There was a palpable silence, then he chuckled, the low, rich timbre filling the air. There was embarrassment in there somewhere; a ploy exposed.
I said prosaically, ‘What’s the job?’
He waited while four businessmen arrived, arranged their drinks and sank into monetary conversation at the table farthest from where we sat.
‘Do you know who I mean by Owen Yorkshire?’ Tatum asked, looking idly at the newcomers, not at me.
‘Owen Yorkshire.’ I rolled the name around in memory and came up with only doubts. ‘Does he own a horse or two?’
‘He does. He also owns Topline Foods.’
‘Topline… as in sponsored race at Aintree? As in Ellis Quint, guest of honor at the Topline Foods lunch the day before the Grand National?’
‘That’s the fellow.’
‘And the inquiry?’
‘Find out if he’s manipulating the Quint case to his own private advantage.’
I said thoughtfully, ‘I did hear that there’s a heavyweight abroad.’
‘Find out who it is, and why.’
‘What about poor old Archbold? He’d turn in his grave.’
‘So you’ll do it!’
‘I’ll try. But why me? Why not the police? Why not the old-boy internet?’
He looked at me straightly. ‘Because you include silence in what you sell.’
‘And I’m expensive,’ I said.
‘Retainer and refreshers,’ he promised.
‘Who’s paying?’
‘The fees will come through me.’
‘And it’s agreed,’ I said, ‘that the results, if any, are yours. Prosecution or otherwise will normally be your choice.’
He nodded.
‘In case you’re wondering,’ I said, ‘when it comes to Ellis Quint, I gave the client’s money back, in order to be able to stop him myself. The client didn’t at first believe in what he’d done. I made my own choice. I have to tell you that you’d run that risk.’
He leaned forward and extended his pudgy hand.
‘We’ll shake on it,’ he said, and grasped my palm with a firmness that sent a shock wave fizzing clear up to my jaw.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said, sensing it.
‘Nothing.’
He wasn’t getting much of a deal, I thought. I had a reputation already in tatters, a cracked ulna playing up, and the prospect of being chewed to further shreds by Ellis’s defense counsel. He’d have done as well to engage my pal Jonathan of the streaky hair.
‘Mr Tatum,’ I began.
‘Davis. My name’s Davis.’
‘Will you give me your assurance that you won’t speak of that Jockey Club business around the clubs?’
‘Assurance?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I told you… it’s to your credit.’
‘It’s a private thing. I don’t like fuss.’
He looked at me thoughtfully. He said, ‘You have my assurance.’ And I wanted to believe in it, but I wasn’t sure that I did. He was too intensely a club man, a filler of large armchairs in dark paneled rooms full of old exploded reputations and fruitily repeated secrets: ‘Won’t say a word, old boy.’
‘Sid.’
‘Mm?’
‘Whatever the papers say, where it really counts, you are respected.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘The clubs are good for gossip, but these days that’s not where the power lies.’
‘Power wanders round like the magnetic North Pole.’
‘Who said that?’
‘I just did,’ I said.
‘No, I mean, did you make it up?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Power, these days, is fragmented,’ he said.
I added, ‘And where the power is at any one time is not necessarily where one would want to be.’
He beamed proprietorially as if he’d invented me himself.
There was a quick rustle of clothes beside my ear and a drift of flowery scent, and a young woman tweaked a chair around to join our table and sat in it, looking triumphant.
‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘Mr Davis Tatum and Sid Halley! What a surprise!’
I said, to Davis Tatum’s mystified face, ‘This is Miss India Cathcart, who writes for The Pump. If you say nothing you’ll find yourself quoted repeating things you never thought, and if you say anything at all, you’ll wish you hadn’t.’
‘Sid,’ she said mock-sorrowfully, ‘can’t you take a bit of kicking around?’
Tatum opened his mouth indignantly and, as I was afraid he might try to defend me, I shook my head. He stared at me, then with a complete change of manner said in smooth, lawyerly detachment, ‘Miss Cathcart, why are you here?’
‘Why? To see you, of course.’
‘But why?’
She looked from him to me and back again, her appearance just as I remembered it: flawless porcelain skin, light-blue eyes, cleanly outlined mouth, black shining hair. She wore brown and red, with amber beads.
She said, ‘Isn’t it improper for a colleague of the Crown Prosecutor to be seen talking to one of the witnesses?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Tatum said, and asked me, ‘Did you tell her we were meeting here?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then how… why, Miss Cathcart, are you here?’
‘I told you. It’s a story.’
‘Does The Pump know you’re here?’ I asked.
A shade crossly she said, ‘I’m not a child. I’m allowed out on my own, you know. And anyway, the paper sent me.’
‘The Pump told you we’d be here?’ Tatum asked.
‘My editor said to come and see. And he was right!’
Tatum said, ‘Sid?’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’
India said to me, ‘Kevin says you went to school in Liverpool.’
Tatum, puzzled, asked, ‘What did you say?’
She explained, ‘Sid wouldn’t tell me where he went to school, so I found out.’ She looked at me accusingly. ‘You don’t sound like Liverpool.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘You sound more like Eton. How come?’
‘I’m a mimic,’ I said.
If she really wanted to, she could find out also that between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one I’d been more or less adopted by a Newmarket trainer (who had been to Eton) who made me into a good jockey and by his example changed my speech and taught me how to live and how to behave and how to manage the money I earned. He’d been already old then, and he died. I often thought of him. He opened doors for me still.
‘Kevin told me you were a slum child,’ India said.
‘Slum is an attitude, not a place.’
‘Prickly, are we?’
Damn, I thought. I will not let her goad me. I smiled, which she didn’t like.
Tatum, listening with disapproval, said, ‘Who is Kevin?’
‘He works for The Pump,’ I told him.
India said, ‘Kevin Mills is The Pump’s chief reporter. He did favors for Halley and got kicked in the teeth.’
‘Painful,’ Tatum commented dryly.
‘This conversation’s getting nowhere,’ I said. ‘India, Mr Tatum is not the prosecutor in any case where I am a witness, and we may talk about anything we care to, including, as just now before you came, golf.’
‘You can’t play golf with one hand.’
It was Tatum who winced, not I. I said, ‘You can watch golf on television without arms, legs or ears. Where did your editor get the idea that you might find us here?’
‘He didn’t say. It doesn’t matter.’
‘It is of the essence,’ Tatum said.
‘It’s interesting,’ I said, ‘because to begin with, it was The Pump that worked up the greatest head of steam about the ponies mutilated in Kent. That was why I got in touch with Kevin Mills. Between us we set up a Hotline, as a “Save the Tussilago faifara” sort of thing.’