Break In

by Dick Francis

  The Bourne Brothers’ assets, he said, had proved to include s Me long overlooked patents for a special valve which had turned out to be just what industry was beginning to need. As soon as it was his, Maynard Allardeck had offered the valve on a royalty basis to the highest bidder, and had been collecting handsomely ever since. The Bourne Brothers? The interviewer shook his head. The Bourne Brothers hadn’t realised what they’d owned until they’d irrevocably parted with it. But did Maynard Allardeck know what he was getting? Almost certainly yes. The interviewer smiled maliciously and pushed the knife right in. If Allardeck had told the Bourne Brothers what they owned, collecting dust in a file, they could have saved themselves several times over.

  The interviewer’s smugly sarcastic face vanished into another section of blizzard, and Rose Quince rose languidly to switch everything off.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Nasty.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Why didn’t they show the whole tape on How’s Trade? They obviously meant to needle Maynard. Why did they smother the results?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ Rose hitched a hip on to one of the tables and regarded me with acid amusement. ‘I should think Allardeck paid them not to show it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pure as a spring lamb, aren’t you? That interviewer and his producer have before this set up a pigeon and then thoroughly shot him down, but without the brawl ever reaching the screen. One politician, I know for certain, was invited by the producer to see his hopelessly damaging tape before it was broadcast. He was totally appalled and asked if there was any way he could persuade the producer to edit it. Sure, the producer said, the oldest way in the world, through your wallet.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The politician told me himself. He wanted me to write about it, he was so furious, but I couldn’t. He wouldn’t let me use his name.’

  ‘Maynard,’ I said slowly, ‘has a real genius for acquiring assets.’

  ‘Oh, sure. And nothing illegal. Not unless he helped the trains to shake the block of flats’ foundations.’

  ‘One could never find out.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘How did the interviewer rake all that up?’

  Rose shrugged. ‘Out of files. Out of archives. Same as we all do when we’re on a story.’

  ‘He’d done a great deal of work.’

  ‘Expecting a great deal of pay-off.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said, ‘if Maynard was already angling for a knighthood, he’d have paid the earth. They could probably have got more from him than they did.’

  ‘They’ll curl up like lemon rind now that they know.’ The idea pleased Rose greatly.

  ‘How did you get this tape?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘From the producer himself, sort of. He owed me a big favour. I told him I wanted to do a shredding job on Allardeck, and asked to see the interview again, uncut if possible, and he was as nice as pie. I wouldn’t tell him I knew about his own little scam, now would I?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said slowly, ‘that I couldn’t have a copy?’

  Rose gave me a long cool look while she considered it. Her eyelids, I noticed, were coloured purple, dark contrast to the pale blue eyes.

  ‘What would you do with it?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘It’s under copyright,’ she said.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have it.’

  ‘No.’

  She bent over the video machine and pressed the eject button. The large black cassette slid quietly and smoothly into her hand. She slotted it into its case and held it out to me, gold chains tinkling.

  ‘Take this one. This is a copy. I made it myself. The originals never left the building, they’re hot as hell about that in that television company, but I’m fairly quick with these things. They left me alone in an editing room to view, with some spare tapes stacked in a corner, which was their big mistake.’

  I took the box, which bore a large white label saying ‘Do not touch’.

  ‘Now listen to me, buddy boy, if you’re found with this, you don’t get me into trouble, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Do you want it back?’

  ‘I don’t know why I trust you,’ she said plaintively. ‘A goddamn jockey. If I want it back I’ll ask. You keep it somewhere safe. Don’t leave it lying about, for God’s sake. Though I suppose I should tell you it won’t play on an ordinary video. The tape is professional tape three-quarters of an inch wide, it gives better definition. You’ll need a machine that takes that size.’

  ‘What were you going to do with it yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Wipe it off,’ she said decisively. ‘I got it yesterday morning and played it several times here to make sure I didn’t put the uncut version’s words into Allardeck’s mouth in the paper. I don’t need suing. Then I wrote my piece, and I’ve been busy today… but if you’d come one day later, it would all have been wiped.’

  ‘Lucky,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. What else? Files? There’s more on the tape, but Bill said files, so files you can have.’

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘Bill Vaughnley. We worked together when we were young. Bill started at the bottom, the old Lord made him. So did I You don’t call someone sir when you’ve shared cigarette butts on a night stint.’

  They had been lovers, I thought. It was in her voice.

  ‘He says I have a tongue like a viper,’ she said without offence. ‘I dare say he told you?’

  I nodded. ‘Rattlesnake.’

  She smiled. ‘When he’s a pompous fool, I let him know it.’

  She stood up, tawny and tinkling like a mobile in a breeze, and we went out of the television room, down a corridor, round a few corners, and found ourselves in an expanse like a library with shelves to the ceiling bearing not books but folders of all sorts, the whole presided over by a severe looking youth in spectacles who signed us in, looked up the indexing and directed us to the section we needed.

  The file on Maynard Allardeck was, as Rose had said, less informative than the tape. There were sundry photographs of him, black and white glossy prints, chiefly taken at race meetings, where I supposed he was more accessible. There were three, several years old now, of him leading in his great horse Metavane after its win in the 2000 Guineas, the Goodwood Mile and the Champion Stakes. Details and dates were on flimsy paper strips stuck to the back of the prints.

  There were two bunches of newspaper clippings, one from the Towncrier, one from other sources such as the Financial Times and the Sporting Life. Nothing critical had been written, it seemed, before the onslaught in the Flag. The paragraphs were mainly dull: Maynard, from one of the oldest racing families… Maynard, proud owner… Maynard, member of the Jockey Club… Maynard, astute businessman… Maynard, supporter of charity… Maynard the great and good. Approving adjectives like bold, compassionate, far-sighted and responsible occurred. The public persona at its prettiest.

  ‘Enough to make you puke,’ Rose said.

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Do you think you could ask your producer friend why he hit on Maynard as a target?’

  ‘Maybe. Why?’

  ‘Someone’s got it in for Maynard. That TV interview might be an attack that didn’t work, God bless bribery and corruption. The attack in the Flag has worked well. You’ve helped it along handsomely yourself. So who got to the Flag, and did they also get to the producer?’

  ‘I take it back,’ she said. ‘Some jockeys are smarter than others.’

  ‘Very few are dumb.’

  ‘They fust talk a different language?’

  ‘Dead right.’

  She returned the file to its place. ‘Anything else? Any dinky little thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How would I get to talk to Sam Leggatt, who edits the Flag?’

  She let out a breath, a cross between a cough and a laugh. ‘Sam Leggatt? You don’t.’

  ‘Why not?’
/>
  ‘He walks around in a bullet-proof vest.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Metaphorically.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Sure, I know him. Can’t say I like him. He was political correspondent on the Record before he went to the Flag, and he’s always thought he was God’s gift to Fleet Street. He’s a mocker by nature. He and the Flag are soulmates.’

  ‘Could you reach him on the telephone?’ I asked.

  She shook her head over my naivety. ‘They’ll be printing the first edition by now, but he’ll be checking everything again for the second. Adding stuff. Changing it round. There’s no way he’d talk to Moses let alone a… a jumping bean.’

  ‘You could say,’ I suggested, ‘that you were your editor’s secretary, and it was urgent.’

  She looked at me in disbelief. ‘And why the hell should I?’

  ‘Because you trade in favours.’

  ‘Jee–sus.’ She blinked the pale blue eyes.

  ‘Any time,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay. I took it for granted that this…’ I held up the tape, ‘was on account.’

  ‘The telephone,’ she said, ‘makes it two favours.’

  ‘All right.’

  She said with amusement, ‘Is this how you win your races?’ She turned without waiting for an answer and led the way back roughly to where we had started from but ending in a small, bare little room furnished only with three or four chairs, a table and a telephone.

  ‘Interview room,’ Rose said. ‘General purposes. Not used much. I’m not having anyone hear me make this call.’

  She sat on one of the chairs looking exotically sensuous and behaving with middle-class propriety, the baroque façade for frighteners, the sensible woman beneath.

  ‘You’ll have about ten seconds, if that,’ she said, stretching out the bracelets for the telephone. ‘Leggatt will know straight away you’re not our editor. Our editor comes from Yorkshire and still sounds like it.’

  I nodded.

  She got an outside line and with long red nails tapped in the Flag’s number, which she knew by heart; and within a minute, after out-blarneying the Irish, she handed me the receiver silently.

  ‘Hello, Martin, what goes?’ an unenthusiastic voice said.

  I said slowly and clearly, ‘Owen Watts left his credit cards in Bobby Allardeck’s garden.’

  ‘What? I don’t see…’ There was a sudden silence. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Jay Erskine,’ I said, ‘left his Press Club card in the same place. To whom should I report these losses? To the Press Council, the police or my member of parliament?’

  ‘Who is that?’ he asked flatly.

  ‘I’m speaking from a telephone in the Towncrier. Will you talk to me in your office, or shall I give the Towncrier a scoop?’

  There was a long pause. I waited. His voice then said, ‘I’ll ring you back. Give me your extension.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Now or never.’

  A much shorter pause. ‘Very well. Come to the front desk. Say you’re from the Towncrier.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  He crashed the telephone down as soon as I’d finished speaking, and Rose was staring at me as if alarmed for my wholeness of mind.

  ‘No one speaks to editors like that,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah… well, I don’t work for him. And somewhere along the way I’ve learned not to be afraid of people. I was never afraid of horses. People were more difficult.’

  She said with a touch of seriousness, ‘People can harm you.’

  ‘They sure can. But I’d get nowhere with Leggatt by being soft.’

  ‘Where do you want to be?’ she asked. ‘What’s this scoop you’re not giving the Towncrier?’

  ‘Nothing much. Just some dirty tricks the Flag indulged in to get their Allardeck story for Intimate Details.’

  She shrugged. ‘I doubt if we’d print that.’

  ‘Maybe not. What’s the limit journalists will go to to get a story?’

  ‘No limit. Up Everest, into battlefields, along the gutters, anywhere a scandal leads. I’ve done my crusading time in rotten health farms, corrupt local governments, nutty religions. I’ve seen more dirt, more famine, more poverty, more tragedy than I need. I’ve sat through nights with parents of murdered children and I’ve been in a village of lifeboatmen’s widows weeping for their dead. And then some damn fool man expects me to go sit on a prissy gilt chair and swoon over skirt lengths in some goddam Paris salon. I’ve never been a women’s writer and I’m bloody well not starting now.’

  She stopped, smiled twistedly, ‘My feminism’s showing.’

  ‘Say you won’t go,’ I said. ‘If it’s a demotion, refuse it. You’ve got the clout. No one expects you to write about fashion, and I agree with you, you shouldn’t.’

  She gave me a long look. ‘I wouldn’t be fired, but he’s new, he’s a chauvinist, he could certainly make life difficult.’

  ‘You,’ I said, ‘are one very marketable lady. Get out the famous poison fangs. A little venom might work wonders.’

  She stood up, stretching tall, putting her hands on her heavily belted hips. She looked like an Amazon equipped for battle but I could still sense the indecision inside. I stood also, to the same height, and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Very brotherly,’ she said dryly. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That’s all you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, mildly surprised. ‘You’re goddam right.’

  The Daily Flag, along Fleet Street from the Towncrier, had either been built much later or had been done over in Modern Flashy.

  There was a fountain throwing out negative ions in the foyer and ceiling-wide chandeliers of thin vertical shimmering glass rods, each emitting light at its downward tip. Also a marble floor, futuristic seating and a security desk populated by four large men in intimidating uniforms.

  I told one of them I’d come from the Towncrier to see Mr Leggatt and half expected to be thrown out bodily into the street. All that happened, however, was that after a check against a list on the desk I was directed upwards with the same lack of interest as I’d met with on friendlier territory.

  Upstairs the decorative contrast continued. Walls in the Flag were pale orange with red flecks, the desks shining green plastic, the floor carpeted with busy orange and red zigzags, the whole a study in unrestfulness. Anger on every page, I thought, and no wonder.

  Sam Leggatt’s office had an opaque glass door marked ‘editor’ in large lower-case white letters, followed some way below by smaller but similar letters telling callers to ring bell and wait.

  I rang the bell and waited, and presently with a buzz the door swung inwards a few inches. Sam Leggatt might not actually wear a bullet-proof vest but his defences against people with grievances were impressive.

  I pushed the door open further and went in to another brash display of rotten taste: black plastic desk, red wallpaper flecked in a geometric pattern, and a mottled green carpet, which as a working environment would have sent me screaming to the bottle.

  There were two shirt-sleeved men in there, both standing, both apparently impervious to their surroundings. One was short, stubby and sandy-haired, the other taller, stooped, bespectacled and going bald. Both about fifty, I thought. A third man, younger, sat in a corner, in a suit, watchful and quiet.

  ‘Mr Leggatt?’ I said.

  The short sandy-haired one said, ‘I’m Leggatt. I’ll give you five minutes.’ He inclined his head towards the taller man beside him. ‘This is Tug Tunny, who edits Intimate Details. That is Mr Evans from our legal department. So who are you, and what do you want?’

  Tug Tunny snapped his fingers. ‘I know who he is,’ he said. ‘Jockey. That jockey.’ He searched for the name in his memory and found it. ‘Fielding. Champion jockey.’

  I nodded, and it seemed to me that they all relaxed. There was a trace of arrogance all the same in the way Leggatt stood, and a suggestion of pugnaciousness, but not more, I supposed
, than his eminence and the circumstances warranted, and he spoke and behaved without bluster throughout.

  ‘What do you want?’ Leggatt repeated, but lacking quite the same tension as when I’d entered; and it crossed my mind as he spoke that with his passion for security they would be recording the conversation, and that I was speaking into an open microphone somewhere out of sight.

  I said carefully, ‘I came to make arrangements for returning the property of two of your journalists, Owen Watts and Jay Erskine.’

  ‘Return it then,’ Leggatt said brusquely.

  ‘I would be so glad,’ I said, ‘if you would tell me why they needed to climb a ladder set against Bobby Allardeck’s house at one in the morning.’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘We found them, you understand, with telephone tapping equipment. Up a ladder, with tools, at the point where the telephone wires enter the Allardecks’ house. What were they doing there?’

  There was a pause, then Tunny flicked his fingers again.

  ‘He’s Allardeck’s brother-in-law. Mrs Allardeck’s brother.’

  ‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘I was staying with them last night when your men came to break in.’

  ‘They didn’t break in,’ Leggatt said. ‘On the contrary, they were, I understand, quite savagely attacked. Allardeck should be arrested for assault.’

  ‘We thought they were burglars. What would you think if you found people climbing a ladder set against your house at dead of night? It was only after we’d chased them off that we found they weren’t after the silver.’

  ‘Found? How found?’

  ‘They left their jackets behind, full of credit cards and other things with their names on.’

  ‘Which you propose to return.’

  ‘Naturally. But I’d like a proper explanation of why they were there at all. Wire-tapping is illegal, and we disturbed them in the act of removing a tap which had been in place for at least two weeks, according to the telephone engineer who came this morning to complete the dismantling.’

  They said nothing, just waited with calculating eyes.

  I went on. ‘Your paper mounted an unprovoked and damaging attack on Bobby Allardeck, using information gleaned by illegal means. Tell me why.’