‘So what’s the down side?’ he said.
‘In what way?’ I said.
‘How long if I get convicted?’
‘How long a sentence?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, irritated. ‘How long until I get an appeal? Until something comes up to show I didn’t do it.’
‘There’s no guarantee you would get an appeal,’ I said. ‘It would have to be either because there is a question of law, say a ruling or the summing up by the trial judge was considered questionable or biased, or if new evidence has appeared in the case. Either way it would be quite some time. Appeals against short sentences are heard more quickly than those for longer ones. It’s not much good waiting two years for an appeal against a three-year sentence, you’d already be out. But life…’
‘Life?’ Steve said loudly, interrupting me.
‘Murder carries a life sentence,’ I said. ‘Mandatory. But life doesn’t actually mean life in most cases.’
‘Oh God,’ he said resting his forehead on his hand. ‘I’ll go bloody mad if I have to stay in here much longer.’
The private hire silver Mercedes was waiting for me outside the prison and it pulled up to the main gate when I appeared. Bob, the driver, stepped out to hold the door for me as I clambered awkwardly into the back seat. Then he carefully placed the crutches in the boot. I could get quite used to this, I thought.
‘Back to London, sir?’ Bob asked.
‘Not yet,’ I said, and I gave him directions to our next stop.
Sandeman was eating from his manger when I went in to see him. He looked casually in my direction, blew hard down his nostrils and then went back to concentrating on his oats. I hobbled over to him and slapped him down his neck with the palm of my hand while feeding him an apple from my pocket.
‘Hello, old boy,’ I said to him as I fondled his ears and rubbed his neck. He put his head down against me and pushed me playfully.
‘Whoa,’ I said amused. ‘Careful, my old boy, I’m not yet able to play.’ I slapped him again a couple of times and left him in peace.
‘He’s doing well,’ said Paul Newington at the door, from where he’d watched the exchange. ‘We’ve started walking him around the village every morning, and he has even trotted a bit round the paddock on a lunge. Still too early to put any weight on that back, of course, but he doesn’t seem to be in any pain.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘He looks well.’
‘Plenty of time for Kit to brush his coat.’ Kit was the stable lad that ‘did’ for Sandeman.
‘Will he ever be able to race again?’ I asked Paul. I had asked him that several times before on the telephone and he’d always been rather noncommittal in his answer.
‘I suspect he could,’ he said. ‘But he’s thirteen now and he would quite likely not be fit enough to run before he becomes fourteen.’ All horses in the northern hemisphere became a year older on 1 January, irrespective of the actual day on which they were born. In the south the date was, for some reason I had never worked out, not 1 July as one would expect, but a month later on 1 August.
‘Are you saying he’d be too old?’ I asked.
‘Racehorses can race at that age,’ he said. ‘I looked it up on the internet. The oldest ever winner was eighteen, but that was over two hundred years ago.’
We stood there leaning on the lower half of the stable door, looking at my dear old horse.
‘I’m not saying he couldn’t get back to fitness,’ Paul went on. ‘I’m just not sure it would be cost effective, or even if it’s fair on the old boy.’
‘You think it’s time to retire him?’ I was miserable. Retiring Sandeman from the racecourse would be tantamount to retiring myself from race riding. I knew that I was too old to start again with a new horse.
‘I do,’ he said bluntly. ‘And I do realize that it would quite likely mean that you wouldn’t have a horse with me again.’
‘But what would we do with him?’ I asked forlornly.
‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, ‘but I am in need of a new hack. And that’s not, I promise, the reason I think you should retire Sandeman.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But what about old Debenture?’
Debenture had been Paul’s hack for almost as long as I could remember and Paul rode him up to the gallops every morning to watch his horses work.
‘He’s too old now,’ said Paul. ‘It’s time to put him out to grass. Every time I’ve got on him recently I’ve feared he’s about to collapse under me.’
‘So you’d replace him with Sandeman?’ I asked.
‘I would like to, if Sandeman recovers sufficiently,’ he said. ‘And I think he probably will, if his progress so far is anything to go by.’
‘Well, I suppose that would be fine by me,’ I said. ‘But can he go on living in this stable?’
‘Geoffrey, you are far too sentimental,’ he said, laughing. ‘No way. He’ll have to live in the dog kennel.’ He laughed loudly, mostly at my expense. ‘Of course he can stay here and Kit will continue to look after him.’
‘Can I still ride him?’ I asked.
‘Geoffrey,’ he said laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘You don’t want to ride him as a hack. I would simply walk him through the village at the head of the string and then I’d sit on him as I watched the other horses, before he walked back here. If you really want to ride out, you can ride one of the others.’
‘Do you mean that?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘And I won’t even make you pay training fees for the privilege. Come any time you like, as long as you stay reasonably fit, and light. I won’t let you if you go over twelve stone.’
‘I have absolutely no intention of doing that,’ I said.
‘That’s what all those fat ex-jockeys said.’ He laughed.
Sandeman finished his lunch and came over to the stable door for another apple from my pocket. I rubbed his ears and massaged his neck. If only he could talk, I thought yet again, he could tell me what he wanted.
‘Well, old boy,’ I said to him. ‘Seems like you and I have run our last race. Welcome to old age.’
‘We’ll look after him,’ said Paul, stroking Sandeman’s nose.
I didn’t doubt it, but somehow this felt like a defining moment in my life. Gone, abruptly and unexpectedly, were the days of excitement and adrenalin that I had coveted for so long. My racing days had been what I had lived for. When one was past, I spent my time working but with half an eye on the calendar to show me when I was next due to weigh out and hear the familiar call for ‘jockeys’. But suddenly, this minute, I was no longer an injured jockey on the road to recovery and my next ride. I had become, here and now, an ex-jockey, and I was very aware of having lost something. There was an emptiness in me as if a part of my soul had been surgically excised.
‘Are you OK?’ said Paul, as if he, too, was aware of the significance of the moment.
‘Fine,’ I said to him with a smile. But I wasn’t really fine. Inside I was hurting.
‘You’ll just have to get a new hobby,’ Paul said.
But riding races had never felt like a hobby to me. It had been what I had lived for, especially these past seven years. It really was time to get a new life, and now I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
I stayed for a leisurely lunch with Paul and Laura and then Bob drove me further west to Uffington and the Radcliffe Foaling Centre. I had called ahead and spoken to the manager, Larry Clayton, who seemed bored with his job and quite keen to show a visitor around the place.
The tyres of the Mercedes crunched over the gravel as we drove slowly up the driveway and pulled up in front of a new looking red-brick single-storey building to the side of the main house. ‘Visitors Report Here’ ordered a smartly painted notice stuck into the grass verge. So I did.
‘It’s very quiet at this time of the year,’ said Larry Clayton as we sat in his office. ‘Most of the mares and foals are gone by now.’