Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,47

along inside the soft crepe bandage I slept in.

‘Especially,’ I said. ‘Very high risk activity for dislocating shoulders.’

‘You speak from experience?’

‘You might say so.’

‘Serve you right.’

We slid slowly, contentedly, to sleep.

11

At Ascot Sales on Wednesday Vic and his pals closed their ranks when they saw me coming, and moved in my direction in a body.

I met them halfway. Like something out of High Noon, I thought frivolously. All we lacked were the Sheriff’s badge and the guns.

‘I warned you,’ Vic said.

They all stared at me. I looked at them one by one. Vic all open aggression, the rest in various shades from satisfied spite to a trace of uneasiness.

‘People who play with fire get burnt,’ I said.

Vic said, ‘We didn’t do it.’

‘Quite right. Fred Smith did. And he’s not telling who paid him. But you and I know, don’t we Vic?’

He looked extraordinarily startled. ‘You know?’ he exclaimed. ‘You couldn’t.’ He considered it and shook his head. ‘You don’t.’

‘But you know,’ I said slowly. ‘And if it isn’t you… who is it?’

Vic gave a fair imitation of a clam.

‘You just do as we tell you and nothing else will happen,’ he said.

‘You’ve got your psychology all wrong,’ I said. ‘You bash me, I’ll bash back.’

Jiminy Bell said to Vic ‘I told you so.’

Vic gave him a reptilian glance. Jiminy was a great one for losing friends and not influencing people.

Ronnie North stood on one side of their battalion commander and the carrot-headed Fynedale on the other.

Neither of them looked either impressed or worried about my vaguely stated intentions.

‘How about a truce?’ I suggested. ‘You leave me entirely alone, and I’ll leave you.’

Six upper lips curled in unison.

‘You can’t do a damn thing,’ Vic said.

I bought four horses for various clients uninfected by Vic, and went home. Crispin, morosely sober, had spent the day watching a demolition gang shift the burnt rubble of the stables into lorries. The stale smell persisted, and the air was full of dust and fine ash, but the hard concrete foundations had been cleared and cleaned in some places and looked like the first outlines of the future.

He was sitting in the office drinking fizzy lemonade in front of a television programme for children. Two days had seen rapid action by the electricity people, who had insulated all burnt-through wires and restored the current, and by the Post Office, who had reconnected me with the outer world. With help from the village I had cleaned up the office and the kitchen and borrowed dry beds, and even if the house was partly roofed by tarpaulin and as sodden as an Irish bog, it was still where I lived.

‘About twenty people telephoned,’ Crispin said. ‘I’ve had a bloody awful day answering the damn thing.’

‘Did you take messages?’

‘Couldn’t be bothered. Told them to ring again this evening.’

‘Have you eaten anything?’

‘Someone brought you an apple pie from the village,’ he said. ‘I ate that.’

I sat down at the desk to make a start on the ever-present paperwork.

‘Get me some lemonade?’ I asked.

‘Get it yourself.’

I didn’t, and presently with an ostentatious sigh he went out to the kitchen and fetched some. The thin synthetic fizz at least took away the taste of brick dust and cinders,though as usual I wished someone would invent a soft drink with a flavour of dry white wine. A great pity all soft drinks were sweet.

During the evening apart from answering the postponed enquiries and finalising various sales I made three more personal calls.

One was to the breeder of the Transporter colt which Vic had bought for thirty thousand and let go to Wilton Young for seventy-five.

One was to Nicol Brevett. And one to Wilton Young himself.

As a result of these the breeder met Nicol the next day in Gloucester, and on the Friday morning I drove them both to see the mail order tycoon in Yorkshire.

The row between Wilton Young and his carrot-headed agent at Doncaster races that Saturday could be heard from Glasgow to The Wash. Along with everyone else I listened avidly and with more than general satisfaction.

Wilton Young had not wanted to believe he had been made a fool of. What man would? I was wrong, he said. His agent Fynedale would never conspire with Vic Vincent to drive the price of a colt up by thousands so that he, Wilton Young, would shell out, while they, the manipulators, split the lolly between them.

I hadn’t said much at the interview. I’d left it all to the breeder. The furious indignation he’d