An hour later Grant was having lunch in the country; a grey and sodden country truly, but a country smelling of clean, fresh, growing things; and the drizzle that had made town a greasy horror was left behind. Grey, wet-looking torn clouds showed blue sky in great rifts, and by the time they had reached the paddock the pale unhappy pools in the rock-garden were smiling uncertainly at an uncertain sun. It was ten minutes before the first race, and both rings from Grant's point of view were impossible. He pushed down his impatience and accompanied Murray to the white rails of the parade ring, where the horses for the first race were walking sedately round, the looker-on in him loving their beauty and their fitness — Grant was a fairly competent judge of a horse — while his eyes wandered over the crowd in a businesslike commentary. There was Mollenstein — Stone, he called himself now — looking as if he owned the earth. Grant wondered what bogus scheme he was foisting on a public of suckers now. He shouldn't have thought that anything as uncomfortable as a jumping meeting in March would have appealed to him. Perhaps one of his suckers was interested in the game. And Vanda Morden, back from her third honeymoon and advertising the fact in a coat of a check so aggressive that it was the most obvious thing in the paddock. Wherever one looked, it seemed, there was Vanda Morden's coat. And the polo-playing earl who had been shadowed in the hope that he was the Levantine. And many others, both pleasant and unpleasant, all of whom Grant recognized and noted with a little mental remark.
When the first race was over, and the little eddy of lucky ones had surrounded the bookmakers and been sent gloating away, Grant began his work. He pursued his inquiries steadily until the ring began to fill again with eager inquirers after odds for the second race, when he returned to the paddock. But no one seemed to have heard of Sorrell, and it was a rather disconsolate Grant who joined Murray in the paddock before the fourth race — a handicap hurdle — in which Murray's horse was running. Murray was sympathetic, and as Grant stood with him in the middle of the parade ring he mixed adjurations to admire his horse with suggestions for the tracking of Sorrell. Grant wholeheartedly admired the magnificent bay that was Murray's property and listened with only half an ear to his suggestions. His thoughts were worried. Why did no one in the silver ring know Sorrell?
The jockeys began to filter into the ring, the crowd round the rail thinned slightly as people moved away to points of vantage on the stands, lads kept ducking eager heads under their charges' necks in anxiety to intercept the summons that would mean mounting time.
"Here comes Lacey," said Murray, as a jockey came stepping catlike over the wet grass to them. "Know him?"
"No," said Grant.
"Flat-race crack really, but has a go over hurdles occasionally. Crack at that too."
Grant had known that — there is very little between a Scotland Yard inspector and omniscience — but he had never actually met the famous Lacey. The jockey greeted Murray with a tight little smile, and Murray introduced the inspector without explaining him. Lacey shivered slightly in the damp air.
"I'm glad it's not fences," he said, with mock fervour. "I'd just hate to be emptied into the water today."
"Bit of a change from heated rooms and all the coddling," said Murray.
"Been in Switzerland?" asked Grant conversationally, remembering that Switzerland was the winter Mecca of flat-race jockeys.