‘You’ve seen him,’ Roberta said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well... who is it?’
‘Lord Gowery.’
She gasped. ‘Oh no, Kelly.’
‘I want to talk to him.’
‘It can’t do any good.’
‘You never know.’
‘Annoying Lord Gowery is the last, positively the last way of getting your licence back. Surely you can see that?’
‘Yes... He’s not going to be kind, I don’t think. So would you mind very much if I took you back to Bobbie first?’
She looked troubled. ‘You won’t say anything silly? It’s Father’s licence as well, remember.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ I said flippantly. She gave me a sharp suspicious glance, but turned easily enough to go back to Bobbie.
Almost immediately outside the bar we were stopped by Jack Roxford, who was hurrying towards us through the throng.
‘Kelly,’ he said, half panting with the exertion. ‘I just wanted to catch you... to say how sorry I am that Grace went off the deep end like that. She’s not herself, poor girl... Miss Cranfield, I do apologise.’
Roberta unbent a little. ‘That’s all right, Mr Roxford.’
‘I wouldn’t like you to believe that what Grace said... all those things about your father... is what I think too.’ He looked from her to me, and back again, the hesitant worry furrowing his forehead. A slight, unaggressive man of about forty-five; bald crown, nervous eyes, permanently worried expression. He was a reasonably good trainer but not enough of a man of the world to have achieved much personal stature. To me, though I had never ridden for him, he had always been friendly, but his restless anxiety-state made him tiring to be with.
‘Kelly,’ he said, ‘If it’s really true that you were both framed, I do sincerely hope that you get your licences back. I mean, I know there’s a risk that Edwin will take his horses to your father, Miss Cranfield, but he did tell me this evening that he won’t do so now, even if he could... But please believe me, I hold no dreadful grudge against either of you, like poor Grace... I do hope you’ll forgive her.’
‘Of course, Mr Roxford,’ said Roberta, entirely placated. ‘Please don’t give it another thought. And oh!’ she added impulsively, ‘I think you’ve earned this!’ and into his astonished hands she thrust the bottle of vodka.
Chapter Nine
When I went back towards the bar I found Lord Gowery had come out of it. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with Lord Ferth, both of them watching me walk towards them with faces like thunder.
I stopped four feet away, and waited.
‘Hughes,’ said Lord Gowery for openers, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘My Lord,’ I said politely. ‘This isn’t Newmarket Heath.’
It went down badly. They were both affronted. They closed their ranks.
‘Insolence will get you nowhere,’ Lord Ferth said, and Lord Gowery added, ‘You’ll never get your licence back, if you behave like this.’
I said without heat, ‘Does justice depend on good manners?’
They looked as if they couldn’t believe their ears. From their point of view I was cutting my own throat, though I had always myself doubted that excessive meekness got licences restored any quicker than they would have been without it. Meekness in the accused brought out leniency in some judges, but severity in others. To achieve a minimum sentence, the guilty should always bone up on the character of their judge, a sound maxim which I hadn’t had the sense to see applied even more to the innocent.
‘I would have thought some sense of shame would have kept you away,’ Lord Ferth said.
‘It took a bit of an effort to come,’ I agreed.
His eyes narrowed and opened again quickly.
Gowery said, ‘As to spreading these rumours... I say categorically that you are not only not on the point of being given your licence back, but that your suspension will be all the longer in consequence of your present behaviour.’
I gave him a level stare and Lord Ferth opened his mouth and shut it again.
‘It is no rumour that Mr Cranfield and I are not guilty,’ I said at length. ‘It is no rumour that two at least of the witnesses were lying. Those are facts.’
‘Nonsense,’ Gowery said vehemently.
‘What you believe, sir,’ I said, ‘Doesn’t alter the truth.’
‘You are doing yourself no good, Hughes.’ Under his heavy authoritative exterior he was exceedingly angry. All I needed was a bore hole, and I’d get a gusher.
I said, ‘Would you be good enough to tell me who suggested to you or the other Stewards that you should seek out and question Mr Newtonnards?’
There was the tiniest shift in his eyes. Enough for me to be certain.
‘Certainly not.’
‘Then will you tell me upon whose instructions the enquiry agent David Oakley visited my flat?’
‘I will not.’ His voice was loud, and for the first time, alarmed.
Ferth looked in growing doubt from one of us to the other.
‘What is all this about?’ he said.
‘Mr Cranfield and I were indeed wrongly warned off,’ I said. ‘Someone sent David Oakley to my flat to fake that photograph. And I believe Lord Gowery knows who it was.’
‘I most certainly do not,’ he said furiously. ‘Do you want to bs sued for slander?’
‘I have not slandered you, sir.’
‘You said...’
‘I said you knew who sent David Oakley. I did not say that you knew the photograph was a fake.’
‘And it wasn’t,’ he insisted fiercely.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘It was.’
There was a loaded, glaring silence. Then Lord Gowery said heavily, ‘I’m not going to listen to this,’ and turned on his heel and dived back into the bar.
Lord Ferth, looking troubled, took a step after him.
I said, ‘My Lord, may I talk to you?’ And he stopped and turned back to me and said, ‘Yes, I think you’d better.’
He gestured towards the supper room next door and we went through the archway into the brighter light. Nearly everyone had eaten and gone. The buffet table bore shambled remains and all but two of the small tables were unoccupied. He sat down at one of these and pointed to the chair opposite. I took it, facing him.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Explain.’
I spoke in a flat calm voice, because emotion was going to repel him where reason might get through. ‘My Lord, if you could look at the Enquiry from my point of view for a minute, it is quite simple. I know that I never had any five hundred pounds or any note from Mr Cranfield, therefore I am obviously aware that David Oakley was lying. It’s unbelievable that the Stewards should have sent him, since the evidence he produced was faked. So someone else did. I thought Lord Gowery might know who. So I asked him.’
‘He said he didn’t know.’
‘I don’t altogether believe him.’
‘Hughes, that’s preposterous.’
‘Are you intending to say, sir, that men in power positions are infallibly truthful?’
He looked at me without expression in a lengthening silence. Finally he said, as Roberta had done, ‘Where did you go to school?’
In the usual course of things I kept dead quiet about the type of education I’d had because it was not likely to endear me to either owners or trainers. Still, there was a time for everything, so I told him.