Break In

by Dick Francis

  I nodded a fraction. ‘I’m OK.’

  She said to Lord Vaughnley, ‘He risks his life most days of the week. You can’t frighten him much.’

  They looked at her speechlessly, to my amusement.

  I said to her, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ and she shook her head slightly, half remembering but not sure.

  ‘This is Lord Vaughnley who owns the Towncrier. This is Nestor Pollgate who owns the Flag. This is Jay Erskine who wrote the paragraphs in Intimate Details and put the tap on your telephone.’ I paused, and to them I said, ‘My sister, Bobby’s wife.’

  She moved closer beside me, her eyes shocked.

  ‘Why are they here? Did you bring them?’

  ‘We sort of brought each other,’ I said. ‘Where are Maynard and Bobby?’

  ‘In the drawing room, I think.’

  Jasper was crunching across the yard with the second horse, Jermyn shouting at him unabated. The other groom who had come with them was scurrying in and out of the trailer, attempting invisibility.

  Nestor Pollgate said brusquely, ‘We’re not standing here watching all this.’

  ‘I’m not leaving Holly alone to put up with that man,’ I said. ‘He’s a menace. It’s because of you that he’s here, so we’ll wait.’

  Pollgate stirred restlessly, but there was nowhere particular for him to go. We waited in varying intensities of impatience while Jasper and the groom raised the ramp and clipped it shut, and while Jermyn Graves walked back several steps in our direction and shook his fist at me with the index finger sticking out, jabbing, and said no one messed with him and got away with it, and he’d see I’d be sorry. I’d pay for what I’d done.

  ‘Kit,’ Holly said, distressed.

  I put my arm round her shoulders and didn’t answer Graves, and after a while he turned abruptly on his heel, went over to his car, climbed in, slammed the door, and overburdened his engine, starting with a jerk that must have rocked his horses off their feet in the trailer.

  ‘He’s a pig,’ Holly said. ‘What will he do?’

  ‘He’s more threat than action.’

  ‘I,’ Pollgate said, ‘am not.’

  I looked at him, meeting his eyes.

  ‘I do know that,’ I said.

  The time, I thought, had inescapably come.

  Power when I needed it. Give me power, I thought.

  I let go of Holly and lent into the car we had come in, picking up my anorak off the floor.

  I said to Holly, ‘Will you take these three visitors into the sitting room? I’ll get Bobby… and his father.’

  She said with wide apprehensive eyes, ‘Kit, do be careful.’

  ‘I promise.’

  She gave me a look of lingering doubt, but set off with me towards the house. We went in by long habit through the kitchen: I don’t think it occurred to either of us to use the formal front door.

  Pollgate, Lord Vaughnley and Jay Erskine followed, and in the hall Holly peeled them off into the sitting room, where in the evenings she and Bobby watched television sometimes. The larger drawing room lay ahead, and there were voices in there, or one voice, Maynard’s, continuously talking.

  I screwed up every inner resource to walk through that door, and it was a great and appalling mistake. Bobby told me afterwards that he saw me in the same way as in the stable and in the garden, the hooded, the enemy, the old foe of antiquity, of immense and dark threat.

  Maynard was saying monotonously as if he had already said it over and over, ‘… And if you want to get rid of him you’ll do it, and you’ll do it today…’

  Maynard was holding a gun, a hand gun, small and black.

  He stopped talking the moment I went in there. His eyes widened. He saw, I supposed, what Bobby saw: Fielding, satanic.

  He gave Bobby the pistol, pressing it into his hand.

  ‘Do it,’ he said fiercely. ‘Do it now.’

  His son’s eyes were glazed, as in the garden.

  He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t…

  ‘Bobby,’ I said explosively, beseechingly: and he raised the gun and pointed it straight at my chest.

  TWENTY

  I turned my back on him.

  I didn’t want to see him do it; tear our lives apart, mine and his, and Holly’s and the baby’s. If he was going to do it, I wasn’t going to watch.

  Time passed, stretched out, uncountable. Danielle, I thought.

  I heard his voice, close behind my shoulder.

  ‘Kit…’

  I stood rigidly still. You can’t frighten him much, Holly had said. Bobby with a gun frightened me into immobility and despair.

  He came round in front of me, as white as I felt. He looked into my face. He was holding the gun flat, not aiming, and put it into my hand.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said.

  I couldn’t speak. He turned away blindly and made for the door. Holly appeared there, questioning, and he enfolded her and hugged her as if he had survived an earthquake, which he had.

  I heard a faint noise behind me and turned, and found Maynard advancing, his face sweating, his teeth showing, the charming image long gone. I turned holding the gun, and he saw it in my hand and went back a pace, and then another and another, looking fearful, looking sick.

  ‘You incited,’ I said bitterly, ‘your own son to murder. Brainwashed him.’

  ‘It would have been an accident,’ he said.

  ‘An Allardeck killing a Fielding would not have been believed as an accident.’

  ‘I would have sworn it,’ he said.

  I loathed him. I said, ‘Go into the sitting room’ and I stood back to let him pass, keeping the gun pointing his way all the while.

  He hadn’t had the courage to shoot me himself. Making Bobby do it… that crime was worse.

  It hadn’t been a good idea to draw him there with the express purpose of getting rid of me once and for all. He’d too nearly succeeded. My own stupid fault.

  We went down the hall and into the sitting room. Pollgate and Erskine and Lord Vaughnley were all there, standing in the centre, with Bobby and Holly, still entwined, to one side. I went in there feeling I was walking into a cageful of tigers, and Holly said later that with the gun in my hand I looked so dangerous she hardly recognised me as her brother.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘You,’ I pointed to Maynard, ‘over there in that chair at the end.’ It was a deep chair, enveloping, no good for springing out of suddenly. ‘You next, beside him,’ I said to Erskine. ‘Then Lord Vaughnley, on the sofa.’

  Pollgate looked at the spare place beside Lord Vaughnley and took it in silence.

  ‘Take out the stunner,’ I said to him. ‘Put it on the floor. Kick it this way.’

  I could feel the refusal in him, see it in his eyes. Then he shrugged, and took out the flat black box, and did as I’d said.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘you’re all going to watch a video.’ I glanced down at the pistol. ‘I’m not a good shot. I don’t know what Pd hit. So stay sitting down.’ I held out the anorak in Bobby’s direction. ‘The tape’s zipped into one of the pockets.’

  ‘Put it on now?’ he said, finding it and bringing it out. His hands were shaking, his voice unsteady. Damn Maynard, I thought.

  ‘Yes, now,’ I said. ‘Holly, close the curtains and put on a lamp, it’ll be dark before we’re finished.’

  No one spoke while she shut out the chilly day, while Bobby switched on the video machine and the television, and fed the tape into the slot. Pollgate looked moodily at the anorak which Bobby had laid on a chair and Lord Vaughnley glanced at the gun, and at my face, and away again.

  ‘Ready,’ Bobby said.

  ‘Start it off,’ I said, ‘and you and Holly sit down and watch.’

  I shut the door and leaned against it as Lord Vaughnley had done in the Guineas, and Maynard’s face came up bright and clear and smiling on the television screen.

  He started to struggle up from his deep chair.

  ‘Sit down,’ I sa
id flatly.

  He must have guessed that what was coming was the tape he thought he’d suppressed. He looked at the gun in my hand and judged the distance he would have to cover to reach me, and he subsided into the cushions as if suddenly weak.

  The interview progressed and went from smooth politeness into direct attack, and Lord Vaughnley’s mouth slowly opened.

  ‘You’ve not seen this before?’ I said to him.

  He said, ‘No, no’ with his gaze uninterruptedly on the screen, and I supposed that Rose wouldn’t have seen any need to go running to the proprietor with her purloined tape, the two days she had had it in the Towncrier building.

  I looked at all their faces as they watched. Maynard sick, Erskine blank, Lord Vaughnley riveted, Pollgate awakening to acute interest, Bobby and Holly horrified. Bobby, I thought ruefully, was in for some frightful shocks: it couldn’t be much fun to find one’s father had done so much cruel damage.

  The interview finished, to be replaced by the Perrysides telling how they’d lost Metavane, with George Tarker and his son’s suicide after, and Hugh Vaughnley, begging to go home; and finally Maynard again, smugly smiling.

  The impact of it all on me was still great, and in the others produced something like suspended animation. Their expressions at the end of the hour and thirteen minutes were identical, of total absorption and stretched eyes, and I thought Joe would have been satisfied with the effect of his cutting, and of his hammer blow of final silence.

  The trial was over: the accused, condemned. The sentence alone remained to be delivered.

  The screen ran from black into snow, and no one moved.

  I peeled myself off the door and walked across and switched off the set.

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘now listen.’

  The eyes of all of them were looking my way with unadulterated concentration, Maynard’s dark with humiliation, his body slack and deep in the chair.

  ‘You,’ I said to Lord Vaughnley, ‘and you,’ I said to Nestor Pollgate. ‘You or your newspapers will each pay to Bobby the sum of fifty thousand pounds in compensation. You’ll write promissory notes, here and now, in this room, in front of witnesses, to pay the money within three days, and those notes will be legal and binding.’

  Lord Vaughnley and Nestor Pollgate simply stared.

  ‘And in return,’ I said, ‘you shall have the wire-tap and the other evidence of Jay Erskine’s criminal activity. You shall have complete silence from me about your various assaults on me and my property. You shall have back the draft for three thousand pounds now lodged in my bank manager’s safe. And you shall have the tape you’ve just watched.’

  Maynard said, ‘No’ in anguished protest, and no one took any notice.

  ‘You,’ I said to Maynard, ‘will write a promissory note promising to pay to Bobby within three days the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which will wipe out the overdrafts and the loans and mortgages on this house and stables, which you and your father made Bobby pay for, and which should rightfully be his by inheritance.’

  Maynard’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.

  ‘You will also,’ I said, ‘give to Major and Mrs Perryside the one share you still own in Metavane.’

  He began to shake his head weakly.

  ‘And in return,’ I said, ‘you will have my assurance that many copies of this tape will not turn up simultaneously in droves of sensitive places, such as with the Senior Steward of the Jockey Club, or among the patrons of the civil service charity of which you are the new chairman, or in a dozen places in the City.’ I paused. ‘When Bobby has the money safe in the bank, you will be safe from me also. But that safety will always be conditional on your doing no harm either to Bobby and Holly or to me in future. The tapes will always exist.’

  Maynard found his voice, hoarse and shaken.

  ‘That’s extortion,’ he said aridly. ‘It’s blackmail.’

  ‘It’s justice,’ I said.

  There was silence. Maynard shrank as if deflated into the chair, and neither Pollgate nor Lord Vaughnley said anything at all.

  ‘Bobby,’ I said, ‘take the tape out of the machine and out of this room and put it somewhere safe, and bring back some writing paper for the notes.’

  Bobby stood up slowly, looking numb.

  ‘You said we could have the tape,’ Pollgate said, demurring.

  ‘So you can, when Bobby’s been paid. If the money’s all safely in the bank by Friday, you shall have it then, along with Erskine’s escape from going to jail.’

  Bobby took the tape away, and I contemplated Pollgate’s and Lord Vaughnley’s expressionless faces and thought they were being a good deal too quiet. Maynard, staring at me blackly from his chair, was simple by comparison, his reactions expected. Erskine looked his usual chilling self, but without the smirk, which was an improvement.

  Bobby came back with some large sheets of the headed writing paper he used for the bills for the owners, and gave a sheet each to Nestor Pollgate and Lord Vaughnley, and with stiff legs and an arm outstretched as far as it would go, gave the third to his father with his head turned away, not wanting to look at his face.

  I surveyed the three of them sitting there stonily holding the blank sheets, and into my head floated various disjointed words and phrases.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Don’t write yet.’

  The words were ‘invalid’, and ‘obtained by menaces’, and ‘invalid by reason of having been extorted at gun point’.

  I wondered if the thought had come on its own or been generated somewhere else in that room, and I looked at their faces carefully, one by one, searching their eyes.

  Not Maynard. Not Erskine. Not Lord Vaughnley

  Nestor Pollgate’s eyelids flickered.

  ‘Bobby,’ I said, ‘tack that black box up off the floor and drop it out of the window, into the garden.’

  He looked bewildered, but did as I asked, the November air blowing in a great gust through the curtains into the room.

  ‘Now the gun,’ I said, and gave it to him.

  He took it gingerly and threw it out, and shut the window again.

  ‘Right,’ I said, putting my hands with deliberation into my pockets, ‘you’ve all heard the propositions. If you accept them, please write the notes.’

  For a long moment no one moved. Then Lord Vaughnley stretched out an arm to the coffee table in front of him and picked up a magazine. He put the sheet of writing paper on the magazine for support. With a slightly pursed mouth but in continued quiet he lifted a pen from a pocket inside his jacket, pressed the top of it with a click, and wrote a short sentence, signing his name and adding the date.

  He held it out towards Bobby, who stepped forward hesitantly and took it.

  ‘Read it aloud,’ I said.

  Bobby’s voice said shakily, ‘I promise to pay Robertson Allardeck fifty thousand pounds within three days of this date.’ He looked up at me. ‘It is signed William Vaughnley, and the date is today’s.’

  I looked at Lord Vaughnley.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said neutrally.

  He gave the supporting magazine to Nestor Pollgate, and offered his own pen. Nestor Pollgate took both with a completely unmoved face and wrote in his turn.

  Bobby took the paper from him, glanced at me, and read aloud, ‘I promise to pay Robertson Allardeck fifty thousand pounds within three days of this date. It’s signed Nestor Pollgate. It’s dated today.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to Pollgate.

  Bobby looked slightly dazedly at the two documents he held. They would clear the debt for the unsold yearlings, I thought. When he sold them, anything he got would be profit.

  Lord Vaughnley and Jay Erskine, as if in some ritual, passed the magazine and the pen along to Maynard.

  With fury he wrote, the pen jabbing hard on the paper. I took the completed page from him myself and read it aloud, I promise to pay my son Robertson two hundred and fifty thousand pounds within three days. Maynard Allardeck. Today’s dat
e.’

  I looked up at him. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t thank me. Your thanks are an insult.’

  I was careful, in fact, to show no triumph, though in his case I did feel it: and I had to admit to myself ruefully that in that triumph there was a definite element of the old feud. A Fielding had got the better of an Allardeck, and I dared say my ancestors were gloating.

  I gave Maynard’s note to Bobby. It would clear all his debts and put him on a sure footing to earn a fair living as a trainer, and he held the paper unbelievingly, as if it would evaporate before his eyes.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ I said cheerfully, ‘bankers’ drafts by Friday, and you shall have the notes back, properly receipted.’

  Maynard stood up, his greying fair hair still smooth, his face grimly composed, his expensive suit falling into uncreased shape; the outer shell intact, the man inside in shreds.

  He looked at nobody, avoiding eyes. He walked to the door, opened it, went out, didn’t look back. A silence lengthened behind his exit like the silence at the end of the tape; the enormity of Maynard struck one dumb.

  Nestor Pollgate rose to his feet, tall, frowning, still with his power intact. He looked at me judiciously, gave me a brief single nod of the head, and said to Holly, ‘Which way do I go out?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ she said, sounding subdued, and led the way into the hall.

  Erskine followed, his face pinched, the drooping reddish moustache in some way announcing his continuing inflexible hatred of those he had damaged.

  Bobby went after him, carrying his three notes carefully as if they were brittle, and Lord Vaughnley, last of all, stood up to go. He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands in a sort of embarrassment.

  ‘What can I say?’ he said. ‘What am I to say when I see you on racecourses?’

  ‘Good morning, Kit,’ I said.

  The grey eyes almost smiled before awkwardness returned. ‘Yes, but,’ he said, ‘after what we did to you in the Guineas…’

  I shrugged. ‘Fortunes of war,’ I said. ‘I don’t resent it, if that’s what you mean. I took the war to the Flag. Seek the battle, don’t complain of the wounds.’