‘What changed?’ I asked.
‘She had a fall,’ Kate said, receiving a stern look from her sister. ‘Broke her leg badly.’
‘A fall from a horse?’
‘Of course from a horse,’ Janie said sharply. ‘Damn thing dumped me onto the concrete outside its box. Snapped both bones in my shin in multiple places. Three bloody months in plaster and four more in rehab. So I went into the office to help out with the paperwork and I’ve been in there ever since.’ She downed the rest of her drink and stood up. ‘Come on, Catherine, we have to go or we’ll be late.’
‘See what I mean?’ Catherine/Kate said with another killer smile in my direction. She stood up and looked at me with a mixture of sorrow and apology. ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again.’
‘You can count on it,’ I said.
I stood and watched as the two sisters walked towards the door. Kate turned round and waved.
Wow! I thought.
As Tom said in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral: ‘Thunderbolt City’.
9
I spent the evening in the hotel wishing I were elsewhere, thinking about Catherine/Kate Logan. Assuming that she actually was Catherine Logan and not Kate Somebody Else, with a husband and four kids in tow.
I berated myself for not getting her phone number.
I imagined her at the birthday dinner, drinking wine and having fun, and positively ached to be there too.
Instead, I sat alone in the hotel dining room absentmindedly pushing my uneaten food around the plate, before giving up and going to my room.
My spirits were briefly raised by the red message light flashing on the phone beside the bed. I positively leapt across the room to pick it up but my joy was short-lived as the message wasn’t from Kate. It was from Ryan Chadwick inviting me to come out to watch the Sheikh’s horses at work on the gallops the following morning.
‘Be at the new yard by six o’clock at the latest,’ his recorded voice said.
I looked at my watch. Ten past nine. Obviously time for bed.
I’d always been a bit of a night owl and my move to London from rural Devon had opened my eyes to the delights of late nights in the West End. I couldn’t remember when I’d last been in bed before eleven o’clock, let alone ten. I would clearly be totally hopeless as a stable lad. Not only would I be frightened of the horses, I wouldn’t get up in time to ride them out.
However, on this occasion, I was up, dressed and standing in Ryan’s new yard at 5.55 a.m. on Wednesday morning, toasty warm in my new socks, boots and coat.
‘Morning, Harry,’ Ryan said, all smiles. ‘Glad you could make it.’ He hurried from one box to another, checking that everything was in order, while I trotted along behind him. ‘Still can’t get through to here from the old yard,’ he moaned. ‘We’ll have to walk right round the road. It’s a bloody nuisance.’
So is a dead body, I thought, but I decided not to mention it.
If I’d learned one thing over the past two days, it was that the good folk of Newmarket were grieving far more over the seven equine losses than they were over the human one.
It was a mindset with which I had some difficulty empathising. Did they also grieve for the cow that had died to provide the roast beef for their Sunday lunch? No, of course not. Surely horses were just animals too, weren’t they?
Clearly not.
For them, horses were different. They were like family, loved and admired by all, irrespective of their actual owners and trainers, whereas people were just... people, with all their faults and shortcomings.
‘Right,’ said Ryan, slapping me jovially on the back. ‘Let’s get going or we’ll miss my slot.’
We hurried down the road to the house and in through the old yard gates, the blue-and-white-police-tape tide having receded a little since yesterday.
‘Is Janie in yet?’ I asked.
Ryan gave me a look as if he thought it was a strange question to ask, which I suppose it was, to him.
‘She doesn’t get in until seven-thirty,’ he said.
Oliver was already sitting in the Land Rover waiting for us.
‘Morning, Harry,’ he said, leaning back over the front seats to shake my hand. ‘Good of you to join us.’
Both Ryan and Oliver were being uncommonly pleasant towards me, I thought, in spite of the early hour.
I wondered if I was being the subject of a charm offensive. Had they finally worked out that the best way to keep the Sheikh’s horses was to be nice to his representative? Or was I just being cynical?
Ryan turned left out of the yard onto Bury Road.
‘We’re on the Limekilns today,’ he said. ‘Fast gallops over six or seven furlongs. Some will do eight.’
Was horse racing the only activity left where distances were still measured in eighths of a mile? No metric units here, that was for sure.
‘How do you decide which horse does which distance?’ I asked, half fearing that the question might further show up my lack of knowledge.
‘The two-year-olds will run shorter, the threes longer,’ Oliver said, without any obvious irritation at the naivety of the question.
We pulled off the road into a parking area already half full with other vehicles, many with men standing near them by the rail, their binoculars and notebooks at the ready.
‘Bloody touts,’ Oliver said.
The three of us ducked under the rail and walked across the grass, eventually standing close to a strip of the undulating gallop marked off by pairs of small white discs placed eight yards apart all along its length, at about hundred-yard intervals.
‘They move the gallop across a bit every day,’ Oliver said. ‘So the turf doesn’t get too worn.’
‘Who’s they?’ I asked.
‘The Jockey Club. They own all the gallops. We pay a fee to use them.’
Ryan stood to one side speaking into his phone.
‘We used to have walkie-talkies,’ Oliver said to me. ‘But the touts would listen in. Phones are better. More private. We’ve done the lists beforehand. Ryan is just telling them to start.’
We stood and watched as a group of four horses came up towards us, galloping side by side. Ryan and Oliver inspected them closely through their binoculars.
‘What are you looking for?’ I asked Oliver as the four thundered past us and began to slow down at the end of their run.
‘Mostly we are watching to see how they perform relative to the rest of the group. We know how good one or two are and we want to see how the others compare.’
Another four were coming up the gallop towards us. Oliver again lifted his binoculars.
‘Two of these are Sheikh Karim’s,’ he said. ‘The one on the far side and second in from this.’
Even to my eye, I could tell that one of the four was struggling to keep up. Thankfully it was not one of the Sheikh’s.
‘Useless,’ Ryan said with feeling as they passed us. ‘Meant to be running him next week. No chance now. It would be an embarrassment.’
‘So what will you do with him?’ I asked.
‘More hard work. If that doesn’t do the trick he’ll have to go to the sales, not that anyone will want him, not after that.’
‘How would they know?’ I asked.
‘That lot,’ Ryan said with a disdainful wave towards the men standing by their cars. ‘They report everything.’
Another group of four horses was coming along the gallop.
‘The one this side is Arab Dancer,’ Oliver said. ‘He’s another of Sheikh Karim’s. Two-year-old. Nice colt.’
I wondered how he knew which one was which. They just looked the same to me, especially from this head-on angle.
‘Do you know them all by sight?’ I asked.
‘Pretty much,’ Oliver said. ‘I recognise horses like you recognise people. It’s often claimed that Lester Piggott could identify every horse he’d ever ridden when walking away from him in a rainstorm.’ He laughed. ‘But he was bloody hopeless at knowing the owners. But this one is easy, Tony’s riding it.’