Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

It was on the day after I went to Islay that I first met Billy. With Conker and Timmie, once they had bitten down their resentment at my pinching their promotion, I had arrived at a truce[72]. On trips they chatted exclusively to each other, not to me, but that was as usual my fault: and we had got as far as sharing things like sandwiches and chocolate – and the work – on a taken-for-granted level basis.

Billy at once indicated that with him it would be quite quite different. For Billy the class war existed as a bloody battlefield upon which he was the most active and tireless warrior alive. Within five seconds of our first meeting he was sharpening his claws.

It was at Cambridge Airport at five in the morning. We were to take two consignments of recently sold racehorses from Newmarket to Chantilly near Paris, and with all the loading and unloading at each end it would be a long day. Locking my car in the car park I was just thinking how quickly Conker and Timmie and I were getting to be able to do things when Yardman himself drove up alongside in a dark Jaguar Mark 10. There were two other men in the car, a large indistinct shape in the back, and in front, Billy.

Yardman stepped out of his car, yawned, stretched, looked up at the sky, and finally turned to me.

‘Good-morning my dear boy,’ he said with great affability. ‘A nice day for flying.’

‘Very,’ I agreed. I was surprised to see him: he was not given to early rising or to waving us bon voyage[73]. Simon Searle occasionally came if there were some difficulty with papers but not Yardman himself. Yet here he was with his black suit hanging loosely on his too thin frame and the cold early morning light making uncomplimentary shadows on his stretched coarsely pitted skin. The black-framed spectacles as always hid the expression in his deep-set eyes. After a month in his employ, seeing him at the wharf building two or three times a week on my visits for instructions, reports, and pay, I knew him no better than on that first afternoon. In their own way his defence barriers were as good as mine.

He told me between small shut-mouthed yawns that Timmie and Conker weren’t coming, they were due for a few days leave. He had brought two men who obligingly substituted on such occasions and he was sure I would do a good job with them instead. He had brought them, he explained, because public transport wasn’t geared to five o’clock rendezvous[74] at Cambridge Airport.

While he spoke the front passenger climbed out of his car.

‘Billy Watkins,’ Yardman said casually, nodding between us.

‘Good-morning, Lord Grey,’ Billy said. He was about nineteen, very slender, with round cold blue eyes.

‘Henry,’ I said automatically. The job was impossible on any other terms and these were in any case what I preferred.

Billy looked at me with eyes wide, blank, and insolent. He spaced his words, bit them out and hammered them down.

‘Good. Morning. Lord. Grey.’

‘Good-morning then, Mr Watkins.’

His eyes flickered sharply and went back to their wide stare. If he expected any placatory soft soaping from me[75], he could think again.

Yardman saw the instant antagonism and it annoyed him.

‘I warned you, Billy,’ he began swiftly, and then as quickly stopped. ‘You won’t, I am sure, my dear boy,’ he said to me gently, ‘allow any personal… er… clash of temperaments to interfere with the safe passage of your valuable cargo.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

He smiled, showing his greyish regular dentures back to the molars. I wondered idly why, if he could afford such a car, he didn’t invest in more natural-looking teeth. It would have improved his unprepossessing appearance one hundred per cent.

‘Right then,’ he said in brisk satisfaction. ‘Let’s get on.’

The third man levered himself laboriously out of the car. His trouble stemmed from a paunch which would have done a pregnant mother of twins proud. About him flapped a brown store-man’s overall which wouldn’t do up by six inches[76], and under that some bright red braces over a checked shirt did a load-bearing job on some plain dark trousers. He was about fift y, going bald, and looked tired, unshaven and sullen, and he did not then or at any time meet my eyes.

What a crew, I thought resignedly, looking from him to Billy and back. So much for a day of speed and efficiency. The fat man, in fact, proved to be even more useless than he looked, and treated the horses with the sort of roughness which is the product of fear. Yardman gave him the job of loading them from their own horseboxes up the long matting-covered side-walled ramp into the aircraft, while Billy and I inside fastened them into their stalls.