Bonecrack

'How?' I asked flatly.

He shrugged. 'What is important to you is not how I would do it, but how to prevent me from doing it. And that, of course, is comparatively simple.'

'Just run the horses to your instructions?' I suggested neutrally. 'Just lose to order?'

A spasm of renewed anger twisted the chubby features and the gun came six inches off his knee. The hand holding it relaxed slowly, and he put it down again.

'I am not,' he said heavily, 'a petty crook.'

But you do, I thought, rise to an insult, even to one that was not intended, and one day, if the game went on long enough, that could give me an advantage.

'I apologise,' I said without sarcasm. 'But those rubber masks are not top level.'

He glanced up in irritation at the two figures standing behind me. 'The masks are their own choice. They feel safer if they cannot be recognised.'

Like highwaymen, I thought: who swung in the end.

'You may run your horses as you like. You are free to choose entirely- save in one special thing.'

I made no comment. He shrugged, and went on.

'You will employ someone who I will send you.'

'No,' I said.

'Yes.' He stared at me unwinkingly. 'You will employ this person. If you do not, I will destroy the stable.'

'That's lunacy,' I insisted. 'It's pointless.'

'No, it is not,' he said. 'Furthermore, you will tell no one that you are being forced to employ this person. You will assert that it is your own wish. You will particularly not complain to the police, either about tonight, or about anything else which may happen. Should you act in any way to discredit this person, or to get him evicted from your stables, your whole business will be destroyed.' He paused. 'Do you understand? If you act in any way against this person, your father will have nothing to return to, when he leaves the hospital.'

After a short, intense silence, I asked, 'In what capacity do you want this person to work for me?'

He answered with care. 'He will ride the horses,' he said. 'He is a jockey.'

I could feel the twitch round my eyes. He saw it, too. The first time he had really reached me.

It was out of the question. He would not need to tell me every time he wanted a race lost. He had simply to tell his man.

'We don't need a jockey,' I said. 'We already have Tommy Hoylake.'

'Your new jockey will gradually take his place.'

Tommy Hoylake was the second best jockey in Britain and among the top dozen in the world. No one could take his place.

'The owners wouldn't agree,' I said.

'You will persuade them.'

'Impossible.'

'The future existence of your stable depends on it.'

There was another longish pause. One of the rubber-faces shifted on his feet and sighed as if from boredom, but the fat man seemed to be in no hurry. Perhaps he understood very well that I was getting colder and more uncomfortable minute by minute. I would have asked him to untie my hands if I hadn't been sure he would count himself one up when he refused.

Finally I said, 'Equipped with your jockey, the stable would have no future existence anyway.'

He shrugged. 'It may suffer a little, perhaps, but it will survive.'

'It is unacceptable,' I said.

He blinked. His hand moved the gun gently to and fro across his well filled trouser leg.

He said, 'I see that you do not entirely understand the position. I told you that you could leave here upon certain conditions.' His flat tone made the insane sound reasonable. 'They are, that you employ a certain jockey, and that you do not seek aid from anyone, including the police. Should you break either of these agreements the stable will be destroyed. But-' He spoke more slowly, and with emphasis, '- if you do not agree to these conditions in the first place, you will not be freed.'

I said nothing.

'Do you understand?'

I sighed. 'Yes.'

'Good.'

'Not a petty crook, I think you said.'

His nostrils flared. 'I am a manipulator.'

'And a murderer.'

'I never murder unless the victim insists.'

I stared at him. He was laughing inside at his own jolly joke, the fun creeping out in little twitches to his lips and tiny snorts of breath.

This victim, I supposed, was not going to insist. He was welcome to his amusement.

I moved my shoulders slightly, trying to ease them. He watched attentively and offered nothing.

'Who then,' I said, 'is this jockey?'

He hesitated.

'He is eighteen,' he said.

'Eighteen-'

He nodded. 'You will give him the good horses to ride. He will ride Archangel in the Derby.'

Impossible. Totally impossible. I looked at the gun lying so quiet on the expensive tailoring. I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

When he next spoke there was the satisfaction of victory in his voice alongside the careful non-accent.

'He will arrive at the stable tomorrow. You will hire him. He has not yet much experience in races.

You will see he gets it.'

An inexperienced rider on Archangel- ludicrous. So ludicrous, in fact, that he had used abduction and the threat of murder to make it clear he meant it seriously.

'His name is Alessandro Rivera,' he said.

After interval for consideration, he added the rest of it.

'He is my son.'

CHAPTER TWO

When I next woke up I was lying face down on the bare floor of the oak panelled room in Rowley Lodge. Too many bare boards everywhere. Not my night.

Facts oozed back gradually. I felt woolly, cold, semi-conscious, anaesthetised-

Anaesthetised.

For the return journey they had had the courtesy not to hit my head. The fat man had nodded to the American rubber-face, but instead of flourishing the truncheon he had given me a sort of quick pricking thump in the upper arm. After that we had waited around for about a quarter of an hour during which no one said anything at all, and then quite suddenly I had lost consciousness. I remembered not a flicker of the journey home.

Creaking and groaning I tested all articulated parts. Everything present, correct, and in working order. More or less, that is, because having clanked to my feet it became advisable to sit down again in the chair by the desk. I put my elbows on the desk and my head in my hands, and let time pass.

Outside, the beginnings of a damp dawn were turning the sky to grey flannel. There was ice round the edges of the windows, where condensed warm air had frozen solid. The cold went through to my bones.

In the brain department things were just as chilly. I remembered all too clearly that Alessandro Rivera was that day to make his presence felt. Perhaps he would take after father, I thought tiredly, and would be so overweight that the whole dilemma would fold its horns and quietly steal away. On the other hand, if not, why should his father use a sledgehammer to crack a peanut. Why not simply apprentice his son in the normal way? Because he wasn't normal, because his son wouldn't be a normal apprentice, and because no normal apprentice would expect to start his career on a Derby favourite.

I wondered how my father would now be reacting, had he not been slung up in traction with a complicated fracture of tibia and fibula. He would not, for certain, be feeling as battered as I was, because he would, with supreme dignity, have gone quietly. But he would none the less have also been facing the same vital questions: which were, firstly, did the fat man seriously intend to destroy the stable if his son did not get the job, and secondly, how could he do it.

And the answer to both was a king-size blank.

It wasn't my stable to risk. They were not my six million pounds worth of horses. They were not my livelihood, nor my life's work.

I could not ask my father to decide for himself; he was not well enough to be told, let alone to reason out the pros and cons.

I could not now transfer the stable to anyone else, because passing this situation to a stranger would be like handing him a grenade with the pin out.