Enquiry by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Horse racing, Sports & Recreation, Fiction, Literary, General
ISBN: 9780330450348
Publisher: Pan
Published: 2007-07-01T19:10:48.420402+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

When I went back towards the bar I found Lord Gowery had come out of it. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with Lord Ferth, both of them watching me walk towards them with faces like thunder.

I stopped four feet away, and waited.

‘Hughes,’ said Lord Gowery for openers, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘My Lord,’ I said politely. ‘This isn’t Newmarket Heath.’

It went down badly. They were both affronted. They closed their ranks.

‘Insolence will get you nowhere,’ Lord Ferth said, and Lord Gowery added, ‘You’ll never get your licence back, if you behave like this.’

I said without heat, ‘Does justice depend on good manners?’

They looked as if they couldn’t believe their ears. From their point of view I was cutting my own throat, though I had always myself doubted that excessive meekness got licences restored any quicker than they would have been without it. Meekness in the accused brought out leniency in some judges, but severity in others. To achieve a minimum sentence, the guilty should always bone up on the character of their judge, a sound maxim which I hadn’t had the sense to see applied even more to the innocent.

‘I would have thought some sense of shame would have kept you away,’ Lord Ferth said.

‘It took a bit of an effort to come,’ I agreed.

His eyes narrowed and opened again quickly.

Gowery said, ‘As to spreading these rumours… I say categorically that you are not only not on the point of being given your licence back, but that your suspension will be all the longer in consequence of your present behaviour.’

I gave him a level stare and Lord Ferth opened his mouth and shut it again.

‘It is no rumour that Mr Cranfield and I are not guilty,’ I said at length. ‘It is no rumour that two at least of the witnesses were lying. Those are facts.’

‘Nonsense,’ Gowery said vehemently.

‘What you believe, sir,’ I said, ‘Doesn’t alter the truth.’

‘You are doing yourself no good, Hughes.’ Under his heavy authoritative exterior he was exceedingly angry. All I needed was a bore hole, and I’d get a gusher.

I said, ‘Would you be good enough to tell me who suggested to you or the other Stewards that you should seek out and question Mr Newtonnards?’

There was the tiniest shift in his eyes. Enough for me to be certain.

‘Certainly not.’

‘Then will you tell me upon whose instructions the enquiry agent David Oakley visited my flat?’

‘I will not.’ His voice was loud, and for the first time, alarmed.

Ferth looked in growing doubt from one of us to the other.

‘What is all this about?’ he said.

‘Mr Cranfield and I were indeed wrongly warned off,’ I said. ‘Someone sent David Oakley to my flat to fake that photograph. And I believe Lord Gowery knows who it was.’

‘I most certainly do not,’ he said furiously. ‘Do you want to bs sued for slander?’

‘I have not slandered you, sir.’

‘You said…’

‘I said you knew who sent David Oakley. I did not say that you knew the photograph was a fake.’

‘And it wasn’t,’ he insisted fiercely.

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