by Dick Francis
I again pulled the driver’s license copy from my pocket and looked at the address: 312 Macpherson Street, Carlton North, in the Australian state of Victoria.
Where exactly was Carlton North? I wondered.
I went upstairs to my office, to the nursery that had never been, and logged on to the Internet. Google Earth provided a fine close-up view of Carlton North. It was a mostly residential suburb of Melbourne just two or three miles north of the city center. Macpherson Street, appropriately for the address of a dead man, ran along the northern edge of an enormous cemetery that covered several blocks in each direction. I rubbed the keys from the key ring between my fingers and thumb and wondered which of the properties on the screen they opened.
I’d never been to Australia, and it was difficult to imagine the upside-down world of Melbourne from the pictures on my computer screen. I sat there looking at the images and wondered if my sisters lived in one of those houses packed so close together into squares or rectangles, each element of the grid separated from its neighbors by relatively wide, tree-lined streets.
As far as I was aware, both my parents had been only children, and I had consequently grown up with no aunts and uncles, and hence no cousins either. My mother’s parents had died before I was born, at least that is what my paternal grandmother had told me, but I now wondered if I could still take her word for it. Teddy Talbot, my father’s father, was certainly dead—as with my father, I had seen his cooling body—but my paternal grandmother was still alive, though nowadays more in body than in mind. She currently lived, if that was the right term, in a residential-care home in Warwick. I went to visit her occasionally, but age and Alzheimer’s had taken their toll, and she was no longer the woman who had raised me and whom I had known for so long. Thankfully, she wasn’t unhappy with her lot, she was just mostly lost in a different existence from the rest of us.
In spite of all her troubles, I had always envied Sophie for having had several siblings and masses of cousins. Despite the rift with her parents over her choice of husband, she had remained as close to the rest of her large family as her illness had allowed. I, meanwhile, had no one other than my demented old grandmother, who sometimes didn’t recognize me anymore.
Except that I now knew I did have family after all. I had two half sisters in Australia. The only problem was that I didn’t know their names or where they lived, and they, in turn, would have absolutely no idea that I existed. I couldn’t imagine my father had told his new family that he already had a son, the offspring of a wife that he had strangled in England before fleeing by ship to the Antipodes.
I went downstairs again and back into the sitting room.
Once more I sifted through the sad piles of shirts, underwear and handkerchiefs as if I would now find something I had previously missed. But there was nothing.
I looked at the black-and-red canvas rucksack. An airline baggage label with LHR printed across it in large, bold capital letters was fastened around one of the straps with the name GRADY printed smaller on it alongside a bar code, but there was no actual indication of where the label had been attached to the strap. Once again I stared into the rucksack as if I might have somehow overlooked something. As before, it appeared to be completely empty, but, nevertheless, I tipped the whole thing upside down and gave it a good shake. It was more out of frustration than in any expectation of finding anything.
As I turned it over, back and forth, I could feel something move.
I placed it down on the floor and peered inside once more.
The rucksack had a waterproof liner sewn into the canvas with a drawstring at the top. There was a gap at the back, and I slid my hand down between the liner and the canvas. A space about two inches deep across the whole bottom of the rucksack existed between the liner and the base, and here I found the treasure that the man in the parking lot must have sought.
I pulled out three blue-plastic-wrap-covered packages and carefully used a pair of kitchen scissors to open them at one end. Each contained sizable wads of large-denomination banknotes, two in British pounds and the other in Australian dollars. I counted each pack in turn and did some rough mental arithmetic.
My father had taken lodgings in a cheap seedy one-star hotel in Sussex Gardens with about thirty thousand pounds’ worth of cash in his luggage.
And he had died for it.
6
There were five other items hidden in the space, in addition to the money.
One was a South African passport in the name of Willem Van Buren.
Another was a small polythene bag containing what appeared at first to be ten grains of rice, but, on closer examination, were clearly man-made. They looked like frosted glass.
Two others were photocopied booklets about six by eight inches with DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION printed along the top of the front cover.
And the fifth was a flat black object about six inches long and two inches wide with some buttons on it. At first I thought it was a television remote control, but it didn’t appear to have VOLUME and CHANNEL buttons, just 0 to 9 plus an ENTER button. I pushed them all. Nothing happened. I turned it over. There was a battery compartment on the back that, I discovered, was empty, so I took the device through to the kitchen and scavenged the battery from the kitchen clock.
I pushed the buttons again and, this time, was rewarded by a small red light that appeared in the top right-hand corner for a moment before going out. Nothing else happened. I pointed the thing at the television and pushed again. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened other than the flash of the little red light.
I didn’t know much about electronics in general, or TV remotes in particular, but I did know that they had to be programmed correctly.
I would show the thing to Luca, I thought. He was not only my whiz kid at using the computer, he also understood what went on under its cover—Luca had even worked as an electronics maintenance man briefly before he transferred to the racetrack. My own technical ability ran simply to giving something a sharp clout with my hand if it failed to perform as expected.
I put the battery back in the kitchen clock, which I reset to the right time of twenty to one. I had to be back on the road by nine o’clock in the morning.
I suddenly felt very hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d had a bowl of cereal and a slice of toast for breakfast sixteen hours earlier. I hadn’t had the time.
I looked in the fridge. There wasn’t much there. I usually went to the supermarket once a week on a Sunday to get the essentials like milk, bread and those ready-cooked meals I could simply stuff in the microwave. But this last weekend I had somehow forgotten to go. I shook the plastic milk bottle. There was only enough left for a small bowl of cereal and maybe a cup of coffee in the morning. The loaf of bread was down to the last few slices, and they looked to have passed their best with green mold spots appearing around the edges.
I found a tin of baked beans in a cupboard and made myself beans on toast, carefully removing a few moldy bits from the bread before placing it in the toaster.
I spread the bounty from the rucksack’s secret compartment out on the kitchen table in front of me and looked at it as I ate.
I picked up the two booklets with the heading DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION. I hadn’t seen one close-up before, but I knew what they were. “Horse passports,” I believed they were called, and every racehorse had to have one in order to race. They were a detailed record of a horse’s marking and hair whorls. A horse presented at a racetrack for a race had to match the one described in its passport to ensure that another horse wasn’t running in its place. In the olden days, unscrupulous trainers might have presented a “ringer” that would run as if it were another horse. The ringer was usually much better than the horse that should have been running and hence it would start at much more favorable odds than if its true identity had been known. Many such deceptions had raked in the cash before the introduction of detailed horse passports had put a stop to it.
But the two in front of me w
ere photocopies, not the originals, and could never have been passed off as the real thing. I scanned through them but could see nothing out of the ordinary.
Next I picked up the human passport, that of Willem Van Buren from South Africa, and looked at the photograph. It wasn’t the same man I had seen in Sussex Gardens, I was sure of that, because the face that looked out at me from the image on the passport was that of my father. Van Buren must have been the name he had used to check into the Royal Sovereign Hotel.
Did I have yet more sisters, or perhaps some brothers, in Cape Town or Johannesburg?
I was also intrigued by the little bag of rice-type grains. I took one of them out of the bag and rolled it between my thumb and index finger. It was, in fact, slightly larger than a grain of rice, being about a centimeter long and about a third of that in diameter. I held it up to the light, but I couldn’t see through as it was opaque. I shook it by my ear, but it made no noise.
Why, I wondered, would anyone bother to hide a few chips of frosted glass? There had to be more to them than the eye, or the ear, could tell.
I took my tomato-sauce-covered knife and recklessly crushed the grain against the table. It actually broke surprisingly easily. I could now see that the grain was not made of solid glass but was a cylinder with what appeared to be a minute electronic circuit housed inside.
I looked carefully at the nine still left in the bag. There were definitely no external connections, no terminals to connect to. Again, I would ask Luca. If anyone knew what they were, he would. I scooped the broken bits back into the bag and placed it on the table.
And then, of course, there was the money.
What should I do with it all?
Well, I told myself, I should go and give it to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn. But how could I? He certainly wouldn’t take it very kindly that I hadn’t told him about my father’s luggage earlier. He might accuse me again of being somehow involved in his murder.
I began to wish I had told him straightaway about the seedy hotel in Sussex Gardens. It would have made things much easier, and also I wouldn’t have suffered the fright of my life. I still came out in a cold sweat just thinking about what would have happened if the man had recognized me.
What should I do?
I decided to sleep on it, and went to bed.
Friday at Ascot was wet, with an Atlantic weather front sweeping in from the west and bringing a ten-degree drop in temperature. Trust me, I thought, to choose this day to switch from my thick and usually overwarm morning coat to a lining-free lightweight blazer. I took shelter under our large, yellow TRUST TEDDY TALBOT-emblazoned umbrella, and shivered in the strengthening breeze.
“Good party?” I asked Luca and Betsy.
They had been uncharacteristically quiet as we had set up our pitch.
“Great,” said Betsy without much conviction.
“Late night?” I asked, enjoying myself.
“Very,” she said.
“Excellent,” I said. “A good party has to end in a late night.”
“Yes. But we could have done without the gate-crashers,” she said, “and the police.”
“The police?”
“My aunt called the police,” she said, clearly not pleased.
“But why?” I asked.
“About a hundred uninvited guests turned up at her house,” she said. “That’s where the party was.”
“Yobs, you mean,” said Luca with a degree of bitterness I hadn’t witnessed in him before. “Your stupid sister. Ruined her own party.”
“She didn’t ruin it,” Betsy retorted in a pained tone.
I was beginning to wish I’d never asked.
“What do you call inviting people to a party on Facebook,” he said.“Not bloody surprising so many weirdos turned up and trashed the place.”
“And you weren’t much help,” Betsy said icily.
“And what exactly do you mean by that?” Luca demanded.
“Look,” I said, interrupting them, “I’m sorry now I asked. Calm down, both of you. We have work to do.”
They both fell silent, but their body language continued to speak louder than words, and the unspoken conversation was far removed from the loving episode I had witnessed on Tuesday as they had walked, hand in hand, on their way to a drink at the bandstand bar.
Oh dear, I thought. It wasn’t just the weather that had turned cool.
The afternoon progressed without any of the excitement of the previous day. The incessant rain understandably kept many punters away from the betting ring. They preferred the dry, warm surroundings of the grandstand bars and restaurants, placing bets with the staff from the tote who would come to them rather than vice versa.
I was allowed by the racetrack to ply my trade as a bookmaker, for a sizable fee of course, but only at my chosen pitch. I couldn’t wander the bars and restaurants, relieving punters of their cash as they sat at table eating their lunch or drinking their champagne.
There were no outages of the Internet service, no disruptions of the mobile phones, no last-minute wild swings in the prices. Everything was as predictable as it was boring. Favorites won three of the six races, while a couple of rank outsiders gave us bookies some respite in the others.
All in all, it was a remarkably unremarkable day. Other than the ongoing frosty relations between my staff, the only memorable feature was the number of technical staff from both the Internet provider and the mobile phone networks who stood around waiting in vain for their systems to crash. Clearly, somebody’s tail had been seriously pulled by the events of yesterday.
“Do you two combatants need a lift home?” I asked as we packed up in deathly silence. Neither of them said a word.“For God’s sake,” I went on, “do either of you want on go on living or what?”
It raised a smile on Luca’s face. A slight smile that evaporated almost as quickly as it appeared.
“The Teddy Talbot bus leaves for High Wycombe and beyond in five minutes whether you’re on it or not,” I said with a degree of exasperation in my tone.
Still nothing.
“Do I assume, then, that we won’t be back here tomorrow?” I asked as we made it to the parking lot unrobbed. Even muggers don’t like the rain.
Royal Ascot Saturday had become one of our busiest days of the year.
“I’m game,” said Luca.
I looked expectantly at Betsy.
“OK,” she said grudgingly. “I’ll be here.”
“Good,” I said. “And can I expect a thawing of the cold war?”
There was no answer from either of them.
I was getting bored with this game.
“OK,” I said. “New rule number one. No talking, no lift.”
“I’m sorry,” Luca said.
“No problem,” I said.
“Not you, Ned,” he said with irritation. “I’m sorry to Betsy.” He turned to her.
“Oh . . .” Betsy burst into tears, gasping great gulps of air.
She and Luca dissolved into each other’s arms and just stood there, hugging each other, getting wet, like a scene from a romantic film.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” I said. “You lovebirds had better get in the backseat while I drive.”
I was quite thankful that Luca didn’t in fact sit in the back with Betsy but up front next to me. I don’t think I could have taken all that lovey-dovey stuff all the way to High Wycombe.
“What do you think that is?” I said to him. I handed over the black plastic object that resembled a television remote that I had put in the door pocket of the Volvo that morning.
He turned the device over and over in his hands. Then he removed the battery-compartment cover.
“Here,” I said, and passed him a pack of batteries I’d bought on my way to the races.
He slid a battery into the housing and was rewarded by the brief flash of red whenever he pushed any of the buttons, just as I had been.
“The light stays on a few moments longer if you press the E
NTER button,” I said. He pressed it, and it did. “Do you think it’s a remote for something?”
“Dunno,” he said, still turning the device over and over. “It obviously can’t be for a television or a radio, there’s no volume control. How about a garage-door opener or something?”
“But why the numbers?” I said. “Surely garage-door openers just have one button?”
“How about if they need a code?” he said. “Maybe you need to push 1066 or something and then ENTER.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “How about these?” I passed him the small plastic bag containing the unbroken grains, along with the one I had crushed.
He poured the tiny items out of the bag onto his hand. Then he held the broken one up in between his thumb and forefinger.
“I assume this one was like the others before you stamped on it?”
“I used a knife, actually,” I said. “And yes, it was. They’re quite easy to break.”
“They’re definitely electronic,” he said.
“Even I can see that,” I replied sarcastically. “But what are they for? They don’t seem to have any connections, and I also know that glass doesn’t conduct electricity, so how do they work?”
“It’s also a bit small to have its own battery,” he said.
“So how does it work?” I asked him.
“If I knew what it did, I’d probably know how it worked.” He continued to study the tiny circuit. “Passive electronics,” he said very quietly, as if to himself.
“What?” I said.
“Passive electronics,” he repeated.
“And what are they when they’re at home?” I said.
He laughed. “Devices with no gain,” he said. “They’re called ‘passive electronic components’ or ‘passive devices.’ ”
“So?” I said, none the wiser.
“Transistors provide gain,” he said. “They can be used as amplifiers to give a signal gain, so, for example, it can drive a speaker in a radio. The signal received by the aerial is very, very small, so, in simple terms, it has to be amplified by a series of transistors in order to drive the speaker so you can hear the music.”