Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [29]
He had walked six miles since then, slowly.
He needed food and somewhere to shelter from the coming snow. He needed a nest, and fire. His rage against mankind deepened with every leaden step.
In London on the same afternoon the Director of the Racecourse Security Service looked morosely out of the Jockey Club office window at the traffic in Portman Square. Behind him in the comfortable brightly-lit room Mr Melbourne Smith was complaining, as he had done either in person or on the telephone every day for the past two weeks, about the lax security at the November Yearling Sales, from which someone had craftily stolen his just-bought and extremely expensive colt.
Melbourne Smith poured so much money into the British bloodstock industry that his complaints could not be ignored, even though strictly it was a matter for the police and the auctioneers, not the Jockey Club. Melbourne Smith, fifty, forceful, a wheeler-dealer to his fingertips, was as much outraged that anyone should dare to steal from him as by the theft itself.
‘They just walked out with him,’ he said for the fiftieth injured time. ‘And you’ve done bloody little to get him back.’
The Director sighed. He disliked Melbourne Smith intensely but hid it well under a bluffly hearty manner. The Director, with a subtle and inventive mind behind a moustached and tweeded exterior, wondered just what else he could do, short of praying for a miracle, to find the missing colt.
The trail, for a start, was cold, as Melbourne Smith had not discovered his loss for more than a month after the sales. He had bought, as usual, about ten of the leggy young animals who would race the following summer as two-year-olds. He had arranged to have them transported, as usual, to the trainer who would break them in, handle them and saddle them and ride them and accustom them to going in and out of starting stalls. And, as usual, in due course he had gone to see how his purchases were making out.
He had been puzzled at first by what should have been his prize colt. Puzzled, and then suspicious, and then explodingly furious. He had paid a fortune for a well-grown aristocratic yearling and he had received instead a spindly no-hoper with a weak neck. Between his purchase and the changeling there were only two points in common: the body colour, a dark bay, and the large white star on the forehead.
‘It’s a scandal,’ Melbourne Smith said. ‘I’ll spend my money in France, next year.’
The Director reflected that the theft of racehorses was exceedingly rare and that the security at the sales was more a matter of behind-the-scenes paperwork than of bars and bolts: and normally the paperwork was security enough.
Every thoroughbred foal had to be registered soon after birth, the certificate not only giving parentage and birth date but also skin colours and markings and where exactly on the body the hairs of the coat grew in whorls. The markings and whorls had to be carefully drawn onto regulation outline pictures of side, front and rear views of horses.
Later on, when the foal was grown up and ready to race, a second chart of his markings had to be filled in by a veterinary surgeon and sent off to the registry. If the foal certificate and the later certificate matched, all was well. If they didn’t, the horse was barred from racing.
The foal certificate of the yearling Melbourne Smith had bought, definitely did not match the changeling he had been landed with. The colour and the white star were right, but the whorls of hair were all in different places.
The Director had set his assistant the mammoth task of checking the changeling against the 20,000 foal certificates in that year’s registry, but so far none of them had matched. The Director thought that