by Dick Francis
“You’re delirious.”
“I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Soon as you can, then,” he said. “See you.”
I put down the receiver with an inward groan. I did not want to go belting down to Lambourn to a crisis, however easily resolved. I wanted to let my aches unwind.
I telephoned the car and heard the ringing tone, but Brad, wherever he was, didn’t answer. Then, as the first step toward leaving, I went along and locked the vault. Alfie in the packing room was stretching his back, his day’s load finished. Lily, standing idle, gave me a repressed look from under her lashes. Jason goosed Tina in the doorway to the stockrooms, which she didn’t seem to mind. There was a feeling of afternoon ending, of abeyance in the offing, of corporate activity drifting to suspense. Like the last race on an October card.
Saying goodnights and collecting the plastic bag, I went down to the yard and found Brad there waiting.
“Did you find those papers OK?” I asked him, climbing in beside him after storing the crutches on the back seat.
“Yerss,” he said.
“And delivered them?”
“Yerss.”
“Thanks. Great. How long have you been back?”
He shrugged. I left it. It wasn’t important.
“Lambourn,” I said, as we turned out of the yard. “But on the way, back to my brother’s house to collect something else. OK?”
He nodded and drove to Greville’s house skillfully, but slowed just before we reached it and pointed to Greville’s car, still standing by the curb.
“See?” he said. “It’s been broken into.”
He found a parking place and we went back to look. The heavily locked trunk had been jimmied open and now wouldn’t close again.
“Good job we took the things out,” I said. “I suppose they are still in my car.”
He shook his head. “In our house, under the stairs. Our mum said to do it with your car outside our door all night. Dodgy neighborhood round our part.”
“Very thoughtful,” I said.
He nodded. “Smart, our mum.”
He came with me into Greville’s garden, holding the gate open.
“They done this place over proper,” he said, producing the three keys from his pocket. “Want me to?”
He didn’t wait for particular assent but went up the steps and undid the locks. Daylight: no floods, no dog.
He waited in the hall while I went along to the little sitting room to collect the tapes. It all looked forlorn in there, a terrible mess made no better by time. I put the featherweight cassettes into my pocket and left again, thinking that tidying up was a long way down my urgency list. When the ankle had altogether stopped hurting; maybe then. When the insurance people had seen it, if they wanted to.
I had brought with me a note which I left prominently on the lowest step of the staircase, where anyone coming into the house would see it.
“Dear Mrs. P. I’m afraid there is bad news for you. Don’t clean the house. Telephone Saxony Franklin Ltd. instead.”
I’d added the number in case she didn’t know it by heart, and I’d warned Annette to go gently with anyone calling. Nothing else I could do to cushion the shock.
Brad locked the front door and we set off again to Lambourn. He had done enough talking for the whole journey and we traveled in customary silence, easy if not comrades.
Milo was striding about in the yard, expending energy to no purpose. He yanked the passenger-side door of my car open and scowled in at Brad, more as a reflection of his general state of mind, I gathered, than from any particular animosity.
I retrieved the crutches and stood up, and he told me it was high time I threw them away.
“Calm down,” I said.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Is Phil here?”
Phil was Phil Urquhart, veterinary surgeon, pill pusher to the stable.
“No, he isn’t,” Milo said crossly, “but he’s coming back. The damned horse won’t give a sample. And for a start, you can tell me whether it is or isn’t Dozen Roses. His passport matches, but I’d like to be sure.”
He strode away toward a box in one corner of the yard and I followed and looked where he looked, over the bottom half of the door.
Inside the box were an obstinate-looking horse and a furious red-faced lad. The lad held a pole which had on one end of it an open plastic bag on a ring, like a shrimping net. The plastic bag was clean and empty.
I chuckled.
“It’s all right for you,” Milo said sharply. “You haven’t been waiting for more than two hours for the damned animal to stale.”
“On Singapore racecourse, one time,” I said, “they got a sample with nicotine in it. The horse didn’t smoke, but the lad did. He got tired of waiting for the horse and just supplied the sample himself.”
“Very funny,” Milo said repressively.
“This often takes hours, though, so why the rage?”
It sounded always so simple, of course, to take a regulation urine sample from two horses after every race, one nearly always from the winner. In practice it meant waiting around for the horses to oblige. After two hours of nonperformance, blood samples were taken instead, but blood wasn’t as easy to come by. Many tempers were regularly lost while the horses made up their minds.
“Come away,” I said, “he’ll do it in the end. And he’s definitely the horse that ran at York. Dozen Roses without a doubt.”
He followed me away reluctantly and we went into the kitchen where Milo switched lights on and asked me if I’d like a drink.
“Wouldn’t mind some tea,” I said.
“Tea? At this hour? Well, help yourself.” He watched me fill the kettle and set it to boil. “Are you off booze forever?”
“No.”
“Thank God.”
Phil Urquhart’s car scrunched into the yard and pulled up outside the window, and he came breezing into the kitchen asking if there were any results. He read Milo’s scowl aright and laughed.
“Do you think the horse is doped?” I asked him.
“Me? No, not really. Hard to tell. Milo thinks so.”
He was small and sandy-haired, and about thirty, the grandson of a three-generation family practice, and to my mind the best of them. I caught myself thinking that when I in the future trained here in Lambourn, I would want him for my horses. An odd thought. The future planning itself behind my back.
“I hear we’re lucky you’re still with us,” he said. “An impressive crunch, so they say.” He looked at me assessingly with friendly professional eyes. “You’ve a few rough edges one can see.”
“Nothing that will stop him racing,” Milo said crisply.
Phil smiled. “I detect more alarm than sympathy.”
“Alarm?”
“You’ve trained more winners since he came here.”
“Rubbish,” Milo said.
He poured drinks for himself and Phil, and I made my tea; and Phil assured me that if the urine passed all tests he would give the thumbs-up to Dozen Roses.
“He may just be showing the effects of the hard race he had at York,” he said. “It might be that he’s always like this. Some horses are, and we don’t know how much weight he lost.”
“What will you get the urine tested for?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows. “Barbiturates, in this case.”
“At York,” I said thoughtfully, “one of Nicholas Loder’s owners was walking around with an inhaler in his pocket. A kitchen baster, to be precise.”
“An owner?” Phil asked, surprised.
“Yes. He owned the winner of the five-furlong sprint. He was also in the saddling box with Dozen Roses.”
Phil frowned. “What are you implying?”
“Nothing. Merely observing. I can’t believe he interfered with the horse. Nicholas Loder wouldn’t have let him. The stable money was definitely on. They wanted to win, and they knew if it won it would be tested. So the only question is, what
could you give a horse that wouldn’t disqualify it? Give it via an inhaler just before a race?”
“Nothing that would make it go faster. They test for all stimulants.”
“What if you gave it, say, sugar? Glucose? Or adrenaline?”
“You’ve a criminal mind!”
“I just wondered.”
“Glucose would give energy, as to human athletes. It wouldn’t increase speed, though. Adrenaline is more tricky. If it’s given by injection you can see it, because the hairs stand up all round the puncture. But straight into the mucous membranes ... well, I suppose it’s possible.”
“And no trace.”
He agreed. “Adrenaline pours into a horse’s bloodstream naturally anyway, if he’s excited. If he wants to win. If he feels the whip. Who’s to say how much? If you suspected a booster you’d have to take a blood sample in the winner’s enclosure, practically, and even then you’d have a hard job proving any reading was excessive. Adrenaline levels vary too much. You’d even have a hard job proving extra adrenaline made any difference at all.” He paused and considered me soberly. “You do realize that you’re saying that if anything was done, Nicholas Loder condoned it?”
“Doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “If he were some tin-pot little crook, well then, maybe, but not Nicholas Loder with his classic winners and everything to lose.”
“Mm.” I thought a bit. “If I asked, I could get some of the urine sample that was taken from Dozen Roses at York. They always make it available to owners for private checks. To my brother’s company, that is to say, in this instance.” I thought a bit more. “When Nicholas Loder’s s friend dropped his baster, Martha Ostermeyer handed the bulb part back to him, but then Harley Ostermeyer picked up the tube part and gave it to me. But it was clean. No trace of liquid. No adrenaline. So I suppose it’s possible he might have used it on his own horse and still had it in his pocket, but did nothing to Dozen Roses.”
They considered it.
“You could get into a lot of trouble making unfounded accusations,” Phil said.
“So Nicholas Loder told me.”
“Did he? I’d think twice, then, before I did. It wouldn’t do you much good generally in the racing world, I shouldn’t think.”
“Wisdom from babes,” I said, but he echoed my thoughts.
“Yes, old man.”
“I kept the baster tube,” I said shrugging, “but I guess I’ll do just what I did at the races, which was nothing.”
“As long as Dozen Roses tests clean both at York and here, that’s likely best,” Phil said, and Milo, for all his earlier pugnaciousness, agreed.
A commotion in the darkening yard heralded the success of the urine mission and Phil went outside to unclip the special bag and close its patented seal. He wrote and attached the label giving the horse’s name, the location, date and time and signed his name.
“Right,” he said, “I’ll be off. Take care.” He loaded himself, the sample and his gear into his car and with economy of movement scrunched away. I followed soon after with Brad still driving but decided again not to go home.
“You saw the mess in London,” I said. “I got knocked out by whoever did that. I don’t want to be in if they come to Hungerford. So let’s go to Newbury instead, and try The Chequers.”
Brad slowed, his mouth open.
“A week ago yesterday,” I said, “you saved me from a man with a knife. Yesterday someone shot at the car I was in and killed the chauffeur. It may not have been your regulation madman. So last night I slept in Swindon, tonight in Newbury.”
“Yerss,” he said, understanding.
“If you’d rather not drive me anymore, I wouldn’t blame you.”
After a pause, with a good deal of stalwart resolution, he made a statement. “You need me.”
“Yes,” I said. “Until I can walk properly, I do.”
“I’ll drive you, then.”
“Thanks,” I said, and meant it wholeheartedly, and he could hear that, because he nodded twice to himself emphatically and seemed even pleased.
The Chequers Hotel having a room free, I booked in for the night. Brad took himself home in my car, and I spent most of the evening sitting in an armchair upstairs learning my way round the Wizard.
Computers weren’t my natural habitat like they were Greville’s and I hadn’t the same appetite for them. The Wizard’s instructions seemed to take it for granted that everyone reading them would be computer-literate, so it probably took me longer than it might have done to get results.
What was quite clear was that Greville had used the gadget extensively. There were three separate telephone and address lists, a world-time clock, a system for entering daily appointments, a prompt for anniversaries, a calendar flashing with the day’s date, and a provision for storing oddments of information. By plugging in the printer, and after a few false starts, I ended with long printed lists of everything held listed under all the headings, and read them with growing frustration.
None of the addresses or telephone numbers seemed to have anything to do with Antwerp or with diamonds, though the “Business Overseas” list contained many gem merchants’ names from all round the world. None of the appointments scheduled, which stretched back six weeks or more, seemed to be relevant, and there were no entries at all for the Friday he’d gone to Ipswich. There was no reference to Koningin Beatrix.
I thought of my question to June the day she’d found her way to “pearl”: what if it were all in there, stored in secret.
The Wizard’s instruction manual, two hundred pages long, certainly did give lessons in how to lock things away. Entries marked “secret” could be retrieved only by knowing the password which could be any combination of numbers and letters up to seven in all. Forgetting the password meant bidding farewell to the entries: they could never be seen again. They could be deleted unseen, but not printed or brought to the screen.
One could tell if secret files were present, the book said, by the small symbol s, which could be found on the lower righthand side of the screen. I consulted Greville’s screen and found the s there, sure enough.
It would be, I thought. It would have been totally unlike him to have had the wherewithal for secrecy and not used it.
Any combination of numbers or letters up to seven ...
The book suggested 1 2 3 4, but once I’d sorted out the opening moves for unlocking and entered 1 2 3 4 in the space headed “Secret Off,” all I got was a quick dusty answer, “Incorrect Password.”
Damn him, I thought, wearily defeated. Why couldn’t he make any of it easy?
I tried every combination of letters and numbers I thought he might have used but got absolutely nowhere. Clarissa was too long, 12Roses should have been right but wasn’t. To be right the password had to be entered exactly as it had been set, whether in capital letters or lower case. It all took time. In the end I was ready to throw the confounded Wizard across the room, and stared at its perpetual “Incorrect Password” with hatred.
I finally laid it aside and played the tiny tape recorder instead. There was a lot of office chat on the tapes and I couldn’t think why Greville should have bothered to take them home and hide them. Long before I reached the end of the fourth side, I was asleep.
I woke stiffly after a while, unsure for a second where I was. I rubbed my face, looking at my watch, thought about all the constructive thinking I was supposed to be doing and wasn’t, and rewound the second of the baby tapes to listen to what I’d missed. Greville’s voice, talking business to Annette.
The most interesting thing, the only interesting thing about those tapes, I thought, was Greville’s voice. The only way I would ever hear him again.
“... going out to lunch,” he was saying. “I’ll be back by two-thirty.”
Annette’s voice said, “Yes, Mr. Franklin.”
A click sounded on the tape.
Almost immediately, because of the concertina-ing of ti
me by the voice-activated mechanism, a different voice said, “I’m in his office now and I can’t find them. He hides everything, he’s security mad, you know that.” Click. “I can’t ask. He’d never tell me, and I don’t think he trusts me.” Click. “Po-faced Annette doesn’t sneeze unless he tells her to. She’d never tell me anything.” Click. “I’ll try. I’ll have to go, he doesn’t like me using this phone, he’ll be back from lunch any second.” Click.
End of tape.
Bloody hell, I thought. I rewound the end of the tape and listened to it again. I knew the voice, as Greville must have done. He’d left the recorder on, I guessed by mistake, and he’d come back and listened, with I supposed sadness, to treachery. It opened up a whole new world of questions and I went slowly to bed groping toward answers.
I lay a long time awake. When I slept, I dreamed the usual surrealist muddle and found it no help, but around dawn awake again and thinking of Greville, it occurred to me that there was one password I hadn’t tried because I hadn’t thought of him using it.
The Wizard was across the room by the armchair. Impelled by curiosity I turned on the light, rolled out of bed and hopped over to fetch it. Taking it back with me, I switched it on, pressed the buttons, found “Secret Off” and into the offered space typed the word Greville had written on the last page of his racing diary, below the numbers of his passport and national insurance.
DEREK, all in capital letters.
I typed DEREK and pressed “Enter,” and the Wizard with resignation let me into its data.
15
I began printing out everything in the secret files as it seemed from the manual that, particularly as regarded the expense organizer, it was the best way to get at the full information stored there.
Each category had to be printed separately, the baby printer clicking away line by line and not very fast. I watched its steady output with fascination, hoping the small roll of paper would last to the end, as I hadn’t any more.
From the Memo section, which I printed first, came a terse note, “Check, don’t trust.”
Next came a long list of days and dates which seemed to bear no relation to anything. Monday, Jan. 30, Wednesday, March 8 ... Mystified I watched the sequence lengthen, noticing only that most of them were Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, five or six weeks apart, sometimes less, sometimes longer. The list ended five weeks before his death, and it began ... it began, I thought blankly, four years earlier. Four years ago; when he first met Clarissa.