‘He couldn’t have done it,’ Gypsy Joe asserted gloomily. ‘His alibi’s perfect.’
‘He couldn’t have done it,’ the superintendent nodded, ‘because at the relevant time he was hobbling round the hospital here on crutches, getting physiotherapy for his broken foot.’
‘And his glued-on trusty, Nigel Tape, couldn’t have done it either, because he was here under my very eyes, riding my horses on the exercise gallops when Red...’ Gypsy Joe stopped short, his throat constricting. The waste and destruction of the soaring talent he’d set free on his horses brought Gypsy Joe daily nearer to tears than he would have thought possible. He knew he would never find another Red Millbrook: a match like that to his horses happened only once in a trainer’s lifetime.
When the superintendent had gone, Gypsy Joe’s hatred for Red Millbrook’s killer continued to burn like a slow relentless furnace in his dark gypsy soul. He would know, he thought. One day, in the unexplained way that things became clear to him, he would know who’d killed Red Millbrook, and he would know what to do.
His horses, meanwhile, had to run in their intended races. The owners telephoned demanding it. Life had to go on. Davey Rockman’s fractured foot mended like magic and Gypsy Joe, with misgivings he didn’t wholly understand, allowed his former number one to retake his earlier place.
The horses missed Red Millbrook. They won races, but not joyously in droves. The glory days were over. Some racegoers cheered; some wept. Gypsy Joe despaired.
It was at the memorial service for Red Millbrook’s life that The Rock made his revealing mistake. In the church, oblivious to Gypsy Joe standing grimly and unsuspected behind him, Davey Rockman turned his head to Nigel Tape and smirked.
Gypsy Joe saw first the evil in the curve of the sneering lips, and felt pierced only with simple disgust. But by evening and through the night the deeper knowledge that he sought arrived.
In the morning he telephoned the Metropolitan Police superintendent.
‘A paid murderer?’ the super repeated doubtfully. ‘Contract killers are very rare, you know. It’s unlikely that this is one.’ He thought to himself that most murders were domestic — family affairs — impulsive, and he knew most were solved. Often drugs were the dynamics of unexplained deaths, but not this time, he didn’t think. There was no smell of it. And no suggestion of political assassination, which was normally flamboyant and led to arrest, either on the scene itself, or soon after.
‘Which leaves you where?’ asked Gypsy Joe.
‘Looking at the currents inside the Millbrook family. We think the young man knew his killer. We think whoever shot him tapped on the window and the young man, recognising the person, lowered the window to talk. The sisters are no sweet cookies...’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Gypsy Joe was positive. ‘The Millbrook family didn’t kill him. I saw violent destructive hatred in Davey Rock man’s eyes at yesterday’s memorial service. You are underestimating the violence of hate. Nearly everyone does. I saw him gloat over Red’s death. I’m certain he had him killed. I’ll go after him and stir things up.’
The superintendent, doubting and believing in turns, not sure after all that gypsy insight could be relied on, told his informant weakly, ‘Take care, then, there’s a murderer about.’
Gypsy Joe took the warning seriously but walked his big frame and his outsize personality into the path of everyone he thought might show him a line to crime. No one exactly gave him directions to an assassin but at length, when his quest had become the talk of every racecourse, someone with a snigger told him to look under his own nose. Nigel Tape, he eventually discovered, had a brother who’d once done time for receiving stolen cars. Hardly helpful, he thought. A pussy-cat when he was looking for a lion.
With nothing therefore but implacable suspicion to fuel him, Gypsy Joe began asking Davey ‘The Rock’ questions. Endless needling questions, on and on and day by day.
‘How did you find a killer? Who did you ask?’
‘How did you pay him? Did you send him a cheque?’
‘He’ll blackmail you, won’t he? He’ll want more and more.’
On and on.
He shredded Davey Rockman’s nerves, but kept on offering him rides in races The questions tormented The Rock, but he needed the fees. His hands began shaking. Gypsy Joe, everywhere, accused in his ear, ‘Murderer.’
‘I didn’t do it,’ The Rock yelled, frantic.
Gypsy Joe, regardless, repeated ‘Murderer’ again and again, and allowed his jockey no peace.
Davey Rockman and Nigel Tape went to Warwick races together, Nigel Tape driving his own leased car and hoping The Rock would pay his share of the petrol. Gone were the days, it seemed, when The Rock grandiosely paid all of their joint expenses as a matter of course. The Rock, Nigel Tape morosely considered, wasn’t any longer the hero he’d worshipped all these years.
The Rock’s saturnine good looks had rapidly lost their taut appeal since the smooth tanned skin on his jaw and cheekbones had loosened and greyed. The bravado of the riding boots no longer strode with self-confident near-arrogance from weighing-room to parade ring. The maestro no longer masterfully slapped his calf with his riding whip. Onlookers used to the swagger of pre-Red Millbrook days hardly recognised the dimmed round-shouldered slinker as the wolf of the tracks, the sexual predator that had set alarmed mothers scurrying protectively after their chicks.
The Rock, under Gypsy Joe’s pitiless barrage, had more than halfway crumbled.
‘He’s sure I did it,’ The Rock moaned. ‘He never leaves me alone five minutes. He wants to know who killed his precious boy and I can scream and scream that I don’t know and he just goes on asking.’
Nigel Tape glanced sideways at the wreck of his friend. He — and every pair of eyes on the racecourse — could clearly see the atrophy of The Rock’s vivid character, let alone his riding skill. Horses in his hands were going soft.
‘You can’t tell him who killed Red Millbrook because you don’t know.’ Nigel Tape’s voice was edging from reasonableness to exasperation. He’d said the same thing a dozen times.
‘I tell him over and over I don’t know,’ The Rock complained. ‘He thinks I just walked up to someone who has a gun and said, “Shoot Red Millbrook for me.” He’s so simple he’s pathetic’
Gypsy Joe, neither simple nor pathetic, watched his jockey’s spineless performances that afternoon and was obliged to apologise to his owners.
For all his persistent inquisition of The Rock, Gypsy Joe hadn’t learned who’d killed Red Millbrook. He began to believe that the jockey truly didn’t know whose hand had actually held the gun. He didn’t change his certainty of The Rock’s basic guilt.
At the end of an unproductive three hours of also-rans, the trainer told his jockey that good owners were harder to replace than good riders (Red Millbrook excepted). He’d given Davey Rockman every chance, he said, but the owners were bitterly complaining and enough was enough, so goodbye. The Rock, speechless, burned behind his eyes with incandescent malice and saw no fault in himself.
‘What about me?’ demanded Nigel Tape. ‘Do I get The Rock’s job? First jockey to the stable?’
‘No, you don’t. You haven’t the drive. If you want to, you can carry on as before.’
‘It isn’t fair,’ Nigel Tape said.
On their drive home from the races, The Rock violently swore to revenge himself for the public disgrace of losing his job.
‘Get that gunman for me,’ The Rock said. ‘Tell him I need him again.’
Nigel Tape drove erratically in troubled silence. Fair haired, with sun-bleached eyebrows, the pale shadow of Davey The Rock painfully felt his long allegiance weakening. He had quite liked Red Millbrook, he belatedly realised, and Gypsy Joe hadn’t been bad to work for, all these years. A steady job, better than most...