Longshot. Part 38

'Absolutely nothing.'

'Doone asked what I was doing there with my belt off.'

The shock still trembled in his voice.

'The innocent aren't found guilty,' I protested.

He said miserably, 'Oh, yes, they are. You know they are.'

'But not on such flimsy evidence.'

'I haven't been able to tell Fiona. I mean, we've always been fine together, but she might start wondering- I don't honestly know how I'd bear that.'

We reached the stands and went up to watch, Harry falling silent in his torturing troubles amid the raucous calls of bookmakers and the enfolding hubbub of the gathering crowd. The runners cantered past on their way to the starting gate, Nolan looking professional as usual on the muscly chestnut that Fiona had ridden all autumn out hunting. Chickweed, Mackie had told me, was Fiona's especial pet: her friend as much as her property. Chickweed, circling and lining up, running in the first hunter chase of the spring season, was going to win three or four times before June, Tremayne hoped.

We were joined at that point by pudgy unfit Lewis, who panted that he had only just arrived in time and asked if the Jockey Club had said anything about Nolan going on riding.

'Not a word,' Fiona said. 'Fingers crossed.'

'If they were going to stop him,' Lewis opined judiciously, taking deep breaths, 'they'd surely have let him know by today, so perhaps the expletive sod's got away with it.'

'Brotherly love,' Fiona remarked ironically.

'He owes me,' Lewis said darkly and with such growling intensity that all of us, I thought, recognised the nature of the debt, even if some hadn't wanted to believe it earlier.

'And will you collect?' Harry asked, his sarcasm showing.

'No thanks to you,' Lewis replied sharply.

'Perjury's not my best act.'

Lewis smiled like a snake, all fangs.

'I,' he said, 'am the best bleep bleep actor of you all.'

Fiona starkly faced the certainty that Lewis had not after all been too drunk to see straight when Olympia died. Mackie's clear face was pinched with dismay. Harry, who had known all along, would have shrugged off Lewis's admission philosophically were it not for his own ominous future.

'What would you have me do?' Lewis demanded, seeing the general disapproval. 'Say he called her every filthy name in the book and shook her by the neck until her eyes popped out?'

'Lewis!' Fiona exclaimed, not believing him. 'Shut up.'

Lewis gave me a mediumly hostile glance and wanted to know why I was always hanging around. No one answered him, me included.

Fiona said, 'They're off a split second before the official announcement and concentrated through her racegla.s.ses.

'I asked you an expletive question,' Lewis said to me brusquely.

'You know why,' I replied, watching the race.

'Tremayne isn't here,' he objected.

'He sent me to see Sandown.'

Chickweed was easy to spot, I discovered, with the white blaze down his chestnut face that so clearly distinguished him in the photograph nodding away on the rails at every galloping step. The overall pace seemed slower to me than the other races I'd watched, the jumping more deliberate; but it wasn't, as Tremayne had warned me, an easy track even for the sport's top performers, and for hunters a searching test. 'Watch them jump the seven fences down the far side,' he'd said. 'If a horse meets the first one right, the others come in his stride. Miss the first, get it wrong, legs in a tangle, you might as well forget the whole race. Nolan is an artist at meeting that first fence right.'

I watched particularly. Chickweed flew the first fence and all the next six down the far side, gaining effortless lengths. 'There's nothing like the hunting field for teaching a horse to jump,' Tremayne had said. 'The trouble is, hunters aren't necessarily fast. Chickweed is, though. So was Oxo who won the Grand National years back.'

Chickweed repeated the feat on the second circuit and then, a length in front of his nearest pursuer, swept round the long bend at the bottom end of the course and straightened himself for the third fence from home - the Pond fence, so called because the small hollow beside it had once been wet, though now held mostly reeds and bushes.

'Oh, come on,' Fiona said explosively, the tension too much. 'Chicky Chickweed- jump it.'

Chicky Chickweed rose to it as if he'd heard her, his white blaze showing straight on to us before he veered right towards the second last fence and the uphill pull to home.

'A lot of races are lost on the hill,' Tremayne had told me. 'It's where stamina counts, where you need the reserves. Any horse that has enough left to accelerate there is going to win. Same at Cheltenham. A race at either place can change dramatically after the last fence. Tired horses just fade away, even if they're in the lead.'

Chickweed made short work of the second last fence but didn't shake off his pursuer.

'I can't bear it,' Fiona said.

Mackie put down her racegla.s.ses to watch the finish, anxiety digging lines on her forehead.

It was only a race, I thought. What did it matter? I answered my own question astringently: I'd written a novel, what did it matter if it won or lost on its own terms? It mattered because I cared, because it was where I'd invested all thought, all effort. It mattered to Tremayne and Mackie the same way. Only a race- but also their skill laid on the line.

Chickweed's pursuer closed the gap coming to the last fence.

'Oh, no,' Fiona groaned, lowering her own gla.s.ses. 'Oh, Nolan, come on.'

Chickweed made a spectacular leap, leaving unnecessary s.p.a.ce between himself and the birch, wasting precious time in the air. His pursuer, jumping lower in a flatter trajectory, landed first and was fastest away.

'd.a.m.n,' Harry said.

Fiona was silent, beginning to accept defeat.

Nolan had no such thoughts. Nolan, aggressive instincts in full flood, was crouching like a demon over Chickweed's withers delivering the message that losing was unacceptable. Nolan's whip rose and fell twice, his arm swinging hard. Chickweed, as if galvanised, reversed his decision to slow down now that he'd been pa.s.sed and took up the struggle again. The jockey and horse in front, judging the battle won, eased up fractionally too soon. Chickweed caught them napping a stride from the winning post and put his head in front just where it mattered, the crowd cheering for him, the favourite, the fighter who never gave up.

It was Nolan, I saw, who had won that race. Nolan himself, not the horse. Nolan's ability, Nolan's character acting on Chickweed's. Through Nolan I began to understand how much more there was to riding races than fearlessness and being able to stay in the saddle. More than tactics, more than experience, more than ambition. Winning races, like survival, began in the mind.

Fiona, triumphant where all had looked lost, breathless and s.h.i.+ny-eyed, hurried ahead with Mackie to meet the returning warriors. Lewis, Harry and I pressed along in their wake.

'Nolan's a genius,' Harry was saying.

'The other expletive jockey threw it away,' Lewis had it.

Never a.s.sume, I thought, thinking of Doone. Never a.s.sume you've won until you hold the prize in your hand.

Doone was a.s.suming things, I thought Not taking his own advice. Or so it seemed.

We all went for a celebratory drink, though in Mackie's case it was ginger ale. Harry ordered the obligatory bubbles, his heart in his boots. Nolan was as high as Fiona, Lewis a grudging applauder. I, I supposed, an observer, still on the outside looking in. Six of us in a racecourse bar smiling in unison while the cobweb ghosts of two young women set traps for the flies.