Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [13]
‘I didn’t do it,’ The Rock yelled, frantic.
Gypsy Joe, regardless, repeated ‘Murderer’ again and again, and allowed his jockey no peace.
Davey Rockman and Nigel Tape went to Warwick races together, Nigel Tape driving his own leased car and hoping The Rock would pay his share of the petrol. Gone were the days, it seemed, when The Rock grandiosely paid all of their joint expenses as a matter of course. The Rock, Nigel Tape morosely considered, wasn’t any longer the hero he’d worshipped all these years.
The Rock’s saturnine good looks had rapidly lost their taut appeal since the smooth tanned skin on his jaw and cheekbones had loosened and greyed. The bravado of the riding boots no longer strode with self-confident near-arrogance from weighing-room to parade ring. The maestro no longer masterfully slapped his calf with his riding whip. Onlookers used to the swagger of pre-Red Millbrook days hardly recognised the dimmed round-shouldered slinker as the wolf of the tracks, the sexual predator that had set alarmed mothers scurrying protectively after their chicks.
The Rock, under Gypsy Joe’s pitiless barrage, had more than halfway crumbled.
‘He’s sure I did it,’ The Rock moaned. ‘He never leaves me alone five minutes. He wants to know who killed his precious boy and I can scream and scream that I don’t know and he just goes on asking.’
Nigel Tape glanced sideways at the wreck of his friend. He – and every pair of eyes on the racecourse – could clearly see the atrophy of The Rock’s vivid character, let alone his riding skill. Horses in his hands were going soft.
‘You can’t tell him who killed Red Millbrook because you don’t know.’ Nigel Tape’s voice was edging from reasonableness to exasperation. He’d said the same thing a dozen times.
‘I tell him over and over I don’t know,’ The Rock complained. ‘He thinks I just walked up to someone who has a gun and said, “Shoot Red Millbrook for me.” He’s so simple he’s pathetic’
Gypsy Joe, neither simple nor pathetic, watched his jockey’s spineless performances that afternoon and was obliged to apologise to his owners.
For all his persistent inquisition of The Rock, Gypsy Joe hadn’t learned who’d killed Red Millbrook. He began to believe that the jockey truly didn’t know whose hand had actually held the gun. He didn’t change his certainty of The Rock’s basic guilt.
At the end of an unproductive three hours of also-rans, the trainer told his jockey that good owners were harder to replace than good riders (Red Millbrook excepted). He’d given Davey Rockman every chance, he said, but the owners were bitterly complaining and enough was enough, so goodbye. The Rock, speechless, burned behind his eyes with incandescent malice and saw no fault in himself.
‘What about me?’ demanded Nigel Tape. ‘Do I get The Rock’s job? First jockey to the stable?’
‘No, you don’t. You haven’t the drive. If you want to, you can carry on as before.’
‘It isn’t fair,’ Nigel Tape said.
On their drive home from the races, The Rock violently swore to revenge himself for the public disgrace of losing his job.
‘Get that gunman for me,’ The Rock said. ‘Tell him I need him again.’
Nigel Tape drove erratically in troubled silence. Fair haired, with sun-bleached eyebrows, the pale shadow of Davey The Rock painfully felt his long allegiance weakening. He had quite liked Red Millbrook, he belatedly realised, and Gypsy Joe hadn’t been bad to work for, all these years. A steady job, better than most…
‘Do it,’ The Rock insisted. ‘Tell your brother to fix it again.’
‘It’ll cost you,’ Nigel Tape said weakly.
‘Get on with it,’ he was told.
Nigel Tape’s ex-jail-bird car-thief brother knew a man who knew a man who was in touch with a man who knew someone in the elimination business. In early February 1987, the patron of Emil Jacques’ local cafe produced from beside his till a pale pink envelope that smelled sweetly of carnations.
The patron smiled widely, nudging Emil Jacques in the ribs. Emil Jacques smelled