Dick Francis's Damage

by Dick Francis

  “Ah, dear boy, that’s the hundred-thousand-pound question. We’ll just have to wait and see what our friend Leonardo has to say. There was nothing in today’s mail.”

  “The announcement didn’t make it into the paper on Saturday. It’s in today’s so let’s hope it does the trick.”

  “We’ve had the results back from the labs about Fontwell,” Crispin said. “Apparently, someone grated up the skin of something called cassava and mixed it in with one of the salads. That was what made the stewards ill.”

  “Cassava,” I repeated. “It’s a type of sweet potato, a major source of carbohydrate in much of the tropical world. But it also contains dangerous toxins unless it’s cooked properly.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it,” Crispin said.

  “I once did a peacekeeping tour with the UN in Rwanda. Cassava was the staple for most of the population. They grew tons of the stuff, and often it was all we had to eat as well. We had to learn how to cook it properly or we’d have starved or died of the poison.”

  “Well, that’s what made the stewards ill at Fontwell and I expect it was the same stuff used in the ginger cake at Ascot. Apparently, the ginger would have covered the slightly bitter taste of the cassava skin, as the vinaigrette dressing did in the salad. How easy is it to get hold of this cassava stuff in the UK?”

  “I suspect most supermarkets sell it,” I said, “especially where there’s a sizable African community. And there will be plenty of specialist food shops in London that will stock it. It’s what comes of having such a multicultural city.”

  “So not much chance of finding out where it came from.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But I might have another lead worth following.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Can we meet later? It’s something I’d rather talk to you about face-to-face.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be in the office all day.”

  “I’d rather not meet you in the office, if you don’t mind. How about at El Vino at one o’clock.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

  He hung up. But before I had a chance to put the phone down, it rang again. However, it wasn’t Crispin ringing back, it was Quentin Calderfield.

  “I’ve just heard from the CPS,” he said. “They are going to offer no evidence in Kenneth’s case.”

  “So he’ll be acquitted?”

  “Absolutely.” I could clearly hear the relief in his voice.

  “Good,” I said. “Thank you for letting me know.”

  “Kenneth’s a very lucky boy,” Quentin said.

  “Perhaps he can now get his life back on track.”

  There was a lengthy pause on the other end of the line. “Yes. Maybe he can.”

  I reckoned that Faye must have found the right moment over the weekend to tell Quentin that Kenneth didn’t want to be a lawyer.

  “So will he be going back into chambers?” I asked. It was a leading question, but I had to know for sure.

  “No,” Quentin said firmly. “We’ve decided he should take a break from the law for a while. Until people have forgotten about this little episode. Kenneth is going traveling round the world. Taking a gap year, I think they call it.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  There was another pause from his end.

  “Right,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “No,” he said. “Well, yes, actually, there is. Did you know about Kenneth?”

  “What about him?” I asked. It was not that I was particularly trying to be vague. I just didn’t want to give away any secrets if Quentin didn’t know them already.

  “That he’s queer.”

  “Quentin,” I said forcefully, “that is not a word you should ever use. I find it offensive and so would many others. You’d never dare use it in court, now would you?”

  “No,” he said, “I suppose you’re right. But did you know?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I knew that Ken was gay.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Does it matter?” I asked.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Ken’s sexuality is his own affair. It was not my place to tell you. But I did say to him that he should stop living a lie and tell you himself.”

  I could tell from the lengthy pause that QC,QC wasn’t very pleased with his brother-in-law. He clearly thought that I should have been more loyal to him than I had been to his son.

  He obviously didn’t know me very well.

  Was our uneasy companionship of the last few weeks about to revert to the frostier relationship of the previous ten years?

  Probably.

  —

  CRISPIN WAS at the El Vino wine bar ahead of me.

  “What’s with the sling?” Crispin said as I walked over to him.

  “Dislocated shoulder,” I said. “A car hit me.”

  “That was careless.” He smiled.

  “Very,” I agreed. “But I don’t think it was an accident.”

  “Explain.”

  “Someone tried to kill me.”

  Crispin looked suitably shocked. “Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly. Someone tried to run me down in the road outside my house on Friday evening and they very nearly succeeded.”

  “Have you been to the police?”

  “They didn’t believe me. I’d had quite a few drinks and they clearly thought I was drunk and making up a story to cover the fact that I hadn’t seen the car coming and had simply wandered out in front of it. But, I’m telling you, it was a deliberate act.”

  “I assume that the car didn’t stop.”

  “You assume correctly.”

  “That’s dreadful.”

  “Indeed it is. And, ever since, I’ve been very careful to keep my eyes open and watch my back in case of another attempt.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill you?”

  “I think it was to stop me talking to Matthew Unwin.”

  Crispin sat in silence, staring at me, waiting for me to go on.

  “I went to see him yesterday in Long Lartin Prison. I was initially looking for some sort of link between him, Graham Perry, Richard Young and Duncan Johnson.”

  “Other than they had horses doped or had been threatened with it?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Graham Perry was once Matthew Unwin’s assistant trainer, but the two haven’t remained friends. It seems it was an acrimonious parting. As for the other two, there seems to be no common factor with either of them.”

  “So why would someone want to stop you speaking to Unwin?”

  “I now know it wasn’t any link between the trainers that was important, it was something else entirely.”

  “What?”

  “Hyperactive children.”

  “What about them?”

  “Matthew Unwin’s fifteen-year-old son is hyperactive. The poor boy had meningitis as a baby and he subsequently developed ADHD.”

  “So?”

  “Unwin’s wife is a leading light in an ADHD support group. She knows the parents of almost every severely hyperactive child in southeast England.”

  “And?”

  “One of those parents is a member of the BHA Board.”

  I told Crispin everything Matthew Unwin had told me and also the limited amount I’d since been able to discover on the Internet.

  “Do you think we should go to the police?” he asked.

  “How can we?” I said. “We have absolutely no proof. It’s all circumstantial and guesswork. Lots of people have hyperactive kids. We’ll need far more than that or the police will just laugh at us again and send us on our way.”

  “Then maybe we should confront him.”

  “What good will that do? He’ll only deny it. And we can’t prove a
nything. No, what we really need to do is catch him in the act of collecting his loot.”

  “That could be risky, dear boy,” Crispin said, “especially as he’s tried to kill you once before.”

  “All the more reason why we should nail the bastard before he tries again and succeeds.”

  33

  I took a taxi from El Vino to the offices of the London Telegraph to see Gordon Tuttle. He came down to meet me in the lobby.

  “What did you do?” he asked, looking at my arm in the sling.

  “Fell off a horse,” I said.

  I could tell that he didn’t believe me. “You don’t ride.”

  “That’s why I fell off,” I said. “What about those briefing documents?”

  “I’ve made you copies,” he said, handing over two sheets of paper. “Just don’t tell my editor I gave them to you. He’s very protective of our sources, even the anonymous ones.”

  “Thanks,” I said, looking down at the sheets. As Gordon had said, each of them had “Press Briefing” printed large across the top and one major fact underneath, in capital letters and underlined, followed by a series of leading questions concerning the suitability of the BHA to govern racing. I read through them all and I could understand how they had molded press opinion. Whoever had written this had been very clever.

  “Why do you think you had an exclusive with the second briefing? The first clearly went to all the papers because they all ran the same story.”

  “I’ve no idea,” Gordon said. “Maybe because we printed quite a large spread for the first one. And perhaps we were more critical of the BHA than the other papers.”

  There was no perhaps about it.

  “I read your follow-up piece this morning,” I said. “Not quite as bad, but you were hardly complimentary either.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but at least I wasn’t calling for a return of the Jockey Club.”

  “It will take more than that to stop the media bandwagon against the BHA.”

  “I did take notice of what you said, you know, and I agree with you.”

  “Then bloody well say so in your paper. Start a campaign to keep things as they are. You know I’m right.”

  He didn’t reply and I feared that my pleadings were falling on deaf ears.

  “Will you do me a favor, then?” I said. “Off the record.”

  He was careful. “What favor?”

  “Ask your financial fellows if there are any City rumors flying round about someone.”

  “What sort of rumors?”

  “Anything to do with personal financial difficulties or irregularity.”

  “Of whom?”

  I told him and his eyebrows lifted almost to his hairline.

  “Is there a story here, Jeff?” he asked seriously, his journalistic antennae twitching madly.

  “No. Not yet. But if there is, you’ll have it.”

  “An exclusive?”

  “It depends on what you find out.” I gave him one of my business cards. “Call me this evening round seven on my cell.”

  —

  ON MY WAY back to Willesden I called in at my usual car-rental office and picked an inconspicuous silver Ford Fiesta with no sporty stripes painted on the bodywork. It had to be an automatic, I told the agent behind the desk without telling him exactly why. Meanwhile, the sling was carefully hidden out of sight in my coat pocket.

  I found a free parking spot at the far end of Spezia Road and cautiously made my way to my front door without being attacked or molested.

  “Good day?” Lydia asked as I walked into the kitchen.

  “Pretty good,” I said. “And you?”

  “Contracts were exchanged on two of my sales today,” she said, beaming with excitement. “One of them was a one-bedroom flat that has sold for over half a million. That’s fifty-five grand over the asking price!”

  “Well done,” I said, giving her a hug and a kiss.

  She smiled. “And the other was an unremarkable house in Kilburn that went for one-point-two. It’s crazy out there. London prices are going through the roof. How do people have the money?”

  “God knows,” I said. “It must be hell for first-time buyers.”

  Our little two-bedroom flat seemed to be an ever-improving investment. Perhaps we might just be able to afford that house in the country with a garden for our kids to play in.

  “What’s for supper?” I asked.

  “Spaghetti bolognese,” she said. “I’m getting it now.”

  “Great. I’m starving.”

  Gordon Tuttle from the London Telegraph called.

  “Bingo,” Gordon said into my ear. “You were absolutely right.”

  “How so?”

  “According to a mate of mine at the City desk, your man is indeed thought to be in a spot of financial hot water. He’s absolutely loaded, as we know, but his money is all tied up in a trust created by his grandfather and the word is that the family trustees are being bloody-minded about doling it out. It seems they don’t approve of his gambling habits and are refusing to bankroll his debts.”

  “A cash flow crisis,” I said.

  “Absolutely. Asset-rich but cash-poor. Not an uncommon problem.”

  “But are his difficulties widely known?”

  “Possibly they are among the City editors, but certainly not by the general public. No one is sure enough of the facts to publish, for fear of being sued. But my mate tells me he’s certain it’s true, he just can’t prove it.”

  “That’s really helpful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Come on, Jeff, what’s the story?”

  “Sorry, Gordon, I don’t want to be sued either,” I replied. “If and when there’s a story, you will get it first. I promise.”

  I hung up.

  “Don’t want to be sued about what?” Lydia asked, standing at the sink, draining the pasta from a saucepan.

  “It’s nothing important,” I said.

  Lydia turned around and slammed the pan down onto the counter with a crash.

  “Why won’t you ever tell me things?” she said loudly and crossly. “You won’t even tell me why someone tried to kill you and now I feel that you’re keeping me in the dark over something else.” She put her hands on her hips. “Jeff, I need to know what’s going on in your life. It matters to me.”

  “I didn’t want to trouble you,” I said, rather taken aback by the strength of her reaction.

  “But don’t you understand, you silly man, I want to be troubled. I need to be able to support you. I know that you’ve been really worried these last few days because you’ve been so quiet, but I don’t know how to help because you won’t talk to me.”

  —

  WE HAD our spaghetti bolognese sitting at the kitchen table and I told her it all—everything from the events at Cheltenham, when Matthew Unwin killed Jordan Furness, right up to the financial information just given to me an hour previously by Gordon Tuttle.

  I went through the whole story in chronological order, including the disruption of racing at Ascot, Aintree and Fontwell Park, the doping of horses at Cheltenham and at Graham Perry’s yard, the notes from Leonardo, the replies in The Times, the first drop of money, my visit to Matthew Unwin. Everything.

  “But if you know who this Leonardo really is,” she said, “why don’t you and Crispin just go to the police and tell them?”

  “Because we have no proof. I’m not even sure it’s the right man. The only evidence I have is that he has a hyperactive child and he’s in a spot of trouble with his cash flow. That would hardly convince a jury, now would it? The police would probably tell me to get lost.”

  “But isn’t it worth a try?”

  “No,” I said. “All that would happen is the police would interview him and that would alert the target to our suspicions. He would
simply go to ground and we would never prove anything. We need to catch him in the act. To get him as he collects the next drop.”

  “Target?”

  “Surveillance-speak,” I said. “It’s how I now think of him.”

  “So what will you do next?”

  “It would be simple if I could be certain that he’d use the same place for the next drop. Then I could just wait for him to fall into a trap. But I can’t be sure of that, so I’m going to follow him.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I assume he’s at his home.”

  “Hadn’t you better make sure? You have to find him in order to follow him.”

  I smiled. “You sound like my old army instructor. And you’re right. That’s why I rented a car.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Lydia said.

  “No,” I said, “you don’t have to get involved.”

  “I want to get involved,” Lydia said. “You know that you could do with some help driving, especially if you have to follow him on foot.”

  She was right. It was difficult, if not impossible, to follow someone properly on your own if they first used a private vehicle and then, say, a bus or a train. By the time you had found somewhere to leave your own car, the target would be long gone.

  “How about work?”

  “They can survive for a day without me. I’ll call in sick.”

  “OK,” I said. “That would be wonderful. But I was intending to get up really early.”

  “How early?”

  “About three-thirty.”

  “Then we had better go to bed now,” she said, pushing away her empty plate.

  I smiled at her. “What a great plan.”

  —

  THE TRAFFIC was very light in the middle of the night and we were outside the target’s house in Weybridge, Surrey, well before five o’clock, a good hour or more before sunrise, with only the occasional streetlamp lighting the darkness.

  Lydia had giggled most of the way there.

  “What are you laughing about?” I’d asked her as we’d got into the car.

  “You,” she’d said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I can’t get used to what you look like.”

  The brown woolen beanie plus wig and the goatee were making a further appearance, together with the black roll-neck sweater, dark-blue jeans and my brown leather bomber jacket. In addition, I had placed small cotton balls in my mouth between my teeth and cheeks to alter the shape of my face.