She smiled when I kissed her cheek. ‘Goodnight, Ty.’
‘Goodnight, honey.’
‘Thanks for everything.’
‘Be my guest.’
Lazily I pottered round the flat, tidying up, brushing my teeth, re-reading what I’d written for Tally and putting the cover on the typewriter. When I finally made it to bed Elizabeth was asleep, and I lay between the lonely sheets and thought about Bert Checkov and the non-starters like Brevity in the Champion Hurdle, planning in detail the article I would write for the Blaze on Sunday.
Sunday.
Inevitably, inexorably, every thought led back to Gail.
5
I telephoned to Charles Dembley, the ex-owner of Brevity, on Wednesday morning, and a girl answered, bright fresh voice, carefree and inexperienced.
‘Golly, did you say Tyrone? James Tyrone? Yes, we do have your perfectly frightful paper. At least we used to. At least the gardener does, so I often read it. Well, of course come down and see Daddy, he’ll be frightfully pleased.’
Daddy wasn’t.
He met me outside his house, on the front step, a smallish man nearing sixty with a grey moustache and heavy pouches under his eyes. His manner was courteous stone-wall.
‘I am sorry you have had a wasted journey, Mr Tyrone. My daughter Amanda is only fifteen and is apt to rush into things... I was out when you telephoned, as I expect she told you. I hope you will forgive her. I have absolutely nothing to say to you. Nothing at all. Good afternoon, Mr Tyrone.’
There was a tiny twitch in one eyelid and the finest of dews on his forehead. I let my gaze wander across the front of his house (genuine Georgian, not too large, unostentatiously well kept) and brought it gently back to his face.
‘What threat did they use?’ I asked. ‘Amanda?’
He winced strongly and opened his mouth.
‘With a fifteen-year-old daughter,’ I commented, ‘one is dangerously vulnerable.’
He tried to speak but achieved only a croak. After clearing his throat with difficulty he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘How did they set about it?’ I asked. ‘By telephone? By letter? Or did you actually see them face to face?’
His expression was a full giveaway, but he wouldn’t answer.
I said, ‘Mr Dembley, I can write my column about the last-minute unexplained withdrawal of favourites, mentioning you and Amanda by name, or I can leave you out of it.’
‘Leave me out,’ he said forcefully. ‘Leave me out.’
‘I will,’ I agreed, ‘if in return you will tell me what threat was made against you, and in what form.’
His mouth shook with a mixture of fear and disgust. He knew blackmail when he heard it. Only too well.
‘I can’t trust you.’
‘Indeed you can,’ I said.
‘If I keep silent you will print my name and they will think I told you anyway...’ He stopped dead.
‘Exactly,’ I said mildly.
‘You’re despicable.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d simply like to stop them doing it to anyone else.’
There was a pause. Then he said ‘It was Amanda. They said someone would rape her. They said I couldn’t guard her twenty-four hours a day for years on end. They said to make her safe all I had to do was call Weatherbys and take Brevity out of the Champion Hurdle. Just one little telephone call, against my daughter’s... my daughter’s health. So I did it. Of course I did. I had to. What did running a horse in the Champion Hurdle matter compared with my daughter?’
What indeed.
‘Did you tell the police?’
He shook his head. ‘They said...’
I nodded. They would.
‘I sold all my horses, after,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t any point going on. It could have happened again, any time.’
‘Yes.’
He swallowed. ‘Is that all?’
‘No... Did they telephone, or did you see them?’
‘It was one man. He came here, driven by a chauffeur. In a Rolls. He was, he seemed to me, an educated man. He had an accent, I’m not sure what it was, perhaps Scandinavian, or Dutch, something like that. Maybe even Greek. He was civilized... except for what he said.’
‘Looks?’
‘Tall... about your height. Much heavier, though. Altogether thicker, more flesh. Not a crook’s face at all. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing him say. It didn’t fit the way he looked.’
‘But he convinced you,’ I commented.
‘Yes.’ He shuddered. ‘He stood there watching me while I telephoned to Weatherbys. And when I’d finished he simply said “I’m sure you’ve made a wise decision, Mr Dembley”, and he just walked out of the house and the chauffeur drove him away.’
‘And you’ve heard no more from him at all?’
‘No more. You will keep your bargain, too, like him?’
My mouth twisted. ‘I will.’
He gave me a long look. ‘If Amanda comes to any harm through you, I will see it costs you... costs you...’ He stopped.
‘If she does,’ I said, ‘I will pay.’
An empty gesture. Harm couldn’t be undone, and paying wouldn’t help. I would simply have to be careful.
‘That’s all,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’ He turned on his heel, went back into his house and shut the front door decisively between us.
For light relief on the way home I stopped in Hampstead to interview the man who had done the handicap for the Lamplighter. Not a well-timed call. His wife had just decamped with an American colonel.
‘Damn her eyes,’ he said. ‘She’s left me a bloody note.’ He waved it under my nose. ‘Stuck up against the clock, just like some ruddy movie.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Come in, come in. What do you say to getting pissed?’
‘There’s the unfortunate matter of driving home.’
‘Take a taxi, Ty, be a pal. Come on.’
I looked at my watch. Four thirty. Half an hour to home, counting rush hour traffic. I stepped over the threshold and saw from his relieved expression that company was much needed. He already had a bottle out with a half-full glass beside it, and he poured me one the same size.
Major Colly Gibbons, late forties, trim, intelligent, impatient and positive. Never suffered fools gladly and interrupted rudely when his thoughts leaped ahead, but was much in demand as a handicapper, as he had a clear comprehensive view of racing as a whole, like a master chess player winning ten games at once. He engineered more multiple dead heats than anyone else in the game; the accolade of his profession and a headache to the interpreters of photo finishes.
‘A bloody colonel,’ he said bitterly. ‘Out-ranked, too.’
I laughed. He gave me a startled look and then an unwilling grin.
‘I suppose it is funny,’ he said. ‘Silly thing is, he’s very like me. Looks, age, character, everything. I even like the guy.’
‘She’ll probably come back,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘If she chose a carbon copy of you, she can’t hate you all that much.’
‘Don’t know as I’d have her,’ he said aggressively. ‘Going off with a bloody colonel, and a Yank at that.’
His pride was bent worse than his heart: none the less painful. He sloshed another stiff whisky into his glass and asked me why, as a matter of interest, I had come. I explained about the Tally article, and, seeming to be relieved to have something to talk about besides his wife, he loosened up with his answers more than I would normally have expected. For the first time I understood the wideness of his vision and the grasp and range of his memory. He knew the form book for the past ten years by heart.