Break In Page 8

  The preserving of Maynard’s public good manners was very much my concern.

  He went as he’d come, private manners non-existent, walking out of the kitchen without a farewell. We listened to the firm footsteps recede and to the distant slam of a car door, and his engine starting.

  ‘Do you realise,’ Bobby said to me slowly, ‘that if he’s made a Steward and you’re still a jockey… you’d be horribly vulnerable…?’

  ‘Mm,’ I said dryly. ‘Very nasty indeed.’

  SIX

  I rode at Plumpton. A typical day of four rides; one win, one third, one nowhere, one very nearly last, with owner reactions to match.

  Far more people than in the previous week seemed to have seen the pieces in Intimate Details, and I spent a good deal of the day assuring all who asked that, no, Bobby wasn’t bankrupt, and yes, I was certain, and no, I couldn’t say for sure what Bobby’s father’s intentions were in any respect.

  There were the usual small scattering of racing journalists at the meeting, but no one from the Flag. The racing column in the Flag was most often the work of a sharp young man who wrote disparagingly about what was to come and critically of what was past, and who was avoided whenever possible by all jockeys. On that day, however, I would have been satisfied enough to see him, but had to make do with his equivalent on the Towncrier.

  You want to know about the Flag? Whatever for? Disgusting rag.’ Large and benevolent, Bunty Ireland, the Towncrier’s man, spoke with the complacency of a more respectful rag behind him. ‘But if you want to know if the parts about your brother-in-law are the work of our sharp-nosed colleague, then no, I’m pretty sure they’re not. He was at Doncaster on Friday and he didn’t know at first what was in the gossip column. Slightly put out, he was, when he found out. He said the gossip people hadn’t consulted him and they should have done. He was his usual endearing sunny self.’ Bunty Ireland beamed. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Who runs Intimate Details?’

  ‘Can’t help you there, old son. I’ll ask around, if you like. But it won’t do Bobby much good, you can’t just go and bop us fellows on the nose, however great the provocation.’

  Never be too sure, I thought.

  I cadged a lift home to Lambourn, ate some lobster and an orange, and thought about telephoning Holly.

  Someone, it was certain, would be listening in on the line. Someone had probably been listening in on that line for quite a long period. Long enough to make a list of people Bobby dealt with in Newmarket, long enough to know where he banked, long enough to know how things stood between him and his father. The owner who had telephoned to say he couldn’t afford to pay fifty thousand for his yearling must have been listened to, and so must Bobby’s unsuccessful attempts to sell it to anyone else.

  Someone must indeed have listened also to Bobby’s racing plans and to his many conversations with owners and jockeys. There was no trainer alive who wouldn’t in the fullness of time have passed unflattering or downright slanderous opinions about jockeys to owners and vice versa, but nothing of that nature had been used in the paper. No ‘inside’ revelations of betting coups. No innuendoes about regulations broken or crimes committed, such as giving a horse an easy race, a common practice for which one could be fined or even have one’s licence suspended if found out. The target hadn’t in fact been Bobby’s training secrets, but his financial status alone.

  Why?

  Too many whys.

  I pressed the necessary buttons and the bell rang only once at the other end.

  ‘Kit?’ Holly said immediately.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you try earlier?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘That’s all right, then. We’ve left the receiver off for most of the day, the calls were so awful. But it just occurred to me that you might be trying to ring, so I put it back less than a minute ago…’ Her voice faded away as she realised what she was saying. ‘We’ve done it again,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She must have heard the smile in my voice, because it was in hers also when she replied.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking… I’ve got to go out, now. I’ll ring you later, OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye,’ I said, and disconnected. I also waited, wondering where she would go. Where she’d planned. She called back within fifteen minutes and it was unexpectedly from the feed-merchant’s office. The feed-merchant, it appeared, had let her in, switched on the heater, and left her in private.

  ‘He’s been terribly good,’ Holly explained. ‘I think he’d been feeling a bit guilty, though he’s no need to really. Anyway I told him we thought our telephone might be bugged and he said he thought it highly possible, and I could come in here and use the phone whenever I liked. I said I’d like to ring you this evening… and anyway, here I am.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘How are things going?’

  ‘We spent the whole day doing those letters and we’re frankly bushed. Bobby’s asleep on his feet. Everyone took your cheque without question and gave us paid-in-full letters, and we photocopied those and also the rebuttal letter we all wrote before you went to Plumpton, and by the time we’d finished putting everything in the envelopes the last post was just going, and in fact the postman actually waited at the post office while I stuck on the last ten stamps, and I saw him take the special delivery one to the editor of the Flag, so with luck, with luck, it will be all over.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope so.’

  ‘Oh, and Bobby went to see the solicitor, who said he would write a strong letter of protest to the editor and demand a retraction in the paper, like Lord Vaughnley told you, but Bobby says he isn’t sure that that letter will have gone today, he says the solicitor didn’t seem to think it was frantically urgent.’

  ‘Tell Bobby to get a different solicitor.’

  Holly almost laughed. ‘Yes. OK.’

  We made plans and times for me to talk to her again the next evening after I got home from Devon, but it was at eight in the morning when my telephone rang and her voice came sharp and distressed into my ear.

  ‘It’s Holly,’ she said. ‘Get a copy of the Flag. I’ll be along where I was last night. OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She disconnected without another word, and I drove to the village for the paper.

  The column would have been printed during the past night. The special delivery envelope wouldn’t reach the editor until later in the present morning. I thought in hindsight it would have been better for Bobby to have driven the letter to London and specially delivered it himself, which might just possibly have halted the campaign.

  The third broadside read:

  Don’t pity Robertson (Bobby) Allardeck (32), strapped for cash but still trying to train racehorses in Newmarket. It’s the small trader who suffers when fat cats run up unpaid bills.

  In his luxury home yesterday Bobby refused to comment on reports he came to blows with the owner of one of the horses in the stable, preventing the owner taking his horse away by force. ‘I deny everything,’ Bobby fumed.

  Meanwhile Daddy Maynard (’Moneybags’) Allardeck (50) goes on record as prize skinflint of the month. ‘My son won’t get a penny in aid from me,’ he intones piously. ‘He doesn’t deserve it.’

  Instead Moneybags lavishes ostentatious hand-outs on good deserving charities dear to the Government’s heart. Can knighthoods be bought nowadays? Of course not!

  Bobby wails that while Daddy lashes out the loot on the main chance, he (Bobby) gets threatening letters from Daddy’s lawyers demanding repayment of a fourteen-year-old loan. Seems Moneybags advanced a small sum for 18-year-old Bobby to buy a banger on leaving school. With the wheels a long-ago memory on the scrapheap, Daddy wants his money back. Bobby’s opinion of Daddy? ‘Ruthless swine.’

  Can stingy Maynard be extorting interest on top?

  Watch this space.

&
nbsp; Thoughtfully I got the feed-merchant’s number from directory enquiries and pressed the buttons: Holly was waiting at the other end.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she said miserably. ‘They’re such pigs. All those quotes… they just made them up.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you could bear to put together another batch of those letters you sent yesterday, it might do some good to send them to the editors of the other national newspapers, and to the Sporting Life. None of them likes the Flag. A spot of ridicule from its rivals might make the Flag shut up.’

  ‘Might,’ Holly said, unconvinced.

  ‘Doing everything one can think of is better than doing nothing,’ I said. ‘You never know which pellet might kill the bird when you loose off the shot.’

  ‘Poetic,’ Holly said sardonically. ‘All right. We’ll try.’

  ‘And what about the solicitor?’ I asked.

  ‘Bobby says he’ll find a better one today. Not local. In a London firm. High powered.’

  ‘Some of his owners may know who’s best,’ I said. ‘If not, I could get him a name from one of the people I ride for.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘But do you know something?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not so sure that Maynard was very far wrong. All this aggro is aimed as much at him as at Bobby.’

  ‘Yes,’ Holly said slowly. ‘When we read today’s bit of dirt, that’s what Bobby thought too.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind betting,’ I said, ‘that a fair few copies of Intimate Details, episodes one, two and three, will find their way to the attention of the Honours’ Secretary in Downing Street. And that this was chiefly what was at the bottom of Maynard’s anger yesterday. If Maynard is really being considered for a knighthood, Intimate Details could have put the lid on his chances, at least for just now.’

  ‘Do you think it would? Just a few words in a paper?’

  ‘You never know. The whole Honours thing is so sensitive. Anyway it’s about now that they send out those ultra-secret letters asking Mr Bloggs if he would accept a medal if invited. They’ll be drawing up the New Year’s Honours’ List at this moment. And the sixty-four dollar question is, if you were the Honours’ Secretary drawing up a list for the Prime Minister’s approval, would you put Maynard on it?’

  ‘But we don’t know that anything like that is happening.’

  ‘No, we sure don’t.’

  ‘It’s probably just the Flag being its typically vicious, mean, destructive self.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘You know how nasty the Press can be, if they want to. And the Flag seems to want to, all the time, as a matter of policy.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘But you don’t think so?’

  ‘Well… It would make more sense if we could see a purpose behind these attacks, and stopping Maynard getting a knighthood would be a purpose. But why they’d want to stop it, and how they got to hear of it… hell alone knows.’

  ‘They didn’t hear about any knighthood from our telephone,’ Holly said positively. ‘So perhaps they’re just making it up.’

  ‘Everything else in those stories is founded on things that have happened or been said,’ I pointed out. ‘They’ve taken the truth and distorted it. Shall I write to the Honours’ Secretary and ask if Maynard’s on his provisional list?’

  ‘Yes, yes, funny joke.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘How did Bobby get on with the telephone people?’

  They said they would look into it. They said telephone tapping is illegal as of 1985. They didn’t send anyone here yesterday looking for bugs. They said something about checking our exchange.’

  ‘The exchange? I didn’t know people could tap into an exchange.’

  ‘Well, apparently they can.’

  ‘So no actual bugs?’

  ‘We told them we couldn’t find any and they said we probably didn’t know where to look.’

  ‘Well, at least they’re paying attention.’

  ‘They said a lot of people think they’re being bugged when they aren’t,’ Holly said. ‘All the same, they did say they would look.’

  ‘Keep them up to it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll ring you this evening when I get back from Devon,’ I said. ‘If I don’t get back… I’ll ring sometime.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘Always do,’ I said automatically; and both she and I knew it was impossible. If a steeplechase jockey took too much care of himself, he didn’t win races, and there were days occasionally when one couldn’t drive oneself home. I was superstitious to the extent of not making binding commitments for the evenings of race-days, and like most other jump jockeys accepted invitations with words like ‘If I can’ and ‘With luck’.

  I drove the two hours to the Devon and Exeter meeting with my mind more on Holly and Bobby and Maynard than on the work ahead. None of the five horses I was due to ride posed the problems of North Face, and I’d ridden all of them often enough to know their little quirks and their capabilities. All I had to do was help them turn in the best they could do on the day.

  The Devon and Exeter racecourse lay on the top of Halden Moor, a majestic sweep of bare countryside with the winds blowing vigorously from the Channel to the Atlantic. The track itself, with its long circuit of almost two miles, stretched away as a green undulating ribbon between oceans of scrub and heather, its far deserted curves as private a place as one could imagine for contest of horse and man.

  Unfashionable in Ascot terms, distant geographically, drawing comparatively small crowds, it was still one of my favourite courses; well run, well kept, with welcoming locals, nice people.

  The princess liked to go there because friends of hers maintained one of the few private boxes, friends who had a house down by a Devon beach and who invited her to stay regularly for the meetings.

  She was there, lunched, fur-coated and discreetly excited, in good time for the first race, accompanied in the parade ring by a small bunch of the friends. Three friends, to be exact. The couple she stayed with, and a young woman.

  The princess made introductions. ‘Kit… you know Mr and Mrs Inscombe…’ We shook hands.’… And my niece. Have you met my niece, Danielle?’

  No, I hadn’t. I shook the niece’s hand.

  ‘Danielle de Brescou,’ the niece said. ‘Hi. How’re you doing?’ And in spite of her name she was not French but audibly American.

  I took in briefly the white wool short coat, the black trousers, the wide band of what looked like flowered chintz holding back a lot of dark hair. I got in return a cool look of assessment; half interest, half judgment deferred, topped by a bright smile of no depth.

  ‘What shall we expect?’ the princess asked. ‘Will Bernina win?’

  Wykeham, naturally, had not made the journey to Devon. Moreover he had been vague when I’d talked to him on the telephone, seeming almost unclear as to Bernina’s identity, let alone her state of readiness, and it had been Dusty, when I’d handed him my saddle to put on to the mare before the race, who had told me she was ‘jumping out of her skin and acting up something chronic’.

  ‘She’s fit and ready,’ I said to the princess.

  ‘And Wykeham’s riding instructions?’ Mr Inscombe enquired genially. ‘What are those?’

  Wykeham’s instructions to me were zero, as they had been for several years. I said diplomatically, ‘Stay handy in fourth place or thereabouts and kick for home at the second last hurdle.’

  Inscombe nodded benevolent approval and I caught the ghost of a grin from the princess, who knew quite well that Wykeham’s instructions, if any, would have taken the form of ‘Win if you can’, an uncomplicated declaration of honesty by no means universal among trainers.

  Wykeham produced his horses fighting fit from a mixture of instinct, inherited wisdom, and loving them individually as athletes and children. He knew how to bring them to a pea
k and understood their moods and preferences, and if nowadays he found the actual races less interesting than the preparation, he was still, just, one of the greats.

  I had been his retained jockey for the whole of the main part of my career and he frequently called me by the name of my predecessor. He quite often told me I would be riding horses long dead. ‘Polonium in the big race at Sandown,’ he would say, and, mystified, I would ask who owned the horse as I’d never heard of it. ‘Polonium? Don’t be stupid. Big chestnut. Likes mints. You won on him last week.’ ‘Oh… Pepperoni?’ ‘What? Yes, Pepperoni, of course, that’s what I said. Big race at Sandown.’

  He was almost as old as my grandfather, and gradually, through their eyes, I was coming to see the whole of racing is a sort of stream that rolled onwards through time, the new generations rising and the old floating slowly away. Racing had a longer history than almost any other sport and changed less, and sometimes I had a powerful feeling of repeating in my own person the experience of generations of jockeys before me and of being a transient speck in a passing pageant; vivid today, talked about, feted, but gone tomorrow, a memory fading into a footnote, until no one alive had seen me race or cared a damn whether I’d won or lost.

  Dead humbling, the whole thing.

  Bernina, named after the mountain to the south of St Moritz, had by four years old produced none of the grandeur of the Alps, and to my mind was never going to. She could, however, turn in a respectable performance in moderate company, which was all she was faced with on that occasion, and I hoped very much to win on her, as much for the princess’s sake as my own. I understood very well that she liked to be able to please the various hosts around the country who offered her multiple invitations, and was always slightly anxious for her horses to do well where she felt they might contribute to her overnight bread and butter. I thought that if people like the Inscombes didn’t enjoy her company for its own sake they wouldn’t keep on asking her to stay. The princess’s inner insecurities were sometimes astonishing.

  Bernina, without any of the foregoing complications of intent, took me out of the parade ring and down to the start in her best immoderate fashion which included a display of extravagant head-shaking and some sideways dancing on her toes. These preliminaries were a good sign: on her off days she went docilely to the starting gate, left it without enthusiasm and took her time about finishing. Last time out she’d had me hauled in front of the Stewards and fined for not trying hard enough to win, and I’d said they should have understood that a horse that doesn’t want to race won’t race; and that mares have dull days like anyone else. They listened, unimpressed. Pay the fine, they said.