Dick Francis's Damage

by Felix Francis

  I was going to follow someone who knew what I looked like so I needed to change my appearance. A pair of thick-rimmed glasses completed the disguise.

  “What’s in the bag?” Lydia had asked as I’d placed it on the backseat.

  “Camera with telephoto lens and night vision equipment,” I’d replied. “Just in case.”

  “And what about your sling?” she had asked disapprovingly.

  “I’ll do without it. My shoulder is not so sore today, and wearing a sling would be far too memorable. I’ve got lots of painkillers.” I had tapped my pant pocket.

  I stopped the car on the tree-lined suburban street, with its multimillion-pound mansions set back away from the road, mostly hidden behind high hedges or fences, electronic wrought-iron security gates shut tight across their driveways.

  “Why are we here so early?” Lydia asked.

  “First, to ensure we get here before the target goes out. And, second, because today is garbage pickup day in these parts.”

  “Garbage pickup day?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Look.” I pointed at the line of wheeled garbage cans standing outside the houses, all of them placed outside the gates. “The council website states that the cans have to be outside before seven a.m. I correctly assumed that people would put them out the night before.”

  “But what about them?” Lydia asked.

  “Watch,” I said.

  I got out of the car, being careful not to slam the door shut, lifted two black garbage bags out of the car trunk and walked straight across to the can standing outside the target’s house.

  I lifted the lid, removed the bags from within and replaced them with those I had brought from home full of our own trash. I then calmly walked back and placed the target’s trash in the trunk.

  “What was that for?” Lydia asked when I’d got back in the car.

  “I want to find out about our target’s life and rummaging through his garbage may reveal more than just what he had for dinner last night. We should have at least an hour before there’s any movement from within.”

  I drove the few miles to the Cobham freeway service area. Even at this early hour, the freeway was busy, with lines of heavy-goods vehicles trying to beat the traffic before the usual morning rush. However, the service area’s parking lot was sparsely occupied, with only about twenty cars, all of them parked close to the buildings. I opted for an empty space some distance away from any other vehicle, one conveniently situated right beneath one of the high-powered floodlights that lit up the area almost like daylight.

  I donned a pair of latex gloves, laid out a waterproof sheet in the car trunk and then emptied the target’s garbage bags onto it.

  One at a time, I picked up each item and returned it to one of the bags.

  “What are you looking for in particular?” Lydia asked as she stood and watched me, shivering slightly in the cool of the April morning.

  “I not really sure,” I said vaguely, “but I’ll know if I find it.”

  There were all sorts of things, including plastic food wrappers, several soup cartons, used Kleenex, about a dozen eye makeup–removal pads, some potato peelings, wet coffee grounds, an old toothbrush, a broken lightbulb and some rather smelly fish skins.

  The recycle police would have had a field day, as there were also three empty Coca-Cola cans, an instant coffee jar, numerous glossy magazines and various other papers that all should have been sent for recycling rather than for landfill.

  There were, however, among the mass of true rubbish, a couple of items of great interest to me.

  One was an empty plastic bubble strip of the drug Ritalin. Methylphenidate hydrochloride was clearly printed on its underside.

  The second was a letter from a major bookmaking firm.

  I nearly missed it, as the letter had been ripped into small pieces, and I noticed the torn-off top corner only because of the bookmaker’s distinctive red logo printed on it. I dug around among the other detritus until I had the majority of the letter, albeit in about fifteen separate bits, some of them rather badly stained with coffee.

  As I found the pieces, Lydia laid them out on the backseat of the car like a jigsaw puzzle.

  Although some of the letter was missing, the two central paragraphs were easily readable.

  Thank you for the recent payment into your account, which has gone some way towards clearing the outstanding debt. Under normal circumstances, we would be unable to accept such a large payment in cash, but, in this instance, we are prepared to make an exception in order to reduce the substantial balance of the account.

  However, we should make it clear that this recent payment is in no way an end of the matter. The rest of the debt remains overdue, and, unless we receive a similar further sum before the end of this current month, we will have no option but to seek alternative methods to recover the unpaid amount.

  I wondered what the “alternative methods” might be.

  All gambling used to be considered as a simple wager between friends, freely offered and accepted, viewed by the law as a “gentleman’s agreement” or as a “debt of honor,” and hence any debts accruing were unenforceable by a court.

  “Alternative methods,” then, would often involve large men with baseball bats turning up on one’s doorstep and demanding to be paid or else.

  However, since the passing of the 2005 Gambling Act, a bet made with a licensed bookmaker was now deemed to be a binding contract and any debt arising from it could therefore be recovered by legal means, although the baseball bats were still usually quicker and cheaper in the long run.

  I looked again at the fragments of the letter.

  Was the recent payment, made in cash, a result of the hundred thousand pounds thrown from the train?

  There was nothing else of any significance to be found, but what I had was enough to confirm my suspicions. I was now certain we had the right man.

  I kept the pieces of the letter and the Ritalin bubble strip but returned the rest of the trash to the bags, which I then placed in a dumpster situated behind the service area’s hamburger outlet, while Lydia went in to buy some protein bars to dispel her hunger pains.

  “We’d better get moving,” I said to Lydia. “I don’t want the target to leave home before we get back.”

  34

  We were back on the road at Weybridge by a quarter to six, by which time the sky in the east was lightening with the coming of the day.

  It certainly wasn’t the best place to sit and watch.

  I would have preferred a nice urban street with lots of parked cars to hide among, not this wide-open space where a waiting car tended to stand out like a sore thumb. The only mitigating factor was that, as I couldn’t see through the high hedges to look into the house windows, the occupants couldn’t see out to spot me either.

  I parked the car so that we were on the opposite side of the road, about thirty yards away and facing the target’s gateway. There was just one other vehicle parked, a white van on the same side as us but much farther down towards the junction at the end.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” Lydia said sarcastically after we had been there for half an hour without seeing any movement in the road whatsoever, either in a car or on foot.

  “Stunning,” I agreed. “Relax. We could be here for hours, maybe even for days. It depends on when the target calls the drop.”

  Lydia looked at me. “You’re joking?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “What about when I need to pee?”

  “Do you?”

  “Not now, but I may in a couple of hours.”

  “Didn’t you go before we left?”

  “Yes, but I also had a cup of tea and some orange juice while you were in the shower.”

  “That was careless,” I said, smiling.

  “Seriously, what do we do when we need t
o pee?”

  “Personally, I’ve always used a plastic drink bottle.”

  “Oh, great,” Lydia said. “Do you have a funnel as well?”

  It was, however, a serious problem for anyone carrying out surveillance.

  The mistaken police shooting of an innocent Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, at a London tube station in July 2005, was largely as a result of misidentification caused by one of the observation team being away from his post answering a call of nature. That gave rise to rushed and incorrect assumptions, and ultimately to de Menezes being shot seven times in the head with dum-dum bullets. Unsurprisingly, he died at the scene.

  “We’ll just have to hope that the target moves before it becomes necessary for you to.”

  At about half past six, a man appeared through the gates of the house two down from the target. He had a lively young black Labrador on a lead, and the pair turned away from us and walked off down the road. Someone else farther down appeared with a garbage can, clearly having failed to roll it out the night before, and a second dog walker emerged from a house behind us.

  The road was slowly waking up, and a few cars moved up and down.

  Lydia and I sat chatting in the front seats, looking for all the world as if sitting and talking in a car in residential Weybridge at six-thirty in the morning was the most natural of pastimes. But I never let my eyes wander for more than a few seconds from the wrought-iron gates across the target’s drive.

  I had parked the car facing west for two reasons. First, so that we were not looking straight into the rising sun, and, second, because I reckoned that if the target left home by car, he would probably turn west towards either the railway station or to the main road to the freeway. The added bonus was that anyone looking at us from the target’s driveway would be staring into the light, which meant that our faces would be in shadow.

  The man and his black Lab returned after about twenty minutes and went back into their house without either of them appearing to give us a second glance. The last thing I wanted was the police turning up and asking us awkward questions.

  Traffic slowly built up as some of the local residents left home for work. Even though the road could never be classified as busy, other traffic made it easier for us to remain inconspicuous, as drivers turning out of driveways were more on the lookout for moving vehicles than for stationary ones.

  At seven-thirty, the council garbage pickup team arrived, making their way up the road behind us, stopping at every driveway to maneuver the garbage cans into the hoist that emptied them automatically into the truck. The three men came slowly past, ignoring us, and I watched as our trash was tipped from the target’s can into the truck’s compression jaws.

  They continued slowly along the road and eventually disappeared around the corner. And still there was no movement of the target’s gates.

  “I spy with my little eye something beginning with H.”

  Lydia was getting bored.

  “Hedge,” I said.

  “That’s not fair!”

  “What’s not fair about it?” I whined in mock annoyance. “You chose it.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but it was too easy.”

  “Have another go, then.”

  “I spy with my little eye something beginning with . . .” She paused and looked around..

  “T,” I said. “Target.”

  The gates were opening, and we watched as the target walked out through them to the edge of the road, collected his empty garbage can and retreated back inside. After a few moments, the gates closed again.

  It all happened so fast that I barely had time to lift the camera from my lap and snap a couple of shots.

  “At least we know he’s here,” I said. “That’s a good start.”

  “He doesn’t look much like a villain,” Lydia said.

  “Appearances can be misleading,” I said. “I read somewhere that Al Capone looked very dapper in his handmade three-piece suit as he personally beat a man’s brains out.”

  “But it’s still difficult to believe,” Lydia said. “He looks so normal.”

  “Don’t be fooled. That normal-looking man tried to kill me, and he’s also been disrupting racing for weeks. To say nothing of extorting money by threats and orchestrating a determined campaign in the media to discredit the BHA.”

  For some time I’d been wondering why he did that. He was a member of the BHA Board, so, by extension, some of the discredit would also fall on him.

  It didn’t really make any sense.

  Suddenly I began to doubt myself.

  Was I actually correct? Was this indeed the right man? Or were the bookmaker’s letter, the methylphenidate tablets and the hyperactive children all mere coincidences?

  I would soon find out.

  —

  CRISPIN CALLED my cell at ten past eight as Lydia and I were still waiting outside the target’s house.

  A note had arrived in the BHA mail from Leonardo, along with another cheap Nokia cell phone.

  “Same as before?” I asked excitedly. This is what I’d been hoping for.

  “Exactly the same. Another Nokia pay-as-you-go phone with no time and password-protected settings. Incoming calls and texts only.”

  “And the note? What does that say?”

  “‘Put the money in a brightly colored canvas bag and await instructions.’ Identical to last time.”

  “So the target has taken the bait,” I said. “Now we need to convince Ian Tulloch to give us the green light for the drop.”

  “I don’t suppose he’d have raised the cash if he wasn’t prepared to go through with it, but surely the Board will have to be asked first?”

  “You might be right,” I said, “although I’d much rather the rest of the Board weren’t involved. It will only cause a delay. Try and convince Ian Tulloch and Howard Lever to make the decision themselves rather than calling another meeting. Tell them it’s really urgent and the decision needs to be made now.”

  “I doubt if they will make it without at least consulting the others.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Ian Tulloch has finally secured the role of BHA chairman, something he has coveted for years. I suspect he now believes that he is in total charge and he can do exactly as he likes, and Howard will do as Ian tells him. Play on his vanity and praise his courage in being decisive.”

  “The Board won’t like it if it goes wrong.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “And they’ll like it even less if we throw away another hundred grand of their money for nothing. However, this time I’m sure we’ll catch him. But don’t say that to Howard or to Ian Tulloch. I don’t want either of them knowing we are setting a trap. The fewer people who know, the better. We can’t afford a leak.”

  “I sincerely hope we’re doing the right thing, dear boy,” Crispin said. “I could really do with not getting sacked. I’m too old to start looking for another job.”

  I worried that he was wavering.

  “Crispin,” I said. “If this does go wrong, the BHA will be ancient history and we will all be looking for another job.”

  “Then it had better not go wrong,” Crispin said decisively. “I’ll go and see Howard and ask him to call the chairman straightaway, although, to be honest, I’m quite surprised Howard hasn’t resigned or been fired by now.”

  “I suspect that Ian Tulloch may think it’s better for Howard to stay until this is all over and then to let him go. That way, all the stories of incompetence may depart with him.”

  “You’re a cynic,” Crispin said.

  “No, I’m a realist,” I replied, laughing. “Now, please go and see Howard. I will wait for the drop instructions. Did the note say anything about when they might come?”

  “No,” Crispin said. “But last time it was in the afternoon of the same day that the phone arrived.”<
br />
  “You’d better get moving, then, and brief Nigel Green.”

  We hung up.

  “Trouble?” Lydia asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. “All good. It seems likely that the drop may be on for today.”

  —

  TEN MINUTES LATER the gates opened again and a woman drove out in a light blue Mini with two children sitting in the back.

  “School run,” I said.

  “Do we follow?” Lydia asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s him I’m interested in, not his wife or kids.”

  We waited some more and, after about twenty minutes, the Mini returned minus the children. The gates closed automatically behind it.

  “That was exciting—not,” said Lydia. “I think I’d rather be at work.”

  “Hadn’t you better call them to say you’re not coming in?”

  She called her office, doing a fine impression of sickness, even adding a few convincing coughs at the end.

  “I’ll never believe you again when you say you’ve got a headache,” I said, laughing.

  “Maybe not,” she said, smiling. “But you’ll have to believe me when I say that I do now need to pee.”

  “There’s a filling station down there,” I said, pointing ahead and to the right. “I saw it when we arrived. You’ll have to walk there for a pee. I’m not leaving. And if the target moves, I’ll have to go without you.”

  Lydia wasn’t very happy, but she got out of the Fiesta and hurried off without a word.

  Slowly the sun climbed higher in the sky, but still nothing moved in the target’s driveway.

  Lydia was back in fifteen minutes and she had bought some chocolate bars and two bottles of water.

  “Well done,” I said, smiling at her.

  We sat and waited.

  “This is so boring,” Lydia said after a while. “Is it always like this?”

  “Just be thankful you’re dry and comfortable,” I said, “and not lying half submerged in a drainage ditch that doubles as an open sewer.”