Silks (24 page)

‘Do you mean that?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘And I won’t even make you pay training fees for the privilege. Come any time you like, as long as you stay reasonably fit, and light. I won’t let you if you go over twelve stone.’

‘I have absolutely no intention of doing that,’ I said.

‘That’s what all those fat ex-jockeys said.’ He laughed.

Sandeman finished his lunch and came over to the stable door for another apple from my pocket. I rubbed his ears and
massaged his neck. If only he could talk, I thought yet again, he could tell me what he wanted.

‘Well, old boy,’ I said to him. ‘Seems like you and I have run our last race. Welcome to old age.’

‘We’ll look after him,’ said Paul, stroking Sandeman’s nose.

I didn’t doubt it, but somehow this felt like a defining moment in my life. Gone, abruptly and unexpectedly, were the days of excitement and adrenalin that I had coveted for so long. My racing days had been what I had lived for. When one was past, I spent my time working but with half an eye on the calendar to show me when I was next due to weigh out and hear the familiar call for ‘jockeys’. But suddenly, this minute, I was no longer an injured jockey on the road to recovery and my next ride. I had become, here and now, an ex-jockey, and I was very aware of having lost something. There was an emptiness in me as if a part of my soul had been surgically excised.

‘Are you OK?’ said Paul, as if he, too, was aware of the significance of the moment.

‘Fine,’ I said to him with a smile. But I wasn’t really fine. Inside I was hurting.

‘You’ll just have to get a new hobby,’ Paul said.

But riding races had never felt like a hobby to me. It had been what I had lived for, especially these past seven years. It really was time to get a new life, and now I didn’t have any choice in the matter.

I stayed for a leisurely lunch with Paul and Laura and then Bob drove me further west to Uffington and the Radcliffe Foaling Centre. I had called ahead and spoken to the manager, Larry
Clayton, who seemed bored with his job and quite keen to show a visitor around the place.

The tyres of the Mercedes crunched over the gravel as we drove slowly up the driveway and pulled up in front of a new looking red-brick single-storey building to the side of the main house. ‘Visitors Report Here’ ordered a smartly painted notice stuck into the grass verge. So I did.

‘It’s very quiet at this time of the year,’ said Larry Clayton as we sat in his office. ‘Most of the mares and foals are gone by now.’

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘Back to their owners for the summer, most of them,’ he said. ‘Some have gone to Ireland. A few of the mares have gone back into training. I don’t really know.’ And it sounded like he didn’t really care.

‘So when’s your busy time?’ I asked.

‘January to April,’ he said. ‘That’s when most of them are born. Absolutely crazy here in February and March. Foals dropping every five minutes.’

‘How many?’ I asked.

‘Too many,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘About a hundred, and they want to double that next year.’

‘Is that more than in the past?’ I said.

‘Dunno,’ he said putting his feet up on his desk. ‘My first year here. But I think it must be. The Radcliffes built more foaling boxes last summer, and these offices. I think it was pretty small fry before then.’

I looked at his feet on the desk. He was wearing badly scuffed cowboy boots under tight blue jeans with a check-pattern open-necked shirt. I wondered if the Radcliffes knew that their manager was so casual with their guests. I had picked up some
of their marketing material stacked upright in a rack in the reception area on my way in. It was a well produced large glossy brochure with plenty of impressive facts and figures about the equine care provided for the expectant mothers, and a smiling picture on the front of Roger and Deborah Radcliffe standing together next to some mares and foals in a paddock.

‘Are they at home?’ I asked Larry, indicating the picture. ‘I didn’t get an answer on their home phone when I called them yesterday.’

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘They are in Kentucky for the sales and the Derby. Not back until next week.’

‘Can I have a look round?’ I asked.

‘Sure,’ he said, lifting both his feet together off the desk. ‘Not much to see.’

We walked around the new complex of foaling boxes and other stalls, each angle covered by a closed-circuit television camera.

‘How many staff do you have?’ I asked.

‘About a dozen in the high season but only a couple now,’ he said. ‘We have an onsite delivery team who are on constant standby when we’re foaling. But they’ve gone now. We only have a few horses here at the moment and they mostly belong to the Radcliffes. Two of them are mares that dropped in early March and their foals will be fully weaned by the end of July, ready for the sales.’

We walked past the rows of deserted stables and looked into the new foaling boxes. They had hard concrete floors devoid of the soft cushion of straw that would be laid down for the arrival of a new foal, possibly a new superstar like Peninsula.

‘Where was Peninsula foaled?’ I asked.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Here somewhere. But lots has changed.’

‘Do you know if the stud groom still works here?’ I asked. ‘The one who helped with Peninsula.’

‘No idea,’ he said again. ‘Do you know who it was? Stud grooms come and go round here like wet Sundays.’

‘Have you ever heard of anyone called Julian Trent?’ I asked him.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Should I?’

I decided that it really hadn’t been a very helpful excursion. In fact, the whole day had been rather disappointing so far from start to finish. I could only hope that it would get better.

Bob dropped me back at Ranelagh Avenue around quarter to eight and, in spite of the bright spring evening light, I asked him to wait while I made it up the steps to the front door and then safely inside it.

But he had driven away before I realized that there was something very wrong. I was about half-way up the stairs when I first heard the sound of running water where there shouldn’t have been.

It was running through the light fitting in the ceiling of my sitting room onto the floor below. It wasn’t just a trickle, more of a torrent. And that wasn’t the only problem. My home had been well and truly trashed.

I made my way as quickly as possible up to the top floor to turn off the water only to discover that doing so was not going to be that easy. The washbasin in the second bathroom had been torn completely away from its fittings and the water was jetting out of a hole in the wall left by a broken pipe. The stream was adding to the inch depth that already existed on the
bathroom floor and which was spreading across the landing and down the top few steps like a waterfall.

Where, I wondered, was the stop cock?

I carefully descended the wet stairs again and used the telephone to call my downstairs neighbours to ask for help. There was no answer. There wouldn’t be. It was Wednesday and they were always out late on Wednesdays, organizing a badminton evening class at the school where they both taught. I had become quite acquainted with their routine since I had needed to call on their assistance over the past six weeks. They would have stayed on at the school after lessons and would usually be back by nine, unless they stopped for some dinner on the way home, in which case it would be ten or even half past. By then, I thought, their lower floor, set as it was below ground level, might be more akin to an indoor swimming pool than a kitchen.

I sat on the torn arm of my sofa and looked about me. Everything that could have been broken had been. My brand-new expensive large flat-screen plasma television would show no pictures ever again. Angela’s collection of Royal Worcester figurines was no more, and the kitchen floor was littered deep with broken crockery and glass.

I looked at the phone in my hand. At least that was working, so I used it to dial 999 and I asked the emergency operator for the police.

They promised to try and send someone as soon as possible but it didn’t sound to me like it was an urgent case in their eyes. No one was hurt or imminently dying, they said, so I would have to wait. So I thumbed through a sopping copy of Yellow Pages to find an emergency plumbing service and promised them a big bonus to get here as soon as humanly possible. I was still
speaking to them when the ceiling around the light fitting, which had been bulging alarmingly, decided to give up the struggle and collapsed with a crash. A huge mass of water suddenly fell into the centre of my sitting room and spread out towards my open-plan kitchen area like a mini tidal wave. I lifted my feet as it passed me by. The plumbing company promised that someone was already on the way.

I hobbled around my house inspecting the damage. There was almost nothing left that was usable. Everything had been broken or sliced through with what must have been a box cutter or a Stanley knife. My leather sofa would surely be unrepairable with so many cuts through the hide, all of which showed white from the stuffing beneath. A mirror that had hung this morning on my sitting-room wall now lay smashed amongst the remains of a glass-and-brass coffee table, and an original oil painting of a coastal landscape by a successful artist friend was impaled over the back of a dining chair.

Upstairs in my bedroom the mattress had also received the box-cutter treatment and so had most of the clothes hanging in my wardrobe. This had been a prolonged and determined assault on my belongings of which almost nothing had survived. Worst of all was that the perpetrator, and I had little doubt as to who was responsible, had smashed the glass and twisted to destruction the silver frame that had stood on the dressing table, and had then torn the photograph of Angela into dozens of tiny pieces.

I stood there looking at these confetti remains and felt not grief for my dead wife, but raging anger that her image had been so violated.

The telephone rang. How was it, I wondered, that he hadn’t broken that too?

I found out. ‘I told you that you’d regret it,’ Julian Trent said down the wire, his voice full of menace.

‘Fuck off, you little creep,’ I said and I slammed down the receiver.

The phone rang again almost immediately and I snatched it up.

‘I said to fuck off,’ I shouted into the mouthpiece.

There was a pause. ‘Geoffrey, is that you?’ Eleanor sounded hesitant.

‘Oh God. I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

‘I should hope so,’ she said with slight admonishment. ‘I called because I have some good news for you.’

I could do with some.

‘I’ve found a copy of the photo of Millie with the foal.’

It took the emergency plumbers forty-five minutes to arrive at Ranelagh Avenue, by which time not only had the ceiling in my sitting room collapsed but also two ceilings below. I know because I heard about it at full volume from my neighbours when they arrived home at five past nine. It was a shame, I thought, that they had decided not to eat out. They wouldn’t be able to produce much of a dinner in the flood. Only when they came upstairs and saw the state of my place did they understand that it hadn’t been a simple thing like leaving a tap running or overflowing a bath.

The police showed up at least an hour after the plumbers had successfully capped off the broken pipe and departed. Two uniformed officers arrived in a patrol car and wandered through the mess, shaking their heads and denigrating the youth of today under their breath.

‘Do you have any idea who may have done this?’ they asked me.

I shook my head. Somehow not actually speaking seemed to reduce the lie. Why didn’t I just tell them that I knew exactly who had done it. It had been Julian Trent and I could probably find his address, or, at least, that of his parents.

But I also knew that Julian Trent was far from stupid, and that he would not have been careless enough to have left any fingerprints or other incriminating evidence in my house, and that he would have half of London lined up to swear that he was nowhere near Barnes at any time during this day. If he could get himself off an attempted murder rap, I had no doubts that he would easily escape a charge of malicious damage to property. To have told the police the truth would simply have given him an additional reason to come back for another dose of destruction – of me, of my father, or, as I feared most, of Eleanor.

The police spent some time going all round my house both outside and in.

‘Whoever did this probably got in through that window,’ one of the policemen said, pointing at the now-broken glass in my utility room. ‘He must have climbed the drainpipe.’

I had changed the locks and bolstered my security on the front door after the time I’d had an unwanted guest with his camera. I now wished I had put in an alarm as well.

‘Is there anything missing?’ asked one of the policemen finally.

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem so. It’s just all broken or slashed.’

‘Mmm,’ said the policeman. ‘Mindless vandalism. Happens all the time, sadly. You should be grateful that the whole place isn’t also smeared with shit.’

‘Oh thanks,’ I said rather sarcastically. But Julian Trent wouldn’t have done that for fear of leaving some speck of his own DNA along with it. ‘So what happens now?’ I asked them.

‘If nothing’s been stolen then CID won’t really be interested,’
he sounded bored himself. ‘If you call Richmond police station in the morning they will give you a crime number. You’ll need that for your insurers.’

That’s why I had called them in the first place.

And with that, they left. No photos, no tests, no search for fingerprints, nothing. As they said, no one was hurt and nothing had been stolen, and the insurance would deal with the rest. End of their problem. They had no hope or expectation of ever catching the person responsible, and, to be fair, I hadn’t exactly been very helpful with their inquiries.

I sat on a chrome kitchen stool and surveyed my ruined castle.

Surprisingly the electrical system seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the cascade of water through the sitting-room light fitting. I had quite expected there to be a blue flash followed by darkness when I chanced turning on the switch, but instead I was rewarded with two bulbs coming on brightly. The remaining bulbs, those in the wall brackets, had received the baseball bat treatment. At least, I assumed that Trent had been accompanied by his weapon of choice. The damage to some of the fittings was too much to have been the result of only a kick or a punch. Even the marble worktops in the kitchen were now cracked right through. Young Julian clearly had considerable prowess in the swing of his bat.