Risk

9

I stood still. Vivian closed the door behind me and sat in another armchair on the edge of my left-hand vision. He crossed one leg elegantly over the other and eased the cloth over the knee with a languid hand.

Ownslow watched with disfavour.

‘Piss off,’ he said.

Vivian’s answer was an extra-sophisticated drawl. ‘My dear fellow, I may have set him up, but you’ve no license to knock him down.’

There were several other empty chairs, pulled back haphazardly from the centre table. I sat unhurriedly in one of them and did my best with Vivian’s leg-crossing ritual, hoping that casualness would reduce the atmosphere from bash-up to boardroom. Ownslow’s malevolent stare hardly persuaded me that I’d succeeded.

Ownslow and Glitberg had run a flourishing construction racket for years, robbing the ratepayers of literally millions. Like all huge frauds, theirs had been done on paper, with Glitberg in the council’s Planning Office, and Ownslow in the Works and Maintenance. They had simply invented a large number of buildings: offices, flats and housing estates. The whole council having approved the buildings in principle, Glitberg, in his official capacity, advertised for tenders from developers. The lowest good-looking tender often came from a firm called National Construction (Wessex) Ltd and the council confidently entrusted the building to them.

National Construction (Wessex) Ltd. did not exist except as expensively produced letterheads. The sanctioned buildings were never built. Huge sums of money were authorised and paid to National Construction (Wessex) Ltd., and regular reports of the buildings’ progress came back as Glitberg, from Planning, made regular inspections. After the point when the buildings were passed as ready for occupation the Maintenance department took over. Ownslow’s men maintained bona-fide buildings, and Ownslow also requisitioned huge sums for the maintenance of the well-documented imaginary lot.

All the paperwork had been punctiliously, even brilliantly, completed. There were full records of rents received from the imaginary buildings, and rates paid by the imaginary tenants; but as all councils took it for granted that council buildings had to be heavily subsidised, the permanent gap between revenue and expenditure was accepted as normal.

Like many big frauds it had been uncovered by accident, and the accident had been my digging a little too deeply into the affairs of one of the smaller operators sharing in the crumbs of the greater rip-off.

The council, when I’d informed them, had refused to believe me. Not, that was, until they toured their area in detail, and found weedy grass where they had paid for, among other things, six storeys of flats for low-income families, a cul-de-sac of maisonettes for single pensioners, and two roadfuls of semi-detached bungalows for the retired and handicapped.

Blind-eye money had obviously been passed to various council members, but bribery in cash was hard to prove. The council had been publicly embarrassed and had not forgiven me. Glitberg and Ownslow, who had seen that the caper could not continue for ever, had been already preparing a quiet departure when the police descended on them in force on a Sunday afternoon. They had not exactly forgiven me either.

In line with all their other attention to detail, neither of them had made the mistake of living above his legal income. The huge sums they had creamed off had been withdrawn from the National Construction (Wessex) Ltd. bank account over the years as a stream of cheques and cash which had aroused no suspicion at the bank, and had then apparently vanished into thin air. Of the million-plus which they had each stolen, not a pound had been recovered.

‘Whatever you want from us,’ Glitberg said, ‘you’re not going to get.’

‘You’re a danger to us,’ Connaught Powys said.

‘And like a wasp, you’ll get swatted,’ said Ownslow.

I looked at their faces. All three showed the pudgy roundness of self-indulgence, and all three had the sharp wary eyes of guilt. Separately, Connaught Powys, with his sun-lamp tan and smoothly brushed hair, looked a high-up City gent. Heavy of body, in navy blue pin-stripes. Pale grey silk tie. Overall air of power and opulence, and not a whisper of cell-fug and slopping-out in the mornings.

Ownslow in jail was an easier picture. Fairish hair straggled to his collar from a fringe round a bald dome. Thick neck, bull shoulders, hands like baseball gloves. A hard tough man whose accent came from worlds away from Connaught Powys.

Glitberg, in glasses, had short bushy grey hair and a fanned-out spread of white side-whiskers, which made him look like a species of ape. If Connaught Powys was power, and Ownslow was muscle, Glitberg was venom.

‘Have you already tried?’ I said.

‘Tried what?’ Ownslow said.

‘Swatting.’

They stared, all three of them, without expression, at some point in the air between myself and Vivian.

‘Someone has,’ I said.

Connaught Powys smiled very slightly. ‘Whatever we have done, or intend to do, about you,’ he said, ‘we are not going to be so insane as to admit it in front of a witness.’

‘You’ll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life,’ Glitberg said, with satisfaction.

‘Don’t go near building sites on a dark night,’ Ownslow said. ‘There’s a bit of advice, free, gratis and for nothing.’

‘How about a sailing boat on a dark night?’ I said. ‘An ocean-going sailing boat.’

I wished at once that I hadn’t said it. The unfriendliness on all three faces hardened to menace, and the whole room became very still.

Into the silence came Vivian’s voice, relaxed and drawling. ‘Ro... time you and I had a drink together, don’t you think?’

He unfolded himself from his chair, and I, feeling fairly weak at the knees, stood up from mine.

Connaught Powys, Glitberg, and Ownslow delivered a collective look of such hatred that even Vivian began to look nervous. His hand fumbled with the door knob, and as he left the room, behind me, he almost tripped over his own feet.

‘Whew,’ he said in my ear. ‘You do play with big rough boys, my dear fellow.’ He steered me this time into a luxurious little office; three armchairs, all safely unoccupied. He waved me to one of them and poured brandy into two balloons.

‘It’s not what they say,’ he said, ‘as how they say it.’

‘And what they don’t say.’

He looked at me speculatively over his glass.

‘Did you get what you wanted? I mean, was it worth your while, running under their guns?’

I smiled twistedly. ‘I think I got an answer.’

‘Well then.’

‘Yes. But it was to a question I didn’t ask.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘I’m afraid,’ I said slowly, ‘that I’ve made everything a great deal worse.’

I slept soundly at the Gloucester, but more from exhaustion than an easy mind.

From the racing page of the newspaper delivered under my door in the morning I saw that my name was down in the list of runners as the rider of Notebook in the last race at Towcester. I sucked my teeth. I hadn’t thought of asking William Finch not to include me in his list for the press, and now the whole world would learn where I would be that afternoon at four-thirty. If, that was, they bothered to turn to an insignificant race at a minor meeting on Grand National day.

‘You’ll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life,’ Glitberg had said.

I didn’t intend to. Life would be impossible if I feared for demons in every shadow. I wouldn’t climb trustingly into any ambulances at Towcester, but I would go and ride there. There was an awfully thin line, it seemed to me, between cowardice and caution.

Jossie, waiting outside the weighing room, sent the heeby-jeebies flying.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Notebook is here, looking his usual noble self and about to turn in his standard useless performance.’

‘Charming.’

‘The trainer’s orders to the jockey,’ she said, ‘are succinct. Stay on, and stay out of trouble. He doesn’t want you getting hurt.’

‘Nor do I,’ I said with feeling.

‘He doesn’t want anything to spoil the day if Ivansky wins the National.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Does he think he will?’

‘He flew off in the air-taxi this morning in the usual agonised euphoria,’ she said, with affection. ‘Hope zigzagging from conviction to doubt.’

Finch had sent two horses to Towcester, the second of them, Stoolery, being the real reason for Jessie’s journey. I helped her saddle it for the two mile handicap ’chase, and cheered with her on the stands when it won. The Grand National itself was transmitted on television all over the racecourse straight afterwards, so that Jossie was already consoled when Ivansky finished fifth.

‘Oh well.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s that. Dad will feel flat, the owners will feel flat, the lads will get gloomily drunk, and then they’ll all start talking about next year.’

We strolled along without much purpose and arrived at the door to the bar.

‘Like a drink?’ I asked.

‘Might pass the time.’

The bar was crowded with people dissecting the National result, and the elbowing customers jockeying for service were four deep.

‘Don’t let’s bother,’ Jossie said.

I agreed. We turned to leave, and a thin hand stretched out from the tight pressed ranks and gripped my wrist hard.

‘What do you want?’ a voice shouted over the din. ‘I’ve just got served. What do you want? Quick!’

The hand, I saw, belonged to Moira Longerman, and beyond her, scowling as usual, stood Binny Tomkins.

‘Jossie?’ I said.

‘Fruit juice. Grapefruit if poss.’

‘Two grapefruit juice,’ I said.

The hand let go and disappeared, shortly to reappear with a glass in it. I took it, and also the next issue, and finally Moira Longerman herself, followed by Binny, fought her way out of the throng, holding two glasses high to avoid having the expensive thimblefuls knocked flying.

‘How super!’ she said. ‘I saw you in the distance just now. I’ve been trying to telephone you for weeks and now I hear some extraordinary story about you being kidnapped.’

I introduced Jossie who was looking disbelieving at what Moira had said.

‘Kidnapped?’ Her eyebrows rose comically. ‘You?’

‘You may well laugh,’ I said ruefully.

Moira handed a glass to Binny, who nodded a scant thanks. Graceless man, I thought. Extraordinary to leave any woman to fight her way to get him a drink, let alone the owner of the most important horse in his yard. She was paying, of course.

‘My dear,’ Moira Longerman said to Jossie. ‘Right after Ro won the Gold Cup on my darling Tapestry, someone kidnapped him from the racecourse. Isn’t that right?’ She beamed quizzically up at my face, her blue eyes alight with friendly interest.

‘Sure is,’ I agreed.

Binny scowled some more.

‘How’s the horse?’ I said.

Binny gave me a hard stare and didn’t answer, but Moira Longerman was overflowing with news and enthusiasm.

‘I do so want you to ride Tapestry in all his races from now on, Ro, so I hope you will. He’s ready for Ascot next Wednesday, Binny says, and I’ve been trying and trying to get hold of you to see if you’ll ride him.’

Binny said sourly, ‘I’ve already engaged another jockey.’

‘Then disengage him, Binny dear.’ Underneath the friendly birdlike brightness there was the same touch of steel which had got me the Gold Cup ride in the first place. Moira might be half Binny’s physical weight but she had twice the mental muscle.

‘It might be better to let this other chap ride...’ I began.

‘No, no,’ she interrupted. ‘It’s you I want, Ro. I won’t have anyone else. I told Binny that, quite definitely, the very moment after you’d won the Cup. Now you’re back and safe again it will either be you on my horse or I won’t run him.’ She glanced defiantly at Binny, impishly at Jossie, and with a determined nod of her blonde curly head, expectantly turned to me. ‘Well? What do you say?’

‘Er,’ I said, which was hardly helpful.

‘Oh go on,’ Jossie said. ‘You’ll have to.’

Binny’s scowl switched targets. Jossie caught the full blast and showed no discomfiture at all.

‘He did win the Gold Cup,’ she said. ‘You can’t say he isn’t capable.’

‘He does say that, my dear,’ beamed Moira Longerman happily. ‘Isn’t it odd?’

Binny muttered something blackly of which the only audible word was ‘amateurs’.

‘I think that what Binny really means,’ said Moira sweetly and distinctly, ‘is that Ro, like most amateurs, always tries very hard to win, and won’t listen to propositions to the contrary.’

Binny’s face turned a dark red. Jossie practically giggled. Moira looked at me with limpid blue eyes as if not quite aware of what she’d said, and I chewed around helplessly for a sensible answer.

‘Like most jockeys,’ I said finally.

‘You’re so nice, Ro,’ she said. ‘You think everyone’s honest.’

I tended, like most accountants, to think exactly the opposite, but as it happened I had never much wondered about Binny. To train a horse like Tapestry should have been enough, without trying to rig his results.

Binny himself had decided to misunderstand what Moira had said, and was pretending that he hadn’t seen the chasm that was opening at his feet. Moira gave him a mischievous glance and allowed him no illusions about her power to push him in.

‘Binny dear,’ she said, ‘I’ll never desert the man who trained a Gold Cup winner for me. Not as long as he keeps turning out my horses beautifully fit, and I choose who rides them.’

Jossie cleared her throat in the following silence and said encouragingly to Binny, ‘I expect you had a good bet in the Gold Cup? My father always puts a bit on in the Cup and the National. Too awful if you win, and you haven’t. Makes you look such an ass, he says.’

If she had tried to rub salt into his raw wounds, it appeared she couldn’t have done a better job. Moira Longerman gave a delighted laugh.

‘You naughty girl,’ she said, patting Jossie’s arm. ‘Poor Binny had so little faith, you see, that not only did he not back Tapestry to win, but I’ve heard he unfortunately laid it to lose. Such a pity. Poor Binny, winning the Gold Cup and ending up out of pocket.’

Binny looked so appalled that I gathered the extent of her information was a nasty shock to him.

‘Never mind,’ Moira said kindly. ‘What’s past is past. And if Ro rides Tapestry next Wednesday, all will be well.’

Binny looked as if everything would be very far from well. I wondered idly if he could possibly have already arranged that Tapestry should lose on Wednesday. On his first outing after a Gold Cup win, any horse would start at short odds. Many a bookmaker would be grateful to know for certain that he wouldn’t have to pay out. Binny could already have sold that welcome information, thinking that I wasn’t around to upset things. Binny was having a thoroughly bad time.

I reflected that I simply couldn’t afford to take Wednesday off. The mountains of undone work made me feel faintly sick.

‘Ro?’ Moira said persuasively.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nothing I’d like better in the world.’

‘Oh goody!’ Her eyes sparkled with pleasure. ‘I’ll see you at Ascot, then. Binny will ring you, of course, if there’s a change of plan.’

Binny scowled.

‘Tell me all,’ Jossie demanded as we walked across to the trainers’ stand to watch the next race. ‘All this drama about you being kidnapped.’

I told her briefly, without much detail.

‘Do you mean they just popped you on a boat and sailed off with you to the Med?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What a lark.’

‘It was inconvenient,’ I said mildly.

‘I’ll bet.’ She paused. ‘You said you escaped. How did you do that?’

‘Jumped overboard.’

Her mouth twisted with sympathy. I reflected that it was only four days since that frantic swim. It seemed another world.

Jossie was of the real, sensible world, where things were understandable, if not always pleasant. Being with her made me feel a great deal more settled, more normal, and safer.

‘How about dinner,’ I said, ‘on the way home?’

‘We’ve got two cars,’ she said.

‘Nothing to prevent them both stopping at the same place.’

‘How true.’

She was again wearing swirly clothes: a soft rusty red, this time. There was nothing tailored about her, and nothing untidy. An organised girl, amusing and amused.

‘There’s a fair pub near Oxford,’ I said.

‘I’ll follow you, then.’

I changed in due course for Notebook’s race, and weighed out, and gave my lightest saddle to the Axwood travelling head lad, who was waiting for it by the door.

‘Carrying overweight, are you?’ he said sardonically.

‘Four pounds.’

He made an eyes-to-heaven gesture, saying louder than words that trainers should put up professionals in novice hurdle races, not amateurs who couldn’t do ten stone six. I didn’t mention that on Gold Cup day I’d weighed eight pounds more.

When I went out to the parade ring, he and Jossie were waiting, while a lad led the noble Notebook round and round, now wearing my saddle over a number cloth. Number thirteen. So who was superstitious?

‘He bucks a bit,’ said the travelling head lad, with satisfaction.

‘When you get home,’ Jossie said to him, ‘please tell my father I’m stopping on the way back for dinner with Roland. So that he doesn’t worry about car crashes.’

‘Right.’

‘Dad fusses,’ Jossie said.

The travelling head lad gave me another look which needed no words, and which speculated on whether I would get her into bed. I wasn’t so sure that I cared all that much for the travelling head lad.

A good many people had already gone home, and from the parade ring one could see a steady drift to the gate. There were few things as disheartening, I thought, as playing to a vanishing audience. On the other hand, if one made a frightful mess, the fewer who saw it, the better.

‘They said “jockeys get mounted” half an hour ago,’ Jossie said.

‘Two seconds,’ I said. ‘I was listening.’

The travelling head lad gave me a leg up. Notebook gave a trial buck.

‘Stay out of trouble,’ Jossie said.

‘It’s underneath me,’ I said, feeling the noble animal again try to shoot me off.

She grinned unfeelingly. Notebook bounced away, hiccupped sideways down to the start, and then kept everyone waiting while he did a circus act on his hind legs. ‘Bucks a bit’, I thought bitterly. I’d fall off before the tapes went up, if I wasn’t careful.

The race started, and Notebook magnanimously decided to take part, setting off at an uncoordinated gallop which involved a good deal of head-shaking and yawing from side to side. His approach to the first hurdle induced severe loss of confidence in his rider, as he seemed to be trying to jump it sideways, like a crab.

As I hadn’t taken the precaution of dropping him out firmly at the back, always supposing I could actually have managed it, as he was as strong as he was wilful, his diagonal crossing of the flight of hurdles harvested a barrage of curses from the other jockeys. ‘Sorry’ was a useless word in a hurdle race, particularly from an unfit amateur who should have known better than to be led astray by a pretty girl. I yanked Notebook’s head straight at the next hurdle with a force which would have had the Cruelty to Animals people swooning. He retaliated by screwing his hindquarters sideways in mid-air and landing on all four feet at once, pointing east-north-east to the rails.

This manoeuvre at least dropped him out into last place, which he tried to put right by running away with me up the stretch in front of the stands. As we fought each other on the way outwards round the mile-and-half circuit I understood the full meaning of the trainer’s orders to his jockey. ‘Stay on, and stay out of trouble.’ My God.

I was not in the least surprised that Notebook had finished last of twenty-six at Newbury. He would have been last of a hundred and twenty-six, if his jockey had had any sense. Last place on Notebook was not exactly safe, but if one had to be anywhere on him, last place was wisest. No one, however, had got the message through to the horse.

The circuit at Towcester went out downhill from the stands, flattened into a straight stretch on the far side, and ended with a stamina-sapping uphill pull to the finishing straight and the winning post. Some of the world’s slowest finishes had been slogged out there on muddy days at the end of three mile ’chases. Notebook however set off downhill on firm going at a graceless rush, roller-coastered over the most distant hurdles, and only began to lose interest when he hit the sharply rising ground on the way back.

By that time the nineteen other runners were ahead as of right, as Notebook’s stop-go and sideways type of jumping lost at every flight the lengths he made up on the flat.

I suppose I relaxed a little. He met the next hurdle all wrong, ignored my bid to help him, screwed wildly in mid-air, and landed with his nose on the turf and all four feet close together behind it. Not radically different from six other landings, just more extreme.

Being catapulted off at approximately thirty miles an hour is a kaleidoscopic business. Sky, trees, rails and grass somersaulted around my vision in a disjointed jumble, and if I tucked my head in it was from instinct, not thought. The turf smacked me sharply in several places, and Notebook delivered a parting kick on the thigh. The world stopped rolling, and half a ton of horse had not come crashing down on top of me. Life would go on.

I sat up slowly, all breath knocked out, and watched the noble hindquarters charge heedlessly away.

An ambulance man ran towards me, in the familiar black St. John’s uniform. I felt a flood of panic. A conditioned reflex. He had a kind face: a total stranger.

‘All right, mate?’ he said.

I nodded weakly.

‘You came a proper purler.’

‘Mm.’ I unclipped my helmet, and pulled it off. Speech was impossible. My chest heaved from lack of air. He put a hand under one of my armpits and helped me as far as my knees, and from there, once I could breathe properly, to my feet.

‘Bones O.K.?’

I nodded.

‘Just winded,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Mm.’

A Land Rover arrived beside us with a jerk, and the vet inside it said that as there were no injured horses needing his attention, he could offer me a lift back to the stands.

‘You fell off,’ Jossie observed, as I emerged with normal breath and clean bill of health from the doctor in the First Aid room.

I smiled, ‘Granted.’

She gave me a sideways glance from the huge eyes.

‘I thought all jockeys were frightfully touchy about being told they fell off,’ she said. ‘All that guff about it’s the horse that falls, and the jockey just goes down with the ship.’

‘Quite right,’ I said.

‘But Notebook didn’t actually fall, so you fell off.’ Her voice was lofty, teasing.

‘I don’t dispute it.’

‘No, aren’t you boring.’ She smiled. ‘They caught Notebook in the next parish, so while you change I’ll go along to the stables and see he’s O.K., and I’ll meet you in the car park.’

‘Fine.’

I changed into street clothes, fixed with the valet to take my saddles, helmet, and other gear to Ascot for the following Wednesday, and walked the short distance to the car park.

The crowds had gone, and only the stragglers like me were leaving now in twos and threes. The cars still remaining stood singly, haphazardly scattered instead of in orderly rows.

I looked into the back of mine, behind the front seats.

No one there.

I wondered with a shiver what I would have done if there had been. Run a mile, no doubt. I stood leaning on my car waiting for Jossie, and no one looked in the least like trying to carry me off. A quiet spring-like Saturday evening in the Northamptonshire countryside, as friendly as beer.