Dead Cert - By Dick Francis Page 0,1

who had lost his first race for two years.

Even the pleasant middle-aged woman whose horse I was riding met me with the question ‘What happened to Admiral?’

‘He fell’ I said.

‘How lucky’ said Mrs Mervyn, laughing happily.

She took hold of the bridle and led her horse into the winner’s unsaddling enclosure. I slid off and undid the girth buckles with fingers clumsy from shock. She patted the horse and chattered on about how delighted she was to have won, and how unexpected it was, and how fortunate that Admiral had tripped up for a change, though a great pity in another way, of course.

I nodded and smiled at her and didn’t answer, because what I would have said would have been savage and unkind. Let her enjoy her win, I thought. They come seldom enough. And Bill might, after all, be all right.

I tugged the saddle off the horse and, leaving a beaming Mrs Mervyn receiving congratulations from all around, pressed through the crowd into the weighing room. I sat on the scales, was passed as correct, walked into the changing room, and put my gear down on the bench.

Clem, the racecourse valet who looked after my stuff, came over. He was a small elderly man, very spry and tidy, with a weatherbeaten face and wrists whose tendons stood out like tight strung cords.

He picked up my saddle and ran his hand caressingly over the leather. It was a habit he had grown into, I imagined, from long years of caring for fine-grained skins. He stroked a saddle as another man would a pretty girl’s cheek, savouring the suppleness, the bloom.

‘Well done, sir’ he said; but he didn’t look overjoyed.

I didn’t want to be congratulated. I said abruptly ‘Admiral should have won.’

‘Did he fall?’ asked Clem anxiously.

‘Yes’ I said. I couldn’t understand it, thinking about it.

‘Is Major Davidson all right sir?’ asked Clem. He valeted Bill too and, I knew, looked upon him as a sort of minor god.

‘I don’t know’ I said. But the hard saddle-tree had hit him plumb in the belly with the weight of a big horse falling at thirty miles an hour behind it. What chance has he got, poor beggar, I thought.

I shrugged my arms into my sheepskin coat and went along to the First-Aid room. Bill’s wife, Scilla, was standing outside the door there, pale and shaking and doing her best not to be frightened. Her small neat figure was dressed gaily in scarlet, and a mink hat sat provocatively on top of her cloudy dark curls. They were clothes for success, not sorrow.

‘Alan’ she said, with relief, when she saw me. ‘The doctor’s looking at him and asked me to wait here. What do you think? Is he bad?’ She was pleading, and I hadn’t much comfort to give her. I put my arm round her shoulders.

She asked me if I had seen Bill fall, and I told her he had dived on to his head and might be slightly concussed.

The door opened, and a tall slim well-groomed man came out. The doctor.

‘Are you Mrs Davidson?’ he said to Scilla. She nodded.

‘I’m afraid your husband will have to go along to the hospital,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be sensible to send him home without an X-ray.’ He smiled reassuringly, and I felt some of the tension go out of Scilla’s body.

‘Can I go in and see him?’ she said.

The doctor hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘but he’s almost unconscious. He had a bit of a bang on the head. Don’t try to wake him.’

When I started to follow Scilla into the First-Aid room the doctor put his hand on my arm to stop me.

‘You’re Mr York, aren’t you?’ he asked. He had given me a regulation check after an easy fall I’d had the day before.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know these people well?’

‘Yes. I live with them most of the time.’

The doctor closed his lips tight, thinking. Then he said, ‘It’s not good. The concussion’s not much, but he’s bleeding internally, possibly from a ruptured spleen. I’ve telephoned the hospital to take him in as an emergency case as soon as we can get him there.’

As he spoke, one of the racecourse ambulances backed up towards us. The men jumped out, opened the rear doors, took out a big stretcher and carried it into the First-Aid room. The doctor went in after them. Soon they all reappeared with Bill on the stretcher. Scilla followed, the anxiety plain on her face, deep and well-founded.

Bill’s firm brown