Nerve

Ten

Late that Monday evening James rang me up at my digs and told me that I could ride his own horse, Turniptop, which was due to run in the novice ’chase at Stratford-on-Avon on the following Thursday. I began to thank him, but he interrupted, ‘I’m doing you no favour. You know it won’t win. He’s never been over fences, only hurdles, and all I want is for you to give him an easy race round, getting used to the bigger obstacles. All right?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right.’ And he rang off. There was no mention of whether he would or would not contemplate juggling with sugar knobs.

I was tired. I had spent the whole day driving to Devon and back to visit Art Mathews’s beautiful widow, the ice maiden. A fruitless journey. She had been as chilly as ever. Widowhood had warmed her no more than wifehood had done. Blonde, well-bred and cold, she had answered my questions calmly and incuriously and with a complete lack of interest. Art had been dead four months. She spoke of him as though she could barely remember what he had looked like. No, she did not know exactly why Art had quarrelled so continuously with Corin. No, she did not know why Art had thought fit to shoot himself. No, Art had not got on well with Mr. John Ballerton, but she did not know why. Yes, Art had once appeared on television on Turf Talk. It had not been a success, she said, the shadow of an old grievance sharpening her voice. Art had been made to look a fool. Art, whose meticulous sense of honour and order had earned him only respect on the racecourse, had been made to look a cantankerous, mean-minded fool. No, she could not remember exactly how it had been done, but she did remember, only too well, the effect it had had on her own family and friends. They had, it appeared, loudly pitied her on her choice of husband.

But I, listening to her, inwardly pitied poor dead Art on his choice of wife.

On the following day, Tuesday, I again appropriated the Mini-Cooper, much to Tick-Tock’s disgust. This time I went towards Cheltenham, and called at Peter Cloony’s neat, new bungalow, turning down the narrow, winding lane from the high main road to the village in the hollow.

Peter’s wife opened the door to me and asked me in with a strained smile. She no longer looked happy and rosily content. She was too thin, and her hair hung straight and wispy round her neck. It was very nearly as cold inside the house at it was outside, and she wore some tattered fur boots, thick stockings, bulky clothes, and gloves. With no lipstick and no life in her eyes, she was almost unrecognisable as the loving girl who had put me up for the night four months ago.

‘Come in,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid Peter isn’t here. He was given a lift to Birmingham races... perhaps he’ll get a spare ride...’ She spoke without hope.

‘Of course he will,’ I said. ‘He’s a good jockey.’

‘The trainers don’t seem to think so,’ she said despairingly. ‘Ever since he lost his regular job, he’s barely had one ride a week. We can’t live on it, how could we? If things don’t change very soon, he’s going to give up racing and try something else. But he only cares for horses and racing... it will break his heart if he has to leave it.’

She had taken me into the sitting-room. It was as bare as before. Barer. The rented television set had gone. In its place stood a baby’s cot, a wickerwork basket affair on a metal stand. I went over and looked down at the tiny baby, only a small bump under the mound of blankets. He was asleep. I made admiring remarks about what I could see of him, and his mother’s face momentarily livened up with pleasure.

She insisted on making us a cup of tea, and I had to wait until the question of no milk, no sugar, no biscuits had all been settled before asking her what I really wanted to know.

I said, ‘That Jaguar — the one which blocked the lane and made Peter late — who did it belong to?’

‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘It was very odd. No one came to move it away and it stayed across the lane all that morning. In the end the police arranged for it to be towed away. I know Peter asked the police who owned it, because he wanted to tell the man just what his filthy Jaguar had cost him, but they said they hadn’t yet traced him.’

‘You don’t happen to know where the Jaguar is now?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know if it is still there,’ she said, ‘but it used to be outside the big garage beside Timberley Station. They’re the only garage round here with a breakdown truck, and they were the ones who towed it away.’

I thanked her and stood up, and she came out to the car with me to say good-bye. I had spent some time going through the form book adding up the number of races Peter had ridden during the past few weeks, and I knew how little he had earned. I had brought with me a big box of groceries, butter, eggs, cheese, and so on, and a stack of tins, and also a string of plastic ducks for the baby. This collection I carried back into the bungalow and dumped on the kitchen table, ignoring her surprised protest as she followed me in.

I grinned. ‘They are too heavy to take back. You’ll have to make the best of it.’

She began to cry.

‘Cheer up,’ I said, ‘things will get better soon. But meanwhile, don’t you think the bungalow is too cold for a baby? I read somewhere that some babies die every winter from breathing freezing air, even though they may be as warmly wrapped up as yours is.’

She looked at me aghast, tears trickling down her cheeks.

‘You ought to heat that room a little, and especially keep it warm all night too, if he sleeps in there,’ I said.

‘But I can’t,’ she said jerkily, ‘the payments on the bungalow take nearly all we have... we can’t afford a fire, except just in the evenings. Is it really true about the babies dying?’

She was frightened.

‘Yes, quite true,’ I said. I took a sealed envelope out of my pocket and gave it to her. ‘This is a present for the baby. Warmth. It’s not a fortune, but it will pay your electricity bills for a while, and buy some coal if you want it. There’s likely to be a lot of cold weather coming, so you must promise to spend most of it on keeping warm.’

‘I promise,’ she said faintly.

‘Good.’ I smiled at her as she wiped her eyes, and I went back to the car and drove away up the lane.

The garage at Timberley Station was a modernised affair with the front all snowy plaster and the back, when I walked round there, of badly pointed cheap brickwork. The elderly abandoned Jaguar stood there, tucked away between the burnt-out remains of a Standard 8 and a pile of old tyres. I went back to the front of the garage to talk to the man in charge, and I asked him if I could buy the car.

‘Sorry, sir, no can do,’ he said breezily. He was a dapper thirtyish man with no oil on his hands.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look good for anything but the scrap heap.’

‘I can’t sell it to you because I don’t know who it belongs to,’ he said regretfully, ‘but,’ he brightened, ‘it’s been here so long now that it might be mine after all... like unclaimed lost property. I’ll ask the police.’

With a bit of prompting he told me all about the Jaguar being stuck across the lane and how his firm had fetched it.

I said, ‘But someone must have seen the driver after he left the car?’

‘The police think he must have got a lift, and then decided the car wasn’t worth coming back for. But it’s in good enough order. And it wasn’t hot... stolen, I mean.’

‘What’s it worth,’ I asked.

‘To you, sir,’ he smiled glossily, ‘I’d have let it go for a hundred pounds.’

A hundred. I parted from him and strolled out on to the forecourt. Was it worth a hundred to Kemp-Lore I wondered, to ruin Peter Cloony? Was his obsessive hatred of jockeys so fierce? But then a hundred to Kemp-Lore, I reflected, was probably a lot less than a hundred to me.

Timberley railway station (six stopping trains a day and twenty-two expresses) lay on my left. I stood and considered it. The station was nearly four miles from the top of the lane leading to Peter’s village; say an hour’s quick walk. Peter had found the Jaguar across the lane at eleven o’clock, and it had to have been jammed in position only seconds before he came up the hill, as his had been the first car to be obstructed. I had a vivid mental picture of Kemp-Lore parked in the gateway where the lane began to curve downwards, watching Peter’s house through binoculars, seeing him go out and get into his car and start on his way to the races. There wouldn’t have been much time to force the Jaguar into position, lock its door and disappear before Peter got there. Not much time: but enough.

And then? The one tremendous disadvantage Kemp-Lore had to overcome, I thought, was his own fame. His face was so well known to almost the entire British population that he could not hope to move about the country inconspicuously, and wherever he went he would be noticed and remembered. Surely, I thought, in this sparsely populated area, it should be possible to find someone who had seen him.

As I was there anyway, I started with the station. Outside, I looked up the times of the stopping trains. There was, I found, a down train at twelve-thirty but no up train until five o’clock. The only other trains ran early in the morning and later in the evening. The booking office was shut. I found the clerk-ticket-collector-porter nodding over a hot stove and a racing paper in the parcels office. A large basket of hens squawked noisily in a corner as I walked in, and he woke with a jerk and told me the next train was due in one hour and ten minutes.

I got him talking via the racing news, but there was nothing to learn. Maurice Kemp-Lore had never (more’s the pity he said) caught a train at Timberley. If it had happened when he was off-duty, he’d have heard about it all right. And yes, he said, he’d been on duty the day they’d fetched the Jaguar down to the garage. Disgusting that. Shouldn’t be allowed, people being rich enough to chuck their old cars in the ditch like cigarette ends.

I asked him if the station had been busy that day: if there had been a lot of passengers catching the midday train.

‘A lot of passengers?’ he repeated scornfully. ‘Never more than three or four, excepting Cheltenham race days...’

‘I was just wondering,’ I said idly, ‘whether the chap who left his Jaguar behind could have caught a train from here that morning?’

‘Not from here, he didn’t,’ the railway man said positively. ‘Because, same as usual, all the people who caught the train were ladies.’

‘Ladies?’

‘Yeh, women. Shopping in Cheltenham. We haven’t had a man catch the midday — excepting race days of course — since young Simpkins from the garage got sent home with chickenpox last summer. Bit of a joke it is round here, see, the midday.’

I gave him a hot tip for Birmingham that afternoon (which won, I was glad to see later) and left him busily putting a call through to his bookmaker on the government’s telephone bill.

Timberley village pub, nearly empty, had never been stirred, they told me regretfully, by the flashing presence of Maurice Kemp-Lore.

The two transport cafés along the main road hadn’t heard of any of their chaps giving him a lift.

None of the garages within ten miles had seen him ever.

The local taxi service had never driven him. He had never caught a bus on the country route.

It wasn’t hard at each place to work conversation round to Kemp-Lore, but it was never quick. By the time a friendly bus conductor had told me, over a cigarette at the Cheltenham terminus, that none of his mates had ever had such a famous man on board because they’d never have kept quiet about it (look how Bill went on for days and days when Dennis Compton took a tenpenny single), it was seven o’clock in the evening.

If I hadn’t been so utterly, unreasonably sure that it was Kemp-Lore who had abandoned the Jaguar, I would have admitted that if no one had seen him, then he hadn’t been there. As it was, I was depressed by the failure of my search, but not convinced that there was nothing to search for.

The army tank carrier that had blocked Peter’s and my way to Cheltenham was there accidentally: that much was clear. But Peter had got into such trouble for being late that a weapon was put straight into the hand of his enemy. He had only had to make Peter late again, and to spread his little rumours, and the deed was done. No confidence, no rides, no career for Cloony.

I found I still hoped by perseverance to dig something up, so I booked a room in a hotel in Cheltenham, and spent the evening in a cinema to take my mind off food. On the telephone Tick-Tock sounded more resigned than angry to hear that he would be car-less yet again. He asked how I was getting on, and when I reported no progress, he said, ‘If you’re right about our friend, he’s as sly and cunning as all get out. You won’t find his tracks too easily.’

Without much hope I went down in the morning to the Cheltenham railway station and sorted out, after a little difficulty with old time-sheets and the passing of a pound note, the man who had collected the tickets from the passengers on the stopping train from Timberley on the day the Jaguar was abandoned.

He was willing enough, but he too had never seen Kemp-Lore, except on television; though he hesitated while he said so.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Well, sir, I’ve never seen him, but I think I’ve seen his sister.’

‘What was she like?’ I asked.

‘Very like him, of course, sir, or I wouldn’t have known who she was. And she had riding clothes on. You know — jodhpurs, I think they’re called. And a scarf over her head. Pretty she looked, very pretty. I couldn’t think who she was for a bit, and then it came to me, afterwards like. I didn’t talk to her, see? I just took her ticket when she went through the barrier, that’s all. I remember taking her ticket.’

‘When was it that you saw her?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I couldn’t say. I don’t rightly know when it was. Before Christmas though, some time before Christmas, I’m certain of that.’

He flipped the pound I gave him expertly into an inner pocket. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you indeed,’ he said.

I dressed and shaved with particular care on the Thursday morning as, I supposed, a sort of barrier against the reception I knew I was going to meet. It was six days since I had been racing, six days in which my shortcomings and the shreds of my riding reputation would have been brought up, pawed over and discarded. Life moved fast in the changing-room: today was important, tomorrow more so; but yesterday was dead. I belonged to yesterday. I was ancient news.

Even my valet was surprised to see me, although I had written to say I was coming.

‘You are riding today then?’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you wanted to sell your saddle... there’s a boy just starting who needs one.’

‘I’ll keep it a bit longer,’ I said. ‘I’m riding Turniptop in the fourth. Mr. Axminster’s colours.’

It was a strange day. As I no longer felt that I deserved the pitying glances to which I was treated, I found that they had, to a great extent, ceased to trouble me, and I even watched with fair equanimity the success of two of my ex-mounts in the first two races. The only thing I worried about was whether or not James would have both sugar lumps in his pocket and willingness in his heart.

He was so busy with his other runners that I did not exchange more than a few words with him during the first part of the afternoon, and when I went out into the parade ring to join him for Turniptop’s race, he was standing alone, thoughtfully gazing into the distance.

‘Maurice Kemp-Lore’s here,’ he said abruptly.

‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I saw him.’

‘He has given sugar to several horses already.’

‘What?’ I exclaimed.

‘I have asked quite a few people... Maurice has been feeding sugar to any number of horses during the past few weeks, not only to the ones you have ridden.’

‘Oh,’ I said weakly. Cunning as all get out, Tick-Tock had said.

‘None of the horses you rode were picked for the regulation dope test,’ said James, ‘but some of the other horses Maurice gave sugar to were tested. All negative.’

‘He only gave doped sugar to my mounts. The rest were camouflage, and he was damn lucky that the horses I rode weren’t tested,’ I said. It sounded improbable, but I was sure of it.

James shook his head.

‘Did you...?’ I began without much hope, ‘Did he... Kemp-Lore... try to give Turniptop any sugar?’

James compressed his lips and stared into the middle distance. I positively held my breath.

‘He did come into the saddling box,’ he said grudgingly. ‘He admired the horse’s coat.’

Turniptop ambled past glowing with good health, but before James could say any more one of the Stewards came over to talk to him, and I had no chance to find out about the sugar before it was time to mount and go out for the race.

I knew by the second fence that whether Kemp-Lore had fed him sugar or not, Turniptop was not doped. The leaden sluggishness which had afflicted my last twenty-eight mounts and which I had been forced to believe was due to my own deficiency had lifted like a spent thunder-cloud.

Turniptop leapt and sprang and surged, pulling like a a train and doing his damnedest to run away with me. I could have shouted aloud with relief. He was an untidy jumper with more enthusiasm than judgment, a style which had brought him no especial grief over hurdles; but now, in his first steeplechase, he showed signs of treating fences with the same disrespect. It wouldn’t really do: there’s a world of difference between a single-thickness, easily-knocked-down hurdle and a three-foot-wide fence, solidly built of birch twigs, particularly when an open ditch lies in front of it. But Turniptop did not want to be steadied. He was eager. He was rash.

With things as they were, and with James to be convinced, I must admit that my mood matched Turniptop’s exactly. We infected each other with recklessness. We took some indefensible risks, and we got away with them.

I kept him continually on the rails, squeezing forward into tiny openings and letting him take all the bumps that came his way. When he met a fence dead right he gained lengths over it, and when he met one wrong he scrambled through and found a foot to land on somehow. It was more like a roller-coaster ride than the sensible, well-judged race James had indicated, but it taught the tough-minded Turniptop just as much about getting himself out of trouble as going round quietly on the outside would have done.

Coming into the second-to-last fence, I was afraid we would win. Afraid, because I knew James wanted to sell the horse, and if he had already won a novice chase he would not be as valuable as if he had not. An apparent paradox: but Turniptop, young and still green, showed great promise. Too early a win would disqualify him from entering a string of good novice ’chases in the following season.

It would be far, far better, I knew, to come second. To have shown what he could do but not actually to have won would have put hundreds on his value. But we had run too fierce a race, and at the second-last the disaster of winning seemed unavoidable. There was only one other tiring horse alongside, and I could hear no others on my tail.

Turniptop rose, or rather fell to the occasion. In spite of my urging him to put in another stride, he took off far too soon and landed with his hind feet tangled hopelessly in the birch. His forelegs buckled under the strain and he went down on to his knees, with my chin resting on his right ear and my hands touching each other round his throat. Even then his indomitable sense of balance rescued him, and he staggered back on to his feet with a terrific upthrust of his shoulders, tipping me back into the saddle, and, tossing his head as if in disgust, he set off again towards the winning-post. The horse which had been alongside was now safely ahead, and two that had been behind me had jumped past, so that we came into the last fence in fourth position.

I had lost my irons in the debacle and couldn’t get my feet into them again in time to jump, so we went over the last with them dangling and clanking in the air. I collected him together and squeezed with my legs, and Turniptop, game to the end, accelerated past two of the horses ahead and flashed into second place four strides from the post.

James waited for me to dismount in the unsaddling enclosure with a face from which all expression had studiously been wiped. Poker-faced to match, I slid from the saddle.

‘Don’t ever ride a race like that for me again,’ he said.

‘No,’ I agreed. I undid the girth buckles and took my saddle over my arm, and at last looked into his eyes.

They gleamed, narrowed and inscrutable. He said, ‘You proved your point. But you could have killed my horse doing it.’

I said nothing.

‘And yourself,’ he added, implying that that was less important.

I shook my head, smiling faintly. ‘Not a chance,’ I said.

‘Hm.’ He gave me a hard stare. ‘You’d better come up to the stable this evening,’ he said. ‘We can’t talk about... what we have to talk about... here. There are too many people about.’

As if to punctuate this remark the owner of the winner leant over the dividing rails to admire Turniptop and I had to loop up the girths and go and weigh in, still without knowing exactly what had happened in the saddling box before the race.

Tick-Tock was standing by my peg in the changing-room, one smoothly shod foot up on the bench and the Tyrolean hat pushed back on his head.

‘Before you ride like that again, you might make a will leaving me your half of the car,’ he said. ‘It would solve so many legal complications.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ I said, peeling off first the crimson and white sweater, James’s colours, and then the thin brown jersey underneath. I took a towel from the valet and went along to the wash-basin.

‘A lot of people,’ said Tick-Tock in a loud voice across the room, ‘are going to have a fine old time eating their words, and I hope it gives them indigestion.’ He followed me along and watched me wash, leaning languidly against the wall. ‘I suppose you realise that your exploits this afternoon were clearly visible to several million assorted housewives, invalids, babes in arms, and people hanging about on the pavement outside electric shops?’

‘What?’ I exclaimed.

‘It’s a fact. Didn’t you really know? The last three races are filling up the spare time between Sex for Sixth Forms and Goggle with Granny. Universal T.C. Maurice’s lot. I wonder,’ he finished more soberly, ‘what he’ll do when he knows you’ve rumbled the sugar bit?’

‘He may not know,’ I said, towelling my chest and shoulders. ‘He may think it was accidental... I haven’t heard yet from James what happened before the race.’

‘Anyway,’ said Tick-Tock confidently, ‘his campaign against you is over. He won’t risk going on with it after today.’

I agreed with him. It just shows how little either of us understood about obsession.

James was waiting for me in the office, busy with papers at his big desk. The fire blazed hotly and the light winked on the glasses standing ready beside the whisky bottle.

He stopped writing when I went in, and got up and poured our drinks, and stood towering above me as I sat in the battered armchair by the fire. His strong heavy face looked worried.

‘I apologise,’ he said abruptly.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘No need.’

‘I very nearly let Maurice give Turniptop that damned sugar,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe him capable of a scheme as fantastic as doping every horse you ride. I mean, it’s... it’s ridiculous.’

‘What happened in the saddling box?’ I asked.

He took a sip from his glass. ‘I gave Sid instructions that no one, absolutely no one, however important they were, was to give Turniptop anything to eat or drink before the race. When I reached the box with your saddle, Maurice was in the box next door and I watched him giving the horse there some sugar. Sid said no one had given Turniptop anything.’ He paused and drank again. ‘I put on your number cloth, weight pad and saddle, and began to do up with girths. Maurice came round the partition from the next box and said hello. That infectious smile of his... I found myself smiling back and thinking you were mad. He was wheezing a bit with asthma... and he put his hand in his pocket and brought out three lumps of sugar. He did it naturally, casually, and held them out to Turniptop. I had my hands full of girths and I thought you were wrong... but... I don’t know... there was something in the way he was standing, with his arm stretched out rather stiffly and the sugar flat on the palm of his hand, that didn’t look right. People who are fond of horses stroke their muzzles when they give them sugar, they don’t stand as far away as possible. And if Maurice wasn’t fond of horses, why was he giving them sugar? Anyway, I did decide suddenly that there would be no harm done if Turniptop didn’t eat that sugar, so I dropped the girths and pretended to trip, and grabbed Maurice’s arm to steady myself. The sugar fell off his hand on to the straw on the ground and I stepped on it as if by accident while I was recovering my balance.’

‘What did he say?’ I asked, fascinated.

‘Nothing,’ said James. ‘I apologised for bumping into him, but he didn’t answer. Just for a second he looked absolutely furious. Then he smiled again, and...’ James’s eyes glinted, ‘... he said how much he admired me for giving poor Finn this one last chance.’

‘Dear of him,’ I murmured.

‘I told him it wasn’t exactly your last chance. I said you would be riding Template on Saturday as well. He just said ‘Oh really?’ and wished me luck and walked away.’

‘So the sugar was crunched up and swept out with the dirty straw,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘Nothing to analyse. No evidence.’ A nuisance.

‘If I hadn’t stepped on it, Maurice could have picked it up and offered it to Turniptop again. I hadn’t taken any sugar with me... I hadn’t any lumps to substitute... I didn’t believe I would need them.’

He hadn’t intended to bother, I knew. But he had bothered. I would never stop feeling grateful.

We drank our whisky. James said suddenly, ‘Why? I don’t understand why he should have gone to such lengths to discredit you. What has he got against you?’

‘I am a jockey, and he is not,’ I said flatly. ‘That’s all.’ I told about my visit to Claudius Mellit and the answers he had given me. I said, ‘It’s no coincidence that you and most other trainers have had trouble finding and keeping a jockey. You’ve all been swayed by Kemp-Lore, either by him directly, or through those two shadows of his, Ballerton and Corin Kellar, who soak up his poison like sponges and drip it out into every receptive ear. They’ve said it all to you. You repeated it to me yourself, not so long ago. Peter Cloony is always late, Tick-Tock doesn’t try, Danny Higgs bets too heavily, Grant sold information, Finn has lost his nerve...’

He stared at me, appalled. I said, ‘You believed it all, James, didn’t you? Even you? And so did everyone else. Why shouldn’t they, with so much evident foundation for the rumours? It doesn’t take much for an owner or a trainer to lose confidence in a jockey. The thought has only to be insinuated, however fleetingly, that a jockey is habitually late, or dishonest, or afraid, and very soon, very soon indeed, he is on his way out... Art. Art killed himself because Corin sacked him. Grant had a mental breakdown. Peter Cloony is so broke his wife was starving herself in a freezing cold house. Tick-Tock makes jokes like Pagliacci...’

‘And you?’ asked James.

‘I? Well... I haven’t exactly enjoyed the last three weeks.’

‘No,’ he said, as if thinking about it from my point of view for the first time. ‘No, I don’t suppose you have.’

‘It’s been so calculated, this destruction of jockeys,’ I said. ‘Every week in ‘Turf Talk’, looking back on it, there has been some damaging reference to one jockey or another. When he had me on the programme he introduced me as an unsuccessful rider, and he meant me to stay that way. Do you remember that ghastly bit of film he showed of me? You’d never have taken me on if you’d seen that before I’d ridden for you, would you?’

He shook his head, very troubled.

I went on, ‘On every possible occasion — when Template won the King ’Chase for instance — he has reminded everyone watching on television that I am only substituting for Pip, and that I’ll be out on my ear as soon as that broken leg is strong again. Fair enough, it’s Pip’s job and he should have it back, but that patronising note in Kemp-Lore’s voice was calculated to make everyone take it for granted that my brief spell in the limelight was thoroughly undeserved. I dare say it was, too. But I think a lot of your owners would have been readier to trust your judgment in engaging me, and less quick to chuck me overboard at the first sign of trouble, if it hadn’t been for the continual deflating pin-pricks Kemp-Lore has dealt out all round. And last Friday...’ I tried, not too successfully, to keep my voice evenly conversational. ‘Last Friday he led Corin and that handicapper on until they said straight out that I was finished. Were you watching?’

James nodded, and poured us another drink.

‘It’s a matter for the National Hunt Committee,’ he said firmly.

‘No,’ I said. ‘His father is a member of it.’

James gasped sharply. ‘I had forgotten...’

I said, ‘The whole Committee’s a stronghold of pro-Kemp-Lore feeling. They’re all sold on Maurice. Most of them wear the same old school tie,’ I grinned. James wore it too. ‘I would be very glad if you would say nothing to any of them, just yet. They would take even more convincing than you did, and there aren’t any facts that Kemp-Lore couldn’t explain away. But I’m digging.’ I drank. ‘The day will come.’

‘You sound unexpectedly cheerful,’ he said.

‘O God, James.’ I stood up abruptly. ‘I wanted to kill myself last week. I’m glad I didn’t. It makes me cheerful.’

He looked so startled that I relaxed and laughed, and put down my glass. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘but you must understand I don’t think the National Hunt Committee meets the case at the moment. Too gentlemanly. I favour something more in the biter-bit line for dear Maurice.’

But I had as yet no useful plan, and dear Maurice still had his teeth; and they were sharp.