Proof by Dick Francis
‘Hair?’
‘Urn… light brown, I suppose. Not blond, not black.’
‘Age?’
I pondered, looking again at the patient questioner. ‘Young. Small. Four, I should think.’
‘Why are you so definite?’
‘I’m not… his head was still big in proportion to his body.’
Wilson’s eyes glimmered deeply. ‘What sort of dog?’ he said.
I stared vaguely once more into the distance, seeing the child on the hill. ‘A whippet,’ I said.
‘On a leash?’
‘No… running and turning back towards the boy.’
‘What sort of shoes did the boy have?’
‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I only saw him for a couple of seconds.’
His mouth twitched. He looked down at his hands and then up again. ‘No one else?’
‘No.’
‘How about the Sheik’s chauffeur?’
I shook my head. ‘He might have been sitting in the car, but one couldn’t tell. It had tinted windows, as you saw.’
He stirred and said thank you and began to get to his feet.
‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘someone stole three cases of champagne and some other bottles out of my van sometime after the accident. I need to report the theft to the police before I claim insurance… May I report it to you?’
He gave me a smile. ‘I will note that you have reported it.’
‘Thanks.’
He held his hand out to me over the counter and I shook it. ‘It’s I who thank you, Mr Beach,’ he said.
‘I haven’t been much help.’
He smiled his small uncommunicative smile, nodded benignly, and went away.
Good grief, I thought inconsequentially, watching his hunched departing back, one hundred and fifty goblets were lying in splinters in the Hawthorns’ back garden, and it was all very well talking of insurance, I was due to supply those very glasses to the Thames Ladies Christmas Charities fund-raising wine and cheese party on the following day, Tuesday, which I had forgotten clean about.
Tentatively I rang the Hawthorns’ number, not wanting to overload Flora but to ask all the same how many glasses if any remained intact, and I got not Flora but an answering machine with Jimmy’s voice, loud, healthy and languid, inviting me to leave my name, number, and message.
I complied, wondering how Jimmy was doing in intensive care, and when Mrs Palissey came back I took Brian with me to the wholesalers, where he helped me shift umpteen cases from the stores onto trolleys, and from those trolleys to other trolleys at the pay desk, for rolling out to the van, and from the second trolleys into the van, and, back at the shop, from the van into the storeroom. My own muscles, after roughly twelve years of such exercise, would have rivalled a fork-lift truck, and Brian’s, too, were coming along nicely. He grinned while he worked. He enjoyed lifting the cases. Two-at-a-time he had begun to scorn; he liked me to pile him with three.
Brian never talked much, which I appreciated. He sat placidly beside me in the van on the way back, lips apart as usual, and I wondered what went on in that big vacant head, and how much one could teach him if one tried. He’d learned quite a lot in the three or so months he’d been with me, I reflected. He was brilliantly useful compared with day one.
He unloaded the van by himself when we returned and put everything in the right places in the storeroom, which I had arranged with much more method since his arrival. Mrs Palissey had taken two more orders on the telephone, and I spent some time making up those and the ones from earlier in the day, collecting all the various items together into boxes for Brian to carry out to the van. Being a wine merchant, I often thought, was not a gentle artistic occupation, but thoroughly backbreakingly physical.
The telephone rang yet again while I was sitting in the office writing the bills to go out with the orders and I stretched out one hand for the receiver with my eyes on my work.
‘Tony?’ a woman’s voice said tentatively. ‘It’s Flora.’
‘Dear Flora,’ I said. ‘How are you? How’s Jack? How’s everything?’
‘Oh…’ She seemed tired beyond bearing. ‘Everything’s so awful. I know I shouldn’t say that… but… oh dear.’
‘I’ll come and fetch the glasses,’ I said, hearing the appeal she hadn’t uttered. ‘I’ll come practically at once.’
‘There… there aren’t many left whole… but yes, do come.’
‘Half an hour,’ I said.
She said, ‘Thank you,’ faintly and disconnected.
I looked at my watch. Four-thirty. Most often at about that time on Mondays Mrs Palissey and Brian set off in the van to do any deliveries which lay roughly on their way home, finishing the round the following morning. Mrs Palissey’s ability to drive had been the chief reason I’d originally hired her, and she on her part had been pleased to be given the use of the shop’s second string, an elderly capacious Rover estate. We swopped the two vehicles around as required, so I said I would do the deliveries that day, if she would stay until five to close the shop, and go home again in the car.
‘By all means, Mr Beach.’ She was graciously obliging. ‘And I’ll be here at nine-thirty, then, in the morning.’
I nodded my thanks and took the bills, the orders, van and myself off up the hill to Jack Hawthorn’s stables, where not a great deal had changed since the day before.
I saw, as I came over the hill, that the great green horsebox still stood on the lawn, with, beyond it, the heaped canvas remains of the marquee. The Sheik had gone, and his bodyguards. The mute bloodstained expanse of fawn matting was scattered with trestle tables and sections of tent pole, and glittering here and there in the rays of late afternoon sunshine lay a million pieces of glass.
I parked as before outside the kitchen entrance and locked the van with a sigh. Flora came slowly out of the house to greet me, dressed in a grey skirt and a green cardigan, dark smudges under exhausted eyes.
I gave her a small hug and a kiss on the cheek. We had never before been on those sort of terms, but disasters could work wonders in that area.
‘How’s Jack? ‘I said.
‘They’ve just now set his leg… pinned it, they say. He’s still unconscious… but I saw him this morning… before.’ Her voice was quavery, as it had been on the telephone. ‘He was very down. So depressed. It made me so miserable.’ The last word came out in a gasp as her face crumpled into tears. ‘Oh dear… Oh dear…’
I put my arm round her shaking shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’ll be all right. Truly.’
She nodded mutely, sniffing and fumbling in a pocket for a handkerchief, and after a while, through gulps, said, ‘He’s alive, and I should be grateful for that, and they say he’ll be home quite soon. It’s just… everything… everything…’
I nodded. ‘Just too much.’
She nodded also and dried her eyes with a re-emergence of spirit, and I asked whether any of her children might not come to help her through this patch.
‘They’re all so busy… I told them not to. And Jack, you know, he’s jealous of them really, he wouldn’t want them here when he’s away, though I shouldn’t say that, only I do seem to tell you things, Tony dear, and I don’t know why.’
‘Like telling the wallpaper,’ I said.
She smiled very faintly, a considerable advance.
‘How’s Jimmy?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t see him. He’s conscious, they say, and no worse. I don’t know what we’ll do if he isn’t well soon… he runs everything, you know… and without them both… I feel so lost. I can’t help it.’
‘Anything I can do?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ she said instantly. ‘I was so hoping… I mean, when you said you’d come… Have you got time?’
‘For what?’ I asked.
‘Um… Tony dear, I don’t know how much I can ask of you, but would you… could you possibly… walk round the yard with me?”
‘Well, of course,’ I said, s
‘It’s evening stables,’ she explained in a rush. ‘Jack was so insistent I walked round. He wants me to tell him how everything is, because we’ve a new head lad, he came only last week, and Jack says he’s not sure of him in spite of his references, and he made me promise I’d walk round. And he knows, he really does, that I don’t know enough about horses, but he wanted me to promise… and he was so depressed, that I did.’
‘No problem at all,’ I said. ‘We’ll walk round together, and we’ll both listen, and afterwards we’ll make notes for you to relay to Jack.’
She sighed with relief and looked at her watch. ‘It’s time now, I should think.’
‘O.K.’ I said, and we walked round the house to the stables and to the sixty or so equine inmates.
In Jack’s yard there were two big old quadrangles, built of wood mostly, with a preponderance of white paint. Some of the many doors stood wide open with lads carrying sacks and buckets in and out, and some were half closed with horses’ heads looking interestedly over the tops.
‘We’d better do the colts’ yard first,’ Flora said, ‘and the fillies’ yard after, like Jack does, don’t you think?’
“Absolutely,’ I agreed.
I knew about horses to the extent that I’d been brought up with them, as much after my father’s death as before. My mother, wholly dedicated, seldom talked of much else. She had in her time ridden in point-to-point races and also adored to go hunting, which filled her life whenever my father was away on duty, and his as well when he was at home and not that minute racing. I had seen day after day the glowing enjoyment in their faces and had tried hard to feel it myself, but whatever enthusiasm I’d shown had been counterfeit, for their sakes. Galloping after hounds across muddy November fields I had thought chiefly of how soon one could decently go home, and the only part of the ritual I had actually enjoyed had been the cleaning and feeding of the horses afterwards. Those great creatures, tired and dirty, were so uncritical. They never told one to keep one’s heels down, one’s elbows in, one’s head up, one’s spine straight. They didn’t expect one to be impossibly brave and leap the largest fences. They didn’t mind if one sneaked through gates instead. Closed into a box with a horse, humming while I brushed off dried mud and sweat, I’d felt a sort of dumb complete communion, and been happy.
After my father died my mother had hunted on with unfaltering zeal and had for the past ten years been joint master of the local hounds, to her everlasting fulfilment. It had been a relief to her, I often thought, when I had finally left home.
Jack Hawthorn’s lads were halfway through the late afternoon programme of mucking out, feeding and watering, a process known throughout the racing world as ‘evening stables’. It was the custom for the trainer to walk round, usually with the head lad, stopping at every box to inspect the racer within, feeling its legs for heat (bad sign) and looking for a bright eye (good).
Jack’s new head lad had greeted Flora’s appearance with an exaggerated obsequiousness which I found distasteful and which seemed also to make Flora even less sure of herself. She introduced him as Howard, and told him Mr Beach would be accompanying her on the rounds.
Howard extending the Uriah Heep manner to myself, we set off on what was clearly the normal pattern, and I listened attentively for Flora’s sake to every Howard opinion.
Very little, it seemed to me, could have been different from the morning before, when Jack himself had been there. One horse had trodden on a stone out at exercise and was slightly footsore. Another had eaten only half of his midday feed. A third had rubbed skin off a hock, which would need watching.
Flora said ‘I see,’ and ‘I’ll tell Mr Hawthorn,’ at regular intervals and Howard ingratiatingly said that Flora could safely leave everything to him, Howard, until Mr Hawthorn’s return.
We came in turn to the Sheik’s horses, still in residence, and also to Larry Trent’s, bursting with health. They had been prolific winners all year, it semed. Both the Sheik and Larry Trent had been excellent judges of potential, and were lucky as well.
‘We’ll be losing all of these horses, I suppose,’ Flora sighed. ‘Jack says it will be a heavy financial loss for us.’
‘What will happen to them?’ I asked.
‘Oh… I expect the Sheik’s will be sold. I don’t know. I don’t know if he has any family. And Larry Trent’s five, of course, will go back to their owners.’
I raised my eyebrows slightly but because of Howard’s unctuous presence said no more, and it wasn’t until Flora and I were at length walking back towards my van that I asked her what she meant.
‘Larry Trent’s horses?’ she repeated. ‘They weren’t his own property. He leased them.’
‘Paid rent for them?’
‘My dear, no. A lease is only an agreement. Say someone owns a horse but can’t really afford the training fees, and someone else wants to have a horse racing in his name and can afford the training fees but not the cost of the horse itself, then those two people make an agreement, all signed and registered, of course. The usual terms are that when the horse earns any prize-money it’s divided fifty-fifty between the two parties. It’s done quite often, you know.’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ I said numbly.
‘Oh yes. Larry Trent always did it. He was pretty shrewd at it. He would lease a horse for a year, say, and if it turned out all right he might lease it for another year, but if it won nothing, he’d try another. You can lease a horse for as long as you like, as long as you both agree, for a year or a season or three months… whatever you want.’
I found it interesting and asked, ‘How are the leases fixed up?’
‘Jack has the forms.’
‘No, I meant, how does anyone know who has a horse they will lease but not sell?’
‘Word of mouth,’ she said vaguely. ‘People just say. Sometimes they advertise. And sometimes one of our owners will ask Jack to find someone to lease their horse so they don’t have to pay the training bills. Very often they do it with mares, so that they can have their horse back for breeding afterwards.’
‘Neat,’ I said.
Flora nodded. ‘Larry Trent always liked it because it meant he could run five horses instead of owning only one outright. He was a great gambler, that man.’
‘Gambler?’
‘A thousand on this, a thousand on that… I used to get tired of hearing about it.’
I gave her an amused glance. ‘Didn’t you like him?’
‘I suppose he was all right,’ she said dubiously. ‘He was always friendly. A good owner, Jack always said. Paid regularly and understood that horses aren’t machines. Hardly ever blamed the jockey if he lost. But secretive, somehow. I don’t really know why I think that, but that’s how he seemed to me. Generous, though. He took us to dinner only last week at that place of his, the Silver Moondance. There was a band playing… so noisy.’ She sighed. ‘But of course you know about us going there… Jimmy said he told you about that whisky. I told him to forget it… Jack didn’t want Jimmy stirring up trouble.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘The trouble got stirred, all the same, not that it matters.’
‘What do you mean?’
I told her of Jimmy’s semi-conscious wanderings and my visit with Detective Sergeant Ridger to the Silver Moondance Saloon, and she said ‘Good heavens’ faintly, with round eyes.
‘Someone in that place had a great fiddle going,’ I said. ‘Whether Larry Trent knew or not.’
She didn’t answer directly, but after a long pause said, ‘You know, he did something once that I didn’t understand. I happened to be at Doncaster sales last year with some friends I was staying with. Jack wasn’t there, he was too busy at home. Larry Trent was there… He didn’t see me, but I saw him across the sale ring, and he was bidding for a horse… it was called Ramekin.’ She paused, then went on. ‘The horse was knocked down to him and I thought good, Jack will be getting it to train. But it never came. Larry Trent neve
‘So who did train Ramekin afterwards?’ I asked.
‘No one.’ She looked at me anxiously. ‘I’m not crazy, you know. I looked it up in the sale prices in the Sporting Life and it was sold for more than thirty thousand pounds. They didn’t say who had bought it, but I’m absolutely certain it was Larry Trent because the auctioneer’s man went right up to him to ask him his name when it had been knocked down to him, but after that… nothing happened.’
‘Well… someone must have him,’ I said reasonably.
I suppose so. But he’s not down in any trainer’s list of horses-in-training. I checked, you know, because it would have been so annoying if Larry had sent the horse to someone else after all the races Jack’s won for him, but Ramekin wasn’t down anywhere, and he hasn’t raced the whole season, I’ve been looking for him. Ramekin just… really… vanished.’
SIX
Flora took me into the kitchen to collect the glasses which were left whole: precisely nineteen.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘It’s a wonder there are as many as that, considering. And don’t worry, I’m insured.’
She helped me slot the survivors into the box I’d brought, her kind round face looking worried.
‘Insurance!’ she said. ‘I’ve been hearing that word all morning. But who, I ask you, insures against such a tragedy? Of course we didn’t have any insurance, not special insurance for the party. And those poor young things who own the horsebox… I had Sally… that’s the wife… on the telephone at lunch time telling me over and over hysterically that Peter never never never left the hand-brake off and always always always left the horsebox in gear, and that they’re going to be ruined if the insurance companies can prove negligence. Poor things. Poor things.’ She glanced at me. ‘He didn’t lock the doors, you know. I asked her. I’m afraid I made her angry. She said you don’t lock the doors when you’re at a friend’s house.’