Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,72

and Icefall, and young Helikon, the four-year-old hurdler going to Sandown that afternoon. Wykeham got half of their names right, waiting for me to prompt him on the others. He unerringly knew their careers, though, and their personalities; they were real to him in a way that needed no name tags. His secretary was adept at sorting out what he intended when he wrote down his lists of entries to races.

In the last courtyard we came to Abseil and opened the top half of his door. Abseil came towards the opening daylight and put his head out enquiringly. I rubbed his grey nose and upper lip with my hand and put my head next to his and breathed out gently like a reversed sniff into his nostril. He rubbed his nose a couple of times against my cheek and then lifted his head away, the greeting done. Wykeham paid no attention. Wykeham talked to horses that way himself, when they were that sort of horse. With some, one would never do it, one could get one’s nose bitten off.

Wykeham gave Abseil a carrot from a deep pocket, and closed him back into his twilight.

Wykeham slapped his hand on the next box along. ‘That’s Kinley’s box usually. It’s empty now. I don’t like keeping him in that corner box, it’s dark and boring for him.’

‘It won’t be for much longer, I hope,’ I said, and suggested going round to see the ‘bombs’.

Wykeham had seen them earlier, and pointed them out to me, and as expected they were the bottom parts of cardboard containers, each four inches square in shape, the top parts burned away. They were both the same, with gaudy red and yellow pictured flames still visible on the singed surfaces, and the words GOLDEN BOMB in jazzy letters on the one under the harrow.

‘We’d better leave them there for the police,’ I said.

Wykeham agreed, but he said fireworks would convince the police even more that it was the work of boys.

We went back into the house, where Wykeham telephoned the police and received a promise of attention, and I got through to Dawson, asking him to tell the princess I was down at Wykeham’s and would go to Sandown from there.

Wykeham and I had breakfast and drove up to the Downs in his big-wheeled pick-up to see the second lot exercise, and under the wide cold windy sky he surprised me by saying apropos of nothing special that he was thinking of taking another assistant. He’d had assistants in the past, I’d heard, who’d never lasted long, but there hadn’t been one there in my time.

‘Are you?’ I said. ‘I thought you couldn’t stand assistants.’

‘They never knew anything,’ he said. ‘But I’m getting old … It’ll have to be someone the princess likes. Someone you get on with, too. So if you think of anyone, let me know. I don’t know who’s around so much these days.’

‘All right,’ I said, but with misgivings. Wykeham, for all his odd mental quirks, was irreplaceable. ‘You’re not going to retire, are you?’

‘No, I’m not. Never. I wouldn’t mind dying up here, watching my horses.’ He laughed suddenly, in his eyes a flash of the vigour that had been there always not so long ago, when he’d been a titan. ‘I’ve had a great life, you know. One of the best.’

‘Stick around,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Maybe next year,’ he said, ‘we’ll win the Grand National.’

Wykeham’s four runners at Sandown were in the first three races and the fifth, and I didn’t see the princess until she came down to the parade ring for Helikon’s race, which was the third on the card.

Beatrice was with her, and also Litsi, and also Danielle, who after the faintest of greetings was busy blanking me out, it seemed, by looking carefully at the circling horses. The fact that she was there, that she was still trying, was something, I supposed.

‘Good morning,’ the princess said, when I bowed to her. ‘Dawson said Wykeham telephoned early … again.’ There was a shade of apprehension in her face, which abruptly deepened at what she read in my own.

She walked a little away from her family, and I followed.

‘Again?’ she said, not wanting to believe it. ‘Which ones?’

‘One,’ I said. ‘Col.’

She absorbed the shock with a long blink.

‘The same way … as before?’ she said.

‘Yes. With the bolt.’

‘My poor horse.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I will not tell my husband,’ she said. ‘Please tell none of them, Kit.’

‘It will be in the newspapers tomorrow