Dick Francis
Forfeit
1
The letter from Tally came on the day Bert Checkov died. It didn’t look like trouble; just an invitation from a glossy to write an article on the Lamplighter Gold Cup. I flicked it across the desk to the Sports Editor and went on opening the mail which always accumulated for me by Fridays. Luke-John Morton grunted and stretched out a languid hand, blinking vacantly while he listened to someone with a lot to say on the telephone.
‘Yeah... yeah. Blow the roof off,’ he said.
Blowing the roof off was the number one policy of the Sunday Blaze, bless its cold heart. Why didn’t I write for the Sunday Times, my wife’s mother said, instead of a rag like the Sunday Blaze? They hadn’t needed me, that was why. She considered this irrelevant, and when she couldn’t actively keep it quiet, continued to apologise to every acquaintance for my employment. That the Blaze paid twenty-eight per cent more than the Times, and that her daughter was expensive, she ignored.
I slit open a cheap brown envelope and found some nut had written to say that only a vicious unscrupulous bum like myself would see any good in the man I had defended last Sunday. The letter was written on lavatory paper and spite oozed from it like marsh gas. Derry Clark read it over my shoulder and laughed.
‘Told you you’d stir them up.’
‘Anything for an unquiet life,’ I agreed.
Derry wrote calm uncontroversial articles each week assessing form and firmly left the crusading rebel stuff to me. My back, as he constantly pointed out, was broader than his.
Eight more of my other correspondents proved to be thinking along the same general lines. All anonymous, naturally. Their problems, I reflected, dumping their work in the waste basket, were even worse than mine.
‘How’s your wife?’ Derry said.
‘Fine, thanks.’
He nodded, not looking at me. He’d never got over being embarrassed about Elizabeth. It took some people that way.
Luke-John’s conversation guttered to a close. ‘Sure... sure. Phone it through by six at the latest.’ He put down the receiver and focussed on my letter from Tally, his eyes skidding over it with professional speed.
‘A study in depth... how these tarty magazines love that phrase. Do you want to do it?’
‘If the fee’s good.’
‘I thought you were busy ghosting Buster Figg’s autobiography.’
‘I’m hung up on chapter six. He’s sloped off to the Bahamas and left me no material.’
‘How far through his horrid little life have you got?’ His interest was genuine.
‘The end of his apprenticeship and his first win in a classic.’
‘Will it sell?’
‘I don’t know,’ I sighed. ‘All he’s interested in is money, and all he remembers about some races is the starting price. He gambled in thousands. And he insists I put his biggest bets in. He says they can’t take away his licence now he’s retired.’
Luke-John sniffed, rubbing a heavily freckled hand across the prominent tendons of his scrawny neck, massaging his walnut sized larynx, dropping the heavy eyelid hoods while he considered the letter from Tally. My contract with the Blaze was restrictive: books were all right, but I couldn’t write articles for any other paper or magazine without Luke-John’s permission, which I mostly didn’t get.
Derry pushed me out of his chair and sat in it himself. As I spent only Fridays in the office, I didn’t rate a desk and usurped my younger colleague’s whenever he wasn’t looking. Derry’s desk held a comprehensive reference library of form books in the top three drawers and a half bottle of vodka, two hundred purple hearts and a pornographic film catalogue in the bottom one. These were window dressing only. They represented the wicked fellow Derry would like to be, not the lawful, temperate, semi-detached man he was.
I perched on the side of his desk and looked out over the Friday morning clatter, a quarter acre of typewriters and telephones going at half speed as the week went on towards Sunday. Tuesdays the office was dead: Saturdays it buzzed like flies squirted with D.D.T. Fridays I felt part of it. Saturdays I went to the races. Sundays and Mondays, officially off. Tuesdays to Thursdays, think up some galvanising subject to write about, and write it. Fridays, take it in for Luke-John, and then for the Editor, to read and vet.
Result, a thousand words a week, an abusive mailbag, and a hefty cheque which didn’t cover my expenses.
Luke-John said, ‘Are you or Derry doing the Lamplighter?’
Without giving me a second Derry jumped in. ‘I am.’
‘That all right with you, Ty?’ Luke-John asked dubiously.
‘Oh sure,’ I said. ‘It’s a complicated handicap. Right up his street.’
Luke-John pursed his thin lips and said with unusual generosity ‘Tally says they want background stuff, not tips... I don’t see why you shouldn’t do it, if you want to.’
He scribbled a large O.K. at the bottom of the page and signed his name. ‘But of course,’ he added, ‘if you dig up any dirt, keep it for us.’
Generous, be damned, I thought wryly. Luke-John’s soul belonged to the Blaze and his simple touchstone in all decisions was, ‘Could it possibly, directly or indirectly, benefit the paper?’ Every member of the Sports section had at some time or other been ruthlessly sacrificed on his altar. For cancelled holidays, smashed appointments, lost opportunities, he cared not one jot.
‘Sure,’ I said mildly. ‘And thanks.’
‘How’s your wife?’ he asked.
‘Fine thanks.’
He asked every week without fail. He had his politenesses, when it didn’t cost the Blaze. Maybe he really cared. Maybe he only cared because when she wasn’t ‘fine’ it affected my work.
I pinched Derry’s telephone and dialled the number.
‘Tally magazine, can I help you?’ A girl’s voice, very smooth, West Ken, and bored.
‘I’d like to talk to Arnold Shankerton.’
‘Who’s calling?’
‘James Tyrone.’
‘One moment, please.’ Some clicks and a pause. ‘You’re through.’
An equally smooth, highly sophisticated tenor voice proclaimed itself to be Arnold Shankerton, Features. I thanked him for his letter and said I would like to accept his commission. He said that would be very nice in moderately pleased tones and I gently added, ‘If the price is right, naturally.’
‘Naturally,’ he conceded. ‘How much do you want?’
Think of a number and double it. ‘Two hundred guineas, plus expenses.’
Luke-John’s eyebrows rose and Derry said, ‘You’ll be lucky.’
‘Our profit margin is small,’ Shankerton pointed out a little plaintively. ‘One hundred is our absolute limit.’
‘I pay too much tax.’
His sigh came heavily down the wire. ‘A hundred and fifty, then. And for that it’ll have to be good.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Your best,’ he said, ‘would scorch the paper. We want the style and the insight but not the scandal. Right?’
‘Right,’ I agreed without offence. ‘How many words?’
‘It’s the main feature. Say three thousand five hundred, roughly speaking.’
‘How about pictures?’
‘You can have one of our photographers when you’re ready. And within reason, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I said politely. ‘When do you want it by?’
‘We go to press on that edition... let’s see... on November twentieth. So we’d like your stuff on the morning of the seventeenth, at the very latest. But the earlier the better.’