you used the system, you wouldn't win enough to think it worth all the work, and you'd get tired of it.' He paused. 'I was jealous of you having it, if you really want to know,'
'I wish you'd told me…'
'If I'd said I didn't want to give it to you, Jane would have made me. She says I must now. She's so cross.'
'If you would,' I said, 'you might save me a lot of grief.'
'Make your fortune, you mean.' The apology, it seemed, hadn't come from the heart: he still sounded resentful that I should be learning his secrets.
I thought again about telling him about Angelo but it still seemed to me that he might think it the best reason for not giving me the system that I could devise, so I said merely, 'It could work for two people, couldn't it? If someone else had it, it wouldn't stop you yourself winning as much as ever.'
'I suppose,' he said grudgingly, 'that that's true.'
'So… when do you come home?'
'The week after next.'
I was silent. Appalled. By the week after next heaven knew what Angelo would have done.
Ted Pitts said with half-suppressed annoyance, 'I suppose you've betted heavily on the wrong horses and lost too much, and now you need bailing out a lot sooner than the week after next?'
I didn't dispute it.
'Jane's furious. She's afraid I've cost you more than you can afford. Well, I'm sorry.' He didn't truly sound it.
'Could she find the tapes to give to me?' I said humbly.
'How soon do you need them?'
'More or less at once. Tonight, if possible.'
'Hmph.' He thought for a few moments. 'All right. All right. But you can save yourself the journey, if you like.'
'Er, how?'
'Do you have a tape recorder?'
'Yes.'
'Jane can play the tapes to you over the telephone. They'll sound like a lot of screeching. But if you've a half- way decent recorder the programs will run all right on a computer.'
'Good heavens.'
'A lot of computer programs whiz round the world on telephones every day,' he said. 'And up to the satellites and down again. Nothing extraordinary in it.'
To me it did seem extraordinary, but then I wasn't Ted Pitts. I thanked him with more intensity than he knew for his trouble in ringing me up.
'Thank Jane,' he said.
I did thank her, sincerely, five minutes later.
'You sounded in such trouble,' she said. 'I told Ted I'd sent you to Ruth because you'd wanted to check the tapes, and he groaned, so I asked him why… and when he told me what he'd done I was just furious. To think of you wasting your precious money when everything we have is thanks to Jonathan.'
Her kindness made me feel guilty. I said, 'Ted said you could play the real tapes to me over the telephone- if you wouldn't mind.'
'Oh yes, all right. I've seen Ted do it often. He and Ruth are always swopping programs that way. I've got the tapes here beside me. I made Ted tell me where to find them. I'll go and get the recorder now, if you'll hang on, and then I'll play them to you straight away.'
I had called her from the office because of the message-recorder already fitted to that telephone, and when she returned I recorded the precious programs on Luke's supply of fresh unused tapes which might not have been of prime computer standard but were all the same a better bet, I reckoned, than trying to record new machine language on top of old.
Cassie came into the office and listened to the scratchy whining noises running on and on and on.
'Horrible,' she said: but to me, sweet music. A ransom to the future. Passport to a peaceful world. In a sudden uprush of optimism entirely at variance with the gloom of my drive home from Leicester, I convinced myself that this time, now that we had the genuine article, our troubles would come to an end. The solution was still, as it had always been, to make Angelo rich, and at last it could be done.
'I'll give these tapes to Angelo,' I said, 'and we'll go away from the cottage for just a while, a few weeks, just until he's won enough not to want his revenge. And we'll be free of him at last, thank God.'
'Where shall we go?'
'Not far. Decide tomorrow.'
When three tapes were full and the noises fell quiet I switched off the recording part of the machine and spoke again to Jane.
'I'm very grateful,' I said. 'More than I can say.'
'My dear William, I'm so sorry…'
'Don't be,' I said. 'You've saved my life.' Quite literally, probably, I thought. 'Everything,' I said, 'will be all right.'
One shouldn't say such things. One really shouldn't.
CHAPTER 20
Cassie came with me in the early morning to see the horses work on the Heath, shivering a little in boots, trousers and padded husky jacket, but glad, she said, to be alive in the free air and the wide spaces. Her breath, like mine, like that of all the horses, spurted out in lung-shaped plumes of condensing vapour, chilled and gone in a second and quickly renewed, cold transformed to heat within the miracle of bodies.
We had already in a preliminary fashion left the cottage, having packed clothes and necessaries and stowed the suitcases in my car. I had also brought along a briefcase containing the precious tapes and a lot of Luke's paperwork and had re-routed my telephone calls by a message on the answer-system, and it remained only to make a quick return trip to pick up the day's mail and arrange for future postal deliveries to be left at the pub.
We hadn't actually decided where we would sleep that night or for many nights to come, but we did between us have a great many friends who might be cajoled, and if the traditional open-house generosity of the racing world failed us, we could for a while afford a hotel. I felt freer and more light-hearted than I had for weeks.
Sim was positively welcoming on the gallops and Mort asked us to breakfast. We shivered gratefully into his house and warmed up with him on toast and coffee while he slit open his letters with a paper-knife and made comments on what he was at the same time reading in the Sporting Life. Mort never did one thing at a time if he could do three.
'I've re-routed my telephone messages to you,' I told him. 'Do you mind?'
'Have you? No, of course not. Why?'
'The cottage,' I said, 'is at the moment uninhabitable.'
'Decorators?' He sounded sympathetic and it seemed simplest to say yes.
'There won't be many calls,' I promised. 'Just Luke's business.'
'Sure,' he said. He sucked in a boiled egg in two scoops of a spoon. 'More coffee?'
'How are the yearlings settling?' I asked.
'Come and see them. Come this afternoon, we'll be lungeing them in the paddock.'
'What's lungeing?' Cassie said.
Mort gave her a fast forgiving smile and snapped his fingers a few times. 'Letting them run round in a big circle on the end of a long rein. Gives them exercise. No one rides them yet. They've never been saddled. Too young.'
'I'd like that,' Cassie said, looking thoughtfully at the plaster and clearly wondering about the timing.
'Where are you staying?' Mort asked me. 'Where can I find you?'
