‘Lewis!’ Fiona exclaimed, not believing him. ‘Shut up.’
Lewis gave me a mediumly hostile glance and wanted to know why I was always hanging around. No one answered him, me included.
Fiona said, ‘They’re off a split second before the official announcement and concentrated through her raceglasses.
‘I asked you an expletive question,’ Lewis said to me brusquely.
‘You know why,’ I replied, watching the race.
‘Tremayne isn’t here,’ he objected.
‘He sent me to see Sandown.’
Chickweed was easy to spot, I discovered, with the white blaze down his chestnut face that so clearly distinguished him in the photograph nodding away on the rails at every galloping step. The overall pace seemed slower to me than the other races I’d watched, the jumping more deliberate; but it wasn’t, as Tremayne had warned me, an easy track even for the sport’s top performers, and for hunters a searching test. ‘Watch them jump the seven fences down the far side,’ he’d said. ‘If a horse meets the first one right, the others come in his stride. Miss the first, get it wrong, legs in a tangle, you might as well forget the whole race. Nolan is an artist at meeting that first fence right.’
I watched particularly. Chickweed flew the first fence and all the next six down the far side, gaining effortless lengths. ‘There’s nothing like the hunting field for teaching a horse to jump,’ Tremayne had said. ‘The trouble is, hunters aren’t necessarily fast. Chickweed is, though. So was Oxo who won the Grand National years back.’
Chickweed repeated the feat on the second circuit and then, a length in front of his nearest pursuer, swept round the long bend at the bottom end of the course and straightened himself for the third fence from home — the Pond fence, so called because the small hollow beside it had once been wet, though now held mostly reeds and bushes.
‘Oh, come on,’ Fiona said explosively, the tension too much. ‘Chicky Chickweed... jump it.’
Chicky Chickweed rose to it as if he’d heard her, his white blaze showing straight on to us before he veered right towards the second last fence and the uphill pull to home.
‘A lot of races are lost on the hill,’ Tremayne had told me. ‘It’s where stamina counts, where you need the reserves. Any horse that has enough left to accelerate there is going to win. Same at Cheltenham. A race at either place can change dramatically after the last fence. Tired horses just fade away, even if they’re in the lead.’
Chickweed made short work of the second last fence but didn’t shake off his pursuer.
‘I can’t bear it,’ Fiona said.
Mackie put down her raceglasses to watch the finish, anxiety digging lines on her forehead.
It was only a race, I thought. What did it matter? I answered my own question astringently: I’d written a novel, what did it matter if it won or lost on its own terms? It mattered because I cared, because it was where I’d invested all thought, all effort. It mattered to Tremayne and Mackie the same way. Only a race... but also their skill laid on the line.
Chickweed’s pursuer closed the gap coming to the last fence.
‘Oh, no,’ Fiona groaned, lowering her own glasses. ‘Oh, Nolan, come on.’
Chickweed made a spectacular leap, leaving unnecessary space between himself and the birch, wasting precious time in the air. His pursuer, jumping lower in a flatter trajectory, landed first and was fastest away.
‘Damn,’ Harry said.
Fiona was silent, beginning to accept defeat.
Nolan had no such thoughts. Nolan, aggressive instincts in full flood, was crouching like a demon over Chickweed’s withers delivering the message that losing was unacceptable. Nolan’s whip rose and fell twice, his arm swinging hard. Chickweed, as if galvanised, reversed his decision to slow down now that he’d been passed and took up the struggle again. The jockey and horse in front, judging the battle won, eased up fractionally too soon. Chickweed caught them napping a stride from the winning post and put his head in front just where it mattered, the crowd cheering for him, the favourite, the fighter who never gave up.
It was Nolan, I saw, who had won that race. Nolan himself, not the horse. Nolan’s ability, Nolan’s character acting on Chickweed’s. Through Nolan I began to understand how much more there was to riding races than fearlessness and being able to stay in the saddle. More than tactics, more than experience, more than ambition. Winning races, like survival, began in the mind.
Fiona, triumphant where all had looked lost, breathless and shiny-eyed, hurried ahead with Mackie to meet the returning warriors. Lewis, Harry and I pressed along in their wake.
‘Nolan’s a genius,’ Harry was saying.
‘The other expletive jockey threw it away,’ Lewis had it.
Never assume, I thought, thinking of Doone. Never assume you’ve won until you hold the prize in your hand.
Doone was assuming things, I thought Not taking his own advice. Or so it seemed.
We all went for a celebratory drink, though in Mackie’s case it was ginger ale. Harry ordered the obligatory bubbles, his heart in his boots. Nolan was as high as Fiona, Lewis a grudging applauder. I, I supposed, an observer, still on the outside looking in. Six of us in a racecourse bar smiling in unison while the cobweb ghosts of two young women set traps for the flies.
We arrived back at Shellerton before Tremayne returned from Chepstow. Fiona dropped Mackie off at her side of the house and I walked round to Tremayne’s, unlocking the door with the key he’d given me and switching on lights.
There was a message from Gareth on the family room corkboard: ‘GONE TO MOVIE. BACK FOR GRUB.’ Smiling, I kicked the hot logs together and blew some kindling sticks to life with the bellows to revive the fire and poured some wine and felt at home.
A knock on the back door drew me from comfort to see who it was, and I didn’t at first recognise the young woman looking at me with a shy enquiring smile. She was pretty in a small way, brown haired, self-effacing... Bob Watson’s wife, Ingrid.
‘Come in,’ I said warmly, relieved to have identified her. ‘But I’m the only one home.’
‘I thought maybe Mackie. Mrs Vickers...’
‘She’s round in her own house.’
‘Oh. Well...’ She came over the threshold tentatively and I encouraged her into the family room where she stood nervously and wouldn’t sit down.
‘Bob doesn’t know I’m here,’ she said anxiously.
‘Never mind. Have a drink?’
‘Oh no. Better not.’
She seemed to be screwing herself up to something, and out it all finally came in a rush.
‘You were ever so kind to me that night. Bob reckons you saved me from frostbite at the least... and pneumonia, he said. Giving me your own clothes. I’ll never forget it. Never.’
‘You looked so cold,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you won’t sit down?’
‘I was hurting with cold.’ She again ignored the chair suggestion. ‘I knew you’d come back just now... I saw Mrs Goodhaven’s car come up the road... I came to talk to you, really. I’ve got to tell someone, I think, and you’re... well... easiest.’
‘Go on then. Talk. I’m listening.’
She said in a small burst, unexpectedly, ‘Angela Brickell was a Roman Catholic, like I am.’
‘Was she?’ The news meant very little.
Ingrid nodded. ‘It said on the local radio news tonight that Angela’s body was found last Sunday by a gamekeeper on the Quillersedge Estate. There was quite a bit about her on the news, about how the police were proceeding with their enquiries and all that. And it said foul play was suspected. They’re such stupid words, foul play. Why don’t they just say someone probably did her in? Anyway, after she’d vanished last year Mrs Vickers asked me to clear all her things out of the hostel and send them to her parents, and I did.’