Enso had found Carlo and Cal hidden in a clump of bushes near the Boy's Grave cross roads.
We found them there too, when we walked along to the end of the Line gallop to flag down a passing motorist to take Etty quickly into Newmarket. Etty, who had arrived frantic up the gallop, had at first like all the other onlookers taken it for granted that the shooting had been an accident. A stray bullet loosed off by someone being criminally careless with a gun.
I watched the doubt appear on her face when she realised that my transport had been Lancat and not the Land-Rover, but I just asked her matter-of-factly to buzz down to Newmarket and ring up the dead horse removers, then to drive herself back. She sent Andy off with instructions to the rest of the string, and the first car that came along stopped to pick her up.
Alessandro walked off the training ground into the road with a stunned, stony face, and came towards me. He was leading Lucky Lindsay, which someone had caught, but as automatically as if unaware he was there. Three or four paces away, he stopped.
'What am I to do?' he said. His voice was without hope or anxiety. Lifeless. I didn't answer immediately, and it was then that we heard the noise.
A low distressed voice calling unintelligibly.
Startled, I walked along the road a little and through a thin belt of bushes, and there I found them.
Three of them. Enso and Carlo and Cal.
It was Cal who had called out. He was the only one capable of it. Carlo lay sprawled on his back with his eyes open to the sun and a splash of drying scarlet trickling from a hole in his forehead.
Cal had a wider, wetter, spreading stain over the front of his shirt. His breath was shallow and quick, and calling out loud enough to be found had used up most of his energy.
The Lee Enfield lay across his legs. His hand moved convulsively towards the butt, but he no longer had the strength to pick it up.
And Enso- Cal had shot Enso with the Lee Enfield at a range of about six feet. It wasn't so much the bullet itself, but the shock wave of its velocity: at that sort distance it had dug an entrance as large as a plate.
The force of it had flung Enso backwards, against a tree. He sat there now at the foot of it with the silenced pistol still in his hand and his head sunk forward on his chest. There was a soul-sickening mess where his paunch had been, and his back was indissoluble from the bark.
I would have stopped Alessandro seeing, but I didn't hear him come. I heard only the moan beside me, and I turned abruptly to see the nausea spring out in sweat on his face.
For Cal his appearance there was macabre.
'You-' he said. 'You- are dead.'
Alessandro merely stared at him, too shocked to understand, too shocked to speak.
Cal's eyes opened wide and his voice grew stronger with a burst of futile anger.
'He said- I had killed you. Killed his son. He was- out of his senses. He said- I should have known it was you-' He coughed, and frothy blood slid over his lower lip.
'You did shoot at Alessandro,' I said. 'But you hit a horse.'
Cal said with visibly diminishing strength, 'He shot Carlo- and he shot me- so I let him have it- the son of a bitch- he was out- of his senses-'
The voice stopped. There was nothing anyone could do for him, and presently, imperceptibly, he died.
He died where he had lain in wait for Tommy Hoylake. When I knelt beside him to feel his pulse, and lifted my head to look along the gallop, there in front of me was the view he had had: a clear sight of the advancing horses, from through the sparse low branches of a concealing bush. The dark shape of Lancat lay like a hump on the grass three hundred yards away, and another batch of horses, uncaring, were sweeping round the far bend and turning towards me.
An easy shot, it had been, for a marksman. He hadn't bothered even with a telescopic sight. At that range, with a Lee Enfield, one didn't need one. One didn't need to be of pinpoint accuracy: anywhere on the head or trunk would do the trick. I sighed. If he had used a telescopic sight, he would probably have realised that what he was aiming at was Alessandro.
I stood up. Clumsily, painfully, wishing I hadn't got down.
Alessandro hadn't fainted. Hadn't been sick. The sweat had dried on his face, and he was looking steadfastly at his father.
When I moved towards him he turned, but he needed two or three attempts before he could get his throat to work.
He managed it, finally. His voice was strained; different; hoarse: and what he said was as good an epitaph as any.
'He gave me everything,' he said.
We went back to the road, where Alessandro had tethered Lucky Lindsay to a fence. The colt had his head down to the grass, undisturbed.
Neither of us said anything at all.
Etty clattered up in the Land-Rover, and I got her to turn it round and take me straight down to the town.
'I'll be right back,' I said to Alessandro, but he stared silently at nothing with eyes that had seen too much.
When I went back, it was with the police. Etty stayed behind at Rowley Lodge to see to the stables, because it was, still, and incredibly, Guineas day, and we had Archangel to look to. Also, in the town, I made a detour to the doctor, where I bypassed an outraged queue waiting in his surgery, and got him to put the ends of my collar-bone back into alignment. After that it was a bit more bearable, though nothing still to raise flags about.
I spent most of the morning up at the cross-roads. Answered some questions and didn't answer others. Alessandro listened to me telling the highest up of the police who had arrived from Cambridge that Enso had appeared to me to be unbalanced.
The police surgeon was sceptical of a layman's opinion.
'In what way?' he said without deference.
I paused to consider. 'You could look for spirochaetes,' I said, and his eyes widened abruptly before he disappeared back into the bushes.
They were considerate to Alessandro. He sat on somebody's raincoat on the grass at the side of the road, and later on the police surgeon gave him a sedative.
It was an injection, and Alessandro didn't want it. They wouldn't pay attention to his objections, and when the needle went into his arm I found him staring fixedly at my face. He knew that I too was thinking about too many other injections; about myself, and Carlo, and Moonrock and Indigo and Buckram. Too many needles. Too much death.
The drug didn't put him out, just made him look more dazed than before. The police decided he should go back to the Forbury Inn and sleep, and steered him towards one of their cars.
He stopped in front of me before he reached it, and gazed at me in awe from hollow dark sockets in a grey gaunt face.
'Look at the flowers,' he said. 'On the Boy's Grave.'
When he had gone I walked over to the raincoat where he had been sitting, close to the little mound.
There were pale yellow polyanthus, and blue forget-me-nots coming into flower round the edge: and all the centre was filled with pansies. Dark dark purple velvet pansies, shining black in the sun.
It was cynical of me to wonder if he could have planted them himself.
Enso was in the mortuary and Alessandro was asleep when Archangel and Tommy Hoylake won the Guineas.
Not what they had planned.
A heaviness like thunder persisted with me all afternoon, even though there was by then no reason for it. The defeat of Enso no longer directed half my actions, but I found it impossible in one bound to throw off his influence. It was not until then that I understood how intense it had become.
What I should have felt was relief that the stable was safe. What I did feel was depression.
The merchant banker, Archangel's owner, was practically incandescent with happiness. He glowed in the unsaddling enclosure and joked with the Press in shaky pride.
'Well done, my boy, well done indeed,' he said to me, to Tommy, and to Archangel impartially, and looked ready to embrace us all.
'And now, my boy, now for the Derby, eh?'
'Now for the Derby,' I nodded, and wondered how soon my father would be back at Rowley Lodge.
I went to see him, the next day.
He was looking even more forbidding than usual because he had heard all about the multiple murders on the gallops. He blamed me for letting anything like that happen. It saved him, I reflected sourly, from having to say anything nice about Archangel.
'You should never have taken on that apprentice.'
'No,' I said.
'The Jockey Club will be seriously displeased.'
'Yes.'
'The man must have been mad.'
'Sort of.'
'Absolutely mad to think he could get his son to ride Archangel by killing Tommy Hoylake.'
I had had to tell the police something, and I had told them that. It had seemed enough.
'Obsessed,' I agreed.
'Surely you must have noticed it before? Surely he gave some sign?'
'I suppose he did,' I agreed neutrally.
'Then surely you should have been able to stop him.'
'I did stop him- in a way.'
'Not very efficiently,' he complained.
'No,' I said patiently, and thought that the only one who had stopped Enso efficiently and finally had been Cal.
'What's the matter with your arm?'
'Broke my collar-bone,' I said.
'Hard luck.'
He looked down at his still suspended leg, almost but not quite saying aloud that a collar-bone was chicken feed compared with what he had endured. What was more, he was right.
'How soon will you be out?' I asked.
He answered in a smug satisfaction tinged with undisguisable malice. 'Sooner than you'd like, perhaps.'
'I couldn't wish you to stay here,' I protested.
He looked faintly taken aback: faintly ashamed.
'No- well- They say not long now.'
The sooner the better,' I said, and tried to mean it.
'Don't do any more work with Archangel. And I see from the Calendar that you have made entries on your own. I don't want you to do that. I am perfectly capable of deciding where my horses should run.'
'As you say,' I said mildly, and with surprisingly little pleasure realised that I now no longer had any reason for amending his plans.
'Tell Etty that she did very well with Archangel.'
'I will,' I said. 'In fact, I have.'
The corners of his mouth turned down. Tell her that I said so.'
'Yes,' I said.
Nothing much, after all, had changed between us. He was still what I had run away from at sixteen, and it would take me a lot less time to leave him again. I couldn't possibly have stayed on as his assistant, even if he had asked me to.
'He gave me everything,' Alessandro had said of his father. I would have said of mine that he gave me not very much. And I felt for him something that Alessandro had never through love or hate felt for his.
I felt- apathy.
'Go away, now,' he said. 'And on your way out, find a nurse. I need a bedpan. They take half an hour, sometimes, if I ring the bell. And I want it now, at once.'
The driver of the car I had hired in Newmarket was quite happy to include Hampstead in the itinerary.
'A couple of hours?' I suggested, when I had hauled myself out on to the pavement outside the flat.
'Sure,' he said. 'Maybe there's somewhere open for tea, even on Sunday.' He drove off hopefully, optimistic soul that he was.
Gillie said she had lost three pounds, she was painting the bathroom sludge green, and how did I propose to make love to her looking like a washed out edition of a terminal consumptive.
'I don't,' I said. 'Propose.'
'Ah,' she said wisely. 'All men have their limits.'
'And just change that description to looking like a racehorse trainer who has just won his first Classic.'
She opened her mouth and obviously was not going to come across with the necessary compliment.
'O. K.,' I interrupted resignedly. 'So it wasn't me. Everyone else, but not me. I do so agree. Wholeheartedly.'
'Self-pity is disgusting,' she said.
'Mm.' I sat gingerly down in a blue armchair, put my head back, and shut my eyes. Didn't get much sympathy for that, either.
'So you collected the bruises,' she observed.
'That's right.'
'Silly old you.'
'Yes.'
'Do you want some tea?'
'No thank you,' I said politely. 'No sympathy, no tea.'
She laughed. 'Brandy, then?'
'If you have some.'
She had enough for the cares of the world to retreat a pace: and she came across, in the end, with her own brand of fellow-feeling.
'Don't wince,' she said, 'When I kiss you.'
'Don't kiss so damned hard.'
After a bit she said, 'Is this shoulder the lot? Or will there be more to come?'
'It's the lot,' I said, and told her all that had happened. Edited, and flippantly; but more or less all.
'And does your own dear dad know all about this?'
'Heaven forbid,' I said.
'But he will, won't he? When you get this Alessandro warned off? And then he will understand how much he owes you?'
'I don't want him to understand,' I said. 'He would loathe it.'
'Charming fellow, your dad.'
'He is what he is,' I said.
'And was Enso what he was?'
I smiled lopsidedly. 'Same principle, I suppose.'
'You're a nut, Neil Griffon.'
I couldn't dispute it.
'How long before he gets out of hospital?' she asked.
'I don't know. He hopes to be on his feet soon. Then a week or two of physiotherapy and walking practice with crutches, or whatever. He expects to be home before the Derby.'
'What will you do then?'
'Don't know,' I said. 'But he'll be three weeks at least, and leverage no longer applies- so would you still like to come to Rowley Lodge?'
'Um,' she said, considering. 'There's a three-year-old Nigerian girl I'm supposed to be settling with a family in Dorset-'
I felt very tired. 'Never mind, then.'
'I could come on Wednesday.'
When I got back to Newmarket I walked round the yard before I went indoors. It all lay peacefully in the soft light of sundown, the beginning of dusk. The bricks looked rosy and warm, the shrubs were out in flower, and behind the green painted doors the six million quids' worth were safely chomping on their evening oats. Peace in all the bays, winners in many of the boxes, and an air of prosperity and timelessness over the whole.
I would be gone from there soon; and Enso had gone, and Alessandro. When my father came back it would be as if the last three months had never happened. He and Etty and Margaret would go on as they had been before; and I would read about the familiar horses in the newspapers.
I didn't yet know what I would do. Certainly I had grown to like my father's job, and maybe I could start a stable of my own, somewhere else. I wouldn't go back to antiques, and I knew by then that I wasn't going to work any more for Russell Arletti.
Build a new empire, Gillie had said.
Well, maybe I would.
I looked in at Archangel, now no longer guarded by men, dogs and electronics. The big brown colt lifted his head from his manger and turned on me an enquiring eye. I smiled at him involuntarily. He still showed the effects of his hard race the day before, but he was sturdy and sound, and there was a very good chance he would give the merchant banker his Derby.
I stifled a sigh and went indoors, and heard the telephone ringing in the office.
Owners often telephoned on Sunday evenings, but it wasn't an owner, it was the hospital.
I'm very sorry,' the voice said several times at the other end. 'We've been trying to reach you for some hours now. Very sorry. Very sorry.'
'But he can't be dead,' I said stupidly. 'He was all right when I left him. I was with him this afternoon, and he was all right.'
'Just after you left,' they said. 'Within half an hour.'
'But how?' My mind couldn't grasp it. 'He only had a broken leg- and that had mended.'
Would I like to talk to the doctor in charge, they said. Yes, I would.
'He was all right when I left him,' I protested. 'In fact he was yelling for a bedpan.'
'Ah. Yes. Well,' said a high pitched voice loaded with professional sympathy. 'That's- er- that's a very common preliminary to a pulmonary embolus. Calling for a bedpan- very typical. But do rest assured, Mr Griffon, your father died very quickly. Within a few seconds. Yes, indeed.'
'What,' I said with a feeling of complete unreality, 'is a pulmonary embolus?'
'Blood clot,' he said promptly. 'Unfortunately not uncommon in elderly people who have been bedridden for some time. And your father's fracture- well, it's tragic, tragic, but not uncommon, I'm afraid. Death sitting up, some people say. Very quick, Mr Griffon. Very quick. There was nothing we could do, do believe me.'
'I believe you.'
But it was impossible, I thought. He couldn't be dead. I had been talking to him just that afternoon-
The hospital would like instructions, they delicately said.
I would send someone from Newmarket, I said vaguely. An undertaker from Newmarket, to fetch him home.
Monday I spent in endless chat. Talked to the police. Talked to the Jockey Club. Talked to a dozen or so owners who telephoned to ask what was going to happen to their horses.
Talked and talked.
Margaret dealt with the relentless pressure as calmly as she did with Susie and her friend. And Susie's friend, she said, had incidentally reported that Alessandro had not left his room since the police took him there on Saturday morning. He hadn't eaten anything, and he wouldn't talk to anyone except to tell them to go away. Susie's chum's mum said it was all very well, but Alessandro never had any money, and his bill had only been paid up to the previous Saturday, and they were thinking of asking him to go.
'Tell Susie's chum's mum that Alessandro has money here, and also that in Switzerland he will be rich.'
'Will do,' she said, and rang the Forbury Inn at once.
Etty took charge of both lots out at exercise, and somehow or other the right runners got dispatched to Bath. Vic Young went in charge of them and said later that the apprentice who had the ride on Pullitzer instead of Alessandro was no effing good.
To the police I told the whole of what had occurred on Saturday morning, but nothing of what had occurred before it. Enso had recently arrived in England, I said, and had developed this extraordinary fixation. There was no reason for them not to accept this abbreviated version, and nothing to be gained by telling them more.
Down at the Jockey Club I had a lengthy session with a committee of Members and a couple of Stewards left over on purpose from the Guineas meeting, and the outcome of that was equally peaceful.
After that I told Margaret to let all enquiring owners know that I would be staying on at Rowley Lodge for the rest of the season, and they could leave or remove their horses as they wished.
'Are you really?' she said. 'Are you staying?'
'Not much else to do, is there?' I said. But we were both smiling.
'Ever since you told that lie about not being able to find anyone to take over, when you had John Bredon lined up all the time, ever since then I've known you liked it here.'
I didn't disillusion her.
'I'm glad you're staying,' she said. 'I suppose it's very disloyal to your father, as he only died yesterday, but I have much preferred working for you.'
I was not so autocratic, that was all. She would have worked efficiently for anyone.
Before she left at three, she said that none of the owners who had so far telephoned were going to remove their horses; and that included Archangel's merchant banker.
When she had gone I wrote to my solicitors in London and asked them to send back to me at Newmarket the package I had instructed them to open in case of my sudden death.
After that I swallowed a couple of codeines and wondered how soon everything would stop aching, and from five to six thirty I walked round at evening stables with Etty.
We passed by Lancat's empty box.
'Damn that Alex,' Etty said, but with a retrospective anger. The past was past. Tomorrow's races were all that mattered. Tomorrow at Chester. She talked of plans ahead. She was contented, fulfilled, and busy. The transition from my father to me had been too gradual to need now any sudden adjustment.
I left her supervising as usual the evening feeds for the horses and walked back towards the house. Something made me look up along the drive, and there, motionless and only half visible against the tree trunks, stood Alessandro.
It was as if he had got half way down the drive before his courage deserted him. I walked without haste out of the yard and went to meet him.
Strain had aged him so that he now looked nearer forty than eighteen. Bones stood out sharply under his skin, and there was little in the black eyes except no hope at all.
'I came,' he started. 'I need- I mean, you said, at the beginning, that I could have half the money I earned racing- Can I still- have it?'
'You can,' I said. 'Of course.'
He swallowed. 'I am sorry to come. I had to come. To ask you about the money.'
'You can have it now,' I said. 'Come along into the office.'
I half turned away from him but he didn't move
'No. I- can't.'
'I'll send it along to the Forbury Inn for you,' I said.
He nodded. 'Thank you.'
'Do you have any plans?' I asked him.
The shadows in his face if anything deepened.
'No.'
He visibly gathered every shred of resolution, clamped his teeth together, and asked me the question which was tearing him to shreds.
'When will I be warned off?'
Neil Griffon was a nut, as Gillie said.
'You won't be warned off,' I told him. 'I talked to the Jockey Club this morning. I told them that you shouldn't lose your licence because your father had gone mad, and they saw that point of view. You may not of course like it that I stressed your father's insanity, but it was the best I could do.'
'But-' he said in bewilderment, and then in realisation, 'Didn't you tell them about Moonrock and Indigo- and about your shoulder?'
'No.'
'I don't understand- why you didn't.'
'I don't see any point in revenging myself on you for what your father did.'
'But- he only did it- in the beginning- because I asked.'
'Alessandro,' I said. 'Just how many fathers would do as he did? How many fathers, if their sons said they wanted to ride Archangel in the Derby, would go as far as murder to achieve it?'
After a long pause, he said, 'He was mad, then. He really was.' It was clearly no comfort.
'He was ill,' I said. 'That illness he had after you were born. It affected his brain.'
'Then I- will not-?'
'No,' I said. 'You can't inherit it. You're as sane as anyone. As sane as you care to be.'
'As I care to be,' he repeated vaguely. His thoughts were turned inward. I didn't hurry him. I waited most patiently, because what he cared to be was the final throw in the game.
'I care to be a jockey,' he said faintly. To be a good one.'
I took a breath. 'You are free to ride races anywhere you like,' I said. 'Anywhere in the world.'
He stared at me with a face from which all the arrogance had gone. He didn't look the same boy as the one who had come from Switzerland three months ago, and in fact he wasn't. All of his values had been turned upside-down, and the world as he had known it had come to an end.
To defeat the father, I had changed the son. Changed him at first only as a solution to a problem, but later also because the emerging product was worth it. It seemed a waste, somehow, to let him go.
I said abruptly, 'You can stay on at Rowley Lodge, if you like.'
Something shattered somewhere inside him, like glass breaking. When he turned away I could have sworn that against all probability there were tears in his eyes.
He took four paces, and stopped.
'Well?' I said.
He turned round. The tears had drained back into the ducts, as they do in the young.
'What as?' he said apprehensively, looking for snags.
'Stable jockey,' I said. 'Second to Tommy.'
He walked six more paces away down the drive as if his ankles were springs.
'Come back,' I called. 'What about tomorrow?'
He looked over his shoulder.
'I'll be here to ride out.'
Three more bouncing steps.
'You won't,' I shouted. 'You get a good sleep and a good breakfast and be here at eleven. We're flying over to Chester.'
' Chester?' He turned and shouted in surprise, and went two more steps, backwards.
'Clip Clop,' I yelled. 'Ever heard of him?'
'Yes,' he yelled back, and the laughter took him uncontrollably, and he turned and ran away down the drive, leaping into the air as if he were six.