The Danger

by Dick Francis

  Alessia looked from Eagler to me and back again. “You’re both the same,” she said blankly. “You’ve both seen so much suffering . . . so much distress. You both know how to make it so that people can hold on . . . It makes the unbearable . . . possible.”

  Eagler gave her a look of mild surprise, and in a totally unconnected thought I concluded that his clothes hung loosely about him because he’d recently lost weight.

  “Alessia herself was kidnapped,” I explained to him. “She knows too much about it.” I outlined briefly what had happened in Italy, and mentioned the coincidence of the horses.

  His attention focused in a thoroughly Sherlockian manner.

  “Are you saying there’s a positive significance?”

  I said, “Before Alessia I worked on another case in Italy in which the family sold their shares in a racecourse to raise the ransom.”

  He stared. “You do, then, see a . . . a thread?”

  “I fear there’s one, yes.”

  “Why fear?” Alessia asked.

  “He means,” Eagler said, “that the three kidnaps have been organized by the same perpetrator. Someone normally operating within the racing world and consequently knowing which targets to hit. Am I right?”

  “On the button,” I agreed, talking chiefly to Alessia. “The choice of target is often a prime clue to the identity of the kidnappers. I mean . . . to make the risks worthwhile, most kidnappers make sure in advance that the family or business actually can pay a hefty ransom. Of course every family will pay what they can, but the risks are just as high for a small ransom as a large, so it makes more sense to aim for the large. To know, for instance, that your father is much richer than the fathers of most other jockeys, women or not.”

  Alessia’s gaze seemed glued to my face. “To know . . . that the man who owns Ordinand has a son . . .?” She stopped, the sentence unfinished, the thought trotting on.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She swallowed. “It costs just as much to keep a bad horse in training as a good one . . . I mean, I do clearly understand what you’re saying.”

  Miranda seemed not to have been listening but the tears had begun to dry up, like a storm passing.

  “I don’t want to go home tonight,” she said in a small voice. “But if I go . . . Alessia, will you come with me?”

  Alessia looked as if it were the last thing she could face and I answered on her behalf, “No, Mrs. Nerrity, it wouldn’t be a good idea. Have you a mother, or a sister . . . someone you like? Someone your husband likes.”

  Her mordant look said as much as words about the current state of her marriage, but after a moment or two she said faintly, “I suppose . . . my mother.”

  “That’s right,” Eagler said paternally. “Now would you two ladies just wait a few minutes while I walk a little way with Mr. Douglas?”

  “We won’t be out of sight,” I said.

  All the same they both looked as insecure as ever as we opened the front doors and climbed out. I looked back as we walked away and waggled a reassuring hand at their two anxious heads showing together from the rear seat.

  “Very upsetting,” Eagler observed as we strolled away. “But she’ll get her kid back, with a bit of luck, not like some I’ve dealt with. Little kids snatched at random by psychos and murdered . . . sexual, often. Those mothers . . . Heartbreaking. Rotten. And quite often we know the psychos. Know they’ll probably do something violent one day. Kill someone. We can often arrest them within a day of the body being found. But we can’t prevent them. We can’t keep them locked up forever, just in case. Nightmare, those people. We’ve got one round here now. Time bomb waiting to go off. And some poor kid, somewhere, will be cycling along, or walking, at just the wrong time, just the wrong place. Some woman’s kid. Something triggers the psycho. You never know what it is. Something small. Tips them over. After, they don’t know why they’ve done it, like as not.”

  “Mm,” I said. “Worse than kidnappers. With them there’s always hope.”

  During his dissertation he’d given me several sideways glances: reinforcing his impressions, I thought. And I too had been doing the same, getting to know what to expect of him, good or bad. Occasionally someone from Liberty Market came across a policeman who thought of us as an unnecessary nuisance encroaching on their jealously guarded preserves, but on the whole they accepted us along the lines of if you want to understand a wreck, consult a diver.

  “What can you tell me that you wouldn’t want those two girls to hear?” he asked.

  I gave him a small smile; got reserved judgment back.

  “The man who kidnapped Alessia,” I said. “Recruited local talent. He recruited one, who roped in another five. The carabinieri have arrested those six, but the leader vanished. He called himself Giuseppe, which will do for now. We produced a drawing of him and flooded the province with it, with no results. I’ll let you have a copy of it, if you like.” I paused. “I know it’s a long shot. This horse thing may be truly and simply a coincidence.”

  Eagler put his head on one side. “File it under fifty-fifty, then.”

  “Right. And there’s today’s note . . .”

  “Nothing Italian about that, eh?” Eagler looked genial. “But local talent? Just the right style for local talent, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Just right for an Italian leaning over the local talent’s shoulder saying in broken English ‘tell her to telephone her husband, tell her not to inform the police.’ ” He smiled fleetingly. “But that’s all conjecture, as they say.”

  We turned as of one accord and began to stroll back to the car.

  “The lady jockey’s a bit jumpy still,” he said.

  “It does that to them. Some are jumpy with strangers forever.”

  “Poor thing,” he said, as if he hadn’t thought of freedom having problems; victims naturally being vastly less interesting than villains to the strong arm of the law.

  I explained about Tony Vine being at that moment with John Nerrity, and said that Nerrity’s local force would also by now know about Dominic. Eagler noted the address and said he would “liaise.”

  “I expect Tony Vine will be in charge from our point of view,” I said. “He’s very bright, if you have any dealings with him.”

  “All right.”

  We arranged that I would send the photostats of Giuseppe and a report on Alessia’s kidnapping down to him on the first morning train; and at that point we were back at the car.

  “Right then, Mr. Douglas.” He shook my hand limply as if sealing a bargain, as different from Pucinelli as a tortoise from a hare: one wily, one sharp; one wrinkled in his carapace, one leanly taut in his uniform; one always on the edge of his nerves, one avuncularly relaxed.

  I thought that I would rather be hunted by Pucinelli, any day.

  11

  John Nerrity was a heavily built man of medium height with graying hair cut neat and short; clipped moustache to match. On good days I could imagine him generating a fair amount of charm, but on that evening I saw only a man accustomed to power who had married a girl less than half his age and looked like regretting it.

  They lived in a large detached house on the edge of a golf course near Sutton, Surrey, south of London, only about three miles distant from where their four-legged wonder had made a fortune on Epsom Downs.

  The exterior of the house, in the dusk of our arrival, had revealed itself as thirties-developed Tudor, but on a restrained and successful scale. Inside, the carpets wall-to-wall looked untrodden, the brocade chairs un-sat-on, the silk cushions unwrinkled, the paper and paint unscuffed. Unfaded velvet curtains hung in stiff regular folds from beneath elaborate pelmets, and upon several glass and chromium coffee tables lay large glossy books, unthumbed. There were no photographs and no flowers, and the pictures had been chosen to occupy wall space, not the mind; the whole thing more like a shop window than the home of a little boy.

  John Nerrity was holding a gin and toni
c with ice clinking and lemon slice floating, a statement in itself of his resistance to crisis. I couldn’t imagine Paolo Cenci organizing ice and lemon six hours after the first ransom demand: it had been almost beyond him to pour without spilling.

  With Nerrity were Tony Vine wearing his most enigmatic expression and another man, sour of mouth and bitter of eye, who spoke with Tony’s accent and looked vaguely, in his flannels and casual sweater, as if he’d been out for a stroll with his dog.

  “Detective Superintendent Rightsworth,” Tony said, introducing him deadpan. “Waiting to talk to Mrs. Nerrity.”

  Rightsworth gave me barely a nod, and that more of repression than of acknowledgement. One of those, I thought. A civilian-hater. One who thought of the police as “us” and the public as “them,” the “them” being naturally inferior. It always surprised me that policemen of that kind got promoted, but Rightsworth was proof enough that they did.

  Alessia and Miranda had come into the sitting room close together and a step behind me, as if using me as a riot shield: and it was clear from John Nerrity’s face that the first sight of his wife prompted few loving, comforting, or supportive feelings.

  He gave her no kiss. No greeting. He merely said, as if in a continuing conversation, “Do you realize that Ordinand isn’t mine to sell? Do you realize we’re in hock to the limit? No, you don’t. You can’t do anything. Not even something simple like looking after a kid.”

  Miranda crumpled behind me and knelt on the floor. Alessia and I bent to help her up, and I said to Miranda’s ear, “People who are frightened are often angry and say things that hurt. He’s as frightened as you are. Hang on to that.”

  “What are you mumbling about?” Nerrity demanded. “Miranda, for Christ’s sake get up, you look a wreck.” He stared with disfavor at the ravaged face and untidy hair of his son’s mother, and with only the faintest flicker of overdue compassion said impatiently, “Get up, get up, they say it wasn’t your fault.”

  She would always think it had been, though; and so would he. Few people understood how persistent, patient, ingenious, and fast committed kidnappers could be. Whomever they planned to take, they took.

  Rightsworth said he wanted to ask Mrs. Nerrity some questions and guided her off to a distant sofa, followed by her bullish husband with his tinkling glass.

  Alessia sat in an armchair as if her legs were giving way, and Tony and I retreated to a window seat to exchange quiet notes.

  “He . . .” Tony jerked his head towards Nerrity, “has been striding up and down here wearing holes in the effing carpet and calling his wife an effing cow. All sorts of names. Didn’t know some of them myself.” He grinned wolfishly. “Takes them like that, sometimes, of course.”

  “Pour the anger on someone that won’t kick back?”

  “Poor little bitch.”

  “Any more demands?” I asked.

  “Zilch. All pianissimo. That ray of sunshine Rightsworth brought a suitcase full of bugging gear with him from the telephone blokes but he didn’t know how to use half of it, I ask you. I fixed the tap on the phone myself. Can’t bear to see effing amateurs mucking about.”

  “I gather he doesn’t like us,” I said.

  “Rightsworth? Despises the ground we walk on.”

  “Is it true John Nerrity can’t raise anything on the horse?”

  I’d asked very quietly, but Tony looked round to make sure neither the Nerritys nor Rightsworth could hear the answer. “He was blurting it all out, when I got here. Seems his effing business is dicky and he’s pledged bits of that horse to bail him out. Borrowed on it, you might say. All this bluster, I reckon it’s because he hasn’t a hope of raising the where-withal to get his nipper back, he’s in a blue funk and sending his effing underpants to the laundry.”

  “What did he say about our fee?”

  “Yeah.” Tony looked at me sideways. “Took him in the gut. He says he can’t afford us. Then he begs me not to go. He’s not getting on too effing well with Rightsworth, who would? So there he is, knackered every which way and taking it out on the lady wife.” He glanced over at Miranda, who was again in tears. “Seems she was his secretary. That’s her photo, here on this table. She was a knockout, right enough.”

  I looked at the glamorous studio-lit portrait: a divinely pretty face with fine bones, wide eyes and a hint of a smile. A likeness taken just before marriage, I guessed, at the point of her maximum attraction; before life rolled on and trampled over the heady dreams.

  “Did you tell him we’d help him for nothing?” I asked.

  “No, I effing didn’t. I don’t like him, to be honest.”

  We sometimes did, as a firm, work for no pay: it depended on circumstances. All the partners agreed that a family in need should get help regardless, and none of us begrudged it. We never charged enough anyway to make ourselves rich, being in existence on the whole to defeat extortion, not to practice it. A flat fee, plus expenses: no percentages. Our clients knew for sure that the size of the ransom in no way affected our own reward.

  The telephone rang suddenly, making everyone in the room jump. Both Tony and Rightsworth gestured to Nerrity to answer it and he walked towards it as if it were hot. I noticed that he pulled his stomach in as the muscles tightened and saw his breath become shallow. If the room had been silent I guessed we would actually have heard his heart thump. By the time he stretched out an unsteady hand to pick up the receiver Tony had the recorder running and the amplifier set so that everyone in the room could hear the caller’s words.

  “Hello,” Nerrity said hoarsely.

  “Is that you, John?” It was a woman’s voice, high and anxious. “Are you expecting me?”

  “Oh.” Miranda jumped to her feet in confusion. “It’s Mother. I asked her . . .” Her voice trailed off as her husband held out the receiver with the murderous glare of a too suddenly released tension, and she managed to take it from him without touching him skin to skin.

  “Mother?” she said, waveringly. “Yes, please do come. I thought you were coming . . .”

  “My dear girl, you sounded so flustered when you telephoned earlier. Saying you wouldn’t tell me what was wrong! I was worried. I don’t like to interfere between you and John, you know that.”

  “Mother, just come.”

  “No, I . . .”

  John Nerrity snatched the telephone out of his wife’s grasp and practically shouted, “Rosemary, just come. Miranda needs you. Don’t argue. Get here as fast as you can. Right?” He crashed the receiver down in annoyance, and I wondered whether or not the masterfully bossy tone would indeed fetch the parent. The telephone rang again almost immediately and Nerrity snatched it up in fury, saying, “Rosemary, I told you . . .”

  “John Nerrity, is it?” a voice said. Male, loud, aggressive, threatening. Not Rosemary. My own spine tingled. Tony hovered over the recording equipment, checking the quivering needles.

  “Yes,” Nerrity said breathlessly, his lungs deflating.

  “Listen once. Listen good. You’ll find a tape in a box by your front gate. Do what it says.” There was a sharp click followed by the dialing tone, and then Tony, pressing buttons, was speaking to people who were evidently telephone engineers.

  “Did you get the origin of the second call?” he asked. We read the answer on his face. “O.K.,” he said resignedly. “Thanks.” To Nerrity he said, “They need fifteen seconds. Better than the old days. Trouble is, the crooks know it too.”

  Nerrity was on his way to the front door and could presently be heard crunching across his gravel.

  Alessia was looking very frail indeed. I went down on my knees by her chair and put my arms protectively around her.

  “You could wait in another room,” I said. “Watch television. Read a book.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I’m sorry about all this.”

  She gave me a rapid glance. “You tried to get me to go home to Popsy. It’s my own fault I’m here. I’m all right. I won’t be a nuisa
nce, I promise.” She swallowed. “It’s all so odd . . . to see it from the other side.”

  “You’re a great girl,” I said. “Popsy told me so, and she’s right.”

  She looked a small shade less fraught and rested her head briefly on my shoulder. “You’re my foundations, you know,” she said. “Without you the whole thing would collapse.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said. “But seriously it would be best if you and Miranda went into the kitchen and found some food. Get her to eat. Eat something yourself. Carbohydrate. Biscuits, cake . . . something like that.”

  “Fattening,” she said automatically: the jockey talking.

  “Best for your bodies just now though. Carbohydrates are a natural tranquilizer. It’s why unhappy people eat and eat.”

  “You do know the most extraordinary things.”

  “And also,” I said, “I don’t want Miranda to hear what’s on the tape.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes widened as she remembered. “Pucinelli switched off that tape . . . so I couldn’t hear.”

  “Yes. It was horrid. So will this be. The first demands are always the most frightening. The threats will be designed to pulverize. To goad Nerrity into paying anything, everything, very quickly, to save his little son. So dearest Alessia, take Miranda into the kitchen and eat cake.”

  She smiled a shade apprehensively and walked over to Miranda, who was sobbing periodically in isolated gulps, like hiccups, but who agreed listlessly to making a cup of tea. The two went off to their haven, and Nerrity crunched back with a brown cardboard box.

  Rightsworth importantly took charge of opening it, telling everyone else to stand back. Tony’s eyebrows were sardonic. Rightsworth produced a pair of clear plastic gloves and methodically put them on before carefully slitting with a penknife the heavy adhesive tape fastening the lid.

  Opening the box Rightsworth first peered inside, then put an arm in and brought out the contents: one cassette tape, in plastic case, as expected.

  Nerrity looked at it as if it would bite and waved vaguely at an ornate stretch of gilt and padded wall unit, some of whose doors proved to be screening a bank of expensive stereo. Rightsworth found a slot for the cassette, which he handled carefully with the plastic gloves, and Nerrity pushed the relevant buttons.