Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,1

I said, ‘is a customer.’

‘Oh sure. Sure.’ The hasty retreat from offence, the placatory grin, the old-pals slap on the shoulder, I disliked them all yet was aware they were only the desperate papering over no self-confidence. I had known him for years and we had jumped many a fence alongside: Jiminy Bell, one-time steeplechase jockey, currently drifting around horse places hoping for hand-outs. Where, but for the grace…

‘Drink?’ I suggested, and pitied the brightening eyes.

‘Brandy,’ he said. ‘Large, if you could.’

I gave him a treble and a fiver. He took both with the usual mix of shame and bravado, consoling himself inwardly with the conviction that I could afford it.

‘What do you know of the Ten Trees Stud?’ he asked, which was much like asking what one knew of the Bank of England. ‘I’ve been offered a job there.’

If it had been a good job, he wouldn’t be asking my opinion. I said, ‘What as?’

‘Assistant.’ He made a face over the brandy, not from the taste but from the realities of life. ‘Assistant stud groom,’ he said.

I paused. It wasn’t much.

‘Better than nothing, perhaps.’

‘Do you think so?’ he asked earnestly.

‘It’s what you are,’ I said. ‘Not what you do.’

He nodded gloomily, and I wondered if he were thinking as I was that it was really what you had been that mattered when you came face to face with the future. Without his ten years as a name in the sports pages he would have settled happily for what he now saw as disgrace.

Through a gap in the crowd I saw Kerry Sanders staring at me crossly and tapping her fingers on the table.

‘See you,’ I said to Jiminy Bell. ‘Let me know how you get on.’

‘Yeah…’

I elbowed back to the lady. Gin and jollying softened the Sales’ impact and eventually she recovered some of the fizz with which she had set out from London in my car. We had come to buy a steeplechaser as a gift for a young man, and she had made it delicately clear that it was not the young man himself that she was attached to, but his father. Pre-marital negotiations, I gathered, were in an advanced stage, but she had been reticent about names. She had been recommended to me, and me to her, by a mutual American acquaintance, a bloodstock agent called Pauli Teksa, and until two days earlier I had not known of her existence. Since then, she had filled my telephone.

‘He will like it, don’t you think?’ she asked now for the seventh or eighth time, seeking admiration more than reassurance.

‘It’s a fantastic present,’ I said obligingly, and wondered if the young man would accept it cynically or with joy. I hoped for her sake he would understand she wanted to please him more than bribe him, even if a bit of both.

‘I think,’ I said, ‘that I ought to go over and take a quick look at the horse before it comes into the ring, just to make sure it hasn’t bowed any tendons or grown any warts since I saw it last.’

She glanced out at the rain. ‘I’ll stay here.’

‘Right.’

I squelched down to the drab old stables and found Box 126 with Lot 126 duly inside, shifting around on his straw and looking bored. Lot 126 was a five-year-old hurdler which someone with a macabre sense of humour had named Hearse Puller, and in a way one could see why. Glossy dark brown all over, he was slightly flashy looking, holding his head high as if preening. All he needed was a black plume on his head and he’d have been fine for Victorian trips to the cemetery.

Kerry Sanders had stipulated that her gift should be a young good-looking past winner, with cast-iron future prospects. Also that in all its races it should never have fallen. Also that it should be of a calibre pleasing to the father even though it was to be given to the son. Also that it should be interesting, well bred, sensible, brave, bursting with health and keen to race: in short, the perfect chaser. Also that it should be bought by Friday which was the young man’s birthday. Also it should cost no more than six or seven thousand dollars.

That had been the gist of her first call to me on Monday afternoon. She had conceived the idea of the gift at two o’clock, found my name by two-ten, and talked to me by two-twenty. She saw no reason why I should