to return to Yorkshire tonight.'
Beckett looked at his watch and rose slowly.
'I must be going, Edward.' To me, with a glance as alive and shrewd as his physique was failing, he said, 'You'll do. And make it fairly snappy, will you?
Time's against us. '
I thought October looked relieved. I was sure of it when Macclesfield shook my hand again and rasped, 'Now that you're actually here the whole scheme suddenly seems more possible… Mr. Roke, I sincerely wish you every success.'
October went down to the street door with them,
and came back and looked at me across the crimson room.
'They are sold on you, Mr. Roke, I am glad to say.'
Upstairs in the luxurious deep-green carpeted, brass bedsteaded guest room where I slept for the next four nights I found the manservant had unpacked the few clothes I had brought with me and put them tidily on the shelves of a heavy Edwardian wardrobe. On the floor beside my own canvas and leather grip stood a cheap fibre suitcase with rust-marked locks. Amused, I explored its contents. On top there was a thick sealed envelope with my name on it. I slit it open and found it was packed with five-pound notes; forty of them, and an accompanying slip which read 'Bread for throwing on waters'. I laughed aloud.
Under the envelope October had provided everything from under-clothes to washing things, jodhpur boots to rainproof, jeans to pyjamas.
Another note from him was tucked into the neck of a black leather jacket.
'This jacket completes what sideburns begin. Wearing both, you won't have any character to speak of. They are regulation dress for delinquents! Good luck.'
I eyed the jodhpur boots. They were second-hand and needed polishing, but to my surprise, when I slid my feet into them, they were a good fit. I took them off and tried on a violently pointed pair of black walking shoes. Horrible, but they fitted comfortably also, and I kept them on to get my feet (and eyes) used to them.
The three box files, which I had carried up with me after October had left for Yorkshire, were stacked on a low table next to a small armchair, and with a feeling that there was no more time to waste I sat down, opened the first of them, and began to read.
Because I went painstakingly slowly through every word, it took me two days to finish all the papers in those boxes. And at the end of it found myself staring at the carpet without a helpful idea in my head.
There were accounts, some in typescript, some in longhand, of interviews the Stewards had held with the trainers, jockeys, head travelling-lads, stable lads, blacksmiths, and veterinary surgeons connected with the eleven horses suspected of being doped. There was a lengthy report from a firm of private investigators who had interviewed dozens of stable lads in 'places of refreshment', and got nowhere. A memo ten pages long from a bookmaker went into copious details of the market which had been made on the horses concerned: but the last sentence summed it up: 'We can trace no one person or syndicate which has won consistently on these horses, and therefore conclude that if any one person or syndicate is involved, their betting was done on the Tote.' Farther down the box I found a letter from Tote Investors Ltd. ' saying that not one of their credit clients had backed all the horses concerned, but that of course they had no check on cash betting at racecourses.
The second box contained eleven laboratory reports of analyses made on urine and saliva samples. The first report referred to a horse called Charcoal and was dated eighteen months earlier. The last gave details of tests made on a horse called Rudyard as recently as September, when October was in Australia.
The word 'negative' had been written in a neat hand at the end of each report.
The press had had a lot of trouble dodging the laws of libel. The clippings from daily papers in the third box contained such sentences as 'Charcoal displayed a totally uncharacteristic turn of foot', and ' In the unsaddling enclosure Rudyard appeared to be considerably excited by his success'.
There were fewer references to Charcoal and the following three horses, but at that point someone had employed a news-gathering agency: the last seven cases were documented by clippings from several daily, evening, local, and sporting papers.
At the bottom of the clippings I came across a medium-sized manila envelope. On it was written 'Received from Sports Editor, Daily Scope, June 10th'. This, I realized, was the packet of cuttings collected by Stapleton, the unfortunate journalist, and I opened the envelope with much curiosity. But to my great disappointment, because I badly needed some help, all the clippings except three were duplicates of those I had already read.
Of these three, one was a personality piece on the woman owner of Charcoal, one was an account of a horse (not one of the eleven) going berserk and killing a woman on June 3rd in the paddock at Cartmel, Lancashire, and the third was a long article from a racing weekly discussing famous cases of doping, how they had been discovered and how dealt with. I read this attentively, with minimum results.
After all this unfruitful concentration I spent the whole of the next day wandering round London, breathing in the city's fumes with a heady feeling of liberation, asking the way frequently and listening carefully to the voices which replied.
In the matter of my accent I thought October had been too hopeful, because two people, before midday, commented on my being Australian.
My parents had retained their Englishness until their deaths, but at nine I had found it prudent not to be 'different' at school, and had adopted the speech of my new country from that age. I could no longer shed it, even if I had wanted to, but if it was to sound like cockney English, it would clearly have to be modified.
I drifted eastwards, walking, asking, listening. Gradually I came to the conclusion that if I knocked off the aitches and didn't clip the ends of my words, I might get by. I practised that all afternoon, and finally managed to alter a few vowel sounds as well. No one asked me where I came from, which I took as a sign of success, and when I asked the last man, a barrow-boy, where I could catch a bus back to the West, I could no longer detect much difference between my question and his answer.
I made one purchase, a zip-pocketed money belt made of strong canvas webbing. It buckled flat round my waist under my shirt, and into it I packed the two hundred pounds: wherever I was going I thought I might be glad to have that money readily available.
In the evening, refreshed, I tried to approach the doping problem from another angle, by seeing if the horses had had anything in common.
Apparently they hadn't. All were trained by different trainers. All were owned by different owners: and all had been ridden by different jockeys. The only thing they all had in common was that they had nothing in common.
I sighed, and went to bed.
Terence, the manservant, with whom I had reached a reserved but definite friendship, woke me on the fourth morning by coming into my room with a laden breakfast tray.
'The condemned man ate hearty,' he observed, lifting a silver cover and allowing me a glimpse and a sniff of a plateful of eggs and bacon.
'What do you mean?' I said, yawning contentedly.
'I don't know what you and his Lordship are up to, sir, but wherever you are going it is different from what you are used to. That suit of yours, for instance, didn't come from the same sort of place as this little lot.'
He picked up the fibre suitcase, put it on a stool, and opened the locks. Carefully, as if they had been silk, he laid out on a chair some cotton pants and a checked cotton shirt, followed by a tan-coloured ribbed pullover, some drain-pipe charcoal trousers, and black socks. With a look of disgust he picked up the black leather jacket and draped it over the chair back, and neatly arranged the pointed shoes.
'His Lordship said I was to make certain that you left behind everything you came with, and took only these things with you,' he said regretfully.
'Did you buy them?' I asked, amused, 'or was it Lord October? '
'His Lordship bought them.' He smiled suddenly as he went over to the door.
'I'd love to have seen him pushing around in that chain store among all those bustling women.'
I finished my breakfast, bathed, shaved, and dressed from head to foot in the new clothes, putting the black jacket on top and zipping up the front. Then I brushed the hair on top of my head forwards instead of back, so that the short black ends curved on to my forehead.
Terence came back for the empty tray and found me standing looking at myself in a full-length mirror. Instead of grinning at him as usual I turned slowly round on my heel and treated him to a hard, narrow- eyed stare.
