Break In Read online

  Cameras clicked.

  There was no sign anywhere of Holly.

  The proprietor’s lady, thin, painted and good-natured, stepped forward in smooth couturier clothes to give a foot-high gilded statue of a towncrier (medieval version) to the princess, amid congratulation and hand shaking. The princess accepted also a smaller gilt version on behalf of Wykeham Harlow, and in my turn I received the smile, the handshake, the congratulations and the attentions of the cameras, but not, to my surprise, my third set of golden towncrier cufflinks.

  ‘We were afraid you might win them again,’ Lady Vaughnley explained sweetly, ‘so this year it’s a figure like the others,’ and she pressed warmly into my hands a little golden man calling out the news to the days before printing.

  I genuinely thanked her. I had more cufflinks already than shirts with cuffs to take them.

  ‘What a finish you gave us,’ she said, smiling. ‘My husband is thrilled. Like an arrow from nowhere, he said.’

  ‘We were lucky.’

  I looked automatically to her shoulder, expecting to greet also her son, who at all other Towncriers had accompanied his parents, hovering around and running errands, willing, nice-natured, on the low side of average for brains.

  ‘Your son isn’t with you?’ I asked.

  Most of Lady Vaughnley’s animation went into eclipse. She glanced swiftly and uncomfortably across to her husband, who hadn’t heard my remark, and said unhappily, ‘No, not today.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said; not for Hugh Vaughnley’s absence, but for the obvious row in the family. She nodded and turned away, blinking, and I thought fleetingly that the trouble must be new and bad, near the surface of tears.

  The princess invited Lord and Lady Vaughnley to her box and they happily accepted.

  ‘You as well, Kit,’ she said.

  ‘I’m riding in the next race.’

  ‘Come after.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  Everyone left their trophies on the presentation table to be taken away for engraving and I returned to the changing room as the princess moved away with the Vaughnleys.

  She always asked me to her box because she liked to discuss her horses and what they’d done, and she had a loving and knowledgeable interest in all of them. She liked most to race where she rented a private box, namely at Cheltenham, Ascot, Sandown and Lingfield, and she went only to other courses where she had standing invitations from box-endowed friends. She was not democratic to the point of standing on the open stands and yelling.

  I came out in the right colours for the next race and found Holly fiercely at my elbow immediately.

  ‘Have you collected your winnings?’ I asked.

  ‘I couldn’t reach you,’ she said disgustedly. ‘All those officials, keeping everyone back, and the crowds…’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got to ride again now.’

  ‘Straight after, then.’

  ‘Straight after.’

  My mount in that race, in contrast to North Face, was unexciting, unintelligent and of only run-of-the-mill ability. Still, we tried hard, finished third, and seemed to give moderate pleasure to owners and trainer. Bread and butter for me: expenses covered for them. The basic fabric of jump racing.

  I weighed in and changed rapidly into street clothes, and Holly was waiting when I came out.

  ‘Now, Kit…’

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘The princess is expecting me.’

  ‘No! Kit!’ She was exasperated.

  ‘Well… it’s my job.’

  ‘Don’t come to the office, you mean?’

  I relented. ‘OK. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Have you seen this?’ She pulled a page torn from a newspaper called the Daily Flag out of her shoulder bag. ‘Has anyone said anything in the weighing room?’

  ‘No and no,’ I said, taking the paper and looking where she was pointing with an agitated stabbing finger. ‘I don’t read that rag.’

  ‘Nor do we, for God’s sake. Just look at it.’

  I glanced at the paragraph which was boxed by heavy red lines on a page entitled ‘Intimate Details’, a page well known to contain information varying from stale to scurrilous and to be intentionally geared to stirring up trouble.

  ‘It’s yesterday’s,’ I said, looking at the date.

  ‘Yes, yes. Read it.’

  I read the piece. It said:

  Folk say the skids are under Robertson (Bobby) Allardeck (32), racehorse-trainer son of tycoon Maynard Allardeck (50). Never Daddy’s favourite (they’re not talking), Bobby’s bought more than he can pay for, naughty boy, and guess who won’t be coming to the rescue. Watch this space for more.

  Robertson (Bobby) Allardeck (32) was my sister Holly’s husband.

  ‘It’s libellous,’ I said. ‘Bobby can sue.’

  ‘What with?’ Holly demanded. ‘We can’t afford it. And we might not win.’

  I looked at the worry in her normally unlined face.

  ‘Is it true, then?’ I said.

  ‘No. Yes. In a way. Of course he’s bought things he can’t pay for. Everyone does. He’s bought horses. It’s yearling sale time, dammit. Every trainer buys yearlings he can’t pay for. It’s natural, you know that.’

  I nodded. Trainers bought yearlings at auction for their owners, paying compulsorily for them on the spot and relying on the owners to reimburse them fairly soon. Sometimes the owners backed out after a yearling had been bought; sometimes trainers bought an extra animal or two to bring on themselves and have ready for a later sale at a profit. Either way, at sale time, it was more common than not to borrow thousands short term from the bank.

  ‘How many has Bobby bought that he can’t sell?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll sell them in the end, of course,’ she said, staunchly.

  Of course. Probably. Perhaps.

  ‘But now?’

  ‘Three. We’ve got three.’

  ‘Total damage?’

  ‘More than a hundred thousand.’

  ‘The bank paid for them?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s not that it won’t be all right in the end, but where did that disgusting rag get the information from? And why put it in the paper at all? I mean, it’s pointless.’

  ‘And what’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s happened is that everyone we owe money to has telephoned demanding to be paid. I mean, horrible threats, really, about taking us to court. All day yesterday… and this morning the feed-merchant rang and said he wouldn’t deliver any more feed unless we paid our bill and we’ve got thirty horses munching their heads off, and the owners are on the line non-stop asking if Bobby’s going to go on training or not and making veiled hints about taking their horses away.’

  I was sceptical. ‘All this reaction from that one little paragraph?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was suddenly close to tears. ‘Someone pushed the paper through the letter-box of half the tradesmen in Newmarket, open at that page with that paragraph outlined in red, just like this. The blacksmith showed me. It’s his paper. He came to shoe some of the horses and made us pay him first. Made a joke of it. But all the same, he meant it. Not everyone’s been so nice.’

  ‘And I suppose you can’t simply just pay everyone off and confound them?’

  ‘You know we can’t. The bank manager would bounce the cheques. We have to do it gradually, like we always do. Everyone will get paid, if they wait.’

  Bobby and Holly lived in fairly usual fashion at permanent full stretch of their permitted overdraft, juggling the incoming cheques from the owners with the outgoing expenses of fodder, wages, overheads and taxes. Owners sometimes paid months late, but the horses had to be fed and the lads’ wages found to the minute. The cash flow tended to suffer from air locks.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘go for another triple gin while I talk to the princess.’

  TWO

  The Princess Casilia, Mme de Brescou (to give her her full style), had as usual asked a few friends to lunch with her to watch
the races, and her box contained, besides herself and the Vaughnleys, a small assortment of furs and tweeds, all With inhabitants I’d formerly met on similar occasions.

  ‘You know everyone, don’t you?’ the princess said, and I nodded ‘Yes’, although I couldn’t remember half their names.

  ‘Tea?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  The same waitress as usual smoothly gave me a full cup, smiling. No milk, no sugar, slice of lemon, as always.

  The princess had had a designer decorate her boxes at the racecourses and they were all the same: pale peach hessian on the walls, coffee-coloured carpet and a glass-topped dining table surrounded by comfortable chairs. By late afternoon, my habitual visiting time, the table had been pushed to one side and bore not lunch but plates of sandwiches, creamy pastries, assorted alcohol, a box of cigars. The princess’s friends tended to linger long after the last races had been run.

  One of the women guests picked up a plate of small delicious-looking cakes and offered it to me.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said mildly. ‘Not this minute.’

  ‘Not ever,’ the princess told her friend. ‘He can’t eat those. And don’t tempt him. He’s hungry.’

  The friend looked startled and confused. ‘My dear! I never thought. And he’s so tall.’

  ‘I eat a lot,’ I said. ‘But just not those.’

  The princess, who had some idea at least of the constant struggle I had to stay down at a body weight of ten stone, gave me a glimmering look through her eyelashes, expressing disbelief.

  The friend was straightforwardly curious. ‘What do you eat most of,’ she asked, ‘if not cake?’

  ‘Lobster, probably,’ I said.

  ‘Good heavens.’

  Her male companion gave me a critical glance from above a large moustache and long front teeth.

  ‘Left it a bit late in the big race, didn’t you, what?’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

  ‘Couldn’t think what you were doing out there, fiddling about at the back. You nearly bungled it entirely, what? The princess was most uncomfortable, I can tell you, as we all had our money on you, of course.’

  The princess said, ‘North Face can behave very badly, Jack. I told you. He has such a mind of his own. Sometimes it’s hard to get him to race.’

  ‘It’s the jockey’s job to get him to race,’ Jack said to me with a touch of belligerence. ‘Don’t you agree, what?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do agree.’

  Jack looked fractionally disconcerted and the princess’s lips twitched.

  ‘And then you set him alight,’ said Lord Vaughnley, overhearing. ‘Gave us a rousing finish. The sort of thing a sponsor prays for, my dear fellow. Memorable. Something to talk about, to refer to. North Face’s finish in the Towncrier Trophy. Splendid, do you see?’

  Jack saw, chose not to like it, drifted away. Lord Vaughn-ley’s grey eyes looked with bonhomie from his large bland face and he patted me with kindly meant approval on the shoulder.

  ‘Third time in a row,’ he said. ‘You’ve done us proud. Would you care, one Saturday night, to see the paper put to bed?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised. ‘Very much.’

  ‘We might print a picture of you watching a picture of yourself go through the presses.’

  More than bonhomie, I thought, behind the grey eyes: a total newspaperman’s mentality.

  He was the proprietor of the Towncrier by inheritance, the fiftyish son of one of the old-style newspaper barons who had muscled on to the scene in the nineteen thirties and brought new screaming life to millions of breakfasts. Vaughnley Senior had bought a dying provincial weekly and turned it into a lusty voice read nationwide. He’d taken it to Fleet Street, seen the circulation explode, and in due course had launched a daily version which still prospered despite sarcastic onslaughts from newer rivals.

  The old man had been a colourful buccaneering entrepreneur. The son was quieter, a manager, an advertising man at heart. The Towncrier, once a raucous newsheet, had over the last ten years developed Establishment leanings, a remarkable testimony of the hand-over from the elder personality to the younger.

  I thought of Hugh Vaughnley, the son, next in the line: the sweet-tempered young man without strength, at present at odds, it appeared, with his parents. In his hands, if it survived at all, the Towncrier would soften to platitude, waffle and syrup.

  The Daily Flag, still at the brassiest stage, and among the Towncrier’s most strident opposition, had been recently bought, after bitter financial intrigues, by a thrusting financier in the ascendant, a man hungry, it was said, for power and a peerage, and taking a well-tried path towards both. The Flag was bustling, go-getting, stamping on sacrosanct toes and boasting of new readers daily.

  Since I’d met Lord Vaughnley several times at various racing presentation dinners where annual honours were dished out to the fortunate (like champion jockeys, leading trainers, owners-of-the-year, and so on) and with Holly’s distress sharp in my mind, I asked him if he knew who was responsible for ‘Intimate Details’ in the Flag.

  ‘Responsible?’ he repeated with a hint of holier-than-thou distaste. ‘Irresponsible, more like.’

  ‘Irresponsible, then.’

  ‘Why, precisely?’ he asked.

  ‘They’ve made an unprovoked and apparently pointless attack on my brother-in-law.’

  ‘Hm,’ Lord Vaughnley said. ‘Too bad. But, my dear fellow, pointless attacks are what the public likes to read. Destructive criticism sells papers, back-patting doesn’t. My father used to say that, and he was seldom wrong.’

  ‘And to hell with justice,’ I said.

  ‘We live in an unkind world. Always have, always will. Christians to the lions, roll up, buy the best seats in the shade, gory spectacle guaranteed. People buy newspapers, my dear fellow, to see victims torn limb from limb. Be thankful it’s physically bloodless, we’ve advanced at least that far.’ He smiled as if talking to a child. ‘Intimate Details, as you must know, is a composite affair, with a whole bunch of journalists digging out nuggets and also a network of informants in hospitals, mortuaries, night clubs, police stations and all sorts of less savoury places, telephoning in with the dirt and collecting their dues. We at the Towncrier do the same sort of thing. Every paper does. Gossip columns would be non-starters, my dear fellow, if one didn’t.’

  ‘I’d like to know where the piece about my brother-in-law came from. Who told who, if you see what I mean. And why.’

  ‘Hm.’ The grey eyes considered. ‘The editor of the Flag is Sam Leggatt. You could ask him of course, but even if he finds out from his staff, he won’t tell you. Head against brick wall, I’m afraid, my dear fellow.’

  ‘And you approve,’ I said, reading his tone. ‘Closing ranks, never revealing sources, and all that.’

  ‘If your brother-in-law has suffered real positive harm,’ he nodded blandly, ‘he should get his solicitor to send Sam Leggatt a letter announcing imminent prosecution for libel unless a retraction and an apology are published immediately. It sometimes works. Failing that, your brother-in-law might get a small cash settlement out of court. But do advise him, my dear fellow, against pressing for a fully-fledged libel action with a jury. The Flag retains heavyweight lawyers and they play very rough. They would turn your brother-in-law’s most innocent secrets inside out and paint them dirty. He’d wish he’d never started. Friendly advice, my dear fellow, I do assure you.’

  I told him about the paragraph being outlined in red and delivered by hand to the houses of tradespeople.

  Lord Vaughnley frowned. ‘Tell him to look for the informant on his own doorstep,’ he said. ‘Gossip column items often spring from local spite. So do stories about vicars and their mistresses.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Good old spite. Whatever would the newspaper industry do without it!’

  ‘Such a confession!’ I said with mockery.

  ‘We clamour for peace, honesty, harmony, common sense and equal ju
stice for all,’ he said. ‘I assure you we do, my dear fellow.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  The princess touched Lord Vaughnley’s arm and invited him to go out on to the balcony to see the last race. He said however that he should return to the Towncrier’s guests whom he had temporarily abandoned in a sponsors’ hospitality room, and, collecting his wife, he departed.

  ‘Now, Kit,’ said the princess, ‘while everyone is outside watching the race, tell me about North Face.’

  We sat, as so often, in two of the chairs, and I told her without reservation what had happened between her horse and myself.

  ‘I do wish,’ she said thoughtfully, at the end, ‘that I had your sense of what horses are thinking. I’ve tried putting my head against their heads,’ she smiled almost self-consciously, ‘but nothing happens. I get nothing at all. So how do you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think head to head would work, anyway. It’s just when I’m riding them, I seem to know. It’s not in words, not at all. It’s just there. It just seems to come. It happens to very many riders. Horses are telepathic creatures.’

  She looked at me with her head on one side. ‘But you, Kit, you’re telepathic with people as well as horses. Quite often you’ve answered a question I was just going to ask. Quite disconcerting. How do you do it?’

  I was startled. ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘But you know you do?’

  ‘Well… I used to. My twin sister Holly and I were telepathic between ourselves at one time. Almost like an extra way of talking. But we’ve grown out of it, these last few years.’

  ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘Such an interesting gift.’

  ‘It can’t logically exist.’

  ‘But it does.’ She patted my hand. ‘Thank you for today, although you and North Face between you almost stopped my heart.’

  She stood up without haste, adept from some distant training at ending a conversation gracefully when she wished, and I stood also and thanked her formally for her tea. She smiled through the eyelashes, as she often did with everybody: not out of coquetry but in order, it seemed to me, to hide her private feelings.