by Dick Francis
We both shook our heads.
“Better to avoid raids and sieges if possible,” I said.
Tony said to Eagler, “If you find a likely house on paper, let me suss it out. I’ve had all sorts of experience at this sort of thing. I’ll tell you if the kid’s there. And if he is, I’ll get him out.”
12
There was an urgent message from the office at the Breakwater Hotel for me to telephone Alessia, which I did.
“Miranda’s distracted . . . she’s in pieces,” she said, sounding strung up herself beyond sympathy to near snapping point. “It’s awful . . . She’s telephoned me three times, crying terribly, begging me to get you to do something . . .”
“Sweet Alessia,” I said. “Take three deep breaths and sit down if you’re standing up.”
“Oh . . .” Her cough of surprise had humor in it, and after a pause she said, “All right. I’m sitting. Miranda’s dreadfully frightened. Is that better?”
“Yes,” I said, half smiling. “What’s happened?”
“Superintendent Rightsworth and John Nerrity are making a plan and won’t listen to Miranda, and she’s desperate to stop them. She wants you to make them see they mustn’t.” Her voice was still high and anxious, the sentences coming fast.
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“John is going to pretend to do what the kidnappers tell him. Pretend to collect the money. Then when the pretend money is handed over, Superintendent Rightsworth will jump on the kidnappers and make them say where Dominic is.” She gulped audibly. “That’s what went wrong . . . with me . . . in Bologna . . . isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, “an ambush at the R.V. is to my mind too high a risk.”
“What’s the R.V.?”
“Sorry. Rendezvous. The place where the ransom is handed over.”
“Miranda says John doesn’t want to pay the ransom and Superintendent Rightsworth is telling him not to worry, he doesn’t need to.”
“Mm,” I said, “well, I can see why Miranda’s upset. Did she talk to you from the telephone in her own house?”
“What? Oh, my goodness, it’s tapped, isn’t it, with the police listening to every word?”
“It is indeed,” I said dryly.
“She was up in her bedroom. I suppose she didn’t think. And . . . heavens . . . she said John was regretting calling in Liberty Market, because you were advising him to pay. Superintendent Rightsworth has assured him the police can take care of everything, there’s no need to have outsiders putting their oar in.”
The phrase had an authentic Rightsworth ring.
“Miranda says John is going to tell Liberty Market he doesn’t want their help anymore. He says it’s a waste of money . . . and Miranda’s frantic.”
“Mm,” I said. “If she telephones you again, try to remind her the phone’s tapped. If she has any sense she’ll ring you back from somewhere else. Then reassure her that we’ll do our best to change her husband’s mind.”
“But how?” Alessia said, despairing.
“Get our chairman to frighten him silly, I daresay,” I said. “And I never said that. It’s for your ears only.”
“Will it work?” Alessia said doubtfully.
“There are also people who can overrule Rightsworth.”
“I suppose there are.” She sounded happier with that. “Shall I tell Miranda to telephone directly to you, in your office?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll be moving about. When you’ve heard from her, leave a message again for me to call you, and I will.”
“All right.” She sounded tired. “I haven’t been able to think of anything else all day. Poor Miranda. Poor, poor little boy. I never really understood until now what Papa went through because of me.”
“Because of your kidnappers,” I said, “and for love of you, yes.”
After a pause she said, “You’re telling me again . . . I must feel no guilt.”
“That’s right,” I said. “No more guilt than Dominic.”
“It’s not easy . . .”
“No,” I agreed. “But essential.”
She asked if I would come to lunch on Sunday, and I said yes if possible but not to count on it.
“You will get him back alive, won’t you?” she said finally, none of the worry dissipated; and I said “Yes,” and meant it.
“Goodbye, then . . .”
“Goodbye,” I said. “And love to Popsy.”
Liberty Market, I reflected, putting down the receiver, might have an overall success rate as high as ninety-five percent, but John Nerrity seemed to be heading himself perilously towards the other tragic five. Perhaps he truly believed, perhaps even Rightsworth believed, that an ambush at the drop produced the best results. And so they did, if capturing some of the kidnappers was the overriding aim.
There had been a case in Florida, however, when the police had ambushed the man who picked up the ransom and shot him down as he ran to escape, and only because the wounded man relented and told where his victim was a few seconds before he slid into a final coma had they ever found the boy alive. He had been left in the trunk of a parked car, and would slowly have suffocated if the police had fired a fraction straighter.
I told Tony of Nerrity’s plans and he said disgustedly, “What is he, an effing optimist?” He bit his thumbnail. “Have to find that little nipper, won’t we?”
“Hope to God.”
“Better chance in this country than anywhere else, of course.”
I nodded. Among well-meaning peoples, like the British, kidnappers were disadvantaged. Their crime was reviled, not tolerated, and the population not afraid of informing. Once the victim was safely home, the trace-and-capture machinery had proved excellent.
Finding the hideout before the payoff was easier in Britain than in Italy, but still dauntingly difficult: and most successes along that line had come from coincidence, from nosy neighbors, and from guessing who had done the kidnap because of the close knowledge inadvertently revealed of the victim’s private life.
“No one knew my daughter was going to be at that dance except her boyfriend,” one grief-stricken father had told us: and sure enough her apparently shattered boyfriend had organized the extortion—that time without the girl’s knowledge, which wasn’t always so. Collusion with the “victim” had to be considered every time, human greed being what it was. The girl in that case had been found and freed without a ransom being paid, but she’d had a worse time in captivity than Alessia and the last I’d heard she was being treated for deep prolonged depression.
“I think I’ll just mosey around a bit where the boats are,” Tony said. “Can I borrow your car? You can use Miranda’s if you’re desperate. Do you mind if I go home later for some gear? I’ll see you at effing breakfast.”
“Don’t crunch it,” I said, giving him the keys.
“As if I would.”
I spent the evening eating the hotel’s very reasonable dinner and packing Miranda’s belongings. Dominic’s clothes, quiet and folded, filled a neat small suitcase. I put his cuddly toys, a teddy and a Snoopy, in beside them, and shut the lid: and thought of him, so defenseless, so frightened, and knew that it was because of people like him and Alessia that what I was doing was a job for life.
IN VIEW OF John Nerrity’s change of heart I guessed he wouldn’t be too pleased with the morning newspapers’ money columns, where the financial editors had done him proud. The word “Nerrity” sprang out in large black letters from every paper I’d visited, which were mostly of the sort that I guessed the writer of the kidnap note would read.
“Nerrity Home and Dried,” “Nerrity’s Nag to the Rescue,” “Nerrity Floats on Stud,” they said: and “Nerrity Solvent by Short Head.” To kidnappers nervously scanning the press for signs of police activity, the bad news couldn’t be missed. Creditors were zeroing in on the Ordinand proceeds, and there would be precious little left for other sharks.
Eagler telephoned me in Miranda’s room while I was still reading. “These pa
pers . . . Is this your doing?” he asked.
“Er, yes.”
He chuckled. “I thought I detected the fine hand. Well, laddie, we’re doing a spot of rummaging around the classifieds in the local rags of a week to two weeks ago, and we’re checking through all the properties to rent. We’ll have a partial list for you anytime today.” He paused. “Now I’m putting a lot of faith in your friend Tony Vine, and I want to be sure it’s not misplaced.”
“He’s an ex-S.A.S.,” I said. “A sergeant.”
“Ah.” He sounded relieved.
“He prefers working at night.”
“Does he now.” Eagler was almost purring. “I should have a fairly complete list for you by late this afternoon. Will you fetch it?”
We arranged time and place, and rang off; and when I went downstairs to breakfast Tony was walking in through the front door, yawning.
Over bacon, eggs, and kippers he recounted what he’d found. “Did you know there’s a whole internal water system behind the coast here? Itchenor Creek goes all the way to Chichester. But there’s a lock some way up, and our fellows didn’t go through it.” He chewed. “I hired a rowing boat. Sneaked around a bit. Reckon it’s an effing needle in a haystack we’re after. There’s dozens, hundreds of likely houses. Holiday flats. Chalets. You name it. And on top of that the water goes clear to somewhere called Hayling Island, with thousands more little bungalows, and there are uncountable places where a car could have met the boat and taken the nipper anywhere.”
I gloomily ate some toast and told him about Eagler’s impending list.
“O.K. then,” Tony said. “I’ll swim this morning, sleep this afternoon, work tonight, O.K.?”
I nodded and passed him one of the newspapers. Tony read the financial news over the rim of his cup of tea. “You hit the effing bull’s-eye. No one could miss it,” he said.
Nerrity himself certainly hadn’t missed it. Gerry Clayton telephoned to say that Nerrity was furious and insisting we drop the case. He wanted nothing more to do with Liberty Market.
“He admitted he’d agreed to your getting the story into the papers,” Gerry said. “But he didn’t think it would happen so quickly, and he had intended to cancel it.”
“Too bad.”
“Yes. So officially you and Tony can break off and come home.”
“No,” I said. “We’re working for Mrs. Nerrity now. She specifically asked for us to continue.”
Gerry’s voice had a smile in it. “I thought you might, but it makes it all a damn sight more tricky. Both of you . . . take care.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fold some nice paper. Try a boat.”
“Boat?”
“A boat to thrust a small boy into so that you can put a tarpaulin or some such over him, a boat to chug noisily away over the breaking waves so that no one can hear him crying out.”
“Is that how it was done?” Gerry asked soberly.
“We think so, yes.”
“Poor little blighter,” Gerry said.
Tony and I in true holiday-making fashion spent the morning in or out of water, although the day was not so warm nor the beach so fruitfully crowded. The policewoman, now in a white bikini, came to splash with us in the shallows but said she hadn’t been able to find anyone who had seen Dominic carried off. “Every single person seems to have been looking at the dinghy,” she said disgustedly. “And all we know about that is that it was stranded on the sand when the tide went out, and it had a large piece of paper taped to the seat saying ‘Don’t touch the boat, we’ll be back for it soon.’ ”
“Didn’t someone say they’d seen who left it?” I asked.
“Well, yes, but that was a boy playing up on the shingle, and all he could say was that they were two men in shorts and bright orange rainproof sailing jackets, who had pulled the dinghy up the sand a bit and been busy round it for a while and then had walked off northwest along the beach. The boy went down, to the dinghy soon afterwards and read the note, and after that he went off to get an ice cream. He wasn’t here in the afternoon when it went up in flames, much to his disgust. When he came back it was burnt and black.”
The policewoman was shivering in the rising breeze and turning a pale shade of blue. “Time for a sweater and thick socks,” she said cheerfully. “And I might as well chat up the ancient ladies living in the Haven Rest Home along there.” She pointed. “They’ve nothing to do but look out of the windows.”
Tony and I picked up our belongings and moved to the shelter of the hotel, and in the afternoon while the clouds thickened overhead he slept undisturbed in Miranda’s bed.
At five I drove to Chichester to collect the list of rentals from Eagler: he came to meet me himself, looking insignificant and slow, and climbed into the passenger seat at my side.
“These top eleven are the most promising,” he said, pointing. “They are collected from all the agencies we could think of. They are all holiday homes on or near the water and they were all rented at the last minute. The weather was so bad in July and at the beginning of August that there were more properties than usual available, and then when it turned warmer there was a rush.”
I nodded. “Miranda herself decided to come here only a few days in advance. The hotel had had cancellations because of the weather, and could take her.”
“I wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t come,” Eagler said thoughtfully.
“They’d have grabbed him at home.”
“You’d have thought they’d have found it easier to wait until he was back there.”
“Kidnappers don’t try to make things easy for themselves,” I said mildly. “They plan to the last inch. They spend money. They’re obsessional. There’s never anything casual about a kidnap. Kidnappers would see a good chance of success while the child was in charge of his mother alone down here, and I bet once they’d done the planning they waited day after day for the right minute. If it hadn’t presented itself they would have followed Miranda home and thought up a new plan. Or perhaps have reverted to a former plan which hadn’t so far borne fruit. You never can tell. But if they’d wanted him, they would have got him in the end.”
“How would they have known she was coming here?” Eagler asked.
“Kidnappers watch,” I said. “They’re obsessional about that too. What conclusion would you come to if you saw Miranda load suitcases and a beach chair into her car, strap Dominic into his seat, and drive away waving?”
“Hm.”
“You’d follow,” I said.
“I expect so.”
“Miranda in her nice red car, driving at a moderate speed, as mothers do with their children in the back.”
“True,” he said. He stirred. “Anyway, the next bunch of houses on the list are all at least one street away from the water, and the last lot are further inland, but still in the coastline villages. Beyond that . . .” he stopped, looking doubtful. “This whole section of Sussex is one big holiday area.”
“We’ll try these,” I said.
“I’ve some good men,” Eagler suggested. “They could help.”
I shook my head. “They might just possibly inquire of one of the kidnappers themselves if they’d heard a child crying. That’s happened before. The kidnapper said no, and the child turned up dead on some waste ground a week later. It happened in Italy. The police caught the kidnappers in the end, and the kidnappers said they’d panicked when they found the police were so close to their hideout.”
Eagler stroked thumb and forefinger down his nose. “All right,” he said. “We’ll do it your way.” He glanced at me sideways. “But to be honest, I don’t think you’ll succeed.”
Tony, back at the hotel, wasn’t particularly hopeful either. He looked judiciously at the first eleven addresses and said he would first locate them by land and then approach by rowing boat, and those eleven alone would take him all night. He said he would take my car, which still had his gear stowed in it, and he’d be back in the morning.
“Sle
ep tomorrow, try again tomorrow night,” he said. “That brings us to Sunday. Hope those effing kidnappers meant it about giving Nerrity a week to collect the dough. They might be twitchy after the newspapers. Might advance the time of the drop. Hope effing not.”
He ate little for dinner and drove away when it was getting dark. I telephoned Alessia for news of Miranda, but except for her having come out of the house to call Alessia, nothing much had happened. Miranda continued distraught. The kidnappers had not been in touch again. John Nerrity still appeared to have faith in the ambush plan and had said he thought Miranda’s near-collapse excessive.
“I wonder how he would have reacted if it had been Ordinand who’d been kidnapped,” I said.
Alessia nearly laughed. “Don’t talk of it. And it’s been done.”
“Without success,” I agreed. “Enough to put the horsenappers off for life.”
“Would your firm work to free a horse?” she asked curiously.
“Sure. Extortion is extortion, however many legs the victim has. Ransoms can be negotiated for anything.”
“Paintings?”
“Anything anyone cares about.”
“Like ‘I’ll give you your ball back if you pay me a penny’?”
“Exactly like that.”
“Where are you?” she said. “Not at home . . . I tried there.”
“An evening off,” I said. “I’ll tell you when I see you.”
“Do come on Sunday.”
“Yes, I’ll try.”
We spent more time than necessary saying goodbye. I thought that I could easily have talked to her all evening, and wished vaguely that she felt secure enough to travel and drive alone.
TONY CAME BACK soon after dawn, waking me from a shallow sleep.
“There are two possibles out of those eleven places,” he said, stripping off for a shower. “Nine of them are occupied by bona-fide effing holidaymakers. I went into four to make absolutely sure, but there they were, tucked up nice and unsuspecting, dads, mums, grannies, and kids, all regular law-abiding citizens.”
Tony’s skill, as he immodestly said, would make any professional night burglar look like a herd of elephants. “A creeper as good as me,” I’d heard him say, “can touch a person in bed and get them to turn over to stop them snoring. I could take the polish off their nails, let alone the wallets from under the pillows. Good thing I’m effing honest.”