Flying Finish

Chapter Seven

Stratford Races were off because of snow, which was just as well as Yardman squeezed in an extra trip on that day at very short notice. Seven three-year-olds to France, he said; but at loading time there were eight.

I was held up on the way to Cambridge by a lorry which had skidded sideways and blocked the icy road, and when I reached the airport all the cargo had already arrived, with the box drivers stamping their feet to keep warm and cursing me fluently. Billy, and it was Billy again, not Conker and Timmie, stood about with his hands in his pocket and a sneer permanently fixed like epoxy resin, enjoying the disapproval I had brought on myself. He had not, naturally, thought of beginning the work before I arrived.

We loaded the horses, he, I, and deaf old Alf, whom Billy had brought with him, and we worked in uncompanionable silence. There was a fourth groom on the trip, a middle-aged characterless man with a large straggly moustache and a bad cold, but he had come with one particular horse from an upper crust stud, and he refrained from offering to help with any others. Neither did he lend a hand on the journey, but sat throughout beside his own protégée, guarding it carefully from no visible danger. Billy dropped a handful of peat in my coffee and later poured his own, which was half full of sugar, over my head. I spent the rest of the journey in the washroom, awkwardly rinsing the stickiness out of my hair and vowing to get even with Billy one day when I hadn’t thousands of pounds worth of bloodstock in my care.

During the unloading I looked closely at one inconspicuous brown mare, trying to memorise her thoroughly unmemorable appearance. She was definitely not a three-year-old, like all the others on the trip, and she was, I was sure, almost identical to the one we had taken to France the first day I flew with Billy. And very like the one we had brought back that afternoon on the second trip. Three mares, all alike... well, it was not impossible, especially as they had no distinct markings between them, none at all.

The special groom left us in Paris, escorting his own horse right through to its new home. He had been engaged, he said, to bring another horse back, a French stallion which his stud had bought, and we would be collecting him again the next week. We duly did collect him, the next Tuesday, complete with the stallion, a tight-muscled butty little horse with a fiery eye and a restless tail. He was squealing like a colt when we stored him on board, and this time there was some point in his straggly moustached keeper staying beside him all the way.

Among the cargo there was yet another undistinguished brown mare. I was leaning on the starboard side of her box, gazing over and down at her, not able to see her very clearly against the peat she stood on and the brown horse on her other side, when Billy crept up behind me and hit me savagely across the shoulders with a spare tethering chain. I turned faster than he expected and got in two hard quick kicks on his thigh. His lips went back with the pain and he furiously swung his arm, the short chain flickering and bending like an angry snake. I dodged it by ducking into one of the cross-way alleys between the boxes, and the chain wrapped itself with a vicious clatter round the corner where I had been standing. Unhesitatingly I skipped through to the port side of the plane and went forward at top speed to the galley. Hiding figuratively under the engineer’s skirts may not have been the noblest course, but in the circumstances by far the most prudent, and I stayed with him, drinking coffee, until we were on the final approach to Cambridge.

I did a good deal of hard thinking that night and I didn’t like my thoughts.

In the morning I waited outside Yardman’s office, and fell into step with Simon as he shambled out to lunch.

‘Hullo,’ he said, beaming. ‘Where did you spring from? Come and have a warmer up at the Angel.’

I nodded and walked beside him, shuffling on the thawing remains of the previous week’s snow. Our breaths shot out in small sharp clouds. The day was misty and overcast; the cold, raw, damp, and penetrating, exactly matched my mood.

Simon pushed the stained glass and entered the fug; swam on to his accustomed stool, tugged free his disreputable corduroy jacket and hustled the willing barmaid into pouring hot water on to rum and lemon juice, a large glass each. There was a bright new modern electric fire straining at its kilowatts in the old brick fireplace, and the pulsating light from its imitation coal base lit warmly the big smiling face opposite me, and shone brightly on the friendliness in his eyes.

I had so few friends. So few.

‘What’s the matter then?’ he said, sipping his steaming drink. ‘You’re excessively quiet today, even for you.’

I watched the fake flames for a while, but it couldn’t be put off for ever.

‘I have found out,’ I said slowly, ‘about the brown mare.’

He put down his glass with a steady hand but the smile drained completely away.

‘What brown mare?’

I didn’t answer. The silence lengthened hopelessly.

‘What do you mean?’ he said at last.

‘I escorted a brown mare to France and back twice in a fortnight. The same brown mare every time.’

‘You must be mistaken.’

‘No.’

There was a pause. Then he said again, but without conviction, ‘You are mistaken.’

‘I noticed her the day she went over in the morning and came back the same afternoon. I wondered when she went over again last Thursday... and I was certain it was the same horse yesterday, when she came back.’

‘You’ve been on several other trips. You couldn’t remember one particular mare out of all those you dealt with...’

‘I know horses,’ I said.

‘You’re too quick,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Too quick.’

‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘You were. You shouldn’t have done it again so soon; then I might not have realised...’

He shook himself suddenly, the bulk quivering in folds. ‘Done what?’ he said more firmly. ‘What if a horse did go over and back twice? And what’s it got to do with me?’

‘There’s no point in telling you what you already know.’

‘Henry,’ he leaned forward. ‘I know what I know, but I don’t know what you think you know. You’ve got some damn-fool notion in your head and I want to hear what it is.’

I watched the steam rise gently from my untouched drink and wished I hadn’t come.

‘Nice little fiddle,’ I sighed. ‘A sweet, neat little fraud. Easy as shelling peas. A few hundred quid every time you send the mare to France.’

He looked at me without speaking, waiting, making me say it all straight out.

‘All right then. You sell a horse — the brown mare — to an accomplice in France. He arranges for his bank to transfer the purchase price to England and the bank over here certifies that it has been received. You put in a claim to the government that one thoroughbred has been exported for x thousand francs: part of the great bloodstock industry. The grateful government pays you the bonus, the one and three quarters per cent bonus on exports, and you put it in your pocket. Meanwhile you bring the horse back here and smuggle the money back as cash to France and you’re ready to start again.’

Simon sat like a stone, staring at me.

‘All you really need is the working capital,’ I said. ‘A big enough sum to make the one and three quarters per cent worth the trouble. Say twenty thousand pounds, for argument’s sake. Three hundred and fifty pounds every time the mare goes across. If she went only once a month that would make an untaxed dividend of over 20 per cent on the year. Four thousand or more, tax free. You’d have a few expenses, of course, but even so...’

‘Henry!’ his voice was low and stunned.

‘It’s not a big fraud,’ I said. ‘Not big. But pretty safe. And it had to be you, Simon, because it’s all a matter of filling up the right forms, and you fill the forms at Yardman’s. If anyone else, an outsider, tried it, he’d have to pay the horse’s air passage each way, which would make the whole business unprofitable. No one would do it unless they could send the horse for nothing. You can send one for nothing, Simon. You just put one down on the flying list, but not on the office records. Every time there’s room on a flight to France, you send the mare. Yardman told me himself there would be seven three-year-olds going over last Thursday, but we took eight horses, and the eighth wasn’t a three-year old, it was the brown mare.

‘The day we did two trips, when we took her over in the morning and brought her back in the afternoon, that day it was no accident the return horses weren’t at the airport to come back on the first trip. Not even you could risk unloading the mare and promptly loading her up again straight away. So you made a “mistake” and put fifteen hundred hours on the trainers’ travelling instructions instead of ten hundred hours, you, who never make such mistakes, whose accuracy is so phenomenal usually that no one queries or checks up on what you do...’

‘How,’ he said dully. ‘How did you work it out?’

‘I came from Anglia Bloodstock,’ I said gently. ‘Don’t you remember? I used to fill up the same export forms as you do. I used to send them to you from the transport section. But I might not have remembered about the government bonus if I hadn’t heard three business men discussing it ten days ago, and last night while I was wondering how anyone could gain from shuffling that mare over and back, the whole thing just clicked.’

‘Clicked,’ he said gloomily.

I nodded. ‘No markings on the mare, either. You couldn’t keep sending her in her own name, someone would have noticed at once. I would have done, for a start. But all you had to do was go through the stud book, and choose other unmarked mares of approximately the same age and fill up the export forms accordingly. The customs certify a brown mare was actually exported from here, and the French customs certify it was imported there. No trouble at all. No one bothers to check with an owner that he has sold his horse. Why ever should they? And coming back, you go through the same process with the French stud book, only this time you have to be a bit careful your faked mare isn’t too well bred because you can’t spend more than two thousand in sterling abroad without searching enquiries, which you couldn’t risk.’

‘Got it all buttoned up, haven’t you?’ he said bitterly.

‘I was thinking about it nearly all night.’

‘Who are you going to tell?’

I glanced at him and away, uncomfortably.

‘Yardman?’ he asked.

I didn’t answer.

‘The police?’

I looked at the flickering fire. I wouldn’t have told anyone had it not been for...

‘Did you,’ I said painfully, ‘did you have to get Billy to knock me about?’

‘Henry!’ He looked shattered. ‘I didn’t. How can you think I did that?’

I swallowed. ‘He’s been on all the trips with the mare, and he’s never given me a moment’s peace on any of them, except perhaps the first. He’s punched me and poured syrupy coffee on my hair, and yesterday when I was looking at the mare he hit me with a chain. He’s not doing it because he dislikes me... or not only. It’s a smoke screen to keep me away from looking too closely at the horses. That’s why he didn’t smash my face in... he was fighting for a purpose, not from real fury.’

‘Henry, I promise you, it isn’t true.’ He seemed deeply distressed. ‘I wouldn’t hurt you, for God’s sake.’

He put out his hand for his drink and took a long swallow. There was no more steam: drink and friendship were both cold.

‘Don’t look like that,’ he said shivering. ‘Like an iceberg.’ He drank again. ‘All right, you’ve got it right about the mare. I’ll admit that, but as God’s my judge, I didn’t put Billy on to you. I can’t stand him. He’s a young thug. Whatever he’s been doing to you, it’s from his own bloody nature. I promise you, Henry, I promise you...’

I looked at him searchingly, wanting very much to believe him, and feeling I’d merely be fooling myself if I did.

‘Look,’ he said anxiously, leaning forward, ‘would you have sicked him on to me?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then.’ He leaned back again. ‘I didn’t either.’

There was a long, long pause.

‘What do you do with the money?’ I asked, shelving it.

He hesitated. ‘Pay my gambling debts.’

I shook my head. ‘You don’t gamble.’

‘I do.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t know everything.’

‘I know that,’ I said tiredly. ‘I know that very well. You’re not interested in racing. You never ask me for tips, never even ask me if I expect to win myself. And don’t say you gamble at cards or something feeble like that... if you gambled enough to have to steal to pay your debts, you’d gamble on anything, horses as well. Compulsively.’

He winced. ‘Steal is a hard word.’ He leaned forward, picked up my untasted drink, and swallowed the lot.

‘There’s no pension at Yardman’s,’ he said.

I looked into his future, into his penurious retirement. I would have the remains of the Creggan fortune to keep me in cars and hot rums. He would have what he’d saved.

‘You’ve banked it?’

‘Only a third,’ he said. ‘A third is my cousin’s. He’s the one who keeps the mare on his small-holding and drives her to the airport at this end. And a third goes to a chap with a horse dealing business in France. He keeps the mare when she is over there, and drives her back and fore to the planes. They put up most of the stake, those two, when I thought of it. I hadn’t anything like enough on my own.’

‘You don’t really make much out of it, then, yourself, considering the risks.’

‘Double my salary,’ he observed dryly. ‘Tax free. And you underestimate us. We have two horses, and they each go about fifteen times a year.’

‘Have I seen the other one?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘There and back.’

‘Once?’

‘Once.’

‘And how do you get the money back to France?’

‘Send it in magazines. Weeklies. The Horse and Hound, things like that.’

‘English money?’

‘Yes. The chap in France has a contact who exchanges it.’

‘Risky, sending it by post.’

‘We’ve never lost any.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘Since they invented the bonus. Shortly after, anyway.’

There was another long silence. Simon fiddled with his empty glass and didn’t look like an embezzler. I wondered sadly if it was priggish to want one’s friends to be honest, and found that I did still think of him as a friend, and could no longer believe that he had paid Billy to give me a bad time. Billy quite simply hated my pedigreed guts: and I could live with that.

‘Well,’ he said in the end. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

He knew as well as I did that he’d have no chance in an investigation. Too many records of his transactions would still exist in various government and banking files. If I started any enquiry he would very likely end up in gaol. I stood up stiffly off the bar stool and shook my head.

‘Nothing...’ I hesitated.

‘Nothing... as long as we stop?’

‘I don’t know.’

He gave me a twisted smile. ‘All right, Henry. We’ll pack it in.’

We went out of the pub and walked together through the slush back to the office, but it wasn’t the same. There was no trust left. He must have been wondering whether I would keep my mouth shut permanently, and I knew, and hated the knowledge, that he could probably go on with his scheme in spite of saying he wouldn’t. The brown mare wouldn’t go again, but he could change her for another, and there was his second horse, which I hadn’t even noticed. If he was careful, he could go on. And he was a careful man.

The travel schedules in the office, checked again, still showed no more trips to Milan till the Wednesday of the following week. Nor, as far as I could see, were there any flights at all before then; only a couple of sea passages booked for polo ponies, which weren’t my concern. I knocked on Yardman’s door, and went in and asked him if I could have the rest of the week off: my rights, Conker would have said.

‘Milan next Wednesday,’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘And there’s nothing before that? Of course, my dear boy, of course you can have the time off. If you don’t mind if I bring you back should an urgent trip crop up?’

‘Of course not.’

‘That’s good, that’s good.’ The spectacles flashed as he glanced out of the window, the tight skin around his mouth lifting fleetingly into a skeletal smile. ‘You still like the job, then?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said politely.

‘Well, well, my dear boy, and I won’t say that you’re not good at it, I won’t say that at all. Very reliable, yes, yes. I admire you for it, dear boy, I do indeed.’

‘Well... thank you, Mr Yardman.’ I wasn’t sure that underneath he wasn’t laughing at me, and wondered how long it would be before he understood that I didn’t look on my job as the great big joke everyone else seemed to think it.

I wrote to Gabriella to tell her I would be coming back the following week, and drove moderately home, thinking alternately of her and Simon in an emotional see-saw.

There was a message for me at home to ring up Julian Thackery’s father, which I did. The weather forecast was favourable, he said, and it looked as though there would be racing on Saturday. He was planning to send a good hunter chaser up to Wetherby, and could I go and ride it.

‘I could,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s fine. She’s a grand little mare, a real trier, with the shoulders of a champion and enough behind the saddle to take you over the best.’

‘Wetherby fences are pretty stiff,’ I commented.

‘She’ll eat them,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘And she’s ready. We gave her a mile gallop this morning, thinking she’d be backward after the snow, and she was pulling like a train at the end of it. Must thrive on being held up.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘A snip,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you in the weighing room, just before the first. Right?’

I assured him I would be there, and was glad to be going, as I learned from a letter of acceptance lying beside the telephone that the Filyhoughs were again expected for the week-end. My sister Alice came along while I held the letter in my hand.

‘I’m going up to Wetherby on Saturday,’ I said, forestalling her.

‘Sunday...’ she began.

‘No, Alice dear, no. I have no intention whatsoever of marrying Angela Fillyhough and there’s no point in seeing her. I thought that we had agreed that Mother should stop this heiress hunting.’

‘But you must marry someone, Henry,’ she protested.

I thought of Gabriella, and smiled. Maybe her, once I was sure she’d be a friend for life, not just a rocket passion with no embers.

‘I’ll marry someone, don’t you worry.’

‘Well,’ Alice said, ‘if you’re going as far north as Wetherby you might as well go on and see Louise and cheer her up a bit.’

‘Cheer her up?’ I said blankly. Louise was the sister just older than Alice. She lived in Scotland, nearly twice as far from Wetherby, as it happened, as Wetherby from home, but before I could point that out Alice replied.

‘I told you yesterday evening,’ she said in exasperation. ‘Weren’t you listening?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ I’d been thinking about brown mares.

‘Louise has had an operation. She goes home from hospital today and she’ll be in bed for two or three weeks more.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’ But Alice either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me, and though I hardly knew Louise in any deep sense I thought she would be far preferable to Angela Filyhough, and I agreed to go. Deciding, as I would be driving a long way after the races, to go up to Yorkshire on the Friday and spend the Saturday morning lazily, I set off northward at lunchtime and made a detour out of habit to Fenland.

‘Hey, Harry, you’re just the man I want. A miracle.’ Tom Wells grabbed my arm as I walked in. ‘Do me a short flight tomorrow? Two trainers and a jockey from Newmarket to Wetherby races.’

I nearly laughed. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I can’t, Tom. I really called in to cancel my booking for Sunday. I can’t come then either. Got to go and visit a sick sister in Scotland. I’m on my way now.’

‘Blast,’ he said forcibly. ‘Couldn’t you put it off?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘You can have a plane to fly up, on Sunday.’ He was cunning, looking at me expectantly. ‘Free.’

I did laugh then. ‘I can’t.’

‘I’ll have to tell the trainers I can’t fix them up.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Yeah. Damn it all. Well, come and have a cup of coffee.’

We sat in the canteen for an hour and talked about aircraft, and I continued my journey to Wetherby thinking in amusement that my life was getting more and more like a juggling act, and that it would need skill to keep the racing, flying, horse-ferrying and Gabriella all spinning round safely in separate orbits.

At Wetherby the struggling sunshine lost to a fierce east wind, but the going was perfect, a surprise after the snow. Mr Thackery’s mare was all that he had promised, a tough workmanlike little chestnut with a heart as big as a barn, a true racer who didn’t agree with giving up. She took me over the first two fences carefully, as she’d not been on the course before, but then with confidence attacked the rest. I’d seldom had a more solid feeling ride and enjoyed it thoroughly, finding she needed the barest amount of help when meeting a fence wrong and was not too pigheaded to accept it. Coming round the last bend into the straight she was as full of running as when she started, and with only a flicker of encouragement from me she began working her way up smoothly past the four horses ahead of us. She reached the leader coming into the last, pecked a bit on landing, recovered without breaking up her stride, and went after the only horse in sight with enviable determination. We caught him in time, and soared past the winning post with the pleasure of winning coursing like wine in the blood.

‘Not bad,’ said Julian’s father beaming. ‘Not bad at all,’ and he gave me a sealed envelope he’d had the faith to prepare in advance.

With about three hundred and fifty miles to go I left soon after the race, and on the empty northern roads made good time to Scotland. My sister Louise lived in a dreary baronial hall near Elgin, a house almost as big as ours at home and just as inadequately heated. She had pleased our parents by marrying for money, and hadn’t discovered her husband’s fanatical tightfistedness until afterwards. For all she’d ever had to spend since, she’d have been better off in a semi-detached in Peckham. Her Christmas gifts to me as a child had been Everyman editions of the classics. I got none at all now.

Even so, when I went in to see her in the morning, having arrived after she was sleeping the night before, it was clear that some of her spirit had survived. We looked at each other as at strangers. She, after a seven-year gap, was much older looking than I remembered, older than forty-three, and pale with illness, but her eyes were bright and her smile truly pleased.

‘Henry, my little brother, I’m so glad you’ve come...’

One had to believe her. I was glad too, and suddenly the visit was no longer a chore. I spent all day with her, looking at old photographs and playing Chinese chequers, which she had taught me as a child, and listening to her chat about the three sons away at boarding school and how poor the grouse had been this winter and how much she would like to see London again, it was ten years since she had been down. She asked me to do various little jobs for her, explaining that ‘dear James’ was apt to be irritated, and the maids had too much else to do, poor things. I fetched things for her, packed up a parcel, tidied her room, filled her hot water bottle and found her some more toothpaste. After that she wondered if we couldn’t perhaps turn out her medicine drawer while we had the opportunity.

The medicine drawer could have stocked a dispensary. Half of them, she said with relief, she would no longer need. ‘Throw them away.’ She sorted the bottles and boxes into two heaps. ‘Put all those in the wastepaper basket.’ Obediently I picked up a handful. One was labelled ‘Conovid,’ with some explanatory words underneath, and it took several seconds before the message got through. I picked that box out of the rubbish and looked inside. There was a strip of foil containing pills, each packed separately. I tore one square open and picked out the small pink tablet.

‘Don’t you want these?’ I asked.

‘Of course not. I don’t need them any more, after the operation.’

‘Oh... I see. No, of course not. Then may I have them?’

‘What on earth for?’

‘Don’t be naïve, Louise.’

She laughed. ‘You’ve got a girl friend at last? Of course you can have them. There’s a full box lying around somewhere too, I think. In my top drawer, perhaps? Maybe some in the bathroom too.’

I collected altogether enough birth control pills to fill a bottle nearly as big as the one Patrick had given Gabriella, a square cornered brown bottle four inches high, which had held a prescription for penicillin syrup for curing the boys’ throat infections. Louise watched with amusement while I rinsed it out, baked it dry in front of her electric fire, and filled it up, stuffing the neck with cotton wool before screwing on the black cap.

‘Marriage?’ she said. As bad as Alice.

‘I don’t know.’ I put the drawer she had tidied back into the bedside table. ‘And don’t tell Mother.’

Wednesday seemed a long time coming, and I was waiting at Gatwick a good hour before the first horses turned up. Not even the arrival of Billy and Alf could damp my spirits, and we loaded the horses without incident and faster than usual, as two of the studs had sent their own grooms as well, and for once they were willing.

It was one of the mornings that Simon came with last minute papers, and he gave them to me warily in the charter airline office when the plane was ready to leave.

‘Good morning, Henry.’

‘Good morning.’

One couldn’t patch up a friendship at seven-thirty in the morning in front of yawning pilots and office staff. I took the papers with a nod, hesitated, and went out across the tarmac, bound for the aircraft and Milan.

There were running steps behind me and a hand on my arm.

‘Lord Grey? You’re wanted on the telephone. They say it’s urgent.’

I picked up the receiver and listened, said ‘All right,’ and slowly put it down again. I was not, after all, going to see Gabriella. I could feel my face contract into lines of pain.

‘What is it?’ Simon said.

‘My father... my father has died... sometime during the night. They have just found him... he was very tired, yesterday evening...’

There was a shocked silence in the office. Simon looked at me with great understanding, for he knew how little I wanted this day.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice thick with sincerity.

I spoke to him immediately, without thinking, in the old familiar way. ‘I’ve got to go home.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘But the horses are all loaded, and there’s only Billy...’

‘That’s easy. I’ll go myself.’ He fished in his brief case and produced his passport.

It was the best solution. I gave him back the papers and took the brown bottle of pills out of my pocket. With a black ball point I wrote on the label, ‘Gabriella Barzini, Souvenir Shop, Malpensa Airport.’

‘Will you give this to the girl at the gift counter, and tell her why I couldn’t come, and say I’ll write?’

He nodded.

‘You won’t forget?’ I said anxiously.

‘No, Henry.’ He smiled as he used to. ‘I’ll see she gets it, and the message. I promise.’

We shook hands, and after a detour through the passport office he shambled across the tarmac and climbed up the ramp into the plane. I watched the doors shut. I watched the aircraft fly away, taking my job, my friend and my gift, but not me.

Simon Searle went to Italy instead of me, and he didn’t come back.