Whip Hand

'How do they help?'

'I've started sorting them into alphabetical order, and making a list.' He frowned sceptically, but I went on. 'The interesting thing is that all the surnames start with the letters L, M, N and O. None from A to K, and none from P to Z.'

'I don't see…'

'They might be part of a mailing list,' I said. 'Like for a catalogue. Or even for a charity. There must be thousands of mailing lists, but this one certainly did produce the required results, so it wasn't a mailing list for dog licence reminders, for example.'

'That seems reasonable,' he said dryly.

'I thought I'd get all the names into order and then see if anyone, like Christie's or Sotheby's, say – because of the polish angle – has a mailing list which matches. A long shot, I know, but there's just a chance.'

'I could help you,' he said.

'It's a boring job.'

'She's my daughter.'

'All right then. I'd like it.'. I finished the scallops and sat back in my chair, and drank Charles's good cold white wine.

He said he would stay overnight in his club and come to my flat in the morning to help with the sorting, and I gave him a spare key to get in with, in case I should be out for a newspaper or cigarettes when he came. He lit a cigar and watched me through the smoke. 'What did Jenny say to you upstairs after lunch on Sunday?'

I looked at him briefly. 'Nothing much.'

'She was moody all day, afterwards. She even snapped at Toby.' He smiled. 'Toby protested, and Jenny said "At least Sid didn't whine.' He paused. 'I gathered that she'd been giving you a particularly rough mauling, and was feeling guilty.'

'It wouldn't be guilt. With luck, it was misgivings about Ashe.'

'And not before time.'

From the Cavendish I went to the Portman Square headquarters of the Jockey Club, to keep an appointment made that morning on the telephone by Lucas Wainwright. Unofficial my task for him might be, but official enough for him to ask me to his office. Ex-Superintendent Eddy Keith, it transpired, had gone to Yorkshire to look into a positive doping test, and no one else was going to wonder much at my visit.

'I've got all the files for you,' Lucas said. 'Eddy's reports on the syndicates, and some notes on the rogues he O.K.'d.'

'I'll make a start then,' I said. 'Can I take them away, or do you want me to look at them here?'

'Here, if you would,' he said. 'I don't want to draw my secretary's attention to them by letting them out or getting them xeroxed, as she works for Eddy too, and I know she admires him. She would tell him. You'd better copy down what you need.'

'Right,' I said.

He gave me a table to one side of his room, and a comfortable chair, and a bright light, and for an hour or so I read and made notes. At his own desk he did some desultory pen-pushing and rustled a few papers, but in the end it was clear that it was only a pretence of being busy. He wasn't so much waiting for me to finish as generally uneasy.

I looked up from my writing. 'What's the matter?' I said.

'The… matter?'

'Something's troubling you.' He hesitated. 'Have you done all you want?' he said, nodding at my work.

'Only about half,' I said. 'Can you give me another hour?'

'Yes, but… Look, I'll have to be fair with you. There's something you'll have to know.'

'What sort of thing?'

Lucas, who was normally urbane even when in a hurry, and whose naval habits of thought I understood from long practice with my Admiral father-in-law, was showing signs of embarrassment. The things that acutely embarrassed naval officers were collisions between warships and quaysides, ladies visiting the crew's mess deck with the crew present and at ease, and dishonourable conduct among gentlemen. It couldn't be the first two; so where were we with the third?

'I have not perhaps given you all the facts,' he said.

'Go on, then.'

'I did send someone else to check on two of the syndicates, some time ago. Six months ago.' He fiddled with some paperclips, no longer looking in my direction. 'Before Eddy checked them.'

'With what result?'

'Ah. Yes.' He cleared his throat. 'The man I sent- his name's Mason – we never received his report because he was attacked in the street before he could write it.'

Attacked in the street… 'What sort of attack?' I said. 'And who attacked him?'

He shook his head. 'Nobody knows who attacked him. He was found on the pavement by some passer-by, who called the police.'

'Well… have you asked him – Mason?' But I guessed at something of the answer, if not all of it.

'He's, er, never really recovered,' Lucas said regretfully. 'His head, it seemed, had been repeatedly kicked, as well as his body. There was a good deal of brain damage. He's still in an institution. He always will be. He's a vegetable… and he's blind.'

I bit the end of the pencil with which I'd been making notes. 'Was he robbed?' I said.

'His wallet was missing. But not his watch.' His face was worried.

'So it might have been a straightforward mugging?'

'Yes… except that the police treated it as intended homicide, because of the number and target of the boot marks.'

He sat back in his chair as if he'd got rid of an unwelcome burden. Honour among gentlemen… honour satisfied.

'All right,' I said. 'Which two syndicates was he checking?'

'The first two that you have there.'

'And do you think any of the people on them – the undesirables – are the sort to kick their way out of trouble?'

He said unhappily, 'They might be.'

'And am I,' I said carefully, 'investigating the possible corruption of Eddy Keith, or Mason's semi-murder?'

After a pause, he said, 'Perhaps both.'

There was a long silence. Finally I said, 'You do realise that by sending me notes at the races and meeting me in the tearoom and bringing me here, you haven't left much doubt that I'm working for you?'

'But it could be at anything.' I said gloomily, 'Not when I turn up on the syndicates' doorsteps.'

'I'd quite understand,' he said, 'if, in view of what I've said, you wanted to… er…'

So would I, I thought. I would understand that I didn't want my head kicked in. But then what I'd told Jenny was true: one never thought it would happen. And you're always wrong, she'd said.

I sighed. 'You'd better tell me about Mason. Where he went, and who he saw. Anything you can think of.'

'It's practically nothing. He went off in the ordinary way and the next we heard was he'd been attacked. The police couldn't trace where he'd been, and all the syndicate people swore they'd never seen him. The case isn't closed, of course, but after six months it's got no sort of priority.'

We talked it over for a while, and I spent another hour after that writing notes. I left the Jockey Club premises at a quarter to six, to go back to the flat; and I didn't get there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I went home in a taxi and paid it off outside the entrance to the flats, yet not exactly outside, because a dark car was squarely parked there on the double yellow lines, which was a towing-away place.

I scarcely looked at the car, which was my mistake, because as I reached it and turned away towards the entrance its nearside doors opened and spilled out the worst sort of trouble.

Two men in dark clothes grabbed me. One hit me dizzyingly on the head with something hard and the other flung what I later found was a kind of lasso of thick rope over my arms and chest and pulled it tight. They both bundled me into the back of the car where one of them for good measure tied a dark piece of cloth over my dazed half-shut eyes.

'Keys,' a voice said. 'Quick. No one saw us.'

I felt them fumbling in my pockets. There was a clink as they found what they were looking for. I began to come back into focus, so to speak, and to struggle, which was a reflex action but all the same another mistake.

The cloth over my eyes was reinforced by a sickly-smelling wad over my nose and mouth. Anaesthetic fumes made a nonsense of consciousness, and the last thing I thought was that if I was going the way of Mason they hadn't wasted any time.