A whole load of no progress, I thought moodily.
I drank the soda water, which had lost its fizz.
I rubbed my arm, which didn’t make it much better.
I wondered what judgment Greville had passed on me, that could be trusted.
There was a polished cupboard that I hadn’t investigated underneath the television set and, not expecting much, I bent down and pulled one of the doors open by its brass ring handle. The other door opened of its own accord and the contents of the cupboard slid outward as a unit: a video machine on top with, on two shelves below, rows of black boxes holding recording tapes. There were small uniform labels on the boxes bearing, not formulas this time, but dates.
I pulled one of the boxes out at random and was stunned to see the larger label stuck to its front: “Race Video Club,” it said in heavy print, and underneath, in typing, “July 7th, Sandown Park, Dozen Roses.”
The Race Video Club, as I knew well, sold tapes of races to owners, trainers, and anyone else interested. Greville, I thought in growing amazement as I looked further, must have given them a standing order: every race his horses had run in for the past two years, I judged, was there on his shelves to be watched.
He’d told me once, when I asked why he didn’t go to see his runners, that he saw them enough on television; and I’d thought he meant on the ordinary scheduled programs, live from the racetracks in the afternoons.
The front doorbell rang, jarring and unexpected. I went along and looked through a small peephole and found Brad standing on the doorstep, blinking and blinded by two spotlights shining on his face. The lights came from above the door and lit up the whole path and the gate. I opened the door as he shielded his eyes with his arm.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Turn the lights off. Can’t see.”
I looked for a switch beside the front door, found several, and by pressing them all upward indiscriminately, put out the blaze.
“Came to see you were OK,” Brad explained. “Those lights just went on.”
Of their own accord, I realized. Another manifestation of Greville’s security, no doubt. Anyone who came up the path after dark would get illuminated for his pains.
“Sorry I’ve been so long,” I said. “Now you’re here, would you carry a few things?”
He nodded as if he’d let out enough words already to last the evening, and followed me silently, when I beckoned him, toward the small sitting room.
“I’m taking that green stone box and as many of those video tapes as you can carry, starting from that end,” I said and he obligingly picked up about ten recent tapes, balancing the box on top.
I found a hall light, switched that on, and turned off the lamp in the sitting room. It promptly turned itself on again, unasked.
“Cor,” Brad said.
I thought that maybe it was time to leave before I tripped any other alarms wired direct after dark to the local constabulary. I closed the sitting room door and we went along the hall to the outer world. Before leaving I pressed all the switches beside the front door downward, and maybe I turned more on than I’d turned off: the spotlights didn’t go on, but a dog started barking noisily behind us.
“Strewth,” Brad said, whirling round and clutching the video tapes to his chest as if they would defend him.
There was no dog. There was a loudspeaker like a bullhorn on a low hall table emitting the deep-throated growls and barks of a determined German shepherd.
“Bleeding hell,” Brad said.
“Let’s go,” I said in amusement, and he could hardly wait.
The barking stopped of its own accord as we stepped out into the air. I pulled the door shut, and we set off to go down the steps and along the path. We’d gone barely three paces when the spotlights blazed on again.
“Keep going,” I said to Brad. “I daresay they’ll turn themselves off in time.”
It was fine by him. He’d managed to park the car not far away, and I spent the swift journey to Hungerford wondering about Clarissa Williams; her life, love and adultery.
During the evening I failed both to open the green stone box and to understand the gadgets.
Shaking the box gave me no impression of contents and I supposed it could well be empty. A cigarette box, I thought, though I couldn’t remember ever seeing Greville smoking. Perhaps a box to hold twin packs of cards. Perhaps a box for jewelry. Its tiny keyhole remained impervious to probes from nail scissors, suitcase keys and a piece of wire, and in the end I surrendered and laid it aside.
Neither of the gadgets opened or shut. One was a small black cylindrical object about the size of a thumb, with one end narrowly ridged, like a coin. Turning the ridged end a quarter-turn clockwise, its full extent of travel, produced a thin, faint high-pitched whine which proved to be the unexciting sum of the thing’s activity. Shrugging, I switched the whine off again and stood the small tube upright on the green box.
The second gadget didn’t even produce a whine. It was a flat black plastic container about the size of a pack of cards with a single square red button placed centrally on the front. I pressed the button: no results. A round chromiumed knob set into one of the sides of the cover revealed itself on further inspection as the end of a telescopic aerial. I pulled it out as far as it would go, about ten inches, and was rewarded with what I presumed was a small transmitter which transmitted I didn’t know what to I didn’t know where.
Sighing, I pushed the aerial back into its socket and added the transmitter to the top of the green box, and after that I fed Greville’s tapes one by one into my video machine and watched the races.
Alfie’s comment about in-and-out running had interested me more than I would have wanted him to know. Dozen Roses, from my own reading of the results, had had a long doldrum period followed by a burst of success, suggestive of the classic “cheating” pattern of running a horse to lose and go on losing until he was low in the handicap and unbacked, then setting him off to win at long odds in a race below his latent abilities and wheeling away the winnings in a barrow.
All trainers did that in a mild way sometimes, whatever the rules might say about always running flat out. Young and inexperienced horses could be ruined by being pressed too hard too soon: one had to give them a chance to enjoy themselves, to let their racing instinct develop fully.
That said, there was a point beyond which no modern trainer dared go. In the bad old days before universal camera coverage it had been harder to prove a horse hadn’t been trying: many jockeys had been artists at waving their whips while hauling on the reins. Under the eagle lenses and fierce discipline of the current scene even natural and unforeseen fluctuations in a horse’s form could find the trainer yanked in before the Stewards for an explanation, and if the trainer couldn’t explain why his short-priced favorite had turned leaden-footed it could cost him a depressing fine.
No trainer, however illustrious, was safe from suspicion, yet I’d never read or heard of Nicholas Loder getting himself into that sort of trouble. Maybe Alfie, I thought dryly, knew something the Stewards didn’t. Maybe Alfie could tell me why Loder had all but panicked when he’d feared Dozen Roses might not run on Saturday next.
Brad had picked up the six most recent outings of Dozen Roses, interspersed by four of Gemstones’. I played all six of Dozen Roses first, starting with the earliest, back in May, checking the details with what Greville had written in his diary.
On the screen there were shots of the runners walking round the parade ring and going down to the start, with Greville’s pink and orange colors bright and easy to see. The May race was a ten-furlong handicap for three-year-olds and upward, run at Newmarket on a Friday. Eighteen runners. Dozen Roses ridden by a second-string jockey because Loder’s chief retained jockey was riding the stable’s other runner, which started favorite.