‘No,’ I said. ‘It was Kemp-Lore himself. Could you draw me a picture of him wearing a head-scarf?’
She found a piece of cartridge paper and with concentration made a recognisable likeness in charcoal of the face I now unwillingly saw in dreams.
‘I’ve only seen him on television,’ she said. ‘It isn’t very good.’ She began to sketch in a head-scarf, adding with a few strokes an impression of a curl of hair over the forehead. Then, putting her head on one side and considering her work, she emphasized the lips so that they looked dark and full.
‘Lipstick,’ she murmured, explaining. ‘How about clothes?’ Her charcoal hovered over the neck.
‘Jodhpurs and hacking jacket,’ I said. ‘The only clothes which look equally right on men and women.’
‘Crumbs,’ she said, staring at me. ‘It was easy, wasn’t it? On with head-scarf and lipstick, and exit the immediately recognisable Kemp-Lore.’
I nodded. ‘Except that he still reminded people of himself.’
She drew a collar and tie and the shoulders of a jacket with revers. The portrait grew into a likeness of a pretty girl dressed for riding. It made my skin crawl.
I found Joanna’s eyes regarding me sympathetically.
‘You can hardly bear to look at him, can you?’ she said. ‘And you talk in your sleep.’
I rolled up the picture, bounced it on the top of her head, and said lightly, ‘Then I’ll buy you some ear plugs.’
‘He was taking a big risk, all the same, pretending to be a girl,’ she said, smiling.
‘I don’t suppose he did it a minute longer than he had to,’ I agreed. ‘Just long enough to get from Timberley to Cheltenham without being recognised.’
I filled ten long envelopes with the various statements, and stuck them down. I addressed one to the senior steward and four others to influential people in the National Hunt Committee. One to the Chairman of Universal Telecast, one to John Ballerton, and one to Corin Kellar, to show them their idol’s clay feet. One to James. And one to Maurice Kemp-Lore.
‘Can’t he get you for libel?’ asked Joanna looking over my shoulder.
‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘There’s a defence in libel actions called justification, which roughly means that if a man has done something dishonest you are justified in disclosing it. You have to prove it is true, that’s all.’
‘I hope you are right,’ she said dubiously, sticking on some stamps.
‘Don’t worry. He won’t sue me,’ I said positively.
I stacked nine of the envelopes into a neat pile on the bookshelf and propped the tenth, the unstamped one for Kemp-Lore, up on end behind them.
‘We’ll post that lot on Friday,’ I said. ‘And I’ll deliver the other one myself.’
At eight-thirty on Thursday morning Joanna made the telephone call upon which so much depended.
I dialled the number of Kemp-Lore’s London flat. There was a click as soon as the bell started ringing, and an automatic answering device invited us to leave a recorded message. Joanna raised her eyebrows; I shook my head, and she put down the receiver without saying anything.
‘Out,’ I said unnecessarily. ‘Damn.’
I gave her the number of Kemp-Lore’s father’s house in Essex and she was soon connected and talking to someone there. She nodded to me and put her hand over the mouthpiece, and said, ‘He’s there. They’ve gone to fetch him. I... I hope I don’t mess it up.’
I shook my head encouragingly. We had rehearsed pretty thoroughly what she was going to say. She licked her lips, and looked at me with anxious eyes.
‘Oh? Mr. Kemp-Lore?’ She could do a beautiful cockney-suburban accent, not exaggerated and very convincing. ‘You don’t know me, but I wondered if I could tell you something that you could use on your programme in the newsy bits at the end? I do admire your programme, I do really. It’s ever so good, I always think...’
His voice clacked, interrupting the flow.
‘What information?’ repeated Joanna. ‘Oh, well, you know all the talk there’s been about athletes using them pep pills and injections and things, well I wondered if you wanted to know about jockeys doing it too... one jockey, actually that I know of, but I expect they all do it if the truth were known... Which jockey? Oh... er... Robbie Finn, you know, the one you talked to on the telly on Saturday after he won that race. Pepped to the eyebrows as usual he was, didn’t you guess? You was that close to him I thought you must have... How do I know? Well I do know... you want to know how I know... well... it’s a bit dodgy, like, but it was me got some stuff for him once. I work in a doctor’s dispensary... cleaning you see... and he told me what to take and I got it for him. But now look here, I don’t want to get into no trouble, I didn’t mean to let on about that... I think I’d better ring off... Don’t ring off? You won’t say nothing about it then, you know, me pinching the stuff?
‘Why am I telling you?... Well, he don’t come to see me no more, that’s why.’ Her voice was superbly loaded with jealous spite. ‘After all I’ve done for him... I did think of telling one of the newspapers, but I thought I’d see if you were interested first. I can tell them if you’d rather... Check, what do you mean check?... You can’t take my word for it on the telephone? Well, yes, you can come and see me if you want to... no, not today, I’m at work all day... yes, all right, tomorrow morning then.
‘How do you get there?... Well, you go to Newbury and then out towards Hungerford...’ She went on with the directions slowly while he wrote them down. ‘And it’s the only cottage along there, you can’t miss it. Yes, I’ll wait in for you, about eleven o’clock, all right then. What’s my name?... Doris Jones. Yes, that’s right. Mrs. Doris Jones... Well ta-ta then.’ The telephone clicked and buzzed as he disconnected.
She put the receiver down slowly, looking at me with a serious face.
‘Hook, line and sinker,’ she said.
When the banks opened I went along and drew out one hundred and fifty pounds. As Joanna had said, what I was doing was complicated and expensive; but complication and expense had achieved top-grade results for Kemp-Lore, and at least I was paying him the compliment of copying his methods. I grudged the money not at alclass="underline" what is money for, if not to get what you want? What I wanted, admirable or not, was to pay him in his own coin.
I drove off to the Bedfordshire farmer who promised to lend me his Land-Rover and trailer. It was standing ready in the yard when I arrived at noon, and before I left I bought from the farmer two bales of straw and one of hay, which we stowed in the back of the Land-Rover. Then, promising to return that evening, I started away to the first of my appointments with the Horse and Hound advertisers.
The first hunter, an old grey gelding in Northamptonshire, was so lame that he could hardly walk out of his box and he was no bargain even at the sixty pounds they were asking for him. I shook my head, and pressed on into Leicestershire.
The second appointment proved to be with a brown mare, sound in limb but noisy in wind, as I discovered when I cantered her across a field. She was big, about twelve years old and gawky, but quiet to handle and not too bad to look at, and she was for sale only because she could not go as fast as her ambitious owner liked. I haggled, bringing him from the hundred he had advertised her for down to eighty-five pounds, and clinched the deal. Then I loaded the mare, whose name, her ex-owner said, was Buttonhook, into the trailer and turned my face South again to Berkshire.
Three hours later, at half-past five in the afternoon, I turned the Land-Rover into the lane at the cottage, and bumped Buttonhook to a standstill on the rough ground behind the bushes beyond the building. She had to wait in the trailer while I got the straw and spread it thickly over the floorboards in the room with the water pipes cemented over the window, and again while I filled her a bucket of water out of the rain butt and carried an armful of hay into the room and put it in the corner behind the door.