I doubted it, but I stepped into the narrow hall and she shut the door behind me. Everything was spotless and shining; it looked a different house from the one I remembered. She led the way to the kitchen and opened the door on to another area of dazzling cleanliness.
Grant was sitting at a table, reading a newspaper. He glanced up as his wife went in, and when he saw me his face too creased into a smile of surprised welcome. He stood up. He was much thinner and older-looking, and shrunken in some indefinable inner way; but he was, or he was going to be soon, a whole man again.
‘How are you, Grant?’ I said inadequately, not understanding their friendliness.
‘I’m much better, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ve been home a fortnight now.’
‘He was in hospital,’ his wife explained. ‘They took him there the day after you brought him home. Dr Parnell wrote to me and told me Grant was ill and couldn’t help being how he was. So I came back.’ She smiled at Grant. ‘And everything’s going to be all right now. Grant’s got a job lined up too. He starts in two weeks, selling toys.’
‘Toys?’ I exclaimed. Of all incongruous things, I thought.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they thought it would be better for him to do something which had nothing to do with horses, so that he wouldn’t start brooding again.’
‘We’ve a lot to thank you for, Rob,’ Grant said.
‘Dr Parnell told me,’ his wife said, seeing my surprise, ‘that you would have been well within your rights if you’d handed him over to the police instead of bringing him here.’
‘I tried to kill you,’ Grant said in a wondering voice, as if he could no longer understand how he had felt. ‘I really tried to kill you, you know.’
‘Dr Parnell said if you’d been a different sort of person Grant could have ended up in a criminal lunatic asylum.’
I said uncomfortably, ‘Dr Parnell appears to have been doing too much talking altogether.’
‘He wanted me to understand,’ she said, smiling, ‘that you had given Grant another chance, so I ought to give him another chance too.’
‘Would it bother you,’ I said to Grant, ‘if I asked you a question about how you lost your job with Axminster?’
Mrs. Oldfield moved protectively to his side. ‘Don’t bring it all back,’ she said anxiously, ‘all the resentment.’
‘It’s all right, love,’ Grant said, putting his arm round her waist. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I believe you were telling the truth when you told Axminster you had not sold information to that professional punter, Lubbock,’ I said. ‘But Lubbock did get information, and did pay for it. The question is, who was he actually handing over the money to, if he thought he was paying it to you?’
‘You’ve got it wrong, Rob,’ Grant said. ‘I went over and over it at the time, and I went to see Lubbock and got pretty angry with him...’ He smiled ruefully, ‘and Lubbock said that until James Axminster tackled him about it he hadn’t known for sure who he was buying information from. He had guessed it was me, he said. But he said I had given him the information over the telephone, and he had sent the payments to me in the name of Robinson, care of a Post Office in London. He didn’t believe I knew nothing about it, of course. He just thought I hadn’t covered myself well enough and was trying to wriggle out of trouble.’ There was a remarkable lack of bitterness in his voice; his spell in a mental hospital, or his illness itself, seemed to have changed his personality to the roots.
‘Can you give me Lubbock’s address?’ I asked.
‘He lives in Solihull,’ he said slowly, ‘I might know the house again, but I can’t remember the name of it, or the road.’
‘I’ll find it,’ I said.
‘Why do you want to?’ he asked.
‘Would it mean anything to you, if I happened to prove that you were telling the truth all along?’
His face came suddenly alive from within. ‘I’ll say it would,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine what it was like, losing that job for something I didn’t do, and having no one believe in me any more.’
I didn’t tell him that I knew exactly what it was like, only too well. I said, ‘I’ll do my best, then.’
‘But you won’t go back to racing?’ his wife said to him anxiously. ‘You won’t start all over again?’
‘No love. Don’t worry,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m going to enjoy selling toys. You never know, we might start a toy shop of our own, next year, when I’ve learned the business.’
I drove the thirty miles to Solihull, looked up Lubbock in the telephone directory, and rang his number. A woman answered. She told me that he was not in, but if I wanted him urgently I would probably get hold of him at the Queen’s Hotel in Birmingham, as he was lunching there.
Having lost my way twice in the one-way streets, I miraculously found a place to park outside the Queen’s, and went in. I wrote a note on the hotel writing-paper, asking Mr. Lubbock, whom I did not know even by sight, if he would be so very kind as to give me a few minutes of his time. Sealing the note in an envelope, I asked the head porter if he would have one of the page-boys find Mr. Lubbock and give it to him.
‘He went into the dining-room with another gentleman a few minutes ago,’ he said. ‘Here, Dickie, take this note in to Mr. Lubbock.’
Dickie returned with an answer on the back of the note: Mr. Lubbock would meet me in the lounge at two-fifteen.
Mr. Lubbock proved to be a plumpish, middle-aged man with a gingery moustache and a thin section of lank hair brushed across a balding skull. He accepted from me a large brandy and a fat cigar with such an air of surprised irony that I was in no doubt that he was used to buying these things for jockeys, and not the other way about.
‘I want to know about Grant Oldfield,’ I said, coming straight to the point.
‘Oldfield?’ he murmured, sucking flame down the cigar. ‘Oh yes, I remember, Oldfield.’ He gave me a sharp upward glance. ‘You... er... you still work for the same firm, don’t you? Do you want a deal, is that it? Well, I don’t see why not. I’ll give you the odds to a pony for every winner you put me on to. No one could say fairer than that.’
‘Is that what you paid Oldfield?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Did you give it to him personally?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But then he didn’t ask me personally. He fixed it up on the telephone. He was very secretive: said his name was Robinson, and asked me to pay him in uncrossed money orders, and to send them to a Post Office for him to collect.’
‘Which one?’ I asked.
He took a swig at the brandy and gave me an assessing look. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘It sounds a good idea,’ I said casually.
He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘Surely it’s unimportant which Post Office it was? Somewhere in a London suburb, I know, but I can’t remember where after all this time. N.E.7? N.12? Something like that.’
‘You wouldn’t have a record of it?’
‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘Why don’t you ask Oldfield himself, if you need to know?’
I sighed. ‘How many times did he give you information?’ I asked.
‘He told me the names of about five horses altogether, I should think. Three of them won, and I sent him the money on those occasions.’
‘You didn’t know it was Oldfield selling you tips, did you?’ I asked.
‘It depends what you mean by “know”,’ he said. ‘I had a pretty good idea. Who else could it have been? But I suppose I didn’t actually “know” until Axminster said “I hear you’ve been buying information from my jockey,’ and I agreed that I had.’
‘So you wouldn’t have told anyone before that that it was Oldfield who was selling you tips?’