Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,79

this morning… and now… and now…’ His face screwed up and turned red as he tried not to cry. The thought of Grace as he’d last seen her was too much for him. The tears rolled. He sniffed into a handkerchief.

I wondered how he would have felt if he’d seen Grace as I’d seen her. But probably the uncritical love he had would have survived even that.

‘Just sit here quietly a moment, Roxford,’ Lord Ferth directed, and he himself stood up and signed for me to walk with him over to the door.

‘So what do we do with him?’ he said.

‘It’s gone too far now,’ I said reluctantly, ‘To be entirely hushed up. And he’s if anything more dangerous than Grace… She will live, and he will very likely see everything for ever in terms of her happiness. Anyone who treats her badly in any way could end up as a victim of his scheming. End up ruined… or dead. People like nurses… or relations… or even people like me, who did her no harm at all. Anybody…’

Ferth said, ‘You seem to understand his mind. I must say that I don’t. But what you say makes sense. We cannot just take away his licence and leave it at that… It isn’t a racing matter any more. But Lord Gowery…’

‘Lord Gowery will have to take his chance,’ I said without satisfaction. ‘Very likely you can avoid busting open his reputation… but it’s much more important to stop Jack Roxford doing the same sort of thing again.’

‘Yes.’ He said. ‘It is.’ He spread out his hands sideways in a pushing gesture as if wanting to step away from the decision. ‘All this is so distressing.’

I looked down the room at Jack, a huddled defeated figure with nervous eyes and an anxious forehead. He was picking at the tablecloth with his ringers, folding it into senseless little pleats. He didn’t look like a villain. No hardened criminal. Just a tenacious little man with a fixed idea, to make up to dear Grace for being what he was.

Nothing was more useless than sending him to prison, and nothing could do him more harm: yet that, I imagined, was where he would go. Putting his body in a little cage wouldn’t straighten the kinks in his mind. The system, for men like him, was screwy.

He stood up slowly and walked unsteadily towards us.

‘I suppose,’ he said without much emotion, ‘That you are going to get the police. I was wondering… please… don’t tell them about the club… I won’t say Lord Gowery goes there… I won’t tell anybody ever… I never really wanted to… it wouldn’t have done any good, would it? I mean, it wouldn’t have kept those horses in my yard… wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference… So do you think anyone need know about… the club?’

‘No,’ said Ferth with well disguised relief. ‘They need not.’

A faint smile set up a rival set of creases to the lines of anxiety. ‘Thank you.’ The smile faded away. The lost look deepened. ‘How long… do you think I’ll get?’

Ferth moved uncomfortably. ‘No point in worrying about that until you have to.’

‘You could probably halve it,’ I said.

‘How?’ He was pathetically hopeful. I flung him the rope.

‘By giving evidence at another trial I have in mind, and taking David Oakley down with you.’

PART THREE

MARCH EPILOGUE

Yesterday I rode Breadwinner in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

A horse of raw talent with more future than past. A shambling washy chestnut carrying his head low. No one’s idea of equine beauty.

Old Strepson watched him slop round the parade ring and said with a sigh, ‘He looks half asleep.’

‘Hughes will wake him up,’ Cranfield said condescendingly.

Cranfield stood in the chill March sunshine making his usual good stab at arrogance. The mean calculating lines round his mouth seemed to have deepened during the past month, and his manner to me was if anything more distant, more master-servant, than ever before. Roberta said she had told him that I had in some way managed to get our licences back, but he saw no reason to believe her and preferred the thought of divine intervention.

Old Strepson said conversationally, ‘Kelly says Breadwinner was a late foal and a late developer, and won’t reach his true strength until about this time next year.’

Cranfield gave me a mouth-tightening mind-your-own-business glare, and didn’t seem to realise that I’d given him an alibi if the horse didn’t win and built him up into one heck of a good trainer