After a respectful pause, I said, ‘Do you know anything of his business affairs?’
‘Business!’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘He is the de Brescou et Nanterre construction company. I don’t know anything about his business, only about his horses. I wouldn’t trust him in business. As a man deals with his racehorse trainer, so will he deal in business. The honourable will be honourable. The greedy bully will run true to form.’
‘And... do you know where I could find him in England?’
‘I wouldn’t look, if I were you.’ She gave me a bright smile. ‘He’ll bring you nothing but trouble.’
I relayed the conversation to Litsi and Danielle up in the princess’s box.
‘What’s navicular?’ Litsi said.
‘A disease of the navicular bone in a horse’s foot. When it gets bad, the horse can’t walk.’
‘That Nanterre,’ Danielle said disgustedly, ‘is gross.’
The princess and Beatrice, a few feet away at the balcony end of the box, were talking to a tall, bulky man with noticeably light grey eyes in a big bland face.
Litsi, following my gaze, said, ‘Lord Vaughnley... he came to commiserate with Aunt Casilia over Col not winning. Do you know him? He’s something in publishing, I think.’
‘Mm,’ I said neutrally. ‘He owns the Towncrier newspaper.’
‘Does he?’ Litsi’s agile mind made the jump. ‘Not the paper which attacked... Bobby?’
‘No, that was the Flag.’
‘Oh.’ Litsi seemed disappointed. ‘Then he isn’t one of the two defeated press barons after all.’
‘Yes, he is.’ Lord Vaughnley’s attention was switching my way. ‘I’ll tell you about it, some time,’ I said to Litsi, and watched Lord Vaughnley hesitate, as he always did, before offering his hand for me to shake: yet he must have known he would meet me in that place, as my being there at the end of each day’s racing was a ritual well known to him.
‘Kit,’ he said, grasping the nettle, ‘a great race... such bad luck.’
‘The way it goes,’ I said.
‘Better luck in the Gold Cup, eh?’
‘It would be nice.’
‘Anything I can do for you, my dear fellow?’
It was a question he asked whenever we met, though I could see Litsi’s astonishment out of the side of my eyes. Usually I answered that there wasn’t, but on that day thought there was no harm in trying a flier. If one didn’t ask, one would never learn.
‘Nothing, really,’ I said, ‘except... I suppose you’ve never come across the name of Henri Nanterre?’
Everyone watched him while he pondered, the princess with rapidly sharpening interest, Litsi and Danielle with simple curiosity, Beatrice with seeming alarm. Lord Vaughnley looked around at the waiting faces, frowned, and finally answered with a question of his own.
‘Who is he?’ he asked.
‘My husband’s business partner,’ the princess said. ‘Dear Lord Vaughnley, do you know of him?’
Lord Vaughnley was puzzled but slowly shook his big head. ‘I can’t recall ever...’
‘Could you... er... see if the Towncrier has a file on him?’ I asked.
He gave me a resigned little smile, and nodded. ‘Write the name down for me,’ he said. ‘In caps.’
I fished out a pen and small note-pad and wrote both the name and that of the construction company, in capital letters as required.
‘He’s French,’ I said. ‘Owns horses. He might be on the racing pages, or maybe business. Or even gossip.’
‘Anything you want specifically?’ he said, still smiling.
‘He’s over in England just now. Ideally, we’d like to know where he’s staying.’
Beatrice’s mouth opened and closed again with a snap. She definitely knows, I thought, how to reach him. Perhaps we could make use of that, when we had a plan.
Lord Vaughnley tucked the slip of paper away in an inner pocket, saying he would get the names run through the computer that very evening, if it was important to the princess.
‘Indeed it is,’ she said with feeling.
‘Any little fact,’ I said, ‘could be helpful.’
‘Very well.’ He kissed the princess’s hand and made general farewells, and to me he said as he was going, ‘Have you embarked on another crusade?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Then God help this Nanterre.’
‘What did he mean by that?’ Beatrice demanded as Lord Vaughnley departed, and the princess told her soothingly that it was a long story which wasn’t to interfere with my telling her all about Col’s race. Lord Vaughnley, she added, was a good friend she saw often at the races, and that it was perfectly natural for him to help her in any way.
Beatrice, to do her justice, had been a great deal quieter since Nanterre’s telephone call the evening before. She had refused to believe he had killed the horses (‘it must have been vandals, as the police said’) until he had himself admitted it, and although she was still adamant that Roland should go along with Nanterre in business, we no longer heard praise of him personally.
Her hostility towards me on the other hand seemed to have deepened, and on my account of the race she passed her own opinion.
‘Rubbish. You didn’t lose the race at the last fence. You were too far back all along. Anyone could see that.’ She picked up a small sandwich from the display on the table and bit into it decisively, as if snapping off my head.
No one argued with her pronouncement and, emboldened, she said to Danielle with malice, ‘Your fortune-hunter isn’t even a good jockey.’
‘Beatrice,’ the princess immediately said, unruffled, ‘Kit has a fortune of his own, and he is heir to his grandfather, who is rich.’
She glanced at me briefly, forbidding me to contradict. Such fortune as I had I’d earned, and although my grandfather owned several chunks of Newmarket, their liquidity was of the consistency of bricks.
‘And Aunt Beatrice,’ Danielle said, faintly blushing, ‘I am poor.’
Beatrice ate her sandwich, letting her round eyes do the talking. Her pale orange hair, I thought inconsequentially, was almost the same colour as the hessian-covered walls.
The sixth and last race was already in progress, the commentary booming outside. Everyone except Beatrice went on the balcony to watch, and I wondered whether a putative million dollars was worth an unquiet mind. ‘It’s nice to be nice,’ our grandmother had said often enough to Holly and me, bringing us up, and ‘Hate curdles your brains.’ Grandfather, overhearing her heresies, had tried to undo her work with anti-Allardeck slogans, but in the end it was she who’d prevailed. Holly had married Bobby, and apart from the present state of affairs with Danielle and other various past hard knocks, I had grown up, and remained, basically happy. Beatrice, for all her mink-crocodile-Spanish house indulgences in Palm Beach, hadn’t been so lucky.
When it came to going home, Beatrice again went with the princess in the Rolls. I had hoped Litsi would join them, as I was detouring to Chiswick to deliver Danielle to the studio, but he took Danielle’s arm and steered her and himself, chatting away, in the direction of the jockeys’ car park as if there had never been any question. Litsi had his aunt’s precious knack of courteously and covertly getting his own way. He would have made a great king, I thought wryly, given the chance.
We dropped Danielle off (she waved to both of us and kissed neither) and I drove the two of us back to Eaton Square. Beatrice, naturally enough, came into the conversation.
‘You were shocked,’ Litsi said, amused, ‘when she called you a fortune-hunter. You hadn’t even thought of Danielle’s prospects.’
‘She called me a bad jockey,’ I said.
‘Oh, sure.’ He chuckled. ‘You’re a puritan.’