‘I’ve told him every day for the past week that I want him off my land...’
‘This structure constitutes a permanent dwelling and as such requires planning permission...’
‘In the town there is a hostel where vagrants can sleep in a dormitory on a one-night basis...’
The council man had begun pulling his branch-and-cardboard roof to pieces, and the other two had joined in. He saw from their faces that his smell offended them, and he saw from the finicky picking of their fingers that they didn’t like touching what he had touched. The slow burning anger had begun in his mind then, but as he detested contacts with other humans and never spoke if he could avoid it, he had merely turned and walked away, shapeless in his bundled clothes, shuffling in his too-big boots, bearded and resentful and smelly.
He had walked six miles since then, slowly.
He needed food and somewhere to shelter from the coming snow. He needed a nest, and fire. His rage against mankind deepened with every leaden step.
In London on the same afternoon the Director of the Racecourse Security Service looked morosely out of the Jockey Club office window at the traffic in Portman Square. Behind him in the comfortable brightly-lit room Mr Melbourne Smith was complaining, as he had done either in person or on the telephone every day for the past two weeks, about the lax security at the November Yearling Sales, from which someone had craftily stolen his just-bought and extremely expensive colt.
Melbourne Smith poured so much money into the British bloodstock industry that his complaints could not be ignored, even though strictly it was a matter for the police and the auctioneers, not the Jockey Club. Melbourne Smith, fifty, forceful, a wheeler-dealer to his fingertips, was as much outraged that anyone should dare to steal from him as by the theft itself.
‘They just walked out with him,’ he said for the fiftieth injured time. ‘And you’ve done bloody little to get him back.’
The Director sighed. He disliked Melbourne Smith intensely but hid it well under a bluffly hearty manner. The Director, with a subtle and inventive mind behind a moustached and tweeded exterior, wondered just what else he could do, short of praying for a miracle, to find the missing colt.
The trail, for a start, was cold, as Melbourne Smith had not discovered his loss for more than a month after the sales. He had bought, as usual, about ten of the leggy young animals who would race the following summer as two-year-olds. He had arranged to have them transported, as usual, to the trainer who would break them in, handle them and saddle them and ride them and accustom them to going in and out of starting stalls. And, as usual, in due course he had gone to see how his purchases were making out.
He had been puzzled at first by what should have been his prize colt. Puzzled, and then suspicious, and then explodingly furious. He had paid a fortune for a well-grown aristocratic yearling and he had received instead a spindly no-hoper with a weak neck. Between his purchase and the changeling there were only two points in common: the body colour, a dark bay, and the large white star on the forehead.
‘It’s a scandal,’ Melbourne Smith said. ‘I’ll spend my money in France, next year.’
The Director reflected that the theft of racehorses was exceedingly rare and that the security at the sales was more a matter of behind-the-scenes paperwork than of bars and bolts: and normally the paperwork was security enough.
Every thoroughbred foal had to be registered soon after birth, the certificate not only giving parentage and birth date but also skin colours and markings and where exactly on the body the hairs of the coat grew in whorls. The markings and whorls had to be carefully drawn onto regulation outline pictures of side, front and rear views of horses.
Later on, when the foal was grown up and ready to race, a second chart of his markings had to be filled in by a veterinary surgeon and sent off to the registry. If the foal certificate and the later certificate matched, all was well. If they didn’t, the horse was barred from racing.
The foal certificate of the yearling Melbourne Smith had bought, definitely did not match the changeling he had been landed with. The colour and the white star were right, but the whorls of hair were all in different places.
The Director had set his assistant the mammoth task of checking the changeling against the 20,000 foal certificates in that year’s registry, but so far none of them had matched. The Director thought that the changeling, whom he had seen, was very likely a half-bred hunter, which hadn’t been eligible for Stud Book entry in the first place, and of whom there would be no official record anywhere.
‘That gate check is a laugh,’ grumbled Melbourne Smith.
The men on the sales paddock gates, the Director admitted to himself, were there only to check that there was an auctioneers’ exit chit for each horse, and that the horse bore the same number, stuck onto its rump, as was written on the chit. They were not there to check whether anyone had sneakily changed the numbers on the horses. They were not at fault because the number 189 which had walked out accompanied by chit 189 had been a weedy-necked no-hoper, and not Melbourne Smith’s expensive aristocrat. It was no good asking them (although the Director had) under exactly what number the expensive aristocrat had actually made his exit. They couldn’t possibly know, and they didn’t.
The Director had discovered in some respects how the substitution had been made, and guessed the rest.
At the sales, the horses up for auction were housed in stable blocks. Horse number I in the catalogue was allotted box number I and had number I stuck on his hip. Number 189 would be found in box 189 and have 189 on his hip. Coming and going along all the rows of boxes would be the customers, assessing and prodding and deciding whether or not to bid. As each horse was sold, its former owners returned it to its box and left it there, and from there the new owners would collect it. Sellers and buyers, in this way, quite often never met.
The lad who had come with 189 had taken it from the sale ring back to its box, and left it there. Melbourne Smith’s lad had collected the horse from box 189 and sent it to the trainer, and it had been the changeling.
The exchange, with so many horses and people on the move, could be (and had been) done without anyone noticing.
The Director supposed that the thieves must have entered their changeling for the sales, and put a ridiculously high reserve on it, so that no one would buy it. He reckoned that the changeling must have been one of the unsold lots between numbers 1 and 188, but the auctioneers had looked blank at the thought of remembering one among so many, so long ago. They auctioned hundreds of horses every week. They didn’t enquire, they said, where the merchandise came from or where it went. They kept records of the horses that had found no takers, but presumed that their owners had taken them back.
‘And this publicity campaign of yours,’ sneered Melbourne Smith, ‘lot of hot air and no results.’
The Director turned wearily away from the window and looked at the newspaper which lay open on his desk. In a week short of headlines the editors had welcomed the story he had persuasively fed them, and no reader could miss the ‘Where is he?’ pictures of the missing treasure. The tabloids had gone for the sob-stuff. The ‘serious’ dailies had reproduced the foal certificate itself. Television newscasters had broadcast both. Two days’ saturation coverage, however, had produced no results. His ‘phone at any time’ number lay silent.
‘You get him back,’ Melbourne Smith said furiously, finally leaving, ‘or I send all my horses to France.’
The Director thought of his wife and children who were preparing for a party that evening and would greet his return with excited faces and smiling eyes. I’ll not think of that damned yearling for two days, he thought: and meanwhile he gave in and prayed intensely for his miracle.