High Stakes

1

I looked at my friend and saw a man who had robbed me. Deeply disturbing. The ultimate in rejection.

Jody Leeds looked back at me, half smiling, still disbelieving.

‘You’re what?’

‘Taking my horses away,’ I said.

‘But... I’m your trainer.’ He sounded bewildered. Owners, his voice and expression protested, never deserted their trainers. It simply wasn’t done. Only the eccentric or the ruthless shifted their horses from stable to stable, and I had shown no signs of being either.

We stood outside the weighing room of Sandown Park racecourse on a cold windy day with people scurrying past us carrying out saddles and number cloths for the next steeplechase. Jody hunched his shoulders inside his sheepskin coat and shook his bare head. The wind blew straight brown hair in streaks across his eyes and he pulled them impatiently away.

‘Come on, Steven,’ he said. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No.’

Jody was short, stocky, twenty-eight, hardworking, clever, competent and popular. He had been my constant adviser since I had bought my first racehorses three years earlier, and right from the beginning he had robbed me round the clock and smiled while doing it.

‘You’re crazy,’ he said, ‘I’ve just won you a race.’

We stood, indeed, on the patch of turf where winners were unsaddled: where Energise, my newest and glossiest hurdler, had recently decanted his smiling jockey, had stamped and steamed and tossed his head with pride and accepted the crowd’s applause as simply his due.

The race he had won had not been important, but the way he had won it had been in the star-making class. The sight of him sprinting up the hill to the winning post, a dark brown streak of rhythm, had given me a rare bursting feeling of admiration, of joy... probably even of love. Energise was beautiful and courageous and chock-full of will to win and it was because he had won, and won in that fashion, that my hovering intention to break with Jody had hardened into action.

I should, I suppose, have chosen a better time and place.

‘I picked out Energise for you at the Sales,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘And all your other winners.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I moved into bigger stables because of you.’

I nodded briefly.

‘Well... You can’t let me down now.’

Disbelief had given way to anger. His bright blue eyes sharpened to belligerence and the muscles tightened round his mouth.

‘I’m taking the horses away,’ I repeated. ‘And we’ll start with Energise. You can leave him here when you go home.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘No.’

‘Where’s he going then?’

I actually had no idea. I said, ‘I’ll make all the arrangements. Just leave him in the stable here and go home without him.’

‘You’ve no right to do this.’ Full-scale anger blazed in his eyes. ‘You’re a bloody rotten shit.’

But I had every right. He knew it and I knew it. Every owner had the right at any time to withdraw his custom if he were dissatisfied with his trainer. The fact that the right was seldom exercised was beside the point.

Jody was rigid with fury. ‘I am taking that horse home with me and nothing is going to stop me.’

His very intensity stoked up in me an answering determination that he should not. I shook my head decisively. I said, ‘No, Jody. The horse stays here.’

‘Over my dead body.’

His body, alive, quivered with pugnaciousness.

‘As of this moment,’ I said, ‘I’m cancelling your authority to act on my behalf, and I’m going straight into the weighing room to make that clear to all the authorities who need to know.’

He glared. ‘You owe me money,’ he said. ‘You can’t take your horses away until you’ve paid.’

I paid my bills with him on the nail every month and owed him only for the current few weeks. I pulled my cheque book out of my pocket and unclipped my pen.

‘I’ll give you a cheque right now.’

‘No you bloody well won’t.’

He snatched the whole cheque book out of my hand and ripped it in two. Then in the same movement he threw the pieces over his shoulder, and all the loose halves of the cheques scattered in the wind. Faces turned our way in astonishment and the eyes of the Press came sharply to life. I couldn’t have chosen anywhere more public for what was developing into a first class row.

Jody looked around him. Looked at the men with notebooks. Saw his allies.

His anger grew mean.

‘You’ll be sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll chew you into little bits.’

The face that five minutes earlier had smiled with cheerful decisive friendliness had gone for good. Even if I now retracted and apologised, the old relationship could not be re-established. Confidence, like Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put together again.

His fierce opposition had driven me further than I had originally meant. All the same I still had the same objective, even if I had to fight harder to achieve it.

‘Whatever you do,’ I said, ‘you won’t keep my horses.’

‘You’re ruining me,’ Jody shouted.

The Press advanced a step or two.

Jody cast a quick eye at them. Maliciousness flooded through him and twisted his features with spite. ‘You big rich bastards don’t give a damn who you hurt.’

I turned abruptly away from him and went into the weighing room, and there carried out my promise to disown him officially as my trainer. I signed forms cancelling his authority to act for me, and for good measure also included a separate handwritten note to say that I had expressly forbidden him to remove Energise from Sandown Park. No one denied I had the right: there was just an element of coolness towards one who was so vehemently and precipitately ridding himself of the services of the man who had ten minutes ago given him a winner.

I didn’t tell them that it had taken a very long time for the mug to face the fact that he was being conned. I didn’t tell them how I had thrust the first suspicions away as disloyalty and had made every possible allowance before being reluctantly convinced.

I didn’t tell them either that the reason for my determination now lay squarely in Jody’s first reaction to my saying I was removing my horses.

Because he hadn’t, not then or afterwards, asked the one natural question.

He hadn’t asked why.

When I left the weighing room, both Jody and the Press had gone from the unsaddling enclosure. Racegoers were hurrying towards the stands to watch the imminent steeplechase, the richest event of the afternoon, and even the officials with whom I’d just been dealing were dashing off with the same intent.

I had no appetite for the race. Decided, instead, to go down to the racecourse stables and ask the gatekeeper there to make sure Energise didn’t vanish in a puff of smoke. But as the gatekeeper was there to prevent villainous strangers walking in, not any bona fide racehorses walking out, I wasn’t sure how much use he would be, even if he agreed to help.

He was sitting in his sentry box, a middle-aged sturdy figure in a navy blue serge uniform with brass buttons. Various lists on clip-boards hung on hooks on the walls, alongside an electric heater fighting a losing battle against the December chill.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I want to ask you about my horse...’

‘Can’t come in here,’ he interrupted bossily. ‘No owners allowed in without trainers.’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I just want to make sure my horse stays here.’

‘What horse is that?’

He was adept at interrupting, like many people in small positions of power. He blew on his fingers and looked at me over them without politeness.

‘Energise,’ I said.

He screwed up his mouth and considered whether to answer. I supposed that he could find no reason against it except natural unhelpfulness, because in the end he said grudgingly, ‘Would it be a black horse trained by Leeds?’

‘It would.’

‘Gone, then,’ he said.

‘Gone?’

‘S’right. Lad took him off, couple of minutes ago.’ He jerked his head in the general direction of the path down to the area where the motor horseboxes were parked. ‘Leeds was with him. Ask me, they’ll have driven off by now.’ The idea seemed to cheer him. He smiled.

I left him to his sour satisfaction and took the path at a run. It led down between bushes and opened abruptly straight on to the gravelled acre where dozens of horseboxes stood in haphazard rows.

Jody’s box was fawn with scarlet panels along the sides: and Jody’s box was already manoeuvring out of its slot and turning to go between two of the rows on its way to the gate.

I slid my binoculars to the ground and left them, and fairly sprinted. Ran in front of the first row of boxes and raced round the end to find Jody’s box completing its turn from between the rows about thirty yards away, and accelerating straight towards me.

I stood in its path and waved my arms for the driver to stop.

The driver knew me well enough. His name was Andy-Fred. He drove my horses regularly. I saw his face, looking horrified and strained, as he put his hand on the horn button and punched it urgently.

I ignored it, sure that he would stop. He was advancing between a high wooden fence on one side and the flanks of parked horseboxes on the other, and it wasn’t until it became obvious that he didn’t know what his brakes were for that it occurred to me that maybe Energise was about to leave over my dead body, not Jody’s.

Anger, not fear, kept me rooted to the spot.

Andy-Fred’s nerve broke first, thank God, but only just. He wrenched the wheel round savagely when the massive radiator grill was a bare six feet from my annihilation and the diesel throb was a roar in my ears.

He had left it too late for braking. The sudden swerve took him flatly into the side of the foremost of the parked boxes and with screeching and tearing sounds of metal the front corner of Jody’s box plowed forwards and inwards until the colliding doors of the cabs of both vehicles were locked in one crumpled mess. Glass smashed and tinkled and flew about with razor edges. The engine stalled and died.

The sharp bits on the front of Jody’s box had missed me but the smooth wing caught me solidly as I leapt belatedly to get out of the way. I lay where I’d bounced, half against the wooden fence, and wholly winded.

Andy-Fred jumped down unhurt from the unsmashed side of his cab and advanced with a mixture of fear, fury and relief.

‘What the bloody hell d’you think you’re playing at?’ he yelled.

‘Why...’ I said weakly, ‘didn’t... you... stop?’

I doubt if he heard me. In any case, he didn’t answer. He turned instead to the exploding figure of Jody, who arrived at a run along the front of the boxes, the same way that I had come.

He practically danced when he saw the crushed cabs and rage poured from his mouth like fire.

‘You stupid bugger? he shouted at Andy-Fred. ‘You stupid sodding effing...’

The burly box driver shouted straight back.

‘He stood right in my way.’

‘I told you not to stop.’

‘I’d have killed him.’

‘No you wouldn’t.’

‘I’m telling you. He stood there. Just stood there...’

‘He’d have jumped if you’d kept on going. You stupid bugger. Just look what you’ve done. You stupid...’

Their voices rose, loud and acrimonious, into the wind. Further away the commentator’s voice boomed over the tannoy system, broadcasting the progress of the steeplechase. On the other side of the high wooden fence the traffic pounded up and down the London to Guildford road. I gingerly picked myself off the cold gravel and leaned against the weathered planks.

Nothing broken. Breath coming back. Total damage, all the buttons missing from my overcoat. There was a row of small right-angled tears down the front where the buttons had been. I looked at them vaguely and knew I’d been lucky.

Andy-Fred was telling Jody at the top of a raucous voice that he wasn’t killing anyone for Jody’s sake, he was bloody well not.

‘You’re fired,’ Jody yelled.

‘Right.’

He took a step back, looked intensely at the mangled horseboxes, looked at me, and looked at Jody. He thrust his face close to Jody’s and yelled at him again.

‘Right.’

Then he stalked away in the direction of the stables and didn’t bother to look back.

Jody’s attention and fury veered sharply towards me. He took three or four purposeful steps and yelled, ‘I’ll sue you for this.’

I said, ‘Why don’t you find out if the horse is all right?’

He couldn’t hear me for all the day’s other noises.

‘What?’

‘Energise,’ I said loudly. ‘Is he all right?’

He gave me a sick hot look of loathing and scudded away round the side of the box. More slowly, I followed. Jody yanked open the groom’s single door and hauled himself up inside and I went after him.

Energise was standing in his stall quivering from head to foot and staring wildly about with a lot of white round his eyes. Jody had packed him off still sweating from his race and in no state anyway to travel and the crash had clearly terrified him: but he was none the less on his feet and Jody’s anxious search could find no obvious injury.

‘No thanks to you,’ Jody said bitterly.

‘Nor to you.’

We faced each other in the confined space, a quiet oasis out of the wind.

‘You’ve been stealing from me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to believe it. But from now on... I’m not giving you the chance.’

‘You won’t be able to prove a thing.’

‘Maybe not. Maybe I won’t even try. Maybe I’ll write off what I’ve lost as the cost of my rotten judgement in liking and trusting you.’

He said indignantly, ‘I’ve done bloody well for you.’

‘And out of me.’

‘What do you expect? Trainers aren’t in it for love, you know.’

‘Trainers don’t all do what you’ve done.’

A sudden speculative look came distinctly into his eyes. ‘What have I done, then?’ he demanded.

‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘You haven’t even pretended to deny you’ve been cheating me.’

‘Look, Steven, you’re so bloody unworldly. All right, so maybe I have added a bit on here and there. If you’re talking about the time I charged you travelling expenses for Hermes to Haydock the day they abandoned for fog before the first... well, I know I didn’t actually send the horse... he went lame that morning and couldn’t go. But trainer’s perks. Fair’s fair. And you could afford it. You’d never miss thirty measly quid.’

‘What else?’ I said.

He seemed reassured. Confidence and a faint note of defensive wheedling seeped into his manner and voice.

‘Well...’ he said. ‘If you ever disagreed with the totals of your bills, why didn’t you query it with me? I’d have straightened things out at once. There was no need to bottle it all up and blow your top without warning.’

Ouch, I thought. I hadn’t even checked that all the separate items on the monthly bills did add up to the totals I’d paid. Even when I was sure he was robbing me, I hadn’t suspected it would be in any way so ridiculously simple.

‘What else?’ I said.

He looked away for a second, then decided that I couldn’t after all know a great deal.

‘Oh all right,’ he said, as if making a magnanimous concession. ‘It’s Raymond, isn’t it?’

‘Among other things.’

Jody nodded ruefully. ‘I guess I did pile it on a bit, charging you for him twice a week when some weeks he only came once.’

‘And some weeks not at all.’

‘Oh well...’ said Jody deprecatingly. ‘I suppose so, once or twice.’

Raymond Child rode all my jumpers in races and drove fifty miles some mornings to school them over fences on Jody’s gallops. Jody gave him a fee and expenses for the service and added them to my account. The twice a week schooling session fees had turned up regularly for the whole of July, when in fact, as I had very recently and casually discovered, no horses had been schooled at all and Raymond himself had been holidaying in Spain.

‘A tenner here or there,’ Jody said persuasively. ‘It’s nothing to you.’

‘A tenner plus expenses twice a week for July came to over a hundred quid.’

‘Oh.’ He tried a twisted smile. ‘So you really have been checking up.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘You’re so easy going. You’ve always paid up without question.’

‘Not any more.’

‘No... Look, Steven, I’m sorry about all this. If I give you my word there’ll be no more fiddling on your account... If I promise every item will be strictly accurate... why don’t we go on as before? I’ve won a lot of races for you, after all.’

He looked earnest, sincere and repentant. Also totally confident that I would give him a second chance. A quick canter from confession to penitence, and a promise to reform, and all could proceed as before.

‘It’s too late,’ I said.

He was not discouraged; just piled on a bit more of the ingratiating manner which announced ‘I know I’ve been a bad bad boy but now I’ve been found out I’ll be angelic.’

‘I suppose having so much extra expense made me behave stupidly,’ he said. ‘The mortgage repayments on the new stables are absolutely bloody, and as you know I only moved there because I needed more room for all your horses.’

My fault, now, that he had had to steal.

I said, ‘I offered to build more boxes at the old place.’

‘Wouldn’t have done,’ he interrupted hastily: but the truth of it was that the old place had been on a plain and modest scale where the new one was frankly opulent. At the time of the move I had vaguely wondered how he could afford it. Now, all too well, I knew.

‘So let’s call this just a warning, eh?’ Jody said cajolingly. ‘I don’t want to lose your horses, Steven. I’ll say so frankly. I don’t want to lose them. We’ve been good friends all this time, haven’t we? If you’d just said... I mean, if you’d just said, “Jody, you bugger, you’ve been careless about a bill or two...” Well, I mean, we could have straightened it out in no time. But... well... When you blew off without warning, just said you were taking the horses away, straight after Energise won like that... well, I lost my temper real and proper. I’ll admit I did. Said things I didn’t mean. Like one does. Like everyone does when they lose their temper.’

He was smiling in a counterfeit of the old way, as if nothing at all had happened. As if Energise were not standing beside us sweating in a crashed horsebox. As if my overcoat were not torn and muddy from a too close brush with death.

‘Steven, you know me,’ he said. ‘Got a temper like a bloody rocket.’

When I didn’t answer at once he took my silence as acceptance of his explanations and apologies, and briskly turned to practical matters.

‘Well now, we’ll have to get this lad out of here.’ He slapped Energise on the rump. ‘And we can’t get the ramp down until we get this box moved away from that other one.’ He made a sucking sound through his teeth. ‘Look, I’ll try to back straight out again. Don’t see why it shouldn’t work.’

He jumped out of the back door and went round to the front of the cab. Looking forward through the stalls I could see him climb into the driver’s seat, check the gear lever, and press the starter: an intent, active, capable figure dealing with an awkward situation.

The diesel starter whirred and the engine roared to life. Jody settled himself, found reverse gear, and carefully let out the clutch. The horsebox shuddered and stood still. Jody put his foot down on the accelerator.

Through the windscreen I could see two or three men approaching, faces a mixture of surprise and anger. One of them began running and waving his arms about in the classic reaction of the chap who comes back to his parked car to find it dented.

Jody ignored him. The horsebox rocked, the crushed side of the cab screeched against its mangled neighbour, and Energise began to panic.

‘Jody, stop,’ I yelled.

He took no notice. He raced the engine harder, then took his foot off the accelerator, then jammed it on again. Off, on, repeatedly.

Inside the box it sounded as if the whole vehicle were being ripped in two. Energise began whinnying and straining backwards on his tethering rope and stamping about with sharp hooves. I didn’t know how to begin to soothe him and could hardly get close enough for a pat, even if that would have made the slightest difference. My relationship with horses was along the lines of admiring them from a distance and giving them carrots while they were safely tied up. No one had briefed me about dealing with a hysterical animal at close quarters in a bucketing biscuit tin.

With a final horrendous crunch the two entwined cabs tore apart and Jody’s box, released from friction, shot backwards. Energise slithered and went down for a moment on his hindquarters and I too wound up on the floor. Jody slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the cab and was promptly clutched by the three newcomers, one now in a full state of apoplectic rage.

I stood up and picked bits of hay off my clothes and regarded my steaming, foam-flaked, terrified, four-footed property.

‘All over, old fellow,’ I said.

It sounded ridiculous. I smiled, cleared my throat, tried again.

‘You can cool off, old lad. The worst is over.’

Energise showed no immediate signs of getting the message. I told him he was a great horse, he’d won a great race, he’d be king of the castle in no time and that I admired him very much. I told him he would soon be rugged up nice and quiet in a stable somewhere though I hadn’t actually yet worked out exactly which one, and that doubtless someone would give him some excessively expensive hay and a bucket of nice cheap water and I dared say some oats and stuff like that. I told him I was sorry I hadn’t a carrot in my pocket at that moment but I’d bring him one next time I saw him.

After a time this drivel seemed to calm him. I put out a hand and gave his neck a small pat. His skin was wet and fiery hot. He shook his head fiercely and blew out vigorously through black moist nostrils, but the staring white no longer showed round his eye and he had stopped trembling. I began to grow interested in him in a way which had not before occurred to me: as a person who happened also to be a horse.

I realised I had never before been alone with a horse. Extraordinary, really, when Energise was the twelfth I’d owned. But racehorse owners mostly patted their horses in stables with lads and trainers in attendance, and in parade rings with all the world looking on, and in unsaddling enclosures with friends pressing round to congratulate. Owners who like me were not riders themselves and had nowhere of their own to turn horses out to grass seldom ever spent more than five consecutive minutes in a horse’s company.

I spent longer with Energise in that box than in all the past five months since I’d bought him.

Outside, Jody was having troubles. One of the men had fetched a policeman who was writing purposefully in a notebook. I wondered with amusement just how Jody would lay the blame on my carelessness in walking in front of the box and giving the driver no choice but to swerve. If he thought he was keeping my horses, he would play it down. If he thought he was losing them, he’d be vitriolic. Smiling to myself I talked it over with Energise.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t know why I haven’t told him yet that I know about his other fraud, but as it turns out I’m damn glad I haven’t. Do you know?’ I said. ‘All those little fiddles he confessed to, they’re just froth.’

Energise was calm enough to start drooping with tiredness. I watched him sympathetically.

‘It isn’t just a few hundred quid he’s pinched,’ I said. ‘It’s upwards of thirty-five thousand.’