Rat Race

Rat Race

by Dick Francis
Rat Race

Rat Race

by Dick Francis

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Overview

Dick Francis, the bestselling master of mystery and suspense, takes you into the thrilling world of horse racing.

Hired to fly four racing buffs to the track, pilot Matt Shore expects it will be the kind of job he likes: quick and easy. That is until he’s forced to make an emergency landing just minutes before the plane explodes.

Luckily nobody is hurt, but it isn’t long before Matt realizes that he’s caught up in a rat race among violent criminals, who are dead set on putting anyone who stands in their way on the wrong side of the odds.

Praise for Dick Francis

‘Dick Francis is a wonder' Cleveland Plain Dealer

‘Few things are more convincing than Dick Francis at a full gallop' Chicago Tribune

‘For more than thirty years, Dick Francis has been mystery’s Gibraltar, a sturdy rock in stormy straits. Nobody executes the whodunit formula better’ Chicago Sun-Times

'A rare and magical talent … who never writes the same story twice’ San Diego Union-Tribune


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781788634854
Publisher: Canelo
Publication date: 11/04/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 292
Sales rank: 37,305
File size: 480 KB

About the Author

About The Author

Dick Francis is widely acclaimed as one of the world's finest thriller writers. His awards include the Crime Writers' Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to the crime genre, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Tufts University of Boston. In 1996 Dick Francis was made a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master for a lifetime's achievement and in 2000 he received a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Hometown:

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, British West Indies

Date of Birth:

October 31, 1920

Date of Death:

February 14, 2010

Place of Birth:

Tenby, Pembrokeshire, southwest Wales

Place of Death:

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, British West Indies

Education:

Dropped out of Maidenhead County School at age 15.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

I picked four of them up at White Waltham in the new Cherokee Six 300 that never got a chance to grow old. The pale blue upholstery still had a new leather smell and there wasn't a scratch on the glossy white fuselage. A nice little airplane, while it lasted.

They had ordered me for noon but they were already in the bar when I landed at eleven-forty. Three double whiskies and a lemonade.

Identification was easy: several chairs around a small table were draped with four lightweight raincoats, three binocular cases, two copies of Sporting Life and one lightweight racing saddle. The four passengers were standing nearby in the sort of spread-about group indicative of people thrown together by business rather than natural friendship. They were not talking to each other, though it looked as though they had been. One, a large man, had a face full of anger. The smallest, evidently a jockey, was flushed and rigid. Two others, an elderly man and a middle-aged woman, were steadfastly staring at nothing in particular in the way that meant a lot of furious activity was going on inside their heads.

I walked toward them across the large lounge-reception room and spoke to an indeterminate spot in midair.

"Major Tyderman?"

The elderly man who said "Yes?" had been made a major a good long time ago. Nearer seventy than sixty; but still with a tough little body, wiry little mustache, sharp little eyes. He had thin salt-and-pepper hair brushed sideways across a balding crown and he carried his head stiffly, with his chin tucked back into his neck. Tense: very tense. And wary, looking at the world with suspicion.

He wore a lightweight speckled fawn suit vaguely reminiscent in cut of his military origins, and, unlike the others, had not parked his binoculars but wore them with the strap diagonally across his chest and the case facing forward on his stomach, like a sporran. Club badges of metal and colored cardboard hung in thick clusters at each side.

"Your airplane is here, Major," I said. "I'm Matt Shore ... I'm flying you."

He glanced over my shoulder, looking for someone else.

"Where's Larry?" he asked abruptly.

"He left," I said. "He got a job in Turkey."

The Major's gaze came back from the search with a click. "You're new," he said accusingly.

"Yes," I agreed.

"I hope you know the way."

He meant it seriously. I said politely, "I'll do my best."

The second of the passengers, the woman on the Major's left, said flatly, "The last time I flew to the races, the pilot got lost."

I looked at her, giving her my best approximation to a confidence-boosting smile. "The weather's good enough today not to have any fear of it."

It wasn't true. There were cu-nims forecast for the June afternoon. And anyone can get lost anytime if enough goes wrong. The woman on the left of Major Tyderman gave me a disillusioned stare and I stopped wasting my confidence builder. She didn't need it. She had all the confidence in the world. She was fifty and fragile-looking, with graying hair cut in a straight-across fringe and a jaw-length bob. There were two mild brown eyes under heavy dark eyebrows and a mouth that looked gentle; yet she held herself and behaved with the easy authority of a much higher command than the Major's. She was the only one of the group not outwardly ruffled.

The Major had been looking at his watch. "You're early," he said. "We've got time for the other half." He turned to the barman and ordered refills, and as an afterthought said to me, "Something for you?"

I shook my head. "No, thank you."

The woman said indifferently, "No alcohol for eight hours before a flight. Isn't that the rule?"

"More or less," I agreed.

The third passenger, the large angry-looking man, morosely watched the barman push the measure up twice on the Johnnie Walker. "Eight hours. Good God," he said. He looked as if eight hours seldom passed for him without topping up. The bulbous nose, the purple thread veins on his cheeks, the swelling paunch – they had all cost a lot in excise duty.

The atmosphere I had walked into slowly subsided. The jockey sipped his low-calorie lemonade, and the bright pink flush faded from his cheekbones and came out in fainter mottles on his neck. He seemed about twenty-one or two, reddish-haired, with a naturally small frame and a moist-looking skin. Few weight problems, I thought. No dehydration. Fortunate for him.

The Major and his large friend drank rapidly, muttered unintelligibly, and removed themselves to the Gents. The woman eyed the jockey and said in a voice which sounded more friendly than her comment, "Are you out of your mind, Kenny Bayst? If you go on antagonizing Major Tyderman, you'll be looking for another job."

The jockey flicked his eyes to me and away again, compressing his rosebud mouth. He put the half-finished lemonade on the table and picked up one of the raincoats and the racing saddle.

"Which plane?" he said to me. "I'll stow my gear."

He had a strong Australian accent with a resentful bite to it. The woman watched him with what would have passed for a smile but for the frost in her eyes.

"The baggage door is locked," I said. "I'll come over with you." To the woman I said, "Can I carry your coat?"

"Thank you." She indicated the coat which was obviously hers, a shiny rust-colored affair with copper buttons. I picked it up, and also the businesslike binoculars lying on top, and followed the jockey out of the door.

After ten fuming paces, he said explosively, "It's too damn easy to blame the man on top."

"They always blame the pilot," I said mildly. "Fact of life."

"Huh?" he said. "Oh, yeah. Too right. They do."

We reached the end of the path and started across the grass. He was still oozing grudge. I wasn't much interested.

"For the record," I said, "what are the names of my other passengers? Besides the Major, that is."

He turned his head in surprise. "Don't you know her? Our Annie Villars? Looks like someone's cozy old granny and has a tongue that would flay a kangaroo. Everyone knows our little Annie." His tone was sour and disillusioned.

"I don't know much about racing," I said.

"Oh? Well, she's a trainer, then. A damned good trainer, I'll say that for her. I wouldn't stay with her else. Not with that tongue of hers. I'll tell you, sport, she can roust her stable lads out on the gallops in words a sergeant major never thought of. But sweet as milk with the owners. Has them eating out of her little hand."

"The horses, too?"

"Uh? Oh, yeah. The horses love her. She can ride like a jock, too, when she's a mind to. Not that she does it much now. She must be getting on a bit. Still, she knows what she's at, true enough. She knows what a horse can do and what it can't, and that's most of the battle in this game."

His voice held resentment and admiration in roughly equal amounts.

I said, "What is the name of the other man? The big one."

This time it was pure resentment: no admiration. He spat the name out syllable by deliberate syllable, curling his lips away from his teeth.

"Mr. Eric Goldenberg."

Having got rid of the name, he shut his mouth tight and was clearly taking his employer's remarks to heart. We reached the aircraft and stowed the coats and his saddle in the baggage space behind the rear seats.

"We're going to Newbury first, aren't we?" he asked. "To pick up Colin Ross?"

"Yes."

He gave me a sardonic look. "Well, you must have heard of Colin Ross."

"I guess," I said, "that I have."

It would have been difficult not to, since the champion jockey was twice as popular as the Prime Minister and earned six times as much. His face appeared on half the billboards in Britain encouraging the populace to drink more milk, and his sharp wits convulsed the headlines at least once a month. There was even a picture strip about him in a children's comic. Everyone, but everyone, had heard of Colin Ross.

Kenny Bayst climbed in through the rear-end door and sat in one of the two rear seats. I took a quick look round the outside of the aircraft, even though I'd done a thorough preflight check on it not an hour before, when I left base. It was my first week, my fourth day, my third flight for Derrydowns Sky Taxis, and after the way fate had clobbered me in the past, I was taking no chances.

There were no nuts loose, no rivets missing on the sharp-nosed little six-seater. There were eight quarts of oil where there should have been eight quarts of oil, there were no dead birds clogging up the air intakes to the engine, there were no punctures in the tires, no cracks in the green or red glass over navigation lights, no chips in the propeller blades, no loose radio aerials. The pale blue cowling over the engine was securely clipped down, and the matching pale blue cowling over the struts and wheels of the fixed undercarriage were as solid as rocks.

By the time I'd finished, the other three passengers were coming across the grass. Goldenberg was doing the talking with steam still coming out of his ears, while the Major nodded agreement in unhappy little jerks and Annie Villars looked as if she wasn't listening. When they arrived within earshot, Goldenberg was saying " ... can't lay the horse unless we're sure he'll pull it —" But he stopped short when the Major gestured sharply in my direction. He need hardly have bothered. I had no curiosity about their affairs.

On the principle that in a light aircraft it is better to have the center of gravity as far forward as possible, I asked Goldenberg to sit in front in the right-hand seat beside me, and put the Major and Annie Villars in the center two seats, and left Kenny in one of the last two, with the empty one ready for Colin Ross. The four rear seats were reached by the portside door, but Goldenberg had to climb in by stepping up on the low wing on the starboard side and lowering himself into his seat through the forward door. He waited while I got in before him and moved over to my side, then squeezed his bulk in through the door and settled heavily into his seat.

They were all old hands at air taxis: they had their safety belts fastened before I did mine, and when I looked round to check that they were ready to go, the Major was already deep in Sporting Life. Kenny Bayst was cleaning his nails with fierce little jabs, relieving his frustration by hurting himself.

I got clearance from the tower and lifted the little airplane away for the twenty-mile hop across Berkshire. Taxi flying was a lot different from the airlines, and finding racecourses looked more difficult to me than being radar-vectored into Heathrow. I'd never before flown a racecourse trip, and I'd asked my predecessor Larry about it that morning when he'd come into the office to collect his cards.

"Newbury's a cinch," he said offhandedly. "Just point its nose at that vast runway the Yanks built at Greenham Common. You can practically see it from Scotland. The racecourse is just north of it, and the landing strip is parallel with the white rails of the finishing straight. You can't miss it. Good long strip. No problems. As for Haydock, it's just where the M6 motorway crosses the East Lancs road. Piece of cake."

He took himself off to Turkey, stopping on one foot at the doorway for some parting advice. "You'll have to practice short landings before you go to Bath; and avoid Yarmouth in a heat wave. It's all yours now, mate, and the best of British Luck."

It was true that you could see Greenham Common from a long way off, but on a fine day it would anyway have been difficult to lose the way from White Waltham to Newbury: the main railway line to Exeter ran more or less straight from one to the other. My passengers had all flown into Newbury before, and the Major helpfully told me to look out for the electric cables strung across the approach. We landed respectably on the newly mown grass and taxied along the strip toward the grandstand end, braking to a stop just before the boundary fence.

Colin Ross wasn't there.

I shut down the engine, and in the sudden silence Annie Villars remarked, "He's bound to be late. He said he was riding work for Bob Smith, and Bob's never on time getting his horses out."

The other three nodded vaguely, but they were still not on ordinarily chatty terms with one another, and after about five minutes of heavy silence I asked Goldenberg to let me out to stretch my legs. He grunted and mumbled at having to climb out onto the wing to let me past him, and I gathered I was breaking Derrydowns' Number 1 rule: never annoy the customers; you're going to need them again.

Once I was out of their company, however, they did start talking. I walked round to the front of the aircraft and leaned against the leading edge of the wing, and looked up at the scattered clouds in the blue-gray sky and thought unprofitably about this and that. Behind me their voices rose acrimoniously, and when they opened the door wide to get some air, scraps of what they were saying floated across.

"... simply asking for a dope test." Annie Villars.

"... if you can't ride a losing race better than last time ... find someone else." Goldenberg.

"... very difficult position ..." Major Tyderman.

A short sharp snap from Kenny, and Annie Villars' exasperated exclamation. "Bayst!"

"... not paying you more than last time." The Major, very emphatically.

Indistinct protest from Kenny, and a violently clear reaction from Goldenberg: "Bugger your license."

Kenny, my lad, I thought remotely, if you don't watch out you'll end up like me, still with a license but with not much else.

A Ford-of-all-work rolled down the road past the grandstands, came through the gate in the boundary fence, and bounced over the turf toward the aircraft. It stopped about twenty feet away, and two men climbed out. The larger, who had been driving, went round to the back and pulled out a brown canvas-and-leather overnight grip. The smaller one walked on over the grass. I took my weight off the wing and stood up. He stopped a few paces away, waiting for the larger man to catch up. He was dressed in faded blue jeans and a whitish cotton sweat shirt with navy-blue edgings. Black canvas shoes on his narrow feet. He had nondescript brownish hair over an exceptionally broad forehead, a short straight nose, and a delicate feminine-looking chin. All his bones were fine and his waist and hips would have been the despair of Victorian maidens. Yet there was something unmistakably masculine about him: and more than that, he was mature. He looked at me with the small still smile behind the eyes which is the hallmark of those who know what life is really about. His soul was old. He was twenty-six.

"Good morning," I said.

He held out his hand, and I shook it. His clasp was cool, firm, and brief.

"No Larry?" he inquired.

"He's left. I'm Matt Shore."

"Fine," he said noncommittally. He didn't introduce himself. He knew there was no need. I wondered what it was like to be in that position. It hadn't affected Colin Ross. He had none of the "I am" aura which often clings around the notably successful, and from the extreme understatement of his clothes I gathered that he avoided it consciously.

"We're late, I'm afraid," he said. "Have to bend the throttle."

"Do my best. ..."

The larger man arrived with the grip, and I stowed it in the forward luggage locker between the engine wall and the forward bulkhead of the cabin. By the time the baggage door was securely fastened, Colin Ross had found his empty seat and strapped himself into it. Goldenberg, with heavy grunts, moved out again so that I could get back to my left-hand place. The larger man, who was apparently the dilatory trainer Bob Smith, said his hellos and goodbyes to the passengers, and stood watching afterward while I started the engine and taxied back to the other end of the strip to turn into wind for takeoff.

The flight north was uneventful: I went up the easy way under the Amber 1 airway, navigating on the radio beacons at Daventry, Lichfield, and Oldham. Manchester control routed us right round the north of their zone, so that I had to drop down southward toward Haydock racecourse, and there it was, just as Larry had said, near the interchange of the two giant roads. We touched down on the grass strip indicated in the center of the course, and I taxied on and parked where the Major told me to, near the rails of the track itself, a mere hundred yards from the grandstand.

The passengers disembarked themselves and their belongings and Colin Ross looked at his watch. A faint smile hovered and was gone. He made no comment. He said merely, "Are you coming in to the races?"

I shook my head. "Think I'll stay over here."

"I'll arrange with the man on the gate to let you into the paddock, if you change your mind."

"Thanks," I said in surprise. "Thanks very much."

He nodded briefly and set off without waiting for the others, ducking under the white-painted rails and trudging across the track.

"Pilots' perks," Kenny said, taking his raincoat from my hand and putting his arm forward for the saddle. "You want to take advantage."

"Maybe I will," I said, but I didn't mean to. Horse racing began and ended with the Derby as far as I was concerned, and also I was a non-gambler by nature.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Rat Race"
by .
Copyright © 1974 Dick Francis.
Excerpted by permission of Canelo Digital Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“THE BEST THRILLER WRITER GOING.”—The Atlantic Monthly

“FRANCIS IS A GENIUS.”—Los Angeles Times

“[THE] MASTER OF CRIME FICTION AND EQUINE THRILLS.”—Newsday

“DICK FRANCIS IS A WONDER.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“FEW THINGS ARE MORE CONVINCING THAN DICK FRANCIS AT A FULL GALLOP.”—Chicago Tribune

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