Reflex Page 6
I suppose it was too much to hope that they would let me get away with it. Yet for three years they had run the Briggs horses honestly, so why not in future? And if they insisted on fraud, couldn’t they get some other poor young slob just starting his career, and put the pressure on him when they wanted a race lost? Foolish wishes, all of them. I’d put my job down at their feet like a football and at that moment they were probably kicking it out of the stadium.
It was ironic. I hadn’t known I was going to say what I had. It had just forced its own way out, like water through a new spring.
All those races I’d thrown away in the past, not liking it, but doing it . . . Why was it so different now? Why was the revulsion so strong now that I didn’t think I could do a Daylight again, even if to refuse meant virtually the end of being a jockey?
When had I changed . . . and how could it have happened without my noticing? I didn’t know. I just had a sense of having already traveled too far to turn back. Too far down a road where I didn’t want to go.
I went upstairs and read the three detectives’ reports on Amanda because it was better, on the whole, than thinking about Briggs and Harold.
Two of the reports had come from fairly large firms and one from a one-man outfit, and all three had spent a lot of ingenuity padding out very few results. Justifying their charges, no doubt. Copiously explaining what they had all spent so long not finding out: and all three, not surprisingly, had not found out approximately the same things.
None of them, for a start, could find any trace of her birth having been registered. They all expressed doubt and disbelief over this discovery, but to me it was no surprise at all. I had discovered that I myself was unregistered when I tried to get a passport, and the fuss had gone on for months.
I knew my name, my mother’s name, my birthdate, and that I’d been born in London. Officially, however, I didn’t exist. “But here I am,” I’d protested, and I’d been told, “Ah yes, but you don’t have a piece of paper to prove it, do you?” There had been affidavits by the ton and miles of red tape, and I’d missed the race I’d been offered in France by the time I got permission to go there.
Owing to my grandmother’s vagueness about when she had received her daughter’s letter, the detectives had all scoured Somerset House for records of Amanda Nore, aged between ten and twenty-five, possibly born in Sussex. In spite of the fairly unusual name, they had all completely failed.
I sucked my teeth, thinking that I could do better than that about her age.
She couldn’t have been born before I went to live with Duncan and Charlie, because I’d seen my mother fairly often before that, about five or six times a year, and often for a week at a time, and I would have known if she’d had a child. The people she left me with used to talk about her when they thought I wasn’t listening, and I gradually understood what I remembered their saying, though sometimes not for years afterwards; but none of them, ever, had hinted that she was pregnant.
That meant that I was at least twelve when Amanda was born; and consequently she couldn’t at present be older than eighteen.
At the other end of things she couldn’t possibly be as young as ten. My mother, I was sure, had died sometime between Christmas and my eighteenth birthday. She might have been desperate enough at that time to write to her own mother and send her the photograph. Amanda in the photograph had been three . . . so Amanda, if she was still alive, would be at least fifteen.
Sixteen or seventeen, most likely. Born during the three years when I hadn’t seen my mother at all, when I’d lived with Duncan and Charlie.
I went back to the reports . . .
All three detectives had been given the last known address of Caroline Nore, Amanda’s mother: Pine Woods Lodge, Mindle Bridge, Sussex. All three had trekked there “to make enquiries.”
Pine Woods Lodge, they rather plaintively reported, was not as the name might suggest a small private hotel complete with guest register going back umpteen years, forwarding addresses attached. Pine Woods Lodge was an old Georgian mansion gone to ruin and due to be demolished. There were trees growing in what had been the ballroom. Large sections had no roof.
It was owned by a family which had largely died out twenty-five years earlier, leaving distant heirs who had no wish and no money to keep the place up. They had let the house at first to various organizations (list attached, supplied by real estate agents) but more recently it had been inhabited by squatters and vagrants. The dilapidation was now so advanced that even such as they had moved out, and the five acres the house was built on were to come up for auction within three months: but as whoever bought the land was going to have to demolish the mansion, it was not expected to fetch much of a price.
I read through the list of tenants, none of whom had stayed long. A nursing home. A sisterhood of nuns. An artists’ commune. A boys’ youth club adventure project. A television film company. A musicians’ cooperative. Colleagues of Supreme Grace. The Confidential Mail Order Corporation.
One of the detectives, persevering, had investigated the tenants as far as he could, and had added unflattering comments.
Nursing home —— Euthanasia for all.
Closed by council.
Nuns —— Disbanded through bitchiness.
Artists —— Left disgusting murals.
Boys —— Broke everything still whole.
TV —— Needed a ruin to film.
Musicians —— Fused all the electricity.
Colleagues —— Religious nuts.
Mail order —— Perverts’ delights.
There were no dates attached to the tenancies, but presumably if the real estate agents could still furnish the list, they would have kept some other details. If I was right about when my mother had written her desperate letter, I should at least be able to find out which bunch of kooks she had been staying with.
If I wanted to, of course.
Sighing, I read on.
Copies of the photograph of Amanda Nore had been extensively displayed in public places (newsstands’ shop windows) in the vicinity of the small town of Mindle Bridge, but no one had come forward to identify either the child or the stable yard or the pony.
Advertisements had been inserted (accounts attached) in various periodicals and one national Sunday newspaper (for six weeks) stating that if Amanda Nore wished to hear something to her advantage she should write to Folk, Langley, Son and Folk, solicitors, of St. Albans, Herts.
One of the detectives, the one who had persisted with the tenants, had also enterprisingly questioned the Pony Club, but to no avail. They had never had a member called Amanda Nore. He had furthermore written to the British Show Jumping Association, with the same result.
A canvass of schools in a wide area around Mindle Bridge had produced no one called Amanda Nore on the registers, past or present.
She had not come into council care in Sussex. She was on no official list of any sort. No doctor or dentist had heard of her. She had not been confirmed, married, buried or cremated within the county.
The reports all came to the same conclusion: that she had been, or was being, brought up elsewhere (possibly under a different name), and was no longer interested in riding.
I shuffled the typed sheets together and returned them to the envelope. They had tried, one had to admit. They had also indicated their willingness to continue to search through each county in the land, if the considerable expenditure should be authorized; but they couldn’t in any way guarantee success.
Their collective fee must already have been fearful. The authorization, anyway, seemed not to have been forthcoming. I wondered sardonically if the old woman had thought of me to look for Amanda because it would cost so much less. A promise, a bribe . . . no foal, no fee.
I couldn’t understand her late interest in her long-ignored grandchildren. She’d had a son of her own, a boy my mother had called “my hateful little brother.” He would have been about ten when I was born, which made him now about forty,
presumably with children of his own.
Uncle. Cousins. Half-sister. Grandmother.
I didn’t want them. I didn’t want to know them or be drawn into their lives. I was in no way whatever going to look for Amanda.
I stood up with decision and went down to the kitchen to do something about cheese and eggs; and to stave off the thought of Harold a bit longer I fetched George Millace’s box of trash in from the car and opened it on the kitchen table, taking out the items and looking at them one by one.
On a closer inspection it didn’t seem to make much sense that he should have kept these particular odds and ends. They didn’t have the appearance of interesting or unique mistakes. Sorting my way through them I concluded with disappointment that it had been a waste of time after all to bring them home.
I picked up the folder which contained the dark print of a shadowy man sitting at a table and thought vaguely that it was odd to have bothered to put such an overexposed mess into a mount.
Shrugging, I slid the dark print out onto my hand . . . and it was then that I found George’s private pot of gold.
5
It was not, at first sight, very exciting.
Taped onto the back of the print there was an envelope made of the special sort of sulphur-free paper used by careful professionals for the long-term storage of developed film. Inside the envelope, a negative.
It was the negative from which the print had been made, but whereas the print was mostly black and elsewhere very dark grays, the negative itself was clear and sharp with many details and highlights.
I looked at the print and at the negative, side by side.
I had no quickening of the pulse. No suspicions, no theories, merely curiosity. As I also had the means and the time, I went back into the darkroom and made four five-by-four-inch prints, each at a different exposure, from one second to eight seconds.
Not even the longest exposure looked exactly like George’s dark print, so I started again with the most suitable exposure, six seconds, and left the photograph in the developer too long, until the sharp outlines first went dark and then mostly disappeared, leaving a gray man sitting at a table against blackness. At that point I lifted the paper from the tray of developer and transferred it to the one containing fixer; and what I had then was another print almost exactly like George’s.
Leaving a print too long in the developing fluid had to be one of the commonest mistakes on earth. If George’s attention had been distracted and he’d left a print too long in developer, he’d simply have cursed and thrown the ruin away. Why, then had he kept it? And mounted it? And stuck the clear sharp negative onto the back?
It wasn’t until I switched on a bright light and looked more closely at the best of the four original exposures I’d made that I understood why; and I stood utterly still in the darkroom, taking in the implications in disbelief.
With something approaching a whistle I finally moved. I switched off the white light, and, when my eyes had accustomed themselves again to the red safelight, I made another print, four times as large, and on a higher contrast grade of paper, to get as clear a result as I could possibly manage. Then I switched on the white light again and fed the finished print through the drier.
What I’d got was a picture of two people talking together who had sworn on oath in a court of law that they had never met.
There wasn’t the slightest possibility of a mistake. The shadowy man was now revealed as a customer sitting at a table outside a cafe somewhere in France. He had not been the real focus of the photograph, just an accidental diner with a plate and a glass by his hand. The cafe had a name: Le Lapin d’Argent. There were advertisements for beer and lottery tickets in its half-curtained window, and a waiter in an apron standing in the doorway. A woman some way inside was sitting at a cash desk in front of a mirror, looking out to the street. The detail was sharp throughout, with remarkable depth of focus. George Millace at his usual expert best.
Sitting together at a table outside the cafe window were two men, both of them facing the camera but with their heads turned towards each other, unmistakably deep in conversation. A wine glass stood in front of each of them, half full, with a bottle to one side. There were coffee cups also, and an ashtray with a half-smoked cigar balanced on the edge. All the signs of a lengthy meeting.
Both men had been involved in an affair which had shaken the racing world like a thunderclap eighteen months earlier. Elgin Yaxley, the one on the left of the photograph, had owned five expensive steeplechasers which had been trained in Lambourn. At the end of the ’chasing season all five had been sent to a local farmer for a few weeks’ summer break out at grass; and then, out in the fields, they had all been shot dead with a rifle. Terence O’Tree, the man on the right in the photograph, had shot them.
Some smart police work (aided by two young boys out at dawn when their parents thought them safe in bed) had tracked down and identified O’Tree, and brought him to court.
All five horses had been heavily insured. The insurance company, screeching with disbelief, had tried their damnedest to prove that Yaxley himself had hired O’Tree to do the killing, but both men had consistently denied it, and no link between them had been found.
O’Tree, saying he’d shot the horses just because he’d felt like it (“For a bit o’ target practice, like, Your Honor, and how was I to know they was valuable racehorses?”) had been sent to jail for nine months with a recommendation that he should see a psychiatrist.
Elgin Yaxley, indignantly proclaiming his virtue and threatening to sue the insurance company for defamation of character if they didn’t instantly pay up, had wrung out of them the whole amount and had then faded out of the racing scene.
The insurance company, I thought, would surely have paid George Millace a great deal for his photograph, if they had known it existed. Probably ten per cent of what they would not have had to pay Yaxley. I couldn’t remember the exact sums, but I knew the total insured value of the five horses had been close to a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It had been, in fact, the very size of the pay-out which had infuriated the insurers into suspecting fraud.
So why hadn’t George asked for a reward . . . and why had he so carefully hidden the negative . . . and why had his house been burgled three times? For all that I’d never liked George Millace, it was the obvious answer to those questions that I disliked even more.
In the morning I walked up to the stables and rode out at early exercise as usual. Harold behaved in his normal blustery fashion, raising his voice over the scouring note of the November wind. The lads scowled and sulked as the vocal lash landed, and one or two, I reckoned, would be gone by the week’s end. When lads left any stable nowadays they tended simply not to turn up one morning. They would sidle off to some other stable and the first news their old masters would have would be requests for references from the new. Notice, for many of the modern breed of lads, was something they never gave. Notice led to arguments and aggravation, and who wanted that, man, when ducking out was so much easier? The lad population washed in and out of British stables like a swirling endless river, with long-stayers being an exception rather than the rule.
“Breakfast,” Harold bellowed at me at one point. “Be there.”
I nodded. I usually went home for breakfast even if I was riding out second lot, which I did only on nonracing days, and not always even then. Breakfast, in Harold’s wife’s view, consisted of a huge fryup accompanied by mountains of toast served on the big kitchen table with generosity and warmth. It always smelled and looked delicious, and I always fell.
“Another sausage, Philip?” Harold’s wife said, lavishly shoveling straight from the pan. “And some hot fried potatoes?”
“You’re destroying him, woman,” Harold said, reaching for the butter.
Harold’s wife smiled at me in her special way. She thought I was too thin; and she thought I needed a wife. She told me so, often. I disagreed with her on both counts, but I dare say she was right.
“No.”
“There’s Pamphlet at Kempton on Wednesday,” he said. “In the two-mile hurdle; and Tishoo and Sharpener on Thursday . . .”
He talked about the races for some time, munching vigorously all the while, so that I got my riding instructions out of the side of his mouth accompanied by crumbs.
“Understood?” he said finally.
“Yes.”
It appeared that after all I had not been given the instant sack, and for that I was relieved and grateful, but it was clear all the same that the precipice wasn’t all that far away.
Harold glanced across the big kitchen to where his wife was stacking things in the dishwasher and said, “Victor doesn’t like your attitude.”
I didn’t answer.
Harold said, “The first thing one demands from a jockey is loyalty.”
That was rubbish. The first thing one demanded from a jockey was value for money.
“My Fuehrer, right or wrong?” I said.
“Owners won’t stand for jockeys’ passing moral judgments on them.”
“Owners shouldn’t defraud the public, then.”
“Have you finished eating?” he demanded.
I sighed regretfully. “Yes.”
“Then come into my office.”
He led the way into the russet-colored room, which was filled with chill bluish Monday morning light and had no fire in the grate.
“Shut the door,” he said.
I shut it.
“You’ll have to choose, Philip,” he said. He stood by the fireplace with one foot on the hearth, a big man in riding clothes, smelling of horses and fresh air and fried eggs.
I waited noncommittally.
“Victor will eventually want another race lost. Not at once, I grant you, because it would be too obvious. But in the end, yes. He says if you really mean you won’t do it, we’ll have to get someone else.”