‘Did Vic travel with the horse himself?’
‘No. He was right here in England.’
‘So... where was the fraud?’
‘Ah... See, the horse that set off for Japan and died of tetanus, that horse wasn’t Polyprint.’
He lit a cigarette, absorbed in his story.
‘It was a horse called Nestegg.’
I stared at him. ‘Nestegg is standing at stud in Ireland.’
‘Ay,’ he said. ‘And that’s Polyprint.’
The gaunt face twisted into the ghost of a smile. ‘See, Vic bought Nestegg because he had a client who wanted it. Nestegg was six and had won a few long distance races, and this client had a small stud and wanted a stallion that wouldn’t cost too much. Well, Vic bought Nestegg for ten thousand and was going to pass him on for fifteen, and then this client just dropped down dead one afternoon and the widow said nothing doing she didn’t want to know. Vic wasn’t much worried because Nestegg wasn’t bad, really.’
He took a few deep puffs, sorting things out.
‘One evening I was at Vic’s place near Epsom and we looked round the yard, like one does. He shows me Polyprint, who’s due to set off to Japan the next day. Big bay horse. Full of himself. Then, three boxes along, there was Nestegg. Another bay, much the same. We went in and looked at him and he was standing there all hunched up and sweating. Vic looked him over and said he would go out and see him again later, and if he was no better he would get the vet in the morning. Then we went into Vic’s house for a drink, and then I went home.’
He looked at me broodingly.
‘So the next day off goes this horse to Japan and dies of tetanus two days later. Next time I saw Vic he sort of winks at me and gives me a thousand quid in readies, and I laughed and took it. Then later he sold this bay which he still had, which was supposed to be Nestegg but was really Polyprint, he sold him to a stud in Ireland for seventeen thousand. He wouldn’t have made a penny if he’d sent Polyprint off to Japan and got a vet to try to save Nestegg. Just by swapping those two horses when he had the chance, he made himself a proper packet.’
‘And it gave him a taste for more easy money in large amounts?’
‘Ay... It was after that that he latched on to the kick-backs in a big way. He asked me to help... Tell you the truth, I was glad to.’
‘And he found this expert,’ I said.
‘Ay...’ He hesitated. ‘It was maybe the other way round. Vic more or less said this chap had come to him and suggested more ways Vic could make money.’
‘He hadn’t done so badly on his own,’ I observed.
‘Well... Polyprint was a one-off, see. You couldn’t work that again. He only did it because he realised Nestegg had tetanus and would die pretty quickly if he wasn’t treated and even maybe if he was. See, tetanus isn’t that common. You couldn’t have two die of it on journeys when they were heavily insured, even if you could infect them on purpose, which you can’t. Vic walked that horse around all night to keep it moving and fed it a bucketful of tranquillisers so that it looked all right when it was loaded on to the plane at Gatwick. But to get another one to die on a journey you’d have to fix some sort of accident. The insurance people would be dead suspicious, and even if they paid up they might afterwards refuse to insure you altogether and you couldn’t risk that, see. But the thing about this expert chap was that nearly everything he suggested was legal. Vic said it was like property development and land speculation. You could make a great deal of money without breaking the law if you knew how to set about it.’
The police were understandably sour about my assertion that I had fallen on the pitchfork by accident and that Fynedale was as innocent of assault as a bunch of violets. They argued and I insisted, and half an hour later Fynedale stood outside on the pavement shivering in the wind.
‘Thanks,’ he said briefly. He looked shrunken and depressed.
He huddled inside his jacket, turned on his heel, and walked away up the street to the railway station. The carrot hair was a receding orange blob against the dead copper leaves of a beech hedge.
Sophie was waiting by the kerb, sitting in the driving seat of my car. I opened the passenger side door and slid in beside her.
‘Will you drive?’ I said.
‘If you like.’
I nodded.
‘You look bushed,’ she said. She started the engine, shifted the gears, and edged out into the road.
‘Couldn’t beat Muhammed AH right now.’
She smiled. ‘How did it go?’
‘Like a torrent, once he’d started.’
‘What did you learn?’
I thought, trying to put everything into its right order. Sophie drove carefully, flicking glances across, waiting for an answer.
I said, ‘Vic swindled an insurance company very neatly, about three years ago. Some time after that someone who Fynedale calls an expert sought Vic out and suggested a sort of alliance, in which Vic would extort money in various more or less legal ways and pay a proportion of it to the expert. I imagine this expert guessed Vic had swindled the insurance and was therefore a good prospect for a whole career of legal robbery.’
‘There’s no such thing as legal robbery.’
I smiled. ‘How about wealth taxes?’
‘That’s different.’
‘Taking by law is legal robbery.’
‘Ah well... go on about Vic.’
‘Vic and the expert started redistributing wealth in no uncertain terms, chiefly into their own pockets but with enough pickings to entice six or seven other agents into the ring.’
‘Fynedale?’ Sophie said.
‘Yes. Especially Fynedale, as he knew about the original insurance swindle. It just seems to have been my bad luck that I started being an agent at about the time Vic and the expert were warming things up. Pauli Teksa had a theory that Vic and his friends wanted me out of the way because I was a threat to their monopoly, and from what Fynedale says I should think he might have been right, though I thought it was nonsense when he suggested it.’
I yawned. Sophie drove smoothly, as controlled at the wheel as everywhere else. She had taken off the fur-lined hood, and the silver blonde hair fell gently to her shoulders. Her profile was calm, efficient, content. I thought that probably I did love her, and would for a long time. I also guessed that however often I might ask her to marry me, in the end she would not. The longer and better I knew her, the more I realised that she was by nature truly solitary. Lovers she might take, but a bustling family life would be alien and disruptive. I understood why her four years with the pilot had been a success: it was because of his continual long absences, not in spite of them. I understood her lack of even the memory of inconsolable grief. His death had merely left her where she basically liked to be, which was alone.
‘Go on about Vic,’ she said.
‘Oh... well... They started this campaign of harassment. Compulsory purchase of Hearse Puller at Ascot. Sending Fred Smith down to my place to do what harm he could, which turned out to be giving Crispin whiskey and letting loose that road-hogging two-year-old. Arrang ing for me to buy and lose River God. When all that, and a few bits of intimidation from Vic himself, failed to work, they reckoned that burning my stable would do the trick.’
‘Their mistake.’
‘Yeah... well... they did it.’ I yawned again. ‘Fred Smith, now. Vic and the expert needed some muscle. Ronnie North knew Fred Smith. Vic must have asked Ronnie if he knew anyone suitable and Ronnie suggested Fred Smith.’