NINE
The vans swept into the yard as if conducting a race; one red, one yellow. Out of each emerged more slowly a man in dark clothes carrying, from the red van, the day’s letters, and from the yellow, a clipboard. The Royal Mail and British Telecom side by side.
Bobby went to the door, accepted the letters, and brought the phone company man back with him into the kitchen.
‘Bug-hunting,’ the latter said heartily, as the red van roared away again outside. ‘Got termites in the telephone, have you? Been hearing clicking noises on the line? No end of people hear them. False alarms, you know.’
He was large, moustached, and too full of unnecessary bonhomie. Bobby, making a great effort, offered tea or coffee, and I went upstairs to fetch the non-imaginary equipment from the chimney.
I could hear the phone man’s voice long before I could see him on my way back.
‘You get your MI5, of course, but your average left-wing militant, they call us in regular. In Cambridge, now, false alarms all the time.’
‘This is not,’ Bobby said through gritted teeth, ‘a false alarm.’
‘We found this,’ I said calmingly, putting the tool-kit on the table, unrolling it, and producing for inspection the small metal cube with its rod and its coil of attached stiff cord.
‘Ah now,’ the telephone man’s interest came to life, ‘now you know what this is, don’t you?’
‘A bug,’ I said.
‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is your transformer stroke transmitter and your earth. Where’s the rest?’
‘What rest?’
He looked at us with pity. ‘You got to have the tap itself. Where did you get this little lot?’
‘From the chimney stack, where the phone wires reach the house.’
‘Did you now.’ He blew down his nose. ‘Then that’s where we’d better look.’
We took him outside the house rather than through the drawing room, walking down the path from the yard and through the gate. The telescopic aluminium ladder still lay on the path, but the phone man, eyeing thowieight of the chimney, decided against its fragile support and went back to his van for much sturdier rungs. He returned also with a busy tool-belt buckled round his rotund middle.
Planting and extending his workmanlike ladder he lumbered up it as casually as walking. To each his own expertise.
At the top, with his stomach supported, he reached out to where the telephone wire divided to the two terminals, and with tools from his belt spent some time clamping, clipping and refastening before returning unruffled to earth.
‘A neat little job,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Superior bit of wire-tapping. Looks like its been in place for a couple of weeks. Grimy, but not too bad, see? Been up there just a while in the soot and rain.’
He held out a large palm on which rested a small cylinder with two short wires leading from it.
‘See, this picks up the currents from your phone wire and leads them into that transformer you took down last night. See, voice frequencies run at anywhere between fifty Hertz and three kiloHertz, but you can’t transmit that by radio, you have to transform it up to about three thousand megaHertz. You need an amplifier which modulates the frequency to something a microwave transmitter can transmit.’ He looked at our faces. ‘Not exactly electronics experts, are you?’
‘No,’ we said.
With complacent superiority he led the way back to the yard, carrying his heavy ladder with ease. In the kitchen he put the newly gathered cylinder alongside the previous night’s spoils and continued with the lecture.
‘These two wires from the cylinder plug into the transformer and this short little rod is the aerial.’
‘What’s all that cord?’ I asked.
‘Cord?’ He smiled largely. ‘That’s not cord, it’s wire. See? Fine wire inside insulation. That’s an earth wire, to complete the circuit.’
We looked no doubt blank.
‘If you’d have closely inspected your brickwork below your chimney these last weeks you’d have seen this so-called cord lying against it. Running through clips, even. Going down from the transmitter into the earth.’
‘Yes,’ Bobby said. ‘We’re never out there much this time of the year.’
‘Neat little job,’ the telephone man said again.
‘Is it difficult to get?’ I asked. ‘This sort of equipment.’
‘Dead easy,’ he said pityingly. ‘You can send for it from your electronic mail order catalogue any day.’
‘And what then?’ I asked. ‘We’ve got the tap and the transmitter. Where would we find the receiver?’
The phone man said judiciously, ‘This is a low-powered transmitter. Has to be, see, being so small. Runs on a battery, see? So you’d need a big dish-receiver to pick up the signals. Line of sight. Say a quarter-mile away? And no buildings to distort things. Then I’d reckon you’d get good results.’
‘A big dish-receiver a quarter of a mile away?’ I repeated. ‘Everyone would see it.’
‘Not inside a van, they wouldn’t.’ He touched the cube transmitter reflectively. ‘Nice high chimney you’ve got there. Most often we find these babies on the poles out on the road. But the higher you put the transmitter, of course, the further you get good reception.’
‘Yes,’ I said, understanding that at least.
‘This is an unofficial bit of snooping,’ he said, happy to instruct. ‘Private. You won’t get no clicks from this, neither. You’d never know it was there.’ He hitched up his tool-belt. ‘Right then, you just sign my sheet and I’ll be off. And you want to take your binoculars out there now and then and keep a watch on your chimney and your pole in the road, and if you see any more little strangers growing on your wires, you give me a ring and I’ll be right back.’
Bobby signed his sheet and thanked him and saw him out to his van; and I looked at the silent bug and wondered vaguely whose telephone I could tap with it, if I learned how.
Holly came in as the yellow van departed, Holly looking pale in jeans and sloppy sweater, with hair still damp from the shower.
‘Morning sickness is the pits,’ she said. ‘Did you make any tea?’
‘Coffee in the pot.’
‘Couldn’t face it.’ She put the kettle on. ‘What happened out there last night between you and Bobby? He said you would never forgive him, but he wouldn’t say what for. I don’t think he slept at all. He was up walking round the house at five. So what happened?’
‘There’s no trouble between us,’ I said. ‘I promise you.’
She swallowed. ‘It would just be the end if you and Bobby quarrelled.’
‘We didn’t.’
She was still doubtful but said no more. She put some bread tn the toaster as Bobby came back, and the three of us sat round the table passing the marmalade and thinking our own thoughts, which in my case was a jumble of journalists, Bobby’s bank manager, and how was I going to warm and loosen my muscles before the first race.
Bobby with apprehension began opening the day’s letters, but his fears were unfounded. There was no blast from the bank and no demands for payment with menaces. Three of the envelopes contained cheques.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, sounding stunned. ‘The owners are paying.’
‘That’s fast,’ I said. ‘They can only have got those letters yesterday. Their consciences must be pricking overtime.’
‘Seb’s paid,’ Bobby said. He mentally added the three totals and then pushed the cheques across to me. ‘They’re yours.’
I hesitated.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You paid our bills on Monday. If those cheques had come on Monday you wouldn’t have had to.’
Holly nodded.
‘What about the lads’ wages this Friday?’ I asked.
Bobby shrugged frustratedly. ‘God knows.’
‘What did your bank manager actually say?’ I said.
‘Sadistic bully,’ Bobby said. ‘He sat there with a smirk on his prim little face telling me I should go into voluntary liquidation immediately. Voluntary! He said if I didn’t, the bank would have no choice but to start bankruptcy proceedings. No choice! Of course they have a choice. Why did they ever lend the money for the yearlings if they were going to behave like this five minutes later?’
The probable answer to that was because Bobby was Maynard’s son. Maynard’s millions might have seemed security enough, before the Flag fired its broadside.
‘Isn’t there any trainer in Newmarket who would buy the yearlings from you?’ I said.
‘Not a chance. Most of them are in the same boat. They can’t sell their own.’
I pondered. ‘Did the bank manager say anything about bailiffs?’
‘No,’ Bobby said, and Holly, if possible, went paler.
We might have a week, I thought. I didn’t know much about liquidation or bankruptcy: I didn’t know the speed of events. Perhaps we had no time at all. No one, however, could expect Bobby to be able to sell all his property overnight.
‘I’ll take the cheques,’ I said, ‘and I’ll get them cashed. We’ll pay your lads this week out of the proceeds and keep the rest for contingencies. And don’t tell the bank manager, because he no doubt thinks this money belongs to the bank.’
‘They lent it to us quick enough,’ Holly said bitterly. ‘No one twisted their arm.’
It wasn’t only Maynard, I thought, who could lend with a smile and foreclose with a vengeance.
‘It’s hopeless,’ Bobby said. ‘I’ll have to tell the owners to take their horses. Sack the lads.’ He stopped abruptly. Holly, too, had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s such a mess,’ Bobby said.
‘Yeah… well… hold tight for a day or two,’ I said.
‘What’s the point?’
‘We might try a little fund-raising.’
‘What do you mean?’
I knew only vaguely what I meant and I didn’t think I would discuss it with Bobby. I said instead, ‘Don’t break up the stable before the dragon’s breathing fire right in the yard.’
‘St George might come along,’ Holly said.
‘What?’ Bobby looked uncomprehending.
‘In the story,’ Holly said. ‘You know. Kit and I had a pop-up book where St George came along and slew the dragon. We used to read it with a torch under the bedclothes and scare ourselves with shadows.’
‘Oh.’ He looked from one of us to the other, seeing dark-haired twins with a shared and private history. He may have felt another twinge of exclusion because he smothered some reaction with a firming of the mouth, but after a while, with only a hint of sarcasm and as if stifling any hope I might have raised, he came up with an adequate reply. ‘OK, St George, Get on your horse.’
I drove to Newbury and solved the stiff muscle problem by borrowing the sauna of a local flat race jockey who spent every summer sweating away his body in there and had thankfully come out for the winter. I didn’t like water-shedding in saunas as a daily form of weight-control (still less diuretics), but after twenty minutes of its hot embrace on that cold morning I did feel a good deal fitter.
My first two mounts were for the Lambourn stable I normally rode for, and, given a jockey with smoothly working limbs, they both cleared the obstacles efficiently without covering themselves with either mud or glory. One could say to the hopeful owners afterwards that yes, their horses would win one day; and so they might, when the weights were favourable and the ground was right and a few of the better opponents fell. I’d ridden duds I wouldn’t have taken out of the stable and had them come in first.
My final mount of the day belonged to the princess, who was waiting, alone as usual, for me to join her in the parade ring. I was aware of being faintly disappointed that Danielle wasn’t with her, even though I hadn’t expected it: most illogical. The princess, sable coat swinging, wore a pale yellow silk scarf at her neck with gold and citrine earrings, and although I’d seen her in them often before I thought she was looking exceptionally well and glowing. I made the small bow; shook her hand. She smiled.
‘How do you think we’ll do today?’ she said.
‘I think we’ll win.’
Her eyes widened. ‘You’re not usually so positive.’
‘Your horses are all in form. And…’ I stopped.
‘And what?’
‘And… er… you were thinking, yourself, that we would win.’
She said without surprise, ‘Yes, I was.’ She turned to watch her horse walk by. ‘What else was I thinking?’
‘That… well… that you were happy.’
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘Do you think the Irish mare will beat us? Several people have tipped it.’
‘She’s got a lot of weight.’
‘Lord Vaughnley thinks she’ll win.’
‘Lord Vaughnley?’ I repeated, my interest quickening. ‘Is he here?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was lunching in a box near mine. I came down the stairs with him just now.’
I asked her if she remembered which box, but she didn’t. I said I would like to talk to him, if I could find him.
‘He’ll be glad to,’ she said, nodding. ‘He’s still delighted about the Towncrier Trophy. He says literally hundreds of people have congratulated him on this year’s race.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘If I ask him a favour, I might get it.’
‘You could ask the world.’
‘Not that much.’
The signal came for jockeys to mount, and I got up on her horse to see what we could do about the Irish mare: and what we did was to start out at a fast pace and maintain it steadily throughout, making the mare feel every extra pound she was carrying every stride of the way, and finally to beat off her determined challenge most satisfactorily by a length and a half.
‘Splendid,’ the princess exclaimed in the winners’ enclosure, sparkling. ‘Beautiful.’ She patted her excited ‘chaser. ‘Come up to the box, Kit, when you’ve changed.’ She saw my very faint and stifled hesitation and interpreted it. ‘I saw Lord Vaughnley up there again. I asked him to my box also.’
‘You’re amazingly kind.’
‘I’m amazingly pleased with winning races like this.’
I changed into street clothes and went up to her familiar box high above the winning post. For once she was there alone, not surrounded by guests, and she mentioned that she was on her way back from Devon, her chauffeur having driven her up that morning.
‘My niece telephoned yesterday evening from her bureau to say she had arrived promptly,’ the princess said. ‘She was most grateful.’
I said I’d been very pleased to help. The princess offered tea, pouring it herself, and we sat on adjacent chairs, as so often, as I described the past race to her almost fence by fence.
‘I could see,’ she said contentedly. ‘You were pushing along just ahead of the mare all the way. When she quickened, you quickened, when she took a breather down the bottom end, so did you. And then I could see you just shake up my horse when her jockey took up his whip… I knew we’d win. I was sure of it all the way round. It was lovely.’
Such sublime confidence could come crashing down on its nose at the last fence, but she knew that as well as I did. There had been times when it had. It made the good times better.
She said, ‘Wykeham says we’re giving Kinley his first try over hurdles at Towcester tomorrow. His first ever race.’
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘And Dhaulagiri’s taking his first start at a novice ‘chase. I rode both of them schooling at Wykeham’s ast week, did he tell you? They both jumped super. Er… will you be there?’
‘I wouldn’t miss it.’ She paused. ‘My niece says she will come with me.’
I lifted my head. ‘Will she?’
‘She said so.’
The princess regarded me calmly and I looked straight back, but although it would have been useful I couldn’t read what she was thinking.
‘I enjoyed driving her,’ I said.
‘She said the journey went quickly.’
‘Yes.’
The princess patted my arm non-committally, and Lord and Lady Vaughnley appeared in the doorway, looking in with enquiring faces and coming forward with greetings. The princess welcomed them, gave them glasses of port, which it seemed they liked particularly on cold days, and drew Lady Vaughnley away with her to admire something out on the viewing balcony, leaving Lord Vaughnley alone inside with me.
He said how truly delighted he’d been with everyone’s response to last Saturday’s race, and I asked if he could possibly do me a favour.
‘My dear man. Fire away. Anything I can.’
I explained again about Bobby and the attacks in the Flag, which by now he himself knew all about.
‘Good Lord, yes. Did you see the comment page in our own paper this morning? That woman of ours, Rose Quince, she has a tongue like a rattlesnake, but when she writes, she makes sense. What’s the favour?’
‘I wondered,’ I said, ‘if the Towncrier would have a file of clippings about Maynard Allardeck. And if you have one, would you let me see it.’
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a reason, no doubt?’
I said we had concluded that Bobby had been a casualty in a campaign mainly aimed at his father. ‘And it would be handy to know who might have enough of a grudge against Maynard to kill off his chance of a knighthood.’
Lord Vaughnley smiled benignly. ‘Such as anyone whose business was pulled from beneath them?’
‘Such as,’ I agreed. ‘Yes.’
‘You’re suggesting that the Flag could be pressured in to mounting a hate campaign?’ He pursed his mouth, considering.
‘I wouldn’t have thought it would take much pressure,’ I said. ‘The whole paper’s a hate campaign.’
‘Dear, dear,’ he said with mock reproof. ‘Very well. I can’t see how it will directly help your brother-in-law, but yes, I’ll see you get access to our files.’
That’s great,’ I said fervently. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘When would suit you?’
‘As soon as possible.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Six o’clock?’
I shut my mouth on a gasp. He said, ‘I have to be at a dinner in the City this evening. I’ll be dropping into the Towncrier first. Ask for me at the front desk.’
I duly asked at his front desk in Fleet Street and was directed upwards to the editorial section on the third floor, arriving, it seemed, at a point of maximum bustle as the earliest editions of the following day’s papers were about to go to press.
Lord Vaughnley, incongruous in tweed jacket, dress trousers, stiff shirt and white tie, stood at the shoulder of a coatless man seated at a central table, both of them intent on the newspaper before them. Around them, in many bays half separated from each other by shoulder-high partitions, were clumps of three or four desks, each bay inhabited by telephones, typewriters, potted plants and people in a faint but continuous state of agitation.
‘What do you want?’ someone said to me brusquely as I hovered, and when I said Lord Vaughnley, he merely pointed. Accordingly I walked over to the centre of the activity and said neutrally to Lord Vaughnley, ‘Excuse me…’
He raised his eyes but not his head. ‘Ah yes, my dear chap, be with you directly,’ he said, and lowered the eyes again, intently scanning what I saw to be tomorrow’s front page, freshly printed.
I waited with interest while he finished, looking around at a functional scene which I guessed hadn’t changed much since the days of that rumbustious giant, the first Lord Vaughnley. Desks and equipment had no doubt come and gone, but from the brown floor to the yellowing cream walls the overall impression was of a working permanence, slightly old-fashioned.
The present Lord Vaughnley finished reading, stretched himself upwards and patted the shirt-sleeved shoulder of the seated man, who was, I discovered later, that big white chief, the editor.
‘Strong stuff, Marty. Well done.’
The seated man nodded and went on reading. Lord Vaughnley said to me, ‘Rose Quince is here. You might like to meet her.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I would.’
‘Over here.’ He set off towards one of the bays, the lair, it proved, of the lady of the rattlesnake tongue who could nevertheless write sense, and who had written that day’s judgment on Maynard.
‘Rose,’ said the paper’s proprietor, ‘take care of Kit Fielding, won’t you?’ and the redoubtable Rose Quince assured him that yes, she would.
‘Files,’ Lord Vaughnley said. ‘Whatever he wants to see, show him.’
‘Right.’
To me he said, ‘We have a box at Ascot. The Towncrier has, I mean. I understand from the princess that you’ll be riding there this Friday and Saturday. No point, I suppose, my dear chap, in asking you to lunch with me on Saturday, which is the day I’ll be there, but do come up for a drink when you’ve finished. You’ll always be welcome.’
I said I’d be glad to.
‘Good. Good. My wife will be delighted. You’ll be in good hands with Rose, now. She was born in Fleet Street the same as I was, her father was Conn Quince who edited the old Chronicle; she knows more of what goes on than the Street itself. She’ll give you the gen, won’t you, Rose?’
Rose, who looked to me to be bristling with reservations, agreed again that yes, she would; and Lord Vaughnley, with the nod of a man who knows he’s done well, went away and left me to her serpent mercies.
She did not, it is true, have Medusa snakes growing out of her head, but whoever had named her Rose couldn’t have foreseen its incongruity.
A rose she was not. A tiger-lily, more like. She was tall and very thin and fifteen to twenty years older than myself. Her artfully tousled and abundant hair was dark but streaked throughout with blonde, the aim having clearly been two contrasting colours, not overall tortoiseshell. The expertly painted sallow face could never have been pretty but was strongly good-looking, the nose masculine, the eyes noticeably pale blue; and from several feet away one could smell her sweet and heavy scent.
A quantity of bracelets, rings and necklaces decorated the ultimate in fashionable outlines, complemented by a heavy bossed and buckled belt round the hips, and I wondered if the general overstatement was a sort of stockade to frighten off the encroachment of the next generation of writers, a battlement against time.
If it was, I knew how she felt. Every jump jockey over thirty felt threatened by the rising nineteen-year-olds who would supplant them sooner or later. Every jockey, every champion had to prove race by race that he was as good as he’d ever been, and it was tough at the top only because of those hungry to take over one’s saddle. I didn’t need bangles, but I pulled out grey hairs when they appeared.
Rose Quince looked me up and down critically and said, ‘Big for a jockey, aren’t you?’ which was hardly original, as most people I met said the same.
‘Big enough.’
Her voice had an edge to it more than an accent, and was as positive as her appearance.
‘And your sister is married to Maynard Allardeck’s son.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘The source of Daddy’s disapproval.’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s wrong with her? Was she a whore?’
‘No, a Capulet.’
Rose took barely three seconds to comprehend, then she shook her head in self-disgust.
‘I missed an angle,’ she said.
‘Just as well.’
She narrowed her eyes and looked at me with her head tilted.
‘I watched the Towncrier Trophy on television last Saturday,’ she said. ‘It would more or less have been treason not to.’ She let her gaze wander around my shoulders. ‘Left it a bit late, didn’t you?’
‘Probably.’
She looked back to my face. ‘No excuses?’
‘We won.’
‘Yes, dammit, after you’d given everyone cardiac arrest. Did you realise that half the people in this building had their pay packets on you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘The Sports Desk told us you couldn’t lose.’
‘Bunty Ireland?’
‘Precisely, Bunty Ireland. He thinks the sun shines out of your arse.’ She shook an armful of baubles to express dismissal of Bunty’s opinions. ‘No jockey is that smart.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Could we talk about Maynard?’
Her dark eyebrows rose. ‘On first name terms, are you?’
‘Maynard Allardeck.’
‘A prize shit.’
‘Olympic gold.’
She smiled, showing well-disciplined teeth. ‘You read nothing in the paper, buddy boy. Do you want to see the tape?’
‘What tape?’
‘The tape of How’s Trade. It’s still here, downstairs. If you want to see it, now’s the time.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Right. Come along. I’ve got the unexpurgated version, the one they cut from to make the programme. Ready for the rough stuff? It’s dynamite.’