To the Hilt (21 page)

His accent was unchanged. The skinhead, the secretary and Chris Young all spoke with the same voice.

“And?” I asked.

“There was a goldsmith name of Maxim working in London in the 1800s. Like Garrard’s or Asprey’s today. Good name. Ritzy. Made fancy things like peacocks for table ornaments, gold filigree feathers with real jewels in.”

“Tobe promised me you were good,” I said.

“Just good?”

“Brilliant. A genius, actually.”

He grinned immodestly. “Tobe told me you were a walking brain and not to be put off by your good manners.”

“I’ll kill him.”

“Tobe told me you were raised in a castle.”

“It was cold.”

“Yeah. I drew an orphanage. Warm.”

We got on fine. I made a drawing of King Alfred’s golden chalice, and he phoned back to his goldsmith informant with a detailed description. “And it has engraved lines round it that look just like random patterns but are some sort of verse in Anglo-Saxon. Yeah, yeah, that’s what I said, Anglo-bloody-Saxon. See what you can do.”

He put down the receiver. “Those specs you gave me,” he said, “you can buy them anywhere.”

I nodded.

“I’d use them myself for disguises, if I could see through them.”

“I reckon that’s why the robber took them off.”

“That’s another thing,” Chris Young said. “Boxing gyms. Your spanking pal Surtees never goes near a gym. He’s as unfit as a leaking balloon. I’ve tailed him until I’ve had it up to here with him, and besides, none of the gyms in his area have ever heard of him ...”

“Fingers doing the walking?”

“Sure.”

“Suppose he uses a different name?”

Chris Young sighed. “He’s not the gym type, I’m telling you. Which leaves me—and don’t point it out—with no option but to flash your drawings of your robbers all over the place hoping for a fist in the guts.”

I stared.

“An adverse reaction,” he said carefully, in his incongruous voice, “is a positive indication of a nerve touched.”

“You’ve been reading books!”

“I’ve been bashed a few times. It always tells me something. Like being bashed told you quite a lot, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it did.”

“See? If anyone bashes you again, learn from it.”

“I don’t intend to be bashed again.”

“No? That’s why you asked about bodyguards?”

“Exactly why.”

He grinned. “I’ve a friend who’s a jockey over the jumps. He’s broken his bones about twenty times. It’ll never happen again, he says. He says it every time.”

“Mad,” I agreed.

“Have you ever met a jump jockey?”

“I was married once to a trainer in Lambourn.”

“Emily Cox,” he said.

I was still.

“I like to know who I’m working for,” he said.

“And to check up on whether I would lie to you?”

“Most of my clients do.”

I would, I acknowledged to myself, have lied to him if I’d wanted to.

His telephone rang and he answered it formally: “Young and Uttley, can I help you?”

He listened and said, “Thank you,” half a dozen times, and wrote a few words onto a notepad, and disconnected.

“Your chalice,” he said, “was inscribed with something called Bede’s Death Song. It sounds a right laugh. It was made in 1867 to the order of a Mr. Haworth Hill of Wantage, Oxfordshire, probably to impress the neighbors. It cost an arm and a leg because it was solid gold inlaid with emeralds, sapphires and rubies.”

“Real ones?” I exclaimed, surprised.

Chris consulted his notes. “Cabochon gems, imperfect.” He looked up. “What does cabochon mean?”

“It means polished but uncut. No facets. Rounded, like pebbles. Not made to sparkle.” I paused. “They don’t look real. They’re big.”

“You mean, you’ve actually seen this thing?”

“I think it’s what I got bashed for.”

“So where is it now?”

“You,” I said, smiling, “are—I hope—going to prevent anyone else from trying to bash that information out of me.”

“Oh.” He blinked. “How difficult would it be to make you tell?”

“Fairly easy.” But, I thought, it might depend on who was asking.

“You’d fold? You surprise me.”

“The chalice isn’t mine.”

“Reasonable. OK. I’ll start on the gyms.”

“Be careful,” I said.

“Sure.” He sounded lighthearted. “Black eyes will cost you extra.”

He wanted to know if I was serious about a bodyguard, and we agreed that identifying my robbers took priority.

Ah well.

Returning by train, metro and legs to Park Crescent I was met by my mother in a state of agitation: that is to say, she was looking out for me and told me calmly but at once that I should telephone Emily immediately.

“What about?”

“Golden Malt got loose.”

Damnation, I thought; fuck it.

“How’s Ivan?” I asked.

“Not bad. Phone Emily, won’t you?”

I phoned her.

“Golden Malt got loose on the Downs at Foxhill,” she said. “He’s not an easy ride, as you know. He bucked off the exercise groom and got loose and they couldn’t catch him.”

“But racehorses often go home by themselves, don’t they? Surely he’ll turn up—”

“He has turned up,” she interrupted. “He’s found his way back here. Don’t ask me how. He’s been in this yard for five years, ever since Ivan bought him as a foal, and first chance he got, he came home.”

“Bugger.”

“The thing is, what do you want me to do?”

“Keep him. I’ll think.”

“I’ve had a phone call from Surtees. He says he’s coming to collect him.”

“He said
what?”

“He says the horse is Patsy’s.”

I took a steadying breath. “The horse is Ivan’s.” “Surtees says Patsy’s going to sell the horse to prevent you getting your hands on it. He says you’ve stolen the King Alfred Cup and you’ll steal Golden Malt and rob Patsy and the brewery. I said you wouldn’t do that, but he’s bringing a trailer to collect Golden Malt and take him to his stud farm for safekeeping.”

I tried to organize scattered thoughts.

“When do you expect him?” I asked.

“He’ll be on his way already.”

I groaned. I’d just come from Reading, about thirty miles from Lambourn, and now, in London, it was nearer eighty.

“How did Surtees know you have the horse back?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But he also knows he was in Foxhill. All my lads know too. I can’t send the horse back there.”

“Well ... I’ll come as soon as I can. Don’t let Surtees take Golden Malt.”

She said despairingly, “But how do I stop him?”

“Let down the tires of the trailer. Build a Great Wall. Anything.”

I explained the problem briefly to my mother, who said at once that I could borrow Ivan’s car.

Two hours at least by car. Roadworks and holdups in tortoise-slow traffic. Also, remembering the gauge from Saturday, I would have to stop for gas.

I chose a train. I wasn’t bad at trains. I ran and was lucky, catching a metro without waiting and a nonstop express from Paddington to Didcot junction and a taxi driver who hurried his wheels to Lamboum for a bonus. I took with me my mother’s cash card and her phone card and all her available money, and my own new credit card and checks, and also a zipped bag containing the things I’d borrowed ten days earlier from Emily—helmet, padded jacket, jodhpur boots—that my mother hadn’t yet returned to her.

Helter-skelter though I went, Surtees had arrived first. He had brought with him not only a trailer for the horse but an assistant horse handler in the shape of his nine-year-old daughter, Xenia.

Surtees, Emily, Xenia and Golden Malt were all out in the stable yard, Emily holding the horse by his bridle and arguing angrily with the others.

Emily’s Land-Rover stood in the driveway behind Surtees’s trailer, effectively blocking his way out. The exit on the far side of the yard, the wide earth track used by the horses on their way out to exercise, was at present impassable as it seemed a truck delivering hay had carelessly shed its load of bales there.

I paid the taxi driver his bonus and with reluctance walked into the angry scene. Emily looked relieved to see me, Surtees furious. Xenia gave me a head-to-toe sneer and in a voice just like her mother’s said, “What do you think you look like?”

“Good afternoon, Surtees,” I said. “Having trouble?”

Surtees said with unthrottled rage, “Tell your wife to get out of my way. That horse is Patsy’s, and I’m taking it.”

I said, “It’s Ivan’s, and I’m looking after Ivan’s things, as you know.”

“Get out of my way!”

“The horse is officially in training here with Emily. It can’t race from your stud farm. You surely know the rules.”

“Bugger the rules!”

Xenia, giving me the insolent stare she’d learned from her parents, said, “You’re a thief. Mummy says so.”

She was dressed in riding breeches, navy hacking jacket, polished boots and black velvet cap, as if for a showground. Not a bad kid. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, hopelessly spoiled.

“Why aren’t you in school?” I asked.

“I have riding lessons on Monday afternoons,” she answered automatically, and then added, “and it’s none of your business.”

Surtees, presumably deciding that argument would get him nowhere, made a sudden American-football charge at me while my head and attention were turned towards Xenia, and with his shoulder cannonballing into my stomach, knocked me over.

He fell on top of me, seeking to damage. Neither American football nor any form of contact sport had ever been my choice or capability. I rolled over and over in the gravelly dirt with Surtees, scrambling for a weight advantage, trying to disconnect myself and stand up.

I could sense Xenia jumping up and down and screaming, “Kill him, Daddy. Kill him.”

The whole situation was idiotic. Farcical. Killing me was definitely outside Surtees’s imagination, but the prospect of offering Golden Malt to Patsy as a symbol of his virility and superiority over the hated stepbrother lent him a strength and viciousness hard to deal with.

Neither of us landed a decisive punch. Surtees, as Chris Young had sworn, wasn’t the boxing gym type.

Add in Xenia, who, as befitted her clothes, carried a riding crop, and we arrived at a childish form of warfare in which a bodyguard would have lightened the load.

Surtees clutched my hair and tried to bang my head on the ground, which gave me the idea of doing it to him, with equal lack of effectiveness, while Xenia danced around us lashing out with the riding crop, which usually landed on me though occasionally on her father, to his bellowing disgust.

I scrambled finally to my feet, but dragged Surtees with me, as he wouldn’t leave go. Xenia hit my legs. Surtees tried a sweeping too-slow wide-armed clout to my head that gave me a chance to both duck the blow and get hold of his clothes and fling him with all my strength away from me so that he overbalanced and staggered backwards and, falling, cracked his head against a brick stable wall.

It stunned him. He slid to his knees. Xenia screamed, “You’ve killed my daddy,” though I clearly hadn’t, and I wrapped my arms round her writhing little body, lifting her off her feet, and yelled to Emily, “Are any of these stalls empty?”

“The end two,” she shouted, and struggled to hold Golden Malt in control, the horse stamping around, upset by the noise.

The top half-door of the end stall stood open, the bottom half closed and bolted. I carried the frantically struggling child over there and dropped her over the lower half of the door, closing the top half and sliding home a bolt before she could agilely climb out.

I unbolted and opened both halves of the vacant stall next door, and grabbing the groggy Surtees by the back of his collar and by his belt, half ran him, half flung him into the space, closing both halves of the door and slapping home the bolts.

Xenia screeched and kicked her door. Surtees had yet to find his voice. Out of breath, I went over to Emily, whose expression was a mixture of outrage and laugh.

“Now what?” she said.

“Now I bolt you into Golden Malt’s stall so that none of this is your fault, and decamp with the horse.”

She stared. “Are you serious?”

“None of this is serious, but it’s not very funny either.”

We could both hear Xenia’s muffled shrieks.

“She’ll upset all the horses,” Emily said, calming Golden Malt with small pats. “I did think you might ride this fellow away again,” she said. “I was just saddling him when Surtees came. The saddle is over there, in his stall.”

I walked across the yard and found the saddle, which I carried back and fixed in place. There was a full net of hay in the stall also, and a head collar for tying up a horse more comfortably than with a bridle. I carried them out and threaded them together with the zipped bag I’d brought, taking out the helmet but slinging the rest over the withers of the horse, in front of the saddle; like saddlebags of yore.