Enquiry

Part Three March Epilogue

Yesterday I rode Breadwinner in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

A horse of raw talent with more future than past. A shambling washy chestnut carrying his head low. No one’s idea of equine beauty.

Old Strepson watched him slop round the parade ring and said with a sigh, ‘He looks half asleep.’

‘Hughes will wake him up,’ Cranfield said condescendingly.

Cranfield stood in the chill March sunshine making his usual good stab at arrogance. The mean calculating lines round his mouth seemed to have deepened during the past month, and his manner to me was if anything more distant, more master-servant, than ever before. Roberta said she had told him that I had in some way managed to get our licences back, but he saw no reason to believe her and preferred the thought of divine intervention.

Old Strepson said conversationally, ‘Kelly says Breadwinner was a late foal and a late developer, and won’t reach his true strength until about this time next year.’

Cranfield gave me a mouth-tightening mind-your-own-business glare, and didn’t seem to realise that I’d given him an alibi if the horse didn’t win and built him up into one heck of a good trainer if it did. Whatever low opinion Cranfield held of me, I reciprocated it in full.

Further along the parade ring stood a silent little group of Kessel, Pat Nikita, and their stable jockey, Al Roach. They were engaged in running poor old Squelch, and their interest lay not so fiercely in winning as in finishing at all costs in front of Breadwinner. Kessel himself radiated so much hatred that I thought it was probably giving him a headache. Hating did that. The day I found it out, I gave up hating.

Grace’s hatred-headache must have been unbearable...

Grace’s recovery was still uncertain. Ferth had somehow wangled the best available psychiatrist on to her case, and had also arranged for him to see Jack. Outside the weighing room when I had arrived, he had jerked his head for me to join him, and told me what the psychiatrist had reported.

‘He says Jack is sane according to legal standards, and will have to stand trial. He wouldn’t commit himself about Grace’s chances. He did say, though, that from all points of view their enforced separation was a godsend. He said he thought their only chance of leading fairly normal lives in the future was to make the separation total and permanent. He said a return to the same circumstances could mean a repeat of the whole cycle.’

I looked at Ferth gloomily. ‘What a cold, sad, depressing solution.’

‘You never know,’ he said optimistically, ‘Once they get over it, they might both feel... well... released.’

I smiled at him. He said abruptly, ‘Your outlook is catching, dammit... How about that dinner?’

‘Any time,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow, then? Eight o’clock. The Caprice, round the corner from the Ritz... The food’s better there than at my club.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘And you can tell me how the police are getting on with David Oakley...’

I’d had the Birmingham police on my telephone and doorstep for much of the past week. They had almost fallen on my neck and sobbed when I first went to them with enough to make an accusation stick, and had later promised to deliver to me, framed, one of the first fruits of their search warrant: a note from Cranfield to Jack Roxford dated two years earlier, thanking him for not bidding him up at an auction after a selling race and enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds. Across the bottom of the page Cranfield had written:

It was the note Oakley had photographed in my flat.

Supplied by Roxford, who had suggested the photograph.

Kept by Oakley, as a hold over Roxford.

The police also told me that Jack Roxford had drawn six hundred pounds in new notes out of his bank during the two weeks before the Enquiry, and David Oakley had paid three hundred of the same notes into his own account five days later.

Clever, slippery Mr Oakley had been heard to remark that he regretted not having slaughtered Kelly Hughes.

The bell rang for the jockeys to mount, and Cranfleld and old Strepson and I walked over to where Breadwinner waited.

The one jockey missing from the day’s proceedings was Charlie West, whose licence had been suspended for the rest of the season. And it was only thanks to Hughes’ intervention, Ferth had told him forcefully, that he hadn’t got his deserts and been warned off for life. Whether Charlie West would feel an atom of gratitude was another matter.

I swung up easily on to Breadwinner and fitted my right foot carefully into the stirrup. A compromise between me and the orthopod had seen the plaster off seven days previously, but the great surgeon’s kind parting words had been, ‘You haven’t given that leg enough time and if it dislocates again it’s your own bloody fault.’

I had told him that I couldn’t afford to have Cranfield engage another jockey for Breadwinner with all the horse’s future races at stake. Old Strepson was the grateful type who didn’t dislodge a jockey who had won for him, and if some other jockey won the Gold Cup on Breadwinner I would lose the mount for life: and it was only this argument which had grudgingly brought out the saw.

I gathered up the reins and walked the horse quietly round the ring while everyone sorted themselves out into the right order for the parade down the course. Apart from the Grand National, the Cheltenham Gold Cup was the biggest steeplechase of the year. In prestige, probably the greatest of all. All the stars turned out for it, meeting each other on level terms. Bad horses hadn’t a hope.

There were nine runners. Breadwinner was the youngest, Squelch the most experienced, and a bad tempered grey called Ironclad, the favourite.

Al Roach, uninfected by Kessel, lined up beside me at the start and gave me his usual wide friendly Irish grin. ‘Now Kelly my bhoy,’ he said, ‘Tell me how you ride this little fellow, now.’

‘You want to be warned off?’ I said.

He chuckled. ‘What’s the owner got against you, Kelly me bhoy?’

‘I was right and he was wrong, and he can’t forgive that.’

‘Peculiar fellow, he is, that Kessel...’

The tapes went up and we were away. Three and a quarter miles, twenty-one jumps, two whole circuits of the course.

Nothing much happened on the first circuit. No horses fell and no jockeys got excited, and going past the stands and outward bound for the second time a fair sized sheet would have covered the lot. The next mile sorted the men from the boys, and the bunch flattened out into a relentless, thundering, muscle-straining procession in which hope and sweat and tactics merged into a rushing private world of conflict. Speed... jumping at near disaster rate... gambling on the horse’s coordination... stretching your own... a race like the Gold Cup showed you what you were made of...

Coming to the second last fence, Ironclad was leading Squelch by three lengths which could have been ten, and he set himself right with all the time in the world. Squelch followed him over, and four lengths behind Breadwinner strained forward to be third.

Between the last two fences the status quo was unchanged, Breadwinner making no impression on Squelch, nor Squelch on Ironclad. Oh well, I thought resignedly. Third. That wasn’t really too bad for such a young horse. One couldn’t have everything. And there was always Pound Postage in the Grand National, two weeks on Saturday...

Ironclad set himself right for the last fence, launched himself muscularly into the air, crossed the birch with a good foot of air beneath him... and pitched forward on to his nose on landing.

I couldn’t believe it. Shook up Breadwinner with a bang of renewed hope and drove him into the last fence for the jump of his young life.

Squelch was over it first, of course. Squelch the sure-footed trained-to-the-minute familiar old rascal... Irony of ironies, to be beaten to the Gold Cup by Squelch.

Breadwinner did the best he could to catch him, and I saw that as in the Lemonfizz, Squelch was dying from tiredness. Length by length my gangling chestnut pegged back the gap, straining, stretching, quivering to get past... but the winning post was too near... it was no good... there wasn’t time...

Al Roach looked round to see who was pressing him. Saw me. Knew that Breadwinner was of all others the one he had to beat. Was seized with panic. If he had sat still, he would have won by two lengths. Instead, he picked up his whip and hit Squelch twice down the flank.

You stupid ass, I thought breathlessly. He hates that. He’ll stop. He always stops if you hit him...

Squelch’s tail swished in fury. His rhythmic stride broke up into bumps. He shook his head violently from side to side.

I saw Al’s desperate face as Breadwinner caught him... and the winning post was there and gone in a flash... and neither of us knew even then which had won.

The photograph gave it to Breadwinner by a nostril. And if I got booed by the crowd after the Lemonfizz they made up for it after the Gold Cup.

Kessel, predictably, was purple with fury, and he seemed on the brink of explosion when someone remarked loudly that Squelch would have won if Hughes had been riding him. I laughed. Kessel looked almost as murderous as Grace.

Old Strepson was pale with emotion but even the Gold Cup did not raise much observable joy in Cranfield; and I found out later that Edwin Byler had just told him he wouldn’t be sending him his horses after all. Grace’s psychiatrist had written to say that Grace’s ultimate sanity might depend on Cranfield not having the horses, and Byler said he felt he owed the Roxfords something... sorry and all that, but there it was.

Roberta with her mother had been there patting Breadwinner in the winner’s enclosure, and when I came out of the weighing room twenty minutes later after changing into street clothes, she was leaning against the rails there, waiting.

‘You’re limping,’ she said calmly.

‘Unfit, that’s all.’

‘Coffee?’ she suggested.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She walked sedately ahead of me into the coffee room. Her copper hair still shone after she’d stepped out of the sunshine, and I liked the simple string-coloured coat which went underneath it.

I bought her some coffee and we sat at a little plastic topped table and looked at the Utter left by the last occupants; empty coffee cups, plates with crumbs, cigarette butts, and a froth-lined beer glass. Roberta packed them coolly to one side and ignored them.

‘Winning and losing,’ she said. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’

‘Racing?’

‘Life.’

I looked at her.

She said, ‘Today is marvellous, and being warned off was terrible. I suppose everything goes on like that... up and down... always.’

‘I suppose so,’ I agreed.

‘I’ve learned a lot, since the Enquiry.’

‘So have I... about you.’

‘Father says I must remember your background...’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘You must.’

‘Father’s mind has chains on. Iron bars in his soul. His head’s chock-a-block with ideas half a century out of date.’ She mimicked my own words with pompous mischief.

I laughed. ‘Roberta...’

‘Please tell me...’ She hesitated. ‘... At the level crossing... when you called me Rosalind... was it her you wanted?’

‘No,’ I said slowly, ‘It was you... In her place.’

She sighed contentedly.

‘That’s all right, then,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’