Tip Off (3 page)

 

When Lord Tintern showed me out, I got into my Audi outside the Jockey Club and joined the traffic creeping round Portman Square, heading for the M4 to go back to the office.

My thoughts flitted between interest in the job I'd just been handed and excitement at seeing Emma again for the first time in over a year.

She'd gone off to the States soon after I'd bought Nester from her, saying she'd be back the following spring. But by autumn, she still hadn't reappeared; she'd gone to spend most of the winter ski-ing in Colorado. I guessed, reluctantly, that there were other, unstated attractions there for her. I couldn't blame her for that; I hadn't told her how much I'd wanted her to stay.

I had spent most of the two years before that with Laura Trevelyan, who had worked with my sister. Laura was neurotic, quick-witted, and one of the best-looking women on
Vogue
. But that relationship had ground to an inevitable and uncomfortable halt soon after Emma had left.

Emma had sent me a few postcards while she was away, asking after Nester and Baltimore and, as an afterthought, me. I'd kept her up to date, but the most recent communication had been at Christmas in which she'd asked only after the horses.

Now she was coming back.

Slowing for the perennial hold up on the M4 near Slough, I could summon up a vivid picture of how Emma had looked, fifteen months earlier at Jane's stables.

She'd been wearing a pair of cream-coloured, stretch jodhpurs, uninterrupted by any panty lines, and a thin denim shirt, open just far enough to show the top of her lively breasts.

Her light auburn hair, damp and dishevelled, fell in rat's tails around a peach-soft face and her large turquoise eyes gleamed with conspiratorial excitement. It would have taken a man of far steelier resolve than I not to fall under her spell. I remembered it as if it were yesterday . . .

 

It had been a darkening afternoon in November when I'd walked through the broad-arched gatehouse into Jane's handsome stable-yard.

‘I'm very sorry, Gerald, but there's absolutely no point in shouting at me.' I could hear a rare tremor in Jane's voice. ‘This horse will never race again and that's all there is to it.'

‘Then you'll just have to shoot the bloody animal!' Gerald Tintern wasn't joking. That much was obvious from the pitch and vindictive edge in his normally mellow voice.

I'd caught the sharp exchange over the howl of a damp wind which blustered unchecked from Salisbury Plain. Not far short of a gale, it shrieked through the old brick archway.

I took in the tableau in front of me: a horse as fit and strong as any I'd seen – apart from a bulky dressing around its near forefoot – and three human figures, all apparently oblivious to the vortex of icy air whirling around the enclosed space.

Instinctively, I changed course, looking for cover from the weather and Lord Tintern's anger. I knew Jane had seen me, and that she might have valued some moral support, but I kept my eyes down and walked quickly across to the office in one of the near corners of the yard.

I let myself in. It was another world in here; warm and quiet except for the murmur of a television in the corner. Even the acrid smell of the head lad's cheap tobacco was welcoming. The sight of Lord Tintern's daughter with her long legs dangling over the side of an old desk was positively exhilarating.

‘Hi, Si,' Emma said in her husky, lazy voice, and I grinned back at her, although up until now I'd always hated being called ‘Si'.

‘What's going on outside?' I asked. ‘Your father doesn't sound too happy.'

Emma sighed. ‘He can be very tough.'

Jane's head lad, Mick Mulcahy, was paging through the entry book. He looked up. ‘He doesn't deserve a good horse.'

‘What's happened?' I asked again.

‘You know how much Dad paid for Nester?'

‘Not exactly,' I said. ‘Obviously a lot, I should imagine, but he'll get it all back on his insurance.'

‘Dad never insures anything. He says he's rich enough to be his own underwriter.'

‘The horse may not be a write-off in any case,' Mick Mulcahy muttered.

‘The vet said he'd cracked his pedal bone, just below the coronet,' Emma said. ‘He said it might mend if he pins it, but it won't ever be strong enough to race.'

Jane had told me that an injury so deep inside the foot was rare. If Nester could have been persuaded to lie down for six weeks, he'd probably have mended well enough, but that was way beyond the patience of any horse. As it was, with luck he'd recover enough to enjoy his retirement at least.

Emma was looking sharply at Mick. ‘How long do
you
think it'll take for that foot to come right?'

‘I don't know if it ever will – I've never seen an injury like it before.'

‘Esmond Cobbold could cure him,' I said with quiet confidence.

‘Who's he?' Emma pounced on the possibility.

I smiled, loving her enthusiasm. ‘He's an old boy I know – a friend of my parents' and a kind of healer – brilliant at getting horses right.'

I picked up the phone on Mick's desk and dialled a number in Herefordshire. After a short conversation, I hung up and turned to Emma with a grin. ‘He's on his way.'

‘Who the hell is this fella?' Mick asked sceptically.

‘Esmond Cobbold is the man who cured Harvey, my old hunter, when every vet who'd looked at him said he was unmendable.'

‘He'll not cure Nester overnight, I can promise you that.' The Irishman didn't like to have his authority overruled.

‘Maybe not,' I said, ‘but he'll help more than anyone else I know.'

‘What does he do exactly?'

‘He can do anything to a horse, bar talk to it. I suppose you'd call him a faith healer, but he's not a crank.'

‘Simon, are you sure you're not exaggerating when you say he really can do something?' Emma asked me, still sceptical despite herself.

I held up my hands. ‘All I'm saying is that he's the nearest thing I've seen to a miracle worker.'

‘Good!' Emma slid off the desk and walked to the window. She looked through the wet glass at the group of figures, heading in different directions now. Jane trailed behind the owner through the arch. The bun on the back of her head had been demolished by the wind and turned into a mass of waving grey hair. She looked thoroughly deflated.

‘Wait here. I'll be back in a moment.' On impulse, Emma reached up to the row of pegs beside the door and helped herself to the nearest Barbour which was five sizes too big for her. She heaved it on. A moment later, letting a quick gust of damp air into the stuffy room, she was outside and the door was banging shut behind her.

 

Five minutes later she came back, and after a modicum of persuasion I looked like being a thousand pounds poorer and the proud owner of a three-legged race-horse.

I could only hope my confidence in Esmond would be justified.

He was an octogenarian ex-cavalry officer and retired farmer. With his conservative background, regimental tie, drooping moustache and monocle, he was an unlikely character to find in the wild and woolly New Age world of personal auras and earth mysteries, but he seemed to accept his gift in a surprisingly prosaic manner.

How he had discovered his ability to heal people's injuries, he never told me, but he'd hinted that in order not to look foolish, he'd started with animals, successfully achieving a complete cure on his own labrador's failing hip. He'd done similar things with other people's dogs and then progressed to horses, which was how I'd first seen the results of his ministrations.

My continuing faith in Esmond's powers was rewarded. A week after he'd first arrived to see the horse at Wetherdown, I happily gave Emma the thousand pounds she'd promised her father, and wrote to advise Weatherbys that Better By Far had become the property of Simon Jeffries, Esquire.

The morning after my visit to Portman Square, I woke early to ride first lot from Wetherdown on Baltimore.

As I splashed water on to my reluctantly opening eyes, I looked at my face in the mirror in front of me and observed that the fresh bloom of youth was no longer evident.

At thirty-five, I'd have been surprised if it were. But the strain of trying to keep my weight below twelve stone when I stood at just under six feet was starting to show, and my sybaritic tastes were beginning to cancel out the benefits of several squash games and four mornings' riding out each week.

I nodded philosophically, though, and grinned at my reflection. I was never going to win the Gold Cup, and I may not have been Leonardo DiCaprio, but I had a sneaky suspicion that the Honourable Emma Birt wasn't totally uninterested in me.

Pleased that I was soon going to see her again, I brushed my teeth, shaved and walked through to my bedroom to fling open the window and let in the first early calls of the hedgerow birds and the damp morning mist. I took a few deep breaths, glad that I'd restricted myself to one glass of wine with dinner and gone to bed before the midnight news.

I pulled on a pair of cavalry twill jodhpurs, a cotton shirt and a cable-knit sweater. I'd left my boots in the back of the car, so slipped on a pair of deck shoes to go downstairs.

I lived in what had once been the coach-house of a large Victorian mansion set a hundred feet above the small riverside town of Streatley. The view from the kitchen window was across the Thames and the flat meadows beyond. Ancient hedges and a few pollarded willows with ghostly spiked heads poked through the shroud of white mist which lay across the valley floor.

I made myself a pot of mega-strength Java Lava and hacked a few segments from a fleshy grapefruit. Whatever other disadvantages Baltimore may have been going to suffer, carrying overweight wasn't one of them.

A few minutes later I was in the car, driving with my headlights on. The day was still struggling to emerge through the moist blanket that lay in scattered patches over the folds of the downs, but by the time I drove between the high stone gate-posts at Wetherdown twenty minutes later, the sun had just appeared as a faint silvery ball above the long horizon behind me.

I by-passed the house, set in a circle of giant specimen pines, and parked close to the broad arch of the brick gatehouse to Jane's handsome Edwardian stables.

I climbed out and stretched while I filled my lungs with crisp dawn air. A thrush anticipated trouble and with a noisy ‘chip-chip', fled to an ancient yew that guarded the entrance, scattering the dew that sparkled on the tree's dark green needles.

From within the yard, I heard the clop of hooves on cobbles, the snorting of the horses, the bustle of lads rushing to be ready to pull out their rides on the dot of seven-thirty. Baltimore would be tacked up and waiting for me.

I walked in through the arch. I didn't look for Jane immediately. I hadn't seen her since my fall at Fontwell, but I'd spoken to her at length on the phone the night before. First, I went to Nester's box and let myself in. He turned to look at me with what I was sure was a friendly nod. I glanced around with my eyes smarting from the sharp tang of a peeled onion dangling from a rafter. This was Jane's way of warding off the bugs and viruses that liked to plague a horse's stable.

I noticed with a smile that the straw bedding was neatly rucked up into what looked like a vast bird's nest on the clean side of his box – he was the nearest I'd seen to a house-trained horse.

In a separate corner, his empty manger was on the floor, since he'd shown long ago that he would only eat up if his food was offered at ground level.

I dropped to one knee and slid my hand down his tendon to feel for heat. There was none there and none in his feet either. There hadn't been since Esmond Cobbold had declared his task finished. I nodded with relief. You could never tell for certain how well injuries had healed until they'd stood the test on a race-course. Nester had galloped a good two and a half miles over the sticky ground at Fontwell, and he was fine.

I also had to give Jane a lot of the credit for his remarkable recovery. She had started his exercise regime with great restraint. For weeks on end he'd barely walked a stride, but he'd swum miles, toning his muscles with no strain on his foot. Then he'd walked slowly and, eventually, begun to trot, but only on the grass or the softness of the all-weather gallop.

Then Jane had cantered and schooled him gently over her least demanding chase fences for another two months, while he rebuilt his formidable driving muscles. The only hitch in the programme so far had been my falling off.

It had been Jane's suggestion to enter Nester for Cheltenham. I was more than happy just to see the horse back on a race-course again, but she was convinced he was as good as ever. After my dismal effort at Fontwell, we still didn't know for sure.

I left Nester's box thinking of the Senior Steward's views on his return to the track, which led my thoughts inevitably back to Toby Brown.

So far I had no firm plan on how I was going to get an angle on his success. Matt's less than subtle suggestion had been to break into his cottage and his flat in London, bug his phones and conduct a thorough search. I had talked him out of this for the time being, on the grounds that Toby was too intelligent not to be alert to the possibility that this might happen.

Abruptly, though, all thoughts of him fled my mind. Walking under the arch into Jane's yard was Emma. It was the first time I'd set eyes on her in over a year.

She was dressed in Levi's and well-worn chaps, and shivering under a thickly lined Drizabone.