Straight by Dick Francis Page A

toes and back, and gave me another prescription for Distalgesic. “No more than eight tablets in twenty-four hours and not with alcohol.” He said it every time.
    “Right.”
    He considered me thoughtfully for a moment and then rose and went over to a cabinet where he kept packets and bottles of drugs. He came back tucking a small plastic bag into an envelope, which he held out to me.
    “I’m giving you something known as DF 118s. Rather appropriate, as they’re your own initials! I’ve given you three of them. They are serious painkillers, and I don’t want you to use them unless something like yesterday happens again.”
    “OK,” I said, putting the envelope into my pocket. “Thanks.”
    “If you take one, you won’t feel a thing.” He smiled. “If you take two at once, you’ll be spaced out, high as a kite. If you take all three at once, you’ll be unconscious. So be warned.” He paused. “They are a last resort.”
    “I won’t forget,” I said, “and I truly am grateful.”
     
    Brad drove to a chemist’s, took my prescription in, waited for it to be dispensed, and finished the ten miles home, parking outside my door.
    “Same time tomorrow morning?” I asked. “Back to London?”
    “Yerss.”
    “I’d be in trouble without you,” I said, climbing out with his help. He gave me a brief haunted glance and handed me the crutches. “You drive great,” I said.
    He was embarrassed, but also pleased. Nowhere near a smile, of course, but a definite twitch in the cheeks. He turned away, ducking my gaze, and set off doggedly toward his mother.
    I let myself into the house and regretted the embargo on a large scotch. Instead, with June’s lunchtime sandwich a distant memory, I refueled with sardines on toast and ice cream after, which more or less reflected my habitual laziness about cooking.
    Then, aligned with icepacks along the sofa, I telephoned to the man in Newmarket who trained Greville’s two racehorses.
    He picked up the receiver as if he’d been waiting for it to ring.
    “Yes?” he said. “What are they offering?”
    “I’ve no idea,” I said. “Is that Nicholas Loder?”
    “What? Who are you?” He was brusque and impatient, then took a second look at things and with more honey said, “I beg your pardon, I was expecting someone else. I’m Loder, yes, who am I talking to?”
    “Greville Franklin’s brother.”
    “Oh, yes?”
    It meant nothing to him immediately. I pictured him as I knew him, more by sight than face to face, a big light-haired man in his forties with enormous presence and self-esteem to match. Undoubtedly a good-to-great trainer, but in television interviews occasionally overbearing and condescending to the interviewer, as I’d heard he could be also to his owners. Greville kept his horses with him because the original horse he’d taken as a bad debt had been in that stable. Nicholas Loder had bought Greville all his subsequent horses and done notably well with them, and Greville had assured me that he got on well with the man by telephone, and that he was perfectly friendly.
    The last time I’d spoken to Greville myself on the telephone he’d been talking of buying another two-year-old, saying that Loder would get him one at the October sales, perhaps.
    I explained to Loder that Greville had died and after the first sympathetic exclamations of dismay he reacted as I would have expected, not as if missing a close friend but on a practical business level.
    “It won’t affect the running of his horses,” he said. “They’re owned in any case by the Saxony Franklin company, not by Greville himself. I can run the horses still in the company name. I have the company’s Authority to Act. There should be no problem.”
    “I’m afraid there may be,” I began.
    “No, no. Dozen Roses runs on Saturday at York. In with a great chance. I informed Greville of it only a few days ago. He always wanted to know when they were running, though he never went to see