by Dick Francis
“No,” said Luca. “Betsy’s mum dropped us off this morning.”
Bugger, I thought. I would either have to come to Ascot again tomorrow or deprive Luca and Betsy of their day.
“OK,” I said with resignation in my voice. “I’ll be here. But I’m fed up with dressing like this. I’ll be more casual tomorrow.”
Luca smiled broadly. I knew he loved the exhilaration and energy of the big race days. I constantly reminded myself that I would lose him if I concentrated too much on the smaller tracks and stopped going to Ascot in June, Cheltenham in March and Aintree in April.
“Great,” said Luca, still grinning. “And you’d hate to miss another day like today, now wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t believe there will be another day like today. Not ever,” I said. “But, no, I wouldn’t want to miss it if there were.”
“We must dash,” said Luca. “See you here tomorrow, then. Usual time?”
“Yes, all right,” I replied. “Have fun tonight.”
They disappeared off towards the station through the gap in the hedge from where the police tent had now been removed, the gap in the hedge where my father had been stabbed.
I stood and watched them go. I couldn’t remember when I had last been to a birthday party.
Jason, the nurse, hadn’t been very happy when I called him to say that I would be late at the hospital. I had a job to do. I had hoped to do it the following day but . . .
I looked again at my watch. It was half past eight.
I’d promised Jason I’d be there in time to watch the ten o’clock news with Sophie. I still hoped I might make it, but things were not going quite as I had planned.
Having left my morning coat, vest and tie in my parked car, I was on foot in Sussex Gardens, in London, looking for a certain seedy hotel or guesthouse. The problem was not that I couldn’t find any. Quite the reverse. Everywhere I looked there were seedy little hotels and guesthouses. There were so many of them, and I hadn’t a clue which was the one I wanted.
“Near Paddington Station,” my father had said.
I imagined him getting off the Heathrow Express at Paddington with his luggage after the long flight from Australia and pitching up at the first place with a vacancy. So I had started close to the station and worked my way outwards. So far, after an hour and a half, I had drawn a complete blank, and I was getting frustrated.
“Do you, or did you, have a guest this week called Talbot?” I asked without much hope in yet another of the little places I had been in. “Or one called Grady?”
I pulled out the now-rather-creased copy of the driver’s license that Detective Sergeant Murray had made for me. A young woman behind the reception counter looked down at the picture, then up at me.
“Who wants know?” she asked in a very Eastern European accent. “Are you police?” she added, looking worried.
“No,” I assured her. “Not police.”
“Who you say you want?”
“Mr. Talbot or Mr. Grady,” I repeated patiently.
“You need ask Freddie,” she said.
“Where is Freddie?” I asked, looking around at the empty hallway.
“In pub,” she said.
“Which pub?” I asked patiently.
“I not know which pub,” she said crossly. “This pub, that pub. Always pub.”
This was going nowhere. “Thank you anyway,” I said politely, and left.
Even if my father had been staying there, I wouldn’t have known about it. It had been a stupid idea, I realized. I thought that if I found out where he had been staying, and recovered his luggage, I might learn why he had really come back to England. There had to have been more of a reason than simply to see me after a thirty-six-year absence. After all, he had risked getting arrested for murder.
Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn hadn’t asked me if I knew where my father had been staying in England, so I hadn’t told him. I wasn’t really sure why I hadn’t. I was generally a law-abiding citizen who, under normal circumstances, would be most helpful to the police. But the circumstances hadn’t been normal and the chief inspector hadn’t been very nice to me. He had point-blank accused me of lying to him, which I hadn’t, but, I now realized, I had also not told him the whole truth either.
I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it was a hopeless task. Over half the hotels and guesthouses I had been into either had no proper record of their guests or they wouldn’t tell me even if they had.
Just another couple more, I decided, and then I must leave for Hemel Hempstead.
Many of the properties in Sussex Gardens had been constructed at a time when households regularly had servants. The grand pillared entrances had been for the family’s use only, while the servants had access to the house via a steep stairway down from street level to a lower ground floor behind iron railings.
The Royal Sovereign Hotel was one such property but, nowadays, its name was rather grander than its appearance. The iron railings were rusting and the white paint was flaking from the stucco pillars set on either side of the dimly lit entrance. And the doormat looked as if it had been doing sterling service removing city dirt and dog muck from travelers’ shoes for at least half a century.
“Do you, or did you, have a guest this week called Mr. Talbot, or Mr. Grady?” I asked yet again, placing the driver’s license photocopy down on the Royal Sovereign Hotel reception desk and pushing it towards the plump, middle-aged woman who stood behind it. She looked down carefully at the photograph.
“Have you come for ’is stuff ?” she asked, looking up at me.
“Yes, I have,” I said excitedly, hardly believing my good luck.
“Good,” she said. “It’s cluttering up my office floor. ’E only paid cash in advance for two nights, so I’ve ’ad to move it this morning. I needed ’is room, you see.”
“Yes, I do see,” I said, nodding at her. “That’s fine. Thank you.”
“But we only ’ad ’im ’ere,” she said, looking down at the picture again. “Not any other one. And ’is name wasn’t Talbot or Grady. It was Van-something or other. South African, ’e said ’e was. But it was definitely ’im.” She put her finger firmly down on the picture.
“Oh yes,” I said. “There is only one person, but he sometimes uses different names.” She looked at me quizzically. “One’s his real name and the others are professional names,” I said. She didn’t look any the wiser, and I didn’t elaborate.
“Where is ’e, then?” she asked, pointing again at the picture.
What should I say?
“He’s in the hospital,” I said. Technically, it was true.
“ ’ Ad an accident, did ’e?” she asked.
“Yes, sort of,” I said.
“Looks like you did too,” she said, putting her hand up to her own eye.
My left eyebrow remained swollen, and my whole eye was turning a nasty shade of purple with orange streaks. I was getting used to it, but it must have been quite a sight for all the hotel and guesthouse reception staff I had encountered.
“Same accident,” I said, putting my hand up to my face. “I’m his son.”
“Oh,” she said.“Right. Back ’ere, then.” She disappeared through a curtain hanging behind her. I placed the photocopy carefully back in my pocket, went around behind the reception desk and followed her through the curtain.
To call it an office was more than a slight exaggeration. It was a windowless alcove, about eight foot square, with a narrow table on one side, piled high with papers, and a cheap yellow secretary’s chair that had seen better days, the white stuffing of its seat appearing in clumps through the yellow vinyl covering. Most of the remaining floor space was occupied by mountains of megasized packs of white toilet paper.
“Got ’em on offer,” the woman said by way of explanation.
Must have been a good one, I thought. There were enough rolls here for an army on maneuvers.
“There,” she said, pointing. “That’s ’is st
uff. I ’ad to pack up some of ’is things. Wash kit and so on, ’cause, as I said, ’e only paid for two nights.”
There were two bags. One was a black-and-red rucksack, the other a small black roll-along suitcase with an extendable handle like those favored by airline stewardesses. I found it strange to think of my father with a rucksack on his back, but things were different in Australia.
“Thank you,” I said to the woman with a smile. “I’ll let you have your floor back.” I picked up the rucksack by its straps and slung it over my shoulder.
“Shouldn’t I get a signature or something?” she said.
“On what?” I asked.
She dug around on the desk for a clean piece of paper and ended up with the back of a used envelope.
“Could you just put your name and signature?” she asked, holding out a pen. “You know, just so I’m covered. And a phone number as well.”
“Sure,” I said. I took her pen and the envelope. Van-something, she had said my father was called. I printed my name as Dick Van Dyke and signed the same with a flourish. The number I wrote down could have been anywhere. I made it up. I didn’t really want Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn on my telephone asking questions that would have been difficult for me to answer.
“Thanks,” she said, tucking the envelope back under a pile of stuff on her desk. “ ’E only paid for two nights,” she repeated yet again. “ ’ Is stuff’s been ’ere for nearly three now.”
At last, I worked out her meaning.
“Here,” I said, holding out a twenty-pound note. “This is for your trouble.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking the money rapidly and thrusting it into a pocket in her skirt.
“I’ll be off, then,” I said, and backed out of the claustrophobic space with the two bags. “Thanks again.”
“I ’ope ’e gets better soon,” she said. “Give ’im my best.”
I promised her I would, and then rapidly took my leave. If she had known her erstwhile guest was now dead, she may well not have given me his things. If she’d been aware that he’d been murdered, I was sure she wouldn’t have. But she wasn’t to know that the Royal Sovereign Hotel had been about the twentieth such place I had been into that evening asking the same question. For all she knew, my father had directed me straight there to collect his belongings.
I turned out of the hotel and moved quickly down Sussex Gardens towards my car, which I had parked near Lancaster Gate tube station. I didn’t want to give the woman time to change her mind and come after me.
I looked down at my watch. It was five past nine. I would have to get a move on if I was to be at the hospital in time for the television news at ten o’clock.
I was still looking down at my watch when a man came out of the building to my right and bumped straight into the roll-along suitcase I was pulling. “Sorry,” I said almost automatically. The man didn’t reply but hurried on, paying me no attention whatsoever. I had glanced up at his eyes, and I suddenly felt an icy chill down my spine. I realized I had seen those eyes before. They were the shifty, close-set eyes that I had seen in parking lot number two at Ascot on Tuesday afternoon when the man who owned them had twice punched a knife through my father’s abdomen and into his lungs.
I didn’t stop walking. In fact, I speeded up, and forced myself not to look back. I prayed he hadn’t seen me, or at least he hadn’t recognized me with my swollen and blackened eye.
Only after another twenty or so rapid strides did I step into another of the pillared entranceways and chance a glance back. There was no sign of him. I must have stopped breathing when I first saw him and I now gasped for air, my heart pounding in my chest like a jackhammer.
I peeped around the pillar and saw him come out of one of the hotels and then disappear into the one next door. It looked as if he might be on the same errand that had also brought me to Sussex Gardens.
I noticed with dismay that if he continued to work his way along the road, the very next place he would go into was the Royal Sovereign Hotel. High time, I decided, to leave the area.
Checking that he was still inside and out of sight, I nipped back out onto the pavement and hurried away, turning right at the next street. It wasn’t the most direct route to my car, but I was keen to get out of sight of the Royal Sovereign. I could imagine the plump, middle-aged woman standing behind her reception desk. Oh yes, she’d say to the man, ’is son’s just been ’ere. ’E took the bags. Only a moment ago. ’E’s got a nasty black eye. I’m sure you’ll catch ’im if you ’urry.
Not if I could ’elp it, ’e wouldn’t.
Surprisingly, I made it back to my Volvo without actually walking into any lampposts, so preoccupied had I been with looking behind me. I flung my father’s bags onto the backseat and quickly climbed into the front. My hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t get the key into the ignition. I held tightly to the steering wheel and took several deep breaths and told myself to calm down. This plan seemed to be working well until I saw the man again. He was jogging down the road, and he was coming straight towards me. My heart rate shot up off the scale.
I tried again to get the key in the hole, but the damn thing wouldn’t go in. I leaned to my right to see better and was still looking down, trying to match the key to the lock, when I heard the man walk calmly past me and climb into the car parked right behind mine. I slid down farther so that he wouldn’t see that there was anyone there. From my lowly position I could just about see the top of his car in my wing mirror.
He sat there for what seemed like an age before he finally started his engine and drove away. I began to breathe again. I seriously thought about following him, but I was worried that in my present state I would quite likely run straight into the back of him when he stopped at traffic lights.
I should be grateful to Luca, I thought, that I hadn’t waited until the following day to do my private-detective act. My father’s bags would, by then, have been long gone. But it would have been much less stressful on my body.
I sat in my car for a good five to ten minutes wondering if I should go report the encounter directly to Chief Inspector Llewellyn. I had been so eager that the man shouldn’t see me as he drove past that I had slipped down to a nearly horizontal position on the seat. Consequently, I hadn’t even seen the make or color of the car he drove, let alone the license plate number. I wasn’t much of a private detective after all, and I would have had little to tell. And I particularly didn’t relish having to explain to the chief inspector why I had said nothing to him earlier about any hotel or guesthouse in Sussex Gardens. In the end, I decided to have a look at the luggage first. I could always call the police then if I wanted to.
My breathing and pulse had at last returned to their normal rates, so I started the Volvo and made tracks to Hemel Hempstead and the hospital.
I sat in the sitting room of my house in Kenilworth, surrounded by the contents of my father’s bags, wondering what it was amongst this lot that his murderer would bother spending an evening looking for.
I had made it to the hospital to watch the second half of the news with Sophie. Jason had given me a stern look as I had arrived, and he had tapped his watch. What could I tell him? “Sorry, I’m late, I’ve been dodging a murderer on the streets of West London.” Fortunately, Sophie didn’t seem at all perturbed, and she gave me a warm kiss on the cheek without even appearing to check if I had been touching demon drink. She hadn’t even objected when I’d made my excuses and left. I’d had things to do.
So here I sat at nearly midnight surrounded by piles of my father’s clothes.
There was nothing much else in the bags. His washing kit was minimal, consisting of just a toothbrush and a half-full tube of paste wrapped up in a cheap, see-through plastic case with a white zip along the top. He didn’t appear to have any regular medications, although there was a half-used pack of painkillers loose in the small suitcase.
He’d obviously had a penchant for blue shirts, of which there were six, all neatly
folded but not very well ironed, and he had preferred an electric razor to a wet shave, and boxer shorts to briefs. He’d worn woolen socks, carefully folded into pairs, of mostly dark colors, and had clearly favored large handkerchiefs with white spots on a dark background.
But there was nothing that struck me as remarkable, certainly nothing worth killing for.
“Where’s the money?” the man had said to my father in the Ascot parking lot.
What money? I wondered. There must be something I had missed. I went through everything again, searching through the pockets of the two jackets, and even taking the top off his electric razor in case there could somehow be a safe-deposit-box key hidden in the minute space beneath. Of course, there wasn’t.
The only things I found that sparked my interest were his passport, a mobile telephone and some keys. They had all been in one of the side pockets of the rucksack.
Nothing happened when I pushed the buttons of the telephone. Either it was broken or the battery was flat. I searched in vain for a charger, then put the phone to one side. I picked up the keys. There were three of them on a small split ring. House keys, I thought, and not very exciting without the house.
The passport was more informative. It was an Australian national’s passport in the name of Alan Charles Grady, and tucked inside it was a printout of a British Airways e-ticket receipt and a boarding card, both also in the name of Grady. I noted with interest that he had actually arrived at Heathrow ten days previously. So where had he been staying for the first week of his visit? The lady at the Royal Sovereign Hotel had clearly said that he had only paid cash in advance for two nights, and she’d moved his stuff on Thursday morning. That would mean he’d arrived there on Tuesday, the same day he had come to Ascot to see me, or possibly on the Monday if she hadn’t moved his bags straightaway. That left at least six nights unaccounted for. Obviously, I’d been wrong in thinking he must have come straight in on the Heathrow Express from the airport and found the first available hotel room. Unless, of course, he had flown elsewhere in the interim. I looked again at the British Airways ticket receipt, but the only other flight listed was his return to Melbourne via Hong Kong scheduled for two weeks from Sunday. A return flight he wouldn’t now make.