‘You don’t really make much out of it, then, yourself, considering the risks.’
‘Double my salary,’ he observed dryly. ‘Tax free. And you underestimate us. We have two horses, and they each go about fifteen times a year.’
‘Have I seen the other one?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘There and back.’
‘Once?’
‘Once.’
‘And how do you get the money back to France?’
‘Send it in magazines. Weeklies. The Horse and Hound, things like that.’
‘English money?’
‘Yes. The chap in France has a contact who exchanges it.’
‘Risky, sending it by post.’
‘We’ve never lost any.’
‘How long have you been doing it?’
‘Since they invented the bonus. Shortly after, anyway.’
There was another long silence. Simon fiddled with his empty glass and didn’t look like an embezzler. I wondered sadly if it was priggish to want one’s friends to be honest, and found that I did still think of him as a friend, and could no longer believe that he had paid Billy to give me a bad time. Billy quite simply hated my pedigreed guts: and I could live with that.
‘Well,’ he said in the end. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
He knew as well as I did that he’d have no chance in an investigation. Too many records of his transactions would still exist in various government and banking files. If I started any enquiry he would very likely end up in gaol. I stood up stiffly off the bar stool and shook my head.
‘Nothing...’ I hesitated.
‘Nothing... as long as we stop?’
‘I don’t know.’
He gave me a twisted smile. ‘All right, Henry. We’ll pack it in.’
We went out of the pub and walked together through the slush back to the office, but it wasn’t the same. There was no trust left. He must have been wondering whether I would keep my mouth shut permanently, and I knew, and hated the knowledge, that he could probably go on with his scheme in spite of saying he wouldn’t. The brown mare wouldn’t go again, but he could change her for another, and there was his second horse, which I hadn’t even noticed. If he was careful, he could go on. And he was a careful man.
The travel schedules in the office, checked again, still showed no more trips to Milan till the Wednesday of the following week. Nor, as far as I could see, were there any flights at all before then; only a couple of sea passages booked for polo ponies, which weren’t my concern. I knocked on Yardman’s door, and went in and asked him if I could have the rest of the week off: my rights, Conker would have said.
‘Milan next Wednesday,’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘And there’s nothing before that? Of course, my dear boy, of course you can have the time off. If you don’t mind if I bring you back should an urgent trip crop up?’
‘Of course not.’
‘That’s good, that’s good.’ The spectacles flashed as he glanced out of the window, the tight skin around his mouth lifting fleetingly into a skeletal smile. ‘You still like the job, then?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said politely.
‘Well, well, my dear boy, and I won’t say that you’re not good at it, I won’t say that at all. Very reliable, yes, yes. I admire you for it, dear boy, I do indeed.’
‘Well... thank you, Mr Yardman.’ I wasn’t sure that underneath he wasn’t laughing at me, and wondered how long it would be before he understood that I didn’t look on my job as the great big joke everyone else seemed to think it.
I wrote to Gabriella to tell her I would be coming back the following week, and drove moderately home, thinking alternately of her and Simon in an emotional see-saw.
There was a message for me at home to ring up Julian Thackery’s father, which I did. The weather forecast was favourable, he said, and it looked as though there would be racing on Saturday. He was planning to send a good hunter chaser up to Wetherby, and could I go and ride it.
‘I could,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s fine. She’s a grand little mare, a real trier, with the shoulders of a champion and enough behind the saddle to take you over the best.’
‘Wetherby fences are pretty stiff,’ I commented.
‘She’ll eat them,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘And she’s ready. We gave her a mile gallop this morning, thinking she’d be backward after the snow, and she was pulling like a train at the end of it. Must thrive on being held up.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘A snip,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you in the weighing room, just before the first. Right?’
I assured him I would be there, and was glad to be going, as I learned from a letter of acceptance lying beside the telephone that the Filyhoughs were again expected for the week-end. My sister Alice came along while I held the letter in my hand.
‘I’m going up to Wetherby on Saturday,’ I said, forestalling her.
‘Sunday...’ she began.
‘No, Alice dear, no. I have no intention whatsoever of marrying Angela Fillyhough and there’s no point in seeing her. I thought that we had agreed that Mother should stop this heiress hunting.’
‘But you must marry someone, Henry,’ she protested.
I thought of Gabriella, and smiled. Maybe her, once I was sure she’d be a friend for life, not just a rocket passion with no embers.
‘I’ll marry someone, don’t you worry.’
‘Well,’ Alice said, ‘if you’re going as far north as Wetherby you might as well go on and see Louise and cheer her up a bit.’
‘Cheer her up?’ I said blankly. Louise was the sister just older than Alice. She lived in Scotland, nearly twice as far from Wetherby, as it happened, as Wetherby from home, but before I could point that out Alice replied.
‘I told you yesterday evening,’ she said in exasperation. ‘Weren’t you listening?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ I’d been thinking about brown mares.
‘Louise has had an operation. She goes home from hospital today and she’ll be in bed for two or three weeks more.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ But Alice either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me, and though I hardly knew Louise in any deep sense I thought she would be far preferable to Angela Filyhough, and I agreed to go. Deciding, as I would be driving a long way after the races, to go up to Yorkshire on the Friday and spend the Saturday morning lazily, I set off northward at lunchtime and made a detour out of habit to Fenland.
‘Hey, Harry, you’re just the man I want. A miracle.’ Tom Wells grabbed my arm as I walked in. ‘Do me a short flight tomorrow? Two trainers and a jockey from Newmarket to Wetherby races.’
I nearly laughed. ‘I’m awfully sorry. I can’t, Tom. I really called in to cancel my booking for Sunday. I can’t come then either. Got to go and visit a sick sister in Scotland. I’m on my way now.’
‘Blast,’ he said forcibly. ‘Couldn’t you put it off?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘You can have a plane to fly up, on Sunday.’ He was cunning, looking at me expectantly. ‘Free.’
I did laugh then. ‘I can’t.’
‘I’ll have to tell the trainers I can’t fix them up.’
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Yeah. Damn it all. Well, come and have a cup of coffee.’
We sat in the canteen for an hour and talked about aircraft, and I continued my journey to Wetherby thinking in amusement that my life was getting more and more like a juggling act, and that it would need skill to keep the racing, flying, horse-ferrying and Gabriella all spinning round safely in separate orbits.
At Wetherby the struggling sunshine lost to a fierce east wind, but the going was perfect, a surprise after the snow. Mr Thackery’s mare was all that he had promised, a tough workmanlike little chestnut with a heart as big as a barn, a true racer who didn’t agree with giving up. She took me over the first two fences carefully, as she’d not been on the course before, but then with confidence attacked the rest. I’d seldom had a more solid feeling ride and enjoyed it thoroughly, finding she needed the barest amount of help when meeting a fence wrong and was not too pigheaded to accept it. Coming round the last bend into the straight she was as full of running as when she started, and with only a flicker of encouragement from me she began working her way up smoothly past the four horses ahead of us. She reached the leader coming into the last, pecked a bit on landing, recovered without breaking up her stride, and went after the only horse in sight with enviable determination. We caught him in time, and soared past the winning post with the pleasure of winning coursing like wine in the blood.