Straight

by Dick Francis

  The front door bell rang, which surprised me. It was too early to be Clarissa: Brad couldn’t have done the errand and got to the Selfridge and back in the time he’d been gone.

  I hopped along to the door and looked through the peephole, and was astounded to see Nicholas Loder on the doorstep. Behind him, on the path, stood his friend Rollo Rollway, looking boredly around at the small garden.

  In some dismay I opened the door and Nicholas Loder immediately said, “Oh, good. You’re in. We happened to be dining in London so as we’d time to spare I thought we’d come round on the off-chance to discuss Gemstones, rather than negotiate on the telephone.”

  “But I haven’t named a price,” I said.

  “Never mind. We can discuss that. Can we come in?”

  I shifted backward reluctantly.

  “Well, yes,” I said, looking at my watch. “But not for long. I have another appointment pretty soon.”

  “So have we,” he assured me. He turned round and waved a beckoning arm to his friend. “Come on, Rollo, he has time to see us.”

  Rollway, looking as if the enterprise were not to his liking, came up the steps and into the house. I turned to lead the way along the passage, ostentatiously not closing the front door behind them as a big hint to them not to stay long.

  “The room’s in a mess,” I warned them over my shoulder. “We had a burglar.”

  “We?” Nicholas Loder said.

  “Greville and L”

  “Oh.”

  He said “Oh” again when he saw the chrysanthemum pot wedged in the television, but Rollway blinked around in an uninterested fashion as if he saw houses in chaos every day of the week.

  Rollway at close quarters wasn’t any more attractive than Rollway at a distance: a dull, dark lump of a man, thickset, middle-aged and humorless. One could only explain his friendship with the charismatic Loder, I thought, in terms of trainer-owner relationship.

  “This is Thomas Rollway,” Nicholas Loder said to me, making belated introductions. “One of my owners. He’s very interested in buying Gemstones.”

  Rollway didn’t look very interested in anything.

  “I’d offer you a drink,” I said, “but the burglar broke all the bottles.”

  Nicholas Loder looked vaguely at the chunks of glass on the carpet. There had been no diamonds in the bottles. Waste of booze.

  “Perhaps we could sit down,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  He sat in Greville’s armchair and Rollway perched on the arm of the second armchair, which effectively left me the one upright hard one. I sat on the edge of it, wanting them to hurry, laying the second crutch aside.

  I looked at Loder, big, light-haired with brownish eyes, full of ability and not angry with me as he had been in the recent past. It was almost with guilt that I thought of the cocaine analyses going on behind his back when his manner toward me was more normal than at any time since Greville’s death. If he’d been like that from the beginning, I’d have seen no reason to have had the tests done.

  “Gemstones,” he said, “what do you want for him?”

  I’d seen in the Saxony Franklin ledgers what Gemstones had cost as a yearling, but that had little bearing on his worth two years later. He’d won one race. He was no bright star. I doubled his cost and asked for that.

  Nicholas Loder laughed with irony. “Come on, Derek. Half.”

  “Half is what he cost Greville originally,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed momentarily and then opened innocently. “So we’ve been doing our homework!” He actually smiled. “I’ve promised Rollo a reasonable horse at a reasonable price. We all know Gemstones is no world-beater, but there are more races in him. His cost price is perfectly fair. More than fair.”

  I thought it quite likely was indeed fair, but Saxony Franklin needed every possible penny.

  “Meet me halfway,” I said, “and he’s yours.”

  Nicholas raised his eyebrows at his friend for a decision: “Rollo?”

  Rollo’s attention seemed to be focused more on the crutch I’d earlier propped unused against a wall rather than on the matter in hand.

  “Gemstones is worth that,” Nicholas Loder said to him judiciously, and I thought in amusement that he would get me as much as he could in order to earn himself a larger commission. Trade with the enemy, I thought: build mutual-benefit bridges.

  “I don’t want Gemstones at any price,” Rollo said, and they were the first words he’d uttered since arriving. His voice was harsh and curiously flat, without inflection. Without emotion, I thought.

  Nicholas Loder protested, “But that’s why you wanted to come here! It was your idea to come here.”

  Thomas Rollway, as if absentmindedly, stood and picked up the abandoned crutch, turning it upside down and holding it by the end normally near the floor. Then, as if the thought had at that second occurred to him, he bent his knees and swung the crutch round forcefully in scything movement a bare four inches above the carpet.

  It was so totally unexpected that I wasn’t quick enough to avoid it. The elbow-rest and cuff crashed into my left ankle and Rollway came after it like a bull, kicking, punching, overbalancing me, knocking me down.

  I was flabbergasted more than frightened, and then furious. It seemed senseless, without reason, unprovoked, out of any sane proportion. Over Rollway’s shoulder I glimpsed Nicholas Loder looking dumbfounded, his mouth and eyes stretched open, uncomprehending.

  As I struggled to get up, Thomas Rollway reached inside his jacket and produced a handgun; twelve inches of it at least, with the thickened shape of a silencer on the business end.

  “Keep still,” he said to me, pointing the barrel at my chest.

  A gun ... Simms ... I began dimly to understand and to despair pretty deeply.

  Nicholas Loder was shoving himself out of his armchair.

  “What are you doing?” His voice was high with alarm, with rising panic.

  “Sit down, Nick,” his friend said. “Don’t get up.” And such was the grindingly heavy tone of his unemotional voice that Nicholas Loder subsided, looking overthrown, not believing what was happening.

  “But you came to buy his horse,” he said weakly.

  “I came to kill him.”

  Rollway said it dispassionately, as if it were nothing. But then, he’d tried to before.

  Loder’s consternation became as deep as my own.

  Rollway moved his gun and pointed it at my ankle. I immediately shifted it, trying desperately to get up, and he brought the spitting end back fast into alignment with my heart.

  “Keep still,” he said again. His eyes coldly considered me as I half sat, half lay on the floor, propped on my elbow and without any weapon within reach, not even the one crutch I’d been using. Then, with as little warning as for his first attack, he stamped hard on my ankle and for good measure ground away with his heel as if putting out a cigarette butt. After that he left his shoe where it was, pressing down on it with his considerable weight.

  I swore at him and couldn’t move, and thought idiotically, feeling things give way inside there, that it would take me a lot longer now to get fit, and that took my mind momentarily off a bullet that I would feel a lot less, anyway.

  “But why?” Nicholas Loder asked, wailing. “Why are you doing this?”

  Good question.

  Rollway answered it.

  “The only successful murders,” he said, “are those for which there appears to be no motive.”

  It sounded like something he’d learned on a course. Something surrealistic. Monstrous.

  Nicholas Loder, sitting rigidly to my right in Greville’s chair, said with an uneasy attempt at a laugh, “You’re kidding, Rollo, aren’t you? This is some sort of joke?”

  Rollo was not kidding. Rollo, standing determinedly on my ankle between me and the door, said to me, “You picked up a piece of my property at York races. When I found it was missing I went back to look for it. An official told me you’d put it
in your pocket. I want it back.”

  I said nothing.

  Damn the official, I thought. So helpful. So deadly. I hadn’t even noticed one watching.

  Nicholas Loder, bewildered, said, “What piece of property ?”

  “The tube part of the inhaler,” Rollway told him.

  “But that woman, Mrs. Ostermeyer, gave it back to your. ”

  “Only the bulb. I didn’t notice the tube had dropped as well. Not until after the race. After the Stewards’ inquiry.”

  “But what does it matter?”

  Rollway pointed his gun unwaveringly at where it would do me fatal damage and answered the question without taking his gaze from my face.

  “You yourself, Nick,” he informed him, “told me you were worried about Franklin, he was observant and too bright.”

  “But that was because I gelded Dozen Roses.”

  “So when I found he had the inhaler, I asked one or two other people their opinion of Derek Franklin as a person, not a jockey, and they all said the same. Brainy. Intelligent. Bright.” He paused. “I don’t like that.”

  I was thinking that through the door, down the passage and in the street there was sanity and Wednesday and rain and rush hour all going on as usual. Saturn was just as accessible.

  “I don’t believe in waiting for trouble,” Rollway said. “And dead men can’t make accusations.” He stared at me. “Where’s the tube?”

  I didn’t answer for various reasons. If he took murder so easily in his stride and I told him I’d sent the tube to Phil Urquhart I could be sentencing Phil to death too, and besides, if I opened my mouth for any reason what might come out wasn’t words at all but something between a yell and a groan, a noise I could hear loudly in my head but which wasn’t important either, or not as important as getting out of the sickening prospect of the next few minutes.

  “But he would never have suspected ...” Loder feebly said.

  “Of course he did. Anyone would. Why do you think he’s had that bodyguard glued to him? Why do you think he’s been dodging about so I can’t find him and not going home? And he had the horse’s urine taken in Lambourn for testing, and there’s the official sample too at York. I tell you, I’m not waiting for him to make trouble. I’m not going to jail, I’ll tell you.”

  “But you wouldn’t.”

  “Be your age, Nick,” Rollway said caustically. “I import the stuff. I take the risks. And I get rid of trouble as soon as I see it. If you wait too long, trouble can destroy you.”

  Nicholas Loder said in wailing protest, “I told you it wasn’t necessary to give it to horses. It doesn’t make them go faster.”

  “Rubbish. You can’t tell, because it isn’t much done. No one can afford it except people like me. I’m swamped with the stuff at the moment, it’s coming in in bulk from the Medellfn cartel in Madrid ... Where’s the tube?” he finished, bouncing his weight up and down.

  If not telling him would keep me alive a bit longer, I wasn’t going to try telling him I’d thrown it away.

  “You can’t just shoot him,” Nicholas Loder said despairingly. “Not with me watching.” .

  “You’re no danger to me, Nick,” Rollway said flatly. “Where would you go for your little habit? One squeak from you would mean your own ruin. I’d see you went down for possession. For conniving with me to drug horses. They’d take your license away for that. Nicholas Loder, trainer of Classic winners, down in the gutter.” He paused. “You’ll keep quiet, we both know it.”

  The threats were none the lighter for being uttered in a measured unexcited monotone. He made my hair bristle. Heaven knew what effect he had on Loder.

  He wouldn’t wait much longer, I thought, for me to tell him where the tube was; and maybe the tube would in the end indeed be his downfall, because Phil knew whose it was, and that the Ostermeyers had been witnesses, and if I were found shot perhaps he would light a long fuse ... but it wasn’t of much comfort at that moment.

  With the strength of desperation I rolled my body and with my right foot kicked hard at Rollway’s leg. He grunted and took his weight off my ankle and I pulled away from him, shuffling backward, trying to reach the chair I’d been sitting on to use it as a weapon against him, or at least not to lie there supinely waiting to be slaughtered, and I saw him recover his rocked balance and begin to straighten his arm, aiming and looking along the barrel so as not to miss.

  That unmistakable stance was going to be the last thing I would see: and the last emotion I would feel would be the blazing fury of dying for so pointless a cause.

  Nicholas Loder, also seeing that it was the moment of irretrievable crisis, sprang with horror from the armchair and shouted urgently, “No, no. Rollo. No, don’t do it!”

  It might have been the droning of a gnat for all the notice Rollo paid him.

  Nicholas Loder took a few paces forward and grabbed at Rollway and at his aiming arm.

  I took the last opportunity to get my hands on something—anything—and got my fingers on a crutch.

  “I won’t let you,” Nicholas Loder frantically persisted. “You mustn’t!”

  Rollo shook him off and swung his gun back to me.

  “No!” Loder was terribly disturbed. Shocked. Almost frenzied. “It’s wrong. I won’t let you!” He put his body against Rollway’s, trying to push him away.

  Rollway shrugged him off, all bull-muscle and undeterrable. Then, very fast, he pointed the gun straight at Nicholas Loder’s chest and without pausing pulled the trigger. Pulled it twice.

  I heard the rapid phut, phut. Saw Nicholas Loder fall, saw the blankness on his face, the absolute astonishment.

  There was no time to waste on terror, though I felt it. I gripped the crutch I’d reached and swung the heavier end of it at Rollway’s right hand, and landed a blow fierce enough to make him drop the gun.

  It fell out of my reach.

  I stretched for it and rolled and scrambled but he was upright and much faster, and he bent down and took it into his hand again with a tight look of fury as hot as my own.

  He began to lift his arm again in my direction and again I whipped at him with the crutch and again hit him. He didn’t drop the gun that time but transferred it to his left hand and shook out the fingers of his right hand as if they hurt, which I hoped to God they did.

  I slashed at his legs. Another hit. He retreated a couple of paces and with his left hand began to take aim. I slashed at him. The gun barrel wavered. When he pulled the trigger, the flame spat out and the bullet missed me.

  He was still between me and the door.

  Ankle or not, I thought, once I was on my feet I’d smash him down and out of the way and run, run ... run into the street ...

  I had to get up. Got as far as my knees. Stood up on my right foot. Put down the left. It wasn’t a matter of pain. I didn’t feel it. It just buckled. It needed the crutch’s help ... and I needed the crutch to fight against his gun, to hop and shuffle forward and hack at him, to put off the inevitable moment, to fight until I was dead.

  A figure appeared abruptly in the doorway, seen peripherally in my vision.

  Clarissa.

  I’d forgotten she was coming.

  “Run,” I shouted agonizedly, “Run. Get away.”

  It startled Rollway. I’d made so little noise. He seemed to think the instructions were for himself. He sneered. I kept my eyes on his gun and lunged at it, making his aim swing wide again at a crucial second. He pulled the trigger. Flame. Phut. The bullet zipped over my shoulder and hit the wall.

  “Run,” I yelled again with fearful urgency. “Quick. Oh, be quick.”

  Why didn’t she run? He’d see her if he turned.

  He would kill her.

  Clarissa didn’t run. She brought her hand out of her raincoat pocket holding a thing like a black cigar and she swung her arm in a powerful arc like an avenging fury. Out of the black tube sprang the fearsome telescopic silvery springs with a knob on the end, and the kiyoga smashed against the side o
f Rollway’s skull.

  He fell without a sound. Fell forward, cannoning into me, knocking me backward. I ended on the floor, sitting, his inert form stomach-down over my shins.

  Clarissa came down on her knees beside me, trembling violently, very close to passing out. I was breathless, shattered, trembling like her. It seemed ages before either of us was able to speak. When she could, it was a whisper, low and distressed.

  “Derek ...”

  “Thanks,” I said jerkily, “for saving my life.”

  “Is he dead?” She was looking with fear at Rollway’s head, strain in her eyes, in her neck, in her voice.

  “I don’t care if he is,” I said truthfully.

  “But I ... I hit him.”

  “I’ll say I did it. Don’t worry. I’ll say I hit him with the crutch.”

  She said waveringly, “You can’t.”

  “Of course I can. I meant to, if I could.”

  I glanced over at Nicholas Loder, and Clarissa seemed to see him for the first time. He was on his back, unmoving.

  “Dear God,” she said faintly, her face even paler. “Who’s that?”

  I introduced her posthumously to Nicholas Loder, racehorse trainer and then to Thomas Rollway, drug baron. They’d squirted cocaine into Dozen Roses, I said, struggling for lightness. I’d found them out. Rollway wanted me dead rather than giving evidence against him. He’d said so.

  Neither of the men contested the charges, though Rollway at least was alive, I thought. I could feel his breathing on my legs. A pity, on the whole. I told Clarissa, which made her feel a shade happier.

  Clarissa still held the kiyoga. I touched her hand, brushing my fingers over hers, grateful beyond expression for her courage. Greville had given her the kiyoga. He couldn’t have known it would keep me alive. I took it gently out of her grasp and let it lie on the carpet.

  “Phone my car,” I said. “If Brad hasn’t gone too far, he’ll come back.”

  “But...”

  “He’ll take you safely back to the Selfridge. Phone quickly.”

  “I can’t just ... leave you.”

  “How would you explain being here, to the police?”

  She looked at me in dismay and obstinacy—“I can’t ...»