Authors: Dick Francis
‘It works,’ he said. ‘Be what Filmer would expect.’
It wasn’t so much what Filmer would expect, I thought, looking at the row of widely assorted jackets in my wardrobe, but what I could sustain over the ten days the party was due to take before it broke up.
Curls, for instance, were out, as they disappeared in rain. Stuck-on moustaches were out in case they came off. Spectacles were out, as one could forget to put them on. I would have to look basically as nature had ordained and be as nondescript and unnoticeable as possible.
I sorted out the most expensive and least worn of my clothes, and decided I’d better buy new shirts, new shoes and a cashmere sweater before I went.
I telephoned Millington on Monday morning as instructed and found him in a usual state of disgruntlement. He had heard about the train. He was not in favour of my going on it. The Security Service (meaning the Brigadier) should have sent a properly trained operative, an ex-policeman preferably. Like himself, for instance. Someone who knew the techniques of investigation and could be trusted not to destroy vital evidence through ignorance and clumsiness. I listened without interruption for so long that, in the end, he said sharply, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I want to see you, preferably later this morning. I’ll have your air ticket. I suppose you do have an up-to-date passport?’
We agreed to meet, as often before, in a reasonably good small snack-bar next to Victoria Station, convenient for both Millington who lived a couple of miles south-west across Battersea Bridge, and for me a few stops down the line to the south.
I arrived ten minutes before the appointed time and found Millington already sitting at a table with a mug of brown liquid and several sausage rolls in progress. I took a tray, slid it along the rails in front of the glass-fronted serving display and picked a slice of cheesecake from behind one of the small hinged doors. I actually approved of the glass-door arrangement: it meant that with luck one’s cheesecake wouldn’t have been sneezed on by the general public, but only by a cook or two and the snack-bar staff.
Millington eyed my partially hygienic wedge and said he preferred the lemon meringue pie, himself.
‘I like that too,’ I said equably.
Millington was a big beer-and-any-kind-of-pie man who must have given up thankfully on weight control when he left the police. He looked as if he now weighed about seventeen stone, and while not gross was definitely a solid mass, but with an agility also that he put to good use in his job. Many petty racecourse crooks had made the mistake of believing Millington couldn’t snake after them like an eel through the crowds, only to feel the hand of retribution falling weightily on their collar. I’d seen Millington catch a dipping pickpocket on the wing: an impressive sight.
The large convenience-food snack-bar, bright and clean, was always infernally noisy, pop music thumping away to the accompaniment of chairs scraping the floor and the clatter of meals at a gallop. The clientele were mostly travellers, coming or going on trains lacking buffet cars, starving or prudent; travellers checking their watches, gulping too-hot coffee, uninterested in others, leaving in a hurry. No one ever gave Millington and me a second glance, and no one could ever have overheard what we said.
We never met there when there was racing at places like Plumpton, Brighton, Lingfield and Folkestone: on those days the whole racing circus could wash through Victoria Station. We never met, either, anywhere near the Security Service head office in the Jockey Club, in Portman Square. It was odd, I sometimes thought, that I’d never once been through my employer’s door.
Millington said, ‘I don’t approve of you travelling with Filmer.’
‘So I gathered,’ I said. ‘You said so earlier.’
‘The man’s a murderer.’
He wasn’t concerned for my safety, of course, but thought me unequal to the contest.
‘He may not actually murder anyone on the train,’ I said flippantly.
‘It’s no joke,’ he said severely. ‘And after this he’ll know you, and you’ll be no use to us on the racecourse, as far as he’s concerned.’
‘There are about fifty people going on the trip, the Brigadier said. I won’t push myself into Filmer’s notice. He quite likely won’t remember me afterwards.’
‘You’ll be too close to him,’ Millington said obstinately.
‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘it’s the only chance we’ve ever had so far to get really close to him at all. Even if he’s only going along for a harmless holiday, we’ll know a good deal more about him this way.’
‘I don’t like wasting you,’ Millington said, shaking his head.
I looked at him in real surprise. ‘That’s a change,’ I said.
‘I didn’t want you working for us, to begin with,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Didn’t see what good you could do, thought it was stupid. Now you’re my eyes. The eyes in the back of my head, that the villains have been complaining about ever since you started. I’ve got the sense to know it. And if you must know, I don’t want to lose you. I told the Brigadier we were wasting our trump card, sending you on that train. He said we might be playing it, and if we could get rid of Filmer, it was worth it.’
I looked at Millington’s worried face. I said slowly, ‘Do you, and does the Brigadier, know something about Filmer’s travel plans that you’ve not told me?’
‘When he said that,’ Millington said, looking down at his sausage rolls, ‘I asked him that same question. He didn’t answer. I don’t know of anything myself. I’d tell you, if I did.’
Perhaps he would, I thought. Perhaps he wouldn’t.
The next day, Tuesday, I drove north to Nottingham for a normal day’s hard work hanging around doing nothing much at the races.
I’d bought the new clothes and a new suitcase and had more or less packed ready for my departure the next morning, and the old long-distance wanderlust that had in the past kept me travelling for seven years had woken from its recent slumber and given me a sharp nudge in the ribs. Millington shouldn’t fear losing me to Filmer, I thought, so much as to the old seductive tug of moving on, moving on … seeing what lay round the next corner.
I could do it now, I supposed, in five-star fashion, not back-packing;
in limousines, not on buses; eating haute cuisine, not hot dogs; staying in Palm Beach, not dusty backwoods. Probably I’d enjoy the lushness for a while, maybe even for a long while, but in the end, to stay real, I’d have to get myself out of the sweet shop and do some sort of work, and not put it off and off until I no longer had a taste for plain bread.
I was wearing, perhaps as a salute to plain bread, a well-worn leather jacket and a flat cloth cap, the binoculars-camera slung round my neck, a race-card clutched in my hand. I stood around vaguely outside the weighing-room, watching who came and who went, who talked to whom, who looked worried, who happy, who malicious.
A young apprentice with an ascendant reputation came out of the weighing-room in street clothes, not riding gear, and stood looking around as if searching for someone. His eyes stopped moving and focused, and I looked to see what had caught his attention. He was looking at the Jockey Club’s paid steward, who was acting at the meeting as the human shape of authority. The steward was standing in social conversation with a pair of people who had a horse running that day, and after a few minutes he raised his hat to the lady and walked out towards the parade ring.
The apprentice calmly watched his departing back, then made another sweep of the people around. Seeing nothing to worry about he set off towards the stand the jockeys watched the races from and joined a youngish man with whom he walked briefly, talking. They parted near the stands, and I, following, transferred my attention from the apprentice and followed the other man instead; he went straight into the bookmakers’ enclosure in front of the stands, and along the rows of bookmakers to the domain of Collie Goodboy who was shouting his offered odds from the height of a small platform the size of a beer-crate.
The apprentice’s contact didn’t place a bet. He picked up a ledger and began to record the bets of others. He spoke to Collie Goodboy (Les Morris to his parents) who presently wiped off the offered odds from his board, and chalked up new ones. The new odds were generous. Collie Goodboy was rewarded by a rush of eager punters keen to accept the invitation. Collie Goodboy methodically took their money.
With a sigh I turned away and wandered off up to the stands to watch the next race, scanning the crowds as usual, watching the world revolve. I ended up standing not far from the rails dividing the bookmakers’ section of the stands (called the Tattersalls enclosure) from the Club, the more expensive end. I often did that, as from there
one could see the people in both enclosures easily. One could see also who came to the dividing rails to put bets on with the row of bookmakers doing business in that privileged position. The ‘rails’ bookmakers were the princes of their trade, genial, obliging, fair, flint-hearted, brilliant mathematicians.
I watched as always to see who was betting with whom, and when I came to the bookmaker nearest to the stands, nearest to me, I saw that the present customer was Filmer.
I was watching him bet, thinking of the rail journey ahead, when he tilted his head back and looked straight up into my eyes.
I looked away instantly but smoothly, and presently glanced back.
Filmer was still talking to the bookmaker. I edged upwards through the crowd behind me until I was about five steps higher and surrounded by other racegoers.
Filmer didn’t look back to where I’d been standing. He didn’t search up or down or sideways to see where I had gone.
My thumping heart quietened down a bit. The meeting of eyes had been accidental: had to have been. Dreadfully unwelcome, all the same, particularly at this point.
I hadn’t expected him to have been at Nottingham, and hadn’t looked for him. Two of his horses were certainly down to run, but Filmer himself almost never went to the midland courses of Nottingham, Leicester or Wolverhampton. He had definite preferences in racecourses, as in so much else: always a creature of habit.
I made no attempt to shadow him closely, as it wasn’t necessary: before the following race he would be down in the parade ring to watch his horse walk round and I could catch him up there. I watched him conclude his bet and walk away to climb the stands for the race about to start, and as far as I could see he was alone, which also was unusual, as either the girlfriend or the male companion was normally in obsequious attendance.
The race began and I watched it with interest. The chatty apprentice wasn’t riding in it himself, but the stable that employed him had a runner. The runner started third favourite and finished third last. I switched my gaze to Collie Goodboy, and found him smiling. A common, sad, fraudulent sequence that did racing no good.
Filmer stepped down from the stands and headed in the direction of the saddling boxes, to supervise, as he always did, the final preparation for his horse’s race. I drifted along in his wake to make sure, but that was indeed where he went. From there to the parade ring, from there to place a bet with the same bookmaker as before, from there to the
stands to watch his horse race. From there to the unsaddling enclosure allotted to the horse that finished second.
Filmer took his defeat graciously, making a point as always of congratulating the winning owner, in this case a large middle-aged lady who looked flushed and flattered.
Filmer left the unsaddling enclosure with a smirk of self-satisfaction and was immediately confronted by a young man who tried to thrust a briefcase into his hand.
Julius Apollo’s face turned from smug to fury quicker than Shergar won the Derby, as Paul Shacklebury would have said. Filmer wouldn’t take the case and he practically spat at the offerer, his black head going forward like a striking cobra. The young man with the briefcase retreated ultra-nervously and in panic ran away, and Filmer, regaining control of himself, began looking around in the general direction of stewards and pressmen to see if any of them had noticed. He visibly sighed with relief that none of them showed any sign of it – and he hadn’t looked my way at all.
I followed the demoralised young man who still held on to the briefcase. He made straight for the men’s cloakroom, stayed there for a fair time and came out looking pale. Filmer’s effect on people’s guts, I reflected, would put any laxative to shame.
The shaken youth with the briefcase then made his nervous way to a rendezvous with a thin, older man who was waiting just outside the exit gate, biting his nails. When the thin man saw the briefcase still in the nervous youth’s possession he looked almost as furious as Filmer had done, and a strong argument developed in which one could read the dressing-down in the vigorous chopping gestures, even if one couldn’t hear the words.
Thin man poked nervous man several times sharply in the chest. Nervous man’s shoulders drooped. Thin man turned away and walked off deep into the car park.
Nervous man brought the briefcase with him back through the gate and into the nearest bar, and I had to hang around for a long time in the small crowd there before anything else happened. The scattered clientele was watching the television: nervous man shuffled from foot to foot and sweated, and kept a sharp look-out at the people passing by outside in the open air. Then, some time after Filmer’s second runner had tried and (according to the closed-circuit commentary) lost, Filmer himself came past, tearing up betting tickets and not looking pleased.
Nervous man shot out from his waiting position just inside the door of the sheltering bar and offered the briefcase again, and this time
Filmer took it, but in fierce irritation and with another sharp set of glances around him. He saw nothing to disturb him. He was leaving after the fifth of the six races and all forms of authority were still engaged to his rear. He gripped the case’s handle and strode purposefully out on his way to his car.
Nervous man shuffled a bit on the spot a bit more and then followed Filmer through the exit gate and into the car park. I tagged along again and saw both of them still making for their transport, though in different directions. I followed nervous man, not Filmer, and saw him get into the front passenger seat of a car already occupied by thin man, who still looked cross. They didn’t set off immediately and I had time to walk at a steady pace past the rear of their car on the way to my own which was parked strategically, as ever, near the gate to the road, for making quick following getaways. I memorised their number plate in case I later lost them: and out on the road, comfortably falling into place behind them, I telephoned to Millington.