‘I see Mrs Cavesey has a runner in the fourth,’ I said.
The dogmatic look faded to be replaced by a slight frown.
‘Ja,’ Arknold said. ‘I expect she may have mentioned to you that her horses are not doing well.’
‘She told me you had no idea why,’ I nodded.
He shook his head. ‘I cannot understand it. They get the same treatment as all the others. Same food, same exercise, everything. They are not ill. I have had a veterinarian examine them, several times. It is worrying. Very.’
‘It must be,’ I agreed sympathetically.
‘And dope tests!’ he said. ‘We must have had a hundred dope tests. All negative, the whole lot.’
‘Do they look fit?’ I asked. ‘I mean, would you expect them to do better, from the way they look?’
‘See for yourself.’ He shrugged. ‘That is... I don’t know how much of a judge of a horse you are...’
‘Bound to be a pretty good one, I’d say,’ said Danilo positively. ‘After all, it’s no secret his old man was a stable hand.’
‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Then perhaps you would like to see round the stables? Maybe you could even come up with some suggestion about Mrs Cavesey’s string, you never know.’
The irony in his voice made it clear that he thought that impossible. Which meant that either he really did not know what was the matter with the horses, or he did know, but was absolutely certain that I would not find out.
‘I’d like to see the stables very much,’ I said.
‘Good. Then you shall. How about tomorrow evening? Walk round with me, at evening stables. Four thirty?’
I nodded.
‘That’s fixed then. And you, Danilo. Do you want to come as well?’
‘That would be just fine, Greville. I sure would like that.’
So it was settled; and Danilo said he would come and pick me up at the Iguana Rock himself.
Chink, Nerissa’s runner in the fourth race, looked good enough in the parade ring, with a healthy bloom on his coat and muscles looking strong and free and loose. There wasn’t a great deal of substance about him, but he had an intelligent head and strong, well-placed shoulders. Nerissa’s sister Portia had given twenty-five thousand rand for him as a yearling on the strength of his breeding, and he had won only one race, his first, way back in April.
‘What do you think of him, Link?’ Danilo asked, leaning his hip against the parade ring rail.
‘He looks fit enough,’ I said.
‘Yeah. They all do, Greville says.’
Chink was being led round by two stable lads, one each side. Nothing wrong with Arknold’s security arrangements.
Because of the upright fetlocks I found it hard to judge the degree of spring in Chink’s stride. All the horses looked to me as if they were standing on their toes, a condition I imagined was caused by living from birth on hard dry ground. Certainly he went down to the post moving no more scratchily than the others, and he lined up in the stalls and bounded out of them with no trouble. I watched every step of his journey through my Zeiss eight by fifties.
He took the first half mile without apparent effort, lying about sixth, nice and handy, just behind the leading bunch. When they turned into the straight for home, the leaders quickened, but Chink didn’t. I saw the head of the jockey bob and the rest of his body become energetically busy trying to keep the horse going: but when a jockey has to work like that on a horse a long way out, he might as well not bother. Chink had run out of steam, and the best rider in the world could have done nothing about that.
I put down my race glasses. The winner fought a ding-dong, the crowd roared, and Chink returned unsung, unbacked, unwatched, and a good thirty lengths later.
With Danilo I went down to where he was being unsaddled, and joined Greville Arknold in his aura of perplexed gloom.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You saw for yourself.’
‘I did,’ I agreed.
Chink was sweating and looked tired. He stood still, with drooping head, as if he felt the disgrace.
‘What do you think?’ Arknold asked.
I silently shook my head. He had in fact looked plainly like a slow horse, yet on his breeding, and the fast time of the race he had won, he should not be.
He and the other ten could not all have bad hearts, or bad teeth, or blood disorders, all undetected. Not after those thorough veterinary investigations. And not all of them. It was impossible.
They had not all been ridden every time by the same jockey. There were, I had discovered from Nerissa’s racing papers, very few jockeys in South Africa compared with England: only thirteen jockeys and twenty-two apprentices riding on the Natal tracks near Durban, the supposed centre of the sport.
There were four main racing areas; the Johannesburg tracks in the Transvaal, the Pietermaritzburg-Durban tracks in Natal, the Port Elizabeth tracks in the Eastern Cape, and the Cape Town tracks in Cape Province. Various ones of Nerissa’s horses had been to all four areas, had been ridden by the local bunch of jockeys, and had turned in the same results.
Fast until May, dead slow from June onwards.
The fact that they moved around meant that it probably could not be attributed to something in their base quarters.
No illness. No dope. No fixed address. No common jockey.
All of which pointed to one solution. One source of disaster.
The trainer himself.
It was easy enough for a trainer to make sure a horse of his didn’t win, if he had a mind to. He merely had to give it too severe an exercise gallop too soon before a race. Enough races had in sober fact been lost that way by accident for it to be impossible to prove that anyone had done it on purpose.
Trainers seldom nobbled their own horses because they had demonstrably more to gain if they won. But it looked to me as if it had to be Arknold who was responsible, even if the method he was using turned out to be the simplest in the world.
I thought the solution to Nerissa’s problem lay in transferring her string to a different trainer.
I thought I might just as well go straight home and tell her so.
Two nasty snags.
I was committed to a premiere two weeks off.
And I might guess who and how, about the horses.
But I had no idea why.
Chapter Five
The ladies and gentlemen of the Press (or in other words a partially shaven, polo-neck sweatered, elaborately casual and uninformed mob) yawned to their feet when I reached the Dettrick Room in Randfontein House within ticking distance of half past eleven.
Clifford Wenkins had met me in the hall, twittering as before, and with wetter than ever palms. We rode up in the lift together, with him explaining to me exactly whom he had asked, and who had come. Interviewers from two radio programmes. He hoped I wouldn’t mind? They would be happy just to tape my answers to their questions. Just into a microphone. If I didn’t mind? And then there were the dailies, the weeklies, the ladies’ magazines, and one or two people who had flown up especially from Cape Town and Durban.
I wished I hadn’t suggested it. Too late to run away.
The only thing to do, I thought, as the lift hissed to a halt and the doors slid open, was to put on a sort of performance. To act.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said to Wenkins.
He stopped with me outside the lift as the doors shut again behind us.
‘What is it?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Nothing. I just need a few seconds, before we go in.’
He didn’t understand, though what I was doing was not a process by any means confined to professional actors. Girding up the loins, the Bible called it. Getting the adrenalin on the move. Making the heart beat faster. Shifting the mental gears into top. Politicians could do it in three seconds flat.