‘Tell your father to console himself with the thought that Wilton Young has probably poured his money down the drain.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘How many horses earn anything like seventy-five thousand?’
‘He’s convinced it’ll win the Arc de Triomphe.’
‘More likely a consolation race at Redcar.’
Nicol laughed. ‘That’ll cheer him up.’
I asked him how River God was doing and he said he was eating well and already looking better. He asked if I had found out why Frizzy Hair had wanted his horses and I said I hadn’t. We spent two or three chunks of the afternoon together, cementing an unexpected friendship.
Vic Vincent took a note of it and disliked what he seemed to see as a threat to his Brevett monopoly. Even Nicol noticed the blast of ill will coming my way.
‘What have you done to upset Vic?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You must have done something.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s what I won’t do,’ I said, ‘And don’t ask what it is, because I can’t tell you.’
He sniffed. ‘Professional secret?’
‘Sort of.’
He gave me the flashing sideways grin. ‘Like when you knew I was lying my head off to keep a race on an objection, and you didn’t split?’
‘Well...’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I remember, even if you don’t. You finished fourth. You listened to me giving my owner a right lot of codswollop and you never said a word.’
‘You’d won the race.’
‘Yeah... and they’d have taken it off me if you’d given me away.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘All of three years.’ He grinned. ‘The leopard still has the same claws.’
‘Spots.’
‘Claws.’ The grin came and went. ‘You were a ferocious bastard to ride against.’
‘No.’
‘Oh sure. Milk and honey on the ground and a bloody nuisance as an opponent.’ He paused. ‘I’ll tell you... I learned something from you. I learned not to go around squealing when things weren’t fair... I learned to shrug off small injustices and get on with the next thing and put my energies in the future instead of rabbiting about the past. I learned not to mind too much when things went against me. And I reckon I owe you a lot for that.’
‘You just paid it,’ I said.
I leaned later alone against the rails of the balcony on the Members’ roof and looked down to where Vic Vincent was moving desultorily from group to group. Talking, smiling, taking notes, nodding, patting people on the back. He looked pleasant, knowledgeable and useful. He looked boyish, harmless and trustworthy. He wore a heavy tweed suit and a slightly dandified dark red shirt with a white collar and tie, and no hat on the reddish-brown hair.
I wondered why he had recently grown so aggressively rapacious. He had been successful for a long time and as one of the top one-man bands he must have been handling about two million pounds’ worth of business every year. At a flat five per cent that meant a hundred thousand stayed with him, and even after heavy expenses and taxes he must have been well off.
He worked hard. He was always there, standing in the bitter winds round the winter sale rings, totting up, evaluating, advising, buying, laying out his judgement for hire. He was working even harder now that he was going around intimidating breeders in far-flung little studs. Something had recently stoked up his appetite for money to within a millimetre of open crime.
I wondered what.
Pauli Teksa rapturised about Newmarket and compared it favourably with every American track from Saratoga to Gulf Stream Park. When pinned down by my scepticism he said he guessed he liked Newmarket because it was so small. And quaint. And so goddam British. The stands at Newmarket were fairly new and comfortable; but I reflected wryly that small, quaint and British usually meant hopelessly inadequate seating, five deep in the bars and not enough shelter from the rain.
He liked the Heath, he said. He liked to see horses running on grass. He liked the long straight course. He liked right-handed races. He’d always liked Newmarket, it was so quaint.
‘You’ve been here before?’ I asked.
‘Sure. Four years ago. Just for a look-see.’
We watched an untidy little jockey squeeze home after five furlongs by a shorter margin than he ought, and on the way down from the stands found ourselves alongside Constantine and Kerry.
She introduced the two men to each other, the big silver-haired man of property and the short wide-shouldered American. Neither took to the other on sight. They exchanged social politenesses, Constantine with more velvet than Pauli, but in less than two minutes they were nodding and moving apart.
‘That guy sure thinks a lot of himself,’ Pauli said.
Wilton Young arrived in a helicopter a quarter of an hour before the big race. Wilton Young had his own pilot and his own Bell Ranger, which was one up on the Brevett Rolls, and he made a point of arriving everywhere as noticeably as possible. If Constantine thought a lot of himself, Wilton Young outstripped him easily.
He came bouncing through the gate from the air strip straight across the paddock and into the parade ring, where his fourth best three-year-old was on display for the contest.
The loud Yorkshire voice cut through the moist October air like a timber saw, the words from a distance indistinct but the overall sound level too fierce to be missed.
Constantine stood at the other end of the parade ring towering protectively over the little knot of Kerry, his trainer and his jockey, and trying to look unaware that his whole scene had just been stolen by the poison ivy from the skies.
Nicol said in my ear ‘All we want now is for Wilton Young’s horse to beat Father’s,’ and inevitably it did. By two lengths. Easing up.
‘He’ll have apoplexy,’ Nicol said.
Constantine however had beautiful manners even in defeat and consoled his trainer in the unsaddling enclosure without appearing to notice the ill-bred glee going on six feet away, in the number one slot.
‘It always happens,’ Nicol said. ‘The one you least want to win is the one which does.’
I smiled. ‘The one you choose not to ride...’
‘They make you look a bloody fool.’
‘Over and over.’
At the end of the afternoon I drove from the racecourse, which lay a mile out on the London road, down into the town again, taking the right-hand turn to the sale paddocks. Nicol came with me, as Constantine was returning with Kerry to his hotel to lick his wounds in private, and we went round the stables looking at the dozen or so yearlings I had noted as possibles. He said he was interested in learning how to buy his own horses so that he wouldn’t have to rely on an agent all his life.
‘More like you, I’d be out of business,’ I said.
There was a filly by On Safari that I liked the look of, a big deep-chested brown mare with a kind eye. She had speed in her pedigree and her dam had produced three two-year-old winners already, and I thought that if she didn’t fetch an astronomical amount she would do very nicely for Eddy Ingram.
She was due to come up about an hour after the evening session started, and I filled in the time by buying two moderate colts for a thousand each for a trainer in Cheshire.
With Nicol still in tow I went outside to watch the On Safari filly walk round the collecting ring. She walked as well as she looked and I feared that Eddy Ingrain’s limit of fifteen thousand might not be enough.
Jiminy Bell did his appearing act, sliding with a wiggle into the space between Nicol and myself as we stood by the rail.
‘Got a note for you,’ he said.
He thrust a folded piece of paper into my hand and vanished again even before I could offer him a drink, which was as unlikely as a gatecrasher leaving before the food.