10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [82]
The chairman listened and at the end asked, “Who, besides you and your father, knew that Vivian Durridge had accused you of drug taking?”
“That’s just it,” I said slowly. “I certainly told no one, and I don’t think my father did, either. Will you let me go and find out?”
He looked at the letter again, and at the reference and at the magazine article with its malice and lies, and made up his mind.
“I’ll give you a week,” he said. “Ten days. Whatever it takes. Before you came, Evan was second in command to an insurance specialist who is now on our board of directors. He will do your job until you come back.”
I was grateful and speechless in the face of his generosity. He merely waved me away with a gesture towards the door and, looking back as I left, I saw him slide the magazine, the letter, and the reference into a drawer in his desk and lock it.
Back in my own office the telephone was ringing. My father’s voice said, “What the hell’s going on? What does Vivian Durridge think he’s doing? I can’t get any answer from his telephone.”
The reason he couldn’t get any answer from Vivian Durridge’s telephone, I discovered three hours later, was because he was not in his own home.
The gravel in the drive was tidily raked. The porticoed front of the near-mansion spoke as usual of effortless wealth, but no one answered the doorbell.
Along in his stable yard there were no horses, but the head groom, who lived in an adjoining cottage, was pottering aimlessly about.
He recognized me without hesitation, though it was over five years since I’d left.
“Well, Ben,” he said, scratching his head, “I never knew you took drugs.”
He was old and small and bandy-legged and had loved and been loved by the great beasts in his care. The life he’d lived in their service had pathetically gone, leaving him without anchor, without purpose, with only a fading mental scrapbook of victories past.
“I never did take drugs,” I said.
“No, I wouldn’t have thought so, but if Sir Vivian says...”
“Where is he?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“He’s ill, of course.”
“Ill?”
“He’s gone in the wits, poor old man. He was walking around the yard with me one day at evening stables, same as usual, when all of a sudden he clapped a hand to his head and fell down, and I got the vet to him.”
“The vet?”
“There’s a telephone in the tack room and I knew the vet’s number.” The head groom shook his own old head. “So, anyway, the vet came and he brought with him the doctor and they thought Sir Vivian had had a stroke or some such. So an ambulance came for him, and his family, they didn’t want to say he was gaga, but he couldn’t go on training, poor old man, so they just told everybody he’d retired.”
I wandered around the yard with the once-supreme head groom, stopping at each empty stall for him to tell me what splendid winners had once stood in each.
All the owners, he said, had been asked to take their horses away and send them somewhere else temporarily, but the weeks had passed and the old man wasn’t coming back; one could see that now, and nothing was ever going to be the same again.
“But where,” I asked gently, “is Sir Vivian at this moment?”
“In the nursing home,” he simply said.
I found the nursing home. A board outside announced Haven House. Sir Vivian sat in a wheelchair, smooth of skin, empty of eye, warmed by a rug over his knees.
“He’s confused. He doesn’t know anyone,” the nurses warned me; but even if he didn’t recognize me, he garrulously talked.
“Oh dear, yes,” he said in a high voice, not like his own gruff tones. “Of course I remember Benedict Juliard. He wanted to be a jockey, but I couldn’t have him you know. I couldn’t have anyone who sniffed glue.”
Sir Vivian’s eyes were wide and guileless. I saw that he now did believe in the fiction he had invented for my father’s sake. I understood that from now on he would repeat that version of my leaving him because he truly believed it.
I asked him, “Did you yourself ever actually see Benedict Juliard sniffing glue, or cocaine,