Knock Down

2

I sat in the driving seat of my car leaning my head against the window. Kerry Sanders sat beside me with the muddy packets of money on her expensive suede lap and unadulterated exasperation in her manner.

‘Well, I couldn’t just sit there and watch them putting you through a wringer,’ she said crossly. ‘Someone had to get you out of that fix, didn’t they?’

I said nothing. She had stepped out of the car and picked up the money and told the thugs to leave me alone. She said they could have the goddam horse and much good might it do them. She had not tried screaming for help or running away or anything equally constructive, but had acted on the great modern dictum that you became less of a hospital case if you gave in to threats of violence right away.

‘You looked as grey as death,’ she said. ‘What did you expect me to do? Sit and applaud?’

I didn’t answer.

‘What’s the matter with your goddam arm, anyway?’

‘It dislocates,’ I said. ‘The shoulder dislocates.’

‘All the time?’

‘Oh no. Not often. Only if it gets into one certain position. Then it falls apart, which is very boring. I wear the strap to prevent that happening.’

‘It isn’t dislocated now, is it?’

‘No.’ I smiled involuntarily. I tended not to be able to sit comfortably in cars whenever it went out.

‘Thanks to you,’ I added.

‘As long as you realise.’

‘Mm.’

They had taken the certificate of sale out of my pocket and had made Kerry Sanders write a receipt for the cash. Then they had simply walked away towards the centre of operations to claim their prize. Kerry Sanders had not felt like trying to stop them and I had still hardly been able to put one foot in front of the other with any certainty, and the one sure thing on that unsure afternoon was that Frizzy Hair and his pal would waste no time in driving off with Hearse Puller to destinations unknown. No one would question their right to the horse. Rapid post-sale sales were common.

‘Why?’ she said for the twentieth time. ‘Why did they want that goddam horse? Why that one?’

‘I absolutely don’t know.’

She sat fidgeting.

‘You said you’d be able to drive by four.’

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Five past.

‘Right.’ I removed my head from the window and gave it a small tentative shake. Reasonable order seemed to have returned in that department so I started the engine and turned out towards London. She made a rapid assessment of my ability to drive and relaxed a shade after we had gone half a mile without hitting anything. At that point grievance took over from shock.

‘I’m going to complain,’ she said with vigour.

‘Good idea. Who to?’

‘Who to?’ She sounded surprised. ‘To the auctioneers, of course.’

‘They’ll commiserate and do nothing.’

‘Of course they will. They’ll have to.’

I knew they wouldn’t. I said so.

She turned to look at me. ‘The Jockey Club, then. The racing authorities.’

‘They have no control... no jurisdiction... over the Sales.’

‘Who does, then?’

‘No one.’

Her voice sharpened with frustration. ‘We’ll tell the police.’

‘If you like.’

‘The Ascot police?’

‘All right.’

So I stopped at the police station and we told our story. Statements were taken and signed and no doubt filed as soon as we left, because as an overworked sergeant tiredly pointed out, we had not been robbed. A bang on the head, very nasty, very reprehensible, a lot of it about. But my wallet hadn’t been stolen, had it? Not even my watch? And these rough customers had actually given Mrs Sanders a profit of two hundred pounds. Where was the crime in that, might one ask?

We drove away, me in resignation, Kerry Sanders in a boiling fury.

‘I will not be pushed around,’ she exploded. ‘Someone... someone has got to do something.’

‘Mr Brevett?’ I suggested.

She gave me one of her sharp glances and noticeably cooled her voice.

‘I don’t want him bothered with this.’

‘No,’ I said.

We drove ten miles in thoughtful silence. She said eventually, ‘Can you find me another horse by Friday?’

‘I could try.’

‘Try, then.’

‘If I succeed can you guarantee that no one else will knock me on the head and pinch it?’

‘For a man who’s supposed to be tough,’ she said, ‘You’re soft.’

This dampening opinion led to a further five miles of silence. Then she said, ‘You didn’t know those two men, did you?’

‘No.’

‘But they knew you. They knew about your shoulder.’

‘They did indeed.’

‘You’d thought of that, had you?’ She sounded disappointed.

‘Mm,’ I said.

I steered with care through the London traffic and stopped outside the Berkeley Hotel, where she was staying.

‘Come in for a drink,’ she said. ‘You look as if you could use one.’

‘Er...’

‘Aw, c’mon,’ she said. ‘I won’t eat you.’

I smiled. ‘All right.’

Her suite looked out over Hyde Park with groups of riding school ponies trotting in the Row and knots of household cavalry practising for state occasions. Late afternoon sunshine slanted into the lilac and blue sitting-room and made prisms of the ice-cubes in our glasses.

She protested over my choice.

‘Are you sure you want Perrier?’ she said.

‘I like it.’

‘When I said come up for a drink, I meant... a drink.’

‘I’m thirsty,’ I said reasonably. ‘And a touch concussed. And I’m driving.’

‘Oh.’ Her manner changed subtly. ‘I understand,’ she said.

I sat down without being asked. It was all very well having had extensive experience of bangs on the head, but this had been the first for three years and the interval had not improved my speed of recovery.

She gave me a disillusioned glance and took off her beautiful muddied coat. Underneath she wore the sort of simplicity only the rich could afford on the sort of shape that was beyond price. She enjoyed quietly my silent appreciation and took it naturally as the most commonplace courtesy.

‘Now look,’ she said. ‘You haven’t said a goddam thing about what happened this afternoon. Now what I’d like is for you to tell me just what you think those men were up to, back there.’

I drank the fizzy water and fractionally shook my head.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you must have ideas,’ she protested.

‘No...’ I paused. ‘Did you tell anyone you were going to Ascot Sales? Did you mention me? Did you mention Hearse Puller?’

‘Hey, now,’ she said, ‘It was you they were after, not me.’

‘How do we know?’

‘Well... your shoulder.’

‘Your horse.’

She moved restlessly across the room, threw the coat over a chair and came back. The slim boots had dirty water marks round the edges of the uppers which looked incongruous against the pale mauve carpet.

‘I told maybe three people,’ she said. ‘Pauli Teksa was the first.’

I nodded. Pauli Teksa was the American who had given Kerry Sanders my name.

‘Pauli said you were an honest bloodstock agent and therefore as rare as fine Sundays.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Then,’ she said pensively, ‘I told the guy who fixes my hair.’

‘Who what?’

‘Hairdresser,’ she said. ‘Right downstairs here in the hotel.’

‘Oh.’

‘And I had lunch with Madge yesterday... Lady Ros-common. Just a friend.’

She sat down suddenly opposite in an armchair with a blue and white chintz cover. A large gin and french had brought sharp colour to her cheeks and a lessening in her slightly dictatorial manner. I had the impression that for the first time she was considering me as a man instead of as an employee who had fallen down (more or less literally) on the job.

‘Do you want to take your coat off?’ she asked.

‘I can’t stay,’ I said.

‘Well then... Do you want more of that goddam water?’

‘Please.’

She refilled my glass, brought it back, sat down.

‘Don’t you ever drink?’ she said.

‘Not often.’

‘Alcoholic?’ she said sympathetically.

I thought it odd of her to ask such a personal question, but I smiled, and said, ‘No.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Nearly all the non-drinkers I know are reformed alcoholics.’

‘I admire them,’ I said. ‘But no. I was hooked on coke at six. Never graduated.’

‘Oh.’ She seemed to lose interest in me. She said, ‘I am on the committee of a private hospital back home.’

‘Which dries out drunks?’

She didn’t care for the bluntness. ‘We treat people with a problem. Yes.’

‘Successfully?’

She sighed. ‘Some.’

I stood up. ‘You can’t win them all.’ I put the empty glass on a side-table and went ahead of her to the door.

‘You’ll let me know if you find another horse?’ she said.

I nodded.

‘And if you have any thoughts about those two men?’

‘Yes.’

I drove slowly home and put the car in the garage in the stable yard. The three racehorses there moved around restlessly in their boxes, mutely complaining because I was two hours late with their evening feed. They were horses in transit, waiting to be shipped by air to foreign buyers; not my horses but very much my responsibility.

I talked to them and fondled their muzzles, and straightened their boxes and gave them food and water and rugs against the October night, and finally, tiredly, took my own throbbing head into the house.

There was no wife there waiting with a smiling face and a hot tempting dinner. There was, however, my brother.

His car was in the garage next to mine, and there were no lights anywhere in the house. I walked into the kitchen, flicked the switch, washed my hands under the hot tap in the sink, and wished with all my heart that I could off-load my drinking problem on to Kerry Sanders and her do-good hospital.

He was in the dark sitting-room, snoring. Light revealed him lying face down on the sofa with the empty Scotch bottle on the carpet near his dangling hand.

He didn’t drink often. He tried very hard, and he was mostly the reason I stayed off it, because if I came home with alcohol on my breath he would smell it across the room, and it made him restless. It was no hardship for me, just a social nuisance, as Kerry Sanders was by no means alone in concluding that non-drinkers were ex-alcoholics. One had to drink to prove one wasn’t, like natural bachelors making an effort with girls.

We were not twins, though much alike. He was a year older, an inch shorter, better looking and not so dark. People had mistaken us for each other continually when we had been young, but less so now at thirty-four and thirty-five.

I picked up the empty bottle and took it out to the dustbin. Then I cooked some scrambled eggs and sat down at the kitchen table to eat, and over coffee and aspirin and a sore head put up a reasonable fight against depression.

There was much to be thankful for. I owned outright the house and stable yard and ten acres of paddocks, and after two years’ slog I was beginning to make it as an agent. On the debit side I had a busted marriage, a brother who lived off my earnings because he couldn’t keep a job,and a feeling that Frizzy Hair was only the tip of an iceberg.

I fetched a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote three names.

Pauli Teksa.

Hairdresser.

Lady Roscommon (Madge).

None looked a winner in the villainy stakes.

For good measure I added Kerry Sanders, Nicol Brevett, Constantine Brevett and two smiley thugs. Shake that lot together and what did we get? A right little ambush by someone who knew my weakest spot.

I spent the evening trying by telephone to find a replacement for Hearse Puller. Not easy. Trainers with horses the owners might sell were not keen to lose them from their yards, and I could give no guarantee that Nicol Brevett would leave his horse with its present trainer. Bound by Kerry Sanders, I could not even mention his name.

I reread the Ascot Sale catalogue for the following day but there was still nothing suitable, and finally with a sigh offered my custom to a bloodstock dealer called Ronnie North, who said he knew of a possible horse which he could get if I would play ball.

‘How much?’ I said.

‘Five hundred.’

He meant that he would sell me the horse for a price. I would then charge Kerry Sanders five hundred pounds more... and hand the five hundred over to North.

‘Too much,’ I said. ‘If you get me a good one for two thousand I’ll give you a hundred.’

‘Nuts.’

‘A hundred and fifty.’ I knew he would probably acquire the horse for maybe fifteen hundred pounds, and sell it to me for double: he always considered he had wasted his time if he made less than one hundred per cent profit. Squeezing a large chunk more from my client was just icing on the cake.

‘And,’ I said, ‘Before we go any further, I want to know about it.’

‘Do me a favour.’

He was afraid that if I knew who owned the horse I would go direct to the source, and cut him out altogether. I wouldn’t have done that, but he would, and he judged me by himself.

I said, ‘If you buy it and I don’t like it, I won’t take it.’

‘It’s what you want,’ he said. ‘You can trust me.’

I could perhaps trust his judgement of a horse, though that was absolutely all. If the horse hadn’t been for Nicol Brevett I might have taken a chance and bought blind, but in this case I could not afford to.

‘I have to O.K. it first.’

‘Then no deal,’ he said succinctly and disconnected.

I chewed the end of my pencil and thought about the bloodstock jungle which I had entered with such innocence two years earlier. It had been naive to imagine that all it took to be a bloodstock agent was a thorough knowledge of horses, an intimate relationship with the stud book, hundreds of acquaintances in the racing industry and a reasonable head for business. Initial surprise at the fiddles I saw all around me had long since passed from revulsion to cynicism, and I had grown a thick skin of self-preservation. I thought that sometimes it was difficult to perceive the honest course, and more difficult still to stick to it, when what I saw as dishonesty was so much the general climate.

I understood, after two years, that dishonesty was much a matter of opinion. There were no absolutes. A deal I thought scandalous might seem eminently reasonable to others. Ronnie North saw nothing wrong at all in milking the market for every possible penny: and moreover he was likeable to meet.

The telephone rang. I picked up the receiver.

‘Jonah?’

He was back, as I’d thought he might be.

‘The horse is River God. You have it for three thousand five hundred with five hundred on top.’

‘I’ll call you back.’

I looked up the River God form and consulted a jockey who’d ridden it a few times, and finally dialled Ronnie North.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Subject to a vet’s report, River God will do well.’

He said with elaborate resignation, ‘I told you, you can trust me.’

‘Yeah. I’ll give you two thousand five hundred.’

‘Three thousand,’ he said. ‘And that’s rock bottom. With five hundred to come.’

‘One fifty,’ I said positively, and compromised at a hundred more.

River God, my jockey friend had said, belonged to a farmer in Devon who had bought it unbroken at three years old as a point-to-point prospect for his son. Between them they’d done a poor job of the breaking and now the son couldn’t control the result. ‘He’s a ride for a pro,’ said my informant, ‘But he’s quite fast and a natural jumper, and they haven’t managed to cock that up.’

I stood up, stretched, and as it was by then half past ten, decided to tell Kerry Sanders in the morning. The room I used as an office, lined with book shelves and fitted cupboards, was half functional, half sitting-room, and mostly what I thought of as home. It had a lightish brown carpet, red woollen curtains and leather armchairs, and one big window which looked out to the stable yard. When I had tidied away the books and papers I’d been using I switched off the powerful desk lamp and stood by the window, looking out from darkness to moonlight.

Everything was quiet out there, the three lodgers patiently waiting for their aeroplane from Gatwick Airport five miles down the road. They should have been gone a week since and the overseas customers were sending irritable cables, but the shipping agents muttered on about unavoidable delays and kept saying the day after tomorrow.

‘The day after tomorrow never comes,’ I said, but they didn’t think it funny.

I used the yard as a staging post and seldom kept horses there more than a night or two. They were a tie, because I looked after them myself, and I did that because until recently I had not been earning enough to think of employing anyone else.

In my first year in the business I had negotiated fifty sales, and in my second ninety three, and during the past three months I had been almost constantly busy. Given a bit of luck, I thought, like, say, buying a Derby winner for five thousand as a yearling... just some such impossible bit of luck... I might yet achieve tax problems.

I left the office and went to the sitting-room. My brother Crispin was still where I’d left him, face down, snoring, spark out. I fetched a rug and draped it over him, knowing he wouldn’t wake for hours, and that when he did he would be in his usual violent hangover temper, spewing out his bitter resentments like untreated effluent.

We had been orphaned when I was sixteen and he seventeen, first by a riding accident which killed our mother, and then three months later by a blood clot in Father. Abruptly, almost from one week to the next, our lives changed to the roots. We had been brought up in comfort in a house in the country, with horses to ride and a cook and gardener and stablemen to do the work. We went to expensive boarding schools and thought it natural, and holidayed on grouse moors in Scotland.

The glitter had by no means been founded on gold. Solicitors gravely told us that our parent had mortgaged all he possessed, had borrowed on his life assurance, had sold the family treasures and was only a Degas sketch away from bankruptcy. He had, it appeared, been living on the brink of disaster for several years, always finding a last minute goody to send to Sotheby’s. When his debts had been paid and house, horses, cook, gardener, stablemen and all had vanished into limbo, Crispin and I, without close relatives, were left with no home to go to and precisely one hundred and forty-three pounds each.

The school had been understanding but not to the point of keeping us without fees. We had finished the Easter term, but that was that.

It had affected Crispin more than me. He had been aiming for university and the law and could not bring himself to settle for the generously offered Articles in the grave solicitor’s office. My more practical nature saved me from such torments. I faced prosaically the fact that from now on I would need to work to eat, totted up my assets which proved to be a thin body, good health and a certain facility on horseback, and got myself a job as a stable lad.

Crispin had been furious with me but I’d been happy. I was not academic. Stable life, after the confines of school, had been a marvellous freedom. I never regretted what I’d lost.

I left him snoring and went upstairs to bed, thinking about our different fates. Crispin had tried stockbroking and insurance and felt he had not been appreciated, and I, in becoming a jockey, had found total fulfilment. I always reckoned I’d had by far the best of it and didn’t begrudge anything I could do to compensate.

My bedroom like the office looked out to the yard, and except when it was freezing I slept with the window open. At twelve thirty I woke from the depths with the sudden instant awareness of the subconscious hitting the alarm switch.

I lay tinglingly awake, listening at full stretch, not knowing what I’d heard but sure that it was wrong.

Then unmistakably it came again. The scrape of a hoof on a hard surface. The clop of horse shoes where they had no business to be at that time of night.

I flung back the duvet and jumped to the window.

No movement down there in the moonlit yard. Just a yawning black oblong which should have been filled by a firmly closed stable door.

I cursed with a sinking heart. The most valuable of my lodgers, all seventy thousand pounds worth, was out loose on the dangerous roads of Surrey.