Blood Sport Page 2

  ‘You’ll drop it in the river, if you aren’t careful.’

  ‘This is only my second film. I used the first one up on the boys at school. Do you think those ducks will come out all right?’

  ‘I expect you had your finger over the shutter.’

  ‘I’ve got a book in there.’ He nodded to the cabin, expertly sifting out the affection behind her sarcasm and showing no resentment. ‘It tells you about exposures and focuses. I think I’ll just check what it says about sunny days. It was cloudy dull all week at school.’

  I don’t belong here, I thought. I wished I were asleep.

  The Flying Linnet nosed upstream through a scatter of row-boats, Keeble at the wheel, Teller sitting forward still on the cabin roof, and Peter trying to get past Lynnie teasing him in the cabin doorway. Joan Keeble sat down on the wide seat across the back and patted the place next to her for me to join her. With an effort I did so, but after a minute or two, in the middle of apparently idle hostessy chat, she pulled me back to attention by trying delicately to find out who I was and why I had been invited, while not wanting to have me realize that she didn’t know.

  I could play that sort of game for ever. Inference on inference. I didn’t know the answer to why was I there, but that she needed to ask it, that indeed she had asked it, told me a great deal about non-contact between Keeble and his wife, and opened new doors on to Keeble himself. I knew then why he’d never before asked me home. It was one thing to employ a microscope, but another to put oneself under the lens. I thought it all the odder that he’d done it now.

  As if he could feel my mind on the back of his neck he turned round and said, ‘The lock’s just ahead.’ I stood up and joined him, and Peter gave up his struggle and went back to his duty with the stern rope.

  ‘Marsh Lock,’ Lynnie said, standing beside me and looking forward through the windscreen. ‘Not an easy one, from this side, going upstream.’

  When we got nearer I saw what she meant. The broad stretch of river narrowed abruptly to the lock gates on the left and the weir on the right, alongside. Baby whirlpools and trails of bubbles met us fifty yards away, with larger eddies and convolutions bubbling up as we went on. The boat tended to swing sideways under their power, and Keeble spun the wheel rapidly to keep her straight. Ahead of us water in tons tumbled over the weir, green and brown and splashing white, thundering down in great curving leaps, smelling of mustiness and mud.

  A low wooden wall divided the lock approach from the turbulent weir water, and to the calm side of the barrier Keeble neatly steered his boat. Teller standing at the bow threw his rope over the hook on a mooring post there, and Peter slung a loop over a bollard at the stern.

  I looked idly over the side of the boat, over the wall, up to the weir. Bouncing, tumbling, foaming, sweeping away back into the width of the river, the rough water looked superb in the sun. I felt the warmth and the fine spray mixed on my face and wondered whether if someone fell in there, he would ever come up.

  The lock gates opened, the downcoming boats chugged out, and the Flying Linnet went in. Teller and Peter did their stuff mooring us to the side and Peter took a photograph of the boat in the lock. Water surged through the sluices in the upper gates, lifting us up, and in ten minutes we were going out of the lock on to another broad calm stretch of river, six feet higher than the one below.

  ‘There are fifty locks on the Thames,’ Keeble said. ‘Lechlade is as far up as you can go except in a rowing boat, and that’s about 300 feet above sea level.’

  ‘Quite a staircase,’ I commented.

  ‘The Victorians,’ he nodded, ‘were a brilliant lot. They built them.’

  Teller stood up on the foredeck holding the coil of rope, the peak of his baseball cap pointing forward like an attentive bird. I watched him, speculating, and Keeble followed the direction of my eyes and gave me only silence to work on.

  Less than half a mile upstream from the lock we made an obviously pre-arranged stop at a riverside pub, Teller jumping ashore with his rope and fending the boat off the concrete edges as we drifted towards it. He and Peter tied expert knots, and everyone followed them ashore.

  We drank sitting on a ring of uncomfortable metal chairs round a table with a sun umbrella spiked through its centre. Lynnie and Peter had Cokes and without consultation Keeble bought Scotch for the rest of us. Joan sipped hers with a pursed mouth and screwed eyes, as if it were a mite too strong for fragile little her, but I noticed she finished a long way first. Teller left his untouched for several minutes and then tossed it back in kingsized gulps. Keeble drank in pauses, revolving his glass in his hands and squinting through it at the sun. They were talking about the river, and other days on it, and other weather. On either side of us, round more umbrellas, sat more family parties much the same; Sunday morning drinks, Sunday lunch, Sunday snooze, Sunday Express, Sunday supper, Sunday Night at the London Palladium… safe little families in a sheltered routine, well-intentioned and more or less content. Even Keeble fitted in. Whereas I … was apart.

  ‘Drink,’ Keeble said. ‘You’re on holiday.’

  Faced with instant sharp curiosity from the rest of his family I meekly picked up my glass, still full when theirs were empty. It felt wrong to drink in the morning; it raised sub-conscious bells of alarm. I liked the taste of alcohol all right, but couldn’t afford its effects. Alcohol encouraged you to put your trust in luck, and I was better off trusting a clear head. Consequently I sometimes didn’t touch the stuff for weeks on end, and on that morning had had none for nearly a month.

  Keeble watched me swallow the whisky, as vivid and familiar as a long-lost friend. The extent to which I was ever on holiday lay in the jacket across my knees, a pound of deadly mechanism in an under-arm holster; but it did seem most unlikely that I would need it on the Thames. When Teller ordered a refill, I drank that too. And then, since it was my turn, a third.

  Peter lasted the course to three Cokes, and then wandered away with his camera poised, looking for excuses to use it. Next door a boatyard, like the one at Henley, was doing a roaring trade in punts. Four of the pub’s more enthusiastic customers were having trouble stepping aboard, and Teller said chuckling, ‘What’s the fine for punting under the influence …?’

  ‘A soaking,’ Lynnie said. ‘Silly nits.’

  The punt pole waved recklessly as they set off, but the four men didn’t fall in. The punt skidded ten feet up the river and hit the pub’s landing stage with a thump that tumbled them into a leg-waving heap. I tried to laugh with everyone else and only succeeded in feeling more remote than ever.

  We finished the drinks, re-embarked, and went up through the next lock, Harbour, to an unpopulated green-pasture stretch of river, where we moored for lunch. Peter swam, jumping off the boat repeatedly in glittering splashes, and Lynnie helped her mother in the cabin, preparing the food. Teller sprawled lazily on the back seat, and Keeble sat down with a Sunday newspaper and unfolded it, and I wearily began to wonder just when he would come to the point.

  The point, however, was the newspaper. We had arrived.

  ‘Read that,’ he said, tapping a small paragraph on an inside page.

  I read it.

  ‘There is still no sign of Chrysalis, free in Kentucky, US, since Tuesday. Anxiety mounts for the safety of the £500,000 stallion, sire of this year’s Derby winner, Moth.’

  ‘Is this what you mean?’ I asked, puzzled, making sure I’d read the right section. I had. He nodded vigorously.

  ‘Didn’t you know about it?’ he asked.

  ‘That Chrysalis had got lost? Yes, I suppose so. It was on all the news bulletins on Wednesday.’

  ‘And it didn’t mean a damn thing to you,’ Teller said, with a trace of controlled and civilized bitterness under his smile.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I have a share in that horse,’ Teller said. ‘A one-eighth share, 200,000 dollars worth.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said blankly. It seemed a lot of money to invest in one-eighth of a h
orse.

  ‘What is more,’ he said, sighing, ‘I have spent all of last month negotiating the sale, and was lucky to beat out another syndicate that was bidding for him. And now as soon as he gets over there, this has to happen.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, conventionally polite.

  ‘I can’t expect you to understand.’ He shook his head, excusingly. ‘It isn’t the money which matters, it’s the horse. He’s irreplaceable.’

  ‘They’ll find him.’ I had no doubts of it, and I didn’t care one way or the other.

  ‘I am not so sure,’ he said. ‘And I would like you to get out there and look for him.’

  For five seconds no one twitched a muscle, least of all me. Then Teller turned his head to Keeble and smiled his glossy smile. ‘I wouldn’t play poker with him,’ he said. ‘OK, I’ll buy what you say about him being all that good.’

  I glanced at Keeble and he gave me raised eyebrows, a tiny shrug, and a slightly embarrassed expression. I wondered just how complete his testimonial had been.

  Teller turned back to me. ‘Sim here and I, we were in the same business, way back in World War II.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. And I did see. Quite a lot.

  ‘It was just a war job for me, though,’ he said. ‘I got out of the Army in ’47 and went back home to Pappy, and a couple of years later he died and left me his racehorses and a few bucks on the side.’ The beautiful teeth flashed.

  I waited. The story had hardly begun.

  After a pause he said, ‘I’ll pay your fare and expenses, of course, and a fee.’

  ‘I don’t hunt horses,’ I protested mildly.

  ‘I can guess what you hunt.’ He glanced again at Keeble. ‘Sim says you’re on vacation.’

  I didn’t need reminding.

  ‘Chrysalis’, he said, ‘is the third stallion of international status to have disappeared in the last ten years.’

  Chapter Two

  They tried pretty hard in their subtle way, but it seemed ridiculous to me.

  ‘You know about horses,’ Keeble said. ‘Your father trained them for racing.’

  ‘There’s the police,’ I pointed out. ‘Also the insurance company. Also every man, woman, and child with an eye for a horse in the state of Kentucky. And I presume there’s a reward?’

  Teller nodded.

  ‘So why me?’

  ‘No one found the other two.’

  ‘There’s a lot of land in America,’ I said. ‘They’re both probably free on a prairie somewhere having a high old time siring herds of wild horses.’

  Teller said grudgingly, ‘The first one was found dead in a gully two years after he disappeared.’

  ‘That’s it, then.’

  ‘But the second one … I bought that one too. I had a one tenth share. This is second time around for me.’

  I stared at him. ‘Were any of the circumstances the same?’

  Reluctantly he shook his head. ‘No … except that they both got free. Allyx was never found. That’s why I want something special done about Chrysalis.’

  I was silent.

  Keeble stirred. ‘You’ve got nothing else to do, Gene. Why not take your holiday in the States? What will you do with yourself, if you stay in Putney?’

  His eyes had stopped blinking, as they always did when he was intent. It was the surest guide I had to the complex calculations which sometimes lay beneath his most casual remarks. He couldn’t have guessed, I thought in alarm. He was a manipulator but not clairvoyant. I shrugged and answered him on the surface.

  ‘Walk round Kew Gardens and smell the orchids.’

  ‘They have no scent,’ said Teller, pointing out the obvious.

  ‘He knows that.’ Keeble nodded, still unblinking. ‘Any fruitless way of passing the time, is what he meant.’

  ‘I guess you two operate on your own private wavelength,’ Teller said with a sigh. ‘But I’d like you to come back with me, Gene, and at least take a look. What’s the harm in that?’

  ‘And what’s the good in it? It’s not my sort of job.’ I looked away, down into the green water. ‘And … I’m tired.’

  They hadn’t a quick answer to that. I thought it would have been simple if all that was the matter with me was the straightforward tiredness of overwork, not the deadly fatigue of a struggle I wasn’t sure I could win. Chasing some crazy colt over a thousand square miles didn’t look like any sort of a cure.

  Joan came out of the cabin into their defeated silence with a bowl of salad and a string of bright fussing chatter. A folding table was erected and the dishes put on to it, and we sat around in the sun eating cold chicken and hot french bread. There was a pleasant pink wine to drink and strawberries and cream afterwards, and Peter, still in wet bathing trunks despite orders from his mother, took mouthfuls and photographs by turn. Lynnie, sitting beside me, told Dave Teller an amusing story about the finishing school she attended, her warm bare arm brushing unselfconsciously against mine. I should have enjoyed that placid Sunday picnic on the river. I tried to. I smiled and answered when I was spoken to and concentrated carefully on the taste and texture of what I was eating, and all that happened was that the fat black slug of depression flexed its muscles and swelled another notch.

  At four o’clock, after dishwashing and dozing, we started back towards Henley. My refusal to go to America hadn’t basically disturbed Teller or Keeble an ounce. I concluded that whatever had prompted the suggestion it wasn’t a burning conviction that I and only I could find the missing horse. I put the whole thing out of my mind. It wasn’t hard.

  There was a punt in difficulties at the approach to Harbour Lock. Teller, again standing up on the bow with rope at the ready, shouted back to Keeble and pointed ahead. We looked, all of us, following his finger.

  Where the river divided, going slowly into the left fork round the bend to the lock and fast on the right straight to the weir, a sturdy post in mid-stream bore a large notice, a single word: DANGER.

  A girl, lying flat half in and half out of the punt with her arms round the post, was trying to tie up to it by passing a rope from one hand to the other, and making a poor job of it. On the stern, watching anxiously, punt pole in hand, stood a young man in a red-and-yellow shirt. He waved his arms when he saw us coming, and as Keeble throttled back and drifted near, he shouted across the water.

  ‘Could you help us, sir?’

  Since the punt was full in the weir stream with only the girl’s slender arms keeping it from floating straight to destruction, he seemed remarkably cool. Keeble cursed about ignorant nitwits and edged nearer with his engine in slow reverse. The Flying Linnet, unlike the punt, was too big to go through this particular weir, a long row of separately openable gates; but the summer current was quite strong enough to crash her nastily against the thick concrete supports and pin her there for someone else humiliatingly to rescue.

  Keeble shouted to the girl that we would tow them away, and to hand the mooring rope to me or Lynnie, whichever she could reach, as soon as we were nearer. The girl nodded, her arms still stretched forward round the big post, her long fair hair nearly brushing the water, her body quivering with the strain.

  ‘Hold on,’ Lynnie shouted urgently. ‘Oh do hold on. Just a little longer, that’s all.’ She leaned over the side as if trying to shorten the few yards of water which still lay between, her worry and fright growing as we drew nearer. With the engine doing little more than tick over, the noise of the water on the far side of the weir began to fill our ears with its threat, but Keeble at any rate remained calm and sure of himself, an easy master of his boat and the situation. With six feet still to go the girl took one arm off the post and held out the rope towards Lynnie’s groping hand. Then, disastrously she dropped it. Crying out, beating in big splashes on the water, she struggled to get her arm back round the post. Lynnie yelled to her to get hold of the rope again, it was fastened to the punt under her chest, to get hold of it again and hand it over. But the girl was now far too frightened either t
o listen or to let go of the post again, and the panic was rising to screams in her voice.

  Out of the side of my vision I saw the young man start forward to help her, apparently at last realizing that their position was serious. The punt pole swung awkwardly in his hands, curved through the air in a clumsy arc, and hit Dave Teller on the head. With buckling knees the American fell forward off the bows and straight into the water.

  I was up on the cabin roof, out of my shoes and into the river after him almost before any of the others realized what had happened. I heard Keeble’s despairing voice shouting ‘Gene’ in the second before I went under, but I was thinking simply that speed was the only chance of finding Teller, since anything that sank in a river the size of the Thames was instantly out of sight. Algae made the water opaque.

  Diving in as near to where he had gone as I could judge, I kicked downwards, arms wide. I was going faster than Teller, I had to be. I had a strong impression that the punt pole had knocked him out, that he was on a slow one-way trip to the bottom.

  About eight feet down my fingers hooked almost immediately into cloth. Even with my eyes open I could see nothing and with my right hand I felt for his face while I tried to kick us both to the surface. I found his face, clamped his nose between my fingers and the heel of my hand on his mouth, and turned him so that I held his head against my chest. He didn’t struggle; couldn’t feel.

  From that point on the rescue operation failed to go as per scheduled. I couldn’t get back to the surface. The current underneath was much stronger, very cold, sweeping us downwards, clinging round our bodies with irresistible force. I thought; we’ll hit the weir and be pinned there down deep, and that will be that. For a treacherous instant I didn’t even care. It would solve all my problems. It was what I wanted. But not really with another life in my arms, for which I was literally the only hope.

  My chest began hurting with the lack of air. When we hit the weir, I thought, I would climb my way up it. Its face might not be slippery smooth. It had to be possible …