jolted me, you know. It struck me that I may not have a hell of a lot of time left, not with enough health and strength to enjoy life. I’ve spent all these years amassing the stuff, and for what? For my goddam children to murder me for? Sod that for a sad story. You buy me a good horse in this race on Sunday and we’ll go and yell it home, boy, at the top of our lungs.’
It took all afternoon and early evening to get even a tinge of interest from anyone. I telephoned to the trainers of the English — or Irish — runners, asking if they thought their owners might sell. I promised each trainer that he would go on training the horse, and that my father would send him also the two-million-guinea colt he’d bought yesterday. Some of the trainers were at the Newmarket Sales and had to be tracked down to hotels, and once tracked, had to track and consult with their owners. Some simply said no, forget it.
Finally, at seven forty-five, a trainer from Newmarket rang back to say his owner would sell a half-share if his price was met. I relayed the news and the price to Malcolm.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘Urn… the horse is quite good, the price is on the high side, the trainer’s in the top league.’
‘OK.’ Malcolm said. ‘Deal.’
‘My father accepts,’ I said. ‘And, er, the colt is still in the Sales stables. Can you fetch it tomorrow, if we clear it with the auctioneers?’
Indeed he could. He sounded quite cheerful altogether. He would complete his paperwork immediately if Malcolm could transfer the money directly to his bloodstock account, bank and account number supplied. I wrote the numbers to his dictation. Malcolm waved a hand and said, ‘No problem. First thing in the morning. He’ll have it by afternoon.’
‘Well,’ I said, breathing out as I put the receiver down, ‘you now own half of Blue Clancy.’
‘Let’s drink to it,’ Malcolm said. ‘Order some Bollinger.’
I ordered it from room service, and while we waited for it to arrive I told him about my encounter with his gardener, Arthur Bellbrook.
‘Decent chap,’ Malcolm said, nodding. ‘Damned good gardener.’
I told him wryly about Moira and the prize vegetables, which he knew nothing about.
‘Silly bitch,’ he said. ‘Arthur lives in a terrace house with a pocket handkerchief garden facing north. You couldn’t grow prize stuff there. If she’d asked me I’d have told her that, and told her to leave him alone. Good gardeners are worth every perk they get.’
‘He seemed pretty philosophical,’ I said, ‘and, incidentally, pretty bright. He’d spotted that the kitchen garden wall is thicker than it should be at the corner. He’d asked old Fred, and heard about the room I built there. He wanted to know how to get in, so he could use it as an apple store.’
Malcolm practically ejected from his armchair, alarm widening his eyes, his voice coming out strangled and hoarse. ‘My God, you didn’t tell him, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said slowly. ‘I told him it was empty and was bricked up twenty years ago.’ I paused. ‘What have you put in there?’
Malcolm subsided into his chair, not altogether relieved of anxiety.
‘Never you mind,’ he said.
‘You forget that I could go and look.’
I don’t forget it.’
He stared at me. He’d been interested, all those summers ago, when I’d designed and built the pivoting brick door. He’d come down the garden day after day to watch, and had patted me often on the shoulder, and smiled at the secret. The resulting wall looked solid, felt solid, was solid. But at one point there was a thick vertical steel rod within it, stretching from a concrete underground foundation up into the beam supporting the roof. Before I’d put the new roof on, I’d patiently drilled round holes in bricks (breaking many) and slid them into the rod, and arranged and mortared the door in neat courses, so that the edges of it dovetailed into the fixed sections next to it.
To open the room, when I’d finished everything, one had first to remove the wedge-like wooden sill which gave extra support to the bottom course of the door when it was closed, and then to activate the spring latch on the inner side by poking a thin wire through a tiny hole in the mortar at what had been my thirteen-year-old waist height. The design of the latch hadn’t been my own, but something