by Dick Francis
Scientific had won against the orders.
Only time would tell what the blackmailer thought.
10
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ Ian Norland stood full square in the middle of the Kauri House kitchen shouting at my mother and me. He had thrown the bridle with the broken reins onto the bleached pine table.
‘Ian, please don’t shout at me,’ my mother said. ‘And what’s the problem, anyway? Scientific won, didn’t he?’
‘More by luck than judgement,’ Ian almost shouted at her. ‘It was just fortunate that the reins parted on the way to the start rather than in the race itself.’
Or unfortunate, I thought.
‘Why?’ Ian said in exasperation. ‘Just tell me why.’
‘Why what?’ I asked.
‘Why did you made the reins break?’
‘Are you accusing us of deliberately sabotaging the reins?’ my mother asked in her most pompous manner.
‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘I am. There’s no other explanation. This bridle was brand new. I put the Australian noseband on it myself just a few days ago.’
‘Perhaps there was a fault in its manufacture,’ I said.
He looked at me with contempt. ‘Do you take me for an idiot or something?’
I assumed it was a rhetorical question and so I kept quiet.
‘If I don’t get some answers,’ he said, ‘then I’m leaving here tonight for good and I will take this to the racing authorities on Monday morning.’ He picked up the bridle in his hand.
I wondered if it was worth pointing out to him that the bridle was not actually his to take away.
‘But why?’ my mother said. ‘Nothing happened. Scientific won the race.’
‘But you tried to make him lose it,’ Ian said, his voice again rising in volume towards a shout.
‘What on earth makes you think we had anything to do with the reins breaking?’ I asked him, all innocently.
He again gave me his contemptuous look. ‘Because you’ve been so bloody interested in the racing tack all week, asking questions and all. What else am I going to think?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my mother.
‘And how about the others?’ he said.
‘What others?’ my mother asked rather carelessly.
‘Pharmacist last week and Oregon the week before. Did you stop them winning, too?’
‘No, of course not.’ My mother sounded affronted.
‘Why should I believe you?’ Ian said.
‘Because, Ian,’ I said in my best voice-of-command, ‘you must.’ He turned to look at me with fire in his eyes. I ignored him. ‘Of course you can go to the authorities if that is what you want. But what would you tell them? That you suspect your employer of stopping her horses. But why? And how? By cutting the reins? But it would not have been the first time that reins have broken on a racecourse, now would it?’
‘But—’ Ian started.
‘But nothing,’ I replied, cutting him off. ‘If you choose to leave here now, then I will have to insist that you do not take any of my mother’s property with you and that includes that bridle.’ I held out my hand towards him with the palm uppermost and curled my fingers back and forth. Reluctantly, he passed the bridle over to me.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now let us understand each other. My mother’s horses are always doing their best to win and the stable is committed to winning on every occasion the horses run. My mother will not tolerate any of her employees who might suggest otherwise. She expects complete loyalty from her staff and if you are not able to guarantee such loyalty then, indeed, you had better leave here this evening. Do I make myself clear?’
He looked at me in mild surprise.
‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘But you have to promise me that the horses will always be doing their best to win, and that there will be no more of this.’ He pointed at the bridle.
‘I do promise,’ I said. There was no way I would be trying this cutting-the-reins malarkey again, I thought, and the horses would be doing their best even if they might be somewhat hampered by feeling ill. ‘Does that mean you’re staying?’
‘Maybe,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll decide in the morning.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll see you in the morning, then.’ I said it by way of dismissal and he reluctantly turned away.
‘I’ll put the bridle back in the tack room for repair,’ he said, turning back and reaching out for it.
‘No,’ I said, keeping a tight hold of the leather. ‘Leave it here.’
He looked at me with displeasure, but there was absolutely no way I was going to let Ian leave the kitchen with the sabotaged bridle. Without it, he had nothing to show the authorities, even though, to my eyes, the ends of the stitches that I had cut with the scalpel looked identical to the few I had left intact, and which had then broken on the way to the start.
Ian must have seen the determination with which I was holding on to the bridle and, short of fighting me for it, he had to realize he wasn’t going anywhere with it. But still he didn’t leave.
‘Thank you, Ian,’ my mother said firmly. ‘That will be all.’
‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you both in the morning.’
He slammed the door in frustration on his way out. I went over to the kitchen window and watched as he crunched across the gravel in the direction of his flat.
‘How good a head lad is he?’ I asked without turning round.
‘What do you mean?’ my mother said.
‘Can you afford to lose him?’
‘No one is indispensable,’ she said rather arrogantly.
I turned to face her. ‘Not even you?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said again.
‘I’m not,’ I said.
Dinner on Saturday night was a grim affair. Had it really been only one week since my arrival at Kauri House? It felt more like a month.
As before, the three of us sat at the kitchen table eating a casserole that had been slow cooking in the Aga while we had been at the races. I think that, on this occasion, it was beef but I didn’t really care, and the conversation was equally unappetizing.
‘So what do we do now?’ I asked into the silence.
‘What do you mean?’ my stepfather said.
‘Do we just sit and wait for the blackmailer to come a-calling?’
‘What else do you suggest?’ my mother asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said in frustration. ‘I just feel it’s time for us to start controlling him, not the other way round.’
We sat there in silence for a while.
‘Have you paid him this week?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ my stepfather replied.
‘So how did you pay?’
‘In cash,’ he said.
‘Yes, but how did you give him the cash?’
‘The same way as always.’
‘And that is?’ I asked. Why was extracting answers from him always such hard work?
‘By post.’
‘But to what address?’ I asked patiently.
‘Somewhere in Newbury,’ he said.
‘And how did you get the address in the first place?’
‘It was included with the first blackmail note.’
‘And when did that arrive?’
‘In July last year.’
When Roderick Ward had his accident.
‘And the address has been the same since the beginning?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have to place two thousand pounds in fifty-pound notes in a padded envelope and post it by first-class mail each Thursday.’
I thought back to the blackmail note that I had found on my mother’s desk. ‘What happened that time to make you late with the payment?’
‘I got stuck in traffic and I didn’t get to the bank in time to draw out the money before they shut.’
‘Couldn’t you use a debit card in a cash machine?’
‘It would only give me two hundred a
nd fifty.’
‘Can you get me the address?’ I asked.
As he stood up to fetch it, the telephone rang. As one, we all looked at the kitchen clock. It was exactly nine o’clock.
‘Oh God,’ my mother said.
‘Let me answer it,’ I said, standing up and striding across the kitchen.
‘No,’ my mother shouted, jumping up. But I ignored her.
‘Hello,’ I said into the phone.
There was silence from the other end.
‘Hello,’ I said again. ‘Who is this?’
Again, nothing.
‘Who is this?’ I repeated.
There was a click on the line and then a single tone. The person at the other end had hung up.
I replaced the receiver back on its cradle.
‘Talkative, isn’t he?’ I said, smiling at my mother.
She was cross. ‘Why did you do that?’ she demanded.
‘Because he has to learn that we aren’t going to just roll over and do everything he says.’
‘But it’s not you that would go to prison,’ my stepfather said angrily.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I thought we’d agreed that we can’t go on paying the blackmailer for ever. Something has to be done to resolve the VAT situation, and the first thing I need to know is who the blackmailer is. I need to force him into a mistake. I want him to put his head up above the parapet, just for a second, so I can see him.’
Or better still, I thought, so I can shoot him.
The phone rang again.
My mother stepped forward but I beat her to it.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Kauri House Stables.’
There was silence again.
‘Kauri House Stables,’ I repeated. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Mrs Kauri please,’ said a whispered voice.
‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘Can you please speak up? I can’t hear you.’
‘Mrs Kauri,’ the voice repeated still in the same quiet whisper.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said extra loudly. ‘She can’t speak to you just now. Can I give her a message?’
‘Give me Mrs Kauri,’ the person whispered again.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You will have to talk to me.’
The line went click again as he hung up.
My mother was crosser than ever. ‘Thomas,’ she said, ‘please do not do that again.’ She was almost crying. ‘We must do as he says.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Why!’ she almost screamed. ‘Because he’ll send the stuff to the taxman if we don’t.’
‘No he won’t,’ I said confidently.
‘How can you know?’ she shouted. ‘He might.’
‘I think it most unlikely that he’ll do anything,’ I said.
‘I hope you’re right,’ my stepfather said gloomily.
‘What has he to gain?’ I said. ‘In fact, he has everything to lose.’
‘I’m the one with everything to lose,’ my mother said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘But you are paying the blackmailer two thousand a week and he won’t get that if he tips off the taxman. He’s not going to give up that lucrative arrangement just because I won’t let him speak to you on the telephone.’
‘But why are you antagonizing him?’ my stepfather said.
More than two thousand years ago Sun Tzu, a mysterious Chinese soldier and philosopher, wrote what has since become the ‘text book’ of war, a volume that is still studied in military academies today. In The Art of War he stated that one should ‘Beat the grass to startle the snake’. What he meant was to do something unexpected to make the enemy give away their position.
‘Because I need to see who it is,’ I said. ‘If I knew the identity of the enemy, I could then start to fight him.’
‘I don’t want you to fight him,’ my mother said forlornly.
‘Well, we have to do something. Tax returns are overdue and it is only a matter of time before the VAT fraud is discovered. I need to identify the enemy, neutralize him, recover your money and tax papers, and then pay the tax. And we need to do it all quickly.’
The phone rang again. I picked it up.
‘Kauri House Stables,’ I said.
Silence.
‘Now, listen here you little creep,’ I said, beating the grass still further. ‘You can’t speak to Mrs Kauri. You’ll have to speak to me. I’m her son, Thomas Forsyth.’
More silence.
‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘all the horses from these stables will, in future, be trying their best to win. And if you don’t like it, hard bloody luck. You can come and speak to me about it any time you like, face to face. Do you understand?’
I listened. There was another few seconds of silence followed by the now-familiar click as he disconnected.
I had just committed a huge tactical gamble. I had put my head way up over the parapet, exposing myself to the enemy, beating the grass in the hope that this particular snake would be startled enough to give away his position, so I could shoot him.
But would he shoot me first?
Sunday had been an uneventful day with apparently no further telephone calls from the whispering blackmailer. However, I couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t called during the time I’d been out in the middle of the day.
My mother had responded to my initiative of Saturday evening by withdrawing into her shell and not appearing at all from her bedroom until six in the evening, and only then briefly to raid the drinks cabinet before returning upstairs to bed. Derek had been despatched downstairs later to make her a sandwich for her dinner.
I was certain that, if the whisperer had called while I was out, my mother wouldn’t have told me. Perhaps she felt like most of the civilians I had encountered in Afghanistan. Even though we firmly believed that we were fighting the Taliban on behalf of the Afghan people, they didn’t seem to share the same view. The old adage ‘my enemy’s enemy is therefore my friend’ simply didn’t apply. It was true that most of the population loathed the Taliban but, deep down, they also hated the foreigners in their midst who were fighting them.
In the same way, I wondered if my mother considered that I was as much her enemy as her blackmailer.
Ian Norland had not made another appearance in the house on Sunday morning, and I had watched through the kitchen window as he had directed the stable staff in the mucking out, feeding, and watering of the horses. I had taken it to mean that he had decided to stay, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, the broken reins in question were sitting safely in the locked boot of my car.
At noon on Sunday I had driven into Newbury, using the Jaguar’s satellite-navigation system to find the address that Derek had finally given me, the address to which he sent the weekly cash payments.
‘But it’s so close,’ I’d said to my stepfather. ‘Surely you’ve been to see where it is you send all this money.’
‘He said not to,’ he’d replied.
‘And you obeyed him?’ I’d asked incredulously. ‘Didn’t you just drive past to see? Even in the middle of the night?’
‘We mustn’t. We have to do exactly what he says.’ He had been close to tears. ‘We’re so frightened.’
I could see. ‘And how specifically did he tell you not to go and see where the money was going?’
‘In a note.’
‘And where’s the note now?’ I’d asked him.
‘I threw it away,’ he’d said. ‘I know I shouldn’t have, but they made me feel sick. I threw all the notes away.’
All of them except the one I’d found on my mother’s desk.
‘So when did the telephone calls start?’
‘When he started telling us the horses must lose.’
‘And when was that?’ I’d asked.
‘Just before Christmas.’ Two months ago.
I hadn’t really expected the address to provide any great revelation into the identity of the blackmailer, and I’d been right.
Number 46B Cheap Street, Newbury, turned out to be
a shop with rentable mailboxes, a whole wall of them, and Suite 116 was not a suite of offices as one might have thought, but a single, six- by four-inch grey mailbox at shoulder level. The shop had been closed on a Sunday, but I had no great expectation that, had the staff been there, they would have told me who had rented box number 116. In due course, when I was ready, the police might be able to find out.
I had returned to Kauri House from Newbury via the Wheelwright Arms in the village for a leisurely lunch of roast beef with all the trimmings. I’d been in no particular hurry to get back to the depressing atmosphere at home. I decided it was time to start looking for more agreeable accommodation – past time, in fact.
Early the next morning, I drove to Oxford and parked in the multi-storey car park near the Westgate shopping centre. The city centre was quiet, even for a Monday in February. The persistent cold snap had deepened with a bitter wind from the north that cut through my overcoat as effortlessly as a well-honed bayonet through a Taliban’s kurta. Most sensible people had obviously decided to stay at home, in the warm.
Oxford Coroner’s Court was housed next door to the Oxfordshire County Council building in New Road, near the old prison. According to the court proceedings notice, the case in which I was interested was the second on the coroner’s list for the day, the case of Roderick Ward, deceased.
It was too cold to hang around outside so I sat in the public gallery for the first case of the day, the suicide of a troubled young man in his early twenties who had hanged himself in a house he’d shared with other students. The two girls who had been his housemates cried almost continuously throughout the short proceedings. They had discovered the swinging body when they had returned from a nightclub at two o’clock in the morning, having literally stumbled into it in the dark.
A pathologist described the mechanics of death by strangulation due to hanging, and a policeman reported the recovery of a suicide note from the house.
Then the young man’s father spoke briefly about his son and his expectations for the future that would now not be fulfilled. It was a moving eulogy, delivered with great dignity, but with huge sadness.
The coroner, having listened to the evidence, thanked the witnesses for attending, then officially recorded that the young man had taken his own life.