Shattered by Dick Francis Read Free Book Online

jockeys change rapidly between races. He also looked after and cleaned their gear, saddles, britches, boots and so on, so it was all ready for the next time they raced. Martin had told me that a single valet would look after a whole bunch of jockeys and the valets would work as a team to cover all the race meetings. While Eddie packed up his hamper of saddles, kit and clothes for laundering, I waited with hope for him to reappear out of the changing room at the end of his day.
    When he came out and saw me, he was at first alarmed, and then resigned.
    â€œI suppose,” he said, “Rose wouldn’t tell you.”
    â€œNo,” I agreed. “So would you ask her something, for Martin’s sake?”
    â€œWell ...” He hesitated. “It depends.”
    I said, “Ask her if the tape Martin gave you was the one he thought it was.”
    He took a few seconds to work it out.
    â€œDo you mean,” he asked doubtfully, “that my Rose thinks Martin had the wrong tape?”
    â€œI think,” I confessed, “that if Martin’s tape ever surfaces after all the muddle and thieving, it’ll be a matter of luck.”
    He protested self-righteously that he’d given me Martin’s tape in good faith. I insisted that I believed him. No more was said about Rose.
    Eddie knew, as did the whole racing world after that day’s newspapers, that Martin’s funeral was planned for Thursday, provided no jinx upset Wednesday’s inquest. Eddie, eyes down, mumbled a few words about seeing me there, he supposed, and in discomfort hurried away to the inner realms of the changing rooms, from where the public with awkward questions were banned.
    Rose Robins and her enmity added complexity to an already tangled situation.
    I caught a bus from the racetrack which wound its way from village to village and, in the end, to Broadway. In spite of my having spent all the time tossing around in my mind the unexpected involvement of Eddie’s scratchy daughter I came to no more satisfactory or original conclusion than that someone had given some tape or other to Martin, who had given it to Eddie, who had given it to me, who had carelessly lost it to a thief.
    Still drifting in outer space was whatever confidential data Martin had meant to entrust to me. In some respects that didn’t matter, and never would, just as long as the hidden nugget of information didn’t heat up or collide with an inconvenient truth. Additionally, as I had no road map to the ingredients of the nugget, I had no way of either foreseeing or preventing trouble.
    Unrealistically, I simply hoped that Martin’s secret would remain forever hidden in uncharted orbit, and all of us could return to normal.
    It was after five-thirty by the time I reached the doors of Logan Glass, and again my assistants were there, two of them making paperweights with enthusiasm and the third keeping shop. Bon-Bon had telephoned, they told me, saying she was begging me to go on organizing her household in return for transport; at least until after the funeral, and, much to the amusement of my assistants, the transport she sent that afternoon wasn’t her own runabout, but was Marigold’s Rolls.
    Whenever we were alone together, I sat beside Worthington as he drove. He had offered me the comfort and prestige of the rear seat usually taken by his employer, but I felt wrong there. Moreover, on the showing of the last few days, if I sat in the back he tended both to call me “Sir” and to favor respectful silence instead of pithy and irreverent observation. When I sat in the front, Marigold was “Marigold”; when in the back, “Mrs. Knight.” When I sat beside her chauffeur, he showed his inner self.
    In addition to being bald, fifty and kind to children, Worthington disliked the police force as a matter of principle, referred to marriage as bondage and believed in the usefulness of being able to outkick any other