Dick Francis's Refusal

by Felix Francis

  He did as I asked, giving his name to the operator as William McCusker, which I thought was quite entertaining under the circumstances.

  I hung back from the Toyota, not wanting to spook the occupants, and they had already disappeared down Mill Lane behind the church when we pulled into the center of Chipping Warden.

  I turned off the headlights and pulled into Hogg End, parking on the grass verge in front of a line of thatched cottages. Chico and I got out, being careful to close the doors quietly behind us.

  “This way,” I whispered.

  There was just enough light from the meager village streetlights for us to negotiate our way silently through the churchyard.

  “Where are the bloody fire department,” I whispered.

  “They’ll be comin’,” Chico replied. “Now, where’s this house?”

  “As far as I remember, it’s just the other side of the church. It’s a modern, red-brick box in a tiny garden.”

  We crept along the side of the church and peered around the corner.

  There was not much to see except darkness.

  There were no lights on in Rose Cottage and not a sign of the Toyota Land Cruiser.

  Had I been mistaken?

  Had McCusker’s chums, in fact, driven straight through the village of Chipping Warden and onwards towards Daventry?

  In the far distance I could hear the faint sound of a siren. The fire department was on its way from Banbury. Would it be a wasted journey?

  Chico grabbed my coat and pointed.

  A pair of dark figures, silhouetted against a more distant streetlight, could be seen at the edge of the property, bending down, about thirty yards in front of us.

  The siren was getting louder.

  Come on, I thought. Come on, hurry up.

  The figures disappeared rapidly into the shadows, and there was no way of telling if they’d come behind the house or had gone around the front.

  Suddenly, there was a great whoosh of flames emanating from just where we had seen the two men, and, to our left, we saw the Toyota Land Cruiser take off at speed from behind the house and towards the main road.

  The flames seemed to run right around and encircle the whole property, leaping up to the roofline and lighting up the night sky like a giant bonfire. And the searing heat caused Chico and me to cower back around the corner of the church.

  “That’s gasoline,” Chico said. “I can smell it. Effin’ stupid. Only a bloody fool sets a fire with gasoline. It’s far too explosive.”

  Maybe, I thought, but it made for a spectacular sight.

  “Stay or go?” Chico asked.

  I didn’t really want to go without knowing if the Molson family would be all right, but, equally, I didn’t really want to get tangled up in another police investigation, being accused of setting fire to the place myself.

  The cavalry arrived with great clamor and flashing of blue lights, the firefighters spilling out of the truck and running out hoses to the hydrants.

  “Come on,” Chico said, “nothing more to do here. Let’s go and check your house.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  We ran back through the churchyard to the Range Rover, dodging the gravestones.

  “No lights,” Chico said as I started the motor. “Too many witnesses.” He pointed at a number of the local residents in dressing gowns and slippers who had emerged from their beds to see what was causing the noise. “We don’t want one of them copyin’ down our license plate as we drive away, now do we?”

  There was plenty of light from the flames to see our way back to the main road, where I switched on the headlights and turned towards Banbury and Nutwell beyond. The thought that the occupants of the Toyota might be planning to use any remaining contents of the jerry can to do the same to my house encouraged my rather heavy-footed approach to the Range Rover’s gas pedal.

  • • •

  I KNOWINGLY broke my bail conditions by going within two miles of Annabel Gaucin. In fact, I drove right past her house on the way to mine.

  “Stop short,” Chico instructed. “Let me have a quick look first.”

  I switched off the headlights and rolled to a halt about fifty yards up the hill from my front gate.

  “It’s down there,” I said to Chico, “second house on the left. The one with gates to the side.”

  “Give me five minutes,” he said, quietly opening the passenger door and drifting away into the night. Better, I thought, to leave him to it rather than to follow. He seemed to me to have night-vision eyes and a degree of stealth that I could only dream about.

  I was still tempted to call the fire department again just in case. It had taken them ten minutes or so to get to the Molsons’ after Chico’s call, and, judging by the speed and ferocity of the flames, it was just as well that they’d had a nine-minute start over the actual fire.

  I stepped out of the Range Rover and stood next to it, listening out for any unusual sounds. There were none, and, presently, Chico returned, walking along the road.

  “There’s no one here,” he said.

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “How about Aynsford?”

  “Let’s go check.”

  • • •

  ALL WAS QUIET at Charles’s house with, unsurprisingly at one o’clock in the morning, no lights showing in the windows.

  I pulled the Range Rover slowly into the driveway, turning off the engine and lights as soon as possible to reduce the chance of waking the occupants.

  Was it really only fourteen hours since Chico and I had left here for Uttoxeter races? It felt more like a week.

  I crunched gingerly across the gravel and tried the door. It was locked. So much for me trying to be as quiet as possible. I was about to ring the doorbell when I saw what looked like a ghostly apparition coming straight towards me.

  Charles, in striped pajamas and dressing gown, was advancing through the glass porch with his shotgun raised at the ready.

  “Charles,” I shouted quickly, “it’s me, Sid. And Chico.”

  “Are you alone?” he shouted back.

  “Yes.”

  The shotgun wavered, and then my scary double-O view of the ends of the barrels disappeared as he lowered them towards the floor.

  He unlocked the door, and he was shaking.

  “Come and sit down,” I said, taking the shotgun out of his hands.

  “Yes,” he said. “Sorry.”

  I broke open the gun and removed the cartridges, thankful that his trembling fingers hadn’t pulled the trigger by mistake.

  I should have called him before we arrived, but I’d been afraid of waking him. I should have known that, as a military man, he’d have been on sentry duty, standing guard over Marina, Saskia and his house. And sleeping on sentry duty had once been a capital offense.

  We went through into his kitchen, and I laid the shotgun down on the table while I fetched Charles a glass of water.

  “I’ve been so worried since you called,” Charles said. “I didn’t tell Marina because I didn’t want her insisting we go to your place.”

  “Our house is fine,” I said. “We checked.”

  I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened since our departure without actually mentioning the fire at the Molson household. For some reason, I thought it was better to leave out that information. Charles was jumpy enough.

  “Do you think they’ve gone back to Manchester?” he asked.

  “I hope so.”

  The phone rang in my pocket.

  “Hello,” I said, answering it warily.

  “Is that William McCusker?” asked a crackly female voice.

  “Who is this?” I asked back.

  “A fire was reported by a William McCusker on this telephone,” came the reply. “A fire in Chipping Warden.”

  I hung
up and immediately switched it off.

  Chico had been listening to the exchange.

  “Take the SIM card out,” he said.

  I opened the back of the phone, removed the little rectangle and gave it to him. He took a pair of scissors from the worktop and cut through the SIM in three places.

  “You’ll have to get a new one tomorrow,” Chico said. “This one’s now history. We’ll just have to hope they didn’t trace the position of the phone before they called it.”

  “I doubt it. This phone’s hardly cutting-edge when it comes to GPS.”

  “They can still do it by triangulation of the signal, not that there’s much of that here.”

  “What’s going on?” Charles asked, somewhat bemused. “What was that little thing anyway?”

  “It’s called a SIM card,” I said. “It’s what makes a cell phone work—gives it its number. We’re just making the number redundant so McCusker can’t call it.”

  He accepted the explanation without question and made his way rather unsteadily up the stairs to bed.

  “Charles, are you all right?” I asked with concern as I watched him from the hall.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just tired. It’s been a long day, and I’d forgotten how exhausting a six-year-old can be. I’ve been up and down these stairs at least a dozen times, searching for her, all day long.” He shook his head.

  Saskia and her games of sardines, I thought with a smile.

  “Good night,” I said.

  He lifted a hand in reply and disappeared towards his bedroom, his movement evident by the creaking of the old landing floorboards.

  I, however, still had things to do, and I went through to Charles’s study to use his computer to look for any news on the Molson fire.

  I decided that living at Aynsford for any length of time would quickly drive me crazy. Either Charles’s computer or the Internet connection, or both, were so slow that I almost had time to make myself a cup of tea between entering a web address and the page appearing on the screen.

  But the slowness didn’t change the fact that there was no news anywhere on the Net of a fire in Chipping Warden. It was probably too soon.

  Short of trying the Molsons’ number direct, which might have taken a bit of explaining if anyone actually answered at one-thirty a.m., I would have to wait until the morning.

  “Do we need to mount a guard?” Chico asked when I went back to give him the news of no news.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “I think they would have been here by now if they were coming. I reckon we’re safe.”

  “Me too,” I said, yawning. “I’m off to bed.”

  “I’ll stay up a while longer,” he said, “just to be sure.”

  I left him in the kitchen, making himself a cup of strong coffee, while I went up the stairs to the guest room, grateful not to be spending the night with Chico in the Range Rover.

  Dodging the creakiest bits of the floor so as to be as quiet as possible, I went along the landing to the bathroom to undress and also to ease my left forearm out of the prosthesis, grimacing at the pain that always accompanied the procedure. It was like taking off a tight-fitting shoe without undoing the laces first. At least the impact with the man’s head in the alley didn’t appear to have caused any damage to its interior workings, not that I really cared if it had. I firmly believed that my prosthesis’s days were numbered. Soon I’d have a real, feeling hand that didn’t need to be removed every night before I went to bed.

  I slid in next to Marina, trying my best not to wake her, but she stirred and turned sleepily towards me, reaching out and cupping my manhood in her warm hands. It caused shudders to go down my legs.

  “Mmm,” she murmured, “that’s nice.”

  Indeed it was, and we snuggled together. It wasn’t long before I had aroused her to full awareness, and she had done more than the same for me.

  With all our recent troubles, sex had been well down our agenda—in fact, it had been so far down that it had fallen off the bottom. Marina and I had argued regularly, and there had been a simmering, minor hostility between us ever since that first visit by Sir Richard Stewart.

  Now all of that was forgotten as we rediscovered each other’s bodies, giving and receiving pleasure in equal measure and bringing each other to a simultaneous, heart-thumping climax.

  “Wow,” I said. “That was good.”

  “It certainly was,” Marina said. “And I needed it.” She snuggled up close to me. “I wasn’t expecting you back tonight.”

  “Would you have preferred it if I wasn’t?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said with a laugh. “Of course not.”

  We lay together with our arms entwined, drifting off into contented sleep.

  • • •

  I WAS AWAKE in an instant as if a noise had disturbed me. It was still pitch-black, so I slowly turned over and touched the top of my bedside clock, lighting up the digital figures, which showed the time as 5:27.

  I had been asleep for less than four hours.

  I lay in the darkness, straining to hear any unfamiliar or unwelcome sound. There was nothing other than the gentle breathing of Marina next to me, and that was hardly unfamiliar or unwelcome.

  Had I dreamed it?

  I rolled out of bed, put on my dressing gown and padded as silently as I could across the landing and down the stairs in my bare feet. In spite of the early hour and the near-complete darkness outside, there was just enough light in the house for me to see my way, light from the alarm keypad near the front door, from the cordless phone charger on the hall table and from the digital-clock readout on the electric stove in the kitchen.

  I looked down at Rosie, fast asleep in her bed in front of the AGA. I smiled. She was clearly not much use as a guard dog.

  All seemed quiet as I peered through the kitchen window for a few moments, searching for any movement outside. There was none that I could see, so I relaxed and went back into the hall, where I was suddenly attacked.

  I felt myself being pushed back and then thrown to the ground, landing on my back and hip with a breath-expelling thump onto Charles’s antique Persian carpet.

  I knew that throw. It was a basic judo move.

  “Chico,” I said urgently with what little air I could muster. “It’s me, Sid, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, why didn’t you bleedin’ say so?” came back his cockney twang from the darkness. “I reckons you was an intruder, like. You should be upstairs in your slumbers, mate.”

  “I thought I heard a noise,” I said, rolling over and trying to get myself up.

  “Here,” Chico said, holding out a hand, “let me help.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking it. It must be a sign of getting old, I thought, that I needed help getting up from the floor. I put it down to only having one available hand to push with.

  “Didn’t you hear anything?” I asked, rubbing a fast-developing bruise on my right hip.

  “Only me droppin’ a bleedin’ coffee cup,” he said sheepishly, “when I nodded off.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s all right, then. Come on. Let’s both go up to bed. No one’s going to come now. And it’ll be light soon.”

  “Yeah, I reckon you’re right.”

  We went upstairs together, with him climbing on up to a second level, to the rooms in the eaves that had once been the domain of the domestic servants, while I went and again slid between the sheets with Marina.

  This time, she remained sleeping, her rhythmic breathing untroubled by my nocturnal excursion. I smiled in the dark, doing my best to ignore my aching hip, and slowly drifted back to sleep.

  25

  There was absolutely nothing on the early-morning radio news about a fire in Chipping Warden—no report of the Molson family being burned to death and no account of any gasoline-fue
led arson.

  In one way, I was hugely relieved. I was sure it would have been the headline story if one of the country’s top twenty or so steeplechase jockeys had met his end in such a manner.

  I dressed and went down to the study to check once more on the computer and found only one minor reference on a local-news website. It reported that a fire engine had responded to an emergency call soon after midnight and had dealt with a minor blaze near the church at Chipping Warden. It gave no other details and no mention of it being set deliberately or, indeed, of any damage to property.

  In fact, it was all rather strange. The fire that Chico and I had seen could surely not be described as a minor blaze. When we had last seen them, the flames had been so fierce that I had feared for the lives of the occupants of Rose Cottage in spite of the presence of the firemen.

  I called the Molsons’ number using Charles’s phone.

  “Tony Molson,” said the voice that answered.

  “Tony, it’s Sid, Sid Halley.”

  “I’m not talking to you,” he said angrily. “Bloody mad, you are. Nearly got us burned alive, you did. I should never have won that race. Now, sod off and leave me alone.”

  “It was me that called the fire department,” I said, hoping that by saying so I wasn’t jumping straight into my own firestorm. “How do you think they got there so fast?”

  “According to the cops, someone called William McCusker phoned them. I nearly jumped out of my skin when they told me that. They asked me if I knew anyone of that name, but, of course, I said I didn’t.”

  “It wasn’t him, it was me,” I said again, although, actually, it had been Chico. “I gave them the name William McCusker in order to try and incriminate him.”

  “So you’re telling me that you knew about the fire before it started. That’s what the senior fire officer told me. He reckoned that whoever called them out must have been the person who’d started it. Otherwise, how would they have known?” There was another pause. “Did you start it, Sid?”

  “No, of course I didn’t,” I said. “Billy McCusker’s men started it, as you must know. But what I don’t understand is how your house wasn’t destroyed, the flames looked so intense.”