To the Hilt by Dick Francis Page B

week?”
    He sighed. “You do have a way of cutting down to the essentials.”
    “Will the bank cough up?”
    “They say not. Not a penny more.”
    “Do I have to go to them on my knees?”
    He said with compassion, “Yes.”
    It was by then Wednesday afternoon. Payroll day at the brewery, as in most business enterprises, was Friday. On the Tollright telephone I engaged the professional services of the lady negotiator and also made an appointment with the bank for the following morning.
    I asked Tobias how much was needed to keep the ship afloat until the creditors could set up the rescue operation—if they would—and he obligingly referred to King Alfred’s ledgers and told me a sum that made Ivan’s heart attack seem a reasonable response to the information.
    “You can only do your best,” Tobias observed, busy with a toothpick. “None of this is your fault. It appears you’ve just been dumped into it up to the hilt.”
    I didn’t know whether to wince or smile at the familiar phrase. Up to the hilt... In one particular way I’d been in jeopardy up to the hilt for the last five years. It had taken five years for the demons to arrive at my door.
    I said, “About that horse—Golden Malt, did you say?—why is there a doubt about who owns it?”
    Tobias frowned. “You’ll have to ask Sir Ivan. The horse isn’t listed as an actual asset of the brewery. There’s been no annual claim for depreciation, as if it were office equipment; but the brewery has paid the training fees and claimed them against tax as an advertising expense. As I said, you’ll need to sort it out.”
    For the next hour he tracked with me through the past year’s accounts, item by item. I could see, as he demonstrated, that but for the perfidy of the man in charge of the cash flow, the beer business would have fermented its yeast to its usual profitable heights.
    “The head brewer’s the best asset,” Tobias said. “Don’t lose him.”
    I said helplessly, “I know nothing about brewing beer.”
    “You don’t have to. You are the overall strategist. I’m simply advising you as an outsider... and I can tell you the brewery’s share of the market has risen perceptibly since they appointed this particular brewmaster.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You do look exhausted,” he said.
    “I was never that good at maths.”
    “You’re doing all right.”
    He produced papers for me to sign. I read them and did my best to understand, but trusted a lot to his good faith. As Ivan had trusted his Finance Director, no doubt.
    “Good luck with the bank tomorrow,” Tobias said, shuffling the papers together and sucking his toothpick. “Don’t let them mug you.”
    They wouldn’t be the first, I thought. “Will you come with me?”
    He shook his head. “It’s your job, not mine. I wish you good luck.”
    I said, “There’s one other thing...”
    “Yes?”
    “How do I get from here to Lambourn nowadays, without a car?”
    “Taxi.”
    “And without much money.”
    “Ah,” he said. “Same as ever. Bus to Newbury. Bus from there to Lambourn.” He obligingly dug out time-tables and amplified, “Bus from Newbury to Lamboum leaves at five forty-five.”
    “Thanks.”
    “What you need,” he said, “is the outpatients department of the Royal Berks Hospital.”
     
     
    I caught the bus instead. I even had time at Newbury to spend some of my mother’s cash on a new pair of jeans and to discard the old paint-stained denims in the bus station’s men’s room. In a fractionally more respectable mode, therefore, I arrived on a Lamboum doorstep that I would have been happier to avoid.
    My stepfather’s horses—and that included Golden Malt—and also my uncle Robert “Himself’s” horses, were trained at the racing town of Lamboum by a young woman, Emily Jane Cox.
    She said at the sight of me, “What the hell are you doing here?”
    “Slumming.”
    “I hate you, Alexander.”
    The problem was that she didn’t, any more than what