Dick Francis's Gamble (3 page)

“Thank you, sir,” said Mr. Patel, giving me my change.

I tucked the heavy newspaper under my arm and retraced my tracks home.

Lichfield Grove was a fairly typical London suburban street of mostly 1930s-built duplexes with bay windows and small front gardens.

I had lived here now for the past eight years yet I hardly knew my neighbors other than to wave at occasionally if we happened, by coincidence, to arrive or leave our homes at the same time. In fact, I knew Mr. Patel, the newsagent, better than those I lived right next to. I was aware that the couple on one side were called Jane and Phil (or was it John?), but I had no idea of their surname or what either of them did for a living.

As I walked back from the newsagent's, I thought how strange it was that members of the human race could live here so cheek by jowl with their fellow beings without any meaningful reaction between them. But at least it made a change from the rural village life I had experienced before, where everyone took pains to know everyone else's business and where nothing could be kept a secret for long.

I wondered whether I should make more of an effort to be more community minded. I suppose it would depend on how long I intended to stay.

Many of my racing friends had thought that Finchley was a strange choice, but I had needed a clean break from my former life. A clean break—that was a joke. It had been a clean break that had forced me to stop race riding just as I was beginning to make my mark in the sport. The clean break in question was to my second cervical vertebra, the axis, on which the atlas vertebra above it rotated to turn the head. In short, I had broken my neck.

I suppose I should be thankful that the break hadn't killed or paralyzed me, either of which could have been a highly likely outcome. The fact that I was now walking down Lichfield Grove at all was due to the prompt and gentle care of the paramedics on duty at Cheltenham racetrack that fateful day. They had taken great pains to immobilize my neck and spine before I was lifted from the turf.

It had been a silly fall, and I had to admit to a degree of carelessness on my part.

The last race on Wednesday of the Cheltenham Steeplechasing Festival was what was known as the Bumper—a National Hunt Flat race. No jumps, no hurdles, just two miles of undulating rich green grass between start and finish. It is not the greatest spectacle the Festival has to offer, and many of the large crowd had already made their way to the parking lots, or the bar.

But the Bumper is very competitive, and the jockeys take it very seriously. Not often do the jump boys and girls get to emulate Willie Shoemaker or Frankie Dettori. Judging the pace with no jumps to break up the rhythm is an art, and knowing where and when to make your final challenge to the finish can make all the difference to the outcome.

That particular Wednesday, just over eight years ago, I had been riding a horse that the
Racing Post
had rather kindly called an outsider. The horse had just one speed—moderate—and absolutely no turn of foot to take it past others up the final climb to victory. My only chance was to go off fairly fast from the start and to try to run the “finish” out of the others.

The plan worked quite well, up to a point.

At about halfway, my mount and I were some fifteen lengths in front of the nearest challenger and still going reasonably well as we swung left-handed and down the hill. But the sound of the pursuers was getting ever louder in my ears, and six or seven of them swept past us like Ferraris overtaking a steamroller as we turned into the straight.

The race was lost, and it was no great surprise to me, or to the few still watching from the grandstands.

Perhaps the horse beneath sensed a subtle change in me—a change from expectation and excitement to resignation and disappointment. Or perhaps the horse was no longer concentrating on the task in hand in the same way that his jockey's mind was wandering to the following day's races and his rides to come.

Whatever the real cause, one moment he was galloping along serenely, albeit one-paced, and the next he had stumbled and gone down as if shot.

I had seen the television coverage. I'd had no chance.

The fall had catapulted me over the horse's neck and headfirst into the ground. I had woken up two days later in the neurosurgery and spinal-injuries department of Frenchay Hospital in Bristol with a humdinger of a headache and a metal contraption called a halo brace surrounding and literally screwed into my skull.

Three uncomfortable months later, with the metal halo finally removed, I set about regaining my fitness and place in the saddle only for my hopes to be dashed by the horse-racing authority's medical board, who decided that I was permanently unfit to return to racing. “Too risky,” they had said. “Another fall on your head could prove fatal.” I had argued that I was prepared to accept the risk and pointed out that a fall on the head could prove fatal even if you hadn't previously broken your neck.

I had tried at length to explain to them that all jockeys risked their lives every time they climbed aboard half a ton of horse and galloped at thirty miles per hour over five-foot fences. Jockeys were well used to taking risks and accepted the consequences without blaming the authorities. But it was all to no avail. “Sorry,” they said. “Our decision is final.”

So that had been that.

From being the new kid on the block, the youngest winning jockey of the Grand National since Bruce Hobbs in 1938 and widely tipped to be the next champion, I was suddenly a twentyone-year-old ex-jockey with nothing to fall back on.

“You will need an education for when your riding days are over,” my father had once said in a last futile attempt to make me take up my place at university instead of going racing when I was eighteen.

“Then I'll get my education when I need it,” I'd replied.

And so I had, applying again and being accepted once more by the LSE to read for a combined degree in government and economics.

And hence I had come to live in Finchley, putting down a deposit on the house from the earnings of my last successful season in the saddle.

Finchley Central Underground Station, around the corner from Lichfield Grove, was just ten stops up the Northern Line from the LSE.

But it hadn't been an easy change.

I had become used to the adrenaline-fueled excitement of riding horses at speed over obstacles when winning was the thing. Winning, winning, winning—nothing else mattered. Everything I did was with winning in mind. I loved it. I lived it. It was like a drug, and I was addicted.

When it was snatched away from me, I suffered badly from withdrawal symptoms. An alcoholic with the d.t.'s had nothing on me.

In those first few months I tried hard to put on a brave face, busying myself with buying the house and getting ready for my studies, cursing my luck and telling everyone that I was fine; but inside I was sick, shaking and near suicidal.

 

 

A
nother shower was about to fall out of the darkening sky as I hurried the last few yards along the road to my house with the newspaper.

In keeping with many of my neighbors, I had arranged early on to concrete over my small overgrown front lawn, converting it into an off-road parking space that was now occupied by my aging Mercedes SLK sports car. I had excitedly bought the car brand-new with my percentage from the Grand National win. That had been ten years and more than a hundred and eighty thousand miles ago, and, in truth, I was well past needing a change.

I opened the trunk and looked down at the two coats lying there. The previous evening the sight of Herb's blue cashmere had almost been too much for me to bear, but now it appeared as just an overcoat without a home.

I picked them both up, slammed the trunk shut and hurried inside as the first large drops of rain began to wet my hair.

I hung my coat on one of the hooks behind the front door and wondered what I should do with Herb's. He wouldn't be needing it now but I supposed it belonged to his family and would go back to them eventually.

In the meantime, I hung it up next to mine in my hallway.

I am not quite sure why I went through the pockets. Maybe I thought that he might have left his flat key there as he had been wearing the coat when he had locked his door the previous morning.

There was no key but there was a piece of paper deep in the left-hand pocket. It had been roughly folded over and screwed up. I flattened it out on the wall.

I stood there in disbelief reading the stark message written on the paper in black ballpoint capital letters:

Did that mean Herb had been the real target? Had the assassin actually shot the right man? And if so, why?

I
spent much of Sunday reading and rereading the message on the paper, trying to work out whether it actually was a prediction of murder or just an innocent communication with no relevance to the events at the Grand National the previous afternoon.

I dug out the business card that I had been given at Aintree by the detective: Inspector Paul Matthews, Merseyside Police. I tried the number printed there, but he wasn't available. I left a message asking him to call me back.

I wondered what it was that Herb should have done, what he had been told to do. And for what, and to whom, had he expressed regret?

I gave up trying to work it out and read about the murder in the
Sunday Times
. I thought again about calling our boss, but he would read about it in the papers and would find out soon enough that the victim had been his senior assistant. Why spoil his Sunday?

I knew all too well from my time as a jockey that one should never believe what one reads in newspapers, but, on this occasion, I was surprised how accurate the reports were as far as the factual information was concerned. The
Sunday Times
correspondent clearly had a good link direct to Merseyside Police headquarters, but not so good that he could actually name the victim. And he had little or no information about any motive, but that didn't stop him speculating.

“Such a clinical assassination has all the hallmarks of a gangland organized crime ‘hit.'” He went on to suggest that a reason the name of the victim was being withheld was possibly because he was a well-known criminal, and the police didn't want potential witnesses not to bother coming forward.

“That's rubbish,” I said out loud.

“What's rubbish?” Claudia asked.

I was sitting in our small kitchen with the newspaper spread out across the kitchen table while Claudia was baking a cake for her sister's birthday, her long black hair tied back in a ponytail.

“This in the paper,” I said. “They're suggesting that Herb was a criminal and probably deserved to be killed.”

“And was he?” Claudia asked, turning around.

“Of course not,” I said firmly.

“How do you know?” she asked, echoing the detective inspector.

“I just do,” I said. “I worked at the next desk to him for the past five years. Don't you think I'd have noticed if he was a criminal?”

“Not necessarily,” Claudia said. “Do you think those who worked next to Bernie Madoff realized he was a crook? And how about that doctor, Harold Shipman? He murdered two hundred of his patients over more than twenty years before anyone suspected him.”

She was right. She usually was.

I had met Claudia during my second year at the LSE. We actually met on the London Underground, the Tube, an environment not usually renowned for introducing strangers. That particular evening, nearly six years ago, I had been going into college for an evening event and I was sitting next to Claudia when the train came to a halt in the tunnel. Twenty minutes later the driver came through the train explaining that there was a signal problem at Euston due to an electrical fire. Another twenty minutes after that we moved slowly forward to Kentish Town, where everybody was required to leave the train.

I never did get to the evening event at the LSE.

Claudia and I went to a pub for supper instead. But it was not a romantic liaison, it was strictly business. I was finding life as a student far more expensive than I had budgeted for, and Claudia was in need of digs close to the Byam Shaw School of Art, where she was studying.

By the end of the evening we had a deal. She would move into the guest bedroom in my house as a lodger and pay a contribution towards the mortgage.

By the end of the same month she had moved out of the guest room and into mine as full-time girlfriend, while she still went on renting the guest room as her studio.

The arrangement still existed although, since our student days, the rent she paid had decreased steadily to nothing as my earnings had risen and hers had remained stubbornly static at zero.

“Making your mark as an artist is not about commercial sales,” she would wail whenever I teased her about it. “It's all to do with creativity.”

And creative she was, there was no doubt about that. Sometimes I just wished that others would appreciate her creations enough to write out a check. As it was, the third bedroom of the house had so many finished canvases stacked against the walls there was no longer space for a bed.

“One day,” she would say, “these will all sell for tens of thousands, and I'll be rich.” But the main problem was that she didn't actually want to part with any of them so she didn't even try to sell them. It was as if she painted them solely for her own benefit. And they were definitely an acquired taste—one I would call dark and foreboding, full of surreal, disturbing images of pain and distress.