Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,31

throw out feelers, and see if anyone finally recommended Oakley. And if so, who.’

He considered it. ‘Because if you found one contact you might work back from there to another… and eventually perhaps to a name which meant something to you…?’

‘I suppose it sounds feeble,’ I said resignedly.

‘It’s a very outside chance,’ he agreed. There was a long pause. Then he added, ‘All the same, I do know of someone who might agree to try.’ He smiled briefly, for the first time.

‘That’s…’ I swallowed. ‘That’s marvellous.’

‘Can’t promise results.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tony came clomping up my stairs on Friday morning after first exercise and poured half an inch of Scotch into the coffee I gave him. He drank the scalding mixture and shuddered as the liquor bit.

‘God,’ he said. ‘It’s cold on the Downs.’

‘Rather you than me,’ I said.

‘Liar,’ he said amicably. ‘It must feel odd to you, not riding.’

‘Yes.’

He sprawled in the green armchair. ‘Poppy’s got the morning ickies again. I’ll be glad when this lousy pregnancy is over. She’s been ill half the time.’

‘Poor Poppy.’

‘Yeah… Anyway, what it means is that we ain’t going to that dance tonight. She says she can’t face it.’

‘Dance…?’

‘The Jockeys’ Fund dance. You know. You’ve got the tickets on your mantel over there.’

‘Oh… yes. I’d forgotten about it. We were going together.’

‘That’s right. But now, as I was saying, you’ll have to go without us.’

‘I’m not going at all.’

‘I thought you might not.’ He sighed and drank deeply. ‘Where did you get to yesterday?’

‘I called on people who didn’t want to see me.’

‘Any results?’

‘Not many.’ I told him briefly about Newtonnards and David Oakley, and about the hour I’d spent with Andrew Tring.

It was because the road home from Birmingham led near his village that I’d thought of Andrew Tring, and my first instinct anyway was to shy away from even the thought of him. Certainly visiting one of the Stewards who had helped to warn him off was not regulation behaviour for a disbarred jockey. If I hadn’t been fairly strongly annoyed with him I would have driven straight on.

He was disgusted with me for calling. He opened the door of his prosperous sprawling old manor house himself and had no chance of saying he was out.

‘Kelly! What are you doing here?’

‘Asking you for some explanation.’

‘I’ve nothing to say to you.’

‘You have indeed.’

He frowned. Natural good manners were only just preventing him from retreating and shutting the door in my face. ‘Come in then. Just for a few minutes.’

‘Thank you,’ I said without irony, and followed him into a nearby small room lined with books and containing a vast desk, three deep armchairs and a colour television set.

‘Now,’ he said, shutting the door and not offering the armchairs, ‘Why have you come?’

He was four years older than me, and about the same size. Still as trim as when he rode races, still outwardly the same man. Only the casual, long established changing-room friendliness seemed to have withered somewhere along the upward path from amateurship to Authority.

‘Andy,’ I said, ‘Do you really and honestly believe that that Squelch race was rigged?’

‘You were warned off,’ he said coldly.

‘That’s far from being the same thing as guilty.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘Then you’re stupid,’ I said bluntly. ‘As well as scared out of your tiny wits.’

‘That’s enough, Kelly. I don’t have to listen to this.’ He opened the door again and waited for me to leave. I didn’t. Short of throwing me out bodily he was going to have to put up with me a little longer. He gave me a furious stare and shut the door again.

I said more reasonably, ‘I’m sorry, Really, I’m sorry. It’s just that you rode against me for at least five years… I’d have thought you wouldn’t so easily believe I’d deliberately lose a race. I’ve never yet lost a race I could win.’

He was silent. He knew that I didn’t throw races. Anyone who rode regularly knew who would and who wouldn’t, and in spite of what Charlie West had said at the Enquiry, I was not an artist at stopping one because I hadn’t given it the practice.

‘There was that money,’ he said at last. He sounded disillusioned and discouraged.

‘I never had it. Oakley took it with him into my flat and photographed it there. All that so called evidence, the whole bloody Enquiry in fact, was as genuine as a lead sixpence.’

He gave me a long doubtful look. Then he said, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Stop