Straight

by Dick Francis

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  I thanked the Ostermeyers inadequately for everything and went to Greville’s house by taxi. I did think of asking the taxi driver to stay, like Brad, until I’d reconnoitered, but the house was quiet and dark behind the impregnable grilles, and I thought the taxi driver would think me a fool or a coward or both, so I paid him off and, fishing out the keys, opened the gate in the hedge and went up the path until the lights blazed on and the dog started barking..

  Everyone can make mistakes.

  11

  Ididn’t get as far as the steps up to the front door. A dark figure, dimly glimpsed in the floodlight’s glare, came launching itself at me from behind in a cannonball rugger tackle and when I reached the ground something very hard hit my head.

  I had no sensation of blacking out or of time passing. One moment I was awake, and the next moment I was awake also, or so it seemed, but I knew in a dim way that there had been an interval.

  I didn’t know where I was except that I was lying facedown on grass. I’d woken up concussed on grass several times in my life, but never before in the dark. They couldn’t have all gone home from the races, I thought, and left me alone out on the course all night.

  The memory of where I was drifted back quietly. In Greville’s front garden. Alive. Hooray for small mercies.

  I knew from experience that the best way to deal with being knocked out was not to hurry. On the other hand, this time I hadn’t come off a horse, not on Greville’s pocket handkerchief turf. There might be urgent reasons for getting up quickly, if I could think of them.

  I remembered a lot of things in a rush and groaned slightly, rolling up onto my knees, wincing and groping about for the crutches. I felt stupid and went on behaving stupidly, acting on fifty percent brain power. Looking back afterward, I thought that what I ought to have done was slither silently away through the gate to go to any neighboring house and call the police. What I actually did was to start toward Greville’s front door, and of course the lights flashed on again and the dog started barking and I stood rooted to the spot expecting another attack, swaying unsteadily on the crutches, absolutely dim and pathetic.

  The door was ajar, I saw, with lights on in the hall, and while I stood dithering it was pulled wide open from inside and the cannonball figure shot out.

  The cannonball was a motorcycle helmet, shiny and black, its transparent visor pulled down over the face. Behind the visor the face also seemed to be black, but a black balaclava, I thought, not black skin. There was an impression of jeans, denim jacket, gloves, black running shoes, all moving fast. He turned his head a fraction and must have seen me standing there insecurely, but he didn’t stop to give me another unbalancing shove. He vaulted the gate and set off at a run down the street and I simply stood where I was in the garden waiting for my head to clear a bit more and start working.

  When that happened to some extent, I went up the short flight of steps and in through the front door. The keys, I found, were still in the lowest of the locks; the small bunch of three keys that Clarissa had had, which I’d been using instead of Greville’s larger bunch as they were easier. I’d made things simple for the intruder, I thought, by having them ready in my hand.

  With a spurt of alarm I felt my trousers pocket to find if Greville’s main bunch had been stolen, but to my relief they were still there, clinking.

  I switched off the floodlights and the dog and in the sudden silence closed the front door. Greville’s small sitting room, when I reached it, looked like the path of a hurricane. I surveyed the mess in fury rather than horror and picked the tumbled phone off the floor to call the police. A burglary, I said. The burglar had gone.

  Then I sat in Greville’s chair with my head in my hands and said “shit” aloud with heartfelt rage and gingerly felt the sore bump swelling on my scalp. A bloody pushover, I thought. Like last Sunday. Too like last Sunday to be a coincidence. The cannonball had known both times that I wouldn’t be able to stand upright against a sudden unexpected rush. I supposed I should be grateful he hadn’t smashed my head in altogether this time while he had the chance. No knife, this time, either.

  After a bit I looked wearily round the room. The pictures were off the walls, most of the glass smashed. The drawers had been yanked out of the tables and the tables themselves overturned. The little pink and brown stone bears lay scattered on the floor, the chrysanthemum plant and its dirt were trampled into the carpet, the chrysanthemum pot itself was embedded in the smashed screen of the television, the video recorder had been tom from its unit and dropped, the video cassettes of the races lay pulled out in yards of ruined tape. The violence of it all angered me as much as my own sense of failure in letting it happen.

  Many of the books were out of the bookshelves, but I saw with grim satisfaction that none of them lay open. Even if none of the hollow books had contained diamonds, at least the burglar hadn’t known the books were hollow. A poor consolation, I thought.

  The police arrived eventually, one in uniform, one not. I went along the hall when they rang the doorbell, checked through the peephole and let them in, explaining who I was and why I was there. They were both of about my own age and they’d seen a great many break-ins.

  Looking without emotion at Greville’s wrecked room, they produced notebooks and took down an account of the assault in the garden. (Did I want a doctor for the bump? No, I didn’t.) They knew of this house, they said. The new owner, my brother, had installed all the window grilles and had them wired on a direct alarm to the police station so that if anyone tried to enter that way they would be nicked. Police specialists had given their advice over the defenses and had considered the house as secure as was possible, up to now: but shouldn’t there have been active floodlights and a dog alarm? They’d worked well, I said, but before they came I’d turned them off.

  “Well, sir,” they said, not caring much, “what’s been stolen?”

  I didn’t know. Nothing large, I said, because the burglar had had both hands free, when he vaulted the gate.

  Small enough to go into a pocket, they wrote.

  What about the rest of the house? Was it in the same state?

  I said I hadn’t looked yet. Crutches. Bang on head. That sort of thing. They asked about the crutches. Broken ankle, I said. Paining me, perhaps? Just a bit.

  I went with them on a tour of the house and found the tornado had blown through all of it. The long drawing room on the ground floor was missing all the pictures from the walls and all the drawers from chests and tables.

  “Looking for a safe,” one of the policemen said, turning over a ruined picture. “Did your brother have one here, do you know?”

  “I haven’t seen one,” I said.

  They nodded and we went upstairs. The black and white bedroom had been ransacked in the same fashion and the bathroom also. Clothes were scattered everywhere. In the bathroom, aspirins and other pills were scattered on the floor. A toothpaste tube had been squeezed flat by a shoe. A can of shaving cream lay in a washbasin, with some of the contents squirted out in loops on the mirror. They commented that as there was no graffiti and no excrement smeared over everything, I had got off lightly.

  “Looking for something small,” the nonuniformed man said. “Your brother was a gem merchant, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you found any jewels here yourself?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  They looked into the empty bedroom on that floor, still empty, and went up the stairs to look around above, but coming down reported nothing to see but space. It’s one big attic room, they explained, when I said I hadn’t been up there. Might have been a studio once, perhaps.

  We all descended to the semibasement where the mess in the kitchen was indescribable. Every packet of cereal had been poured out, sugar and flour had been emptied and apparently sieved in a strainer. The fridge’s door hung open with the contents gutted. All liquids had been pou
red down the sinks, the cartons and bottles either standing empty or smashed by the draining boards. The ice cubes I’d wondered about were missing, presumably melted. Half of the floor of carpet tiles had been pulled up from the concrete beneath.

  The policemen went phlegmatically round looking at things but touching little, leaving a few footprints in the floury dust.

  I said uncertainly, “How long was I unconscious? If he did all this...”

  “Twenty minutes, I’d say,” one said, and the other nodded. “He was working fast, you can see. He was probably longest down here. I’d say he was pulling up these tiles looking for a floor safe when you set the alarms off again. I’d reckon he panicked then, he’d been here long enough. And also, if it’s any use to you, I’d guess that if he was looking for anything particular, he didn’t find it.”

  “Good news, is that?” asked the other, shrewdly, watching me.

  “Yes, of course.” I explained about the Saxony Franklin office being broken into the previous weekend. “We weren’t sure what had been stolen, apart from an address book. In view of this,” I gestured to the shambles, “probably nothing was.”

  “Reasonable assumption,” one said.

  “When you come back here another time in the dark,” the other advised, “shine a good big torch all around the garden before you come through the gate. Sounds as if he was waiting there for you, hiding in the shadow of the hedge, out of range of the body-heat-detecting mechanism of the lights.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “And switch all the alarms on again, when we leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “And draw the curtains. Burglars sometimes wait about outside, if they haven’t found what they’re after, hoping that the householders, when they come home, will go straight to the valuables to check if they’re there. Then they come rampaging back to steal them.”

  “I’ll draw the curtains,” I said.

  They looked around in the garden on the way out and found half a brick lying on the grass near where I’d woken up. They showed it to me. Robbery with violence, that made it.

  “If you catch the robber,” I said.

  They shrugged. They were unlikely to, as things stood. I thanked them for coming and they said they’d be putting in a report, which I could refer to for insurance purposes when I made a claim. Then they retreated to the police car double-parked outside the gate and presently drove away, and I shut the front door, switched on the alarms, and felt depressed and stupid and without energy, none of which states was normal.

  The policemen had left lights on behind them everywhere. I went slowly down the stairs to the kitchen meaning merely to turn them off, but when I got there I stood for a while contemplating the mess and the reason for it.

  Whoever had come had come because the diamonds were still somewhere to be found. I supposed I should be grateful at least for that information; and I was also inclined to believe the policemen who said the burglar hadn’t found what he was looking for. But could I find it, if I looked harder?

  I hadn’t particularly noticed on my first trip downstairs that the kitchen’s red carpet was in fact carpet tiles, washable squares that were silent and warmer underfoot than conventional tiles. I’d been brought up on such flooring in our parents’ house.

  The big tiles, lying flat and fitting snugly, weren’t stuck to the hard surface beneath, and the intruder had had no trouble in pulling them up. The intruder hadn’t been certain there was a safe, I thought, or he wouldn’t have sieved the sugar. And if he’d been successful and found a safe, what then? He hadn’t given himself time to do anything about it. He hadn’t killed me. Hadn’t tied me. Must have known I would wake up.

  All it added up to, I thought, was a frantic and rather unintelligent search, which didn’t make the bump on my head or my again knocked-about ankle any less sore. Grinding machines had no brains either. Nor, I thought dispiritedly, had the ground product.

  I drew the curtains as advised and bent down and pulled up another of the red tiles, thinking about Greville’s security complex. It would be just like him to build a safe into the solid base of the house and cover it with something deceptive. Setting a safe in concrete, as the pamphlet had said. People tended to think of safes as being built into walls: floors were less obvious and more secure, but far less convenient. I pulled up a few more tiles, doubting my conclusions, doubting my sanity.

  The same sort of feeling as in the vaults kept me going. I didn’t expect to find anything but it would be stupid not to make sure, just in case. This time it took half an hour, not three days, and in the end the whole area was up except for a piece under a serving table on wheels. Under that carpet square, when I’d moved the table, I found a flat circular piece of silvery metal flush with the hard base floor, with a recessed ring in it for lifting.

  Amazed and suddenly unbearably hopeful, I knelt and pulled the ring up and tugged, and the flat piece of metal came away and off like the lid of a biscuit tin, revealing another layer of metal beneath: an extremely solid-looking circular metal plate the size of a dinner plate in which there was a single keyhole and another handle for lifting.

  I pulled the second handle. As well tried to pull up the house by its roots. I tried all of Greville’s bunch of keys in the keyhole but none of them came near to fitting.

  Even Greville, I thought, must have kept the key reasonably handy, but the prospect of searching anew for anything at all filled me with weariness. Greville’s affairs were a maze with more blind alleys than Hampton Court.

  There were keys in the hollow books, I remembered. Might as well start with those. I shifted upstairs and dug out With a Mule in Patagonia and the others, rediscovering the two businesslike keys and also the decorative one which looked too flamboyant for sensible use. True to Greville’s mind, however, it was that one whose wards slid easily into the keyhole of the safe and under pressure turned the mechanism inside.

  Even then the circular lid wouldn’t pull out. Seesawing between hope and frustration I found that, if one turned instead of pulling, the whole top of the safe went round like a wheel until it came against stops; and at that point it finally gave up the struggle and came up loose in my grasp.

  The space below was big enough to hold a case of champagne but to my acute disappointment it contained no nestegg, only a clutch of businesslike brown envelopes. Sighing deeply I took out the top two and found the first contained the freehold deeds of the house and the second the paperwork involved in raising a mortgage to buy it. I read the latter with resignation: Greville’s house belonged in essence to a finance company, not to me.

  Another of the envelopes contained a copy of his will, which was as simple as the lawyers had said, and in another there was his birth certificate and our parents’ birth and marriage certificates. Another yielded an endowment insurance policy taken out long ago to provide him with an income at sixty-five: but inflation had eaten away its worth and he had apparently not bothered to increase it. Instead, I realized, remembering what I’d learned of his company’s finances, he had plowed back his profits into expanding his business which would itself ride on the tide of inflation and provide him with a munificent income when he retired and sold.

  A good plan, I thought, until he’d knocked the props out by throwing one point five million dollars to the winds. Only he hadn’t, of course. He’d had a sensible plan for a sober profit. Deal with honor ... He’d made a good income, lived a comfortable life and run his racehorses, but he had stacked away no great personal fortune. His wealth, whichever way one looked at it, was in the stones.

  Hell and damnation, I thought. If I couldn’t find the damned diamonds I’d be failing him as much as myself. He would long for me to find them, but where the bloody hell had he put them?

  I stuffed most of the envelopes back into their private basement, keeping out only the insurance policy, and replaced the heavy circular lid. Turned it, turned the key, replaced the upper piece of metal and laid a carpet tile on top. Fir
eproof the hiding place undoubtedly was, and thiefproof it had proved, and I couldn’t imagine why Greville hadn’t used it for jewels.

  Feeling defeated, I climbed at length to the bedroom where I found my own overnight bag had, along with everything else, been tipped up and emptied. It hardly seemed to matter. I picked up my sleeping shorts and changed into them and went into the bathroom. The mirror was still half covered with shaving cream and by the time I’d wiped that off with a face cloth and swallowed a Distalgesic and brushed my teeth and swept a lot of the crunching underfoot junk to one side with a towel, I had used up that day’s ration of stamina pretty thoroughly.

  Even then, though it was long past midnight, I couldn’t sleep. Bangs on the head were odd, I thought. There had been one time when I’d dozed for a week afterward, going to sleep in midsentence as often as not. Another time I’d apparently walked and talked rationally to a doctor but hadn’t any recollection of it half an hour later. This time, in Greville’s bed, I felt shivery and unsettled, and thought that that had probably as much to do with being attacked as concussed.

  I lay still and let the hours pass, thinking of bad and good and of why things happened, and by morning felt calm and much better. Sitting on the lid of the loo in the bathroom, I unwrapped the crepe bandage and by hopping and holding on to things took a long, luxurious and much needed shower, washing my hair, letting the dust and debris and the mental tensions of the week run away in the soft bombardment of water. After that, loinclothed in a bath towel, I sat on the black and white bed and more closely surveyed the ankle scenery.

  It was better than six days earlier, one could confidently say that. On the other hand it was still black, still fairly swollen and still sore to the touch. Still vulnerable to knocks. I flexed my calf and foot muscles several times: the bones and ligaments still violently protested, but none of it could be helped. To stay young the muscles had to move, and that was that. I kneaded the calf muscle a bit to give it some encouragement and thought about borrowing an apparatus called Electrovet which Milo had tucked away somewhere, which he used on his horses’ legs to give their muscles electrical stimuli to bring down swelling and get them fit again. What worked on horses should work on me, I reckoned.