Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,27

already lost the best chance I ever had of winning the Grand National. Her horses mean almost as much to me as they do to her and to you, and I’m damned well not going to let anyone pick them off two by two. So you get the security people here by tonight, and make sure there’s someone about in the stable the whole time from now on, patrolling all the courtyards night and day.’

‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll fix it … If I knew who’d killed them, I’d kill him myself.’

It sounded extraordinary, said that way, without anger, more as an unexpected self-discovery. What I’d wished I could do in fury, he proposed as a sane course of action; but people say these things, not meaning them, and he wouldn’t have a mouse’s chance physically, I thought regretfully, against the hawk-like Nanterre.

Wykeham had been a Hercules in his youth, he’d told me, a power-house on legs with the joy of life pumping through his veins. ‘Joy of life,’ he’d said to me several times, ‘that’s what I have. That’s what you have. No one gets anywhere without it. Relish the struggle, that’s the way.’

He’d been an amateur jockey of note, and he’d dazzled and married the daughter of a mediumly successful trainer whose horses had started winning from the day Wykeham stepped into the yard. Now, fifty years on, with his strength gone, his wife dead and his own daughters grandmothers, he retained only the priceless ability to put the joy of life into his horses. He thought of little besides his horses, cared for little else, walked round at evening stables talking to each as a person, playing with some, admonishing others, coaxing a few, ignoring none.

I’d ridden for him from when I was nineteen, a fact he was apt to relate with complacency. ‘Spot ’em young,’ he’d told sundry owners. ‘That’s the thing. I’m good at that.’ And he’d steadfastly given me, I sometimes reflected, exactly what he gave his charges: opportunity, trust and job-satisfaction.

He had trained a winner of the Grand National twice when I’d been at school, and in my time had come close, but it was only recently I’d realised how deeply he longed for a third slice of glory. The dead horse outside was for all of us a sickening, dragging, deflating disappointment.

‘Cotopaxi,’ he said intensely, for once getting the name right, ‘was the one I would have saved first in a fire.’

The princess and I travelled back to London without waiting for the police, the insurers or the slaughterer’s men. (‘So horrid, all of that.’)

I’d expected her to talk as usual chiefly about her horses, but it was of Wykeham, it seemed, that she was thinking.

‘Thirty-five years ago, before you were born,’ she said, ‘when I first went racing, Wykeham strode the scene like a Colossus. He was almost everything he says he was, a Hercules indeed. Powerful, successful, enormously attractive … Half the women swooning over him with their husbands spluttering …’ She smiled at this memory. ‘I suppose it’s hard for you to picture, Kit, knowing him only now, when he’s old, but he was a splendid man … he still is, of course. I felt privileged, long ago, when he agreed to train my horses.’

I glanced in fascination at her serene face. In the past, I’d seen her often with Wykeham at the races, always deferring to him, tapping him playfully on the arm. I hadn’t realised how much she must miss him now he stayed at home, how much she must regret the waning of such a titan.

A contemporary of my grandfather (and of Maynard Allardeck’s father), Wykeham had been already a legend to me when he’d offered me the job. I’d accepted, almost dazed, and I’d grown up fast, mature at twenty from the demands and responsibility he’d thrust on me. Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of horseflesh in my hands all the time, the success of the stable on my shoulders. He’d given me no allowances for youth, told me in no uncertain terms from the beginning that the whole enterprise rested finally on its jockey’s skill, cool head and commonsense, and told me if I didn’t measure up to what was needed, too bad, but bye bye.

Shaken to my soul, I’d wholeheartedly embraced what he offered, knowing there weren’t two such chances in any life: and it had worked out fine, on the whole.

The princess’s thoughts were following my own. ‘When Paul Peck