I spent the whole of the rest of the afternoon looking for a man, any man, wearing sun glasses, but the only thing I saw in shades was an actress dodging her public.
Inevitably, at one stage, I came face to face with Jody.
Newbury was his local meeting and he was running three horses, so I had been certain he would be there. A week earlier I had shrunk so much from seeing him that I had wanted to duck going, but in the end I had seen that it was essential. Somehow or other I had to convince him that I had forgotten most of my nocturnal visit, that the crack on the head and concussion had between them wiped the memory slate clean.
I couldn’t afford for him to be certain I had seen and recognised Energise and knew about the swap. I couldn’t afford it for exactly the same reason that I had failed to go to the police. For the same reason that I had quite seriously sworn Charlie and Allie to secrecy.
Given a choice of prosecution for fraud and getting rid of the evidence, Jody would have jettisoned the evidence faster than sight. Energise would have been dead and dogmeat long before an arrest.
The thought that Jody had already killed him was one I tried continually to put out of my head. I reasoned that he couldn’t be sure I’d seen the horse, or recognised him even if I had. They had found me down one end of the line of boxes: they couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t started at that far end and was working back. They couldn’t really be sure I had been actually searching for a ringer, or even that I suspected one. They didn’t know for certain why I’d been in the yard.
Energise was valuable, too valuable to destroy in needless panic. I guessed, and I hoped, that they wouldn’t kill him unless they had to. Why else would they have gone to such trouble to make sure my word would be doubted. Transporting me to London and making me drunk had given them ample time to whisk Energise to a safer place, and I was sure that if I’d gone belting back there at once with the police I would have been met by incredulous wide-eyed innocence.
‘Come in, come in, search where you like,’ Jody would have said.
No Energise anywhere to be seen.
‘Of course, if you were drunk, you dreamt it all, no doubt.’
End of investigation, and end of Energise, because after that it would have been too risky to keep him.
Whereas if I could convince Jody I knew nothing, he would keep Energise alive and somehow or other I might get him back.
I accidentally bumped into him outside the weighing room. We both half-turned to each other to apologise, and recognition froze the words in our mouths.
Jody’s eyes turned stormy and I suppose mine also.
‘Get out of my bloody way,’ he said.
‘Look, Jody,’ I said, ‘I want your help.’
‘I’m as likely to help you as kiss your arse.’
I ignored that and put on a bit of puzzle. ‘Did I, or didn’t I, come to your stables a fortnight ago?’
He was suddenly a great deal less violent, a great deal more attentive.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I know it’s stupid... but somehow or other I got drunk and collected concussion from an almighty bang on the head, and I thought... it seemed to me, that the evening before, I’d set out to visit you, though with things as they are between us I can’t for the life of me think why. So what I want to know is, did I arrive at your place, or didn’t I?’
He gave me a straight narrow-eyed stare.
‘If you came, I never saw you,’ he said.
I looked down at the ground as if disconsolate and shook my head. ‘I can’t understand it. In the ordinary way I never drink much. I’ve been trying to puzzle it out ever since, but I can’t remember anything between about six one evening and waking up in a police station next morning with a frightful headache and a lot of bruises. I wondered if you could tell me what I’d done in between, because as far as I’m concerned it’s a blank.’
I could almost feel the procession of emotions flowing out of him. Surprise, elation, relief and a feeling that this was a totally unexpected piece of luck.
He felt confident enough to return to abuse.
‘Why the bloody hell should you have wanted to visit me? You couldn’t get shot of me fast enough.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said glumly. ‘I suppose you didn’t ring me up and ask me...’
‘You’re so right I didn’t. And don’t you come hanging round. I’ve had a bellyful of you and I wouldn’t have you back if you crawled.’
He scowled, turned away and strode off, and only because I knew what he must really be thinking could I discern the twist of satisfied smile that he couldn’t entirely hide. He left me in much the same state. If he was warning me so emphatically to stay away from his stables there was the best of chances that Energise was back there, alive and well.
I watched his sturdy backview threading through the crowd, with people smiling at him as he passed. Everyone’s idea of a bright young trainer going places. My idea of a ruthless little crook.
At Christmas I had written to Allie in code four.
“Which is the first night you could have dinner with me and where? I enclose twenty dollars for cab fare home.”
On the morning after Newbury races I received her reply, also in groups of five letters, but not in code four. She had jumbled her answer ingeniously enough for it to take me two minutes to unravel it. Very short messages were always the worst, and this was brief indeed.
“January fifth in Miami.”
I laughed aloud. And she had kept the twenty bucks.
The Racing Calendar came in the same post. I took it and a cup of coffee over to the big window on the balcony and sat in an armchair there to read. The sky over the Zoo in Regent’s Park looked as heavy and grey as the day before, thick with the threat of snow. Down by the canal the bare branches of trees traced tangled black lines across the brown water and grassy banks, and the ribbon traffic as usual shattered the illusion of rural peace. I enjoyed this view of life which, like my work, was a compromise between old primitive roots and new glossy technology. Contentment, I thought, lay in being succoured by the first and cosseted by the second. If I’d had a pagan god, it would have been electricity, which sprang from the skies and galvanised machines. Mysterious lethal force of nature, harnessed and insulated and delivered on tap. My welder-uncle had made electricity seem a living person to me as a child. “Electricity will catch you if you don’t look out.” He said it as a warning; and I thought of Electricity as a fiery monster hiding in the wires and waiting to pounce.
The stiff yellowish pages of the Racing Calendar crackled familiarly as I opened their double spread and folded them back. The Calendar, racing’s official weekly publication, contained lists of horses entered for forthcoming races, pages and pages of them, four columns to a page. The name of each horse was accompanied by the name of its owner and trainer, and also by its age and the weight it would have to carry if it ran.
With pencil in hand to act as insurance against skipping a line with the eye, I began painstakingly, as I had the previous week and the week before that, to check the name, owner, and trainer of every horse entered in hurdle races.
Grapevine (Mrs R. Wantage) B. Fritwell 6 11 11
Pirate Boy (Lord Dresden) A. G. Barnes 10 11 4
Hopfield (Mr Paul Hatheleigh) K. Poundsgate 5 11 2
There were reams of them. I finished the Worcester entries with a sigh. Three hundred and sixty-eight down for one novice hurdle and three hundred and forty-nine for another, and not one of them what I was looking for.