by Dick Francis
I went into the office to find Caroline standing by the desk, shaking. She was sobbing quietly and close to hysteria. I held her close to me and kissed her neck.
“Sit and wait here,” I said in her ear. “I have others to find.” I pushed her into a chair. “Did you call the police?” I asked her. She nodded.
I went back into the kitchen, and I could hear George Kealy outside the back door, shouting for Gary. I removed the skewer and held the gun up as I carefully reopened the cold-room. Komarov was still there, sitting on the wooden slats and leaning up against the bottom shelf. He looked up at me, but the broken nose, the bullet wound and the loss of blood had taken the fight out of him.
I could hear George coming back in through the scullery. So could Komarov.
“George,” he tried to shout, but it was little more than a croak.
I simply stepped behind the door and held it open as far as I could. I sensed, more than saw, George come into the kitchen and walk over to the cold-room. His gun appeared around the edge of the door, then withdrew when he spotted Komarov inside. Then he walked in and I slammed the door shut behind him. I quickly replaced the skewer.
I heard George pushing the rod to try to open the door, but the skewer held it closed with ease. He fired the gun, but there was about three inches of insulation between the stainless steel sides of the door and there was no chance of a bullet from a handgun penetrating that.
Now I only had Gary to deal with.
It took me a while to find him. He was leaned up against one of the trees on the far side of the parking lot. He was no trouble. In fact, he wouldn’t be any trouble to anyone ever again, except perhaps the undertaker. A fish filleter was embedded in his chest the full length of its thin, eight-inch, razor-sharp blade. There was virtually no blood, just a slight trickle from the corner of his mouth. The knife looked like it had pierced his heart and had probably stopped its beating almost instantly.
Who, I wondered, had done that? Surely not George Kealy. He wouldn’t have had the strength.
I spun around. There must be someone else here.
Caroline suddenly screamed from inside, and I hared across the parking lot, back into the building via the scullery door and through the kitchen. She was standing, wide-eyed in the center of the office, and she was not alone.
Jacek was standing in front of her, and he too was bleeding. Large drops of blood dripped continuously from all the fingers of his left hand onto the wooden floor below and made a bright red pool by his foot. Would this bloodletting ever end? I raised the gun, but it wasn’t needed. Before I could say anything, he dropped to his knees and slowly rolled over onto his back. He had been shot in the shoulder.
Jacek, the man I hadn’t trusted, the kitchen porter of whom I had believed there was more to than met the eye, had been one of the good guys all the time, and he had undoubtedly saved my life.
THE POLICE arrived, in the end. And an ambulance. Caroline had indeed called the emergency number but she had apparently been too shocked to make herself understood properly. The operator had finally traced the call and dispatched help.
First Jacek, then Caroline were conveyed to hospital. I was assured by the paramedics that they would be fine but that both definitely would be admitted overnight. Caroline was suffering badly from shock, and, it appeared, would again miss out on her stay at the Bedford Lodge Hotel.
The police who had arrived in the first patrol car had no real idea how to proceed, and, it seemed to me, they spent most of their time winding blue-and-white plastic POLICE-DO NOT CROSS tape around everything while they waited for reinforcements.
I tried to leave in the ambulance with Caroline but was prevented from doing so by a policeman, who took a break from his taping long enough to insist that I stay at the restaurant to make a statement.
So, instead, I went through the office and the bar to the lobby. Richard was still lying facedown on the stone floor. I moved some of the glass fragments and kneeled down next to him. I was sure he was dead, but I felt his left wrist just to make sure. There was no pulse, and his skin was already noticeably cold to the touch. How could such a thing happen to my caring, reliable headwaiter? I knelt there for a while, resting my hand on his back, as if I could give him some comfort in death, until one of the policemen came in and told me to please leave.
The police reinforcements, when they finally arrived, took the form of some senior plainclothes detectives, a firearms squad and the bomb-disposal team from the Army.
Understandably, none of them was too eager to open the cold-room door. There was still the issue of the loaded gun inside. They decided to leave the occupants where they were for a while to cool off, literally. Three degrees centigrade would have been pretty uncomfortable even if they’d been wearing thick coats, gloves and hats. As it was, it had been a warm late-May evening, and Pyotr Komarov and George Kealy had both been in shirtsleeves. Was I bothered?
The senior officer present interviewed me briefly, and I tried to explain to him what had happened. But it was complicated, and he seemed preoccupied with the men still in the cold-room. I would be reinterviewed, he explained, at the police station later. In the morning, I hoped, yawning.
Both the police and I were required by the bomb-disposal team to leave the building while they removed the explosive, so I sat on a white plastic chair on the gravel in front of the restaurant. One of the ambulance staff came over, wrapped a red blanket around my shoulders and asked me if I was OK.
“I’m fine,” I said. It reminded me of being at Newmarket racetrack on the day of the bombing. But, this time, I really was fine. The nightmare was over.
EPILOGUE
S ix months later, I opened Maximilian’s, a modern and exciting restaurant on the south side of Berkeley Square in Mayfair serving mostly French food but with an English influence.
The opening night was a grand affair, with lots of invited guests. There was even a string quartet playing at one end of the dining room. I looked over at them, four tall, elegant young women in black dresses. I took particular notice of the viola player. She had shoulder-length light-brown hair tied back in a ponytail, bright blue eyes, high cheekbones and a longish, thin nose above a broad mouth and square-shaped jaw. She was playing a new viola-at least, it was new to her. As her left hand glided up and down the fingerboard, I could see a diamond engagement ring glistening in the light. I had given it to her on my bended knee in the kitchen just before the first guests had arrived.
“I’d always thought your name was Maxwell,” said a booming voice in my ear. It was Bernard Sims. “I hear you’ve decided to make an honest woman of the plaintiff,” he said, shaking his head but with a smile.
“Guilty,” I pleaded with a grin.
The prosecution of me under section 7 of the Food Safety Act 1990 had been dropped, and the civil poisoning case had been settled out of court with the plaintiff accepting undisclosed damages from the defendant. Caroline’s agent had tried to claim his fifteen percent of the amount, which was confidential, but Bernard had explained to him that he was entitled to commission only on her earnings and the damages had been offered and accepted not for loss of earnings but in recompense for distress caused. He hadn’t been best pleased, but, then again, it would have been very difficult for Caroline to play only eighty-five percent of an 1869 Stefano Scarampella viola.
D.I. Turner had finally returned my calls, and had come eagerly in person when I’d told him I knew who had committed the racetrack bombing at Newmarket. Since then, he had kept me up-to-date with progress in the case. Komarov had survived both the bullet wound in his leg and the hypothermia brought on by the cold-room, and had been charged with a total of twenty murders, including the cold-blooded killing of Richard, my much-missed headwaiter. Further charges of conspiracy to set off explosions and traffic drugs were expected to follow. George Kealy had also been charged with Richard’s murder, although Turner was pretty sure that he would eventually be convicted only of being an accessory to the
murders because George was singing for his freedom, or, at least, for a shorter sentence. A police search of the Kealy residence had discovered boxes of the metal balls in a locked storeroom, and a similar exploration of Gary’s flat had turned up a certain silver key fob, complete with the key to my now-burned cottage front door. Many of the details had been widely reported in the newspapers, and especially by Clare Harding in the Cambridge Evening News.
As I had expected, George Kealy was Komarov’s man in the UK, just as Rolf Schumann had been in the U.S. George had been the official link between Horse Imports Ltd and Tattersalls, the bloodstock auctioneers in Newmarket, and he had even been the chairman of the East Anglia Polo Club.
Like Rolf Schumann, George had apparently been a busy boy in the drugs market, supplying some big players with a steady stream of high-quality cocaine. The coke was then cut before being passed down the chain to the street dealers and the users, with the proceeds passing back up the line. Rolf had been skimming off about half of this drug cash to keep his business afloat. It took precisely three months from the Newmarket bombing until the tractor factory closed for good. The lady in the Delafield embroidered-cushion store wouldn’t be happy.
Unlike Rolf Schumann, George it seemed had remained loyal to Komarov, at least until he had been arrested and charged with murder.
As a result of the information George was giving to the police, several big-time drug barons had received a dawn visit from one of Her Majesty’s constabularies, and they were now languishing in one of Her prisons awaiting trial. A number of other leads he had provided were also being investigated by various police forces around the world. I reckoned that the horse-breeding business in South America was about to suffer a major downturn.
Kurt and Walter, meanwhile, had been cornered by the Delafield sheriff’s department, who had wanted to question them concerning criminal damage and a vicious assault at the home of Mrs. Dorothy Schumann. Walter, the impetuous boy, had apparently tried to brain one of the sheriff’s men with a polo mallet and had been shot dead for his trouble. It was not a great loss.
I stood by the bar and surveyed my new domain. Mark Winsome had been as good as his word, but I think he’d had to write a check rather larger than he had originally intended. But the money had been well spent, with acres of glass and a forest of beech wood visible to the customers, and a further mass of stainless steel out of sight in the well-equipped kitchen. There were more than twice the number of tables than at the Hay Net, and I was confident that, with the longer dinner service in the big city, we could serve at least three times as many covers on a busy night.
In spite of opening the London venture, I had decided not to close down in Newmarket. Carl and I had worked together on his people management skills, and then I had appointed him as chef de cuisine at the Hay Net, with three new assistants, one of whom was Oscar, who had accepted our profuse apologies, a substantial one-off cash payment, and a permanent position as Carl’s number two. Ray and Jean had decided to go elsewhere, but there had been no shortage of capable staff to fill their shoes and breathe new life into the freshly recarpeted dining room. Jacek, however, also didn’t stay.
I had been right about him, at least in one respect. There was, indeed, much more to my kitchen porter than had first met the eye. When he had arrived from his native Czech Republic, his English had been so limited that he had been categorized by the local job center as suitable only for unskilled restaurant work. But Jacek proved to be highly skilled. At home, he had been not a scrubber of cooking pots but a user of them. He did not remain at the Hay Net because, now joined by his wife and daughter, he came with me to Maximilian’s as an assistant chef. After all, one never knew when a bodyguard might come in useful.
I felt a hand on my arm and turned to find Sally standing there. She and Toby had eagerly accepted my invitation to the opening, and they had brought my mother with them in their car.
“It’s lovely, Max,” said Sally with a genuine smile. “Absolutely lovely.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.
I had seen more of Sally and Toby over the past six months than I had during the previous six years. Caroline and I had been invited to stay with them on several occasions, which was great since their house still felt like home to me, and was, for the moment, my only home. I had, by now, become quite accustomed to my nomadic existence, living constantly out of a suitcase. My cottage had been completely bulldozed, the heat of the fire having rendered the walls unsafe to reuse. The plot of land on which it had stood, complete with permits to build a new dwelling, was currently on the market at a price that I thought was unreasonably high but one that my real estate agent was confident of obtaining.
Over the past months, when in Newmarket, I regularly stayed with Carl, except when his wife and children were there, which was increasingly often. On those occasions, I took a room at the Bedford Lodge Hotel, where I had finally managed to entertain Caroline the night after she was released from the hospital.
My temporary London address was a certain ground-floor flat in Tamworth Street, in Fulham, where two miniature listening devices had eventually been discovered, one in the cupboard under the kitchen sink and the other hidden among the packages in the dark recesses of the medicine cabinet.
Caroline hadn’t made it to the Cadogan Hall for her solo, and neither had Viola, whose remains had been lovingly borne to a top violin restorer. He had tut-tutted over her condition for some time and had declared that she was beyond reasonable repair. I had asked him what he meant by “reasonable repair,” and he had replied that he could easily make Viola look all right but was highly doubtful that she would ever again sound as she should. The belly and the back had been split right through, he had explained, and bits of the ribs were missing altogether, as was the sound post-no doubt rolled up and thrown away with the bloodied Hay Net dining room carpet. He would have to replace the missing ribs and to add reinforcing materials to the inside of the body that would permanently and adversely affect the tone. So we had taken her home as she was and had laid her on a shelf as a constant reminder to us of her sacrifice.
Caroline, meanwhile, had quickly been restored to perfection, and she had even wooed the orchestra directors into adding the Benjamin Britten Concerto for Violin and Viola, the piece she had missed at Cadogan Hall, into a Summer Soirée concert in St. James’s Park. It had been a wonderful, warm late-June evening, and I had been spellbound by her talent.
I looked again across the restaurant at her and smiled. She smiled back. Miss Caroline Aston, violist and proud of it, my fiancée and my savior.
Between them, Jacek and Caroline had given me back my life. I had been reborn after I had fully expected to die. That fateful night, as I had sat waiting for the bomb squad to remove the explosives from the Hay Net, I had resolved to grab life by the horns and hang on.
I was going to live my second life at full throttle.
***
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Dick Francis, Dead Heat