Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,80

if it did. Whatever low opinion Cranfield held of me, I reciprocated it in full.

Further along the parade ring stood a silent little group of Kessel, Pat Nikita, and their stable jockey, Al Roach. They were engaged in running poor old Squelch, and their interest lay not so fiercely in winning as in finishing at all costs in front of Breadwinner. Kessel himself radiated so much hatred that I thought it was probably giving him a headache. Hating did that. The day I found it out, I gave up hating.

Grace’s hatred-headache must have been unbearable…

Grace’s recovery was still uncertain. Ferth had somehow wangled the best available psychiatrist on to her case, and had also arranged for him to see Jack. Outside the weighing room when I had arrived, he had jerked his head for me to join him, and told me what the psychiatrist had reported.

‘He says Jack is sane according to legal standards, and will have to stand trial. He wouldn’t commit himself about Grace’s chances. He did say, though, that from all points of view their enforced separation was a godsend. He said he thought their only chance of leading fairly normal lives in the future was to make the separation total and permanent. He said a return to the same circumstances could mean a repeat of the whole cycle.’

I looked at Ferth gloomily. ‘What a cold, sad, depressing solution.’

‘You never know,’ he said optimistically, ‘Once they get over it, they might both feel… well… released.’

I smiled at him. He said abruptly, ‘Your outlook is catching, dammit… How about that dinner?’

‘Any time,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow, then? Eight o’clock. The Caprice, round the corner from the Ritz… The food’s better there than at my club.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘And you can tell me how the police are getting on with David Oakley…’

I’d had the Birmingham police on my telephone and doorstep for much of the past week. They had almost fallen on my neck and sobbed when I first went to them with enough to make an accusation stick, and had later promised to deliver to me, framed, one of the first fruits of their search warrant: a note from Cranfield to Jack Roxford dated two years earlier, thanking him for not bidding him up at an auction after a selling race and enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds. Across the bottom of the page Cranfield had written:

‘As agreed. Thanks. D.C.’

It was the note Oakley had photographed in my flat.

Supplied by Roxford, who had suggested the photograph.

Kept by Oakley, as a hold over Roxford.

The police also told me that Jack Roxford had drawn six hundred pounds in new notes out of his bank during the two weeks before the Enquiry, and David Oakley had paid three hundred of the same notes into his own account five days later.

Clever, slippery Mr Oakley had been heard to remark that he regretted not having slaughtered Kelly Hughes.

The bell rang for the jockeys to mount, and Cranfleld and old Strepson and I walked over to where Breadwinner waited.

The one jockey missing from the day’s proceedings was Charlie West, whose licence had been suspended for the rest of the season. And it was only thanks to Hughes’ intervention, Ferth had told him forcefully, that he hadn’t got his deserts and been warned off for life. Whether Charlie West would feel an atom of gratitude was another matter.

I swung up easily on to Breadwinner and fitted my right foot carefully into the stirrup. A compromise between me and the orthopod had seen the plaster off seven days previously, but the great surgeon’s kind parting words had been, ‘You haven’t given that leg enough time and if it dislocates again it’s your own bloody fault.’

I had told him that I couldn’t afford to have Cranfield engage another jockey for Breadwinner with all the horse’s future races at stake. Old Strepson was the grateful type who didn’t dislodge a jockey who had won for him, and if some other jockey won the Gold Cup on Breadwinner I would lose the mount for life: and it was only this argument which had grudgingly brought out the saw.

I gathered up the reins and walked the horse quietly round the ring while everyone sorted themselves out into the right order for the parade down the course. Apart from the Grand National, the Cheltenham Gold Cup was the biggest steeplechase of the year. In prestige, probably the greatest of all. All the stars turned out for it, meeting each other on level terms. Bad

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