She looked more disgusted than horrified. ‘My aunt was right about you all being crooks.’
‘Your aunt wouldn’t tell me who demanded half her profits... if you ring her again, ask her if she’s ever heard of Vic Vincent, and see what she says.’
‘Why not right now?’
She dialled her aunt’s number, and asked, and listened. Antonia Huntercombe spoke with such vehemence that I could hear her from the other side of the room, and her words were earthy Anglo-Saxon. Sophie made a face at me and nearly burst out laughing.
‘All right,’ she said, putting down the receiver. ‘It was Vic Vincent. That’s one of life’s little mysteries cleared up. Now what about the rest?’
‘Let’s forget them.’
‘Let’s absolutely not. You can’t just forget two fights in three days.’
‘Not to mention a loose horse.’
She stared. ‘Not the one...’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I might have believed that I hadn’t shut a stable door properly for the first time in eighteen years, but not that a horse could get out of his rug by undoing the buckles.’
‘You said... he was darker without his rug.’
‘Yes.’
‘You mean... someone took off his rug and shooed him out in front of my car... just to cause a crash?’
‘To injure the horse,’ I said. ‘Or even to kill it. I’d have been in very great trouble if you hadn’t reacted so quickly and missed him.’
‘Because you would have been sued for your horse causing an accident?’
‘No. The law is the other way round, if anything. Loose animals are no one’s fault, like fallen trees. No... The way the insurance on that horse was fixed, I could have lost seventy thousand pounds if he’d been damaged but not dead. And that,’ I added fervently, ‘is a position I am never going to be in again.’
‘Have you got seventy thousand pounds?’
‘Along with six castles in Spain.’
‘But...’ She wrinkled her forehead. ‘Letting that horse loose means that whoever it is is attacking you personally. Not Kerry Sanders or the Brevetts... but you.’
‘Mm.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must have some idea.’
I shook my head. ‘As far as I know I’ve done no one any harm. I’ve thought about little else for two days but I can’t think of anyone with a big enough grudge to go to all this trouble.’
‘What about small grudges?’
‘Dozens of them, I dare say. They flourish like weeds.’
She looked disapproving.
‘You get them everywhere,’ I said mildly. ‘In every working community. Schools, offices, convents, horse shows... all seething with little grudges.’
‘Not in control towers.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘You’re a cynic.’
‘A realist; How about marriage?’
She shook her head with a smile that took the suggestion still as a joke, and her hand strayed for the twentieth time to the little gold aeroplane on its slender chain.
‘Tell me about him,’ I said.
Her eyes opened wide with shock. ‘How did you...?’
‘The aeroplane. You wear it for someone else.’
She looked down at her hand and realised how often she held it in just that position, touching the talisman.
‘I... He’s dead.’
She stood up abruptly and carried the coffee pot out to the kitchen. I stood also. She came back immediately with the calm friendly face, no grief showing and no encouragement either. She gestured to me to sit down again and we took our former places, me on the sofa, her in an adjacent armchair. There was a lot of space beside me on the sofa, but no way of getting her to sit there before she was ready.
‘We lived together,’ she said. ‘For nearly four years. We never bothered to marry. It didn’t seem to matter. At the beginning we never expected it to last... and it just grew more and more solid. I suppose we might have taken out a licence in the end...’
Her eyes looked back into the past.
‘He was a pilot. A first officer on Jumbos, always on long trips to Australia... We were used to being apart.’
Still no emotion in her voice. ‘He didn’t die in an aeroplane.’ She paused. ‘Eighteen months ago yesterday he died in a hospital in Karachi. He had a two day rest stop there and developed an acute virus infection... It didn’t respond to antibiotics.’
I looked at her in silence.
‘I was mad to say I would marry you,’ she said. A smile twitched the corners of her eyes. ‘It was just... a rather nice bit of nonsense.’
‘A nonsense a day is good for the digestion.’
‘Then you certainly will never get ulcers.’
We looked at each other. A moment like that in the kitchen, but with this time no Crispin to interrupt.
‘Would you consider,’ I said, ‘coming to sit on the sofa?’
‘Sit on it. Not lie on it.’
Her meaning was plain.
‘All right.’
She moved to the sofa without fuss.
‘I’ll say one thing for you,’ she said. ‘When you make a contract, you keep it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Too proud not to.’
‘Beast.’
She laughed. She put her head on my shoulder and her mouth eventually on mine, but it was more a matter of warmth than of kindling passions. I could feel the withdrawal lying in wait only a fraction below the surface, a tenseness in the muscles warning me how easily I could go too far.
‘Stop worrying,’ I said. ‘A contract’s a contract, like you said.’
‘Is this enough for you?’
‘Yes.’
She relaxed a good deal. ‘Most men nowadays think dinner leads straight to bed.’
Most men, I reflected, had exactly the right idea. I put my arm round her and shoved the most basic of urges back into its cave. I had won a lot of waiting races in my time. Patience was an old friend.
She lifted her head off my chest and rubbed her cheek.
‘Something’s scratching me.’
I explained about the dislocating shoulder, and the strap I wore to keep it anchored in place. She traced the line of webbing across my chest and rubbed her fingers on the scratching buckle.
‘How does it work?’
‘A small strap round my arm is linked to the one round my chest. It stops me lifting my arm up.’
‘Do you wear it always?’
I nodded. ‘Mm.’
‘Even in bed?’
‘Not this one. A softer one.’
‘Isn’t it a nuisance?’
‘I’m so used to it I never notice.’
She looked up at my face. ‘Couldn’t you get it fixed? Isn’t there an operation?’
‘I’m allergic to scalpels.’
‘Reasonable.’
She stretched for a cigarette and I lit it, and we sat side by side talking about her job, and mine, her childhood and mine, her tastes in books and places and people, and mine.
Exploration, not conflagration.
When the time was right I kissed her again. And went home.
7
I spent most of the next week in Newmarket, staying with a trainer friend for the sales and the races.
Crispin, sober and depressed, had sworn to stay off drink in my absence and find a job, and as usual I had assured him he had the willpower to do both. Experience always proved me wrong, but to him the fiction was a prop.
Sophie had worked awkward hours all week-end and Monday but said she would come down to my house for lunch the next Sunday, if I would like. I could bear it, I said.
The whole mob was at Newmarket. All the bloodstock agents, big and small. All the trainers with runners, all the jockeys with mounts, all the owners with hopes. All the clients with their cheque books ready. All the breeders with their year’s work at stake. All the bookies looking for mugs. All the Press looking for exclusives.