10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [84]
Both Stallworthy and Jim were outraged on my behalf and wrote more fiercely in my defense than I could have asked for.
Stallworthy gave me a bed for the night and a horse to ride in the early morning, and I left after breakfast and drove along the familiar country roads back to the university.
The two years since I’d graduated seemed to vanish. I parked the car in the road outside the Streatham Campus and walked up the steep path to the Laver Building, home of the mathematics department. There, after a good deal of casting about, I found my tutor—the one who had written for me the reference sought by Weatherbys—and explained to him, as to Stallworthy and Jim, what I was asking of him.
“Drugs? Of course, a lot of the students experiment, and as you know we try to get rid of the hard core, but you were about the last student I would have suspected of getting hooked. For a start, drugs and mathematics don’t mix, and your work was particularly clear-headed. This magazine article is all rubbish.”
I beseeched him to put those views in writing, which he did with emphasis.
“Good luck,” he said when I left. “These journalists get away with murder.”
I hiked back to my car and drove across country to my old school at Malvern.
There on its hillside campus, steep like Exeter University, though not so big, I sought out the man who had taught me mathematics. He passed the buck to my onetime housemaster, who listened and sent me to the head.
The headmaster walked with me down the broad familiar stone-floored passage in the main building and up the stone stairs to his study, where I showed him a copy of SHOUT! and also a copy of Vivian Durridge’s letter.
“Of course I’ll support you,” he said without hesitation, and wrote, and handed me the handwritten page to read.
It said:
Benedict Juliard attended Malvern College for five years. During the last two, while he was successfully working towards his A levels and university entrance in mathematics, he spent all breaks either riding racehorses—he won three steeplechases—or skiing, in which sport he won a European under-eighteen downhill race.
In addition to those skills he was a considerable marksman with a rifle: he shot in the school team that won the prestigious Ashburton Shield.
In all these activities he showed clearheadedness, natural courage and a high degree of concentration. It is ludicrous to suggest that he was ever under the influence of hallucinatory drugs.
I looked up, not knowing quite what to say. “I admire your father,” the headmaster said. “I’m not saying I agree with him all the time politically, but the country could certainly do worse.”
I said “Thank you” rather feebly, and he shook hands with me on a smile.
Onwards I went to Wellingborough, where I briefly called in to see the chairman to tell him what I’d been doing and what I proposed to do. Then, taking a couple of the photocopies of Vivian Durridge’s letter and his reference from their folder, and making copies of all the letters I’d collected, I drove to Wellingborough station and, tired of the roads, I caught the train to London.
SHOUT! emanated, it transpired, from a small and grubby-looking building south of the Thames. The editor wouldn’t in the least want to see me but, late in the afternoon, I marched straight into his office shedding secretaries like bow waves. He was sitting in a sweatshirt behind a cluttered desk, typing on a keyboard of a computer.
He didn’t recognize me, of course. When I told him who I was, he invited me to leave.
“I am going to sue you for libel,” I said, opening the copy of SHOUT! at the center pages. “I see from the small print at the beginning of this magazine that the name of the editor is Rufus Crossmead. If that’s who you are, I’ll be suing Rufus Crossmead personally.”
He was a small, pugnacious man, sticking