by Steve Reeder
Outside the workshop, a crowd had gathered around the Robinson siblings. Some to find out about the new rider in their team, but most to look at, chat up, or hit on Michele, depending on how they rated their chances. Michele, I was happy to see, politely rebuffed them all.
“All right you lot, all right,” Rodber growled. “I’ll put her in a tight T-shirt and mini skirt and have her stand on the grid at the next race, but for the moment you can all get back to work, or we won’t make it to the grid at all.” He waved the crowd away and came to a halt before Brett. Michele gave him a frosty smile, which was ignored.
“Josh Rodber,” he stated. “Welcome to Rodber racing. This is Bud. He’s my team manager. Anything you need, talk to Bud. OK?” Brett nodded. “Come into the office, why don’t you and we’ll have a chat.” He told the rest of us to have a look around if we felt like it, and led Brett back into the office, with Michele following. I stood looking at Bud for a moment. He shrugged.
“OK. He’s not Mr Personality, but he’s paying lots of money for everything you see around here, so that makes him all right.”
“Why exactly is he getting into bike racing?” I asked.
“It used to be a passion of his twenty odd years ago. He’s spent the last twenty-two years building up Rodber Engineering Design Plc. Now he’s made a mint of money when the company was listed on the stock exchange six months ago, and he’s decided to indulge his old enthusiasm for fast motorbikes.”
I considered this for a moment. “Strange, but he doesn’t seem the type. He seems very much like a businessman still, rather than a racing nut,” I said.
“You know yourself it is big business these days, Simon. He’s as keen as the rest of us, and he means to win. I guess having been at the top of a competitive business like he has, he just finds it hard to adapt. Besides, as I said, we’ve had a couple of problems here.”
“Such as what?” Bud didn’t seem like he was going to spill the details without prompting. So I prompted him. He thought for a long ten seconds and then finally said reluctantly “Two weeks ago the workshops were gutted by fire.” He indicated the converted barn behind me. “Then one of our vans that we use for general transport of spares and what-have-you, was run off the road by a gent who looked a bit Arabic, like.”
“Why would you assume he was Arabic?” I asked. “He could just have been dark skinned.” Bud thought for a moment longer, then, “Rodber’s had some problem with one of the Middle Eastern states. Something to do with a design patent that the Sultan or Sheikh, or whatever he is, claims is his, but Rodber’s got it. He designed it, like.”
I thought about that while Bud stared at his feet, busy with his own thoughts. I hoped the kid wasn’t getting involved with someone in industrial espionage. I said as much to my old friend. His head jerked up in outrage at my suggestion.
“Do you think I would be here if I thought there was something illegal going on?” he demanded.
“No, I guess not. Sorry if it sounded like I was thinking that, Bud. What is the Arab’s complaint, then?”
“Tell you the truth, Simon, I’m not exactly sure of the details. Just that Rodber is determined not to give this geezer the design. He says it’s his, and that it has nothing to do with anyone else.” That seemed fair enough I suppose, but if that was the case, had anybody done anything about it, like tell the police? I asked Bud.
“We’ve told them that that is what happened, for insurance purposes, but not why or who. Rodber seems to think that this foreigner will stop his nonsense soon. He thinks he’s just pissed off and taking a swipe at him, like. Not much this Arab fellow can do is there? If Rodber holds the patent, and the design itself, what can he do?”
That may be true enough I thought, although it depended on how much the Arab wanted the patent, and how far he was prepared to go to get it. Sometimes, if you are the head of your own little country, you get to think that normal laws don’t apply to you. I thought about tackling Rodber himself on the subject, before remembering that it was nothing to do with me, anyway.
Come to think of it, I didn’t have much excuse to stay here anymore. I had delivered my charges, and Rodber had said they would be put up in the main house, which apparently was somewhere at the back of the old farmhouse-cum-racing H.Q, and had nine bedrooms. It also had a sauna and spa as well as a squash court. Nice what a few million quid will get you these days.
I looked round to find Michele, Brett too, to bid them farewell. Naturally I was hoping for a fond farewell from one of them - not Brett - and an invite to come visit again. Neither was in sight, so I went looking.
What I found was a secretary with pink hair who told me that Josh had them both in his office giving them the ‘welcome to my empire’ speech. Her words not mine. If I would wait a while she would be most pleased to find me some drinkable coffee. I accepted, and strolled around the office enquiring after peoples’ duties and equipment, and generally making a nuisance of myself.
Finally, deciding that the staff was becoming tired of my presence, I phoned a local bed and breakfast inn, and booked myself a room. I left a message with pink hair asking Michele to phone me as soon after six as she could, and then drove off in my borrowed car to find the B&B.
I was dozing in my rented room when the phone rang. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.
“Hello?” I said, trying to sound human.
“Mr Roberts, there is a call for you. I’ll put it through now,” Mrs Michael, the owner of the Inn said, in my ear.
“Thank you.” The phone clicked. “Hello?” I said again. Definitely more human-like second time around.
“Oh dear, did I wake you?” Her voice purred delightfully in my ear. “Sorry,” Michele said, sounding not a bit sorry.
“Yeah, right, you don’t sound a bit sorry. You just take delight in waking up sleeping old men, don’t you?” I replied. She laughed lightly down the phone line.
“You did leave a message asking me to call. I’m just obeying your every whim.”
“Hmm. I should be so lucky. But since you’re in the mood to do as I beg of you, get dressed in your sexiest evening gown, and I’ll take you out to dinner, OK?”
“I don’t even have an evening gown. Not with me, anyway. Besides, where would we go, out here in the sticks?” As neither she nor her brother had been to England before, I could understand her thinking that where she was staying was miles from anywhere. In truth, it was impossible to be far from anywhere in Southern England
“In the sticks? Dear girl, you are just down the road from London. But OK. It doesn’t matter about the gown anyway. I am going to take you to a place near here that does truly fantastic Italian food. Your mouth will water, and you will be so grateful that you’ll want to spend the rest of your life eating out with me.”
“Oh yes? And can you afford to spend the rest of your life eating out?”
“No. But I would only tell you that after a year or two. But let’s start with tonight. I’ll pick you up at eight, all right?” There was a pause while she obviously slipped back from the light-hearted banter to consider the more serious implications of accepting a dinner date. By now, we were both pretty sure that I, at least, was after more than a casual fling.
“OK,” she replied finally, “but it’s strictly casual dress tonight.” I think she put more information into that last statement than just her intended dress code, but I chose to ignore it for the moment.
“See you later then.”
I put down the phone and lay back, enjoying the pounding of my heart in my ears. Someone had once put heart rate monitors on half the riders at a race meeting at Donnington Park two years ago and measured our heart rates just before the start of the race. As the lights turned green, the average pulse rate amongst the riders on the grid was a hundred and seventy three. Right at that moment, I’m sure mine was over that mark by a long way. This girl had an effect on me like nothing I’d ever felt before. I suddenly realised why I had never married. If this was love, then I
had never before experienced it.
I hauled myself out of bed feeling better than I had in a long time, and climbed into the shower whistling a natty, but rude version of a tune I couldn’t remember the words to.
When I arrived to pick Michele up, she had Brett and a pale dark-haired girl in tow. Our date had been expanded to a foursome. Michele looked at me enquiringly to see if I minded, which I did, but failed to tell anyone. So they all piled in the car. Brett leaned over from the back seat and gestured to the young girl with him.
“Simon, this is Julia Rodber.” I nodded at her via the rear view mirror. She didn’t look any older than sixteen but I learnt later that she was actually closer to twenty. She had a pleasant face, which smiled occasionally, mostly at Brett. She was also Brett’s boss’s daughter. Good move that, Brett. I thought. Just be careful when it’s time to move on.
I drove the old Granada to a quaint little pub that I remembered served good, if unadventurous, food. I preferred my Italian food to be good rather than adventurous. The twenty-minute trip would have taken longer if Julia hadn’t chipped in with some helpful directional short cuts, but was mostly done in silence. Michele sat staring straight ahead, feeling, I suspect, a bit awkward, although I couldn’t think why. Perhaps it was having Julia and her brother in the back seat, and being aware of their togetherness. Perhaps she was self-conscious of our own growing relationship. For my part, I could not have cared less who was in the back seat. I could happily have stopped the car there and then and taken Michele into my arms. The desire to touch her was almost overwhelming. Still, there would be time; provided I was right in thinking she was having similar feelings about me. I mentally crossed my fingers.
The old pub hadn’t changed since I last saw it two years ago, which was unremarkable, as it hadn’t changed much in the last fifty years. The roof was thatched, and looked as if the thatcher had long ago died of old age, but like a lot of buildings lovingly built ninety or a hundred years ago, it looked as if it would be here long after the newer steel and concrete structures had fallen down.
Parking seemed to be in plentiful supply; the serious drinkers hadn’t arrived yet, so I parked right outside the front door.
The food was good, as I had promised, but the conversation was a little stop start to begin with. Mainly it was Julia wanting to know all about Brett. She stared at me for a moment over a fork full of lasagne.
“Brett says you were a top motorcycle racer before retiring last year.”
Brett shrugged his shoulders at me. It was a little white lie that I was quite content to let him get away with.
“More like a top privateer, sometimes,” I replied modestly. “I came close to winning the championship last year though,” I added less modestly.
We naturally stayed on to the subject of motor racing, what with all four of us being involved in one way or another. I tried to pump Julia for her father’s reasons for starting his own team more or less out of the blue, but she appeared to know and care nothing about her father’s business ventures. Just as well for her sake, considering what we later found he was into.
Josh Rodber had made a fortune dealing with people and goods that not many businessmen would have touched even with their worst enemy’s credit card.
It was ten past eleven by the time we had started on after-dinner drinks - gin and tonic for the girls, a rum and coke for me and mineral water for Brett. He was a fitness freak. There is nothing wrong with that of course - indeed it’s very necessary if you’re going to spend your working hours hurtling a hundred and seventy-kilogram machine around a strip of tarmac at over two hundred and fifty kph. You have to be fit just to keep your concentration focused. The smallest of slip-ups will plant you and your £500 000 bike in the catch fences, which would be painful, both physically and financially.
Julia came out of her shell and proved to be not only intelligent, but quite talkative too, retreating only occasionally into some private world where something was obviously worrying her. I was tempted to ask what it was, but again reminded myself that it was, after all, none of my business.
The night out was a success in spite of my initial irritation at not having Michele to myself. I glanced at her as I was thinking this. She caught my eye and smiled with a ‘told you so’ look in her eyes. I was beginning to think she could read my every thought.
It was just after midnight when I turned the Granada into Rodber’s yard to be met by police cars and a milling assortment of Rodber employees. Julia let out a strangled cry.
“Something’s happened to Dad!” she screamed, and sprang from the car as soon as two uniformed policemen stopped us.
Ignoring the running girl, one officer came to my window to find out who we were, and what we were doing there. I countered with a ‘what’s happened’ question of my own, and found out that Rodber had been kidnapped, and Bud was on his way to hospital with unspecified injuries.
Chapter 5
In the office we found Inspector Hammil in charge of proceedings. He was a tall heavily built man in his early forties, with prematurely grey hair and a slightly harassed expression. He was a physically impressive presence and had a reassuring manner that inspired confidence in those around him. In spite of being turned out of bed not two hours earlier, he had obviously taken trouble over his appearance. This summed up his attitude to his work, which we came to appreciate. His accent was pure Essex, unobtrusive but commanding and quietly spoken orders sent subordinates scurrying to obey.
Julia was already in the office when the rest of us arrived, and was showing some of the forceful Rodber family personality: demanding answers from Hammil in an almost, but not quite, hysterical voice. The inspector calmed her with the practised words of someone who had been through it all before, and after inquiring from the sergeant as to who we all were, he motioned us into Rodbers’ private office, and closed the door behind us. Indicating that we should all sit where we could (the girls chose the only two chairs available in front of the desk) Hammil took a deep breath and filled us in with regards to the night’s events.
“Miss Rodber, your Father was travelling back from London with Mr Bud Roache when, at approximately nine thirty, his car was forced off the road by persons in two black pick-up vans. Mr Roache was injured in the crash, and is at the moment undergoing surgery at the St. Vincent Hospital. Your Father seems to have been kidnapped.”
Julia gave a small cry of anguish and rammed the knuckles of her left hand into her mouth.
“If I may ask, Inspector,” I interrupted, “how do you know the details?”
Hammil looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, and then asked. “Mr Roberts, was it?” I nodded. “Are you any relation to that American racing fellow, world champion a while back?” I shook my head. “Mmm,” he said suspiciously. I guess police detectives are trained to disbelieve the first answer they hear at a crime scene.
“Anyway,” he continued. “When the local police arrived at the scene, Mr Roache was being loaded into the ambulance. At that point he was conscious and gave a brief description of the events, along with what information he could recall about the perpetrators of the crime.” He paused for a moment, and directed his sympathetic gaze back at Julia.
“Please believe me when I say that we are doing all we can to find your father as quickly as we can, Miss Rodber. To move things along as quickly as possible, it would be helpful if you could spend some time with my sergeant and me, answering some questions about your father’s business acquaintances, friends, family or anyone else who might have knowledge that would be of any use to us.” Hammil had a strange habit of speaking faster when using a long sentence. The longer the sentence, the faster he spoke. It would have been quite amusing in any other situation.
“I believe your father has had some business disagreements with people who might have a grudge against him?”
Julia nodded, looking glum, and buried her face in her hands. Brett slipped his arms around her shoulders and whispered words of comfort to her
.
Hammil assigned Michele and I to a young man who said he was a detective constable. He took our details, asked us to wait in case the inspector needed us again, and then left us alone. Brett stayed with Julia.
By this time we were both pretty weary, the earlier elation having disappeared and left us feeling washed out and in need of sleep. Michele sagged into my arms and buried her face in my jacket. Neither of us said a word for some minutes.
“Perhaps we should go and find out how your friend Bud is?” she finally said, lifting her head. I thought about the suggestion for a second or two.
“I don’t even know if Bud is married or not,” I replied. “Wait here a moment, I’ll find the Inspector and ask him. If he has nobody, then we’ll go to the hospital first thing in the morning. We need some sleep first though.” I sat Michele down in the Granada and went in search of Hammil.
Five minutes later I was back. It seemed that Bud was married, but he and his wife were divorced, and had been for some years now. No one knew how to get in touch with her. This information I received from pink hair, whose name turned out to be Tracy. I told Michele what I had found out, and we agreed that we would meet Tracy at the hospital at eight-thirty that morning - only five hours away now.
We were ten minutes late in reaching the hospital, but Tracy had waited for us at the front door. The police were still at the Rodber house when I left, and Michele hadn’t wanted to stay, so I took her back with me to the Bed and Breakfast Inn. Getting up and about that morning had needed a bit of explaining to the owner of the Inn though. It was not considered the done thing in her house for male guests to sneak young ladies into the rooms while she was not looking.
When we had arrived, in the dead of night, it had been too late to arrange a separate room for Michele. I hadn’t even thought about sleeping arrangements before actually opening the door to the room, we were that tired. Michele just shrugged her shoulders, nudged me towards the bed, away from the sofa, and disappeared into the bathroom. By the time she reappeared, dressed in her underwear, I was already under the duvet. Smiling shyly, she slipped into bed, curled up in my arms and was asleep in no time flat. Under the circumstances, I found it rather more difficult to get to sleep.