by Dick Francis
“Gin,” corrected one of the children dryly.
I thought it scandalous that Bon-Bon’s doctor should have refused to tend her and had a go at him myself. Capitulating with apologetic grace, he promised he would “look in,” New Year’s Day holiday notwithstanding. He hadn’t understood Mrs. Stukely, he excused himself. He didn’t realize she’d been attacked. She’d been partly incoherent. Had we informed the police?
It did seem obvious that robbery had been the purpose of the mass anesthesia. Three television sets with integral tape players were missing. Bon-Bon had been angry enough to count things.
Also gone was a separate video player on which she’d been watching Martin, together with dozens of tapes. Two laptop computers, with printers and racks of filing disks, were missing too, but Worthington prophesied that the police would offer little hope of recovering these things, as Martin had apparently not recorded any identifying numbers anywhere.
Bon-Bon began crying quietly from the strain of it all and it was Worthington, recovering and worth his weight in videotapes, who talked to the overburdened local police station. My constable, Catherine Dodd, he found, was attached to a different branch. Detectives, however, would arrive on the Stukely doorstep soon.
Not surprisingly, the THOMPSON ELECTRONICS van had gone.
Marigold went on snoring on the stairs.
Worthington made calming sandwiches of banana and honey for the children.
Feeling queasy, I sat in Martin’s black leather chair in his den, while Bon-Bon, on an opposite sofa, dried her complicated grief on tissues and finally gave no complete answer to my repeated question, which was, “What was on the tape that Martin meant to give me after the races, and where did it come from? That’s to say, who gave it to Martin himself at Cheltenham?”
Bon-Bon studied me with wet eyes and blew her nose. She said, “I know Martin wanted to tell you something yesterday, but he had those other men in the car, and I know he wanted to talk to you without Priam listening, so he planned to take you home last, after the others, even though you live nearest to the racetrack ...” Even in distress she looked porcelain pretty, the plumpness an asset in a curvy black wool suit cut to please a living husband rather than a mourning neighborhood.
“He trusted you,” she said finally.
“Mm. ” I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t.
“No, you don’t understand.” Bon-Bon hesitated and went on slowly. “He knew a secret. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said I would fret. But he wanted to tell someone. We did discuss that, and I agreed it should be you. You should be his backup. Just in case. Oh dear ... He had what he wanted you to know put onto a plain old-fashioned recording tape, not onto a CD or a computer disk, and he did that, I think, because whoever was giving him information preferred it that way. I’m not sure. And also it was easier to play, he said. Better on video than computer because, darling Gerard, you know I never get things right when it comes to computers. The children laugh at me. I can play a videotape easily. Martin wanted me to be able to do that if he died, but of course ... of course ... he didn’t think he’d die, not really.”
I asked, “Could you yourself make a home movie on a videotape?”
She nodded. “Martin gave me a video camera for Christmas. It makes your own home films but I’ve hardly had time to learn how to use it.”
“And he didn’t say anything about what was on that tape he meant for me?”
“He was awfully careful not to.”
I shook my head in frustration. The tape stolen from the glass showroom was surely the one with the secret on it. The one passed to Martin, then to Eddie the valet, and then to me. Yet if the Broadway thieves, or thief, had viewed it—and they’d had all night to do so—why were they needing to rob Martin’s house ten hours later?
Did the tape taken from the showroom actually contain Martin’s secret?
Perhaps not.
Was the second robbery carried out by a different thief, who didn’t know about the first one?
I had no answers, only guesses.
Marigold at that point tottered into the den as if coming to pieces in all directions. I had been used to Marigold for the four years since Martin had straight facedly presented me to his buxom mother-in-law, a magnified version of his pretty wife. Marigold could be endlessly witty or tiresomely belligerent according to the gin level, but this time the effect of gas on alcohol seemed to have resulted in pity-me pathos, a state that aroused genuine sympathy, not serve-you-right.
In Bon-Bon’s house it was the police that turned up first, and Bon-Bon’s children who described down to the laces on his shoes the clothes worn by their attacker. He had stared with wide eyes through his black head mask while he’d pointed the orange cylinder at them and squirted a nearly invisible but fierce mist, sweeping from face to face and knocking them out before they’d realized what was happening. Asked about it, Daniel, the eldest child, described the black-masked man having something white tied over his face underneath. An elementary gas mask, I surmised. Something to prevent the robber from inhaling his own gas.
Worthington had been attacked most strongly and had fallen unconscious first, and Bon-Bon—in the den—last. The gas had perhaps been exhausted by the time I arrived; a direct bang on the head had sufficed.
Worthington had been right in guessing the police would offer no hope of Bon-Bon ever again seeing the missing goods. She felt less pain than I would have expected over the loss of tapes showing Martin winning the Grand National because, as she explained, she could get duplicates.
Scarcely had the police notebooks been folded away than Bon-Bon’s doctor hurried in without apology, giving the impression he was making an exception, out of the goodness of his heart.
It was the color orange that slowed him into frowns and more thorough care. He and the police all listened to Daniel, brought out paper, and took notes. The doctor told the departing detectives to look for villains with access to the anesthetic gas cyclopropane, which came in orange cylinders, and wasn’t much used because of being highly flammable and explosive.
Slowly, after decently thorough peerings into eyes and throats and careful stethoscope chest checks, each of the family was judged fit to go on living. Sweet Bon-Bon, when her house was finally free of official attention, sat sprawling on the office sofa telling me she was utterly exhausted and needed help. Specifically she needed my help and Martin would have asked for it.
So I stayed and looked after things, and because of that I saved myself at least another sore head, as thieves broke into my house on the hill that night and stole everything that could remotely be called a videotape.
On Monday, after an early-morning session in the workshop making new little items for stock, I went to Cheltenham races again (by taxi) to talk to Martin’s valet, Eddie Payne.
Ed or Eddie (he answered to both) was ready to help, he said, but he couldn’t. He’d spent all weekend thinking it over and he said, his gaze darting over my shoulder and back again to my face, he couldn‘t—however hard he tried—remember any more than he’d told me on Friday. I thought back to the moment of empathy between us, when we had each realized what we’d lost. That moment of genuine emptiness had gone.
The difference between Friday and Monday was a fierce-eyed woman approaching forty, now standing a pace or two behind me, a woman Ed referred to as his daughter. He slid a second glance at her expressionlessly and like a ventriloquist not moving his lips, said to me almost too quietly for me to hear, “She knows the man who gave Martin the tape.”
The woman said sharply, “What did you say, Dad? Do speak up.”
“I said we’d miss Martin badly,” Eddie said, “and I’m due back in the changing room. Tell Gerard—Mr. Logan—what he wants to know, why don’t you?”
He walked away with a worried shuffle, apologetically saying to me as he went, “Her name’s Rose; she’s a good girl really.”
Rose, the good girl, gave me such a bitter flash of hate that
I wondered what I’d ever done to annoy her, as I hadn’t known of her existence until moments earlier. She was angularly bony and had mid-brown hair with frizzy sticking-out curls. Her skin was dry and freckled, and although her clothes looked too big for the thin body inside, there was about her an extraordinary air of magnetism.
“Er ... Rose ... ,” I started.
“Mrs. Robins,” she interrupted abruptly.
I cleared my throat and tried again.
“Mrs. Robins, then, could I buy you some coffee, or a drink in the bar?”
She said, “No, you could not.” She bit the words off with emphasis. She said, “You’d do better to mind your own business.”
“Mrs. Robins, did you see who gave a brown paper-wrapped parcel to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races last Friday?”
Such a simple question. She primped her lips together tightly, swiveled on her heel, and walked away with an air of not intending to come back.
After a short pause, I followed her. Looking down from time to time at my racecard as any prospective punter would, I trickled along in her wake as she made for the ranks of bookmakers’ pitches in front of the open-to-the-public Tattersalls stands. She stopped at a board announcing ARTHUR ROBINS, PRESTWICK, ESTABLISHED 1894, and talked to an Elvis Presley lookalike with heavy black side whiskers, who was standing on a box, leaning down to take money from the public and dictating his transactions to a clerk, who was punching the bets into a computer.
Rose Robins, established long after 1894, had a fair amount to say. The Elvis lookalike frowned, listening, and I retreated: I might have strength and reasonable agility but Rose’s contact made my muscle power look the stuff of kindergartens. Whichever Robins filled the shoes of Arthur nowadays, if he were the Elvis lookalike, he weighed in with grandfather-gorilla shoulders.
Patiently I climbed the stands and waited while the Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, bookmakers—three of them—took bets on the final two races of the afternoon, and then I watched their chief, the Elvis lookalike, pack up the board and take charge of the money bag and walk towards the exit with Rose and his two helpers beside him. I watched them go out of sight. As far as I could tell, they all left the racetrack. As a group, they equaled an armored tank.
From experience with Martin, I knew that jockeys’ valets finished their work after most of the crowds had gone home. A valet was the man who helped the jockeys change rapidly between races. He also looked after and cleaned their gear, saddles, britches, boots and so on, so it was all ready for the next time they raced. Martin had told me that a single valet would look after a whole bunch of jockeys and the valets would work as a team to cover all the race meetings. While Eddie packed up his hamper of saddles, kit and clothes for laundering, I waited with hope for him to reappear out of the changing room at the end of his day.
When he came out and saw me, he was at first alarmed, and then resigned.
“I suppose,” he said, “Rose wouldn’t tell you.”
“No,” I agreed. “So would you ask her something, for Martin’s sake?”
“Well ...” He hesitated. “It depends.”
I said, “Ask her if the tape Martin gave you was the one he thought it was.”
He took a few seconds to work it out.
“Do you mean,” he asked doubtfully, “that my Rose thinks Martin had the wrong tape?”
“I think,” I confessed, “that if Martin’s tape ever surfaces after all the muddle and thieving, it’ll be a matter of luck.”
He protested self-righteously that he’d given me Martin’s tape in good faith. I insisted that I believed him. No more was said about Rose.
Eddie knew, as did the whole racing world after that day’s newspapers, that Martin’s funeral was planned for Thursday, provided no jinx upset Wednesday’s inquest. Eddie, eyes down, mumbled a few words about seeing me there, he supposed, and in discomfort hurried away to the inner realms of the changing rooms, from where the public with awkward questions were banned.
Rose Robins and her enmity added complexity to an already tangled situation.
I caught a bus from the racetrack which wound its way from village to village and, in the end, to Broadway. In spite of my having spent all the time tossing around in my mind the unexpected involvement of Eddie’s scratchy daughter I came to no more satisfactory or original conclusion than that someone had given some tape or other to Martin, who had given it to Eddie, who had given it to me, who had carelessly lost it to a thief.
Still drifting in outer space was whatever confidential data Martin had meant to entrust to me. In some respects that didn’t matter, and never would, just as long as the hidden nugget of information didn’t heat up or collide with an inconvenient truth. Additionally, as I had no road map to the ingredients of the nugget, I had no way of either foreseeing or preventing trouble.
Unrealistically, I simply hoped that Martin’s secret would remain forever hidden in uncharted orbit, and all of us could return to normal.
It was after five-thirty by the time I reached the doors of Logan Glass, and again my assistants were there, two of them making paperweights with enthusiasm and the third keeping shop. Bon-Bon had telephoned, they told me, saying she was begging me to go on organizing her household in return for transport; at least until after the funeral, and, much to the amusement of my assistants, the transport she sent that afternoon wasn’t her own runabout, but was Marigold’s Rolls.
Whenever we were alone together, I sat beside Worthington as he drove. He had offered me the comfort and prestige of the rear seat usually taken by his employer, but I felt wrong there. Moreover, on the showing of the last few days, if I sat in the back he tended both to call me “Sir” and to favor respectful silence instead of pithy and irreverent observation. When I sat in the front, Marigold was “Marigold”; when in the back, “Mrs. Knight.” When I sat beside her chauffeur, he showed his inner self.
In addition to being bald, fifty and kind to children, Worthington disliked the police force as a matter of principle, referred to marriage as bondage and believed in the usefulness of being able to outkick any other muscle man in sight. It wasn’t so much as a chauffeur that I now valued Worthington at my elbow, but as a prospective bodyguard. The Elvis lookalike had radiated latent menace at an intensity that I hadn’t met before and didn’t like; and for a detonator there was fierce, thorny Rose, and it was with her in mind that I casually asked Worthington if he’d ever placed a bet at the races with Arthur Robins, Est. 1894.
“For a start,” he said with sarcasm, fastening his seat belt as if keeping to the law were routine, “the Robins family don’t exist. That bunch of swindlers known as Arthur Robins are mostly Veritys and Webbers, with a couple of Browns thrown in. There hasn’t been a bona fide Arthur Robins ever. It’s just a pretty name.”
Eyebrows raised in surprise, I asked, “How do you know all that?”
“My old man ran a book,” he said. “Fasten your seat belt, Gerard, the cops in this town would put eagles out of business. Like I said, my old man was a bookmaker, he taught me the trade. You’ve got to be real sharp at figures, though, to make a profit, and I never got quick enough. But Arthur Robins, that’s the front name for some whizzers of speed merchants. Don’t bet with them, that’s my advice.”
I said, “Do you know that Eddie Payne, Martin’s valet, has a daughter called Rose who says her last name is Robins and who’s on cuddling terms with an Elvis Presley lookalike taking bets for Arthur Robins?”
Worthington, who had been about to start the car outside Logan Glass to drive us to Bon-Bon, sat back in his seat, letting his hands fall laxly on his thighs.
“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I didn’t know that.” He thought for a while, his forehead troubled. “That Elvis fellow,” he said finally, “that’s Norman Osprey. You don’t want to mix with him.”
“And Rose?”
Worthington shook his head. “I don’t know her. I’ll ask around.” He roused himself and started the car.
B
y Thursday, the day of Martin’s funeral, the police as predicted hadn’t found one identifiable videotape in a country awash with them.
On the day before the funeral a young woman on a motorbike—huge helmet, black leather jacket, matching pants, heavy boots—steered into one of the five parking spaces at the front of Logan Glass. Outside in the January chill she pulled off the helmet and shook free a cap of fair fine hair before walking without swagger into the gallery and showroom as if she knew the way well.
I was putting the pre-annealing final touches to a vase, with Pamela Jane telling a group of American tourists how it was done, but there was something attention-claiming about the motorcyclist, and as soon as I thought of her in terms of glass, I knew her infallibly.
“Catherine Dodd,” I said.
“Most people don’t recognize me.” She was amused, not piqued.
With interest I watched the tourists pack somewhat closer together as if to elbow out the stranger in threatening clothes.
Pamela Jane finished her spiel and one of the American men said the vases were too expensive, even if they were handmade and handsome. He collected nods and all-around agreement, and there was relief in the speed with which the tourists settled instead on simple dolphins and little dishes. While Hickory wrapped the parcels and wrote out bills, I asked the motorcyclist if there were any news of my lost tape.
She watched me handle the vase in heatproof fiber and put it to cool in the annealing oven.
“I’m afraid,” said Detective Constable Dodd in plain—well, plainer—clothes, “your tape is gone for good.”
I told her it held a secret.
“What secret?”
“That’s the point, I don’t know. Martin Stukely told his wife he was giving me a secret on tape for safekeeping—that’s a bit of a laugh—in case he was killed in a car crash, or something like that.”
“Like a steeplechase?”
“He didn’t expect it.”