Hot Money

by Dick Francis

  I said placatingly, ‘It’s just that we’re anxious… someone got in, they must have.’

  ‘Not me.’ He was slightly mollified. ‘I was working in the kitchen garden all day, digging potatoes and such like. I had the two dogswith me, tied up on their leads. If anyone had tried to get in the house, they’d have barked for sure, but they didn’t.’

  Malcolm said, ‘Arthur, could you keep the dogs with you for another day or two?’

  ‘Yes, I…’ He looked helplessly at the heap of rubble spilling out across the terrace and onto the lawn. ‘What do you want me to do about the garden?’

  ‘Just… carry on,’ Malcolm said. ‘Keep it tidy.’ It didn’t seem incongruous to him to polish the setting, though I thought that perhaps, left to its own, nature would scatter leaves and grow longer grass and soften the raw brutality of the jagged edges.

  The superintendent, seeing Arthur Bellbrook, came across to him and asked the same questions that I had. Again, they seemed to know each other well, undoubtedly from Moira’s investigations, and if there didn’t seem to be friendship, there was clearly a mutual respect.

  The reporters, having sucked the nectar from Gervase, advanced on Malcolm and on the gardener and the superintendent. I moved away, leaving them to it, and tried to talk to Ferdinand.

  He was unfriendly and answered with shrugs and monosyllables.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said bitterly, ‘you would rather I was lying in shreds and bloody tatters under all that lot.’

  He looked at the tons of fallen masonry. ‘Not really,’ he said coolly.

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘You can’t expect us to like it that you’ve an inside edge with Malcolm.’

  ‘You had three years,’ I pointed out, ‘during which he wouldn’t speak to me. Why did you waste them? Why didn’t you get an inside edge yourself?’

  ‘We couldn’t get past Moira.’

  I half smiled. ‘Nor could I.’

  ‘It’s now we’re talking about,’ he said. He looked greatly like Malcolm, right down to the stubbornness in the eyes.

  ‘What do you want me to do, walk away and let him be murdered?’ I said.

  ‘Walk away …?’

  ‘That’s why he wants me with him, to try to keep him safe. He asked me to be his bodyguard, and I accepted.’

  Ferdinand stared. ‘Alicia said …’

  ‘Alicia is crazy,’ I interrupted fiercely. ‘So are you. Take a look at yourself. Greed, jealousy and spite, you’ve let them all in. I won’t cut you out with Malcolm, I’d never attempt it. Try believing that instead, brother, and save yourself a lot of anxiety.’

  I turned away from him in frustration. They were all illogical, I thought. They had almost begged me to use any influence I had with Malcolm to stop him spending and bale them out, and at the same time they believed I would ditch them to my own advantage. But then people had always been able to hold firmly to two contradictory ideas at the same time, as when once, in racing’s past, Stewards, Press and public alike had vilified one brilliant trainer as ‘most crooked’, and elected one great jockey as‘most honest’, blindly and incredibly ignoring that it was the self-same trusted jockey who for almost all of his career rode the brilliant trainer’s horses. I’d seen a cartoon once that summed it up neatly:‘Entrenched belief is never altered by the farts.’

  I wished I hadn’t lashed out at Ferdinand. My idea of detection from the inside wasn’t going to be a riotous success if I let my own feelings get in the way so easily. I might think the family unjust, they might think me conniving: OK, I told myself, accept all that and forget it. I’d had to put up with their various resentments for much of my life and it was high time I developed immunity.

  Easier said than done, of course.

  Superintendent Yale had had enough of the reporters. The family had by this time divided into two larger clumps, Vivien’s and Alicia’s, with Joyce and I hovering between them, belonging to neither. The superintendent went from group to group asking that everyone should adjourn to the police station. ‘As you are all here,’ he was saying, ‘we may as well take your statements straight away, to save you being bothered later.’

  ‘Statements?’ Gervase said, eyebrows rising.

  ‘Your movements yesterday and last night, sir.’

  ‘Good God,’ Gervase said. ‘You don’t think any of us would have done this, do you?’

  ‘That’s what we have to find out.’

  ‘It’s preposterous.’

  None of the others said anything, not even Joyce.

  The superintendent conferred with a uniformed colleague who was busy stationing his men round the house so that the ever-increasing spectators shouldn’t get too close. The word must have spread, Ithought. The free peepshow was attracting the next villages, if not Twyford itself.

  Much of the family, including Malcolm, Joyce and myself, packed into the three police cars standing in the front drive, and Gervase, Ferdinand and Serena set off on foot to go back to the transport they had come in.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past Alicia,’ Joyce said darkly to the superintendent as we drove past them towards the gate, ‘to have incited that brood of hers to blow up Quantum.’

  ‘Do you have any grounds for that statement, Mrs Pembroke?’

  ‘Statement? It’s an opinion. She’s a bitch.’

  In the front passenger seat, Yale’s shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.

  The road outside was still congested with cars, with still more people coming on foot. Yale’s driver stopped beside Joyce’s car, which she’d left in the centre of the road in her haste, and helped to clear room for her to turn in. With her following, we came next to the hired car Malcolm and I had arrived in, but as it was hopelessly shut in on three sides by other locked vehicles, we left it there and went on in the police car.

  In his large modern police station with its bullet-proofed glass enquiry desk, the superintendent ushered us through riot-proofed doors to his office and detailed a policewoman to take Joyce off for some tea. Joyce went protesringly, and Yale with another sigh sat us down in his bare-looking Scandinavian-type place of business.

  He looked at us broodingly from behind a large desk. He looked at his nails. He cleared his throat. Finally he said to Malcolm, ‘AH right. You don’t have to say it. I do not believe you would blow up your house just to make me believe that someone is trying to kill you.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘That being so,’ he said, as we both sat without speaking, ‘we must take the attack in the garage more seriously.’

  He was having a hard time, I thought. He ran a finger and thumb down his large black moustache and waited for comments from us that still didn’t come.

  He cleared his throat again. ‘We will redouble our efforts to find Mrs Moira Pembroke’s killer.’

  Malcolm finally stirred, brought out his cigar case, put a cigar in his mouth and patted his pockets to find matches. There was a plastic notice on Yale’s desk saying NO SMOKING. Malcolm, his glance restingon it momentarily, lit the match and sucked the flame into the tobacco.

  Yale decided on no protest and produced a glass ashtray from a lower drawer in his desk.

  ‘I would be dead twice over,’ Malcolm said, ‘if it weren’t for Ian.’

  He told Yale about the car roaring straight at us at Newmarket.

  ‘Why didn’t you report this, sir?’ Yale said, frowning.

  ‘Why do you think?’

  Yale groomed his moustache and didn’t answer.

  Malcolm nodded. ‘I was tired of being disbelieved.’

  ‘And… er… last night?’ Yale asked.

  Malcolm told him about our day at Cheltenham, and about Quantum’s inner doors. ‘I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I was tired. Ian absolutely wouldn’t have it, and drove us to London.’

  Yale looked at me steadily. ‘Did you have a premonition?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I hadn’t felt a shiver, as I had in my flat. Perhap
s the premonition in the flat had been for the house. ‘I was just… frightened,’ I said.

  Malcolm glanced at me with interest.

  Yale said, ‘What of?’

  ‘Not of bombs,’ I said. ‘I never considered that. Frightened there was someone in the house. I couldn’t have slept there, that’s all.’ I paused. ‘I saw the way the car drove at my father at Newmarket — it hit my leg, after all - and I believed him, of course, about being attacked and gassed in the garage. I knew he wouldn’t have murdered Moira, or have had her murdered by anyone else. I believe absolutely in his extreme danger. We’ve been moving around, letting no one know where to find us, until this week.’

  ‘My fault,’ Malcolm said gloomily. ‘I insisted on coming back here. Ian didn’t want to.’

  ‘When the doors were moved,’ I said, ‘it was time to go.’

  Yale thought it over without comment for a while and then said, ‘When you were in the house looking round, did you see anything unusual except for the doors?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Nothing where it shouldn’t be? Or absent from where it should have been?’

  I thought back to that breathless heart-thumping search. Whoever had moved the doors must at least have looked into the office and the sitting-room. I hadn’t bothered with the position of any of the otherdoors except closing the one from the kitchen to the hall. Someone could have looked into all the rooms in the house, for all I knew.

  ‘No,’ I said in the end. ‘Nothing else seemed out of place.’

  Yale sighed again. He sighed a lot, it seemed to me. ‘If you think of anything later, let me know.’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘The time-frame we’re looking at,’ he said, ‘is between about three-forty p.m., when the gardener went home taking the dogs, and ten-thirty p.m., when you returned from Cheltenham.’ He pursed his lips. ‘If you hadn’t stayed out to dinner, what time would you have been home?’

  ‘We meant to stay out to dinner,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s why Arthur had the dogs.’

  ‘Yes, but if…’

  ‘About six-thirty,’ I said. ‘If we’d gone straight home after the last race.’

  ‘We had a drink at the racecourse after the last race,’ Malcolm said. ‘I had scotch, Ian had some sort of fizzy gut-rot.’ He tapped ash into the ashtray. He was enjoying having Yale believe him at last, and seemed to be feeling expansive.

  ‘Ian thinks,’ he said, ‘that I was probably knocked out just outside the kitchen door that day, and that I was carried from there straight into the garage, not dragged, and that it was someone the dogs knew, as they didn’t bark. They were jumping up and down by the kitchen door, I can remember that, as they do if someone they know has come. But they do that anyway when it’s time for their walk, and I didn’t give it a thought.’ He inhaled a lot of smoke and let it out into the superintendent’s erstwhile clean air. ‘Oh yes, and about the fingerprints …’ He repeated what I’d said about firemen’s lifts.

  Yale looked at me neutrally and polished his moustache. He was difficult to read, I thought, chiefly because he didn’t want to be read. All policemen, I supposed, raised barriers and, like doctors and lawyers, tended not to trust what they were told, which could be bitterly infuriating to the truthful.

  He must have been forty or forty-five, I supposed, and had to be competent to have reached that rank. He looked as if he habitually had too little exercise and too many sandwiches, and gave no impression of wallowing in his own power. Perhaps now he’d dropped his over-smart suspicions of Malcolm, he could actually solve his case, though I’d heard the vast majority of criminals were injail because of having been informed on, not detected. I did very much want him to succeed. I wished he could spontaneously bring himself to share what he was thinking, but I supposed he’d been trained not to. He kept his counsel anyway on that occasion, and I kept mine, and perhaps it was a pity.

  A policewoman came in and said, looking harassed, that she didn’t know where to put the Pembroke family.

  Yale thought briefly and told her to show them all to his office. Malcolm said, ‘Oh God,’ and dragged on his cigar, and presently the whole troop arrived.

  I got to my feet and Alicia immediately sat on my chair. Vivien and Joyce both glared at Malcolm, still seated, willing him to rise, which he didn’t. Which of them could he possibly give his chair to, I thought, stifling laughter, without causing exmarital bloodshed?

  With a straight face, Yale asked the policewoman to fetch two more chairs, and I couldn’t even tell if he were amused or simply practical. When Vivien and Joyce were suitably enthroned, he looked around and counted us all: thirteen.

  ‘Who’s missing?’ he asked.

  He got various answers:‘My wife, Debs’, ‘Thomas, my husband’, ‘Ursula, of course.’

  ‘Very well. Now, if any of you know anything or guess anything about the explosion at Quantum House, I want to hear about it.’

  ‘Terrorists,’ Vivien said vaguely.

  Everyone ignored her and no one else made any suggestion.

  ‘While you are here,’ Yale said, ‘I’ll ask you all to answer certain questions. I’ll have my personnel write down your answers, and of course after that you can leave. The questions are, what were you doing yesterday between three in the afternoon and midnight, what were you doing a week last Tuesday between the same hours, and what were you doing two weeks ago today, Friday, also between three p.m. and midnight.’

  Edwin said crossly, ‘We’ve already answered most of those questions for that wretched man, West. It’s too much to go over it all again.’

  Several of the others nodded.

  Yale looked blank. ‘Who is West?’

  ‘A detective,’ Berenice said. ‘I sent him away with a flea in his ear, I can tell you.’

  ‘He was awfully persistent,’ Helen said, not liking the memory. ‘Itold him I couldn’t possibly remember exactly, but he went on prying.’

  ‘Dreadful little man,’ Serena said.

  ‘He said I was illegitimate,’ Gervase complained sourly. ‘It’s thanks to Joyce that he knew.’

  Yale’s mouth opened and closed again and he took a deep breath. ‘Who is West?’ he asked intensely.

  ‘Fellow I hired,’ Malcolm said. ‘Private detective. Hired him to find out who was trying to kill me, as I reckoned the police weren’t getting anywhere.’

  Yale’s composure remained more or less intact. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘please answer the questions again. And those of you without husband and wife here, please answer for them as best you can.’ He looked around at all the faces, and I would have sworn he was puzzled. I looked to see what he had seen, and I saw the faces of ordinary people, not murderers. Ordinary people with problems and hang-ups, with quirks and grievances. People anxious and disturbed by the blasting of the house that most had lived in and all had visited. Not one of them could possibly be a murderer, I thought. It had after all to be someone from outside.

  I felt a lot of relief at this conclusion until I realised I was raising any excuse not to have to find a murderer among ourselves; yet we did have to find one, if Malcolm were to live. The dilemma was permanent.

  ‘That’s all for now,’ Yale said, rising to his feet. ‘My staff will take your statements in the interview rooms. And Mr Pembroke senior, will you stay here a moment? And Mr Ian Pembroke also? There are the arrangements to be made about the house.’

  The family left me behind with bad grace. ‘It’s my job, not Ian’s, to see to things. I am the eldest.’ That was Donald. ‘You need someone with know-how.’ That was Gervase, heavily. ‘It’s not Ian’s house.’ Petulance from Edwin.

  Yale managed however to shovel them all out, and immediately the door had closed, I said, ‘While they’re all in the interview rooms, I’m taking my father out of here.’

  ‘The house …’ Malcolm began.

  ‘I’ll see to the house later. We’re leaving here now, this minute. If Superintendent Yale wil
l lend us a police car, fine; otherwise we’ll catch buses or taxis.’

  ‘You can have a police car within reason,’ Yale said.

  ‘Great. Then… urn… just take my father to the railway station. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘All right.’

  To Malcolm, I said, ‘Go to London. Go to where we were last night. Use the same name. Don’t telephone anyone. Don’t for God’s sake let anyone know where you are.’

  ‘You’re bloody arrogant.’

  ‘Yes. This time, listen to me.’

  Malcolm gave me a blue glare, stubbed out his cigar, stood up and let the red blanket drop from his shoulders to the floor.

  ‘Where will you be?’ Yale asked him.

  ‘Don’t answer,’ I said brusquely.

  Malcolm looked at me, then at the superintendent. ‘Ian will know where I am. If he doesn’t want to tell you, he won’t. Gervase tried to burn some information out of him once, and didn’t succeed. He still has the scars …’ he turned to me ‘… don’t you?’

  ‘Malcolm!’ I protested.

  Malcolm said to Yale, ‘I gave Gervase a beating he’ll never forget.’

  ‘And he’s never forgiven me,’ I said.

  ‘Forgiven you? For what? You didn’t snitch to me. Serena did. She was so young she didn’t really understand what she’d been seeing. Gervase could be a proper bully.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we’re wasting time.’

  Superintendent Yale followed us out of his office and detailed a driver to take Malcolm.

  ‘I’ll come in the car, once I can move it,’ I said to him. ‘Don’t go shopping, I’ll buy us some things later. Do be sensible, I beg you.’

  ‘I promise,’ he said; but promises with Malcolm weren’t necessarily binding. He went out with the driver and I stood on the police station steps watching his departure and making sure none of the family had seen him or could follow.

  Yale made no comment but waved me back to his office. Here he gave me a short list of reputable building contractors and the use of his telephone. I chose one of the firms at random and explained what was needed, and Yale took the receiver himself and insisted that they were to do minimum weather-proofing only, and were to move none of the rubble until the police gave clearance.