Dick Francis
Flying Finish
With my thanks to
THE BRITISH BLOODSTOCK AGENCY
BRUCE DAGLISH
OF LEP TRANSPORT
PETER PALMER
AIRLINE CAPTAIN
JOHN MERCER
OF C.S.E. AVIATION
OXFORD AIRPORT
I assure them that everyone
in this book is imaginary
Chapter One
‘You’re a spoilt bad-tempered bastard,’ my sister said, and jolted me into a course I nearly died of.
I carried her furious unattractive face down to the station and into the steamed-up compartment of Monday gloom and half done crosswords and all across London to my unloved office.
Bastard I was not: not with parents joined by bishop with half Debrett and Burke in the pews. And if spoilt, it was their doing, their legacy to an heir born accidentally at the last possible minute when earlier intended pregnancies had produced five daughters. My frail eighty-six year old father in his second childhood saw me chiefly as the means whereby a much hated cousin was to be done out of an earldom he had coveted: my father delighted in my existence and I remained to him a symbol.
My mother had been forty-seven at my birth and was now seventy-three. With a mind which had to all intents stopped developing round about Armistice Day 1918, she had been for as long as I could remember completely batty. Eccentric, her acquaintances more kindly said. Anyway, one of the first things I ever learnt was that age had nothing to do with wisdom.
Too old to want a young child around them, they had brought me up and educated me at arms length — nurse-maids, prep school and Eton — and in my hearing had regretted the length of the school holidays. Our relationship was one of politeness and duty, but not of affection. They didn’t even seem to expect me to love them, and I didn’t. I didn’t love anyone. I hadn’t had any practice.
I was first at the office as usual. I collected the key from the caretaker’s cubbyhole, walked unhurriedly down the long echoing hall, up the gritty stone staircase, down a narrow dark corridor, and at the far end of it unlocked the heavily brown varnished front door of the Anglia Bloodstock Agency. Inside, typical of the old London warren-type blocks of offices, comfort took over from barracks. The several rooms opening right and left from the passage were close carpeted, white painted, each with the occupant’s name in neat black on the door. The desks ran to extravagances like tooled leather tops, and there were sporting prints on the wall. I had not yet, however, risen to this success bracket.
The room where I had worked (on and off) for nearly six years lay at the far end, past the reference room and the pantry. ‘Transport’ it said, on the half-open door. I pushed it wide. Nothing had changed from Friday. The three desks looked the same as usuaclass="underline" Christopher’s, with thick uneven piles of papers held down by cricket balls; Maggie’s with the typewriter cover askew, carbons screwed up beside it, and a vase of dead chrysanthemums dropping petals into a scummy teacup; and mine, bare.
I hung up my coat, sat down, opened my desk drawers one by one and uselessly straightened the already tidy contents. I checked that it was precisely eight minutes to nine by my accurate watch, which made the office clock two minutes slow. After this activity I stared straight ahead unseeingly at the calendar on the pale green wall.
A spoilt bad-tempered bastard, my sister said.
I didn’t like it. I was not bad-tempered, I assured myself defensively. I was not. But my thoughts carried no conviction. I decided to break with tradition and refrain from reminding Maggie that I found her slovenly habits irritating.
Christopher and Maggie arrived together, laughing, at ten past nine.
‘Hullo,’ said Christopher cheerfully, hanging up his coat. ‘I see you lost on Saturday.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘Better luck next time,’ said Maggie automatically, blowing the sodden petals out of the cup on to the floor. I bit my tongue to keep it still. Maggie picked up the vase and made for the pantry, scattering petals as she went. Presently she came back with the vase, fumbled it, and left a dripping trail of Friday’s tea across my desk. In silence I took some white blotting paper from the drawer, mopped up the spots, and threw the blotting paper in the waste basket. Christopher watched in sardonic amusement, pale eyes crinkling behind thick spectacles.
‘A short head, I believe?’ he said, lifting one of the cricket balls and going through the motions of bowling it through the window.
‘A short head,’ I agreed. All the same if it had been ten lengths, I thought sourly. You got no present for losing, whatever the margin.
‘My uncle had a fiver on you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said formally.
Christopher pivoted on one toe and let go: the cricket ball crashed into the wall, leaving a mark. He saw me frowning at it and laughed. He had come straight into the office from Cambridge two months before, robbed of a cricket blue through deteriorating eyesight and having failed his finals into the bargain. He remained always in better spirits than I, who had suffered no similar reverses. We tolerated each other. I found it difficult, as always, to make friends, and he had given up trying.
Maggie came back from the pantry, sat down at her desk, took her nail varnish out of the stationery drawer and began brushing on the silvery pink. She was a large assured girl from Surbiton with a naturally unkind tongue and a suspect talent for registering remorse immediately after the barbs were securely in.
The cricket ball slipped out of Christopher’s hand and rolled across Maggie’s desk. Lunging after it, he brushed one of his heaps of letters into a fluttering muddle on the floor, and the ball knocked over Maggie’s bottle of varnish, which scattered pretty pink viscous blobs all over the ‘We have received yours of the fourteenth ult.’
‘God-damn,’ said Christopher with feeling.
Old Cooper who dealt with insurance came into the room at his doddery pace and looked at the mess with cross disgust and pinched nostrils. He held out to me the sheaf of papers he had brought.
‘Your pigeon, Henry. Fix it up for the earliest possible.’
‘Right.’
As he turned to go he said to Christopher and Maggie in a complaining voice certain to annoy them, ‘Why can’t you two be as efficient as Henry? He’s never late, he’s never untidy, his work is always correct and always done on time. Why don’t you try to be more like him?’
I winced inwardly and waited for Maggie’s inevitable retaliation. She would be in good form: it was Monday morning.
‘I wouldn’t want to be like Henry in a thousand years,’ she said sharply. ‘He’s a prim, dim, sexless nothing. He’s not alive.’
Not my day, definitely.
‘He rides those races, though,’ said Christopher in mild defence.
‘And if he fell off and broke both his legs, all he’d care about would be seeing they got the bandages straight.’
‘The bones,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The bones straight.’
Christopher blinked and laughed. ‘Well, well, what do you know? The still waters of Henry might just possibly be running deep.’
‘Deep, nothing,’ said Maggie. ‘A stagnant pond, more like.’
‘Slimy and smelly?’ I suggested.
‘No... oh dear... I mean, I’m sorry...’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Never mind.’ I looked at the paper in my hand and picked up the telephone.
‘Henry...’ said Maggie desperately. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
Old Cooper tut-tutted and doddered away along the passage, and Christopher began sorting his varnished letters. I got through to Yardman Transport and asked for Simon Searle. ‘Four yearlings from the Newmarket sales to go to Buenos Aires as soon as possible,’ I said.