing.

She beckoned to George to come and hold Moonrock's headcollar and keep him soothed. To me she said, stepping out of the box, 'What about this frost? It seems to me it may be thawing.'

'Take the horses over to Warren Hill and use your own judgement about whether to canter.'

She nodded. 'Right.' She looked back at Moonrock and a momentary softness twisted her mouth. 'Mr Griffon will be sorry.'

'I won't tell him yet.'

'No.' She gave me a small businesslike smile and then walked off into the yard, a short neat figure, hardy and competent.

Moonrock would be quiet enough with George. I followed Etty back into the main yard and watched the horses pull out: thirty-three of them in the first lot. The lads led their charges out of the boxes, jumped up into the saddles, and rode away down the yard, through the first double gates, across the lower yard, and out through the far gates into the collecting paddock beyond. The sky lightened moment by moment and I thought Etty was probably right about the thaw.

After ten minutes or so, when she had sorted them out as she wanted them, the horses moved away out beyond the paddocks, through the trees and the boundary fence and straight out on to the Heath.

Before the last of them had gone there was a rushing scrunch in the drive behind me and the vet halted his dusty Land Rover with a spray of gravel. Leaping out with his bag he said breathlessly, 'Every bloody horse on the Heath this morning has got colic or ingrowing toenails- You must be Neil Griffon- sorry about your father- Etty says it's old Moonrock- still in the same box?' Without drawing breath he turned on his heel and strode along the outside boxes. Young, chubby, purposeful, he was not the vet I had expected. The man I knew was an older version, slower, twinkly, just as chubby, and given to rubbing his jaw while he thought things over.

'Sorry about this,' the young vet said, having given Moonrock three full seconds examination. 'Have to put him down, I'm afraid.'

'I suppose that hock couldn't just be dislocated?'

I suggested, clinging to straws.

He gave me a brief glance full of the expert's forgiveness for a layman's ignorance. 'The joint is shattered,' he said succinctly.

He went about his business, and splendid old Moonrock quietly folded down on to the straw. Packing his bag again he said, 'Don't look so depressed. He had a better life than most. And be glad it wasn't Archangel.'

I watched his chubby back depart at speed. Not so very unlike his father, I thought. Just faster.

I went slowly into the house and telephoned to the people who removed dead horses. They would come at once, they said, sounding cheerful. And within half an hour, they came.

Another cup of coffee. Sat down beside the kitchen table and went on feeling unwell. Abduction didn't agree with me in the least.

The string came back from the Heath without Etty, without a two-year-old colt called Lucky Lindsay, and with a long tale of woe.

I listened with increasing dismay while three lads at once told me that Lucky Lindsay had whipped round and unshipped little Ginge over by Warren Hill, and had then galloped off loose and seemed to be making for home, but had diverted down Moulton Road instead, and had knocked over a man with a bicycle and had sent a woman with a pram into hysterics, and had ended up by the clock tower, disorganising the traffic. The police, added one boy, with more relish than regret, were currently talking to Miss Etty.

'And the colt?' I asked. Because Etty could take care of herself, but Lucky Lindsay had cost thirty thousand guineas and could not.

'Someone caught him down the High Street outside Woolworths.'

I sent them off to their horses and waited for Etty to come back, which she presently did, riding Lucky Lindsay herself and with the demoted and demoralised Ginge slopping along behind on a quiet three-year-old mare.

Etty jumped down and ran an experienced hand down the colt's chestnut legs.

'Not much harm done,' she said. 'He seems to have a small cut there- I think he probably did it on the bumper of a parked car.'

'Not on the bicycle?' I asked.

She looked up, and then straightened. 'Shouldn't think so.'

'Was the cyclist hurt?'

'Shaken,' she admitted.

'And the woman with the pram?'

'Anyone who pushes a baby and drags a toddler along Moulton Road during morning exercise should be ready for loose horses. The stupid woman wouldn't stop screaming. It upset the colt thoroughly, of course. Someone had caught him at that point, but he backed off and broke free and went down into the town-'

She paused and looked at me. 'Sorry about all this.'

'It happens,' I said. I stifled the small inward smile at her relative placing of colts and babies. Not surprising. To her, colts were in sober fact more important than humans.

'We had finished the canters,' she said. 'The ground was all right. We went right through the list we mapped out yesterday. Ginge came off as we turned for home.'

'Is the colt too much for him?'

'Wouldn't have thought so. He's ridden him before.'

'I'll leave it to you, Etty.'

'Then maybe I'll switch him to something easier for a day or two-' She led the colt away and handed him over to the lad who did him, having come as near as she was likely to admitting she had made an error in putting Ginge on Lucky Lindsay. Anyone, any day, could be thrown off. But some were thrown off more than others.

Breakfast. The lads put straight the horses they had just ridden and scurried round to the hostel for porridge, bacon sandwiches and tea. I went back into the house and didn't feel like eating.

It was still cold indoors. There were sad mounds of fir cones in the fireplaces of ten dust-sheeted bedrooms, and a tapestry fire screen in front of the hearth in the drawing-room. There was a two-tier electric fire in the cavernous bedroom my father used and an undersized convector heater in the oak panelled room where he sat at his desk in the evenings. Not even the kitchen was warm, as the cooker fire had been out for repairs for a month. Normally, having been brought up in it, I did not notice the chill of the house in winter: but then, normally I did not feel so physically wretched.

A head appeared round the kitchen door. Neat dark hair coiled smoothly at the base, to emerge in a triumphant arrangement of piled curls on the crown.

'Mr Neil?'

'Oh- good morning, Margaret.'

A pair of fine dark eyes gave me an embracing once-over. Narrow nostrils moved in a small quiver, testing the atmosphere. As usual I could see no further than her neck and half a cheek, as my father's secretary was as economical with her presence as with everything else.

'It's cold in here,' she said.

'Yes.'

'Warmer in the office.'

The half-head disappeared and did not come back. I decided to accept what I knew had been meant as an invitation, and retraced my way towards the corner of the house which adjoined the yard. In that corner were the stable office, a cloakroom, and the one room furnished for comfort, the room we called the owners' room, where owners and assorted others were entertained on casual visits to the stable.

The lights were on in the office, bright against the grey day outside. Margaret was taking off her sheepskin coat, and hot air was blowing busily out of a mushroom shaped heater.

'Instructions?' she asked briefly.

'I haven't opened the letters yet.'

She gave me a quick comprehensive glance.

Trouble?'

I told her about Moonrock and Lucky Lindsay. She listened attentively, showed no emotion, and asked how I had cut my face.

'Walked into a door.'

Her expression said plainly 'I've heard that one before,' but she made no comment.

In her way she was as unfeminine as Etty, despite her skirt, her hairdo, and her efficient make-up. In her late thirties, three years widowed and bringing up a boy and a girl with masterly organisation, she bristled with intelligence and held the world at arm's length from her heart.

Margaret was new at Rowley Lodge, replacing mouselike old Robinson who had finally scratched his way at seventy into unwilling retirement. Old Robinson had liked his little chat, and had frittered away hours of working time telling me in my childhood about the days when Charles II rode in races himself, and made Newmarket the second capital of England, so that ambassadors had to go there to see him, and how the Prince Regent had left the town for ever because of an enquiry into the running of his colt Escape, and refused to go back even though the Jockey Club apologised and begged him to, and how in 1905 King Edward VII was in trouble with the police for speeding down the road to London-at forty miles an hour on the straight bits.

Margaret did old Robinson's work more accurately and in half the time, and I understood after knowing her for six days why my father found her inestimable. She demanded no human response, and he was a man who found most human relationships boring. Nothing tired him quicker than people who constantly demanded attention for their emotions and problems, and even social openers about the weather irritated him. Margaret seemed to be a matched soul, and they got on excellently.

I slouched down in my father's revolving office armchair and told Margaret to open the letters herself. My father never let anyone open his letters, and was obsessive about it. She simply did as I said without comment, either spoken or implied. Marvellous.

The telephone rang. Margaret answered it.

'Mr Bredon? Oh yes. He'll be glad you called. I'll put you on to him.'

She handed me the receiver across the desk, and said, 'John Bredon.'

Thanks.'

I took the receiver with none of the eagerness I would have shown the day before. I had spent three intense days trying to find someone who was free at short notice to take over Rowley Lodge until my father's leg mended, and of all the people whom helpful friends had suggested, only John Bredon, an elderly recently-retired trainer, seemed to be of the right experience and calibre. He had asked for time to think it over and had said he would let me know as soon as he could.

He was calling to say he would be happy to come. I thanked him and uncomfortably apologised as I put him off. The fact is that after thinking it over I've decided to stay on myself-'

I set the receiver down slowly, aware of Margaret's astonishment. I didn't explain. She didn't ask. After a pause she went back to opening the letters.

The telephone rang again. This time, with schooled features, she asked if I would care to speak to Mr Russell Arletti.

Silently I stretched out a hand for the receiver.

'Neil?' a voice barked. 'Where the hell have you got to? I told Grey and Cox you'd be there yesterday. They're complaining. How soon can you get up there?'

Grey and Cox in Huddersfield were waiting for Arletti Incorporated to sort out why their once profitable business was going down the drain. Arletti Incorporated's sorter was sitting disconsolately in a stable office in Newmarket wishing he was dead.

'You'll have to tell Grey and Cox that I can't come.'

'You what?'

'Russell- count me out for a while. I've got to stay on here.'

'For God's sake why?'

'I can't find anyone to take over.'

'You said it wouldn't take you more than a week.'

'Well, it has. There isn't anyone suitable. I can't go and sort out Grey and Cox and leave Rowley Lodge rudderless. There is six million involved here. Like it or not, I'll have to stay.'

'Damn it, Neil-'

'I'm really sorry.'

'Grey and Cox will be livid.' He was exasperated.

'Go up there yourself. It'll only be the usual thing. Bad costing. Underpricing their product at the planning stage. Rotten cash flow. They say they haven't any militants, so it's ninety per cent to a cornflake that it's lousy finance.'

He sighed. 'I don't have quite your talent. Better ones, mind you. But not the same.' He paused for thought. 'Have to send James, when he gets back from Shoreham. If you're sure?'

'Better count me out for three months at least.'

'Neil!'

'Better say, in fact, until after the Derby- '

'Legs don't take that long,' he protested.

'This one is a terrible mess. The bones were splintered and came through the skin, and it was touch and go whether they amputated.'

'Oh hell.'

'I'll give you a call,' I said. 'As soon as I look like being free.'

After he had rung off I sat with the receiver in my hand, staring into space. Slowly I put it back in its cradle.

Margaret sat motionless, her eyes studiously downcast, her mouth showing nothing. She made no reference at all to the lie I had told.

It was, I reflected, only the first of the many.