Reflex

by Dick Francis

  “You won’t approve,” I said. “I carried on where George left off.”

  They listened with their forks in the air, taking mouthfuls at long intervals, eating peas and lasagne slowly.

  “So you see,” I said at the end. “It isn’t finished yet. There’s no going back or wishing I hadn’t started . . . I don’t know that I do wish that . . . but I asked to come here for a few days because I didn’t feel safe in the cottage, and I’m not going back there to live permanently until I know who tried to kill me.”

  Clare said, “You might never know.”

  “Don’t say that,” Samantha said sharply. “If he doesn’t find out . . .” She stopped.

  I finished it for her, “I’ll have no defense.”

  “Perhaps the police . . .” Clare said.

  “Perhaps.”

  We passed the rest of the evening more in thoughtfulness than depression, and the news from Swindon was good. Jeremy’s lungs were coming out of paralysis. Still on the respirator, but a significant improvement during the past twenty-four hours. The prim voice reading the written bulletin sounded bored. Could I speak to Jeremy himself yet, I asked. They’d check. The prim voice came back; not in intensive care: try on Sunday.

  I spent a long time in the bathroom on Friday morning scraping off beard and snipping out unabsorbed ends of the fine transparent thread the nurse had used in her stitching. She’d done a neat job, I had to confess. The cuts had all healed, and would disappear probably without scars. All the swelling, also, had gone. There were still the remains of black bruises turning yellow, and still the chipped teeth, but what finally looked out of the mirror was definitely a face, not a nightmare.

  Samantha looked relieved over the reemergence of civilization and insisted on telephoning to her dentist. “You need caps,” she said, “and caps you’ll have.” And caps I had, late that afternoon. Temporaries, until porcelain jobs could be made.

  Between the two sessions in the clinic I drove north out of London to Basildon in Essex, where a British firm manufactured photographic printing paper. I went instead of telephoning because I thought they would find it less easy to say they had no information if I was actually there; and so it proved.

  They did not, they said in the front office politely, know of any photographic material which looked like plastic or typing paper. Had I brought the specimens with me?

  No, I had not. I didn’t want them examined in case they were sensitive to light. Could I see someone else?

  Difficult, they said.

  I showed no signs of leaving. Perhaps Mr. Christopher could help me, they suggested at length, if he wasn’t too busy.

  Mr. Christopher turned out to be about nineteen with an antisocial haircut and chronic catarrh. He listened, however, attentively.

  “This paper and this plastic’ve got no emulsion on them?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  He shrugged. “There you are, then.”

  “There I am where?”

  “You got no pictures.”

  I sucked at the still broken teeth and asked him what seemed to be a nonsensical question.

  “Why would a photographer want ammonia?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t. Not for photographs. No straight ammonia in any developer or bleach or fix, that I know of.”

  “Would anyone here know?” I asked.

  He gave me a pitying stare, implying that if he didn’t know, no one else would.

  “You could ask,” I said persuasively. “Because if there’s a process which does use ammonia, you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah. I reckon I would.”

  He gave me a brisk nod and vanished, and I waited a quarter of an hour, wondering if he’d gone off to lunch. He returned, however, with a gray elderly man in glasses who was none too willing but delivered the goods.

  “Ammonia,” he said, “is used in the photographic sections of engineering industries. It develops what the public call blueprints. More accurately, of course, it’s the diazo process.”

  “Please,” I said humbly and with gratitude, “could you describe it to me.”

  “What’s the matter with your face?” he said.

  “Lost an argument.”

  “Huh.”

  “Diazo process,” I said. “What is it?”

  “You get a drawing—a line drawing, I’m talking about—from the designer. Say of a component in a machine. A drawing with exact specifications for manufacture. Are you with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “The industry will need several copies of the master drawing. So they make blueprints of it. Or rather, they don’t.”

  “Er . . .” I said.

  “In blueprints,” he said severly, “the paper turns blue, leaving the design in white. Nowadays the paper turns white and the lines develop in black. Or dark red.”

  “Please, go on.”

  “From the beginning?” he said. “The master drawing, which is of course on translucent paper, is pinned and pressed tightly by glass over a sheet of diazo paper. Diazo paper is white on the back and yellow or greenish on the side covered with ammonia-sensitive dye. Bright carbon arclight is shone onto the master drawing for a measured length of time. This light bleaches out all the dye on the diazo paper underneath except for the parts under the lines on the master drawing. The diazo paper is then developed in hot ammonia fumes, and the lines of dye emerge, turning dark. Is that what you want?”

  “Indeed it is,” I said with awe. “Does diazo paper look like typing paper?”

  “Certainly it can, it it’s cut down to that size.”

  “And how about a piece of clear-looking plastic?”

  “Sounds like a diazo film,” he said calmly. “You don’t need hot ammonia fumes for developing that. Any form of cold liquid ammonia will do. But be careful. I said carbon arclight, because that’s the method that’s used in engineering, but of course a longer exposure to sunlight or any other form of light would also have the same effect. If the piece of film you have looks clear, it means that most of the yellow-looking dye has already been bleached out. If there is a drawing there, you must be careful not to expose it to too much more light.”

  “How much more light is too much?” I said anxiously.

  He pursed his lips. “In sunlight, you’d have lost any trace of dye forever in thirty seconds. In normal room light, five to ten minutes.”

  “It’s in a light-proof envelope.”

  “Then you might be lucky.”

  “And the sheets of paper? They look white on both sides.”

  “The same applies,” he said. “They’ve been exposed to light. You might have a drawing there, or you might not.”

  “How do I make hot ammonia fumes, to find out?”

  “Simple,” he said, as if everyone would know items like that. “Put some ammonia in a saucepan and heat it. Hold the paper over the top. Don’t get it wet. Just steam it.”

  “Would you,” I said carefully, “like some champagne for lunch?”

  I returned to Samantha’s house at about six o’clock with a cheap saucepan, two bottles of Ajax, an anesthetized top lip, and a set of muscles that had been jerked, pressed and exercised into some sort of resurrection. I also felt dead tired, which wasn’t a good omen for fitness the next day, when, Harold had informed me on the telephone, two ’chasers would be awaiting my services at Sandown Park.

  Samantha had gone out. Clare, with work scattered all over the kitchen table, gave me a fast assessing scrutiny and suggested a large brandy.

  “It’s in the cupboard with the salt and flour and herbs. Cooking brandy. Pour me some, too, would you?”

  I sat at the table with her for a while, sipping the repulsive stuff neat and feeling a lot better for it. Her dark head was bent over the book she was working on, the capable hand stretching out now and again for the glass, the mind engrossed in her task.

  “Would you live with me?” I said.

  She looked up; abstracted, faintly frow
ning, questioning.

  “Did you say . . . ?”

  “Yes. I did,” I said. “Would you live with me?”

  Her work at last lost her attention. With a smile in her eyes, she said, “Is that an academic question or a positive invitation?”

  “Invitation.”

  “I couldn’t live in Lambourn,” she said. “Too far to commute. You couldn’t live here. Too far from the horses.”

  “Somewhere in between.”

  She looked at me wonderingly. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we haven’t . . .” She stopped, leaving a clear meaning.

  “Been to bed.”

  “Well . . .”

  “In general,” I said, “what do you think?”

  She took refuge and time with sips from her glass. I waited for what seemed a small age.

  “I think,” she said finally, “why not give it a try?”

  I smiled from intense satisfaction.

  “Don’t look so smug,” she said. “Drink your brandy while I finish this book.”

  She bent her head down again but didn’t read far.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “How can I work? Let’s get the supper.”

  Cooking frozen fish fillets took ages because of her trying to do it with my arms around her waist and my chin on her hair. I didn’t taste the stuff when we ate it. I felt extraordinarily light-headed. I hadn’t deeply hoped she would say yes, and still less had I expected the incredible sense of adventure since she had. To have someone to care about seemed no longer a burden to be avoided, but a positive privilege.

  Amazing, I thought dimly; the whole thing’s amazing. Was this what Lord White had felt for Dana den Relgan?

  “What time does Samantha get back?” I said.

  Clare shook her head. “Too soon.”

  “Will you come with me tomorrow?” I said. “To the races . . . and then stay somewhere together afterwards?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Samantha won’t mind?”

  She gave me an amused look. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why do you laugh?”

  “She’s gone to the pictures. I asked her why she had to go on your last night here. She said she wanted to see the film. I thought it odd, but I believed her. She saw more than I did.”

  “My God,” I said. “Women.”

  While she tried again to finish her work, I fetched the rubbish box and took out the black light-proof envelope.

  I borrowed a flat glass dish from a cupboard. Took the piece of plastic film from the envelope. Put it in the dish. At once poured liquid Ajax over it. Held my breath.

  Almost instantly dark brownish-red lines became visible. I rocked the dish, sloshing the liquid across the plastic surface, conscious that all of the remaining dye had to be covered with ammonia before the light bleached it away.

  It was no engineering drawing, but handwriting.

  It looked odd.

  As more and more developed, I realized that from the reading point of view the plastic was wrong side up.

  Turned it over. Sloshed more Ajax over it, tilting it back and forth until I could read the revealed words, as clear as when they’d been written.

  They were, they had to be, what Dana den Relgan had written on the cigarette packet.

  Heroin, cocaine, marijuana. Quantities, dates, prices paid, suppliers. No wonder she had wanted it back.

  Clare looked up from her work.

  “What have you found?”

  “What the Dana girl who came last Sunday was wanting.”

  “Let’s see.” She came across and looked into the dish, reading. “That’s pretty damning, isn’t it?”

  “Mm.”

  “But how did it turn up like this?”

  I said appreciatively, “Crafty George Millace. He got her to write on cellophane wrapping with a red-felt tip pen. She felt safer that way, because cigarette packet wrapping is so fragile, so destructible . . . and I expect the words themselves looked indistinct, over the printed packet. But from George’s point of view all he wanted was solid lines on transparent material, to make a diazo print.”

  I explained to her all that I’d learned in Basildon. “He must have cut the wrapping off carefully, pressed it flat under glass on top of this piece of diazo film, and exposed it to light. Then with the drugs list safely recorded, it wouldn’t matter if the wrapping came to pieces. And the list was hidden, like everything else.”

  “He was an extraordinary man.”

  I nodded. “Extraordinary. Though mind you he didn’t mean anyone else to have to solve his puzzles. He made them only to please himself and to save the records from angry burglars.”

  “In which he succeeded.”

  “He sure did.”

  “What about all your photographs?” she said in sudden alarm. “All the ones in the filing cabinet. Suppose—”

  “Calm down,” I said. “Even if anyone stole them or burned them, they’d miss all the negatives. The butcher has those down the road in his freezer room.”

  “Maybe all photographers,” she said, “are obsessed.”

  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I hadn’t disputed her classification. I hadn’t even thought, “I’m a jockey.”

  I asked her if she’d mind if I filled the kitchen with the smell of boiling ammonia.

  “I’ll go and wash my hair,” she said.

  When she’d gone, I drained the Ajax out of the dish into the saucepan and added to it what was left in the first bottle, and while it heated opened the french windows so as not to asphyxiate. Then I held the first of the sheets of what looked like typing paper over the simmering cleaner, and watched George’s words come alive as if they’d been written in secret ink. The ammonia content clearly evaporated quickly, because it took the whole second bottle to get results with the second sheet, but it too grew words like the first.

  Together they constituted one handwritten letter in what I had no doubt was George’s own writing. He must himself have written on some sort of transparent material. It could have been anything: a plastic bag, tracing paper, a piece of glass, film with all the emulsion bleached off, anything. When he’d written, he had put his letter over diazo paper and exposed it to light, and immediately stored the exposed paper in the light-proof envelope.

  And then what? Had he sent his transparent original? Had he written it again on ordinary paper? Had he typed it? No way of knowing. But one thing was certain: in some form or other he had dispatched his letter.

  I had heard of the results of its arrival.

  I could guess, I thought, who wanted me dead.

  19

  Harold met me with some relief on the verandah outside the weighing room at Sandown.

  “You at least look better . . . have you passed the doctor?”

  I nodded. “He signed my card.” He’d no reason not to. By his standards a jockey who took a week off because he’d been kicked was acting more self-indulgently than usual. He’d asked me to a bendstretch, and nodded me through.

  “Victor’s here,” Harold said.

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Yes, I did. He says he doesn’t want to talk to you on a racecourse. He says he wants to see his horses work on the Downs. He’s coming on Monday. He’ll talk to you then. And, Philip, you bloody well be careful what you say.”

  “Mm,” I said noncommittally “How about Coral Key?”

  “What about him? He’s fit.”

  “No funny business?”

  “Victor knows how you feel,” Harold said.

  “Victor doesn’t care a losing tote ticket how I feel. Is the horse running straight?”

  “He hasn’t said anything.”

  “Because I am,” I said. “If I’m riding it, I’m riding it straight. Whatever he says in the parade ring.”

  “You’ve got bloody aggressive all of a sudden.”

  “No, just saving you money. You personally. Don’t back me to l
ose, like you did on Daylight. That’s all.”

  He said he wouldn’t. He also said there was no point in holding the Sunday briefing if I was talking to Victor on Monday, and that we would discuss next week’s plans after that. Neither of us said what was in both our minds. After Monday, would there be any plans?

  Steve Millace in the changing room was complaining about a starter letting a race off when he, Steve, hadn’t been ready, with the consequence that he was left so flat-footed that the other runners had gone half a furlong before he’d begun. The owner was angry and said he wanted another jockey next time, and, as Steve asked everyone ad infinitum, was it fair?

  “No,” I said. “Life isn’t.”

  “It should be.”

  “Better face it,” I said smiling. “The best you can expect is a kick in the teeth.”

  “Your teeth are all right,” someone said.

  “They’ve got caps on.”

  “Pick up the pieces, huh? Is that what you’re saying?”

  I nodded.

  Steve said, not following this exchange, “Starters should be fined for letting a race off when the horses aren’t pointing the right way.”

  “Give it a rest,” someone said. But Steve as usual was still going on about it a couple of hours later.

  His mother, he said when I inquired, had gone to friends in Devon for a rest.

  Outside the weighing room Bart Underfield was lecturing one of the more gullible of the reporters on the subject of unusual nutrients.

  “It’s rubbish giving horses beer and eggs and ridiculous things like that. I never do it.”

  The reporter refrained from saying—or perhaps he didn’t know—that the trainers addicted to eggs and beer were on the whole more successful than Bart. Bart’s face when he saw me changed from bossy know-all to tight-lipped spite. He jettisoned the reporter and took two decisive steps to stand in my path, but when he’d stopped me he didn’t speak.

  “Do you want something, Bart?” I said.

  He still didn’t say anything. I thought that quite likely he couldn’t find words intense enough to convey what he felt. I was growing accustomed, I thought, to being hated.

  He found his voice. “You wait,” he said with bitter quiet. “I’ll get you.”