Reflex

by Dick Francis

  I could of course place Dana den Relgan’s candid list before the proper authorities. I will telephone you shortly, however, with an alternative suggestion.

  Yours sincerely,

  George Millace

  “It was typed when I got it,” Lance Kinship said dully. “I burned it.”

  “When George telephoned,” I said, “did he tell you his alternative suggestion?”

  The shock in Lance Kinship began to abate, with enmity growing in its place.

  “I’m telling you nothing.”

  I said, disregarding him, “Did George Millace say to stop supplying drugs and donate to the Injured Jockeys’ Fund?”

  His mouth opened and snapped shut viciously.

  “Did he telephone?” I asked. “Or did he tell you his terms when he called here?”

  A tight silence.

  “Did you put something from your store cupboard into his whisky?”

  “Prove it!” he said with sick triumph.

  One couldn’t, of course. George had been cremated, with his blood tested only for alcohol. There had been no checks for other drugs. Not for, perhaps, tranquilizers, which were flavorless, and which in sufficient quantity would certainly have sent a driver to sleep.

  George, I thought regretfully, had stepped on one victim too many. Had stepped on what he’d considered a worm and never recognized the cobra.

  George had made a shattering mistake if he’d wanted for once to see the victim squirm when he came up with his terms. George hadn’t dreamed that the inadequate weakling would lethally lash out to preserve his sordid life style, hadn’t really understood how fanatically Lance Kinship prized his shoulder-rubbing with a jet set that at best tolerated him. George must have enjoyed seeing Lance Kinship’s fury. Must have driven off laughing. Poor George.

  “Didn’t you think,” I said, “that George had left a copy of his letter behind him?”

  Form his expression, he hadn’t. I supposed he’d acted on impulse. He’d very nearly been right.

  “When you heard that George had blackmailed other people, including Dana, is that when you began thinking I might have your letter?”

  “I heard—” he said furiously “—I heard . . . in the clubs . . . Philip Nore has the letters . . . he’s ruined den Relgan . . . got him sacked from the Jockey Club. Did you think . . . once I knew . . . did you really think I’d wait for you to come around to me?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said slowly, “whether you like it or not, I now have come around to you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell you straight away that like George Millace I’m not asking for money.”

  He didn’t look much reassured.

  “I’ll also tell you it’s your bad luck that my mother died from addiction to heroin.”

  He said wildly, “But I didn’t know your mother.”

  “No, of course not. But there’s no question of your ever having supplied her yourself. It’s just that I have a certain long-standing prejudice against drug pushers. You may as well know it. You may as well understand why I want what I want.”

  He took a compulsive step towards me. I thought of the brisk karate kick he had delivered to den Relgan at Kempton and wondered if in his rope-soled sandals on parquet he could be as effective. Wondered if he had any real skill or whether it was more window-dressing to cover the vacuum.

  He looked incongruous, not dangerous. A man not young, not old, thinning on top, wearing glasses and beach clothes indoors in December.

  A man who could kill if pushed too far. Kill not by physical contact, when one came to think of it, but in his absence, by drugs and gas.

  He never reached me to deliver whatever blind vengeful blow he had in mind. He stepped on one of the fallen photographs, and slid, and went down hard on one knee. The inefficient indignity of it seemed to break up conclusively whatever remained of his confidence, for when he looked up at me, I saw not hatred or defiance, but fear.

  I said, “I don’t want what George did. I don’t ask you to stop peddling drugs. I want you to tell me who supplies you with heroin.”

  He staggered to his feet, his face aghast. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “It shouldn’t be difficult,” I said mildly. “You must know where you get it from. You get it in sizeable quantities, to sell, to give away. You always have plenty, I’m told. So you must have a regular supplier, mustn’t you? He’s the one I want.”

  The source, I thought. One source supplying several pushers. The drug business was like some monstrous tentacly creature: cut off one tentacle and another grew in its place. The war against drugs would never be won, but it had to be fought, if only for the sake of silly girls who were sniffing their way to perdition. For the sake of the pretty ones. For Dana. For Caroline, my lost butterfly mother, who had saved me from an addiction of my own.

  “You don’t know—” Lance Kinship seemed to be breathless. “It’s impossible. I can’t tell you. I’d be dead.”

  I shook my head. “It will be between the two of us. No one will ever know you told me unless you yourself talk, like den Relgan did in the gaming clubs.”

  “I can’t,” he said desparingly.

  “If you don’t,” I said conversationally, “I will first tell the policemen investigating an attempted murder in my house that my neighbor positively identifies you as having posed as a tax assessor. This isn’t enough on its own to get you charged, but it could certainly get you investigated for access to chemicals and so on.”

  He looked sick.

  “Secondly,” I said, “I’ll see that it gets known all over the place that people would be unwise to ask you to their parties, despite your little goodies, because they might at any time be raided. Unlawful possession of certain drugs is still an offense, I believe.”

  “You . . . you . . .”

  I nodded. He couldn’t find a word bad enough.

  “I know where you go, to whose houses. Everyone talks. I’ve been told. A word in the ear of the drugs squad and you’d be the least welcome guest in Britain.”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “Going to these places is what makes your life worth living. I don’t ask you not to go. I don’t ask you to stop your gifts. Just to tell me where the heroin comes from. Not the cocaine, not the marijuana, just the heroin. Just the deadly one.”

  The faintest of crafty looks crept in around his anguished eyes.

  “And don’t,” I said, watching for it, “think you get away with any old lie. You may as well know that what you tell me will go to the drugs squad. Don’t worry, buy such a roundabout route that no one will ever connect it with you. But your present supplier may very likely be put out of business. If that happens, you’ll be safe from me.”

  He trembled as if his legs would give way.

  “Mind you,” I said judiciously, “with one supplier out of business, you might have to look around for another. In a year or so, I might ask you his name.”

  His face was sweating and full of disbelief. “You mean it will go on . . . and on . . .”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you can’t.”

  “I think you killed George Millace. You certainly tried to kill me. You very nearly killed my friend. Why should you think I shouldn’t want retribution?”

  He stared.

  “I ask very little,” I said. “A few words written down . . . now and then.”

  “Not in my writing,” he said, appalled.

  “Certainly, in your writing,” I said matter-of-factly. “To get the spelling right, and so on. But don’t worry, you’ll be safe. I promise you no one will ever find out where the tip-offs come from. No one will ever know they come via me. Neither my name nor yours will ever be mentioned.”

  “You . . . you’re sure?”

  “Sure.”

  I produced a small notebook and fiber-tipped pen. “Write now,” I said. “Your supplier.”

  “Not now,” he said,
wavering.

  “Why not?” I said calmly. “May as well get it over. Sit down.”

  He sat by one of his glass and chrome coffee tables, looking totally dazed. He wrote a name and address on the notepad.

  “And sign it,” I said casually.

  “Sign . . .”

  “Of course. Just your name.”

  He wrote: Lance Kinship. And then, underneath, with a flourish, added Film Director.

  “That’s great,” I said, without emphasis. I picked up the pad, reading what he’d written. A foreign name. An address in London. One tentacle under the axe.

  I stored away in a pocket the small document that would make him sweat next year . . . and the next, and the next. The document that I would photograph, and keep safe.

  “That’s all?” he said numbly.

  I nodded. “All for now.”

  He didn’t stand up when I left him. Just sat on his black lacquer chair in his T-shirt and white trousers, stunned into silence, staring at space.

  He’d recover his bumptiousness, I thought. Phonies always did.

  I went out to where Clare and Jeremy were still waiting, and paused briefly in the winter air before getting into the car.

  Most people’s lives, I thought, weren’t a matter of world affairs, but of the problems right beside them. Not concerned portentously with saving mankind, but with creating local order: in small checks and balances.

  Neither my life nor George Millace’s would ever sway in the fate of nations, but our actions could change the lives of individuals; and they had done that.

  The dislike I’d felt for him alive was irrelevant to the intimacy I felt with him dead. I knew his mind, his intentions, his beliefs. I’d solved his puzzles. I’d fired his guns.

  I got into the car.

  “Everything all right?” Clare asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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