For Kicks

by Dick Francis

  Grinning, I sat down opposite October. He looked exceedingly embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t worry on my account,’ I said, ‘I’m used to it.’ And I realized that I was indeed used to it at last and that no amount of such treatment would ever trouble me again. ‘But if you would rather pretend you don’t know me, go ahead.’ I picked up the menu.

  ‘You are insulting.’

  I smiled at him over the menu. ‘Good.’

  ‘For deviousness, Daniel, you are unsurpassed. Except possibly by Roddy Beckett.’

  ‘My dear Edward… have some bread.’

  He laughed, and we travelled amicably to London together, as ill-assorted looking a pair as ever rested heads on British Railways’ starched white antimacassars.

  I poured some more coffee and looked at my watch. Colonel Beckett was twenty minutes late. The pigeons sat peacefully on the window sill and I shifted gently in my chair, but with patience, not boredom, and thought about my visit to October’s barber, and the pleasure with which I had had my hair cut short and sideburns shaved off. The barber himself (who had asked me to pay in advance) was surprised, he said, at the results.

  ‘We look a lot more like a gentleman, don’t we? But might I suggest… a shampoo?’

  Grinning, I agreed to a shampoo, which left a high water mark of cleanliness about midway down my neck. Then, at October’s house, there was the fantastic luxury of stepping out of my filthy disguise into a deep hot bath, and the strangeness with which I afterwards put on my own clothes. When I had finished dressing I took another look in the same long mirror. There was the man who had come from Australia four months ago, a man in a good dark grey suit, a white shirt and a navy blue silk tie: there was his shell anyway. Inside I wasn’t the same man, nor ever would be again.

  I went down to the crimson drawing-room where October walked solemnly all round me, gave me a glass of bone dry sherry and said, ‘It is utterly unbelievable that you are the young tyke who just came down with me on the train.’

  ‘I am,’ I said dryly, and he laughed.

  He gave me a chair with its back to the door, where I drank some sherry and listened to him making social chit-chat about his horses. He was hovering round the fireplace not entirely at ease, and I wondered what he was up to.

  I soon found out. The door opened and he looked over my shoulder and smiled.

  ‘I want you both to meet someone,’ he said.

  I stood up and turned round.

  Patty and Elinor were there, side by side.

  They didn’t know me at first. Patty held out her hand politely and said, ‘How do you do?’ clearly waiting for her father to introduce us.

  I took her hand in my left one and guided her to a chair.

  ‘Sit down,’ I suggested. ‘You’re in for a shock.’

  She hadn’t seen me for three months, but it was only four days since Elinor had made her disastrous visit to Humber’s. She said hesitantly, ‘You don’t look the same… but you’re Daniel.’ I nodded, and she blushed painfully.

  Patty’s bright eyes looked straight into mine, and her pink mouth parted.

  ‘You… are you really? Danny boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh,’ A blush as deep as her sister’s spread up from her neck, and for Patty that was shame indeed.

  October watched their discomfiture. ‘It serves them right,’ he said, ‘for all the trouble they have caused.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s too hard on them… and you still haven’t told them anything about me, have you?’

  ‘No,’ he agreed uncertainly, beginning to suspect there was more for his daughters to blush over than he knew, and that his surprise meeting was not an unqualified success.

  ‘Then tell them now, while I go and talk to Terence… and Patty… Elinor…’ They looked surprised at my use of their first names and I smiled briefly, ‘I have a very short and defective memory.’

  They both looked subdued when I went back, and October was watching them uneasily. Fathers, I reflected, could be very unkind to their daughters without intending it.

  ‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘I’d have had a dull time in England without you two.’

  ‘You were a beast,’ said Patty emphatically, sticking to her guns.

  ‘Yes… I’m sorry.’

  ‘You might have told us,’ said Elinor in a low voice.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said October. ‘He couldn’t trust Patty’s tongue.’

  ‘I see,’ said Elinor, slowly. She looked at me tentatively. ‘I haven’t thanked you, for… for saving me. The doctor told me… all about it.’ She blushed again.

  ‘Sleeping beauty,’ I smiled. ‘You looked like my sister.’

  ‘You have a sister?’

  ‘Two,’ I said. ‘Sixteen and seventeen.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and looked comforted.

  October flicked me a glance. ‘You are far too kind to them Daniel. One of them made me loathe you and the other nearly killed you, and you don’t seem to care.’

  I smiled at him. ‘No. I don’t. I really don’t. Let’s just forget it.’

  So in spite of a most unpromising start it developed into a good evening, the girls gradually losing their embarrassment and even, by the end, being able to meet my eyes without blushing.

  When they had gone to bed October put two fingers into an inner pocket, drew out a slip of paper, and handed it to me without a word. I unfolded it. It was a cheque for ten thousand pounds. A lot of noughts. I looked at them in silence. Then, slowly, I tore the fortune in half and put the pieces in an ash-tray.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘But I can’t take it.’

  ‘You did the job. Why not accept the pay?’

  ‘Because…’ I stopped. Because what? I was not sure I could put it into words. It had something to do with having learned more than I had bargained for. With diving too deep. With having killed. All I was sure of was that I could no longer bear the thought of receiving money for it.

  ‘You must have a reason,’ said October, with a touch of irritation.

  ‘Well, I didn’t really do it for the money, to start with, and I can’t take that sort of sum from you. In fact, when I get back I am going to repay you all that is left of the first ten thousand.’

  ‘No,’ he protested. ‘You’ve earned it. Keep it. You need it for your family.’

  ‘What I need for my family, I’ll earn by selling horses.’

  He stubbed out his cigar. ‘You’re so infuriatingly independent that I don’t know now how you could face being a stable lad. If it wasn’t for the money, why did you do it?’

  I moved in my chair. The bruises still felt like bruises. I smiled faintly, enjoying the pun.

  ‘For kicks, I suppose.’

  The door of the office opened, and Beckett unhurriedly came in. I stood up. He held out his hand, and remembering the weakness of his grasp I put out my own. He squeezed gently and let go.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Mr Roke.’

  ‘More than three months,’ I agreed.

  ‘And you completed the course.’

  I shook my head, smiling. ‘Fell at the last fence, I’m afraid.’

  He took off his overcoat and hung it on a knobbed hat rack, and unwound a grey woollen scarf from his neck. His suit was nearly black, a colour which only enhanced his extreme pallor and emphasized his thinness: but his eyes were as alive as ever in the gaunt shadowed sockets. He gave me a long observant scrutiny.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting. I see they’ve looked after you all right.’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ I sat down again in the leather chair, and he walked round and sank carefully into the one behind his desk. His chair had a high back and arms, and he used them to support his head and elbows.

  ‘I didn’t get your report until I came back to London from Newbury on Sunday morning,’ he said. ‘It took two days to come from Posset and didn’t reach my house until Friday. When I had read it I tel
ephoned to Edward at Slaw and found he had just been rung up by the police at Clavering. I then telephoned to Clavering myself. I spent a good chunk of Sunday hurrying things up for you in various conversations with ever higher ranks, and early on Monday it was decided finally in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions that there was no charge for you to answer.’

  Thank you very much,’ I said.

  He paused, considering me. ‘You did more towards extricating yourself than Edward or I did. We only confirmed what you had said and had you freed a day or two sooner than you might have been. But it appeared that the Clavering police had already discovered from a thorough examination of the stable office that everything you had told them was borne out by the facts. They had also talked to the doctor who had attended Elinor, and to Elinor herself, and taken a look at the shed with the flame thrower, and cabled to your solicitor for a summary of the contract you signed with Edward. By the time I spoke to them they were taking the truth of your story for granted, and were agreeing that you had undoubtedly killed Adams in self-defence.

  ‘Their own doctor – the one who examined you – had told them straight away that the amount of crushing your right forearm had sustained was entirely consistent with its having been struck by a force strong enough to have smashed in your skull. He was of the opinion that the blow had landed more or less along the inside of your arm, not straight across it, thus causing extensive damage to muscles and blood vessels, but no bone fracture; and he told them that it was perfectly possible for you to have ridden a motor-bike a quarter of an hour later if you had wanted to enough.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I didn’t think they had taken any notice of a single word I said.’

  ‘Mmm. Well, I spoke to one of the C.I.D. men who questioned you last Thursday evening. He said they brought you in as a foregone conclusion, and that you looked terrible. You told them a rigmarole which they thought was nonsense, so they asked a lot of questions to trip you up. They thought it would be easy. The C.I.D. man said it was like trying to dig a hole in a rock with your finger nails. They all ended up by believing you, much to their own surprise.’

  ‘I wish they’d told me,’ I sighed.

  ‘Not their way. They sounded a tough bunch.’

  ‘They seemed it, too.’

  ‘However, you survived.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Beckett looked at his watch. ‘Are you in a hurry?’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head.

  ‘Good… I’ve rather a lot to say to you. Can you lunch?’

  ‘Yes. I’d like to.’

  ‘Fine. Now, this report of yours.’ He dug the hand-written foolscap pages out of his inside breast pocket and laid them on the table. ‘What I’d like you to do now is to lop off the bit asking for reinforcements and substitute a description of the flame–thrower operation. Right? There’s a table and chair over there. Get to work, and when it’s done I’ll have it typed.’

  When I had finished the report he spent some time outlining and discussing the proceedings which were to be taken against Humber, Cass and Jud Wilson, and also against Soupy Tarleton and his friend Lewis Greenfield. He then looked at his watch again and decided it was time to go out for lunch. He took me to his Club, which seemed to me to be dark brown throughout, and we ate steak, kidney and mushroom pie which I chose because I could manage it unobtrusively with a fork. He noticed though.

  ‘That arm still troubling you?’

  ‘It’s much better.’

  He nodded and made no further comment. Instead, he told me of a visit he had paid the day before to an elderly uncle of Adams, whom he had discovered living in bachelor splendour in Piccadilly.

  ‘Young Paul Adams, according to his uncle, was the sort of child who would have been sent to an approved school if he hadn’t had rich parents. He was sacked from Eton for forging cheques and from his next school for persistent gambling. His parents bought him out of scrape after scrape and were told by a psychiatrist that he would never change, or at least not until late middle age. He was their only child. It must have been terrible for them. The father died when Adams was twenty-five, and his mother struggled on, trying to keep him out of too disastrous trouble. About five years ago she had to pay out a fortune to hush up a scandal in which Adams had apparently broken a youth’s arm for no reason at all, and she threatened to have him certified if he did anything like that again. And a few days later she fell out of her bed-room window and died. The uncle, her brother, says he has always thought that Adams pushed her.’

  ‘Very likely, I should think,’ I agreed.

  ‘So you were right about him being psychopathic’

  ‘Well, it was pretty obvious.’

  ‘From the way he behaved to you personally?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We had finished the pie and were on to cheese. Beckett looked at me curiously and said, ‘What sort of life did you really have at Humber’s stable?’

  ‘Oh,’ I grinned. ‘You could hardly call it a holiday camp.’

  He waited for me to go on and when I didn’t, he said, ‘Is that all you’ve got to say about it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. This is very good cheese.’

  We drank coffee and a glass of brandy out of a bottle with Beckett’s name on it, and eventually walked slowly back to his office.

  As before he sank gratefully into his chair and rested his head and arms, and I as before sat down opposite him on the other side of his desk.

  ‘You are going back to Australia soon, I believe?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I expect you are looking forward to getting back into harness.’

  I looked at him. His eyes stared straight back, steady and grave. He waited for an answer.

  ‘Not altogether.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I shrugged; grinned. ‘Who likes harness?’

  There was no point, I thought, in making too much of it.

  ‘You are going back to prosperity, good food, sunshine, your family, a beautiful house and a job you do well… isn’t that right?’

  I nodded. It wasn’t reasonable not to want to go to all that.

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ he said abruptly. ‘The unvarnished honest truth. What is wrong?’

  ‘I’m a discontented idiot, that’s all,’ I said lightly.

  ‘Mr Roke.’ He sat up slightly in the chair. ‘I have a good reason for asking these questions. Please give me truthful answers. What is wrong with your life in Australia?’

  There was a pause, while I thought and he waited. When at last I answered, I was aware that whatever his good reason was it would do no harm to speak plainly.

  ‘I do a job which I ought to find satisfying, and it leaves me bored and empty.’

  ‘A diet of milk and honey, when you have teeth,’ he observed.

  I laughed. ‘A taste for salt, perhaps.’

  ‘What would you have been had your parents not died and left you with three children to bring up?’

  ‘A lawyer, I think, though possibly…’ I hesitated.

  ‘Possibly what?’

  ‘Well… it sounds a bit odd, especially after the last few days… a policeman.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said softly, ‘that figures.’ He leant his head back again and smiled.

  ‘Marriage might help you feel more settled,’ he suggested.

  ‘More ties,’ I said, ‘Another family to provide for. The rut for ever.’

  ‘So that’s how you look at it. How about Elinor?’

  ‘She’s a nice girl.’

  ‘But not for keeps?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You went to a great deal of trouble to save her life,’ he pointed out.

  ‘It was only because of me that she got into danger at all.’

  ‘You couldn’t know that she would be so strongly attracted to you and find you so… er… irresistible that she would drive out to take another look at you. When you went back to Humber’s to extricate her, you had already
finished the investigation, tidily, quietly and undiscovered. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘Enjoy it?’ I repeated, surprised.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean the fracas at the end, or the hours of honest toil you had to put in,’ he smiled briefly, ‘But the… shall we say, the chase?’

  ‘Am I, in fact, a hunter by nature?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a silence. My unadorned affirmative hung in the air, bald and revealing.

  ‘Were you afraid at all?’ His voice was matter of fact.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To the point of incapacity?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You knew Adams and Humber would kill you if they found you out. What effect did living in perpetual danger have on you?’ His voice was so clinical that I answered with similar detachment.

  ‘It made me careful.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Well, if you mean was I in a constant state of nervous tension, then no, I wasn’t.’

  ‘I see.’ Another of his small pauses. Then he said, ‘What did you find hardest to do?’

  I blinked, grinned, and lied. ‘Wearing those loathsome pointed shoes.’

  He nodded as if I had told him a satisfying truth. I probably had. The pointed shoes had hurt my pride, not my toes.

  And pride had got the better of me properly when I visited Elinor in her college and hadn’t been strong enough to play an oaf in her company. All that stuff about Marcus Aurelius was sheer showing off, and the consequences had been appalling. It didn’t bear thinking of, let alone confessing.

  Beckett said idly, ‘Would you ever consider doing something similar again?’

  ‘I should think so. Yes. But not like that.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well… I didn’t know enough, for one thing. For example, it was just luck that Humber always left his office unlocked, because I couldn’t have got in if he hadn’t. I don’t know how to open doors without keys. I would have found a camera useful… I could have taken films of the blue ledger in Humber’s office, and so on, but my knowledge of photography is almost nil. I’d have got the exposures wrong. Then I had never fought anyone in my life before. If I’d known anything at all about unarmed combat I probably wouldn’t have killed Adams or been so much battered myself. Apart from all that there was nowhere where I could send you or Edward a message and be sure you would receive it quickly. Communications, in fact, were pretty hopeless.’