by Dick Francis
“But we don’t actually know he smuggles drugs,” Caroline said.
“It doesn’t matter what he’s smuggling,” I said. “It could be anything of high value that can fit into those balls. Provided someone is prepared to pay, it could be computer chips, explosives or even radioactive materials.”
“Wouldn’t that injure the horses?” she said.
“Not if they were alpha particle sources,” I said. “Alpha particles can be stopped by a piece of paper, and the horse would easily be shielded from them by the metal of the ball. But they are very deadly if they enter the body without any shield at all. Remember that ex-KGB spy who was murdered in London with polonium-210? That stuff is an alpha source, and it had to have been smuggled here from Russia or somewhere in Eastern Europe. These metal balls easily could have been used to smuggle polonium-210 here without any harm being done to the horse.”
Caroline shivered. “It’s scary.”
“It certainly is.”
“But surely the balls would show up if the horses were X-rayed,” she said.
“I expect so,” I said. “But they don’t X-ray the horses. X-rays can damage a developing embryo or a fetus, and many horses are transported after they are pregnant. It would be far too risky.”
“But,” she said, smiling, “if someone was to anonymously whisper to Her Majesty’s Customs that Mr. Komarov’s next jumbo jetful of horses from South America might just be worth X-raying, then Mr. Komarov might find himself in a bit of hot water, not to mention in the slammer.”
I kissed her. Perfect.
“But something is still worrying me,” she said. “Why did Komarov bomb the box at Newmarket? Surely that was stupid and dangerous.”
“I wonder if it was a punishment,” I said.
“For what?”
“Maybe Rolf Schumann was not paying his dues to Komarov.” I thought for a moment. “Perhaps he’d been using the cash from the drug and horse sales to support his ailing tractor business instead of passing it on. Maybe the bombing was a demonstration to warn Komarov’s associates in other countries around the world that he means business, and he won’t stand for anyone robbing him.”
“You mean he killed innocent people just to send a warning?” she said.
“Komarov wouldn’t care about the innocent,” I said. “Drugs kill innocent people every day, one way or another.”
TOBY WAS very moody in the morning. He snapped at the children over breakfast, and even swore at the dog in front of them. It was out of character.
He had been out on the gallops with the first string of horses at six, an unusually warm May driving them out earlier and earlier. Breakfast with the family was between the first and second lots, before the three little ones were packed off to school in the car with Sally. They were at an age when the coming and going in this house washed over their world of school, parties, television and computer games.
“Bye, Uncle Max,” they all shouted to me as they clambered into Sally’s people carrier, and then they were gone. I had left Caroline in bed, catching up on six hours’ time difference, and I had dragged myself from between the sheets only because I felt I had neglected the children the previous evening.
I went back inside and found Toby at the kitchen table trying to read the Racing Post. However, he obviously wasn’t concentrating on the newspaper, as I saw him restart the same article at least three times.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, sitting myself back down with a mug of coffee.
“Nothing,” he said, and set about reading the article for the fourth time.
“Yes there is.” I reached across the table and dragged the paper away from him. “What is it?”
He looked up at me. “Sally and I had a row.”
“I can tell,” I said. It had been obvious the whole time Sally was getting breakfast. “What about?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he stated firmly, standing up.
“It clearly does,” I said. “Is it about me?”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“So, it was about me,” I said. “Tell me.”
He didn’t answer. He turned to go out of the door, back to the stables.
“Toby,” I almost shouted, “for God’s sake, what is it?”
He stopped, but he didn’t turn around. “Sally wants you to leave here this morning,” he said. He now turned and looked at me. “She’s worried and frightened. You know, for the children.”
“Oh, is that all?” I said with a smile. “We’ll go as soon as we’re ready.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “I put my foot down. You’re my brother, and if I can’t help you when you’re in trouble, then who will? What good am I as a brother if I throw you out of my home?”
I could hear in his voice that this was an argument well rehearsed during his row with Sally.
“It OK,” I said. “She’s right. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here in the first place.” But I was glad I had. Toby’s knowledge of horses had been the key to everything.
“But where will you go?” he asked.
“Somewhere else,” I said. Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t know. “We’ll be gone when you get back from second lot. I’ll call you later. And thank Sally for me, for having us.”
Surprisingly, he walked across the kitchen and gave me a huge hug.
“Be careful,” he said into my ear. “Be a shame to lose you now.” He suddenly let me go, looked away as if in embarrassment and went straight outside without saying another word. Maybe he was too emotional to speak. I was.
CAROLINE AND I were packed up and away by nine-thirty. She hadn’t been too happy when I had woken her from a deep sleep, but she hadn’t protested much either.
“Where are we going?” she asked as we drove out of the gate.
“Where do you suggest?” I said.
“Somewhere with a nice soft bed.” She yawned, leaned back in the passenger’s seat and closed her eyes.
I thought about my mother’s cottage down the road. I didn’t have a key, but I knew, as I expect everyone else in East Hendred knew, that she always kept a spare under the third geranium-filled flowerpot to the left of the back door. I decided against it. If, before I went to Chicago, I had believed that it was too risky for my mother to stay there, then surely it was too dangerous for me and Caroline now.
I drove aimlessly for a while along roads I knew so well from my childhood. Maybe my conscious mind thought my driving was aimless, but subconsciously my brain took the Mondeo unerringly the twelve miles from East Hendred to the establishment overlooking the river Thames that had once been owned by my mother’s distant widowed cousin and where my passion for cooking food had been first awakened.
The place had changed during the six years since I had left. It was no longer the elegant sixteenth-century inn with restaurant that I remembered. There was a new, twenty-first-century glass extension reaching down towards the river, over what had been a well-tended lawn when I last saw it. A long brass-fronted bar had been built down one side of the old dining room, and the only food now offered was what my mother’s distant widowed cousin had always referred to with distaste as “bar snacks.”
Caroline, Viola and I sat down at an outside table with benches, set up on what once also had been part of the lawn but was now a concrete patio. Viola could not be left in the car, Caroline explained, as she was too valuable. Quite apart from the fact, Caroline added, she felt lost without her close by, to pat. At least Viola was out of sight, in her case.
It was too early for what my father had always called a proper drink, so Caroline and I had cups of coffee, while Viola just sat there. I didn’t recognize either the barman who took the order or the waitress who delivered it. I suspected that none of the happy team from six years ago would remain. But what hadn’t changed was the restful view of the ancient six-arched stone bridge that spanned the river, the endless sounds of gurgling water and the seeming calmness of a mother duck gliding along i
n the sunshine followed by a line of six tiny, fluffy chicks.
“What a beautiful place,” said Caroline. “Have you been here before?”
“This is where I learned to cook,” I said.
“Really.” She was surprised. She had looked at the menu while I had ordered the coffee.
“It’s changed a lot,” I said. “Where the bar is now is what used to be the restaurant. I’m rather sad to see that it’s all gone a bit down-market. The place was taken over by a chain that was obviously more interested in selling beer than in fine dining.”
“So why did we come here now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I wanted somewhere peaceful to think, and to plan.”
“So what is the plan?” she asked eagerly.
“I don’t know that either,” I replied. “But first, I’m going to make a few calls.”
I turned on my cell phone and used it to call the car-rental company in Newmarket. No problem, they said, keep the Mondeo as long as you like. They took my credit card details and told me that I would be charged weekly. Fine, I said, and hung up.
The phone immediately rang in my hand. It was my voice-message service.
“You have six new messages,” it told me, and then played them. One was from Clare Harding, the news editor, belatedly thanking me for dinner, and the other five were all from Carl. He needed to speak with me, his disembodied voice repeatedly told me. Over the five successive messages, he became more and more agitated that I hadn’t been in touch.
I rang him. He was relieved and delighted that I called, but I was hardly delighted with what he told me. “I need you back here,” he said urgently. “And now.” Things had clearly gone downhill quickly since we spoke on Saturday.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, concerned. It was not like Carl to be in a panic.
“I’ve had to fire Oscar,” he said. “Gary caught him in the office going through the papers on your desk, and some of the petty cash was missing too. Oscar denied it. But, then, he would, wouldn’t he? But that’s only the half of it. He was disruptive in the kitchen with Gary all last week. Then the two of them had a stand-up row on Saturday. I thought Oscar was going to stick Gary with a fish filleter at one point.” A fish filleter was a very sharp, very thin, eight-inch-bladed kitchen knife. Sticking anyone with a fish filleter was likely to prove very terminal, very quickly. I was very glad that Oscar had gone.
“But surely you and Gary can cope without him for a few days?” I said.
“We could if Gary was here,” he exclaimed. “He’s now got bloody chicken pox, and the doctor’s told him to stay at home for the next ten bloody days.”
“Can’t you get another chef from the agency?” I asked him.
“I’ve tried that,” he said. “They’ve got their back up over Oscar. They say we didn’t treat him right. I tell you, he was nothing but a bloody menace.”
“Apart from all that,” I said to him, “is everything else all right?”
“No, not really,” he replied. I wished I hadn’t asked. “Jean wants to know when we are going to replace Louisa. She claims she is being worked too hard in the dining room. I told her to shut up or get out, and now she has her back up too.”
I wasn’t surprised. Staff management had never been Carl’s strong point.
“OK,” I said. “Is everything else fine?”
“No it’s not,” he said. “Jacek says he wants more money. He says that the other kitchen porter gets more money than him and it’s not fair.” Jacek’s English must be getting better, I thought. “I also told him to shut up or get out,” Carl continued. “He’s still here today, so I presume he’s shut up. But when are you coming back?” Soon. I feared that if I didn’t get back there quickly, the whole business would be destroyed.
“I’ll call you again later to let you know,” I said.
“Please come back,” he was pleading. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.” He sounded almost manic.
“I said I’ll call you,” I replied, and hung up.
“Problems?” asked Caroline, who had only been able to hear my end of the conversation.
“The ship is foundering on the rocks without the captain,” I said. “One of the chefs has been fired for threatening another with a knife, and now the threatened one has caught chicken pox. Carl, my number two, is basically on his own.” Julie, who prepared the cold dishes, wouldn’t be much use in the heat of the kitchen.
“Can he cope on his own?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. “Not if the restaurant is more than half full.”
“And is it?” said Caroline.
“I didn’t ask,” I said. “But I hope so. And if it’s not tonight, it certainly will be towards the end of the week. But that’s not all. Carl has upset some of the other staff, and I can imagine the undercurrents running through the place. They will all be waiting for me to get back before the volcano explodes, and the longer I’m away, the worse will be the eruption when it finally happens.”
“Then you must go back there now,” said Caroline.
“I couldn’t be much help one-handed,” I said, holding up the cast.
“Even a one-handed Max Moreton would be better than most,” she said.
I smiled at her. “But is it safe?” I said. “Or is it precisely what someone wants?”
“Who?” she asked. “Komarov?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or Carl.”
“Carl? Don’t you trust your number two?”
“I don’t know who I can trust,” I said. I sat there, thinking, as I watched a boat chug upstream through the bridge with two pasty-white sunbathers lying on its roof. “Yes, I think I probably do trust Carl.”
“Right,” she said. “Then we go back to Newmarket and save your restaurant. But we don’t tell anyone we’re coming before we get there, not even Carl.”
CAROLINE TOOK Viola for a walk down the riverbank into the meadow below the pub while I sat and made the rest of my calls. I could hear the mellow tones of her playing as I rang first my mother, to ensure she was all right, and then the police-the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, to be precise.
“Can I speak to D.I. Turner, please?” I asked.
“Can you hold?” said a female voice. It wasn’t so much a question as an order. Eventually, she came back on the line. “D.I. Turner is off duty until two p.m.”
I left him a message, asking him to call me. I told him it was urgent. I was promised that he would get the message. I wondered if I should have spoken to someone else. But D.I. Turner knew who I was, and he was less likely to dismiss my information with a laugh.
Caroline continued walking the riverbank towpath and playing sweet music for about forty minutes before she returned, flushed, smiling and happy.
“Oh that’s great,” she sighed, sitting down. I looked enviously at Viola. I wished I could make Caroline feel like that in the middle of the day, and with jet lag.
“Don’t you need to read the music?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “Not for this piece. I know it so well. I was just making sure my fingers knew it as well as my head does.”
“I thought orchestras always have music,” I said. “They have music stands. I’ve seen them.”
“Well, we do. But soloists usually don’t, and often the music is there just as an aide-mémoire rather than being absolutely necessary.” She slipped Viola lovingly back into her case. “Are we staying here for lunch?”
“No,” I said. “I’d rather go. It’s been over an hour since I first used my phone here and it’s time to move on.” And, I thought, the food wasn’t very inviting.
“Can someone really find out where you are from your cell?” she asked.
“I know the police can,” I said, “from your phone records. I’ve heard about it in trials. I’m just not taking any chances that Komarov has someone at the phone company on his payroll.”
“Do you want to go back to Newmarket?�
� Caroline asked.
“Yes and no,” I said. “Of course I want to go to the Hay Net and sort out the mess, but I have to admit that I’m wary.”
“We don’t have to go, you know,” she said.
“I can’t go on running forever,” I said. “I’ll have to go back there sometime. I’ve left a message for the policeman I spoke to at the Special Branch, and I’ll tell him what I think has been going on and ask him for some police protection. It’ll be fine.”
WE STOPPED just north of Oxford and enjoyed a leisurely lunch in a pub garden, sitting under a bright red sun umbrella that made our delicious stilton and broccoli soup appear pink when it should have been green. The closer we came to Newmarket, the more nervous I became, and, when we arrived in the town at about six o’clock, I felt lost, like a fish out of water. I had no home to go to, nothing but a pile of blackened stones and ash, which I drove slowly past, in each direction, as Caroline sat silently staring at the devastation.
“Oh, Max,” she said after our second pass. “I am so sorry.”
“I can always rebuild,” I said. But that little cottage was the only home I had ever owned, and I could remember clearly the excitement on that July day nearly six years ago when I had first moved in, the joy of discovery of unknown cupboards, and the sounds made by the structure as the hot summer day had cooled towards evening. It had been built from local stone in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and although I currently owned the freehold I had always considered myself a temporary tenant in its long and endless existence. But now its life had been burned away. Murder had been done here, not on a human being but on a member of my family nevertheless. What remained was dead, and silent. Would rebuilding ever bring it back its soul? Perhaps the time was right, after all, for me to grieve for my loss, and to move on.