Hot Money

by Dick Francis

  ‘Same thing. If nothing happens and we get no results, I’ll phone you on Monday evening.’

  ‘Darling, let me go to Quantum with you.’

  ‘No, definitely not.’ I was alarmed. ‘Joyce, promise me you’ll stay in Surrey. Promise!’

  ‘Darling, don’t be so vehement. All right, I promise,’ She paused. ‘Was that old bugger in good nick when you last saw him?’

  In excellent nick,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t help being fond of him, darling, but don’t bloody tell him I said so. Can’t go back, of course. But well, darling, if there’s one thing I regret in my life it’s getting that frightful man West to catch him with Alicia. If I’d had any bloody sense, darling, I’d have turned a blind eye and let him have his bit on the side. But there it is, I was too young to know any better.’

  She said goodbye cheerfully, however, promising to do all the phone calls in the morning, and I put the receiver down slowly.

  ‘Did you hear any of that last bit?’ I asked Malcolm.

  ‘Not a lot. Something about if she’d had any sense, she wouldn’t have done something or other.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have divorced you,’ I said.

  He stared incredulously. ‘She insisted on it.’

  ‘Twenty-seven years later, she’s changed her mind.’

  He laughed. ‘Poor old Joyce.’ He spent no more thought on it. ‘Moira didn’t doodle on notepads that I know of.’

  ‘I dare say she didn’t. But if you were a murderer, would you bet on it?’

  He imagined it briefly, i’d be very worried to hear from Joyce. I would think long and hard about going to Quantum to search for the notepad before she told the police.’

  ‘And would you go? Or would you think, if the police didn’t find it when Moira was first murdered, then it isn’t there? Or if it is there, there’s nothing incriminating on it?’

  I don’t know if I would risk it. I think I would go. If it turned out to be a silly trap of Joyce’s, I could say I’d just come to see how the house was doing.’ He looked at me questioningly. ‘Are we both going down there?’

  ‘Yes, but not until morning. I’m jet-lagged. Don’t know about you. I need a good sleep.’

  He nodded. ‘Same for me.’

  ‘And that shopping you were doing?’ he eyed the several Fortnum & Mason carrier bags with tall parcels inside. ‘Essential supplies?’

  ‘Everything I could think of. We’ll go down by train and…’

  He waved his cigar in a negative gesture. ‘Car and chauffeur.’ He fished out his diary with the phone numbers. ‘What time here?’

  Accordingly, we went in the morning in great comfort and approached Quantum circumspectly from the far side, not past the eyes of the village.

  The chauffeur goggled a bit at the sight of the house, with its missing centre section and boarded-up windows and large new sign saying: ‘Keep out. Building unsafe.’

  ‘Reconstructions,’ Malcolm said.

  The chauffeur nodded and left, and we carried the Fortnum & Mason bags across the windy central expanse and down the passage on the far side of the staircase, going towards the playroom.

  Black plastic sheeting still covered all the exposed floor space, not taut and pegged down, but wrinkled and slack. Our feet made soft crunching noises on the grit under the plastic and there were small puddles here and there as if rain had blown in. The boarded-up doors and the barred stairs looked desolate, and far above, over the roof, the second black plastic sheet flapped like sails between the rafters.

  Sad, sad house. Malcolm hadn’t seen it like that, and was deeply depressed. He looked at the very solid job the police had made of hammering the plywood to the door-frame of the playroom and asked me politely how I proposed to get in.

  ‘With your fingernails?’ he suggested.

  I produced a few tools from one of the bags. ‘There are other shops in Piccadilly,’ I said. ‘Boy scouts come prepared.’

  I’d thought it likely that I wouldn’t be able to get the plywood off easily as I understood they’d used four-inch nails, so I’d brought a hammer and chisel and a saw, and before Malcolm’s astonished gaze proceeded to dig a hole through the plywood and cut out a head-high, body-wide section instead. Much quicker, less sweat.

  ‘You didn’t think of all this since yesterday, did you?’ he asked.

  ‘No. On the plane. There were a lot of hours then.’

  I freed the cut-out section and put it to one side, and we went inton the playroom. Nothing had changed in there. Malcolm fingered the bicycles when his eyes had adjusted to the partial light, and I could see the sorrow in his body.

  It was by that time nine-thirty. If Joyce by any chance phoned the right person first, the earliest we could have a visitor was about half past ten. After that, anything was possible. Or nothing.

  Malcolm had wanted to know what we would do if someone came.

  ‘All the family have keys to the outside kitchen door,’ I said. ‘We never had the locks changed, remember? Our visitor will go into the kitchen that way and we will go round and… er…’

  ‘Lock him in,’ Malcolm said.

  ‘Roughly, yes. And then talk about confessing. Talk about what to do with the future.’

  I went round myself to the kitchen door and made sure it did still unlock normally, which it did. I locked it again after a brief look inside. Still a mess in there, unswept.

  I returned to the playroom and from the bags produced two stick-on mirrors, each about eight inches by ten.

  ‘I thought you’d brought champagne,’ Malcolm grumbled. ‘Not saws and bloody looking-glasses.’

  ‘The champagne’s there. No ice.’

  ‘It’s cold enough without any bloody ice.’ He wandered aimlessly round the playroom, finally slumping into one of the armchairs. We had both worn layers of the warmest clothes we had, leaving the suitcases in the Ritz, but the raw November air looked as if it would be a match for the Simpson’s vicuna overcoat and my new Barbour, and the gloves I had bought for us in the same shop the day before. We were at least out of the wind which swirled round and through the house, but there was no heat but our own.

  I stuck one of the mirrors onto the cut-out piece of plywood, and the other at the same height onto the wall which faced the playroom door, the side wall of the staircase: stuck it not exactly opposite the door but a little further along towards the hall.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Malcolm asked.

  ‘Just making it possible for us to see anyone come up the drive without showing ourselves. Would you mind sitting in the other chair, and telling me when the mirrors are at the right angle? Look into the one on the stair wall. I’ll move the other. OK?’

  He rose and sat in the other chair as I’d asked, and I moved the plywood along and angled it slightly until he said, ‘Stop. That’s it. I can see a good patch of drive.’

  I went and took his place and had a look for myself. It would have been better if the mirrors had been bigger, but they served the purpose. Anyone who came to the house that way would be visible.

  If they came across the fields we’d have to rely on our ears.

  By eleven, Malcolm was bored. By eleven-thirty, we’d temporarily unbolted and unlocked the door at the end of the passage and been out into the bushes to solve the problem posed by no plumbing. By twelve, we were into Bollinger in disposable glasses (disgusting, Malcolm said) and at twelve-thirty ate biscuits and pâté.

  No one came. It seemed to get colder. Malcolm huddled inside his overcoat in the armchair and said it had been a rotten idea in the first place.

  I had had to promise him that we wouldn’t stay overnight. I thought it unlikely anyway that someone would choose darkness rather than daylight for searching for a small piece of paper that could be anywhere in a fairly large room, and I’d agreed to the chauffeur returning to pick us up at about six. Left to myself, I might have waited all night, but the whole point of the exercise was that Malcolm himself should be there. We w
ould return in the morning by daybreak.

  He said, ‘This person we’re waiting for… you know who it is, don’t you?’

  ‘Well… I think so.’

  ‘How sure are you, expressed as a percentage?’

  ‘Um… ninety-five.’

  ‘That’s not enough.’

  ‘No, that’s why we’re here.’

  ‘Edwin,’ he said. ‘It’s Edwin, isn’t it?’

  I glanced across at him, taking my gaze momentarily off the mirrors. He wanted it to be Edwin. He could bear it to be Edwin. In Edwin’s own words, he could have faced it. Edwin might possibly have been capable of killing Moira, I thought: an unplanned killing, shoving her head into the potting compost because the open bag of it gave him the idea. I didn’t think he had the driving force, the imagination or the guts to have attempted the rest.

  When I didn’t contradict him, Malcolm began saying, ‘If Edwin comes…’ and it was easier to leave it that way.

  Time crept on. It was cold. By two-thirty, to stoke our internal fires, we were eating rich dark fruit cake and drinking claret. (Heresy, Malcolm said. We should have had the claret with the pate and the champagne with the cake. As at weddings? I asked. God damn you, he said.)

  I didn’t feel much like laughing. It was a vigil to which there could be no good end. Malcolm knew as well as I did that he might be going to learn something he fervently didn’t want to know. He didn’t deep down want anyone to come. And I wanted it profoundly.

  By three-thirty, he was restless. ‘You don’t really mean to go through all this again tomorrow, do you?’

  I watched the drive. No change, as before. ‘The Ritz might give us a packed lunch.’

  ‘And Monday? Not Monday as well.’ He’d agreed on three days before we’d started. The actuality was proving too much.

  ‘We’ll give up on Monday when it gets dark,’ I said.

  ‘You’re so bloody persistent.’

  I watched the mirrors. Come, I thought. Come.

  ‘Joyce might have forgotten the phone calls,’ Malcolm said.

  ‘She wouldn’t forget.’

  ‘Edwin might have been out.’

  ‘That’s more likely.’

  A light-coloured car rolled up the drive, suddenly there.

  No attempt at concealment. No creeping about, looking suspicious. AH confidence. Not a thought given to entrapment.

  I sat still, breathing deeply.

  She stood up out of the car, tall and strong. She went round to the passenger side, opened the door, and lifted out a brown cardboard box which she held in front of her, with both arms round it, as one holds groceries. I’d expected her to go straight round to the kitchen door, but she didn’t do that, she walked a few steps into the central chasm, looking up and around her as if with awe.

  Malcolm noticed my extreme concentration, rose to his feet and put himself between me and the mirrors so that he could see what 1 was looking at. I thought he would be stunned and miserably silent, but he was not in the least.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said with annoyance. ‘What’s she doing here?’

  Before I could stop him, he shot straight out of the playroom and said, ‘Serena, do go away, you’re spoiling the whole thing.*

  I was on his heels, furious with him. Serena whirled round when she heard his voice. She saw him appear in the passage. I glimpsed her face, wide-eyed and scared. She took a step backwards, and tripped on a fold of the black plastic floor covering, and let go of the box. She tried to catch it… touched it… knocked it forward.

  I saw the panic on her face. I had an instantaneous understanding of what she’d brought.

  I yanked Malcolm back with an arm round his neck, twisting and flinging us both to find shelter behind the wall of the staircase.

  We were both still falling when the world blew apart.

  Nineteen

  I lay short of the playroom door trying to breathe. My lungs felt collapsed. My head rang from the appalling noise, and the smell of the explosive remained as a taste as if my mouth were full of it.

  Malcolm, on his stomach a few feet away, was unconscious.

  The air was thick with dust and seemed to be still reverberating, though it was probably my concussion. I felt pulped. I felt utterly without strength. I felt very lucky indeed.

  The house around us was still standing. We weren’t under tons of new rubble. The tough old load-bearing walls that had survived the first bomb had survived the second - which hadn’t anyway been the size of a suitcase.

  My chest gave a heave, and breath came back. I moved, struggled to get up, tried things out. I felt bruised and unwell, but there were no broken bones; no blood. I rolled to my knees and went on them to Malcolm. He was alive, he was breathing, he was not bleeding from ears or nose: at that moment, it was enough.

  I got slowly, weakly, to my feet, and walked shakily into the wide centre space. 1 could wish to shut my eyes, but one couldn’t blot it out. One had to live through terrible things if they came one’s way.

  At the point where the bomb had exploded, the black floor covering had been ripped right away, and the rest was doubled over and convoluted in large torn pieces. Serena - the things that had been Serena - lay among and half under the black folds of plastic: things in emerald and frilly white clothes, pale blue leg-warmers, dark blue tights; torn edges of flesh, scarlet splashes… a scarlet pool.

  I went round covering the parts of her completely with the black folds, hiding the harrowing truth from anyone coming there unprepared. I felt ill. I felt as if my head were full of air. I was trembling uncontrollably. I thought of people who dealt often with such horrors and wondered if they ever got hardened.

  Malcolm groaned in the passage. I went back to him fast. He was trying to sit up, to push himself off the floor. There was a large area already beginning to swell on his forehead, and I wondered if he’d simply been knocked out through hitting the wood floor at high speed.

  ‘God,’ he said in anguish. ‘Serena… oh dear God.’

  I helped him to his groggy feet and took him out into the garden through the side-door, and round past the office to the front of the house. I eased him into the passenger seat of Serena’s car.

  Malcolm put his head in his hands and wept for his daughter. I stood with my arms on top of the car and my head on those, and felt wretched and sick and unutterably old.

  I’d hardly begun to wonder what to do next when a police car came into the drive and rolled slowly, as if tentatively, towards us.

  The policeman I’d looked through the windows with stopped the car and stepped out. He looked young, years younger than I was.

  ‘Someone in the village reported another explosion…’ He looked from us to the house questioningly.

  ‘Don’t go in there,’ I said. ‘Get word to the superintendent. Another bomb has gone off here, and this time someone’s been killed.’

  Dreadful days followed, full of questions, formalities, explanations, regrets. Malcolm and I went back to the Ritz where he grieved for the lost child who had tried hard to kill him.

  ‘But you said… she didn’t care about my money. Why… why did she do it all?’

  ‘She wanted…’ I said, ‘to put it at its simplest, I think she wanted to live at Quantum with you. That’s what she’s longed for since she was six, when Alicia took her away. She might perhaps have grown up sweet and normal if the courts had given you custody, but courts favour mothers, of course. She wanted to have back what had been wrenched away from her. I saw her cry about it, not long ago. It was still sharp and real to her. She wanted to be your little girl again. She refused to grow up. She dressed very often like a child.’

  He was listening with stretched eyes, as if seeing familiar country haunted by devils.

  ‘Alicia was no help to her,’ I said. ‘She filled her with stories of how you’d rejected her, and she actively discouraged her from maturing, because of her own little-girl act.’

  ‘Poor Serena.’ He looked tormented.
‘She didn’t have much luck.’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘But Moira …?’ he said.

  ‘I think Serena made herself believe that if she got rid of Moira, you would go back to Quantum and she would live there with you and look after you, and her dream would come true.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense…’

  ‘Murder has nothing to do with sense. It has to do with obsession. With compulsion, irresistible impulse, morbid drive. An act beyond reason.’

  He shook his head helplessly.

  ‘It’s impossible to know,’ I said, ‘whether she intended to kill Moira on that day. I wish we could know, but we can’t… she can’t have meant to kill her the way she did, because no one could know there’d be a slit-open nearly full sack of potting compost waiting there, handy. If she meant to kill Moira that day, she’d have taken some sort of weapon. I’ve been wondering, you know, if she meant to hit her over the head and put her in the car, the way she did you.’

  ‘God…’

  ‘Anyway, after Moira was out of the way, Serena offered to live with you at Quantum and look after you, but you wouldn’t have it.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t have worked, you know. I didn’t even consider it seriously. It was nice of her, I thought, but I didn’t want her, it’s true.’

  ‘And I expect you made it clear in a fairly testy way?’

  He thought about it. I suppose in the end I did. She kept on about it, you see. Asked me several times. Came to Quantum to beg me. I got tired of it and said no pretty definitely. I told her not to keep bothering me…’ He looked shattered. ‘She began to hate me then, do you think?’

  I nodded unhappily. ‘I’d think so. I think she finally believed she would never have what she craved for. You could have given it to her, and you wouldn’t. The rejection was ultimate. Absolute. Extreme. She believed it, as she’d never really believed it before. She told me she’d given you a chance, but you’d turned her down.’

  He put a hand over his eyes.

  ‘So she set out to kill you, and finally to kill the house as well… to destroy what she couldn’t have.’