Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [38]
Aggrieved, the racing writer phoned Dennis Kinser, and he and Dennis Kinser between them, prompter and prompted, concocted a totally false account of the new trainer being flooded by applications to take horses from excited would-be syndicate owners, thanks to the enthusiastic support of the Cotswold Voice.
The new editor nodded over the piece sagely and initialled it for publication. The ex-editor shook his head, and, knowing his racing writer and reading his Saturday gush in an up-river bar, didn’t believe a word of it.
Bill Williams floated down in two days from Oxford to the meeting-place, a restaurant by the river – imaginatively named Mainstream Mile – and in late afternoon sunshine tied his mooring ropes tidily to the pier provided. He agreed at once with his food columnist’s statement that, from the water at least, the dining-room of Mainstream Mile was one of the most attractive on the Thames, with tables set on terraces behind a sheet of glass, so that diners could have a grandstand view of river traffic.
There was a short patch of rose garden between the building and the river, with a path winding upwards from the pier. Down the path, as Bill Williams stood on the pier, stretching and relaxing in his jeans and T-shirt after his completed journey, a young dark-suited man bounced with a self-satisfied air and told the visitor to leave at once as he was not welcome.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Bill Williams said, thinking it a joke. ‘What do you mean, leave?’
‘The dining-room is fully booked for tonight.’
‘Oh,’ Bill Williams laughed, ‘that’s all right then. I booked a table for tonight two weeks ago.’
‘You cannot have done!’ The young man began to lose his bounce. ‘It is impossible. We do not accept boats.’
Incredulously, Bill Williams looked around him. He said, ‘This restaurant is called Mainstream Mile. It is on the bank of the Thames. It has a proper pier, to which you see I am properly moored. How can you say you don’t accept boats?’
‘It is the rule of the house.’
Bill Williams lost more than half of his temper. ‘You go and tell the house,’ he said forcefully, tapping the young man’s chest with his forefinger, ‘that I booked a table here two weeks ago, and no one said anything about not accepting boats.’
The editorial floor of the Cotswold Voice knew better than to argue with a Williams’ righteous rage. The young man backed off nervously and said, ‘What name?’
‘Williams. Four people. Eight o’clock. I am meeting my three guests in the bar here at seven-thirty. You go back and tell that to the house.’
Mrs Robin Dawkins drove north-westwards from London in a bad mood made worse by the dipping sun shining straight into her eyes.
Beside her sat F. Harold Field with Russell Maudsley behind her, belted into the rear seat. Mrs Dawkins had wanted the company chauffeur, not herself, to be at the wheel of the firm’s Daimler for this aggravating expedition, but had been outvoted on the good grounds that the chauffeur’s discretion leaked freely if offered enough cash.
Mrs Robin Dawkins, Mr F. Harold Field and Mr Russell Maudsley collectively owned the newspaper conglomerate, The Lionheart News Group. All were hard-eyed bottom liners. All were fifty, astute and worried. The circulation of all newspapers had dropped owing to television, but theirs more than most. Boardroom rows were constant. Each of the three proprietors strongly disliked the other two, and it was the feuding between them that had led to the last disastrous choice of editor for the Daily Troubadour.
Mrs Robin Dawkins thought it completely pointless interviewing a thirty-three-year-old from the boondocks, and only desperation had persuaded her onto this