Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,46

Danielle with simple curiosity, Beatrice with seeming alarm. Lord Vaughnley looked around at the waiting faces, frowned, and finally answered with a question of his own.

‘Who is he?’ he asked.

‘My husband’s business partner,’ the princess said. ‘Dear Lord Vaughnley, do you know of him?’

Lord Vaughnley was puzzled but slowly shook his big head. ‘I can’t recall ever …’

‘Could you … er … see if the Towncrier has a file on him?’ I asked.

He gave me a resigned little smile, and nodded. ‘Write the name down for me,’ he said. ‘In caps.’

I fished out a pen and small note-pad and wrote both the name and that of the construction company, in capital letters as required.

‘He’s French,’ I said. ‘Owns horses. He might be on the racing pages, or maybe business. Or even gossip.’

‘Anything you want specifically?’ he said, still smiling.

‘He’s over in England just now. Ideally, we’d like to know where he’s staying.’

Beatrice’s mouth opened and closed again with a snap. She definitely knows, I thought, how to reach him. Perhaps we could make use of that, when we had a plan.

Lord Vaughnley tucked the slip of paper away in an inner pocket, saying he would get the names run through the computer that very evening, if it was important to the princess.

‘Indeed it is,’ she said with feeling.

‘Any little fact,’ I said, ‘could be helpful.’

‘Very well.’ He kissed the princess’s hand and made general farewells, and to me he said as he was going, ‘Have you embarked on another crusade?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Then God help this Nanterre.’

‘What did he mean by that?’ Beatrice demanded as Lord Vaughnley departed, and the princess told her soothingly that it was a long story which wasn’t to interfere with my telling her all about Col’s race. Lord Vaughnley, she added, was a good friend she saw often at the races, and that it was perfectly natural for him to help her in any way.

Beatrice, to do her justice, had been a great deal quieter since Nanterre’s telephone call the evening before. She had refused to believe he had killed the horses (‘it must have been vandals, as the police said’) until he had himself admitted it, and although she was still adamant that Roland should go along with Nanterre in business, we no longer heard praise of him personally.

Her hostility towards me on the other hand seemed to have deepened, and on my account of the race she passed her own opinion.

‘Rubbish. You didn’t lose the race at the last fence. You were too far back all along. Anyone could see that.’ She picked up a small sandwich from the display on the table and bit into it decisively, as if snapping off my head.

No one argued with her pronouncement and, emboldened, she said to Danielle with malice, ‘Your fortune-hunter isn’t even a good jockey.’

‘Beatrice,’ the princess immediately said, unruffled, ‘Kit has a fortune of his own, and he is heir to his grandfather, who is rich.’

She glanced at me briefly, forbidding me to contradict. Such fortune as I had I’d earned, and although my grandfather owned several chunks of Newmarket, their liquidity was of the consistency of bricks.

‘And Aunt Beatrice,’ Danielle said, faintly blushing, ‘I am poor.’

Beatrice ate her sandwich, letting her round eyes do the talking. Her pale orange hair, I thought inconsequentially, was almost the same colour as the hessian-covered walls.

The sixth and last race was already in progress, the commentary booming outside. Everyone except Beatrice went on the balcony to watch, and I wondered whether a putative million dollars was worth an unquiet mind. ‘It’s nice to be nice,’ our grandmother had said often enough to Holly and me, bringing us up, and ‘Hate curdles your brains.’ Grandfather, overhearing her heresies, had tried to undo her work with anti-Allardeck slogans, but in the end it was she who’d prevailed. Holly had married Bobby, and apart from the present state of affairs with Danielle and other various past hard knocks, I had grown up, and remained, basically happy. Beatrice, for all her mink-crocodile-Spanish house indulgences in Palm Beach, hadn’t been so lucky.

When it came to going home, Beatrice again went with the princess in the Rolls. I had hoped Litsi would join them, as I was detouring to Chiswick to deliver Danielle to the studio, but he took Danielle’s arm and steered her and himself, chatting away, in the direction of the jockeys’ car park as if there had never been any question. Litsi had his aunt’s precious knack of courteously and