Field of Thirteen Read online

  Oliver invited Joanie Vine to take part in a televised tribute to her mother. Joanie’s hysterics nearly choked her. Peregrine tried for an injunction to stop Oliver’s project but could offer no credible grounds. ‘The Life of Mona’ filled the glossy magazine that reprinted Joanie’s ball-gowns and put them alongside views of the dingy two-up two-down. Peregrine suffered sniggers, albeit hidden behind hands.

  Every seat of the great Olympia stadium was filled for the first of the five afternoon performances. People sat illegally in the aisles. News had got around. All ten shows were sold out.

  Oliver’s voice in silent darkness announced that this performance, given free, was dedicated to the memory of his top-flight groom, Mona Watkins, a homespun Welshwoman from the valleys. Her care and understanding of what it took to prepare a European-class horse had been without equal.

  ‘I owe her,’ he said, ‘so ladies and gentlemen, here, in her memory is her friend, my wife Cassidy Lovelace Ward, with a Song for Mona.’

  The darkness suddenly vibrated with music from vast speakers pouring out a huge wattage of sound from high up round the arena, delivering the sweet clear theme carefully taught in advance so that the song was known, recognised, hummable.

  A single spotlight flashed on, slicing through the tingling air, lighting with throbbing dramatic impact the big grey horse standing motionless in the entrance to the ring. Astride the horse’s back sat Cassidy, dressed in silver leather, Western style, with glittering fringes, silver gauntleted gloves and a white ten-gallon hat. The rig that had galvanised the Mississippi brought spontaneous cheering to London.

  Cassidy and the grey horse circled the ring with banks of rainbow lights making stained-glass window colours on the silver and white, with prisms flashing on the sparkling fringes. Every few paces the grey circled fast on his hocks, standing tall with Cassidy clinging, clearly enjoying himself, the old show-jumper in a starring role; and the crowd, who knew who he was from a page-long introduction in the programme, laughed and cheered him until, back at the start, Cassidy swept off her outsized hat and shook free her silver-blonde curls.

  Oliver had worried slightly that the glitz that had triumphed in Tennessee might strike too brassy a note for a horse-show audience in England, but he needn’t have feared. Cassidy’s people were expert professionals – musicians, lighting crew, electricians, all, and they’d promised – and were delivering – an unforgettable excitement.

  At the end of the multicoloured circuit Cassidy rode to the centre of the ring and slid off the horse’s back, handing the reins to Oliver, who waited there in the dark. Then in one of the transformations that regularly brought gasps and a stamping of feet, Cassidy shed her riding gear in a shimmering heap and, revealed in a white, full-skirted, crystal-embroidered evening dress, climbed shallow steps to a platform where a microphone waited.

  Cassidy took the microphone and sang the Song for Mona with Mona in her mind, a song of a woman who longed for the love she remembered but had lost. Cassidy sang not of Mona by name, but of all lonely people searching for a warm new heart. Cassidy sang the song twice: once quietly, murmuring, plaintive, and then with full voice, glorious, flooding all Olympia, beseeching and arousing the Fates, calling on hope.

  She sustained the last long true soaring note until it seemed her lungs must burst, then from one second to the next the barrage of super-sound from the speakers fell silent. The white spotlights folded their beams, as Cassidy, shedding the glittering dress in the lights’ dying rays, left just a heap of glimmer while she slipped out of the ring in black.

  She returned briefly to wild applause in a black cloak with a sparkling lining. She waved in thanks with raised arms, and was gone. The old magic that had worked so well in Nashville had spread its wings and flown free at Olympia.

  Sentimental, some critics complained; but sentimental songs reached the hearts of millions, and so it was with Cassidy’s Song for Mona. By the end of the ten live performances at Olympia, the long-lasting melody was spilling from CDs and radios everywhere on its way to classic status.

  Joanie and Peregrine, with gritted teeth, watched the cheering show the evening it was televised. Such a pity, the studio announcer deplored with regret, that top auctioneer Peregrine Vine and his socialite wife Joan, who was Mona Watkins’ only daughter, had been unable to attend any of the performances.

  Joanie fell speechless with bitter chagrin. Peregrine wondered if it were possible to start again in yet another town: but the Song for Mona was sung everywhere, from concerts to karaoke. Peregrine looked at his beautiful selfish wife and wondered if she were worth it.

  A while after the glories of Olympia, Oliver and Cassidy cooked in their kitchen and ate without quarrelling. Although they were used to Mona’s absence, her spirit hovered around, it seemed to them, telling them to break eggs, not plates.

  Probate completed, Cassidy had duly given all Mona’s ‘bits and pieces’ (including the pearl brooch and the bicycle) to the hair-curlered neighbour who lovingly took them in, and it was only occasionally that either of the Bolingbrokes wondered what Joanie had so urgently sought on the morning her mother died.

  ‘You know,’ Cassidy said over the mushroom omelettes, ‘that old box Mona brought with pictures of Joanie in her ball-gowns… there were pictures of us in it, too.’

  Oliver lifted down the neglected box from a high shelf on a dresser and emptied it onto the table.

  Under the clippings of Joanie and themselves they found two folded pages of a Welsh country town newspaper, now extinct; old, fragile and brown round the edges.

  Oliver cautiously unfolded them, careful not to tear them, and both of the Bolingbrokes learned what Joanie Vine had been frantic to conceal.

  Centre front page on the first sheet was a picture of a group of three people: a younger Mona, a child recognisably Joanie, and a short unsmiling man. Alongside, a headline read: ‘Local man pleads guilty to child rape, sentenced to ten years.’

  Idris Watkins, stable-lad, husband of Mona, and father of Joan, confessed to the crime and has been sentenced without trial.

  The second brown-edged fragile page ran a story but no pictures:

  ‘Stable-lad killed in a fall on gallops.

  Idris Watkins, recently freed after serving six years of a ten-year sentence for child rape, died of a fractured skull, Thursday. He leaves a widow, Mona, and a daughter, Joan, 13.’

  After a silence, Oliver said ‘It explains a lot, I suppose.’

  He made photocopies of the old pages and sent the copies to Joanie.

  Cassidy, nodding, said, ‘Let her worry that we’ll publish her secret and ruin her social-climbing life.’

  They didn’t publish, though.

  Mona wouldn’t have liked it.

  BRIGHT WHITE STAR

  A country magazine, Cheshire Life, sent me a letter.

  ‘Write us a story,’ they said.

  I asked, ‘What about?’

  ‘About three thousand words,’ they replied.

  It was winter at the time, and by car I drove frequently up and down a hill where a tramp had once lived in a hollow. So I wrote about a tramp in winter.

  This story describes how to steal a horse from an auction.

  Don’t do it!

  The tramp was cold to his bones.

  The air and the ground stood at freezing point, and a heavy layer of yellowish snow-cloud hung like a threat over the afternoon. Black boughs of stark trees creaked in the wind, and the rutted fields lay bare and dark, waiting.

  Shambling down a narrow road the tramp was cold and hungry and filled with an intense unfocused resentment. By this stage of the winter he liked to be deep in a nest, sheltered in a hollow in the ground in the lee of a wooded hill, roofed by a lavish thatch of criss-crossed branches and thick brown cardboard, lying on a warm comfortable bed of dry dead leaves and polythene sheeting and sacks. He liked to have his wood-fire burning all day near his threshold, with the ashes glowing red all night. He liked to live snug
through the frost and the snows and the driving rains, and kick the whole thing to pieces when he moved on in the spring.

  What he did not like was having someone else kick his nest in as they had done on that morning. Three of them – the man who owned the land where he had settled, and two people from the local council, a hard-eyed middle-aged man and a prim bossy woman with a clip-board. Their loud voices, their stupid remarks, echoed and fed the anger in his mind.

  ‘I’ve told him every day for the past week that I want him off my land…’

  ‘This structure constitutes a permanent dwelling and as such requires planning permission…’

  ‘In the town there is a hostel where vagrants can sleep in a dormitory on a one-night basis…’

  The council man had begun pulling his branch-and-cardboard roof to pieces, and the other two had joined in. He saw from their faces that his smell offended them, and he saw from the finicky picking of their fingers that they didn’t like touching what he had touched. The slow burning anger had begun in his mind then, but as he detested contacts with other humans and never spoke if he could avoid it, he had merely turned and walked away, shapeless in his bundled clothes, shuffling in his too-big boots, bearded and resentful and smelly.

  He had walked six miles since then, slowly.

  He needed food and somewhere to shelter from the coming snow. He needed a nest, and fire. His rage against mankind deepened with every leaden step.

  In London on the same afternoon the Director of the Racecourse Security Service looked morosely out of the Jockey Club office window at the traffic in Portman Square. Behind him in the comfortable brightly-lit room Mr Melbourne Smith was complaining, as he had done either in person or on the telephone every day for the past two weeks, about the lax security at the November Yearling Sales, from which someone had craftily stolen his just-bought and extremely expensive colt.

  Melbourne Smith poured so much money into the British bloodstock industry that his complaints could not be ignored, even though strictly it was a matter for the police and the auctioneers, not the Jockey Club. Melbourne Smith, fifty, forceful, a wheeler-dealer to his fingertips, was as much outraged that anyone should dare to steal from him as by the theft itself.

  ‘They just walked out with him,’ he said for the fiftieth injured time. ‘And you’ve done bloody little to get him back.’

  The Director sighed. He disliked Melbourne Smith intensely but hid it well under a bluffly hearty manner. The Director, with a subtle and inventive mind behind a moustached and tweeded exterior, wondered just what else he could do, short of praying for a miracle, to find the missing colt.

  The trail, for a start, was cold, as Melbourne Smith had not discovered his loss for more than a month after the sales. He had bought, as usual, about ten of the leggy young animals who would race the following summer as two-year-olds. He had arranged to have them transported, as usual, to the trainer who would break them in, handle them and saddle them and ride them and accustom them to going in and out of starting stalls. And, as usual, in due course he had gone to see how his purchases were making out.

  He had been puzzled at first by what should have been his prize colt. Puzzled, and then suspicious, and then explodingly furious. He had paid a fortune for a well-grown aristocratic yearling and he had received instead a spindly no-hoper with a weak neck. Between his purchase and the changeling there were only two points in common: the body colour, a dark bay, and the large white star on the forehead.

  ‘It’s a scandal,’ Melbourne Smith said. ‘I’ll spend my money in France, next year.’

  The Director reflected that the theft of racehorses was exceedingly rare and that the security at the sales was more a matter of behind-the-scenes paperwork than of bars and bolts: and normally the paperwork was security enough.

  Every thoroughbred foal had to be registered soon after birth, the certificate not only giving parentage and birth date but also skin colours and markings and where exactly on the body the hairs of the coat grew in whorls. The markings and whorls had to be carefully drawn onto regulation outline pictures of side, front and rear views of horses.

  Later on, when the foal was grown up and ready to race, a second chart of his markings had to be filled in by a veterinary surgeon and sent off to the registry. If the foal certificate and the later certificate matched, all was well. If they didn’t, the horse was barred from racing.

  The foal certificate of the yearling Melbourne Smith had bought, definitely did not match the changeling he had been landed with. The colour and the white star were right, but the whorls of hair were all in different places.

  The Director had set his assistant the mammoth task of checking the changeling against the 20,000 foal certificates in that year’s registry, but so far none of them had matched. The Director thought that the changeling, whom he had seen, was very likely a half-bred hunter, which hadn’t been eligible for Stud Book entry in the first place, and of whom there would be no official record anywhere.

  ‘That gate check is a laugh,’ grumbled Melbourne Smith.

  The men on the sales paddock gates, the Director admitted to himself, were there only to check that there was an auctioneers’ exit chit for each horse, and that the horse bore the same number, stuck onto its rump, as was written on the chit. They were not there to check whether anyone had sneakily changed the numbers on the horses. They were not at fault because the number 189 which had walked out accompanied by chit 189 had been a weedy-necked no-hoper, and not Melbourne Smith’s expensive aristocrat. It was no good asking them (although the Director had) under exactly what number the expensive aristocrat had actually made his exit. They couldn’t possibly know, and they didn’t.

  The Director had discovered in some respects how the substitution had been made, and guessed the rest.

  At the sales, the horses up for auction were housed in stable blocks. Horse number I in the catalogue was allotted box number I and had number I stuck on his hip. Number 189 would be found in box 189 and have 189 on his hip. Coming and going along all the rows of boxes would be the customers, assessing and prodding and deciding whether or not to bid. As each horse was sold, its former owners returned it to its box and left it there, and from there the new owners would collect it. Sellers and buyers, in this way, quite often never met.

  The lad who had come with 189 had taken it from the sale ring back to its box, and left it there. Melbourne Smith’s lad had collected the horse from box 189 and sent it to the trainer, and it had been the changeling.

  The exchange, with so many horses and people on the move, could be (and had been) done without anyone noticing.

  The Director supposed that the thieves must have entered their changeling for the sales, and put a ridiculously high reserve on it, so that no one would buy it. He reckoned that the changeling must have been one of the unsold lots between numbers 1 and 188, but the auctioneers had looked blank at the thought of remembering one among so many, so long ago. They auctioned hundreds of horses every week. They didn’t enquire, they said, where the merchandise came from or where it went. They kept records of the horses that had found no takers, but presumed that their owners had taken them back.

  ‘And this publicity campaign of yours,’ sneered Melbourne Smith, ‘lot of hot air and no results.’

  The Director turned wearily away from the window and looked at the newspaper which lay open on his desk. In a week short of headlines the editors had welcomed the story he had persuasively fed them, and no reader could miss the ‘Where is he?’ pictures of the missing treasure. The tabloids had gone for the sob-stuff. The ‘serious’ dailies had reproduced the foal certificate itself. Television newscasters had broadcast both. Two days’ saturation coverage, however, had produced no results. His ‘phone at any time’ number lay silent.

  ‘You get him back,’ Melbourne Smith said furiously, finally leaving, ‘or I send all my horses to France.’

  The Director thought of his wife and children who were preparing for a party that e
vening and would greet his return with excited faces and smiling eyes. I’ll not think of that damned yearling for two days, he thought: and meanwhile he gave in and prayed intensely for his miracle.

  ‘What I need,’ he said aloud to his peacefully empty office, ‘is a white star. A bright white star, stationary in the sky, shining over a stable, saying, “Here I am. Come here to me. Come here and find me.”’

  God forgive me my blasphemy, he thought; and went home at four o’clock.

  In the country on that afternoon Jim and Vivi Turner spread out four newspapers on the kitchen table and studied them over mugs of tea.

  ‘They won’t find him, will they?’ Jim said.

  Vivi shook her head. ‘A bay with a white star… common as dirt.’

  Their minds wandered to the aristocratic yearling rugged up outside in their tumbledown twenty-box stable, but it was five weeks or more since they had stolen him, and time had given them a sense of safety.

  ‘And anyway,’ Vivi said, ‘these papers are two days old, and nothing’s happened.’

  Jim Turner nodded, reassured. He would never have brought it all off, he knew, without Vivi. It was she who had said that what they badly needed, to get him going as a trainer, was one really good horse. The sort, let’s face it (she said) that no one was going to send to a newly retired jump jockey who had never risen above middle-rank and who had been suspended twice for taking bribes.

  As Jim Turner would take a bribe any time anyone offered, the two suspensions had been mild. He himself wouldn’t have minded retiring to a job as a head lad in a big stable, where the chances for bribery grew like berries ripe for plucking. Vivi had wanted to be a trainer’s wife, not a head lad’s, and you had to hand it to her – the girl had brains.

  It was Vivi, with her sharp eyes, who had seen how they could steal a top yearling from the sales. It was Vivi, a proper little Lady Macbeth, who had egged Jim on when he faltered, who had herself engineered the exchange in box 189; she who had taken the aristocrat and Jim who had left the changeling.