Trial Run Read online

  ‘But, sir,’ I said, protesting mildly. ‘The Olympics are still some way off. I know Lord Farringford is good, but he might not be selected, and then there would be no problem at all.’

  The Prince shook his head. ‘If the problem isn’t dealt with, however good Johnny is, even if he’s the best we’ve got, he will not be selected.’

  I looked at him speculatively. ‘You would prevent it?’

  ‘Yes, I should.’ His voice was positive. ‘It would no doubt cause a great deal of friction in my own home, as both Johnny and my wife have set their hearts on his getting a place in the team. He has a real chance, too, I admit. He won several Events during the summer and he’s been working hard at improving his dressage to international standards. I don’t want to stand in his way… In fact, that’s why I’m here, asking you to be a good chap and find out what, if anything, there is to make it risky for him to go to Russia.’

  ‘Sir,’ I said. ‘Why me? Why not the diplomats?’

  ‘They’ve passed the buck. They think, and I must say I agree, that a private individual is the best bet. If there is… anything… we don’t want it in official records.’

  I said nothing, but my disinclination must have been obvious.

  ‘Look,’ the Prince said, ‘we’ve known each other a long time. You’ve twice the brains I have, and I trust you. I’m damned sorry about your eyesight, and all that, but you’ve got a lot of empty time to fill now, and if your agent can run your estate like clockwork while you chunter round Cheltenham and Ain-tree, he can do it while you go to Moscow.’

  I said, ‘I suppose you didn’t get the no-glasses rule passed just so that I’d have time to go on your errand?’

  He listened to the bitterness in my voice, and chuckled in his throat. ‘Most likely it was all the other amateurs, who wanted you out of their daylight.’

  ‘A couple have already sworn it wasn’t.’

  ‘Will you go, then?’ he said.

  I looked at my hands and bit my fingernails and took my glasses off and put them on again.

  ‘I know you don’t want to,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know who else to ask.’

  ‘Sir… well… can we leave it until the spring? I mean… you might think of someone better…’

  ‘It’s got to be now, Randall. Right this minute, in fact. We’ve got the chance of buying one of the top young German horses, a real cracker, for Johnny. We… that is, his trustees… I suppose I should explain… His money is in trust until he is twenty-five, which is still three years ahead, and although of course he has a generous living allowance, a big item like an Olympic-type horse needs to come out of the capital. Anyway, we will be happy to buy this horse, and we have an option on it, but they are pressing for a reply. We must say yes or no by Christmas. It is too expensive except for an all-out attempt at the Olympics, and we are damned lucky to have been given the few weeks’ option. They’ve got other buyers practically queueing for it.’

  I stood up restlessly, went to the window, and looked out at the cold November sky. Winter in Moscow, chasing someone’s possible indiscretion, maybe digging up a lot of private dirt, was an absolutely revolting prospect.

  ‘Please, Randall,’ said the Prince. ‘Please go. Just give it a try.’

  Emma was standing by the sitting-room window watching the Daimler roll away down the drive. She glanced assessingly at my face.

  ‘I see he suckered you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m still fighting a rearguard action.’

  ‘You haven’t a chance.’

  She walked across the panelled room and sat on the long stool in front of the fire, stretching out her hands to the warmth. ‘It’s too ingrained in you. Service to the sovereign, and all that. Grandfather an equerry, aunt a lady-in-waiting. Stacks like them in your family for generations back. What hope have you got? When a Prince says jump, all your ancestors’ genes spring to attention and salute.’

  2

  The Prince lived in a modest house only a shade larger than my own, but a hundred years older, and he opened his door to me himself, although he did have living-in staff, which I did not. But then, he also had a wife, three children, and, apparently, six dogs. A dalmatian and a whippet oozed between his legs and the doorposts and bowled over to give me a good sniffing as I climbed out of my Mercedes, with a yapping collection of terriers cantering along in their wake.

  ‘Kick ’em out of your way,’ advised the Prince loudly, waiting on his doorstep. ‘Get down, Fingers, you spotted oaf.’

  The dalmatian paid little attention, but I reached the door unchewed. Shook the Prince’s hand. Made the small bow. Followed him across the rugs of his pillared hall into an ample sort of study. Leather-bound books in tidy rows lined two of the walls, with windows, doors, portraits and fireplace leaving small surrounds of pale green emulsion on the others. On his big cluttered desk stood ranks of photographs in silver frames, and in one corner a huge white cyclamen in a copper bowl drooped its pale heads in the greyish light.

  I knew, and the Prince knew I knew, that his act in opening his door to me himself was a very unusual token of appreciation. He really must have been quite extraordinarily relieved, I thought, that I had agreed to take even the partial step I had: and I wondered a bit uneasily about the size of the pitfalls which he knew would lie ahead.

  ‘Good of you, Randall,’ he said, waving me to a black leather armchair. ‘Did you have a good drive? We’ll rustle up some coffee in a minute…’

  He sat in a comfortable swivel beside his desk and kept up the flow of courteous chatter. Johnny Farringford, he said, had promised to be there by ten-thirty: he took a quick look at his watch and no doubt found it was roughly fifteen minutes after that already. It was good of me to come, he said again. It was probably better, he said, that I shouldn’t be tied in too closely with Johnny at this stage, so it was perhaps wiser we should meet at the Prince’s house, and not at Johnny’s, if I saw what he meant.

  He was strongly built, fairly tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed, with the easy good looks of youth beginning to firm into the settled character of coming middle age. The eyebrows were bushier than five years earlier, the nose more pronounced, and the neck a little thicker. Time was turning him from an athlete into a figurehead, and giving me unwanted insights into mortality on a Monday morning.

  Another quick look at his watch, this time accompanied by a frown. I thought hopefully that perhaps the precious Johnny wouldn’t turn up at all, and I could go contentedly back home and forget the whole thing.

  The two tall windows of the study looked out to the sweep of drive in front of the house, in the same way as those of my own sitting-room. Perhaps the Prince, too, found it useful to have early warning of people calling: time to dodge, if he wanted.

  My Mercedes was clearly in view on the wide expanse of raked gravel, standing alone, bluish-grey and quiet. While I idly watched, a white Rover suddenly travelled like an arrow across the uncluttered area, making straight for my car’s back. As if in horrorstruck inevitable slow-motion I waited helplessly for the crash.

  There was a noise like the emptying of ten metal dustbins into a pulverising plant, followed by the uninterrupted blowing of the horn, as the unconscious driver of the Rover slumped over the steering wheel.

  ‘Christ!’ said the Prince, appalled and leaping to his feet. ‘Johnny!’

  ‘My car!’ I said, involuntarily betraying my regrettable priorities.

  The Prince was fortunately already on his way to the study door, and I followed on his heels across the hall, bursting into the fresh air after him at a run.

  The reverberating crunch and the wailing horn had brought an assortment of horrified faces to the windows and to the fringe of the scene, but it was the Prince and I who reached the tangle first.

  The front of the Rover had half mounted the back of my car in a sort of monstrous mechanical mating, so that the Rover’s wheels were slightly off the ground. The whole arrangement looked most precarious, and an assaulting sm
ell of petrol brought one face to face with possibilities.

  ‘Get him out,’ said the Prince urgently, tugging at the handle of the driver’s door. ‘God…’

  The door had buckled under the impact, and was wedged shut. I raced round to the far side, and tried the passenger door. Same thing. If he’d tried, Johnny Farringford couldn’t have hit my Mercedes any straighter.

  The rear doors were locked. The hatchback also. The horn blew on, urgent and disturbing.

  ‘Jesus,’ shouted the Prince frantically. ‘Get him out.’

  I climbed up on to the concertina’d mess between the two vehicles and slithered through the space where the windscreen had been, carrying with me a shower of crumbling glass. Knelt on the passenger seat, and hauled the unconscious man off the horn button. The sudden quiet was a blessing, but there was nothing reassuring about Johnny Farringford’s face.

  I didn’t wait to look beneath the blood. I stretched across behind him, supporting his lolling head, and pulled up the locking catch on the offside rear door. The Prince worked at it feverishly from the outside, but it took a contortionist manoeuvre from me and a fierce stamp from my heel to spring it open: the thought of sparks from the scraping metal was a vivid horror, as I could now hear as well as scarcely breathe from the flood of escaping petrol.

  It didn’t make it any better that it was the petrol from my own car, or that I’d filled the capacious tank that very morning.

  The Prince put his head and shoulders into the Rover and thrust his wrists under his brother-in-law’s armpits. I squirmed back into the buckled front space and disengaged the flopping feet from the clutter of clutch, brake and accelerator pedals. The Prince heaved with his considerable strength and I lifted the lower part of the inert body as best I could, and, between us, we shifted him over the back of his seat and out through the rear door. I let go of his legs as the Prince tugged him backwards, and he flopped out free on to the gravel like a calf from a cow.

  God help him, I thought, if we’ve made any broken bones worse by our rough handling, but anything on the whole was better than incineration. I scrambled along Johnny Farringford’s escape route with no signs of calm unhurried nonchalance.

  Assistance had arrived in a houseman’s coat and in gardening clothes, and the victim was carried more carefully from then on.

  ‘Take him away from the car,’ the Prince was saying to them while turning back towards me. ‘The petrol… Randall, get out, man.’

  Superfluous advice. I’d never felt so slow, so awkward, so over-equipped with knees and elbows and ankle joints.

  Whether the balance of one vehicle on the other was in any case unstable, or whether my far from delicate movements rocked it over the brink, the effect was the same: the Rover began to move while I was still inside it.

  I could hear the Prince’s voice, rising with apprehension, ‘Randall…’

  I got one foot out free: began to put my weight on it, and the Rover shifted further. I stumbled, hung on to the door frame, and pulled myself out by force of arms. Landed sideways on hip and elbow, sprawling and ungainly.

  I rolled and put my feet where they ought to be, with my hands on the ground like a runner, to get a bit of purchase. Behind me the Rover’s heavy weight crunched backwards and tore itself off my Mercedes with metal screeching violently on metal, but I dare say it was some form of electrical short-circuiting which let go with a shower of sparks like a hundred cigarette lighters in chorus.

  The explosion threw the two cars apart and left both of them burning like mini infernos. There was a hissing noise in the air as the expanding vapour flashed into a second’s flame, and a positive roaring gust of hot wind, which helped me onwards.

  ‘Your hair’s on fire,’ observed the Prince, as I reached him.

  I rubbed a hand over it, and so it was. Rubbed with both hands rather wildly, and put the conflagration out.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all.’

  He grinned at me in an un-Princely and most human fashion. ‘And your glasses, I see, haven’t shifted an inch.’

  A doctor and a private ambulance arrived in due course for Johnny Farringford, but long before that he had woken up and looked around him in bewilderment. He was lying, by that time, on the long comfortable sofa in the family sitting-room, attended by the Princess, his sister, who was taking things matter-of-factly and mopping his wounds with impressive efficiency.

  ‘What happened?’ Farringford said, opening dazed eyes.

  Bit by bit they told him: he had driven his car across a space as big as a tennis court, straight into the back of my Mercedes. Nothing else in sight.

  ‘Randall Drew,’ added the Prince, making the introduction.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Damn silly thing to do,’ said the Princess disparagingly, but in her concerned face I read the lifelong protectiveness of older sister to little brother.

  ‘I don’t… remember.’

  He looked at the red stains on the swabs which were piling up on a tray beside him, at the blood dripping from a cut on one finger, and appeared to be going to be sick.

  ‘He used to pass out at the sight of blood,’ said his sister. ‘A good job he’s grown out of it.’

  Johnny Farringford’s injuries had resolved themselves into numerous cuts to the face but no obviously broken bones. However, he winced every time he moved, pressing his arm across his waist as if to hold himself together, which spoke to me rather reminiscently of cracked ribs.

  He was a willowy, fairly tall young man with a great deal of crinkly reddish hair extending into tufty bits of beard down the outer sides of his jaw. His nose looked thin and sharp, and an out-of-door tan sat oddly on his skin over the pallor of shock.

  ‘Creeping… shit,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘It could have been worse,’ said the Prince, dubiously.

  ‘No…’ Farringford said. ‘They hit me.’

  ‘Who did?’ The Prince mopped a bleeding cut and clearly thought the remark was the rambling of concussion.

  ‘Those men… I…’ He broke off and focused his dazed eyes with great deliberation on the Prince’s face, as if the act of keeping his glance steady was also helping to reorganise his thoughts.

  ‘I drove here… after. I felt… I was sweating. I remember turning in through the gates… and seeing the house…’

  ‘Which men?’ said the Prince.

  ‘The ones you sent… about the horse.’

  ‘I didn’t send any men.’

  Farringford blinked slowly and re-established the concentrating stare.

  ‘They came… to the stable. Just when I was thinking… time to come here… see this fellow… someone… you want me to…’

  The Prince nodded. ‘That’s right. Randall Drew, here.’

  ‘Yeah… well… Higgins had got my car out… the Rover… said I wanted the Porsche but something about new tyres… so I just went into the yard… to see if Groucho’s legs OK… which Lakeland said they were, but wanted to look myself, you know… So there they were, saying could they have a word… you’d sent them. I said I was in a hurry… got into the Rover … they just crowded in after me… punched me… one of them drove down the road, past the village… then they stopped… and the sods knocked me about… gave them as good as I got… but two to one… no good, you know.’

  ‘They robbed you?’ the Prince said. ‘We’ll have to consider the police.’ He looked worried. Police meant publicity, and unfavourable publicity was anathema to the Prince.

  ‘No…’ Farringford closed his eyes. ‘They said… to keep away… from Alyosha.’

  ‘They what?’ The Prince jerked as if he too had been hit.

  ‘That’s right… knew you wouldn’t like it…’

  ‘What else did they say?’

  ‘Nothing. Bloody ironic…’ said Farringford rather faintly. It’s you… who wants Alyosha… found… Far as I’m concerned… whole thing can stay… buried.’

  ‘Just rest,’ said the
Princess anxiously, wiping red oozing drops from his grazed forehead. ‘Don’t talk any more, Johnny, there’s a lamb.’ She looked up at the two of us, standing at the sofa’s foot. ‘What will you do about the cars?’

  The Prince stared morosely at the two burnt-out wrecks and at five empty extinguishers which lay around like scarlet torpedoes. An acrid smell in the November air was all that was left of the thick column of smoke and flame which had risen higher than the rooftops. The firemen, still in the shape of houseman and gardener, stood in the background, looking smugly at their handiwork and waiting for the next gripping instalment.

  ‘Do you suppose he fainted?’ said the Prince.

  ‘It sounds like it, sir,’ I said. ‘He said he was sweating. Not much fun being beaten up like that.’

  ‘And he never could stand the sight of blood.’

  The Prince traced with his eye the path the Rover would have taken with an unconscious driver had not my car been parked slap in the way.

  ‘He’d’ve crashed into one of those beeches,’ said the Prince. ‘And his foot was on the accelerator…’

  Across the lawn a double row of stately, mature trees stretched away from the house, thick with criss-crossing branches, and bare except for a last dusting of dried brown leaves. They had been planted, one would guess, as a break against the north-east winds, in an age when sculpture of the land was designed to delight the eye of future generations, and their sturdy trunks would have stopped a tank, let alone a Rover. They were lucky, I thought, to have survived where so many had fallen to drought, fungus and gales.