Reflex (8 page)

“Mrs. Millace,” I said matter-of-factly. “Did they ask if George had any photographs worth burglary and burning?”

“George wouldn't . . .” she said intensely.

George had, I thought.

“Look,” I said slowly, “you might not want me to . . . you might not trust me . . . but if you like I could look through those transparencies for you, and I could tell you if I thought there were any which could possibly come into the category we're talking about.”

After a while she said only, “Tonight?”

“Yes, certainly. Then if they're OK you can tell the police they exist . . . if you want to.”

“George isn't a blackmailer,” she said. Coming from the swollen mouth the words sounded extraordinary, distorted but passionately meant. She was not saying, “I don't want to believe George would blackmail anyone,” but “George didn't.” Yet she hadn't been sure enough to give the transparencies to the police. Emotionally sure. Rationally unsure. In a nonsensical way, that made sense.

She hadn't much left except that instinctive faith. It was beyond me entirely to tell her it was misplaced.

 

I collected the three metal boxes from the neighbor, who had been told, it appeared, that they contained just odds and ends the burglars had missed, and I was given in exchange a conducted tour of the burned mess next door.

Even in the dark one could see that there was nothing
to salvage. Five gallons of paraffin had made no mistake. The house was a shell, roofless, windowless, acrid and creaking; and it was to this savage destruction that Marie would have to return.

I drove home with George's life's work and spent the rest of the evening and half of the night projecting his slides onto the flat white wall of my sitting room.

His talent had been stupendous. Seeing his pictures there together, one after the other, and not scattered in books and newspapers and magazines across a canvas of years, I was struck continually by the speed of his vision. He had caught life over and over and over again at the moment when a painter would have composed it: nothing left out, nothing disruptive let in. An absolute master.

The best of his racing pictures were there, some in color, some in black and white, but there were also several stunning series on unexpected subjects like card players and alcoholics and giraffes and sculptors in action and hot Sundays in New York. These series stretched back almost to George's youth, the date and place being written on each mount in tiny fine-nibbed letters.

There were dozens of portraits of people: some posed in a studio, mostly not. Again and again he had caught the fleeting expression which exposed the soul, and even if he had originally taken twenty shots to keep but one, the ones he had kept were collectively breathtaking.

Pictures of France. Paris, St. Tropez, cycle racing, fish docks. No pictures of people sitting outside cafes, talking to who they shouldn't.

When I'd got to the end of the third box I sat for a while thinking of what George hadn't photographed, or hadn't in any case kept.

No wars. No riots. No horrors. No mangled bodies or starving children or executions or cars bombed apart by terrorists.

What had yelled from my wall for hours had been a satirical baring of the essence under the external; and
perhaps George had felt the external satire of violence left him nothing to say.

I was rather deeply aware that I was never going to see the world in quite the same way again: that George's piercing view of things would intrude when I least expected it and nudge me in the ribs. But George had had no compassion. The pictures were brilliant. Objective, exciting, imaginative and revealing; but none of them kind.

None of them either, in any way that I could see, could have been used as a basis for blackmail.

 

I telephoned to Marie Millace in the morning, and told her so. The relief in her voice when she answered betrayed the existence of her doubts, and she heard it herself and immediately began a cover-up.

“I mean,” she said, “of course, I knew George wouldn't . . .”

“Of course,” I said. “What shall I do with the pictures?”

“Oh dear, I don't know. No one will try to steal them now though, will they?” The mumbling voice was even less distinct over the wire. “What do you think?”

“Well,” I said. “You can't exactly advertise that although George's pictures still exist no one needs to feel threatened. So I do think they may still be at risk.”

“But that means . . . that means . . .”

“I'm terribly sorry. I know it means that I agree with the police. That George did have something which someone desperately wanted destroyed. But please don't worry. Please don't. Whatever it was has probably gone with the house . . . and it's all over.” And God forgive me, I thought.

“Oh dear . . . George didn't . . . I know he didn't . . .”

I could hear the distress rising again in the noise of her breathing.

“Listen,” I said quickly. “About those transparencies. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“I think the best thing for now would be to put them into cold storage somewhere. Then when you feel better, you could get an agent to put on an exhibition of George's work. The collection is marvelous, it really is. An exhibition would celebrate his talent, and make you a bit of money . . . and also reassure anyone who might be worrying that there was nothing to . . . er . . . worry about.”

There was a silence, but I knew she was still there, because of the breathing.

“George wouldn't use an agent,” she said at last. “How could I find one?”

“I know one or two. I could give you their names.”

“Oh . . .” She sounded weak and there was another long pause. Then she said, “I know . . . I'm asking such a lot . . . but could you . . . put those transparencies into storage? I'd ask Steve . . . but you seem to know . . . what to do.”

I said that I would, and when we disconnected I wrapped the three boxes in their plastic sheets and took them along to the local butcher, who already kept a box of my own in his walk-in freezer room. He cheerfully agreed to the extra lodgers, suggested a reasonable rental, and gave me a receipt.

Back home I looked at the negative and the print of Elgir Yaxley talking to Terence O'Tree, and wondered what on earth I should do with them.

If George had extorted from Elgin Yaxley all the profits from the murdered horses—and it looked as if he must have done, because of Bart Underfield's gloominess and Yaxley's own disappearance from racing—then it had to be Elgin Yaxley who was now desperate to find the photograph before anyone else did.

If Elgin Yaxley had arranged the burglaries, the beating-up and the burning, should retribution not follow? If I gave the photograph to the police, with explanations, Elgin Yaxley would be in line for prosecution for most
crimes on the statutes, not least perjury and defrauding an insurance company of a hundred and fifty thousand.

If I gave the photograph to the police, I was telling the world that George Millace had been a blackmailer.

Which would Marie Millace prefer, I thought: never to know who had attacked her, or to know for sure that George had been a villain . . . and to have everyone else know it too.

There was no doubt about the answer.

I had no qualms about legal justice. I put the negative back where I'd found it, in its envelope stuck onto the back of the dark print in its paper mount. I put the mount back into the box of rubbish which still lay on the kitchen dresser, and I put the clear big print I'd make into a folder in the filing cabinet in the hall.

No one knew I had them. No one would come looking. No one would burgle or burn my house, or beat me up. Nothing at all would happen from now on.

I locked my doors and went to the races to ride Tishoo and Sharpener and to agonize over that other thorny problem, Victor Briggs.

I
vor den Relgan was again the big news, and what was more, he was there.

I saw him immediately when I arrived, as he was standing just outside the weighing room door talking to two reporters. I was a face among many to him, but to me, as to everyone else whose business was racing, he was as recognizable as a poppy in corn.

He wore, as he often did, an expensively soft camel-colored coat, buttoned and belted, and he stood bareheaded with graying hair neatly brushed, a stocky slightly pugnacious-looking man with an air of expecting people to notice his presence. A lot of people considered it a plus to be in his favor, but for some reason I found his self-confidence repellent, and his strong gravitational pull was something I instinctively resisted.

I would have been more than happy never to have come into his focus, but as I was passing one of the reporters shot out a hand and fastened it on my arm.

“Philip,” he said, “you can tell us. You're always on the business end of a camera.”

“Tell you what?” I said, hovering in midstride, and intending to walk on.

“How do you photograph a wild horse?”

“Point and click,” I said pleasantly.

“No, Philip,” he said, exasperated. “You know Mr. den Relgan, don't you?”

I inclined my head slightly and said, “By sight.”

“Mr. den Relgan, this is Philip Nore. Jockey, of course.” The reporter was unaccustomedly obsequious: I'd noticed den Relgan often had that effect. “Mr. den Relgan wants photographs of all his horses, but one of them rears up all the time when he sees a camera. How would you get him to stand still?”

“I know one photographer,” I said, “who got a wild horse to stand still by playing a tape of a hunt in full cry. The horse just stood and listened. The pictures were great.”

Den Relgan smiled superciliously as if he didn't want to hear good ideas that weren't his own, and I nodded with about as much fervor and went on into the weighing room thinking that the Jockey Club must have been mad. The existing members of the Jockey Club were for the most part forward-looking people who put good will and energy into running a huge industry fairly. That they were also self-electing meant in practice that they were almost all aristocrats or upper class, but the ideal of service bred into them worked pretty well for the good of racing. The old autocratic change-resistant bunch had died out, and there were fewer bitter jokes nowadays about boneheads at the top. All the more surprising that they should have beckoned to a semi-phony like den Relgan.

Harold was inside the weighing room talking to Lord White, which gave me a frisson like seeing a traffic warden standing next to one's wrongly parked car; but it appeared that Lord White, powerful steward of the Jockey Club, was not enquiring into the outcome of the Sandown Pattern 'Chase, nor into any other committed sins. He was telling Harold that there was a special trophy for Sharpener's race, and, should he happen to win it, both Harold
and I, as well as the owner, would be required to put in an appearance and receive our gifts.

“It wasn't advertised as a sponsored race,” Harold said, surprised.

“No . . . but Mr. den Relgan has generously made this gesture. And incidentally it will be his daughter who does the actual presentations.” He looked directly at me. “Nore, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You heard all that? Good. Fine.” He nodded, turned, and left us, crossing to speak to another trainer with a runner in the same race.

“How many trophies does it take,” Harold said under his breath, “to buy your way into the Jockey Club?” And in a normal voice he added, “Victor's here.”

I said anxiously, “But Sharpener will do his best.”

Harold looked amused. “Yes, he will. This time. Win that pot if you can. It would really give Victor a buzz, taking Ivor den Relgan's cup. They can't stand each other.”

“I didn't know they knew—”

“Everyone knows everyone,” Harold said, shrugging. “I think they belong to the same gaming club.” He lost interest and went out of the weighing room, and I stood for a few aimless moments watching Lord White make his way towards yet another trainer to pass on the instructions.

Lord White, in his fifties, was a well-built goodlooking man with thick light-gray hair progressively turning the color of his name. He had disconcertingly bright blue eyes and a manner that disarmed anyone advancing on him with a grievance; and it was he, although not senior steward, who was the true leader of the Jockey Club, elected not by votes but by the natural force born in him.

An upright man, widely respected, whose nickname Driven Snow (spoken only behind his back) had been coined, I thought, only partly through admiration and
mostly to poke fun at the presence of so much noticeable virtue.

I went off to the changing room and on into the business of the day, and was guiltily relieved to find Steve Millace had not made the journey. No beseeching eyes and general helplessness to inveigle me into yet another round of fetching and carrying and visiting the sick. I changed into Tishoo's colors and thought only about the race, which was for novices over hurdles.

In the event there were no great problems but no repeat either of the previous day's joys. Tishoo galloped willingly enough into fourth place at the finish, which pleased his woman owner, and I carried my saddle to the scales to be weighed in, and so back to my changing-room peg to put on Victor Brigg's colors for Sharpener. Just another day's work. Each day unique in itself, but in essence the same. On two thousand days, or thereabouts, I had gone into changing rooms and put on colors and passed the scales and ridden the races. Two thousand days of hope and effort and sweat and just and unjust rewards. More than a job: part of my fabric.

I put on a jacket over Victor Briggs' colors, because there were two other races to be run before Sharpener's, and went outside for a while to see what was happening in general; and what was happening in particular was Lady White with a scowl on her thin aristocratic face.

Lady White didn't know me especially, but I, along with most other jump jockeys, had shaken her hand as she stood elegantly at Lord White's side at two parties they had given to the racing world. They had been large every-one-invited affairs three or four years apart, held at Cheltenham racecourse during the March meeting; and they had been Lord White's own idea, paid for by him, and given, one understood, because of his belief that everyone in jump racing belonged at heart to a brotherhood of friends, and should meet as such to enjoy themselves. Old
Driven Snow at his priceless best, and like everyone else I'd gone to the parties and enjoyed them.

Lady White was hugging her mink around her and almost glaring from under a wide-brimmed brown hat. Her intensity was such that I followed her gaze and found it fixed on her paragon of a husband, who was himself talking to a girl.

Lord White was not simply talking to the girl but reveling in it, radiating flirtatious fun from his sparkling eyes to his gesturing fingertips. I looked sardonically back from this picture telling the old old story and found Lady White's attention still balefully fixed on it, and I thought in amusement, “Oh dear,” as one does. The pure white lord, that evening, would be in for an unaristocratic ticking off.

Ivor den Relgan was still holding court in a clutch of journalists, among whom were two racing writers and three gossip columnists from the larger daily papers. Ivor den Relgan was definitely a gossip man's man.

Bart Underfield was loudly telling an elderly married couple that Osborne should know better than to run Sharpener in a three-mile 'chase when any fool knew that the horse couldn't go further than two. The elderly couple nodded, impressed.

I gradually became aware that a man standing near me was also, like Lady White, intently watching Lord White and the girl. The man near me was physically unremarkable; an average man no longer young, not quite middleaged, with dark thinning hair and black-framed glasses. He was wearing gray trousers, olive-green jacket, suede, not tweed, well-cut. When he realized that I was looking at him, he gave me a quick annoyed glance and moved away; and I thought no more about him for another hour.

Victor Briggs, when I joined him in the parade ring before Sharpener's race, was heavily pleasant and made no reference to the issue hanging between us. Harold had boosted himself into a state of confidence and was
standing with his long legs apart, his hat tipped back on his head, and his binoculars swinging rhythmically from one hand.

“A formality,” he was saying. “Sharpener's never been better, eh, Philip? Gave you a good feel on the Downs, didn't he? Worked like a train.” His robust voice floated easily over several nearby owner-trainer-jockey groups who were all suffering from their own prerace tensions and could have done without Harold's.

“Jumping out of his skin,” Harold said, booming. “Never been better. He'll run the legs off 'em, today, eh, Victor?”

The only good thing one could say about Harold's bursts of overconfidence was that if in the event they proved to be misplaced he would not relapse into acrimony and gloom. Failures were apt to be expansively forgiven with “it was the weight that beat him, of course” and were seldom held to be the jockey's fault, even when they were.

Sharpener himself reacted to Harold's optimism in a thoroughly positive way, and encouraged also perhaps by my confidence left over from the two winners the day before, ran a faultless race with energy and courage, so that for the third time at that meeting my mount returned to applause.

Harold was metaphorically by this time two feet off the ground, and even Victor allowed his mouth a small smile.

Ivor den Relgan manfully shaped up to the fact that his fancy trophy had been won by a man he disliked, and Lord White fluttered around the girl he'd been talking to, clearing a passage for her through the throng.

When I'd weighed in and handed my saddle to my valet, and combed my hair and gone out to the prizegiving, the scene had sorted itself out into a square table with a blue cloth bearing one large silver object and two
smaller ones surrounded by Lord White, the girl, Ivor den Relgan, Victor and Harold.

Lord White said through a hand microphone to the small watching crowd that Miss Dana den Relgan would present the trophies so kindly given by her father; and it cannot have been only in my mind that the cynical speculation arose. Was it the Dad that Lord White wanted in the Jockey Club, or Dad's daughter? Perish the thought. Lord White with a girlfriend? Impossible.

At close quarters it was clear that he was attracted beyond sober good sense. He touched her continually under the guise of arranging everyone suitably for the presentations, and he was vivacious where normally staid. It all remained just within the acceptable limits of roguishly avuncular behavior, but discreet it was not.

Dana den Relgan was enough, I supposed, to excite any man she cared to respond to; and to Lord White she was responding with sweetness. Slender and graceful and not very tall, she had a lot of blonde-flecked hair curling casually onto her shoulders. There was also a curving mouth, wide spread eyes, excellent skin, and a quality of being smarter than her looks would suggest. Her manner was observably more restrained than Lord White's, as if she didn't dislike his attentions but thought them too obvious, and she presented the trophies to Victor and Harold and myself without much conversation.

To me she said merely, “Well done,” and gave me the small silver object (which turned out to be a saddle-shaped paper-weight) with the bright surface smile of someone who isn't really looking at you and is going to forget you again within five minutes. Her voice, from what I heard of it, held the same modified American accent as her father's, but in her it lacked the patronizing quality and was, to me at least, attractive. A pretty girl but not mine. Life was full of them.

While Victor and Harold and I compared trophies, the average-looking man in spectacles reappeared, walking
quietly up to Dana den Relgan's shoulder and speaking softly into her ear. She turned away from the presentation table and began slowly to move off with him, smiling a little, and listening to what he was saying.

This apparently harmless proceeding had the most extraordinary effect upon den Relgan, who stopped looking fatuously pleased with himself in one five-hundredth of a second and flung himself into action. He almost ran after his daughter, gripped the inoffensive-looking man by the shoulder and threw him away from her with such force that he staggered and went down on one knee.

“I've told you to keep away from her,” den Relgan said, looking as if kicking a man when he was down was something he had no reservations about; and Lord White muttered, “I say,” and, “Oh dear,” and looked embarrassed.

“Who is that man?” I asked of no one in particular, and it was Victor Briggs, surprisingly, who answered.

“Film director. Fellow called Lance Kinship.”

“And why the fuss?”

Victor Briggs knew the answer, but it took a fair amount of internal calculation before he decided to part with it. “Cocaine,” he said finally. “White powder, for sniffing straight up the nose. Very fashionable. All these stupid little girls . . . their noses will collapse when the bone dissolves, and then where will they be?”

Both Harold and I looked at him with astonishment; it was the longest speech I'd ever heard him make, and certainly the only one containing any private opinion.

“Lance Kinship supplies it,” he said. “He gets asked to parties for what he takes along.”

Lance Kinship was up on his feet and brushing dirt off his trousers; setting his glasses firmly on his nose and looking murderous.

“If I want to talk to Dana, I'll talk to her,” he said.

“Not while I'm there, you won't.”

Den Relgan's Jockey Club manners were in tatters and
the bedrock under the camouflage was plainly on view. A bully, I thought; a bad enemy, even if his cause was just.