Break In

Fifteen

I watched Joe the editor, dark-skinned and with rapid fingers, sort his way through a mass of noisy peacock footage, clicking his tongue as a sort of commentary to himself, punctuating the lifted sections he was stringing together to make the most flamboyant impact. Kaleidoscope arrival of Devil-Boy, earlier entrance of royals, wriggling release of new incomprehensible song.

‘Thirty seconds,’ he said, running through the finished sequence. ‘Maybe they’ll use it all, maybe they won’t.’

‘It looks good to me.’

‘Thirty seconds is a long news item.’ He took the spooled tape from the machine, put it into an already labelled box and handed it to the gaunt transmitter man, who was waiting to take it away. ‘Danielle says you want to learn to edit, so what do you want to know?’

‘Er... what these machines will do, for a start.’

‘Quite a lot.’ He fluttered his dark fingers over the banks of controls, barely touching them. ‘They’ll take any size tape, any make, and record on any other. You can bring the sound up, cut it out, transpose it, superimpose any sounds you like. You can put the sound from one tape on to the pictures of another, you can cut two tapes together so that it looks as if the people are talking to each other when they were recorded hours and miles apart, you can tell lies and goddam lies and put a false face on truth.’

‘Anything else?’

‘That about covers it.’

He showed me how to achieve some of his effects, but his speed confounded me.

‘Have you got an actual tape you want to edit?’ he asked finally.

‘Yes, but I want to add to it first, if I can.’

He looked at me assessingly, a poised black man of perhaps my own age with a touch of humour in the eyes but a rarely smiling mouth. I felt untidy in my anorak beside his neat suit and cream shirt; also battered and sweaty and dim. It had been, I thought ruefully, too long a day.

‘Danielle says you’re OK,’ he said surprisingly. ‘I don’t see why you can’t ask the chief to rent you the use of this room some night we’re not busy. You tell me what you want, and I’ll edit your tapes for you, if you like.’

‘Joe’s a nice guy,’ Danielle said, stretching lazily beside me in the rented Mercedes on her way home. ‘Sure, if he said he’d edit your tape, he means it. He gets bored. He waited three hours tonight for the Devil-Boy slot. He loves editing. Has a passion for it. He wants to work in movies. He’ll enjoy doing your tape.’

The bureau chief, solicited, had proved equally generous. ‘If Joe’s using the machines, go ahead.’ He’d looked over to where Danielle was eyes down marking paragraphs in the morning papers. ‘I had New York on the line this evening congratulating me on the upswing of our output recently. That’s her doing. She says you’re OK, you’re OK.’

For her too it had been a long day.

‘Towcester,’ she said, yawning, ‘seems light years back.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘What did Princess Casilia say after you went in, when you got back to Eaton Square?’

Danielle looked at me with amusement. ‘In the hall she told me that good manners were a sign of strength, and in the drawing room she asked if I thought you would really be fit for Ascot.’

‘What did you say?’ I asked, faintly alarmed.

‘I said yes, you would.’

I relaxed. That’s all right, then.’

‘I did not say,’ Danielle said mildly, ‘that you were insane, but only that you didn’t appear to notice when you’d been injured. Aunt Casilia said she thought this to be fairly typical of steeplechase jockeys.’

‘I do notice,’ I said.

‘But?’

‘Well... if I don’t race, I don’t earn. Almost worse, if I miss a race on a horse and it wins, the happy owner may put up that winning jockey the next time, so I can lose not just the one fee but maybe the rides on that horse for ever.’

She looked almost disappointed. ‘So it’s purely economic, this refusal to look filleted ribs in the face?’

‘At least half.’

‘And the rest?’

‘What you feel for your job. What Joe feels for his. Much the same.’

She nodded, and after a pause said, ‘Aunt Casilia wouldn’t do that, though. Keep another jockey on, after you were fit again.’

‘No, she never has. But your aunt is special.’

‘She said,’ Danielle said reflectively, ‘that I wasn’t to think of you as a jockey.’

‘But I am.’

‘That’s what she said this morning on the way to Towcester.’

‘Did she explain what she meant?’

‘No. I asked her. She said something vague about essences.’ She yawned. ‘Anyway, this evening she told Uncle Roland all about those horrid men with knives, as she put it, and although he was scandalised and said she shouldn’t get involved in such sordid brawls, she seemed quite serene and unaffected. She may look like porcelain, but she’s quite tough. The more I get to know her, the more, to be honest, I adore her.’

The road from Chiswick to Eaton Square, clogged by day with stop — go traffic, was at two-fifteen in the morning regrettably empty. Red lights turned green at our approach and even sticking rigidly to the speed limit didn’t much seem to lengthen the journey. We slid to a halt outside the princess’s house far too soon.

Neither of us made a move to spring at once out of the car: we sat rather for a moment letting the day die in peace.

I said, ‘I’ll see you then, on Saturday.’

‘Yes,’ she sighed for no clear reason. ‘I guess so.’

‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

‘Oh no,’ she half laughed. ‘I suppose I meant... Saturday’s some way off.’

I took her hand. She let it lie in mine, passive, waiting.

‘We might have,’ I said, ‘a lot of Saturdays.’

‘Yes, we might.’

I leaned over and kissed her mouth, tasting her pink lipstick, feeling her breath on my cheek, sensing the tremble somewhere in her body. She neither drew back nor clutched forward, but kissed as I’d kissed, as an announcement, as a promise perhaps; as an invitation.

I sat away from her and smiled into her eyes, and then got out of the car and went round to open her door.

We stood briefly together on the pavement.

‘Where are you sleeping?’ she said. ‘It’s so late.’

‘In a hotel.’

‘Near here?’

‘Less than a mile.’

‘Good... you won’t have far to drive.’

‘No distance.’

‘Goodnight, then,’ she said.

‘Goodnight.’

We kissed again, as before. Then, laughing, she turned away, walked across the pavement and let herself through the princess’s porticoed front door with a latchkey: and I drove away thinking that if the princess had disapproved of her jockey making approaches to her niece, she would by now have let both of us know.

I slept like the dead for five hours, then rolled stiffly out of bed, blinked blearily at the heavy cold rain making a mess of the day, and pointed the Mercedes towards Bletchley.

The Golden Lion was warm and alive with the smells of breakfast, and I ate there while the desk processed my bill. Then I telephoned the AA for news of my car (ready Monday) and to Holly to check that the marked Flag copies had been delivered as promised (which they had: the feed-merchant had telephoned) and after that I packed all my gear into the car and headed straight back towards the hotel I’d slept in.

No problem, they said helpfully at reception, I could retain my present room for as long as I wanted, and yes, certainly, I could leave items in the strongroom for safe-keeping.

Upstairs I put Jay Erskine’s Press Club pass and Owen Watts’s credit cards into an envelope and wrote ‘URGENT DELIVER TO MR LEGGATT IMMEDIATELY’ in large letters on the outside. Then I put the video recordings and all of the journalists’ other possessions, except their jackets, into one of the hotel’s laundry bags, rolling it into a neat bundle which downstairs was fastened with sticky-tape and labelled before vanishing into the vault.

After that I drove to Fleet Street, parked where I shouldn’t, ran through the rain to leave the envelope for Sam Leggatt at the Flag front desk, fielded the car from under the nose of a traffic warden, and went lightheartedly to Ascot.

It was a rotten afternoon there in many ways. Sleet fell almost ceaselessly, needle-sharp, ice-cold and slanting, soaking every jockey to the skin before the start and proving a blinding hazard thereafter. Goggles were useless, caked with flying mud; gloves slipped wetly on the reins; racing boots clung clammily to waterlogged feet. A day for gritting one’s teeth and getting round safely, for meeting fences exactly right and not slithering along on one’s nose on landing. Raw November at its worst.

The crowd was sparse, deterred before it started out by the visible downpour and the drenching forecast, and the few people standing in the open were huddled inside dripping coats looking like mushrooms with their umbrellas.

Holly and Bobby both came but wouldn’t stay, arriving after I’d won the first race more by luck than inspiration, and leaving before the second. They took the money out of the money-belt, which I returned to the valet with thanks.

Holly hugged me. ‘Three people telephoned, after I’d talked to you, to say they were pleased about the apology,’ she said. ‘They’re offering credit again. It’s made all the difference.’

‘Take care how you go with running up bills,’ I said.

‘Of course we will. The bank manager haunts us.’

I said to Bobby, ‘I borrowed some of that money. I’ll repay it next week.’

‘It’s all yours, really.’ He spoke calmly in friendship, but the life-force was again at a low ebb. No vigour. Too much apathy. Not what was needed.

Holly looked frozen and was shivering. ‘Keep the baby warm,’ I said. ‘Go into the trainers’ bar.’

‘We’re going home.’ She kissed enter me with cold lips. ‘We would stay to watch you, but I feel sick. I feel sick most of the time. It’s the pits.’

Bobby put his arm round her protectively and took her away under a large umbrella, both of them leaning head down against the icy wind, and I felt depressed for them, and thought also of the risks that lay ahead, before they could be safe.

The princess had invited to her box the friends of hers that I cared for least, a quartet of aristocrats from her old country, and as always when they were there I saw little of her. With two of them she came in red oilskins down to the parade ring before the first of her two runners, smiling cheerfully through the freezing rain and asking what I thought of her chances, and with the other two she repeated the enquiry an hour and a half later.

In each case I said, ‘Reasonable.’ The first runner finished reasonably fourth, the second runner, second. Neither time did she come down to the unsaddling enclosure, for which one couldn’t blame her, and nor did I go up to her box, partly because it was a perfunctory routine when those friends were there, but mostly on account of crashing to the ground on the far side of the course in the last race. By the time I got in and changed, she would be gone.

Oh well, I thought dimly, scraping myself up; six rides, one winner, one second, one fourth, two also-rans, one fall. You can’t win four every day, old son. And nothing broken. Even the stitches had survived without leaking. I waited in the blowing sleet for the car to pick me up, and took off my helmet to let the water run through my hair, embracing in a way the wild day, feeling at home. Winter and horses, the old song in the blood.

There was no fruit cake left in the changing room.

‘Rotten buggers,’ I said.

‘But you never eat cake,’ my valet said, heaving off my sodden boots.

‘Every so often,’ I said, ‘like on freezing wet Fridays after a fall in the last race.’

‘There’s some tea still. It’s hot.’

I drank the tea, feeling the warmth slide down, heating from inside. There was always tea and fruit cake in the changing rooms; instant energy, instant comfort. Everyone ate cake now and then.

An official put his head through the door: someone to see you, he said.

I pulled on a shirt and shoes and went out to the door from the weighing room to the outside world. No one all day had appeared with a banker’s draft from Pollgate, and I suppose I went out with an incredulous flicker of hope. Hope soon extinguished. It was only Dusty, huddled in the weighing room doorway, blue of face, eyes watering with cold.

‘Is the horse all right?’ I asked. ‘I heard you caught him.’

‘Yes. Useless bugger. What about you?’

‘No damage. I got passed by the doctor. I’ll be riding tomorrow.’

‘Right, I’ll tell the guv’nor. We’ll be off, then. So long.’

‘So long.’

He scurried away into the leaden early dusk, a small dedicated man who liked to check for himself after I’d fallen that I was in good enough shape to do his charges justice next time out. He had been known to advise Wykeham to stand me down. Wykeham had been known to take the advice. Passing Dusty was sometimes harder than passing the medics.

I showered and dressed and left the racecourse via the cheaper enclosures, walking from there into the darkening town, where I’d left the rented Mercedes in a public parking place in the morning. Maybe it was unlikely that a repeat ambush would be set in the nearly deserted jockeys’ car park long after the last race, but I was taking no chances. I climbed unmolested into the Mercedes and drove in safety to London.

There in my comfortable bolthole I again made additions to my astronomical phone bill, arranging first for my obliging neighbour to go into my cottage in the morning and pack one of my suits and some shirts and other things into a suitcase.

‘Of course I will, Kit dear, but I thought you’d be back here for sure tonight, after riding at Ascot.’

‘Staying with friends,’ I said. ‘I’ll get someone to pick up the suitcase from your place tomorrow morning to take it to Ascot. Would that be all right?’

‘Of course, dear.’

I persuaded another jockey who lived in Lambourn to collect the case and bring it with him, and he said sure he would, if he remembered.

I telephoned Wykeham when I judged he’d be indoors after his evening tour of the horses and told him his winner had been steadfast, the princess’s two as good as could be hoped for, and one of the also-rans disappointing.

And Dusty says you made a clear balls-up of the hurdle down by Swinley Bottom in the last.’

Yeah,’ I said. ‘If Dusty can see clearly half a mile through driving sleet in poor light he’s got better eyesight than I thought.’

‘Er...’ Wykeham said. ‘What happened?’

‘The one in front fell. Mine went down over him. He wouldn’t have won, if that’s any consolation. He was beginning to tire already, and he was hating the weather.’

Wykeham grunted assent. ‘He’s a sun-lover, true-bred. Kit, tomorrow there’s Inchcape for the princess in the big race and he’s in grand form, jumping out of his skin, improved a mile since you saw him last week.’

‘Inchcape,’ I said resignedly, ‘is dead.’

‘What? Did I say Inchcape? No, not Inchcape. What’s the princess’s horse?’

‘Icefall.’

‘Icicle’s full brother,’ he said, not quite making it a question.

‘Yes.’

‘Of course.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Icefall. Naturally. He should win, Kit, seriously.’

‘Will you be there?’ I asked. ‘I half expected you today.’

In that weather?’ He sounded surprised. ‘No, no, Dusty and you and the princess, you’ll do fine.’

‘But you’ve had a whole bunch of winners this week and you haven’t seen one of them.’

I see them here in the yard. I see them on video tapes. You tell Inchcape he’s the greatest, and he’ll jump Ben Nevis.’

‘All right,’ I said. Icefall, Inchcape, what did it matter?

‘Good. Great. Goodnight, Kit.’

‘Goodnight, Wykeham,’ I said.

I got through to my answering machine and collected the messages, one of which was from Eric Olderjohn, the civil servant owner of the horse I’d won on for the Lambourn trainer at Towcester.

I called him back without delay at the London number he’d given, and caught him, it seemed, on the point of going out.

‘Oh, Kit, yes. Look, I suppose you’re in Lambourn?’

‘No, actually. In London.’

‘Really? That’s fine. I’ve something you might be interested to see, but I can’t let it out of my hands.’ He paused for thought. ‘Would you be free this evening after nine?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Right. Come round to my house, I’ll be back by then.’ He gave me directions to a street south of Sloane Square, not more than a mile from where I was staying. ‘Coffee and brandy, right? Got to run. Bye.’

He disconnected abruptly and I put down my own receiver more slowly saying ‘Wow’ to myself silently. I hadn’t expected much action from Eric Olderjohn, civil servant, and certainly none with such speed.

I sat for a while thinking of the tape of Maynard, and of the list of companies at the end, of those who had suffered from Maynard’s philanthropy. Short of finding somewhere to replay the tape, I would have to rely on memory, and the only name I could remember for certain was Purfleet Electronics; chiefly because I’d spent a summer sailing holiday with a schoolfriend there long ago.

Purfleet Electronics, directory enquiries told me, was not listed.

I sucked my teeth a bit and reflected that the only way to find things was to look in the right place. I would go to Purfleet, as to Hitchin, in the morning.

I filled in the evening with eating and more phone calls, and by nine had walked down Sloane Street and found Eric Olderjohn’s house. It was narrow, two storeys, one of a long terrace built for low-income early Victorians, now inhabited by the affluent as pieds-à-terre: or so Eric Olderjohn affably told me, opening his dark green front door and waving me in.

From the street one stepped straight into the sitting room, which stretched from side to side of the house; all of four metres. The remarkably small space glowed with pinks and light greens, textured trellised wallpaper, swagged satin curtains, round tables with skirts, china birds, silver photograph frames, fat buttoned armchairs, chinese creamy rugs on the floor. There were softly glowing lamps, and the trellised wallpaper covered the ceiling also, enclosing the crowded contents in an impression of a summer grotto.

My host watched my smile of appreciation as if the reaction were only what he would have expected.

‘It’s great,’ I said.

‘My daughter did it.’

‘The one you would defend from the Flag?’

‘My only daughter. Yes. Sit down. Has it stopped raining? You’d like a brandy, I dare say?’ He moved the one necessary step to a silver tray of bottles on one of the round tables and poured cognac into two modest balloon glasses. ‘I’ve set some coffee ready. I’ll just fetch it. Sit down, do.’ He vanished through a rear door camouflaged by trellis and I looked at the photographs in the frames, seeing a well-groomed young woman who might be his daughter, seeing the horse that he owned, with myself on its back.

He returned with another small tray, setting it alongside the first.

‘My daughter,’ he said, nodding, as he saw I’d been looking. ‘She lives here part of the time, part with her mother.’ He shrugged. ‘One of those things.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes. Well, it happens. Coffee?’ He poured into two small cups and handed me one. ‘Sugar? No, I suppose not. Sit down. Here’s the brandy.’

He was neat in movement as in dress, and I found myself thinking ‘dapper’; but there was purposefulness there under the surface, the developed faculty of getting things done. I sat in one of the armchairs with coffee and brandy beside me, and he sat also, and sipped, and looked at me over his cup.

‘You were in luck,’ he said finally. ‘I put out a few feelers this morning and was told a certain person might be lunching at his club.’ He paused. ‘I was sufficiently interested in your problem to arrange for a friend of mine to meet and sound out that person, whom he knows well, and their conversation was, one might say, fruitful. As a result I myself went to a certain person’s office this afternoon, and the upshot of that meeting was some information which I’ll presently show you.’

His care over the choice of words was typical, I supposed, of the stratosphere of the civil service: the wheeler-dealers in subtlety, obliqueness and not saying quite what one meant. I never discovered the exact identity of the certain person, on the basis no doubt that it wasn’t something I needed to know, and in view of what he’d allowed me a sight of, I could scarcely complain.

‘I have some letters,’ Eric Olderjohn said. ‘More precisely, photocopies of letters. You can read them, but I am directly commanded not to let you take them away. I have to return them on Monday. Is all that... er... quite dear?’

‘Yes.’ I said.

‘Good.’

Without haste he finished his coffee and put down the cup. Then, raising the skirt of the table which bore the trays, he bent and brought out a brown leather attaché case, which he rested on his knees. He snapped open the locks, raised the lid and paused again.

‘They’re interesting,’ he said, frowning.

I waited.

As if coming to a decision which until that moment he had left open, he drew a single sheet of paper out of the case and passed it across.

The letter had been addressed to the Prime Minister and had been sent in September from a company which made fine china for export. The chairman, who had written the letter, explained that he and the other directors were unanimous in suggesting some signal honour for Mr Maynard Allardeck, in recognition of his great and patriotic services to industry.

Mr Allardeck had come generously to the aid of the historic company, and thanks entirely to his efforts the jobs of two hundred and fifty people had been saved. The skills of many of these people were priceless and included the ability to paint and gild porcelain to the world’s highest standards. The company was now exporting more than before and was looking forward to the brightest of futures.

The board would like to propose a knighthood for Mr Allardeck.

I finished reading and looked over at Eric Olderjohn.

‘Is this sort of letter normal?’ I asked.

‘Entirely.’ He nodded. ‘Most awards are the result of recommendations to the Prime Minister’s office. Anyone can suggest anyone for anything. If the cause seems just, an award is given. The patronage people draw up a list of awards they deem suitable, and the list is passed to the Prime Minister for approval.’

I said, ‘So all these people in the honours lists who get medals... firefighters, music teachers, postmen, people like that, it’s because their mates have written in to suggest it?’

‘Er, yes. More often their employers, but sometimes their mates.’

He produced a second letter from his briefcase and handed it over. This one also was from an exporting company and stressed Maynard’s invaluable contributions to worthwhile industry, chief among them the saving of very many jobs in an area of great local unemployment.

It was impossible to overestimate Mr Allardeck’s services to his country in industry, and the firm unreservedly recommended that he should be offered a knighthood.

‘Naturally,’ I said, ‘the patronage people checked that all this was true?’

‘Naturally,’ Eric Olderjohn said.

‘And of course it was?’

‘I am assured so. The certain person with whom I talked this afternoon told me that occasionally, if they receive six or seven similar letters all proposing someone unknown to the general public, they may begin to suspect that the person is busily proposing himself by persuading his friends to write in. The writers of the two letters I’ve shown you were specifically asked, as their recommendations were so similar, if Maynard himself had suggested they write. Each of them emphatically denied any such thing.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Well they would, wouldn’t they, if they stood to gain from Maynard for his knighthood.’

‘That’s a thoroughly scurrilous remark.’

‘So it is,’ I said cheerfully. ‘And your certain person, did he put Maynard down for his Sir?’

He nodded. ‘Provisionally. To be considered. Then they received a third letter, emphasising substantial philanthropy that they already knew about, and the question mark was erased. Maynard Allardeck was definitely in line for his K. The letter inviting him to accept the honour was drafted, and would have been sent out in about ten days from now, at the normal time for the New Year’s list.’

‘Would have been?’ I said.

‘Would have been.’ He smiled twistedly. ‘It is not now considered appropriate, as a result of the stories in the Daily Flag and the opinion page in the Towncrier.’

‘Rose Quince,’ I said.

He looked uncomprehending.

‘She wrote the piece in the Towncrier,’ I said.

‘Oh... yes.’

‘Would your, er, certain person,’ I asked, ‘really take notice of those bits in the newspapers?’

‘Oh, definitely. Particularly as in each case the paragraphs were delivered by hand to his office, outlined in red.’

‘They weren’t!’

Eric Olderjohn raised an eyebrow. ‘That means something to you?’ he asked.

I explained about the tradespeople and the owners all receiving similarly marked copies.

‘There you are, then. A thorough job of demolition. Nothing left to chance.’

‘You mentioned a third letter,’ I said. ‘The clincher.’

He peered carefully into his case and produced it. ‘This one may surprise you,’ he said.

The third letter was not from a commercial firm but from a charitable organisation with a list of patrons that stretched half the way down the left side of the page. The recipients of the charity appeared to be the needy dependants of dead or disabled public servants. Widows, children, the old and the sick.

‘How do you define a public servant?’ I asked.

‘The Civil Service, from the top down.’

Maynard Allardeck, the letter reported, had worked tirelessly over several years to improve the individual lives of those left in dire straits through no fault of their own. He unstintingly poured out his own fortune in aid, besides giving his time and extending a high level of compassionate ongoing care to families in need. The charitable organisation said it would itself feel honoured if the reward of a knighthood should be given to one of its most stalwart pillars: to the man they had unanimously chosen to be their next chairman, the appointment to be effective from 1 December of that year.

The letter had been signed by no fewer than four of the charity’s officers: the retiring chairman, the head of the board of management, and two of the senior patrons. It was the fourth of these signatures which had me lifting my head in astonishment.

‘Well?’ Eric Olderjohn asked, watching.

‘That’s odd,’ I said blankly.

‘Yes, curious, I agree.’

He held out his hand for the letters, took them from me, snapped them safely back into his case. I sat with thoughts tumbling over themselves and unquestioned assumptions melting like wax.

Was it true, I had wanted to know, if Maynard Allardeck was being considered for a knighthood, and if so, who knew?

The people who had proposed him; they knew.

The letter from the charity, dated 1 October, had been signed by Lord Vaughnley.