Whip Hand

CHAPTER TWO

I had fallen into a recent habit of lunching on Thursdays with my father-in-law. To be accurate, with my ex -father-in-law; Admiral (retired) Charles Roland, parent of my worst failure. To his daughter Jenny I had given whatever devotion I was capable of, and had withheld the only thing she eventually said she wanted, which was that I should stop riding in races.

We had been married for five years; two in happiness, two in discord, and one in bitterness; and now only the itching half-mended wounds remained. Those, and the friendship of her father, which I had come by with difficulty and now prized as the only treasure saved from the wreck. We met most weeks at noon in the upstairs bar of the Cavendish Hotel, where a pink gin for him and a whisky and water for me now stood on prim little mats beside a bowl of peanuts.

'Jenny will be at Aynsford this week-end,' he said.

Aynsford was his house in Oxfordshire. London on Thursdays was his business. He made the journey between the two in a Rolls.

'I'd be glad if you would come down,' he said.

I looked at the fine distinguished face and listened to the drawling noncommittal voice. A man of subtlety and charm who could blast through you like a laser if he felt the need. A man whose integrity I would trust to the gates of hell, and whose mercy, not an inch. I said carefully, without rancour, 'I am not coming to be sniped at.'

'She agreed that I should invite you.'

'I don't believe it.' He looked with suspicious concentration at his glass. I knew from long experience that when he wanted me to do something he knew I wouldn't like, he didn't look at me. And there would be a pause, like this, while he found it in him to light the fuse. From the length of the pause, I drew no comfort of any sort. He said finally, 'I'm afraid she's in some sort of trouble.'

I stared at him, but he wouldn't raise his eyes.

'Charles,' I said despairingly, 'you can't… you can't ask me… You know how she speaks to me these days.'

'You give as good as you get, as I recall.'

'No one in their senses walks into a tiger's cage.'

He gave me a brief flashing upward glance, and there was a small twitch to his mouth. And perhaps it was not the best way of referring to a man's beautiful daughter.

'I have known you, Sid,' he said, 'to walk into tigers' cages more than once.'

'A tigress, then,' I amended, with a touch of humour.

He pounced on it. 'So you'll come?'

'No… Some things, honestly, are too much.' He sighed and sat back in his chair, looking at me over the gin. I didn't care for the blank look in his eyes, because it meant he was still plotting.

' Dover sole?' he suggested smoothly. 'Shall I call the waiter? We might eat soon, don't you think?'

He ordered sole for both of us, and off the bone, out of habit. I could eat perfectly well in public now, but there had been a long and embarrassing period when my natural hand had been a wasted, useless deformity, which I'd self-consciously hidden in pockets. At about the time I finally got used to it, it had been smashed up again, and I'd lost it altogether. I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.

The waiter told us our table would be ready in ten minutes and went quietly away, hugging menus and order pad to his dinner jacket and grey silk tie. Charles glanced at his watch and then gazed expansively round the big, light, quiet room, where other couples, like us, sat in beige armchairs and sorted out the world.

'Are you going to Kempton this afternoon?' he said.

I nodded. 'The first race is at two-thirty.'

'Are you working on a job?' As an inquiry, it was a shade too bland.

'I'm not coming to Aynsford,' I said. 'Not while Jenny's there.'

After a pause, he said, 'I wish you would, Sid.'

I merely looked at him. His eyes were following the track of a bar waiter delivering drinks to distant customers: and he was taking a great deal too much time thinking out his next sentence.

He cleared his throat and addressed himself to nowhere in particular. 'Jenny has lent some money… and her name, I'm afraid… to a business enterprise which would appear to be fraudulent.'

'She's done what? I said.

His gaze switched back to me with suspicious speed, but I interrupted him as he opened his mouth.

'No,' I said. 'If she's done that, it's well within your province to sort it out.'

'It's your name she's used, of course,' Charles said. 'Jennifer Halley.'

I could feel the trap closing round me. Charles studied my silent face and with a tiny sigh of relief let go of some distinct inner anxiety. He was a great deal too adept, I thought bitterly, at hooking me.

'She was attracted to a man,' he said dispassionately. 'I didn't especially like him, but then I didn't like you, either, to begin with… and I have found that error of judgement inhibiting, as a matter of fact, because I no longer always trust my first instincts.'

I ate a peanut. He had disliked me because I was a jockey, which he saw as no sort of husband for his well-bred daughter: and I had disliked him right back as an intellectual and social snob. It was odd to reflect that he was now probably the individual I valued most in the world.

He went on, 'This man persuaded her to go in for some sort of mail order business… all frightfully up-market and respectable, at least on the surface. A worthy way of raising money for charity… you know the sort of thing. Like Christmas cards, only in this case I think it was a sort of wax polish for antique furniture. One was invited to buy expensive wax, knowing that most of the profits would go to a good cause.'

He looked at me sombrely. I simply waited, without much hope.

'The orders rolled in,' he said. 'And the money with them, of course. Jenny and a girl friend were kept busy sending off the wax.'

'Which Jenny,' I guessed, 'had bought ready, in advance?'

Charles sighed. 'You don't need to be told, do you?'

'And Jenny paid for the postage and packing and advertisements and general literature?'

He nodded. 'She banked all the receipts into a specially opened account in the name of the charity. Those receipts have all been drawn out, the man has disappeared, and the charity, as such, has been found not to exist.'

I regarded him in dismay.

'And Jenny's position?' I said.

'Very bad, I'm afraid. There may be a prosecution. And her name is on everything, and the man's nowhere.'

My reaction was beyond blasphemy. Charles observed my blank silence and nodded slowly in sympathy.

'She has been exceedingly foolish,' he said.

'Couldn't you have stopped her? Warned her?'

He shook his head regretfully. 'I didn't know about it until she came to Aynsford yesterday in a panic. She has done it all from that flat she's taken in Oxford.'

We went in to lunch, and I couldn't remember, afterwards, the taste of the sole.

'The man's name is Nicholas Ashe,' Charles said, over the coffee. 'At least that's what he said.' He paused briefly. 'My solicitor chap thinks it would be a good idea if you could find him.'

I drove to Kempton with visual and muscular responses on auto-pilot and my thoughts uncomfortably on Jenny.

Divorce itself, it seemed, had changed nothing. The recent antiseptic drawing of the line, the impersonal court to which neither of us had gone (no children, no maintenance disputes, no flicker of reconciliation, petition granted, next case please) seemed to have punctuated our lives not with a full stop but with hardly a comma. The legal position had not proved a great liberating open door. The recovery from emotional cataclysm seemed a long slow process, and the certificate was barely an aspirin.

Where once we had clung together with delight and passion, we now, if we chanced to meet, ripped with claws. I had spent eight years in loving, losing and mourning Jenny, and although I could wish my feelings were dead, they weren't. The days of indifference still seemed a weary way off.

If I helped her in the mess she was in, she would give me a rotten time. If I didn't help her, I would give it to myself. Why, I thought violently, in impotent irritation, had the silly bitch been so stupid.

There was a fair attendance at Kempton for a weekday in April, though as often before I regretted that in Britain the nearer a racecourse was to London, the more vulnerable it became to stay-away crowds. City-dwellers might be addicted to gambling, but not to fresh air and horses. Birmingham and Manchester, in days gone by, had lost their racecourses to indifference, and Liverpool had survived only through the Grand National. Most times it took a course in the country to burst at the seams and run out of racecards; the thriving plants still growing from the oldest roots.

Outside the weighing room there was the same old bunch of familiar faces carrying on chats which had been basically unchanged for centuries. Who was going to ride what, and who was going to win, and there should be a change in the rules, and what so-and-so had said about his horse losing, and wasn't the general outlook grim, and did you know young fella-me-lad has left his wife? There were the scurrilous stories and the slight exaggerations and the downright lies. The same mingling of honour and corruption, of principle and expediency. People ready to bribe, people with the ready palm. Anguished little hopefuls and arrogant big guns. The failures making brave excuses, and the successful hiding the anxieties behind their eyes. All as it had been, and was, and would be, as long as racing lasted.

I had no real right any longer to wander in the space outside the weighing room, although no one ever turned me out. I belonged in the grey area of ex-jockeys: barred from the weighing room itself but tolerantly given the run of much else. The cosy inner sanctum had gone down the drain the day half a ton of horse landed feet first on my metacarpals. Since then I had come to be glad simply to be still part of the brotherhood, and the ache to be riding was just part of the general regret. Another ex-champion had told me it took him twenty years before he no longer yearned to be out there on the horses, and I'd said thanks very much.

George Caspar was there, talking to his jockey, with three runners scheduled that afternoon; and also Rosemary, who reacted with a violent jerk when she saw me at ten paces, and promptly turned her back. I could imagine the waves of alarm quivering through her, although that day she looked her usual well-groomed elegant self: mink coat for the chilly wind, glossy boots, velvet hat. If she feared I would talk about her visit, she was wrong.

There was a light grasp on my elbow and a pleasant voice saying 'A word in your ear, Sid.'

I was smiling before I turned to him, because Lord Friarly, Earl, landowner, and frightfully decent fellow, had been one of the people for whom I'd ridden a lot of races. He was of the old school of aristocrats; sixtyish, beautifully mannered, genuinely compassionate, slightly eccentric, and more intelligent than people expected. A slight stammer was nothing to do with speech impediment but all to do with not wanting to seem to throw his rank about in an egalitarian world.

Over the years I had stayed several times in his house in Shropshire, mostly on the way to northern racemeetings, and had travelled countless miles with him in a succession of elderly cars. The age of the cars was not an extension of the low profile, but rather a disinclination to waste money on inessentials. Essentials, in terms of the Earl's income, were keeping up Friarly Hall and owning as many racehorses as possible.

'Great to see you, sir,' I said.

'I've told you to call me Philip.' 'Yes… sorry.'

'Look,' he said, 'I want you do something for me. I hear you're damned good at looking into things. Doesn't surprise me, of course, I've always valued your opinion, you know that.'

'Of course I'll help if I can,' I said.

'I've an uncomfortable feeling I'm being used,' he said. 'You know that I'm a sucker for seeing my horses run, the more the merrier, and all that. Well, during the past year I have agreed to be one of the registered owners in a syndicate… you know, sharing the costs with eight or ten other people, though the horses run in my name, and my colours.'

'Yeah,' I said nodding. 'I've noticed.'

'Well… I don't know all the other people, personally. The syndicates were formed by a chap who does just that – gets people together and sells them a horse. You know?'

I nodded. There had been cases of syndicate-formers buying horses for a smallish sum and selling them to the members of the syndicate for up to four times as much. A healthy little racket, so far legal.

'Those horses don't run true to form, Sid,' he said bluntly. 'I've a nasty feeling that somewhere in the syndicates we've got someone fixing the way the horses run. So will you find out for me? Nice and quietly?'

'I'll certainly try,' I said.

'Good,' he said, with satisfaction. 'Thought you would. So I brought the names for you, of the people in the syndicates.' He pulled a folded paper out of his inner pocket. 'There you are,' he said, opening it and pointing. 'Four horses. The syndicates are all registered with the Jockey Club, everything above board, audited accounts, and so on. It all looks all right on paper, but, frankly, Sid, I'm not happy.'

'I'll look into it,' I promised, and he thanked me profusely, and also genuinely, and moved away, after a minute or two, to talk to Rosemary and George.

Further away, Bobby Unwin, notebook and pencil in evidence, was giving a middle-rank trainer a hard-looking time. His voice floated over, sharp with northern aggression and tinged with an inquisitorial tone caught from tele-interviewers. 'Can you say, then, that you are perfectly satisfied with the way your horses are running?' The trainer looked around for escape and shifted from foot to foot. It was amazing, I thought, that he put up with it, even though Bobby Unwin's printed barbs tended to be worse if he hadn't had the personal pleasure of intimidating his victim face to face. He wrote well, was avidly read, and among most of the racing fraternity was heartily disliked. Between him and me there had been for many years a sort of sparring truce, which in practice had meant a diminution of words like 'blind' and 'cretinous' to two per paragraph when he was describing any race I'd lost. Since I'd stopped riding I was no longer a target, and in consequence we had developed a perverse satisfaction in talking to each other, like scratching a spot.

Seeing me out of the corner of his eye he presently released the miserable trainer and steered his beaky nose in my direction. Tall, forty, and forever making copy out of having been born in a back-to-back terrace in Bradford: a fighter, come up the hard way, and letting no one ever forget it. We ought to have had much in common, since I too was the product of a dingy back street, but temperament had nothing to do with environment. He tended to meet fate with fury and I with silence, which meant that he talked a lot and I listened.

'The colour mag's in my briefcase in the Press room,' he said.

'What do you want it for?'

'Just general interest.'

'Oh come off it,' he said. 'What are you working on?'

'And would you,' I said, 'give me advance notice of your next scoop?'

'All right,' he said. 'Point taken. And I'll have a bottle of the best vintage bubbly in the members' bar. After the first race. O.K.?'

'And for smoked salmon sandwiches extra, would I acquire some background info that never saw the light of print?'

He grinned nastily and said he didn't see why not: and in due course, after the first race, he kept his bargain.

'You can afford it, Sid, lad,' he said, munching a pink-filled sandwich and laying a protective hand on the gold-foiled bottle standing beside us on the bar counter. 'So what do you want to know?'

'You went to Newmarket… to George Caspar's yard… to do this article?' I indicated the colour magazine, which lay, folded lengthwise, beside the bottle.

'Yeah. Sure.' 'So tell me what you didn't write.'

He stopped in mid-munch. 'In what area?'

'What do you privately think of George as a person?' He spoke round bits of brown bread. 'I said most of it in that.' He looked at the magazine. 'He knows more about when a horse is ready to race and what race to run him in than any other trainer on the Turf. And he's got as much feeling for people as a block of stone. He knows the name and the breeding back to the flood of every one of the hundred and twenty plus horses in his yard, and he can recognise them walking away from him in a downpour, which is practically impossible, but as for the forty lads he's got there working for him, he calls them all Tommy, because he doesn't know tother from which.'

'Lads come and go,' I said neutrally.

'So do horses. It's in his mind. He doesn't give a bugger's damn for people.'

'Women?' I suggested.

'Uses them, poor sods. I bet when he's at it he's got his mind on his next day's runners.'

'And Rosemary… what does she think about things?'

I poured a refill into his glass, and sipped my own. Bobby finished his sandwich with a gulp and licked the crumbs off his fingers.

'Rosemary? She's half way off her rocker.'

'She looked all right yesterday at the races,' I said. 'And she's here today, as well.'

'Yeah, well, she can hold on to the grande dame act in public still, I grant you, but I was in and out of the house for three days, and I'm telling you, mate, the goings-on there had to be heard to be believed.'

'Such as?' 'Such as Rosemary screaming all over the place that they hadn't enough security and George telling her to belt up. Rosemary's got some screwy idea that some of their horses have been got at in the past, and I daresay she's right at that, because you don't have a yard that size and that successful that hasn't had its share of villains trying to alter the odds. But anyway…'he drank deep and tipped the bottle generously to replenish his supplies,'… she seized me by the coat in their hall one day… and that hall's as big as a fair-sized barn… literally seized me by the coat and said what I should be writing was some stuff about Gleaner and Zingaloo being got at… you remember, those two spanking two-year-olds who never developed… and George came out of his office and said she was neurotic and suffering from the change of life, and right then and there in front of me they had a proper slanging match.' He took a breath and a mouthful. 'Funny thing is, in a way I'd say they were fond of each other. As much as he could be fond of anybody.'

I ran my tongue round my teeth and looked only marginally interested, as if my mind was on something else. 'What did George say about her ideas on Gleaner and Zingaloo?' I said.

'He took it for granted I wouldn't take her seriously, but anyway, he said it was just that she had the heeby-jeebies that someone would nobble Tri-Nitro, and she was getting everything out of proportion. Her age, he said. Women always went very odd, he said, at that age. He said the security round Tri-Nitro was already double what he considered really necessary, because of her nagging, and when the new season began he'd have night patrols with dogs, and such like. Which is now, of course. He told me that Rosemary was quite wrong, anyway, about Gleaner and Zingaloo being got at, but that she'd got this obsession on the subject, and he was ready to humour her to some degree to stop her going completely bonkers. It seems that both of them… the horses, that is… proved to have a heart murmur, which of course accounted for their rotten performances as they matured and grew heavier. So that was that. No story.' He emptied his glass and refilled it. 'Well, Sid, mate, what is it you really want to know about George Caspar?'

'Um,' I said. 'Do you think there's anything he is afraid of?'

'George?' he said disbelievingly. 'What sort of thing?'

'Anything.'

'When I was there, I'd say he was about as frightened as a ton of bricks.'

'He didn't seem worried?'

'Not a bit.' 'Or edgy?' He shrugged.

'Only with his wife.'

'How long ago was it, that you went there?'

'Oh…' He considered, thinking. 'After Christmas. Yes… second week in January. We have to do those colour mags such a long time in advance.'

'You don't think, then,' I said slowly, sounding disappointed, 'that he'd be wanting any extra protection for Tri-Nitro?'

'Is that what you're after?' He gave the leering grin. 'No dice, then, Sid, mate. Try someone smaller. George has got his whole ruddy yard sewn up tight. For a start, see, it's one of those old ones enclosed inside a high wall, like a fortress. Then there's ten-foot high double gates across the entrance, with spikes on top.' I nodded.

'Yes… I've seen them.'

'Well, then.' He shrugged, as if that settled things.

There were closed-circuit televisions in all the bars at Kempton to keep serious drinkers abreast of the races going on outside, and on the nearest of these sets Bobby Unwin and I watched the second race. The horse which won by six lengths was the one trained by George Caspar, and while Bobby was thoughtfully eying the two inches of fizz still left in the bottle, George himself came into the bar. Behind him, in a camel-coloured overcoat, came a substantial man bearing all the stigmata of a satisfied winning owner. Cat-with-the-cream smile, big gestures, have this one on me.

'Finish the bottle, Bobby,' I said.

'Don't you want any?'

'It's yours.' He made no objections.

Poured, drank, and comfortably belched. 'Better go,' he said. 'Got to write up these effing colts in the third. Don't you go telling my editor I watched the second in the bar, I'd get the sack.' He didn't mean it. He saw many a race in the bar. 'See you, Sid. Thanks for the drink.'

He turned with a nod and made a sure passage to the door, showing not a sign of having despatched seven eighths of a bottle of champagne within half an hour. Merely laying the foundations, no doubt. His capacity was phenomenal.

I tucked his magazine inside my jacket and made my own way slowly in his wake, thinking about what he'd said. Passing George Caspar I said, 'Well done,' in the customary politeness of such occasions, and he nodded briefly and said 'Sid,' and, transaction completed, I continued towards the door.

'Sid…' he called after me, his voice rising.

I turned. He beckoned. I went back.

'Want you to meet Trevor Deansgate,' he said.

I shook the hand offered: snow-white cuff, gold links, smooth pale skin, faintly moist; well-tended nails, onyx and gold signet ring on little finger.

'Your winner?' I said. 'Congratulations.'

'Do you know who I am?'

'Trevor Deansgate?'

'Apart from that.'

It was the first time I'd seen him at close quarters. There was often, in powerful men, a give-away droop of the eyelids which proclaimed an inner sense of superiority, and he had it. Also dark grey eyes, black controlled hair, and the tight mouth which goes with well-exercised decision-making muscles.

'Go on, Sid,' George said into my tiny hesitation. 'If you know, say. I told Trevor you knew everything.'

I glanced at him, but all that was to be read on his tough weathered countenance was a sort of teasing expectancy. For many people, I knew, my new profession was a kind of game. There seemed to be no harm, on this occasion, of jumping obligingly through his offered hoop.

'Bookmaker?' I said tentatively: and to Trevor Deansgate directly, added, 'Billy Bones?'

'There you are,' said George, pleased. 'I told you so.'

Trevor Deansgate took it philosophically. I didn't try for a further reaction, which might not have been so friendly. His name at birth was reputed to be Shummuck. Trevor Shummuck from Manchester, who'd been born in a slum with a razor mind and changed his name, accent and chosen company on the way up. As Bobby Unwin might have said, hadn't we all, and why not?

Trevor Deansgate's climb to the big league had been all but completed by buying out the old but ailing firm of 'Billy Bones', in itself a blanket pseudonym for some brothers called Rubenstein and their uncle Solly. In the past few years 'Billy Bones' had become big business. One could scarcely open a sports paper or go to the races without seeing the blinding fluorescent pink advertising, and slogans like 'Make no Bones about it, Billy's best' tended to assault one's peace on Sundays. If the business was as vigorous as its sales campaign, Trevor Deansgate was doing all right.

We civilly discussed his winner until it was time to adjourn outside to watch the colts. 'How's Tri-Nitro?' I said to George, as we moved towards the door.

'Great,' he said. 'In great heart.'

'No problems?'

'None at all.' We parted outside, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in the usual desultory way, watching the races, talking to people, and thinking unimportant thoughts. I didn't see Rosemary again, and calculated she was avoiding me, and after the fifth race I decided to go.

A racecourse official at the exit gate stopped me with an air of relief, as if he'd been waiting for me for a shade too long.

'Note for you, Mr Halley.'

'Oh? Thanks.'

He gave me an unobtrusive brown envelope. I put it in my pocket and walked on, out to my car. Climbed in. Took out, opened, and read the letter.

Sid,

I've been busy all afternoon but I want to see you. Please can you meet me in the tea room? After the last?

Lucas Wainwright

Cursing slightly, I walked back across the car park, through the gate, and along to the restaurant, where lunch had given place to sandwiches and cake. The last race being just finished, the tea customers were trickling in in small thirsty bunches, but there was no sign of Commander Lucas Wainwright, Director of Security to the Jockey Club.

I hung around, and he came in the end, hurrying, anxious, apologising and harassed.

'Do you want some tea?' He was out of breath.

'Not much.'

'Never mind. Have some. We can sit here without being interrupted, and there are always too many people in the bar.' He led the way to a table and gestured to me to sit down.

'Look, Sid. How do you feel about doing a job for us?' No waster of time, Commander Wainwright.

'Does "us" mean the Security Service?'

'Yes.'

'Official?' I said, surprised. The Racecourse Security people knew in moderate detail what I'd recently been doing and had raised no objections, but I hadn't imagined they actually approved. In some respects, I'd been working in their territory, and stepping on their toes.

Lucas drummed his fingers on the tablecloth. 'Unofficial,' he said. 'My own private show.'

As Lucas Wainwright was himself the top brass of the Security Service, the investigative, policing arm of the Jockey Club, even unofficial requests from him could be considered to be respectably well-founded. Or at least, until proved otherwise.

'What sort of job?' I said.

The thought of what sort of job slowed him up for the first time. He hummed and hah'ed and drummed his fingers some more, but finally shaped up to what proved to be a brute of a problem.

'Look, Sid, this is in strictest confidence.'

'Yes.'

'I've no higher authority for approaching you like this.'

'Well,' I said. 'Never mind. Go on.'

'As I've no authority, I can't promise you any pay.'

I sighed.

'All I could offer is… well… help, if you should ever need it. And if it was within my power to give it, of course.'

'That could be worth more than pay,' I said.

He looked relieved. 'Good. Now… this is very awkward. Very delicate.' He still hesitated, but at last, with a sigh like a groan, he said. 'I'm asking you to make… er… discreet enquiries into the… er… background… of one of our people.'

There was an instant's silence. Then I said, 'Do you mean one of you? One of the Security Service?'

'I'm afraid that's right.'

'Enquiries into exactly what?' I said. He looked unhappy. 'Bribery. Backhanders. That sort of thing.'

'Um,' I said. 'Have I got this straight? You believe one of your chaps may be collecting pay-offs from villains, and you want me to find out?'

'That's it,' he said. 'Exactly.'

I thought it over. 'Why don't you do the investigating yourselves? Just detail another of your chaps.'

'Ah. Yes.' He cleared this throat. 'But there are difficulties. If I am wrong, I cannot afford to have it known that I was suspicious. It would cause a great, a very great deal of trouble. And if I am right, which I fear I am, we… that is, the Jockey Club… would want to be able to deal with things quietly. A public scandal involving the Security Service would be very damaging to racing.'

I thought he was perhaps putting it a bit high, but he wasn't.

'The man in question,' he said miserably, 'is Eddy Keith.'

There was another countable silence. In the hierarchy of the Security Service then existing, there was Lucas Wainwright at the top, with two equal deputies one step down. Both of the deputies were retired senior-rank policemen. One of them was ex-Superintendent Eddison Keith.

I had a clear mental picture of him, as I had talked with him often. A big bluff breezy man with a heavy hand for clapping one on the shoulder. More than a trace of Suffolk accent in a naturally loud voice. A large flourishing straw-coloured moustache, fluffy light brown hair through which one could see the pink scalp shining, and fleshy-lidded eyes which seemed always to be twinkling with good humour, and often weren't.

I had glimpsed there occasionally a glint as cold and unmerciful as a crevasse. Very much a matter of sun on ice: pretty but full of traps. One for applying the handcuffs with a cheery smile; that was Eddy Keith.

But crooked…? I would never have thought so.

'What are the indications?' I said at last. Lucas Wainwright chewed his lower lip for a while and then said, 'Four of his enquiries over the past year have come up with incorrect results.'

I blinked. 'That's not very conclusive.' 'No. Precisely. If I were sure, I wouldn't be here talking to you.'

'I guess not.' I thought a bit. 'What sort of enquiries were they?'

'They were all syndicates. Enquiries into the suitability of people wanting to form syndicates to own horses. Making sure there weren't any undesirables sneaking into racing through the back door. Eddy gave all-clear reports on four proposed syndicates which do in fact all contain one or more people who would not be allowed through the gates.'

'How do you know?' I said. 'How did you find out?'

He made a face. 'I was interviewing someone last week in connection with a dope charge. He was loaded with spite against a group of people he said had let him down, and he crowed over me that those people all owned horses under false names. He told me the names, and I checked, and the four syndicates which contain them were all passed by Eddy.'

'I suppose,' I said slowly, 'they couldn't possibly be syndicates headed by Lord Friarly?'

He looked depressed. 'Yes, I'm afraid so. Lord Friarly mentioned to me earlier this afternoon that he'd asked you to take a look-see. Told me out of politeness. It just reinforced the idea I'd already had of asking you myself. But I want it kept quiet.'

'So does he,' I said reassuringly. 'Can you let me have Eddy's reports? Or copies of them? And the false and true names of the undesirables?'

He nodded. 'I'll see you get them.' He looked at his watch and stood up, the briskness returning to his manner like an accustomed coat. 'I don't need to tell you… But do be discreet.'

I joined him on his quick march to the door, where he left me at an even faster pace, sketching the merest wave of farewell. His backview vanished uprightly through the weighing room door, and I took myself out again to my car, reflecting that if I went on collecting jobs at the present rate I would need to call up the troops.