by Dick Francis
I held her close. I could feel her heart beating.
‘Today I was wandering about, looking at things,’ she said. ‘Wondering if I wanted a life of racecourses and winter and perpetual anxiety … watching you go out on those horses, with you not knowing … and not caring … if it’s going to be your last half-hour ever … and doing that five or six hundred times every year. I looked at the other jockeys on their way out to the parade ring, and they’re all like you … perfectly calm, as if they’re going to an office.’
‘Much better than an office.’
‘Yes, for you.’ She kissed me. ‘You can thank Aunt Casilia for shaming me into going racing again … but most of all, Joe’s wife. I thought today clearly of what life would be like without you … no fear, no Kit … like she said … I guess I’ll take the fear.’
‘And throw up.’
‘Everything up, everything down. She said it was like that for all of the wives, sometime or other. And a few husbands, I guess.’
It was odd, I thought, how life could totally change from one minute to the next. The fog of wretchedness of the past month had vanished like ruptured cobwebs. I felt light-heartedly, miraculously happy, more even than in the beginning. Perhaps one truly had to have lost and regained, to know that sort of joy.
‘You won’t change your mind, will you?’ I said.
‘No, I won’t,’ she answered, and spent a fair time doing her best, in the restricted circumstances, to show me she meant it.
I saw her eventually into the studio and drove back towards Eaton Square on euphoric auto-pilot, returning to earth in time to park carefully and methodically in the usual place in the mews.
I switched off the engine and sat looking vaguely at my hands, sat there for a while thinking of what might lie ahead. Then with a mental shiver I telephoned to the house, and got Litsi immediately, as if he’d been waiting.
‘I’m in the alley,’ I said.
TWENTY
We didn’t know how he would come, or when, or even if.
We’d shown him an opportunity and loaded him with a motive. Given him a time and place when he could remove an immovable obstruction: but whether or not he would accept the circuitous invitation, heaven alone knew.
Henri Nanterre … his very name sounded threatening.
I thought about his being at Windsor and making his way through the crowds on the stands, moving upwards and sideways, approaching Danielle. I thought that until that afternoon he might not have reliably known what she looked like. He’d seen her in the dark the previous Monday, when he’d opened her tyre valves and chased her, but it had been her car he had identified her by, not her face.
He’d probably have seen her with Litsi at Bradbury, but maybe not from close to. He’d have known she was the young woman with Litsi because Beatrice had told him they were going together with me.
Nanterre might not have known that Danielle had gone to Windsor at all until he’d seen her with me several times in the paddock and on the stands during the fourth race. He couldn’t have gone to Windsor with any advance plans, but what he’d meant to do if he’d reached Danielle was anyone’s nightmare.
I was sitting with these thoughts not in my own car but on a foam cushion on the floor inside the garage where Danielle was keeping her little Ford. One of the garage doors was open about a hand’s span, enough for me to see the Mercedes and a good deal of the mews, looking up towards the road entrance. A few people were coming home from work, opening their garages, shunting the cars in, closing and locking. A few were reversing the process, going out for the evening. The mechanics had long gone, all their garages silent. Several cars, like the Mercedes, were narked in the open, close to the sides, leaving a scant passage free in the centre.
Dusk had turned to night, and local bustle died into the restless distant roar of London’s traffic. I sat quietly with a few pre-positioned necessities to hand, like Perrier, smoked salmon and an apple, and rehearsed in my mind all sorts of eventualities, none of which happened.
Every half hour or so, I rose to my feet, stretched my spine, paced round Danielle’s car, and sat down again. Nothing of much interest occurred in the mews, and the hands of my watch travelled like slugs; eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten.
I thought of Danielle, and of what she’d said when I left her.
‘For Aunt Casilia’s sake I must hope that the rattlesnake turns up in the mews, but if you get yourself killed, I’ll never forgive you.’
‘A thought for eternity,’ I said.
‘You just make sure eternity is spent right here on earth, with me.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said, and kissed her.
The rattlesnake, I thought, yawning as eleven o’clock passed, was taking his time. I normally went round to the mews at one-thirty so as to be at Chiswick before two, and I thought that if Nanterre was planning a direct physical attack of any sort, he would be there well before that time, seeking a shadow to hide in. He hadn’t been there before seven, because I’d searched every cranny before settling in the garage, and there were no entrances other than the way in from the street. If he’d sneaked in somehow since then without my seeing him, we were maybe in trouble.
At eleven-fifteen, I stretched my legs round Danielle’s car and sat down again.
At eleven-seventeen, unaware, he came to the lure.
I’d been hoping against hope, longing for him to come, wanting to expect it … and yet, when he did, my skin crawled with animal fear as if the tiger were indeed stalking the goat.
He walked openly down the centre of the mews as if he owned a car there, moving with his distinctive eel-like lope, fluid and smooth, not a march.
He was turning his head from side to side, looking at the silent parked cars, and even in the dim light filtering down from the high windows of the surrounding buildings, the shape of nose and jaw were unmistakable.
He came closer and closer; and he wasn’t looking for a hiding place, I saw, but for my car.
For one appalling moment he looked straight at the partly opened door of the garage where I sat, but I was immobile in dark clothes in dark shadow, and I started breathing again when he appeared to see nothing to alarm him or frighten him away.
Nanterre was there, I thought exultantly; right there in front of my eyes, and all our planning had come to pass. Whatever should happen, I reckoned that that was a triumph.
Nanterre looked back the way he’d come, but nothing stirred behind him.
He came close to my car. He stopped beside it, about the length of a Rolls Royce away, and he coolly fiddled about and opened the passenger’s seat door with some sort of key as if he’d spent a lifetime thieving.
Well bloody well, I thought, and heard him unlatch the bonnet with the release knob inside the car. He raised the bonnet, propped it open with its strut, and leaned over the engine with a lighted torch as if working on a fault: anyone coming into the mews at that point would have paid no attention.
After a while, he switched off the torch and closed the bonnet gently, latching it by direct downward pressure of both palms, not by a more normal brisk slam. Finally he shut the open passenger door quietly; and as he turned away to leave, I saw he was smiling.
I wondered whether what he’d left by my engine was plastic, like his guns.
He’d walked several paces along the mews before I stood, slid out through the door and started after him, not wanting him to hear me too soon.
I waited until he was nearing a particular small white car parked on one side, and then I ran swiftly up behind him, quiet in rubber soles on the cobbles, and shone a torch of my own on the back of his neck.
‘Henri Nanterre,’ I said.
He was struck for a long moment into slow motion, unable to move from shock. Then he was fumbling, tearing at the front of a bloused gaberdine jacket, trying to free the pistol bolstered beneath.
‘Sammy,’ I yelled, and Sammy shot like a screaming cannon-ball out of the small white car, my voice and
his whooping cries filling the quiet place with nerve-breaking noise.
Nanterre, his face rigid, pulled the pistol free. He swung it towards me, taking aim … And Sammy, true to his boast, kicked it straight out of his hand.
Nanterre ran, leaving the gun clattering to the ground.
Sammy and I ran after him, and from another, larger, parked car, both Thomas and Litsi, shouting manfully and shining bright torches, emerged to stand in his way.
Thomas and Litsi stopped him and Sammy and I caught hold of him, Sammy tying Nanterre’s left wrist to Thomas’s right with nylon cord and an intriguingly nice line in knots.
Not the most elegant of captures, I thought, but effective all the same; and for all the noise we’d made, no one came with curious questions to the fracas, no one in London would be so foolish. Dark alleys were dark alleys, and with noise, even worse.
We made Nanterre walk back towards the Mercedes. Thomas half dragging him, Sammy stepping behind him and kicking him encouragingly on the calves of the legs.
When we reached the pistol, Sammy picked it up, weighed it with surprise in his hand, and briefly whistled.
‘Bullets?’ I asked.
He slid out the clip and nodded. ‘Seven,’ he said. ‘Bright little darlin’s.’
He slapped the gun together again, looked around him, and dodged off sideways to hide it under a nearby car, knowing I didn’t want to use it myself.
Nanterre was beginning to recover his usual browbeating manner and to bluster that what we were doing was against the law. He didn’t specify which law, and nor was he right. Citizens’ arrests were perfectly legal.
Not knowing what to expect, we’d had to make the best plans we could to meet anything that might happen. I’d hired the small white car and the larger dark one, both with tinted windows, and Thomas and I had parked them that morning in spaces which we knew from mews-observation weren’t going to obstruct anyone else: the larger car in the space nearest to the way in from the road, the white car half way between there and the Mercedes.
Litsi, Thomas and Sammy had entered the cars after I’d searched the whole place and telephoned reassuringly again to Litsi, and they’d been prepared to wait until one-thirty and hope.
No one had known what Nanterre would do if he came to the mews. We’d decided that if he came in past Litsi and Thomas and hid himself before he reached the white car, Litsi and Thomas would set up a racket and shine torches to summon Sammy and me to their aid, and we’d reckoned that if he came in past Sammy, I would see him, and everyone would wait for my cue, which they had.
We’d all acknowledged that Nanterre, if he came to the area, might decide to sit in his car out in the street, waiting for me to walk round from the square, and that if he did that, or if he didn’t come at all, we’d spent a long while preparing for a big anti-climax.
There had been the danger that even if he came, we could lose him, that he’d slip through our grasp and escape: and there had been the worse danger that we would panic him into shooting, and that one or more of us could be hurt. Yet when that moment had come, when he’d freed his gun and pointed it my way, the peril, long faced, had gone by so fast that it seemed suddenly nothing, not worth the consideration.
We had meant, if we captured Nanterre, to take him into the garage where I’d waited for him to come, but I did a fast rethink on the way down the alley, and stopped by my car.
The others paused enquiringly.
‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘untie your wrist and attach Mr Nanterre to the rear-view mirror beside the front passenger door.’
Thomas, unquestioning, took a loop of cord off one of his fingers and pulled it, and all the knots round his wrist fell apart: Sammy’s talents seemed endless. Thomas tied much more secure knots round the sturdy mirror assembly, and Nanterre told us very loudly and continuously that we were making punishable mistakes.
‘Shut up,’ I said equally loudly, without much effect.
‘Let’s gag him,’ Thomas said cheerfully. He produced a used handkerchief from his trousers pocket, at the sight of which Nanterre blessedly stopped talking.
‘Gag him if someone comes into the mews,’ I said, and Thomas nodded.
‘Was there enough light,’ I asked Litsi, Sammy and Thomas, ‘for you to see Mr Nanterre lift up the bonnet of my car?’
They all said that they’d seen.’
Nanterre’s mouth fell soundlessly open, and for the first time seemed to realise he was in serious trouble.
‘Mr Nanterre,’ I said conversationally to the others, ‘is an amateur who has left his fingerprints all over my paintwork. It might be a good idea at this point to bring in the police.’
The others looked impassive because they knew I didn’t want to, but Nanterre suddenly tugged frantically at Sammy’s securely tied knots.
‘There’s an alternative,’ I said.
Nanterre, still struggling under Sammy’s interested gaze, said, ‘What alternative?’ furiously.
‘Tell us why you came here tonight, and what you put in my car.’
‘Tell you …’
‘Yes. Tell us.’
He was a stupid man, essentially. He said violently, ‘Beatrice must have warned you. That cow. She got frightened and told you …’ He glared at me with concentration. ‘All that stood between me and my millions was de Brescou’s signature and you … you … everywhere, in my way.’
‘So you decided on a little bomb, and pouf, no obstructions?’
‘You made me,’ he shouted. ‘You drove me … If you were dead, he would sign.’
I let a moment go by, then I said, ‘We talked to the man who gave your message to Prince Litsi at Bradbury. He picked you out from a photograph. We have his signed statement.’
Nanterre said viciously, ‘I saw your advertisement. If Prince Litsi had died, no one would have known of the message.’
‘Did you mean him to die?’
‘Live, die, I didn’t care. To frighten him, yes. To get de Brescou to sign.’ He tried ineffectually still to unravel his bonds. ‘Let me go.’
I went instead into the garage where I’d waited and came out again with the big envelope of signed documents.
‘Stop struggling,’ I said to Nanterre, ‘and listen carefully.’
He paid little attention.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘or I fetch the police.’
He said sullenly then that he was listening.
‘The price of your freedom,’ I said, ‘is that you put your signature to these contracts.’
‘What are they?’ he said furiously, looking at their impressive appearance. ‘What contracts?’
‘They change the name of the de Brescou et Nanterre construction company to the Gascony construction company, and they constitute an agreement between the two equal owners to turn the private company into a public company, and for each owner to put his entire holding up for public sale.’
He was angrily and bitterly astounded.
‘The company is mine … I manage it … I will never agree!’
‘You’ll have to,’ I said prosaically.
I produced the small tape recorder from the pocket of my jacket, pressed the rewind button slightly, and started it playing.
Nanterre’s voice came out clearly ‘Live, die, I didn’t care. To frighten him, yes. To get de Brescou to sign.’
I switched off. Nanterre, incredibly, was silent, remembering, perhaps, the other incriminating things he had said.
‘We have the evidence of the messenger at Bradbury,’ I said. ‘We have your voice on this tape. We have your bomb, I suspect, in my car. You’ll sign the contract, you know.’
‘There’s no bomb in your car,’ he said furiously.
‘Perhaps a firework?’ I said.
He looked at me blankly.
‘Someone’s coming into the mews,’ Thomas said urgently, producing the handkerchief. ‘What do we do?’ A car had driven in, coming home to its garage.
‘If you yell,’ I said to Nanter
re with menace, ‘the police will be here in five minutes and you’ll regret it … They’re not kind to people who plant bombs in cars.’
The incoming car drove towards us and stopped just before reaching Sammy’s white hiding place. The people got out, opened their garage, drove in, closed the doors, and looked our way dubiously.
‘Goodnight,’ I called out, full of cheer.
‘Goodnight,’ they replied, reassured, and walked away to the street.
‘Right,’ I said, relaxing, ‘time to sign.’
‘I will not sell the company. I will not.’
I said patiently, ‘You have no alternative except going to prison for attempting to murder both Prince Litsi and myself.’
He still refused to face facts: and perhaps he felt as outraged at being coerced to sign against his will as Roland had done.
I brought the car-starting gadget out of my pocket and explained what it was.
Nanterre at last began to shake, and Litsi, Sammy and Thomas backed away from the car in freshly awakened genuine alarm, as if really realising for the first time what was in there, under the bonnet.
‘It’ll be lonely for you,’ I said to Nanterre. ‘We’ll walk to the end of the mews, leaving you here. Prince Litsi and the other two will go away. When they’re safely back in the house in Eaton Square, I’ll press the switch that starts my engine.’
Litsi, Sammy and Thomas had already retreated a good way along the mews.
‘You’ll die by your own bomb,’ I said, and put into my voice and manner every shred of force and conviction I could summon. ‘Goodbye,’ I said.
I turned away. Walked several steps. Wondered if he would be too scared to call my bluff; wondered if anyone would have the nerve to risk it.
‘Come back,’ he yelled. There was real fear in the rising voice. Real deadly fear.
Without any pity, I stopped and turned.
‘Come back …’
I went back. There was sweat in great drops on his forehead, running down. He was struggling frantically still with the knots, but also trembling too much to succeed.