Read Online Reflex by Dick Francis - Free Book Online Page A

more.”
    â€œYou’ll do what you’re bloody told,” Harold said.
    Victor Briggs rose purposefully to his feet, and the twoof them, suddenly silent, stood looking down at me.
    It seemed that a long time passed, and then Harold said in a quiet voice which held a great deal more threat than his shouting, “You’ll do what you’re told, Philip.”
    I stood up in my turn. My mouth had gone dry, but I made my voice sound as neutral, as calm, as unprovoking as possible.
    â€œPlease . . . don’t ask me for a repeat of yesterday.”
    Victor Briggs narrowed his eyes. “Did the horse hurt you? He trod on you . . . you can see it on the video.”
    I shook my head. “It’s not that. It’s the losing. You know I hate it. I just . . . don’t want you to ask me . . . again.”
    More silence.
    â€œLook,” I said. “There are degrees. Of course I’ll give a horse an easy race if he isn’t a hundred per cent fit and a hard race would ruin him for next time out. Of course I’ll do that, it only makes sense. But no more like Daylight yesterday. I know I used to . . . but yesterday was the last.”
    Harold said coldly, “You’d better go now, Philip. I’ll talk to you in the morning,” and I nodded, and left, and there were none of the warm handshakes which had greeted my arrival.
    What would they do, I wondered. I walked in the windy dark down the road from Harold’s house to mine as I had on hundreds of Sundays, and wondered if it would be for the last time. If he wanted to he could put other jockeys up on his horses from that day onwards. He was under no obligation to give me rides. I was classed as self-employed, because I was paid per race by the owners, and not per week by the trainer; and there were no such things as “unfair dismissal” enquiries for the self-employed.
    I suppose it was too much to hope that they would let me get away with it. Yet for three years they had run the Briggs horses honestly, so why not in future? And if theyinsisted on fraud, couldn’t they get some other poor young slob just starting his career, and put the pressure on him when they wanted a race lost? Foolish wishes, all of them. I’d put my job down at their feet like a football and at that moment they were probably kicking it out of the stadium.
    It was ironic. I hadn’t known I was going to say what I had. It had just forced its own way out, like water through a new spring.
    All those races I’d thrown away in the past, not liking it, but doing it . . . Why was it so different now? Why was the revulsion so strong now that I didn’t think I could do a Daylight again, even if to refuse meant virtually the end of being a jockey?
    When had I changed . . . and how could it have happened without my noticing? I didn’t know. I just had a sense of having already traveled too far to turn back. Too far down a road where I didn’t want to go.
    Â 
    I went upstairs and read the three detectives’ reports on Amanda because it was better, on the whole, than thinking about Briggs and Harold.
    Two of the reports had come from fairly large firms and one from a one-man outfit, and all three had spent a lot of ingenuity padding out very few results. Justifying their charges, no doubt. Copiously explaining what they had all spent so long not finding out: and all three, not surprisingly, had not found out approximately the same things.
    None of them, for a start, could find any trace of her birth having been registered. They all expressed doubt and disbelief over this discovery, but to me it was no surprise at all. I had discovered that I myself was unregistered when I tried to get a passport, and the fuss had gone on for months.
    I knew my name, my mother’s name, my birthdate, and that I’d been born in London. Officially, however, Ididn’t exist.