by Dick Francis
“Not enough tracks,” I said. “There used to be masses of them, but they keep closing for redevelopment. Too few tracks mean too few dogs. It all becomes far too predictable. And the public’s appetite for dog racing has also changed. Nowadays, they all sit in restaurants and bet from their dinner tables using the tote.”
“You make it sound as if you don’t like the tote,” he said with a smile.
“I don’t,” I said. “The tote can never lose its shirt. It always takes its cut before paying out the winning tickets. They can’t get it wrong because they don’t have to set the prices, while I have to use my knowledge and experience to keep myself in business.”
“I see,” he said slowly, clearly losing interest.
“But I will be at home whenever Sophie needs me,” I said.
I decided not to mention unwelcome nighttime visitors or men with twelve-centimeter knives.
“Thank you, Mr. Talbot,” said the psychiatrist. “I’m sure you will.”
His tone implied that he didn’t really believe it. He looked down and wrote more notes.
“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up. “I assure you that Sophie’s well-being is far more important to me than my work. I desperately want her home. And I will do everything within my power to ensure she remains safe and unharmed. I love my wife.”
I had sat all day holding Sophie’s hand, listening to these emotionally distant professionals discussing her most personal secrets in matter-of-fact detail, and now I quite surprised myself with the passion of my plea. But I did want Sophie home.
I realized that I wanted it very much indeed.
“Yes, Mr. Talbot,” said the psychiatrist, “I believe you do.” He smiled at Sophie, who went on holding my hand very tightly.
He went back to writing a few more notes before looking up. “Mrs. Talbot, Mr. Talbot, thank you both for your time. As you know, we shall have further discussion among us before we make our final decision. Today is Thursday. We should have an answer for you by tomorrow or Saturday.” He looked around at the other medical staff as if inquiring whether any of them had anything more to say. They didn’t.
“Thank you, then,” he said, rising to his feet, indicating that our time was up.
“Thank you,” said Sophie.
We stood up in turn and made our way out of the conference room.
“I thought that went quite well,” I said to her quietly.
“Did you?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, being upbeat. “Didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t like that psychiatrist much.”
“He seemed OK to me,” I said. “I’m sure it will be all right.”
We walked together, side by side, along the corridor towards her room.
“Do you really love me?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Very much.”
She didn’t stop walking. But she did start smiling.
I spent the evening at the hospital with Sophie watching the television. Neither of us spoke about the assessment or what conclusion the medics might come to. Neither did we make any plans for the coming weeks. Twice in the past, we had been cruelly disappointed, having decided to go away together on holiday only to have the case conference rule against release.
Nowadays, we told ourselves that discharge was an unexpected bonus to be celebrated, but, deep down, we would still be devastated if they refused to allow her home this time. The new drug regime was working well, and Sophie was becoming less tired from the side effects as her body became used to the medications.
But neither of us wanted to tempt fate by discussing the matter, so we sat quietly watching a string of situation comedies on a golden-oldies TV channel.
Was I, in fact, being sensible in wanting Sophie to come home with so many unresolved issues surrounding my father?
John Smith, or whoever he was, had gone on ad infinitum about his blessed microcoder, but he hadn’t once mentioned any money. I wondered again if he even knew about the cash. He certainly did if he was working with Shifty-eyes. But had it been Shifty-eyes in the dark blue Ford? Or was there someone else? Maybe John really was from the Australian Racing Board, and there was a whole team behind him.
And what was the money for?
Where’s the money, Shifty-eyes had hissed at my father before he stabbed him. Had the money been due as payment? And for what? And why then had Shifty-eyes then killed my father when he was the only one who knew where it was?
I tried to remember every detail of the stabbing as my eyes watched yet another situation comedy about dysfunctional family life. They should film my family, I thought, except it wouldn’t be a comedy.
The man had run up and kicked me in the face, but he had then turned his attention solely to my father. It had clearly not been a robbery as I had first thought. Our attacker had taken no notice of me at all until I shouted for help and the party crowd had begun moving towards us.
I remembered my father telling the man to Go to hell and kicking him in the groin. That had made Shifty-eyes very angry, and he had retaliated by stabbing out with his knife. Perhaps he shouldn’t have done that. Maybe killing my father had been a big mistake. There were an awful lot of cheap hotels in London. I had been very lucky to have found the right one, and the more so because my father had registered using a name that was neither Talbot nor Grady. Without knowing that it was in Sussex Gardens, it would have been an impossible task.
“Shall we have some coffee?” Sophie asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Yes,” I said. “That would be lovely. Shall I call the nurse?”
“No,” she replied. “Since last week, they’ve let me go down the corridor to the little kitchen. I’ll get it.”
“Do you need any help?” I asked her.
“Ned,” she replied, looking at me sideways, “I can make coffee on my own. I’ll be all right, you know. I won’t slit my wrists or anything.” She smiled at me. My heart now did the same flip-flop that it had all those years ago when we had first met and she had smiled at me.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Positive. They might let me use the kitchen, but even they aren’t crazy enough to leave sharp knives lying round for us—the real crazies—to harm ourselves.” She laughed at her joke, and I laughed with her.
She had come a long way even during the last week, and she truly did seem better than ever this time.
“I am trying very hard, you know,” she said more seriously. “I haven’t missed a single dose of these new drugs, and I do honestly believe that they are helping. I feel really quite well now and ready again for the world.”
I stood up and hugged her. There were tears in my eyes.
“Go and get the coffee,” I said.
She went out the door, and I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. Tears of happiness and hope at last after so many of despair and hopelessness.
I thought about staying over at the hospital in their guest suite, but if I wasn’t confident enough to go home alone tonight what chance did I have of taking Sophie there tomorrow?
However, I was still quite wary as I pulled my Volvo into the parking area in front of the dark house. I sat in the car for a few moments looking all around for anything out of the ordinary. Everything seemed fine.
I quickly locked the car and made it safely to my front door.
There were a few letters and bills on the mat but no threatening notes or demands.
Calm down, I told myself.
I tried to, but it didn’t stop me going all around the house checking that the windows were fully closed and drawing the curtains in every room. I had been quite disturbed to think of Mr. John Smith looking through the window at me as I had vacuumed up the mess in the drawing room. He wouldn’t be spying on me again tonight. I made sure of that by not allowing the slightest chink of light to escape through the blinds in the kitchen.
I laid the booty from my father’s rucksack out on the kitchen table, as I had done the first night I’d found it, and sat there look
ing at it.
Why didn’t I deliver the whole lot to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn and let him sort it out? Wash my hands of the affair and get on with my life, which was complex enough without microcoders, forged RFIDs and shifty-eyed men with long, sharp knives?
A good part of me thought that was a great idea.
But it had disadvantages too. For a start, there would be the difficult task of explaining to the chief inspector why I hadn’t given him the stuff as soon as I had found it or even given him the necessary information so that he could have found it himself. I didn’t exactly think he would be very happy about that. He might, with good reason, charge me with obstructing the police, and then what protection would they afford me against a knife man? None whatsoever.
Second, keeping hold of the microcoder and the money might give me some leverage, provided I kept alive long enough to use it.
I picked up my father’s mobile telephone and tried again to turn it on but without success. It had NOKIA written on the front. My mobile was a Samsung. I tried my charger, but the connection was wrong, naturally. I took the SIM card out of my father’s phone and put it in mine, but I seemed unable to get any details of his numbers. If there was anything there, he had stored it in the phone’s memory, not on the SIM.
I dug around in the bottom drawer of my desk, where I always put spare or old chargers, but nothing would fit.
I picked up the Alan Charles Grady passport and examined it. It had been issued nine months previously and appeared to me to be genuine, but I had no real idea of what an Australian passport should look like. I turned the pages and found a stamp from an immigration officer at Heathrow showing that he had not entered the United Kingdom until the day before he came to see me at Ascot. It was the only UK stamp in his passport, but there was also one from Dublin Airport dated the previous week. So he had flown straight out again from Heathrow after his arrival from Australia, just as John Smith had thought, and using the name Grady.
I wondered what he had been up to in Ireland for six days, and I decided it was time to find out. I couldn’t just sit and wait for Shifty-eyes to turn up demanding his money with a knife at my throat for encouragement. Or, worse still, at Sophie’s throat.
The following morning, Friday, I was waiting outside the local mobile telephone shop for it to open at nine o’clock sharp.
I’d not slept well, mostly due to imagining that I could hear creaks on the stairs. I had firmly wedged Sophie’s dressing-table chair under the bedroom door handle when I had retired, and, of course, it had still been safely there in the morning.
At ten past nine, the door was unlocked by a female shop assistant who looked about twelve years old. “Yes, sir,” she said in a bored tone. “Can I help you?”
“I need a charger for this phone,” I said, holding out my father’s Nokia and refrained from asking if her mother was in.
“No problem,” she said with a little more interest. “Mains or in-car?”
“Mains,” I said.
She went over to a display and took one of the chargers.
“This should be the one,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Could you just check that it’s the right one?” I said.
“It will be,” she reiterated.
“Could you just open it to make sure?” I said. “Please.”
She obviously thought I was mad, but she took a large pair of scissors from a drawer beneath the desk and cut through the plastic around the charger. She plugged it into a socket and took the phone from me.
“There,” she said, “it’s charging. You can see from the little lines moving on the side.”
I looked, and indeed the display was no longer completely blank as before.
“Thank you,” I said. “Can you turn it on?”
She pushed a button on the top. The screen lit up, and then the phone played a five-note tune. She handed it back to me with it still connected by the cord to the charger.
The phone had the message PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECURITY CODE displayed on the screen.
“It’s a long time since I used this phone,” I said to her, “and I can’t remember the security code. Can you bypass it for me?”
“No chance,” she said, sounding horrified at the suggestion. “I’m not allowed to do that. How do I know it’s your phone anyway?”
“So, theoretically, you could bypass the security code,” I said, “if you really wanted to?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But I expect Carl could.”
“Who’s Carl?”
“He works out the back,” she said. “He mends mobiles. He’s very clever.”
She disappeared and returned with a young man who didn’t strike me as the very clever type. He was wearing faded, torn and frayed blue jeans, a plain off-white T-shirt and a knitted brown hat that reminded me of a tea cosy. Tufts of fair hair stuck out from under the hat in all directions, and there was a further supply of wispy blond fluff sprouting on his chin.
“Can you unlock this phone?” I asked him.
He didn’t say anything but took the phone from my hand and looked at it.
“What’s the four-digit security code?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said patiently. “That’s why I need it unlocked.”
“What’s the phone’s IMEI number?” he said.
“IMEI?”
“International Mobile Equipment Identity,” he said slowly as if for a child.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“It’s normally written inside the phone,” he said, taking off the back and removing the battery. “Hello. This one’s been removed. There should be a sticker just here.” He pointed. “That’s what people do with stolen phones,” he said, looking warily at me.
“How else can I get this IMEI?” I asked, ignoring his suspicions.
“You could input *#06# on the keypad once it’s unlocked,” he said unhelpfully. “Or it would have been printed on a sticker on the box when you bought it.”
I decided against telling him I hadn’t bought the phone. It would only further his opinion that the phone was stolen, which, if past form was anything to go by, it probably was.
He put the battery back into the phone and turned it on. PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECURITY CODE appeared again on the display.
“Can’t you do it without the IMEI number?” I asked.
“No, mate,” he said, handing back the phone. “Can’t help you without the IMEI or the security code. Not without wiping clean the whole phone memory. Do you want me to do that?”
“No,” I said quickly. It was the phone’s memory I wanted most.
I paid the girl for the charger and took it and the phone back to my home in Station Road and sat again at my kitchen table, thinking about what to do next.
I wondered what the security code might be.
I punched in 3105. My father’s real birthday had been the thirty-first of May.
The display momentarily read INCORRECT SECURITY CODE before returning to PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECURITY CODE.
I tried 0531, the American way of writing dates, but with the same result.
I inserted the year of his birth. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
Next I tried 1234. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
I looked at the copy of his driver’s license. I typed in 0312, his house number. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
The license showed Alan Grady’s birthday as 15 March 1948. I tried 1503. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE. I typed in 1948. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
It could be anything. I wondered how many wrong chances I’d have before the whole phone locked up forever. If it was based on his phone number, I reckoned I had no chance.
I worked out there were ten thousand different combinations of four numbers. If I input one combination every ten seconds, it could take me one hundred thousand seconds, assuming I made no mistakes. One hundred thousand seconds was—I sat there trying to do the mental arithmetic—one thousand six hundred and sixty-six and two-thirds minutes,
which was . . . nearly twenty-eight hours. With no sleep or breaks. And that assumed the phone didn’t lock up completely because I’d keyed in too many wrong attempts. There had to be a better way.
I took the phone and the charger with me and decided to go back to see Carl to see if he had any other ideas.
But I never got there.
I sat in the car outside the shop and stared at the phone in my hand. I couldn’t quite believe it. It was unlocked. I had entered my birthday, 2504, just for a laugh, and suddenly there it was: CORRECT SECURITY CODE.
So he hadn’t forgotten. There may, of course, have been other events in his life that happened on the twenty-fifth of April, but I would assume it was my birthday he had remembered.
The phone rang in my hand, making me jump.
I answered it.
“This is voice mail,” a disembodied female voice said. “Please enter your security code.”
Not again, I thought. I tried 2504.
“You have three new messages,” said the voice. “Message one received at ten-thirteen a.m. on the eighteenth of June.”
Two days after he died.
“Alan, this is Paddy, Paddy Murphy,” said a male voice with a strong Irish accent. “Where are you? You were meant to call me yesterday.”
I assumed, therefore, that Paddy Murphy and Shifty-eyes were not one and the same person. Otherwise, he would have known why there had been no call.
Messages two and three were also from Paddy Murphy, each with an increasing degree of urgency, asking, then pleading, for Alan to call him back.
“The caller’s number was plus 353 42 3842 . . .” said the disembodied voice when I pushed the right button. I wrote it down on the notepad I always kept in the glove box of the car. Plus, 353 meant it was a Republic of Ireland number. Perhaps Paddy Murphy was the man my father had flown to Dublin to visit.
So all I had to do now was find a certain Paddy Murphy in Ireland. Easy, I thought. I suppose it must be marginally more straightforward than finding someone called Chang in China.
And I had Paddy’s telephone number, which helped.