Taking the Fall (23 page)

You didn’t think it was interference?’

‘Mike did nothing wrong. Nothing I could have done, or he could have done differently. He went on to win it fair and square.’

Some papers were shuffled. One of the stewards said the result would stand. The announcement was quickly made over the public address system, echoing round the track. It was all over.

Later, in the owners’ bar, Duncan found Petie, Roisin and Kerry. They were having a drink with Mike and Aaron. George Pleasance was across the other side of the room, drinking with Osborne, Cadogan and a couple of others. Duncan tried to avoid eye contact. Pleasance seemed to be doing the same thing.

‘Well,’ said Aaron at last, ‘that was a bit of bad luck you had there, Duncan.’

‘Right.’

‘But you came through unscathed. So was it a bit of good luck?’

Duncan looked up. The Monk’s face, gazing back at him, was completely unreadable. What did he mean by that? He couldn’t possibly be in with George Pleasance. On the other hand, Mike might have told him that Cadogan had come to him with the ride and that he as an agent hadn’t gone looking for it. The Monk was beginning to unnerve him. It was like he knew everything.

Or maybe he had just meant that it was good luck to fall off without injury. For sure, there were a dozen ways to slow up a horse and lose a race, and falling off wasn’t exactly first choice. You’d have to be an idiot. It was too damned dangerous.

‘Let’s call it good luck,’ said Mike Ruddy. ‘It ain’t been a bad day.’

16

C
hristie had been calling him. He’d neglected her. His damned conscience had been getting the better of him again. What was it about Lorna that made him want to keep away from other women? Maybe he should talk to a priest or something; find out what the hell was going wrong. Sometimes he wished he were a Catholic like Kerry. That way he could go up to the confessional box and say,
Help me out here, Father, I’ve gone right off sinning.

Sandy Sanderson obviously didn’t have a problem. He was as horny as a three-balled rabbit. Any and every Thursday night, you’re safe, Christie had told Duncan. Somehow Sandy had come to an arrangement with his mistress that he would always be with her on a Thursday night, whatever was happening the next day. Christie wasn’t supposed to know. Officially it was his regular boys’ night out, but it had been clear to her for a long time. She wanted to see Duncan that Thursday. That meant lying to Lorna, and he didn’t like doing that.

He was going to have to find a way of extricating himself from Christie. Screwing the Champion Jockey’s wife had limited satisfaction. It had been fun planting tiny clues around the house for Sanderson to find, but it just wasn’t deep-down satisfying. When revenge came, it was going to have to be much more far-reaching.

Christie opened the door. She wore something that made her look like a Greek goddess. It was a loose-fitting, low-cut pleated white minidress. It revealed the beautiful curve of her elegant shoulders and her long, long legs. There was a gold sash at her waist and she wore high-heeled gold-leaf sandals with wraparound strands climbing up her tanned calves.

‘Are we fancy dress?’ Duncan said.

‘Get in here,’ she said, pulling him in and closing the door behind him. She grabbed his belt buckle and led him through the house towards the kitchen, where as before she had champagne chilling. As she led him, he noticed the light was on in the dedicated snooker room.

She poured champagne. ‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ she said.

‘No. I’ve been very busy. You should know that, with Cheltenham coming up.’

The Cheltenham Festival, with its Gold Cup and other landmark races, was just a couple of weeks away. A kind of fever started to take over all major stables in the build-up to the Festival.

‘I know that. But I told you: Thursdays are always clear. Where were you last week?’

‘I do have a girlfriend, you know.’

‘You’re not telling me it’s serious. I thought you were just after getting a few races.’

‘Think what you want.’

‘Let’s not fight.’

Duncan felt a little sorry for Christie. She was surely one of the most stunningly beautiful women he’d ever met in his life. And yet here she was on a Thursday evening playing second fiddle to Sanderson’s mistress, whoever that was; and having to complain about playing second fiddle to her lover’s girlfriend, namely Lorna. She had wealth and beauty in great store and yet she was desperately lonely for company.

‘Kiss me, Duncan,’ she said.

‘Wait. Have you been playing snooker?’

‘Yes. While I was waiting for you.’

‘Can you play?’

‘I could wipe the floor with you. Before I married Sandy, I went out with Tony Swinton.’

‘Tony the Terminator? You’re joking.’

She shook her head. ‘Want to try me?’

They spent the next hour not having sex but playing snooker. She took a frame; he took a frame. Then, with Christie poised to win the third, Duncan broke the rules. It was the sight of her bent across the table, the green baize shining under the overhead lamp and the catchlight winking on the snooker balls. He reached around her waist and slid her knickers down to her ankles.

‘This means I win,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

He stuck three fingers inside her and she gasped and rocked against the table. She drew herself erect and let her snooker cue rattle to the floor. Then she slipped off her sandals, one after the other, before climbing on to the snooker table itself. She got on her hands and knees on the green baize and spread her buttocks open, swaying slightly, waiting for him to join her.

He undressed quickly and climbed up on the snooker table with her. He was already aching hard but he knew how he wanted her. He pushed her so she was belly down on the baize and spread her arms and legs towards the corner pockets of the table. Then he kneeled astride her legs, pulling her ankles up either side of his hips and rocking her back on to him, pushing deep inside her.

She groaned and clawed at the baize, threatening to tear it as he rocked back and forth on her. In turn he raked her tanned back. Her fingers found her way around a pair of the Crystalite snooker balls and she hung on to them as if they were a way of staying attached to the table. At last he lifted up her buttocks and she raised herself to her hands and knees so that he could push deeper and deeper inside her.

He felt her flood. He turned her over so that she was lying on her back, now blinking at him, her eyes seeming to dissolve in the light from the overhead lamp. When he was beyond the point of no return, he shouted out her name. Just as he was coming, she grabbed his balls a little too enthusiastically. Duncan shot up in the air like a rocket. He hit the fringed canopy lamp overhead so hard that it shattered and, fittings and all, tumbled down around them on to the baize of the snooker table.

The excitement was growing at Petie’s yard as they counted down the days to the Cheltenham Festival. The Festival was the pinnacle of jump racing, three days in which a year’s preparation, anticipation, hope and action was played out at a superb venue. It was a mix of showground and sporting event in which the very best horses and the bravest jockeys got to compete. Here you needed that little bit of extra luck and that little bit of extra heart. It was a place where reputations were forged in the heat of the race and where owners, trainers, jockeys, stable hands, bookies and punters came together in a carnival atmosphere that also dragged in with it crooks, freaks, con men and fortune-hunters. There was music and shopping tents and pageantry aplenty.

It was a theatre of dreams. For those centrally involved in the sport it could provide glory of the kind that would last a lifetime in the memory. It was the thing Charlie Claymore was aiming for before his dreams were shattered by the conspiracies of Duke Cadogan, Sandy Sanderson and William Osborne. Duncan could taste glory weeks ahead of the event. He wanted it for himself; but most of all he wanted it for Charlie.

Three great days; every race momentous. The Festival kicked off with Champion Hurdle Day. The second day, the one on which Petie was planning to make his mark, was Champion Chase Day. The final day saw competition for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, a long and punishing race over three miles, two and a half furlongs, on a track gone heavy.

It was time for the big boys to show their muscles. Though Petie was not quite in the same league as trainers like William Osborne, Alan Bonsor or Dick Sommers at Penderton, he was bubbling under. He was thereabouts. Unlike those others, he wasn’t anywhere near Champion Trainer capacity, but his presence was a threatening one. He’d proved he could pull off surprises and upset the big-time boys on more than one occasion.

Mandy Gleeson had persuaded Duncan to set up an interview with the shy Irishman for a journalist friend. The newspapers had identified Quinn’s stable as a presence to watch for at the Festival. They’d assembled a photograph in which Petie, scruffy as ever, peered into the camera flanked by Duncan and Kerry in their brilliant silks.

‘Talk about crucified between two thieves,’ Petie had said, scowling at the newspaper.

‘Bit of attention won’t hurt, Daddy,’ Roisin had said.

It was true. The Cheltenham Festival was all about glamour, and the news boys wanted their stories. They wanted Davids and Goliaths; they wanted fairy tales; they wanted talk of dark horses and piebald ponies. The punter running his eye down a page of form might let his finger come to rest at Quinn’s name a little more often.

Meanwhile, the training at Petie’s yard was becoming intense. Fitness, health and diet. Petie was a revolutionary in thinking about horses and how they raced. Of course everyone knew you had to have a fit horse, but they hadn’t quite figured out the fine tuning for a super-healthy animal that would lead to maximum fitness. He experimented with their diet all the time. He had a food scientist set up a kind of laboratory in the grounds. The scientist wore a white coat around the stables. He took samples of the horses’ blood. Some people thought Petie was crazy, that he was going over the top.

‘Listen,’ Petie said to Duncan one day. ‘If you’re not feeling well, you can tell me. But that horse over there can’t tell me, can she? She can’t say: look here, Petie, I’m feelin’ a bit under the weather, you know? But if we look at her blood, we can see if she’s right, and if she’s not right we can try to get her right.’

But as well as these modern ideas, he was old-school, too. He was still inviting Charlie down to see the set-up and Charlie was still refusing. So Petie went to him and consulted him about using a tongue-tie on a horse that had been doing well but occasionally when tongue-tied would give up and lose heart. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Charlie asked what he was using for the tongue-tie and when Petie said leather, Charlie said: to hell with that, make a new one out of an old pair of tights. Petie scratched his head and said he’d give it a go. Duncan thought he was just humouring the old man.

Petie told Charlie he had a box at Cheltenham and wanted him to be his guest. Charlie declined again, and Petie told him, well, the place was there anyway.

Gifts continued to arrive from an appreciative George Pleasance. A crate of champagne. A box of Havana cigars. A pair of tickets to watch Nottingham Forest in the quarter-finals of the European Cup. As far as George Pleasance was concerned, Duncan had taken the fall. Duncan wanted him to keep thinking that.

There were some repercussions. Mandy Gleeson invited him to have lunch with her in Soho.

‘Is that all you’re going to eat?’ she said to him when his lunch arrived. He was fretting about his weight and taking pee pills in the run-up to Cheltenham. ‘We could have made it a picnic on the banks of the Thames. I could have brought you a lettuce leaf in my handbag.’

‘Do I detect a hostile note?’

‘I’ll be honest with you, Duncan. The talk around our investigation is that you’ve gone over to the dark side.’

‘On what evidence?’

‘We know George Pleasance made a huge lay bet against Supernatural. I honestly thought you were different.’

‘Have you ever fallen off a horse, Mandy?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘In the middle of a race? Jumping a fence at thirty miles per hour or more? You’d have to be fucking crazy. If a jockey wants to hold back, he will run out or pull up or gear down.’

‘Unless he wants to keep his reputation intact. Unless he wants to make it look really good.’

‘You’re full of shit,’ Duncan said. ‘You think you know all about it. But you can’t see over the fence.’

‘Give me some information, then.’

‘You’ve got the information. Now you’re like a six-year-old, filling in the pictures with coloured crayons.’

‘What are we supposed to conclude? You suddenly start hanging around with George Pleasance. You ride one of Cadogan’s horses. It’s a stonewall favourite and it happens to have a calamity fall.’

‘Do you know what
I’ve
concluded, Mandy? That everyone will already have made up their minds one way or the other, mostly shaded by what they read or hear in the media. What was that about the journalist and the whore? Something about power without responsibility?’

‘That’s a bit rich from someone who enjoys Mediterranean nights. Marbella, wasn’t it?’

‘You sound angry. I suppose you’re still not going to let me fuck you.’

Mandy stood up and fumbled inside her handbag. She flung a couple of banknotes on the table. ‘No, but I’ll pay for your lettuce.’

‘Sit down, Mandy. Come on. We said we would help each other. Let’s tell each other what we know.’

He persuaded her to sit down again. The idea had been for him to hear what she knew; where her investigations had led her. He apologised and told her what he could: about the unsolicited gifts from George Pleasance. He told her the truth, which was that he’d been under no direct pressure from Pleasance to take a fall, and that Pleasance’s clever technique was to let jockeys recruit themselves into his schemes. He also told her she would just have to believe him when he said that his fall from Supernatural was unplanned.