Dick Francis's Damage by Felix Francis Read Free Book Online Page A

out if the horses are high on amphetamines?”
    â€œWell. We could do just that. But wait! What if our caller is merely a mischief-maker? Analyses are expensive, you know. Would the substantial outlay be prudent?”
    It would be prudent, I thought, if not doing so endangered the good name of racing. “Surely we don’t have to worry about the cost if the sport’s integrity is at stake.”
    â€œI have my reasons,” Crispin said. “I want you, our shadowy, silent sleuth, to have a quiet look first.”
    â€œSo what is it you want me to do, exactly?” I asked.
    â€œDo your usual business, dear boy. Ask quiet questions, look under stones, discover if there’s any substance to the accusation. Or is it some vengeful malcontent spreading unsubstantiated tittle-tattle? Report back to me asap.”
    Crispin tended to speak in a manner that was as cryptic as the crossword puzzles he was renowned for completing in double-quick time.
    â€œWhen by?”
    â€œThere is a requirement for prompt results. If it is true, then we must be seen to react. Say, next week?”
    â€œOK. I’ll have a look and ask the questions.”
    â€œQuietly, now, dear boy. Quietly. We don’t need the proverbial scrambled on our faces, now do we? Aye, aye.”
    I wondered why Crispin couldn’t speak normally like everyone else. Particularly as he had a brain that was so sharp.
    Even though he always jokingly referred to me as the BHAresident genius, and I was pretty good at understanding complicated situations, Crispin outdid me with ease. He would recognize issues that everyone else would miss. All intelligence is information, he would often say, but not all information is intelligence. The real trick was distinguishing which was and which wasn’t, and Crispin was the real genius at doing that.
    He had been the chief intelligence officer for the BHA since its creation, having been a secret agent in either MI5 or MI6 before that. No one really knew which, as he wouldn’t say. Since his arrival, many a disgruntled racing miscreant had received his just desserts because Crispin Larson could decode the intelligence.
    If he said that quiet questions should be asked first rather than a full-frontal approach with the testing team, then I was not the one to argue. He must have good reasons, and maybe I’d find out what they were or maybe I wouldn’t. Crispin could be so secretive that I wondered if his wife knew what he did for a living, if indeed he even had a wife. That was something else he was secretive about.
    Once, as we had been leaving the offices together at the end of the day, I’d casually asked him, by way of conversation, where he lived and how he got home. He’d looked at me keenly and asked, dear boy, why I needed to know. Clearly, such information was issued only on a need-to-know basis and, as I obviously hadn’t needed to know, he didn’t tell me.
    â€”
    BACK AT MY DESK, the hands on the clock had crept around to twelve twenty-three.
    Surely by now the top-guy surgeon would be hard at work in Faye’s innards. I tried to visualize what he might be doing but decided not to linger too long on the image. I was always a bitsqueamish about abdominal operations when they were shown on the television, thankful that the patient was fast asleep and unaware of all the pushing and pulling, the cutting and the burning, that was going on inside them.
    God, I hoped she would be all right.
    Health issues, especially those of a life-threatening nature, put everything else into perspective. There was little point in worrying about how the nation’s economy might perform over the next few years if simply being alive after six months was going to be a toss-up.
    And did it really matter, in the big picture, if Graham Perry was or was not dosing his horses with amphetamines when Faye’s very existence lay literally in the hands of a jet-lagged surgeon on some