Enquiry

Chapter One

Yesterday I lost my licence.

To a professional steeplechase jockey, losing his licence and being warned off Newmarket Heath is like being chucked off the medical register, only more so.

Barred from race riding, barred from racecourses. Barred moreover, from racing stables. Which poses me quite a problem, as I live in one.

No livelihood and maybe no home.

Last night was a right so-and-so, and I prefer to forget those grisly sleepless hours. Shock and bewilderment, the feeling that it couldn’t have happened, it was all a mistake... this lasted until after midnight. And at least the disbelieving stage had had some built-in comfort. The full thudding realisation which followed had none at all. My life was lying around like the untidy bits of a smashed teacup, and I was altogether out of glue and rivets.

This morning I got up and percolated some coffee and looked out of the window at the lads bustling around in the yard and mounting and cloppeting away up the road to the downs, and I got my first real taste of being an outcast.

Fred didn’t bellow up at my window as he usually did, ‘Going to stay there all day, then?’

This time, I was.

None of the lads looked up... they more or less kept their eyes studiously right down. They were quiet, too. Dead quiet. I watched Bouncing Bernie heave his ten stone seven on to the gelding I’d been riding lately, and there was something apologetic about the way he lowered his fat bum into the saddle.

And he, too, kept his eyes down.

Tomorrow, I guessed, they’d be themselves again. Tomorrow they’d be curious and ask questions. I understood that they weren’t despising me. They were sympathetic. Probably too sympathetic for their own comfort. And embarrassed: that too. And instinctively delicate about looking too soon at the face of total disaster.

When they’d gone I drank my coffee slowly and wondered what to do next. A nasty, very nasty, feeling of emptiness and loss.

The papers had been stuck as usual through my letterbox. I wondered what the boy had thought, knowing what he was delivering. I shrugged. Might as well read what they’d said, the Goddamned pressmen, God bless them.

The Sporting Life, short on news, had given us the headlines and the full treatment.

‘Cranfield and Hughes Disqualified.’

There was a picture of Cranfield at the top of the page, and half way down one of me, all smiles, taken the day I won the Hennessy Gold Cup. Some little sub-editor letting his irony loose, I thought sourly, and printing the most cheerful picture he could dig out of the files.

The close-printed inches north and south of my happy face were unrelieved gloom.

‘The Stewards said they were not satisfied with my explanation,’ Cranfield said. ‘They have withdrawn my licence. I have no further comment to make.’

Hughes, it was reported, had said almost exactly the same. Hughes, if I remembered correctly, had in fact said nothing whatsoever. Hughes had been too stunned to put one word collectedly after another, and if he had said anything at all it would have been unprintable.

I didn’t read all of it. I’d read it all before, about other people. For ‘Cranfield and Hughes’ one could substitute any other trainer and jockey who had been warned off. The newspaper reports on these occasions were always the same; totally uninformed. As a racing enquiry was a private trial the ruling authorities were not obliged to open the proceedings to the public or the press, and as they were not obliged to, they never did. In fact like many another inward-looking concern they seemed to be permanently engaged in trying to stop too many people from finding out what was really going on.

The Daily Witness was equally fog-bound, except that Daddy Leeman had suffered his usual rush of purple prose to the head. According to him: ‘Kelly Hughes, until now a leading contender for this season’s jump-jockeys’ crown, and fifth on the list last year, was sentenced to an indefinite suspension of his licence. Hughes, thirty, left the hearing ten minutes after Cranfield. Looking pale and grim, he confirmed that he had lost his licence, and added “I have no further comment”.’

They had remarkable ears, those pressmen.

I put down the paper with a sigh and went into the bedroom to exchange my dressing-gown for trousers and a jersey, and after that I made my bed, and after that I sat on it, staring into space. I had nothing else to do. I had nothing to do for as far ahead as the eye could see. Unfortunately I also had nothing to think about except the Enquiry.

Put baldly, I had lost my licence for losing a race. More precisely, I had ridden a red-hot favourite into second place in the Lemonfizz Crystal Cup at Oxford in the last week of January, and the winner had been an unconsidered outsider. This would have been merely unfortunate, had it not been that both horses were trained by Dexter Cranfield.

The finishing order at the winning post had been greeted with roars of disgust from the stands, and I had been booed all the way to the unsaddling enclosure. Dexter Cranfield had looked worried more than delighted to have taken first and second places in one of the season’s big sponsored steeplechases, and the Stewards of the meeting had called us both in to explain. They were not, they announced, satisfied with the explanations. They would refer the matter to the Disciplinary Committee of the Jockey Club.

The Disciplinary Committee, two weeks later, were equally sceptical that the freak result had been an accident. Deliberate fraud on the betting public, they said. Disgraceful, dishonest, disgusting, they said. Racing must keep its good name clean. Not the first time that either of you have been suspected. Severe penalties must be inflicted, as a deterrent to others.

Off, they said. Warned off. And good riddance.

It wouldn’t have happened in America, I thought in depression. There, all runners from one stable, or one owner, for that matter, were covered by a bet on any of them. So if the stable’s outsider won instead of its favourite, the backers still collected their money. High time the same system crossed the Atlantic. Correction, more than high time; long, long overdue.

The truth of the matter was that Squelch, my red-hot favourite, had been dying under me all the way up the straight, and it was in the miracle class that I’d finished as close as second, and not fifth or sixth. If he hadn’t carried so many people’s shirts, in fact, I wouldn’t have exhausted him as I had. That it had been Cranfield’s other runner Cherry Pie who had passed me ten yards from the finish was just the worst sort of luck.

Armed by innocence, and with reason to believe that even if the Oxford Stewards had been swayed by the crowd’s hostile reception, the Disciplinary Committee were going to consider the matter in an atmosphere of cool common sense, I had gone to the Enquiry without a twinge of apprehension.

The atmosphere was cool, all right. Glacial. Their own common sense was taken for granted by the Stewards. They didn’t appear to think that either Cranfield or I had any.

The first faint indication that the sky was about to fall came when they read out a list of nine previous races in which I had ridden a beaten favourite for Cranfield. In six of them, another of Cranfield’s runners had won. Cranfield had also had other runners in the other three.

‘That means,’ said Lord Gowery, ‘That this case before us is by no means the first. It has happened again and again. These results seem to have been unnoticed in the past, but this time you have clearly overstepped the mark.’

I must have stood there looking stupid with my mouth falling open in astonishment, and the trouble was that they obviously thought I was astonished at how much they had dug up to prove my guilt.

‘Some of those races were years ago,’ I protested. ‘Six or seven, some of them.’

‘What difference does that make?’ asked Lord Gowery. ‘They happened.’

‘That sort of thing happens to every trainer now and then,’ Cranfield said hotly. ‘You must know it does.’

Lord Gowery gave him an emotionless stare. It stirred some primeval reaction in my glands, and I could feel the ripple of goose pimples up my spine. He really believes, I thought wildly, he really believes us guilty. It was only then that I realised we had to make a fight of it; and it was already far too late.

I said to Cranfield, ‘We should have had that lawyer,’ and he gave me an almost frightened glance of agreement.

Shortly before the Lemonfizz the Jockey Club had finally thrown an old autocratic tradition out of the twentieth century and agreed that people in danger of losing their livelihood could be legally represented at their trials, if they wished. The concession was so new that there was no accepted custom to be guided by. One or two people had been acquitted with lawyers’ help who would presumably have been acquitted anyway; and if an accused person engaged a lawyer to defend him, he had in all cases to pay the fees himself. The Jockey Club did not award costs to anyone they accused, whether or not they managed to prove themselves innocent.

At first Cranfield had agreed with me that we should find a lawyer, though both of us had been annoyed at having to shell out. Then Cranfield had by chance met at a party the newly elected Disciplinary Steward who was a friend of his, and had reported to me afterwards, ‘There’s no need for us to go to the expense of a lawyer. Monty Midgely told me in confidence that the Disciplinary Committee think the Oxford stewards were off their heads reporting us, that he knows the Lemonfizz result was just one of those things, and not to worry, the Enquiry will only be a formality. Ten minutes or so, and it will be over.’

That assurance had been good enough for both of us. We hadn’t even seen any cause for alarm when three or four days later Colonel Sir Montague Midgely had turned yellow with jaundice and taken to his bed, and it had been announced that one of the Committee, Lord Gowery, would deputise for him in any Enquiries which might be held in the next few weeks.

Monty Midgely’s liver had a lot to answer for. Whatever he had intended, it now seemed all too appallingly clear that Gowery didn’t agree.

The Enquiry was held in a large lavishly furnished room in the Portman Square headquarters of the Jockey Club. Four Stewards sat in comfortable armchairs along one side of a polished table with a pile of papers in front of each of them, and a shorthand writer was stationed at a smaller table a little to their right. When Cranfield and I went into the room the shorthand writer was fussing with a tape-recorder, unwinding a lead from the machine which stood on his own table and trailing it across the floor towards the Stewards. He set up a microphone on a stand in front of Lord Gowery, switched it on, blew into it a couple of times, went back to his machine, flicked a few switches, and announced that everything was in order.

Behind the Stewards, across a few yards of plushy dark red carpet, were several more armchairs. Their occupants included the three Stewards who had been unconvinced at Oxford, the Clerk of the Course, the Handicapper who had allotted the Lemonfizz weights, and a pair of Stipendiary Stewards, officials paid by the Jockey Club and acting at meetings as an odd mixture of messenger boys for the Stewards and the industry’s private police. It was they who, if they thought there had been an infringement of the rules, brought it to the notice of the Stewards of the meeting concerned, and advised them to hold an Enquiry.

As in any other job, some Stipendiaries were reasonable men and some were not. The Stipe who had been acting at Oxford on Lemonfizz day was notoriously the most difficult of them all.

Cranfield and I were to sit facing the Stewards’ table, but several feet from it. For us, too, there were the same luxurious armchairs. Very civilised. Not a hatchet in sight. We sat down, and Cranfield casually crossed his legs, looking confident and relaxed.

We were far from soul-mates, Cranfield and I. He had inherited a fortune from his father, an ex-soap manufacturer who had somehow failed to acquire a coveted peerage in spite of donating madly to every fashionable cause in sight, and the combination of wealth and disappointed social ambition had turned Cranfield fils into a roaring snob. To him, since he employed me, I was a servant; and he didn’t know how to treat servants.

He was, however, a pretty good trainer. Better still, he had rich friends who could afford good horses. I had ridden for him semi-regularly for nearly eight years, and although at first I had resented his snobbish little ways, I had eventually grown up enough to find them amusing. We operated strictly as a business team, even after all that time. Not a flicker of friendship. He would have been outraged at the very idea, and I didn’t like him enough to think it a pity.

He was twenty years older than me, a tallish, thin Anglo-Saxon type with thin fine mousy hair, greyish-blue eyes with short fair lashes, a well developed straight nose and aggressively perfect teeth. His bone structure was of the type acceptable to the social circle in which he tried to move, but the lines his outlook on life had etched in his skin were a warning to anyone looking for tolerance or generosity. Cranfield was mean-minded by habit and open handed only to those who could lug him upwards. In all his dealings with those he considered his inferiors he left behind a turbulent wake of dislike and resentment. He was charming to his friends, polite in public to his wife, and his three teenage children echoed his delusions of superiority with pitiful faithfulness.

Cranfield had remarked to me some days before the Enquiry that the Oxford Stewards were all good chaps and that two of them had personally apologised to him for having to send the case on to the Disciplinary Committee. I nodded without answering. Cranfield must have known as well as I did that all three of the Oxford Stewards had been elected for social reasons only; that one of them couldn’t read a number board at five paces, that another had inherited his late uncle’s string of racehorses but not his expert knowledge, and that the third had been heard to ask his trainer which his own horse was, during the course of a race. Not one of the three could read a race at anything approaching the standard of a racecourse commentator. Good chaps they might well be, but as judges, frightening.

‘We will show the film of the race,’ Lord Gowery said.

They showed it, projecting from the back of the room on to a screen on the wall behind Cranfield and me. We turned our armchairs round to watch it. The Stipendiary Steward from Oxford, a fat pompous bully, stood by the screen, pointing out Squelch with a long baton.

‘This is the horse in question,’ he said, as the horses lined up for the start. I reflected mildly that if the Stewards knew their job they would have seen the film several times already, and would know which was Squelch without needing to have him pointed out.

The Stipe more or less indicated Squelch all the way round. It was an unremarkable race, run to a well tried pattern: hold back at the start, letting someone else make the pace; ease forwards to fourth place and settle there for two miles or more; move smoothly to the front coming towards the second last fence, and press on home regardless. If the horse liked that sort of race, and if he were good enough, he would win.

Squelch hated to be ridden any other way. Squelch was, on his day, good enough. It just hadn’t been his day.

The film showed Squelch taking the lead coming into the second last fence. He rolled a bit on landing, a sure sign of tiredness. I’d had to pick him up and urge him into the last, and it was obvious on the film. Away from the last, towards the winning post, he’d floundered about beneath me and if I hadn’t been ruthless he’d have slowed to a trot. Cherry Pie, at the finish, came up surprisingly fast and passed him as if he’d been standing still.

The film flicked off abruptly and someone put the lights on again. I thought that the film was conclusive and that that would be the end of it.

‘You didn’t use your whip,’ Lord Gowery said accusingly.

‘No, sir,’ I agreed. ‘Squelch shies away from the whip. He has to be ridden with the hands.’

‘You were making no effort to ride him out.’

‘Indeed I was, sir. He was dead tired, you can see on the film.’

‘All I can see on the film is that you were making absolutely no effort to win. You were sitting there with your arms still, making no effort whatsoever.’

I stared at him. ‘Squelch isn’t an easy horse to ride sir. He’ll always do his best but only if he isn’t upset. He has to be ridden quietly. He stops if he’s hit. He’ll only respond to being squeezed, and to small flicks on the reins, and to his jockey’s voice.’

‘That’s quite right,’ said Cranfield piously. ‘I always give Hughes orders not to treat the horse roughly.’

As if he hadn’t heard a word, Lord Gowery said, ‘Hughes didn’t pick up his whip.’

He looked enquiringly at the two Stewards flanking him, as if to collect their opinions. The one on his left, a youngish man who had ridden as an amateur, nodded non-committally. The other one was asleep.

I suspected Gowery kicked him under the table. He woke up with a jerk, said ‘Eh? Yes, definitely,’ and eyed me suspiciously.

It’s a farce, I thought incredulously. The whole thing’s a bloody farce.

Gowery nodded, satisfied, ‘Hughes never picked up his whip.’

The fat bullying Stipe was oozing smugness. ‘I am sure you will find this next film relevant, sir.’

‘Quite,’ agreed Gowery. ‘Show it now.’

‘Which film is this?’ Cranfield enquired.

Gowery said, ‘This film shows Squelch winning at Reading on 3rd January.’

Cranfield reflected. ‘I was not at Reading on that day.’

‘No,’ agreed Gowery. ‘We understand you went to the Worcester meeting instead.’ He made it sound suspicious instead of perfectly normal. Cranfield had run a hot young hurdler at Worcester and had wanted to see how he shaped. Squelch, the established star, needed no supervision.

The lights went out again. The Stipe used his baton to point out Kelly Hughes riding a race in Squelch’s distinctive colours of black and white chevrons and a black cap. Not at all the same sort of race as the Lemonfizz Crystal Cup. I’d gone to the front early to give myself a clear view of the fences, pulled back to about third place for a breather at midway, and forced to the front again only after the last fence, swinging my whip energetically down the horse’s shoulder and urging him vigorously with my arms.

The film stopped, the lights went on, and there was a heavy accusing silence. Cranfield turned towards me, frowning.

‘You will agree,’ said Gowery ironically, ‘That you used your whip, Hughes.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Which race did you say that was?’

‘The last race at Reading,’ he said irritably. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’

‘I agree that the film you’ve just shown was the last race at Reading, sir. But Squelch didn’t run in the last race at Reading. The horse in that film is Wanderlust. He belongs to Mr Kessel, like Squelch does, so the colours are the same, and both horses are by the same sire, which accounts for them looking similar, but the horse you’ve just shown is Wanderlust. Who does, as you saw, respond well if you wave a whip at him.’

There was dead silence. It was Cranfield who broke it, clearing his throat.

‘Hughes is quite right. That is Wanderlust.’

He hadn’t realised it, I thought in amusement, until I’d pointed it out. It’s all too easy for people to believe what they’re told.

There was a certain amount of hurried whispering going on. I didn’t help them. They could sort it out for themselves.

Eventually Lord Gowery said, ‘Has anyone got a form book?’ and an official near the door went out to fetch one. Gowery opened it and took a long look at the Reading results.

‘It seems,’ he said heavily, ‘That we have the wrong film. Squelch ran in the sixth race at Reading, which is of course usually the last. However, it now appears that on that day there were seven races, the Novice Chase having been divided and run in two halves, at the beginning and end of the day. Wanderlust won the seventh race. A perfectly understandable mix-up, I am afraid.’

I didn’t think I would help my cause by saying that I thought it a disgraceful mix-up, if not criminal.

‘Could we now, sir,’ I asked politely, ‘See the right film? The one that Squelch won.’

Lord Gowery cleared his throat. ‘I don’t, er, think we have it here. However,’ he recovered fast, ‘We don’t need it. It is immaterial. We are not considering the Reading result, but that at Oxford.’

I gasped. I was truly astounded. ‘But sir, if you watch Squelch’s race, you will see that I rode him at Reading exactly as I did at Oxford, without using the whip.’

‘That is beside the point, Hughes, because Squelch may not have needed the whip at Reading, but at Oxford he did.’

‘Sir, it is the point,’ I protested. ‘I rode Squelch at Oxford in exactly the same manner as when he won at Reading, only at Oxford he tired.’

Lord Gowery absolutely ignored this. Instead he looked left and right to his Stewards alongside and remarked, ‘We must waste no more time. We have three or four witnesses to call before lunch.’

The sleepy eldest Steward nodded and looked at his watch. The younger one nodded and avoided meeting my eyes. I knew him quite well from his amateur jockey days, and had often ridden against him. We had all been pleased when he had been made a Steward, because he knew at first-hand the sort of odd circumstances which cropped up in racing to make a fool of the brightest, and we had thought that he would always put forward or explain our point of view. From his downcast semi-apologetic face I now gathered that we had hoped too much. He had not so far contributed one single word to the proceedings, and he looked, though it seemed extraordinary, intimidated.

As plain Andrew Tring he had been lighthearted, amusing, and almost reckless over fences. His recently inherited baronetcy and his even more recently acquired Stewardship seemed on the present showing to have hammered him into the ground.

Of Lord Plimborne, the elderly sleepyhead, I knew very little except his name. He seemed to be in his seventies and there was a faint tremble about many of his movements as if old age were shaking at his foundations and would soon have him down. He had not, I thought, clearly heard or understood more than a quarter of what had been said.

An Enquiry was usually conducted by three Stewards, but on this day there were four. The fourth, who sat on the left of Andrew Tring, was not, as far as I knew, even on the Disciplinary Committee, let alone a Disciplinary Steward. But he had in front of him a pile of notes as large if not larger than the others, and he was following every word with sharp hot eyes. Exactly where his involvement lay I couldn’t work out, but there was no doubt that Wykeham, second Baron Ferth, cared about the outcome.

He alone of the four seemed really disturbed that they should have shown the wrong film, and he said quietly but forcefully enough for it to carry across to Cranfield and me, ‘I did advise against showing the Reading race, if you remember.’

Gowery gave him an icelance of a look which would have slaughtered thinner skinned men, but against Ferth’s inner furnace it melted impotently.

‘You agreed to say nothing,’ Gowery said in the same piercing undertone. ‘I would be obliged if you would keep to that.’

Cranfield had stirred beside me in astonishment, and now, thinking about it on the following day, the venomous little exchange seemed even more incredible. What, I now wondered, had Ferth been doing there, where he didn’t really belong and was clearly not appreciated.

The telephone bell broke up my thoughts. I went into the sitting-room to answer it and found it was a jockey colleague ringing up to commiserate. He himself, he reminded me, had had his licence suspended for a while three or four years back, and he knew how I must be feeling.

‘It’s good of you, Jim, to take the trouble.’

‘No trouble, mate. Stick together, and all that. How did it go?’

‘Lousy,’ I said. ‘They didn’t listen to a word either Cranfield or I said. They’d made up their minds we were guilty before we ever went there.’

Jim Enders laughed. ‘I’m not surprised. You know what happened to me?’

‘No. What?’

‘Well, when they gave me my licence back, they’d called the Enquiry for the Tuesday, see, and then for some reason they had to postpone it until the Thursday afternoon. So along I went on Thursday afternoon and they hummed and hahed and warned me as to my future conduct and kept me in suspense for a bit before they said I could have my licence back. Well, I thought I might as well collect a Racing Calendar and take it home with me, to keep abreast of the times and all that, so, anyway, I collected my Racing Calendar which is published at twelve o’clock on Thursdays, twelve o’clock mind you, and I opened it, and what is the first thing I see but the notice saying my licence has been restored. So how about that? They’d published the result of that meeting two hours before it had even begun.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said.

‘Quite true,’ he said. ‘Mind you, that time they were giving my licence back, not taking it away. But even so, it shows they’d made up their minds. I’ve always wondered why they bothered to hold that second enquiry at all. Waste of everyone’s time, mate.’

‘It’s incredible,’ I said. But I did believe him: which before my own Enquiry I would not have done.

‘When are they giving you your licence back?’ Jim asked.

‘They didn’t say.’

‘Didn’t they tell you when you could apply?’

‘No.’

Jim shoved one very rude word down the wires. ‘And that’s another thing, mate, you want to pick your moment right when you do apply.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘When I applied for mine, on the dot of when they told me I could, they said the only Steward who had authority to give it back had gone on a cruise to Madeira and I would have to wait until he turned up again.’

Chapter Two

When the horses came back from second exercise at midday my cousin Tony stomped up the stairs and trod muck and straw into my carpet. It was his stable, not Cranfield’s, that I lived in. He had thirty boxes, thirty-two horses, one house, one wife, four children and an overdraft. Ten more boxes were being built, the fifth child was four months off and the overdraft was turning puce. I lived alone in the flat over the yard and rode everything which came along.

All very normal. And, in the three years since we had moved in, increasingly successful. My suspension meant that Tony and the owners were going to have to find another jockey.

He flopped down gloomily in a green velvet armchair.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Give me a drink, for God’s sake.’

I poured half a cupful of J and B into a chunky tumbler.

‘Ice?’

‘As it is.’

I handed him the glass and he made inroads. Restoration began to take place.

Our mothers had been Welsh girls, sisters. Mine had married a local boy, so that I had come out wholly Celt, shortish, dark, compact. My aunt had hightailed off with a six foot four languid blond giant from Wyoming who had endowed Tony with most of his physique and double his brain. Out of U.S.A.A.F. uniform, Tony’s father had reverted to ranch-hand, not ranch owner, as he had led his in-laws to believe, and he’d considered it more important for his only child to get to ride well than to acquire any of that there fancy book learning.

Tony therefore played truant for years with enthusiasm, and had never regretted it. I met him for the first time when he was twenty-five, when his Pa’s heart had packed up and he had escorted his sincerely weeping Mum back to Wales. In the seven years since then he had acquired with some speed an English wife, a semi-English accent, an unimpassioned knowledge of English racing, a job as assistant trainer, and a stable of his own. And also, somewhere along the way, an unquenchable English thirst. For Scotch.

He said, looking down at the diminished drink, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know, exactly.’

‘Will you go back home?’

‘Not to live,’ I said. ‘I’ve come too far.’

He raised his head a little and looked round the room, smiling. Plain white walls, thick brown carpet, velvet chairs in two or three greens, antique furniture, pink and orange striped curtains, heavy and rich. ‘I’ll say you have,’ he agreed. ‘A big long way from Coedlant Farm, boyo.’

‘No further than your prairie.’

He shook his head. ‘I still have grass roots. You’ve pulled yours up.’

Penetrating fellow, Tony. An extraordinary mixture of raw intelligence and straws in the hair. He was right; I’d shaken the straws out of mine. We got on very well.

‘I want to talk to someone who has been to a recent Enquiry,’ I said, abruptly.

‘You want to just put it behind you and forget it,’ he advised. ‘No percentage in comparing hysterectomies.’

I laughed, which was truly something in the circumstances. ‘Not on a pain for pain basis,’ I explained. ‘It’s just that I want to know if what happened yesterday was... well, unusual. The procedure, that is. The form of the thing. Quite apart from the fact that most of the evidence was rigged.’

‘Is that what you were mumbling about on the way home? Those few words you uttered in a wilderness of silence?’

‘Those,’ I said, ‘Were mostly “they didn’t believe a word we said”.’

‘So who rigged what?’

‘That’s the question.’

He held out his empty glass and I poured some more into it.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes. Starting from point A, which is that I rode Squelch to win, we arrive at point B, which is that the Stewards are convinced I didn’t. Along the way were three or four little birdies all twittering their heads off and lying in their bloody teeth.’

‘I detect,’ he said, ‘That something is stirring in yesterday’s ruins.’

‘What ruins?’

‘You.’

‘Oh.’

‘You should drink more,’ he said. ‘Make an effort. Start now.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Do that.’ He wallowed to his feet. ‘Time for lunch. Time to go back to the little nestlings with their mouths wide open for worms.’

‘Is it worms, today?’

‘God knows. Poppy said to come, if you want.’

I shook my head.

‘You must eat,’ he protested.

‘Yes.’

He looked at me consideringly. ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘That you’ll manage.’ He put down his empty glass. ‘We’re here, you know, if you want anything. Company. Food. Dancing girls. Trifles like that.’

I nodded my thanks, and he clomped away down the stairs. He hadn’t mentioned his horses, their races, or the other jockeys he would have to engage. He hadn’t said that my staying in the flat would be an embarrassment to him.

I didn’t know what to do about that. The flat was my home. My only home. Designed, converted, furnished by me. I liked it, and I didn’t want to leave.

I wandered into the bedroom.

A double bed, but pillows for one.

On the dressing chest, in a silver frame, a photograph of Rosalind. We had been married for two years when she went to spend a routine week-end with her parents. I’d been busy riding five races at Market Rasen on the Saturday, and a policeman had come into the weighing-room at the end of the afternoon and told me unemotionally that my father-in-law had set off with his wife and mine to visit friends and had misjudged his overtaking distance in heavy rain and had driven head on into a lorry and killed all three of them instantly.

It was four years since it had happened. Quite often I could no longer remember her voice. Other times she seemed to be in the next room. I had loved her passionately, but she no longer hurt. Four years was a long time.

I wished she had been there, with her tempestuous nature and fierce loyalty, so that I could have told her about the Enquiry, and shared the wretchedness, and been comforted.

That Enquiry...

Gowery’s first witness had been the jockey who had finished third in the Lemonfizz, two or three lengths behind Squelch. About twenty, round faced and immature, Master Charlie West was a boy with a lot of natural talent but too little self-discipline. He had a great opinion of himself, and was in danger of throwing away his future through an apparent belief that rules only applied to everyone else.

The grandeur of Portman Square and the trappings of the Enquiry seemed to have subdued him. He came into the room nervously and stood where he was told, at one end of the Stewards’ table: on their left, and to our right. He looked down at the table and raised his eyes only once or twice during his whole testimony. He didn’t look across to Cranfield and me at all.

Gowery asked him if he remembered the race.

‘Yes, sir.’ It was a low mumble, barely audible.

‘Speak up,’ said Gowery irritably.

The shorthand writer came across from his table and moved the microphone so that it was nearer Charlie West. Charlie West cleared his throat.

‘What happened during the race?’

‘Well sir... Shall I start from the beginning, sir?’

‘There’s no need for unnecessary detail, West,’ Gowery said impatiently. ‘Just tell us what happened on the far side of the course on the second circuit.’

‘I see, sir. Well... Kelly, that is, I mean, Hughes, sir... Hughes... Well... Like...’

‘West, come to the point.’ Gowery’s voice would have left a lazer standing. A heavy flush showed in patches on Charlie West’s neck. He swallowed.

‘Round the far side, sir, where the stands go out of sight, like, for a few seconds, well, there, sir... Hughes gives this hefty pull back on the reins, sir...’

‘And what did he say. West?’

‘He said, sir, “O.K. Brakes on, chaps.” Sir.’

Gowery said meaningfully, though everyone had heard the first time and a pin would have crashed on the Wilton, ‘Repeat that, please, West.’

‘Hughes, sir, said “O.K. Brakes on, chaps”.’

‘And what did you take him to mean by that, West?’

‘Well sir, that he wasn’t trying, like. He always says that when he’s pulling one back and not trying.’

‘Always?’

‘Well, something like that, sir.’

There was a considerable silence.

Gowery said formally, ‘Mr Cranfield... Hughes... You may ask this witness questions, if you wish.’

I got slowly to my feet.

‘Are you seriously saying,’ I asked bitterly, ‘That at any time during the Lernonfizz Cup I pulled Squelch back and said “O.K., brakes on, chaps?” ’

He nodded. He had begun to sweat.

‘Please answer aloud,’ I said.

‘Yes. You said it.’

‘I did not.’

‘I heard you’

‘You couldn’t have done.’

‘I heard you.’

I was silent. I simply had no idea what to say next. It was too like a playground exchange: you did, I didn’t, you did, I didn’t...

I sat down. All the Stewards and all the officials ranked behind them were looking at me. I could see that all, to a man, believed West.

‘Hughes, are you in the habit of using this phrase?’ Gowery’s voice was dry acid.

‘No, sir.’

‘Have you ever used it?’

‘Not in the Lemonfizz Cup, sir.’

‘I said, Hughes, have you ever used it?’

To lie or not to lie...‘Yes, sir, I have used it, once or twice. But not on Squelch in the Lemonfizz Cup.’

‘It is sufficient that you said it at all, Hughes. We will draw our own conclusions as to when you said it.’

He shuffled one paper to the bottom of his pack and picked up another. Consulting it with the unseeing token glance of those who know their subject by heart, he continued, ‘And now, West, tell us what Hughes did after he had said these words.’

‘Sir, he pulled his horse back, sir.’

‘How do you know this?’ The question was a formality. He asked with the tone of one already aware of the answer.

‘I was just beside Hughes, sir, when he said that about brakes. Then he sort of hunched his shoulders, sir, and give a pull, sir, and, well, then he was behind me, having dropped out, like.’

Cranfield said angrily, ‘But he finished in front of you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Charlie West flicked his eyes upwards to Lord Gowery, and spoke only to him. ‘My old horse couldn’t act on the going, sir, and Hughes came past me again going into the second last, like.’

‘And how did Squelch jump that fence?’

‘Easy, sir. Met it just right. Stood back proper, sir.’

‘Hughes maintains that Squelch was extremely tired at that point.’

Charlie West left a small pause. Finally he said, ‘I don’t know about that, sir. I thought as how Squelch would win, myself, sir. I still think as how he ought to have won, sir, being the horse he is, sir.’

Gowery glanced left and right, to make sure that his colleagues had taken the point. ‘From your position during the last stages of the race, West, could you see whether or not Hughes was making every effort to win?’

‘Well he didn’t look like it, sir, which was surprising, like.’

‘Surprising?’

‘Yes sir. See, Hughes is such an artist at it, sir.’

‘An artist at what?’

‘Well, at riding what looks from the stands one hell of a finish, sir, while all the time he’s smothering it like mad.’

‘Hughes is in the habit of not riding to win?’

Charlie West worked it out. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Thank you, West,’ Lord Gowery said with insincere politeness. ‘You may go and sit over there at the back of the room.’

Charlie West made a rabbit’s scurry towards the row of chairs reserved for those who had finished giving evidence. Cranfield turned fiercely to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you deny it more vehemently, for God’s sake? Why the Hell didn’t you insist he was making the whole thing up?’

‘Do you think they’d believe me?’

He looked uneasily at the accusing ranks opposite, and found his answer in their implacable stares. All the same, he stood up and did his best.

‘Lord Gowery, the film of the Lemonfizz Cup does not bear out West’s accusation. At no point does Hughes pull back his horse.’

I lifted my hand too late to stop him. Gowery’s and Lord Ferth’s intent faces both registered satisfaction. They knew as well as I did that what West had said was borne out on the film. Sensing that Squelch was going to run out of steam, I’d give him a short breather a mile from home, and this normal everyday little act was now wide open to misinterpretation.

Cranfield looked down at me, surprised by my reaction.

‘I gave him a breather,’ I said apologetically. ‘It shows.’

He sat down heavily, frowning in worry.

Gowery was saying to an official, ‘Show in Mr Newtonnards’ as if Cranfield hadn’t spoken. There was a pause before Mr Newtonnards, whoever he was, materialised. Lord Gowery was looking slightly over his left shoulder, towards the door, giving me the benefit of his patrician profile. I realised with almost a sense of shock that I knew nothing about him as a person, and that he most probably knew nothing about me. He had been, to me, a figure of authority with a capital A. I hadn’t questioned his right to rule over me. I had assumed naively that he would do so with integrity, wisdom and justice.

So much for illusions. He was leading his witnesses in a way that would make the Old Bailey reel. He heard truth in Charlie West’s lies and lies in my truth. He was prosecutor as well as judge, and was only admitting evidence if it fitted his case.

He was dispersing the accepting awe I had held him in like candyfloss in a thunderstorm, and I could feel an unforgiving cynicism growing in its stead. Also I was ashamed of my former state of trust. With the sort of education I’d had, I ought to have known better.

Mr Newtonnards emerged from the waiting-room and made his way to the witnesses’ end of the Stewards’ table, sporting a red rosebud in his lapel and carrying a large blue ledger. Unlike Charlie West he was confident, not nervous. Seeing that everyone else was seated he looked around for a chair for himself, and not finding one, asked.

After a fractional pause Gowery nodded, and the official-of-all-work near the door pushed one forward. Mr Newtonnards deposited into it his well-cared-for pearl-grey-suited bulk.

‘Who is he?’ I said to Cranfield. Cranfield shook his head and didn’t answer, but he knew, because his air of worry had if anything deepened.

Andrew Tring flipped through his pile of papers, found what he was looking for, and drew it out. Lord Plimborne had his eyes shut again. I was beginning to expect that: and in any case I could see that it didn’t matter, since the power lay somewhere between Gowery and Ferth, and Andy Tring and Plimborne were so much window-dressing.

Lord Gowery too picked up a paper, and again I had the impression that he knew its contents by heart.

‘Mr Newtonnards?’

‘Yes, my Lord.’ He had a faint cockney accent overlaid by years of cigars and champagne. Mid-fifties, I guessed; no fool, knew the world, and had friends in show business. Not too far out: Mr Newtonnards, it transpired, was a bookmaker.

Gowery said, ‘Mr Newtonnards, will you be so good as to tell us about a certain bet you struck on the afternoon of the Lemonfizz Cup?’

‘Yes, my Lord. I was standing on my pitch in Tattersall’s when this customer come up and asked me for five tenners on Cherry Pie.’ He stopped there, as if that was all he thought necessary.

Gowery did some prompting. ‘Please describe this man, and also tell us what you did about his request.’

‘Describe him? Let’s see, then. He was nothing special. A biggish man in a fawn coat, wearing a brown trilby and carrying race glasses over his shoulder. Middle-aged, I suppose. Perhaps he had a moustache. Can’t remember, really.’

The description fitted half the men on the racecourse.

‘He asked me what price I’d give him about Cherry Pie,’ Newtonnards went on. ‘I didn’t have any price chalked on my board, seeing Cherry Pie was such an outsider. I offered him tens, but he said it wasn’t enough, and he looked like moving off down the line. Well...’ Newtonnards waved an expressive pudgy hand, ‘... business wasn’t too brisk, so I offered him a hundred to six. Couldn’t say fairer than that now, could I, seeing as there were only eight runners in the race? Worse decision I made in a long time.’ Gloom mixed with stoicism settled on his well covered features.

‘So when Cherry Pie won, you paid out?’

‘That’s right. He put down fifty smackers. I paid him nine hundred.’

‘Nine hundred pounds?’

‘That’s right, my Lord,’ Newtonnards confirmed easily, ‘Nine hundred pounds.’

‘And we may see the record of this bet?’

‘Certainly.’ He opened the big blue ledger at a marked page. ‘On the left, my lord, just over half way down. Marked with a red cross. Nine hundred and fifty, ticket number nine seven two.’

The ledger was passed along the Stewards’ table. Plimborne woke up for the occasion and all four of them peered at the page. The ledger returned to Newtonnards, who shut it and let it lie in front of him.

‘Wasn’t that a very large bet on an outsider?’ Gowery asked.

‘Yes it was, my Lord. But then, there are a lot of mugs about. Except, of course, that once in a while they go and win.’

‘So you had no qualms about risking such a large amount?’

‘Not really, my lord. Not with Squelch in the race. And anyway, I laid a bit of it off. A quarter of it, in fact, at thirty-threes. So my actual losses were in the region of four hundred and eighty-seven pounds ten. Then I took three hundred and two-ten on Squelch and the others, which left a net loss on the race of one eight five.’

Cranfield and I received a glare in which every unit of the one eight-five rankled.

Gowery said, ‘We are not enquiring into how much you lost Mr Newtonnards, but into the identity of the client who won nine hundred pounds on Cherry Pie.’

I shivered. If West could lie, so could others.

‘As I said in my statement, my Lord, I don’t know his name. When he came up to me I thought I knew him from somewhere, but you see a lot of folks in my game, so I didn’t think much of it. You know. So it wasn’t until after I paid him off. After the last race, in fact. Not until I was driving home. Then it came to me, and I went spare, I can tell you.’

‘Please explain more clearly,’ Gowery said patiently. The patience of a cat at a mousehole. Anticipation making the waiting sweet.

‘It wasn’t him, so much, as who I saw him talking to. Standing by the parade ring rails before the first race. Don’t know why I should remember it, but I do.’

‘And who did you see this client talking to?’

‘Him.’ He jerked his head in our direction. ‘Mr Cranfield.’

Cranfield was immediately on his feet.

‘Are you suggesting that I advised this client of yours to back Cherry Pie?’ His voice shook with indignation.

‘No, Mr Cranfield,’ said Gowery like the North Wind, ‘The suggestion is that the client was acting on your behalf, and that it was you yourself that backed Cherry Pie.’

‘That’s an absolute lie.’

His hot denial fell on a lot of cold ears.

‘Where is this mysterious man?’ he demanded. ‘This unidentified, unidentifiable nobody? How can you possibly trump up such a story and present it as serious evidence? It is ridiculous. Utterly, utterly ridiculous.’

‘The bet was struck,’ Gowery said plonkingly, pointing to the ledger.

‘And I saw you talking to the client,’ confirmed Newtonnards.

Cranfield’s fury left him gasping for words, and in the end he too sat down again, finding like me nothing to say that could dent the preconceptions ranged against us.

‘Mr Newtonnards,’ I said, ‘Would you know this client again?’

He hesitated only a fraction. ‘Yes, I would.’

‘Have you seen him at the races since Lemonfizz day?’

‘No. I haven’t.’

‘If you see him again, will you point him out to Lord Gowery?’

‘If Lord Gowery’s at the races.’ Several of the back ranks of officials smiled at this, but Newtonnards, to give him his due, did not.

I couldn’t think of anything else to ask him, and I knew I had made no headway at all. It was infuriating. By our own choice we had thrust ourselves back into the bad old days when people accused at racing trials were not allowed a legal defendant. If they didn’t know how to defend themselves: if they didn’t know what sort of questions to ask or in what form to ask them, that was just too bad. Just their hard luck. But this wasn’t hard luck. This was our own stupid fault. A lawyer would have been able to rip Newtonnards’ testimony to bits, but neither Cranfield nor I knew how.

Cranfield tried. He was back on his feet.

‘Far from backing Cherry Pie, I backed Squelch. You can check up with my own bookmaker.’

Gowery simply didn’t reply. Cranfield repeated it.

Gowery said, ‘Yes, yes. No doubt you did. It is quite beside the point.’

Cranfield sat down again with his mouth hanging open. I knew exactly how he felt. Not so much banging the head against a brick wall as being actively attacked by a cliff.

They waved Newtonnards away and he ambled easily off to take his place beside Charlie West. What he had said stayed behind him, stuck fast in the officials’ minds. Not one of them had asked for corroboration. Not one had suggested that there might have been a loophole in identity. The belief was written plain on their faces: if someone had backed Cherry Pie to win nine hundred pounds, it must have been Cranfield.

Gowery hadn’t finished. With a calm satisfaction he picked up another paper and said, ‘Mr Cranfield, I have here an affidavit from a Mrs Joan Jones, who handled the five pound selling window on the Totalisator in the paddock on Lemonfizz Cup day, that she sold ten win-only tickets for horse number eight to a man in a fawn raincoat, middle aged, wearing a trilby. I also have here a similar testimony from a Mr Leonard Roberts, who was paying out at the five pound window in the same building, on the same occasion. Both of these Tote employees remember the client well, as these were almost the only five pound tickets sold on Cherry Pie, and certainly the only large block. The Tote paid out to this man more than eleven hundred pounds in cash. Mr Roberts advised him not to carry so much on his person, but the man declined to take his advice.’

There was another accusing silence. Cranfield looked totally nonplussed and came up with nothing to say. This time, I tried for him. ‘Sir, did this man back any other horses in the race, on the Tote? Did he back all, or two or three or four, and just hit the jackpot by accident?’

‘There was no accident about this, Hughes.’

‘But did he, in fact, back any other horses?’

Dead silence.

‘Surely you asked?’ I said reasonably.

Whether anyone had asked or not, Gowery didn’t know. All he knew was what was on the affidavit. He gave me a stony stare, and said, ‘No one puts fifty pounds on an outsider without good grounds for believing it will win.’

‘But sir...’

‘However,’ he said, ‘We will find out.’ He wrote a note on the bottom of one of the affidavits. ‘It seems to me extremely unlikely. But we will have the question asked.’

There was no suggestion that he would wait for the answer before giving his judgement. And in fact he did not.

Chapter Three

I wandered aimlessly round the flat, lost and restless. Reheated the coffee. Drank it. Tried to write to my parents, and gave it up after half a page. Tried to make some sort of decision about my future, and couldn’t.

Felt too battered. Too pulped. Too crushed.

Yet I had done nothing.

Nothing.

Late afternoon. The lads were bustling round the yard setting the horses fair for the night, and whistling and calling to each other as usual. I kept away from the windows and eventually went back to the bedroom and lay down on the bed. The day began to fade. The dusk closed in.

After Newtonnards they had called Tommy Timpson, who had ridden Cherry Pie.

Tommy Timpson ‘did his two’ for Cranfield and rode such of the stable’s second strings as Cranfield cared to give him. Cranfield rang the changes on three jockeys: me, Chris Smith (at present taking his time over a fractured skull) and Tommy. Tommy got the crumbs and deserved better. Like many trainers, Cranfield couldn’t spot talent when it was under his nose, and it wasn’t until several small local trainers had asked for his services that Cranfield woke up to the fact that he had a useful emerging rider in his own yard.

Raw, nineteen years old, a stutterer, Tommy was at his worst at the Enquiry. He looked as scared as a two year old colt at his first starting gate, and although he couldn’t help being jittery it was worse than useless for Cranfield and me.

Lord Gowery made no attempt to put him at ease but simply asked questions and let him get on with the answers as best he could.

‘What orders did Mr Cranfield give you before the race? How did he tell you to ride Cherry Pie? Did he instruct you to ride to win?’

Tommy stuttered and stumbled and said Mr Cranfield had told him to keep just behind Squelch all the way round and try to pass him after the last fence.

Cranfield said indignantly: ‘That’s what he did. Not what I told him to do.’

Gowery listened, turned his head to Tommy, and said again, ‘Will you tell us what instructions Mr Cranfield gave you before the race? Please think carefully.’

Tommy swallowed, gave Cranfield an agonised glance, and tried again. ‘M.. M.. M.. Mr Cranfield s.. s.. said to take my p.. p.. pace from S.. S.. Squelch and s.. s.. stay with him as long as I c.. c.. could.’

‘And did he tell you to win?’

‘He s.. s.. said of course g.. g.. go on and w.. w.. win if you c.. c.. can, sir.’

These were impeccable instructions. Only the most suspicious or biased mind could have read any villainy into them. If these Stewards’ minds were not suspicious and biased, snow would fall in the Sahara.

‘Did you hear Mr Cranfield giving Hughes instructions as to how he should ride Squelch?’

‘N.. No, sir. M.. Mr Cranfield did.. didn’t g.. give Hughes any orders at all, sir.’

‘Why not?’

Tommy ducked it and said he didn’t know. Cranfield remarked furiously that Hughes had ridden the horse twenty times and knew what was needed.

‘Or you had discussed it with him privately, beforehand?’

Cranfield had no explosive answer to that because of course we had discussed it beforehand. In general terms. In an assessment of the opposition. As a matter of general strategy.

‘I discussed the race with him, yes. But I gave him no specific orders.’

‘So according to you,’ Lord Gowery said, ‘You intended both of your jockeys to try to win?’

‘Yes. I did. My horses are always doing their best.’

Gowery shook his head. ‘Your statement is not borne out by the facts.’

‘Are you calling me a liar?’ Cranfield demanded.

Gowery didn’t answer. But yes, he was.

They shooed a willing Tommy Timpson away and Cranfield went on simmering at boiling point beside me. For myself, I was growing cold, and no amount of central heating could stop it. I thought we must now have heard everything, but I was wrong. They had saved the worst until last, building up the pyramid of damning statements until they could put the final cap on it and stand back and admire their four square structure, their solid, unanswerable edifice of guilt.

The worst, at first, had looked so harmless. A quiet slender man in his early thirties, endowed with an utterly forgettable face. After twenty-four hours I couldn’t recall his features or remember his voice, and yet I couldn’t think about him without shaking with sick impotent fury.

His name was David Oakley. His business, enquiry agent. His address, Birmingham.

He stood without fidgeting at the end of the Stewards’ table holding a spiral bound notebook which he consulted continually, and from beginning to end not a shade of emotion affected his face or his behaviour or even his eyes.

‘Acting upon instructions, I paid a visit to the flat of Kelly Hughes, jockey, of Corrie House training stables, Corrie, Berkshire, two days after the Lemonfizz Crystal Cup.’

I sat up with a jerk and opened my mouth to deny it, but before I could say a word he went smoothly on.

‘Mr Hughes was not there, but the door was open, so I went in to wait for him. While I was there I made certain observations.’ He paused.

Cranfield said to me, ‘What is all this about?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before.’

Gowery steamrollered on. ‘You found certain objects.’

‘Yes, my Lord.’

Gowery sorted out three large envelopes, and passed one each to Tring and Plimborne. Ferth was before them. He had removed the contents from a similar envelope as soon as Oakley had appeared, and was now, I saw, watching me with what I took to be contempt.

The envelopes each held a photograph.

Oakely said, ‘The photograph is of objects I found on a chest of drawers in Hughes’s bedroom.’

Andy Tring looked, looked again, and raised a horrified face, meeting my eyes accidentally and for the first and only time. He glanced away hurriedly, embarrassed and disgusted.

‘I want to see that photograph,’ I said hoarsely.

‘Certainly.’ Lord Gowery turned his copy round and pushed it across the table. I got up, walked the three dividing steps, and looked down at it.

For several seconds I couldn’t take it in, and when I did, I was breathless with disbelief. The photograph had been taken from above the dressing chest, and was sparkling clear. There was the edge of the silver frame and half of Rosalind’s face, and from under the frame, as if it had been used as a paperweight, protruded a sheet of paper dated the day after the Lemonfizz Cup. There were three words written on it, and two initials.

‘As agreed. Thanks. D.C.’

Slanted across the bottom of the paper, and spread out like a pack of cards, were a large number of ten pound notes.

I looked up, and met Lord Gowery’s eyes, and almost flinched away from the utter certainty I read there.

‘It’s a fake,’ I said. My voice sounded odd. ‘It’s a complete fake.’

‘What is it?’ Cranfield said from behind me, and in his voice too everyone could hear the awareness of disaster.

I picked up the photograph and took it across to him, and I couldn’t feel my feet on the carpet. When he had grasped what it meant he stood up slowly and in a low biting voice said formally, ‘My Lords, if you believe this, you will believe anything.’

It had not the slightest effect.

Gowery said merely, ‘That is your handwriting, I believe.’

Cranfield shook his head. ‘I didn’t write it.’

‘Please be so good as to write those exact words on this sheet of paper.’ Gowery pushed a plain piece of paper across the table, and after a second Cranfield went across and wrote on it. Everyone knew that the two samples would look the same, and they did. Gowery passed the sheet of paper signficantly to the other Stewards, and they all compared and nodded.

‘It’s a fake,’ I said again. ‘I never had a letter like that.’

Gowery ignored me. To Oakley he said, ‘Please tell us where you found the money.’

Oakley unnecessarily consulted his notebook. ‘The money was folded inside this note, fastened with a rubber band, and both were tucked behind the photo of Hughes’s girl friend, which you see in the picture.’

‘It’s not true,’ I said. I might as well not have bothered. No one listened.

‘You counted the money, I believe?’

‘Yes my Lord. There was five hundred pounds.’

‘There was no money,’ I protested. Useless. ‘And anyway,’ I added desperately, ‘Why would I take five hundred for losing the race when I would get about as much as that for winning?’

I thought for a moment that I might have scored a hit. Might have made them pause. A pipe dream. There was an answer to that, too.

‘We understand from Mr Kessel, Squelch’s owner,’ Gowery said flatly, ‘That he pays you ten per cent of the winning stake money through official channels by cheque. This means that all presents received by you from Mr Kessel are taxed; and we understand that as you pay a high rate of tax your ten per cent from Mr Kessel would have in effect amounted to half, or less than half, of five hundred pounds.’

They seemed to have enquired into my affairs down to the last penny. Dug around in all directions. Certainly I had never tried to hide anything, but this behind-my-back tin-opening made me feel naked. Also, revolted. Also, finally, hopeless. And it wasn’t until then that I realised I had been subconsciously clinging to a fairy tale faith that it would all finally come all right, that because I was telling the truth I was bound to be believed in the end.

I stared across at Lord Gowery, and he looked briefly back. His face was expressionless, his manner entirely calm. He had reached his conclusions and nothing could overthrow them.

Lord Ferth, beside him, was less bolted down, but a great deal of his earlier heat seemed to have evaporated. The power he had generated no longer troubled Gowery at all, and all I could interpret from his expression was some kind of resigned acceptance.

There was little left to be said. Lord Gowery briefly summed up the evidence against us. The list of former races. The non use of the whip. The testimony of Charlie West. The bets struck on Cherry Pie. The riding orders given in private. The photographic proof of a pay off from Cranfield to Hughes.

‘There can be no doubt that this was a most flagrant fraud on the racing public... No alternative but to suspend your licences... And you, Dexter Cranfield, and you, Kelly Hughes, will be warned off Newmarket Heath until further notice.’

Cranfield, pale and shaking, said, ‘I protest that this has not been a fair hearing. Neither Hughes nor I are guilty. The sentence is outrageous.’

No response from Lord Gowery. Lord Ferth, however, spoke for the second time in the proceedings.

‘Hughes?’

‘I rode Squelch to win,’ I said. ‘The witnesses were lying.’

Gowery shook his head impatiently. ‘The Enquiry is closed. You may go.’

Cranfield and I both hesitated, still unable to accept that that was all. But the official near the door opened it, and all the ranks opposite began to talk quietly to each other and ignore us, and in the end we walked out. Stiff legged. Feeling as if my head were a floating football and my body a chunk of ice. Unreal.

There were several people in the waiting-room outside, but I didn’t see them clearly. Cranfield, tight lipped, strode away from me, straight across the room and out of the far door, shaking off a hand or two laid on his sleeve. Dazed, I started to follow him, but was less purposeful, and was effectively stopped by a large man who planted himself in my way.

I looked at him vaguely, Mr Kessel. The owner of Squelch.

‘Well?’ he said challengingly.

‘They didn’t believe us. We’ve both been warned off.’

He hissed a sharp breath out between his teeth. ‘After what I’ve been hearing, I’m not surprised. And I’ll tell you this, Hughes, even if you get your licence back, you won’t be riding for me again.’

I looked at him blankly and didn’t answer. It seemed a small thing after what had already happened. He had been talking to the witnesses, in the waiting-room. They would convince anyone, it seemed. Some owners were unpredictable anyway, even in normal times. One day they had all the faith in the world in their jockey, and the next day, none at all. Faith with slender foundations. Mr Kessel had forgotten all the races I had won for him because of the one I had lost.

I turned blindly away from his hostility and found a more welcome hand on my arm. Tony, who had driven up with me instead of seeing his horses work.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

I nodded and went down with him in the lift, out into the hall, and towards the front door. Outside there we could see a bunch of newspaper reporters waylaying Cranfield with their notebooks at the ready, and I stopped dead at the sight.

‘Let’s wait till they’ve gone,’ I said.

‘They won’t go. Not before they’ve chewed you up too.’

We waited, hesitating, and a voice called behind me, ‘Hughes.’

I didn’t turn round. I felt I owed no one the slightest politeness. The footsteps came up behind me and he finally came to a halt in front.

Lord Ferth. Looking tired.

‘Hughes. Tell me. Why in God’s name did you do it?’

I looked at him stonily.

‘I didn’t.’

He shook his head. ‘All the evidence...’

‘You tell me,’ I said, rudely, ‘Why decent men like Stewards so easily believe a lot of lies.’

I turned away from him, too. Twitched my head at Tony and made for the front door. To hell with the press. To hell with the Stewards and Mr Kessel. And to everything to do with racing. The upsurge of fury took me out of the building and fifty yards along the pavement in Portman Square and only evaporated into grinding misery when we had climbed into the taxi Tony whistled for.

Tony thumped up the stairs to the darkened flat. I heard him calling.

‘Are you there, Kelly?’

I unrolled myself from the bed, stood up, stretched, went out into the sitting-room and switched on the lights. He was standing in the far doorway, blinking, his hands full of tray.

‘Poppy insisted,’ he explained.

He put the tray down on the table and lifted off the covering cloth. She’d sent hot chicken pie, a tomato, and about half a pound of Brie.

‘She says you haven’t eaten for two days.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Get on with it, then.’ He made an instinctive line for the whisky bottle and poured generously into two tumblers.

‘And here. For once, drink this.’

I took the glass and a mouthful and felt the fire trickle down inside my chest. The first taste was always the best. Tony tossed his off and ordered himself a refill.

I ate the pie, the tomato, and the cheese. Hunger I hadn’t consciously felt rolled contentedly over and slept.

‘Can you stay a bit?’ I asked.

‘Natch.’

‘I’d like to tell you about the Enquiry.’

‘Shoot,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

I told him all that had happened, almost word for word. Every detail had been cut razor sharp into my memory in the way that only happens in disasters.

Tony’s astonishment was plain. ‘You were framed!’

‘That’s right.’

‘But surely no one can get away with that?’

‘Someone seems to be doing all right.’

‘But was there nothing you could say to prove...’

‘I couldn’t think of anything yesterday, which is all that matters. It’s always easy to think of all the smart clever things one could have said, afterwards, when it’s too late.’

‘What would you have said, then?’

‘I suppose for a start I should have asked who had given that so called enquiry agent instructions to search my flat. Acting on instructions, he said. Well, whose instructions? I didn’t think of asking, yesterday. Now I can see that it could be the whole answer.’

‘You assumed the Stewards had instructed him?’

‘I suppose so. I didn’t really think. Most of the time I was so shattered that I couldn’t think clearly at all.’

‘Maybe it was the Stewards.’

‘Well, no. I suppose it’s barely possible they might have sent an investigator, though when you look at it in cold blood it wouldn’t really seem likely, but it’s a tear drop to the Atlantic that they wouldn’t have supplied him with five hundred quid and a forged note and told him to photograph them somewhere distinctive in my flat. But that’s what he did. Who instructed him?’

‘Even if you’d asked, he wouldn’t have said.’

‘I guess not. But at least it might have made the Stewards think a bit too.’

Tony shook his head. ‘He would still have said he found the money behind Rosalind’s picture. His word against yours. Nothing different.’

He looked gloomily into his glass. I looked gloomily into mine.

‘That bloody little Charlie West,’ I said. ‘Someone got at him, too.’

‘I presume you didn’t in fact say “Brakes on, chaps?” ’

‘I did say it, you see. Not in the Lemonfizz, of course, but a couple of weeks before, in that frightful novice ’chase at Oxford, the day they abandoned the last two races because it was snowing. I was hitting every fence on that deadly bad jumper that old Almond hadn’t bothered to school properly, and half the other runners were just as green, and a whole bunch of us had got left about twenty lengths behind the four who were any use, and sleet was falling, and I didn’t relish ending up with a broken bone at nought degrees centigrade, so as we were handily out of sight of the stands at that point I shouted ‘O.K., brakes on, chaps,’ and a whole lot of us eased up thankfully and finished the race a good deal slower than we could have done. It didn’t affect the result, of course. But there you are. I did say it. What’s more, Charlie West heard me. He just shifted it from one race to another.’

‘The bastard.’

‘I agree.’

‘Maybe no one got at him. Maybe he just thought he’d get a few more rides if you were out of the way.’

I considered it and shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he was that much of a bastard.’

‘You never know.’ Tony finished his drink and absent-mindly replaced it. ‘What about the bookmaker?’

‘Newtonnards? I don’t know. Same thing, I suppose. Someone has it in for Cranfield too. Both of us, it was. The Stewards couldn’t possibly have warned off one of us without the other. We were knitted together so neatly.’

‘It makes me livid,’ Tony said violently. ‘It’s wicked.’

I nodded. ‘There was something else, too, about that Enquiry. Some undercurrent, running strong. At least, it was strong at the beginning. Something between Lord Gowery and Lord Ferth. And then Andy Tring, he was sitting there looking like a wilted lettuce.’ I shook my head in puzzlement. ‘It was like a couple of heavy animals lurking in the undergrowth, shaping up to fight each other. You couldn’t see them, but there was a sort of quiver in the air. At least, that’s how it seemed at one point...’

‘Stewards are men,’ Tony said with bubble-bursting matter-of-factness. ‘Show me any organisation which doesn’t have some sort of power struggle going on under its gentlemanly surface. All you caught was a whiff of the old brimstone. State of nature. Nothing to do with whether you and Cranfield were guilty or not.’

He half convinced me. He polished off the rest of the whisky and told me not to forget to get some more.

Money. That was another thing. As from yesterday I had no income. The Welfare State didn’t pay unemployment benefits to the self-employed, as all jockeys remembered every snow-bound winter.

‘I’m going to find out,’ I said abruptly.

‘Find out what?’

‘Who framed us.’

‘Up the Marines,’ Tony said unsteadily. ‘Over the top, boys, Up and at ’em.’ He picked up the empty bottle and looked at it regretfully. ‘Time for bed, I guess. If you need any help with the campaign, count on my Welsh blood to the last clot.’

He made an unswerving line to the door, turned, and gave me a grimace of friendship worth having.

‘Don’t fall down the stairs,’ I said.