To the Hilt

by Dick Francis

  “I’ll take it,” Grantchester said authoritatively, but Ivan put the envelope on his knees and folded his hands on it, and shook his head.

  “I’ll keep it here, Oliver,” he said.

  “But ...”

  “Then I can tear it up if I change my mind.”

  I smiled into Ivan’s troubled eyes and without weight said I would be upstairs for an hour or two more if he wanted me.

  “He doesn’t want you,” Surtees said spitefully. “None of us do.”

  I shrugged and left them and, shaking my head to my mother’s pleading eyes, went back upstairs, looking out of the window and waiting.

  They went on shouting, downstairs, but finally the angry voices came out of Ivan’s study and descended to street level and left by the front door. When all was quiet I went out of my room and onto the stairs, and found Ivan on the landing below me, looking up. He made a gesture towards his study, a flip of the hand that was unmistakably an invitation, so I went down and followed him into his room, and sat opposite him in my usual chair.

  My mother, looking as frail as her husband, stood beside Ivan, touching him as if to give him strength.

  He said to me, “Did you mean it, that you’ve had enough?”

  For answer I asked, “Did you cancel the powers of attorney?”

  “I ... I don’t know what to do.”

  “No, he didn’t,” my mother said. “Ivan, tell Alexander... beg Alexander to go on acting for you.” To me she said, “Don’t leave us.”

  I had so recently vowed I would do anything on earth for my mother. So small a thing, to stay and field a few insults. I wilted inside from disinclination.

  “What did you mean about being beaten?” Ivan said.

  “That black eye I had last week ...”

  He frowned. “Keith Robbiston said you were hurt.”

  I told them about the robbers. “I didn’t want to worry you when you were so ill ... so I didn’t tell you.”

  “Oh my God,” he said, “I’ve done so much harm.”

  “Nothing that isn’t being put right.”

  I poured brandy into two glasses standing ready on a nearby silver tray and handed one to Ivan, one to my mother. They both drank without protest, as if I’d given them medicine.

  I said to Ivan, “If you just leave things as they are, the brewery should be out of debt in three years. I know some of the terms are hard. They have to be. The debts are truly enormous. Mrs. Morden has done a marvelous job, but she says the future depends greatly on keeping the services of your present brewmaster and on the managing energies of Desmond Finch. Desmond Finch wouldn’t take a diamond-studded suggestion from me, but he’s used to following your instructions, so that’s what you have to do, Ivan. Go back to the brewery and instruct him.”

  My stepfather nodded with resolution. And how long, I morosely considered, would that resolution last?

  The telephone rang. Ivan’s hand asked me to answer it, so I did.

  A confident voice said, “This is Detective Constable Thompson of the Leicestershire police. I want to speak to Sir Ivan Westering.”

  Ivan of course wanted me to deal with whatever it was. I explained that Sir Ivan was recovering from a heart attack, and offered my services.

  “And you are, sir?”

  “His son.” Well, near enough.

  After a pause a different voice, just as confident, identified himself as Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds.

  “What is this about?” I asked.

  The voice inquired whether Sir Ivan knew anyone named Norman Quorn.

  “Yes, he does.”

  The voice impersonally explained. I listened blankly. The Leicestershire police had for two weeks been trying to identify a body that they now had reason to believe was that of a Mr. Norman Quorn. The Chief Inspector wanted Sir Ivan Westering, as Mr. Quorn’s long-term employer, to assist in making a positive identification, yes or no.

  With shortened breath, I said, “Doesn’t he have any relations?”

  “Only his sister, sir, and she is ... distressed. The body is partly decomposed. The sister gave us Sir Ivan’s name. So we would be grateful, sir ...”

  “He isn’t well,” I said.

  “Perhaps you, then ...”

  “I didn’t know him.” I thought briefly. “I’ll tell my father. Give me a number to phone you back.” He told me a number, which I wrote out of habit on the bottom of a box of tissues. “Right,” I said, “five minutes.”

  As unemotionally as possible I gave Ivan the news.

  “Norman!” he said disbelievingly. “Dead?”

  “They want to know for sure. They ask you to go.”

  “I’ll go with you,” my mother said.

  I phoned the Chief Inspector, told him I would be driving, and wrote his directions on the bottom of the tissue box.

  In the end four of us went to Leicestershire in Ivan’s Rover (retrieved from an underground garage), Ivan and my mother in the back with Wilfred sitting in the front beside me, a box of heart-attack remedies on his lap. Wilfred read out the directions on the tissue box so that fairly early in the afternoon we arrived at a featureless building in Leicester that housed a mortuary and investigating laboratories.

  The detective chief inspector met us, shook hands with Ivan and my mother and me and was impressed into solicitude by Wilfred’s presence and medical precautions. Ivan, though in suit and tie, looked almost grayer than in his robe.

  Inside the building, in a small reception area that doubled as waiting room, a large weeping woman was being comforted in the arms of an equally large uniformed policewoman. The Chief Inspector indicated that we should wait there while he took Ivan to see the body, but Ivan clutched my arm and wouldn’t go without me, so, shrugging, the senior policeman settled for taking me, too.

  We were all then issued disposable gowns, with gloves, overshoes and masks for our noses and mouths. Dead bodies, it seemed, could infect the living.

  I hadn’t been in such a place before, but it was curiously familiar from pictures. We went down a passage into a white-painted room that was clean, brightly lit, not very large and smelled not unpleasantly of disinfectant. On a high center table, under a white cover, lay a long quiet shape.

  Ivan’s hand shook on my arm but civic duty won the day. He looked steadily at the white face revealed when a gowned and masked mortuary attendant pulled back one end of the covering sheet, and he said without wavering, “Yes, that’s Norman.”

  “Norman Quorn?”

  “Yes, Chief Inspector. Norman Quorn.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I said, “What did he die of?”

  There was a pause. The policeman and the mortuary attendant exchanged eyebrow signals that I hadn’t the code to read, and the policeman also looked assessingly at Ivan’s physical state, and at mine, and came to a decision.

  “I’ll take you back to your wife, sir,” he said to Ivan, and offered his arm instead of mine, neatly leaving me behind alone to hear the answer to my question.

  The mortuary attendant first of all identified himself as the pathologist who had carried out the original postmortem.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be.” He casually pulled down his mask, revealing a young face, competent.

  “So ... what did he die of?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure.” He shrugged. “There are no obvious causes of death. No gunshots, no stab wounds, no fractures of the skull, no signs of strangulation, no household poisons. No evidence of murder. He had been dead about two weeks when he was discovered. He didn’t die where he was found, which was in a rubbish dump. I saw him in situ. He had been placed there after death.”

  “Well ...” I frowned. “Was he simply ill? Heart attack? Stroke? Pneumonia?”

  “More likely one of the first two, though we can’t know for sure. But there is an abnormality ...” He hesitated. “We showed it to his sister, and she fainted.”

  “I’m not his sister.�
�

  “No.”

  He stripped back the sheet as far as the body’s waist, showing the dark discolorations of decomposition and the efforts made to tidy up the radical postmortem incisions. I thought it no wonder the sister had fainted, and hoped I wouldn’t copy her.

  “Look at his back,” the pathologist instructed, and with his gloved hands gripped the shoulders and half rolled the body towards him.

  There were about a dozen or more rows of darker marks in the darkened flesh, and flecks of white.

  The pathologist eased the body flat again.

  “Those white bits—did you see them?—are his ribs.”

  I felt nauseous, and swallowed.

  The pathologist said, “Those darker marks are burns.”

  “Burns?”

  “Yes. The skin and flesh have been burned away in a few places down to the ribs. He must have fallen into something very hot when he died. Something like a grating. People fall on electric fires in that way. Terrible burns, sometimes. This is like that. Any thoughts?”

  My chief thought was how soon I could leave the mortuary.

  “He was wearing a nylon shirt,” the pathologist said chattily, “and there were man-made fibers in the lining and cloth of his suit jacket. They melted to some extent into his skin.”

  In another minute, I thought, I would vomit.

  I said, “Could he have died from the burns?”

  “I don’t think so. As you saw, the burns extended only from below his shoulder blades to his waist. Severe local burns, but not lethal, I don’t think. It’s most likely they occurred just after death, or anyway at about the same time. I would guess he had a stroke, fell unconscious on the fire and died.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway,” the pathologist said with satisfaction, “now that we have a positive identification we can have an inquest. The coroner’s verdict will be ‘cause of death unknown’ and the poor man can have a decent burial. I’ll be glad to get him out of here, to be honest.”

  I left him with relief and, stripping off the protective clothing, rejoined the group in the entrance area.

  “Please tell us,” I said to the Chief Inspector, “where exactly you found Mr. Quorn.”

  Instead of directly answering he explained that the still-quietly weeping woman was Norman Quorn’s sister. My mother had taken over from the policewoman the role of comforter although, true to form, she looked as if she would prefer saying, “Pull yourself together” to “There, there.”

  “Mr. Quorn,” the Chief Inspector told us conversationally, “was found by council workers who went to clear away a decaying rubbish dump left behind on a farmer’s land when a band of travelers moved on. We made lengthy inquiries among the travelers at their next place, but drew a total blank. We spent a great deal of time on it. The travelers pointed out that they were all much younger—we had told them the unknown body was elderly ...”

  “Sixty-five,” the sister sobbed.

  “On the other hand, these travelers were accustomed to cook on homemade barbecues of brick supports with metal rods across, and there were signs that perhaps Mr. Quom had overbalanced backwards onto something like that. None of their new barbecues matched Mr. Quorn’s burns, but it was all inconclusive. There are absolutely no indications at all of foul play. So now that we have your identifications, we can close the case. I’m sorry, but it isn’t always possible to determine how things happened, and unless any other facts turn up ...”

  He left the sentence unfinished. Neither Ivan nor my mother told him that the brewery’s funds had vanished with the Finance Director, and nor did I. Ivan would have to think it through, and decide.

  Because of Wilfred’s presence we were silent on the way back to London, but spent the evening discussing nothing else.

  Ivan was inclined to be glad that Norman Quorn hadn’t after all run off with the money.

  “We misjudged him,” he said sorrowfully. “My dear old friend ...”

  “Your dear old friend,” I corrected regretfully, “certainly did transfer the money out of the brewery. I’ve seen copies of about six huge withdrawals that he made just before he left. He did indeed, I’m afraid, send all the funds on their way to destinations still unknown.”

  “But he didn’t go!”

  “No. He died. He didn’t die on the rubbish tip. Someone put him there. Wherever he died, someone didn’t report it to anyone, but just dumped him.”

  Ivan’s beliefs and intentions swung widely to and fro, but his chief instinct, as before, was not to make public the brewery’s loss. Norman Quorn dead, Norman Quorn living under palm trees ... it made no difference. The theft existed and either way would be covered up.

  I said, “But don’t you care who dumped him? Don’t you want to know where he died?”

  “What does it really matter? And as Norman was homosexual—” Ivan saw my surprise. “Didn’t you know? No, I suppose you didn’t, he was always discreet ... But, you see, suppose he died where it was awkward for someone... do you see what I mean?”

  I saw.

  “And it wouldn’t do Norman or the brewery any good to disclose his sexual preference or, oh dear, his theft.”

  It was astounding, I thought, to find my starchy stepfather so tolerant of homosexuality, but my mother, who after all knew him better, took it for granted. “Quite a lot of Ivan’s friends,” she told me later, “were ‘that way.’ Delightful friends,” she added. “Good company always.”

  Ivan asked me, “If we tell the police that Norman stole the funds and was homosexual, would it affect the creditors’ arrangements?”

  “Well ... I don’t know. The creditors do know he stole the funds. They signed the agreements knowing that.”

  “Well, then?”

  “But they believe he skipped the country. They believe he’s alive. They believe the money is with him ... and it isn’t.”

  “So?”

  “So where is it?”

  A long silence.

  By ten in the evening Ivan was saying we needed someone else’s advice.

  “OK,” I agreed. “Whose?”

  “Perhaps ... Oliver’s?”

  I said mildly, “Oliver would ask you what I, Alexander, suggested, and then give you an opposite opinion.”

  “But he knows the law!”

  I had been careful always not to belittle Patsy to her father. Oliver was Patsy’s man. So was Desmond Finch.

  I asked, “What did Patsy think of Norman Quorn?”

  “She didn’t like him. Always a sadness. Why do you want to know?”

  “What would she expect you to do?”

  Ivan dithered.

  By midnight he had decided, in his law-abiding Jockey Club persona, that I should ask Margaret Morden whether Norman Quorn’s death made any difference to the creditors, and that I, not Ivan, should tell Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds that the now-identified corpse had been probably an embezzler about to leave the country.

  “Probably?” I echoed with skepticism.

  “We don’t know for sure.”

  I thought he would have changed his mind again by morning, but it seemed my sensible mother had fortified his decision, as she agreed with it; so at nine o’clock Ivan, again in robe and slippers, instructed me to phone Leicestershire.

  Slight snag. The policeman’s phone number was written on the tissue box. The tissue box was still in the car. I trailed off to retrieve it and finally reached the necessary ear.

  “Tell me on the phone,” he commanded when I suggested meeting.

  “Better face-to-face.”

  “I’m off duty at noon.”

  “I’ll get there. Where?”

  “Do you remember the way to the mortuary? There then. It’s on my way home.”

  I refrained—just—from observing that the mortuary was on everyone’s way home, and managed to trace Margaret Morden to hers.

  “It’s Saturday,” she said tartly.

  “I do know.”

  “Then
it had better be important.”

  “The King Alfred Brewery’s Finance Director has turned up, still in England, but dead.”

  “I agree,” she said slowly, “that that is Saturday news. How did he die?”

  “Stroke or heart attack, the pathologist thinks.”

  “When?”

  “About the time he disappeared.”

  She thought briefly and said, “Phone me in the office on Monday. And tell Tobias. But if what’s bothering you most is the status of the creditors’ agreements, my first impression is that they will stand.”

  “You’re a doll.”

  “No, I’m definitely not.”

  I put down the receiver with a smile and drove to Leicester.

  The Chief Inspector’s reaction was as expected. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

  “The brewery has hushed up the theft.”

  “The body,” he said reflectively, “was dressed in suit, shirt, tie, underpants, socks and shoes, all unremarkable. There was nothing in his pockets.”

  “How did you identify him in the end?”

  “One of our clever young constables took another look at the clothes. The shoes were new—on the sole of one was the name of a shop and the price. The shop was in Wantage, Oxfordshire, and they remembered the sale... Mr. Quorn was a regular customer. He was away from home, but a neighbor had the sister’s address.”

  “Neat.”

  “But what he was doing in Leicestershire ...” He shrugged. “It’s possible he died out of doors, in a garden. There were a few blades of mown grass in his clothes. That would jell with him falling back onto a barbecue of some sort.”

  “Hardly the right clothes for a barbecue.”

  He looked me up and down in amusement. “While you, sir, if I may say so, look more like a traveler.”

  I acknowledged it in good humor.

  “I’ll complete my case notes with what you’ve told me,” the policeman said. “It isn’t by any means unknown for people to get rid of bodies when they’ve died inconveniently. I appreciate your help. Give my regards to Sir Ivan. He looks so ill himself.”

  It was by then three and a half weeks since Ivan’s heart attack (and four weeks and a day since Quorn had skipped with the cash), and what Ivan still badly needed and wasn’t getting was complete untroubled rest. I drove back to London and for the remainder of that day and all of the next kept the house tranquil with the telephone switched into an answering machine and with simple meals, cooked by me, that needed no decisions. I gave Wilfred the rest of the weekend off and did his jobs: it was all peaceful and curative and its own reward.