To the Hilt

by Dick Francis

  The caterers, spread all around the extensive room, were packing away their equipment. I threaded a path through them, my mother following, and fetched up by Patsy’s side in time to hear Lois saying indignantly, “... of course I threw the box away. There were only a couple of tissues left in it, which I used. I gave Sir Ivan a fresh box, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Didn’t you check whether anything was written on the bottom of the box you threw away?”

  “Of course not,” Lois said scornfully. “Whoever looks on the bottom of empty tissue boxes?”

  “But you must have known my father wrote on the bottom of a tissue box all the time.”

  “Why should I know that?”

  “You kept moving his notepad onto the desk, out of his reach.”

  Patsy was right, of course, but predictably (like most legislation) she achieved the opposite result to that intended. Lois inflated her lungs and stuck out her considerable frontage, her hoity-toity level at boiling-over point.

  “Sir Ivan never complained,” she announced with self-righteousness, “and if you’re implying some stupid tissue box gave him a heart attack and that it’s my fault, I’ll ... I’ll ... I’ll ... I’ll consult my lawyer!”

  She tossed her head grandly. Everyone knew she didn’t have a lawyer. Even Patsy wasn’t fool enough to point it out.

  My mother, looking exhausted, said soothingly, “Of course it wasn’t your fault, Lois.” Turning to go, she stopped and said to me, “I think I’ll go up to my sitting room. Alexander, would you bring me some tea?”

  “Of course.”

  “Patsy ...” My mother hesitated. “Thank you, dear, for arranging everything so well. I couldn’t have done it. Ivan would have been so pleased.”

  She went slowly and desolately out of the kitchen and Patsy spoiled the moment by giving me the grim glare of habit.

  “Go on, say it,” she said. “You could have done it better.”

  “No, I couldn’t. It was a brilliantly managed funeral, and she’s right, Ivan would have been proud.” I meant it sincerely, which she didn’t believe.

  She said bitterly over her shoulder, stalking away, “I can do without your sarcasm,” and Edna, touching my arm, said kindly, “You go on up, I’ll make Lady Westering’s tea.”

  Lois, in unspent pique, slammed a few pots together to make a noise. She had been Patsy’s appointee and, I guessed, Patsy’s informant as to my comings and goings in that house, but she was discovering, as everyone did in the end, that Patsy’s beauty and charm were questionable pointers to her core nature.

  I followed her up the stairs to where my mother was bidding goodbye on the doorstep to Oliver Grantchester and, after him, to Patsy, Surtees and Xenia.

  A taxi cruised past slowly on the road outside. Chris Young didn’t look our way out of the window, but I saw his profile clearly. I wouldn’t have known how to begin to follow Surtees, but when Chris was trying he seldom lost him. Since the dustup in Emily’s stable, Surtees hadn’t often left home without a tail.

  I went up to my mother’s sitting room, where she soon joined me, followed by Edna with the tea. When Edna had gone I poured the hot liquid and squeezed lemon slices and handed the tea as she liked it to a woman who looked frail and spent and unable to answer questions.

  She told me what I wanted to know, however, without my asking.

  “You’re bursting to know if I saw what Ivan wrote on that terrible tissue box. Do you really think he was frantic to find it? I can’t bear it, Alexander. I would have looked for the box, if he’d told me. But we’d kissed goodnight ... he didn’t say anything then about the box.

  I’m certain it wasn’t in his mind. He’d been so much better ... calmer ... saying he relied on your strength ... We were truly happy that evening ...”

  “Yes.”

  “Connie Hall didn’t say anything about Ivan being in the street, not until today.”

  “She would have caused you pain if she had.”

  She drank the tea and said slowly, reluctantly, “What was written on the tissue box ... I wrote it.”

  “My dearest Ma ...”

  “I don’t remember what it was. I haven’t given it a thought. I wish I’d known ...”

  The cup rattled in its saucer. I took them from her and kneeled beside her.

  “I wish he was here, ” she said.

  I waited through the inconsolable bout of grief. I knew, after four days, that it would sweep through her like a physical disturbance, making her tremble, and then would subside back into a general state of misery.

  “Someone telephoned—it was a woman,” she said, “and she wanted to speak to Ivan, and he was in the bathroom or something, and I said he would phone her back, and you know how there was never a notepad beside the phone, so I wrote what she said on the back of the box, like Ivan does, and I told him ... but ...” She stopped, trying to remember, and shook her head. “I didn’t think it was important.”

  “It probably wasn’t,” I said.

  “But if he went down to the street to find it ...”

  “Well ... when did the woman phone? What time of day?”

  She thought. “She phoned in the morning, when Ivan was dressing. He did phone her back, but she was out, I think. There was no reply.”

  “And Lois was cleaning?”

  “Yes. She always comes on Saturday mornings, just to tidy up.” She drank her tea, thinking. “All I wrote on the box was her phone number.”

  “And you don’t know who she was?”

  She frowned. “I remember that she wouldn’t say.” A few moments passed, then she exclaimed, “She said it was something to do with Leicestershire.”

  “Leicestershire?”

  “I think so.”

  Leicestershire to me at that time meant Norman Quorn, and anything to do with Norman Quorn would have caught Ivan’s attention.

  I said slowly, “Do you think it could possibly have been Norman Quorn’s sister, that we met in Leicestershire, at that mortuary?”

  “That poor woman! She wouldn’t stop crying.”

  She had just seen something pretty frightful, I thought. Enough to make me feel sick. “Could it have been her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you by any chance remember her name?”

  My mother looked blank. “No, I don’t.”

  I couldn’t remember having heard it at all, though I suppose I must have been told. Perhaps, I speculated, it had been only when he was going to bed that Ivan remembered that he hadn’t phoned back again to Norman Quorn’s sister, and had then discovered that he had lost her phone number, and had gone to look for the box ... and had thought of something to make him frantic.

  How could I find Norman Quorn’s sister if I didn’t know her name ... ?

  I phoned the brewery.

  Total blank. No one even seemed to know he had had a sister at all.

  Who else?

  Via directory inquiries (because yet another tissue box was long gone) I asked for Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds. Off duty. impossible to be given his home number. Try in the morning.

  I sought out and telephoned the mortuary. All they could or would tell me was the name of the mortician to whom they had released the body of Norman Quorn. I phoned the mortician, asking who had arranged cremation and paid the bills. Sir Ivan Westering, I was told, had written them a single check to cover all expenses.

  How like him, I thought.

  chapter 12

  I reached Chief Inspector Reynolds in the morning. He hummed and hahhed and told me to phone him back in ten minutes, and when I did he told me the answers.

  Norman Quom’s sister was a Mrs. Audrey Newton, widow, living at 4 Minton Terrace, in the village of Bloxham, Oxfordshire. Telephone number supplied.

  I thanked him wholeheartedly. Let him know, he said, if I found anything he should add to his files.

  “Like, where did Norman Quorn die?” I asked.

  “Exactly like that.”
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br />   I promised.

  Using the portable phone, as I had for all the calls I’d made from the Park Crescent house, I tried Mrs. Audrey Newton’s number and found her at home. She agreed that yes, nearly a week ago she had tried to talk to Sir Ivan Westering, but he hadn’t called back, and she would have quite understood if he didn’t want to talk to her, but he’d been ever so kind in paying for the cremation, and she’d thought things over, and since her brother couldn’t get into any more trouble, poor man, she had decided to give Sir Ivan something Norman had left with her.

  “What thing?” I asked.

  “A paper, really. A list. Very short. But Norman thought it important.”

  I cleared my throat, trying to disregard sudden breathlessness, and asked if she would give the list to me instead.

  After a pause she said, “I’ll give it to Lady Westering. Ever so kind, she was, that day I had to identify Norman.”

  Her voice shook at the memory.

  I said I would bring Lady Westering to her house, and please could she tell me how to find it.

  My mother disliked the project.

  “Please, ” I said. “And the drive will do you good.”

  I drove her northwest out of London in Ivan’s car and came to a large village, almost a small town, not far from the big bustling spread of modem Banbury, where no fair lady would be allowed anywhere near the Cross on a white horse, bells on her toes notwithstanding.

  Minton Terrace proved to be a row of very small cottages with thatched roofs, and at No. 4 the front door was opened by the rounded woman we’d met at the mortuary.

  She invited us in. She was nervous. She had set out sherry glasses and a plate of small cakes on round white crocheted mats which smelled of cedar, for deterring moths.

  Audrey Newton, plain and honest, was ashamed of the brother she had spent years admiring. It took a great deal of sherry drinking and cake eating to bring her, not just to give the list to my mother, but to explain how and why Norman had given it to her.

  “I was over in Wantage, staying with him for a few days. I did that sometimes, there was only the two of us, you see. He never married, of course. Anyway, he was going away on holiday, he always liked to go alone, and he was going that day, and I was going to catch a bus to start on my way home.”

  She paused to see if we understood. We nodded.

  “He was going to go in a taxi to Didcot railway station, but someone, I think from the brewery, came to collect him first. We happened to be both standing by the window on the upstairs landing when the car drew up at the gate.” She frowned. “Norman wasn’t pleased. It’s extraordinary, but looking back I might almost say he was frightened, though at the time it didn’t occur to me. I mean, the brewery was his life. ”

  And his death, I thought.

  “Norman said he’d better go,” she went on, “but all of a sudden he took an envelope out of the inner pocket of his jacket—and I saw his passport there because he was going to Spain for his holiday, as he usually did—and he pushed the envelope into my hands and told me to keep it for him until he sent for it ... and of course he never sent for it. And it wasn’t until I was clearing out his house after the cremation that I remembered the envelope and wondered what was in it, so I opened it when I got home here and found this little list, and I wondered ... if it had anything to do with the brewery

  ... if I should give it to Sir Ivan, as he had been so good to me, paying for everything he didn’t need to, considering Norman stole all that money, which I can hardly believe, even now.”

  I sorted my way through the flood of words.

  I said, “You brought the envelope home with you—”

  “That’s right,” she interrupted. “Norman told me to take his taxi, which he’d ordered, when it came, and he gave me the money for it to take me all the way home—such a treat—he was so generous ... and I would never get him into trouble if he was alive.”

  “We do know that, Mrs. Newton,” I said. “So you only opened the envelope one day last week ... ?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And you phoned Sir Ivan ...”

  “But I didn’t get him.”

  “And you still have the list.”

  “Yes.” She crossed to a sideboard and took an envelope out of a drawer. “I do hope I’m doing right,” she said, handing the envelope to my mother. “The brewery man telephoned only about an hour ago asking if Norman had left anything with me, and I said only a small list, nothing important, but he said he would send someone over for it early this afternoon.”

  I looked at my watch. It was then twelve o’clock, noon.

  I asked my mother, “Did you tell anyone we were coming here?”

  “Only Lois.” She was puzzled by the question. “I said we were going to see a lady in Bloxham and wouldn’t be needing lunch.”

  I looked at her and at Audrey Newton. Neither woman had the slightest understanding of the possible consequences of what they had just said.

  I turned to Mrs. Newton. “The brewery told me they didn’t know your name. They said they didn’t know Norman Quorn had a sister.”

  She said, surprised, “But of course I’m known there. Norman sometimes used to take me to the Directors’ parties. Ever so proud, he was, of being made Director of Finance.”

  “Who was it at the brewery who phoned you today?”

  “Desmond Finch.” She made a face. “I’ve never liked him much. But he definitely knows me, even if no one else does.”

  I took the envelope from my mother and removed the paper from inside, which was, as Audrey Newton had said, a short list. There were two sections, one of six lines, each line a series of numbers, and another, also of six lines, each line either a personal or corporate name. I put the list back into the envelope and held it loosely.

  A silence passed, which seemed long to me, in which I did some very rapid thinking.

  I said to Audrey Newton, “I think it would be a marvelous idea if you would go away for a lovely long weekend at the seaside.” And I said to my mother, “And it would be a marvelous idea if you would go with Mrs. Newton, and get away just for a few days from the sadness of Park Crescent.”

  My mother looked astonished. “I don’t want to go,” she said.

  “I so seldom ask anything,” I said. “I wouldn’t ask this if it were not important.” To Audrey Newton I said, “I’ll pay for you to go to a super hotel if you would go upstairs now and pack what you would need for a few days.”

  “But it’s so sudden,” she objected.

  “Yes, but spur-of-the-moment treats are often the best, don’t you think?”

  She responded almost girlishly, and with an air of growing excitement, went upstairs out of earshot.

  My mother said, “What on earth is all this about?”

  “Keeping you safe,” I said flatly. “Just do it, Ma.”

  “I haven’t any clothes!”

  “Buy some.”

  “You’re truly eccentric, Alexander.”

  “Just as well,” I said.

  I picked up my mobile phone and pressed the numbers of the pager Chris carried always, and spoke the message, “This is Al, phone me at once.”

  We waited barely thirty seconds before my mobile buzzed. “It’s Chris.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Outside Surtees’s house.”

  “Is he home?”

  “I saw him five minutes ago, wandering around, looking at his horses.”

  “Good. Can Young and Uttley do a chauffeur and nice-car job?”

  “No problem.”

  “Chauffeur’s hat. Comfortable car for three ladies.”

  “When and where?”

  “Like five minutes ago. Leave Surtees’s, get the chauffeur to Emily Cox’s stable in Lambourn. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Urgent?”

  “Ultra urgent.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  My mother fluttered her hands. “What is ultra urgent ?”
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  “Have you by any chance got a safety pin?”

  She looked at me wildly.

  “Have you? You always used to have, in a baby sewing kit.”

  She dug into her purse and produced the credit card-sized traveling sewing kit that she carried for emergencies from lifelong habit, and speechlessly she opened it and gave me the small safety pin it contained.

  I was as usual wearing a shirt under a sweater. I put the Quorn envelope in my shirt pocket, pinned it to the shirt to prevent its falling out and pulled my sweater down over it.

  “And paper,” I said. “Have you anything I could draw on?”

  She had a letter from a friend. I took the envelope, opened it out flat, and on its clean inside, with my mother’s ballpoint pen, had time to make nine small outline drawings of familiar people—Desmond Finch, Patsy, Surtees, Tobias included—before Audrey Newton came happily downstairs in holiday mood carrying a suitcase.

  I showed her the page of small heads. “The person who came to pick up your brother on the first day of his holiday ... was it one of these?”

  She looked carefully and, as if the request were nothing out of the ordinary, pointed firmly. “That one,” she said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Let’s get going,” I said.

  Audrey Newton having locked her house, we drove away and headed for Lambourn.

  “Why Lambourn?” my mother asked.

  “I want to talk to Emily.”

  “What’s wrong with a telephone?”

  “Insects,” I said. “Bugs.”

  Friday lunchtime. If Emily had gone to the races it would have complicated things a little, but she was at home, in her office, busy at paperwork with her secretary.

  Nothing I did surprised her anymore, she said. She agreed easily to my making lunch and pouring wine for her unexpected guests but adamantly refused to join them in any flight from Egypt. She was not, she pointed out, Moses.

  I persuaded her to go as far as her drawing room and there explained the explosive dangers of the present situation.

  “You’re exaggerating,” she objected.

  “Well, I hope so.”

  “And anyway, I’m not afraid.”

  “But I am,” I said.

  She stared.