Crossfire Read online

  Even as a teenager I had been mad about being fit. I had run every morning on the hills above Lambourn, trying to beat the horses as they chased me along the lush grass training gallops.

  Army life, especially that of the infantry officer at war, was a strange mix of lengthy, boring interludes punctuated by brief but intensely high-adrenalin episodes where the separation between living and dying could be rice-paper thin. With the episode over, if one was still alive and intact, the boredom would recommence until the next ‘contact’ broke the spell once more.

  I had always used the boring times to work on my fitness, constantly trying to break my own record for the number of sit-ups, or push-ups, or pull-ups, or anythingelse-ups I could think of, all within a five-minute period. What the Taliban had thought of their enemy chinning it up and down in full body armour, plus rifle and helmet, on an improvised bar welded across the back of a Snatch Land Rover is anyone’s guess, but I had been shot at twice while trying to break the battalion record, once when I was on track to succeed. The Taliban obviously had no sense of sport, or of timing.

  But now look at me: taking the escalator, and placing my bag on the moving stairway while doing so. Months of sedentary hospital life had left my muscles weak, flabby, and lacking any sort of condition. I clearly had much to do before I had any hope of convincing the major from the MOD that I could be ‘combat-ready’ once more.

  I stood at the bottom of the steep driveway to my mother’s home and experienced the same reluctance to go up that I had so often felt in the past.

  I had taken a taxi from Newbury station to Lambourn, purposely asking the driver to drop me some way along the road from my mother’s gate so that I could walk the last hundred yards.

  It was force of habit, I suppose. I felt happier approaching anywhere on foot. It must have been something to do with being in the infantry. On foot, I could hear the sounds that vehicle engines would drown out, and smell the scents that exhaust fumes would smother. And I could get a proper feel of the lie of the land, essential to anticipate an ambush.

  I shook my head and smiled at my folly.

  There was unlikely to be a Taliban ambush in a Berkshire village, but I could recall the words of my platoon colour sergeant at Sandhurst: ‘You can never be too careful,’ he would say. ‘Never assume anything, always check.’

  No shots rang out, no IEDs went bang, and no turban-headed Afghan tribesmen sprang out with raised Kalashnikovs as I safely negotiated the climb up from the road to the house, a red-brick and flint affair built sometime back between the world wars.

  As usual, in the middle of the day, all was quiet as I wandered round the side of the house towards the back door. A few equine residents put their heads out of their boxes in the nearest stable yard as I crunched across the gravel, inquisitive as ever to see a new arrival.

  My mother was out.

  I knew she would be. That was why I hadn’t phoned ahead to say I was coming. Perhaps I needed to be here alone first, to get used to the idea of being back; to have a moment of recollection and renewal before the whirlwind of energy that was my mother swept through and took away any chance I might have of changing my mind.

  My mother was a racehorse trainer. But she was much more than just that. She was a phenomenon. In a sport where there were plenty of big egos, my mother had the biggest ego of them all. She did, however, have some justification for her high sense of worth. In just her fifth year in the sport, she had been the first lady to be crowned Champion Jump Trainer, a feat she had repeated for each of the next six seasons.

  Her horses had won three Cheltenham Gold Cups and two Grand Nationals and she was rightly recognized as the ‘first lady of British racing’.

  She was also a highly opinionated anti-feminist, a workaholic and no sufferer of fools or knaves. If she had been Prime Minister she would have probably brought back both hanging and the birch, and she was not averse to saying so loudly, and at length, whenever she had the opportunity. Her politics made Genghis Khan seem like an indecisive liberal, but everybody loved her nevertheless. She was a ‘character’.

  Everyone, that is, except her ex-husbands and her children.

  For about the twentieth time that morning, I asked myself why I had come here. There had to be somewhere else I could go. But I knew there wasn’t.

  My only friends were in the army, mostly in my regiment, and they were still out in Afghanistan for another five weeks. And, anyway, I wasn’t ready to see them. Not yet. They would remind me too much of what I was no longer – and I wouldn’t be able to stand their pity.

  I suppose I could have booked myself into an army officers’ mess. No doubt I would have been made welcome at Wellington Barracks, the Grenadiers’ home base in London. But what would I have done there?

  What could I do anywhere?

  Once again I thought it might have been better if the IED explosion, or the pneumonia, had completed the task: Union Flag-draped coffin, firing of volleys in salute, and I’d be six feet under by now and be done with it all. Instead, I was outside my mother’s back door struggling with a damned artificial foot to get down low enough to find the key that she habitually left under a stone in the flower bed.

  And for what?

  To get into a house I hated; to stay with a parent I despised. To say nothing of my stepfather, to whom I had hardly spoken a civil word since I had walked out of here, aged seventeen.

  I couldn’t find the damn key. Perhaps my mother had become more security minded over the years. There had been a time when she would have left the house unlocked completely. I tried the handle. Not any more.

  I sat down on the doorstep and leaned back against the locked door.

  My mother would be home later.

  I knew where she was. She was at the races; Cheltenham races, to be precise. I had looked up the runners in the morning paper, as I always did. She had four horses declared, including the favourite in the big race, and my mother would never miss a day at her beloved Cheltenham, the scene of her greatest triumphs. And, while today’s might be a smaller meeting than the steeplechase Festival in March, I could visualize her holding court in the parade ring before the races, and welcoming the winner back after them. I had seen it so often. It had been my childhood.

  The sun had long before given up trying to break through the veil of cloud, and it was beginning to get cold. I sighed. At least the toes on my right foot wouldn’t get chilblains. I put my head back against the wood and rested my eyes.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said a voice.

  I reopened my eyes. A short man in his mid-thirties wearing faded jeans and a puffy anorak stood on the gravel in front of me. I silently remonstrated with myself. I must have briefly drifted off to sleep because I hadn’t heard him coming. What would my sergeant have said?

  ‘I’m waiting for Mrs Kauri,’ I said.

  Mrs Kauri was my mother, Mrs Josephine Kauri, although Josephine had not been the name with which she had been christened. It was her name of choice. Sometime back, long before I was born, she had obviously decided that Jane, her real name, was not classy enough for her. Kauri was not her proper name either. It had been the surname of her first husband, and she was now on her third.

  ‘Mrs Kauri is at the races,’ replied the man.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ll just wait for her here.’

  ‘She won’t be back for hours, not until after dark.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ I said. ‘I’m her son.’

  ‘The soldier?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, somewhat surprised that he would know.

  But he did know. It was only fleeting but I didn’t miss his glance down at my right foot. He knew only too well.

  ‘I’m Mrs Kauri’s head lad,’ he said. ‘Ian Norland.’

  He held out a hand and I used it to help me up.

  ‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tom Forsyth. What happened to old Basil?’

  ‘He retired. I’ve been here three years now.’

  ‘It’s be
en a while longer than that since I’ve been here,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I saw you from the window of my flat,’ Ian said pointing to a row of windows above the stable boxes. ‘Would you like to come in and watch the racing on the telly? It’s too bloody cold to wait out here.’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  We climbed the stairs to what I remembered had once been a storage loft over the stables.

  ‘The horses provide great central heating,’ Ian said over his shoulder as he led the way. ‘I never have to turn the boiler on until it actually freezes outside.’

  The narrow stairway opened out into a long open-plan living area with a kitchen at the near end and doors at the far that presumably led to bedroom and bathroom beyond. There was no sign of any Mrs Norland, and the place had a ‘man look’ about it, with stacked-up dishes in the sink and newspapers spread over much of the floor.

  ‘Take a pew,’ Ian said waving a hand at a brown corduroy-covered sofa placed in front of a huge plasma television. ‘Fancy a beer?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I’d not had a beer in more than five months.

  Ian went to a fridge which appeared to contain nothing but beers. He tossed me a can.

  We sat in easy companionship on the brown sofa watching the racing from Cheltenham on the box. My mother’s horse won the second race and Ian punched the air in delight.

  ‘Good young novice, that,’ Ian said. ‘Strong quarters. He’ll make a good chaser in time.’

  He took pleasure in the success of his charges as I had done in the progress of a guardsman from raw recruit into battle-hardened warrior, a man who could then be trusted with one’s life.

  ‘Now for the big one,’ Ian said. ‘Pharmacist should win. He’s frightened off most of the opposition.’

  ‘Pharmacist?’ I asked.

  ‘Our Gold Cup hope,’ he said in a tone that implied I should have known. ‘This is his last warm-up for the Festival. He loves Cheltenham.’

  ‘What do you mean, he’s frightened off the opposition?’ I asked.

  ‘Mrs Kauri’s been saying all along that old Pharm will run in this race and so the other Gold Cup big guns have gone elsewhere. Not good for them to be beaten today with only a few weeks left to the Festival.’

  Ian became more and more nervous, continually getting up and walking round the room for some unnecessary reason or other.

  ‘Fancy another beer?’ he asked, standing by the fridge.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. He’d only given me one two minutes before.

  ‘God, I hope he wins,’ he said, sitting down and opening a fresh can with another still half full on the table.

  ‘I thought you said he would,’ I said.

  ‘He should do, he’s streaks better than the rest, but …’

  ‘But what?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ He paused. ‘I just hope nothing strange happens, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you think something strange might happen?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Something bloody strange has been happening to our horses recently.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Bloody strange things,’ he repeated.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like not winning when they should,’ he said. ‘Especially in the big races. Then they come home unwell. You can see it in their eyes. Some have even had diarrhoea, and I’ve never seen racehorses with that before.’

  We watched as my mother was shown on the screen tossing the jockey up onto Pharmacist’s back, the black-and-white check silks appearing bright against the dull green of the February grass. My stepfather stood nearby observing events, as he always did.

  ‘God, I hope he’s OK,’ said Ian with a nervous rattle.

  The horse looked fine to me, but how would I know? The last horse I’d been close to had been an Afghan tribesman’s nag with half of one ear shot away, reportedly by its owner as he was trying to shoot and charge at the same time. I tactfully hadn’t asked him which side he’d been shooting at. Afghani allegiance was variable. It depended on who was paying, and how much.

  Ian became more and more nervous as the race time approached.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘You’ll give yourself a heart attack.’

  ‘I should have gone,’ he said. ‘I knew I should have gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘To Cheltenham,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To keep an eye on the bloody horse, of course,’ he said angrily. ‘To make sure no bugger got close enough to nobble him.’

  ‘Do you really think the horses are being nobbled?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The bloody dope tests are all negative.’

  We watched as the horses walked round in circles at the start. Then the starter called them into line, and they were off.

  ‘Come on Pharm, my old boy,’ Ian said, his eyes glued to the television image. He was unable to sit down but stood behind the sofa like a little boy watching some scary science-fiction film, ready to dive down at the first approach of the aliens.

  Pharmacist appeared to be galloping along with relative ease in about third place of the eight runners as they passed the grandstand on the first circuit. But only when they started down the hill towards the finishing straight for the last time did the race unfold properly, and the pace pick up.

  Pharmacist still seemed to be going quite well and even jumped to the front over the second last. Ian began to breathe a little more easily, but then the horse appeared to fade rapidly, jumping the final fence in a very tired manner and almost coming to a halt on landing. He was easily passed by the others on the run-in up the hill, and he crossed the finishing line in last place, almost walking.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Ian. ‘He can’t run at the Festival, not now.’

  Pharmacist certainly did not look like a horse that could win a Gold Cup in six weeks’ time.

  Ian stood rigidly behind the sofa, his white-knuckled hands gripping the corduroy fabric to hold himself upright.

  ‘Bastards,’ he whimpered. ‘I’ll kill the bastards who did this.’

  I was not the only angry young man in Lambourn.

  2

  To say my homecoming was not a happy event would not have been an exaggeration.

  No ‘Hello, darling’, no kiss on the cheek, no fatted calf, nothing. But no surprise, either.

  My mother walked straight past me as if I had been invisible, her face taut and her lips pursed. I knew that look. She was about to cry but would not do so in public. To my knowledge, my mother had never cried in public.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ my stepfather said by way of greeting, reluctantly shaking my offered hand.

  Lovely to see you too, I thought, but decided not to say so. No doubt, as usual, we would fight and argue over the coming days, but not tonight. It was cold outside and beginning to rain. Tonight, I needed a roof over my head.

  My stepfather and I had never really got on.

  In the mixed-up mind of an unhappy child, I had tried to make my mother feel guilty for driving away my father and had ended up alienating not only her but everyone else.

  My father had packed his bags and left when I was just eight, finally fed up with being well behind the horses in my mother’s affection. Her horses had always come first, then her dogs, then her stable staff, and finally, if there was time, which there invariably wasn’t, her family.

  How my mother ever had the time to have three children had always been a mystery to me. Both my siblings were older than I, and had been fathered by my mother’s first husband, whom she had married when she was seventeen. Richard Kauri had been rich and thirty, a New Zealand playboy who had toyed at being a racehorse trainer. My mother had used his money to further her own ambition in racing, taking over the house and stables as part of their divorce settlement after ten years of turbulent marriage. Their young son and daughter had both sided with their father, a situation I now believed
she had encouraged as it gave her more chance of acquiring the training business if her ex-husband had the children.

  Almost immediately she had married my father, a local seed merchant, and had produced me like a present on her twenty-ninth birthday. But I had never been a much-wanted, much-loved child. I think my mother looked upon me as just another of her charges to be fed and watered twice a day, mucked out and exercised as required, and expected to stay quietly in my stable for the rest of the time.

  I suppose it had been a lonely childhood but I hadn’t known anything different and, mostly, I’d been happy enough. What I missed in human contact at home I made up for with dogs and horses, both of which had plenty of time for me. I would make up games with them. They were my friends. I could remember thinking the world had ended when Susie, my beloved beagle, had been killed by a car. What had made it much worse was that my mother, far from comforting me, had instead told me to pull myself together, it was only a dog.

  When my parents divorced there had been a long and protracted argument over custody of me. It was not until many years later that I realized that they had argued because neither of them had wanted the responsibility of bringing up an eight-year-old misfit. My mother had lost the argument, so I had lived with her, and my father had disappeared from my life for good. I hadn’t thought it a great loss at the time, and I still didn’t. He had written to me a few times, and had sent an occasional Christmas or birthday card, but he clearly thought he was better off without me, and I was sure I was without him.

  ‘So, darling, how was Afghanistan? You know, to start with, before you were injured?’ my mother asked rather tactlessly. ‘Were you able to enjoy yourself at all?’

  My mother had always managed to call me ‘darling’ without any of the emotion the word was designed to imply. In her case there was perhaps even a degree of sarcasm in the way she pronounced it with a long ‘r’ in the middle.

  ‘I wasn’t sent there to enjoy myself,’ I said slightly irritated. ‘I was there to fight the Taliban.’

  ‘Yes, darling. I know that,’ she said. ‘But did you have any good times?’