Grumbling at great length about owners who knew nothing at all about racing and should leave all decisions to their trainer, Stallworthy complainingly sent the chestnut to carry his 5-lb. penalty at Newton Abbot.
I’d never before ridden on the course and at first sight of it felt foolish not to have listened to Stallworthy’s judgment. The steeplechase track was an almost one-and-a-half-mile flat circuit with sharpish turns, and the short grass gave little purchase on rock-hard ground, baked by the sun of August.
Stallworthy, with several other runners from his yard, had brought his critical eye to the course. Jim, saddling Sarah’s Future, told me the chestnut knew the course better than I did (I’d walked around it a couple of hours earlier to see the jumps, and the approaches to them, at close quarters) and to remember what I’d learned from him at home, and not to expect too much because of the weight disadvantage and because the other jockeys were all professionals, and that this was not an amateur race.
As usual, it was the speed that seduced me and fulfilled, and the fact that we finished third was enough to make my day worthwhile, though Stallworthy, who had incidentally also trained the winner, announced to me several times, “I told you so. I told your father it was too much to expect. Perhaps you’ll listen to me next time.”
“Never mind,” Jim consoled. “If you’d won today you’d have to have carried a 10-lb. penalty at Exeter races next Saturday, always supposing you can persuade the old man to let him run there, after this. He’ll say it’s too soon, which it probably is.”
The old man (Stallworthy) conducted a running battle over the telephone with my father.
My father won.
So, blisteringly, by six lengths, did Sarah’s Future, because the much longer galloping track, up on Halden Moor above Exeter, suited him better. He carried a 5-lb. penalty, not 10, and made light of it. The starting price, my father assured me later, would pay the training fees until Christmas.
Two days after that, in cooler blood, I went to learn mathematics.
My father learned back-bench tactics, but that wasn’t what the party had sent him to Hoopwestern for. He tried to explain it to me that the path upward led through the whip’s office, which sounded nastily about flagellation to me, though he laughed.
“The whip’s office is what gives you the thumbs-up for advancement towards the ministerial level.”
“And their thumbs are up for you?”
“Well... so far... yes.”
“Minister of what?” I asked, disbelievingly. “Surely you’re too young?”
“The really forward boys are on their way by twenty-two. At thirty-eight, I’m old.”
“I don’t like politics.”
“I can’t ride races,” he said.
To have the whip withdrawn, he explained, meant the virtual end to a political career. If getting elected was the first giant step, then winning the whip’s approval was the second. When the newly elected member for Hoopwestern was shortly appointed as undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, it was apparently a signal to the whole fabric of government that a bright, fast-moving comet had risen over the horizon.
I went to listen to his maiden speech, sitting inconspicuously in the gallery. He spoke about lightbulbs and had the whole House laughing, and Hoopwestern’s share of the illumination market soared.
I met him for dinner after his speech, when he was again in the high exaltation of post-performance spirits.
“I suppose you haven’t been back to Hoopwestern?” he said.
“Well, no.”
“I have, of course. Leonard Kitchens is in trouble.”
“Who?”
“Leonard...”
“Oh, yes. Yes, the unbalanced mustache. What sort of trouble?”
“The police now have a rifle which may be the one fired at us that evening.”
“By the police,” I asked as he paused, “do you mean Joe the policeman whose mother drives a school bus?”
“Joe whose mother drives a school bus is actually Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, and yes, he’s now received from The Sleeping Dragon a very badly rusted .22 rifle. It seems that after the trees shed their leaves the guttering ’round the roof of the hotel got choked with them, as happens most years, and rainwater overflowed instead of draining down the pipes as it should, so they sent a man up a ladder to clear out the leaves, and they found it wasn’t just leaves clogging the guttering, it was the .22 rifle.”
“But what’s that got to do with Leonard Kitchens?”
My father ate peppered steak, rare, with spinach.
“Leonard Kitchens is the nurseryman who festoons The Sleeping Dragon with all those baskets of geraniums.”
“But...” I objected.
“Apparently in a broom cupboard on that bedroom level he keeps a sort of cart with things for looking after the baskets. Shears, a long-spouted watering can, fertilizer. They think he could have hidden the gun in the cart. If you stand on a chair by the window you can reach up far enough outside to put a rifle up in the gutter. And someone did put a gun up there.”
I frowned over my food.
“You know what people are like,” my father said. “Someone says, ‘I suppose Leonard Kitchens could have put the rifle in the gutter, he’s always in and out of the hotel,’ and the next person drops the ‘I suppose’ and repeats the rest as a fact.”
“What does Leonard Kitchens himself say?”
“Of course, he says it wasn’t his gun and he didn’t put it in the gutter, and he says no one can prove he did.”
“That’s what guilty people always say,” I observed.
“Yes, but it’s true, no one can prove he ever had the gun. No one has come forward to connect him to rifles in any way.”
“What does Mrs. Kitchens say?”
“Leonard’s wife is doing him no good at all. She goes around saying her husband was so besotted with Orinda Nagle that he would do anything, including shooting me in the back, to get me out of Orinda’s way. Joe Duke asked her if she had ever seen a rifle in her husband’s possession, and instead of saying no, as any sensible woman would, she said he had a garden shed full of junk, and it was possible he had anything lying around in there.”
“Did Joe by any chance search the shed? I mean, did he have a look around to see if Leonard had any bullets?”
“Joe couldn’t get a warrant to search, as there were no real grounds for suspicion. Also, as I suppose you know, it’s quite easy to buy high-velocity bullets, and even easier to throw them away. There’s no chance of telling that it was indeed that rifle that was used because, even if you could remove all the rust, there is no bullet to match it to, as the one from the whatnot finally got lost altogether in the fire. No one ever found any cartridge cases in the hotel, either.”
My father continued with his steak. Putting down his knife and fork, he said, “I took the Range Rover to Basil Rudd’s garage and had him dismantle the engine for a thorough check of the oil system. There was nothing in the sump except oil. It was actually extremely unprofessional for that mechanic — Terry, I think he is — to push the substitute plug up into the sump, but Basil Rudd won’t hear a word against him, and I suppose there was no harm done.”
“There might have been,” I said. I thought for a moment and asked, “I suppose Leonard Kitchens isn’t accused of being in possession of candles?”
“You may laugh,” my father said, “but in the shop at his garden center, where they sell plastic gnomes and things, they do have table centerpieces with candles and ribboned bows and stuff.”
“You can buy candles anywhere,” I said. “And what about the fire? Was that Leonard Kitchens, too?”