‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘And you still look so young. You look... strong... and dark... and young.’
‘And you look pale and pretty and about fifteen. So stop fretting.’
‘How old is... that girl?’
‘You said you didn’t want to hear about her.’
‘I suppose I don’t, really.’
‘Forget her,’ I said. ‘She is of no importance. She means nothing to me. Nothing at all.’ I sounded convincing, even to myself. I wished it were true. In spite of the scope of her betrayal, in a weak inner recess I ached to be able to sleep with her again. I sat with the whisky glass in my hand and thought about her on the white rug and in her own bed and in the hotel, and suffered dismally from the prospect of the arid future.
After a while I pushed myself wearily to my feet and went to fix the supper. Fish again. Mean little bits of frozen plaice. I cooked and ate them with aversion and fed Elizabeth when her wrist tired on the gadget. All evening she kept up the pathetic attempt to be nice to me, thanking me exaggeratedly for every tiny service, apologising for needing me to do things for her which we had both for years taken for granted, trying hard to keep the anxiety, the embarrassment and the unhappiness out of her eyes and voice, and nowhere near succeeding. She couldn’t have punished me more if she had tried.
Late that evening Tiddely Pom developed violent colic.
Norton Fox couldn’t get hold of Luke-John or Derry, who had both long gone home. The Blaze never divulged home addresses, however urgent the enquiry. Norton didn’t know my telephone number either; didn’t know anyone who did.
In a state of strong anxiety, and on his vet’s advice, he rang up Victor Roncey and told him where his horse was, and what they were doing to save its life.
12
I heard about it in the morning. Roncey telephoned at ten-thirty, when I was sitting in the writing room looking vacantly at the walls and trying to drum up some preliminary gems for my column on Sunday. Mrs Woodward had gone out to the launderette, and Elizabeth called me to the telephone with two rings on the bell over my head: two rings for come at once but not an emergency. Three rings for 999. Four for panic.
Roncey had calmed down from the four ring stage he had clearly been in the night before. He was calling, he said, from Norton Fox’s house, where he had driven at once after being given the news. I sorted out that he had arrived at 2 a.m. to find that the vet had got Tiddely Pom over the worst, with the stoppage in the horse’s gut untangling into normal function. Norton Fox had given Roncey a bed for the rest of the night, and he had just come in from seeing Tiddely Pom walk and trot out at morning exercise. The horse was showing surprisingly few ill effects from his rocky experience, and it was quite likely he would be fit enough to run in the Lamplighter on Saturday.
I listened to his long, brisk detailed saga with uncomfortable alarm. There were still two whole days before the race. Now that Roncey knew where he was, Tiddely Pom’s safety was halved. When he had come to the end of the tale I asked him whether anyone had tried to find out from him at home where his horse had gone.
‘Of course they did,’ he said. ‘Exactly as you said. Several other newspapers wanted to know. Most of them telephoned. Three or four actually turned up at the farm, and I know they asked Peter and Pat as well as me. Some of their questions were decidedly tricky. I thought at the time you’d been quite right, we might have let it slip if we’d known ourselves.’
‘When did these people come to the farm? What did they look like?’
‘They didn’t look like anything special. Just nondescript. One of them was from the Evening Peal, I remember. All the enquiries were on Sunday and Monday, just after your article came out.’
‘No one turned up in a Rolls?’ I asked.
He laughed shortly. ‘They did not.’
‘Were any of your visitors tallish, thickish, blondish, with a faintly yellow skin and a slightly foreign accent?’
‘None that I saw were like that. One or two saw only the boys, because they called while I was in Chelmsford. You could ask them, if you like.’
‘Maybe I will,’ I agreed. ‘No one tried any threats?’
‘No, I told your Sports Editor that. No one has tried any pressure of any sort. To my mind, all your elaborate precautions have been a waste of time. And now that I know where Tiddely Pom is, you may as well tell me where my family is too...’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘Would you ask Norton Fox if I could have a word with him?’
He fetched Norton, who apologised for bursting open the secrecy, but said he didn’t like the responsibility of keeping quiet when the horse was so ill.
‘Of course not. It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘As long as it goes no further than Roncey himself it may not be too bad, though I’d prefer...’
‘His sons knew, of course,’ Norton interrupted. ‘Though I don’t suppose that matters.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Roncey told one of his sons where he was. He telephoned to him just now. He explained to me that he couldn’t remember your telephone number, but he’d got it written down somewhere at home, from having rung you up before sometime. So he rang his son... Pat, I think he said... and his son found it for him. I think he, the son, asked Roncey where he was calling from, because Roncey said that as everyone had stopped enquiring about where the horse was, he didn’t see any harm in his son knowing, so he told him.’
‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘The man’s a fool.’
‘He might be right.’
‘And he might be wrong,’ I said bitterly. ‘Look, Norton, I suppose there was no question of Tiddely Pom’s colic being a misjudged case of poisoning?’
‘For God’s sake Ty... no. It was straightforward colic. How on earth could he have been poisoned? For a start, no one knew then who he was.’
‘And now?’ I asked. ‘How many of your lads know now that he is Tiddely Pom?’
There was a brief, supercharged silence.
‘All of them,’ I said flatly.
‘Some of them knew Roncey by sight,’ he explained. ‘And they’d all read the Blaze. So they put two and two together.’
One of them would soon realise he could earn a fiver by ringing up a rival newspaper. Tiddely Pom’s whereabouts would be as secret as the Albert Memorial. Tiddely Pom, at that moment, was a certain non-starter for the Lamplighter Gold Cup.
Even if Victor Roncey thought that the opposition had backed out of the project, I was certain they hadn’t. In a man like Vjoersterod, pride would always conquer discretion. He wouldn’t command the same respect in international criminal circles if he turned out and ran just because of a few words in the Blaze. He wouldn’t, therefore, do it.
At the four day declaration stage, on the Tuesday, Roncey had confirmed with Weatherbys that his horse would be a definite runner. If he now withdrew him, as he could reasonably do because of the colic, he would forfeit his entry fee, a matter of fifty pounds. If he left his horse at Norton’s still intending to run, he would forfeit a great deal more.
Because I was certain that if Tiddely Pom stayed where he was, he would be lame, blind, doped or dead by Saturday morning.
Norton listened in silence while I outlined these facts of life.
‘Ty, don’t you think you are possibly exaggerating...?’
‘Well,’ I said with a mildness I didn’t feel, ‘how many times will you need to have Brevity — or any other of your horses — taken out of the Champion Hurdle at the last moment without any explanation, before you see any need to do something constructive in opposition?’