Dick Francis's Refusal

by Felix Francis

  “Mommy!” Sassy shouted from the backseat. “That’s a naughty word.”

  “Shush, darling,” I said.

  But it wasn’t Marina’s use of the naughty word bloody that I found disturbing, it was the word terrorist. I was about to start the engine when I suddenly had visions of booby traps and car bombs.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Marina asked in irritation as I slipped out of the driver’s seat and went to look under the Range Rover’s hood. I also checked all around the vehicle, and underneath it as well, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, at least nothing I could see.

  “Just checking,” I said with a smile as I climbed back in, but there remained a certain degree of unease in my mind when I did finally push the start button.

  Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened, nothing other than the twin-turbo V6 3.0-liter diesel engine coming smoothly to life.

  I silently rebuked myself for being so melodramatic. The situation was tense enough already.

  Nevertheless, I spent almost as much time watching the rearview mirror as I did the road on the fifty or so miles up the A34 to home, but, if a car had followed us, I couldn’t spot it.

  I was also careful when we arrived back at the house, leaving Marina and Saskia in the locked car while I checked for unwanted guests lurking in the undergrowth.

  “We can’t go on living like this,” Marina said in desperation when we were all safely inside and I’d relocked all the doors. “I can’t get you to search the garden every time I need to put the dogs out.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but the dogs will bark if they hear anything.”

  “But what are you going to do about it?” she asked.

  “What can I do?”

  “Get the police to stop this McCusker man terrorizing our lives. They can arrest him for kidnapping Sassy from school, for a start. Go and call them now.” It was not a request but a demand.

  “OK,” I said, “I will.”

  I went into my office and Marina followed. I called the number on the chief inspector’s business card.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Watkinson, please,” I said to the person who answered.

  “He’s off duty,” came the reply.

  “Could you please ask him to ring Sid Halley?”

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Halley. This is Detective Sergeant Lynch. I came with the chief inspector to your house on Thursday afternoon. Can I help?”

  “I may know the identity of the man on the phone, the one with the Northern Irish accent.”

  “Who is it?” D.S. Lynch asked.

  “A man called Billy McCusker, from West Belfast.”

  “You say you think he may be the one?” said the sergeant. “Or he may not be?”

  “I can’t be certain.”

  “I can’t arrest a man for kidnapping if you only think he may be responsible, now can I? What evidence do you have?”

  What did I have? Only Paddy O’Fitch’s Guinness-fueled rambling and a brief break in Jimmy Guernsey’s stride when I’d called out the name Billy McCusker. Even I could see it didn’t amount to much.

  “Not much,” I conceded, “but surely it’s a name worth pursuing?”

  “I will make a note of it and discuss it with the chief inspector on Monday.”

  “What about us?” I interjected strongly. “My family and I feel that we are living under a threat from this man, and the police aren’t taking our security seriously. He’s taken my daughter once from her school, and I have absolutely no intention of letting him take her again. We need some police protection.”

  Marina was nodding in approval alongside me.

  “I will also discuss that with the chief inspector.”

  “What about over the weekend?” I said.

  “Mr. Halley, I’m sorry but we simply don’t have the manpower to provide you with a personal bodyguard. I advise you to keep all your doors locked and call me again if this man McCusker contacts you. The chief inspector will be sure to call you on Monday.”

  I felt I was being fobbed off and my genuine concerns for our safety were being underestimated or dismissed. But I was not surprised. I’d had lots of dealings with the police over the years, and it was always my belief that they were much happier investigating serious crimes than they were trying to prevent them in the first place—look at the number of violent crimes committed by those out on bail, awaiting trial for previous violent offenses.

  “Well?” said Marina, who’d only been listening to my side of the conversation.

  “The sergeant said he’ll discuss it with Chief Inspector Watkinson, and they’ll let us know on Monday.”

  “Monday!” she screamed. “We might all be dead by Monday.”

  “Marina, my love, calm down,” I said, trying my best to soothe her anxiety. “If necessary, I will have to do what this man asks—at least until Monday.”

  • • •

  I SPENT most of the evening at my computer in my office researching the Troubles in Northern Ireland in general and Billy McCusker in particular.

  I was surprised to find that far more British soldiers were killed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles than have died in both Iraq and Afghanistan put together. More than seven hundred British servicemen lost their lives as a result of Irish terrorist action between 1969 and 2001, but none of those deaths could be laid at the door of Billy McCusker.

  According to Paddy, Billy had left the security forces well alone and had concentrated on killing members of the minority Catholic community.

  Even though there was a mass of information on the Troubles, there were only two short references I could find to any Billy McCusker. The first was a brief account in official court papers of the outcome of a trial for murder at Belfast Crown Court, where McCusker had been convicted of killing one Darren Paisley by nailing him to a wooden floor in a disused factory and leaving him there to die of thirst. According to the report, McCusker claimed to have informed Paisley’s father where to find his son, but Paisley Senior denied ever having received such a message.

  There was a small picture accompanying the report, a police mug shot of McCusker taken soon after he’d been arrested. I studied the image intently. It was nearly twenty years since it was taken, but the features were very distinctive—high cheekbones and a low, protruding brow that gave his eyes a deep, sunken appearance.

  The second mention was in a list of prisoners released from the Maze prison under the terms of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. Billy McCusker had walked free after serving just two and a half years of a life sentence by somehow convincing the government of the day that his murder of a fellow Protestant was a sectarian offense.

  Other than that, there was nothing else. I searched through the online archives for Northern Irish newspapers from the Belfast Telegraph to the Carrickfergus Advertiser, but there was not a single mention of anyone called Billy McCusker. He had obviously been very proficient at keeping his name out of the media.

  Honest Joe Bullen appeared several times in the Manchester and Liverpool dailies, especially in reports of betting-shop takeovers, but there were no references to Billy McCusker as being the owner of the company.

  Could Paddy O’Fitch have been wrong?

  I doubted it. Paddy was a walking encyclopedia when it came to racing matters, and his fear of McCusker had been genuine and unquestionable.

  The phone on my desk started to ring.

  I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to midnight—just as before.

  “What do you want?” I said, answering.

  “Ah, Mr. Halley,” said the now familiar voice. “How good of you to answer your phone. Did you have a good day at Newbury races?”

  “That’s none of your business,” I said.

  “Oh, I think it is,” he said in his condescendingly humorous tone. “Everything about you is now
my business.”

  “And how about the other way round?” I said. “Are you also my business?”

  There was a slight pause. “Mr. Halley,” he said, all humor having disappeared, “you will find out that I will very much be your business if you don’t do as I tell you.”

  “Why would I do what a kidnapper and a murderer says?”

  “Who says I’m a murderer?”

  “I’m sure Darren Paisley’s father would, for one.”

  There was a much longer pause from the other end of the line. I wondered if it had been wise to declare my hand so early. Once upon a time, I’d managed to defeat another particularly nasty villain only because he had underestimated me as a foe. There would be no chance of that now.

  “I will send you a report. Sign it.”

  “I will not,” I said. “I only sign reports I write myself.”

  “Make it easy on yourself. Sign the report now and save yourself a lot of grief. You’ll sign it eventually.”

  “On the contrary,” I said, “you can save yourself a lot of grief by leaving me alone and going back to West Belfast.”

  “I’m warning you, Mr. Halley,” he said.

  “And I’m warning you too, Mr. McCusker.”

  I hung up. There was little point in carrying on what would quickly descend into name-calling.

  I sat at my desk looking at the telephone and, sure enough, it rang again.

  “Now, listen to me, you bastard,” I said, picking it up, but it wasn’t him. Another voice, an English voice, cut through what I was saying.

  “Mr. Halley, this is Detective Sergeant Lynch.”

  “Who?”

  “Detective Sergeant Lynch,” he repeated. “I was listening in to your call.”

  I’d forgotten about that.

  “If the man calls again, try and get him to confirm that he is indeed Billy McCusker. Then we can issue a warrant for his arrest.”

  “Don’t you have enough already?” I asked. “He didn’t deny it.”

  “He probably wouldn’t deny it even if you were wrong. To throw us off on a tangent.”

  “Get off the line, then, in case he calls again.”

  I sat at my desk, watching the phone, for well over an hour, but without it ringing, before going quietly up the stairs to bed.

  Marina was asleep in Saskia’s room again, so I lay in our bed alone with the lights out, thinking about what I should do next.

  The chief inspector had said that involving Sid Halley was comparable to our friend poking a hornets’ nest with a stick. I now felt that I had well and truly poked a hornets’ nest of my own.

  I thought about Darren Paisley, lying nailed to a floor for days on end until he died of thirst. It made me shiver.

  Perhaps it wasn’t so much poking a hornets’ nest as putting my hand into a bag of vipers—my real hand, that is.

  • • •

  CHIEF INSPECTOR WATKINSON called at eleven o’clock on Monday morning.

  “How the search going for the blue Golf with a dent?” I asked.

  “Not well,” he said. “It seems that dark blue is the favorite color for Golfs, and there are tens of thousands of the damn things still running around on British roads.”

  “Are any of them registered to a Billy McCusker?” I asked.

  “Not that we can find. And I can hardly describe your actions as wise, telling him that you knew who he was.”

  “What would you have me do?” I asked him. “Roll over and capitulate?”

  “No,” he said. “But it might have been safer to keep that knowledge to yourself.”

  “I hoped that by telling him I know his name, it might actually make my family and me a little safer. Surely he wouldn’t be stupid enough to harm us if the police would then immediately be aware of who’d done it.”

  “I have spent an hour this morning discussing Billy McCusker with my police colleagues from the Northern Ireland Police Service and I wouldn’t bank on that. He may have been convicted of only one murder, but he is known to have committed many more, along with all sorts of other criminal activity. However, it seems that recently he has been extraordinarily adept at avoiding prosecution.”

  “Did you also speak to the police in Manchester?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” he said. “But, so far, McCusker seems to have kept himself out of the Manchester courts. Not that there aren’t plenty of rumors flying round—you know, extortion and money laundering, that sort of thing.” He sounded almost blasé about it.

  “So will you give us some protection?”

  “I’ll ensure that your village is regularly patrolled. I can’t do more than that. I can’t even keep the tap on your telephone after midnight tonight without renewing the order, and I don’t think my superintendent’s budget will allow it.”

  “What does McCusker have to do before you’ll put an armed policeman at our door?”

  “Mr. Halley,” said the chief inspector, “I have no reason to believe that you or your family are in any imminent danger.”

  “Did you listen to the call he made last night?” I asked almost in disbelief. “He as good as told me that he would give me more grief unless I signed his report.”

  “So why don’t you sign the report and then tell the racing authorities it was signed under duress and that it should be ignored?”

  “That would surely amount to the same as not signing it in the first place, at least in his eyes. And, anyway, I have my pride, you know.”

  “Pride before a fall?” said the chief inspector. “Maybe it’s time to be pragmatic and do what he asks.”

  “You can’t seriously believe that McCusker would go away just because I signed his stupid report,” I said. “I’ve come across people like him before and, trust me, it’s not a matter of getting this damn thing signed or not, it’s more about getting the better of Sid Halley.”

  “You flatter yourself.”

  “You may think so, but I’ve been in this situation all too often in my life. That’s why I gave up the investigating business. I’m not the police, and too many of the people I have encountered have taken out their frustrations on me personally. I have the scars to prove it. I even met a man who believed that murdering me would give him a certain status in prison as the man who had killed Sid Halley.”

  “But he didn’t kill you.”

  “No, not quite.” But I could remember how frighteningly close he had come to doing so. And it had been the growing realization that there were so many gangsters standing in line to be the one to kill Sid Halley that had made my decision to stop investigating so easy. Consequently, I had broadcast to the world that Sid Halley had retired from chasing villains and that henceforth they had nothing further to fear provided my family and I were left alone.

  Clearly, that announcement had not fully registered with Billy McCusker.

  Now I had little choice but to fight back. And fight back I would.

  7

  On Tuesday morning, much to Marina’s dismay, I caught the train from Banbury to London for the annual checkup and service on my myoelectric hand.

  “You should stay here and look after Sassy and me,” Marina had said crossly over breakfast.

  “Sassy will be fine at school,” I’d replied. “They’ve employed a security guard to ensure no child can leave the premises unless personally collected by a parent or guardian. It took me several minutes yesterday afternoon to convince him that I was indeed Saskia’s dad because I didn’t have any ID on me, and I’m sure he thought I was too old.”

  Marina still hadn’t liked it. “But what about me?”

  “Why don’t you come to London with me? You could do some shopping while I go to the hospital.”

  Marina would have normally jumped at the chance to have a day’s shopping in London, so it was a measure of
her disquiet that she opted instead to go spend the day with Paula Gaucin, Annabel’s mother and Marina’s best friend, who lived almost next door to the school in the next village.

  “I can then be close by in case Sassy needs me,” she’d said, even though both of us knew that Saskia was the least worried of the three of us. She had gone off happily to school, as she always did, seemingly not affected one jot by her unauthorized lift home the previous week.

  I took a taxi from Paddington station to Roehampton Lane and walked into the now familiar Queen Mary’s Hospital building and along the corridor to the prosthesis service department.

  My current left arm was the third I’d had in fourteen years and a replacement for the previous one, which I’d damaged beyond repair due to using it as a crowbar to extricate myself from some handcuffs. The brainiacs at Queen Mary’s had not been amused, and I’d been sad to see it go. That particular arm had saved my life.

  There was no doubt that the mechanical engineering involved in making an artificial hand that moved with my thoughts and motor-nerve impulses was pure genius, but the medics had yet to discover a way of giving the fingers any sensory function. Hence I reckoned that it was little more use to me than an old-fashioned hook made famous by the captain of the same name in Peter Pan.

  Now I eased my truncated left forearm out of the tightly fitting fiberglass shell and handed the false bit of me over to one of the technicians. He plugged a computer lead into a small socket alongside the battery compartment.

  “Everything seems to be in order,” he said, studying his computer screen. “All the motors are working fine.” I found it slightly eerie to watch as my now disembodied left hand opened and closed by itself as it lay on the technician’s workbench. “Do you have any difficulty operating it?”

  “I suppose not,” I said. “But, to be honest, I hardly use it anymore. I wear it more for show, like a piece of clothing.”

  “A very expensive piece of clothing,” he said.

  Didn’t I know it! The insurers had refused point-blank to cough up for the damage to my previous hand on the grounds that use as a crowbar was not in their list of insured perils, and it could hardly be described as fair wear and tear. So I’d had to pay for the new one.