Kris had drawn two straight lines on the wipe-clean surface of the air map, a dog-leg route to lunch. It was he who steered by the direction indicator, allowing for magnetic variation and a crosswind, and I with small triumphs who checked our passage over the roads and rivers two thousand feet below and pointed them out to him, earning grins and nods.
From White Waltham we flew north to avoid crossing straight over London, turning north-east where the north-heading multi-lane M 1 motorway reached the outskirts of the sprawling town of Luton, with its busy airport to the east.
Kris yearned for some of the expensive avionic packages that would give him access to all the latest equipment that made air navigation easier. It cost him every spare cent, however, just to keep flying, so he navigated by dead reckoning and sharp-eyed passengers, and only once, he said, had he been disastrously lost.
Dead reckoning delivered us safely alive into the Newmarket area, where he sought out a large house some way south of the town and, descending to a thousand feet or so, circled round it twice, causing figures below to appear waving in the garden.
‘Caspar Harvey’s house,’ Kris shouted unnecessarily.
I nodded OK; and as he was circling clockwise, with the wing on my side low to give me a good view, I brought out the handy little camera I carried with me always and took enough shots, I reckoned, to thank and please our host.
Kris, breaking off from the circling, ascended again a few hundred more feet and gave me a Cherokee-eye view of the purpose-built town that the racing world called ‘Headquarters’. I’d talked a hundred or more times on the telephone or voice mail to the trainers who worked there. I’d corresponded with e-mail by the electronic ton. I knew voices and I knew characters, and it wasn’t only Oliver Quigley whose sharp anxieties begged assurances from me that I couldn’t give.
Neither Kris nor I, as I’d checked with him before the flight, knew which of the many stable yards in Newmarket were identifiable from the air, and once over the place and thundering along at a hundred and twenty knots, I found I was sure only of one or two of the biggest.
Oliver Quigley had often told me that his string could trot straight from his yard onto Warren Hill, but with the speed and the sunshine and my ground-to-air ignorance of the town’s geography, I wasn’t at all sure in which quadrangle stable-yard stood Caspar Harvey’s equine investments, not to mention a filly due to run on Friday. To be on the safe side of pleasing the trainer, therefore, I snapped as many stable-yards as I could.
There wasn’t a horse to be seen, neither on the well-marked gallops nor in the stable-yards nor on the horse-walks (special paths for horses) which laced the town. There were upwards of twelve hundred aristocratic thoroughbreds down there somewhere, but at lunch time on a Sunday they weren’t doing much but dream.
Kris looked at his watch and headed south of the town, where he put the wheels down sweetly on the official grass strip that ran beside the part of the racecourse used in high summer — the July course. The Jockey Club not only allowed this but, to Kris’s indignation, charged a fee.
He taxied back fast to where a Land Rover waited with a young woman in an ultra short skirt leaning against it.
‘Shit,’ Kris said forcefully.
‘Why shit?’
‘He’s sent his daughter. He promised she wouldn’t be here.’
‘She looks OK to me.’
Kris said ‘Huh’ with pity for my ignorance and slowed the Cherokee and, swinging it round neatly into a tidy configuration for parking, cut the engine.
‘Her name’s Belladonna,’ Kris said. ‘Poison.’
I unclipped my seat-belt, unlatched the door, climbed out and jumped down from the wing. Kris, having checked his switches, scrambled after. I wasn’t sure he meant it about her name but he casually introduced us. ‘Bell, this is Perry. Perry... Belladonna. Call her Bell.’
I shook her hand. She said, eyebrows lifting, ‘Aren’t you...?’
‘I expect so,’ I said.
She looked sugar-sweet, not deadly. Fair hair, more wispy than regulated. Blue eyes with innocuously blinking lids. Pink-outlined lips with a smile that never quite left them. Even without Kris’s comment, I’d have been aware of witchcraft.
‘Climb in,’ she invited, gesturing to the Land Rover. ‘Dad heard you circling overhead and sent me along. He’s mulling wine. He’d never leave with cinnamon floating.’
Kris, apparently deaf to the instruction, was walking round his aircraft and patting it with approval, listening to the small cracking noises of the metal cooling. Its white-painted fuselage gleamed in the sun along with the dark blue personalised insignia of a lightning flash and the registration letters that identified Kris worldwide: and in fact he had flown in enough countries to be known (not without respect) as the ‘the fussy English’. After his final landing on wet days he sponged and dried the undersides of the wings, not just the tops, to get rid of any mud thrown up by the wheels.
‘Get in, do,’ Bell told him, opening the Land Rover’s front passenger door for him. ‘This party’s today, not tomorrow.’
The antagonism between them was faint but positive. I sat in the rear seat for the five-mile drive to Caspar Harvey’s house, listening to the semi-polite exchanges and wondering how far their mutual dislike would go, such as, would they save each other if it risked themselves.
Caspar Harvey’s home proved to be more than half way to grand but just definitely on the under side of ostentatious. The front, with small-scale Palladian pillars, seemed imposing, but the inside was only one room deep, and no one had tried to pretend otherwise. Entrance hall and sitting-room, combined by a wall of arches, made a single space ample enough for the gathering of upwards of thirty people who stood around drinking hot red wine, eating handfuls of peanuts and talking about Newmarket’s main profitable crop — racehorses.
Caspar Harvey, noticing Kris’s arrival, eeled his way, drink held high, until he could greet his guest within shouting distance in the throng.
‘I heard your overhead pass,’ he nodded to Kris. ‘And welcome to you, too,’ he added in my direction. ‘My trainer swears by your nose for rain. He’s here somewhere. Do I run my filly on Friday? My wife puts her faith in the stars. Have some wine.’
I accepted the wine which tasted melodiously of cinnamon and sugar, and followed his identifying finger to his trainer across the crowd, Oliver Quigley, a-quiver and visibly ill at ease.
‘Tell him it will be dry until Friday,’ Harvey said. ‘Tell him to run my horse.’
He was enjoying, I thought, his role of lavish host. Reprehensible of me to think also that the role itself meant more to him than his guests. His expansive gestures were like his setting: a conscious indication of wealth and achievement, but one that carefully fell short of a flourish of trumpets.
I told him I’d taken aerial photos of his house and would send them to him and, pleased, he invited me to take as many shots of his guests as they would allow.
In body he was as substantial as in means, a heavy-shouldered presence with a thick neck and a trim grey grizzled beard. Shorter by only three inches than Kris’s willowy extent — as I was myself — Caspar Harvey would nevertheless have been noticeable at any height, or lack of it: he had, strongly developed, the indefinable aura that comes with success. I took his picture. He posed again, and nodded benignly at the flash.