by Dick Francis
Bananas made a face. “He’s a horrible man, that.”
“You talked to him?”
“He was shouting through the door that you’d stopped his circulation by tying his wrists too tight. I went in to see, but you hadn’t; his fingers were pink. He was halfway up the stairs and he tried to knock me over. Tried to sweep my legs from under me and make me fall. God knows what he thought it would achieve.”
“Probably to scare me into letting him go.”
Bananas scratched himself around the ribs. “I came up into the kitchen and shut the door on him, and switched his light off, and he went on howling for ages about what he’d do to you when he got out.”
Keeping his courage up, I thought.
I looked at my watch. Five o’clock. Soon be light. Soon be Friday with all its problems. “I guess,” I said yawning, “that a couple of hours shut-eye would do no harm.”
“And that one?” He jerked his head toward the kitchen.
“He won’t suffocate.”
“You’re a revelation to me,” Bananas said.
I grinned at him and I think he thought me as ruthless as our visitor. But he was wrong. I was fairly sure that Angelo that night had come back to kill, to finish off what he had earlier started, knowing by then who I was and not expecting a Cassie. I was soft compared with him.
Bananas walked home to his dishwasher and I took his place on the sofa, feeling the bedroom too far away, out of touch. Despite the hectic night I went to sleep immediately and woke with mind-protesting reluctance to switch off the alarm clock at seven o’clock. The horses would be working on the Heath. Simpson Shell had set up a trial of two late-developing three-year-olds, and if I wasn’t there to watch he’d be writing to Luke Houston to say I was a shirker. And I wanted anyway, Angelo or no Angelo, to see how those horses went.
I loved the Heath in the early mornings with the manes blowing under the wide skies. My affection for horses was so deep and went back so far that I couldn’t imagine life without them. They were a friendly foreign nation living in our land, letting their human neighbors tend them and feed them, accepting them as servants as much as masters. Fast, fascinating, essentially untamed, they were my landscape, my old shoes, the place to where my heart returned, as necessary to me as the sea to sailors.
Even on that morning they lifted my spirits and I watched the trial with a concentration Angelo couldn’t disrupt. One of the three-year-olds finished most decisively fast and Simpson said with careful civility that he hoped I would report to Luke how well the colt was looking.
“I’ll tell Luke you’ve done wonders with him. Remember how unbalanced he looked in May? He’ll win next week, don’t you think?”
He gave me the usual ambivalent stare, needing my approbation but hating it. I smiled internally and left him to drive the short distance to where Mort was directing his string.
“All OK?” I asked.
“Well, yes,” Mort said. “Genotti’s still shaping up well for the Leger.” He flicked his fingers six times rapidly. “Can you come back to the house for breakfast? The Bun-gay filly is still not eating well, and I thought we might discuss what we could do. You sometimes have ideas. And there’s Luke’s bill. I want to explain one or two items before you query them.”
“Mort,” I interrupted him regretfully, “could we postpone it for a day or two? Something’s come up that I’ll have to deal with first.”
“Oh? Oh.” He sounded put out, because I’d never refused him before. “Are you sure?”
“Really sorry,” I said.
“I might see you this afternoon,” he said, fidgeting badly.
“Um . . . yes. Of course.”
He nodded with satisfaction and let me go with good grace, and I doubted whether I would in fact turn up on Newmarket racecourse for that day’s program, even though three of Luke’s horses were running.
On my way back through the town I stopped at a few shops which were open early and did some errands on my prisoner’s account, buying food and one or two small comforts. Then I rocketed the six miles to the village and stopped first at the pub.
Bananas, looking entirely his usual self, had done his dishes, cleaned the bar, and put Betty’s back up by saying she was too old to start learning to ride.
“The old cow’s refusing to make the celery mousse for lunch. Working to her stupid rules.” He disgustedly assembled his breakfast, adding chopped ginger as a topping to the ice cream and pouring brandy lavishly over the lot. “I went down to the cottage again. Not a peep from our friend.” He stirred his mixture with anticipation. “You can’t hear him from outside, however loud he yells. I found that out last night. You’ll be all right if you keep any callers in the garden.”
“Thanks.”
“When I’ve finished this I’ll come and help you.”
“Great.”
I hadn’t wanted to ask him, but I was most thankful for his offer. I drove on down to the cottage and unloaded all the shopping into the kitchen, and Bananas appeared in his tennis shoes while I was packing food into a carrier. He looked at the small heap of things I’d put ready by the door.
“Let’s get it over,” he said. “I’ll carry this lot.”
I nodded. “He’ll be blinded at first by the light, so even if he’s got himself free we should have the advantage.”
We began to remove the barricade from against the door, and when it would open satisfactorily I took the knife out of the latch, picked up the carrier, switched on the cellar light and went into the cage.
Angelo was lying facedown in the middle of the floor, still trussed the way we’d left him: arms behind his back, white clothesline leading slackly between tied wrists and tied ankles.
“It’s morning,” I said cheerfully.
Angelo barely moved. He said a few low words of which “turd” was the only one distinguishable.
“I’ve brought you some food.” I dumped in one corner the carrier bag, which in fact contained two sliced loaves, several cartons of milk, some water in a plastic bottle, two large cooked chickens, some apples and a lot of various candy bars and chocolate. Bananas silently dumped his own load, which consisted of a blanket, a cheap cushion, some paperback books and two disposable polystyrene chamber pots with lids.
“I’m not letting you out,” I said to Angelo. “But I’ll untie you.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Here’s your watch.” I had slipped it off his wrist the evening before to make the tying easier. I took it out of my pocket and put it on the floor near his head. “Lights out tonight at eleven,” I said.
It seemed prudent at that point to search Angelo’s pockets, but all he was carrying was money. No knives, no matches, no keys: nothing to help him escape.
I nodded to Bananas and we both began to untie the knots, I the wrists, Bananas the ankles, but Angelo’s struggles had so tightened our original work that it took time and effort to remove it. Once Angelo was free we coiled the line and retreated up the stairs, from where I watched him move stiffly into a kneeling position with his arms loose and not yet working properly.
The air in the cellar had seemed quite fresh. I closed the door and fixed the latch, and Bananas restacked the barricade with methodical thoroughness.
“How much food did you give him?” he asked.
“Enough for two to four days. Depends on how fast he eats it.”
“He’s used to being locked up, there’s that about it.”
Bananas, I thought, was busy stifling remaining doubts. He shoved the four planks into place between the cellar door and the refrigerator, casually remarking that during the night he’d sawn the wood to fit.
“More secure that way,” he said. “He won’t get out.”
“Hope you’re right.”
Bananas stood back, hands on hips, to contemplate his handiwork, and indeed I was as sure as one could be that Angelo couldn’t kick his way out, particularly as he would have to try it while standing on the stairs.
“
His car must be here somewhere,” I said. “I’ll look for it after I’ve phoned the hospital.”
“You phone, I’ll look,” Bananas said, and he went on the errand.
Cassie, I was told, would be having her arm set under anesthetic during the morning. I could collect her at six that evening if all went well.
“May I speak to her?”
“One moment.”
Her voice came slowly and sleepily onto the line. “I’m pie-eyed with pre-med,” she said. “How’s our guest?”
“Happy as a kangaroo with blisters.”
“Hopping . . . mad?”
“That pre-med isn’t working,” I said.
“Sure is. My body’s floating but my brain’s fizzing along in zillions of sparks. It’s weird.”
“They say I can fetch you at six.”
“Don’t . . . be late.”
“I might be,” I said.
“You don’t love me.”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet William,” she said. “A pretty flower.”
“Cassie, go to sleep.”
“Mm.”
She sounded infinitely drowsy. “Goodbye,” I said, but I don’t think she heard.
I telephoned next to her office and told her boss she’d fallen down the cellar steps and broken her arm, and that she’d probably be back at work sometime the next week.
“How irritating,” he said. “Er, for her, of course.”
“Of course.”
Bananas came back as I was putting down the receiver and said that Angelo’s car was parked harmlessly at the top of the lane where the hard surface petered out into muddy cart track. Angelo had left the keys in the ignition. Bananas dumped them on the table.
“Want anything, shout,” he said. I nodded gratefully and he padded off, a powerhouse in a suit of blubber.
I set about the task of finding Ted Pitts, telephoning first to Jonathan’s old school at West Ealing. A female voice there crisply told me that no one of that name was presently on the staff, and that none of the present staff could help me as they were not there: the new term would not start for another week. The only master who had been teaching in the school fourteen years ago would be, she imagined, Mr. Ralph Jenkins, assistant headmaster, but he had retired at the end of the summer term and in any case it would be unlikely that any of his past assistants would have kept in touch with him.
“Why not?” I asked curiously.
After the faintest of hesitations the voice said levelly, “Mr. Jenkins himself would have discouraged it.”
Or in other words, I thought, Mr. Jenkins had been a cantankerous old bastard. I thanked her for as little as I had realistically expected and asked if she could tell me the address of the Schoolmasters Union.
“Do you want their number as well?”
“Yes, please.”
She told me both, and I put through a call to their offices. Ted Pitts? Edward? I suppose so, I said. Could I wait? Yes, I could.
The answering voice, a man’s this time, shortly told me that Edward Farley Pitts was no longer a member. He had resigned his membership five years previously. His last known address was in Middlesex. Did I want it? Yes, please, I said.
Again I was given a telephone number along with the address. Another female voice answered it, this time with music and children’s voices loud in the background.
“What?” she said. “I can’t hear you.”
“Ted Pitts,” I shouted. “Can you tell me where he lives?”
“You’ve got the wrong number.”
“He used to live in your house.”
“What? Wait a minute. Shut up, you lousy kids. What did you say?”
“Ted Pitts—”
“Terry, shut off that bleeding stereo. Can’t hear myself think. Shut it off. Go on, shut it off.”
The music suddenly stopped.
“What did you say?” she said again.
I explained that I wanted to find my lost friend, Ted Pitts.
“Guy with three daughters?”
“That’s right.”
“We bought this house off of him. Terry, you knock Michelle’s head on that wall one more time and I’ll rattle your teeth. Where was I? Oh, yes, Ted Pitts. He gave us an address to send things on to, but it’s years ago and I don’t know where my husband put it.”
It was really important, I said.
“Well if you hold on I’ll look. Terry . . . Terry!” There was the sound of a slap and a child’s wail. The joys of motherhood, I thought.
I held on for an age listening to the scrambled noise of the squabbling siblings, held on so long that I thought she had forgotten all about me and simply left me off the hook, but in the end she did come back.
“Sorry I’ve been so long, but you can’t put your hand on a thing in this house. Anyway, I’ve found where he moved to.”
“You’re a doll,” I said, writing it down.
She laughed in a pleased fashion. “Want to call around? I’m fed to the teeth with these bloody kids.”
“School starts next week.”
“Thank the Lord.”
I disconnected and tried the number she had given me, but to this one there was no reply. Ten minutes later, again no reply.
I went to the kitchen. All quiet from the cellar. I ate some cornflakes, padded restlessly about and tried the number again.
Zilch.
There was something, I thought, looking at it, that I could immediately do about the front door. It wouldn’t at the moment even fit into the frame, but given a chisel and some sandpaper . . . I fetched them from the tool-rack in the garage and reduced the sharply splintered patches to smooth edges, finally shutting the door by totally removing the broken lock. It looked all right from the outside but swung inward at a touch: and we had sweet but inquisitive neighbors who called sometimes to sell us honey.
I again dialed Ted Pitts’s possible number. No reply.
Shrugging I tugged a small chest of drawers across inside the front door and climbed out through the dining room window. Drove down to the pub; told Bananas the new way in.
“Do you expect me—?”
“Not really. Just in case.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
I showed him the address. “It’s a chance.”
The address was in Mill Hill on the northern outskirts of London. I drove there with my mind resolutely on the traffic and not on Cassie, unconscious, and Angelo, captive. Crunching the car at that point could be the ultimate disaster.
The house, when I found it, proved to be a middle-sized detached affair in a street of trees and somnolence; and it was empty.
I went up the driveway and looked through the windows. Bare walls, bare floors, no curtains.
With sinking spirits I rang the bell of the house next door, and although it was clearly occupied there was no one in there either. I tried several more houses, but none of the people I spoke to knew anything more of Ted Pitts than, yes, perhaps they had seen some girls going in and out, but of course with all the shrubs and trees one was shielded from one’s neighbors, which meant, of course, that also one couldn’t see them.
It was in one of the houses obliquely opposite, from where only a corner of the Pittses’ front garden was visible, that in the end I found some help. The front door was opened a foot by a large woman in pink hair rollers with a pack of assorted small dogs roaming round her legs.
“If you’re selling, I don’t want it,” she said.
I exercised on her the story I had by then invented, saying that Ted Pitts was my brother, he’d sent me his new address but I’d lost it, and I wanted to get in touch with him urgently. After six repetitions, I almost believed it.
“I didn’t know him,” she said, not opening the door any wider. “He didn’t live there long. I never even saw him, I don’t think.”
“But, er, you noticed them move in, and out ...”
“Walking the dogs, you see.” She looked fondly down at the pack. “I
go past there every day.”
“Do you remember how long ago they left?”
“It must be ages. Funny your brother didn’t tell you. The house was for sale for weeks after they’d gone. It’s only just been sold, as a matter of fact. I saw the agents taking the board down just last week.”
“You don’t happen to remember,” I said carefully, “the name of the agents?”
“Goodness,” she said. “I must have walked past it a hundred times. Just let me think.” She stared at her pets, her brow wrinkled with concentration. I could still see only half of her body, but I couldn’t tell whether the forbidding angle of the door was designed to keep the dogs in or me out.
“Hunt bleach!” she exclaimed.
“What?”
“Hunt comma BLEACH.” She spelled it out. “The name of the agents. A yellow board with black lettering. You’ll see it all over the place, if you look.”
I said fervently, “Thank you very much.”
She nodded the pink rollers and shut herself in, and I drove around until I found a yellow board with Hunt, Bleach’s local address: Broadway, Mill Hill.
The brother story brought its by-now-familiar crop of sympathetic and/or pitying looks but finally gained results. A slightly sullen-looking girl said she thought the house had been handled by their Mr. Jackman, who was now away on his vacation.
“Could you look in the files?”
She took advice from various colleagues, who doubtfully agreed under my urging that perhaps in the circumstances she might. She went into an inner office, and I heard cabinet drawers begin to open and shut.
“Here you are, Mr. Pitts,” she said, returning, and it took me a moment to realize that of course I too would be Pitts. “Ridge View, Oaklands Road.”
She didn’t give me a town. I thought; he’s still here.
“Could you tell me how to get there?” I said.
She shook her head unhelpfully, but one of the colleagues said, “You go back up the Broadway, around the roundabout until you’re pointing toward London, then first left, up the hill, turn right, that’s Oaklands Road.”
“Terrific.” I spoke with heartfelt relief, which they took as appropriate, and I followed their directions faithfully and found the house. It looked a small brown affair; brownish bricks, brown-tiled roof, a narrow window on each side of an oak front door, bushes screening much else. I parked in what seemed an oversized driveway outside a closer double garage and doubtfully rang the doorbell.