The Danger

by Dick Francis

  The voice filled the room, harsh, thunderous, uncompromising.

  “Now, you, Nerrity, you listen good.”

  I took three quick strides and turned down the volume, on the grounds that threats fortissimo would sound even worse than threats should. Tony nodded appreciatively, but Rightsworth was irritated. The voice went on, more moderate in decibels, immoderate in content.

  “We nicked your kid, Nerrity, and if you want your heir back in one piece you do what you’re told like a good boy. Otherwise we’ll take our knife out, Nerrity, and slash off something to persuade you. Not his hair, Nerrity. A finger maybe. Or his little privates. Those for sure. Understand, Nerrity? No messing about. This is for real.

  “Now you got a horse, Nerrity. Worth a bit, we reckon. Six million. Seven. Sell it, Nerrity. Like we said, we want five million. Otherwise your kid suffers. Nice little kid too. You don’t want him screaming, do you? He’ll scream with what we’ll do to him.

  “You get a bloodstock agent busy. We’ll wait a week. One week, seven days. Seven days from now, you get that money ready in used notes, nothing bigger than twenty. We’ll tell you where to leave it. You do what we tell you, or it’s the castration. We’ll send you a tape of what it sounds like. Slash. Rip. Scream.

  “And you keep away from the police. If we think you’ve called in the Force, your kid’s for the plastic bag. Final. You won’t get his body back. Nothing. Think about it.

  “Right, Nerrity. That’s the message.”

  The voice stopped abruptly and there was a numb minute of silence before anyone moved. I’d heard a score of ransom demands, but always, every time, found them shocking. Nerrity, like many a parent before him, was poleaxed to his roots. “They can’t . . .” he said, his mouth dry, the words gagging.

  “They can,” Tony said flatly. “But not if we manage it right.”

  “What did they say to you this afternoon?” I asked. “What’s different?”

  Nerrity swallowed. “The . . . the knife. That part. Before, he just said ‘five million for your kid.’ And I said I hadn’t got five million . . . He said ‘you’ve got a horse, so sell it.’ That was all. And no police, he said that too. Five million, no police, or the boy would die. He said he’d be getting in touch. I began to shout at him . . . he just rang off.”

  Rightsworth took the cassette out of the recorder and put it in its box, putting that in its turn in the cardboard carton, all with exaggerated care in the plastic gloves. He would be taking the tape, he said. They would maintain the tap on Mr. Nerrity’s telephone, he said. They would be working on the case, he said.

  Nerrity, highly alarmed, begged him to be careful; and begging didn’t come easy, I thought, to one accustomed to bully. Rightsworth said with superiority that every care would be taken, and I could see Tony thinking, as I was, that Rightsworth was treating the threats too pompously and was not, in consequence, a brilliant detective.

  When he had gone, Nerrity, his first fears subsiding, poured himself another stiff gin and tonic, again with ice and lemon. He picked the ice out of a bucket with a pair of tongs. Tony watched with incredulity.

  “Drink?” he said to us as an afterthought.

  We shook our heads.

  “I’m not paying that ransom,” he said defensively. “For one thing, I can’t. The horse is due to be sold in any case. It’s four years old, and going to stud. I don’t need to get a bloodstock agent, it’s being handled already. Some of the shares have already been sold, but I’ll hardly see a penny. Like I said, I’ve got business debts.” He took a deep drink. “You may as well know, that horse is the difference to me between being solvent and bankrupt. Biggest stroke of luck ever, the day I bought it as a yearling.” He swelled slightly, giving himself a mental pat on the back, and we could both see an echo of the expansiveness with which he must have waved many a gin and tonic while he recounted his good fortune.

  “Isn’t your business,” I said, “a limited company? If you’ll excuse my asking.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “What is your business?” Tony asked him casually.

  “Importer. Wholesale. One or two wrong decisions . . .” He shrugged. “Bad debts. Firms going bankrupt, owing me money. On my scale of operations it doesn’t take much of a recession to do a damned lot of damage. Ordinand will clear everything. Set me to rights. Fund me for future trading. Ordinand is a bloody miracle.” He made a furious chopping gesture with his free hand. “I’m damned if I’m going to throw away my entire life for those bloody kidnappers.”

  He’d said it, I thought. He’d said aloud what had been festering in his mind ever since Miranda’s phone call. He didn’t love his son enough for the sacrifice.

  “How much is Ordinand worth?” Tony said unemotionally.

  “They got it right. Six million, with luck. Forty shares at a hundred and fifty thousand each.” He drank, the ice clinking.

  “And how much do you need to straighten your business?”

  “That’s a bloody personal question.”

  Tony said patiently, “If we’re going to negotiate for you, we have to know just what is or isn’t possible.”

  Nerrity frowned at his lemon slice, but then said, “Four and a half, thereabouts, will keep me solvent. Five would clear all debts. Six will see me soundly based for the future.”

  Tony glanced about him at the overplush room. “What about this house?”

  Nerrity looked at him as if he were a financial baby. “Every brick mortgaged,” he said shortly.

  “Any other assets?”

  “If I had any other bloody assets I’d have cashed them by now.”

  Tony and I exchanged glances, then Tony said, “I reckon we might get your kid back for less than half a million. We’ll aim lower, of course. First offer a hundred thousand. Then take it from there.”

  “But they won’t . . . they said . . .” Nerrity stopped, floundering.

  “The best thing,” I said, “would be to get yourself onto the City pages of the newspapers. Go into print telling the world there’s nothing like a Derby winner for keeping the bailiffs out.”

  “But . . .”

  “Yes,” I interrupted. “Maybe not in the normal way good for business. But your creditors will be sure they’ll be paid, and the kidnappers will be sure they won’t. Next time they get in touch, they’ll demand less. Once they acknowledge to themselves that the proceeds will be relatively small compared with their first demand, that’s what they’ll settle for. Better than nothing, sort of thing.”

  “But they’ll harm Dominic . . .”

  I shook my head. “It’s pretty doubtful, not if they’re sure they’ll make a profit in the end. Dominic’s their only guarantee of that profit. Dominic, alive and whole. They won’t destroy or damage their asset in any way if they’re convinced you’ll pay what you can. So when you talk to the press, make sure they understand—and print—that there’ll be a margin over, when Ordinand is sold. Say that the horse will wipe out all your debts and then some.”

  “But . . .” he said again.

  “If you have any difficulty approaching the City editors, we can do that for you,” I said.

  He looked from Tony to me with the uncertainty of a commander no longer in charge.

  “Would you?” he said.

  We nodded. “Straight away.”

  “Andrew will do it,” Tony said. “He knows the City. Cut his teeth in Lloyds, our lad here.” Neither he nor I explained how lowly my job there had been. “Very smooth, our Andrew, in his city suit,” Tony said.

  Nerrity looked me up and down. I hadn’t replaced my tie, although I’d long unrolled my trousers. “He’s young,” he said disparagingly.

  Tony silently laughed. “As old as the pyramids,” he said. “We’ll get your nipper back, don’t you fret.”

  Nerrity said uncomfortably, “It’s not that I don’t like the boy. Of course I do.” He paused. “I don’t see much of him. Five minutes in the morning. He’s in bed when I get h
ome. Weekends . . . I work, go to the races, go out with business friends. Don’t have much time for lolling about.”

  Not much inclination, either, I diagnosed.

  “Miranda dotes on him,” Nerrity said, as if that were no virtue. “You’d have thought she could keep her eyes on him for five minutes, wouldn’t you? I don’t see how she could have been so bloody stupid.”

  I tried explaining about the determination of kidnappers, but it seemed to have no effect.

  “It was her idea to have the kid in the first place,” Nerrity grumbled. “I told her it would spoil her figure. She went on and on about being lonely. She knew what my life was like before she married me, didn’t she?”

  From the other side, I thought. From the office side, where his life was most intense, where hers was busy and fulfilled.

  “Anyway, we had the kid.” He made another sharply frustrated gesture. “And now . . . this.”

  Miranda’s mother arrived conveniently at that point, and shortly afterwards I put Alessia in my car and talked to Tony quietly in the garden.

  “Thursday, tomorrow,” I said. “Wittering’s a seaside place. Good chance the same people will be on the beach tomorrow as today, wouldn’t you think?”

  “The super in Chichester, would he buy that?” Tony asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a day myself of sitting on the effing pebbles.”

  “The tide’s going out in the mornings,” I said. “How about if you take the stuff down to Eagler on the train, and I’ll join you for a paddle when I’ve buzzed up the City?”

  He nodded. “See you at the Breakwater Hotel, then?”

  “Yeah. Tell them at Reception that we’re taking over Miranda’s room. She’s booked in until Saturday. Tell them the boy’s ill, she’s had to take him home, we’re her brothers, we’ve come down to collect her clothes and her car . . . and pay her bill.”

  “I don’t know that sitting around in the Breakwater too long will do much good.”

  I grinned in the darkness. “Make a change from the switchboard, though.”

  “You’re an effing rogue, I always knew it.”

  He vanished into the shadows without noise, departing on foot to his distantly parked car, and I climbed in beside Alessia and pointed our nose towards Lambourn.

  I asked if she were hungry and would like to stop somewhere for a late dinner, but she shook her head. “Miranda and I ate cornflakes and toast until our eyes crossed. And you were right, she seemed a bit calmer by the time we left. But oh . . . when I think of that little boy . . . so alone, without his mother . . . I can’t bear it.”

  I SPENT THE next morning in Fleet Street swearing various business-page editors to secrecy and enlisting their aid, and then drove back to West Wittering, reflecting that I’d spent at least twelve of the past thirty hours with my feet on the pedals.

  Arriving at the Breakwater in jeans and sports shirt, I found Tony had checked in and left a message that he was out on the beach. I went down there and came across him sitting on a gaudy towel, wearing swimming trunks and displaying a lot of impressive keep-fit muscle. I dropped down beside him on a towel of my own and watched the life of the beach ebb and flow.

  “Your Eagler already had the same idea,” Tony said. “Half the holidaymakers on this patch of sand are effing plainclothesmen quizzing the other half. They’ve been out here since breakfast.”

  It appeared that Tony had got on very well with Eagler. Tony considered he had “constructive effing ideas,” which was Tony’s highest mark of approval. “Eagler’s already sorted out what arson device was used to fire the dinghy. The dinghy was stolen, what a surprise.”

  Some small children were digging a new sandcastle where Dominic’s had been wiped out by the tide.

  “A little girl of about eight gave Miranda the kidnapper’s note,” I said. “What do you bet she’s still here?”

  Without directly answering Tony rose to his feet and loped down onto the sand, where he was presently passing the time of day with two agile people kicking a football.

  “They’ll look for her,” he said, returning. “They’ve found plenty who saw the boat. Some who saw who left it. The one with the green shorts has a stat of Giuseppe in his pocket, but no luck with that, so far.”

  The two boys who had helped me carry the boat up from the grasp of the tide came by and said hello, recognizing me.

  “Hi,” I said. “I see the boat’s gone, what was left of it.”

  One of them nodded. “We came back along here after supper and there were two fisherman types winching it onto a pickup truck. They didn’t know whose it was. They said the coastguards had sent them to fetch it into a yard in Itchenor.”

  “Do you live here?” I asked.

  They shook their heads. “We rent a house along there for August.” One of them pointed eastwards, along the beach. “We come every year. Mum and Dad like it.”

  “You’re brothers?” I asked.

  “Twins, actually. But fraternal, as you see.”

  They picked up some pebbles and threw them at an empty Coke can for target practice, and presently moved off.

  “Gives you a thought or two, doesn’t it?” Tony said.

  “Yes.”

  “Eagler wanted to see us anyway at about five,” he said. “In the Silver Sail Café in that place the boy mentioned. Itchenor. Sounds like some disgusting effing disease.”

  The football-kicker in green shorts was presently talking to a little girl whose mother bustled up in alarm and protectively shepherded her nestling away.

  “Never mind,” Tony said. “That smashing bit of goods in the pink bikini over there is a policewoman. What’ll you bet green shorts will be talking to her in two effing ticks?”

  “Not a pebble,” I said.

  We watched while green shorts got into conversation with pink bikini. “Nicely done,” Tony said approvingly. “Very natural.”

  The pink-bikini girl stopped looking for shells exclusively and started looking for small girls as well, and I took my shirt off and began turning a delicate shade of lobster.

  No dramas occurred on the beach. The hot afternoon warmed to teatime. The football-kickers went off across the breakwaters and the pink bikini went in for a swim. Tony and I stood up, stretched, shook and folded our towels, and in good holidaymaker fashion got into my car and drove westwards to Itchenor.

  Eagler, inconspicuous in an open-necked shirt, baggy gray flannels and grubby tennis shoes, was drinking tea in the Silver Sail and writing a picture postcard.

  “May we join you?” I asked politely.

  “Sit down, laddie, sit down.”

  It was an ordinary sort of café; sauce bottles on the tables, murals of sailing boats round the walls, brown tiled floor, plastic stacking chairs in blue. A notice by a cash desk stated “The best chips on the coast” and a certain warm oiliness in the atmosphere tended to prove their popularity.

  “My W.P.C. found your girl child,” Eagler said, sticking a stamp on his postcard. “Name of Sharon Wellor, seven years old, staying in a guest house until Saturday. She couldn’t describe the man who asked her to deliver the note. She says he gave her a roll of fruit pastilles, and she’s scared now because her mother’s always told her never to take sweets from strangers.”

  “Did she know whether he was old or young?” I asked.

  “Everyone over twenty is old to a seven-year-old,” Eagler said. “She told my W.P.C. where she’s staying, though, so perhaps we’ll ask again.” He glanced at us. “Come up with any more ideas, have you?”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “Kidnappers often don’t transport their victims very far from their snatching point. Lowers the risk.”

  “In holiday resorts,” I said mildly. “Half the houses are for rent.”

  Eagler fiddled aimlessly with his teaspoon. “Thousands of them,” he said dryly.

  “But one of them might have been rented sometime last week.”

  We waited, a
nd after a while he nodded. “We’ll do the leg-work. Ask the travel agents, estate agents, local papers.” He paused, then said without emphasis, “The kid may have been taken off in a boat.”

  Tony and I paid fast attention.

  “There was a motorboat there,” Eagler said. “One of those putt-putt things for hire by the hour. My detective constables were told that when the dinghy went on fire the other boat was bobbing round in the shallows with no one in it, but a man in swimming trunks standing knee-deep in the water holding on to it by the bows. Then, our informants said, the dinghy suddenly went up in flames, very fast, with a whoosh, and everyone ran towards it, naturally. Our informants said that afterwards the motorboat had gone, which they thought perfectly normal as its time was probably up.” He stopped, looking at us neutrally but with a smile of satisfaction plainly hovering.

  “Who were your informants?” I asked.

  The smile almost surfaced. “A ten-year-old canal digger and his grandmother.”

  “Very reliable,” I said.

  “The boat was blue, clinker built, with a number seventeen in white on its bow and stern.”

  “And the man?”

  “The man was a man. They found the boat more interesting.” He paused again. “There’s a yard here in Itchenor with boats like that for hire. The trouble is they’ve got only ten. They’ve never had one with seventeen on it, ever.”

  “But who’s to know?” Tony said.

  “Look for a house with a boat shed,” I murmured. Eagler said benignly, “It wouldn’t hurt, would it, to find the kid?”

  “If they spot anyone looking they’ll be off in a flash,” I said, “and it would be dangerous for the boy.”

  Eagler narrowed his eyes slightly at our alarm. “We’ll go round the agencies,” he said. “If we turn up anything likely on paper we won’t surround it without telling you first. How’s that?”