The Danger

by Dick Francis

  After about an hour of coffee, gossip, and reading reports the meeting began, the bulk of it as usual being a review of work in progress.

  “This business in Ecuador,” the chairman said. “The victim’s an American national, isn’t he?”

  A few heads nodded.

  The chairman pursed his lips. “I think we’ll have to advise that corporation to use local men and not send any more from the States. They’ve had three men captured in the last ten years, all Americans . . . you’d think they’d learn.”

  “It’s an American-owned corporation,” someone murmured.

  “They’ve tried paying the police themselves,” another said. “I was out there myself last time. The police took the money saying they would guard all the managers with their lives, but I reckon they also took a cut of the ransom then too. And don’t forget, the corporation paid a ransom of something like ten million dollars . . . plenty to spread around.”

  There was a small gloomy silence.

  “Right,” the chairman said. “Future advice, no Americans. Present advice?” He looked around. “Opinions, anyone?”

  “The kidnappers know the corporation will pay in the end,” Tony Vine said. “The corporation can’t afford not to.”

  All corporations had to ransom their captured employees if they wanted anyone ever to work overseas for them in future. All corporations also had irate shareholders, whose dividends diminished as ransoms rose. Corporations tended to keep abductions out of the news, and to write the ransoms down as a “trading loss” in the annual accounts.

  “We’ve got the demand down to ten million again,” Tony Vine said. “The kidnappers won’t take less, they’d be losing face against last time, even if—especially if—they’re a different gang.”

  The chairman nodded. “We’ll advise the corporation to settle?”

  Everyone agreed, and the meeting moved on.

  The chairman, around sixty, had once been a soldier himself, and like Tony felt comfortable with other men whose lives had been structured, disciplined, and official. He had founded the firm because he’d seen the need for it; the action in his case of a practical man, not a visionary. It had been a friend of his, now dead, who had suggested partnerships rather than a hierarchy, advising the sweeping away of all former ranks in favor of one new one: equal.

  The chairman was exceptionally good-looking, a distinctly marketable plus, and had an air of quiet confidence to go with it. He could maintain that manner in the face of total disaster, so that one always felt he would at any moment devise a brilliant victory-snatching solution, even if he didn’t. It had taken me a while, when I was new there, to see that it was Gerry Clayton who had that sort of mind.

  The chairman came finally to my report, photocopies of which most people had already read, and asked if any partners would like to ask questions. We gained always from what others had learned during a case, and I usually found question time very fruitful—though better when not doing the answering.

  “This carabinieri officer . . . er . . . Pucinelli, what sort of a personal relationship could you have with him? What is your estimate of his capabilities?” It was a notoriously pompous partner asking: Tony would have said, “How did you get on with the sod? What’s he like?”

  “Pucinelli’s a good policeman,” I said. “Intelligent, bags of courage. He was helpful. More helpful, I found, than most, though never stepping out of the official line. He hasn’t yet . . .” I paused. “He hasn’t the clout to get any higher, I don’t think. He’s second-in-command in his region, and I’d say that’s as far as he’ll go. But as far as his chances of catching the kidnappers are concerned, he’ll be competent and thorough.”

  “What was the latest, when you left?” someone asked. “I haven’t yet had time to finish your last two pages.”

  “Pucinelli said that when he showed the drawings of the man I’d seen to the two kidnappers from the siege, they were both struck dumb. He showed them to them separately, of course, but in each case he said you could clearly see the shock. Neither of them would say anything at all and they both seemed scared. Pucinelli said he was going to circulate copies of the drawings and see if he could identify the man. He was very hopeful, when I left.”

  “Sooner the better,” Tony said. “That million quid will be laundered within a week.”

  “They were a pretty cool lot,” I said, not arguing. “They might hold it for a while.”

  “And they might have whisked it over a border and changed it into francs or schillings before they released the girl.”

  I nodded. “They could have set up something like that for the first ransom, and been ready.”

  Gerry Clayton’s fingers as usual were busy with any sheet of paper within reach, this time the last page of my report. “You say Alessia Cenci came to England with you. Any chance she’ll remember any more?” he asked.

  “You cannot rule it out, but Pucinelli and I both went through it with her pretty thoroughly in Italy. She knows so little. There were no church bells, no trains, no close airplanes, no dogs . . . she couldn’t tell whether she was in city or country. She thought the faint smell she was conscious of during the last few days might have been someone baking bread. Apart from that . . . nothing.”

  A pause.

  “Did you show the drawings to the girl?” someone asked. “Had she ever seen the man, before the kidnap?”

  I turned to him. “I took a photostat to the villa, but she hadn’t ever seen him that she could remember. There was absolutely no reaction. I asked if he could have been one of the four who abducted her, but she said she couldn’t tell. None of her family or anyone in the household knew him. I asked them all.”

  “His voice . . . when he spoke to you outside the restaurant . . . was it the voice on the tapes?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not good enough at Italian. It wasn’t totally different, that’s all I could say.”

  “You brought copies of the drawings and the tapes back with you?” the chairman asked.

  “Yes. If anyone would like . . . ?”

  A few heads nodded.

  “Anything you didn’t put in the report?” the chairman asked. “Insignificant details?”

  “Well . . . I didn’t include the lists of the music. Alessia wrote what she knew, and Pucinelli said he would try to find out if they were tapes one could buy in shops, ready recorded. Very long shot, even if they were.”

  “Do you have the lists?”

  “No, afraid not. I could ask Alessia to write them again, if you like.”

  One of the ex-policemen said you never knew. The other ex-policemen nodded.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll ask her.”

  “How is she?” Gerry asked.

  “Just about coping.”

  There were a good many nods of understanding. We’d all seen the devastation, the hurricane’s path across the spirit. All of us, some oftener than others, had listened to the experiences of the recently returned: the debriefing, as the firm called it, in its military way.

  The chairman looked around for more questions but none were ready. “All finished? Well, Andrew, we can’t exactly sack you for coming up with pictures of an active kidnapper, but driving a car to the drop is not on the cards. Whether or not it turns out well this time, don’t do it again. Right?”

  “Right,” I said neutrally; and that, to my surprise, was the full extent of the ticking-off.

  A COUPLE OF days later the partner manning the switchboard called to me down the corridor, where I was wandering with a cup of coffee in search of anything new.

  “Andrew? Call for you from Bologna. I’ll put it through to your room.”

  I dumped the coffee and picked up the receiver, and a voice said, “Andrew? This is Enrico Pucinelli.”

  We exchanged hellos, and he began talking excitedly, the words running together in my ear.

  “Enrico,” I shouted. “Stop. Speak slowly. I can’t understand you.”

 
; “Hah.” He sighed audibly and began to speak clearly and distinctly, as to a child. “The young one of the kidnappers has been talking. He is afraid of being sent to prison for life, so he is trying to make bargains. He has told us where Signorina Cenci was taken after the kidnap.”

  “Terrific,” I said warmly. “Well done.”

  Pucinelli coughed modestly, but I guessed it had been a triumph of interrogation.

  “We have been to the house. It is in a suburb of Bologna, middle-class, very quiet. We have found it was rented by a father with three grown sons.” He clicked his tongue disgustedly. “All of the neighbors saw men going in and out, but so far no one would know them again.”

  I smiled to myself. Putting the finger on a kidnapper was apt to be unhealthy anywhere.

  “The house has furniture belonging to the owner, but we have looked carefully, and in one room on the upper floor all the marks where the furniture has stood on the carpet for a long time are in slightly different places.” He stopped and said anxiously, “Do you understand, Andrew?”

  “Yes,” I said. “All the furniture had been moved.”

  “Correct.” He was relieved. “The bed, a heavy chest, a wardrobe, a bookcase. All moved. The room is big, more than big enough for the tent, and there is nothing to see from the window except a garden and trees. No one could see into the room from the outside.”

  “And have you found anything useful . . . any clues . . . in the rest of the house?”

  “We are looking. We went to the house for the first time yesterday. I thought you would like to know.”

  “You’re quite right. Great news.”

  “Signorina Cenci,” he said. “Has she thought of anything else?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Give her my respects.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will indeed.”

  “I will telephone again,” he said. “I will reverse the charges again, shall I, like you said? As this is private, between you and me, and I am telephoning from my own house?”

  “Every time,” I said.

  He said goodbye with deserved satisfaction, and I added a note of what he’d said to my report.

  By Thursday morning I was back in Lambourn, chiefly for the lists of music, and I found I had arrived just as a string of Popsy’s horses were setting out for exercise. Over her jeans and shirt Popsy wore another padded waistcoat, bright pink this time, seeming not to notice that it was a warm day in July; and her fluffy gray-white hair haloed her big head like a private cumulus cloud.

  She was on her feet in the stable yard surrounded by scrunching skittering quadrupeds, and she beckoned to me, when she saw me, with a huge sweep of the arm. Trying not to look nervous and obviously not succeeding, I dodged a few all-too-mobile half-tons of muscle and made it to her side.

  The green eyes looked at me slantwise, smiling. “Not used to them, are you?”

  “Er . . .” I said. “No.”

  “Want to see them on the gallops?”

  “Yes, please.” I looked round at the riders, hoping to see Alessia among them, but without result.

  The apparently disorganized throng suddenly moved off towards the road in one orderly line, and Popsy jerked her head for me to follow her into the kitchen; and at the table in there, coffee cup in hand, sat Alessia.

  She still looked pale, but perhaps now only in contrast to the outdoor health of Popsy, and she still looked thin, without strength. Her smile when she saw me started in the eyes and then curved to the pink lipstick; an uncomplicated welcome of friendship.

  “Andrew’s coming up on the Downs to see the schooling,” Popsy said.

  “Great.”

  “You’re not riding?” I asked Alessia.

  “No . . . I . . . anyway, Popsy’s horses are jumpers.”

  Popsy made a face as if to say that wasn’t a satisfactory reason for not riding them, but passed no other comment. She and I talked for a while about things in general and Alessia said not much.

  We all three sat on the front seat of a dusty Land Rover while Popsy drove with more verve than caution out of Lambourn and along a side road and finally up a bumpy track to open stretches of grassland.

  Away on the horizon the rolling terrain melted into blue haze, and under our feet, as we stepped from the Land Rover, the close turf had been mown to two inches. Except for a bird call or two in the distance there was a gentle enveloping silence, which was in itself extraordinary. No drone of airplanes, no clamor of voices, no hum of faraway traffic. Just wide air and warm sunlight and the faint rustle from one’s own clothes.

  “You like it, don’t you?” observed Popsy, watching my face.

  I nodded.

  “You should be up here in January with the wind howling across. Though mind you, it’s beautiful even when you’re freezing.”

  She scanned a nearby valley with a hand shading her eyes. “The horses will be coming up from there at a half-speed canter,” she said. “They’ll pass us here. Then we’ll follow them up in the Land Rover to the schooling fences.”

  I nodded again, not reckoning I’d know a half-speed canter from a slow waltz, but in fact when the row of horses appeared like black dots from the valley I soon saw what speed she meant. She watched with concentration through large binoculars as the dots became shapes and the shapes flying horses, lowering the glasses only when the string of ten went past us, still one behind the other so that she had a clear view of each. She pursed her mouth but seemed otherwise not too displeased, and we were soon careering along in their wake, jerking to a stop over the brow of the hill and disembarking to find the horses circling with tossing heads and puffing breath.

  “See those fences over there?” said Popsy, pointing to isolated timber and brushwood obstacles looking like refugees from a racecourse. “Those are schooling fences. To teach the horses how to jump.” She peered into my face, and I nodded. “The set on this side, they’re hurdles. The far ones are . . . er . . . fences. For steeplechasers.” I nodded again. “From the start of the schooling ground up to here there are six hurdles—and six fences—so you can give a horse a good workout if you want to, but today I’m sending my lot over these top four only, as they’re not fully fit.”

  She left us abruptly and strode over to her excited four-legged family, and Alessia with affection said, “She’s a good trainer. She can see when a horse isn’t feeling right, even if there’s nothing obviously wrong. When she walks into the yard all the horses instantly know she’s there . . . You see all the heads come out, like a chorus.”

  Popsy was dispatching three of the horses towards the lower end of the schooling ground. “Those three will come up over the hurdles,” Alessia said. “Then those riders will change onto three more horses and start again.”

  I was surprised. “Don’t all of the riders jump?” I asked.

  “Most of them don’t ride well enough to teach. Of those three doing the schooling, two are professional jockeys and the third is Popsy’s best lad.”

  Popsy stood beside us, binoculars ready, as the three horses came up over the hurdles. Except for a ratatatat at the hurdles themselves it was all very quiet, mostly, I realized, because there was no broadcast commentary as on television, but partly also because of the Doppler effect. The horses seemed to be making far more noise once they were past and going away.

  Popsy muttered unintelligibly under her breath and Alessia said “Borodino jumped well” in the sort of encouraging voice which meant the other two hadn’t.

  We all waited while the three schooling riders changed horses and set off again down the incline to the starting point, and I felt Alessia suddenly stir beside me and take a bottomless breath, moving from there into a small, restless, aimless circle. Popsy glanced at her but said nothing, and after a while Alessia stopped her circling and said, “Tomorrow . . .”

  “Today, here and now,” Popsy interrupted firmly, and yelled to a certain Bob to come over to her at once.

  Bob proved to be a middle-aged lad riding
a chestnut which peeled off from the group and ambled over in what looked to me a sloppy walk.

  “Hop off, will you,” Popsy said, and when Bob complied she said to Alessia, “O.K., just walk round a bit. You’ve no helmet, so I don’t want you breaking the speed limit, and besides old Paperbag here isn’t as fit as the others.”

  She made a cradle for Alessia’s knee and threw her casually up into the saddle, where the lady jockey landed with all the thump of a feather. Her feet slid into the stirrups and her hands gathered the reins, and she looked down at me for a second as if bemused at the speed with which things were happening. Then as if impelled she wheeled her mount and trotted away, following the other three horses down the schooling ground.

  “At last,” Popsy said. “And I’d begun to think she never would.”

  “She’s a brave girl.”

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded. “One of the best.”

  “She had an appalling time.”

  Popsy gave me five seconds of the direct green eyes. “So I gather,” she said, “from her refusal to talk about it. Let it all hang out, I told her, but she just shook her head and blinked a couple of tears away, so these past few days I’ve stopped trying to jolly her along, it was obviously doing no good.” She raised the binoculars to watch her three horses coming up over the hurdles and then swung them back down the hill, focusing on Alessia.

  “Hands like silk,” Popsy said. “God knows where she got it from, no one else in the family knows a spavin from a splint.”

  “She’ll be better now,” I said, smiling, “but don’t expect . . .”

  “Instant full recovery?” she asked, as I paused.

  I nodded. “It’s like convalescence. Gradual.”

  Popsy lowered the glasses and glanced at me briefly. “She told me about your job. What you’ve done for her father. She says she feels safe with you.” She paused. “I’ve never heard of a job like yours. I didn’t know people like you existed.”