Without in the least meaning to I again found myself standing near Ursula, and this time she introduced me to the pork-pie hat, who had temporarily stopped talking.
‘This is Fred Barnet,’ she said. ‘And his wife Susan.’ A rounded motherly person in blue. ‘And their son, Ricky.’ A boy taller than his father, dark-haired, pleasant-faced.
I shook hands with all three, and it was while I was still touching the son that Ursula in her clear voice said my name, ‘Tim Ekaterin.’
The boy’s hand jumped in mine as if my flesh had burned him. I was astonished, and then I looked at his whitening skin, at the suddenly frightened dark eyes, at the stiffening of the body, at the rising panic: and I wouldn’t have known him if he hadn’t reacted in that way.
‘What’s the matter, Ricky?’ his mother said, puzzled.
He said ‘Nothing’ hoarsely and looked around for escape, but all too clearly he knew I knew exactly who he was now and could always find him however far he ran.
‘What do you think, then, Ursula?’ Fred Barnet demanded, returning to the business in hand. ‘Will you buy him? Can I count on you?’
Ursula said she would have to consult her client.
‘But he was third,’ Fred Barnet insisted. ‘A good third... In that company, a pretty good showing. And he’ll win, I’m telling you. He’ll win.’
‘I’ll tell my client all about him. I can’t say fairer than that.’
‘But you do like him, don’t you? Look, Ursula, he’s a good sort, easy to handle, just right for an amateur...’ He went on for a while in this vein while his wife listened with a sort of aimless beam meaning nothing at all.
To the son, under cover of his father’s hard sell, I quietly said, ‘I want to talk to you, and if you run away from me now I’ll be telephoning the police.’
He gave me a sick look and stood still.
‘We’ll walk down the course together to watch the next race,’ I said. ‘We won’t be interrupted there. And you can tell me why. And then we’ll see.’
It was easy enough for him to drop back unnoticed from his parents, who were still concentrating on Ursula, and he came with me through the gate and out across the track itself to the centre of the racecourse, stumbling slightly as if not in command of his feet. We walked down towards the last fence, and he told me why he’d tried to kill Calder Jackson.
‘It doesn’t seem real, not now, it doesn’t really,’ he said first. A young voice, slightly sloppy accent, full of strain.
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
‘Seventeen.’
I hadn’t been so far out, I thought, fifteen months ago.
‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ he said explosively, sounding faintly aggrieved at the twist of fate. ‘I mean, the papers said you worked in a bank.’
‘So I do. And I go racing.’ I paused. ‘You remembered my name.’
‘Yeah. Could hardly forget it, could I? All over the papers.’
We went a few yards in silence. ‘Go on,’ I said.
He made a convulsive gesture of frustrated despair. ‘All right. But if I tell you, you won’t tell them, will you, not Mum and Dad?’
I glanced at him, but from his troubled face it was clear that he meant exactly what he’d said: it wasn’t my telling the police he minded most, but my telling his parents.
‘Just get on with it,’ I said.
He sighed. ‘Well, we had this horse. Dad did. He’d bought it as a yearling and ran it as a two-year-old and at three, but it was a jumper really, and it turned out to be good.’ He paused. ‘Indian Silk, that’s what it was called.’
I frowned. ‘But Indian Silk... didn’t that win at Cheltenham this year, in March?’
He nodded. ‘The Gold Cup. The very top. He’s only seven now and he’s bound to be brilliant for years.’ The voice was bitter with a sort of resigned, stifled anger.
‘But he doesn’t any longer belong to your father?’
‘No, he doesn’t.’ More bitterness, very sharp.
‘Go on, then,’ I said.
He swallowed and took his time, but eventually he said, ‘Two years ago this month, when Indian Silk was five, like, he won the Hermitage ’Chase very easily here at Newbury, and everyone was tipping him for the Gold Cup last year, though Dad was saying he was still on the young side and to give him time. See, Dad was that proud of that horse. The best he’d ever trained, and it was his own, not someone else’s. Don’t know if you can understand that.’
‘I do understand it,’ I said.
He gave a split-second glance at my face. ‘Well, Indian Silk got sick,’ he said. ‘I mean, there was nothing you could put your finger on. He just lost his speed. He couldn’t even gallop properly at home, couldn’t beat the other horses in Dad’s yard that he’d been running rings round all year. Dad couldn’t run him in races. He could hardly train him. And the vet couldn’t find out what was wrong with him. They took blood tests and all sorts, and they gave him antibiotics and purges, and they thought it might be worms or something, but it wasn’t.’
We had reached the last fence, and stood there on the rough grass beside it while in twos and threes other enthusiasts straggled down from the grandstand towards us to watch the horses in action at close quarters.
‘I was at school a lot of the time, see,’ Ricky said. ‘I was home every night of course but I was taking exams and had a lot of homework and I didn’t really want to take much notice of Indian Silk getting so bad or anything. I mean, Dad does go on a bit, and I suppose I thought the horse just had the virus or something and would get better. But he just got slowly worse and one day Mum was crying.’ He stopped suddenly, as if that part was the worst. ‘I hadn’t seen a grown up cry before,’ he said. ‘Suppose you’ll think it funny, but it upset me something awful.’
‘I don’t think it funny,’ I said.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, seeming to gather confidence, ‘It got so that Indian Silk was so weak he could barely walk down the road and he wasn’t eating, and Dad was in real despair because there wasn’t nothing anyone could do, and Mum couldn’t bear the thought of him going to the knackers, and then some guy telephoned and offered to buy him.’
To buy a sick horse?’ I said, surprised.
‘I don’t think Dad was going to tell him just how bad he was. Well, I mean, at that point Indian Silk was worth just what the knackers would pay for his carcass, which wasn’t much, and this man was offering nearly twice that. But the man said he knew Indian Silk couldn’t race any more but he’d like to give him a good home in a nice field for as long as necessary, and it meant that Dad didn’t have the expense of any more vets’ bills and he and Mum didn’t have to watch Indian Silk just getting worse and worse, and Mum wouldn’t have to think of him going to the knackers for dog meat, so they let him go.’
The horses for the second race came out onto the course and galloped down past us, the jockeys’ colors bright in the sun.
‘And then what?’ I said.
‘Then nothing happened for weeks and we were getting over it, like, and then someone told Dad that Indian Silk was back in training and looking fine, and he couldn’t believe it.’
‘When was that?’ I asked.
‘It was last year, just before... before Ascot.’
A small crowd gathered on the landing side of the fence, and I drew him away down the course a bit further, to where the horses would set themselves right to take off.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘My exams were coming up,’ he said. ‘And I mean, they were important, they were going to affect my whole life, see?’
I nodded.