Enquiry Read online

  Books by Dick Francis

  THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography)

  DEAD CERT

  NERVE

  FOR KICKS

  ODDS AGAINST

  FLYING FINISH

  BLOOD SPORT

  FORFEIT

  ENQUIRY

  RAT RACE

  BONECRACK

  SMOKESCREEN

  SLAY-RIDE

  KNOCK DOWN

  HIGH STAKES

  IN THE FRAME

  RISK

  TRIAL RUN

  WHIP HAND

  REFLEX

  TWICE SHY

  BANKER

  THE DANGER

  PROOF

  BREAK IN

  LESTER: The Official Biography

  BOLT

  HOT MONEY

  THE EDGE

  STRAIGHT

  LONGSHOT

  COMEBACK

  DRIVING FORCE

  DECIDER

  WILD HORSES

  COME TO GRIEF

  TO THE HILT

  10-lb PENALTY

  FIELD OF THIRTEEN

  SECOND WIND

  SHATTERED

  DICK FRANCIS

  Enquiry

  THE DICK FRANCIS LIBRARY

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  LONDON

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published in Great Britain October 1969

  Second impression June 1971

  Third impression October 1974

  Fourth impression August 1977

  Fifth impression October 1981

  Sixth impression September 1983

  Seventh impression January 1986

  Eighth impression February 1990

  Ninth impression January 1994

  Tenth impression July 2003

  Copyright © Dick Francis, 1969

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192959-0

  PART ONE

  FEBRUARY

  CHAPTER ONE

  Yesterday I lost my licence.

  To a professional steeplechase jockey, losing his licence and being warned off Newmarket Heath is like being chucked off the medical register, only more so.

  Barred from race riding, barred from racecourses. Barred moreover, from racing stables. Which poses me quite a problem, as I live in one.

  No livelihood and maybe no home.

  Last night was a right so-and-so, and I prefer to forget those grisly sleepless hours. Shock and bewilderment, the feeling that it couldn’t have happened, it was all a mistake… this lasted until after midnight. And at least the disbelieving stage had had some built-in comfort. The full thudding realisation which followed had none at all. My life was lying around like the untidy bits of a smashed teacup, and I was altogether out of glue and rivets.

  This morning I got up and percolated some coffee and looked out of the window at the lads bustling around in the yard and mounting and cloppeting away up the road to the downs, and I got my first real taste of being an outcast.

  Fred didn’t bellow up at my window as he usually did, ‘Going to stay there all day, then?’

  This time, I was.

  None of the lads looked up… they more or less kept their eyes studiously right down. They were quiet, too. Dead quiet. I watched Bouncing Bernie heave his ten stone seven on to the gelding I’d been riding lately, and there was something apologetic about the way he lowered his fat bum into the saddle.

  And he, too, kept his eyes down.

  Tomorrow, I guessed, they’d be themselves again. Tomorrow they’d be curious and ask questions. I understood that they weren’t despising me. They were sympathetic. Probably too sympathetic for their own comfort. And embarrassed: that too. And instinctively delicate about looking too soon at the face of total disaster.

  When they’d gone I drank my coffee slowly and wondered what to do next. A nasty, very nasty, feeling of emptiness and loss.

  The papers had been stuck as usual through my letterbox. I wondered what the boy had thought, knowing what he was delivering. I shrugged. Might as well read what they’d said, the Goddamned pressmen, God bless them.

  The Sporting Life, short on news, had given us the headlines and the full treatment.

  ‘Cranfield and Hughes Disqualified.’

  There was a picture of Cranfield at the top of the page, and half way down one of me, all smiles, taken the day I won the Hennessy Gold Cup. Some little sub-editor letting his irony loose, I thought sourly, and printing the most cheerful picture he could dig out of the files.

  The close-printed inches north and south of my happy face were unrelieved gloom.

  ‘The Stewards said they were not satisfied with my explanation,’ Cranfield said. ‘They have withdrawn my licence. I have no further comment to make.’

  Hughes, it was reported, had said almost exactly the same. Hughes, if I remembered correctly, had in fact said nothing whatsoever. Hughes had been too stunned to put one word collectedly after another, and if he had said anything at all it would have been unprintable.

  I didn’t read all of it. I’d read it all before, about other people. For ‘Cranfield and Hughes’ one could substitute any other trainer and jockey who had been warned off. The newspaper reports on these occasions were always the same; totally uninformed. As a racing enquiry was a private trial the ruling authorities were not obliged to open the proceedings to the public or the press, and as they were not obliged to, they never did. In fact like many another inward-looking concern they seemed to be permanently engaged in trying to stop too many people from finding out what was really going on.

  The Daily Witness was equally fog-bound, except that Daddy Leeman had suffered his usual rush of purple prose to the head. According to him:

  ‘Kelly Hughes, until now a leading contender for this season’s jump-jockeys’ crown, and fifth on the list last year, was sentenced to an indefinite suspension of his licence. Hughes, thirty, left the hearing ten minutes after Cranfield. Looking pale and grim, he confirmed that he had lost his licence, and added “I have no further comment”.’

  They had remarkable ears, those pressmen.

  I put down the paper with a sigh and went into the bedroom to exchange my dressing-gown for trousers and a jersey, and after that I made my bed, and after that I sat on it, staring into space. I had nothing else to do. I had nothing to do for as far ahead as the eye could see. Unfortunately I also had nothing to think about except the Enquiry.

  Put baldly, I had lost my licenc
e for losing a race. More precisely, I had ridden a red-hot favourite into second place in the Lemonfizz Crystal Cup at Oxford in the last week of January, and the winner had been an unconsidered outsider. This would have been merely unfortunate, had it not been that both horses were trained by Dexter Cranfield.

  The finishing order at the winning post had been greeted with roars of disgust from the stands, and I had been booed all the way to the unsaddling enclosure. Dexter Cranfield had looked worried more than delighted to have taken first and second places in one of the season’s big sponsored steeplechases, and the Stewards of the meeting had called us both in to explain. They were not, they announced, satisfied with the explanations. They would refer the matter to the Disciplinary Committee of the Jockey Club.

  The Disciplinary Committee, two weeks later, were equally sceptical that the freak result had been an accident. Deliberate fraud on the betting public, they said. Disgraceful, dishonest, disgusting, they said. Racing must keep its good name clean. Not the first time that either of you have been suspected. Severe penalties must be inflicted, as a deterrent to others.

  Off, they said. Warned off. And good riddance.

  It wouldn’t have happened in America, I thought in depression. There, all runners from one stable, or one owner, for that matter, were covered by a bet on any of them. So if the stable’s outsider won instead of its favourite, the backers still collected their money. High time the same system crossed the Atlantic. Correction, more than high time; long, long overdue.

  The truth of the matter was that Squelch, my red-hot favourite, had been dying under me all the way up the straight, and it was in the miracle class that I’d finished as close as second, and not fifth or sixth. If he hadn’t carried so many people’s shirts, in fact, I wouldn’t have exhausted him as I had. That it had been Cranfield’s other runner Cherry Pie who had passed me ten yards from the finish was just the worst sort of luck.

  Armed by innocence, and with reason to believe that even if the Oxford Stewards had been swayed by the crowd’s hostile reception, the Disciplinary Committee were going to consider the matter in an atmosphere of cool common sense, I had gone to the Enquiry without a twinge of apprehension.

  The atmosphere was cool, all right. Glacial. Their own common sense was taken for granted by the Stewards. They didn’t appear to think that either Cranfield or I had any.

  The first faint indication that the sky was about to fall came when they read out a list of nine previous races in which I had ridden a beaten favourite for Cranfield. In six of them, another of Cranfield’s runners had won. Cranfield had also had other runners in the other three.

  ‘That means,’ said Lord Gowery, ‘That this case before us is by no means the first. It has happened again and again. These results seem to have been unnoticed in the past, but this time you have clearly overstepped the mark.’

  I must have stood there looking stupid with my mouth falling open in astonishment, and the trouble was that they obviously thought I was astonished at how much they had dug up to prove my guilt.

  ‘Some of those races were years ago,’ I protested. ‘Six or seven, some of them.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’ asked Lord Gowery. ‘They happened.’

  ‘That sort of thing happens to every trainer now and then,’ Cranfield said hotly. ‘You must know it does.’

  Lord Gowery gave him an emotionless stare. It stirred some primeval reaction in my glands, and I could feel the ripple of goose pimples up my spine. He really believes, I thought wildly, he really believes us guilty. It was only then that I realised we had to make a fight of it; and it was already far too late.

  I said to Cranfield, ‘We should have had that lawyer,’ and he gave me an almost frightened glance of agreement.

  Shortly before the Lemonfizz the Jockey Club had finally thrown an old autocratic tradition out of the twentieth century and agreed that people in danger of losing their livelihood could be legally represented at their trials, if they wished. The concession was so new that there was no accepted custom to be guided by. One or two people had been acquitted with lawyers’ help who would presumably have been acquitted anyway; and if an accused person engaged a lawyer to defend him, he had in all cases to pay the fees himself. The Jockey Club did not award costs to anyone they accused, whether or not they managed to prove themselves innocent.

  At first Cranfield had agreed with me that we should find a lawyer, though both of us had been annoyed at having to shell out. Then Cranfield had by chance met at a party the newly elected Disciplinary Steward who was a friend of his, and had reported to me afterwards, ‘There’s no need for us to go to the expense of a lawyer. Monty Midgely told me in confidence that the Disciplinary Committee think the Oxford stewards were off their heads reporting us, that he knows the Lemonfizz result was just one of those things, and not to worry, the Enquiry will only be a formality. Ten minutes or so, and it will be over.’

  That assurance had been good enough for both of us. We hadn’t even seen any cause for alarm when three or four days later Colonel Sir Montague Midgely had turned yellow with jaundice and taken to his bed, and it had been announced that one of the Committee, Lord Gowery, would deputise for him in any Enquiries which might be held in the next few weeks.

  Monty Midgely’s liver had a lot to answer for. Whatever he had intended, it now seemed all too appallingly clear that Gowery didn’t agree.

  The Enquiry was held in a large lavishly furnished room in the Portman Square headquarters of the Jockey Club. Four Stewards sat in comfortable armchairs along one side of a polished table with a pile of papers in front of each of them, and a shorthand writer was stationed at a smaller table a little to their right. When Cranfield and I went into the room the shorthand writer was fussing with a tape-recorder, unwinding a lead from the machine which stood on his own table and trailing it across the floor towards the Stewards. He set up a microphone on a stand in front of Lord Gowery, switched it on, blew into it a couple of times, went back to his machine, flicked a few switches, and announced that everything was in order.

  Behind the Stewards, across a few yards of plushy dark red carpet, were several more armchairs. Their occupants included the three Stewards who had been unconvinced at Oxford, the Clerk of the Course, the Handicapper who had allotted the Lemonfizz weights, and a pair of Stipendiary Stewards, officials paid by the Jockey Club and acting at meetings as an odd mixture of messenger boys for the Stewards and the industry’s private police. It was they who, if they thought there had been an infringement of the rules, brought it to the notice of the Stewards of the meeting concerned, and advised them to hold an Enquiry.

  As in any other job, some Stipendiaries were reasonable men and some were not. The Stipe who had been acting at Oxford on Lemonfizz day was notoriously the most difficult of them all.

  Cranfield and I were to sit facing the Stewards’ table, but several feet from it. For us, too, there were the same luxurious armchairs. Very civilised. Not a hatchet in sight. We sat down, and Cranfield casually crossed his legs, looking confident and relaxed.

  We were far from soul-mates, Cranfield and I. He had inherited a fortune from his father, an ex-soap manufacturer who had somehow failed to acquire a coveted peerage in spite of donating madly to every fashionable cause in sight, and the combination of wealth and disappointed social ambition had turned Cranfield fils into a roaring snob. To him, since he employed me, I was a servant; and he didn’t know how to treat servants.

  He was, however, a pretty good trainer. Better still, he had rich friends who could afford good horses. I had ridden for him semi-regularly for nearly eight years, and although at first I had resented his snobbish little ways, I had eventually grown up enough to find them amusing. We operated strictly as a business team, even after all that time. Not a flicker of friendship. He would have been outraged at the very idea, and I didn’t like him enough to think it a pity.

  He was twenty years older than me, a tallish, thin Anglo-Saxon type with thin
fine mousy hair, greyish-blue eyes with short fair lashes, a well developed straight nose and aggressively perfect teeth. His bone structure was of the type acceptable to the social circle in which he tried to move, but the lines his outlook on life had etched in his skin were a warning to anyone looking for tolerance or generosity. Cranfield was mean-minded by habit and open handed only to those who could lug him upwards. In all his dealings with those he considered his inferiors he left behind a turbulent wake of dislike and resentment. He was charming to his friends, polite in public to his wife, and his three teenage children echoed his delusions of superiority with pitiful faithfulness.

  Cranfield had remarked to me some days before the Enquiry that the Oxford Stewards were all good chaps and that two of them had personally apologised to him for having to send the case on to the Disciplinary Committee. I nodded without answering. Cranfield must have known as well as I did that all three of the Oxford Stewards had been elected for social reasons only; that one of them couldn’t read a number board at five paces, that another had inherited his late uncle’s string of racehorses but not his expert knowledge, and that the third had been heard to ask his trainer which his own horse was, during the course of a race. Not one of the three could read a race at anything approaching the standard of a racecourse commentator. Good chaps they might well be, but as judges, frightening.

  ‘We will show the film of the race,’ Lord Gowery said.

  They showed it, projecting from the back of the room on to a screen on the wall behind Cranfield and me. We turned our armchairs round to watch it. The Stipendiary Steward from Oxford, a fat pompous bully, stood by the screen, pointing out Squelch with a long baton.

  ‘This is the horse in question,’ he said, as the horses lined up for the start. I reflected mildly that if the Stewards knew their job they would have seen the film several times already, and would know which was Squelch without needing to have him pointed out.

  The Stipe more or less indicated Squelch all the way round. It was an unremarkable race, run to a well tried pattern: hold back at the start, letting someone else make the pace; ease forwards to fourth place and settle there for two miles or more; move smoothly to the front coming towards the second last fence, and press on home regardless. If the horse liked that sort of race, and if he were good enough, he would win.