Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,35

useful. He looked boyish, harmless and trustworthy. He wore a heavy tweed suit and a slightly dandified dark red shirt with a white collar and tie, and no hat on the reddish-brown hair.

I wondered why he had recently grown so aggressively rapacious. He had been successful for a long time and as one of the top one-man bands he must have been handling about two million pounds’ worth of business every year. At a flat five per cent that meant a hundred thousand stayed with him, and even after heavy expenses and taxes he must have been well off.

He worked hard. He was always there, standing in the bitter winds round the winter sale rings, totting up, evaluating, advising, buying, laying out his judgement for hire. He was working even harder now that he was going around intimidating breeders in far-flung little studs. Something had recently stoked up his appetite for money to within a millimetre of open crime.

I wondered what.

Pauli Teksa rapturised about Newmarket and compared it favourably with every American track from Saratoga to Gulf Stream Park. When pinned down by my scepticism he said he guessed he liked Newmarket because it was so small. And quaint. And so goddam British. The stands at Newmarket were fairly new and comfortable; but I reflected wryly that small, quaint and British usually meant hopelessly inadequate seating, five deep in the bars and not enough shelter from the rain.

He liked the Heath, he said. He liked to see horses running on grass. He liked the long straight course. He liked right-handed races. He’d always liked Newmarket, it was so quaint.

‘You’ve been here before?’ I asked.

‘Sure. Four years ago. Just for a look-see.’

We watched an untidy little jockey squeeze home after five furlongs by a shorter margin than he ought, and on the way down from the stands found ourselves alongside Constantine and Kerry.

She introduced the two men to each other, the big silver-haired man of property and the short wide-shouldered American. Neither took to the other on sight. They exchanged social politenesses, Constantine with more velvet than Pauli, but in less than two minutes they were nodding and moving apart.

‘That guy sure thinks a lot of himself,’ Pauli said.

Wilton Young arrived in a helicopter a quarter of an hour before the big race. Wilton Young had his own pilot and his own Bell Ranger, which was one up on the Brevett Rolls, and he made a point of arriving everywhere as noticeably as possible. If Constantine thought a lot of himself, Wilton Young outstripped him easily.

He came bouncing through the gate from the air strip straight across the paddock and into the parade ring, where his fourth best three-year-old was on display for the contest.

The loud Yorkshire voice cut through the moist October air like a timber saw, the words from a distance indistinct but the overall sound level too fierce to be missed.

Constantine stood at the other end of the parade ring towering protectively over the little knot of Kerry, his trainer and his jockey, and trying to look unaware that his whole scene had just been stolen by the poison ivy from the skies.

Nicol said in my ear ‘All we want now is for Wilton Young’s horse to beat Father’s,’ and inevitably it did. By two lengths. Easing up.

‘He’ll have apoplexy,’ Nicol said.

Constantine however had beautiful manners even in defeat and consoled his trainer in the unsaddling enclosure without appearing to notice the ill-bred glee going on six feet away, in the number one slot.

‘It always happens,’ Nicol said. ‘The one you least want to win is the one which does.’

I smiled. ‘The one you choose not to ride…’

‘They make you look a bloody fool.’

‘Over and over.’

At the end of the afternoon I drove from the racecourse, which lay a mile out on the London road, down into the town again, taking the right-hand turn to the sale paddocks. Nicol came with me, as Constantine was returning with Kerry to his hotel to lick his wounds in private, and we went round the stables looking at the dozen or so yearlings I had noted as possibles. He said he was interested in learning how to buy his own horses so that he wouldn’t have to rely on an agent all his life.

‘More like you, I’d be out of business,’ I said.

There was a filly by On Safari that I liked the look of, a big deep-chested brown mare with a kind eye. She had speed in her pedigree and