‘No,’ I said, ‘no, Davey. Calm down. How tight is the security on the Dunstable stables? Would anyone but a lad or a trainer get in there?’
‘No,’ he said, more moderately, ‘it’s as tight as a drum. The last gateman got sacked for letting an owner in alone without a trainer, and the new man’s as pernickety as they come.’
‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘We’ve got you as far as the paddock.’
‘Well, I walked the horse round the assembly ring for a bit, waiting for the guvnor to bring the saddle up from the weighing-room...’ He smiled suddenly, as at some pleasant memory ‘... and then when he came I took Shanty into one of the saddling boxes and the Guvnor saddled up, and then I took Shanty down into the parade ring and walked him round until they called me over and you got up on him.’ He stopped. ‘I can’t see what you wanted to hear all that for.’
‘What happened while you were walking round the assembly ring?’ I asked. ‘Something you enjoyed? Something you smile about when you remember it?’
He sniffed. ‘It’s nothing you’d want to know.’
I said, ‘The quid was for telling everything.’
‘Oh very well then, but it’s nothing to do with racing. It was that chap on the telly, Maurice Kemp-Lore, he came over and spoke to me and admired the horse. He said he was a friend of the owner, old man Ballerton. He patted Shanty and gave him a couple of sugar knobs, which I wasn’t too keen on, mind, but you can’t be narky with a chap like him, somehow, and he asked me what his chances were, and I said pretty good... more fool me... and then he went away again. That’s all. I told you it wasn’t anything to do with racing.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, never mind. Thanks for trying.’
I straightened up and turned away from the door, and Tick-Tock had taken a step or two towards the car when Davey said under his breath behind me, ‘Trying... you two could both do a bit more of that yourselves, if you ask me.’ But Tick-Tock fortunately didn’t hear, and we folded ourselves back into the Mini-Cooper and drove un-mourned out of the yard.
Tick-Tock exploded. ‘Anyone would think you’d killed your mother and robbed your grandmother, the way they look at you. Losing your nerve isn’t a crime.’
‘Unless you can put up with a few harmless sneers you’d better get out at the next railway station,’ I said cheerfully, having blessedly discovered in the last half-hour that they no longer hurt. ‘And I haven’t lost my nerve. Not yet, anyway.’
He opened his mouth and shut it again and flicked a glance at me, and drove another twenty miles without speaking.
We reached the next yard on my list shortly before one o’clock, and disturbed the well-to-do farmer, who trained his own horses, just as he was about to sit down to his lunch. When he opened the door to us a warm smell of stew and cabbage edged past him, and we could hear a clatter of saucepans in the kitchen. I had ridden several winners for him in the past two years before disgracing his best horse the previous week, and after he had got over the unpleasant shock of finding me on his doorstep, he asked us, in a friendly enough fashion, to go in for a drink. But I thanked him and refused, and asked where I could find the lad who looked after the horse in question. He came out to the gate with us and pointed to a house down the road.
We winkled the lad out of his digs and into the car, where I gave him a pound and invited him to describe in detail what had happened on the day I had ridden his horse. He was older, less intelligent and less truculent than Davey, but not much more willing. He didn’t see no sense in it, he didn’t. He said so, several times. Eventually I got him started, and then there was no stopping him. Detail I had asked for, and detail I got, solidly, for close on half an hour.
Sandwiched between stripping off the paddock clothing and buckling up the saddle came the news that Maurice Kemp-Lore had lounged into the saddling box, said some complimentary things to the farmer-owner about his horse, meanwhile feeding the animal some lumps of sugar, and had drifted away again leaving behind him the usual feeling of friendliness and pleasure.
‘A proper corker, ain’t he?’ was how the lad put it.
I waited until he had reached the point when the farmer had given me a leg up on the horse, and then stopped him and thanked him for his efforts. We left him muttering that we were welcome, but he still didn’t see the point.
‘How odd,’ said Tick-Tock pensively as we sped along the road to the next stable, eighty miles away. ‘How odd that Maurice Kemp-Lore...’ but he didn’t finish the sentence; and nor did I.
Two hours later, in Kent, we listened, for another pound, to a gaunt boy of twenty telling us what a smashing fellow that Maurice Kemp-Lore was, how interested he’d been in the horse, how kind to give him some sugar, though it wasn’t really allowed in his stables, but how could you tell a man like that not to, when he was being so friendly? The lad also treated us with a rather offensive superiority, but even Tick-Tock by now had become too interested to care.
‘He drugged them,’ he said flatly, after a long silence, turning on to the Maidstone by-pass. ‘He drugged them to make it look as if you couldn’t ride them... to make everyone believe you’d lost your nerve.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘But it’s impossible,’ he protested vehemently. ‘Why on earth should he? It can’t be right. It must be a coincidence that he gave sugar to three horses you rode.’
‘Maybe. We’ll see,’ I said.
And we did see. We went to the stables of every horse (other than James’s) that I had ridden since Shantytown, talking to every lad concerned. And in every single case we heard that Maurice Kemp-Lore had made the lad’s afternoon memorable (before I had blighted it) by admiring the way the lad had looked after his horse, and by offering those tempting lumps of sugar. It took us the whole of Saturday, and all Sunday morning, and we finished the last stable on my list on the edge of the Yorkshire moors at two o’clock in the afternoon. Only because I wanted my facts to be as cast-iron as possible had we gone so far north. Tick-Tock had become convinced in Northamptonshire.
I drove us back to our respective digs in Berkshire, and the following morning, Monday, I walked up to the Axminster stables to see James.
He had just come in from supervising the morning exercise, and the cold downland air had numbed his toes and fingers.
‘Come into the office,’ he said when he saw me waiting. His tone was neutral, but his protruding lower jaw was unrelenting. I followed him in, and he turned on an electric heater to warm his hands.
‘I can’t give you much to ride,’ he said, with his back to me. ‘All the owners have cried off, except one. You’d better look at this; it came this morning.’ He stretched out his hand, picked up a paper from his desk, and held it out to me.
I took it. It was a letter from Lord Tirrold. It said, ‘Dear James, Since our telephone conversation I have been thinking over our decision to replace Finn on Template next Saturday, and I now consider that we should reverse this and allow him to ride as originally planned. It is, I confess, at least as much for our sake as for his, since I do not want it said that I hurried to throw him out at the first possible moment, showing heartless ingratitude after his many wins on my horses. I am prepared for the disappointment of not winning the Midwinter and I apologise to you for robbing you of the chance of adding this prize to your total, but I would rather lose the race than the respect of the racing fraternity. Yours ever, George.’
I put the letter back on the desk.
‘He doesn’t need to worry,’ I said thickly. ‘Template will win.’
‘Do you mean you aren’t going to ride it?’ said James, turning round quickly. There was a damaging note of eagerness in his voice, and he saw that I had heard it. ‘I... I mean...’ he tailed off.