Field of 13

Bright White Star

A country magazine, Cheshire Life, sent me a letter.

‘Write us a story,’ they said.

I asked, ‘What about?’

‘About three thousand words,’ they replied.

It was winter at the time, and by car I drove frequently up and down a hill where a tramp had once lived in a hollow. So I wrote about a tramp in winter.

This story describes how to steal a horse from an auction.

Don’t do it!

The tramp was cold to his bones.

The air and the ground stood at freezing point, and a heavy layer of yellowish snow-cloud hung like a threat over the afternoon. Black boughs of stark trees creaked in the wind, and the rutted fields lay bare and dark, waiting.

Shambling down a narrow road the tramp was cold and hungry and filled with an intense unfocused resentment. By this stage of the winter he liked to be deep in a nest, sheltered in a hollow in the ground in the lee of a wooded hill, roofed by a lavish thatch of criss-crossed branches and thick brown cardboard, lying on a warm comfortable bed of dry dead leaves and polythene sheeting and sacks. He liked to have his wood-fire burning all day near his threshold, with the ashes glowing red all night. He liked to live snug through the frost and the snows and the driving rains, and kick the whole thing to pieces when he moved on in the spring.

What he did not like was having someone else kick his nest in as they had done on that morning. Three of them — the man who owned the land where he had settled, and two people from the local council, a hard-eyed middle-aged man and a prim bossy woman with a clip-board. Their loud voices, their stupid remarks, echoed and fed the anger in his mind.

‘I’ve told him every day for the past week that I want him off my land...’

‘This structure constitutes a permanent dwelling and as such requires planning permission...’

‘In the town there is a hostel where vagrants can sleep in a dormitory on a one-night basis...’

The council man had begun pulling his branch-and-cardboard roof to pieces, and the other two had joined in. He saw from their faces that his smell offended them, and he saw from the finicky picking of their fingers that they didn’t like touching what he had touched. The slow burning anger had begun in his mind then, but as he detested contacts with other humans and never spoke if he could avoid it, he had merely turned and walked away, shapeless in his bundled clothes, shuffling in his too-big boots, bearded and resentful and smelly.

He had walked six miles since then, slowly.

He needed food and somewhere to shelter from the coming snow. He needed a nest, and fire. His rage against mankind deepened with every leaden step.

In London on the same afternoon the Director of the Racecourse Security Service looked morosely out of the Jockey Club office window at the traffic in Portman Square. Behind him in the comfortable brightly-lit room Mr Melbourne Smith was complaining, as he had done either in person or on the telephone every day for the past two weeks, about the lax security at the November Yearling Sales, from which someone had craftily stolen his just-bought and extremely expensive colt.

Melbourne Smith poured so much money into the British bloodstock industry that his complaints could not be ignored, even though strictly it was a matter for the police and the auctioneers, not the Jockey Club. Melbourne Smith, fifty, forceful, a wheeler-dealer to his fingertips, was as much outraged that anyone should dare to steal from him as by the theft itself.

‘They just walked out with him,’ he said for the fiftieth injured time. ‘And you’ve done bloody little to get him back.’

The Director sighed. He disliked Melbourne Smith intensely but hid it well under a bluffly hearty manner. The Director, with a subtle and inventive mind behind a moustached and tweeded exterior, wondered just what else he could do, short of praying for a miracle, to find the missing colt.

The trail, for a start, was cold, as Melbourne Smith had not discovered his loss for more than a month after the sales. He had bought, as usual, about ten of the leggy young animals who would race the following summer as two-year-olds. He had arranged to have them transported, as usual, to the trainer who would break them in, handle them and saddle them and ride them and accustom them to going in and out of starting stalls. And, as usual, in due course he had gone to see how his purchases were making out.

He had been puzzled at first by what should have been his prize colt. Puzzled, and then suspicious, and then explodingly furious. He had paid a fortune for a well-grown aristocratic yearling and he had received instead a spindly no-hoper with a weak neck. Between his purchase and the changeling there were only two points in common: the body colour, a dark bay, and the large white star on the forehead.

‘It’s a scandal,’ Melbourne Smith said. ‘I’ll spend my money in France, next year.’

The Director reflected that the theft of racehorses was exceedingly rare and that the security at the sales was more a matter of behind-the-scenes paperwork than of bars and bolts: and normally the paperwork was security enough.

Every thoroughbred foal had to be registered soon after birth, the certificate not only giving parentage and birth date but also skin colours and markings and where exactly on the body the hairs of the coat grew in whorls. The markings and whorls had to be carefully drawn onto regulation outline pictures of side, front and rear views of horses.

Later on, when the foal was grown up and ready to race, a second chart of his markings had to be filled in by a veterinary surgeon and sent off to the registry. If the foal certificate and the later certificate matched, all was well. If they didn’t, the horse was barred from racing.

The foal certificate of the yearling Melbourne Smith had bought, definitely did not match the changeling he had been landed with. The colour and the white star were right, but the whorls of hair were all in different places.

The Director had set his assistant the mammoth task of checking the changeling against the 20,000 foal certificates in that year’s registry, but so far none of them had matched. The Director thought that the changeling, whom he had seen, was very likely a half-bred hunter, which hadn’t been eligible for Stud Book entry in the first place, and of whom there would be no official record anywhere.

‘That gate check is a laugh,’ grumbled Melbourne Smith.

The men on the sales paddock gates, the Director admitted to himself, were there only to check that there was an auctioneers’ exit chit for each horse, and that the horse bore the same number, stuck onto its rump, as was written on the chit. They were not there to check whether anyone had sneakily changed the numbers on the horses. They were not at fault because the number 189 which had walked out accompanied by chit 189 had been a weedy-necked no-hoper, and not Melbourne Smith’s expensive aristocrat. It was no good asking them (although the Director had) under exactly what number the expensive aristocrat had actually made his exit. They couldn’t possibly know, and they didn’t.

The Director had discovered in some respects how the substitution had been made, and guessed the rest.

At the sales, the horses up for auction were housed in stable blocks. Horse number I in the catalogue was allotted box number I and had number I stuck on his hip. Number 189 would be found in box 189 and have 189 on his hip. Coming and going along all the rows of boxes would be the customers, assessing and prodding and deciding whether or not to bid. As each horse was sold, its former owners returned it to its box and left it there, and from there the new owners would collect it. Sellers and buyers, in this way, quite often never met.

The lad who had come with 189 had taken it from the sale ring back to its box, and left it there. Melbourne Smith’s lad had collected the horse from box 189 and sent it to the trainer, and it had been the changeling.

The exchange, with so many horses and people on the move, could be (and had been) done without anyone noticing.

The Director supposed that the thieves must have entered their changeling for the sales, and put a ridiculously high reserve on it, so that no one would buy it. He reckoned that the changeling must have been one of the unsold lots between numbers 1 and 188, but the auctioneers had looked blank at the thought of remembering one among so many, so long ago. They auctioned hundreds of horses every week. They didn’t enquire, they said, where the merchandise came from or where it went. They kept records of the horses that had found no takers, but presumed that their owners had taken them back.

‘And this publicity campaign of yours,’ sneered Melbourne Smith, ‘lot of hot air and no results.’

The Director turned wearily away from the window and looked at the newspaper which lay open on his desk. In a week short of headlines the editors had welcomed the story he had persuasively fed them, and no reader could miss the ‘Where is he?’ pictures of the missing treasure. The tabloids had gone for the sob-stuff. The ‘serious’ dailies had reproduced the foal certificate itself. Television newscasters had broadcast both. Two days’ saturation coverage, however, had produced no results. His ‘phone at any time’ number lay silent.

‘You get him back,’ Melbourne Smith said furiously, finally leaving, ‘or I send all my horses to France.’

The Director thought of his wife and children who were preparing for a party that evening and would greet his return with excited faces and smiling eyes. I’ll not think of that damned yearling for two days, he thought: and meanwhile he gave in and prayed intensely for his miracle.

‘What I need,’ he said aloud to his peacefully empty office, ‘is a white star. A bright white star, stationary in the sky, shining over a stable, saying, “Here I am. Come here to me. Come here and find me.”’

God forgive me my blasphemy, he thought; and went home at four o’clock.

In the country on that afternoon Jim and Vivi Turner spread out four newspapers on the kitchen table and studied them over mugs of tea.

‘They won’t find him, will they?’ Jim said.

Vivi shook her head. ‘A bay with a white star... common as dirt.’

Their minds wandered to the aristocratic yearling rugged up outside in their tumbledown twenty-box stable, but it was five weeks or more since they had stolen him, and time had given them a sense of safety.

‘And anyway,’ Vivi said, ‘these papers are two days old, and nothing’s happened.’

Jim Turner nodded, reassured. He would never have brought it all off, he knew, without Vivi. It was she who had said that what they badly needed, to get him going as a trainer, was one really good horse. The sort, let’s face it (she said) that no one was going to send to a newly retired jump jockey who had never risen above middle-rank and who had been suspended twice for taking bribes.

As Jim Turner would take a bribe any time anyone offered, the two suspensions had been mild. He himself wouldn’t have minded retiring to a job as a head lad in a big stable, where the chances for bribery grew like berries ripe for plucking. Vivi had wanted to be a trainer’s wife, not a head lad’s, and you had to hand it to her — the girl had brains.

It was Vivi, with her sharp eyes, who had seen how they could steal a top yearling from the sales. It was Vivi, a proper little Lady Macbeth, who had egged Jim on when he faltered, who had herself engineered the exchange in box 189; she who had taken the aristocrat and Jim who had left the changeling.

Vivi, deciding that they should use a half-bred unregistered throw-out as their entry to the sales, had bought one from a knacker’s yard for peanuts; a bay with a white star, common as dirt. There would be bound to be one a bit like him at the sales, she’d said. They would swap him for anything great that came after him in the catalogue; and, sure enough, number 189 had been perfect.

Vivi, planning ahead, would send Jim up north in the spring with all their savings to buy a cheap thoroughbred two-year-old, a bay with a white star, that looked at any rate passable. Then Jim would get the vet to fill in the new horse’s markings certificate which would match its foal certificate in the registry; and Jim Turner, racehorse trainer, would have in his stable a bay with a white star checked and registered and free to race.

Jim and Vivi knew, as the Director did, that young horses changed as they grew older, like children into men, so that there would be little chance of anyone recognising the aristocrat by sight. It could race for ever in its new identity, and no one would ever know. Vivi couldn’t see how anything could go wrong, and never thought of the long-term tenacity of the Director, who was already pondering wearisome sporadic whorl-checks of white-starred bays for years to come.

‘In the summer,’ Vivi said, ‘we’ll smarten the place up a bit. Lick of paint. Tubs of flowers. Then in autumn when the colt starts winning and people take notice, we’ll have a place new owners won’t mind coming to.’

Jim nodded. Vivi could do it. She was real bright, Vivi was.

‘And you’ll be on the map right enough, Jim Turner, and none of those snooty cows of trainers’ wives will look down on us ever again.’

There was a sudden metallic clatter just outside the back door and, immediately intensely alarmed, they both stood up jerkily and went outside.

A shambling, untidy figure stood there, with his hands fumbling through the household refuse in their dustbin, turning already to back away.

‘It’s a tramp!’ Vivi said disbelievingly. ‘Stealing our rubbish.’

‘Get off,’ Jim said, advancing roughly. ‘Go on, get off.’

The tramp retreated a few steps, very slowly.

Jim Turner dived back into his kitchen and snatched up the shot-gun with which he deterred rabbits.

‘Go on,’ he shouted, coming out again and pointing the barrels. ‘Clear off and don’t come back. I don’t want muck like you round here. Bugger off.’

The tramp went slowly away towards the road, and the Turners, righteously reassured, returned to their warm kitchen.

The landowner spent the afternoon regretting what he’d done in the morning. It was not a good day, he belatedly realised, for turning a man out of his home, even if his home was a hole in the ground.

When they’d pulled the nest to pieces, the two council workers and himself, he had found in the ruins a plastic bag full of cigarette ends. He wasn’t an imaginative man, but it came to him that everything the tramp had, his home and his comforts, he had taken away. He had looked up at the sullen sky, and shivered.

During the afternoon he walked lengthily round his land, half looking for the tramp, to quieten his own conscience; but it was almost with surprise that he finally saw him walking towards him along one of his boundary roads.

The tramp shambled slowly, and he was not alone. At his shoulder, as slowly following, came a horse.

The tramp stopped, and the horse also. The tramp held out a horse cube on a grimy palm, and the horse ate it.

The landowner looked in puzzlement at the two of them, the filthy man and the well-groomed horse in its tidy rug.

‘Where did you get that?’ said the landowner, pointing.

‘Found it. In the road.’ The tramp’s voice was hoarse from disuse, but the words were clear. They were also not true.

‘Look,’ said the landowner awkwardly, ‘you can build that house of yours again, if you like. Stay for a few days. How’s that?’

The tramp considered it but shook his head, knowing that he couldn’t stay, because of the horse. He had freed the horse from its stable and taken it with him. They would call him a thief and arrest him. In his past he had compulsively absconded from institutions, from children’s homes and then the army, and if he couldn’t face the walls of a doss house, still less could he face a cell in the nick. Cold and hunger and freedom, yes. Warmth and food and a locked door, no.

He turned away, gesturing unmistakably to the landowner to take the horse, to put his hand on its head-collar and do what was right. Automatically, almost, the landowner did so.

‘Wait,’ he said, as the tramp retreated. ‘Look... take these.’ He pulled from his pocket a packet of cigarettes and held them out. ‘Take them... please.’

Hesitating, the tramp went back and accepted the gift, nodding his acknowledgement of something given, something received. Then again he turned away and set off down the road, and the long-threatened snow began to fall in big single floating flakes, obliterating his shaggy outline in the dying afternoon.

Where will he go? the landowner wondered uncomfortably: and the tramp thought without anxiety that he would walk all night through the snow to keep warm, and in the morning he would find shelter, and eat, as usual, what others of their plenty had thrown away. The tramp’s earlier festering anger, which had flared up and focused on Jim Turner, had by now burnt away, and all he felt, as he put distance safely behind him, was his normal overwhelming desire to be alone.

The landowner looked at the horse and the white star on its forehead, and shook his head sardonically at the thought which came to him. All the same, when he’d shut the horse into a stable behind his house, he fished out the day before yesterday’s newspapers, and looked at the tabloid’s headline ‘Find the Bright Star’ and at the foal certificate facsimile in the ‘serious’ daily. And then he tentatively telephoned the police.

‘Found a horse, have you, sir?’ said a cheerful sergeant’s voice robustly. ‘And you’re not the only one, I’ll tell you that. There’s horses all over the village, here. Some fool opened all the boxes at Jim Turner’s place and let them all out. It might be a tramp. Turner says he chased one out of his yard earlier. We’re looking for that one as lived on your land. But it’s dark and it’s snowing and I’m short of men, of course, as today’s Christmas Eve.’

Christmas Eve.

The landowner felt first a burst of irritation with the tramp, and then, like a stab, understood that he wouldn’t have set loose the horses if he hadn’t been turned out of his own home at Christmas. He decided not to tell the sergeant that he’d seen the tramp with the horse now in his own stable, nor which way the tramp had gone.

‘I’ll tell Jim Turner to come and fetch that horse, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘He’ll be glad to have it back. In a proper tizzy, he is.’

‘Er...’ said the landowner, slowly, not wanting to be thought a fool, ‘I don’t know if you’ve read the papers about that stolen horse, sergeant, but I think instead of returning this one to Jim Turner immediately, we might try that “phone at any time” number for reaching the Director of the Racecourse Security Service.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose that the Director believes in Christmas miracles, but the horse I have here in my stable is a young bay colt with a bright white star on his forehead... and whorls in all the right places...’