Free Come to Grief by Dick Francis

sake.”
    I added, smiling, “How many horses do you train for nothing?”
    “That’s different.”
    “How many races would you have asked me to ride for nothing?”
    “Oh, all right, then. I’ll pay your damned fee. The fact is, I think I’m being had, and I want you to find out.”
    It seemed he had received a glowing testimonial from the present employer of a chauffeur/houseman/handyman who’d applied for a job he’d advertised. He wanted to know if it was worth bringing the man up for an interview.
    “She,” he said, “his employer is a woman. I phoned her when I got the letter, to check the reference, you see. She couldn’t have been more complimentary about the man if she’d tried, but ... I don’t know ... She was too complimentary, if you see what I mean.”
    “You mean you think she might be glad to see the back of him?”
    “You don’t hang about, Sid. That’s exactly what I mean.”
    He gave me the testimonial letter of fluorescent praise.
    “No problem,” I said, reading it. “One day’s fee, plus travel expenses. I’ll phone you, then send you a written report.”
    “You still look like a jockey,” he complained. “You’re a damned sight more expensive on your feet.”
    I smiled, put the letter away in a pocket, drank his scotch and applauded the string of winners he’d had recently, cheering him up before separating him from his cash.
    I drifted around pleasurably but unprofitably for the rest of the day, slept thankfully without nightmares and found on a dry and sunny Derby Day morning that my friendly Pump reporter had really done his stuff.
    “Lock up your colts,” he directed in the paper. “You’ve heard of foot fetishists? This is one beyond belief.”
    He outlined in succinct paragraphs the similarities in “the affair of the four severed fetlocks” and pointed out that on that very night after the Derby—the biggest race of all—there would be moonlight enough at three A.M. for flashlights to be unnecessary. All two-year-old colts should, like Cinderella, be safe indoors by midnight. “And if ...,” he finished with a flourish, “... you should spy anyone creeping through the fields armed with a machete, phone ex-jockey turned gumshoe Sid Halley, who provided the information gathered here and can be reached via The Pump‘ s special hotline. Phone The Pump! Save the colts! Halley to the rescue!”
    I couldn’t imagine how he had got that last bit—including a telephone number—past any editor, but I needn’t have worried about spreading the message on the racecourse. No one spoke to me about anything else all afternoon.
     
    I phoned The Pump myself and reached someone eventually who told me that Kevin Mills had gone to a train crash; sorry.
    “Damn,” I said. “So how are you rerouting calls about colts to me? I didn’t arrange this. How will it work?”
    “Hold on.”
    I held on. A different voice came back.
    “As Kevin isn’t available, we’re rerouting all Halley hotline calls to this number,” he said, and he read out my own Pont Square number.
    “Where’s your bloody Mills? I’ll wring his neck.”
    “Gone to the train crash. Before he left he gave us this number for reaching you. He said you would want to know at once about any colts.”
    That was true enough—but hell’s bloody bells, I thought, I could have set it up better if he’d warned me.
    I watched the Derby with inattention. An outsider won.
    Ellis teased me about the piece in The Pump.
    “Hotline Halley,” he said, laughing and clapping me on the shoulder, tall and deeply friendly and wiping out in a flash the incredulous doubts I’d been having about him. “It’s an extraordinary coincidence, Sid, but I actually saw one of those colts. Alive, of course. I was staying with some chums from York, and after we’d gone home someone vandalized their colt. Such fun people. They didn’t deserve anything like that.”
    “No one does.”
    “True.”
    “The really puzzling thing