to Bill himself, thanking him for the second safe delivery of the boxes and asking him to open his home garage and bring bits of motorbike out onto his drive.
‘We’ve decided to film your stuff after dark,’ I said. ‘Can you spare us the evening? And will you have your big bike at home?’
Natch, fine, yes indeedy, and cor, he said.
Tired and a shade dispirited I called it a day at five-thirty in the afternoon and invited Nash to my Bedford Lodge rooms for a reviver.
‘Sure,’ he agreed easily, and greeted Lucy with enough warmth to tongue-tie her into knock knees.
‘How did you get on?’ I asked her, explaining the task briefly to Nash; and she apologised for being slow and having completed only five boxes. She had just discovered that one of the boxes held some clippings about Sonia’s death. Wasn’t that extraordinary? Box six, she said. She hadn’t had time to go through them.
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Come again tomorrow, will you? Are you going right home at nights? Or perhaps staying with your Uncle Ridley?’
She made a face. ‘Not with him. Actually,’ she blushed perceptibly, ‘I’m staying here in this hotel. They had a room free and Dad agreed. I hope that’s all right?’
‘It’s splendid,’ I said moderately, knowing enthusiasm would frighten her. ‘What about Sunday, day after tomorrow?’
‘I can stay until the job’s finished,’ she said. ‘Dad said it was better.’
‘Good for Dad,’ Nash smiled.
‘He’s awfully interested,’ Lucy said, and after a pause added, ‘It’s really odd, Mr Rourke, imagining you as my dad.’
Nash smiled, the eyelids crinkling. Despite his pregnant wife, he didn’t look at all like anyone’s dad, certainly not Lucy’s.
We drank briefly together and split up, Nash yawning as he went and saying the slavedriver (T. Lyon) wanted him out working again in a couple of hours. Lucy, without making an issue of it, excused herself at the same time. Staying in the hotel, she was telling me, meant no more than convenience.
When she’d gone I looked at her master list of the boxes’ contents. Since they had been well jumbled up on the journeys, and since she had started methodically at one end, the six boxes she’d worked on held mixed and random contents.
Box I. Form books. Flat racing.
Box II. Biographies, trainers, owners and jockeys.
Box III. Form books. National Hunt racing.
Box IV. Weekly columns, Racing Gazette.
Box V. Books, annuals, racing history.
With unstoppable curiosity I knelt on the floor and opened Box III, National Hunt form books, and found that by happy chance it contained the records of two of the years when I’d been racing.
A British racing form book, built up week by week throughout the season with loose-leaf inserts tied between soft leather covers, contained details of every single race run, identifying each runner by name, trainer, jockey, weight carried, age and sex, and giving a start to finish commentary of performance.
There was no gainsaying the form book. If the form books said Mr T. Lyon (the Mr denoting amateur status) had finished fifth a long way back, it was no good Mr T. Lyon in memory thinking he’d ridden a close contest to be beaten by half a length. Mr T. Lyon, I read with nostalgia, had won a three-mile steeplechase by two lengths at Newbury, the horse carrying ten stone six. The underfoot conditions that day had been classified as ‘soft’, and the starting price had been 100-6, Mr T. Lyon’s mount having unaccountably beaten the hot favourite (weighted out of it, carrying 20 lbs more). Mr T. Lyon, I remembered, had been ecstatic. The crowd, who’d mostly lost their bets, had been unenthusiastically silent.
I smiled. Here I was, twelve years later, clad in Delta-cast and trying not to be killed: and I didn’t think I’d ever been happier than on that cold long-ago afternoon.
Valentine had put a red exclamation mark against my winner, which meant that he personally had fitted the horse with shoes especially for racing, probably on the morning of the race.
Horses wore thin aluminium shoes for racing, much lighter and thinner than the steel shoes they needed in the stable and out at exercise. Farriers would routinely change the shoes before and after a race.
Owing to chance, the form books in Box III went back only as far as my seventeenth birthday. For the Mr T. Lyon debut at sixteen to turn up, I would have to wait for Lucy.
I opened Box I, Flat racing form books, and found that in this instance the books