10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [56]
Or what?
After about half an hour a man dressed much as I was myself, though a good ten years older, appeared in the lobby. He looked around and drifted unhurriedly in my direction.
“Juliard?” he said. “Benedict?”
“Yes.” I stood up, taller than he by an inch or two, which seemed to surprise him. He had yellow-blond hair, white eyelashes and outdoor skin. A man of strong muscles, self-confident, at home in his world.
“I’m Jim,” he said. “I’ve come to collect you.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are we going?”
He smiled and said merely, “Come on.”
He led the way out of the hotel and around a few comers, fetching up beside a dusty dented red car that contained torn magazines, screwed-up sandwich papers, coffee-stained polystyrene cups and a mixed-parentage dog introduced as Bert.
“Disregard the mess,” Jim said cheerfully, sweeping crumpled newspapers off the front passenger seat onto the floor. “Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Uh ... thanks.”
He drove the way I’d been taught not to; jerking acceleration and sudden brakes. Start and stop. Impulse and caution. I would have gone a long way with Jim.
It turned out to be only eight miles westward, as far as I could judge. Out of the city, past a signpost to Exeter University’s Streatham Campus (home among much else of the department of mathematics), deep into rural Devon, with heavy thatched roofs frowning over tiny-windowed cottages.
Jim jerked to a halt in front of a larger example of the basic pattern and pointed to a heavy wooden front door.
“Go in there,” he instructed. “Down the passage, last room on the left.” He grinned. “And good luck.”
I was quite glad to be getting out of his car, even if only to stop the polymorphous Bert from licking my neck.
“Who lives here?” I asked.
“You’ll find out.”
He left me with a simple choice: to do as I’d been told or find a way of returning to Exeter. Alice down the bleeding rabbit hole, I thought.
I opened the heavy door and went along the passage to the last room on the left.
Eight
In the last room on the left a man sat behind a desk, and at first I thought with an unwelcome skipped heartbeat that he was Vivian Durridge, intent on sacking me all over again.
He looked up from his paperwork as I went in and I saw that though he wasn’t Vivian Durridge himself, he was of the same generation and of the same severe cast of mind.
He gave me no warm greeting, but looked me slowly up and down.
“Your father has gone to a great deal of trouble for you,” he said. “I hope you’re worth it.”
No reply seemed suitable, so I didn’t make one.
“Do you know who I am?” he demanded.
“I’m afraid not ... sir.”
“Stallworthy.”
He waited for the name to trickle through my brain, which it did pretty fast. It was the implication of his name that slowed my reply. Too much hope was bad for the pulse.
“Er ... do you mean Spencer Stallworthy, the racehorse trainer?”
“I do.” He paused. “Your father telephoned me. He wants to buy a horse and put it in training here with me, so that you can bicycle over from the university to ride it out at exercise. He asked me to enter it in amateur events so that you can ride it in races.”
He studied my face. I must have looked pretty ecstatic because a slow wintry smile lightened his heavy expression.
“I just hope,” he said, “that you can ride well enough not to disgrace my stable.”
I just hoped he hadn’t been talking to Vivian Durridge.
“Your father asked me to find a suitable horse. We discussed price, of course. I told him I train forty or so horses, and one or two of them are always for sale. I have two here at present which might fit the bill. Your father and I agreed that you should come here today and have a ride on both. You are to choose which of them you prefer. He wanted it to be a surprise for your birthday ... and I see it is.”
I breathlessly nodded.
“Right. Then go out