Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,54

through the paperwork and did the inevitable telephoning.

‘I’m going to get a job.’

We both knew that he wouldn’t. Those he wanted, he couldn’t keep. Those he could keep, he despised.

‘You can have one here,’ I said. ‘At this rate, I’ll have to get help with the paperwork. I can’t cope with it all.’

‘I’m not a bloody typist,’ he said scornfully.

‘You can’t type.’

‘We all know I’m absolutely useless. No need to rub it in.’

‘You can keep the accounts, though. You know all about figures.’

He thought it over. Unreliable he might be, but not untrained. If he wanted to he could take over the financial half of the office load and do it well.

‘I’ll see,’ he said.

Outside in the yard the demolition work was nearly finished. Plans for the new stables lay on my desk, drawn up at high speed by a local architect from the scribbled dimensions I’d given him. Depending on the time it took the Council to pass them, I’d be open for business again by the summer.

The rebuilding of the roof of the house was due to be started the following week. Rewiring from stem to stern had to be done after that, and there were several fallen ceilings to be replastered. Despite day and night oil heaters astrono-micalising my fuel bills in every room, the damp and the damp smell persisted. Repainting lay a long way ahead. It would take almost a year, I reckoned, to restore in full what had been done to intimidate me.

Vic had not seen the damage he’d caused and maybe he could put it comfortably out of his mind, but I came home to it night after night. He might forget, but he had made sure that I didn’t.

Sophie had had two weeks of night shift, telling departing freight flights where to get off.

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ she asked on the telephone.

‘Day or night?’

‘Day.’

‘Damn.’

She laughed. ‘What’s wrong with the day?’

‘Apart from anything else… I have to go to Ascot Sales.’

‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Couldn’t I come with you?’

‘If you don’t mind me working.’

‘I’d love it. See all the little crooks doing the dirty. And Vic Vincent… will I see him?’

‘I’m not taking you,’ I said.

‘I won’t bite him.’

‘Can’t risk it.’

‘I promise.’

When I picked her up at nine she was still yawning from five hours sleep and a system geared to waking at noon. She opened her door in jeans, sweater, toast and honey.

‘Come in.’ She gave me a slightly sticky sweet-tasting kiss. ‘Coffee?’

She poured two cups in her tiny kitchen. Bright sunshine sliced through the window, giving a misleading report of the freezing day outside, where the north-west wind was doing its Arctic damndest.

‘You’ll need warm boots,’ I said. ‘And sixteen layers of insulation. Also a nose muff or two and some frostbite cream.’

‘Think I’ll stay at home and curl up with a good television programme.’

When wrapped up she looked ready for Outer or even Inner Mongolia and complained that the padding made her fat.

‘Ever seen a thin Eskimo?’

She tucked the silver hair away inside a fur-lined hood. ‘So everyone has problems.’

I drove to the Ascot sale ring. Sophie’s reaction, although forewarned, was very much like Kerry’s.

‘Ascot,’ she said.

‘At least today it isn’t raining.’

She huddled inside the fat-making layers. ‘Thank God you insisted on the igloo bit.’

I took her down to the stables where there were several horses I wanted to look at, the underfoot conditions that day rock hard, not oozing with mud. She dutifully stuck her head inside each box to look at the inmates, though her claim to know less about horses than quantum mechanics was quickly substantiated.

‘Do they see two views at once, with their eyes on opposite sides of their head like that?’

‘Their brains sort it out,’ I said.

‘Very confusing.’

‘Most animals look sideways. And birds. And fish.’

‘And snakes in the grass,’ she said.

Some of the horses had attendants with them. Some didn’t. Some had attendants who had vanished temporarily to the refreshment room. Everywhere lay the general clutter of stables in the morning; buckets, muck sacks, brushes, bandages, haynets and halters, mostly in little clumps either outside or inside each box door. Most of the early lot numbers had stayed overnight.

I asked for three or four horses to be led out of their boxes by their attendants to get an idea of how they moved. They trotted obligingly along and back a wider piece of ground, the attendant running alongside holding them by the head on a short rope. I watched them from behind and from dead