Bonecrack - Страница 3

He shrugged. 'It may suffer a little, perhaps, but it will survive.'

'It is unacceptable,' I said.

He blinked. His hand moved the gun gently to and fro across his well filled trouser leg.

He said, 'I see that you do not entirely understand the position. I told you that you could leave here upon certain conditions.' His flat tone made the insane sound reasonable. 'They are, that you employ a certain jockey, and that you do not seek aid from anyone, including the police. Should you break either of these agreements the stable will be destroyed. But-' He spoke more slowly, and with emphasis, '- if you do not agree to these conditions in the first place, you will not be freed.'

I said nothing.

'Do you understand?'

I sighed. 'Yes.'

'Good.'

'Not a petty crook, I think you said.'

His nostrils flared. 'I am a manipulator.'

'And a murderer.'

'I never murder unless the victim insists.'

I stared at him. He was laughing inside at his own jolly joke, the fun creeping out in little twitches to his lips and tiny snorts of breath.

This victim, I supposed, was not going to insist. He was welcome to his amusement.

I moved my shoulders slightly, trying to ease them. He watched attentively and offered nothing.

'Who then,' I said, 'is this jockey?'

He hesitated.

'He is eighteen,' he said.

'Eighteen-'

He nodded. 'You will give him the good horses to ride. He will ride Archangel in the Derby.'

Impossible. Totally impossible. I looked at the gun lying so quiet on the expensive tailoring. I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

When he next spoke there was the satisfaction of victory in his voice alongside the careful non-accent.

'He will arrive at the stable tomorrow. You will hire him. He has not yet much experience in races.

You will see he gets it.'

An inexperienced rider on Archangel- ludicrous. So ludicrous, in fact, that he had used abduction and the threat of murder to make it clear he meant it seriously.

'His name is Alessandro Rivera,' he said.

After interval for consideration, he added the rest of it.

'He is my son.'

CHAPTER TWO

When I next woke up I was lying face down on the bare floor of the oak panelled room in Rowley Lodge. Too many bare boards everywhere. Not my night.

Facts oozed back gradually. I felt woolly, cold, semi-conscious, anaesthetised-

Anaesthetised.

For the return journey they had had the courtesy not to hit my head. The fat man had nodded to the American rubber-face, but instead of flourishing the truncheon he had given me a sort of quick pricking thump in the upper arm. After that we had waited around for about a quarter of an hour during which no one said anything at all, and then quite suddenly I had lost consciousness. I remembered not a flicker of the journey home.

Creaking and groaning I tested all articulated parts. Everything present, correct, and in working order. More or less, that is, because having clanked to my feet it became advisable to sit down again in the chair by the desk. I put my elbows on the desk and my head in my hands, and let time pass.

Outside, the beginnings of a damp dawn were turning the sky to grey flannel. There was ice round the edges of the windows, where condensed warm air had frozen solid. The cold went through to my bones.

In the brain department things were just as chilly. I remembered all too clearly that Alessandro Rivera was that day to make his presence felt. Perhaps he would take after father, I thought tiredly, and would be so overweight that the whole dilemma would fold its horns and quietly steal away. On the other hand, if not, why should his father use a sledgehammer to crack a peanut. Why not simply apprentice his son in the normal way? Because he wasn't normal, because his son wouldn't be a normal apprentice, and because no normal apprentice would expect to start his career on a Derby favourite.

I wondered how my father would now be reacting, had he not been slung up in traction with a complicated fracture of tibia and fibula. He would not, for certain, be feeling as battered as I was, because he would, with supreme dignity, have gone quietly. But he would none the less have also been facing the same vital questions: which were, firstly, did the fat man seriously intend to destroy the stable if his son did not get the job, and secondly, how could he do it.

And the answer to both was a king-size blank.

It wasn't my stable to risk. They were not my six million pounds worth of horses. They were not my livelihood, nor my life's work.

I could not ask my father to decide for himself; he was not well enough to be told, let alone to reason out the pros and cons.

I could not now transfer the stable to anyone else, because passing this situation to a stranger would be like handing him a grenade with the pin out.

I was already due back at my own job and was late for my next assignment, and I had only stop-gapped at the stable at all because my father's capable assistant, who had been driving the Rolls when the lorry jack-knifed into it, was now lying in the same hospital in a coma.

All of which added up to a fair sized problem. But then problems, I reflected ironically, were my business. The problems of sick businesses were my business.

Nothing at that moment looked sicker than my prospects at Rowley Lodge.

Shivering violently, I removed myself bit by bit from the desk and chair, went out to the kitchen, and made myself some coffee. Drank it. Moderate improvement only.

Inched upstairs to the bathroom. Scraped off the night's whiskers and dispassionately observed the dried blood down one cheek. Washed it off. Gun barrel graze, dry and already healing.

Outside, through the leafless trees, I could see the lights of the traffic thundering as usual up and down Bury Road. These drivers in their warm moving boxes, they were in another world altogether, a world where abduction and extortion were something that only happened to others. Incredible to think that I had in fact joined the others.

Wincing from an all over feeling of soreness, I looked at my smudge-eyed reflection and wondered how long I would go on doing what the fat man had told me to. Saplings who bent before the storm lived to grow into oaks.

Long live oaks.

I swallowed some aspirins, stopped shivering, tried to marshal a bit more sense into my shaky wits, and struggled into jodhpurs, boots, two more pullovers, and a windproof jacket. Whatever had happened that night, or whatever might happen in the future, there were still those eighty-five six million quids worth downstairs waiting to be seen to.

They were housed in a yard that had been an inspiration of spacious design when it was built in 1870 and which still, a hundred-plus years later, worked as an effective unit. Originally there had been two blocks facing each other, each block consisting of three bays, and each bay being made up to ten boxes. Across the far end, forming a wall joining the two blocks, were a large feed-store room, a pair of double gates, and an equally large tack room. The gates had originally led into a field, but early on in his career, when success struck him, my father had built two more bays, which formed another small enclosed yard of twenty-five boxes. More double gates opened from these, now, into a small railed paddock.

Four final boxes had been built facing towards Bury Road, on to the outside of the short west wall at the end of the north block. It was in the furthest of these four boxes that a full blown disaster had just been discovered.

My appearance through the door which led directly from the house to the yard galvanised the group which had been clustered round the outside boxes into returning into the main yard and advancing in ragged but purposeful formation. I could see I was not going to like their news. Waited in irritation to hear it. Crises, on that particular morning, were far from welcome.

'It's Moonrock, sir,' said one of the lads anxiously, 'Got cast in his box, and broke his leg.'

'All right,' I said abruptly. 'Get back to your own horses, then. It's nearly time to pull out.'

'Yessir,' they said, and scattered reluctantly round the yard to their charges, looking back over their shoulders.

'Damn and bloody hell,' I said aloud, but I can't say it did much good. Moonrock was my father's hack, a pensioned-off star-class steeplechaser of which he was uncharacteristically fond. The least valuable inmate of the yard in many terms, but the one he would be most upset to lose. The others were also insured. No one, though, could insure against painful emotion.

I plodded round to the box. The elderly lad who looked after him was standing at the door with the light from inside falling across the deep worried wrinkles in his tortoise skin and turning them to crevases. He looked round towards me at my step. The crevasses shifted and changed like a kaleidoscope.

'Ain't no good, sir. He's broke his hock.'

Nodding, and wishing I hadn't, I reached the door and went in. The old horse was standing up, tied in his usual place by his head-collar. At first sight there was nothing wrong with him: he turned his head towards me and pricked his ears, his liquid black eyes showing nothing but his customary curiosity. Five years in headline limelight had given him the sort of presence which only intelligent, highly successful horses seem to develop; a sort of consciousness of their own greatness. He knew more about life and about racing than any of the golden youngsters round in the main yard. He was fifteen years old and had been a friend of my father's for five.

The hind leg on his near side, towards me, was perfect. He bore his weight on it. The off-hind looked slightly tucked up.