Even Money

by Dick Francis

  The answer was that the panic was up here in front, with me.

  24

  I suppose if one had to be involved in an impromptu stock-car race along the highways and byways of Warwickshire, an old Volvo 940 2.3-liter turbocharged station wagon might actually be one’s car of choice. In their prime, they hadn’t been nicknamed the “Volvo Tank” for nothing.

  At the A46 junction, I debated with myself which way to go. Kipper, in his silver hatchback, was right up against my tailgate, and I could feel the Volvo lurch every time he hit me. If I went down towards the M40, I would have to deal with the traffic lights at the motorway junction. Equally, if I went straight on the A425, towards Birmingham, there were traffic lights within a few hundred yards. So I decided to turn right onto the A46, back towards Kenilworth and Coventry.

  I swept onto the roundabout so fast that my mobile phone slid off the passenger seat and down the gap between it and the door. Sod it, I thought. I’d wanted to call the police, but I would have had to stop the car to retrieve the phone from down there. And, at the moment, stopping was completely out of the question.

  Kipper kept darting back and forth around the rear of the Volvo like an annoying insect. Twice he gave me such a big nudge that I feared I would lose control completely, and my car was still fishtailing badly as it sped down the on-ramp and onto the A46 divided highway.

  In spite of being thrown around by the constant lurching of the car, Sophie had managed to get herself into a fairly upright position on the backseat. I smiled at her in the rearview mirror. She looked back at me with wide, frightened eyes.

  “Can you untie me?” she asked.

  “Not just at the moment, my darling. I need both hands to drive.”

  The car lurched as it was struck again by the hatchback. Sophie lay back down on the seat.

  Fortunately, the A46 was quite empty at that time of the evening, and I was able to put my foot down on the gas. The Volvo’s speedometer climbed to well over ninety miles per hour, but still I couldn’t get away from Kipper’s car, which seemed to be stuck to me like a limpet. Twice he tried to get alongside, but both times I swerved to cut him off, forcing him back. The road was only two lanes wide each way at this point, but I knew that it went to three after the next junction. Keeping him back, then, would not be so easy.

  What I needed was a police car, but, of course, there wasn’t one to be seen.

  Our two cars raced along the road together towards the junction. At the very last moment, I jerked the steering wheel to the left and went across the white-painted hatching on the road and up the off-ramp, hoping that Kipper wouldn’t be able to make the turn. Sadly, he was able to follow, slowing only momentarily to cross the grass verge, which sent up a shower of earth and stones.

  I shot up the ramp to the roundabout at the top of the rise. I hoped that nothing was coming around it, for I wasn’t about to slow down. My tires squealed in objection as I took the first exit along the country road towards the village of Leek Wooton. It was a two-lane road, so I now had to cope with the oncoming traffic as well as trying to keep Kipper behind me.

  I thought the best plan was to drive to the nearest police station and park right outside the door. Surely, even shifty-eyed Kipper wouldn’t be crazy enough to try anything there. The only police station that I knew well was in Kenilworth because I’d had to go there a couple of times to show them my driving documents. But I also knew it was a very small office and that it didn’t operate around the clock. Would it still be open at this time of the evening? I assumed there also must be a police station in Warwick, and I was aware there was a large one in Leamington Spa, but I didn’t know exactly where, and I wasn’t about to ask a bystander for directions.

  Kenilworth would have to do, I thought. Even if the police station was shut, it might still be enough to put Kipper off.

  I tore down the road towards Leek Wooton with the silver hatchback seemingly glued to the back of my Volvo. At one point, he tried to overtake me, so I pulled right into the middle of the road, swerving back to my side only at the last second to avoid an oncoming truck whose driver was leaning heavily on his horn.

  At the new roundabout outside the entrance to the Warwickshire Golf Club, I had to slow down slightly in order to make it around. Kipper in the hatchback, however, went the wrong way around the circle to try to get an advantage, and he almost made it as we emerged side by side. But he was now on the wrong side of the road. I squeezed him over yet farther until his wheels were almost on the grass, but still he wouldn’t give up. I looked across at him and I swear he was laughing at me. Finally, an oncoming car forced him to brake and fall in once more behind me.

  I ignored the thirty-miles-per-hour signs at the entrance to the village, hoping desperately that a child didn’t step out into my path. At more than double the speed limit, I would have had no chance to stop in time.

  I realized that I didn’t even have my seat belt on, so I reached up behind me for it and clicked its buckle into the lock at my side. But Sophie had no chance of doing the same.

  “Darling, please lie down on the floor behind the seats,” I said firmly. “Get as low as you can and brace yourself with your feet. Just in case we have an accident.” I glanced over to her and tried to give her a reassuring smile.

  “When will all this stop?” she cried.

  “We’re on our way to the police station right now,” I said. “It will stop there.”

  But it didn’t. Because we never reached the police station.

  Beyond the village of Leek Wooton, the road to Kenilworth is straight, flat and narrow, but only about a mile in length before it reaches the outskirts of town.

  I worried briefly about how I would deal with the many road junctions ahead, but, for now, it was as much as I could do to keep my car straight and on the tarmac surface as the silver hatchback continually thumped into the back. Why couldn’t he lose control or terminally damage his car?

  So far, we had not encountered much other traffic, but our luck ran out as we left the village. A line of four cars was following a slow-moving builder’s flat-bed truck that was piled high with sand. I could see a van coming the opposite way, but it was still some distance off. I swung out and overtook all four cars and the truck as if they were going backwards, with my hand firmly on the horn to stop anyone else pulling out. Kipper tried to come through behind me, but he ran out of room and had to brake hard and dive in behind the truck in order to miss the oncoming van.

  Suddenly, I was away from him. But not for long, and not by much, and I watched in the mirror as he quickly swept past the truck and set off in pursuit.

  I looked ahead in absolute horror. In the distance, there was some roadwork, with temporary traffic lights, and I could see a line of waiting vehicles.

  I was doing about eighty miles an hour, and the roadwork was looming large. I glanced in the mirror, and even at this speed the silver hatchback was gaining on me fast. Again I looked ahead. Traffic was coming towards us, headed by a huge eighteen-wheeled semi, and there were rows of trees lining both sides of the road.

  I made a quick decision.

  “Sophie, my darling,” I shouted, “brace yourself against the seats as hard as you can.”

  With about four hundred yards still to go to the temporary traffic lights, I took my right foot off the accelerator and stood hard on the brake.

  My old Volvo 940 station wagon weighed a little over one and a half tons, but, in spite of their age, the brakes were in excellent working order. With a small amount of shuddering from the antilock system, the car pulled up in a much shorter space than that shown as the stopping distance for eighty miles per hour in the Highway Code. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the tires had actually dug grooves in the road surface, so quickly did the car come to a halt.

  Kipper hadn’t a hope of stopping in time. For a start, he had been going faster than I, and he’d still been accelerating in his attempt to catch me.

  I looked in the rearview mirro
r. The Volvo had almost stopped completely before Kipper realized what I’d done. White smoke poured from his tires, as all four wheels of the hatchback locked up, but, by then, it was far too late.

  I had hoped that he might have hit a tree, or the oncoming truck, but his locked front wheels meant he couldn’t steer, and he came thundering straight towards the back of the Volvo. I watched him coming ever closer, almost as if it was happening in slow motion, and in the last moments before impact I flicked off my car’s ignition, pulled the seat belt tight, clasped my hands firmly together in my lap and put my head back against the headrest, all the while shouting at Sophie, “Brace! Brace!”

  There was a tremendous bang as the vehicles collided. I don’t know how quickly he was traveling, but it was fast enough to throw the Volvo violently forwards and sideways onto the grass verge in spite of me still having my foot pressed down hard on the brake pedal. At the same time, the air bag in front of me inflated with another bang and a cloud of white gas.

  Then there was another huge thump from somewhere behind me. Something else had collided but not with us, the Volvo hadn’t moved again.

  “Sophie, Sophie,” I shouted urgently, fighting to undo my seat belt and turning around in my seat. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Ned, I’m fine,” she said almost calmly from the back. “Is it over?”

  “Yes, my darling, it’s over.”

  But I didn’t know that for certain. I couldn’t even see the silver hatchback from where I was, let alone know the state of its occupant.

  “Can you please untie me, then?” she asked.“I’m bloody hurting.” She still sounded remarkably unfazed by the whole affair.

  The driver’s door wouldn’t open, and I began to be a bit panicky as I could smell petrol. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped inside a burning car.

  I pushed and shoved, but the door wouldn’t budge, jammed shut by the collision. The windows were electrically operated, but I didn’t fancy turning on the car ignition with flammable fuel all over the place. I struggled over the center armrest into the passenger seat, and, thankfully, the passenger door opened easily. I scrambled out of the car onto the verge.

  “You all right, mate?” shouted someone from behind me.

  “Yes, fine,” I said, turning around. “How about him?” I pointed at the crumpled mess that had been the silver hatchback, which was now some ten yards or so behind the Volvo.

  “Doesn’t look too good, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’ve called the ambulance and the police.”

  I looked around. The road was completely blocked, and the traffic queues were beginning to build up in both directions. People were spilling out of their vehicles to come have a closer look at the crash. I didn’t really care.

  I tugged frantically at the nearside back door of the car, but it wouldn’t open, so I went back in through the front and knelt on the passenger seat, looking over.

  Sophie still was curled up on the floor with her hands tied together with the plastic garden tie. I needed some scissors or a knife to free her. I thought fleetingly about the knife Kipper had with him, but I decided it wouldn’t be such a good idea to go fetch it, not just now. I needed to get Sophie loose as soon as possible, and before anyone came snooping around asking why I had a tied-up woman in the back of my car.

  I knew that there was a pair of scissors somewhere amongst our bookmaking equipment. We often used gaffer tape to affix the odds board to the umbrella pole when it was windy and we always needed scissors to cut it.

  I looked towards the back of the Volvo. Our equipment boxes, which had been neatly stowed at Bangor, were now all in a jumble. The collision had completely buckled the big top-hinged back door of the Volvo, but, amazingly, the back window was still intact. I slithered on my stomach over the top of the passenger seat and then over the backseat into the luggage space. I found the scissors in the second box I tried.

  I soon had Sophie cut loose and safely out of the car. I sat her down on the grass verge and told her to wait.

  “Please don’t leave me, Ned,” she wailed.

  I looked lovingly at my battered, sore and frightened wife. “There’s absolutely no chance of that,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  The road was rapidly filling with people from their cars as I walked around behind my Volvo to inspect the damage. It was pretty bad, with the rear far corner of the car completely caved in. The back wheel on that side was at the wrong angle and the tire was burst, and I could see petrol still dripping out onto the road from the ruptured fuel tank. But it was not half as bad as the near-total destruction of the silver hatchback.

  It seemed that Kipper’s car had collided not only with my Volvo Tank but also with oncoming traffic, the first impact having bounced the hatchback onto the wrong side of the road and straight into the path of the semi tractor trailer. The driver of the truck was walking amongst the crowd in a bit of a daze. “I had no chance,” he kept saying to everyone. “That car came straight across the road. I had no chance.”

  Nor had shifty-eyed Kipper. The eighteen-wheeler had plowed straight into the driver’s door of the hatchback, mangling the whole of the vehicle almost beyond recognition. A couple of men were leaning in through the broken windows trying to help him. And, in the distance, I could hear the sirens coming closer.

  Another James Bond-style car chase was over, and, this time, I thought M might have been fairly proud of me. I was only shaken, not stirred.

  But I suddenly felt quite ill. This was reality, not a spy movie.

  Sophie and I sat side by side on the grass verge for quite some time while a team of firemen, police and ambulance staff did their best to remove Kipper from the twisted wreckage of his car.

  It seemed remarkable that he was still alive, but apparently he was only just. The efforts of the emergency crews were trying to keep him that way.

  I rather wished that they wouldn’t bother.

  Sophie and I had been assessed by a paramedic as being physically unharmed before being wrapped in red ambulance blankets and asked to wait.

  We waited.

  After a while, a bright-yellow-and-black helicopter landed in the cornfield alongside the road, and soon a doctor in a bright orange flight suit came over and asked us if we were both OK. “Yes,” we said in unison. He went over to join the team working on the hatchback.

  Sophie took my hand. “We are OK, aren’t we, Ned?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said with certainty. “We are definitely OK.”

  EPILOGUE

  Six months later, Sophie and I went to Australia to look for my sisters, while Luca, my new, fully documented, legal business partner, and his young full-time assistant, Douglas Masters, carried on our flourishing business at home without me.

  “Don’t hurry back,” Luca had said the day before I left. “Duggie and I will do just fine. And Millie will help us when she can.” Millie, it seemed, had moved in with Luca, and she hadn’t yet been murdered for doing so by her sister, Betsy.

  Since that glorious Monday in July at the Bangor-on-Dee races, I had discovered renewed energy and enthusiasm for my work. Bookmaking had become fun again, not least because Sophie had often stood with me, paying out winning tickets and bantering with the crowds as she’d never done before. She had clearly been taking lessons from Duggie.

  It had actually been Sophie’s idea to go to Australia, but I’d jumped at it.

  Understandably, she had had one or two problems after the events involving Kipper and the car crash. At the time, I’d been amazed at her calmness, but, according to the psychiatrists, this had been due to her brain bottling up the stress and literally switching off some of her emotions. Only afterwards did the fear and the panic manifest themselves with a physical reaction. I had found her four days later in the middle of the night, lying awake in our bed, shaking uncontrollably and soaked in sweat. It had been a very frightening experience for us both, and she had been returned immediately by ambulan
ce to the hospital in Hemel Hempstead for further treatment.

  Fortunately, the panic attack had been short-lived, and she was soon able to return home, but not before yet another full assessment of her condition. Since then, she had been doing really well, with only a couple of minor setbacks. On one occasion, when she had a particularly nasty cold, some of her cough medicine had reacted badly to the antidepressants, and she’d had a bit of a wobble. I had come home, stone-cold sober, from the races, and she accused me of being drunk. That was always the first sign to arrive and the last to leave. I had sat up all that night waiting for the expected decline into full mania, but in the morning she had been fine. The new drugs really were working, and both of us had begun to hope and to make plans for a future.

  Slowly, over the months, I had recounted to her the complete story of those three weeks in late June and early July. I told her the full details of my father’s murder, about finding his rucksack and its hidden contents. I told her about Mr. John Smith and the microcoder, about finding him in our house and breaking his wrist. I even told her about Luca and Larry’s little games with the phones and Internet at Ascot, and how I had extracted revenge for the attack on me at Kempton by the big-firm bullyboys.

  Once or twice, she told me off for not having contacted the police straightaway, and she was justifiably really quite cross that I had placed myself and her in such danger from a known murderer.

  I had tried to explain to her that I didn’t like the policeman in charge of the case, but she, quite rightly, had said that personalities shouldn’t have made any difference. But of course they did. Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn’s poor opinion of bookmakers in general, and of me in particular, had clouded his judgment in the same way that my antipathy towards him had clouded mine. Even when it was all over, he had still been reluctant to admit that I’d had nothing to do with my father’s murder.