The point, however, was the newspaper. We had arrived.
‘Read that,’ he said, tapping a small paragraph on an inside page.
I read it.
‘There is still no sign of Chrysalis, free in Kentucky, US, since Tuesday. Anxiety mounts for the safety of the £500,000 stallion, sire of this year’s Derby winner, Moth.’
‘Is this what you mean?’ I asked, puzzled, making sure I’d read the right section. I had. He nodded vigorously.
‘Didn’t you know about it?’ he asked.
‘That Chrysalis had got lost? Yes, I suppose so. It was on all the news bulletins on Wednesday.’
‘And it didn’t mean a damn thing to you,’ Teller said, with a trace of controlled and civilized bitterness under his smile.
‘Well...’
‘I have a share in that horse,’ Teller said. ‘A one-eighth share, 200,000 dollars worth.’
‘Wow,’ I said blankly. It seemed a lot of money to invest in one-eighth of a horse.
‘What is more,’ he said, sighing, ‘I have spent all of last month negotiating the sale, and was lucky to beat out another syndicate that was bidding for him. And now as soon as he gets over there, this has to happen.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, conventionally polite.
‘I can’t expect you to understand.’ He shook his head, excusingly. ‘It isn’t the money which matters, it’s the horse. He’s irreplaceable.’
‘They’ll find him.’ I had no doubts of it, and I didn’t care one way or the other.
‘I am not so sure,’ he said. ‘And I would like you to get out there and look for him.’
For five seconds no one twitched a muscle, least of all me. Then Teller turned his head to Keeble and smiled his glossy smile. ‘I wouldn’t play poker with him,’ he said. ‘OK, I’ll buy what you say about him being all that good.’
I glanced at Keeble and he gave me raised eyebrows, a tiny shrug, and a slightly embarrassed expression. I wondered just how complete his testimonial had been.
Teller turned back to me. ‘Sim here and I, we were in the same business, way back in World War II.’
‘I see,’ I said. And I did see. Quite a lot.
‘It was just a war job for me, though,’ he said. ‘I got out of the Army in ’47 and went back home to Pappy, and a couple of years later he died and left me his racehorses and a few bucks on the side.’ The beautiful teeth flashed.
I waited. The story had hardly begun.
After a pause he said, ‘I’ll pay your fare and expenses, of course, and a fee.’
‘I don’t hunt horses,’ I protested mildly.
‘I can guess what you hunt.’ He glanced again at Keeble. ‘Sim says you’re on vacation.’
I didn’t need reminding.
‘Chrysalis’, he said, ‘is the third stallion of international status to have disappeared in the last ten years.’
Chapter Two
They tried pretty hard in their subtle way, but it seemed ridiculous to me.
‘You know about horses,’ Keeble said. ‘Your father trained them for racing.’
‘There’s the police,’ I pointed out. ‘Also the insurance company. Also every man, woman, and child with an eye for a horse in the state of Kentucky. And I presume there’s a reward?’
Teller nodded.
‘So why me?’
‘No one found the other two.’
‘There’s a lot of land in America,’ I said. ‘They’re both probably free on a prairie somewhere having a high old time siring herds of wild horses.’
Teller said grudgingly, ‘The first one was found dead in a gully two years after he disappeared.’
‘That’s it, then.’
‘But the second one... I bought that one too. I had a one tenth share. This is second time around for me.’
I stared at him. ‘Were any of the circumstances the same?’
Reluctantly he shook his head. ‘No... except that they both got free. Allyx was never found. That’s why I want something special done about Chrysalis.’
I was silent.
Keeble stirred. ‘You’ve got nothing else to do, Gene. Why not take your holiday in the States? What will you do with yourself, if you stay in Putney?’
His eyes had stopped blinking, as they always did when he was intent. It was the surest guide I had to the complex calculations which sometimes lay beneath his most casual remarks. He couldn’t have guessed, I thought in alarm. He was a manipulator but not clairvoyant. I shrugged and answered him on the surface.
‘Walk round Kew Gardens and smell the orchids.’
‘They have no scent,’ said Teller, pointing out the obvious.
‘He knows that.’ Keeble nodded, still unblinking. ‘Any fruitless way of passing the time, is what he meant.’
‘I guess you two operate on your own private wavelength,’ Teller said with a sigh. ‘But I’d like you to come back with me, Gene, and at least take a look. What’s the harm in that?’
‘And what’s the good in it? It’s not my sort of job.’ I looked away, down into the green water. ‘And... I’m tired.’
They hadn’t a quick answer to that. I thought it would have been simple if all that was the matter with me was the straightforward tiredness of overwork, not the deadly fatigue of a struggle I wasn’t sure I could win. Chasing some crazy colt over a thousand square miles didn’t look like any sort of a cure.
Joan came out of the cabin into their defeated silence with a bowl of salad and a string of bright fussing chatter. A folding table was erected and the dishes put on to it, and we sat around in the sun eating cold chicken and hot french bread. There was a pleasant pink wine to drink and strawberries and cream afterwards, and Peter, still in wet bathing trunks despite orders from his mother, took mouthfuls and photographs by turn. Lynnie, sitting beside me, told Dave Teller an amusing story about the finishing school she attended, her warm bare arm brushing unselfconsciously against mine. I should have enjoyed that placid Sunday picnic on the river. I tried to. I smiled and answered when I was spoken to and concentrated carefully on the taste and texture of what I was eating, and all that happened was that the fat black slug of depression flexed its muscles and swelled another notch.
At four o’clock, after dishwashing and dozing, we started back towards Henley. My refusal to go to America hadn’t basically disturbed Teller or Keeble an ounce. I concluded that whatever had prompted the suggestion it wasn’t a burning conviction that I and only I could find the missing horse. I put the whole thing out of my mind. It wasn’t hard.
There was a punt in difficulties at the approach to Harbour Lock. Teller, again standing up on the bow with rope at the ready, shouted back to Keeble and pointed ahead. We looked, all of us, following his finger.
Where the river divided, going slowly into the left fork round the bend to the lock and fast on the right straight to the weir, a sturdy post in mid-stream bore a large notice, a single word: DANGER.
A girl, lying flat half in and half out of the punt with her arms round the post, was trying to tie up to it by passing a rope from one hand to the other, and making a poor job of it. On the stern, watching anxiously, punt pole in hand, stood a young man in a red-and-yellow shirt. He waved his arms when he saw us coming, and as Keeble throttled back and drifted near, he shouted across the water.
‘Could you help us, sir?’
Since the punt was full in the weir stream with only the girl’s slender arms keeping it from floating straight to destruction, he seemed remarkably cool. Keeble cursed about ignorant nitwits and edged nearer with his engine in slow reverse. The Flying Linnet, unlike the punt, was too big to go through this particular weir, a long row of separately openable gates; but the summer current was quite strong enough to crash her nastily against the thick concrete supports and pin her there for someone else humiliatingly to rescue.