Knock Down

14

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

‘Positive.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘I reckon you could, if you wanted to.’

‘How did he do it?’

‘See... it was about three years ago... he shipped a four-year-old stallion out to Japan. Polyprint, it was called.’

I said, ‘I remember that. It died on the way.’

‘Ay. It did. And Vic had insured it for a hundred and fifteen thousand for the journey, with himself to collect if anything happened to the horse.’

‘Nothing especially unusual in that.’

‘No. And he insured it a week before it was due to go. That is what made the insurance firm pay up. Because a week before the horse set off, Vic couldn’t have known it was going to die, because a vet had been over it from nose to arse and given it the O.K., and it was the High Power Company’s own vet, which strung them up proper.’

‘I can’t remember what it died of...’

‘Tetanus,’ he said. ‘Three days by air to Japan. They took it out of Gatwick looking as right as rain... it walked up the ramp into the aircraft as quiet as you please. By the time they got to the Middle East it was sweating something chronic. Next stop, they got it out and walked it around, but it was staggering a bit. Next stop they had a local vet waiting. Tetanus, he said. So they cabled the insurance company and they wanted to send their own man out to take a look. See, there was a lot of brass involved. Anyway he never went because the horse died while he was still in England getting cholera jabs or something. So Vic claims the money, and the High Power has to pay up.’

‘Did Vic travel with the horse himself?’

‘No. He was right here in England.’

‘So... where was the fraud?’

‘Ah... See, the horse that set off for Japan and died of tetanus, that horse wasn’t Polyprint.’

He lit a cigarette, absorbed in his story.

‘It was a horse called Nestegg.’

I stared at him. ‘Nestegg is standing at stud in Ireland.’

‘Ay,’ he said. ‘And that’s Polyprint.’

The gaunt face twisted into the ghost of a smile. ‘See, Vic bought Nestegg because he had a client who wanted it. Nestegg was six and had won a few long distance races, and this client had a small stud and wanted a stallion that wouldn’t cost too much. Well, Vic bought Nestegg for ten thousand and was going to pass him on for fifteen, and then this client just dropped down dead one afternoon and the widow said nothing doing she didn’t want to know. Vic wasn’t much worried because Nestegg wasn’t bad, really.’

He took a few deep puffs, sorting things out.

‘One evening I was at Vic’s place near Epsom and we looked round the yard, like one does. He shows me Polyprint, who’s due to set off to Japan the next day. Big bay horse. Full of himself. Then, three boxes along, there was Nestegg. Another bay, much the same. We went in and looked at him and he was standing there all hunched up and sweating. Vic looked him over and said he would go out and see him again later, and if he was no better he would get the vet in the morning. Then we went into Vic’s house for a drink, and then I went home.’

He looked at me broodingly.

‘So the next day off goes this horse to Japan and dies of tetanus two days later. Next time I saw Vic he sort of winks at me and gives me a thousand quid in readies, and I laughed and took it. Then later he sold this bay which he still had, which was supposed to be Nestegg but was really Polyprint, he sold him to a stud in Ireland for seventeen thousand. He wouldn’t have made a penny if he’d sent Polyprint off to Japan and got a vet to try to save Nestegg. Just by swapping those two horses when he had the chance, he made himself a proper packet.’

‘And it gave him a taste for more easy money in large amounts?’

‘Ay... It was after that that he latched on to the kick-backs in a big way. He asked me to help... Tell you the truth, I was glad to.’

‘And he found this expert,’ I said.

‘Ay...’ He hesitated. ‘It was maybe the other way round. Vic more or less said this chap had come to him and suggested more ways Vic could make money.’

‘He hadn’t done so badly on his own,’ I observed.

‘Well... Polyprint was a one-off, see. You couldn’t work that again. He only did it because he realised Nestegg had tetanus and would die pretty quickly if he wasn’t treated and even maybe if he was. See, tetanus isn’t that common. You couldn’t have two die of it on journeys when they were heavily insured, even if you could infect them on purpose, which you can’t. Vic walked that horse around all night to keep it moving and fed it a bucketful of tranquillisers so that it looked all right when it was loaded on to the plane at Gatwick. But to get another one to die on a journey you’d have to fix some sort of accident. The insurance people would be dead suspicious, and even if they paid up they might afterwards refuse to insure you altogether and you couldn’t risk that, see. But the thing about this expert chap was that nearly everything he suggested was legal. Vic said it was like property development and land speculation. You could make a great deal of money without breaking the law if you knew how to set about it.’

The police were understandably sour about my assertion that I had fallen on the pitchfork by accident and that Fynedale was as innocent of assault as a bunch of violets. They argued and I insisted, and half an hour later Fynedale stood outside on the pavement shivering in the wind.

‘Thanks,’ he said briefly. He looked shrunken and depressed.

He huddled inside his jacket, turned on his heel, and walked away up the street to the railway station. The carrot hair was a receding orange blob against the dead copper leaves of a beech hedge.

Sophie was waiting by the kerb, sitting in the driving seat of my car. I opened the passenger side door and slid in beside her.

‘Will you drive?’ I said.

‘If you like.’

I nodded.

‘You look bushed,’ she said. She started the engine, shifted the gears, and edged out into the road.

‘Couldn’t beat Muhammed AH right now.’

She smiled. ‘How did it go?’

‘Like a torrent, once he’d started.’

‘What did you learn?’

I thought, trying to put everything into its right order. Sophie drove carefully, flicking glances across, waiting for an answer.

I said, ‘Vic swindled an insurance company very neatly, about three years ago. Some time after that someone who Fynedale calls an expert sought Vic out and suggested a sort of alliance, in which Vic would extort money in various more or less legal ways and pay a proportion of it to the expert. I imagine this expert guessed Vic had swindled the insurance and was therefore a good prospect for a whole career of legal robbery.’

‘There’s no such thing as legal robbery.’

I smiled. ‘How about wealth taxes?’

‘That’s different.’

‘Taking by law is legal robbery.’

‘Ah well... go on about Vic.’

‘Vic and the expert started redistributing wealth in no uncertain terms, chiefly into their own pockets but with enough pickings to entice six or seven other agents into the ring.’

‘Fynedale?’ Sophie said.

‘Yes. Especially Fynedale, as he knew about the original insurance swindle. It just seems to have been my bad luck that I started being an agent at about the time Vic and the expert were warming things up. Pauli Teksa had a theory that Vic and his friends wanted me out of the way because I was a threat to their monopoly, and from what Fynedale says I should think he might have been right, though I thought it was nonsense when he suggested it.’

I yawned. Sophie drove smoothly, as controlled at the wheel as everywhere else. She had taken off the fur-lined hood, and the silver blonde hair fell gently to her shoulders. Her profile was calm, efficient, content. I thought that probably I did love her, and would for a long time. I also guessed that however often I might ask her to marry me, in the end she would not. The longer and better I knew her, the more I realised that she was by nature truly solitary. Lovers she might take, but a bustling family life would be alien and disruptive. I understood why her four years with the pilot had been a success: it was because of his continual long absences, not in spite of them. I understood her lack of even the memory of inconsolable grief. His death had merely left her where she basically liked to be, which was alone.

‘Go on about Vic,’ she said.

‘Oh... well... They started this campaign of harassment. Compulsory purchase of Hearse Puller at Ascot. Sending Fred Smith down to my place to do what harm he could, which turned out to be giving Crispin whiskey and letting loose that road-hogging two-year-old. Arrang ing for me to buy and lose River God. When all that, and a few bits of intimidation from Vic himself, failed to work, they reckoned that burning my stable would do the trick.’

‘Their mistake.’

‘Yeah... well... they did it.’ I yawned again. ‘Fred Smith, now. Vic and the expert needed some muscle. Ronnie North knew Fred Smith. Vic must have asked Ronnie if he knew anyone suitable and Ronnie suggested Fred Smith.’

‘Bingo.’

‘Mm... You know something odd?’

‘What?’

‘The insurance company that Vic swindled was the one Crispin used to work for.’

Sophie made us tea in her flat. We sat side by side on the sofa, bodies casually touching in intimate friendship, sipping the hot reviving liquid.

‘I ought to sleep a bit,’ she said. ‘I’m on duty at eight.’

I looked at my watch. Four thirty, and darkening already towards the winter night. It had seemed a long day.

‘Shall I go?’

She smiled. ‘Depends how sore you are.’

‘Sex is a great anaesthetic.’

‘Nuts.’

We went to bed and put it fairly gently to the test, and certainly what I felt most was not the stab along my rib.

The pattern as before: sweet, intense, lingering, a vibration of subtle pleasure from head to foot. She breathed softly and slowly and smiled with her eyes, as close as my soul and as private as her own.

Eventually she said sleepily, ‘Do you always give girls what suits them best?’

I yawned contentedly. ‘What suits them best is best for me.’

‘The voice of experience...’ She smiled drowsily, drifting away.

We woke to the clatter of her alarm less than two hours later.

She stretched out a hand to shut it off, then rolled her head over on the pillow for a kiss.

‘Better than sleeping pills,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’d slept all night.’

She made coffee and rapid bacon and eggs, because to her it seemed time for breakfast, and in an organised hurry she offered her cheek in goodbye on the pavement and drove away to work.

I watched her rear lights out of sight. I remembered I had read somewhere that air traffic controllers had the highest divorce rates on earth.

Wilton Young came to Cheltenham races the following day in spite of the basic contempt he held for steeple-chasing because of is endemic shortage of brass. He came because the rival tycoon who was sponsoring the day’s big race had asked him, and the first person he saw at the pre-lunch reception was me.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said bluntly.

‘I was invited.’

‘Oh.’

He didn’t quite ask why, so I told him. ‘I rode a few winners for our host.’

He cast his mind back and gave a sudden remembering nod. ‘Ay. So you did.’

A waiter offered a silver tray with glasses of champagne. Wilton Young took one, tasted it with a grimace, and said he would tell me straight he would sooner have had a pint of bitter.

‘I’m afraid I may have some disappointing news for you,’ I said.

He looked immediately belligerent. ‘Exactly what?’

‘About Fynedale.’

‘Him!’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Any bad news about him is good news.’

I said, ‘The man I sent to South Africa says he can’t swear the extra horses he looked after on the way were yours.’

‘You seemed sure enough that he would.’

‘He says he had the impression they were yours, but he couldn’t be sure.’

‘That’ll not stand up in court.’

‘No.’

He grunted. ‘I’ll not sue, then. I’ll not throw good brass after bad. Suing’s a mug’s game where there’s any doubt.’

His plain honesty rebuked me for the lie I’d told him. My man had been absolutely positive about the horses’ ownership: he’d seen the papers. I reckoned my promise to get Fynedale off was fully discharged and from there on he would have to take his chances.

‘What’s past is past,’ Wilton Young said. ‘Cut your losses. Eh, lad?’

‘I guess so,’ I said.

‘Take my word for it. Now, look here. I’ve a mind to buy an American horse. Tough, that’s what they are. Tough as if they came from Yorkshire.’ He wasn’t joking. ‘There’s one particular one I want you to go and buy for me. He comes up for sale soon after Christmas.’

I stared at him, already guessing.

‘Phoenix Fledgeling. A two-year-old. Ever heard of it?’

‘Did you know,’ I said, ‘That Constantine Brevett is after it too?’

He chuckled loudly. ‘Why the hell do you think I want it? Put his bloody superior nose out of joint. Eh, lad?’

The bloody superior nose chose that precise moment to arrive at the reception, closely accompanied by the firm mouth, smooth grey hair, thick black spectacle frames and general air of having come straight from some high up chairmanship in the City.

As his height and booming voice instantly dominated the assembly, I reflected that the advantage always seemed to go to the one who arrived later: maybe if Constantine and Wilton Young both realised it they would try so hard to arrive after each other that neither would appear at all, which might be a good idea all round. Constantine’s gaze swept authoritatively over the guests and stopped abruptly on Wilton Young and me. He frowned very slightly. His mouth marginally compressed. He gave us five seconds uninterrupted attention, and then looked away.

‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ I said slowly, ‘That it might just be your nose that he’s putting out of joint?’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘How many times have you had to out-bid him to get a horse?’

He chuckled. ‘Can’t remember. I’ve beaten him more times than he’s sold office blocks.’

‘He’s cost you a great deal of money.’

The chuckle died ‘That was bloody Fynedale and Vic Vincent.’

‘But... what if Constantine approved... or even planned it?’

‘You’re chasing the wrong rabbit, I tell thee straight.’

I chewed my lower lip. ‘As long as you’re happy.’

‘Ay.’

Nicol won the amateurs’ race by some startlingly aggressive tactics that wrung obscenities from his opponents and some sharp-eyed looks from the Stewards. He joined me afterwards with defiance flying like banners.

‘How about that, then?’ he said, attacking first.

‘If you were a pro on the Flat you’d have been suspended.’

‘That’s right.’

‘A proper sportsman,’ I said dryly.

‘I’m not in it for the sport.’

‘What then?’

‘Winning.’

‘Just like Wilton Young,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Neither of you cares what winning costs.’

He glared. ‘It cost you enough in your time in smashed up bones.’

‘Well... maybe everyone pays in the way that matters to them least.’

‘I don’t give a damn what the others think of me.’

‘That’s what I mean.’

We stood in silence, watching horses go by. All my life I’d stood and watched horses go by. There were a lot worse ways of living.

‘When you grow up,’ I said, ‘You’ll be a bloody good jockey.’

‘You absolute sod.’ The fury of all his twenty-two pampered years bunched into fists. Then with the speed of all his mercurial changes he gave me instead the brief, flashing, sardonic smile. ‘OK. OK. OK. I just aged five years.’

He turned on his heel and strode away, and although I didn’t know it until afterwards, he walked straight into the Clerk of the Course’s office and filled out an application form for a licence.

Vic didn’t come to Cheltenham races. I had business with him, however, so after a certain amount of private homework I drove to his place near Epsom early on the following morning.

He lived as he dressed, a mixture of distinguished traditional and flashy modern. The house, down a short well-kept drive off a country by-road on the outskirts of Oxshott Woods, had at heart the classically simple lines of early Victorian stone. Stuck on the back was an Edwardian outcrop of kitchens and bathrooms and to one side sprawled an extensive new single storey wing which proved to embrace a swimming pool, a garden room, and a suite for guests.

Vic was in his stable, a brick-built quadrangle standing apart from the house. He came out of its archway, saw me standing by my car and walked across with no welcome written plain on his large unsmiling face.

‘What the hell do you want?’ he said.

‘To talk to you.’

The cold sky was thick with clouds and the first heavy drops spoke of downpours to come. Vic looked irritated and said he had nothing to say.

‘I have,’ I said.

It began to rain in earnest. Vic turned on his heel and hurried away towards the house, and I followed him closely. He was even more irritated to find me going in with him through his own door.

‘I’ve nothing to say,’ he repeated.

‘You’ll listen, then.’

We stood in a wide passage running between the old part of the house and the new, with central heating rushing out past us into the chilly air of Surrey. Vic tightened his mouth, shut the outer door, and jerked his head for me to follow.

Money had nowhere been spared. Large expanses of pale blue carpeting stretched to the horizon. Huge plushy sofas stood around. Green plants the size of saplings sprouted from Greek looking pots. He probably had a moon bath, I thought, with gold taps: and a water bed for sleep.

I remembered the holes in Antonia Huntercombe’s ancient chintz. Vic’s legal robbery had gone a long way too far.

He took me to the room at the far end of the hallway, his equivalent of my office. From there the one window looked out to the pool, with the guest rooms to the left, and the garden room to the right. His rows of record books were much like mine, but there ended the resemblance between the two rooms. His had bright new paint, pale blue carpet, three or four Florentine mirrors, Bang and Olufsen stereo and a well stocked bar.

‘Right,’ Vic said. ‘Get it over. I’ve no time to waste.’

‘Ever heard of a horse called Polyprint?’ I said.

He froze. For countable seconds not a muscle twitched. Then he blinked.

‘Of course.’

‘Died of tetanus.’

‘Yes.’

‘Ever heard of Nestegg?’

If I’d run him through with a knitting needle he would have been no more surprised. The stab went through him visibly. He didn’t answer.

‘When Nestegg was foaled,’ I said conversationally, ‘There was some doubt as to his paternity. One of two stallions could have covered the dam. So the breeder had Nestegg’s blood typed.’

Vic gave a great imitation of Lot’s wife.

‘Nestegg’s blood was found to be compatible with one of the stallions, but not with the other. Records were kept. Those records still exist.’

No sign.

‘A full brother of Polyprint is now in training in Newmarket.’

Nothing.

I said, ‘I have arranged a blood test for the horse now known as Nestegg. You and I both know that his blood type will be entirely different from that recorded for Nestegg as a foal. I have also arranged a blood test for Polyprint’s full brother. And his blood type will be entirely compatible with the one found in the supposed Nestegg.’

‘You bugger.’ The words exploded from him, all the more forceful for his unnatural immobility.

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘The tests have not yet been made, and in certain circumstances I would cancel them.’

His breath came back. He moved. ‘What circumstances?’ he said.

‘I want an introduction.’

‘A what?’

‘To a friend of yours. The friend who drew up the agreement that the breeder of the Transporter colt signed. The friend who decided to burn my stable.’

Vic moved restlessly.

‘Impossible.’

I said without heat, ‘It’s either that or I write to the High Power Insurance people.’

He fidgeted tensely with some pens lying on his desk.

‘What would you do if you met... this friend?’

‘Negotiate for permanent peace.’

He picked up a calendar, looked at it unseeingly, and put it down.

‘Today’s Saturday,’ I said. ‘The blood tests are scheduled for Monday morning. If I meet your friend today or tomorrow, I’ll call them off.’

He was more furious than frightened, but he knew as well as I did that those blood tests would be his first step to the dock. What I didn’t know was whether Vic like Fred Smith would swallow the medicine with, so to speak, his mouth shut.

Vic said forcefully, ‘You’d always have that threat over me. It’s bloody blackmail.’

‘Sort of,’ I agreed.

Ripples of resentment screwed up his face. I watched him searching for a way out.

‘Face to face with your friend,’ I said. ‘Five minutes will do. That’s not much when you think what you stand to lose if I don’t get it.’ I gestured round his bright room and out to the luxurious pool. ‘Built on Polyprint’s insurance, no doubt.’

He banged his fist down on the desk, making the pins rattle.

‘Bloody Fynedale told you,’ he shouted. ‘It must have been. I’ll murder the little rat.’

I didn’t exactly deny it, but instead I said matter-of-factly, ‘One calculation you left out... my brother Crispin worked for High Power.’