by Dick Francis
I understood vaguely why he didn’t simply ditch her and decamp: he couldn’t face doing what Malcolm had done, forsaking wife and children when the going got rough. He had been taught from a very young age to despise Malcolm’s inconstancy. He stayed grimly glued to Berenice and their two cheeky offspring and suffered for his virtue; and it was from fear of making the same calamitous mistake, I acknowledged, that I had married no one at all.
Thomas’s was the last message on the tape. I took it out of the machine and put it in my pocket, inserting a fresh tape for future messages. I also, after a bit of thought, sorted through a boxful of family photographs, picking out groups and single pictures until I had a pretty comprehensive gallery of Pembrokes. These went into my suitcase along with a small cassette player and my best camera.
I did think of answering some of the messages, but decided against it. The arguments would all have been futile. I did truly believe in Malcolm’s absolute right to do what he liked with the money he had made by his own skill and diligence. If he chose to give it in the end to his children, that was our good luck. We had no rights to it; none at all. I would have had difficulty in explaining that concept to Thomas or Joyce or Gervase or Serena, and apart from not wanting to, I hadn’t the time.
I put my suitcase in the car, along with my racing saddle, helmet, whip and boots and drove back to the Savoy, being relieved to find Malcolm still there, unattacked and unharmed.
He was sitting deep in an armchair, dressed again as for the City, drinking champagne and smoking an oversize cigar. Opposite him, perched on the front edge of an identical armchair, sat a thin man of much Malcolm’s age but with none of his presence.
‘Norman West,’ Malcolm said to me, waving the cigar vaguely at his visitor; and to the visitor he said, ‘My son, Ian.’
Norman West rose to his feet and shook my hand briefly. I had never so far as I knew met a private detective before, and it wouldn’t have been the occupation I would have fitted to this damp-handed nervous threadbare individual. Of medium height, he had streaky grey hair overdue for a wash, dark-circled brown eyes, greyish unhealthy skin and a day’s growth of greying beard. His grey suit looked old and uncared for and his shoes had forgotten about polish. He looked as much at home in a suite in the Savoy as a punk rocker in the Vatican.
As if unerringly reading my mind he said, ‘As I was just explaining to Mr Pembroke, I came straight here from an all-night observation job, as he was most insistent that it was urgent. This rig fitted my observation point. It isn’t my normal gear.’
‘Clothes for all seasons?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
His accent was the standard English of bygone radio announcers, slightly plummy and too good to be true. I gestured to him to sit down again, which he did as before, leaning forward from the front edge of the seat cushion and looking enquiringly at Malcolm.
‘Mr West had just arrived when you came,’ Malcolm said. ‘Perhaps you’d better explain to him what we want.’
I sat on the spindly little sofa and said to Norman West that we wanted him to find out where every single member of our extended family had been on the previous Friday from, say, four o’clock in the afternoon onwards, and also on Tuesday, yesterday, all day.
Norman West looked from one to the other of us in obvious dismay.
‘If it’s too big a job,’ Malcolm said, ‘bring in some help.’
‘It’s not really that,’ Norman West said unhappily. ‘But I’m afraid there may be a conflict of interest.’
‘What conflict of interest?’ Malcolm demanded.
Norman West hesitated, cleared his throat and hummed a little. Then he said, ‘Last Saturday morning I was hired by one of your family to find you, Mr Pembroke. I’ve already been working, you see, for one of your family. Now you want me to check up on them. I don’t think I should, in all conscience, accept your proposition.’
‘Which member of my family?’ Malcolm demanded.
Norman West drummed his fingers on his knee, but decided after inner debate to answer.
‘Mrs Pembroke,’ he said.
Four
Malcolm blinked. ‘Which one?’ he asked.
‘Mrs Pembroke,’ Norman West repeated, puzzled.
‘There are nine of them,’ I said. ‘So which one?’
The detective looked uncomfortable. ‘I spoke to her only on the telephone. I thought… I assumed… it was the Mrs Malcolm Pembroke for whom I worked once before, long ago. She referred me to that case, and asked for present help. I looked up my records …’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘I imagined it was the same lady.’
‘Did you find Mr Pembroke,’ I asked, ‘when you were looking for him?’
Almost unwillingly, West nodded. ‘In Cambridge. Not too difficult.’
‘And you reported back to Mrs Pembroke?’
‘I really don’t think I should be discussing this any further.’
‘At least, tell us how you got back in touch with Mrs Pembroke to tell her of your success.’
‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘She rang me two or three times a day, asking for progress reports. Finally on Monday evening, I had news for her. After that, I proceeded with my next investigation, which I have now concluded. This left me free for anything Mr Pembroke might want.’
‘I want you to find out which Mrs Pembroke wanted to know where I was.’
Norman West regretfully shook his unkempt head. ‘A client’s trust…’ he murmured.
‘A client’s trust, poppycock!’ Malcolm exploded. ‘Someone who knew where to find me damn near killed me.’
Our detective looked shocked but rallied quickly. ‘I found you, sir, by asking Mrs Pembroke for a list of places you felt at home in, as in my experience missing people often go to those places, and she gave me a list of five such possibilities, of which Cambridge was number three. I didn’t even go to that city looking for you. As a preliminary, I was prepared to telephone to all the hotels in Cambridge asking for you, but I tried the larger hotels first, as being more likely to appeal to you, sir, and from only the third I got a positive response. If it was as easy as that for me to find you, it was equally easy for anyone else. And, sir, if I may say so, you made things easy by registering under your own name. People who want to stay lost shouldn’t do that.’
He spoke with a touching air of dignity ill-matched to his seedy appearance and for the first time I thought he might be better at his job than he looked. He must have been pretty efficient, I supposed, to have stayed in the business so long, even if catching Malcolm with his trousers off couldn’t have taxed him sorely years ago.
He finished off the glass of champagne that Malcolm had given him before my arrival, and refused a refill.
‘How is Mrs Pembroke paying you?’ I asked.
‘She said she would send a cheque.’
‘When it comes,’ I said, ‘you’ll know which Mrs Pembroke.’
‘So I will.’
‘I don’t see why you should worry about a conflict of interests,’ I said. ‘After all, you’ve worked pretty comprehensively for various Pembrokes. You worked for my mother, Joyce Pembroke, to catch my father with the lady who gave her grounds for divorce. You worked for my father, to try to catch his fifth wife having a similar fling. You worked for the unspecified Mrs Pembroke to trace my father’s whereabouts. So now he wants you to find out where all his family were last Friday and yesterday so as to be sure it was none of his close relatives who tried to kill him, as it would make him very unhappy if it were. If you can’t square that with your conscience, of course with great regret he’ll have to retain the services of someone else.’
Norman West eyed me with a disillusionment which again encouraged me to think him not as dim as he looked. Malcolm was glimmer-eyed with amusement.
‘Pay you well, of course,’ he said.
‘Danger money,’ I said, nodding.
Malcolm said, ‘What?’
‘We don’t want him to step on a ra
ttlesnake, but in fairness he has to know he might.’
Norman West looked at his short and grimy nails. He didn’t seem unduly put out, nor on the other hand eager.
‘Isn’t this a police job?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘My father called them in when someone tried to kill him last Friday, and he’ll tell you all about it. And you have to bear in mind that they’re also enquiring into the murder of Moira Pembroke, whom you followed through blameless days. But you would be working for my father, not for the police, if you take his cash.’
‘Pretty decisive, aren’t you, sir?’ he said uneasily.
‘Bossy,’ Malcolm agreed, ‘in his quiet way.’
All those years, I thought, of getting things done in a racing stable, walking a tightrope between usurping the power of the head lad on one hand and the trainer himself on the other, like a lieutenant between a sergeant-major and a colonel. I’d had a lot of practice, one way and another, at being quietly bossy.
Malcolm unemotionally told West about his abortive walk with the dogs and the brush with carbon monoxide, and after that described also the near-miss at Newmarket.
Norman West listened attentively with slowly blinking eyes and at the end said, ‘The car at Newmarket could have been accidental. Driver looking about for cigarettes, say. Not paying enough attention. Seeing you both at the last minute… swerving desperately.’
Malcolm looked at me. ‘Did it seem like that to you?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ West asked.
‘The rate of acceleration, I suppose.’
‘Foot on accelerator going down absent-mindedly during search for cigarettes?’
‘Headlights, full beam,’ I said.
‘A sloppy driver? Had a few drinks?’
‘Maybe.’ I shook my head. ‘The real problem is that if the car had hit us - or Malcolm - there might have been witnesses. The driver might have been stopped before he could leave the sales area. The car number might have been taken.’
West smiled sorrowfully. ‘It’s been done successfully before now, in broad daylight in a crowded street.’
‘Are you saying,’ Malcolm demanded of me, ‘that the car wasn’t trying to kill me?’
‘No, only that the driver took a frightful risk.’
‘Did any witnesses rush to pick us up?’ Malcolm asked forcefully. ‘Did anyone so much as pass a sympathetic remark? No, they damned well didn’t. Did anyone try to stop the driver or take his number? The hell they did.’
‘All the same,’ West said, ‘your son is right. Hit-and-run in a public place has its risks. If it was tried here, and sirs, I’m not saying it wasn’t, the putative gain must have outweighed the risk, or, er, in other words -’
‘In other words,’ Malcolm interrupted with gloom, ‘Ian is right to think they’ll try again.’
Norman West momentarily looked infinitely weary, as if the sins of the world were simply too much to contemplate. He had seen, I supposed, as all investigators must, a lifetime’s procession of sinners and victims; and, moreover, he looked roughly seventy and hadn’t slept all night.
‘I’ll take your job,’ he said without enthusiasm, radiating minimum confidence, and I glanced at Malcolm to see if he really thought this was the best we could do in detectives, signs of intelligence or not. Malcolm appeared to have no doubts, however, and spent the next five minutes discussing fees which seemed ominously moderate to me.
‘And I’ll need a list,’ West said finally, ‘of the people you want checked. Names and addresses and normal habits.’
Malcolm showed unexpected discomfort, as if checking that amorphous entity ‘the family’ was different from checking each individual separately, and it was I who found a piece of Savoy writing paper to draw up the list.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘first of all there’s Vivien, my father’s first wife. Mrs Vivien Pembroke.’
‘Not her,’ Malcolm objected. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
‘Everyone,’ I said firmly. ‘No exceptions. That makes it fair on everyone… because there are going to be some extremely angry relations when they all realise what’s happening.’
‘They won’t find out,’ Malcolm said.
Fat chance, I thought.
To West, I said, ‘They all telephone each other all the time, not by any means always out of friendship but quite often out of spite. They won’t gang up against you because they seldom form alliances among themselves. Some of them are pretty good liars. Don’t believe everything they say about each other.’
‘Ian!’ Malcolm said protestingly.
‘I’m one of them, and I know,’ I said.
After Vivien’s name on the list I wrote the names of her children: Donald Lucy Thomas
‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘is married to Berenice.’ I added her name beside his. ‘He is easy to deal with, she is not.’
‘She’s a five-star cow,’ Malcolm said.
West merely nodded.
‘Lucy,’ I said, ‘married a man called Edwin Bugg. She didn’t like that surname, and persuaded him to change it to hers, and she is consequently herself a Mrs Pembroke.’
West nodded.
‘Lucy is a poet,’ I said. ‘People who know about poetry say her stuff is the real thing. She makes a big production of unworldliness which Edwin, I think, has grown to find tiresome.’
‘Huh,’ Malcolm said. ‘Edwin’s an out-and-out materialist, always tapping me for a loan.’
‘Do you give them to him?’ I said interestedly.
‘Not often. He never pays me back.’
‘Short of money, are they?’ West asked.
‘Edwin Bugg,’ Malcolm said, ‘married Lucy years ago because he thought she was an heiress, and they’ve scraped along ever since on the small income she gets from a trust fund I set up for her. Edwin’s never done a stroke of work in his parasitic life and I can’t stand the fellow.’
‘They have one teenage schoolboy son,’ I said, smiling, ‘who asked me the last time I saw him how to set about emigrating to Australia.’
West looked at the list and said to Malcolm, ‘What about Donald, your eldest?’
‘Donald,’ said his father, ‘married a replica of his mother, beautiful and brainless. A girl called Helen. They live an utterly boring virtuous life in Henley-on-Thames and are still billing and cooing like newlyweds although Donald must be nearly forty-five, I suppose.’
No one commented. Malcolm himself, rising sixty-nine, could bill and coo with the best, and with a suppressed shiver I found myself thinking for the first time about the sixth marriage, because certainly, in the future, if Malcolm survived, there would be one. He had never in the past lived long alone. He liked rows better than solitude.
‘Children?’ Norman West asked into the pause.
‘Three,’ Malcolm said. ‘Pompous little asses.’
West glanced at me questioningly, and yawned.
‘Are you too tired to take all this in?’ I asked.
‘No, go ahead.’
‘Two of Donald’s children are too young to drive a car. The eldest, a girl at art school, is five foot two and fragile, and I cannot imagine her being physically capable of knocking Malcolm out and carrying his body from garden to garage and inserting him into Moira’s car.’
‘She hasn’t the courage either,’ Malcolm said.
‘You can’t say that,’ I disagreed. ‘Courage can pop up anywhere and surprise you.’
West gave me a noncommittal look. ‘Well,’ he said, taking the list himself and adding to it, ‘this is what we have so far. Wife number one: Vivien Pembroke. Her children: Donald (44), wife Helen, three offspring. Lucy, husband Edwin (né Bugg), school-age son. Thomas, wife Berenice …?’
‘Two young daughters.’
‘Two young daughters,’ he repeated, writing.
‘My grandchildren,’ Malcolm protested, ‘are all too young to have murdered anybody.’
‘Psychopaths start in the nursery,’ West said laconica
lly. ‘Any sign in any of them of abnormal violent behaviour? Excessive cruelty, that sort of thing? Obsessive hatreds?’
Malcolm and I both shook our heads but with a touch of uncertainty; his maybe because of something he did know, mine because of all I didn’t know, because of all the things that could be hidden.
‘Does greed, too, begin in the nursery?’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t say so, would you?’ West answered.
I shook my head again. ‘I’d say it was nastily adult and grows with opportunity. The more there is to grab, the greedier people get.’
Malcolm said, only half as a question, ‘My fortune corrupts… geometrically?’
‘You’re not alone,’ I said dryly. ‘Just think of all those multi-billionaire families where the children have already had millions settled on them and still fight like cats over the pickings when their father dies.’
‘Bring it down to thousands,’ West said unexpectedly. ‘Or to hundreds. I’ve seen shocking spite over hundreds. And the lawyers rub their hands and syphon off the cream.’ He sighed, half disillusionment, half weariness. ‘Wife number two?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘Mrs Joyce Pembroke.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m her son. She had no other children. And I’m not married.*
West methodically wrote me down.
‘Last Friday evening,’ I said. ‘I was at work in a racing stable at five o’clock with about thirty people as witnesses, and last night I was certainly not driving the car that nearly ran us over.’
West said stolidly, ‘I’ll write you down as being cleared of primary involvement. That’s all I can do with any of your family, Mr Pembroke.’ He finished the sentence looking at Malcolm who said, ‘Hired assassin’ between his teeth, and West nodded, if any of them hired a good professional, I doubt if I’ll discover it.’