His unconscious boy was beginning to stir. I watched him sit up, put his hands to his head, begin to remember what had happened. I listened to his big colleague still shouting furiously from inside the car. Then with deliberate non-haste I climbed back into the cab of the horsebox, started the engine, and drove carefully away.
I had never intended to go far. I took Tiddely Pom to the safest place I could think of; the racecourse stables at Heathbury Park. There he would be surrounded by a high wall and guarded by a security patrol at night. Everyone entering racecourse stables had to show a pass: even owners were not allowed in unless accompanied by their trainer.
Willy Ondroy, consulted on the telephone, had agreed to take in Tiddely Pom, and to keep his identity a secret. The stables would in any case be open from mid-day and the guards would be on duty from then on: any time after that, he said, Tiddely Pom would be just one of a number of horses arriving for the following day’s racing. Horses which came from more than a hundred miles away normally travelled the day before their race and stayed overnight in the racecourse stables. A distant stable running one horse on Friday and another on Saturday would send them both down on Thursday and leave them both at the racecourse stables for two nights, or possibly even three. Tiddely Pom’s two nights’ stay would be unremarkable and inconspicuous. The only oddity about him was that he had no lad to look after him, an awkward detail to which Willy Ondroy had promised to find a solution.
He was looking out for me and came across the grass outside the stable block to forestall me from climbing down from the cab. Instead, he opened the door on the passenger side, and joined me.
‘Too many of these lads know you by sight,’ he said, waving an arm to where two other horseboxes were unloading. ‘If they see you, they will know you would not have brought any other horse but Tiddely Pom. And as I understand it, you don’t want to land us with the security headache of a bunch of crooks trying to injure him. Right?’
‘Right,’ I agreed thankfully.
‘Drive down this road, then. First left. In through the white gate posts, fork left, park outside the rear door of my house. Right?’
‘Right,’ I said again, and followed his instructions, thankful for his quick grasp of essentials and his jet formation pilot’s clarity of decision.
‘I’ve had a word with the racecourse manager,’ he said. ‘The stables and security are his pigeon really. Had to enlist his aid. Hope you don’t mind. He’s a very sound fellow, very sound indeed. He’s fixing up a lad to look after Tiddely Pom. Without telling him what the horse is, naturally.’
‘That’s good,’ I said with relief.
I stopped the horsebox and we both disembarked. The horse, Willy Ondroy said, could safely stay where he was until the racecourse manager came over for him. Meanwhile, would I care for some tea? He looked at his watch. Three fifty. He hesitated. Or a whisky, he added.
‘Why a whisky?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I suppose because you look as though you need it.’
‘You may be right,’ I said, dredging up a smile. He looked at me assessingly, but how could I tell him that I’d just risked killing two men to bring Tiddely Pom safe and unfollowed to his door. That I had been extremely lucky to get away with merely stopping them. That only by dishing out such violence had I avoided a second beating of proportions I couldn’t contemplate. It wasn’t really surprising that I looked as if I needed a whisky. I did. It tasted fine.
13
Norton Fox was less than pleased when I got back.
He heard me rumble into the yard and came out of his house to meet me. It was by then full dark, but there were several external lights on, and more light flooded out of open stable doors as the lads bustled around with the evening chores. I parked, climbed stiffly down from the cab and looked at my watch. Five-fifty. I’d spent two hours on a roundabout return journey to fool the box driver over the distance I’d taken Tiddely Pom. Heathbury Park and back was probably the driver’s most beaten track: he would know the mileage to a hundred yards, recognise it instantly if he saw it on the clock, know for a certainty where the horse was, and make my entire afternoon a waste of time.
‘You’re in trouble, Ty,’ Norton said, reaching me and frowning. ‘What in God’s name were you thinking of? First the man delivering my hay gets here in a towering rage and says my horsebox drove straight at him with some maniac at the wheel and that there’d be an accident if he was any judge, and the next thing is we hear there has been an accident over by Long Barrow crossroads involving a horsebox and I’ve had the police here making enquiries...’
‘Yes.’ I agreed. ‘I’m very sorry, Norton. Your horsebox has a dent in it, and a broken rear light. I’ll apologise to the hay lorry driver. And I guess I’ll have to talk to the police.’
Dangerous driving. Putting it mildly. Very difficult to prove it was a case of self-preservation.
Norton looked near to explosion. ‘What on earth were you doing?’
‘Playing cowboys and Indians,’ I said tiredly. ‘The Indians bit the dust.’
He was not amused. His secretary came out to tell him he was wanted on the telephone, and I waited by the horsebox until he came back, gloomily trying to remember the distinction between careless, reckless and dangerous, and the various penalties attached. Failing to stop. Failing to report an accident. How much for those?
Norton came back less angry than he went. ‘That was the police,’ he said abruptly. ‘They still want to see you. However it seems the two men involved in the crash have vanished from the casualty department in the hospital and the police have discovered that the Cortina was stolen. They are less inclined to think that the accident was your fault, in spite of what the hay lorry driver told them.’
‘The men in the Cortina were after Tiddely Pom,’ I said flatly, ‘And they damn nearly got him. Maybe you could tell Victor Roncey that there is some point to our precautions, after all.’
‘He’s gone home,’ he said blankly. I began to walk across the dark stable yard to where I’d left my van, and he followed me, giving me directions about how to find the police station.
I stopped him. ‘I’m not going there. The police can come to me. Preferably on Monday. You tell them that.’
‘Why on Monday?’ He looked bewildered. ‘Why not now?’
‘Because,’ I spelled it out, ‘I can tell them roughly where to find those men in the Cortina and explain what they were up to. But I don’t want the police issuing any warrants before Monday, otherwise the whole affair will be sub judice and I won’t be able to get a squeak into the Blaze. After all this trouble, we’ve earned our story for Sunday.’
‘You take my breath away,’ he said sounding as if I had. ‘And the police won’t like it.’
‘For God’s sake, don’t tell them,’ I said in exasperation. ‘That was for your ears only. If and when they ask you where I am, simply say I will be getting in touch with them, that you don’t know where I live, and that they could reach me through the Blaze, if they want me.’
‘Very well,’ he agreed doubtfully. ‘If you’re sure. But it sounds to me as though you’re landing yourself in serious trouble. I wouldn’t have thought Tiddely Pom was worth it.’
‘Tiddely Pom, Brevity, Polyxenes, and all the rest... individually none of them was worth the trouble. That’s precisely why the racket goes on.’