‘And leave them there?’ I gestured back towards the courtyard.
‘They’re not going anywhere,’ he said, but he went back and shut the boxes’ doors, in case, he said, any owners turned up for a nice Sunday look-round and had their sensibilities affronted. Robin’s own sensibilities had been sensibly dumped during week one of his veterinary training, I guessed, but he didn’t need a bedside manner to be a highly efficient minister to Wykeham’s jumpers.
We went into Wykeham’s house, ancient and rambling to match the yard, and found him and the princess consoling themselves with tea and memories, she at her most sustaining, he looking warmer and more in command, but puzzled.
He rose to his feet at our appearance and bustled me out of his sitting room making some flimsy remark about showing me where to make hot drinks, which I’d known for ten years.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, leading the way into the kitchen. ‘Why doesn’t she ask who killed them? It’s the first thing I’d want to know. She hasn’t mentioned it once. Just talks about the races in that way she has, and asking about the others. Why doesn’t she want to know who killed them?’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘She suspects she knows.’
‘What? For God’s sake then, Kit... who?’
I hesitated. He looked thin and shaky, with lines cut deep in the wrinkled old face, the dark freckles of age standing out starkly. ‘She’d have to tell you herself,’ I said, ‘but it’s something to do with her husband’s business. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you need worry about a traitor in your own camp. If she hasn’t told you who she thinks it is, she won’t tell anyone until she’s discussed it with her husband, and they might decide to say nothing even then, they hate publicity so much.’
‘There’s going to be publicity anyway,’ he said worriedly. ‘The ante-post co-favourite for the Grand National shot in his box... Even if we try, we can’t keep that out of the papers.’
I rattled about making fresh tea for Robin and myself, not relishing any more than he did the fuss lying ahead.
‘All the same,’ I said, ‘your main worry isn’t who. Your main worry is keeping all the others safe.’
‘Kit!’ He was totally appalled. ‘B... bloody hell, K... Kit.’ He was back to stuttering. ‘It w... won’t happen again.’
‘Well,’ I said temperately, but there was no way to soften it, ‘I’d say they’re all at risk. The whole lot of her horses. Not immediately, not today. But if the princess and her husband decide on one particular course of action, which they may do, then they’ll all be at risk, Kinley, perhaps, above all. So the thing to do is to apply our minds to defensive action.’
‘But Kit...’
‘Dog patrols,’ I said.
‘They’re expensive...’
‘The princess,’ I remarked, ‘is rich. Ask her. If she doesn’t like the expense, I’ll pay for them myself.’ Wykeham’s mouth opened and closed again when I pointed out, ‘I’ve already lost the best chance I ever had of winning the Grand National. Her horses mean almost as much to me as they do to her and to you, and I’m damned well not going to let anyone pick them off two by two. So you get the security people here by tonight, and make sure there’s someone about in the stable the whole time from now on, patrolling all the courtyards night and day.’
‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll fix it... If I knew who’d killed them, I’d kill him myself.’
It sounded extraordinary, said that way, without anger, more as an unexpected self-discovery. What I’d wished I could do in fury, he proposed as a sane course of action; but people say these things, not meaning them, and he wouldn’t have a mouse’s chance physically, I thought regretfully, against the hawk-like Nanterre.
Wykeham had been a Hercules in his youth, he’d told me, a power-house on legs with the joy of life pumping through his veins. ‘Joy of life,’ he’d said to me several times, ‘that’s what I have. That’s what you have. No one gets anywhere without it. Relish the struggle, that’s the way.’
He’d been an amateur jockey of note, and he’d dazzled and married the daughter of a mediumly successful trainer whose horses had started winning from the day Wykeham stepped into the yard. Now, fifty years on, with his strength gone, his wife dead and his own daughters grandmothers, he retained only the priceless ability to put the joy of life into his horses. He thought of little besides his horses, cared for little else, walked round at evening stables talking to each as a person, playing with some, admonishing others, coaxing a few, ignoring none.
I’d ridden for him from when I was nineteen, a fact he was apt to relate with complacency. ‘Spot ’em young,’ he’d told sundry owners. ‘That’s the thing. I’m good at that.’ And he’d steadfastly given me, I sometimes reflected, exactly what he gave his charges: opportunity, trust and job-satisfaction.
He had trained a winner of the Grand National twice when I’d been at school, and in my time had come close, but it was only recently I’d realised how deeply he longed for a third slice of glory. The dead horse outside was for all of us a sickening, dragging, deflating disappointment.
‘Cotopaxi,’ he said intensely, for once getting the name right, ‘was the one I would have saved first in a fire.’
The princess and I travelled back to London without waiting for the police, the insurers or the slaughterer’s men. (‘So horrid, all of that.’)
I’d expected her to talk as usual chiefly about her horses, but it was of Wykeham, it seemed, that she was thinking.
‘Thirty-five years ago, before you were born,’ she said, ‘when I first went racing, Wykeham strode the scene like a Colossus. He was almost everything he says he was, a Hercules indeed. Powerful, successful, enormously attractive... Half the women swooning over him with their husbands spluttering...’ She smiled at this memory. ‘I suppose it’s hard for you to picture, Kit, knowing him only now, when he’s old, but he was a splendid man... he still is, of course. I felt privileged, long ago, when he agreed to train my horses.’
I glanced in fascination at her serene face. In the past, I’d seen her often with Wykeham at the races, always deferring to him, tapping him playfully on the arm. I hadn’t realised how much she must miss him now he stayed at home, how much she must regret the waning of such a titan.
A contemporary of my grandfather (and of Maynard Allardeck’s father), Wykeham had been already a legend to me when he’d offered me the job. I’d accepted, almost dazed, and I’d grown up fast, mature at twenty from the demands and responsibility he’d thrust on me. Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of horseflesh in my hands all the time, the success of the stable on my shoulders. He’d given me no allowances for youth, told me in no uncertain terms from the beginning that the whole enterprise rested finally on its jockey’s skill, cool head and commonsense, and told me if I didn’t measure up to what was needed, too bad, but bye bye.
Shaken to my soul, I’d wholeheartedly embraced what he offered, knowing there weren’t two such chances in any life: and it had worked out fine, on the whole.
The princess’s thoughts were following my own. ‘When Paul Peck had that dreadful fall and decided to retire,’ she said, ‘there we were at the height of the season with no stable jockey and all the other top jockeys signed up elsewhere. Wykeham told me and the other owners that there was this young Fielding boy in Newmarket who had been riding as an amateur since he’d left school a year earlier...’ She smiled. ‘We were very doubtful. Wykeham said to trust him, he was never wrong. You know how modest he is!’ She paused, considering. ‘How long ago was that?’