by Dick Francis
She laughed. “I like the peace of pale walls. Why should I want to change them?”
I said merely, “I’m glad you don‘t,” and offered her thirst quenchers. Like Martin, it seemed she preferred fizzy water to alcohol, though in her case the cause wasn’t weight but the combination of a police badge and a motorbike. She went soberly home before dawn, steady on two wheels. I watched her red rear light fade into what was left of the night and quite fiercely wanted her to stay with me instead.
I walked restlessly downhill through the slow January dawn, reaching the workshop well before the others. The Internet, though, when I’d accessed it, proved less obliging about Adam Force than the address of Waltman Verity in Taunton. There had been a whole clutch of Veritys. Adam Force wasn’t anywhere in sight.
Hickory arrived at that point, early and eager to take his precious sailboat out of the Lehr annealing oven. He unbolted the oven door and lifted out his still-warm treasure. Although he would get the transparent colors clearer with practice, it wasn’t a bad effort, and I told him so. He wasn’t pleased, however. He wanted unqualified praise. I caught on his face a fleeting expression of contempt for my lack of proper appreciation of his ability. There would be trouble ahead if he tackled really difficult stuff, I thought; but as I’d done once in the past with someone of equal talent, I would give him good references when he looked for a different teacher, as, quite soon now, he would.
I would miss him most in the selling department for results and in the humor department for good company.
Irish, more humble about his skills, and Pamela Jane, twittery and positively self-deprecating, came sweeping in together in the cold morning and gave the sailboat the extravagant admiration Hickory thought it deserved. Harmony united the three of them as usual, but I hadn’t much faith in its lasting much longer.
Watched and helped by all three of them I spent the day replacing the minaret-shaped scent bottles we’d sold at Christmas, working fast at eight pieces an hour, using blue, turquoise, pink, green, white and purple in turn and packing the finished articles in rows in the ovens to cool. Speed was a commercial asset as essential as a three-dimensional eye, and winter in the Cotswold Hills was the time to stock up for the summer tourists. I consequently worked flat out from morning to six in the evening, progressing from sailboats via scent bottles to fishes, horses, bowls and vases.
At six in the evening when my semi-exhausted crew announced all six ovens to be packed, I sent them off home, tidied the workshop and put everything ready for the morrow. In the evening Catherine Dodd, straight off duty, rode her bike to Broadway, collected a pillion passenger and took him to his home. Every night possible that week Detective Constable Dodd slept in my arms in my bed but left before the general world awoke, and, during that time, no one managed to stick an address on Adam Force.
Glassblowing aside, by Friday afternoon, three days after Worthington and Marigold had joyfully left for Paris, the weekend held no enticements, as Catherine had departed on Friday morning as promised to a school-friends’ reunion.
On the same Friday, aching, I dare say, from the absence of their daily quarrel, Bon-Bon filled her need of Martin by driving his BMW, bursting at the seams with noisy children, to pick me up at close of day in Broadway.
“Actually,” Bon-Bon confessed as we detoured to my hill house for mundane clean shirts and socks, “Worthington didn’t like you being out here alone.”
“Worthington didn’t?”
“No ... He phoned from somewhere south of Paris and specially told me a whole gang of people jumped on you in Broadway last Sunday evening when there were dog-walkers about, and this place of yours out here is asking for trouble, he said. He also said Martin would have taken you home.”
“Worthington exaggerated,” I protested, but after we’d all unloaded at Bon-Bon’s house, I used the evening there to invent a game for the children to compete in, a game called “Hunt the orange cylinder and the shoelaces.”
Bon-Bon protested. “But they told everything they know to the police! They won’t find anything useful.”
“And after that game,” I said, gently ignoring her, “we’ll play ‘Hunt the letters sent to Daddy by somebody called Force’ and there are prizes for every treasure found, of course.”
They played until bedtime with enthusiasm on account of the regular handouts of gold coin treasure (money), and when they’d noisily departed upstairs I laid out their final offerings all over Martin’s desk in the den.
I had watched the children search uninhibitedly in places I might have left untouched so that their haul was in some ways spectacular. Perhaps most perplexing was the original of the letter Victor had sent a copy of to Martin.
Dear Martin, it said, and continued word for word as far as the signature, which didn’t say Victor Waltman Verity in computer-print, but was scrawled in real live handwriting, Adam Force.
“The kids found that letter in a secret drawer in Martin’s desk,” Bon-Bon said. “I didn’t even know there was a secret drawer, but the children did.”
“Um,” I pondered. “Did any of these other things come out of the drawer?”
She said she would go and ask, and presently returned with Daniel, her eleven-year-old eldest, who opened a semi-hidden drawer in the desk for us with an easy twiddle, and asked if it were worth another handout. He hadn’t emptied the drawer, he explained, as he’d found the letter straightaway, the letter that was the point of the whole game, the letter sent to Daddy by someone called Force.
Of course, no one had found any trace of an orange cylinder or of recognizable laces for sneakers.
I gladly handed over another installment of treasure, as the hidden drawer proved to stretch across the whole width of the desk under the top surface, and to be about four inches deep. Daniel patiently showed me how it opened and closed. Observant and quick-witted, he offered other discoveries with glee, especially when I gave him a coin for every good hiding place with nothing in it. He found four. He jingled the coins.
Bon-Bon, searching the desk drawer, found with blushing astonishment a small bunch of love letters from her that Martin had saved. She took them over to the black leather sofa and wept big slow tears, while I told her that her son knew the so-called secret drawer wasn’t a secret at all but was a built-in feature of the modern desk.
“It’s designed to hold a laptop computer,” I told Bon-Bon. “Martin just didn’t keep a laptop in it, as he used that tabletop one over there, the one with the full keyboard and the screen.”
“How do you know?”
“Daniel says so.”
Bon-Bon said through her tears, “How disappointing it all is,” and picked up a tissue for mopping.
I, however, found the laptop drawer seething with interest, if not with secrets, as apart from Adam Force’s letter to Martin, there was a photocopy of Martin’s letter to Force, an affair not much longer than the brief reply.
It ran:Dear Adam Force,
I have now had time to consider the matter of your formulae and methods. Please will you go ahead and record these onto the videotape as you suggested and take it to Cheltenham races on New Year’s Eve. Give it to me there, whenever you see me, except, obviously, not when I’m on my way out to race.
Yours ever,
Martin Stukely.
I stared not just at the letter, but at its implications.
Daniel looked over my shoulder, and asked what formulae were. “Are they secrets?” he said.
“Sometimes.”
When Bon-Bon had read the last loving letter and had dried her tears, I asked her how well Martin had known Doctor Adam Force.
With eyes darkened from crying, she said she didn’t know. She regretted desperately all the hours the two of them had spent in pointless arguing. “We never discussed anything without quarreling. You know what we were like. But I loved him ... and he loved me, I know he did.”
They had quarreled and loved, both intensely, throughout the four years I’d kn
own them. It was too late to wish that Martin had confided more in her, even in spite of her chattering tongue, but together for once they had decided that it should be I and not Bon-Bon who held Martin’s secret for safekeeping.
What secret? What secret? Dear God.
Alone in the den since Bon-Bon and Daniel had gone upstairs to the other children, I sorted through everything in the drawer, putting many loose letters in heaps according to subject. There were several used old checkbooks with sums written on the stubs but quite often not dates or payees. Martin must have driven his accountant crazy. He seemed simply to have thrust tax papers, receipts, payments and earnings haphazardly into his out-of-sight drawer.
Semi-miracles occasionally happen, though, and on one stub, dated November 1999 (no actual day), I came across the plain name Force (no Doctor, no Adam). On the line below there was the single word BELLOWS, and in the box for the amount of money being transferred out of the account there were three zeros, 000, with no whole numbers and no decimal points.
Searches through three other sets of stubs brought to light a lot of similar unfinished records: Martin deserved secrets, curse him, when he wrote so many himself.
The name Force appeared again on a memo pad, when a Martin handwriting scrawl said, “Force, Bristol, Wednesday if P. doesn’t declare Legup at Newton Abbot.”
Legup at Newton Abbot ... Say Legup was a horse and Newton Abbot the racetrack where he was entered ... I stood up from Martin’s desk and started on the form books in his bookcase, but although Legup had run in about eight races in the fall and spring over four or five years, and seldom, as it happened, on Wednesdays, there wasn’t any mention of days he’d been entered but stayed at home.
I went back to the drawer.
A loose-leaf notebook, the most methodically kept of all his untidy paperwork, appeared as a gold mine of order compared with all the rest. It listed, with dates, amounts given by Martin to Eddie Payne, his racetrack valet, since the previous June 1. It included even the day he died, when he’d left a record of his intentions.
As there was, to my understanding, a pretty rigid scale of pay from jockeys to valets, the notebook at first sight looked less important than half the neglected rest, but on the first page Martin had doodled the names of Ed Payne, Rose Payne, Gina Verity and Victor. In a box in a corner, behind straight heavy bars, he’d written Waltman. There were small sketches of Ed in his apron, Gina in her curlers, Victor with his computer and Rose ... Rose had a halo of spikes.
Martin had known this family, I reflected, for almost as long as Ed had been his valet. When Martin had received the letter from Victor Waltman Verity, he would have known it was a fifteen-year-old’s game. Looking back, I could see I hadn’t asked the right questions, because I’d been starting from the wrong assumptions.
With a sigh I put down the notebook and read through the letters, most of which were from the owners of horses that Martin’s skill had urged first past the post. All the letters spoke of the esteem given to an honest jockey and none of them had the slightest relevance to secrets on videotapes.
A 1999 diary came next, though I found it not in the drawer but on top of the desk, put there by one of the children. It was a detailed jockey’s diary, with all race meetings listed. Martin had circled everywhere he’d ridden, with the names of his mounts. He had filled in Tallahassee on the last day of the century, the last day of his life.
I lolled in Martin’s chair, both mourning him and wishing like hell that he could come back alive just for five minutes.
My mobile phone, lying on the desk, gave out its brisk summons and, hoping it was Catherine, I pushed “send.”
It wasn’t Catherine.
Victor’s cracked voice spoke hurriedly.
“Can you come to Taunton on Sunday? Please say you will catch the same train as before. I’m running out of money for this phone. Please say yes.”
I listened to the urgency, to the virtual panic.
I said, “Yes, OK,” and the line went dead.
I would have gone blithely unwarned to Taunton on that Sunday if it hadn’t been for Worthington shouting in alarm over crackling lines from a mountaintop.
“Haven’t you learned the first thing about not walking into an ambush?”
“Not Victor,” I protested. “He wouldn’t lure me into a trap.”
“Oh yeah? And does the sacrificial lamb understand he’s for the chop?”
Lamb chop or not, I caught the train.
6
Tom Pigeon, who lived within walking distance with his three energetic Dobermans, strolled to the gallery door of Logan Glass late on Saturday morning and invited me out for a beer in a local pub. Any bar, but not the Dragon’s across the road, he said.
With the dogs quietly tied to a bench outside, Tom Pigeon drank deep on a pint in a crowded dark inn and told me that Worthington thought that I had more nerve than sense when it came to the Verity-Paynes.
“Mm. Something about a wasps’ nest,” I agreed. “When, exactly, did he talk to you?”
Tom Pigeon looked at me over the rim of his glass as he swallowed the dregs. “He said you were no slouch in the brain box. He told me this morning.” He smiled. “He phoned from Gstaad. Only the best for his lady employer, of course.”
He ordered a second pint while I still dawdled about on my first. His slightly piratical dark little pointed beard and his obvious physical strength turned heads our way. I might be of his age and height, but no one sidled away at my approach, or found me an instinctive threat.
“It was only a week ago tomorrow.” he said, “that they hammered you until you could hardly stand.”
I thanked him for my deliverance.
He said, “Worthington wants you to stay away from any more trouble of that sort. Especially, he said, while he’s in Switzerland.”
I listened, though, to the Tom Pigeon view of that course of inaction. He sounded as bored with the safe road to old age as Worthington himself had been the day he had goaded me to go to Leicester races.
“Worthington’s coming across like a father,” Tom said.
“A bodyguard,” I commented wryly, “and I miss him.”
Tom Pigeon said casually but with unmistakable sincerity, “Take me on board instead.”
I reflected briefly that Tom’s offer wasn’t what Worthington had intended to spark off, and wondered what my dear constable Dodd would think of my allying myself to an ex-jail occupant with a nickname like Backlash. I said regardless, “Yes, if you’ll do what I ask...”
“Maybe.”
I laughed and suggested how he might spend his Sunday. His eyes widened and came to vivid approving life.
“Just as long as it’s legal,” he bargained. “I’m not going back in the slammer.”
“It’s legal,” I assured him; and when I caught the train the following morning I had a new rear defender in the guards’ van, accompanied by three of the most dangerous-looking black dogs that ever licked one’s fingers.
There was only one possible train combination to travel on that would achieve the same time of arrival at Lorna Terrace as I’d managed the previous Sunday. It would be the time that Victor meant. Tom had wanted to rethink the plan and go by car. He would drive, he said. I shook my head and changed his mind.
Suppose, I’d suggested, this is not the ambush that Worthington feared, but just the frantic need of a worried boy. Give him a chance, I’d said.
We would compromise, though, about the awkward return journey. We would rent a car with driver to follow us from Taunton station, to shadow us faithfully, to pick us up when we wanted and finally drive us to Broadway and home.
“Expensive,” Tom Pigeon complained.
“I’m paying,” I said.
Victor himself was waiting on the Taunton platform when the train wheels ran smoothly into the station. I’d traveled near the front of the train so as to be able to spot and to pass any little unwelcoming committee where I had plenty of space to assess them, but th
e boy seemed to be alone. Also, I thought, anxious. Also cold in the January wind. Beyond that, an enigma.
Tom’s dogs, traveling at the rear of the train, slithered down onto the platform and caused a sharp local division between dog lovers and those with antifang reservations.
I reckoned, or anyway hoped, that Victor himself wouldn’t know Tom or his dogs by sight, even though Rose and the rest of her family probably would, after the rout of the black masks in Broadway.
I needed no black mask to meet Victor, but learning from the plainclothes police, I wore a baseball cap at the currently with-it angle above a navy-blue tracksuit topped with a paler blue sleeveless padded jacket. Normal enough for many, but different from my usual gray pants and white shirt.
Bon-Bon’s children having sniggered behind their hands, and Tom having swept his gaze over me blankly as if I had been a stranger, I walked confidently and silently in my sneakers to Victor’s back and said quietly in his ear, “Hello.”
He whirled around and took in my changed appearance with surprise, but chief of his emotions seemed to be straightforward relief that I was there at all.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said. “Not when I heard them saying how they’d smashed you up proper. I don’t know what to do. I want you to tell me what to do. They tell me lies.” He was shaking slightly, more with nervousness, I guessed, than with cold.
“First of all, we get off this windy platform,” I said. “Then you tell me where your mother thinks you are.”
Down in front of the station the driver I’d engaged was polishing a dark blue estate car large enough for the occasion. Tom Pigeon came out of the station with his dogs, made contact with the driver and loaded the Dobermans into the big rear space designed for them.
Victor, not yet realizing that the car and dogs had anything to do with him, answered my question and a dozen others. “Mom thinks I’m at home. She’s gone to see my dad in jail. It’s visiting day. I listened to her and my auntie Rose planning what they would say to me, and they made up some story about Mom going to see a woman with a disgusting illness that I wouldn’t like. Every time she goes to see Dad they make up another reason why I stay at home. Then, when I listened some more, I heard them say they’re going to try again, after Mom sees Dad, to make you tell them where the tape is you had from Granddad Payne. They say it’s worth millions. My auntie Rose says its all nonsense for you to say you don’t know. Please, please tell her where it is, or what’s on it, because I can’t bear her making people tell her things. I’ve heard them twice up in our attic screaming and groaning and she just laughs and says they have toothache.”