by Dick Francis
I flung him back hard into his chair, knocking the wind out of him, and then I reached over and switched off his microphone. I wasn’t anxious that either the police or the taxi drivers should overhear what I was going to say.
There was a crackle as I brushed against his coat. I pulled it open. A folded piece of brown paper protruded from an inner pocket, and I tugged it out and-spread it open on the desk. He was gasping for breath and didn’t try to stop me. I read what was on it.
Joe’s address.
I turned it over. In one corner on the other side, scribbled carelessly as if someone were not sure of the spelling and had used the nearest piece of paper to try them out on, were the words:
Chichen Itza
Chitchen Itsa
Chitsen
Not chickens, not Chichester. Chichen Itza. I had the vaguest memory of having heard it before. It was the name of an emperor I thought; and it meant nothing to me, nothing. Yet Joe had died for it.
I left the paper on the desk, and hoped that the police would find it useful.
The hysteria had drained out of Uncle George. He looked suddenly ill and old, now that his day was done. I could summon no compassion for him, all the same: but then it was not regard for Kate’s uncle that had brought me into the Marconicar office, but love for Kate herself.
‘The police will be here in less than a minute’ I said, speaking slowly and distinctly. He shifted in his seat and made a sharp helpless gesture with his pudgy hands I went on, ‘They have been listening in to what you have been saying on the radio.’
Uncle George’s eyes widened. ‘Twenty-three,’ he said, with a remnant of anger. ‘Twenty-three hasn’t answered my last few calls.’
I nodded. I said, ‘You will be charged with incitement to murder. Gaol for life, at least.’ I paused. ‘Think,’ I said with emphasis. ‘Think of your wife. You did it all for her, didn’t you, so that she could go on living in the luxury she was used to?’ I was guessing, but I felt sure it was true, and he didn’t deny it.
‘You have shielded her from reality too long,’ I said. ‘What will it do to her, if you are arrested and tried, and maybe hanged?’
Or to Kate either, I added hopelessly to myself.
Uncle George listened and stared at me, and slowly his gaze fell to the pistol I still held in my hand.
‘It’s quicker,’ I said.
There was a short silence.
Very faintly in the distance I heard an alarm bell. Uncle George heard it too. He looked up. He hated me still, but he had come to the end of the line, and he knew it.
‘The police,’ I said. The bell grew perceptibly louder.
I took the three steps across to the door, turned, and tossed the gun back into Uncle George’s lap. As his stubby fingers fumbled and clutched it I went through the door, closed it, and ran down the stairs. The front door was still open. I hurried through that and pulled it shut behind me. The police alarm bells were no longer ringing.
In the shadow of the building I slipped along into the dark porch of the next-door house; and I was only just in time. Two police cars slowed, crawled, and halted in front of the Marconicar building.
Over in the Olde Oake Café the lights were out. The plump waitress had gone home.
There had been no sound from upstairs. I shivered, struck by the horrifying thought that Uncle George, having already screwed himself once to pull the trigger, might just possibly shoot a policeman instead of himself. With the gun I had so thoughtfully given back to him.
As the doors of the police cars slammed open and the black figures poured out I took the first step towards them to warn them that their quarry was armed. But Uncle George’s devotion to Aunt Deb’s interests remained steadfast after all. I thought that the single crashing shot in the room behind the neon sign was the best thing he had ever done for her sake.
I waited for a few minutes in my dark doorway, and while I stood there a small crowd began to collect on the pavement, drawn by the noise of the shots and the presence of the police cars. I slipped unhurriedly among them, and after a little while walked quietly away.
Round two or three turnings I found a telephone box and stepped inside, feeling in my pocket for coins. The calls to Lodge had taken all my small change, and for a moment I looked blankly at the threepenny piece and two halfpennies which were all I could dredge from my trouser pocket. Then I remembered my cosh. I untied the sock, tipped some of the pennies out on to my hand, pushed four of them into the slot, and asked the operator for Pete’s number.
He answered at the second ring.
He said, ‘Thank God you’ve rung. Where the hell have you been?’
‘Touring Sussex.’
‘And where’s Admiral?’
‘Well… I left him tied to a tree somewhere in the heathland,’ I said.
Pete began to splutter, but I interrupted him.
‘Can you send the horse-box to collect him? Get the driver to come down to Brighton and pick me up on the sea-front, near the main pier. And Pete… have you got a decent map of Sussex?’
‘A map? Are you mad? Don’t you know where you left him? Have you really just tied the best hunter ’chaser in the country to a tree and forgotten where?’ He sounded exasperated.
‘I’ll find him easily if you send a map. Don’t be too long, will you? I’ll tell you all about it later. It’s a bit complicated.’
I put down the receiver, and after some thought, rang up the Blue Duck. Ex-Regimental Sergeant-Major Thomkins answered the ’phone himself.
‘The enemy is routed, sergeant-major,’ I said. ‘The Marconicars are out of business.’
‘A lot of people will be thankful to hear it,’ said the strong deep voice, with a good deal of warmth.
I went on, ‘However, the mopping up operations are still in progress. Would you be interested in taking charge of a prisoner and delivering him to the police?’
‘I would indeed,’ he said.
‘Meet me down at the main pier, then, at the double, and I’ll gen you up.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said the sergeant-major.
He joined me by the sea wall soon after I got there myself. It was quite dark by then, and the lights along the front barely lit the ghostly grey lines of the breaking waves.
We had not long to wait for the horse-box, and when it came, Pete himself poked his big bald head out of the passenger seat and called to me. He, I and the sergeant-major got into the back and sat on a couple of straw bales, and as we swayed to the movement of the box on its way west I told them all that had happened since the day Bill died at Maidenhead. All, that is, up to my last conversation with Lodge. Of my visit to the Marconicar office and the true identity of Claud Thiveridge, I said nothing. I didn’t know how English law viewed the crime of inciting to suicide, and for various reasons had decided to tell no one about it.
Parts of the story Pete already knew, and part Thomkins knew, but I had to go over the whole thing for them both to get it clear from first to last.
Thé horse-box driver had been given my note of the all-important sign post, and by comparing it with the map Pete had brought, he drove us back to it in remarkably short time.
Both Admiral and Corny Blake were still attached to their various trees, and we led one and frog-marched the other into the horse-box. Admiral was overjoyed to see us, but Blake’s emotions seemed slightly mixed, especially when he recognised Thomkins. It appeared that it was Blake who had bashed the sergeant-major on the head with one of his own bottles.
With a grin I fished Blake’s brass knuckleduster out of my pocket and handed it to Thomkins. ‘The prisoner’s armoury,’ I said.
Thomkins tossed the wicked-looking weapon in his hand and tried it on for size, and Blake gave one agonised look at it and rolled off his bale of straw in a dead faint.
‘We had better go round by West Sussex racecourse, if you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘My car is still in the car park there; I hope.’
It was there, all alone i
n the big field, the rising moon glinting on its low dark shape. I stepped down into the road, shook hands with Thomkins and Pete, wished them luck, and watched the red tail lights of the horse-box until they disappeared into the darkness.
Then I went over and started my car, turned my back firmly on what was doubtless my duty—the answering of interminable questions in Brighton police station—and with a purring roar set off for the Cotswolds.
Driven by an irresistible curiosity, I made a detour along the coast to Portsmouth, taking a chance that the public library would still be open there; and it was. In the reference department I hefted out a volume of an encyclopaedia and looked up Chichen Itza. The first spelling on the paper was the right one.
Chichen Itza, I found, was not an emperor; it was a capital city. It was the ancient Yucatan capital of the Mayas, an Indian nation who had flourished in Central America fifteen hundred years ago.
I stared at the page until the words faded into a blur.
What happened next was partly, I supposed, delayed reaction from the abysmal fear I felt when I looked into the barrel of Uncle George’s gun; and partly it was hunger and a wave of deathly tiredness, and the sudden letting up of the stresses of the past weeks. My hands, my whole body began to shake. I braced my foot against the leg of the table I was sitting at and gripped the big book hard to stop it. It went on for minutes, until I could have cried with weakness, but gradually the spasm lessened, and the tension went out of my muscles, and I was just plain cold.
Chichen Itza. I stood up stiffly and closed the book and put it back on the shelf, and went soberly out to the car. I had set a better trap than I knew, pretending to be on the point of understanding what Joe might have said before he died.
I remembered clearly the study lined with glass cases. I could see the heavy carved oak desk, the folders devoted to Indian tribes, and the one separate folder clearly marked ‘Mayas’. Uncle George had told me too much about the Mayas: and he’d known that Chichen Itza would lead me conclusively to him.
EIGHTEEN
What I had not managed to do for Kate by loving her, I had done by tearing her world apart.
She stood in front of me, rigidly controlling herself, with a look of such acrid unrelenting hatred that I tasted my misery literally as a bitterness in the mouth. The banked fires were burning fiercely at last. There was a new depth and maturity in her face, as if in two weeks she had become wholly a woman. It made her more desirable than ever.
The inquest and enquiry into the life and death of George Penn had been adjourned twice, and had just ended; and police, witnesses, and Kate and I were standing in the hall of the Brighton court building, preparing to leave.
The verdict of temporary insanity was merciful, but there had been no hiding from news-scenting journalists the extent of Uncle George’s criminal activities, and L. C. Perth and Marconicars had been front page news, on and off, for a fortnight.
My getting Uncle George to kill himself had been no help after all to Aunt Deb. It had been impossible to keep the truth from her, and shock and distress had brought on a series of heart attacks, of which the fourth was fatal. But for Kate, though she knew nothing about it, it was still the best thing. She had had to face the knowledge of his guilt, but not his trial and punishment.
But my letters of condolence had been unanswered. My telephone calls had regularly found her ‘out.’ And now I saw why. She blamed me alone for the sorrows which had come to her.
‘I loathe you,’ she said implacably. ‘You nauseate me. You wormed your way into our house and accepted everything we gave you…’ I thought of those gentle kisses, and so, from the extra flash in her eyes, did Kate… ‘and all you have done in return is to hound a poor old man to his death, and kill a defenceless old woman as a result. I have no Uncle and no Aunt. I have no one anywhere at all. I have no one.’ She spoke in anguish. ‘Why did you do it? Why couldn’t you leave them alone? Why did you have to destroy my home? You knew how much I loved them. I can’t bear to look at you, I loathe you so much…’
I swallowed, and tried to work some saliva into my dry mouth. I said ‘Do you remember the children who had to be driven to school by a judo expert to keep them safe?’
But Kate stared blackly back as if she hadn’t heard. ‘You are the most beastly person I have ever known, and although you have made it impossible for me to forget you, I shall never think of you without… without…’ Her throat moved convulsively as if she were going to be sick. She turned away abruptly and walked unsteadily out through the big main door into the street.
The flash of camera bulbs met her and caught her unawares, and I saw her throw up her arm in a forlorn attempt to hide her face. The vulnerability and the loneliness in the droop of her shoulders cried out for comfort, and I, who most wanted to give it, was the only person she wouldn’t accept it from. I watched her walk quickly through the questioning newspapermen and get into the hired car which was waiting for her.
It drove off. I stared after it, numbly.
Presently I became aware that Lodge was standing at my elbow and had been talking for some seconds. I hadn’t heard a word he said, and he appeared to be waiting for a reply.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’
Lodge glanced out through the door where Kate had gone and sighed. ‘It wasn’t very important… Look, she’ll see things more reasonably in a little while, when she begins to think straight again. I heard a good deal of what she said… but you aren’t to blame because her uncle took to crime.’
‘If I had known…’ I stopped, on the verge of adding the give-away words ‘for sure’: ‘If I had known that George Penn was Claud Thiveridge, I would have done things differently.’
‘Things worked out well for the Penns, I think,’ said Lodge. ‘A quick end has its mercies.’
His tone was loaded with meaning, and I knew that he half guessed what part I had played in Uncle George’s death. He had several times earlier remarked that my disappearance from Brighton at the moment of success was out of character, and had shown polite scepticism over my excuse that I was growing anxious about my horse. He had mentioned pointedly that the Brighton police, listening in the Marconicar taxi to Uncle George’s ravings, had heard a faint murmur (indistinguishable) in the background, a single shot, and nothing more. They had not been able to account for this, apart from later finding the microphone switched off and a bullet in the wall, and had come to the conclusion that Uncle George had been testing the old pistol to see if it were in working order. The shot had, however, brought them in haste to the Marconicar building, where they had arrived just in time to hear him shoot himself.
‘You may be right,’ I said non-commitally to Lodge. His eyelids flickered, and he smiled and changed the subject.
‘The Marconicar drivers come up in court again this week. You’ll be there to give evidence, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, not liking the prospect.
All the drivers who had been looking for me had been alarmed by the shot and the silence on their radios. Some had begun to drive back to Brighton, some had made for London, and one or two had left their taxis and started out on foot. But all had quickly been rounded up, as following the rather vague directions I had phoned to Lodge, the police had begun making road blocks round them while they were still listening to Uncle George. Now the drivers faced charges ranging from intimidation and grievous bodily harm to murder itself.
Records discovered in Uncle George’s study, inside a folder marked with gory humour ‘Notes on Human Sacrifices,’ made it clear that Joe Nantwich had indeed been knifed by the man who had been wearing my tie.
And Uncle George’s motives were now clear too. Keeping up old standards of luxury had been too much for his income after the war, and instead of making Aunt Deb face reality, or facing it himself, he had gradually spent most of his capital. With almost the last of it he had bought Marconicars and launched into crime. He had directed everything through F
ielder and had apparently never seen with his own eyes the brutal results of his orders. I doubted whether his misdeeds had seemed either more or less real to him than the primitive barbarities he spent his time studying.
The police had found neat lists, in files going back four years, of the money he had collected from the little terrorised businesses; and occasionally against the name of a café or a shop or a pub, Lodge told me, was written the single word, ‘Persuaded.’
The racing record was shorter and contained lists of sums of money which the police did not know the purpose of; but one sheet headed ‘Joe Nantwich’ was clear enough. It was a list of dates and amounts, of which the smallest was one hundred pounds. And underneath was drawn a thick line, with the words: ‘Account closed’ printed in Uncle George’s neat handwriting.
With Kate gone, the press men had drifted away. Their fun was over.
‘Are you ready to go?’ I asked Lodge. I had picked him up in Maidenhead on my way down. He nodded, and we went out to my car.
I drive fastest when I’m happy. That day I had no trouble at all in keeping within the speed limit through all the twisty Sussex villages; and Lodge endured my gloomy silence without comment half the way back to Maidenhead.
Finally he said, ‘Miss Ellery-Penn was very useful to her uncle. Everything you did in pursuing him went straight back to him through her. No wonder he was so well informed about your movements.’
I had lived with this thought for a long time now; but hearing someone else speak it aloud had a most extraordinary effect. A tingle ran up my spine and set my brain suddenly alive, as if an alarm bell were ringing in my subconscious.
We were running through scrub and heathland. I slowed, swung the car off the road on to the peaty verge, and stopped. Lodge looked at me questioningly.
‘What you said… I want to think,’ I said.
He waited a while in silence, and then said, ‘What’s worrying you? The case is over. There are no more mysteries.’