Whip Hand

by Dick Francis

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We just stay as we are for an hour and a half and let the wind take us. If you feel odd, it’s lack of oxygen.’ He took a pair of wool gloves from his pocket and put them on. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘Yes, a bit.’

  He grinned. ‘I’ve got long johns under my jeans, and two sweaters under my anorak. You’ll just have to freeze.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’ I stood on the map and put my real hand deep into the pocket of my cotton anorak and he said at least the false hand couldn’t get frostbite.

  He operated the burner and looked at his watch and the ground and the altimeter, and seemed pleased with the way things were. Then he looked at me in slight puzzlement and I knew he was wondering, now that there was time, how I happened to be where I was.

  ‘I came to Highalane Park to see you,’ I said. ‘I mean, you, John Viking, particularly.’

  He looked startled. ‘Do you read minds?’

  ‘All the time.’ I pulled my hand out of one pocket and dipped into another, and brought out the paperback on navigation. ‘I came to ask you about this. It’s got your name on the flyleaf.’

  He frowned at it, and opened the front cover. ‘Good Lord. I wondered where this had got to. How did you have it?’

  ‘Did you lend it to anyone?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Um …’ I said. ‘If I describe someone to you, will you say if you know him?’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘A man of about twenty-eight,’ I said. ‘Dark hair, good looks, full of fun and jokes, easy-going, likes girls, great company, has a habit of carrying a knife strapped to his leg under his sock, and is very likely a crook.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘He’s my cousin.’

  12

  His cousin, Norris Abbott. What had he done this time, he demanded, and I asked, what had he done before?

  ‘A trail of bouncing cheques that his mother paid for.’

  Where did he live, I asked. John Viking didn’t know. He saw him only when Norris turned up occasionally on his doorstep, usually broke and looking for free meals.

  ‘A laugh a minute for a day or two. Then he’s gone.’

  ‘Where does his mother live?’

  ‘She’s dead. He’s alone now. No parents or brothers or sisters. No relatives except me.’ He peered at me, frowning. ‘Why do you ask all this?’

  ‘A girl I know wants to find him.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s nothing much.’

  He lost interest at once and flicked the lever for another burn. ‘We use twice the fuel up here as near the ground,’ he said afterwards. ‘That’s why I brought so much. That’s how some nosey parker told Popsy I was planning to go high, and through the airways.’

  By my reckoning the airway was not that far off.

  ‘Won’t you get into trouble?’ I said.

  The wolf grin came and went. ‘They’ve got to see us, first. We won’t show up on radar. We’re too small for the equipment they use. With a bit of luck, we’ll sneak across and no one will be any the wiser.’

  I picked up the map and studied it. At fifteen thousand feet we would be illegal from when we entered controlled airspace until we landed, all but the last two hundred feet. The airway over Brighton began at a thousand feet above sea level and the hills to the north were eight hundred feet high. Did John Viking know all that? Yes, he did.

  When we had been flying for one hour and fifty minutes he made a fuel line change from cylinder to cylinder that resulted in a thin jet of liquid gas spurting out from the connection like water out of a badly joined hose. The jet shot across the corner of the basket and hit a patch of wickerwork about six inches below the top rail.

  John Viking was smoking at the time.

  Liquid propane began trickling down the inside of the basket in a stream. John Viking cursed and fiddled with the faulty connection, being over it; and his glowing cigarette ignited the gas.

  There was no ultimate and final explosion. The jet burnt as jets do, and directed its flame in an organized manner at the patch of basket it was hitting. John Viking threw his cigarette over the side and snatched off his denim cap, and beat at the burning basket with great flailing motions of his arm, while I managed to stifle the jet at source by turning off the main switch on the cylinder.

  When the flames and smoke and cursing died down, we had a hole six inches in diameter right through the basket, but no other damage.

  ‘Baskets don’t burn easily,’ he said calmly, as if nothing had happened. ‘Never known one burn much more than this.’ He inspected his cap, which was scorched into black-edged lace, and gave me a maniacal four seconds from the bright blue eyes. ‘You can’t put out a fire with a crash helmet,’ he said.

  I laughed quite a lot.

  It was the altitude, I thought, which was making me giggle.

  ‘Want some chocolate?’ he said.

  There were no signposts in the sky to tell us when we crossed the boundary of the airway. We saw an aeroplane or two some way off, but nothing near us. No one came buzzing around to direct us downward. We simply sailed straight on, blowing across the sky as fast as a train.

  At ten past five he said it was time to go down, because if we didn’t touch ground by five-thirty exactly he would be disqualified, and he didn’t want that; he wanted to win. Winning was what it was all about.

  ‘How would anyone know exactly when we touched down?’ I said.

  He gave me a pitying look and gently directed his toe at a small box strapped to the floor beside one of the corner cylinders.

  ‘In here is a barograph, all stuck about with pompous red seals. The judges seal it, before the start. It shows variations in air pressure. Highly sensitive. All our journey shows up like a row of peaks. When you’re on the ground, the trace is flat and steady. It tells the judges just when you took off and when you landed. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘OK. Down we go, then.’

  He reached up and untied a red cord which was knotted to the burner frame, and pulled it ‘It opens a panel at the top of the balloon,’ he said. ‘Lets the hot air out.’

  His idea of descent was all of a piece. The altimeter unwound like a broken clock and the rate-of-climb meter was pointing to a thousand feet a minute, downwards. He seemed to be quite unaffected, but it made me queasy and hurt my ear drums. Swallowing made things a bit better, but not much. I concentrated, as an antidote, on checking with the map to see where we were going.

  The Channel lay like a broad grey carpet to our right, and it was incredible but, whichever way I looked at it, it seemed that we were on a collision course with Beachy Head.

  ‘Yeah,’ John Viking casually confirmed. ‘Guess we’ll try not to get blown off those cliffs. Might be better to land on the beach further on …’ He checked his watch. ‘Ten minutes to go. We’re still at six thousand feet … that’s all right … might be the edge of the sea …’

  ‘Not the sea,’ I said positively.

  ‘Why not? We might have to.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this …’ lifted my left arm. ‘Inside this hand-shaped plastic there’s actually a lot of fine engineering. Strong pincers inside the thumb and first two fingers. A lot of fine precision gears and transistors and printed electrical circuits. Dunking it in the sea would be like dunking a radio. A total ruin. And it would cost me two thousand quid to get a new one.’

  He was astonished. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Better keep you dry, then. And anyway, now we’re down here, I don’t think we’ll get as far south as Beachy Head. Probably further east.’ He paused and looked at my left hand doubtfully. ‘It’ll be a rough landing. The fuel’s cold from being so high … the burner doesn’t function well on cold fuel. It takes time to heat enough air to give us a softer touch-down.’

  A softer touch-down took time … too much time.

  ‘Win the race,’ I said.

  His face lit into sheer happiness. ‘Right
,’ he said decisively. ‘What’s that town just ahead?’

  I studied the map. ‘Eastbourne.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Five minutes.’ He looked at the altimeter and at Eastbourne, upon which we were rapidly descending. ‘Two thousand feet. Bit dicey, hitting the roofs. There isn’t much wind down here, is there … But if I burn, we might not get down in time. No, no burn.’

  A thousand feet a minute, I reckoned, was eleven or twelve miles an hour. I had been used for years to hitting the ground at more than twice that speed … though not in a basket, and not when the ground might turn out to be fully inhabited by brick walls.

  We were travelling sideways over the town, with houses below us. Descent was very fast. ‘Three minutes,’ he said.

  The sea lay ahead again, fringing the far side of the town, and for a moment it looked as if it was there we would have to come down after all. John Viking, however, knew better.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘This is it.’

  He hauled strongly on the red cord he held, which led upwards into the balloon. Somewhere above, the vent for the hot air widened dramatically, the lifting power of the balloon fell away, and the solid edge of Eastbourne came up with a rush.

  We scraped the eaves of grey slate roofs, made a sharp diagonal descent over a road and a patch of grass, and smashed down on a broad concrete walk twenty yards from the waves.

  ‘Don’t get out. Don’t get out,’ he yelled. The basket tipped on its side and began to slither along the concrete, dragged by the still half-inflated silken mass. ‘Without our weight, it could still fly away.’

  As I was again wedged among the cylinders, it was superfluous advice. The basket rocked and tumbled a few more times and I with it, and John Viking cursed and hauled at his red cord and finally let out enough air for us to be still.

  He looked at his watch, and his blue eyes blazed with triumph.

  ‘We’ve made it. Five twenty-nine. That was a bloody good race. The best ever. What are you doing next Saturday?’

  I went back to Aynsford by train, which took forever, with Charles picking me up from Oxford station not far short of midnight.

  ‘You went on the balloon race,’ he repeated disbelievingly. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘And your car’s still at Highalane Park?’

  ‘It can stay there until morning,’ yawned. ‘Nicholas Ashe now has a name, by the way. He’s someone called Norris Abbott. Same initials, silly man.’

  ‘Will you tell the police?’

  ‘See if we can find him, first.’

  He glanced at me sideways. ‘Jenny came back this evening, after you’d telephoned.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was going to.’

  I supposed I believed him. I hoped she would have gone to bed before I arrived, but she hadn’t. She was sitting on the gold brocade sofa in the drawing room, looking belligerent.

  ‘I don’t like you coming here so much,’ she said.

  A knife to the heart of things from my pretty wife.

  Charles said smoothly, ‘Sid is welcome here always.’

  ‘Discarded husbands should have more pride than to fawn on their fathers-in-law, who put up with it because they’re sorry for them.’

  ‘You’re jealous,’ I said, surprised.

  She stood up fast, as angry as I’d ever seen her.

  ‘How dare you!’ she said. ‘He always takes your side. He thinks you’re bloody marvellous. He doesn’t know you like I do, all your stubborn little ways and your meanness and thinking you’re always right.’

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said.

  ‘And you’re a coward as well,’ she said furiously. ‘Running away from a few straight truths.’

  ‘Good night, Charles,’ I said. ‘Good night, Jenny. Sleep well, my love, and pleasant dreams.’

  ‘You …’ she said. ‘You … I hate you, Sid.’

  I went out of the drawing room without fuss and upstairs to the bedroom I thought of as mine; the one I always slept in nowadays at Aynsford.

  You don’t have to hate me,’ Jenny, I thought miserably; I hate myself.

  Charles drove me to Wiltshire in the morning to collect my car, which still stood where I’d left it, though surrounded now by acres of empty grass. There was no Peter Rammileese in sight and no thugs waiting in ambush. All clear for an un-eventful return to London.

  ‘Sid,’ Charles said, as I unlocked the car door. ‘Don’t pay any attention to Jenny.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come to Aynsford whenever you want.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I mean it, Sid.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Damn Jenny,’ he said explosively.

  ‘Oh no. She’s unhappy. She …’ I paused. ‘I guess she needs comforting. A shoulder to cry on, and all that.’

  He said austerely, ‘I don’t care for tears.’

  ‘No.’ I sighed and got into the car, waved goodbye, and drove over the bumpy grass to the gate. The help that Jenny needed, she wouldn’t take from me; and her father didn’t know how to give it. Just another of life’s bloody muddles, another irony in the general mess.

  I drove into the city and around in a few small circles, and ended up in the publishing offices of Antiques for All, which proved to be only one of a number of specialist magazines put out by a newspaper company. To the Antiques editor, a fair-haired earnest young man in heavy-framed specs, I explained both the position and the need.

  ‘Our mailing list?’ he said doubtfully. ‘Mailing lists are strictly private, you know.’

  I explained all over again, and threw in a lot of pathos. My wife behind bars if I didn’t find the con man, that sort of thing.

  ‘Oh very well,’ he said. ‘But it will be stored in a computer. You’ll have to wait for a print-out.’

  I waited patiently, and received in the end a stack of paper setting out fifty-three thousand names and addresses, give or take a few dead ones.

  ‘And we want it back,’ he said severely. ‘Unmarked and complete.’

  ‘How did Norris Abbott get hold of it?’ I asked.

  He didn’t know, and neither the name nor the description of Abbott/Ashe brought any glimmer of recognition.

  ‘How about a copy of the magazine, for good measure?’

  I got that too, and disappeared before he could regret all his generosity. Back in the car, I telephoned to Chico and got him to come to the flat. Meet me outside, I said. Carry my bag upstairs and earn your salary.

  He was there when I pulled up at a vacant parking meter and we went upstairs together. The flat was empty, and quiet, and safe.

  ‘A lot of leg work, my son,’ I said, taking the mailing list out of the package I had transported it in, and putting it on the table. ‘All your own.’

  He eyed it unenthusiastically. ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Chester races,’ I said. ‘One of the syndicate horses runs there tomorrow. Meet me back here Thursday morning, ten o’clock. OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He thought. ‘Suppose our Nicky hasn’t got himself organized yet, and sends out his begging letters next week, after we’ve drawn a blank?’

  ‘Mm … Better take some sticky labels with this address on, and ask them to send the letters here, if they get them.’

  ‘We’ll be lucky.’

  ‘You never know. No one likes being conned.’

  ‘May as well get started, then.’ He picked up the folder containing the magazine and mailing list, and looked ready to leave.

  ‘Chico … Stay until I’ve repacked my bag. I think I’ll start northwards right now. Stay until I go.’

  He was puzzled. ‘If you like, but what for?’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘Come on, Sid. Out with it.’

  ‘Peter Rammileese and a couple of guys came looking for me yesterday at Highalane Park. So I’d just like you around, while I’m here.’

  ‘What sort of guys?’ he said suspicio
usly.

  I nodded. ‘Those sort. Hard eyes and boots.’

  ‘Guys who kick people half to death in Tunbridge Wells?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘You dodged them, I see.’

  ‘In a balloon.’ I told him about the race while I put some things in a suitcase. He laughed at the story but afterwards came quite seriously back to business.

  Those guys of yours don’t sound like your ordinary run-of-the-mill rent-a-thug,’ he said. ‘Here, let me fold that jacket, you’ll turn up at Chester all creased.’ He took my packing out of my hands and did it for me, quickly and neatly. ‘Got all the spare batteries? There’s one in the bathroom.’ I fetched it. ‘Look, Sid, I don’t like these syndicates.’ He snapped the locks shut and carried the case into the hall. ‘Let’s tell Lucas Wainwright we’re not doing them.’

  ‘And who tells Peter Rammileese?’

  ‘We do. We ring him up and tell him.’

  ‘You do it,’ I said. ‘Right now.’

  We stood and looked at each other. Then he shrugged and picked up the suitcase. ‘Got everything?’ he said. ‘Raincoat?’ We went down to the car and stowed my case in the boot. ‘Look, Sid, you just take care, will you? I don’t like hospital visiting, you know that.’

  ‘Don’t lose that mailing list,’ I said. ‘Or the editor of Antiques will be cross.’

  I booked unmolested into a motel and spent the evening watching television, and the following afternoon arrived without trouble at Chester races.

  All the usual crowd were there, standing around, making the usual conversations. It was my first time on a racecourse since the dreary week in Paris, and it seemed to me when I walked in that the change in me must be clearly visible. But no one, of course, noticed the blistering sense of shame I felt at the sight of George Caspar outside the weighing room, or treated me any differently from usual. It was I alone who knew I didn’t deserve the smiles and the welcome. I was a fraud. I shrank inside. I hadn’t known I would feel so bad.