10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [64]
As usual, it was the speed that seduced me and fulfilled, and the fact that we finished third was enough to make my day worthwhile, though Stallworthy, who had incidentally also trained the winner, announced to me several times, “I told you so. I told your father it was too much to expect. Perhaps you’ll listen to me next time.”
“Never mind,” Jim consoled. “If you’d won today you’d have to have carried a 10-lb. penalty at Exeter races next Saturday, always supposing you can persuade the old man to let him run there, after this. He’ll say it’s too soon, which it probably is.”
The old man (Stallworthy) conducted a running battle over the telephone with my father.
My father won.
So, blisteringly, by six lengths, did Sarah’s Future, because the much longer galloping track, up on Halden Moor above Exeter, suited him better. He carried a 5-lb. penalty, not 10, and made light of it. The starting price, my father assured me later, would pay the training fees until Christmas.
Two days after that, in cooler blood, I went to learn mathematics.
My father learned back-bench tactics, but that wasn’t what the party had sent him to Hoopwestern for. He tried to explain it to me that the path upward led through the whip’s office, which sounded nastily about flagellation to me, though he laughed.
“The whip’s office is what gives you the thumbs-up for advancement towards the ministerial level.”
“And their thumbs are up for you?”
“Well ... so far ... yes.”
“Minister of what?” I asked, disbelievingly. “Surely you’re too young?”
“The really forward boys are on their way by twenty-two. At thirty-eight, I’m old.”
“I don’t like politics.”
“I can’t ride races,” he said.
To have the whip withdrawn, he explained, meant the virtual end to a political career. If getting elected was the first giant step, then winning the whip’s approval was the second. When the newly elected member for Hoopwestern was shortly appointed as undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, it was apparently a signal to the whole fabric of government that a bright, fast-moving comet had risen over the horizon.
I went to listen to his maiden speech, sitting inconspicuously in the gallery. He spoke about lightbulbs and had the whole House laughing, and Hoopwestern’s share of the illumination market soared.
I met him for dinner after his speech, when he was again in the high exaltation of post-performance spirits.
“I suppose you haven’t been back to Hoopwestern?” he said.
“Well, no.”
“I have, of course. Leonard Kitchens is in trouble.”
“Who?”
“Leonard ...”
“Oh, yes. Yes, the unbalanced mustache. What sort of trouble?”
“The police now have a rifle which may be the one fired at us that evening.”
“By the police,” I asked as he paused, “do you mean Joe the policeman whose mother drives a school bus?”
“Joe whose mother drives a school bus is actually Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, and yes, he’s now received from The Sleeping Dragon a very badly rusted .22 rifle. It seems that after the trees shed their leaves the guttering ’round the roof of the hotel got choked with them, as happens most years, and rainwater overflowed instead of draining down the pipes as it should, so they sent a man up a ladder to clear out the leaves, and they found it wasn’t just leaves clogging the guttering, it was the .22 rifle.”
“But what’s that got to do with Leonard Kitchens?”
My father ate peppered steak, rare, with spinach.
“Leonard Kitchens is the nurseryman who festoons The Sleeping Dragon with all those baskets of geraniums.”
“But ...,” I objected.
“Apparently in a broom cupboard on that bedroom level he keeps a sort of cart with things for looking after the baskets. Shears, a long-spouted watering can, fertilizer. They think he could have hidden the gun in the cart. If you stand