Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

  “Well ...”

  “There are people who crack passwords just for the fun of it. And others hack into secrets. You wouldn’t believe how careless some firms are with their most private information. Someone has recently accessed my own on-line computer—during the past month. I have a detector program that tells me. Much good it will do any hacker, as I never keep anything personal there. But a combination of my mobile phone and your office computer must have come up with the possibility that your appointment was with me. Someone in The Pump did it. So-they sent India along to find out ... and here we are. And because they succeeded, we now know they tried.”

  “It’s incredible.”

  “Who runs The Pump? Who sets the policy?”

  Tatum said thoughtfully, “The editor is George Godbar. The proprietor’s Lord Tilepit.”

  “Any connection with Ellis Quint?”

  He considered the question and shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

  “Does Lord Tilepit have an interest in the television company that puts on Ellis Quint’s program? I think I’d better find out.”

  Davis Tatum smiled.

  Reflecting that, as about thirty hours had passed since Gordon Quint had jumped me in Pont Square, he was unlikely still to be hanging about there with murderous feelings and his fencing post (not least because with Ginnie dead he would have her inquest to distract him), and also feeling that one could take self-preservation to shaming lengths, I left the Piccadilly restaurant in a taxi and got the driver to make two reconnoitering passes around the railed central garden.

  All seemed quiet. I paid the driver, walked without incident up the steps to the front door, used my key, went up to the next floor and let myself into the haven of home.

  No ambush. No creaks. Silence.

  I retrieved a few envelopes from the wire basket clipped inside the letter box and found a page in my fax. It seemed a long time since I’d left, but it had been only the previous morning.

  My cracked arm hurt. Well, it would. I’d ridden races—and winners—now and then with cracks: disguising them, of course, because the betting public deserved healthy riders to carry their money. The odd thing was that in the heat of a race one didn’t feel an injury. It was in the cooler ebbing of excitement that the discomfort returned.

  The best way, always, to minimize woes was to concentrate on something else. I looked up a number and phoned the handy acquaintance who had set up my computers for me.

  “Doug,” I said, when his wife had fetched him in from an oil change, “tell me about listening in to mobile phones.”

  “I’m covered in grease,” he complained. “Won’t this do another time?”

  “Someone is listening to my mobile.”

  “Oh.” He sniffed. “So you want to know how to stop it?”

  “You’re dead right.”

  He sniffed again. “I’ve got a cold,” he said, “my wife’s mother is coming to dinner and my sump is filthy.”

  I laughed; couldn’t help it. “Please, Doug.”

  He relented. “I suppose you’ve got an analog mobile. They have radio signals that can be listened to. It’s difficult, though. Your average bloke in the pub couldn’t do it.”

  “Could you?”

  “I’m not your average bloke in the pub. I’m a walking midlife crisis halfway through an oil change. I could do it if I had the right gear.”

  “How do I deal with it?”

  “Blindingly simple.” He sneezed and sniffed heavily. “I need a tissue.” There was a sudden silence on the line, then the distant sound of a nose being vigorously blown, then the hoarse voice of wisdom in my ear.

  “OK,” he said. “You ditch the analog, and get a digital.”

  “I do?”

  “Sid, being a jockey does not equip the modem man to live in tomorrow’s world.”

  “I do see that.”

  “Everyone,” he sniffed, “if they had any sense, would go digital.”

  “Teach me.”

  “The digital system,” he said, “is based on two numbers, zero and one. Zero and one have been with us from the dawn of computers, and no one has ever invented anything better.”

  “They haven’t?”

  He detected my mild note of irony. “Has anyone,” he asked, “reinvented the wheel?”

  “Er, no.”

  “Quite. One cannot improve on an immaculate conception.”

  “That’s blasphemous.” I enjoyed him always.

  “Certainly not,” he said. “Some things are perfect to begin with. E=mc2, and all that.”

  “I grant that. How about my mobile?”

  “The signal sent to a digital telephone,” he said, “is not one signal, as in analog, but is eight simultaneous signals, each transmitting one-eighth of what you hear.”

  “Is that so?” I asked dryly.

  “You may bloody snigger,” he said, “but I’m giving you the goods. A digital phone receives.eight simultaneous signals, and it is impossible for anyone to decode them, except the receiving mobile. Now, because the signal arrives in eight pieces, the reception isn’t always perfect. You don’t get the crackle or the fading in and out that you get on analog phones, but you do sometimes get bits of words missing. Still, no one can listen in. Even the police can never tap a digital mobile number.”

  “So,” I said, fascinated, “where do I get one?”

  “Try Harrods,” he said.

  “Harrods?”

  “Harrods is just round the corner from where you live, isn’t it?”

  “More or less.”

  “Try there, then. Or anywhere else that sells phones. You can use the same number that you have now. You just need to tell your service provider. And of course you’ll need an SIM card. You have one, of course?”

  I said meekly, “No.”

  “Sid!” he protested. He sneezed again. “Sorry. An SIM card is a Subscriber’s Identity Module. You can’t live without one.”

  “I can’t?”

  “Sid, I despair of you. Wake up to technology.”

  “I’m better at knowing what a horse thinks.”

  Patiently he enlightened me, “An SIM card is like a credit card. It actually is a credit card. Included on it are your name and mobile phone number and other details, and you can slot it into any mobile that will take it. For instance, if you are someone’s guest in Athens and he has a mobile that accepts an SIM card, you can slot your card into his phone and the charge will appear on your account, not his.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “With my problems, would I joke?”

  “Where do I get an SIM card?”

  “Ask Harrods.” He sneezed. “Ask anyone who travels for a living. Your service provider will provide.” He sniffed. “So long, Sid.”

  Amused and grateful, I opened my mail and read the fax. The fax being most accessible got looked at first.

  Handwritten, it scrawled simply, “Phone me,” and gave a long number.

  The writing was Kevin Mills‘s, but the fax machine he’d sent it from was anonymously not The Pump’s.

  I phoned the number given, which would have connected me to a mobile, and got only the infuriating instruction, “Please try later.”

  There were a dozen messages I didn’t much want on my answering machine and a piece of information I definitely didn’t want in a large brown envelope from Shropshire.

  The envelope contained a copy of a glossy county magazine, one I’d sent for as I’d been told it included lengthy coverage of the heir-to-the-dukedom’s coming-of-age dance. There were, indeed, four pages of pictures, mostly in color, accompanied by prose gush about the proceedings and a complete guest list.

  A spectacular burst of fireworks filled half a page, and there in a group of heaven-gazing spectators, there in white tuxedo and all his photogenic glory, there unmistakably stood Ellis Quint.

  My heart sank. The fireworks had started at three-thirty. At three-thirty, when the moon was high, Ellis had been
a hundred miles northwest of the Windward Stud’s yearling.

  There were many pictures of the dancing, and a page of black and white shots of the guests, names attached. Ellis had been dancing. Ellis smiled twice from the guests’ page, carefree, having a good time.

  Damn it to hell, I thought. He had to have taken the colt’s foot off early. Say by one o‘clock. He could then have arrived for the fireworks by three-thirty. I’d found no one who’d seen him arrive, but several who swore to his presence after five-fifteen. At five-fifteen he had helped the heir to climb onto a table to make a drunken speech. The heir had poured a bottle of champagne over Ellis’s head. Everyone remembered that. Ellis could not have driven back to Northampton before dawn.

  For two whole days the previous week I’d traipsed around Shropshire, and next-door Cheshire, handed on from grand house to grander, asking much the same two questions (according to sex): Did you dance with Ellis Quint, or did you drink/eat with him? The answers at first had been freely given, but as time went on, news of my mission spread before me until I was progressively met by hostile faces and frankly closed doors. Shropshire was solid Ellis country. They’d have stood on their heads to prove him unjustly accused. They were not going to say that they didn’t know when he’d arrived.

  In the end I returned to the duchess’s front gates, and from there drove as fast as prudence allowed to the Windward Stud Farm, timing the journey at two hours and five minutes. On empty roads at night, Northampton to the duchess might have taken ten minutes less. I’d proved nothing except that Ellis had had time.

  Enough time was not enough.

  As always before gathering at such dances, the guests had given and attended dinner parties both locally and farther away. No one that I’d asked had entertained Ellis to dinner.

  No dinner was not enough.

  I went through the guest list crossing off the people I’d seen. There were still far more than half unconsulted, most of whom I’d never heard of.

  Where was Chico? I needed him often. I hadn’t the time or, to be frank, the appetite to locate and question all the guests, even if they would answer. There must have been people—local people—helping with the parking of cars that night. Chico would have chatted people up in the local pubs and found out if any of the car-parkers remembered Ellis’s arrival. Chico was good at pubs, and I wasn’t in his class.

  The police might have done it, but they wouldn’t. The death of a colt still didn’t count like murder.

  The police.

  I phoned Norman Picton’s police station number and gave my name as John Paul Jones.

  He came on the line in a good humor and listened to me without protest.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want me to ask favors of the Northamptonshire police? What do I offer in return?”

  “Blood in the hinges of lopping shears.”

  “They’ll have made their own tests.”

  “Yes, and that Northamptonshire colt is dead and gone to the glue factory. An error, wouldn’t you say? Might they not do you a favor in exchange for commiseration?”

  “You’ll have my head off. What is it you actually want?”

  “Er...,” I began, “I was there when the police found the lopping shears in the hedge.”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking. Those shears weren’t wrapped in sacking, like the ones we took from the Quints.”

  “No, and the shears weren’t the same, either. The ones at Northampton are a slightly newer model. They’re on sale everywhere in garden centers. The problem is that Ellis Quint hasn’t been reported as buying any, not in the Northamptonshire police district, nor ours.”

  “Is there any chance,” I asked, “of my looking again at the material used for wrapping the shears?”

  “If there are horse hairs in it, there’s nothing left to match them to, same as the blood.”

  “All the same, the cloth might tell us where the shears came from. Which garden center, do you see?”

  “I’ll see if they’ve done that already.”

  “Thanks, Norman.”

  “Thank Archie. He drives me to help you.”

  “Does he?”

  He heard my surprise. “Archie has influence,” he said, “and I do what the magistrate tells me.”

  When he’d gone off the line I tried Kevin Mills again and reached the same electronic voice: “Please try later.”

  After that I sat in an armchair while the daylight faded and the lights came on in the peaceful square. We were past the equinox, back in winter thoughts, the year dying ahead. Fall for me had for almost half my life meant the longed-for resurgence of major jump racing, the time of big winners and speed and urgency in the blood. Winter now brought only nostalgia and heating bills. At thirty-four I was growing old.

  I sat thinking of Ellis and the wasteland he had made of my year. I thought of Rachel Ferns and Silverboy, and lymphoblasts. I thought of the press, and especially The Pump and India Cathcart and the orchestrated months of vilification. I thought of Ellis’s relentless jokes.

  I thought for a long time about Archie Kirk, who had drawn me to Combe Bassett and given me Norman Picton. I wondered if it had been from Archie that Norman had developed a belief in a heavy presence behind the scenes. I wondered if it could possibly be Archie who had prompted Davis Tatum to engage me to find that heavyweight. I wondered if it could possibly have been Archie who told Davis Tatum about my run-in with the bad hat at the Jockey Club, and if so, how did he know?

  I trusted Archie. He could pull my strings, I thought, as long as I was willing to go where he pointed, and as long as I was sure no one was pulling his.

  I thought about Gordon Quint’s uncontrollable rage and the practical difficulties his fencing post had inflicted. I thought of Ginnie Quint and despair and sixteen floors down.

  I thought of the colts and their chopped-off feet.

  When I went to bed I dreamed the same old nightmare.

  Agony. Humiliation. Both hands.

  I awoke sweating.

  Damn it all to hell.

  9

  In the morning, when I’d failed yet again to get an answer from Kevin Mills, I shunted by subway across central London and emerged not far from Companies House at 55 City Road, E.C.

  Companies House, often my friend, contained the records of all public and private limited companies active in England, including the audited annual balance sheets, investment capital, fixed assets and the names of major shareholders and the directors of the boards.

  Topline Foods, I soon learned, was an old company recently taken over by a few new big investors and a bustling new management. The chief shareholder and managing director was listed as Owen Cliff Yorkshire. There were fifteen non-executive directors, of whom one was Lord Tilepit.

  The premises at which business was carried out were located at Frodsham, Cheshire. The registered office was at the same address.

  The product of the company was foodstuffs for animals.

  After Topline I looked up Village Pump Newspapers (they’d dropped the “Village” in about 1900, but retained the idea of a central meeting place for gossip) and found interesting items, and after Village Pump Newspapers I looked up the TV company that aired Ellis’s sports program, but found no sign of Tilepit or Owen Yorkshire in its operations.

  I traveled home (safely) and phoned Archie, who was, his wife reported, at work.

  “Can I reach him at work?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, Sid. He wouldn’t like it. I’ll give him a message when he gets back.”

  Please try later.

  I tried Kevin Mills later and this time nearly got my eardrums perforated. “At last!”

  “I’ve tried you a dozen times,” I said.

  “I’ve been in an old people’s home.”

  “Well, bully for you.”

  “A nurse hastened three harpies into the hereafter.”

  “Poor old sods.”

  “If yo
u’re in Pont Square,” he said, “can I call round and see you? I’m in my car not far away.”

  “I thought I was The Pump’s number one all-time shit.”

  “Yeah. Can I come?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Great.” He clicked off before I could change my mind and he was at my door in less than ten minutes.

  “This is nice,” he said appreciatively, looking around my sitting room. “Not what I expected.”

  There was a Sheraton writing desk and buttoned brocade chairs and a couple of modem exotic wood inlaid tables by Mark Boddington. The overall colors were grayish-blue, soft and restful. The only brash intruder was an ancient slot machine that worked on tokens.

  Kevin Mills made straight towards it, as most visitors did. I always left a few tokens haphazardly on the floor, with a bowl of them nearby on a table. Kevin picked a token from the carpet, fed it into the slot and pulled the handle. The wheels clattered and clunked. He got two cherries and a lemon. He picked up another token and tried again.

  “What wins the jackpot?” he asked, achieving an orange, a demon and a banana.

  “Three horses with jockeys jumping fences.”

  He looked at me sharply.

  “It used to be the bells,” I said. “That was boring, so I changed it.”

  “And do the three horses ever come up?”

  I nodded. “You get a fountain of tokens all over the floor.”

  The machine was addictive. It was my equivalent of the psychiatrist’s couch. Kevin played throughout our conversation but the nearest he came was two horses and a pear.

  “The trial has started, Sid,” he said, “so give us the scoop.”

  “The trial’s only technically started. I can’t tell you a thing. When the adjournment’s over, you can go to court and listen.”

  “That’s not exclusive,” he complained.

  “You know damned well I can’t tell you.”

  “I gave you the story to begin with.”

  “I sought you out,” I said. “Why did The Pump stop helping the colt owners and shaft me instead?”

  He concentrated hard on the machine. Two bananas and a blackberry.

  “Why?” I said.