Knock Down - By Dick Francis Page 0,8

passed from revulsion to cynicism, and I had grown a thick skin of self-preservation. I thought that sometimes it was difficult to perceive the honest course, and more difficult still to stick to it, when what I saw as dishonesty was so much the general climate.

I understood, after two years, that dishonesty was much a matter of opinion. There were no absolutes. A deal I thought scandalous might seem eminently reasonable to others. Ronnie North saw nothing wrong at all in milking the market for every possible penny: and moreover he was likeable to meet.

The telephone rang. I picked up the receiver.

‘Jonah?’

He was back, as I’d thought he might be.

‘The horse is River God. You have it for three thousand five hundred with five hundred on top.’

‘I’ll call you back.’

I looked up the River God form and consulted a jockey who’d ridden it a few times, and finally dialled Ronnie North.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Subject to a vet’s report, River God will do well.’

He said with elaborate resignation, ‘I told you, you can trust me.’

‘Yeah. I’ll give you two thousand five hundred.’

‘Three thousand,’ he said. ‘And that’s rock bottom. With five hundred to come.’

‘One fifty,’ I said positively, and compromised at a hundred more.

River God, my jockey friend had said, belonged to a farmer in Devon who had bought it unbroken at three years old as a point-to-point prospect for his son. Between them they’d done a poor job of the breaking and now the son couldn’t control the result. ‘He’s a ride for a pro,’ said my informant, ‘But he’s quite fast and a natural jumper, and they haven’t managed to cock that up.’

I stood up, stretched, and as it was by then half past ten, decided to tell Kerry Sanders in the morning. The room I used as an office, lined with book shelves and fitted cupboards, was half functional, half sitting-room, and mostly what I thought of as home. It had a lightish brown carpet, red woollen curtains and leather armchairs, and one big window which looked out to the stable yard. When I had tidied away the books and papers I’d been using I switched off the powerful desk lamp and stood by the window, looking out from darkness to moonlight.

Everything was quiet out there, the three lodgers patiently waiting for their aeroplane from Gatwick Airport five miles down the road. They should have been gone a week since and the overseas customers were sending irritable cables, but the shipping agents muttered on about unavoidable delays and kept saying the day after tomorrow.

‘The day after tomorrow never comes,’ I said, but they didn’t think it funny.

I used the yard as a staging post and seldom kept horses there more than a night or two. They were a tie, because I looked after them myself, and I did that because until recently I had not been earning enough to think of employing anyone else.

In my first year in the business I had negotiated fifty sales, and in my second ninety three, and during the past three months I had been almost constantly busy. Given a bit of luck, I thought, like, say, buying a Derby winner for five thousand as a yearling… just some such impossible bit of luck… I might yet achieve tax problems.

I left the office and went to the sitting-room. My brother Crispin was still where I’d left him, face down, snoring, spark out. I fetched a rug and draped it over him, knowing he wouldn’t wake for hours, and that when he did he would be in his usual violent hangover temper, spewing out his bitter resentments like untreated effluent.

We had been orphaned when I was sixteen and he seventeen, first by a riding accident which killed our mother, and then three months later by a blood clot in Father. Abruptly, almost from one week to the next, our lives changed to the roots. We had been brought up in comfort in a house in the country, with horses to ride and a cook and gardener and stablemen to do the work. We went to expensive boarding schools and thought it natural, and holidayed on grouse moors in Scotland.

The glitter had by no means been founded on gold. Solicitors gravely told us that our parent had mortgaged all he possessed, had borrowed on his life assurance, had sold the family treasures and was only a Degas sketch away from bankruptcy. He had, it appeared, been living on the brink of disaster for several