Risk

By Dick Francis

“The thrills, the terror, come on a mile-a-minute. . . . A particularly ingenious . . . novel of suspense” from a New York Times–bestselling author (Publishers Weekly).
 
Dick Francis, Edgar Award–winning master of mystery and suspense, takes you into the thrilling world of horse racing.

When he wakes in a pitch black room with his hands bound, Roland Britten, accountant and champion steeplechase jockey, knows he’s entered a nightmare of someone else’s making. Wracking his brain to figure out who is out to get him and why, he comes up empty, but somehow manages a death defying escape.
 
It isn’t long though before he’s recaptured. Now, with his life at stake, he must take every risk to outsmart his well disguised enemy and save himself.
 
Praise for the writing of Dick Francis:
 
“Dick Francis is a wonder.” —The Plain Dealer

“Few things are more convincing than Dick Francis at a full gallop.” —Chicago Tribune

“Few match Francis for dangerous flights of fancy and pure inventive menace.” —Boston Herald

“[The] master of crime fiction and equine thrills.” —Newsday

“[Francis] has the uncanny ability to turn out simply plotted yet charmingly addictive mysteries.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Francis is a genius.” —Los Angeles Times

“Nobody executes the whodunit formula better.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“A rare and magical talent . . . who never writes the same story twice.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788634915

Book preview

To the memory of

LIONEL VICK

first a professional steeplechase jockey,

then a certified accountant;

always a brave man.

And my thanks to his associate,

MICHAEL FOOTE

Chapter 1

Thursday, March 17, I spent the morning in anxiety, the afternoon in ecstasy, and the evening unconscious. Thursday night, somewhere between dark and dawn, I slowly surfaced into a nightmare which might have been all right if I’d been asleep.

It took me a good long time to realize I was actually awake. Half awake, anyway.

There was no light. I thought my eyes were open, but the blackness was absolute.

There was a lot of noise. Different noises, loud and confusing. A heavy engine. Rattling noises. Creaks. Rushing noises. I lay in a muzzy state and felt battered by too much sound.

Lay… I was lying on some sort of mattress. On my back. Cold, sick, and stiff. Aching. Shivering. Physically wretched and mentally bewildered.

I tried to move. Couldn’t for some reason lift either hand to my face. They seemed to be stuck to my legs. Very odd.

An interminable time passed. I grew colder, sicker, stiffer, and wide awake.

Tried to sit up. Banged my head on something close above. Lay down again, fought a sudden spurt of panic, and made myself take it step by step.

Hands. Why couldn’t I move my hands? Because my wrists seemed to be fastened to my trousers. It didn’t make sense, but that was what it felt like.

Space. What of space? I stiffly moved my freezing feet, exploring. Found I had no shoes on. Only socks. On the immediate left, a wall. Close above, a ceiling. On the immediate right, a softer barrier. Possibly cloth.

I shifted my whole body a fraction to the right, and felt with my fingers. Not cloth, but netting. Like a tennis net. Pulled tight. Keeping me in. I pushed my fingers through the mesh, but could feel nothing at all on the far side.

Eyes. If I hadn’t gone suddenly blind (and it didn’t feel like it), I was lying somewhere where no light penetrated. Brilliant deduction. Most constructive. Ha bloody ha.

Ears. Almost the worse problem. Constant din assaulted them, shutting me close in the narrow black box, preventing my hearing any further than the powerful, nearby, racketing engine. I had a frightening feeling that even if I screamed no one would hear me. I had a sudden even more frightening feeling of wanting to scream. To make someone come. To make someone tell me where I was, and why I was there, and what on earth was happening.

I opened my mouth and yelled.

I yelled Hey and Come here and Bloody bastard, come and let me out, and thrashed about in useless rage, and all that happened was that my voice and fear bounced back in the confined space and made things worse. Chain reaction. One-way trip to exhaustion.

In the end I stopped shouting and lay still. Swallowed. Ground my teeth. Tried to force my mind into holding on to sense. Disorientation was the road to gibbering.

Concentrate, I told myself. Think.

That engine…

A big one. Doing a job of work. Situated somewhere close, but not where I was. The other side of a wall. Perhaps behind my head.

If it would only stop, I thought numbly, I would feel less sick, less pulverized, less panicky, less threatened.

The engine went right on hammering, its vibration reaching me through the walls. Not a turbine engine: not smooth enough, and no whine. A piston engine. Heavy-duty, like a tractor… or a lorry. But I wasn’t in a lorry. There was no feeling of movement; and the engine never altered its rate. No slowing or accelerating. No changes of gear. Not a lorry.

A generator. It’s a generator, I thought. Making electricity.

I was lying tied up in the dark and on a sort of shelf near an electric generator. Cold, sick, and frightened. And where?

As to how I’d got there… well, I knew that, up to a point. I remembered the beginning well enough, I would never forget Thursday, March 17.

The most shattering questions were those to which I could think of no answer at all.

Why? What for? And… what next?

Chapter 2

That Thursday morning a client with his life in ruins kept me in the office in Newbury long after I should have left for Cheltenham races, and it seemed churlish to say, Yes, Mr. Wells, terribly sorry about your agony, but I can’t stop to help you now because I want to nip off and enjoy myself. Mr. Wells, staring-eyed and suicidal, simply had to be hauled in from his quicksand.

It took three and a half hours of analysis, sympathy, brandy, discussion of ways and means, and general pep talk to restore the slightest hope to his horizon, and I wasn’t his doctor, priest, solicitor, or other assorted handholder, but only the accountant he’d engaged in a frenzy the night before.

Mr. Wells had bitten the dust in the hands of a crooked financial adviser. Mr. Wells, frantic, desperate, had heard that Roland Britten, although young, had done other salvage jobs. Mr. Wells on the telephone had offered double fees, tears, and lifelong gratitude as inducements; and Mr. Wells was a confounded nuisance.

For the first and probably the only time in my life I was that day going to ride in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the race which ranked next to the Grand National in the lives of British steeplechase riders. No matter that the tipsters gave my mount little chance or the bookies were offering ante-post odds of forty to one, the fact remained that for a part-time amateur like myself the offer of a ride in the Gold Cup was as high as one could go.

Thanks to Mr. Wells I did not leave the office calmly and early after a quick shuffle through the day’s mail. Not until a quarter to one did I begin to unstick his leechlike dependence and get him moving, and only then by promising another long session on the following Monday. Halfway through the door, he froze yet again. Was I sure we had covered every angle? Couldn’t I give him the afternoon? Monday, I said firmly. Wasn’t there anyone else he could see, then?

Sorry, I said. My senior partner is away on holiday.

Mr. King? he asked, pointing to the neat notice King and Britten painted on the open door.

I nodded, reflecting gloomily that my senior partner, if he hadn’t been touring somewhere in Spain, would have been most insistent that I get off to Cheltenham in good time. Trevor King, big, silver-haired, authoritative, and worldly, had my priorities right.

We had worked together for six years, ever since he’d enticed me, from the city offices where I’d been trained, with the one inducement I couldn’t refuse: flexible working hours which allowed time to go racing. He already had five or six clients from the racing world, Newbury being central for many of the racing stables strung out along the Berkshire Downs, and, needing a replacement for a departing assistant, he’d reckoned that if he engaged me he might acquire a good deal more business in that direction. Not that he’d ever actually said so, because he was not a man to use two words where one would do; but his open satisfaction as his plan had gradually worked made it obvious.

All he had apparently done toward checking my ability as an accountant, as opposed to amateur jockey, was to ask my former employers if they would offer me a substantial raise in salary in order to keep me. They said yes, and did so. Trevor, it seemed, had smiled like a gentle shark, and gone away. His subsequent offer to me had been for a full partnership and lots of racing time; the partnership would cost me ten thousand pounds and I could pay it to him over several years out of my earnings. What did I think?

I’d thought it might turn out just fine; and it had.

In some ways I knew Trevor no better than on that first day. Our real relationship began and ended at the office door, social contact outside being confined to one formal dinner party each year, to which I was invited by letter by his wife. His house was opulent: building and contents circa 1920s, with heavy plate glass cut to fit the top surfaces of polished furniture, and an elaborate bar built into the room he called his snug. Friends tended to be top management types or county councillors, worthy substantial citizens like Trevor himself.

On the professional level, I knew him well. Orthodox establishment outlook, sober and traditional. Patriarchal, but not pompous. Giving the sort of gilt-edged advice that still appeared sound even if in hindsight it turned out not to be.

Something punitive about him, perhaps. He seemed to me sometimes to get a positive pleasure from detailing the extent of a client’s tax liabilities, and watching the client droop.

Precise in mind and method, discreetly ambitious, pleased to be a noted local personage, and at his charming best with rich old ladies. His favorite clients were prosperous companies; his least favorite, incompetent individuals with their affairs in a mess.

I finally got rid of the incompetent Mr. Wells and took my tensions down to the office car park. It was sixty miles from Newbury to Cheltenham and on the way I chewed my fingernails through two lots of roadworks and an army convoy, knowing also that near the course the crawling racegoing jams would mean half an hour for the last mile. There had been enough said already about the risks of putting up an amateur (however good, some kind columnist had written) against the top brass of the professionals on the country’s best horses in the most important race of the season’s most prestigious meeting. The best thing Roland Britten can do is to keep Tapestry out of everyone else’s way was the offering of a less kind writer, and although I more or less agreed with him, I hadn’t meant to do it by not arriving on time. Of all possible unprofessional behavior, that would be the worst.

Lateness was the last and currently the most acute of a whole list of pressures. I had been riding as an amateur in jump races since my sixteenth birthday, but was now, with thirty-two in sight, finding it increasingly difficult to keep fit. Age and desk work were nibbling away at a stamina I’d always taken for granted: it now needed a lot of effort to do what I’d once done without thought. The hour and a half I spent early every morning riding exercise for a local trainer were no longer enough. Recently, in a couple of tight finishes, I’d felt the strength draining like bath water from my creaking muscles, and had lost at least one race because of it. I couldn’t swear to myself that I was tuned up tight for the Gold Cup.

Work in the office had multiplied to the point where doing it properly was a problem in itself. Half days off for racing had begun to feel like treachery. Saturdays were fine, but impatient clients viewed Wednesdays at Ascot or Thursday at Stratford-upon-Avon with irritation. That I worked at home in the evenings to make up for it satisfied Trevor, but no one else. And my caseload, as jargon would put it, was swamping me.

Apart from Mr. Wells, there had been other jobs I should have done that morning. I should have sent an appeal against a top jockey’s tax assessment; I should have signed a certificate for a solicitor; and there had been two summonses for clients to appear before the Tax Commissioners, which needed instant action, even if only evasive.

I’ll apply for postponements, I told Peter, one of our two assistants. Ring both those clients, and tell them not to worry, I’ll start on their cases at once. And check that we’ve all the papers we need. Ask them to send any that are missing.

Peter nodded sullenly, unwillingly, implying that I was always giving him too much work. And maybe I was.

Trevor’s plans to take on another assistant had so far been halted by an offer which was currently giving both of us headaches. A big London firm wanted to move in on us, merge, amalgamate, and establish a large branch of itself on our patch, with us inside. Materially, we would benefit, as at present the steeply rising cost of overheads like office rent, electricity, and secretarial wages was coming straight out of our own pockets. We would also be under less stress, as at present when one of us was ill or on holiday, the burden on the other was heavy. But Trevor agonized over the prospect of demotion from absolute boss, and I over the threat of loss of liberty. We had postponed a decision until Trevor’s return from Spain in two weeks’ time, but at that point bleak realities would have to be faced.

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel of my Dolomite and waited impatiently for the roadworks traffic lights to turn green. Looked at my watch for the hundredth time. Come on, I said aloud. "Come on." Binny Tomkins would be absolutely furious.

Binny, Tapestry’s trainer, didn’t want me on the horse. Not in the Gold Cup, he’d said positively, when the owner had proposed it. They’d faced each other belligerently outside the weighing room of Newbury racecourse, where Tapestry had just obliged in the three mile ’chase: Mrs. Moira Longerman, small, blond and birdlike, versus sixteen stone of frustrated male.

"…Just because he’s your accountant, Binny was saying in exasperation when I rejoined them after weighing-in. It’s bloody ridiculous."

Well, he won today, didn’t he? she said.

Binny threw his arms wide, breathing heavily. Mrs. Longerman had offered me the Newbury ride on the spur of the moment when the stable jockey had broken his ankle in a fall in the previous race. Binny had accepted me as a temporary arrangement with fair grace, but Tapestry was the best horse in his yard, and for a middle-ranker like him a runner in the Gold Cup was an event. He wanted the best professional jockey he could get. He did not want Mrs. Longerman’s accountant, who rode in thirty races in a year, if he was lucky. Mrs. Longerman, however, had murmured something about removing Tapestry to a more accommodating trainer, and I had not been unselfish enough to decline the offer, and Binny had fumed in vain.

Mrs. Longerman’s previous accountant had for years let her pay to the Inland Revenue a lot more tax than she’d needed, and I’d got her a refund of thousands. It wasn’t the best grounds for choosing a jockey to ride for you in the Gold Cup, but I understood she was thanking me by giving me something beyond price. I quite passionately did not want to let her down; and that, too, was a pressure.

I was worried about making a reasonable show, but not about falling. When one worried about falling, it was time to stop racing; it would happen to me one day, I supposed, but it hadn’t yet. I worried about being unfit, unwanted, and late. Enough to be going on with.

Binny was spluttering like a lit fuse when I finally arrived, panting, in the weighing room.

Where the hell have you been? he demanded. Do you realize the first race is over already and in another five minutes you’d be fined for not turning up?

Sorry.

I carried my saddle, helmet, and bag of gear through into the changing room, sat down thankfully on the bench, and tried to stop sweating. The usual bustle went on around me: jockeys dressing, undressing, swearing, laughing, accepting me from long acquaintance as a part of the scenery. I did the accounts for thirty-two jockeys and had unofficially filled in tax assessment forms for a dozen more. I was also to date employed as accountant by thirty-one trainers, fifteen stud farms, two Stewards of the Jockey Club, one racecourse, thirteen bookmakers, two horse-transport firms, one blacksmith, five forage merchants, and upwards of forty people who owned race horses. I probably knew more about the private financial affairs of the racing world than any other single person on the racecourse.

---

In the parade ring Moira Longerman twittered with happy nerves, her button nose showing kittenishly just above a fluffy upstanding sable collar. Below the collar she snuggled into a coat to match, and on the blond curls floated a fluffy sable hat. Her middle-aged blue eyes brimmed with excitement, and in the straightforward gaiety of her manner one could see why it was that so many thousands of people spent their hobby money on owning race horses. Not just for the gambling, nor the display: more likely for the kick from extra adrenaline, and the feeling of being involved. She knew well enough that the fun could turn to disappointment, to tears. The lurking valleys made the mountaintops more precious.

"Doesn’t Tapestry look marvelous?" she said, her small gloved hands fluttering in the horse’s direction as he plodded round the ring under the gaze of the ten-deep banks of intent spectators.

Great, I said truthfully.

Binny scowled at the cold sunny sky. He had produced the horse with a gloss seldom achieved by his other runners: impeccably plaited mane and tail, oiled hoofs, a new rug, gleamingly polished leather tack, and an intricate geometric pattern brushed into the well-groomed hairs of the hindquarters. Binny was busy telling the world that if his horse failed it would not be from lack of preparation. Binny was going to use me forevermore as his reason for not having won the Gold Cup.

I can’t say that it disturbed me very much. Like Moira Longerman, I was feeling the throat-catching once-in-a-lifetime thrill of a profound experience waiting just ahead. Disaster might follow, but whatever happened, I would have had my ride in the Gold Cup.

There were eight runners, including Tapestry. We mounted, walked out onto the course, paraded in front of the packed and noisy stands, cantered down to the start. I could feel myself trembling, and knew it was stupid. Only a cool head could produce a worthy result. Tell that to the adrenal glands.

I could pretend, anyway. Stifle the butterfly nerves and act as if races of this caliber came my way six times a season. None of the other seven riders looked anxious or strung up, yet I guessed that some of them must be. Even for the top pros, this was an occasion. I reckoned that their placid expressions were nearly as phony as mine, and felt better.

We advanced to the tapes in a bouncing line, restraining the eager heads on short reins, and keeping the weight still back in the saddle. Then the starter pressed his lever and let the tapes fly up, and Tapestry took a great bite of air and practically yanked my arms out of their sockets.

Most three-and-a-quarter-mile ’chases started moderately, speeded up a mile from home, and maybe finished in a decelerating procession. The Gold Cup field that day set off as if to cover the whole distance in record Derby time, and Moira Longerman told me later that Binny used words she’d never heard before when I failed to keep Tapestry close in touch.

By the time we’d swept over the first two fences, by the stands, I was last by a good six lengths, a gap not much in itself but still an I-told-you-so sort of distance so early in the proceedings. I couldn’t in fact make up my mind. Should I go faster? Stick closer to the tails in front? Tapestry had set off at a greater speed already than when he’d won with me at Newbury. If I let him zip along with the others he could be exhausted and tailed off at halfway. If I held him up, we might at least finish the race.

Over the third fence and over the water I saw the gap lengthening and still dithered about tactics. I hadn’t expected the others to go off so fast. I didn’t know if they hoped to maintain that speed throughout, or whether they would slow and come back to me later. I couldn’t decide which was more likely.

But what would Binny say if I guessed wrong and was last the whole way? What wouldn’t he say?

What was I doing in this race, out of my class?

Making an utter fool of myself.

Oh, God, I thought, why did I try it?

Accountants are held to be cautious by nature, but at that point I threw caution to the winds. Almost anything would be better than starting last and staying last. Prudence would get me nowhere. I gave Tapestry a kick which he didn’t expect and he shot forward like an arrow.

Steady, I gasped. Steady, dammit.

Shorten the gap, I thought, but not too fast. Spurt too fast and I’d use the reserves we’d need for the last stretch uphill. If we ever got there. If I didn’t fall off. If I didn’t let Tapestry meet a fence wrong, or run out, or refuse to jump at

Reviews for Risk

[northern_light-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

this is the first Dick Francis book I've read and I was surprised that I enjoyed it so much. I don't really know much about horse-racing but that wasn't a problem at all as its not needed to follow the plot.

After winning a prestigious race the jockey finds himself abducted but cannot work out why. Is it related to his horse-racing or his job as an accountant. Some of the scenes are somewhat contrived but overall a good read

[themulhern · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A poor outing by Dick Francis. The beginning is really well written but the plot is preposterous and the final situation a bit of a clone of Francis' first, Dead Cert.

[docwalt10 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Dick Francis is one of my favorite authors. I always enjoy his books. Good character development.

[tzelman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Accountant/jockey as hero this time. Abductions and escapes only unsatisfying in that the baddies get off rather lightly.