I looked at him blankly and didn’t answer. It seemed a small thing after what had already happened. He had been talking to the witnesses, in the waiting-room. They would convince anyone, it seemed. Some owners were unpredictable anyway, even in normal times. One day they had all the faith in the world in their jockey, and the next day, none at all. Faith with slender foundations. Mr Kessel had forgotten all the races I had won for him because of the one I had lost.
I turned blindly away from his hostility and found a more welcome hand on my arm. Tony, who had driven up with me instead of seeing his horses work.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
I nodded and went down with him in the lift, out into the hall, and towards the front door. Outside there we could see a bunch of newspaper reporters waylaying Cranfield with their notebooks at the ready, and I stopped dead at the sight.
‘Let’s wait till they’ve gone,’ I said.
‘They won’t go. Not before they’ve chewed you up too.’
We waited, hesitating, and a voice called behind me, ‘Hughes.’
I didn’t turn round. I felt I owed no one the slightest politeness. The footsteps came up behind me and he finally came to a halt in front.
Lord Ferth. Looking tired.
‘Hughes. Tell me. Why in God’s name did you do it?’
I looked at him stonily.
‘I didn’t.’
He shook his head. ‘All the evidence...’
‘You tell me,’ I said, rudely, ‘Why decent men like Stewards so easily believe a lot of lies.’
I turned away from him, too. Twitched my head at Tony and made for the front door. To hell with the press. To hell with the Stewards and Mr Kessel. And to everything to do with racing. The upsurge of fury took me out of the building and fifty yards along the pavement in Portman Square and only evaporated into grinding misery when we had climbed into the taxi Tony whistled for.
Tony thumped up the stairs to the darkened flat. I heard him calling.
‘Are you there, Kelly?’
I unrolled myself from the bed, stood up, stretched, went out into the sitting-room and switched on the lights. He was standing in the far doorway, blinking, his hands full of tray.
‘Poppy insisted,’ he explained.
He put the tray down on the table and lifted off the covering cloth. She’d sent hot chicken pie, a tomato, and about half a pound of Brie.
‘She says you haven’t eaten for two days.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Get on with it, then.’ He made an instinctive line for the whisky bottle and poured generously into two tumblers.
‘And here. For once, drink this.’
I took the glass and a mouthful and felt the fire trickle down inside my chest. The first taste was always the best. Tony tossed his off and ordered himself a refill.
I ate the pie, the tomato, and the cheese. Hunger I hadn’t consciously felt rolled contentedly over and slept.
‘Can you stay a bit?’ I asked.
‘Natch.’
‘I’d like to tell you about the Enquiry.’
‘Shoot,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘I’ve been waiting.’
I told him all that had happened, almost word for word. Every detail had been cut razor sharp into my memory in the way that only happens in disasters.
Tony’s astonishment was plain. ‘You were framed!’
‘That’s right.’
‘But surely no one can get away with that?’
‘Someone seems to be doing all right.’
‘But was there nothing you could say to prove...’
‘I couldn’t think of anything yesterday, which is all that matters. It’s always easy to think of all the smart clever things one could have said, afterwards, when it’s too late.’
‘What would you have said, then?’
‘I suppose for a start I should have asked who had given that so called enquiry agent instructions to search my flat. Acting on instructions, he said. Well, whose instructions? I didn’t think of asking, yesterday. Now I can see that it could be the whole answer.’
‘You assumed the Stewards had instructed him?’
‘I suppose so. I didn’t really think. Most of the time I was so shattered that I couldn’t think clearly at all.’
‘Maybe it was the Stewards.’
‘Well, no. I suppose it’s barely possible they might have sent an investigator, though when you look at it in cold blood it wouldn’t really seem likely, but it’s a tear drop to the Atlantic that they wouldn’t have supplied him with five hundred quid and a forged note and told him to photograph them somewhere distinctive in my flat. But that’s what he did. Who instructed him?’
‘Even if you’d asked, he wouldn’t have said.’
‘I guess not. But at least it might have made the Stewards think a bit too.’
Tony shook his head. ‘He would still have said he found the money behind Rosalind’s picture. His word against yours. Nothing different.’
He looked gloomily into his glass. I looked gloomily into mine.
‘That bloody little Charlie West,’ I said. ‘Someone got at him, too.’
‘I presume you didn’t in fact say “Brakes on, chaps?” ’
‘I did say it, you see. Not in the Lemonfizz, of course, but a couple of weeks before, in that frightful novice ’chase at Oxford, the day they abandoned the last two races because it was snowing. I was hitting every fence on that deadly bad jumper that old Almond hadn’t bothered to school properly, and half the other runners were just as green, and a whole bunch of us had got left about twenty lengths behind the four who were any use, and sleet was falling, and I didn’t relish ending up with a broken bone at nought degrees centigrade, so as we were handily out of sight of the stands at that point I shouted ‘O.K., brakes on, chaps,’ and a whole lot of us eased up thankfully and finished the race a good deal slower than we could have done. It didn’t affect the result, of course. But there you are. I did say it. What’s more, Charlie West heard me. He just shifted it from one race to another.’
‘The bastard.’
‘I agree.’
‘Maybe no one got at him. Maybe he just thought he’d get a few more rides if you were out of the way.’
I considered it and shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he was that much of a bastard.’
‘You never know.’ Tony finished his drink and absent-mindly replaced it. ‘What about the bookmaker?’
‘Newtonnards? I don’t know. Same thing, I suppose. Someone has it in for Cranfield too. Both of us, it was. The Stewards couldn’t possibly have warned off one of us without the other. We were knitted together so neatly.’
‘It makes me livid,’ Tony said violently. ‘It’s wicked.’
I nodded. ‘There was something else, too, about that Enquiry. Some undercurrent, running strong. At least, it was strong at the beginning. Something between Lord Gowery and Lord Ferth. And then Andy Tring, he was sitting there looking like a wilted lettuce.’ I shook my head in puzzlement. ‘It was like a couple of heavy animals lurking in the undergrowth, shaping up to fight each other. You couldn’t see them, but there was a sort of quiver in the air. At least, that’s how it seemed at one point...’
‘Stewards are men,’ Tony said with bubble-bursting matter-of-factness. ‘Show me any organisation which doesn’t have some sort of power struggle going on under its gentlemanly surface. All you caught was a whiff of the old brimstone. State of nature. Nothing to do with whether you and Cranfield were guilty or not.’
He half convinced me. He polished off the rest of the whisky and told me not to forget to get some more.
Money. That was another thing. As from yesterday I had no income. The Welfare State didn’t pay unemployment benefits to the self-employed, as all jockeys remembered every snow-bound winter.