Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,42

your present behaviour.’

I gave him a level stare and Lord Ferth opened his mouth and shut it again.

‘It is no rumour that Mr Cranfield and I are not guilty,’ I said at length. ‘It is no rumour that two at least of the witnesses were lying. Those are facts.’

‘Nonsense,’ Gowery said vehemently.

‘What you believe, sir,’ I said, ‘Doesn’t alter the truth.’

‘You are doing yourself no good, Hughes.’ Under his heavy authoritative exterior he was exceedingly angry. All I needed was a bore hole, and I’d get a gusher.

I said, ‘Would you be good enough to tell me who suggested to you or the other Stewards that you should seek out and question Mr Newtonnards?’

There was the tiniest shift in his eyes. Enough for me to be certain.

‘Certainly not.’

‘Then will you tell me upon whose instructions the enquiry agent David Oakley visited my flat?’

‘I will not.’ His voice was loud, and for the first time, alarmed.

Ferth looked in growing doubt from one of us to the other.

‘What is all this about?’ he said.

‘Mr Cranfield and I were indeed wrongly warned off,’ I said. ‘Someone sent David Oakley to my flat to fake that photograph. And I believe Lord Gowery knows who it was.’

‘I most certainly do not,’ he said furiously. ‘Do you want to bs sued for slander?’

‘I have not slandered you, sir.’

‘You said…’

‘I said you knew who sent David Oakley. I did not say that you knew the photograph was a fake.’

‘And it wasn’t,’ he insisted fiercely.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘It was.’

There was a loaded, glaring silence. Then Lord Gowery said heavily, ‘I’m not going to listen to this,’ and turned on his heel and dived back into the bar.

Lord Ferth, looking troubled, took a step after him.

I said, ‘My Lord, may I talk to you?’ And he stopped and turned back to me and said, ‘Yes, I think you’d better.’

He gestured towards the supper room next door and we went through the archway into the brighter light. Nearly everyone had eaten and gone. The buffet table bore shambled remains and all but two of the small tables were unoccupied. He sat down at one of these and pointed to the chair opposite. I took it, facing him.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Explain.’

I spoke in a flat calm voice, because emotion was going to repel him where reason might get through. ‘My Lord, if you could look at the Enquiry from my point of view for a minute, it is quite simple. I know that I never had any five hundred pounds or any note from Mr Cranfield, therefore I am obviously aware that David Oakley was lying. It’s unbelievable that the Stewards should have sent him, since the evidence he produced was faked. So someone else did. I thought Lord Gowery might know who. So I asked him.’

‘He said he didn’t know.’

‘I don’t altogether believe him.’

‘Hughes, that’s preposterous.’

‘Are you intending to say, sir, that men in power positions are infallibly truthful?’

He looked at me without expression in a lengthening silence. Finally he said, as Roberta had done, ‘Where did you go to school?’

In the usual course of things I kept dead quiet about the type of education I’d had because it was not likely to endear me to either owners or trainers. Still, there was a time for everything, so I told him.

‘Coedlant Primary, Tenby Grammar, and L.S.E.’

‘L.S.E.… you don’t mean… the London School of Economics?’ He looked astonished.

‘Yes.’

‘My God…’

I watched while he thought it over. ‘What did you read there?’

‘Politics, philosophy and economics.’

‘Then what on earth made you become a jockey?’

‘It was almost an accident,’ I said. ‘I didn’t plan it. When I’d finished my final exams I was mentally tired, so I thought I’d take a sort of paid holiday working on the land… I knew how to do that, my father’s a farm hand. I worked at harvesting for a fanner in Devon and every morning I used to ride his ’chasers out at exercise, because I’d ridden most of my life, you see. He had a permit, and he was dead keen. And then his brother, who raced them for him, broke his shoulder at one of the early Devon meetings, and he put me up instead, and almost at once I started winning… and then it took hold of me… so I didn’t get around to being a Civil Servant, as I’d always vaguely intended, and… well… I’ve never regretted it.’

‘Not even now?’ he said with irony.

I shook my head. ‘Not even now.’

‘Hughes…’ His face crinkled dubiously.