Dick Francis's Bloodline (9781101600931)

by Francis, Felix

  So much for my day off.

  Both Emily and I decided against dessert and coffee, opting to go.

  “We can open a bottle of wine when we get to my place,” Emily said, “and have coffee there.”

  I looked at my watch. It was still only twenty to nine.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  I paid the bill, and we walked out together toward Emily’s car.

  I was careless. Very careless.

  Since the events of Friday night, I had been checking the inside of cars and avoiding all dark places, but, here and now, I had relaxed my guard.

  Thinking back, I believe the fateful moment was when Emily took my hand in hers. Perhaps I was preoccupied by the thoughts of what was to come, reliving the excitement of our first lovemaking the previous afternoon. Or maybe it was just due to an overwhelming feeling of contentment that was flooding through me.

  Either way, I was careless.

  I didn’t even notice the darkened car until it was almost upon us.

  We were halfway across the gravel parking lot, and just a few yards from Emily’s red Mercedes, when the roaring engine to my left finally cut through into my consciousness.

  I half turned and screamed at Emily, but it was too late, much too late.

  The car hit both of us, spiraling me over the hood while Emily went down under the wheels.

  I remembered hitting the roof of the car and, the next thing I knew, I was lying on the gravel, panting madly, wanting to run but unable to get up.

  I rolled over, trying to ignore the searing pain in my side.

  The car was already out of the parking lot and on the road, traveling fast, and still it had no lights on.

  Emily, I thought with panic. Where is Emily?

  I gritted my teeth and rolled over again. I searched for her with my eyes, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Emily.” I tried to shout, but the sound came out as more of a croak. “Emily. Where are you? Are you all right?”

  There was no reply, and I began to panic further.

  I drew myself up onto my knees, and coughed.

  Blood, I thought. I can taste blood in my mouth. I coughed again. This time, I knew I was coughing up blood.

  Each breath was painful and difficult, and I felt sick.

  “Emily,” I tried to shout again.

  Still nothing.

  I forced myself to stand up—if doubled over and clutching my side could be considered standing up. But at least I was on my feet.

  I took three small steps over and leaned on a car.

  Where was she?

  I staggered from car to car, wildly searching in the darkness between them.

  I found her lying facedown near the exit of the parking lot. She must have been dragged there under the wheels.

  I sank to my knees beside her.

  “Emily,” I called, touching her shoulder, but there was no reply.

  Breathing was becoming very difficult, but I mustered the strength to roll her over on her back. Her face was just a mass of blood, and I couldn’t even tell if she was alive or dead.

  “Oh my God!” I cried. “I’m so sorry.”

  Another couple came out of the pub and started to walk toward us.

  “Help!” I croaked at them. “Please help me.”

  They stopped.

  “Call an ambulance,” I said, tears streaming down my face.

  —

  I AGAIN ENDED UP in Addenbrooke’s emergency room, just as I had the previous Friday. But this time I wasn’t left alone in a cubicle to recover. I was rushed into a treatment room, where I was worked on by a whole team of medics, and they seemed to be getting more concerned as time went on.

  I was placed on my left side, with my head and shoulders slightly raised, and I was wearing what the doctors had referred to as a positive flow oxygen mask strapped over my face.

  But the mask didn’t seem to be doing much good. My breathing was now so labored and shallow that I was hardly taking in any air at all, and I felt light-headed and close to unconsciousness.

  Was this how I would die?

  One of the medical staff came up toward my head and into view.

  “Can you hear me?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You’ve broken a couple of ribs,” he said. “One of them has punctured your left lung and it has collapsed. We’re trying to remove the air from inside your chest cavity so that your lung can reinflate on its own.”

  I tried to speak, but I didn’t seem to have enough breath.

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “Concentrate on your breathing. I don’t particularly want to have to put a tube down your throat as it may cause more problems. Our main concern is a rapid buildup of fluid in and round your right lung as well, but we are doing our best to remove it.” He smiled a wry smile. I wasn’t sure if that was encouraging or not.

  One lung collapsed and a buildup of fluid in the other. No wonder it felt like I was drowning.

  I desperately wanted to ask him about Emily. When I’d been carried into the ambulance, she had still been on the ground being attended to by paramedics, and I was dreadfully worried because I hadn’t seen her move since I’d first found her.

  The doctor resumed his attempts to remove the fluid from my lungs, and I went on breathing, albeit with increasingly rapid and shallow breaths.

  I tried to take my mind off my immediate medical troubles by thinking back to what had happened in the pub parking lot.

  There was no doubt in my mind that it had been a deliberate attempt to run us down. The driver of the car had made no effort to stop. In fact, quite the reverse. He had accelerated across the lot with his engine roaring and had driven off at speed.

  He must have been waiting for Emily and me to come out from dinner. He hadn’t put on his headlights, but there would have been enough ambient light for him to see us walking through the garden and across the parking lot.

  How had he known we were there?

  All I could think was that he must have followed us from the races.

  But who knew I was at Huntingdon racetrack?

  Anyone, I suppose, who’d listened to me either at the track or at home on the RacingTV channel, which had covered the meeting using my commentaries.

  And Mitchell Stacey had definitely known.

  His car had already gone from the lot when Emily and I came out to her Mercedes, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been waiting somewhere near the exit in order to follow us.

  The doctor reappeared in my field of vision.

  “Right. Now we need you to sit up,” he said. “To help the fluid drain.”

  I hardly had the breath to move a single muscle and I needed the help of two burly male nurses just to swing my legs off the examination table.

  I was leaned forward on a high table while the doctor inserted a tube into my back.

  “There,” he said. “The fluid is now draining out of your chest, and you’ll soon be feeling a lot better.”

  As if by magic, my breathing improved dramatically over the next couple of minutes as three large bottlefuls of pinkish fluid were drained from my body.

  Suddenly I began to believe that I might actually survive.

  “Is that better?” asked the doctor from behind me.

  I nodded. “Much,” I gasped through the oxygen mask.

  “Good. You were breathing for a time there with only about a tenth of one lung operational. If you’d arrived here just a couple of minutes later, you’d have been a goner.”

  “What about Emily?” I asked quietly, almost as if I didn’t want to know.

  “Eh?”

  “What about Emily?” I asked him again, this time louder. “The lady I was with.”
r />   There was no answer.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  The doctor came around to face me.

  “I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”

  20

  I lay in the semidarkness of a hospital room in utter despair.

  It was my fault.

  I should never have placed Emily in such danger.

  It was true that I’d known her for only two days, and maybe there had been something of the rebound about our coming together after my breakup with Sarah, but, even so soon, I truly felt that I’d finally met someone I would have been happy to live with, someone with whom to share the rest of my life.

  And now she was gone. Snatched away in an instant.

  Why?

  It was me who should be dead, not her.

  But why would anyone want me dead? There was no question that they did. Attempted strangulation on Friday and now a hit-and-run in a darkened pub parking lot on Sunday. But why?

  Everything in my head came back to Mitchell Stacey.

  Who else was there?

  That is what Detective Chief Inspector Perry had asked me just as soon as the doctor decided I was well enough to be interviewed by him and another plainclothes policeman.

  “You told me I’d be perfectly safe,” I’d said to him in an accusing tone.

  “I thought you would be,” he had said in reply. “I’m sorry.”

  “How about Mitchell Stacey?” I’d asked. “What did he have to say?”

  “Mr. Stacey was interviewed by officers from the Thames Valley Police early yesterday morning and he provided an alibi for his whereabouts on Friday evening. He could not have been the man who tried to strangle you.”

  “But he could have arranged it, and it might have been him in the pub parking lot tonight,” I’d said.

  “That will now be up to the Cambridgeshire force to determine.” He indicated the other policeman. “DCI Coaker here is dealing with the inquiry into the murder of Mrs. Lowther. I’m assisting him only because of last Friday’s incident.”

  I had spent the next two hours answering the two policemen’s questions in increasing frustration and anger.

  “Could you identify the car?”

  “No.”

  “Could you identify the driver?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why anyone would want you dead?”

  “No—other than Mitchell Stacey.”

  They asked me at least ten times about the sequence of events in the pub parking lot and each time I gave them the same answers.

  I continually asked them how Emily had died and in the end they told me that her neck had been broken. She must have been rolled under the car for ten or fifteen yards. It would have been enough to break anything.

  Now alone at last, I grieved for her, and also for me, and for what we might have been together.

  —

  THE MORNING brought little or no relief from my pain, or my misery, and Detective Chief Inspector Coaker came back soon after eight o’clock with more questions.

  “Who knew you would be at the Three Horseshoes pub?”

  “No one. Going there was a last-minute decision.”

  “Were you followed there from Huntingdon?”

  “We must have been, but I didn’t notice. Emily was driving.”

  Even I could tell that my answers weren’t very helpful. But that didn’t stop him from asking the same things over and over and over again.

  “How about my phone?” I said during a lull in the questioning.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s in Emily Lowther’s car,” I said. “Along with a leather bag containing my laptop computer, a pair of binoculars, and a few other things. I need them for my job.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said the chief inspector.

  Eventually he had to leave while a doctor came in the room to examine me, placing his stethoscope all over my chest and back while I breathed in and out.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Medically or emotionally?” I replied.

  “Both.”

  “Considering I was convinced last night that I was dying, I’m feeling pretty well on the medical front. My side is still very sore down here.” I placed my hand gingerly on my left lower ribs. “But I can breathe all right.”

  “How about deep breaths?” he asked.

  “Very painful,” I said. “As is coughing.”

  He nodded. “But you must try to use all of your lung capacity if you can. It will help prevent complications.”

  I didn’t like the sound of “complications,” so I breathed deeply, trying my best to ignore the stabbing pain in my side.

  “How long do I have to stay here?” I asked.

  “There’s no medical reason why you shouldn’t go home. Your left lung reflated of its own accord and the function of both lungs is now good, and there has been no recurrence overnight of fluid buildup anywhere in your chest.” He smiled at me. “But you must take things easy. No heavy lifting. It will take six weeks for those ribs to heal properly, and they’ll give you some considerable discomfort for most of that time. I’ll prescribe you something for the pain.”

  “Can’t you strap them up to stop them hurting?”

  “We don’t do that anymore. Strapping the chest is no longer advised because it’s constrictive and prevents you taking those necessary deep breaths. Let me tell you, a bit of pain is far preferable to pneumonia.”

  It certainly was, I thought. I took yet another deep breath.

  “So I can go now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “But seek medical advice immediately if you become even the slightest bit out of breath.” He paused. “How are you feeling in here?” He tapped his head.

  “Pretty bloody,” I said. “But staying in bed won’t help that.”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  So was I.

  —

  MY SISTER ANGELA came to collect me from the hospital around ten-thirty, and we were both in tears.

  I’d called her earlier on a hospital pay phone to tell her about Emily, but she already knew, it had been reported on the radio.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “Clare’s cottage,” I said. “I need to collect my stuff.”

  She drove in silence, too shocked even to ask me what had happened.

  I was glad. I’d done enough answering questions for one morning. But I was sure none of my answers had been of any use to the police—or to me, for that matter. Nothing helped to make sense of Emily’s death.

  But I hadn’t said anything to DCI Coaker about blackmail. I couldn’t see how it might have been relevant.

  Now I wondered if I should have. But surely that would have opened a whole new can of worms and sent the likes of Austin Reynolds and Harry Jacobs running for the hills. Then they would, of course, deny everything, and I’d be left with egg on my face. And did I really want to expose my sister as a cheat and a race fixer if I didn’t absolutely have to?

  But why else did someone want me dead?

  According to Chief Inspector Perry, Mitchell Stacey had had an alibi for Friday night, but he had also once threatened to have my legs broken and he would have needed some help to do that. Did he have some “heavies” he could call on for a bit of garroting to order or was I just being fanciful and maybe also guilty of confusing television drama with real life?

  Oh, Emily!

  How I wished this nightmare was nothing more than a fictional story line from some screenwriter’s imagination.

  —

  “I NEED TO GET the key from the stable office,” I said to Angela as she turned into the driveway of Clare’s cottage.

  But I was wrong.
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  The front door to the cottage was wide open, and a key hadn’t been used to open it. The frame had been splintered all around the lock, and there were six overlapping, two-inch-wide round impressions in the door. Someone clearly had used brute force and a sledgehammer to simply smash their way in.

  “Oh shit!” I said with feeling. “It’s been burgled.”

  Angela stayed in the car while I moved forward warily to the door. I thought it unlikely that any burglar would still be in the cottage at eleven o’clock in the morning, but I didn’t particularly want to disturb some crazy, knife-wielding drug addict who was searching for the wherewithal for his next fix.

  “Hello,” I called. “Anyone there?”

  I stood in the doorway listening for the sound of any movement inside or someone escaping out the back. There was nothing.

  “We should call the police,” Angela shouted at me through the open car window.

  I’d had enough of the police for one morning.

  “I’ll take a look first,” I shouted back.

  I stepped inside, expecting to discover that the place had been completely ransacked, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that nothing much looked out of place. The bags of Clare’s clothes were still stacked under the stairs, and the cardboard boxes I’d filled with the contents of her desk remained where I’d left them on the floor of the sitting room.

  Indeed, the only things I could see that had been shifted were some of the papers that had been in the boxes, which were now strewn across the carpet.

  However, there was something missing.

  Not the fancy television set. Not even Clare’s collection of silver racing trophies that were still lined up on the mantelpiece.

  It was the white envelope containing the two thousand pounds in cash that was missing—gone from the cardboard box where I’d placed it, along with the blackmail note that I had carelessly left in full view on the desk.

  Austin Reynolds, I thought.

  Who else would only take those items and leave the silver?

  Austin Reynolds removing any evidence that could incriminate him. And this time he would have worn gloves.