Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,12

across the roadway spilling water from its dented radiator and frosty fragments from its windscreen.

The owner of the Rover was stamping about in loquacious fury, shouting about women drivers and that it was not his fault.

The girl stood looking at the orange remains of an MGB GT which had buried itself nose first into the ditch. She wore a long dress of a soft floaty material, white with a delicate black pattern and silver threads glittering in the lights. She had silver shoes and silver-blonde hair which hung straight to her shoulders, and she was bleeding.

At first I was surprised that she was standing there alone, that the masculine onlookers were not wrapping her in rugs, binding up her wounds and generally behaving protectively, but when I spoke to her I saw why. She was in icy command of herself, as cool and silver as the moonlight. Despite the oozing cut on her forehead and the smears she had made trying to wipe it, despite the much heavier stain on her right arm and the scarlet splashes down the front of the pretty dress, she somehow repelled help. And she was not as young as she looked at first sight.

‘She cut right across me,’ the Rover driver was shouting. ‘Swerved right across me. I didn’t have a chance. She went to sleep. That’s what she did. And now she gives us all this crap about a horse. I ask you. A horse! Swerved to avoid a horse. She went to sleep. She dreamed the horse. The silly bitch.’

Shock took people like that sometimes, and to be fair he had had a bad fright.

I said to the girl, ‘There was a horse.’

She looked at me without eagerness.

‘Of course there was,’ she said.

‘Yes… He got loose from my stable and strayed up here on to the road.’

I was immediately the focus of a hedge of accusing eyes and also the new target for the Rover driver’s ire. He had really been quite restrained with the girl. He knew a lot of words one seldom heard even on a racecourse.

In a gap in the tirade the girl spoke. She had one hand pressed against her abdomen and a strained look on her face.

‘I need,’ she said distinctly, ‘to go to the bathroom.’

‘I’ll take you to my house,’ I said. ‘It’s not far.’

The Rover driver was against it. She should stay until the police arrived, which would be at any second, he said.But some of the men showed that they understood what such an occasion could do to the viscera and silently parted to let her go with me across to my car.

‘If the police want her,’ I said, ‘Tell them she’s at Jonah Dereham’s house. First turn left, through the village, a house and stable yard out on the far side, on the right.’

They nodded. When I looked back I could see most of them returning to their own cars and driving away, and only one or two staying to support the Rover man.

She said nothing on the short journey. There was sweat on her face as well as blood. I drew up outside the kitchen and led her inside without delay.

‘The cloakroom is there,’ I said, showing her the door.

She nodded and went inside. White walls, bright unshaded light bulb, gumboots, waterproofs, two framed racing photographs and an ancient shotgun. I left her to this uncosy decor and went outside again to where my ‘chaser still patiently stood hitched to the railing.

I patted him and told him he was a great fellow. Fetched him a couple of apples from the tackroom and led him back to his paddock. He hadn’t galloped so fast or felt such excitement since the day they cheered him home up the hill at Cheltenham. He snorted with what was easy to read as pride when I released him and trotted away on springy ankles like a yearling.

She was coming out of the cloakroom when I returned. She had washed the streaked blood off her face and was dabbing the still unclotted cut on her forehead with a towel. I invited her with a gesture back to the kitchen and she came with the same marked and unusual composure.

‘What you can give me now,’ she said, ‘is a large drink.’

‘Er… How about some hot strong tea?’

She stared. ‘No. Brandy.’

‘I haven’t any.’

She gestured impatiently. ‘Whiskey, then. Gin. Anything will do.’

‘I’m afraid,’ I said apologetically, ‘that I haven’t anything at all.’

‘Do you mean,’ she said in disbelief, ‘that you have