As often happens when a fresh bidder comes in at the last moment the two contestants soon gave up, and the gavel came down at three thousand four.
‘Sold to Jonah Dereham.’
Jiminy Bell was staring at me slit-eyed from the other side of the ring.
‘What’s that in dollars?’ said my client.
‘About seven thousand five hundred.’
We left the wooden shelter and she raised the umbrella again although the drizzle had all but ceased.
‘More than I authorised you to spend,’ she said, without great complaint. ‘And your commission on top, I guess?’
‘Five per cent,’ I nodded.
‘Ah well... In the States you wouldn’t buy a three-legged polo pony for that money.’ She gave me a small smile as nicely judged as a tip and decided to walk on to wait in my car while I completed the paper work and arranged for the onward transport of Hearse Puller. He was to be stabled for the night in my own back yard and delivered to his new owner on the birthday morning.
Nicol Brevett... A surprise like a wasp at the honey, harmless unless you touched it on the stinging side.
He was a hard forceful young man who put his riding cards on the table and dared the professionals to trump them. His obsessive will to win led him into ruthlessness, rudeness and rows. His temper flared like a flame thrower. No one could deny his talent, but where most of his colleagues won friends and races, Nicol Brevett just won races.
Hearse Puller was within his scope as a rider and if I were lucky they would have a good season together in novice chases: and I thought I would need to be lucky because of Brevett senior, whose weight could be felt all over the Turf.
My respect for Kerry Sanders rose several notches. Any woman who could interest Constantine Brevett to the point of matrimony had to be of a sophistication to put Fabergé eggs to shame, and I could well understand her coyness about naming him. If any announcements concerning him were to be made he would want to make them himself.
Constantine covered with velvet the granite core which showed in rocky outcrops in his son, and from brief racecourse meetings over the past few years I knew his social manners to be concentrated essence of old-boy network. The actions which spoke truer had repeatedly left a wake of smaller operatives who sadly wished they had never been flattered by his attention. I didn’t know exactly what his business was, only that he dealt in property and thought in millions, and was now trying to build up the best collection of horses in the country. I had guessed it was being best that interested him more than the actual horses.
When I was ready to leave the Sales the best thing of the day was due to come up in the ring, so it seemed that everyone was flocking in one direction to watch it while I went in the other towards the cars. I could see Kerry Sanders sitting waiting, her head turned towards me behind the rain-speckled glass. Two men were leaning on the car beside mine, cupping their hands over matches while they lit cigarettes.
When I passed them, one of them picked up some sort of bar from the bonnet of the car and hit me a crunching blow on the head.
Dazed and astonished I staggered and sagged and saw all those stars they print in comic strips. Vaguely I heard Kerry Sanders shouting and opening the door of my car, but when the world stopped whirling a little I saw that she was still sitting inside. Door shut, window open. Her expression as much outrage as fright.
One of the men clutched my right arm which probably stopped me falling flat on my face. The other calmly stood and watched. I leaned against the car next to mine and weakly tried to make sense of it.
‘Muggers,’ Kerry Sanders said scathingly. I thought she said ‘buggers’ with which I agreed, but finally understood what she meant.
‘Four pounds,’ I said. ‘Only got four pounds.’ It came out as a mumble. Indistinct.
‘We don’t want your money. We want your horse.’
Dead silence. They shouldn’t have hit my head so hard if they wanted sense.
Kerry Sanders made things no clearer. ‘I’ve already told you once,’ she said icily, ‘That I intend to keep him.’
‘You told us, but we don’t believe you.’
The one doing the talking was a large cheerful man with a bouncer’s biceps and frizzy mouse-brown hair standing round his head like a halo.
‘A fair profit, I offered you,’ he said to Kerry. ‘Can’t say fairer than that, now can I, darlin’.’
‘What the hell,’ I said thickly, ‘is going on?’
‘See now,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘Three thousand six. Can’t say fairer than that.’
Kerry Sanders said no.
Frizzy Hair turned his reasonable smile on me.
‘Look now, lover boy, you and the lady is going to sell us the horse. Now we might as well do it civilised like. So give her some of your expensive advice and we’ll be on our way.’
‘Buy some other horse,’ I said. Still a mumble.
‘We haven’t got all afternoon, lover boy. Three thousand six. Take it.’
‘Or leave it,’ I said automatically.
Kerry Sanders almost laughed.
Frizzy Hair dug into an inner pocket and produced wads of cash. Peeling a few notes away from one packet he threw the bulk of it through the car window onto Kerry Sanders’ lap, followed by three closely taped packets which he didn’t count. The lady promptly threw the whole lot out again and it lay there in the mud of the car park, lucre getting suitably filthy.
The haze in my head began to clear and my buckling knees to straighten. Immediately, sensing the change, Frizzy Hair shed the friendly persuader image in favour of extortionist, grade one.
‘Let’s forget the games,’ he said. ‘I want that horse and I’m going to get it. See?’
He unzipped the front of my rain-proof jacket.
I made a mild attempt at freeing myself from the other man’s grasp, but my co-ordination was still shot to pieces. The net result was nothing except a fresh whirling sensation inside my skull, and I’d been knocked out often enough in the past to know that the time of profitable action was still a quarter of an hour ahead.
Under my jacket I wore a sweater, and under that a shirt. Frizzy Hair slid his hand up between these two layers until his fingers encountered the webbing strap I wore across my chest. He smiled with nasty satisfaction, yanked up the sweater, found the buckle on the strap, and undid it.
‘Now you see, don’t you, lover boy,’ he said, ‘How I’m going to get that horse?’
2
I sat in the driving seat of my car leaning my head against the window. Kerry Sanders sat beside me with the muddy packets of money on her expensive suede lap and unadulterated exasperation in her manner.
‘Well, I couldn’t just sit there and watch them putting you through a wringer,’ she said crossly. ‘Someone had to get you out of that fix, didn’t they?’
I said nothing. She had stepped out of the car and picked up the money and told the thugs to leave me alone. She said they could have the goddam horse and much good might it do them. She had not tried screaming for help or running away or anything equally constructive, but had acted on the great modern dictum that you became less of a hospital case if you gave in to threats of violence right away.
‘You looked as grey as death,’ she said. ‘What did you expect me to do? Sit and applaud?’
I didn’t answer.
‘What’s the matter with your goddam arm, anyway?’
‘It dislocates,’ I said. ‘The shoulder dislocates.’
‘All the time?’
‘Oh no. Not often. Only if it gets into one certain position. Then it falls apart, which is very boring. I wear the strap to prevent that happening.’
‘It isn’t dislocated now, is it?’