The third son of a baron, he trained for a distantly royal personage thirty-somethingth from the throne, a snob-value combination that had brought him Rich’s custom in the first place. The deterioration in the first flush of gratification on both sides — there were no longer many owner-strings as big as Rich’s nor as talented in depth — had been complete, both men throwing me asides along the way from euphoria to disillusion.
‘The man’s impossible!’ Michael had exclaimed over some particular transport demand from Jericho. ‘Totally unreasonable.’
‘My horse lost the race on the journey to Scotland,’ Rich complained. ‘Why does he send them so far? It costs too much and they arrive tired.’ He overlooked entirely Michael’s successful forays to France with the same animals.
I remained strictly neutral and non-partisan through all owner-trainer differences out of a strong sense of self-preservation, starting right back in my early racing days over fences when an incautious criticism had got back to its target and very nearly cost me my job. I’d become adept at sympathetic noises with the minimum of actual comment, even to friends.
Getting my own way softly had eased my whole path through life and in business had served me well. I was better at placating than confronting, at persuading than commanding; and I wasn’t defeated much.
Michael said slowly, ‘Is it true your box brought back... a dead man?’
‘ ’Fraid so.’
‘Who?’
I explained yet again about Kevin Keith Ogden, and I told him that Jericho Rich had already demanded a different box and driver for his fillies on the morrow.
‘That man,’ Michael said bitterly. ‘Despite the hole it makes in my yard, I’ll be glad to see the last of him. Vile-tempered oaf.’
‘Will you fill up the holes?’
‘Oh sure, in time. I’ve got ten boarded out that I can bring in now, for a start. Losing Jericho’s a blight, but not a disaster.’
‘Great.’
‘Lunch on Sunday? Maudie will call you.’
‘Fine.’
‘Bye.’
A man could drown in Maudie Watermead’s blue eyes. Her Sunday lunches were legendary.
Farway, still by the window, was growing impatient, repeatedly consulting his watch as if the constant checking would make time go faster.
‘Scotch?’ I offered again.
‘I don’t drink.’
Dislike or addiction, I wondered? Probably plain disapproval, on the whole.
I looked round my spacious familiar room, wondering how he would see it. Grey carpet with a scattering of rugs. Cream walls, racing photographs, my mother’s china parrot collection in an alcove. Edwardian mahogany desk, green leather swivelling chair. Sofas with ancient fading chintz, tray of drinks on a side table, padded cream curtains, table lamps everywhere, book-shelves and a pot plant, all leaves, no flowers. A lived-in room, not excessively tidy, not a decorator’s triumph.
Home.
An unenthusiastic black van at long last crawled onto the tarmac and parked between the horsebox and my door. It had long black windowless sides and black windowless rear doors, and I realised it was, in fact, a hearse. Sandy in his official car returned in its wake.
Farway, exclaiming, hurried out to meet him and the three men who emerged phlegmatically from the hearse to set about their task. I followed in Farway’s wake and watched the unloading of a narrow stretcher which seemed to be covered on the upper surface with a lot of dark canvas and several sinewy straps.
The man who seemed to be in charge of things said he was the coroner’s officer and produced paperwork for Farway to deal with.
The other two climbed with the stretcher up into the cab, followed by Sandy, who soon descended again bringing with him a grip and a briefcase. Both bags were of leather, battered but originally good.
‘Belongings of the deceased?’ the man asked.
Farway thought so.
‘They are not my men’s,’ I agreed.
Sandy put the bags on the tarmac and then went aloft again to return with a plastic bag containing booty collected from the body — a watch, a cigarette lighter, a packet of cigarettes, a pen, a comb, a nail file, a handkerchief, glasses and the onyx and gold ring. He itemised them aloud to the coroner’s officer who wrote at his dictation, then attached a label saying ‘property of K. K. Ogden’ and stowed them in his car.
While Sandy and the coroner’s officer climbed back into the cab, I squatted down beside the bags and unzipped the top of the grip.
‘I don’t think you should do that,’ Farway protested.
The grip, half-full, held overnight necessities; shaving kit, pyjamas, clean shirt, nothing very new, nothing out of the ordinary. I closed the zip and snapped open the briefcase, which wasn’t locked.
‘Hey,’ Farway said.
‘If a man dies on my property,’ I said reasonably, ‘I’d like to get to know him.’
‘But you’ve no right...’
I looked anyway through the meagre contents, which seemed to me wholly uninformative. A calculator. Writing pad, nothing written on it. A bunch of postcards in an elastic band, all the same, a view of a country hotel, advertisement hand-outs. A bottle of aspirins, a packet of indigestion tablets, two small air-line size bottles of vodka, both full.
‘Look here,’ Farway said uncomfortably.
I shut the briefcase and stood up. ‘All yours,’ I said.
The undertakers took their time, and when they finally brought Kevin Keith out it was through the front passenger door, not via the grooms’ door further back through which we had all so far climbed to reach the rear seat. It appeared that, death having done its stiffening work, the only way out for the body was to load it forward onto the stretcher laid along the front seats: so it came out that way, feet forward, wrapped amorphically in canvas, retaining straps in place.
As bodies went, it appeared that this one was heavy and awkward in shape, the bent right arm being impossible to straighten. Certainly respect for the dead as such was markedly absent, the problem seeming to present itself rather as of the order of extricating an obstinate grand piano from a small angular attic. I supposed body-collectors got used to it. One of the men, besides remarks like ‘Heave now’ and ‘That arm’s jamming on the door,’ was assessing the chances of his football team on the following Saturday. They lifted the stretcher unceremoniously through the open back doors of the black hearse as if engaged in rubbish disposal and I saw them transfer the canvas-wrapped Ogden off the stretcher into an opened metal coffin.
Farway too, more used to corpses than I, was taking the removal of this one prosaically. He told me he wouldn’t be doing the post-mortem himself but it looked to him like straightforward cardiac arrest. Plain unlucky. The inquest should be a brief formality. He would be certifying death. I might not be called.
He said goodnight neutrally, folded himself into his car and followed the hearse as it rolled away off my tarmac. Sandy, taking with him the grip and the briefcase, drove off peacefully in the rear.
All suddenly seemed very quiet. I looked up at the stars, eternal in the face of mortality. I wondered if Kevin Keith Ogden had known he was dying, lying along a leatherette bench seat behind a thundering engine.
I thought quite likely not. There had been times when I’d been knocked out in racing falls, when the last thing I’d seen had been a whirling blurring vision of grass and sky. After the impact, I wouldn’t have known if I’d died; and I’d thought sometimes, gratefully waking up, that an unaware death would be a blessing.