Derry looked dubiously at the lists he had made. ‘There were too many non-starters. There really were.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But you can’t have worked out all that just from what I said, from just that simple casual remark...’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘There was something else, of course. It was something Bert himself said, last Friday, when I walked back with him from lunch. He wanted to give me a piece of advice.’
‘That’s right,’ Derry said. ‘He never came out with it.’
‘Yes he did. He did indeed. With great seriousness. He told me not to sell my soul. Not to sell my column.’
‘No,’ Luke-John said.
‘He said “First they buy you and then they blackmail you”.’
Luke-John said ‘No,’ again automatically.
‘He was very drunk,’ I said. ‘Much worse than usual. He called the advice he was giving me his famous last words. He went up in the lift with a half-bottle of whisky, he walked right across his office, he drank from the bottle and without a pause he fell straight out of the window.’
Luke-John put his freckled fingers on his thin mouth and when he spoke his voice was low, protesting and thick, ‘No... my God.’.
After leaving the Blaze I collected the van and drove down to a racing stable in Berkshire to interview the girl who looked after the best known horse in the Lamplighter.
Zig Zag was a household name, a steeplechaser of immense reputation and popularity, automatic headline materiaclass="underline" but any day the cracks would begin to show, since he would be turning eleven on January the first. The Lamplighter, to my mind, would be his last bow as grand old man before the younger brigade shouldered him out. Until Bert Checkov had rammed home the telling difference in weights, Zig Zag, even allotted a punitive twelve stone ten pounds, had been the automatic choice for ante-post favourite.
His girl groom was earnest and devoted to him. In her twenties, unsophisticated, of middling intelligence, Sandy Willis’s every sentence was packed with pithy stable language which she used unself-consciously and which contrasted touchingly with her essential innocence. She showed me Zig Zag with proprietary pride and could recite, and did, his every race from the day he was foaled. She had looked after him always, she said, ever since he came into the yard as a leggy untried three year old. She didn’t know what she’d do when he was retired, racing wouldn’t be the same without him somehow.
I offered to drive her into Newbury to have tea in a café or an hotel, but she said no, thank you, she wouldn’t have time because the evening work started at four. Leaning against the door of Zig Zag’s box she told me about her life, hesitantly at first, and then in a rush. Her parents didn’t get on, she said. There were always rows at home, so she’d cleared out pretty soon after leaving school, glad to get away, her old man was so mean with the housekeeping and her Mum did nothing but screech, nag, nag, at him mostly but at her too and her two kid sisters, right draggy the whole thing was, and she hoped Zig Zag would be racing at Kempton on Boxing Day so she’d have a good excuse not to go home for Christmas. She loved her work, she loved Zig Zag, the racing world was the tops, and no, she wasn’t in any hurry to get married, there were always boys around if she wanted them and honestly whoever would swop Zig Zag for a load of draggy housework, especially if it turned out like her Mum and Dad...
She agreed with a giggle to have her photograph taken if Zig Zag could be in the picture too, and said she hoped that Tally magazine would send her a free copy.
‘Of course,’ I assured her, and decided to charge all free copies against expenses.
When I left her I walked down through the yard and called on the trainer, whom I saw almost every time I went racing. A businesslike man in his fifties, with no airs and few illusions.
‘Come in, Ty,’ he said. ‘Did you find Sandy Willis?’
‘Thank you, yes. She was very helpful.’
‘She’s one of my best lads.’ He waved me to an armchair and poured some oak coloured tea out of a silver pot. ‘Sugar?’ I shook my head. ‘Not much in the upstairs department, but her horses are always jumping out of their skins.’
‘A spot of transferred mother love,’ I agreed. I tasted the tea. My tongue winced at the strength of the tannin. Norton Fox poured himself another cup and took three deep swallows.
‘If I write her up for Tally,’ I said, ‘You won’t do the dirty on me and take Zig Zag out of the Lamplighter at the last minute?’
‘I don’t plan to.’
‘Twelve stone ten is a prohibitive weight,’ I suggested.
‘He’s won with twelve thirteen.’ He shrugged. ‘He’ll never come down the handicap.’
‘As a matter of interest,’ I said, ‘What happened to Brevity just before the Champion Hurdle?’
Norton clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘You can rely on it, Zig Zag will not be taken out at the last minute. At least, not for no reason, like Brevity.’
‘He was favourite, wasn’t he?’ I knew he was, I’d checked carefully from Derry’s list. ‘What exactly happened?’
‘I’ve never been so furious about anything.’ The eight month old grievance was still vivid in his voice. ‘I trained that horse to the minute. To the minute. We always had the Champion Hurdle as his main target. He couldn’t have been more fit. He was ready to run for his life. And then what? Do you know what? I declared him at the four day stage, and the owner, the owner, mark you, went and telephoned Weatherbys two days later and cancelled the declaration. Took the horse out of the race. I ask you! And on top of that, he hadn’t even the courtesy, or the nerve probably, to tell me what he’d done, and the first I knew of it was when Brevity wasn’t in the overnight list of runners. Of course I couldn’t believe it and rang up Weatherbys in a fury and they told me old Dembley himself had struck his horse out. And I still don’t know why. I had the most God almighty row with him about it and all he would say was that he had decided not to run, and that was that. He never once gave me a reason. Not one, after all that planning and all that work. I told him to take his horses away, I was so angry. I mean, how can you train for a man who’s going to do that to you? It’s impossible.’
‘Who trains for him now?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘No one. He sold all three of his horses, including Brevity. He said he’d had enough of racing, he was finished with it.’
‘You wouldn’t still have his address?’ I asked.
‘Look here, Ty, you’re not putting all that in your wretched paper.’
‘No,’ I assured him. ‘Just one day I might write an article on owners who’ve sold out.’
‘Well... yes, I still have it.’ He copied the address from a ledger and handed it to me. ‘Don’t cause any trouble.’
‘Not for you,’ I said. Trouble was always Luke-John’s aim, and often mine. The only difference was that I was careful my friends shouldn’t be on the receiving end. Luke-John had no such difficulties. He counted no one, to that extent, a friend.
Mrs Woodward and Elizabeth were watching the news on television when I got back. Mrs Woodward took a quick look at her watch and made an unsuccessful attempt at hiding her disappointment. I had beaten her to six o’clock by thirty seconds. She charged overtime by the half hour, and was a shade over businesslike about it. I never got a free five minutes: five past six and it would have cost me the full half hour. I understood that it wasn’t sheer miserliness. She was a widow whose teenage son had a yearning to be a doctor, and as far as I could see it would be mainly Tyrone who put him through medical school.