Come to Grief

Chapter 3

Back in London I met Kevin Mills, the journalist from The Pump, at lunchtime in the same pub as before.

‘It’s time for both barrels,’ I said.

He swigged his double gin. ‘What have you discovered?’

I outlined the rest of the pattern, beyond what he’d told me about two-year-old colts on moonlit nights. One chop from something like a machete. Always the off-fore foot. Always near a water trough. No insurance. And always just after a major local race meeting: the Gold Cup Festival at Cheltenham; the Grand National at Liverpool; the Spring Meeting at York.

‘And this Saturday, two days from now,’ I said levelly, ‘we have the Derby.’

He put his glass down slowly, and after a full silent minute said, ‘What about the kid’s pony?’

I shrugged resignedly. ‘It was the first that we know of.’

‘And it doesn’t fit the pattern. Not a two-year-old colt, was he? And no major race meeting, was there?’

‘The severed foot was by the water trough. The off-fore foot. Moon in the right quarter. One chop. No insurance.’

He frowned, thinking. ‘Tell you what,’ he said eventually, ‘it’s worth a warning. I’m not a sports writer, as you know, but I’ll get the message into the paper somewhere. “Don’t leave your two-year-old colts unguarded in open fields during and after the Epsom meeting.” I don’t think I can do more than that.’

‘It might be enough.’

‘Yeah. If all the owners of colts read The Pump.’

‘It will be the talk of the racecourse.. I’ll arrange that.’

‘On Derby Day?’ He looked skeptical. ‘Still, it will be better than nothing.’ He drank again. ‘What we really need to do is catch the bugger red-handed.’

We gloomily contemplated that impossibility. Roughly fifteen thousand thoroughbred foals were born each year in the British Isles. Half would be colts. Many of those at two would already be in training for flat racing, tucked away safely in stables; but that still left a host unattended out of doors. By June, also, yearling colts, growing fast, could be mistaken at night for two-year-olds.

Nothing was safe from a determined vandal.

Kevin Mills went away to write his column and I traveled on to Kent to report to my clients.

‘Have you found out who?’ Linda demanded.

‘Not yet.’

We sat by the sitting-room window again, watching Rachel push Pegotty in his buggy around the lawn, and I told her about the three colts and their shattered owners.

‘Three more,’ Linda repeated numbly. ‘In March, April and May? And Silverboy in February?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And what about now? This month… June?’

I explained about the warning to be printed in The Pump.

‘I’m not going to tell Rachel about the other three,’ Linda said. ‘She wakes up screaming as it is.’

‘I inquired into other injured horses all over England,’ I said, ‘but they were all hurt differently from each other. I think… well… that there are several different people involved. And I don’t think the thugs that blinded and cut the ponies round here had anything to do with Silverboy.’

Linda protested. ‘But they must have done! There couldn’t be two lots of vandals.’

‘I think there were.’

She watched Rachel and Pegotty, the habitual tears not far away. Rachel was tickling the baby to make him laugh.

‘I’d do anything to save my daughter,’ Linda said. ‘The doctor said that if only she’d had several sisters, one of them might have had the right tissue type. Joe — Rachel’s father — is half Asian. It seems harder to find a match. So I had the baby. I had Pegotty five months ago.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Joe has his new wife and he wouldn’t sleep with me again, not even for Rachel. So he donated sperm and I had artificial insemination, and it worked at once. It seemed an omen… and I had the baby… but he doesn’t match Rachel… There was only ever one chance in four that he would have the same tissue type. and antigens… I hoped and prayed… but he doesn’t.’ She gulped, her throat closing. ‘So I have Pegotty… he’s Peter, really, but we call him Pegotty… but Joe won’t bond with him… and we still can’t find a match anywhere for Rachel, and there isn’t much time for me to try with another baby… and Joe won’t, anyway. His wife objects… and he didn’t want to do it the first time.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘Joe’s wife goes on and on about Joe having to pay child support for Pegotty… and now she’s pregnant herself.’

Life, I thought, brought unlimited and complicated cruelties.

‘Joe isn’t mean,’ Linda said. ‘He loves Rachel and he bought her the pony and he keeps us comfortable, but his wife says I could have six children without getting a match…’ Her voice wavered and stopped, and after a while she said, ‘I don’t know why I burdened you with all that. You’re so easy to talk to.’

‘And interested.’

She nodded, sniffing and blowing her nose. ‘Go out and talk to Rachel. I told her you were coming back today. She liked you.’

Obediently I went out into the garden and gravely shook hands with Rachel, and we sat side by side on a garden bench like two old buddies.

Though still warm, the golden days of early June were graying and growing damp: good for roses, perhaps, but not for the Derby.

I apologized that I hadn’t yet found out who had attacked Silverboy.

‘But you will in the end, won’t you?’

‘I hope so,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I told Daddy yesterday that I was sure you would.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. He took me out in his car. He does that sometimes, when Didi goes to London to do shopping.’

‘Is Didi his wife?’

Rachel’s nose wrinkled in a grimace, but she made no audible judgment. She said, ‘Daddy says someone chopped your hand off, just like Silverboy.’

She regarded me gravely, awaiting confirmation.

‘Er,’ I said, unnerved, ‘not exactly like Silverboy.’

‘Daddy says the man who did it was sent to prison, but he’s out again now on parole.’

‘Do you know what “on parole” means?’ I asked curiously.

‘Yes. Daddy told me.’

‘Your daddy knows a lot.’

‘Yes, but is it true that someone chopped your hand off?’

‘Does it matter to you?’

‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘I was thinking about it in bed last night. I have awful dreams. I tried to stay awake because I didn’t want to go to sleep and dream about you having your hand chopped off.’

She was trying to be grown up and calm, but I could feel screaming hysteria too near the surface; so, stifling my own permanent reluctance to talk about it, I gave her an abbreviated account of what had happened.

‘I was a jockey,’ I began.

‘Yes, I know. Daddy said you were the champion for years.’

‘Well, one day my horse fell in a race, and while I was on the ground another horse landed over a jump straight onto my wrist and… um… tore it apart. It got stitched up, but I couldn’t use my hand much. I had to stop being a jockey, and I started doing what I do now, which is finding out things, like who hurt Silverboy.’

She nodded.

‘Well, I found out something that an extremely nasty man didn’t want me to know, and he… er… he hit my bad wrist and broke it again, and that time the doctors couldn’t stitch it up, so they decided that I’d be better off with a useful plastic hand instead of the useless old one.’

‘So he didn’t really… not really chop it off. Not like with an axe or anything?’

‘No. So don’t waste dreams on it.’

She smiled with quiet relief and, as she was sitting on my left, put her right hand down delicately but without hesitation on the replacement parts. She stroked the tough plastic, unfeeling skin and looked up with surprise at my eyes.

‘It isn’t warm,’ she said.

‘Well, it isn’t cold, either.’

She laughed with uncomplicated fun. ‘How does it work?’

‘I tell it what to do,’ I said simply. ‘I send a message from my brain down my arm saying open thumb from fingers, or close thumb to fingers, to grip things, and the messages reach very sensitive terminals called electrodes, which are inside the plastic and against my skin.’ I paused, but she didn’t say she didn’t understand. I said, ‘My real arm ends about there’ — I pointed — ‘and the plastic arm goes up round my elbow. The electrodes are up in my forearm, there, against my skin. They feel my muscles trying to move. That’s how they work.’

‘Is the plastic arm tied on or anything?’

‘No. It just fits tightly and stays on by itself. It was specially made to fit me.’

Like all children she took marvels for granted, although to me, even though by then I’d had the false arm for nearly three years, the concept of nerve messages moving machinery was still extraordinary.

‘There are three electrodes,’ I said. ‘One for opening the hand, one for closing, and one for turning the wrist.’

‘Do electrodes work on electricity?’ It puzzled her. ‘I mean, you’re not plugged into the wall, or anything?’

‘You’re a clever girl,’ I told her. ‘It works on a special sort of battery which slots into the outside above where I wear my watch. I charge up the batteries on a charger which is plugged into the wall.’

She looked at me assessingly. ‘It must be pretty useful to have that hand.’

‘It’s brilliant,’ I agreed.

‘Daddy says Ellis Quint told him that you can’t tell you have a plastic hand unless you touch it.’

I asked, surprised, ‘Does your daddy know Ellis Quint?’

She nodded composedly. ‘They go to the same place to play squash. He helped Daddy buy Silverboy. He was really really sorry when he found out it was Silverboy himself that he was making his program about.’

‘Yes, he would be.’

‘I wish…’ she began, looking down at my hand, ‘I do wish Silverboy could have had a new foot… with electrodes and a battery.’

I said prosaically, ‘He might have been able to have a false foot fitted, but he wouldn’t have been able to trot or canter, or jump. He wouldn’t have been happy just limping around.’

She rubbed her own fingers over the plastic ones, not convinced.

I said, ‘Where did you keep Silverboy?’

‘The other side of that fence at the end of the garden.’ She pointed. ‘You can’t see it from here because of those trees. We have to go through the house and out and down the lane.’

‘Will you show me?’

There was a moment of drawing back, then she said, ‘I’ll take you if I can hold your hand on the way.’

‘Of course.’ I stood up and held out my real, warm, normal arm.

‘No…’ She shook her head, standing up also. ‘I mean, can I hold this hand that you can’t feel?’

It seemed to matter to her that I wasn’t whole; that I would understand someone ill, without hair.

I said lightly, ‘You can hold which hand you like.’ She nodded, then pushed Pegotty into the house, and matter-of-factly told Linda she was taking me down to the field to show me where Silverboy had lived. Linda gave me a wild look but let us go, so the bald-headed child and the one-handed man walked in odd companionship down a short lane and leaned against a five-barred gate across the end.

The field was a lush paddock of little more than an acre, the grass growing strongly, uneaten. A nearby standing pipe with an ordinary tap on it stood ready to fill an ordinary galvanized water trough. The ground around the trough was churned up, the grass growing more sparsely, as always happened around troughs in fields.

‘I don’t want to go in,’ Rachel said, turning her head away.

‘We don’t need to.’

‘His foot was by the trough,’ she said jerkily, ‘I mean… you could see blood… and white bones.’

‘Don’t talk about it.’ I pulled her with me and walked back along the lane, afraid I should never have asked her to show me.

She gripped my unfeeling hand in both of hers, slowing me down.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago. It’s all right now when I’m awake.’

‘Good.’

‘I don’t like going to sleep.’

The desperation of that statement was an open appeal, and had to be addressed.

I stopped walking before we reached the door of the house. I said, ‘I don’t usually tell anyone this, but I’ll tell you. I still sometimes have bad dreams about my hand. I dream I can clap with two hands. I dream I’m still a jockey. I dream about my smashed wrist. Rotten dreams can’t be helped. They’re awful when they happen. I don’t know how to stop them. But one does wake up.’

‘And then you have leukemia… or a plastic arm.’

‘Life’s a bugger,’ I said.

She put her hand over her mouth and, in a fast release of tension, she giggled. ‘Mum won’t let me say that.’

‘Say it into your pillow.’

‘Do you?’

‘Pretty often.’

We went on into the house and Rachel again pushed Pegotty into the garden. I stayed in the sitting room with Linda and watched through the window.

‘Was she all right?’ Linda asked anxiously.

‘She’s a very brave child.’

Linda wept.

I said, ‘Did you hear anything at all the night Silverboy was attacked?’

‘Everyone asks that. I’d have said if I had.’

‘No car engines?’

‘The police said they must have stopped the car in the road and walked down the lane. My bedroom window doesn’t face the lane, nor does Rachel’s. But that lane doesn’t go anywhere except to the field. As you saw, it’s only a track really, it ends at the gate.’

‘Could anyone see Silverboy from the road?’

‘Yes, the police asked that. You could see him come to drink. You can see the water trough from the road, if you know where to look. The police say the thugs must have been out all over this part of Kent looking for unguarded ponies like Silverboy. Whatever you say about two-year-olds, Silverboy must have been done by thugs. Why don’t you ask the police?’

‘If you wholeheartedly believed the police, you wouldn’t have asked me for help.’

‘Joe just telephoned,’ she confessed, wailing, ‘and he says that calling you in to help is a waste of money.’

‘Ah.’

‘I don’t know what to think.’

I said, ‘You’re paying me by the day, plus expenses. I can stop right now, if you like.’

‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’ She wiped her eyes, undecided, and said, ‘Rachel dreams that Silverboy is standing in the field and he’s glowing bright and beautiful in the moonlight. He’s shining, she says. And there’s a dark mass of monsters oozing down the lane… “oozing” is what she says… and they are shapeless and devils and they’re going to kill Silverboy. She says she is trying to run fast to warn him, and she can’t get through the monsters, they clutch at her like cobwebs. She can’t get through them and they reach Silverboy and smother his light, and all his hair falls out, and she wakes up and screams. It’s always the same nightmare. I thought if you could find out who cut the poor thing’s foot off, the monsters would have names and faces and would be in the papers, and Rachel would know who they were and stop thinking they’re lumps that ooze without eyes and won’t let her through.’

After a pause, I said, ‘Give me another week.’

She turned away from me sharply and, crossing to a desk, wrote me a check. ‘For two weeks, one gone, one ahead.’

I looked at the amount. ‘That’s more than we agreed on.’

‘Whatever Joe says, I want you to go on trying.’

I gave her tentatively a small kiss on the cheek. She smiled, her eyes still dark and wet. ‘I’ll pay anything for Rachel,’ she said.

I drove slowly back to London thinking of the cynical old ex-policeman who had taught me the basics of investigation. ‘There are two cardinal rules in this trade,’ he said. ‘One. Never believe everything a client tells you, and always believe they could have told you more if you’d asked the right questions. And two. Never, never get emotionally involved with your client.’

Which was all very well, except when your client was a bright, truthful nine-year-old fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of lymphoblasts.

I bought a take-out curry on the way home and ate it before spending the evening on overdue paperwork.

I much preferred the active side of the job, but clients wanted, and deserved, and paid for, detailed accounts of what I’d done on their behalf, preferably with results they liked. With the typed recital of work done, I sent also my final bill, adding a list of itemized expenses supported by receipts. I almost always played fair, even with clients I didn’t like: investigators had been known to charge for seven days’ work when, with a little application, they could have finished the job in three. I didn’t want that sort of reputation. Speed succeeded in my new occupation as essentially as in my old.

Besides bathroom and kitchen, my pleasant (and frankly, expensive) apartment consisted of three rooms: bedroom, big sunny sitting room and a third, smaller room that I used as an office. I had no secretary or helper; no one read the secrets I uncovered except the client and me, and whatever the client did with the information he’d paid for was normally his or her own business. Privacy was what drove many people to consult me, and privacy was what they got.

I listened to some unexciting messages on my answering machine, typed a report on my secure word processor, printed it and put it ready for mailing. For reports and anything personal I used a computer system that wasn’t connected to any phone line. No one could in consequence tap into it and, as a precaution against thieves, I used unbreakable passwords. It was my second system that could theoretically be accessed; the one connected by modem to the big wide world of universal information. Any snooper was welcome to anything found there.

On the subject of the management of secrecy, my cynical mentor had said, ‘Never, ever tell your right hand what your left hand is doing. Er…’ he added, ‘whoops. Sorry, Sid.’

‘It’ll cost you a pint.’

‘And,’ he went on later, drinking, ‘keep back-up copies of completed sensitive inquiries in a bank vault, and wipe the information from any computer systems in your office. If you use random passwords, and change them weekly, you should be safe enough while you’re actually working on something, but once you’ve finished, get the back-up to the bank and wipe the office computer, like I said.’

‘All right.’

‘Never forget,’ he told me, ‘that the people you are investigating may go to violent lengths to stop you.’

He had been right about that.

‘Never forget that you don’t have the same protection as the police do. You have to make your own protection. You have to be careful.’

‘Maybe I should look for another job.’

‘No, Sid,’ he said earnestly, ‘you have a gift for this. You listen to what I tell you and you’ll do fine.’

He had taught me for the two years I’d spent doing little but drift in the old Radnor detection agency after the end of my racing life and, for nearly three years since, I’d lived mostly by his precepts. But he was dead now, and Radnor himself also, and I had to look inward for wisdom, which could be a variable process, not always ultra-productive.

I could try to comfort Rachel by telling her I had bad dreams also, but I could never have told her how vivid and liquefying they could be. That night, after I’d eased off the arm and showered and gone peacefully to bed, I fell asleep thinking of her, and descended after midnight into a familiar dungeon.

It was always the same.

I dreamed I was in a big dark space, and some people were coming to cut off both my hands.

Both.

They were making me wait, but they would come. There would be agony and humiliation and helplessness… and no way out.

I semi-awoke in shaking, sweating, heart-thudding terror and then realized with flooding relief that it wasn’t true, I was safe in my own bed — and then remembered that it had already half happened in fact, and also that I’d come within a fraction once of a villain’s shooting the remaining hand off. As soon as I was awake enough to be clear about the present actual not-too-bad state of affairs I slid back reassured into sleep, and that night the whole appalling nightmare cycled again… and again.

I forced myself to wake up properly, to sit up and get out of bed and make full consciousness take over. I stood under the shower again and let cool water run through my hair and down my body. I put on a terry cloth bathrobe and poured a glass of milk, and sat in an armchair in the sitting room with all the lights on.

I looked at the space where a left hand had once been, and I looked at the strong whole right hand that held a glass, and I acknowledged that often, both waking as well as sleeping, I felt, and could not repress, stabs of savage, petrifying fear that one day it would indeed be both. The trick was not to let the fear show, nor to let it conquer, nor rule, my life.

It was pointless to reflect that I’d brought the terrors on myself. I had chosen to be a jockey. I had chosen to go after violent crooks. I was at that moment actively seeking out someone who knew how to cut off a horse’s foot with one chop.

My own equivalent of the off-fore held a glass of milk.

I had to be mentally deranged.

But then there were people like Rachel Ferns.

In one way or another I had survived many torments, and much could have been avoided but for my own obstinate nature. I knew by then that whatever came along, I would deal with it. But that child had had her hair fall out and had found her beloved pony’s foot, and none of that was her fault. No nine-year-old mind could sleep sweetly under such assaults.

Oh God, Rachel, I thought, I would dream your nightmares for you if I could.

In the morning I made a working analysis in five columns of the Ferns pony and the three two-year-olds. The analysis took the form of a simple graph, ruled in boxes. Across the top of the page I wrote: Factors, Ferns, Cheltenham, Aintree, York, and down the left-hand column, Factors, I entered ‘date’, ‘name of owner’, ‘racing programme’, ‘motive’ and finally, ‘who knew of victim’s availability?’ I found that although I could think of answers to that last question, I hadn’t the wish to write them in, and after a bit of indecision I phoned Kevin Mills at The Pump and, by persistence, reached him.

‘Sid,’ he said heartily, ‘the warning will be in the paper tomorrow. You’ve done your best. Stop agitating.’

‘Great,’ I said, ‘but could you do something else? Something that could come innocently from The Pump, but would raise all sorts of reverberations if I asked directly myself.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Such as ask Topline Foods for a list of the guests they entertained at a sponsors’ lunch at Aintree the day before the National.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘Will you do it?’

He said, ‘What are you up to?’

‘The scoop is still yours. Exclusive.’

‘I don’t know why I trust you.’

‘It pays off,’ I said, smiling.

‘It had better.’ He put down his receiver with a crash, but I knew he would do what I asked.

It was Friday morning. At Epsom that day they would be running the Coronation Cup and also the Oaks, the fillies’ equivalent of the Derby. It was also lightly raining: a weak warm front, it seemed, was slowly blighting southern England.

Racecourses still drew me as if I were tethered to them with bungee elastic, but before setting out I telephoned the woman whose colt’s foot had been amputated during the night after the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

‘I’m sorry to bother you again, but would you mind a few more questions?’

‘Not if you can catch the bastards.’

‘Well… was the two-year-old alone in his field?’

‘Yes he was. It was only a paddock. Railed, of course. We kept him in the paddock nearest to the house, that’s what is so infuriating. We had two old hacks turned out in the field beyond him, but the vandals left them untouched.’

‘And,’ I said neutrally, ‘how many people knew the colt was accessible? And how accessible was he?’

‘Sid,’ she exclaimed, ‘don’t think we haven’t racked our brains. The trouble is, all our friends knew about him. We were excited about his prospects. And then, at the Cheltenham meeting, we had been talking to people about trainers. Old Gunners, who used to train for us in the past, has died, of course, and we don’t like that uppity assistant of his that’s taken over the stable, so we were asking around, you see.’

‘Yeah. And did you decide on a trainer?’

‘We did, but, of course…’

‘Such a bloody shame,’ I sympathized. ‘Who did you decide on?’

She mentioned a first-class man. ‘Several people said that with him we couldn’t go wrong.’

‘No.’ I mentally sighed, and asked obliquely, ‘What did you especially enjoy about the festival meeting?’

‘The Queen came,’ she said promptly. ‘I had thick, warm boots on, and I nearly fell over them, curtseying.’ She laughed. ‘And oh, also, I suppose you do know you’re in the Hall of Fame there?’

‘It’s an honor,’ I said. ‘They gave me an engraved glass goblet that I can see across the room right now from where I’m sitting.’

‘Well, we were standing in front of that big exhibit they’ve put together of your life, and we were reading the captions, and dear Ellis Quint stopped beside us and put his arm round my shoulders and said that our Sid was a pretty great guy, all in all.’

Oh shit, I thought.

Her warm smile was audible down the line. ‘We’ve known Ellis for years, of course. He used to ride our horses in amateur races. So he called in at our house for a drink on his way home after the Gold Cup. Such a lovely day.’ She sighed. ‘And then those bastards… You will catch them, won’t you, Sid?’

‘If I can,’ I said.

I left a whole lot of the boxes empty on my chart, and drove to Epsom Downs, spirits as gray as the skies. The bars were crowded. Umbrellas dripped. The brave colors of June dresses hid under drabber raincoats, and only the geraniums looked happy.

I walked damply to the parade ring before the two-year-old colts’ six-furlong race and thoughtfully watched all the off-fore feet plink down lightheartedly. The young, spindly bones of those forelegs thrust thousand-pound bodies forward at sprinting speeds near forty miles an hour. I had mostly raced on the older, mature horses of steeplechasing, half a ton in weight, slightly slower, capable of four miles and thirty jumps from start to finish, but still on legs scarcely thicker than a big man’s wrist.

The anatomy of a horse’s foreleg consisted, from the shoulder down, of forearm, knee, cannon bone, fetlock joint (also known as the ankle), pastern bone, and hoof. The angry Lancashire farmer’s colored photograph had shown the amputation to have been effected straight through the narrowest part of the whole leg, just at the base of the fetlock joint, where the pastern emerged from it. In effect, the whole pastern and the hoof had been cut off.

Horses had very fast instincts for danger and were easily scared. Young horses seldom stood still. Yet one single chop had done the job each time. Why had all those poor animals stood quietly white the deed was done? None of them had squealed loud enough to alert his owner.

I went up on the stands and watched the two-year-olds set off from the spur away to the left at the top of the hill; watched them swoop down like a flock of star lings round Tattenham Comer, and sort themselves out into winner and losers along the straight with its deceptively difficult camber that could tilt a horse towards the rails if his jockey was inexperienced.

I watched, and I sighed. Five long years had passed since I’d ridden my last race. Would regret, I wondered, ever fade?

‘Why so pensive, Sid lad?’ asked an elderly trainer, grasping my elbow. ‘A scotch and water for your thoughts!’ He steered me around towards the nearest bar and I went with him unprotestingly, as custom came my way quite often in that casual manner. He was great with horses and famously mean with his money.

‘I hear you’re damned expensive,’ he began inoffensively, handing me a glass. ‘What will you charge me for a day’s work?’

I told him.

‘Too damned much. Do it for nothing, for old times’ sake.’

I added, smiling, ‘How many horses do you train for nothing?’

‘That’s different.’

‘How many races would you have asked me to ride for nothing?’

‘Oh, all right, then. I’ll pay your damned fee. The fact is, I think I’m being had, and I want you to find out.’

It seemed he had received a glowing testimonial from the present employer of a chauffeur/houseman/handyman who’d applied for a job he’d advertised. He wanted to know if it was worth bringing the man up for an interview.

‘She—’ he said, ‘his employer is a woman. I phoned her when I got the letter, to check the reference, you see. She couldn’t have been more complimentary about the man if she’d tried, but… I don’t know… She was too complimentary, if you see what I mean.’

‘You mean you think she might be glad to see the back of him?’

‘You don’t hang about, Sid. That’s exactly what I mean.’

He gave me the testimonial letter of fluorescent praise.

‘No problem,’ I said, reading it. ‘One day’s fee, plus travel expenses. I’ll phone you, then send you a written report.’

‘You still look like a jockey,’ he complained. ‘You’re a damned sight more expensive on your feet.’

I smiled, put the letter away in a pocket, drank his scotch and applauded the string of winners he’d had recently, cheering him up before separating him from his cash.

I drifted around pleasurably but unprofitably for the rest of the day, slept thankfully without nightmares and found on a dry and sunny Derby Day morning that my friendly Pump reporter had really done his stuff.

‘Lock up your colts,’ he directed in the paper. ‘You’ve heard of foot fetishists? This is one beyond belief.’

He outlined in succinct paragraphs the similarities in ‘the affair of the four severed fetlocks’ and pointed out that on that very night after the Derby — the biggest race of all — there would be moonlight enough at three A.M. for flashlights to be unnecessary. All two-year-old colts should, like Cinderella, be safe indoors by midnight. ‘And if…’ he finished with a flourish, ‘…you should spy anyone creeping through the fields armed with a machete, phone ex-jockey turned gumshoe Sid Halley, who provided the information gathered here and can be reached via The Pump’s special Hotline. Phone The Pump! Save the colts! Halley to the rescue!’

I couldn’t imagine how he had got that last bit — including a telephone number — past any editor, but I needn’t have worried about spreading the message on the racecourse. No one spoke to me about anything else all afternoon.

I phoned The Pump myself and reached someone eventually who told me that Kevin Mills had gone to a train crash; sorry.

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘So how are you rerouting calls about colts to me? I didn’t arrange this. How will it work?’

‘Hold on.’

I held on. A different voice came back.

‘As Kevin isn’t available, we’re re-routing all Halley Hotline calls to this number,’ he said, and he read out my own Pont Square number.

‘Where’s your bloody Mills? I’ll wring his neck.’

‘Gone to the train crash. Before he left he gave us this number for reaching you. He said you would want to know at once about any colts.’

That was true enough — but hell’s bloody bells, I thought, I could have set it up better if he’d warned me.

I watched the Derby with inattention. An outsider won.

Ellis teased me about the piece in The Pump.

‘Hotline Halley,’ he said, laughing and clapping me on the shoulder, tall and deeply friendly and wiping out in a flash the incredulous doubts I’d been having about him. ‘It’s an extraordinary coincidence, Sid, but I actually saw one of those colts. Alive, of course. I was staying with some chums from York, and after we’d gone home someone vandalized their colt. Such fun people. They didn’t deserve anything like that.’

‘No one does.’

‘True.’

‘The really puzzling thing is motive,’ I said. ‘I went to see all the owners. None of the colts was insured. Nor was Rachel Fems’s pony, of course.’

He said interestedly, ‘Did you think it was an insurance scam?’

‘It jumps to mind, doesn’t it? Theoretically it’s possible to insure a horse and collect the lucre without the owner knowing anything about it. It’s been done. But if that’s what this is all about, perhaps someone in an insurance company somewhere will see the piece in The Pump and connect a couple of things. Come to think of it,’ I finished slowly, ‘I might send a copy to every likely insurance company’s board of directors, asking, and warning them.’

‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Does insurance and so on really take the place of racing? It sounds a pretty dull life for you, after what we used to do.’

‘Does television replace it for you?’

‘Not a hope.’ He laughed. ‘Danger is addictive, wouldn’t you say? The only dangerous job in television is reporting wars and — have you noticed? — the same few war reporters get out there all the time, talking with their earnest, committed faces about this or that month’s little dust-up, while bullets fly and chip off bits of stone in the background to prove how brave they are.’

‘You’re jealous.’ I smiled.

‘I get sodding bored sometimes with being a chat-show celebrity, even if it’s nice being liked. Don’t you ache for speed?’

‘Every day,’ I said.

‘You’re about the only person who understands me. No one else can see that fame’s no substitute for danger.’

‘It depends what you risk.’

Hands, I thought. One could risk hands.

‘Good luck, Hotline,’ Ellis said.

It was the owners of two-year-old colts that had the good luck. My telephone jammed and rang nonstop all evening and all night when I got home after the Derby, but the calls were all from people enjoying their shivers and jumping at shadows. The moonlight shone on quiet fields, and no animal, whether colt or two-year-old thoroughbred or children’s pony, lost a foot.

In the days that followed, interest and expectation dimmed and died. It was twelve days after the Derby, on the last night of the Royal Ascot meeting, that the screaming heeby-jeebies re-awoke.