Dick Francis's Refusal

by Felix Francis

  “I don’t suppose you can make it feel?” I asked the technician.

  “Sorry,” he replied. “I hear that there’s some research going on in the States to add pressure sensors to the fingers that connect via electrodes to the patient’s brain. But it’s in the early stages. No sign of it here yet.”

  “Shame,” I said.

  “I’ll give this a proper internal clean and lubrication. It’ll take about twenty minutes. You can wait outside, if you like.” He made it clear that he didn’t really want me looking over his shoulder, watching him work. I’d seen it all before anyway.

  “I’ve an appointment to see Dr. Harold Bryant,” I said.

  “Ah, Harry the Hands,” the technician said with a smile. “Got his sights on you, has he?”

  “Sights?” I said.

  “For one of his hand transplants. Dead keen, he is. And he’s good too. Great results so far. Early days, of course, but I don’t think he’ll be putting me out of a job just yet.” He laughed.

  I wasn’t at all sure it was a laughing matter.

  “How many transplants has he done?” I asked.

  “Only one,” replied the technician. “At least he’s only done one here. But he did some before that as part of a transplant team in America—in Kentucky, I think.”

  One transplant didn’t sound to me to be quite enough.

  Did I really want to be Harry the Hands’ second guinea pig?

  “I’ll have this finished by time you’ve seen Harry—that’s if you still need it.”

  I left the technician laughing again at his own little joke, walked down the corridor to the outpatient department and straight into a consulting room to meet Dr. Harry Bryant, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, aka Harry the Hands, who had been waiting for me, his sights at the ready.

  “Mr. Halley,” he said in a surprisingly soft voice for such a big man, “how wonderful to meet you at last.” He stood up from behind his desk and leaned forward to shake my right hand with a firm grip. “Please, do sit down.”

  I sat in the chair across the desk from him.

  “Now,” he said, leaning back, “tell me why you want a new hand.”

  • • •

  HARRY THE HANDS and I spoke for almost an hour, but, somehow, the discussion did not proceed in the manner that I’d been expecting.

  Either he was being very clever or I was being rather dim, or maybe it was because what he was offering was precisely what I craved, but far from him having to convince me to be his guinea pig number two, I found myself being the one who was selling me to him as a possible candidate.

  “When are we talking about?” I asked. “How soon?”

  “We need to do some tests first, to look at your remaining forearm to ensure that you are suitable, and then it’s up to fate—we have to wait for a suitable donor.”

  Donor. It was the first time he’d used the word.

  Donor.

  There was suddenly more of a psychological dimension to the whole thing. It was far beyond simply replacing what I’d lost; it was having someone else’s hand attached in its place.

  “There are no guarantees,” Harry said. “During my time in the United States, we had some problems with rejection, and not only physical rejection of the hand by the body’s immune system. There was also a case of emotional rejection when the recipient couldn’t come to terms with having a new limb that wasn’t his to start with.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “The transplanted hand had to be removed.”

  “So the transplant is reversible?”

  “You should not enter into this procedure with that state of mind. Yes, we can remove the hand again, and it has occasionally been necessary. But there is every likelihood that such a removal would not leave your arm as it is now.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “Amputation would likely have to be above where your arm finishes now, maybe even above the elbow.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But we should look at the positives as well. My experience has also shown me how successful hand and wrist transplantation can be. There are patients who had the operation more than ten years ago who now live perfectly normal lives.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve watched the videos on YouTube.”

  • • •

  I WALKED OUT of Queen Mary’s Hospital with a new spring in my step. Suddenly, the prospect of dispensing with the steel and plastic and having a living, feeling left hand again had filled me with great excitement.

  After my meeting with Harry, I had been taken away by one of his team who had conducted the tests. Blood was drawn and X-rays taken; measurements of my right hand were made—to try to match for size and color—and I was asked to fill out a lengthy psychological evaluation questionnaire.

  I looked down at my freshly serviced prosthesis.

  “Your days are numbered,” I said to it out loud and received a rather strange look from a woman who was waiting with me for the bus to Hammersmith. I smiled at her and she moved away a few steps.

  So absorbed had I been with the whole concept of the transplant that I had quite forgotten my ongoing troubles with Billy McCusker, at least I had until my cell rang while I was sitting on the bus.

  “Mr. Halley,” said the now familiar voice, “have you received the report?”

  “No,” I replied. I’d left home before the mailman had been. “But it would make no difference if I had. I won’t sign it, and I won’t play along with your silly game.”

  “It’s not a game, Mr. Halley.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I’m not playing.”

  I disconnected the call.

  What had that policeman said? Maybe it’s time to be pragmatic and do what he asks.

  Not bloody likely.

  • • •

  MARINA PICKED ME UP from Banbury station at three, and we drove together to collect Saskia from school.

  “Had a good day?” Marina asked. “Did your hand pass its checkup?”

  “Yes,” I said, “my hand was fine. And it was a very good day.” I paused. “I met a surgeon who does hand transplants.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wants to give me a new hand.”

  “What?” Marina exclaimed, almost driving into a stationary bus. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m very serious,” I said. “He told me he could give me a working, feeling hand again.”

  “But surely it’s been too long since you lost yours.”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “In fact, he prefers to have patients who have had no hand for some years.”

  “But when?”

  “They would need to do some tests first to make sure my arm is suitable, and also for tissue typing, then it would be a matter of waiting for a suitable donor.”

  “My God!” Marina said. “How macabre.”

  “Harry Bryant, that’s the surgeon, said that it will be very important to think of the hand as mine and not as still belonging to someone who has died.”

  “It’s all a bit strange though, don’t you think, wishing for someone to die.”

  I thought back to what Harry the Hands had said to me as I’d been leaving his office. “We’ll sort out all the tests and then you’ll just have to wait and hope for rain.”

  “Why rain?” I’d asked him.

  “There are always more donors when it rains.”

  “Why?”

  “Motorcyclists,” he’d said. “Far more motorcyclists are killed in the wet.”

  Even the memory of the conversation made me shiver.

  I agreed with Marina. It was a very strange mind-set indeed to be hoping for others to die so I could have their bits.

  • • •

  SASSY CAME bounding down the
path to the gate but had to wait her turn to be released by the school security guard.

  “Hello, darling,” I said as she jumped up into the Range Rover. “What have you learned today?”

  “Nothing,” Sassy said with conviction, “but Annabel and I played hopscotch at lunchtime and, Mommy, I won.”

  “Well done, darling,” Marina said.

  I smiled broadly as I drove the couple of miles and turned in through the gates of home.

  “Where are the dogs?” I said, the smile suddenly disappearing from my face.

  “I left them in the kennel,” Marina said with certainty, but we were looking at the kennel, and the gate was now wide open. “I know I did. And I came back to check on them round two o’clock. They were there then.”

  “Wait here,” I said, parking the Range Rover on the drive, “I’ll go and have a look.” I got out of the car. “Lock the doors.”

  Both Marina and Saskia looked at me with big, frightened eyes.

  I walked over to the kennel. It was a small, red-brick building in the corner of the garden with a fenced-off run that included a patch of grass. I had built it soon after we moved in so that we could leave the dogs alone for the day without them having to be cooped up inside the house. The kennel gave them the chance to be under cover if it rained but also to lie in the sun on nice days.

  “Here, girls,” I called out, but neither of our two setters appeared. “Mandy, Rosie, where are you?”

  I went into the kennel, through the open gate, but there were no dogs hiding in there. I hadn’t expected them to be. The two would always rush to the kennel gate whenever we came home, standing up on their hind legs with their front paws on the rail, their tails wagging enthusiastically. It would have been very unlike either of them to hide from us.

  I walked over to the house with a degree of trepidation, but I could see no sign of a forced entry. Nevertheless, I was very wary as I went inside and searched thoroughly both upstairs and down. I had mental visions of pet rabbits boiling in saucepans or bloodied horse heads lying between satin sheets, but there was nothing.

  I went back into the garden and searched everywhere, including amongst the deep undergrowth in the shrubbery.

  Nothing.

  The dogs weren’t anywhere on our property.

  I went back to the Range Rover.

  “What is going on, Sid?” Marina asked with alarm. “Where are the dogs?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Has someone taken them?” Sassy asked.

  “They may have got out and run away.”

  Sassy pulled a very sad face. “Why would they run away?” she said. “Don’t they like living with us?”

  “Of course they do, darling,” said Marina. “Don’t worry. We’ll find them.”

  I wished I shared Marina’s confidence but decided not to say so.

  “Can we go and look for them?” Sassy asked miserably. “I want Rosie and Mandy back now.” She started to cry, and Marina tried to comfort her.

  I think we all felt like crying. Rosie and Mandy were almost as much a part of our family as Saskia, and I had little doubt as to who was responsible for their disappearance.

  Billy McCusker was right. This was no game. It was war.

  • • •

  “DOG THEFT is all too common, I’m afraid. Did you have a padlock on your kennel?”

  “It’s not theft,” I said. “It’s kidnapping.”

  “Dognapping, you mean. Have you received a ransom note?” D.S. Lynch wasn’t being very helpful. “And how do you know for sure that their disappearance is due to Billy McCusker?”

  “I just do,” I said.

  I could remember Sir Richard Stewart saying the exact same words in the exact same frustrated tone during his visit to my house the previous week when I had questioned his conviction that race results were being manipulated.

  I didn’t question it anymore.

  “So what are you going to do about our dogs?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” said D.S. Lynch.

  “How about sending a detective round to fingerprint the kennel or organizing a search party?”

  “Mr. Halley, even if I knew for sure that the dogs had been taken rather than wandering off on their own, I couldn’t allocate any manpower to finding them. Dogs are considered property. In the eyes of the law, the theft of a domestic animal is no more serious an offense than the taking of, say, a bicycle or a garden table, and I’d hardly send a posse out in search of those, now would I?”

  “I thought they once hanged horse thieves in the American West.”

  “Maybe they did, and stealing sheep used to be a capital offense here too, but we’ve thankfully moved on in the past two hundred years.”

  “But the dogs are part of our family.”

  “They may be,” he said, “but they are just dogs.”

  Just dogs!

  Not to us, they weren’t. To us, they were like children.

  “So what should I do?” I asked.

  “Contact your local dog warden. Any dogs that are found should be handed in to him. Were they wearing tags?”

  “Yes,” I said. “On their collars. They’re also microchipped.”

  “Then you should contact the microchip service provider and tell them the dogs are missing and check that their records are up to date. Other than that, all you can do is wait.”

  Wait for Billy McCusker to call, I thought. And then what? A ransom demand? Sign more papers? Absolve him of his sins? Curl up and die?

  I was desperate to fight back, but how could I if I couldn’t see my enemy?

  It was definitely time to look for him.

  8

  Marina took Saskia out in the Range Rover to try to find the dogs while I sat in the house waiting for the inevitable call from Billy McCusker.

  I collected the mail from the basket under the letterbox in the front door. The so-called report was amongst the bills and the junk mail, a slim brown envelope with no markings other than my name and address printed on a white stick-on label.

  I was careful not to touch the surfaces of the envelope, holding it only by the edges. I didn’t for a moment think there would be any fingerprints on the paper—none, that was, other than the mailman’s—but one could only hope that McCusker had been careless.

  I slit open the envelope using a carving knife and poured out the contents onto the kitchen table.

  There was only one sheet of ubiquitous white copy paper, with one brief computer-printed paragraph under the heading A Report into Sir Richard Stewart’s Allegations by Sid Halley.

  I was approached by Sir Richard Stewart concerning his belief that the results of certain races were suspicious and that irregular betting patterns existed on those races. I have studied the races in detail, and I have interviewed some of the jockeys that rode in the races concerned. I am satisfied that the betting patterns for the races were not exceptional or unusual, and I am content that no evidence exists which supports the beliefs held by Sir Richard.

  There was a space beneath the paragraph for my signature and the date.

  It was laughable. The man was more of a fool than I had thought.

  For a start, a genuine Sid Halley report would have been prepared on proper headed, printed notepaper and would have included detailed notes of all the interviews conducted, with records of with whom, where and when, not to mention a detailed breakdown of each of the original allegations, race by race, with a thorough and reasoned conclusion drawn from expressed evidence.

  There was no way I was putting my name to this garbage, true or false. I had standards to live up to.

  • • •

  MARINA AND SASKIA returned about eight o’clock without the dogs. Not that I’d imagined for a moment that they’d find them. In fact, I feared that our girls
might never be found.

  McCusker was a killer. He’d been convicted of one gruesome murder and he’d clearly been responsible for many others. Dispatching a couple of dogs would not have severely pricked his conscience. He’d have probably enjoyed it.

  Little Saskia was inconsolable, weeping buckets into Marina’s shoulder as she carried her into the kitchen.

  “Bedtime,” Marina said to me, and she took Saskia upstairs to her room.

  I looked again at the sheet of paper and its printed paragraph.

  I have interviewed some of the jockeys that rode in all the races concerned.

  Indeed, I had, on Saturday at Newbury. But how did McCusker know that?

  Had he been watching my movements or had either Jimmy Guernsey or Angus Drummond reported back?

  I went through to my office and looked again at the detailed lists I had made of all the jockeys and trainers of the more than one hundred horses that had run in Sir Richard’s suspicious races.

  In all, there were thirty-six different jockeys who had taken part in the nine races. A third had ridden in only one of them, eight more had ridden in two, while the other sixteen had gone to post in three or more, including Angus Drummond and Jimmy Guernsey, who’d had mounts in all nine.

  I decided to concentrate first on those who had ridden three or more times. Other than Guernsey and Drummond, I knew most of them fairly well, all except a couple of the younger ones who had only recently entered the sport.

  I used the Directory of the Turf website to look up all their private addresses. Of the sixteen, eleven lived within a six-mile radius of Lambourn, the Berkshire village that was a major center for racehorse training, especially steeplechasing. Maybe I could visit some of those in a single day, but I’d have to choose a day when there were no local jump meetings and hope they were at home.

  I looked up the fixtures, but, as I’d feared, there were no days in the coming week without any jump racing at all. However, there was one with only a single meeting at Wetherby and that was in two days’ time, on Thursday. Most of the southern jockeys, those who lived around Lambourn, would be unlikely to travel so far north for midweek racing.