Bonecrack - Страница 6

'Was the cyclist hurt sergeant?'

'I understand he was bruised, sir.'

'And his bicycle?'

'I couldn't say, sir.'

'Do you think that a- er- a settlement out of court, so to speak, would be in order?'

'I couldn't say, sir,' he repeated flatly. His face was full of the negative attitude which erects a barrier against sympathy or understanding. Into my mind floated one of the axioms that Russell Arletti lived by: in business matters with trade unions, the press, or the police, never try to make them like you. It arouses antagonism instead. And never make jokes: they are anti jokes.

I gave the sergeant back a stare of equal indifference and asked if he had the cyclist's name and address. After only the slightest hesitation he flicked over a page or two of notebook and read it out to me. Margaret took it down.

'And the young woman's?'

He provided that too. He then asked if he might take a statement from Miss Craig and I said certainly sergeant, and took him out into the yard. Etty gave him a rapid adding-up inspection and answered his questions in an unemotional manner. I left them together and went back to the office to finish the paper work with Margaret, who preferred to work straight through the lunch hour and leave at three to collect her children from school.

'Some of the account books are missing,' she observed.

'I had them last night,' I said. 'They're in the oak room- I'll go and fetch them.'

The oak room was quiet and empty. I wondered what reaction I would get from the sergeant if I brought him in there and said that last night two faceless men had knocked me out, tied me up, and removed me from my home by force. Also they had threatened to kill me, and had punched me full of anaesthetic to bring me back.

'Oh yes sir? And do you want to make a formal allegation?'

I smiled slightly. It seemed ridiculous. The sergeant would produce a stare of top-grade disbelief, and I could hardly blame him. Only my depressing state of health and the smashed telephone lying on the desk made the night's events seem real at all.

The fat man, I reflected, hardly needed to have warned me away from the police. The sergeant had done the job for him.

Etty came into the office fuming while I was returning the account books to Margaret.

'Of all the pompous clods-'

'Does this sort of thing happen often?' I asked.

'Of course not,' Etty said positively. 'Horses get loose, of course, but things are usually settled without all this fuss. And I told that old man that you would see he didn't suffer. Why he had to go complaining to the police beats me.'

'I'll go and see him this evening,' I said.

'Now, the old sergeant, Sergeant Chubb,' Etty said forcefully, 'he would have sorted it out himself. He wouldn't have come round taking down statements. But this one, this one is new here. They've posted him here from Ipswich and he doesn't seem to like it. Just promoted, I shouldn't wonder. Full of his own importance.'

The stripes were new,' Margaret murmured in agreement.

'We always have good relations with the police here,' Etty said gloomily. 'Can't think what they're doing, sending the town someone who doesn't understand the first thing about horses.'

The steam had all blown off. Etty breathed sharply through her nose, shrugged her shoulders, and produced a small resigned smile.

'Oh well- worse things happen at sea.'

She had very blue eyes, and light brown hair that went frizzy when the weather was damp. Middle age had roughened her skin without wrinkling it, and as with most undersexed women there was much in her face that was male. She had thin dry lips and bushy unkempt eyebrows, and the handsomeness of her youth was only something I remembered. Etty seemed a sad, wasted person to many who observed her, but to herself she was fulfilled, and was busily content.

She stamped away in her jodhpurs and boots and we heard her voice raised at some luckless boy caught in wrong doing.

Rowley Lodge needed Etty Craig. But it needed Alessandro Rivera like a hole in the head.

He came late that afternoon.

I was out in the yard looking round the horses at evening stables. With Etty alongside I had got as far round as bay five, from where we would go round the bottom yard before working up again towards the house.

One of the fifteen-year-old apprentices nervously appeared as we came out of one box and prepared to go into the next.

'Someone to see you, sir.'

'Who?'

'Don't know, sir.'

'An owner?'

'Don't know, sir.'

'Where is he?'

'Up by the drive, sir.'

I looked up, over his head. Beyond the yard, out on the gravel, there was parked a large white Mercedes with a uniformed chauffeur standing by the bonnet.

'Take over, Etty, would you?' I said.

I walked up through the yard and out into the drive. The chauffeur folded his arms and his mouth like barricades against fraternisation. I stopped a few paces away from him and looked towards the inside of the car.

One of the rear doors, the one nearest to me, opened. A small black-shod foot appeared, and then a dark trouser leg, and then, slowly straightening, the whole man.

It was clear at once who he was, although the resemblance to his father began and ended with the autocratic beak of the nose and the steadfast stoniness of the black eyes. The son was a little shorter, and emaciated instead of chubby. He had sallow skin that looked in need of a sun-tan, and strong thick black hair curving in springy curls round his ears. Over all he wore an air of disconcerting maturity, and the determination in the set of his mouth would have done credit to a steel trap. Eighteen he might be, but it was a long time since he had been a boy.

I guessed that his voice would be like his father's; definite, unaccented, and careful.

It was.

'I am Rivera,' he announced. 'Alessandro.'

'Good evening,' I said, and intended it to sound polite, cool, and unimpressed.

He blinked.

'Rivera,' he repeated. 'I am Rivera.'

'Yes,' I agreed. 'Good evening.'

He looked at me with narrowing attention. If he expected from me a lot of grovelling, he was not going to get it. And something of this message must have got across to him from my attitude, because he began to look faintly surprised and a shade more arrogant.

'I understand you wish to become a jockey,' I said.

'Intend.'

I nodded casually, 'No one succeeds as a jockey without determination,' I said, and made it sound patronising.

He detected the flavour immediately. He didn't like it. I was glad. But it was a small pin-pricking resistance that I was showing, and in his place I would have taken it merely as evidence of frustrated surrender.

'I am accustomed to succeed,' he said.

'How very nice,' I replied dryly.

It sealed between us an absolute antagonism. I felt him shift gear into overdrive, and it seemed to me that he was mentally gathering himself to fight on his own account a battle he believed his father had already won.

'I will start at once,' he said.

'I am in the middle of evening stables,' I said matter of-factly. 'If you will wait, we will discuss your position when I have finished.' I gave him the politeness of an inclination of the head which I would have given to anybody, and without waiting around for him to throw any more of his slight weight about, I turned smoothly away and walked without haste back to Etty.

When we had worked our way methodically round the whole stable, discussing briefly how each horse was progressing, and planning the work programme for the following morning, we came finally to the four outside boxes, three only busy now, and the fourth full of Moonrock's absence.

The Mercedes still stood on the gravel, with both Rivera and the chauffeur sitting inside it. Etty gave them a look of regulation curiosity and asked who they were.

'New customer,' I said economically.

She frowned in surprise. 'But surely you shouldn't have kept him waiting!'

'This one,' I reassured her with private, rueful irony, 'will not go away.'

But Etty knew how to treat new clients, and making them wait in their car was not it. She hustled me along the last three boxes and anxiously pushed me to return to the Mercedes. Tomorrow, no doubt, she would not be so keen.

I opened the rear door and said to him, 'Come along in to the office.'

He climbed out of the car and followed me without a word. I switched on the fan heater, sat in Margaret's chair behind the desk, and pointed to the swivel armchair in front of it. He made no issue of it, but merely did as I suggested.

'Now,' I said in my best interviewing voice, 'You want to start tomorrow.'

'Yes.'

'In what capacity?'

He hesitated. 'As a jockey.'

'Well, no,' I said reasonably. 'There are no races yet. The season does not start for about four weeks.'

'I know that,' he said stiffly.

'What I meant was, do you want to work in the stable? Do you want to look after two horses, as the others do?'

'Certainly not.'

Then what?'

'I will ride the horses at exercise two or three times a day. Every day. I will not clean their boxes or carry their food. I wish only to ride.'

Highly popular, that was going to be, with Etty and the other lads. Apart from all else, I was going to have a shop floor management confrontation, or in plain old terms, a mutiny, on my hands in no time at all. None of the other lads was going to muck out and groom a horse for the joy of seeing Rivera ride it.

However, all I said was, 'How much experience, exactly, have you had so far?'