I may not have been drunk, but I woke the next morning with a shattering headache, just the same: all in a good cause, I thought, trying to ignore the blacksmith behind my eyes.
Sparking Plug ran in his race and lost by half a length. I took the opportunity of saying aloud on the lads' stand that there was the rest of my week's pay gone down the bloody drain.
Colonel Beckett patted his horse's neck in the cramped unsaddling enclosure and said casually to me, "Better luck next time, eh? I've sent you what you wanted, in a parcel." He turned away and resumed talking to Inskip and his jockey about the race.
We all went back to Yorkshire that night, with Grits and me sleeping most of the way on the benches in the back of the horse box.
He said reproachfully as he lay down, "I didn't know you hated it at Inskip's and I haven't seen you drunk before either."
"It isn't the work. Grits, it's the pay." I had to keep it Up.
"Still there are some who are married and have kids to keep on what you were bleating about." He sounded disapproving, and indeed my behaviour must have affected him deeply, because he seldom spoke to me after that night.
There was nothing of interest to report to October the following afternoon, and our meeting in the gully was brief. He told me, however, that the information then in the post from Beckett had been collected by eleven keen young officer cadets from Aldershot who had been given the task as an initiative exercise, and told they were in competition with each other to see which of them could produce the most comprehensive report of the life of his allotted horse. A certain number of questions those I had suggested were outlined for them.
The rest had been left to their own imagination and detective ability, and October said Beckett had told him they had used them to the full.
I returned down the hill more impressed than ever with the Colonel's staff work, but not as staggered as when the parcel arrived the following day. Wally again found some wretched job for me to do in the afternoon, so that it was not until after the evening meal, when half the lads had gone down to Slaw, that I had an opportunity of taking the package up to the dormitory and opening it. It contained 237 numbered typewritten pages bound into a cardboard folder, like the manuscript of a book, and its production in the space of one week must have meant a prodigious effort not only from the young men themselves, but from the typists as well. The information was given in note form for the most part, and no space had anywhere been wasted in flowing prose: it was solid detail from cover to cover.
Mrs. AUnut's voice floated up the stairs.
"Clan, come down and fetch me a bucket of coal, will you please?"
I thrust the typescript down inside my bed between the sheets, and went back to the warm, communal kitchen-living-room where we ate and spent most of our spare time. It was impossible to read anything private there, and my life was very much supervised from dawn to bedtime; and the only place I could think of where I could concentrate uninterruptedly on the typescript was the bathroom. Accordingly that night I waited until all the lads were asleep, and then went along the passage and locked myself in, ready to report an upset stomach if anyone should be curious.
It was slow going: after four hours I had read only half. I got up stiffly, stretched, yawned, and went back to bed. Nobody stirred. The following night, as I lay waiting for the others to go to sleep so that I could get back to my task, I listened to them discussing the evening that four of them had spent in Slaw.
"Who's that fellow who was with Soupy?" asked Grits.
"I haven't seen him around before."
"He was there last night too," said one of the others.
"Queer sort of bloke."
"What was queer about him?" asked the boy who had stayed behind, he watching the television while I in an armchair caught up on some sleep.
"I dunno," said Grits.
"His eyes didn't stay still, like."
"Sort of as if he was looking for someone," added another voice.
Paddy said firmly from the wall on my right, "You just all keep clear of that chap, and Soupy too. I'm telling you. People like them are no good."
"But that chap, that one with that smashing gold tie, he bought us a round, you know he did. He can't be too bad if he bought us a round"
Paddy sighed with exasperation that anyone could be so simple.
"If you'd have been Eve, you'd have eaten the apple as soon as look at it.
You wouldn't have needed a serpent. "
"Oh well," yawned Grits.
"I don't suppose he'll be there tomorrow. I heard him say something to Soupy about time getting short."
They muttered and murmured and went to sleep, and I lay awake in the dark thinking that perhaps I had just heard something very interesting indeed. Certainly a trip down to the pub was indicated for the following evening.
With a wrench I stopped my eyes from shutting, got out of my warm bed, repaired again to the bathroom, and read for another four hours until I had finished the typescript. I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the wall and stared sightlessly at the fixtures and fittings. There was nothing, not one single factor, that occurred in the life histories of all of the eleven microscopically investigated horses. No common denominator at all. There were quite a few things which were common to four or five but not often the same four or five like the make of saddles their jockeys used, the horse cube nuts they were fed with, or the auction rings they had been sold in: but the hopes I had had of finding a sizeable clue in those packages had altogether evaporated. Cold, stiff, and depressed, I crept back to bed.
The next evening at eight I walked alone down to Slaw, all the other lads saying they were skint until payday and that in any case they wanted to watch Z Cars on television.
"I thought you lost all your cash on Sparks at Cheltenham," observed Grits.
"I've about two bob left," I said, producing some pennies.
"Enough for a pint."
The pub, as often on Wednesdays, was empty. There was no sign of Soupy or his mysterious friend, and having bought some beer I amused myself at the dart board, throwing one-to-twenty sequences, and trying to make a complete ring in the trebles. Eventually I pulled the darts out of the board, looked at my watch, and decided I had wasted the walk;
and it was at that moment that a man appeared in the doorway, not from the street, but from the saloon bar next door. He held a glass of gently fizzing amber liquid and a slim cigar in his left hand and pushed open the door with his right. Looking me up and down, he said, "Are you a stable lad?"
"Yes."
"Granger's or Inskip's?"
"Inskip's."
"Hmm." He came farther into the room and let the door swing shut behind him.
"There's ten bob for you if you can get one of your lads down here tomorrow night… and as much beer as you can both drink."
I looked interested.
"Which lad?" I asked.
"Any special one? Lots of them will be down here on Friday."
"Well, now, it had better be tomorrow, I think. Sooner the better, I always say. And as for which lad… er… you tell me their names and I'll pick one of them… how's that?"
I thought it was damn stupid, and also that he wished to avoid asking too directly, too memorably for. well. for me?
"OK. Paddy, Grits, Wally, Steve, Ron…" I paused.
"Go on," he said.
"Reg, Norman, Dave, Jeff, Clan, Mike…"
His eyes brightened.
"Clan," he said.
"That's a sensible sort of name.
Bring Clan. "
"I am Clan," I said.
There was an instant in which his balding scalp contracted and his eyes narrowed in annoyance.
"Stop playing games," he said sharply.
"It was you," I pointed out gently, 'who began it. "
He sat down on one of the benches and carefully put his drink down on the table in front of him.