Straight

10

She had known I would be there, it was clear, and if she hadn’t wanted me to find out who she was she could have developed a strategic illness in plenty of time.

She was saying graciously, “Didn’t I see you on television winning the Gold Cup?” and I thought of her speed with that frightful kiyoga and the tumult of her feelings on Tuesday, four days ago. She seemed to have no fear that I would give her away, and indeed, what could I say? Lord Knightwood, my brother was your wife’s lover?

Just the right sort of thing to get the happy party off to a good start.

The said Lord was introducing the Ostermeyers to a professor of physics who with twinkles said that as he was the only true aficionado of horse racing among the teaching academics, he had been pressed into service to carry the flag, although there were about fifty undergraduates out on the course ready to bet their socks off in the cause.

“Derek has a degree,” Martha said brightly, making conversation.

The professorial eyeballs swiveled my way speculatively. “What university?”

“Lancaster,” I said dryly, which raised a laugh. Lancaster and York had fought battles of the red and white roses for many a long year.

“And subject?”

“Independent Studies.”

His desultory attention sharpened abruptly.

“What are Independent Studies?” Harley asked, seeing his interest.

“The student designs his own course and invents his own final subject,” the professor said. “Lancaster is the only university offering such a course and they let only about eight students a year do it. It’s not for the weak-willed or the feeble-minded.”

The Knightwoods and the Ostermeyers listened in silence and I felt embarrassed. I had been young then, I thought.

“What did you choose as your subject?” asked the professor, intent now on an answer. “Horses, in some way?”

I shook my head. “No... er... ‘Roots and Results of War.’ ”

“My dear chap,” Lord Knightwood said heartily, “sit next to the professor at lunch.” He moved away benignly, taking his wife and the Ostermeyers with him, and the professor, left behind, asked what I fancied for the races.

Clarissa, by accident or design, remained out of talking distance throughout the meal and I didn’t try to approach her. The party broke up during and after the first race, although everyone was invited to return for tea, and I spent most of the afternoon, as I’d spent so many others, watching horses stretch and surge and run as their individual natures dictated. The will to win was born and bred in them all, but some cared more than others: it was those with the implacable impulse to lead a wild herd who fought hardest and won most often. Sportswriters tended to call it courage but it went deeper than that, right down into the gene pool, into instinct, into the primordial soup, on the same evolutionary level as the belligerence so easily aroused in Homo sapiens that was the taproot of war.

I was no stranger to the thought that I sought battle on the turf because though the instinct to fight and conquer ran strong I was averse to guns. Sublimation, the pundits would no doubt call it. Datepalm and I both, on the same primitive plane, wanted to win.

“What are you thinking?” someone asked at my shoulder.

I would have known her voice anywhere, I thought. I turned to see her half-calm, half-anxious expression, the Lady Knightwood social poise explicit in the smooth hair, the patrician bones and the tailoring of her clothes, the passionate woman merely a hint in the eyes.

“Thinking about horses,” I said.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I came today, after I learned last night that you’d not only be at the races, which I expected you might be anyway because of Dozen Roses, but actually be coming to our lunch...” She stopped sounding uncertain.

“I’m not Greville,” I said. “Don’t think of me as Greville.”

Her eyelids flickered. “You’re too damned perceptive.” She did a bit of introspection. “Yes, all right, I wanted to be near you. It’s a sort of comfort.”

We were standing by the rails of the parade ring watching the runners for the next race walk round, led by their lads. It was the race before the University Trophy, two races before that of Dozen Roses, a period without urgency for either of us. There were crowd noises all around and the clip-clop of horses walking by, and we could speak quietly as in an oasis of private space without being overheard.

“Are you still angry with me for hitting you?” she said a shade bitterly, as I’d made no comment after her last remark.

I half-smiled. “No.”

“I did think you were a burglar.”

“And what would you have explained to the police, if they’d come?”

She said ruefully, “I hope I would have come to my senses and done a bunk before they got there.” She sighed. “Greville said if I ever had to use the kiyoga in earnest to escape at once and not worry what I’d done to my attacker, but he never thought of a burglar in his own house.”

“I’m surprised he gave you a weapon like that,” I said mildly. “Aren’t they illegal? And him a magistrate.”

“I’m a magistrate too,” she said unexpectedly. “That’s how we originally met, at a magistrate’s conference. I’ve not inquired into the legality of kiyogas. If I were prosecuted for carrying and using an offensive weapon, well, that would be much preferable to being a victim of the appalling assaults that come before us every week.”

“Where did he get it?” I asked curiously.

“America.”

“Do you have it with you here?”

She nodded and touched her handbag. “It’s second nature, now.”

She must have been thirty years younger than her husband, I thought inconsequently, and I knew what she felt about him. I didn’t know whether or not I liked her, but I did recognize there was a weird sort of intimacy between us and that I didn’t resent it.

The jockeys came out and stood around with the owners in little groups. Nicholas Loder was there with the man he’d come in with, a thickset powerful-looking man in a dark suit, the pink cardboard Club badge fluttering from his lapel.

“Dozen Roses,” I said, watching Loder talking to the owner and his jockey, “was he named for you?”

“Oh, God,” she said, disconcerted. “How ever...?”

I said, “I put your roses on the coffin for the service.”

“Oh...” she murmured with difficulty, her throat closing, her mouth twisting, “I... I can’t...”

“Tell me how York University came to be putting its name to a race.” I made it sound conversational, to give her composure time.

She swallowed, fighting for control, steadying her breathing. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I can’t even mourn for him except inside; can’t let it show to anyone except you, and it sweeps over me, I can’t help it.” She paused and answered my unimportant question. “The Clerk of the Course wanted to involve the city. Some of the bigwigs of the University were against joining in, but Henry persuaded them. He and I have always come here to meetings now and then. We both like it, for a day out with friends.”

“Your husband doesn’t actually lecture at the University, does he?”

“Oh no, he’s just a figurehead. He’s chairman of a fair number of things in York. A public figure here.”

Vulnerable to scandal, I thought: as she was herself, and Greville also. She and he must have been unwaveringly discreet.

“How long since you first met Greville?” I asked noncommittally.

“Four years.” She paused. “Four marvelous years. Not enough.”

The jockeys swung up onto the horses and moved away to go out onto the course. Nicholas Loder and his owner, busily talking, went off to the stands.

“May I watch the race with you?” Clarissa said. “Do you mind?”

“I was going to watch from the grass.” I glanced down apologetically at the crutches. “It’s easier.”

“I don’t mind the grass.”

So we stood side by side on the grass in front of the grandstand and she said, “Whenever we could be together, he bought twelve red roses. It just... well...” She stopped, swallowing again hard.

“Mm,” I said. I thought of the ashes and the red rose tree and decided to tell her about that another time. It had been for him, anyway, not for her.

Nicholas Loder’s two-year-old won the sprint at a convincing clip and I caught a glimpse of the owner afterward looking heavily satisfied but unsmiling. Hardly a jolly character, I thought.

Clarissa went off to join her husband for the University race and after that, during their speeches and presentations, I went in search of Dozen Roses who was being led round in the pre-parade ring before being taken into a box or a stall to have his saddle put on.

Dozen Roses looked docile to dozy, I thought. An unremarkable bay, he had none of the looks or presence of Datepalm, nor the ‘chaser’s alert interest in his surroundings. He was a good performer, of that there was no question, but he didn’t at that moment give an impression of going to be a “trot-up” within half an hour, and he was vaguely not what I’d expected. Was this the colt that on the video tapes had won his last three races full of verve? Was this the young buck who had tried to mount a filly at the starting gate at Newmarket Park?

No, I saw with a sense of shock, he was not. I peered under his belly more closely, as it was sometimes difficult to tell, but there seemed to be no doubt that he had lost the essential tackle; that he had in fact been gelded.

I was stunned, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or be furious. It explained so much: the loss of form when he had his mind on procreation rather than racing, and the return to speed once the temptation was removed. It explained why the Stewards hadn’t called Loder in to justify the difference in running: horses very often did better after the operation.

I unfolded my race-card at Dozen Roses’ race, and there, sure enough, against his name stood not c for colt or h for horse, but g for gelding.

Nicholas Loder’s voice, vibrating with fury, spoke from not far behind me, “That horse is not your horse. Keep away from him.”

I turned. Loder was advancing fast with Dozen Roses’ saddle over his arm and full-blown rage in his face. The heavily unjoyful owner, still for some reason in tow, was watching the proceedings with puzzlement.

“Mine or not, I’m entitled to look at him,” I said. “And look at him I darned well have, and either he is not Dozen Roses or you have gelded him against my brother’s express wishes.”

His mouth opened and snapped shut.

“What’s the matter, Nick?” the owner said. “Who is this?”

Loder failed to introduce us. Instead he said to me vehemently, “You can’t do anything about it. I have an Authority to Act. I am the registered agent for this horse and what I decide is none of your business.”

“My brother refused to have any of his horses gelded. You knew it well. You disobeyed him because you were sure he wouldn’t find out, as he never went to the races.”

He glared at me. He was aware that if I lodged a formal complaint he would be in a good deal of trouble, and I thought he was certainly afraid that as my brother’s executor I could and quite likely would do just that. Even if I only talked about it to others, it could do him damage: it was the sort of tidbit the hungry racing press would pounce on for a giggle, and the owners of all the princely colts in his prestigious stable would get cold feet that the same might happen to their own property without their knowledge or consent.

He had understood all that, I thought, in the moment I’d told him on the telephone that it was I who would be inheriting Dozen Roses. He’d known that if I ever saw the horse I would realize at once what had been done. No wonder he’d lost his lower resonances.

“Greville was a fool,” he said angrily. “The horse has done much better since he was cut.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, “but it’s not the point.”

“How much do you want, then?” he demanded roughly.

My own turn, I thought, to gape like a fish. I said feebly, “It’s not a matter of money.”

“Everything is,” he declared. “Name your price and get out of my way.”

I glanced at the attendant owner who looked more phlegmatic than riveted, but might remember and repeat this conversation, and I said merely, “We’ll discuss it later, OK?” and hitched myself away from them without aggression.

Behind me the owner was saying, “What was that all about, Nick?” and I heard Loder reply, “Nothing, Rollo. Don’t worry about it,” and when I looked back a few seconds later I saw both of them stalking off toward the saddling boxes followed by Dozen Roses in the grasp of his lad.

Despite Nicholas Loder’s anxious rage, or maybe because of it, I came down on the side of amusement. I would myself have had the horse gelded several months before the trainer had done it out of no doubt unbearable frustration: Greville had been pigheaded on the subject from both misplaced sympathy and not knowing enough about horses. I thought I would make peace with Loder that evening on the telephone, whatever the outcome of the race, as I certainly didn’t want a fight on my hands for so rocky a cause. Talk about the roots of war, I thought wryly: there had been sillier reasons for bloody strife in history than the castration of a thoroughbred.

At York some of the saddling boxes were open to public view, some were furnished with doors. Nicholas Loder seemed to favor the privacy and took Dozen Roses inside away from my eyes.

Harley and Martha Ostermeyer, coming to see the horses saddled, were full of beaming anticipation. They had backed the winner of the University Trophy and had wagered all the proceeds on my, that was to say, my brother’s horse.

“You won’t get much return,” I warned them. “It’s favorite.”

“We know that, dear,” Martha said happily, looking around. “Where is he? Which one?”

“He’s inside that box,” I pointed, “being saddled.”

“Harley and I have had a marvelous idea,” she said sweetly, her eyes sparkling.

“Now, Martha,” Harley said. He sounded faintly alarmed as if Martha’s marvelous ideas weren’t always the best possible news.

“We want you to dine with us when we get back to London,” she finished.

Harley relaxed, relieved. “Yes. Hope you can.” He clearly meant that this particular marvelous idea was passable, even welcome. “London at weekends is a graveyard.”

With a twitching of an inward grin I accepted my role as graveyard alleviator and, in the general good cause of cementing Ostermeyer-Shandy-Franklin relations, said I would be very pleased to stay to dinner. Martha and Harley expressed such gratification as to make me wonder whether when they were alone they bored each other to silence.

Dozen Roses emerged from his box with his saddle on and was led along toward the parade ring. He walked well, I thought, his good straight hocks encouraging lengthy strides, and he also seemed to have woken up a good deal, now that the excitement was at hand.

In the horse’s wake hurried Nicholas Loder and his friend Rollo, and it was because they were crowding him, I thought, that Dozen Roses swung round on his leading rein and pulled backward from his lad, and in straightening up again hit the Rollo man a hefty buffet with his rump and knocked him to his knees.

Martha with instinctive kindness rushed forward to help him, but he floundered to his feet with a curse that made her blink. All the same she bent and picked up a thing like a blue rubber ball which had fallen out of his jacket and held it toward him, saying “You dropped this, I think.”

He ungraciously snatched it from her, gave her an unnecessarily fierce stare as if she’d frightened the horse into knocking him over, which she certainly hadn’t, and hurried into the parade ring after Nicholas Loder. He, looking back and seeing me still there, reacted with another show of fury.

“What perfectly horrid people,” Martha said, making a face. “Did you hear what that man said? Disgusting! Fancy saying it aloud!”

Dear Martha, I thought, that word was everyday coinage on racecourses. The nicest people used it: it made no one a villain. She was brushing dust off her gloves fastidiously as if getting rid of contamination and I half expected her to go up to Rollo and in the tradition of the indomitable American female to tell him to wash his mouth out with soap.

Harley had meanwhile picked something else up off the grass and was looking at it helplessly. “He dropped this too,” he said. “I think.”

Martha peered at his hands and took the object out of them.

“Oh, yes,” she said with recognition, “that’s the other half of the baster. You’d better have it, Derek, then you can give it back to that obnoxious friend of your trainer, if you want to.”

I frowned at what she’d given me, which was a rigid plastic tube, semitransparent, about an inch in diameter, nine inches long, open at one end and narrowing to half the width at the other.

“A baster,” Martha said again. “For basting meat when it’s roasting. You know them, don’t you? You press the bulb thing and release it to suck up the juices which you then squirt over the meat.”

I nodded. I knew what a baster was.

“What an extraordinary thing to take to the races,” Martha said wonderingly.

“Mm,” I agreed. “He seems an odd sort of man altogether.” I tucked the plastic tube into an inside jacket pocket, from which its nozzle end protruded a couple of inches, and we went first to see Dozen Roses joined with his jockey in the parade ring and then up onto the stands to watch him race.

The jockey was Loder’s chief stable jockey, as able as any, as honest as most. The stable money was definitely on the horse, I thought, watching the forecast odds on the information board change from 2/1 on to 5/2 on. When a gambling stable didn’t put its money up front, the whisper went round and the price eased dramatically. The whisper where it mattered that day had to be saying that Loader was in earnest about the “trot-up,” and Alfie’s base imputation would have to wait for another occasion.

Perhaps as a result of his year-by-year successes, Loder’s stable always, it was well-known in the racing world, attracted as owners serious gamblers whose satisfaction was more in winning money than in winning races; and that wasn’t the truism it seemed, because in steeplechasing the owners tended to want to win the races more than the money. Steeplechasing owners only occasionally made a profit overall and realistically expected to have to pay for their pleasure.

Wondering if the Rollo man was one of the big Loder gamblers, I flicked back the pages of the race-card and looked up his name beside the horse of his that had won the sprint. Owner, Mr. T. Rollway, the card read. Rollo for short to his friends. Never heard of him, I thought, and wondered if Greville had.

Dozen Roses cantered down to the start with at least as much energy and enthusiasm as any of the seven other runners and was fed into the stalls without fuss. He’d been striding out well, I thought, and taking a good hold of the bit. An old hand at the game by now, of course, as I was also, I thought dryly.

I’d ridden in several Flat races in my teens as an amateur, learning that the hardest and most surprising thing about the unrelenting Flat race crouch over the withers was the way it cramped one’s lungs and affected one’s breathing. The first few times I’d almost fallen off at the finish from lack of oxygen. A long time ago, I thought, watching the gates fly open in the distance and the colors spill out, long ago when I was young and it all lay ahead.

If I could find Greville’s diamonds, I thought, I would in due course be able to buy a good big yard in Lambourn and start training free of a mortgage and on a decent scale, providing of course I could get owners to send me horses, and I had no longer any doubt that one of these years, when my body packed up mending fast, as everyone’s did in the end, that I would be content with the new life, even though the consuming passion I still felt for race-riding couldn’t be replaced by anything tamer.

Dozen Roses was running with the pack, all seven bunched after the first three furlongs, flying along the far side of the track at more than cruising speed but with acceleration still in reserve.

If I didn’t find Greville’s diamonds, I thought, I would just scrape together whatever I could and borrow the rest, and still buy a place and set my hand to the future. But not yet, not yet.

Dozen Roses and the others swung left-handed into the long bend round the far end of the track, the bunch coming apart as the curve element hit them. Turning into the straight five furlongs from the winning post, Dozen Roses was in fourth place and making not much progress. I wanted him quite suddenly to win and was surprised by the strength of the feeling; I wanted him to win for Greville, who wouldn’t care anyway, and perhaps also for Clarissa, who would. Sentimental fool, I told myself. Anyway, when the crowd started yelling home their fancy I yelled for mine also, and I’d never done that before as far as I could remember.

There was not going to be a trot-up, whatever Nicholas Loder might have thought. Dozen Roses was visibly struggling as he took second place at a searing speed a furlong from home and he wouldn’t have got the race at all if the horse half a length in front, equally extended and equally exhausted, hadn’t veered from a straight line at the last moment and bumped into him.

“Oh dear,” Martha exclaimed sadly, as the two horses passed the winning post. “Second. Oh well, never mind.”

“He’ll get the race on an objection,” I said. “Which I suppose is better than nothing. Your winnings are safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain,” I said, and almost immediately the loudspeakers were announcing “Stewards’ inquiry.”

More slowly than I would have liked to be able to manage, the three of us descended to the area outside the weighing room where the horse that was not my horse stood in the place for the unsaddling of the second, a net rug over his back and steam flowing from his sweating skin. He was moving about restlessly, as horses often do after an all-out effort, and his lad was holding tight to the reins, trying to calm him.

“He ran a great race,” I said to Martha, and she said, “Did he, dear?”

“He didn’t give up. That’s really what matters.”

Of Nicholas Loder there was no sign: probably inside the Stewards’ room putting forward his complaint. The Stewards would show themselves the views from the side camera and the head-on camera, and at any moment now...

“Result of the Stewards’ inquiry,” said the loudspeakers. “Placing of first and second reversed.” Hardly justice, but inevitable: the faster horse had lost. Nicholas Loder came out of the weighing room and saw me standing with the Ostermeyers, but before I could utter even the first conciliatory words like, “Well done,” he’d given me a sick look and hurried off in the opposite direction. No Rollo in his shadow, I noticed.

Martha, Harley and I returned to the luncheon room for the University’s tea where the Knightwoods were being gracious hosts and Clarissa, at the sight of me, developed renewed trouble with the tear glands. I left the Ostermeyers taking cups and saucers from a waitress and drifted across to her side.

“So silly,” she said crossly, blinking hard as she offered me a sandwich. “But wasn’t he great?”

“He was.”

“I wish...” She stopped. I wished it too. No need at all to put it into words. But Greville never went to the races.

“I go to London fairly often,” she said. “May I phone you when I’m there?”

“Yes, if you like.” I wrote my home number on my race-card and handed it to her. “I live in Berkshire,” I said, “not in Greville’s house.”

She met my eyes, hers full of confusion.

“I’m not Greville,” I said.

“My dear chap,” said her husband boomingly, coming to a halt beside us, “delighted your horse finally won. Though, of course, not technically your horse, what?”

“No, sir.”

He was shrewd enough, I thought, looking at the intelligent eyes amid the bonhomie. Not easy to fool. I wondered fleetingly if he’d ever suspected his wife had a lover, even if he hadn’t known who. I thought that if he had known who, he wouldn’t have asked me to lunch.

He chuckled. “The professor says you tipped him three winners.”

“A miracle.”

“He’s very impressed.” He looked at me benignly. “Join us at any time, my dear chap.” It was the sort of vague invitation, not meant to be accepted, that was a mild seal of approval, in its way.

“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded, knowing he’d been understood.

Martha Ostermeyer gushed up to say how marvelous the whole day had been, and gradually from then on, as such things always do, the University party evaporated.

I shook Clarissa’s outstretched hand in farewell, and also her husband’s, who stood beside her.

They looked good together, and settled, a fine couple on the surface.

“We’ll see you again,” she said to me, and I wondered if it were only I who could hear her smothered desperation.

“Yes,” I said positively. “Of course.”

“My dear chap,” her husband said. “Any time.”

Harley, Martha and I left the racecourse and climbed into the Daimler, Simms following Brad’s routine of stowing the crutches.

Martha said reproachfully, “Your ankle’s broken, not twisted. One of the guests told us. I said you’d ridden a gallop for us on Wednesday and they couldn’t believe it.”

“It’s practically mended,” I said weakly.

“But you won’t be able to ride Datepalm in that race next Saturday, will you?”

“Not really. No.”

She sighed. “You’re very naughty. We’ll simply have to wait until you’re ready.”

I gave her a fast smile of intense gratitude. There weren’t many owners who would have dreamed of waiting. No trainer would; they couldn’t afford to. Milo was currently putting up one of my arch-rivals on the horses I usually rode, and I just hoped I would get all of them back once I was fit. That was the main trouble with injuries, not the injury itself but losing one’s mounts to other jockeys. Permanently, sometimes, if they won.

“And now,” Martha said as we set off south toward London, “I have had another simply marvelous idea, and Harley agrees with me.”

I glanced back to Harley who was sitting behind Simms. He was nodding indulgently. No anxiety this time.

“We think,” she said happily, “that we’ll buy Dozen Roses and send him to Milo to train for jumping. That is,” she laughed, “if your brother’s executor will sell him to us.”

“Martha!” I was dumbstruck and used her Christian name without thinking, though I’d called her Mrs. Ostermeyer before, when I’d called her anything.

“There,” she said, gratified at my reaction, “I told you it was a marvelous idea. What do you say?”

“My brother’s executor is speechless.”

“But you will sell him?”

“I certainly will.”

“Then let’s use the car phone to call Milo and tell him.” She was full of high good spirits and in no mood for waiting, but when she reached Milo he apparently didn’t immediately catch fire. She handed the phone to me with a frown, saying, “He wants to talk to you.”

“Milo,” I said, “what’s the trouble?”

“That horse is an entire. They don’t jump well.”

“He’s a gelding,” I assured him.

“You told me your brother wouldn’t ever have it done.”

“Nicholas Loder did it without permission.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No,” I said. “Anyway the horse got the race today on a Stewards’ inquiry but he ran gamely, and he’s fit.”

“Has he ever jumped?”

“I shouldn’t think so. But I’ll teach him.”

“All right then. Put me back to Martha.”

“Don’t go away when she’s finished. I want another word.”

I handed the phone to Martha who listened and spoke with a return to enthusiasm, and eventually I talked to Milo again.

“Why,” I asked, “would one of Nicholas Loder’s owners carry a baster about at the races?”

“A what?”

“Baster. Thing that’s really for cooking. You’ve got one. You use it as an inhaler for the horses.”

“Simple and effective.”

He used it, I reflected, on the rare occasions when it was the best way to give some sort of medication to a horse. One dissolved or diluted the medicine in water and filled the rubber bulb of the baster with it. Then one fitted the tube onto that, slid the tube up the horse’s nostril, and squeezed the bulb sharply. The liquid came out in a vigorous spray straight onto the mucous membranes and from there passed immediately into the bloodstream. One could puff out dry powder with the same result. It was the fastest way of getting some drugs to act.

“At the races?” Milo was saying. “An owner?”

“That’s right. His horse won the five-furlong sprint.”

“He’d have to be mad. They dope test two horses in every race, as you know. Nearly always the winner, and another at random. No owner is going to pump drugs into his horse at the races.”

“I don’t know that he did. He had a baster with him, that’s all.”

“Did you tell the Stewards?”

“No, I didn’t. Nicholas Loder was with his owner and he would have exploded as he was angry with me already for spotting Dozen Roses’ alteration.”

Milo laughed. “So that was what all the heat was about this past week?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Will you kick up a storm?”

“Probably not.”

“You’re too soft,” he said, “and oh yes, I almost forgot. There was a phone message for you. Wait a tick. I wrote it down.” He went away for a bit and returned. “Here you are. Something about your brother’s diamonds.” He sounded doubtful. “Is that right?”

“Yes. What about them?”

He must have heard the urgency in my voice because he said, “It’s nothing much. Just that someone had been trying to call you last night and all day today, but I said you’d slept in London and gone to York.”

“Who was it?”

“He didn’t say. Just said that he had some info for you. Then he hummed and hahed and said if I talked to you would I tell you he would telephone your brother’s house, in case you went there, at about ten tonight, or later. Or it might have been a she. Difficult to tell. One of those middle-range voices. I said I didn’t know if you would be speaking to me, but I’d tell you if I could.”

“Well, thanks.”

“I’m not a message service,” he said testily. “Why don’t you switch on your answer phone like everyone else?”

“I do sometimes.”

“Not enough.”

I switched off the phone with a smile and wondered who’d been trying to reach me. It had to be someone who knew Greville had bought diamonds. It might even be Annette, I thought: her voice had a mid-range quality.

I would have liked to have gone to Greville’s house as soon as we got back to London, but I couldn’t exactly renege on the dinner after Martha’s truly marvelous idea, so the three of us ate together as planned and I tried to please them as much as they’d pleased me.

Martha announced yet another marvelous idea during dinner. She and Harley would get Simms or another of the car firm’s chauffeurs to drive us all down to Lambourn the next day to take Milo out to lunch, so that they could see Datepalm again before they went back to the States on Tuesday. They could drop me at my house afterward, and then go on to visit a castle in Dorset they’d missed last time around. Harley looked resigned. It was Martha, I saw, who always made the decisions, which was maybe why the repressed side of him needed to lash out sometimes at car-park attendants who boxed him in.

Milo, again on the telephone, told me he’d do practically anything to please the Ostermeyers, definitely including Sunday lunch. He also said that my informant had rung again and he had told him/her that I’d got the message.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you tomorrow.”

I thanked the Ostermeyers inadequately for everything and went to Greville’s house by taxi. I did think of asking the taxi driver to stay, like Brad, until I’d reconnoitered, but the house was quiet and dark behind the impregnable grilles, and I thought the taxi driver would think me a fool or a coward or both, so I paid him off and, fishing out the keys, opened the gate in the hedge and went up the path until the lights blazed on and the dog started barking..

Everyone can make mistakes.