Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,23

in-coming call for me. I picked up the receiver and found it was Wykeham on the line.

Racing stables wake early on Sundays, as on other days, and I was used to Wykeham’s dawn thoughts, as he woke always by five. His voice that day, however, was as incoherently agitated as I’d ever heard it, and at first I wondered wildly what sins I might have committed in my sleep.

‘D … did you hear what what I s … said?’ he stuttered. ‘Two of them! T … two of the p … princess’s horses are d … dead.’

‘Two?’ I said, sitting bolt upright in bed and feeling cold. ‘How? I mean … which two?’

‘They’re dead in their boxes. Stiff. They’ve been dead for hours …’

‘Which two?’ I said again, fearfully.

There was a silence at the other end. He had difficulty remembering their names at the best of times, and I could imagine that at that moment a whole roll-call of long-gone heroes was fumbling on his tongue.

‘The two,’ he said in the end, ‘that ran on Friday.’

I felt numb.

‘Are you there?’ he demanded.

‘Yes … Do you mean … Cascade … and Cotopaxi?’

He couldn’t mean it, I thought. It couldn’t be true. Not Cotopaxi … not before the Grand National.

‘Cascade,’ he said. ‘Cotopaxi.’

Oh no … ‘How?’ I said.

‘I’ve got the vet coming,’ he said. ‘Got him out of bed. I don’t know how. That’s his job. But two! One might die, I’ve known it happen, but not two … Tell the princess, Kit.’

‘That’s your job,’ I protested.

‘No, no, you’re there … Break it to her. Better than on the phone. They’re like children to her.’

People she liked … Jesus Christ.

‘What about Kinley?’ I asked urgently.

‘What?’

‘Kinley … yesterday’s hurdle winner.’

‘Oh, yes, him. He’s all right. We checked all the others when we found these two. Their boxes were next to each other, I expect you remember … Tell the princess soon, Kit, won’t you? We’ll have to move these horses out. She’ll have to say what she wants done with the carcasses. Though if they’re poisoned …’

‘Do you think they’re poisoned?’ I said.

‘Don’t know. Tell her now, Kit.’ He put his receiver down with a crash, and I replaced mine feeling I would burst with ineffectual anger.

To kill her horses! If Henri Nanterre had been there at that moment, I would have stuffed his plastic gun down his loud-voiced throat. Cascade and Cotopaxi … people I knew, had known for years. I grieved for them as for friends.

Dawson agreed that his wife would wake the princess and tell her I had some sad news of one of her horses, and would wait for her in the sitting room. I dressed and went down there, and presently she came, without make-up and with anxious eyes.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Which one?’

When I told her it was two, and which two, I watched her horror turn to horrified speculation.

‘Oh no, he couldn’t,’ she exclaimed. ‘You don’t think, do you …’

‘If he has,’ I said, ‘he’ll wish he hadn’t.’

She decided that we should go down to Wykeham’s stable immediately, and wouldn’t be deterred when I tried to persuade her not to.

‘Of course, I must go. Poor Wykeham, he’ll need comforting. I should feel wrong if I didn’t go.’

Wykeham needed comforting less than she did, but by eight-thirty we were on the road, the princess in lipstick and Thomas placidly uncomplaining about the loss of his free day. My offer of driving the Rolls instead of him had been turned down like an improper suggestion.

Wykeham’s establishment, an hour’s drive south of London, was outside a small village on a slope of the Sussex Downs. Sprawling and complex, it had been enlarged haphazardly at intervals over a century, and was attractive to owners because of its maze of unexpected little courtyards, with eight or ten boxes in each, and holly bushes in red-painted tubs. To the stable staff, the picturesque convolution meant a lot of fetching and carrying, a lot of time wasted.

The princess’s horses were spread through five of the courtyards, not filling any of them. Wykeham, like many trainers, preferred to scatter an owner’s horses about rather than to clump them all together, and Cascade and Cotopaxi, as it happened, had been the only two belonging to the princess to be housed in the courtyard nearest the entrance drive.

One had to park in a central area and walk through archways into the courtyards, and when he heard us arrive, Wykeham came out of the first courtyard