by Dick Francis
‘What’s in there?’ I repeated.
He put on his airiest expression. ‘Just some things I didn’t want Moira to get her hands on.’
I remembered sharply the objects missing from his study.
‘The gold dolphin, the amethyst tree, the silver candelabra… those?’
‘You’ve been looking,’ he accused.
I shook my head. ‘I noticed they were gone.’
The few precious objects, all the same, hardly accounted for the severity of his first alarm.
‘What else is in there?’ I said.
‘Actually,’ he said, calmly now, ‘quite a lot of gold.’
Five
‘Some people buy and sell gold without ever seeing it,’ he said. ‘But I like possessing the actual stuff. There’s no fun in paper transactions. Gold is beautiful on its own account, and I like to see it and feel it. But it’s not all that easy to store it in banks or safety deposits. Too heavy and bulky. And insurance is astronomical. Takes too much of the profit. I never insure it.’
‘You’re storing it there in the wall… waiting for the price to rise?’
‘You know me, don’t you?’ He smiled. ‘Buy low, bide your time, sell high. Wait a couple of years, not often more. The price of gold itself swings like a pendulum, but there’s nothing, really, like gold shares. When gold prices rise, gold shares often rise by two or three times as much. I sell the gold first and the shares a couple of months later. Psychological phenomenon, you know, that people go on investing in gold mines, pushing the price up, when the price of gold itself is static or beginning to drop. Illogical, but invaluable to people like me.’
He sat looking at me with the vivid blue eyes, teaching his child.
‘Strategic Minerals, now. There never was anything like the Strategic Minerals Corporation of Australia. This year, the price of gold itself rose twenty-five per cent, but Strats - shares in Strategic Minerals - rose nearly a thousand per cent before they dropped off the top. Incredible. I got in near the beginning of those and sold at nine hundred and fifty per cent profit. But don’t be fooled, Strats happen only once or twice in a lifetime.’
‘How much,’ I said, fascinated, ‘did you invest in Strats?’
After a brief pause he said, ‘Five million. I had a feeling about them… they just smelted right. I don’t often go in so deep, and I didn’t expect them to fly so high, no one could, but there you are, all gold shares rose this year, and Strats rose like a skylark.’
‘How are they doing now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know. I’m concerned with the present. Gold mines, you see, don’t go on for ever. They have a life: exploration, development, production, exhaustion. I get in, wait a while, take a profit, forget them. Never stay too long with a rising gold share. Fortunes are lost by selling too late.’
He did truly trust me, I thought. If he’d doubted me still, he wouldn’t have told me there was gold behind the brick door, nor that even after tax he had made approximately thirty million pounds on one deal. I stopped worrying that he was overstretching himself in buying the colt and a half-share in Blue Clancy. I stopped worrying about practically everything except how to keep him alive and spending.
I’d talked to someone once whose father had died when she was barely twenty. She regretted that she hadn’t ever known him adult to adult, and wished she could meet him again, just to talk. Watching Malcolm, it struck me that in a way I’d been given her wish: that the three years’ silence had been a sort of death, and that I could talk to him now adult to adult, and know him as a man, not as a father.
We spent a peaceful evening together in the suite, talking about what we’d each done during the hiatus, and it was difficult to imagine that outside, somewhere, a predator might be searching for the prey.
At one point I said, ‘You gave Joyce’s telephone number on purpose to the film man, didn’t you? And Gervase’s number to the retarded-children lady? You wanted me with you to see you buy the colt… You made sure that the family knew all about your monster outlays as soon as possible, didn’t you?’
‘Huh,’ he said briefly, which after a moment I took as admission. One misdirected telephone call had been fairly possible: two stretched credibility too far.
‘Thomas and Berenice,’ I said, ‘were pretty frantic over some little adventure of yours. What did you do to stir them up?’
‘How the hell do you know all this?’
I smiled and fetched the cassette player, and re-ran for him the message tape from my telephone. He listened grimly but with an undercurrent of amusement to Serena, Gervase and Joyce and then read Thomas’s letter, and when he reached Thomas’s intense closing appeal I waited for explosions.
They didn’t come. He said wryly, ‘I suppose they’re what I made them.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Personality is mysterious, but it’s born in you, not made.’
‘But it can be brainwashed.’
‘Yes, OK,’ I said. ‘But you didn’t do it.’
‘Vivien and Alicia did… because of me.’
‘Don’t wallow in guilt so much. It isn’t like you.’
He grinned. ‘I don’t feel guilty, actually.’
Joyce, I thought, had at least played fair. A screaming fury she might have been on the subject of Alicia, but she’d never tried to set me against Malcolm. She had agreed in the divorce settlement when I was six that he should have custody of me: she wasn’t basically maternal, and infrequent visits from her growing son were all she required. She’d never made great efforts to bind me to her, and it had always been clear to me that she was relieved every time at my departure. Her life consisted of playing, teaching, and writing about bridge, a game she played to international tournament standard, and she was often abroad. My visits had always disrupted the acute concentration she needed for winning, and as winning gave her the prestige essential for lecture tours and magazine articles, I had more often raised impatience in her than comradeship, a feeling she had dutifully tried to stifle.
She had given me unending packs of cards to play with and had taught me a dozen card games, but I’d never had her razor memory of any and every card played in any and every game, a perpetual disappointment to her and a matter for impatience in itself. When I veered off to make my life in a totally different branch of the entertainment industry, she had been astonished at my choice and at first scornful, but had soon come round to checking the racing pages during the steeplechase season to see if I was listed as riding.
‘What did you tell Thomas and Berenice?’ I asked Malcolm again, after a pause.
With satisfaction he said, ‘I absentmindedly gave their telephone number to a wine merchant who was to let me know the total I owed him for the fifty or so cases of 1979 Pol Roger he was collecting for me to drink.’
‘And, er, roughly how much would that cost?’
‘The 1979, the Winston Churchill vintage, is quite exceptional, you know.’
‘Of course it would be,’ I said.
‘Roughly twenty-five thousand pounds, then, for fifty cases.’
Poor Thomas, I thought.
‘I also made sure that Alicia knew I’d given about a quarter of a million pounds to fund scholarships for bright girls at the school Serena went to. Alicia and I haven’t been talking recently. I suppose she’s furious I gave it to the school and not to Serena herself.’
‘Well, why did you?’
He looked surprised. ‘You know my views. You must all carve your own way. To make you all rich too young would rob you of incentive.’
I certainly did know his views, but I wasn’t sure I always agreed with them. I would have had bags of incentive to make a success of being a racehorse trainer if he’d lent, advanced or given me enough to start, but I also knew that if he did, he’d have to do as much for the others (being ordinarily a fair man), and he didn’t believe in it, as he said.
‘Why did you want them all to know how much you’
ve been spending?’ I asked. ‘Because of course they all will know by now. The telephone wires will have been red hot.’
‘I suppose I thought… um… if they believed I was getting rid of most of it there would be less point in killing me… do you see?’
I stared at him. ‘You must be crazy,’ I said. ‘It sounds to me like an invitation to be murdered without delay.’
‘Ah well, that too has occurred to me of late.’ He smiled vividly. ‘But I have you with me now to prevent that.’
After a speechless moment I said, ‘I may not always be able to see the speeding car.’
‘I’ll trust your eyesight.’
I pondered. ‘What else have you spent a bundle on, that I haven’t heard about?’
He drank some champagne and frowned, and I guessed that he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me. Finally he sighed and said, ‘This is for your ears only. I didn’t do it for the same reason, and I did it earlier… several weeks ago, in fact, before Moira was murdered.’ He paused. ‘She was angry about it, though she’d no right to be. It wasn’t her money. She hated me to give anything to anyone else. She wanted everything for herself.’ He sighed, ‘I don’t know how you knew right from the beginning what she was like.’
‘Her calculator eyes,’ I said.
He smiled ruefully. He must have seen that look perpetually, by the end.
‘The nursing home where Robin is,’ he said unexpectedly, ‘needed repairs. So I paid for them.’
He wasn’t talking, I gathered, in terms of a couple of replaced window-frames.
‘Of course, you know it’s a private nursing home?’ he said. ‘A family business, basically.’
‘Yes.’
‘They needed a new roof. New wiring. A dozen urgent upgradings. They tried raising the residential fees too high and lost patients, familiar story. They asked my advice about fund-raising. I told them not to bother. I’d get estimates, and all I’d want in return was that they’d listen to a good business consultant who I’d send them.’ He shifted comfortably in his armchair. ‘Robin’s settled there. Calm. Any change upsets him, as you know. If the whole place closed and went out of business, which was all too likely, I’d have to find somewhere else for him, and he’s lost enough …’
His voice tapered off. He had delighted in Robin and Peter when they’d been small, playing with them on the carpet like a young father, proud of them as if they were his first children, not his eighth and ninth. Good memories: worth a new roof.
‘I know you still go to visit him,’ he said. ‘The nurses tell me. So you must have seen the place growing threadbare.’
I nodded, thinking about it. ‘They used to have huge vases of fresh flowers everywhere.’
‘They used to have top quality everything, but they’ve had to compromise to patch up the building. Country houses are open money drains when they age. I can’t see the place outliving Robin, really. You will look after him, when I’ve gone?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded, taking it for granted. ‘I appointed you his trustee when I set up the fund for him, do you remember? I’ve not altered it.’
I was glad that he hadn’t. At least, somewhere, obscurely, things had remained the same between us.
‘Why don’t we go and see him tomorrow?’ he said. ‘No one will kill me there.’
‘All right,’ I agreed: so we went in the hired car in the morning, stopping in the local town to buy presents of chocolate and simpletoys designed for three-year-olds, and I added a packet of balloons to the pile while Malcolm paid.
‘Does he like balloons?’ he asked, his eyebrows rising.
‘He gets frustrated sometimes. I blow the balloons up, and he bursts them.’
Malcolm looked surprised and in some ways disturbed. ‘I didn’t know he could feel frustration.’
‘It seems like that. As if sometimes he half remembers us… but can’t quite.’
‘Poor boy.’
We drove soberly onwards and up the drive of the still splendid-looking Georgian house which lay mellow and symmetrical in the autumn sunshine. Inside, its near fifty rooms had been adapted and transformed in the heyday of private medicine into a highly comfortable hospital for mostly chronic, mostly old, mostly rich patients. Short-stay patients came and went, usually convalescing after major operations performed elsewhere, but in general one saw the same faces month after month: the same faces ageing, suffering, waiting for release. Dreadfully depressing, I found it, but for Robin, it was true, it seemed the perfect haven, arrived at after two unsuccessful stays in more apparently suitable homes involving other children, bright colours, breezy nurses and jollying atmospheres. Robin seemed better with peace, quiet and no demands, and Malcolm had finally acted against professional advice to give them to him.
Robin had a large room on the ground floor with french doors opening on to a walled garden. He seldom went out into the garden, but he preferred the doors open in all weathers, including snowstorms. Apart from that, he was docile and easy to deal with, and if anyone had speculated on the upheavals that might happen soon if puberty took its natural course, they hadn’t mentioned it in my hearing.
He looked at us blankly, as usual. He seldom spoke, though he did retain the ability to make words: it was just that he seemed to have few thoughts to utter. Brain damage of that magnitude was idiosyncratic, we’d been told, resulting in behaviour individual to each victim. Robin spoke rarely and then only to himself, in private, when he didn’t expect to be overheard: the nurses sometimes heard him, and had told us, but said he stopped as soon as he saw them.
I’d asked them what he said, but they didn’t know, except forwords like ‘shoes’ and ‘bread’ and ‘floor’: ordinary words. They didn’t know why he wouldn’t speak at other times. They were sure, though, that he understood a fair amount of what others said, even if in a haze.
We gave him some pieces of chocolate which he ate, and unwrapped the toys for him which he fingered but didn’t play with. He looked at the balloon packet without emotion. It wasn’t a frustration day: on those, he looked at the packet and made blowing noises with his mouth.
We sat with him for quite a while, talking, telling him who we were while he wandered around the room. He looked at our faces from time to time, and touched my nose once with his finger as if exploring that I was really there, but there was no connection with our minds. He looked healthy, good looking, a fine boy: heartbreaking, as always.
A nurse came in the end, middle-aged, kind-faced, to take him to a dining-room for lunch, and Malcolm and I transferred to the office where my father was given a saviour’s welcome and offered a reviving scotch.
‘Your son, slow progress, I’m afraid.’ Earnest, dedicated people.
Malcolm nodded. No progress would have been more accurate.
‘We do our best for him always.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Malcolm drank the scotch, shook their hands, made our farewells. We left, as I always left, in sadness, silence and regret.
‘So bloody unfair,’ Malcolm said halfway back to London. ‘He ought to be laughing, talking, roaring through life.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t bear to see him, and I can’t bear not to. I’d give all my money to have him well again.’
‘And make a new fortune afterwards,’ I said.
‘Well, yeah, why not?’ He laughed, but still with gloom. ‘It would have been better if he’d died with the others. Life’s a bugger, sometimes, isn’t it?’
The gloom lasted back to the Savoy and through the next bottle of Bollinger, but by afternoon Malcolm was complaining of the inactivity I’d thrust upon him and wanting to visit cronies in the City. Unpredictability be our shield, I prayed, and kept my eyes open for speeding cars; but we saw the day out safely in offices, bars, clubs and a restaurant, during which time Malcolm increased his wealth by gambling a tenner at evens on the day’s closing price of gold whichfell by two pounds when the trend was upwards, ‘It’ll sho
ot right up next year, you watch.’
On Friday, despite my pleas for sanity, he insisted on accompanying me to Sandown Park races.
‘You’ll be safer here,’ I protested, ‘in the suite.’
‘I shan’t feel safer.’
‘At the races, I can’t stay beside you.’
‘Who’s to know I’ll be there?’
I gazed at him. ‘Anyone who guesses we are now together could know. They’ll know how to find me, if they look in the papers.’
‘Then don’t go.’
‘I’m going. You stay here.’
I saw, however, that the deep underlying apprehension which he tried to suppress most of the time would erupt into acute nervous anxiety if I left him alone in the suite for several hours, and that he might, out of boredom, do something much sillier than going to the races, like convincing himself that anyone in his family would keep a secret if he asked it.
Accordingly I drove him south of London and took him through the jockeys’ entrance gate to the weighing-room area where he made his afternoon a lot safer by meeting yet another crony and being instantly invited to lunch in the holy of holies.
‘Do you have cronies all over the world?’ I asked.
‘Certainly,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘Anyone I’ve known for five minutes is a crony, if I get on with them.’
I believed him. Malcolm wasn’t easy to forget, nor was he hard to like. I saw the genuine pleasure in his immediate host’s face as they walked away together, talking, and reflected that Malcolm would have been a success in whatever career he had chosen, that success was part of his character, like generosity, like headlong rashness.
I was due to ride in the second race, a steeplechase for amateurs, and as usual had arrived two prudent hours in advance. I turned away from watching Malcolm and looked around for the owner of the horse I was about to partner, and found my path blocked by a substantial lady in a wide brown cape. Of all the members of the family, she was the last I would have expected to see on a racecourse.
‘Ian,’ she said accusingly, almost as if I’d been pretending to be someone else.