High Stakes

5

On Wednesday morning Charlie Canterfield telephoned at seven-thirty. I stretched a hand sleepily out of bed and groped for the receiver.

‘Hullo?’

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Charlie said. ‘I’ve been trying your number since Sunday morning.’

‘Out.’

‘I know that.’ He sounded more amused than irritated. ‘Look... can you spare me some time today?’

‘All of it, if you like.’

My generosity was solely due to the unfortunate fact that Allie had felt bound to spend her last full day with her sister, who had bought tickets and made plans. I had gathered that she’d only given me Monday and Tuesday at the expense of her other commitments, so I couldn’t grumble. Tuesday had been even better than Monday, except for ending in exactly the same way.

‘This morning will do,’ Charlie said. ‘Nine-thirty?’

‘Okay. Amble along.’

‘I want to bring a friend.’

‘Fine. Do you know how to get here?’

‘A taxi will find it,’ Charlie said and disconnected.

Charlie’s friend turned out to be a large man of Charlie’s age with shoulders like a docker and language to match.

‘Bert Huggerneck,’ Charlie said, making introductions.

Bert Huggerneck crunched my bones in his muscular hand. ‘Any friend of Charlie’s is a friend of mine,’ he said, but with no warmth or conviction.

‘Come upstairs,’ I said. ‘Coffee? Or breakfast?’

‘Coffee,’ Charlie said. Bert Huggerneck said he didn’t mind, which proved in the end to be bacon and tomato ketchup on toast twice, with curried baked beans on the side. He chose the meal himself from my meagre store cupboard and ate with speed and relish.

‘Not a bad bit of bleeding nosh,’ he observed, ‘considering.’

‘Considering what?’ I asked.

He gave me a sharp look over a well-filled fork and made a gesture embracing both the flat and its neighbourhood. ‘Considering you must be a rich bleeding capitalist, living here.’ He pronounced it “capitalist”, and clearly considered it one of the worst of insults.

‘Come off it,’ Charlie said amiably. ‘His breeding’s as impeccable as yours and mine.’

‘Huh.’ Total disbelief didn’t stop Bert Huggerneck accepting more toast. ‘Got any jam?’ he said.

‘Sorry.’

He made do with half a jar of marmalade.

‘What’s that about breeding?’ he said suspiciously to Charlie. ‘Capitalists are all snobs.’

‘His grandfather was a mechanic,’ Charlie said. ‘Same as mine was a milkman and yours a navvie.’

I was amused that Charlie had glossed over my father and mother, who had been school teacher and nurse. Far more respectable to be able to refer to the grandfather-mechanic, the welder-uncle and the host of card-carrying cousins. If politicians of all sorts searched diligently amongst their antecedents for proletarianism and denied aristocratic contacts three times before cockcrow every week-day morning, who was I to spoil the fun? In truth the two seemingly divergent lines of manual work and schoolmastering had given me the best of both worlds, the ability to use my hands and the education to design things for them to make. Money and experience had done the rest.

‘I gather Mr Huggerneck is here against his will,’ I observed.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Charlie said. ‘He wants your help.’

‘How does he act if he wants to kick you in the kidneys?’

‘He wouldn’t eat your food.’

Fair enough, I thought. Accept a man’s salt, and you didn’t boot him. Times hadn’t collapsed altogether where that still held good.

We were sitting round the kitchen table with Charlie smoking a cigarette and using his saucer as an ashtray and me wondering what he considered so urgent. Bert wiped his plate with a spare piece of toast and washed that down with coffee.

‘What’s for lunch?’ he said.

I took it as it was meant, as thanks for breakfast.

‘Bert,’ said Charlie, coming to the point, ‘is a bookie’s clerk.’

‘Hold on,’ Bert said. ‘Not is. Was.’

‘Was,’ Charlie conceded, ‘and will be again. But at the moment the firm he worked for is bankrupt.’

‘The boss went spare,’ Bert said, nodding. ‘The bums come and took away all the bleeding office desks and that.’

‘And all the bleeding typists?’

‘Here,’ said Bert, his brows suddenly lifting as a smile forced itself at last into his eyes. ‘You’re not all bad, then.’

‘Rotten to the core,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, see, the boss got all his bleeding sums wrong, or like he said, his mathematical computations were based on a misconception.’

‘Like the wrong horse won?’

Bert’s smile got nearer. ‘Cotton on quick, don’t you? A whole bleeding row of wrong horses. Here, see, I’ve been writing for him for bleeding years. All the big courses, he has... well, he had... a pitch in Tatt’s and down in the Silver Ring too, and I’ve been writing for him myself most of the time, for him personally, see?’

‘Yes.’ Bookmakers always took a clerk to record all bets as they were made. A bookmaking firm of any size sent out a team of two men or more to every allowed enclosure at most race meetings in their area: the bigger the firm, the more meetings they covered.

‘Well, see, I warned him once or twice there was a leary look to his book. See, after bleeding years you get a nose for trouble, don’t you? This last year or so he’s made a right bleeding balls-up more than once and I told him he’d have the bums in if he went on like that, and I was right, wasn’t I?’

‘What did he say?’

‘Told me to mind my own bleeding business,’ Bert said. ‘But it was my bleeding business, wasn’t it? I mean, it was my job at stake. My livelihood, same as his. Who’s going to pay my H.P. and rent and a few pints with the lads, I asked him, and he turned round and said not to worry, he had it all in hand, he knew what he was doing.’ His voice held total disgust.

‘And he didn’t,’ I remarked.

‘Of course he bleeding didn’t. He didn’t take a blind bit of notice of what I said. Bleeding stupid, he was. Then ten days ago he really blew it. Lost a bleeding packet. The whole works. All of us got the push. No redundancy either. He’s got a bleeding big overdraft in the bank and he’s up to the eyeballs in debt.’

I glanced at Charlie who seemed exclusively interested in the ash on his cigarette.

‘Why,’ I asked Bert, ‘did your boss ignore your warnings and rush headlong over the cliff?’

‘He didn’t jump over no cliff, he’s getting drunk every night down the boozer.’

‘I meant...’

‘Hang on, I get you. Why did he lose the whole bleeding works? Because someone fed him the duff gen, that’s my opinion. Cocky as all get out, he was, on the way to the races. Then coming home he tells me the firm is all washed up and down the bleeding drain. White as chalk, he was. Trembling, sort of. So I told him I’d warned him over and over. And that day I’d warned him too that he was laying too much on that Energise and not covering himself, and he’d told me all jolly like to mind my own effing business. So I reckon someone had told him Energise was fixed not to win, but it bleeding did win, and that’s what’s done for the firm.’

Bert shut his mouth and the silence was as loud as bells. Charlie tapped the ash off and smiled.

I swallowed.

‘Er...’ I said eventually.

‘That’s only half of it,’ Charlie said, interrupting smoothly. ‘Go on, Bert, tell him the rest.’

Bert seemed happy to oblige. ‘Well, see, there I was in the boozer Saturday evening. Last Saturday, not the day Energise won. Four days ago, see? After the bums had been, and all that. Well, in walks Charlie like he sometimes does and we had a couple of jars together, him and me being old mates really on account of we lived next door to each other when we were kids and he was going to that la-di-da bleeding Eton and someone had to take him down a peg or two in the holidays. So, anyway, there we were in the boozer and I pour out all my troubles and Charlie says he has another friend who’d like to hear them, so... well... here we are.’

‘What are the other troubles, then?’ I asked.

‘Oh... Yeah. Well, see, the boss had a couple of betting shops. Nothing fancy, just a couple of betting shops in Windsor and Staines, see. The office, now, where the bailiffs came and took everything, that was behind the shop in Staines. So there’s the boss holding his head and wailing like a siren because all his bleeding furniture’s on its way out, when the phone rings. Course by this time the phone’s down on the floor because the desk it was on is out on the pavement. So the boss squats down beside it and there’s some geezer on the other end offering to buy the lease.’

He paused more for dramatic effect than breath.

‘Go on,’ I said encouragingly.

‘Manna from Heaven for the boss, that was,’ said Bert, accepting the invitation. ‘See, he’d have had to go on paying the rent for both places even if they were shut. He practically fell on the neck of this geezer in a manner of speaking, and the geezer came round and paid him in cash on the nail, three hundred smackers, that very morning and the boss has been getting drunk on it ever since.’

A pause. ‘What line of business’ I asked, ‘is this geezer in?’

‘Eh?’ said Bert, surprised. ‘Bookmaking, of course.’

Charlie smiled.

‘I expect you’ve heard of him,’ Bert said. ‘Name of Ganser Mays.’

It was inevitable, I supposed.

‘In what way,’ I asked, ‘do you want me to help?’

‘Huh?’

‘Charlie said you wanted my help.’

‘Oh that. I dunno, really. Charlie just said it might help to tell you what I’d told him, so I done it.’

‘Did Charlie tell you,’ I asked, ‘who owns Energise?’

‘No, Charlie didn’t,’ Charlie said.

‘What the bleeding hell does it matter who owns it?’ Bert demanded.

‘I do,’ I said.

Bert looked from one of us to the other several times. Various thoughts took their turn behind his eyes, and Charlie and I waited.

‘Here,’ he said at last. ‘Did you bleeding fix that race?’

‘The horse ran fair and square, and I backed it on the Tote,’ I said.

‘Well, how come my boss thought...’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said untruthfully.

Charlie lit another cigarette from the stub of the last. They were his lungs, after all.

‘The point is,’ I said, ‘who gave your boss the wrong information?’

‘Dunno.’ He thought it over, but shook his head. ‘Dunno.’

‘Could it have been Ganser Mays?’

‘Blimey!’

‘Talk about slander,’ Charlie said. ‘He’d have you for that.’

‘I merely ask,’ I said. ‘I also ask whether Bert knows of any other small firms which have gone out of business in the same way.’

‘Blimey,’ Bert said again, with even more force.

Charlie sighed with resignation, as if he hadn’t engineered the whole morning’s chat.

‘Ganser Mays,’ I said conversationally, ‘has opened a vast string of betting shops during the past year or so. What has happened to the opposition?’

‘Down the boozer getting drunk,’ Charlie said.

Charlie stayed for a while after Bert had gone, sitting more comfortably in one of my leather armchairs and reverting thankfully to his more natural self.

‘Bert’s a great fellow,’ he said. ‘But I find him tiring.’ His Eton accent, I noticed, had come back in force and I realised with mild surprise how much he tailored voice and manner to suit his company. The Charlie Canterfield I knew, the powerful banker smoking a cigar who thought of a million as everyday currency, was not the face he had shown to Bert Huggerneck. It occurred to me that of all the people I had met who had moved from one world to another, Charlie had done it with most success. He swam through big business like a fish in water but he could still feel completely at home with Bert in a way that I, who had made a less radical journey, could not.

‘Which is the villain,’ Charlie asked. ‘Ganser Mays or Jody Leeds?’

‘Both.’

‘Equal partners?’

We considered it. ‘No way of knowing at the moment,’ I said.

‘At the moment?’ His eyebrows went up.

I smiled slightly. ‘I thought I might have a small crack at... would you call it justice?’

‘The law’s a bad thing to take into your own hands.’

‘I don’t exactly aim to lynch anyone.’

‘What, then?’

I hesitated. ‘There’s something I ought to check. I think I’ll do it today. After that, if I’m right, I’ll make a loud fuss.’

‘Slander actions notwithstanding?’

‘I don’t know.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s infuriating.’

‘What are you going to check?’ he asked.

‘Telephone tomorrow morning and I’ll tell you.’

Charlie, like Allie, asked before he left if I would show him where I made the toys. We went down to the workshop and found Owen Idris, my general helper, busy sweeping the tidy floor.

‘Morning, Owen.’

‘Morning, sir.’

‘This is Mr Ganterfield, Owen.’

‘Morning, sir.’

Owen appeared to have swept without pause but I knew the swift glance he had given Charlie was as good as a photograph. My neat dry little Welsh factotum had a phenomenal memory for faces.

‘Will you want the car today, sir?’ he said.

‘This evening.’

‘I’ll just change the oil, then.’

‘Fine.’

‘Will you be wanting me for the parking?’

I shook my head. ‘Not tonight.’

‘Very good, sir.’ He looked resigned. ‘Any time,’ he said.

I showed Charlie the machines but he knew less about engineering than I did about banking.

‘Where do you start, in the hands or in the head?’

‘Head,’ I said. ‘Then hands, then head.’

‘So clear.’

‘I think of something, I make it, I draw it.’

‘Draw it?’

‘Machine drawings, not an artistic impression.’

‘Blue prints,’ said Charlie, nodding wisely.

‘Blue prints are copies... The originals are black on white.’

‘Disillusioning.’

I slid open one of the long drawers which held them and showed him some of the designs. The fine spidery lines with a key giving details of materials and sizes of screw threads looked very different from the bright shiny toys which reached the shops, and Charlie looked from design to finished article with a slowly shaking head.

‘Don’t know how you do it.’

‘Training,’ I said. ‘Same way that you switch money round ten currencies in half an hour and end up thousands richer.’

‘Can’t do that so much these days,’ he said gloomily. He watched me put designs and toys away. ‘Don’t forget though that my firm can always find finances for good ideas.’

‘I won’t forget.’

‘There must be a dozen merchant banks,’ Charlie said, ‘all hoping to be nearest when you look around for cash.’

‘The manufacturers fix the cash. I just collect the royalties.’

He shook his head. ‘You’ll never make a million that way.’

‘I won’t get ulcers, either.’

‘No ambition?’

‘To win the Derby and get even with Jody Leeds.’

I arrived at Jody’s expensive stable uninvited, quietly, at half past midnight, and on foot. The car lay parked half a mile behind me, along with prudence.

Pale fitful moonlight lit glimpses of the large manor house with its pedimented front door and rows of uniform windows. No lights shone upstairs in the room Jody shared with Felicity, and none downstairs in the large drawing-room beneath. The lawn, rough now and scattered with a few last dead leaves, stretched peacefully from the house to where I stood hidden in the bushes by the gate.

I watched for a while. There was no sign of anyone awake or moving, and I hadn’t expected it. Jody like most six-thirty risers was usually asleep by eleven at the latest, and telephone calls after ten were answered brusquely if at all. On the other hand he had no reservations about telephoning others in the morning before seven. He had no patience with life-patterns unlike his own.

To the right and slightly to the rear of the house lay the dimly gleaming roofs of the stables. White railed paddocks lay around and beyond them, with big planned trees growing at landscaped corners. When Berksdown Court had been built, cost had come second to excellence.

Carrying a large black rubber-clad torch, unlit, I walked softly up the drive and round towards the horses. No dogs barked. No all-night guards sprang out to ask my business. Silence and peace bathed the whole place undisturbed.

My breath, all the same, came faster. My heart thumped. It would be bad if anyone caught me. I had tried reassuring myself that Jody would do me no actual physical harm, but I hadn’t found myself convinced. Anger, as when I’d stood in the path of the horsebox, was again thrusting me into risk.

Close to the boxes one could hear little more than from a distance. Jody’s horses stood on sawdust now that straw prices had trebled, and made no rustle when they moved. A sudden equine sneeze made me jump.

Jody’s yard was not a regular quadrangle but a series of three-sided courts of unequal size and powerful charm. There were forty boxes altogether, few enough in any case to support such a lavish establishment, but since my horses had left I guessed there were only about twenty inmates remaining. Jody was in urgent need of another mug.

He had always economised on labour, reckoning that he and Felicity between them could do the work of four. His inexhaustible energy in fact ensured that no lads stayed in the yard very long as they couldn’t stand the pace. Since the last so-called head lad had left in dudgeon because Jody constantly usurped his authority, there had been no one but Jody himself in charge. It was unlikely, I thought, that in present circumstances he would have taken on another man, which meant that the cottage at the end of the yard would be empty.

There were at any rate no lights in it, and no anxious figure came scurrying out to see about the stranger in the night. I went with care to the first box in the first court and quietly slid back the bolts.

Inside stood a large chestnut mare languidly eating hay. She turned her face unexcitedly in the torchlight. A big white blaze down her forehead and nose. Asphodel.

I shut her door, inching home the bolts. Any sharp noise would carry clearly through the cold calm air and Jody’s subconscious ears would never sleep. The second box contained a heavy bay gelding with black points, the third a dark chestnut with one white sock. I went slowly round the first section of stables, shining the torch at each horse.

Instead of settling, my nerves got progressively worse. I had not yet found what I’d come for, and every passing minute made discovery more possible. I was careful with the torch. Careful with the bolts. My breath was shallow. I decided I’d make a rotten burglar.

Box number nine, in the next section, contained a dark brown gelding with no markings. The next box housed an undistinguished bay, the next another and the next another. After that came an almost black horse, with a slightly Arab looking nose, another very dark horse, and two more bays. The next three boxes all contained chestnuts, all unremarkable to my eyes. The last inhabited box held the only grey.

I gently shut the door of the grey and returned to the box of the chestnut next door. Went inside. Shone my torch over him carefully inch by inch.

I came to no special conclusion except that I didn’t know enough about horses.

I’d done all I could. Time to go home. Time for my heart to stop thudding at twice the speed of sound. I turned for the door.

Lights came on in a blaze. Startled I took one step towards the door. Only one.

Three men crowded into the opening.

Jody Leeds.

Ganser Mays.

Another man whom I didn’t know, whose appearance scarcely inspired joy and confidence. He was large, hard and muscular, and he wore thick leather gloves, a cloth cap pulled forward and, at two in the morning, sun glasses.

Whomever they had expected, it wasn’t me. Jody’s face held a mixture of consternation and anger, with the former winning by a mile.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’ he said.

There was no possible answer.

‘He isn’t leaving,’ Ganser Mays said. The eyes behind the metal rims were narrowed with ill intent and the long nose protruded sharply like a dagger. The urbane manner which lulled the clients while he relieved them of their cash had turned into the naked viciousness of the threatened criminal. Too late to worry that I’d cast myself in the role of threat.

‘What?’ Jody turned his face to him, not understanding.

‘He isn’t leaving.’

Jody said ‘How are you going to stop him?’

Nobody told him. Nobody told me, either. I took two steps towards the exit and found out.

The large man said nothing at all, but it was he who moved. A large gloved fist crashed into my ribs at the business end of a highly efficient short jab. Breath left my lungs faster than nature intended and I had difficulty getting it back.

Beyond schoolboy scuffles I had never seriously had to defend myself. No time to learn. I slammed an elbow at Jody’s face, kicked Ganser Mays in the stomach and tried for the door.

Muscles in cap and sun glasses knew all that I didn’t. An inch or two taller, a stone or two heavier, and warmed to his task. I landed one respectable punch on the junction of his nose and mouth in return for a couple of bangs over the heart, and made no progress towards freedom.

Jody and Ganser Mays recovered from my first onslaught and clung to me like limpets, one on each arm. I staggered under their combined weight. Muscles measured his distance and flung his bunched hand at my jaw. I managed to move my head just in time and felt the leather glove burn my cheek. Then the other fist came round, faster and crossing, and hit me square. I fell reeling across the box, released suddenly by Ganser Mays and Jody, and my head smashed solidly into the iron bars of the manger.

Total instant unconsciousness was the result.

Death must be like that, I suppose.