by Dick Francis
He closed the door. “I can’t see what there is to laugh about,” he said.
“Life’s a toss-up.”
“And today it came up heads?”
I liked the professor. I grinned and held out to him the small object I’d salvaged from the gutter, asking him with moderate urgency, “Can you find out what this contains?”
He looked with shock at what I’d brought him, and I nodded as if in confirmation that I’d got it right. He asked a shade austerely if I knew what he was with great care holding.
“Yes. It’s a sort of syringe. You can put the needle into any liquid drug and suck it into the bubble,” I said. “Then you push the needle into the patient and squeeze the bubble to deliver the drug. Veterinarians sometimes use them on horses that are upset by the sight of an ordinary hypodermic syringe.”
He said, “You’re right. You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I was with Martin once ...” I broke off. So much of my life seemed to have touched Martin’s.
Lawson-Young made no comment about Martin but said, “These little syringes can be used too on manic patients, to make them manageable and calm them down.”
Phoenix House treated patients with mental illnesses. Adam Force had access to a well-stocked pharmacy.
George Lawson-Young turned away from me and, holding the tiny balloon with great care, led the way back to that part of the laboratory that held the gas chromatograph.
The thumbnail-sized balloon was full still of liquid, and was also wet outside from lying in the gutter. George Lawson-Young laid it carefully in a dish and asked one of his young doctors to identify the baby balloon’s contents as soon as possible.
“Should it be one of several forms of poison,” he warned me, “it might be impossible to find out what it is.”
“It surely had to be something already in the Phoenix House pharmacy,” I said. “It was only yesterday afternoon that I met Force. He hadn’t much time to mobilize anything too fancy.”
The balloon’s contents raised little but smiles.
It took the young research doctor barely ten minutes to come back with an identification. “It’s insulin,” he said confidently. “Plain ordinary insulin, as used by diabetics.”
“Insulin!” I exclaimed, disappointed. “Is that all?”
Both the young research doctor and the professor smiled indulgently. The professor said, “If you have diabetes, the amount of insulin in that syringe might send you into a permanent coma. If you don’t have diabetes, there’s enough to kill you.”
“To kill?”
“Yes, certainly.” Lawson-Young nodded. “That amount was a lethal dose. It’s reasonable to suppose it was intended for you, not your chauffeur, but I can hardly believe it of Adam.” He sounded shattered. “We knew he’d steal, but to kill...” He shook his head. “Are you sure that syringe came from him? You didn’t just find it lying in the road?”
“I’m positive he was holding it in his hand, and I dislodged it.”
The professor and I by that time were sitting on swiveling chairs in the professor’s personal officelike room section of the laboratory.
“Actually,” I murmured, “the big question is why?”
George Lawson-Young couldn’t say.
“Do me a favor,” he finally begged. “Start from the beginning.”
“I will phone my driver first.”
I used my mobile. When Jim answered his car phone he sounded first relieved that I was free and talking to him, and second, anxious that he was going to be late home for his wife’s risotto, and third, worried about where he was going to find me safe and on my own. I was glad enough that he proposed to wait for me. The professor, taking the phone, gave Jim pinpointing instructions for one hour’s time, and suggested to me that I waste none of it.
“It’s a tale of two tapes,” I tentatively began.
“Two?” said the professor.
“Yes, two,” I replied, but then hesitated.
“Do go on, then.” The professor was in a natural hurry.
“One was filmed here and stolen by Adam Force,” I said. “He persuaded Martin Stukely to keep it safe for him, so that it couldn’t be found.”
“We had obtained a Search and Seizure Order from the court and had already started searching everywhere for it,” said Lawson-Young, “including in Adam’s own home, but we didn’t ever think of it being in the care of a jockey.”
“That must be why he did it,” I said. “But as I understand it, Martin thought Force’s tape would be safer still with me, a friend who hasn’t four inquisitive children.” And no talkative or quarrelsome wife, I could have added. But, I thought, would Martin have really given me the tape if he knew the contents were stolen?
The professor smiled.
I continued, “Martin Stukely received the stolen tape from Force at Cheltenham races and gave it into the temporary care of his valet while he went out to ride a horse called Tallahassee, in the race from which he didn’t return.”
He nodded. “When Martin Stukely died his valet, Eddie, gave the tape to you, as he knew that’s what Martin intended.
“Eddie the valet,” the professor went on, “was eventually one of the people that our investigators talked to and he said he didn’t know anything about any stolen laboratory tape. He said he thought he was handling a tape that you yourself had made, which explained how to copy an ancient and priceless necklace.”
“That’s the second tape,” I said. “It’s also missing.”
“Eddie had seen your duplicate of the necklace in the jockeys’ changing rooms. And incidentally”—George Lawson-Young’s smile illuminated his little office—“he said your copy of the necklace was stunning. Perhaps you will show it to me one day, when all this is over.”
I asked him what he would consider “over,” and his smile disappeared. “For me it will be over when we find the tape of our work.”
He was aware, I supposed, that it was comparatively easy to make duplicates of videotapes. And that the knowledge recorded on them was like the contents of Pandora’s box; once out, it couldn’t be put back. The stolen tape itself might now show racing. The records of the cancer research might already be free in the world, and would never again be under the professor’s control. For him, perhaps, it was already over.
For me, I thought, it would be over when Rose and Adam Force left me alone... but abruptly, out of nowhere, the specter of the fourth black mask floated into my consciousness. It wouldn’t be over for me until his mask came off.
As casually as I could I mentioned Number Four to the professor, fearing he would discount my belief, but instead he took it seriously.
“Add your Number Four into all equations,” he instructed, “and what do you get in the way of answers? Do you get a reason for Force to want you dead? Do you get a reason for anyone to attack you? Think about it.”
I thought that that method must be what he used in nearly all research: if I added in an X factor, an “unknown,” into all I’d seen and heard and hadn’t wholly understood, what would I get?
Before I could really learn the technique, one of the young doctors came to tell me and the professor that Adam Force was standing on the sidewalk opposite with a thin woman with brown hair—my friend Rose. Doctor Force was staring at the entrance of his former workplace as if deciding how best to storm the Bastille. The young doctor, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy devising an escape from the fortress.
The professor said thoughtfully, “Adam knows his way round this house and its environs at least as well as any of us. He’ll have stationed the other man, the one we can’t see now, at the rear door into the mews. So how do we get Mr. Logan out of here without Adam Force being aware of it?”
The brilliant researchers came up with several solutions that required Tarzan-like swinging over an abyss, but with civil regard for each other’s brains, they voted unanimously for the exit I actually took.
The glowingly pretty female doctor whose id
ea I followed gave me life-threatening directions. “Go up the stairs. Beside the top of the staircase, on the sixth floor, there’s a bolted door. Unbolt it. Open it. You’ll find yourself on the roof. Slide down the tiles until you meet a parapet. Crawl along behind the parapet there, so that the man in the mews doesn’t see you. Crawl to the right. Keep your head down. There are seven houses joined together. Go along behind their parapets until you come to the fire escape at the end. Go down it. There’s a bolt mechanism that lets the last part of the iron ladder slide down to the pavement. When you’re down, shove the last part of the ladder up again until it clicks. My car is parked in the mews. I’ll drive out in half an hour. You should be on the ground there by then, out of sight of Doctor Force. I’ll pick you up and go to meet your driver. When I pick you up, lie on the floor, so that my car looks empty except for me.”
Everyone nodded.
I shook hands with George Lawson-Young. He gave me multiple contact numbers and mentioned with a grin that I already had the phone number of the lab. He would expect me to find the stolen tape. Deduction and intuition would do it.
I said, “What a hope!”
“Our only hope,” he added soberly.
The author of my escape and a couple of her colleagues came up to the top floor with me in high good spirits and unbolted the door to the roof.
Cheerfully, but in whispers because of the man in the mews far below, the researchers helped me slide down the gently sloping roof tiles to reach the parapet along the edge. Seeing me safely on my knees there, they happily waved good-bye and bolted the top-floor door behind me.
It was true I could have crawled along on my hands and knees, but I would have been visible to Norman Osprey waiting below. She, my savior, being tiny, hadn’t realized that I was almost double her body size. To be invisible I would have to go on my stomach, as the height of the parapet was barely the length of a forearm.
I sweated and trembled along on my stomach within the parapet’s scanty cover and had to freeze my nerves and imagination to zero in order to cross crumbling bits of old mortar. It was a long way down to the ground.
Dusk gathered in unwary corners and made matters worse.
The seven houses seemed like fifty.
When at last I reached the fire escape, I’d begun to think that falling over the parapet would be less terrifying than inching along so precariously behind it.
At least, I thought grimly, if Adam Force had ever been up on the laboratory house’s roof, he wouldn’t expect me to have gone up there myself.
My dear pretty savior, on picking up my shaky self, remarked critically that I’d taken my time on the journey. My dry mouth found it impossible to reply. She apologized that the recent rain had drenched the roof and wet my clothes. Think nothing of it, I croaked. She switched on the headlights and the heater. I gradually stopped shivering—both from cold and from fear.
We found Jim at the rendezvous in his usual state of agitation. My savior, handing me over, reported that the fun escape had been a great success. She wouldn’t accept anything for petrol. She did accept an absolutely heartfelt hug of gratitude, and a long, long kiss.
9
I made a detour to talk to Bon-Bon on my way home and found her tears fewer and her memory recovering. When I asked her questions, she sweetly answered. When I suggested a course of action, she willingly agreed.
By the time Jim decanted me yawning to my hill house we were both very tired and he still had a few miles to go. Far and away the most orthodox of my three self-appointed minders, he also lived nearest. His wife, he said, had told him to apply to drive me regularly until I got my license back. I was considering the cost, and he was considering a ban on radio and music. We had agreed to let each other know.
On that Wednesday, Catherine’s transport stood on its frame outside the kitchen door. Inside the kitchen, when Jim had driven away, the warm welcoming smell of cooking seemed as natural as in the past with other women it had been contrived.
“Sorry about this.” She pointed with her elbow at half-scrambled eggs. “I didn’t know when you were coming back, and I was hungry.”
I wondered how much care had gone into saying “back” instead of “home.”
She gave me a careful look, her eyebrows rising.
“I got a bit wet,” I said.
“Tell me later.” She cooked more eggs while I changed, and we ate in companionable peace.
I made coffee for us both and drank mine looking at her neat face, her blond curving hair and her close-textured skin; and I wondered without confidence what I looked like to her.
I said, “I saw Doctor Force again today....” Catherine smiled. “And was he still charming and good-looking and filling everyone with belief in humanity?”
I said, “Well, not exactly. He quite likely meant to bump me off, if he got a chance.” I yawned, and bit by bit, without exaggeration, told her about my day.
She listened with concentration and horror.
I collected her coffee cup and put it in the sink. We were still in the kitchen, which thanks to my mother had a pair of large comfortable chairs near an efficient heater.
We sat together, squashed into one of the chairs, as much for support for the spirits as for physical pleasure.
I told her about the professor and his X-factor method of research. “So now,” I finished, “I go over everything that anyone has said and done, add in X and see what I get.”
“It sounds difficult.”
“Different, anyway.”
“And when you find him? Blackmask Number Four?”
“He gives me nightmares,” I said.
I smoothed her hair. She felt right in my arms, curling there comfortably.
If I added Blackmask Four into the picture when he’d first blown into my awareness of his existence I had to remember every separate blow of that encounter on the Broadway sidewalk and, I realized with distaste, I had to go back and listen again in my mind to every word of Rose’s.
She’d shouted, “Break his wrists ...”
Catherine stirred in my arms and cuddled closer, and I discarded Rose in favor of bed.
Catherine woke early and went off before dawn to her morning shift, and I walked down in the dark to Logan Glass thinking of the past two days in Lynton and Bristol and wondering, like Professor Lawson-Young, if Doctor Force still possessed and could produce for sale the irreplaceable data he’d stolen.
Strictly speaking, none of it was truly the business of a provincial glassblower, but my fast-mending skin reminded me still that not everyone agreed.
Also, strictly speaking, none of it was truly the business of a dead steeplechase jockey, but his wife and children had been assaulted by gas and comprehensively robbed of their video machines.
The dedicated professor depended, he’d hopefully said, on my deductive abilities, but to my mind he was staking his shirt on a nonrunner, as Martin would have put it.
I had come to see the hunt for the videotape as sorties up a series of roads leading nowhere: as a starburst of cul-de-sacs. The professor believed that one of the roads would eventually lead to his treasure, and I thought of Lloyd Baxter and Ed Payne and Victor and Rose and Norman Osprey and Bon-Bon and Adam Force, all as blind-alley roads. I thought of all they’d said and done, and the professor was right, if I could discard the lies, I’d be left with the truth.
Far more absorbing of my time and mental energy was his assertion that if I included factor X (Blackmask Four) in all my insoluble sums, I would find them adding up.
Although I arrived at work half an hour before the normal starting time, Hickory was there before me, obstinately trying again to make a perfect sailing boat. He’d made the boat itself much larger and had put in red and blue streaks up the mast and the whole thing looked lighter and more fun.
I congratulated him and got a scornful grunt in return, and I thought how quickly his sunny temperament could blow up a thunderstorm, and hoped for his sake as well as for our compete
nt little team’s, that it would blow over just as fast. Meanwhile I tidied the shelves in the stock-room end of the furnace room, where Hickory had currently raised the melted-glass temperature to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit. To give Hickory his due, he handled semi-liquid glass with a good deal of the panache he would need on the way to general recognition. I privately thought, though, that he would get stuck on “pretty good” and never reach “marvelous,” and because he understood deep down where his limit lay, and knew I could do better, his present feeling of mild resentment needed patience and friendly laughter if he were either to stay or to leave on good terms.
Irish and Pamela Jane arrived together, as they often did, and this time were arguing about a film they’d seen that had a bad glassblower in it. They asked Hickory what he thought and embroiled him so intensely in the argument that with a fatally noisy bang Hickory’s precious new sailing boat cracked apart into five or six pieces. It had been standing free on the marver table, the outer surfaces cooling more rapidly than the superhot core. The stresses due to unequal rates of contraction had become too great for the fragile glass. The pieces had blown away from each other and lay on the floor.
All three of my helpers looked horrified. Hickory himself glanced at his watch and said bleakly, “Three minutes, that’s all it took. I was going to put it in the oven... God damn that stupid film.”
No one touched or tried to pick up the fallen pieces. They were still near to their liquid heat and would incinerate one’s fingers.
“Never mind,” I said, shrugging and looking at the sad bits, “it happens.” And I didn’t need to remind them that practice glass was cheap. It did happen to everyone. It happened to the best.
We worked conscientiously all morning, making swooping birds for mobiles, which always sold fast. Pamela Jane, loving them particularly, was the one who fixed their strings the following morning early and who at noon would carefully pack them in boxes in such a way that they would pull out easily to fly.
