“I guess so.”
I went back into the workshop, put on my outdoor clothes and told Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane to keep on making paperweights while I went to the sports. They had all known Martin alive, as my friend, and all of them in brief snatches, and in turn, had been to his sending off. They wished me luck with many winners at the races.
I sat beside Worthington for the journey. We stopped to buy me a cheap watch, and to pick up a daily racing newspaper for the runners and riders. In a section titled “News Today” on the front page I read, among a dozen little snippets, that the Leicester Stewards would be hosts that day to Lloyd Baxter (owner of star jumper Tallahassee) to honor the memory of jockey Martin Stukely.
Well, well.
After a while I told Worthington in detail about my visit to Lorna Terrace, Taunton. He frowned over the more obvious inconsistencies put forward by mother and son, but seemed struck to consternation when I said,
“Didn’t you tell me that the bookmaking firm of Arthur Robins, established 1894, was now owned and run by people named Webber, Brown... and Verity?”
The consternation lasted ten seconds. “And the mother and son in Taunton were Verity!” A pause. “It must be a coincidence,” he said.
“I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”
Worthington slid a silent glance my way as he navigated a roundabout, and after a while said, “Gerard... if you have any clear idea of what’s going on... what is it? For instance, who were those attackers in black masks last night, and what did they want?”
I said, “I’d think it was one of them who squirted you with cyclopropane and laid me out with the empty cylinder... and I don’t know who that was. I’m sure, though, that one of the black masks was the fragrant Rose.”
“I’m not saying she wasn’t, but why?”
“Who else in the world would scream at Norman Osprey — or anyone else, but I’m pretty sure it was him — to break my wrists? Rose’s voice is unmistakable. And there is the way she moves... and as for purpose... partly to put me out of business, wouldn’t you say? And partly to make me give her what I haven’t got. And also to stop me from doing what we’re aiming to do today.”
Worthington said impulsively, “Let’s go home, then.”
“You just stay beside me, and we’ll be fine.”
Worthington took me seriously and body-guarded like a professional. We confirmed one of the black-mask merchants for certain simply from his stunned reaction to my being there and on my feet when anyone with any sense would have been knocking back aspirins on a sofa with an ice pack. Martin himself had shown me how jump jockeys walked around sometimes with broken ribs and arms and other injuries. Only broken legs, he’d said, postponed actual riding for a couple of months. Bruises, to him, were everyday normal, and he dealt with pain by putting it out of his mind and thinking about something else. “Ignore it,” he’d said. I copied him at Leicester as best I could.
When he saw me, Norman Osprey had stopped dead in the middle of setting up his stand, his heavy shoulders bunching; and Rose herself made the mistake of striding up to him in a carefree bounce at that moment, only to follow his disbelieving gaze and lose a good deal of her self-satisfaction. What she said explosively was “bloody hell.”
If one imagined Norman Osprey’s shoulders in black jersey, he was recognizably the figure who’d smashed my watch with his baseball bat, while aiming at my wrist. I’d jerked at the vital moment and I’d kicked his shin very hard indeed. The sharp voice urging him to try again, had, without doubt, been Rose’s.
I said to them jointly, “Tom Pigeon sends his regards.”
Neither of them looked overjoyed. Worthington murmured something to me urgently about it not being advisable to poke a wasps’ nest with a stick. He also put distance between himself and Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, and, with unobvious speed, I followed.
“They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for,” I pointed out, slowing down. “If they knew, they would have asked for it by name last night.”
“They might have done that anyway, if Tom Pigeon hadn’t been walking his dogs.” Worthington steered us still farther away from Norman Osprey, looking back all the same to make certain we weren’t being followed.
My impression of the events of barely fifteen hours earlier was that damage, as well as information, had been the purpose. But if Tom Pigeon hadn’t arrived, and if it had been to save the multiple wrist bones that Martin had said never properly mended, and if I could have answered their questions, then would I...?
Sore as I already felt all over, I couldn’t imagine any piece of knowledge that Martin might have had that he thought was worth my virtual destruction... and I didn’t like the probability that they — the black masks — wrongly believed that I did know what they wanted, and that I was being merely stubborn in not telling them.
Mordantly I admitted to myself that if I’d known for certain what they wanted and if Tom Pigeon hadn’t arrived with his dogs, I wouldn’t at that moment be strolling around any racetrack, but would quite likely have told them anything to stop them, and have been considering suicide from shame. And I was not going to confess that to anyone at all.
Only to Martin’s hovering presence could I even admit it. Bugger you, pal, I thought. What the sod have you let me in for?
Lloyd Baxter lunched at Leicester with the Stewards. His self-regarding nature found this admirable invitation to be merely his due. He told me so, condescendingly, when our paths crossed between parade ring and stands.
To Lloyd Baxter the meeting was unexpected, but I’d spotted him early and waited through the Stewards’ roast beef, cheese and coffee, talking to Worthington outside, and stiffening uncomfortably in the cold wind.
Cold weather emphasized the Paleolithic-like weight of Baxter’s facial structure and upper body, and even after only one week (though a stressful one) his hair seemed definitely to have grayed a further notch.
He wasn’t pleased to see me. I was sure he regretted the whole Broadway evening, but he concentrated hard on being civil, and it was churlish of me, I dare say, to suspect that it was because I knew of his epilepsy. Nowhere in print or chat had his condition been disclosed, but if he were afraid I would not only broadcast but snigger, he had made a judgment of my own character which hardly flattered.
Worthington melted temporarily from my side and I walked with Lloyd Baxter while he oozed compliments about the Stewards’ lunch and discussed the worth of many trainers, excluding poor old Priam Jones.
I said mildly, “It wasn’t his fault that Tallahassee fell at Cheltenham.”
I got an acid reply. “It was Martin’s fault. He unbalanced him going into the fence. He was too confident.”
Martin had told me that it — whatever it might be — was, with a disgruntled owner, normally the jockey’s fault. “Pilot error.” He’d shrugged philosophically. “And then you get the other sort of owner, the cream to ride for, the ones who understand that horses aren’t infallible, who say, ‘That’s racing,’ when something shattering happens, and who comfort the jockey who’s just lost them the win of a lifetime... And believe me,” Martin had said, “Lloyd Baxter isn’t one of those. If I lose for him, it is, in his opinion, my fault.”
“But,” I said without heat to Lloyd Baxter during his trainer-spotting at Leicester, “if a horse falls, it surely isn’t the trainer’s fault? It wasn’t Priam Jones’s fault that Tallahassee fell and lost the Coffee Cup.”
“He should have schooled him better.”
“Well,” I reasoned, “that horse had proved he could jump. He’d already won several races.”