High stakes - By Dick Francis Page 0,53

muck heap had gone and Owen had sloshed to some effect with buckets of water, though without obliterating the smell. He had also stayed late, waiting for my return. All three of us left our shoes in the hall and went upstairs.

‘Too Japanese for words,’ Charlie said.

‘I stayed, sir,’ Owen said, ‘because a call came from America.’

‘Miss Ward?’ I said hopefully.

‘No, sir. About a horse. It was a shipping firm. They said a horse consigned to you would be on a flight to Gatwick Airport tonight as arranged. Probable time of arrival, ten a.m. tomorrow morning. I wrote it down.’ He pointed to the pad beside the telephone. ‘But I thought I would stay in case you didn’t see it. They said you would need to engage transport to have the horse met.’

‘You,’ I said, ‘will be meeting it.’

‘Very good, sir,’ he said calmly.

‘Owen,’ Charlie said, ‘if he ever kicks you out, come to me.’

We all sat for a while discussing the various arrangements and Owen’s part in them. He was as eager as Charlie to make the plan work, and he too seemed to be plugged into some inner source of excitement.

‘I’ll enjoy it, sir,’ he said, and Charlie nodded in agreement. I had never thought of either of them as being basically adventurous and I had been wrong.

I was wrong also about Bert Huggerneck, and even in a way about Allie, for they too proved to have more fire than reservations.

Charlie brought Bert with him after work on Thursday and we sat round the kitchen table poring over a large scale map.

‘That’s the A34,’ I said, pointing with a pencil to a red line running south to north. ‘It goes all the way from Newbury to Stratford. For Nottingham, you branch off just north of Oxford. The place we’ve chosen is some way south of that. Just here…’ I marked it with the pencil. ‘About a mile before you reach the Abingdon bypass.’

‘I know that bleeding road,’ Bert said. ‘Goes past the Harwell atomic.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Yeah. I’ll find that. Easy as dolly-birds.’

‘There’s a roadside fruit stall there,’ I said. ‘Shut, at this time of year. A sort of wooden hut.’

‘Seen dozens of ’em,’ Bert nodded.

‘It has a good big space beside it for cars.’

‘Which side of the road?’

‘On the near side, going north.’

‘Yeah. I get you.’

‘It’s on a straight stretch after a fairly steep hill. Nothing will be going very fast there. Do you think you could manage?’

‘Here,’ he complained to Charlie. ‘That’s a bleeding insult.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Is that all I do, then? Stop the bleeding traffic?’ He sounded disappointed; and I’d thought he might have needed to be persuaded.

‘No,’ I said. ‘After that you do a lot of hard work extremely quickly.’

‘What, for instance?’

When I told him, he sat back on his chair and positively beamed.

‘That’s more bleeding like it,’ he said. ‘Now that’s a daisy, that is. Now you might think I’m slow on my feet, like, with being big, but you’d be bleeding wrong.’

‘I couldn’t do it at all without you.’

‘Hear that?’ he said to Charlie.

‘It might even be true,’ Charlie said.

Bert at that point described himself as peckish and moved in a straight line to the store cupboard. ‘What’ve you got here, then? Don’t you ever bleeding eat? Do you want this tin of ham?’

‘Help yourself,’ I said.

Bert made a sandwich inch-deep in mustard and ate it without blinking. A couple of cans of beer filled the cracks.

‘Can I chuck the betting shop, then?’ he asked between gulps.

‘What have you learned about Ganser Mays?’

‘He’s got a bleeding nickname, that’s one thing I’ve learned. A couple of smart young managers run his shops now, you’d never know they was the same place. All keen and sharp and not a shred of soft heart like my old boss.’

‘A soft-hearted bookmaker?’ Charlie said. ‘There’s no such thing.’

‘Trouble was,’ Bert said, ignoring him, ‘he had a bleeding soft head and all.’

‘What is Ganser Mays’ nickname?’ I asked.

‘Eh? Oh yeah. Well, these two smart alecs, who’re sharp enough to cut themselves, they call him Squeezer. Squeezer Mays. When they’re talking to each other, of course, that is.’

‘Squeezer because he squeezes people like your boss out of business?’

‘You don’t hang about, do you? Yeah, that’s right. There’s two sorts of squeezer. The one they did on my boss, telling him horses were fixed to lose when they wasn’t. And the other way round, when the smart alecs know a horse that’s done no good before is fixed to win. Then they