Dick Francis's Damage

by Felix Francis

  That was also for sure.

  23

  I stayed the night at the Royal Albion, the first hotel I encountered just a few minutes’ walk from the station on the northern edge of Taunton, while Crispin took the nine-fifteen train back to London, muttering about how much money had been wasted in having to get tickets all the way to Plymouth.

  “Why didn’t he just say Taunton? It would have been half the price.”

  I reminded him that he had just thrown a hundred thousand pounds in readies out a train window. That was surely far more important than the four-hundred-pound cost of his train ticket, but it didn’t seem to stop him grumbling about it as he hurried off through the tunnel under the tracks to catch the eastbound express with his now-empty grip bashing against his legs.

  I was still smiling about it when I checked in to the hotel, declining the receptionist’s offer to help me with my nonexistent luggage.

  I called Lydia, using the phone in my room. “I’m in Taunton.”

  “That was very sudden,” she said. “Any particular reason?”

  “I was desperate for some cider,” I said with a laugh.

  “Interesting choice. When will you be back?”

  “Sometime tomorrow, I expect. Sorry.”

  Lydia was used to me suddenly disappearing for a night—or more. Most of the time, I couldn’t even ring her to say where I was. It came with working undercover.

  “That policeman from Cheltenham, Sergeant Galley, he called the house phone round seven this evening,” Lydia said. “Apparently, he couldn’t get you on your cell. He wants you to phone him. He said it was quite urgent.”

  I wondered what he wanted.

  I looked at my watch. “It’s probably too late now. I’ll call him in the morning.”

  “OK,” Lydia said. “Take care. Love you.”

  “Love you more.”

  We hung up and I lay back on the bed, contemplating my future.

  Lydia and I had used the Love you. Love you more salutation for years, almost since we met, and I wondered if it had now become a habit more than a true expression of our affection.

  Did she love me?

  Did I love her more?

  What did love actually mean?

  Did it mean I was comfortable in my life with Lydia, because, if it did, then that was fine. I was comfortable. And mostly content.

  Or did it require a level of steamy passion that should have forced me home tonight because I just couldn’t bear to sleep away from her?

  I mulled such questions around in my head without coming to an agreeable conclusion. Maybe I was making far too much of the whole thing. After all, we’d had a couple of great nights out recently. But, then again, it took more than that to make a successful marriage.

  I snapped myself out of such thoughts, stood up and went in search of some refreshment.

  Apart from being the county town of Somerset, Taunton was famous for its Scrumpy, and I went down to the hotel bar to sample a pint of their best, together with a sandwich made from local Cheddar cheese and West Country apple chutney.

  I had to admit that the cloudy, strong cider was very tasty, but hardly worth the two-hour train journey from London.

  I went back up to my room.

  The reason D.S. Galley hadn’t been able to get me earlier was that my phone was switched off. It would have been too much of a distraction if it had rung during the drop, and also the cell signal tended to interfere with the communication system I’d rigged between Crispin and myself.

  I switched it on and connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi.

  The train had left Newbury Station at seven-fifty precisely and Crispin had thrown the bag out the window exactly eighteen minutes later at eight past eight.

  Even though our particular train hadn’t stopped there, the Wiltshire village of Pewsey had a railway station and, according to the timetable on the Internet, nonstop trains took about twenty minutes to get there from Newbury.

  I calculated that the point I was looking for should be just east of Pewsey village. That was where I would start looking in the morning.

  —

  I DROVE a rental car from Taunton along the A303 to Amesbury before turning north to Pewsey.

  I stopped in the market square beneath the imposing stone statue of King Alfred the Great, the revered Anglo-Saxon king who, in the ninth century, had liberated the English from both the Vikings and the Danes. He is still the only English monarch to have been called the Great, even if the epithet was added some seven hundred years after his death rather than by his contemporaries.

  I switched on the tracker receiver and held it up, rotating through a full three hundred and sixty degrees. Nothing.

  I took Milton Road eastwards out of the village for about a mile and tried again.

  This time there was a faint beeping sound from the receiver earpiece when facing to the north. Excitedly, I took the next turn and drove north to a bridge over the railway line, stopping in a small parking lot reserved, according to the sign, for the Jones’s Mill Nature Reserve. From that point, there was no mistaking the electronic beep. It was at its clearest when I stood on the bridge and pointed the receiver loop along the railway line back towards Newbury.

  In the end, it was relatively easy to find the rugby ball with the tracker inside, although I would have to have words with my army friend in the spy gadget shop. The detection range was considerably less than the four miles he had claimed, more like a mile at best. But it was enough.

  The bag of money had been thrown off the train as it had passed just south of New Mill, a small hamlet some two miles northeast of Pewsey village situated between the River Avon and the Kennet and Avon Canal.

  The railway ran at this point along an embankment, with the rails themselves some twenty feet or so above the surrounding farmland. There was a good stretch of a couple of hundred yards on the south side with no trees, just a grassy bank. Ideal, I thought, for locating a bag of cash thrown from a train.

  In addition, next to the bridge where the railway crossed a country road, there was a cell phone mast festooned with aerials. I looked at my iPhone—five bars of signal.

  Remote, but with easy access, and a good cell signal to boot, this place had been well chosen by Leonardo. It was absolutely ideal for the purpose.

  I parked in front of a farm gate, clambered over a small, padlocked gate and climbed up the steep slope from the road to the railway tracks, still holding the receiver, which was by this stage beeping away very loudly indeed in my ear.

  The battered old rugby ball had ended up between the rails of the London-bound line. As I walked alongside the tracks towards it, I could see it clearly lying up against the far rail. Retrieving it might be another matter altogether.

  Trains traveled along this part of the line at very high speeds, in excess of a hundred miles per hour, and they would arrive almost without warning, the noise of the engines somehow appearing to follow on after, rather than precede their arrival.

  A high-pitched ringing from the rails themselves gave the first warning that a train was imminent and then suddenly it was upon you, clattering past in a cacophony, before disappearing just as swiftly with the abrupt return to rural tranquility.

  An express traveling towards London came sweeping around the curve at full speed, and I could see the look of horror on the driver’s face when he saw me standing alongside the track. I waved and smiled reassuringly, but I saw him reach instinctively for the brake lever as he swept past. I couldn’t tell if the train was slowing or not as it disappeared from view around the next curve, still moving at high speed.

  There would have been no chance of the driver stopping the train in time, and suicides on the railways were an all too regular occurrence. However, he would most likely be speaking to the police about me via his in-cab telephone system.

  As s
oon as the train had passed by, I nipped onto the track to retrieve the rugby ball, then I ran back towards the bridge and down the steep slope to the waiting rental car.

  I spent a few moments looking around to see if I could spot anything that might give me a clue about who had waited here the previous evening to collect a bag of cash. Perhaps if there had been a full police crime scene team available, then plaster casts of footprints or tire tracks in the soft verges may have been an option, but there was nothing useful I could ascertain with just my eyes.

  I used my iPhone to take a few quick photographs of the spot, but they were mostly to make sure I could find it again rather than to provide any helpful evidence.

  Then I drove away, silently apologizing to all the rail passengers who would suffer delays on their trains over the next hour or so as the Transport Police searched for a member of the public seen wandering on the tracks.

  —

  “DID YOU find it?” Crispin asked me when he called that afternoon.

  “Yes,” I said. “It was outside a village called Pewsey, where the railway line crosses a country lane. There’s no doubt that’s where Leonardo collected his bag of loot.”

  “How about the Nokia phone?”

  “Not a dicky bird,” I said. The phone had remained by my bedside during the night in Taunton and in my pocket ever since. There had been no further texts or any calls. “He must know by now that he’s been shortchanged.”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t want to use that phone again in case we’ve found a way of setting up a trace on it.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “He probably bought two of those anonymous pay-as-you-go phones, the one he mailed to us and the other one that he used himself to send the texts. His one is probably at the bottom of the Kennet and Avon Canal by now.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Wait,” I said. “He will be in touch, you can bet on it. Has Stephen spoken to his policeman friend yet?”

  “Yes, he has. And he will be at the meeting of the Board tomorrow morning at nine o’clock sharp at Scrutton’s Club. Howard asked me to tell you that your presence is required.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll be there. But why is it still at Scrutton’s?”

  “Howard is obsessed with secrecy.”

  I thought that rather rich, coming from Crispin.

  “What’s your wife’s name?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon. What did you say?”

  “I asked what your wife’s name is?”

  “What has that got to do with all this?”

  “Nothing,” I said with a laugh. “But you’re the one who’s obsessed with secrecy. I don’t even know if you have a wife, let alone her name. You never say anything about yourself.”

  “Don’t I? No, I suppose not.”

  “Definitely not. I only learned that you used to be in MI5 or MI6 due to a slip of the tongue by Neil Wallinger.”

  “I’ll have to have words with him,” he said quietly.

  “So what is Howard so secretive about?”

  There was a pause from the other end of the line. I could almost hear the cogs going around in his brain. Did I need to know?

  “He, and Roger Vincent, they’re both absolutely paranoid about the newspapers finding out and criticizing them or the BHA. They take everything so personally. I think they now wish they had called in the police on the very first day and they’re worried they will be thought of as fools for not doing so.”

  I reckoned they had good reason to be worried.

  “So what did the friendly policeman say when he was told?”

  “Oh, he hasn’t been told. Not until tomorrow. That’s what the meeting is about.”

  So it would be yet another day before the police became involved. And, all the while, the trail of the Grand National fireworks would be getting colder and more distant in people’s memories.

  24

  Daniel Jubowski came out of the offices of Hawthorn Pearce at five-twenty on Tuesday afternoon and I was waiting for him, dressed as Tony Jefferson, my gay alter ego.

  He saw me immediately and came over.

  “Hi, Tony,” he said. “What brings you here?”

  “Daniel, I desperately need some help.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I need a place to stay for a night or two,” I said quickly, “until I can find somewhere of my own.”

  “I thought you lived with your mother.”

  “I did.” I said it almost in a sob. “My stepfather has found out that I’m gay and he has thrown me out. He owns the house, so there is nothing my mom can do about it. I didn’t know where else to go.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Come on, Tony, cheer up. I’m sure we can find you a bed. You’d better come home with me.”

  “Thank you,” I said with a wan smile, “that’s what I hoped you might say.” And I’d made sure I hadn’t tried this on a Wednesday evening. I had no desire to go home with him via the Fit Man gym in Soho.

  We took the Northern Line from Bank to King’s Cross and then walked from there to number 17 New Wharf Road.

  As I had thought when I’d first followed him here, this flat was anything but cheap.

  “Wow!” I said, going out onto the second-floor balcony overlooking Regent’s Canal. “What a place.”

  “I’m very lucky,” Daniel replied.

  “Rented?” I asked, coming back in to face him.

  He shook his head. “I bought it two months ago.”

  “Wow!” I said. “Do you share?”

  “I used to but not anymore.”

  “That’s good,” I said, changing my tone of voice completely. “Then we won’t be disturbed. Tell me, Daniel, are Hawthorn Pearce aware that you offer strangers crystal meth at just a tenner for their first wrap?”

  He was completely taken aback and just stood there with his mouth hanging open.

  “Are they aware of that, Daniel?” I asked again. “And do they also know that your colleague at Hawthorn Pearce, John McClure, solicits sex from men in pubs by groping their bottoms? Do they know that, Daniel?”

  “Who are you?” he said finally.

  “A friend of Ken Calderfield.”

  I could see from his body language that he wanted to run. He bunched the muscles in his arms and he began to look around him. The last thing I wanted was for him to disappear again.

  “Daniel,” I said to him firmly, “sit down. Sit down now.”

  I pointed at the deep leather sofa and, slowly, he did as he was told.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know why you are accusing Ken of supplying drugs when both you and I know he’d never do such a thing.”

  “He took them.”

  “Maybe he did, but he didn’t supply them, did he, Daniel?” I stood over him and did my best to make my five-foot-ten-inch frame as imposing as possible. “You do all the supplying, don’t you, Daniel? That’s how you can afford to buy this flat. You supply crystal meth to your gay friends at parties, don’t you, Daniel? I’m sure your elders and betters at Hawthorn Pearce would love to hear all about those, now wouldn’t they, Daniel?”

  He sat staring at me.

  “You can’t prove anything.”

  “I don’t need to prove it,” I said. “I just need to send an anonymous file to the chief executive of Hawthorn Pearce. I assure you I have plenty of photographic evidence. For a start, I have a video of you trying to sell me drugs at the William Ball pub and of your chum John trying to seduce me into going with him to the Fit Man gym for sex. And I have another video of the two of you going into the same gym later that night together with Mike Kennedy, dragging with you a reluctant teenager.” I paused to let everything sink in. “Oh, no, Daniel, I don’t need to prove anything. I am sure the directors of
Hawthorn Pearce are pretty old-school, with traditional values. Trust me, they will believe enough of it. You may not go to jail, but you would never work in the City again.”

  “What do you want?” he asked once more.

  “Just the truth,” I said. “You will withdraw your statement to the police that Ken Calderfield supplied drugs to you or to anyone else. You will also tell the police that the drugs found in Ken’s flat did not belong to him and that he had no knowledge of them being there. That’s all. Just the truth. Then I will go away and leave you and John McClure in peace.”

  “How can I be sure of that?”

  “You can’t,” I said. “But what choice do you have?”

  “The police might accuse me of wasting their time.”

  “That’s your problem, Daniel, because you have indeed been wasting their time. But it’s better than telling lies in court and being convicted of perjury.”

  He sat slumped into the leather sofa.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “there’s one more thing. I want to know why you set out to destroy Ken Calderfield. What did he do to deserve it?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Oh, yes, Daniel,” I said, “I think you will. It’s part of the deal to keep me quiet.”

  “You didn’t say that.”

  “Well, I’m saying it now.”

  He sat silently for what seemed like a long time but was probably only about thirty seconds or so. Once or twice he appeared as if to start saying something but then didn’t.

  “Come on, Daniel,” I said encouragingly, “you can tell me.”

  “I was jealous.” He said it quietly, without looking up at me.

  “Jealous?” I could hardly believe it. “You have a great job and this fabulous flat. How can you be jealous of anyone?”

  “I am jealous of Ken,” he said. “He is so young and so gorgeous. The others at the gym swoon over him, they won’t leave him alone.” He swallowed. “That’s what they used to do with me.”

  “Ken also dumped you, didn’t he, Daniel, in favor of other men from the gym? So you decided to get your revenge by setting him up, isn’t that right?”