by Dick Francis
I stood on the pavement for a while but it was cold and my real toes became chilled inside my inappropriately thin leather loafers.
Of course, I had no toes on my right side but that didn’t mean that I had no feeling there. The nerves that had once stretched all the way to my toes now ended seven inches below my knee. However, they often sent signals as if they had come from my foot.
In particular, when my real left foot was cold, the nerves in my right leg tended to confuse the situation by sometimes sending cold signals to my brain or worse, as now, hot ones. It felt like I had one foot inside a block of ice while the other was resting on a red-hot griddle plate. The sensation from the truncated nerves may only have been from a phantom limb but they were real enough in my head, and they hurt.
I took shelter from the cold in my car. I started the engine and switched on the heater.
Consequently, I almost missed the arrival of the old man’s meal.
A dark blue Nissan came towards me and pulled up in front of the house and a middle-aged woman leapt out and almost ran to the old man’s door carrying a foil-covered tray. She had a key and let herself in. Only a few seconds later she emerged again, slammed the door shut and was back in her car almost before I had a chance to get out of mine.
I walked in the road so she couldn’t leave without reversing or running me over. She sounded the horn and waved me out of the way. I put up a hand in a police-style stop signal.
‘I’m in a hurry,’ she shouted.
‘I just need to ask you a question,’ I shouted back.
The driver’s window slid down a few inches.
‘Are you Stella Beecher?’ I asked, coming alongside the car.
‘No,’ she said.
‘The old man said Stella delivered his meals.’
She smiled. ‘He calls all of us Stella,’ she said. ‘Someone called Stella used to do it for him but she hasn’t been here for months.’
‘Is her name Stella Beecher?’ I asked.
‘I don’t really know,’ the woman said. ‘We’re volunteers. I’d only just started when she stopped coming.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. The old people don’t like me being late with their food.’
‘How can I contact Stella?’ I asked.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea where she is now.’
‘What’s his name?’ I asked, nodding at the house.
‘Mr Horner,’ she said. ‘He’s a cantankerous old git. And he never even bothered to wash up his plate from yesterday.’ I could see his dirty plate lying on the front seat beside her. ‘Must dash.’
She revved the engine and was gone.
I stood there wishing I’d asked her name, or for her contact details, or at least for the name of the organization for whom she acted as a volunteer. Perhaps the council would know, I thought. I’d ask them.
I walked back up the driveway of number 26 and rang the bell.
There was no reply.
I leaned down and called through the letterbox. ‘Mr Horner,’ I shouted. ‘I need to ask you some questions.’
‘Go away.’ I could hear him in the distance. ‘I’m having my lunch.’
‘I only want a minute,’ I shouted, again through the letterbox. ‘I need to ask you about your post.’
‘What about my post?’ he said from much closer.
I stood up straight and he opened the door a crack on a security chain.
‘Do you ever receive post for other people?’ I asked him.
‘How do you mean?’ he said.
‘Do letters arrive here for other people with your house address on them?’
‘Sometimes,’ he said.
‘What do you do with them?’ I asked.
‘Stella takes them,’ he said.
‘And did Stella take them today?’ I asked, knowing that the lady he called Stella hadn’t taken anything away from here except the dirty plate.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Have you got any post for other people at the moment?’ I asked.
‘Lots of it,’ he said.
‘Shall I take it away for you?’ I asked him.
He closed the door and I thought I had missed my chance, but he was only undoing the security chain. The door opened wide.
‘It’s in there,’ he said, pointing at a rectangular cardboard box standing next to his feet.
I looked down. There must have been at least thirty items of various shapes and sizes lying in a heap in the box.
‘I’ve been wondering about it,’ he said. ‘Most of it’s been there for months. Stella doesn’t seem to take it any more.’
Without asking again I reached down, picked up the box, and walked off with it towards my car.
‘Hey,’ old Mr Horner shouted after me. ‘You can’t do that. I need that box to put the next lot into.’
I poured the contents out onto the front seat of the Jaguar and took the empty box back to him.
‘That’s better,’ he said, dropping the box back onto the floor and kicking it into position next to the door.
‘Don’t forget your lunch,’ I said, turning back towards my car. ‘Don’t let it get cold.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right. Bye.’ He closed the door and I was back in my car and speeding off before he had time to rethink the last few minutes.
I spent the afternoon in my bedroom, first impersonating a government official and then knowingly opening other people’s mail. I was pretty sure that both actions were illegal and, even if they weren’t against the letter of the law, they would certainly be in breach of the Values and Standards of the British Army.
First, using the local Yellow Pages directory, I started calling nursing homes, claiming to be an official from the Pensions Office enquiring after the well-being of a Mr George Sutton. I told them that I was checking that Mr Sutton was still alive and entitled to his state pension.
I had never before realized there were so many nursing homes. After about fifty fruitless calls, I was on the point of giving up when someone at the Silver Pines Nursing Home in Newbury Road, Andover, informed me in no uncertain terms that Mr George Sutton was indeed very much alive and kicking, and that his pension was an essential part of the payment for his care and I’d better leave it alone, or else.
I had to assure them profusely that I would take no action to stop it.
Next, I turned to the mail sent to 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford.
In all, there had been forty-two different items in Mr Horner’s cardboard box but most of them were junk circulars and free papers with no name or address. Six of them, however, were of particular interest to me. Three were addressed to Mr R. Ward, a fourth to Mrs Jane Philips, my mother, and the two others to a Mrs Stella Beecher, all three persons supposedly resident at 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford.
Two of the letters to Roderick Ward had not been that informative, simply being tax circulars giving general notes of new tax bands. The third, however, was from Mr Anthony Cigar of Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd, formally confirming the immediate closure of the bank’s investment fund and the imminent proceedings in the Gibraltar bankruptcy court. The letter was, in fact, a copy of one addressed to my mother and stepfather at Kauri House. It was dated 7 July 2009 and almost certainly did not arrive in Banbury Drive until after Roderick’s fatal car accident of the night of 12 July.
On the other hand, the letter to my mother was much more recent. It was a computer-generated notice of an automatic penalty of £100 for the late filing of her tax return which had been due just ten days ago.
But it was the two letters to Mrs Stella Beecher that were the real find.
One was from the Oxford coroner’s office informing her that the adjourned inquest into the death of her brother, Roderick Ward, was due to be reconvened on 15 February, the following Monday.
And the other was a handwritten note on lined paper that simply read, in capital letters:
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER THIS WILL GET THERE IN TIME BUT TELL HIM I HAVE THE STUFF HE WANTS.
I sat on my bed for quite a while looking at the note and wondering if ‘in time’ meant before the ‘accident’ occurred and if ‘THE STUFF’ had anything to do with my mother’s tax papers.
I looked carefully at it once again. Now, I was no handwriting expert, but this message to Stella Beecher looked, to my eyes, to have been written in the same style, and to be on the same type of paper, as the blackmail note that I had found on my mother’s desk.
On Thursday evening, at seven forty-five, I carried a bottle of fairly reasonable red wine round from Kauri House to the Hall in Lambourn for a kitchen supper with Isabella and her guests. I was looking forward to a change in both venue and company.
As I had expected, the supper was not quite as casual as Isabella had made out. Far from being in jeans, she herself was wearing a tight black dress that showed off her alluring curves to their best advantage. I was pleased with myself for having decided to put on a jacket and tie but, there again, I’d worn a jacket and tie for dinner in officers’ messes for years, especially on a weekday. Dressing for dinner, even for a kitchen supper, was like a comfort blanket. For all its preoccupation with killing the enemy, the British Army was still very formal in its manners.
‘Tom,’ she squealed, opening the front door and taking my offered bottle. ‘How lovely. Come and meet the others.’
I followed her from the hallway towards the kitchen, and the noise. The room was already pretty full of guests. Isabella grabbed my arm and pulled me into the throng where everyone seemed to be talking at once.
‘Ewen,’ she shouted to a fair-haired man about forty years old. ‘Ewen,’ she shouted again, grabbing hold of his sleeve. ‘I want you to meet Tom. Tom, this is Ewen Yorke. Ewen, Tom.’
We shook hands.
‘Tom Forsyth,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ he said in a dramatic manner, throwing an arm wide and nearly knocking over someone’s glass behind him. ‘Jackson, we have a spy in our midst.’
‘A spy?’ Isabella said.
‘Yes,’ Ewen said. ‘A damn spy from Kauri Stables. Come to steal our secrets about Saturday.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You must mean about Newark Hall in the Game Spirit.’ His mouth opened. ‘You’ve got no chance with Scientific running.’
‘There you are,’ he boomed. ‘What did I tell you? He’s a bloody spy. Fetch the firing squad.’ He laughed heartily at his own joke and we all joined in. Little did he know.
‘Where is this spy?’ said a tall man pushing his way past people towards me.
‘Tom,’ said Isabella. ‘This is my husband, Jackson Warren.’
‘Good to meet you,’ I said, shaking his offered hand and hoping he couldn’t see the envy in my eyes, envy that he had managed to snare my beautiful Isabella.
Jackson Warren certainly didn’t give the impression of someone suffering from prostate cancer. I knew that he was sixty-one years old because I’d looked him up on the internet, but his lack of any grey hair seemed to belie the fact. Rather unkindly, I wondered if he dyed it, or perhaps just being married to a much younger woman had helped keep him youthful.
‘So, are you spying on us, or on Ewen?’ he asked jovially with an infectious booming laugh.
‘Both,’ I said jokily, but I had partially misjudged the moment.
‘Not for the Sunday papers, I hope,’ he said, changing his mood instantly from amusement to disdain. ‘Though, I suppose, one more bastard won’t make any difference.’ He laughed once more, but, this time, the amusement didn’t reach his eyes and there was an unsettling seriousness about his face.
‘Come on, darling,’ said Isabella, sensing his unease. ‘Relax. Tom’s not a spy. In fact he’s a hero.’
I gave her a stern look as if to say, ‘No, please don’t,’ but the message didn’t get through.
‘A hero?’ said Ewen.
Isabella was about to reply when I cut her off sharply.
‘Isabella exaggerates,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m in the army, that’s all. And I’ve been in Afghanistan.’
‘Really,’ said an attractive woman in a low-cut dress who was standing next to Ewen. ‘Was it very hot?’
‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘It’s very hot in the summer but it’s damn cold in the winter, especially at night.’ Trust a Brit, I thought, to talk about the weather.
‘Did you see any action?’ Ewen asked.
‘A fair bit,’ I said. ‘But I was only there for a couple of months this last time.’
‘So you’ve been before?’ Ewen said.
‘I’ve been in the army since I was seventeen,’ I said. ‘I’ve been most places.’
‘Were you in Iraq?’ the woman asked with intensity.
‘Yes. In Basra. And also in Bosnia and Kosovo. The modern army keeps you busy.’ I laughed.
‘How exciting,’ she said.
‘It can be,’ I agreed. ‘But only in short bursts. Mostly it’s very boring.’ Time, I thought, to change the subject. ‘So, Ewen,’ I said, ‘how many horses do you train?’
‘There you are,’ he said expansively. ‘I told you he was a spy.’
We all laughed.
The attractive woman next to Ewen turned out to be his wife, Julie, and I found myself sitting next to her at supper at one of two large round tables set up in the extensive Lambourn Hall kitchen.
On the other side, on my left, was a Mrs Toleron, a rather dull grey-haired woman who didn’t stop telling me about how successful her ‘wonderful’ husband had been in business. She had even introduced herself as Mrs Martin Toleron, as if I would recognize her spouse’s name.
‘You must have heard of him,’ she exclaimed, amazed that I hadn’t. ‘He was head of Toleron Plastics until we sold out a few months ago. It was all in the papers at the time, and on the television.’
I didn’t tell her that a few months ago I had been fighting for my life in a Birmingham hospital and, at the time, the business news hadn’t been very high on my agenda.
‘We were the biggest plastic drainpipe manufacturer in Europe.’
‘Really,’ I said, trying to keep myself from yawning.
‘Yes,’ she said, incorrectly sensing some interest on my part. ‘We made white, grey or black drainpipe in continuous lengths. Mile after mile of it.’
‘Thank goodness for rain,’ I said, but she didn’t get the joke.
As soon as I was able, and without appearing too rude, I managed to stem the tide of plastic drainpipe from my left, turning more eagerly towards Julie on my right.
‘So, how many horses does Ewen train?’ I asked her as we tucked in to lasagne and garlic bread. ‘He never did tell me.’
‘About sixty,’ she said. ‘But it’s getting more all the time. We’re no longer really big enough at home so we are looking to buy the Webster place.’
‘Webster place?’ I asked.
‘You must know, on the hill off the Wantage road. Old Larry Webster used to train there but he dropped down dead a couple of years ago now. It’s been on the market for months and months. Price is too high, I reckon, and it needs a lot doing to it. Ewen’s dead keen to open another yard but I’d rather stay the size we are.’ She sighed. ‘Ewen says we’re too small but, the truth is, he’s not very good at saying no to new owners.’ She smiled wearily.
‘He’s lucky in the current economic climate to have the option,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she agreed. ‘Lots of trainers are having troubles. I hear it all the time from their wives at the races.’
‘Do you go racing a lot?’ I asked.
‘Not as much as I once
did,’ she said. ‘Ewen is always so busy these days that I never see him like I used to, either at the races or at home.’
She sighed again. Clearly, success had not brought happiness, at least not for Mrs Yorke.
‘But, enough about me. Tell me about you.’ She turned in her chair to give me her full attention, and a much better view of her ample cleavage. Ewen should spend more time with her, I thought, both at home and at the races, or he might soon find her straying.
‘Not much to tell,’ I said.
‘Now, come on. You must have lots of stories.’
‘None that I’d be happy to repeat,’ I said.
‘Go on,’ she said, putting her hand on my arm. ‘You can tell me.’ She fluttered her eyelashes at me. It made me think that it was probably already too late for Ewen, far too late.
Isabella insisted that everyone moved around after the lasagne and so, in spite of Julie Yorke’s best efforts, I escaped her advances before they became too obvious, but not before she’d had the shock of her life trying to play footsie under the table with my prosthesis.
‘My God! What’s that?’ she had exclaimed, but quietly, almost under her breath.
And so I’d been forced to explain about the IED and all the other things I would have preferred to keep confidential.
Far from turning her off, the idea of a man with only one leg had seemed to excite her yet further. She had become even more determined to invade my privacy with intimate questions that I was seriously not prepared to answer.
As soon as Isabella suggested it, I was quick and happy to move seats, opting to sit between Jackson Warren and another man at the second table.
I’d had my fill of the female of the species for one night.
‘So how long have you been back?’ Jackson asked me as I sat down.
‘In Lambourn?’ I asked.
‘From Afghanistan.’
‘Four months,’ I said.
‘In hospital?’ he asked.
I nodded. Isabella must have told him.
‘In hospital?’ the man on my other side asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was wounded.’
He looked at me and was clearly waiting for me to expand on my answer. As far as I was concerned, he was waiting in vain.