Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,10

which every unit of the one eight-five rankled.

Gowery said, ‘We are not enquiring into how much you lost Mr Newtonnards, but into the identity of the client who won nine hundred pounds on Cherry Pie.’

I shivered. If West could lie, so could others.

‘As I said in my statement, my Lord, I don’t know his name. When he came up to me I thought I knew him from somewhere, but you see a lot of folks in my game, so I didn’t think much of it. You know. So it wasn’t until after I paid him off. After the last race, in fact. Not until I was driving home. Then it came to me, and I went spare, I can tell you.’

‘Please explain more clearly,’ Gowery said patiently. The patience of a cat at a mousehole. Anticipation making the waiting sweet.

‘It wasn’t him, so much, as who I saw him talking to. Standing by the parade ring rails before the first race. Don’t know why I should remember it, but I do.’

‘And who did you see this client talking to?’

‘Him.’ He jerked his head in our direction. ‘Mr Cranfield.’

Cranfield was immediately on his feet.

‘Are you suggesting that I advised this client of yours to back Cherry Pie?’ His voice shook with indignation.

‘No, Mr Cranfield,’ said Gowery like the North Wind, ‘The suggestion is that the client was acting on your behalf, and that it was you yourself that backed Cherry Pie.’

‘That’s an absolute lie.’

His hot denial fell on a lot of cold ears.

‘Where is this mysterious man?’ he demanded. ‘This unidentified, unidentifiable nobody? How can you possibly trump up such a story and present it as serious evidence? It is ridiculous. Utterly, utterly ridiculous.’

‘The bet was struck,’ Gowery said plonkingly, pointing to the ledger.

‘And I saw you talking to the client,’ confirmed Newtonnards.

Cranfield’s fury left him gasping for words, and in the end he too sat down again, finding like me nothing to say that could dent the preconceptions ranged against us.

‘Mr Newtonnards,’ I said, ‘Would you know this client again?’

He hesitated only a fraction. ‘Yes, I would.’

‘Have you seen him at the races since Lemonfizz day?’

‘No. I haven’t.’

‘If you see him again, will you point him out to Lord Gowery?’

‘If Lord Gowery’s at the races.’ Several of the back ranks of officials smiled at this, but Newtonnards, to give him his due, did not.

I couldn’t think of anything else to ask him, and I knew I had made no headway at all. It was infuriating. By our own choice we had thrust ourselves back into the bad old days when people accused at racing trials were not allowed a legal defendant. If they didn’t know how to defend themselves: if they didn’t know what sort of questions to ask or in what form to ask them, that was just too bad. Just their hard luck. But this wasn’t hard luck. This was our own stupid fault. A lawyer would have been able to rip Newtonnards’ testimony to bits, but neither Cranfield nor I knew how.

Cranfield tried. He was back on his feet.

‘Far from backing Cherry Pie, I backed Squelch. You can check up with my own bookmaker.’

Gowery simply didn’t reply. Cranfield repeated it.

Gowery said, ‘Yes, yes. No doubt you did. It is quite beside the point.’

Cranfield sat down again with his mouth hanging open. I knew exactly how he felt. Not so much banging the head against a brick wall as being actively attacked by a cliff.

They waved Newtonnards away and he ambled easily off to take his place beside Charlie West. What he had said stayed behind him, stuck fast in the officials’ minds. Not one of them had asked for corroboration. Not one had suggested that there might have been a loophole in identity. The belief was written plain on their faces: if someone had backed Cherry Pie to win nine hundred pounds, it must have been Cranfield.

Gowery hadn’t finished. With a calm satisfaction he picked up another paper and said, ‘Mr Cranfield, I have here an affidavit from a Mrs Joan Jones, who handled the five pound selling window on the Totalisator in the paddock on Lemonfizz Cup day, that she sold ten win-only tickets for horse number eight to a man in a fawn raincoat, middle aged, wearing a trilby. I also have here a similar testimony from a Mr Leonard Roberts, who was paying out at the five pound window in the same building, on the same occasion. Both of these Tote employees remember the