Dead Cert

by Dick Francis

  ‘He might be worth thousands if I sold him—but I couldn’t sell him, you know. I couldn’t bear to do that. He meant so much to Bill. How could I sell him as soon as Bill’s back was turned? And if I keep him and run him, I’ll have to pay the bills; which might not be easy for a while with death duties hanging over me. If I give him to you, he’s in hands Bill would approve of, and you can pay for his keep. I’ve thought it all out, so you’re not to argue. Admiral is yours.’

  She meant it.

  ‘Then let me lease him from you,’ I said.

  ‘No, he’s a gift. From Bill to you, if you like.’

  And on those terms I gave in, and thanked her as best I could.

  The following morning, early, I drove to Pete Gregory’s stables in Sussex to jump my green young Forlorn Hope over the schooling hurdles. A drizzling rain was falling as I arrived, and only because I had come so far did we bother to take the horses out. It was not a very satisfactory session, with Forlorn Hope slipping on the wet grass as we approached the first hurdle and not taking on the others with any spirit after that.

  We gave it up and went down to Pete’s house. I told him Admiral was to be mine and that I would be riding him.

  He said, ‘He’s in the Foxhunters’ at Liverpool, did you know?’

  ‘So he is!’ I exclaimed delightedly. I had not yet ridden round the Grand National course, and the sudden prospect of doing it a fortnight later was exciting.

  ‘You want to have a go?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I said.

  We talked over the plans for my other horses, Pete telling me Palindrome was in fine fettle after his Cheltenham race and a certainty for the following day at Bristol. We went out to look at him and the others, and I inspected the splint which Heavens Above was throwing out. His leg was tender, but it would right itself in time.

  When I left Pete’s I went back to Brighton, parking the Lotus and taking a train as before. I walked out of Brighton station with a brief glance at the three taxis standing there (no yellow shields) and walked briskly in the direction of the headquarters of the Marconicars as listed in the telephone directory.

  I had no particular plan, but I was sure the core of die mystery was in Brighton, and if I wanted to discover it, I would have to dig around on the spot. My feelers on the racecourse had still brought me nothing but a husky warning on the telephone.

  The Marconicars offices were on the ground floor of a converted Regency terrace house. I went straight into the narrow hall.

  The stairs rose on the right, and on the left were two doors, with a third, marked Private, facing me at the far end of the passage. A neat board on the door nearest the entrance said ‘Enquiries.’ I went in.

  It had once been an elegant room and even the office equipment could not entirely spoil its proportions. There were two girls sitting at desks with typewriters in front of them, and through the half-open folded dividing doors I could see into an inner office where a third girl sat in front of a switchboard. She was speaking into a microphone.

  ‘Yes, madam, a taxi will call for you in three minutes,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She had a pleasant high voice of excellent carrying quality.

  The two girls in the outer office looked at me expectantly. They wore tight sweaters and large quantities of mascara. I spoke to the one nearest the door.

  ‘Er… I’m enquiring about booking some taxis… for a wedding. My sister’s,’ I added, improvising and inventing the sister I never had. ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think so,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask the manager. He usually deals with big bookings.’

  I said, ‘I’m only asking for an estimate… on behalf of my sister. She has asked me to try all the firms, to find out which will be most—er—reasonable. I can’t give you a definite booking until I’ve consulted her again.’

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll ask Mr Fielder to see you.’ She went out, down the passage, and through the door marked Private.

  While I waited I grinned at the other girl, who patted her hair, and I listened to the girl at the switchboard.

  ‘Just a minute, sir. I’ll see if there’s a taxi in your area,’ she was saying. She flipped a switch and said, ‘Come in, any car in Hove two. Come in, any car in Hove two.’

  There was a silence and then a man’s voice said out of the radio receiving set, ‘It looks as though there’s no one in Hove two, Marigold. I could get there in five minutes. I’ve just dropped a fare in Langbury Place.’

  ‘Right, Jim.’ She gave him the address, flipped the switch again, and spoke into the telephone. ‘A taxi will be with you in five minutes, sir. I am sorry for the delay, we have no cars available who can reach you faster than that. Thank you, sir.’ As soon as she had finished speaking the telephone rang again. She said, ‘Marconicars. Can I help you?’

  Down the hall came the clip clop of high heels on linoleum, and the girl came back from Mr Fielder. She said, ‘The manager can see you now, sir.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I went down the hall and through the open door at the end.

  The man who rose to greet me and shake hands was a heavy, well-tailored, urbane man in his middle forties. He wore spectacles with heavy black frames, had smooth black hair and hard blue eyes. He seemed a man of too strong a personality to be sitting in the back office of a taxi firm, too high-powered an executive for the range of his job.

  I felt my heart jump absurdly, and I had a moment’s panic in which I feared he knew who I was and what I was trying to do. But his gaze was calm and businesslike, and he said only, ‘I understand you wish to make a block booking for a wedding.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and launched into fictitious details. He made notes, added up some figures, wrote out an estimate, and held it out to me. I took it. His writing was strong and black. It fitted him.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll give this to my sister, and let you know.’

  As I went out of his door and shut it behind me, I looked back at him. He was sitting behind his desk staring at me through his glasses with unwinking blue eyes. I could read nothing in his face.

  I went back into the front office and said, ‘I’ve got the estimate I wanted. Thank you for your help.’ I turned to go, and had a second thought. ‘By the way, do you know where I can find Mr Clifford Tudor?’ I asked.

  The girls, showing no surprise at my enquiry, said they did not know.

  ‘Marigold might find out for you,’ said one of them. ‘I’ll ask her.’

  Marigold, finishing her call, agreed to help. She pressed the switch. ‘All cars. Did anyone pick up Mr Tudor today? Come in please.’

  A man’s voice said, ‘I took him to the station this morning, Marigold. He caught the London train.’

  ‘Thanks, Mike,’ said Marigold.

  ‘She knows all their voices,’ said one of the girls, admiringly. ‘They never have to tell her the number of their car.’

  ‘Do you all know Mr Tudor well?’ I asked.

  ‘Never seen him,’ said one girl, and the others shook their heads in agreement.

  ‘He’s one of our regulars. He takes a car whenever he wants one, and we book it here. The driver tells Marigold where he’s taking him. Mr Tudor has a monthly account, and we make it up and send it to him.’

  ‘Suppose the driver takes Mr Tudor from place to place and fails to report it to Marigold?’ I asked conversationally.

  ‘He wouldn’t be so silly. The drivers get commission on regulars. Instead of tips, do you see? We put ten per cent on the bills to save the regulars having to tip the drivers every five minutes.’

  ‘A good idea,’ I said. ‘Do you have many regulars?’

  ‘Dozens,’ said one of the girls. ‘But Mr Tudor is about our best client.’

  ‘And how many taxis are there?’ I asked.

  ‘Thirty-one. Some of them will be in the garage for servicing, of course, and sometimes in the winter we only have half of them on the road. There’s a lot of competition from the othe
r firms.’

  ‘Who actually owns the Marconicars?’ I asked casually.

  They said they didn’t know and couldn’t care less.

  ‘Not Mr Fielder?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Marigold. ‘I don’t think so. There’s a Chairman, I believe, but we’ve never seen him. Mr Fielder can’t be all that high up, because he sometimes takes over from me in the evenings and at week-ends. Though another girl comes in to relieve me on my days off, of course.’

  They suddenly all seemed to realise that this had nothing to do with my sister’s wedding. It was time to go, and I went.

  I stood outside on the pavement wondering what to do next. There was a café opposite, across the broad street, and it was nearly lunch-time. I went over and into the café, which smelled of cabbage, and because I had arrived before the rush there was a table free by the window. Through the chaste net curtains of the Olde Oake Café I had a clear view of the Marconicar office. For what it was worth.

  A stout girl with wispy hair pushed a typed menu card in front of me. I looked at it, depressed. English home cooking a its very plainest. Tomato soup, choice of fried cod, sausages in batter, or steak and kidney pie, with suet pudding and custard to follow. It was all designed with no regard for an amateur rider’s weight. I asked for coffee. The girl said firmly I couldn’t have coffee by itself at lunch-time, they needed the tables. I offered to pay for the full lunch if I could just have the coffee, and to this she agreed, clearly thinking me highly eccentric.

  The coffee, when it came, was surprisingly strong and good. I was getting the first of the brew, I reflected, idly watching the Marconicar front door. No one interesting went in or out.

  On the storey above the Marconicars a big red neon sign flashed on and off, showing little more than a flicker in the daylight. I glanced up at it. Across the full width of the narrow building was the name L. C. PERTH. The taxi office had ‘Marconi-cars’ written in bright yellow on black along the top of its big window, and looking up I saw that the top storey was decorated with a large blue board bearing in white letters the information ‘Jenkins, Wholesale Hats.’

  The total effect was colourful indeed, but hardly what the Regency architect had had in mind. I had a mental picture of him turning in his grave so often that he made knots in his winding sheet, and I suppose I smiled, for a voice suddenly said, ‘Vandalism, isn’t it?’

  A middle-aged woman had sat down at my table, unnoticed by me as I gazed out of the window. She had a mournful horsey face with no make-up, a hideous brown hat which added years to her age, and an earnest look in her eyes. The café was filling up, and I could no longer have a table to myself.

  ‘It’s startling, certainly,’ I agreed.

  ‘It ought not to be allowed. All these old houses in this district have been carved up and turned into offices, and it’s really disgraceful how they look now. I belong to the Architectural Preservation Group,’ she confided solemnly, ‘and we’re getting out a petition to stop people desecrating beautiful buildings with horrible advertisements.’

  ‘Are you having success?’ I asked.

  She looked depressed. ‘Not very much, I’m afraid. People just don’t seem to care as they should. Would you believe it, half the people in Brighton don’t know what a Regency house looks like, when they’re surrounded by them all the time? Look at that row over there, with all those boards and signs. And that neon,’ her voice quivered with emotion, ‘is the last straw. It’s only been there a few months. We’ve petitioned to make them take it down, but they won’t.’

  ‘That’s very discouraging,’ I said, watching the Marconicar door. The two typists came out and went chattering up the road, followed by two more girls whom I supposed to have come down from the upper floors.

  My table companion chatted on between spoonfuls of tomato soup. ‘We can’t get any satisfaction from Perth’s at all because no one in authority there will meet us, and the men in the office say they can’t take the sign down because it doesn’t belong to them, but they won’t tell us who it does belong to so that we can petition him in person.’ I found I sympathised with Perth’s invisible ruler in his disinclination to meet the Architectural Preservation Group on the warpath. ‘It was bad enough before, when they had their name just painted on the windows, but neon…’ Words failed her, at last.

  Marigold left for lunch. Four men followed her. No one arrived.

  I drank my coffee, parted from the middle-aged lady without regret, and gave it up for the day. I took the train back to my car and drove up to London. After a long afternoon in the office, I started for home at the tail end of the rush-hour traffic. In the hold-ups at crossings and roundabouts I began, as a change from Bill’s mystery, to tackle Joe Nantwich’s.

  I pondered his ‘stopping’ activities, his feud with Sandy Mason, his disgrace with Tudor, his obscure threatening notes. I thought about the internal workings of the weighing-room, where only valets, jockeys and officials are allowed in the changing-rooms, and trainers and owners are confined to the weighing-room itself: while the press and the public may not enter at all.

  If the ‘Bolingbroke, this week’ note was to be believed, Joe would already have received his punishment, because ‘this week’ was already last week. Yet I came to the conclusion that I would see him alive and well at Bristol on the following day, even if not in the best of spirits. For, by the time I reached home, I knew I could tell him who had written the notes, though I wasn’t sure I was going to.

  Sleep produces the answers to puzzles in the most amazing way. I went to bed on Wednesday night thinking I had spent a more or less fruitless morning in Brighton. But I woke on Thursday morning with a name in my mind and the knowledge that I had seen it before, and where. I went downstairs in my dressing-gown to Bill’s desk, and took out the betting tickets he had saved for Henry. I shuffled through them, and found what I wanted. Three of them bore the name L. C. PERTH.

  I turned them over. On their backs Bill had pencilled the name of a horse, the amount of his bet, and the date. He was always methodical. I took all the tickets up to my room, and looked up the races in the form book. I remembered many casual snatches of conversation. And a lot of things became clear to me.

  But not enough, not enough.

  ELEVEN

  It poured with rain at Bristol, a cold, steady unrelenting wetness which took most of the pleasure out of racing.

  Kate sent a message that she was not coming because of the weather, which sounded unlike her, and I wondered what sort of pressure Aunt Deb had used to keep her at home.

  The main gossip in the weighing-room concerned Joe Nantwich. The Stewards had held an enquiry into his behaviour during the last race on Champion Hurdle day, and had, in the official phrase, ‘severely cautioned him as to his future riding.’ It was generally considered that he was very lucky indeed to have got off so lightly, in view of his past record.

  Joe himself was almost as cocky as ever. From a distance his round pink face showed no traces of the fear or drunkenness which had made a sodden mess of him at Cheltenham. Yet I was told that he had spent the preceding Friday and Saturday and most of Sunday in the Turkish baths, scared out of his wits. He had drunk himself silly and sweated it off alternately during the whole of that time, confiding to the attendants in tears that he was safe with them, and refusing to get dressed and go home.

  The authority for this story, and one who gave it its full flavour, was Sandy, who had happened, he said, to go into the Turkish baths on Sunday morning to lose a few pounds for Monday’s racing.

  I found Joe reading the notices. He was whistling through his teeth.

  ‘Well, Joe?’ I said, ‘what makes you so cheerful?’

  ‘Everything.’ He smirked. At close quarters I could see the fine lines round his mouth and the slightly bloodshot eyes, but his experiences had left no other signs of strain. ‘I didn’t get suspended by the Stewards. And I got paid for losing that race.’

  ‘You what?’ I exclaimed.r />
  ‘I got paid. You know, I told you. The packet of money. It came this morning. A hundred quid.’ I stared at him. ‘Well, I did what I was told, didn’t I?’ he said aggrievedly.

  ‘I suppose you did,’ I agreed, weakly.

  ‘And another thing, those threatening notes. I fooled them you know. I stayed in the Turkish baths all over the week-end, and they couldn’t harm me there. I got off scot free,’ said Joe, triumphantly, as if ‘this week’ could not be altered to ‘next week.’ He did not realise either that he had already taken his punishment, that there are other agonies than physical ones. He had suffered a week of acute anxiety, followed by three days of paralysing fear, and he thought he had got off scot free.

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said, mildly. ‘Joe, answer me a question. The man who rings you up to tell you what horse not to win on, what does his voice sound like?’

  ‘You couldn’t tell who it is, not by listening to him. It might be anybody. It’s a soft voice, and sort of fuzzy. Almost a whisper, sometimes, as if he were afraid of being overheard. But what does it matter?’ said Joe. ‘As long as he delivers the lolly he can croak like a frog for all I care.’

  ‘Do you mean you’ll stop another horse, if he asks you to?’ I said.

  ‘I might do. Or I might not,’ said Joe, belatedly deciding that he had been speaking much too freely. With a sly, sidelong look at me he edged away into the changing-room. His resilience was fantastic.

  Pete and Dane were discussing the day’s plans not far away, and I went over to them. Pete was cursing the weather and saying it would play merry hell with the going, but that Palindrome, all the same, should be able to act on it.

  ‘Go to the front at half way, and nothing else will be able to come to you. They’re a poor lot. As far as I can see, you’re a dead cert.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, automatically, and then remembered with a mental wince that Admiral had been a dead cert at Maidenhead.

  Dane asked me if I had enjoyed my stay with Kate and did not look too overjoyed by my enthusiastic answer.

  ‘Curses on your head, pal, if you have cut me out with Kate.’ He said it in a mock ferocious voice, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that he meant it. Could a friendship survive between two men who were in love with the same girl? Suddenly at that moment, I didn’t know; for I saw in Dane’s familiar handsome face a passing flash of enmity. It was as disconcerting as a rock turning to quicksand. And I went rather thoughtfully into the changing-room to find Sandy.