Bonecrack

CHAPTER NINE

For three weeks the status at Rowley Lodge remained approximately quo.

I heavily amended my father's entry forms and sent them in, and sold six of the half shares to various acquaintances, without offering Lancat to any of them.

Margaret took to wearing green eye shadow, and Susie's friend reported that Alessandro had made a telephone call to Switzerland and didn't wear pyjamas. Also that the chauffeur always paid for everything, as Alessandro didn't have any money.

Etty grew more tense as the beginning of the season drew nearer, and lines of anxiety seldom left her forehead. I was leaving a great deal more to her judgement than my father did, and she was in consequence feeling insecure. She openly ached for his return.

The horses all the same were working well. We had no further mishaps except that a two-year-old filly developed severe sinus trouble, and as far as I could judge from watching the performances of the other forty-five stables using Newmarket Heath, the Rowley Lodge string was as forward as any.

Alessandro turned up day after day and silently rode what and how Etty told him to, though with a ramrod spine of protest. He said no more about not taking orders from a woman, and I imagined that even he could see that without Etty there would be fewer winners on the horizon. She herself had almost stopped complaining about him and was watching him with a more objective eye; because there was no doubt that after a month's concentrated practice he was riding better than the other apprentices.

He was also growing visibly thinner, and no longer looked well. Small-framed though he might be, the six stone seven pounds that he was aiming to shrink his body down to was punitive for five foot four.

Alessandro's fanaticism was an awkward factor. If I had imagined that by making the going as rough as I dared he would give up his idle fancy and depart, I had been wrong. This was no idle fancy. It was revealing itself all too clearly as a consuming ambition: an ambition strong enough to make him starve himself, take orders from a woman, and perform what were evidently miracles of self-discipline, considering that it was probably the first time in his life that he had had to use any.

Against Etty's wishes I put him up one morning on Archangel.

'He's not ready for that,' she protested, when I told her I was going to.

There isn't another lad in the yard who will take more care of him,' I said.

'But he hasn't the experience.'

'He has, you know. Archangel is only more valuable, not more difficult to ride, than the others.'

Alessandro received the news not with joy but with an 'at last' expression, more scorn than patience. We went down to the Waterhall canter, away from public gaze, and there Archangel did a fast six furlongs and pulled up looking as if he had just walked out of his box.

'He had him balanced,' I said to Etty. 'All the way.'

'Yes, he did,' she said grudgingly. 'Pity he's such an obnoxious little squirt.'

Alessandro returned with an 'I told you so' face which I wiped off by saying he would be switched to Lancat tomorrow.

'Why?' he demanded furiously. 'I rode Archangel very well.'

'Well enough,' I agreed. 'And you can ride him again, in a day or two. But I want you to ride Lancat in a trial on Wednesday, so you can go out on him tomorrow as well, and get used to him. And after the trial I want you to tell me your opinion of the horse and how he went. And I don't want one of your short sneering comments but a thought-out assessment. It is almost as important for a jockey to be able to analyse what a horse has done in a race as ride it. Trainers depend quite a lot on what their jockeys can tell them. So you can tell me about Lancat, and I'll listen.'

He gave me a long concentrating stare, but for once without the habitual superciliousness.

'All right,' he said. 'I will.'

We held the trial on the Wednesday afternoon on the trial ground past the Limekilns, a long way out of Newmarket. Much to Etty's disgust, because she wanted to watch it on television, I had timed the trial to start at exactly the same moment as the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham. But the strategem worked. We achieved the well-nigh impossible, a full scale trial without an observer or a tout in sight.

Apart from the two Etty and I rode, we took only four horses along there: Pease Pudding, Lancat, Archangel, and one of the previous year's most prolific winners, a four-year-old colt called Subito, whose best distance was a mile. Tommy Hoylake drove up from his home in Berkshire to ride Pease Pudding, and we put Andy on Archangel and a taciturn lad called Faddy on the chestnut Subito.

'Don't murder them,' I said, before they started. 'If you feel them falter, just ease off.'

Four nods. Four fidgeting colts, glossy and eager.

Etty and I hacked round to within a hundred yards of where the trial ground ended and when we had pulled up in a useful position for watching, she waved a large white handkerchief above her head. The horses started towards us, moving fast and still accelerating, with the riders crouched forward on their withers, heads down, reins very short, feet against the horses' moving shoulders.

They passed us still going all out, and pulled up a little further on. Archangel and Pease Pudding ran the whole gallop stride for stride and finished together. Lancat, from starting level, lost ten lengths, made up eight, lost two again, but still moved easily. Subito was ahead of Lancat at the beginning, behind him when he moved up quickly, and alongside when they passed Etty and me.

She turned to me with a deeply worried expression.

'Pease Pudding can't be ready for the Lincoln if Lancat can finish so near him. In fact the way Lancat finished means that neither Archangel or Subito are as far on as I thought.'

'Calm down, Etty,' I said. 'Relax. Take it easy.

Just turn it the other way round.'

She frowned. 'I don't understand you. Mr Griffon will be very worried when he hears-'

'Etty,' I interrupted. 'Did Pease Pudding, or did he not, seem to you to be moving fast and easily?'

'Well, yes, I suppose so,' she said doubtfully.

'Then it may be Lancat who is much better than you expected, not the others which are worse.'

She looked at me with a face screwed up with indecision. 'But Alex is only an apprentice, and Lancat was useless last year.'

'In what way was he useless?'

'Oh- sprawly. Babyish. Had no action.'

'Nothing sprawly about him today,' I pointed out.

'No,' she admitted slowly. 'You're right. There wasn't.'

The riders walked towards us, leading the horses, and Etty and I both dismounted to hear more easily what they had to say. Tommy Hoylake, built like a twelve-year-old boy with a forty-three-year-old man's face sitting incongruously on top, said in his comfortable Berkshire accent that he had thought that Pease Pudding had run an excellent trial until he saw Lancat pulling up so close behind him. He had ridden Lancat a good deal the previous year, and hadn't thought much of him.

Andy said Archangel went beautifully, considering the Guineas was nearly six weeks away, and Faddy in his high pitched finicky voice said Subito had only been a pound or two behind Pease Pudding last year in his opinion, and he could have been nearer to him if he had really tried. Tommy and Andy shook their heads. If they had really tried, they too could have gone faster.

'Alessandro?' I said.

He hesitated. 'I- I lost ground at the beginning because I didn't realise- I didn't expect them to go so fast. When I asked him, Lancat just shot forward- and I could have kept him nearer to Archangel at the end, only he did seem to tire a bit, and you said-' he stopped with his voice, so to speak, on one foot.

'Good,' I said. 'You did right.' I hadn't expected him to be so honest. For the first time since his arrival he had made an objective self-assessment, but my faint and even slightly patronising praise was enough to bring back the smirk. Etty looked at him with uncontrolled dislike, which didn't disturb Alessandro one little bit.

'I hardly need to remind you,' I said to all of them, ignoring the displayed emotions, 'To keep this afternoon's doings to yourselves. Tommy, you can count on Pease Pudding in the Lincoln and Archangel in the Guineas, and if you'll come back to the office now we'll go through your other probable rides for the next few weeks.'

Alessandro's smirk turned sour, and the look he cast on Tommy was pure Rivera. Actively dangerous: inured to murder. Any appearance he might have given of being even slightly tamed was suddenly as reliable as sunlight on quicksand. I remembered the unequivocal message of Enso's gun pointing at my chest; that if killing seemed desirable, killing would quite casually be done. I had put Tommy Hoylake in jeopardy, and I'd have to get him out.

I sent the others on ahead and told Alessandro to stay for a minute. When the others were too far away to hear, I said, 'You will have to accept that Tommy Hoylake will be riding as first jockey to the stable.'

I got the full stare treatment, black, wide, and ill intentioned. I could almost feel the hate which flowed out of him like hot waves across the cool March air.

'If Tommy Hoylake breaks his leg,' I said clearly, 'I'll break yours.'

It shook him, though he tried not to show it.

'Also it would be pointless to put Tommy Hoylake out of action, as I would then engage someone else. Not you. Is that clear?'

He didn't answer.

'If you want to be a top jockey, you've got to fight your own battles. It's no good thinking your father will destroy everyone who stands in your way. If you are good enough, no one will stand in your way; and if you are not, no amount of ruining others will make you.'

Still no sound. But fury, yes. Signifying all too much.

I said seriously, 'If Tommy Hoylake comes to any harm whatsoever, I will see that you never ride in another race. At whatever consequence to myself.'

He removed the stare from my face and scattered it over the wide windy spread of the Heath.

'I am accustomed-' he began arrogantly, and then stopped.

'I know to what you are accustomed,' I said. 'To having your own way at any expense to others. Your own way, bought in misery, pain and fear. Well- you should have settled for something which could be paid for. No amount of death and destruction will buy you ability.'

'All I wanted was to ride Archangel in the Derby,' he said defensively.

'Just like that? Just a whim?'

He turned his head towards Lancat and gathered together the reins. 'It started like that,' he said indistinctly, and walked away from me in the direction of Newmarket.

He came and rode out as usual the following morning, and all the days after. News that the trial had taken place got around, and I heard that I had chosen the time of the Champion Hurdle so that I could keep the unfit state of Pease Pudding decently concealed. The ante-post price lengthened and I put a hundred pounds on him at twenty to one.

My father shook the Sporting Life at me in a rage and insisted that the horse should be withdrawn.

'Have a bit on him instead,' I said. 'I have.'

'You don't know what you're doing.'

'Yes, I do.'

'It says here-' He was practically stuttering with the frustration of not being able to get out of bed and thwart me. 'It says here that if the trial was unsatisfactory, nothing more could be expected, with me away.'

'I read it,' I agreed. 'That's just a guess. And it wasn't unsatisfactory, if you want to know. It was very encouraging.'

'You're crazy,' he said loudly. 'You're ruining the stable. I won't have it. I won't have it, do you hear?'

He glared at me. A hot amber glare, not a cold black one. It made a change.

'I'll send Tommy Hoylake to see you,' I said. 'You can ask him what he thinks.'

Three days before the racing season started I walked into the office at two-thirty to see if Margaret wanted me to sign any letters before she left to collect her children, and found Alessandro in there with her, sitting on the edge of her desk. He was wearing a navy-black track suit and heavy white running shoes, and his black hair had crisped into curls from the dampness of his own sweat.

She was looking up at him with obvious arousal, her face slightly flushed as if someone had given all her senses a friction rub.

She caught sight of me before he did, as he had his back to the door. She looked away from him in confusion, and he turned to see who had disturbed them.

There was a smile on the thin sallow face. A real smile, warm and uncomplicated, wrinkling the skin round the eyes and lifting the upper lip to show good teeth. For two seconds I saw an Alessandro I wouldn't have guessed existed, and then the light went out inside and the facial muscles gradually reshaped themselves into the familiar lines of wariness and annoyance.

He slid his slight weight to the ground and wiped away with a thumb some of the sweat which stood out on his forehead and trickled down in front of his ears.

'I want to know what horses I am going to ride this week at Doncaster,' he said. 'Now that the season is starting, you can give me horses to race.'

Margaret looked at him in astonishment, for he had sounded very much the boss. I answered him in a manner and tone carefully lacking in both apology and aggression.

'We have only one entry at Doncaster, which is Pease Pudding in the Lincoln on Saturday, and Tommy Hoylake rides it,' I said. 'And the reason we have only one entry,' I went straight on, as I saw the anger stoking up at what he believed to be a blocking movement on my part, 'is that my father was involved in a motor accident the week these entries should have been made, and they were never sent in.'

'Oh,' he said blankly.

'Still,' I said, 'it would be a good idea for you to go every day to the races, to see what goes on, so that you don't make any crashing mistakes next week.'

I didn't add that I intended to do the same myself. It never did to show all your weaknesses to the opposition.

'You can start on Pullitzer on Wednesday at Catterick,' I said. 'And after that, it's up to you.'

There was a flash of menace in the black eyes.

'No,' he said, a bite in his voice. 'It's up to my father.'

He turned abruptly on one toe and without looking back trotted out of the office into the yard, swerved left and set off at a steady jog up the drive towards Bury Road. We watched him through the window, Margaret with a smile tinged with puzzlement and I with more apprehension than I liked.

'He ran all the way to the Boy's Grave and back,' she said. 'He says he weighed six stone twelve before he set off today, and he's lost twenty-two pounds since he came here. That sounds an awful lot, doesn't it? Twenty-two pounds, for someone as small as him.'

'Severe,' I said, nodding.

'He's strong, though. Like wire.'

'You like him,' I said, making it hover on the edge of a question.

She gave me a quick glance. 'He's interesting.'

I slouched into the swivel chair and read through the letters she pushed across to me. All of them in economic, good English, perfectly typed.

'If we win the Lincoln,' I said, 'You can have a raise.'

'Thanks very much.' A touch of irony. 'I hear the Sporting Life doesn't think much of my chances.'

I signed three of the letters and started reading the fourth. 'Does Alessandro often call in?' I asked casually.

'First time he's done it.'

'What did he want?' I asked.

'I don't think he wanted anything, particularly. He said he was going past, and just came in.'

'What did you talk about?'

She looked surprised at the question but answered without comment.

'I asked him if he liked the Forbury Inn and he said he did, it was much more comfortable than a house his father had rented on the outskirts of Cambridge. He said anyway his father had given up that house now and gone back home to do some business.' She paused thinking back, the memory of his company making her eyes smile, and I reflected that the house at Cambridge must have been where the rubber-faces took me, and that there was now no point in speculating more about it.

'I asked him if he had always liked riding horses and he said yes, and I asked him what his ambitions were and he said to win the Derby and be Champion Jockey, and I said that there wasn't an apprentice born who didn't want that.'

I turned my head to glance at her. 'He said he wanted to be Champion Jockey?'

That's right.'

I stared gloomily down at my shoes. The skirmish had been a battle, the battle was in danger of becoming war, and now it looked as if hostilities could crackle on for months. Escalation seemed to be setting in in a big way.

'Did he,' I asked, 'Ask you anything?'

'No. At least- yes, I suppose he did.' She seemed surprised, thinking about it.

'What?'

'He asked if you or your father owned any of the horses- I told him your father had half shares in some of them, and he said did he own any of them outright. I said Buckram was the only one- and he said-' She frowned, concentrating, 'He said he supposed it would be insured like the others, and I said it wasn't, actually, because Mr Griffon had cut back on his premiums this year, so he'd better be extra careful with it on the roads-' She suddenly sounded anxious. 'There wasn't any harm in telling him, was there? I mean, I didn't think there was anything secret about Mr Griffon owning Buckram.'

'There isn't,' I said comfortingly. 'It runs in his name, for a start. It's public knowledge, that he owns it.'

She looked relieved and the lingering smile crept back round her eyes, and I didn't tell her that it was the bit about insurance that I found disturbing.

One of the firms I had advised in their troubles were assemblers of electronic equipment. Since they had in fact reorganised themselves from top to bottom and were now delighting their shareholders, I rang up their chief executive and asked for help for myself.

Urgently, I said. In fact, today. And it was half past three already.

A sharp 'phew' followed by some tongue clicking, and the offer came. If I would drive towards Coventry, their Mr Wallis would meet me at Kettering. He would bring what I wanted with him, and explain how I was to install it, and would that do?

It would do very well indeed, I said: and did the chief executive happen to be in need of half a racehorse?

He laughed. On the salary cut I had persuaded him to take? I must be joking, he said.

Our Mr Wallis, all of nineteen, met me in a business-like truck and blinded me with science. He repeated the instructions clearly and twice, and then obviously doubted whether I could carry them out. To him the vagaries of the photoelectric effect were home ground, but he also realised that to the average fool they were not. He went over it again to make sure I understood.

'What is your position with the firm?' I asked in the end.

'Deputy Sales Manager,' he said happily, 'And they tell me I have you to thank.'

I quite easily, after the lecture, installed the early warning system at Rowley Lodge: basically a photoelectric cell linked to an alarm buzzer. After dark, when everything was quiet, I hid the necessary ultra-violet light source in the flowering plant in a tub which stood against the end wall of the four outside boxes, and the cell itself I camouflaged in a rose bush outside the office window. The cable from this led through the office window, across the lobby and into the owners' room, with a switch box handy to the sofa.

Soon after I had finished rigging it, Etty walked into the yard from her cottage for her usual last look round before going to bed, and the buzzer rasped out loud and clear. Too loud, I thought. A silent intruder might just hear it. I put a cushion over it, and the muffled buzz sounded like a bumble bee caught in a drawer.

I switched the noise off. When Etty left the yard it started again immediately. Hurrah for the Deputy Sales Manager, I thought, and slept in the owners' room with my head on the cushion.

No one came.

Stiffly at six o'clock I got up and rolled up the cable, and collected and stowed all the gear in a cupboard in the owners' room; and when the first of the lads ambled yawning into the yard, I headed directly to the coffee pot.

Tuesday night, no one came.

Wednesday, Margaret mentioned that Susie's friend had reported two Swiss phone calls, one outgoing by Alessandro, one incoming to the chauffeur.

Etty, more anxious than ever with the Lincoln only three days away, was snapping at the lads, and Alessandro stayed behind after second exercise and asked me if I had reconsidered and would put him up on Pease Pudding in place of Tommy Hoylake.

We were outside, in the yard, with the late morning bustle going on all around. Alessandro looked tense and hollow eyed.

'You must know I can't,' I said reasonably.

'My father says I am to tell you that you must.'

I slowly shook my head. 'For your own sake, you shouldn't. If you rode it, you would make a fool of yourself. Is that what your father wants?'

'He says I must insist.' He was adamant.

'O. K.,' I said. 'You've insisted. But Tommy Hoylake is going to ride.'

'But you must do what my father says,' he protested.

I smiled at him faintly, but didn't answer, and he did not seem to know what to say next.

'Next week, though,' I said matter-of-factly, 'You can ride Buckram in a race at Aintree. I entered him there especially for you. He won first time out last year, so he should have a fair chance again this time.'

He just stared; didn't even blink. If there was anything to be given away, he didn't give it.

At three o'clock Thursday morning the buzzer went off with enthusiasm three inches from my ear drum and I nearly fell off the sofa. I switched off the noise and got to my feet, and took a look into the yard through the owners' room window.

Moving quickly through the moonless night went one single small light, very faint, directed at the ground. Then, as I watched, it swung round, paused on some of the boxes in bay four, and settled inexorably on the one which housed Buckram.

Treacherous little bastard, I thought. Finding out which horse he could kill without the owner wailing a complaint; an uninsured horse, in order to kick Rowley Lodge the harder in the financial groin.

Telling him Buckram might win him a race hadn't stopped him. Treacherous, callous little bastard-

I was out through the ready left-ajar doors and down the yard, moving silently on rubber shoes. I heard the bolts drawn quietly back and the doors squeak in their hinges, and homed on the small flicking light with far from charitable intentions.

No point in wasting time. I swept my hand down on the switch and flooded Buckram's box with a hundred watts.

I took in at a glance the syringe held in a stunned second of suspended animation in the gloved hand, and noticed the truncheon lying on the straw just inside the door.

It wasn't Alessandro. Too heavy. Too tall. The figure turning purposefully towards me, dressed in black from neck to foot, was one of the rubber-faces.

In his rubber-face.