Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [46]
The customers of Thoroughbred Foodstuffs saw a big man in his late thirties with a rugged, slightly forbidding face and a way of narrowing his eyes to dark-lashed slits. The frank, open and sincere stock-in-trade expression of a salesman was nowhere to be seen, nor was there any obvious honey in his voice. The one factor which brought out the handshakes, the fountain pens and the cheque books was his formidable knowledge of horses. He could sum up a horse in a glance and make helpfully constructive suggestions in a throwaway fashion, never taking credit although it was due.
‘I expect you’ve tried remedial shoeing,’ he would say casually, or ‘Don’t you find vitamin B12 injections help build bone?’ Second time around he was greeted as a trusted friend.
He prospered.
All the same he was in trouble. There was no peace in his sleep. When he slept, he woke always from a nightmare, his heart thumping, his skin prickling with cold instant sweat. Always a dream variation on the same theme – the violent untimely death of his father. Sometimes he saw the face, dead but still talking, with blood gushing out of the mouth. Sometimes he saw the wheel, the great fat black sharp-treaded tyre biting into the soft bulging belly.
Sometimes he felt he was inside his father’s body, slipping and falling behind the loaded motor horsebox and having the life crushed out of him in one great unimaginable explosion of agony. Sometimes, but not so often, he saw the face of the other man who had been there, the callous man in the dark clothes, looking coldly down at his dying father and giving him no comfort, saying not a word.
Every morning Martin Retsov stood wearily under the shower, rinsing the stickiness from his body and wishing he could as easily sponge his subconscious mind. Every day, sliding into the car, he shed his night self and looked to the future. He saw foals born, watched them grow, traced their fortunes at auction and beyond. He could have told the trainers, better than they knew themselves, the breeding, history, career and fate of every horse he reached with Thoroughbred food.
After nearly three years he had made many acquaintances -he was not a man to make friends. He knew every horse over a wide stretch of country and hundreds that had been sold out of it. He was the most efficient salesman in his company. And even his nightmares were at last becoming rarer.
One evening in early spring he picked up Johnnie Duke. A hitchhiker, a tall thin fair-haired youth looking not much above twenty, wearing faded jeans and an old leather jacket and carrying a few extra clothes in a canvas hold-all. Martin Retsov, in an expansive mood, took him to be a college kid on vacation and agreed to drop him forty miles down the road in the next town.
‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ he asked, half puzzled, as the young man settled into the front seat beside him.
‘Shouldn’t think so.’
‘Well…’ He thought it over. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you. Day or two ago. Where would that be?’
The young man took his time over answering. Then he said, ‘I hitch up and down this road pretty regular. Maybe you saw me thumbing.’
Martin Retsov nodded several times. ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s it.’ He relaxed in his seat, glad to have resolved the small mystery. He liked to be sure of things. ‘That’s where I’ve seen you. On the road. More than once.’
The young man nodded briefly and said he was glad Martin had stopped for him because he had a date with his girl.
‘I don’t often stop for hitchers,’ Martin Retsov said, and thought with amusement that three easy years must have softened him.
They drove amicably together for five miles and passed alongside the white railed paddocks of a prosperous stud farm. Martin Retsov cast a rapid assessing eye over the small groups of animals grazing the new spring grass but kept his thoughts unspoken.
It was Johnnie Duke who said, ‘It’s odd you never get a piebald thoroughbred.’
‘You know