Dick Francis & Felix Francis

by Crossfire

  And who, I wondered, was the potential beneficiary of the insurance?

  “So were you satisfied with the verdict?” I asked.

  “It’s what we expected,” Mr. Hoogland said dismissively, looking past my right shoulder.

  Time to dive in, I thought. “Are you absolutely sure that the dead man in the car was Roderick Ward?”

  “What?” he said, suddenly giving me his full attention.

  “Are you sure that it was Roderick Ward in that car?” I asked again.

  “Yes, of course. The body was identified by his sister.”

  “Yes, but where is the sister today?” I said. “And is she the beneficiary of your client’s insurance policy?”

  He stared at me. “What are you implying?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “I’m just curious. If my brother had died, and I’d been the one to identify him, then I’d be at the inquest.” Mr. Hoogland wasn’t to know that the coroner’s letter to Stella Beecher was in my pocket.

  “Why didn’t you say this in court?” he asked.

  “I’m not what they call an ‘officially interested party,’”I said. “So why would I be allowed to speak? And it’s not compulsory for members of the deceased’s family to be present at an inquest. Anyway, I don’t have access to the full pathologist’s report. For all I know, he might have already done a DNA test and double-checked it against the national DNA database.”

  “Why would Roderick Ward’s DNA be in the database?” he asked.

  “Because he was arrested two years ago for breaking windows,” I replied. “It should be there.”

  Mr. Hoogland opened a notebook and made some notes.

  “And what is your name?” he asked.

  “Is that important?” I said.

  “You can’t go round making accusations anonymously.”

  “I’m not accusing anyone,” I said. “I just asked you if you were sure it was Roderick Ward in that car.”

  “That in itself is an accusation of fraud.”

  “Or murder,” I said.

  He stared at me again. “Are you serious?”

  “Very,” I said.

  “But why?”

  “It just seems too easy,” I said. “Late at night on a country road with little or no traffic, low-speed collision, contusion on the side of the head, alcohol, car tips into convenient deep stretch of river, no attempt to get out of the car, life insurance. Need I go on?”

  “So what are you going to do about your theory?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s not me that has the client who’s about to pay out a large sum in life insurance.”

  I could see in his face that he was having doubts. He must be asking himself if I was a complete nutter.

  “You’ve nothing to lose,” I said. “At least find out for sure if the deceased really was Roderick Ward by getting a DNA test done. Maybe the pathologist already has. Look in his report.”

  He said nothing but stared at a point somewhere over the top of my head.

  “And ask the pathologist if he tested to determine if the water in the lungs actually came from the river.”

  “You do have a suspicious mind,” he said, again looking down at my face.

  “Did Little Bo Peep actually lose her sheep, or were they stolen?”

  He laughed. “Did Humpty Dumpty fall, or was he pushed?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Do you have a card?”

  He fished one out of his jacket pocket and gave it to me.

  “I’ll call you,” I said, turning away.

  “Right,” he shouted to my departing back. “You do that.”

  11

  I woke in agony. And in the dark, pitch-black dark.

  Where was I?

  My arms hurt badly, and my head was spinning, and there was some sort of cloth on my face, rough cloth, like a sack.

  What had happened?

  It felt as if I was hanging by my arms and my shoulders didn’t like it, not one bit. My whole back ached, and my head pounded as if there were jackhammers trying to break out of my skull behind my eyes. I felt sick, very sick, and I could smell the rancid odor of vomit on the cloth over my face.

  How had I got here?

  I tried to remember, but the pain in my arms clouded every thought. Being blown up by an IED had nothing on this. My upper body screamed in agony, and I could hear myself screaming with it. Whoever thought too much pain brought on unconsciousness was an idiot. My brain, now awake, clearly had no intention of switching off again. How much pain does it take to kill, I wondered. Surely it was time for me to die?

  Was this just another bad dream?

  No, I decided, this was no dream. This agony, sadly, was reality.

  I wondered if my arms were actually being pulled from their sockets. I couldn’t feel my hands, and I was suddenly very afraid.

  Had I been captured by the Taliban? The very thought struck terror into my heart. I could feel myself coming close to panic, so I put such thoughts back in their box and tried to concentrate solely on the locations of my pain and its causes.

  Apart from the ongoing fire in my back and arms, my left leg also hurt—in particular, my heel. “Concentrate,” I shouted out loud at myself. “Concentrate.” Why does my heel hurt? Because it’s pressing on the floor. Now I realized for the first time that I wasn’t hanging straight down. My left foot was stretched out in front of me. I bent my knee, pulled my foot back, and stood up. The searing agony in my shoulders instantly abated. The change was dramatic. I no longer wanted to die. Instead, I became determined to live.

  Where was I? What happened? Why was I here? And how did I get here?

  The same questions kept rotating over and over in my head.

  I knew that I couldn’t have been captured by the Taliban. I remembered that I was in England, not in Afghanistan. At least, I assumed I was still in England. But could I assume anything? The world had suddenly gone mad.

  I felt dizzy. Why couldn’t I stand up properly?

  Then I remembered that too.

  I reached down to the floor with my right leg. Nothing. My prosthesis was missing. I could feel the empty right trouser leg flapping against my left calf as I moved my leg back and forth.

  Standing up, even on one leg, had vastly improved the pain in my back and shoulders, and feeling was beginning to return to my hands with the onset of horrendous pins and needles. But that was a pain I could bear. It was a good sign. In fact, it was the only good sign I could think of at the moment.

  My head went on throbbing, and I continued to feel sick.

  I turned my head from side to side, which did nothing to improve my nausea. Not a chink of light was visible at any point through the hood. I heel-and-toed myself through half a revolution and looked again. Still nothing.

  I was at home in darkness, but even so, I closed my eyes tight. I had discovered many years ago that with my eyes firmly held shut I could somehow switch off that part of my brain that dealt with visual images and increase the concentration on my other senses.

  I listened but could hear nothing, save for my own breathing inside the hood.

  I smelled the air, but the overpowering stench of vomit clouded out almost everything. There was, however, a faint sweet smell alongside it. Glue, perhaps, I thought, or something like an alcoholic solvent.

  With my now recovered and responsive fingers, I searched the space above my head. My wrists were tightly bound together by some sort of thin plastic, which was in turn attached to a chain. I followed the chain along its short length until I came to a ring fixed into the solid wall. The ring was set just over my head height, six-feet-six or so from the floor, and was about two inches across. I could feel that the chain was secured to it by a padlock.

  I leaned forwards against the wall. There was something running horizontally that was sticking into my elbows. I couldn’t quite get my hands low enough to feel it, so I used my face through the cloth. The horizontal bar ran in both directions as far as I could feel, with
a small ledge above it. I banged on the wall with my arms, and suddenly I knew where I was.

  I was in a stable. The horizontal bar and ledge that I could feel was the top of the wooden boarding that runs around a stall to protect a horse from kicking out at the unforgiving brick or stone. And the ring in the wall was there to tie up the horse, or to hang a hay net.

  But which stable was I in? Was it in my mother’s stable yard? Was Ian Norland asleep upstairs?

  I shouted. “Can anyone hear me? Help! Help!”

  I went on shouting for ages, but no one came running. I don’t think the hood helped. My voice sounded very loud to me inside it, but I wondered if the noise had even penetrated beyond the stable.

  I was pretty sure I wasn’t at Kauri House Stables. When I stopped shouting to listen, it was too quiet. Even if there had been an empty stall in my mother’s yard, there would be horses nearby, and horses make noises, even at night, and especially if someone is shouting their head off next door.

  I was beginning to be particularly irritated by the hood, not least by having to breathe vomit fumes, even if it was my own vomit. I tried to hold the material and pull it off, but it was tied too tightly around my neck and I couldn’t reach down with my hands far enough to untie it. I would just have to stand the irritation. It was nothing compared to the previous pain in my shoulders.

  I stood on my one leg for a long time. Occasionally I would lean back against the wall, but mostly I just stood.

  I wondered how long I had been here before I woke, and how much longer I was to remain. But that decision wasn’t mine.

  Night turned into day. I found that I could tell because a very small amount of light did penetrate the dark cloth of the hood, and if I turned my head, I could just tell that there was a window to my left as I stood with the wall behind me.

  The day brought nothing new.

  I went on standing for hours.

  I was hungry and thirsty, and my leg began to ache. And to make matters worse, I desperately needed to pee.

  I tried to remember how I had come to be here. I could recall the inquest and speaking to Mr. Hoogland. What had happened after that?

  I had walked back to my car in the multistory parking lot. I could remember being annoyed that someone had parked so close to my Jaguar on the driver’s side. I had purposely parked it on a high level, well away from any other cars, and it was not just because I didn’t want to get my paintwork scratched. The attaching system for my prosthetic leg meant I couldn’t bend my right knee through more than about seventy degrees, so getting into my low sports car was not as easy now as it had once been.

  My annoyance had stemmed from the fact that the particular level of the parking lot was still almost empty, but nevertheless, someone had parked within a foot of the off side of my car. I remembered wondering how on earth I was going to open the driver’s door wide enough to get my arm in, let alone my whole body.

  But I had never reached the door to try.

  Something had knocked me down, and I remembered having a towel wrapped around my face. The towel had been soaked in ether. I had known immediately what it was. The boys from the transport pool had used ether in Norway when the battalion had been there on winter exercise. They’d injected it straight into the engine cylinders to get the army trucks started when the diesel fuel was too cold to ignite. All the troops, including me, had tried to sniff the stuff to get high. But ether was also an anesthetic.

  And the next thing I’d known had been waking up in this predicament.

  Who could have done such a thing?

  And why had I been so careless as to let it happen? I’d been off my guard, thinking about the inquest and my conversation with the lawyer, Mr. Hoogland. I had stuck my head up over the parapet, but I hadn’t been shot, I’d been kidnapped.

  I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  As time passed, I became hungrier and the pain in my bladder grew to the extent that in the end, I had to let go, the urine briefly warming my leg as it ran down to the floor.

  But it was the thirst and the fatigue that were becoming my greatest problems.

  In the army, soldiers were used to standing for long periods, especially in the Guards regiments. Lengthy stints of ceremonial duty outside the royal palaces in London taught all guardsmen to stand completely still for hours, unmoved and unamused by the antics of camera-wielding tourists or little boys with water pistols.

  I had done my time there as a young guardsman, but nothing had prepared me for the hours of standing on only one leg, unable to go for a march up and down to alleviate the pain, and especially the cramp that started to appear in my calf. I tried rocking back and forth from heel to toe, but my heel was still sore and it didn’t do much good. I tried resting my elbows on the ledge at the top of the wooden paneling to relieve the pressure. But nothing helped for long.

  I bent my knee and allowed some of my weight to hang once more from my hands, but soon the pain in my shoulders returned and my hands started to go numb once more.

  I spent some more time shouting, but no one came, and it just made me even thirstier.

  What did the people who did this want from me?

  I would gladly give them everything I owned just to sit down with a glass of water.

  Values and Standards of the British Army stated that prisoners must be treated with respect and in accordance with both British and international laws. International Law is based on the four Geneva Convention treaties and the three additional protocols that set the standards for the humanitarian treatment of victims of war.

  I knew; I’d been taught it at Sandhurst.

  In particular, the conventions prohibit the use of torture. Hooding, sleep deprivation and continuous standing had all been designated as torture by case law in the European Court of Human Rights. To say nothing of the withholding of food and water.

  Surely someone had to come soon.

  But they didn’t, and the light from the window went away as day turned into my second night in the stable.

  I passed some of the time counting seconds.

  Mississippi one, Mississippi two, Mississippi three, and so on . . . and on . . . and on. Mississippi sixty to one minute, Mississippi sixty times sixty to one hour. Anything to keep my mind off the pain in my leg.

  Eventually, sometime that I reckoned, from my counting, must be after midnight, it dawned on me that my kidnapper simply wasn’t going to arrive with food and water for his hostage. If he had been going to, he’d have come during the daylight hours or in the early evening.

  I faced the shocking reality that I wasn’t here to be ransomed, I was here to die.

  In spite of the pain in my leg, I went to sleep standing up. i I only realized when I lost my balance and was woken by the jerk of the chain attached to my wrists. I twisted around so I was facing the wall and stood up again.

  I was cold.

  I could tell that I was only in my shirtsleeves. I’d been wearing an overcoat when I walked back to the car from the Coroner’s Court, but it had obviously been removed.

  I shivered, but the cold was the least of my worries.

  I was desperately thirsty, and I knew that my body must be getting dehydrated. My kidneys had gone on making urine, and I had peed three times during the day, losing liquid down my leg that I could ill afford. I knew from my training that in these cool conditions, human beings could live for several weeks without food but only a matter of a few days without water.

  The knowledge was not hugely comforting.

  I thought back to the survival-skills instructor at Sandhurst who had told me that. The whole platoon had sat up and taken special notice of the attractive female captain from the Royal Army Medical Corps who had taught us about the physiological effects of the various situations in which we might find ourselves.

  Sadly, there hadn’t been a lecture on how to stand forever on one leg.

  But the captain had turned out to be more than just an army medico who knew the theory, she was a g
et-up-and-go girl who had put it into practice. She was the female equivalent of Bear Grylls, spending all her army leave on expeditions to remote parts, and she could count both poles as well as the top of Everest in her résumé.

  “If you’re in a bit of a spot,” she had said, grossly understating some of the “spots” she had described from her own experiences, “never just sit and wait to be rescued. Your best bet for survival is always to evacuate under your own steam if that is humanly possible. There are well-documented occasions when people with broken legs, or worse, left for dead high up on Everest, have subsequently turned up alive at Base Camp. They crawled off the mountain. No one else was going to save them, so they saved themselves.”

  I was definitely in a bit of a spot.

  Time, I thought, to save myself.

  First things first. I had to get myself disconnected from the ring in the wall. It sounded deceptively easy.

  I reached up with my hands to where the chain was attached by the padlock. The ring stuck straight out from the wall as if it had been screwed in as a single piece. I grabbed hold of it with my right hand and tried to twist it anticlockwise. It didn’t budge an iota.

  I went on trying for a long time. I wrapped the chain around the ring and put all my weight on it. I then tried to twist the chain, rotating my body around and around, back and forth, hoping that I would find a weak link to snap. Nothing.

  Next, I tried turning the ring clockwise in case it had a left-hand screw thread. Still nothing, other than sore fingers.

  I jerked it with the chain, on one occasion throwing myself off balance and back into the hanging-by-shoulders position. But still the damn ring didn’t shift. If I couldn’t detach myself from the ring, then I would simply hang here until I died of dehydration, and the exertions of trying to escape would reduce the time that would take.

  “Always to evacuate under your own steam if that is humanly possible.” That’s what the lady captain had said. Maybe freeing myself from the ring wasn’t humanly possible.