by Dick Francis
‘So you deny you have been blackmailing my mother?’ I asked him.
‘I do,’ he said emphatically. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense. Now let me go or I’ll call the police.’
‘You are in no position to call anyone,’ I said. ‘And if anyone will be calling the police, it will be me.’
‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘It’s not me who would be in the most trouble.’
‘And what is that meant to imply?’
‘Work it out,’ he said, becoming more sure of himself.
‘Are you aware of what the maximum sentence is for blackmail?’ I asked.
He said nothing.
‘Fourteen years.’
His eyes didn’t even flicker. He clearly thought he was onto a good thing. He was assuming that I would just threaten him a bit, then let him go and do nothing more.
But one should never assume anything.
I had told Ian that I would be out all night. No one was expecting me back for hours and hours. So I was in no hurry.
I left him lying on the hard hall floor and went into the kitchen to see if I could find myself a drink. Waiting all that time outside had made me thirsty.
‘Let me go,’ he shouted from the hallway.
‘No,’ I shouted back, putting his phone down on the worktop.
‘Help,’ he shouted, this time much louder.
I went quickly through into the hall.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’
‘Why not?’ he said belligerently.
I shrugged myself free of the small rucksack on my back and removed the roll of duct tape. I held it towards him and pulled the end of the tape free. ‘Because I would be forced to wrap your head in this. Is that what you want?’
He didn’t shout again as I went back into the kitchen and fetched a can of Heineken from his fridge. I took a drink, allowing a little of the beer to pour out of the corner of my mouth and drip onto the floor near his legs.
‘Do you have any idea how long a human being can go on living without taking in any fluid?’ He went on staring at me. ‘How long it would be before chronic dehydration causes irreversible kidney failure, and death?’
He obviously didn’t like the question but he still wasn’t particularly worried.
I bent down to my rucksack and dug around for the short piece of chain attached to the ring by the padlock. I held it up for him to see, but it was clear from his lack of expression that he didn’t know where it had come from, or its significance. He probably wasn’t fully aware that his lack of reaction may have saved his life. Maybe I didn’t now want to kill the little weasel, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to use him.
‘Are you a diabetic?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Lucky you.’
I removed the red-coloured first-aid kit from my rucksack. It was what was known in the expedition business as an ‘anti-AIDS kit’. It was a small zipped-up pouch containing two each of sterile syringes, hypodermic needles, intravenous drip cannulas, ready-threaded suture needles, and scalpels, plus three small sterile pouches of saline solution for emergency rehydration. I had bought it some years previously to take on a regimental jolly, a trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. It was designed to allow access to sterile equipment in the event of one of the team having to have an emergency medical procedure, something that was not always readily available, especially in some of the more remote hospitals of HIV-ridden sub-Saharan Africa.
Thankfully, no one on the expedition had needed it, and the kit had returned with me to the UK intact. But, now, it might just prove to have been a worthwhile purchase.
I removed one of the syringes and attached it to one of the hypodermic needles. Alex watched me.
‘What are you doing?’ He sounded worried for the first time.
‘Time for my insulin,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t want me collapsing in a diabetic coma, now, would you? Not with you in that state.’
Alex watched carefully as I unpacked one of the pouches of saline solution from its sterile packaging and hung it up on the stair banister. The packaging had an official-looking label stuck on the side with INSULIN printed on it in large bold capital letters that he couldn’t have failed to see. I had asked him if he was a diabetic, and he’d said no. I hoped that he wouldn’t know that insulin is nearly always provided either in ready-loaded injecting devices or in little glass bottles. I had produced the official-looking INSULIN label that afternoon using Ian Norland’s printer.
I drew a very little amount of the clear liquid into the smaller of the two syringes, pulled up the front of my black roll-neck sweater, pinched the flesh of my abdomen together, and inserted the needle. I depressed the plunger and injected the fluid under my skin. I smiled down at Alex.
‘How often do you have to do that?’ he asked.
‘Two or three times a day,’ I said.
‘And what exactly is insulin?’
‘It’s a hormone,’ I said, ‘that allows the muscles to use the energy from glucose carried in the blood. In most people it is created naturally in the pancreas.’
‘So what happens if you don’t take it?’
‘The glucose level in my blood would become so high that my organs would stop working properly, and I would eventually go into a coma, and then die.’
I smiled down at him again. ‘We wouldn’t want that, now, would we?’
He didn’t answer. Perhaps me in a coma or dead was exactly what he wanted. But it wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t really diabetic, but my best friend at secondary school had been and I’d watched him inject himself with insulin hundreds of times, although he’d always used a special syringe with a finer and less painful needle. Injecting small amounts of sterile saline solution under my skin might be slightly uncomfortable, but it was harmless.
I went back into the kitchen and picked up his flight bag from where it had come to rest. It was heavy. Inside, amongst other things, were a laptop computer and a large bottle of duty-free vodka that had somehow survived the impact with the hall floor. I put the bag down on the kitchen table, removed the computer and turned it on. While it booted up I took an upright chair out into the hallway, placed it near Alex’s feet, and sat down.
‘Now,’ I said, leaning forward. ‘I have some questions I need you to answer.’
‘I’m not answering anything unless you let me go.’
‘Oh, I think you will,’ I said. ‘It’s a long night.’
I stood up and went back into the kitchen. I pulled down the blind over the window, turned on a television set, and sat down at the kitchen table with Alex’s computer.
‘Hey,’ he called after about five minutes.
‘Yes,’ I shouted back. ‘What do you want?’
‘Are you just going to leave me here?’
‘Yes,’ I said, turning up the volume on the television.
‘How long for?’ he shouted louder.
‘How long do you need?’
‘Need?’ he shouted. ‘What do mean, need?’
‘How long do you need before you will answer my questions?’
‘What questions?’
I went back into the hall and sat down on the chair by his feet.
‘How long have you been having an affair with Julie Yorke?’ I said.
It wasn’t a question he had been expecting, but he recovered quickly.
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
It seemed we hadn’t come too far in the past half hour.
‘Please yourself,’ I said, standing up and walking back to the kitchen table, and his computer.
There was a football highlights programme on the television and I turned the volume up even higher so that Alex wouldn’t hear me tapping away on his laptop keyboard.
The computer automatically connected to his wireless internet router so I clicked on his e-mail, and opened the inbox. Careless of him, I thought, to not have it password protected. I highlighted all his messages received during
the past two weeks and forwarded them, en masse, to my own e-mail account. Next I did the same to his Sent Items folder. One never knew how useful the information might prove to be, and it was no coincidence that the first thing the police searched when arresting someone was their computer hard drive.
I glanced up at the football on the television and ignored the whining from the hallway.
‘Let me go,’ Alex bleated. ‘My hands hurt.’
I went back to studying the computer screen.
‘I need to sit up,’ he whinged. ‘My back aches.’
I continued to ignore him.
I opened a computer folder called Rock Accounts. There were twenty or so files in the folder and I highlighted them all, attached them to an e-mail, and again sent them to my computer.
The football highlights programme finished and the evening news had started. Fortunately, there were no reports about an ongoing case of forced imprisonment in the village of Greenham.
I clicked on the search button in the computer’s start menu and asked it to probe the main drive for files containing the terms ‘password’ or ‘user name’. Obligingly, it came up with eight references, so I attached those files to another e-mail and off they went as well.
‘OK, OK!’ he shouted finally. ‘I’ll answer your question.’
The messages from one further e-mail folder, one simply named Gibraltar, were also despatched through cyberspace. I then checked that everything had gone before erasing the ‘sent’ records for my forwarded files so Alex would have no knowledge that I had copied them. I closed the lid of the laptop and returned it to the flight bag, which I placed back on the floor.
I then went out into the hall, sat down once again on the upright chair, and leaned over him menacingly.
But I didn’t ask him the same question as before. Using my best voice-of-command, I asked him something completely different.
‘Why did you murder Roderick Ward?’
He was shocked.
‘I–I didn’t,’ he stammered.
‘So who did?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘So he was murdered?’ I said.
‘No,’ he whined. ‘It was an accident.’
‘No, it wasn’t. That car crash was far too contrived. It had to be a set-up.’
‘The car crash wasn’t the accident,’ he said flatly. ‘It was the fact that he died that was the accident. I tried to warn them but I was too late.’
‘Them?’ I asked, intrigued.
He clammed up.
I removed a folded piece of paper from my pocket and held it out to him.
He looked at it in disbelief.
I knew the words written there by heart, so often had I looked at them during the past few days. It was the handwritten note that had been addressed to Mrs Stella Beecher at 26 Banbury Drive in Oxford, the note I had found in the pile of mail I had taken from the cardboard box that meals-on-wheels Mr Horner kept by his front door:
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER THIS WILL GET THERE IN TIME BUT TELL HIM I HAVE THE STUFF HE WANTS.
‘What stuff?’ I demanded.
He said nothing.
‘And tell who?’
Again there was no response.
‘And in time for what?’
He just stared at me.
‘You will have to answer my questions, or you will leave me with no alternative but …’ I tailed off.
‘No alternative but what?’ he asked in a panic.
‘To kill you,’ I said calmly.
I quickly grabbed his bound feet and swiftly removed his left shoe and sock. I used the duct tape to bind his left foot upright against one of the spindles on the stairway so that it was completely immobile.
‘What are you doing?’ he screamed, trying to wriggle away from me but without success.
‘Preparations,’ I said. ‘I always have to make the right preparations before I kill someone.’
‘Help,’ he yelled. But I had left the television on with the volume turned up and his shout was drowned out by an advertising jingle.
However, to be sure that he wouldn’t be heard, I took a piece of the duct tape and fixed it firmly over his mouth to stop him yelling again. Instead, he began breathing heavily through his nose, hyperventilating, his nostrils alternately flaring and contracting below a pair of big frightened eyes.
‘Now then, Alex,’ I said, in as calm a manner as I could manage. ‘You seem not to fully appreciate the rather dangerous predicament in which you have found yourself.’ He stared at me unblinkingly. ‘So let me explain it to you. You have been blackmailing my mother to the tune of two thousand pounds per week for the past seven months, to say nothing about the demands on her to fix races. Some weeks you collect the money yourself from the mailbox in Cheap Street and sometimes you get Julie Yorke to collect it for you.’
I removed the three prints of the photos I had taken of Julie through the window of the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant and held them up to him. With the tape on his mouth, it was difficult to fully gauge his reaction, but he went pale and looked from the photos to my face with doleful, pleading eyes.
‘And,’ I went on, ‘you are blackmailing my mother over the knowledge you have that she has not been paying the tax that she should have been. Which means you either have her tax papers in your possession or have had access to them.’
I reached down into my rucksack and again brought out the red ‘anti-AIDS’ kit. If anything, Alex went paler.
‘Now my problem is this,’ I said. ‘If I let you go, you will still have my mother’s tax papers. And even if you give me back the papers, you would still have the knowledge.’
I took the large syringe out of the kit, attached a new needle, and then drew up a large quantity of the saline solution from the bag that was still hanging on the stair banister, the bag with the INSULIN label.
‘So you see,’ I said. ‘If you won’t help me then I will have no alternative but to prevent you speaking to the tax authorities.’
I held the syringe up to the light and squirted a little of the fluid out in a fine jet.
‘Did you know that insulin is essential for proper body functions?’ I asked. ‘But that too much of it causes the glucose level in the blood to drop far too low, which in turn triggers a condition called hypoglycaemia? That usually results in a seizure, followed by coma and death. Do you remember the case of that nurse, Beverley Allitt, who killed those children in Grantham hospital? The media called her the Angel of Death. She murdered some of her victims by injecting them with large overdoses of insulin.’
I knew because I’d looked that up on the internet as well.
I touched his foot.
‘And do you know, Alex, if you inject insulin between someone’s toes it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find the puncture mark on the skin, and the insulin would be undetectable because you create it naturally in your body? It would appear you died of a seizure followed by a heart attack.’
The statement wasn’t entirely accurate. The insulin used nowadays to treat diabetics is almost exclusively synthetic insulin, and it can be detected as being different from the natural human product.
But Alex wasn’t to know that.
‘Now, then,’ I said, smiling and holding up the syringe to him again. ‘Between which two toes would you like it?’
16
I was worried that he was going to pass out. His eyes started to roll back in their sockets and his breathing suddenly became shallower. I didn’t want him to have a heart attack simply from fear. That might take some explaining.
‘Alex,’ I shouted at him, bringing his eyes back into focus on my face. ‘You can prevent this, you know. All you have to do is cooperate and answer all my questions. But you have to be completely candid and tell me everything. Do you understand?’
He nodded eagerly.
‘And do you agree to answer everything?’
He nodded again.
‘Nothing held back?’
He shook his head from side to side, so I stepped forward and tore off the tape from across his mouth.
‘Now, for a start,’ I said. ‘Who killed Roderick Ward?’
He still wouldn’t answer.
‘I won’t give you another chance,’ I said seriously.
‘How do I know you won’t kill me anyway, after I’ve told you?’
‘You don’t,’ I said. ‘But do you have any choice? And if I gather enough incriminating information about you, so that you would also be in big trouble if you told the taxman about my mother, then we would both have a weapon of mass destruction, as it were. Either of us telling the authorities would result in the very thing we were trying so hard to prevent. We would both have the safety of mutually assured annihilation, a bit like nuclear deterrence. Neither of us would use the information for fear of retaliation.’
‘But you could still kill me,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘I suppose I could, but why would I? There would be no need, and even I don’t kill people without a reason.’
He didn’t look terribly reassured so I untaped his foot from the spindle and then pulled him across the floor so he was sitting up with his back against the wall by the kitchen door.
‘Now,’ I said, sitting down once more on the upright chair. ‘If you didn’t kill Roderick Ward, who did?’
I still wasn’t sure he would tell me, so, seemingly absent-mindedly, I picked up the syringe and made another fine spray of fluid shoot from the needle.
‘His sister,’ Alex said.
I looked at him. ‘Stella Beecher?’
He seemed surprised I knew her name, but I’d already shown him the note he had sent to her. He nodded.
‘Now why would she kill her own brother?’
‘She didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’
‘You mean the car crash?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘He was already dead when he went into the river. He drowned in a bath.’
‘What on earth was Stella Beecher doing giving him a bath?’