Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,40

faces. Some of them didn’t know what had happened at Ascot. But Vic did. Fynedale did. Ronnie North and Jiminy Bell did….

‘Who was it?’

‘Never you mind. You just reckon you’ve had a taster. And you bloody will do what you’re told.’

They all looked so furiously intent that I wanted to laugh: but when they suddenly wheeled away and went off to their own cars I found I didn’t want to laugh after all. I stood where they’d left me and breathed in deep lungfuls of winter night. However ludicrous I might think it that some perfectly ordinary citizens should threaten to beat me up if I didn’t join their strong-arm union, their collective menace had been real enough.

All I suddenly wanted was a cigarette.

There were few cars left in the park, but the one next to mine turned out to be Pauli Teksa’s.

‘Jonah?’ he said, peering at me through the dim lighting.

‘Hullo.’

‘You’re just standing there smoking?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Want to come to my place for a bite to eat?’

By tacit consent my dinner date with Eddy and Marji had lapsed, but my hosts for the week were not expecting me back. If I wanted to eat at all it might as well be in company.

‘Couldn’t think of anything better,’ I said.

He was staying in a pub outside Newmarket which put on late dinners especially for people after the sales. The cosy bar and dining-room were full of familiar faces and the general conversation was predictable.

He moved his strong stocky body through the crowd with ease, and there was some quality about him which parted the crush like Moses and the Red Sea. I watched him being served at the bar at once where others had waited longer and saw that the others acknowledged rather than resented his priority. I wondered what it must be like to be Pauli, generating such natural and unconscious power.

We ate smoked salmon and then roast pheasant, and drank Chateau Haut Badon 1970, which was my choice, not his, as he said Americans knew goddam all about French wines and he was no exception. He preferred Bourbon, he said.

‘All these guys here,’ he said over coffee, waving a hand at the other crowded tables. ‘They kinda like you.’

‘You imagine it.’

‘Nope.’ He gave me a cigar from a crocodile case with gold mountings. A Havana. He inhaled the smoke deeply, and sighed, and said the only good thing ever to come out of Cuba was its cigars and life in the States was hardly worth living now they were banned. He had stocked up in England, he said. He was going to smuggle a hundred or so through in his baggage.

‘You looked a bit shook up back there in the car park,’ he said.

‘Did I?’

‘Those guys I saw standing round you when I came out of the gate. They friends of yours?’

‘Business acquaintances.’

He smiled sympathetically. ‘Ganging up on you, eh? Well I sure did warn you.’

‘You sure did,’ I said, smiling back.

He looked at me assessingly. ‘They don’t seem to have made it stick.’

‘No.’

‘You want to take care, fellah,’ he said earnestly. ‘Remember you got bashed at Ascot.’

‘Tonight’s lot said they didn’t do that.’

He was surprised. ‘They said…?’

I nodded. ‘They clammed up as soon as they’d said it. It might be true in a way, because the two men who took Hearse Puller and tried to get River God aren’t regulars on the racing scene. I’d never seen them before. But at a guess… tonight’s crowd supplied the basic information.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Between them they knew everything the two strangers knew.’

‘What sort of things?’

His strong face was intent, receptive, helpful. I told him about the two-year-old getting loose on the main road, and about Crispin’s whiskey.

He was astounded. I said, ‘Of the people there tonight, Jiminy Bell knew about my dicey arm as he’d seen the strap often enough in the changing room, when we were both jockeys. Ronnie North knew I’d bought River God, because he’d sold it to me. Vic Vincent knew I kept horses in transit in my yard. Any of them could have known I have an alcoholic brother, it’s no secret. All of them were at Ascot the day I bought Hearse Puller. It’s quite clear they could have supplied the info if they’d wanted to. The trouble is that I simply don’t see the point.

He carefully edged half an inch of ash off the end of his cigar and took his time over replying.

‘I’ll tell you what they might have been after,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘To