George Caspar was there, talking to his jockey, with three runners scheduled that afternoon; and also Rosemary, who reacted with a violent jerk when she saw me at ten paces, and promptly turned her back. I could imagine the waves of alarm quivering through her, although that day she looked her usual well-groomed elegant self: mink coat for the chilly wind, glossy boots, velvet hat. If she feared I would talk about her visit, she was wrong.
There was a light grasp on my elbow and a pleasant voice saying 'A word in your ear, Sid.'
I was smiling before I turned to him, because Lord Friarly, Earl, landowner, and frightfully decent fellow, had been one of the people for whom I'd ridden a lot of races. He was of the old school of aristocrats; sixtyish, beautifully mannered, genuinely compassionate, slightly eccentric, and more intelligent than people expected. A slight stammer was nothing to do with speech impediment but all to do with not wanting to seem to throw his rank about in an egalitarian world.
Over the years I had stayed several times in his house in Shropshire, mostly on the way to northern racemeetings, and had travelled countless miles with him in a succession of elderly cars. The age of the cars was not an extension of the low profile, but rather a disinclination to waste money on inessentials. Essentials, in terms of the Earl's income, were keeping up Friarly Hall and owning as many racehorses as possible.
'Great to see you, sir,' I said.
'I've told you to call me Philip.' 'Yes… sorry.'
'Look,' he said, 'I want you do something for me. I hear you're damned good at looking into things. Doesn't surprise me, of course, I've always valued your opinion, you know that.'
'Of course I'll help if I can,' I said.
'I've an uncomfortable feeling I'm being used,' he said. 'You know that I'm a sucker for seeing my horses run, the more the merrier, and all that. Well, during the past year I have agreed to be one of the registered owners in a syndicate… you know, sharing the costs with eight or ten other people, though the horses run in my name, and my colours.'
'Yeah,' I said nodding. 'I've noticed.'
'Well… I don't know all the other people, personally. The syndicates were formed by a chap who does just that – gets people together and sells them a horse. You know?'
I nodded. There had been cases of syndicate-formers buying horses for a smallish sum and selling them to the members of the syndicate for up to four times as much. A healthy little racket, so far legal.
'Those horses don't run true to form, Sid,' he said bluntly. 'I've a nasty feeling that somewhere in the syndicates we've got someone fixing the way the horses run. So will you find out for me? Nice and quietly?'
'I'll certainly try,' I said.
'Good,' he said, with satisfaction. 'Thought you would. So I brought the names for you, of the people in the syndicates.' He pulled a folded paper out of his inner pocket. 'There you are,' he said, opening it and pointing. 'Four horses. The syndicates are all registered with the Jockey Club, everything above board, audited accounts, and so on. It all looks all right on paper, but, frankly, Sid, I'm not happy.'
'I'll look into it,' I promised, and he thanked me profusely, and also genuinely, and moved away, after a minute or two, to talk to Rosemary and George.
Further away, Bobby Unwin, notebook and pencil in evidence, was giving a middle-rank trainer a hard-looking time. His voice floated over, sharp with northern aggression and tinged with an inquisitorial tone caught from tele-interviewers. 'Can you say, then, that you are perfectly satisfied with the way your horses are running?' The trainer looked around for escape and shifted from foot to foot. It was amazing, I thought, that he put up with it, even though Bobby Unwin's printed barbs tended to be worse if he hadn't had the personal pleasure of intimidating his victim face to face. He wrote well, was avidly read, and among most of the racing fraternity was heartily disliked. Between him and me there had been for many years a sort of sparring truce, which in practice had meant a diminution of words like 'blind' and 'cretinous' to two per paragraph when he was describing any race I'd lost. Since I'd stopped riding I was no longer a target, and in consequence we had developed a perverse satisfaction in talking to each other, like scratching a spot.
Seeing me out of the corner of his eye he presently released the miserable trainer and steered his beaky nose in my direction. Tall, forty, and forever making copy out of having been born in a back-to-back terrace in Bradford: a fighter, come up the hard way, and letting no one ever forget it. We ought to have had much in common, since I too was the product of a dingy back street, but temperament had nothing to do with environment. He tended to meet fate with fury and I with silence, which meant that he talked a lot and I listened.
'The colour mag's in my briefcase in the Press room,' he said.
'What do you want it for?'
'Just general interest.'
'Oh come off it,' he said. 'What are you working on?'
'And would you,' I said, 'give me advance notice of your next scoop?'
'All right,' he said. 'Point taken. And I'll have a bottle of the best vintage bubbly in the members' bar. After the first race. O.K.?'
'And for smoked salmon sandwiches extra, would I acquire some background info that never saw the light of print?'
He grinned nastily and said he didn't see why not: and in due course, after the first race, he kept his bargain.
'You can afford it, Sid, lad,' he said, munching a pink-filled sandwich and laying a protective hand on the gold-foiled bottle standing beside us on the bar counter. 'So what do you want to know?'
'You went to Newmarket… to George Caspar's yard… to do this article?' I indicated the colour magazine, which lay, folded lengthwise, beside the bottle.
'Yeah. Sure.' 'So tell me what you didn't write.'
He stopped in mid-munch. 'In what area?'
'What do you privately think of George as a person?' He spoke round bits of brown bread. 'I said most of it in that.' He looked at the magazine. 'He knows more about when a horse is ready to race and what race to run him in than any other trainer on the Turf. And he's got as much feeling for people as a block of stone. He knows the name and the breeding back to the flood of every one of the hundred and twenty plus horses in his yard, and he can recognise them walking away from him in a downpour, which is practically impossible, but as for the forty lads he's got there working for him, he calls them all Tommy, because he doesn't know tother from which.'
'Lads come and go,' I said neutrally.
'So do horses. It's in his mind. He doesn't give a bugger's damn for people.'
'Women?' I suggested.
'Uses them, poor sods. I bet when he's at it he's got his mind on his next day's runners.'
'And Rosemary… what does she think about things?'
I poured a refill into his glass, and sipped my own. Bobby finished his sandwich with a gulp and licked the crumbs off his fingers.
'Rosemary? She's half way off her rocker.'
'She looked all right yesterday at the races,' I said. 'And she's here today, as well.'
'Yeah, well, she can hold on to the grande dame act in public still, I grant you, but I was in and out of the house for three days, and I'm telling you, mate, the goings-on there had to be heard to be believed.'
'Such as?' 'Such as Rosemary screaming all over the place that they hadn't enough security and George telling her to belt up. Rosemary's got some screwy idea that some of their horses have been got at in the past, and I daresay she's right at that, because you don't have a yard that size and that successful that hasn't had its share of villains trying to alter the odds. But anyway…'he drank deep and tipped the bottle generously to replenish his supplies,'… she seized me by the coat in their hall one day… and that hall's as big as a fair-sized barn… literally seized me by the coat and said what I should be writing was some stuff about Gleaner and Zingaloo being got at… you remember, those two spanking two-year-olds who never developed… and George came out of his office and said she was neurotic and suffering from the change of life, and right then and there in front of me they had a proper slanging match.' He took a breath and a mouthful. 'Funny thing is, in a way I'd say they were fond of each other. As much as he could be fond of anybody.'