Dick Francis's Gamble

by Felix Francis

  If I did get fired from my job, I might need to live off my savings for a while. And then what would I do? Billy had accused me of being boring, but it wasn’t me that was boring, I decided, it was my job. I needed more excitement in my life, more adrenaline rushing through my veins, but not necessarily due to having a silenced pistol pointed at me.

  But what could I do? I was trained and qualified only to be a financial adviser. But what I wanted to be most was a jockey or a rodeo rider or a free-fall-skydiving instructor or a crocodile fighter or . . .

  Bugger my dodgy neck.

  My mother interrupted my depressing thoughts by asking me what I wanted for lunch.

  “What have we got?” I asked.

  “Jan said we can use whatever we want from the fridge or from the larder.”

  “So what is there?” I said.

  “Come and have a look.”

  In truth, there wasn’t very much to choose from, just a few low-calorie meals-for-one in the freezer, with more bare shelves than anything in the larder. Old Mother Hubbard would have felt quite at home.

  “Time to go shopping,” I said.

  So the three of us piled into the unremarkable blue rental car and went to a huge supermarket on the outskirts of Newbury in order to fill the empty spaces in Jan’s fridge and larder. It was the least we could do as uninvited guests.

  While Claudia and my mother went from aisle to aisle, loading two large trolleys with mountains of food, I was banished by them to the clothing section.

  I browsed through the rails of shirts and trousers, jackets and suits, but, sadly, this particular supermarket didn’t stock bulletproof vests.

  17

  Sunday was, indeed, a day of rest.

  The trip to the supermarket had almost been too much for Claudia, who was still far from well after her surgery.

  “Don’t try and do too much too soon,” Dr. Tomic, the surgeon, had said. “Plenty of rest is needed to allow the abdominal wall to mend.”

  He hadn’t mentioned anything about running up stairs, shouting at gunmen or food shopping, but he probably wouldn’t have approved of any of them.

  “You stay in bed today,” I said to Claudia. “I’ll fetch you some breakfast.”

  She smiled and closed her eyes again as I went out.

  Jan was already downstairs making toast.

  “My God,” she said, going into the larder, “we’ve even got marmalade!” She turned around and grinned at me. “I can’t remember when I last had so much food in here. I’m completely useless at cooking. All I can do is heat things up in the microwave. But you really shouldn’t have bought so much.”

  “Consider it our rent,” I said.

  “You don’t have to pay rent, lover boy,” she said, coming back out of the larder and opening the marmalade. “You can pay me in kind.” She laughed. “Except I now know I have no chance of that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I think Claudia is really lovely. You’re a lucky man.” She paused and breathed deeply. “And I suppose I’d better stop calling you lover boy.”

  There were tears in her eyes. I went over to her and gave her a hug. There was nothing to say, so I didn’t speak, I just held her tightly until the moment had passed.

  “Life can be so random,” she said, stepping back from me. “When I was married to Stuart, all I wanted was to divorce him and keep half his fortune. Well, I’ve done that, but—and I know this sounds crazy—I miss him. I even miss the god-awful rows we used to have. Now, with Maria away at college in London, I’m just a rich, lonely old spinster.”

  “But you must have masses of friends,” I said.

  She looked at me as she spread the marmalade on her toast. “I have plenty of acquaintances but no real friends. Racing is so competitive that I find it difficult to make any true friends with racing people. Of course, I know lots of them round here, other trainers and such, and I see them at the races, but I’m not a member of the village dinner-party set. All my friends were Stuart’s friends, and when he went, they went too.”

  “Well, it’s high time you met some more,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  She laughed again but only briefly. “That’s not as simple as it sounds, and finding someone to satisfy one’s needs is far from straightforward, I can tell you. You chaps have it made.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “If a man wants sex, he can just go and buy it from some girl on a street corner or in some lap-dancing club,” she said. “It’s not so easy for a middle-aged woman.”

  I stood there slightly dumbstruck. I had always treated her advances as a bit of a joke. I hadn’t realized the degree of her desperation.

  “Oh, Jan!” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t want your pity,” she said, quickly turning away from me and taking the marmalade back into the larder.

  No, I thought, she wanted my body.

  I took a cup of coffee and some muesli up to Claudia.

  “You took your time,” she said, sitting up in bed.

  “Sorry. I was talking to Jan.”

  “Isn’t she lovely?” Claudia said. “We had a long chat yesterday morning while you were out.”

  “What did you talk about?” I asked.

  “Life in general,” she said obliquely. “Stuff like that.”

  “Did you tell her about . . . you know?”

  Why was the word cancer so difficult to use?

  “I started to, but then your mother came in, and I’m still not sure it’s time to tell her yet.”

  “But when will it be time?” I said. “Now seems as good a time as any.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “I just feel . . .” She stopped.

  “What?” I said.

  “I suppose I feel a failure. And I don’t want her to be disappointed in me.”

  “Don’t be daft,” I said. “She loves you.”

  “Only because she thinks I’m her pathway to grandchildren.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, but I did wonder if she was right.

  “And she won’t love me if I marry you and then we find I can’t have any babies. She will then see me not as a pathway but as an obstacle.”

  She was almost in tears.

  “Darling,” I said, “please don’t upset yourself. OK, if you don’t want to, we won’t tell her. Not yet.”

  But we would have to tell her if, and when, Claudia’s hair started falling out.

  The rest of Sunday seemed to drag on interminably, with me forever wondering how Ben Roberts was faring with his father. But, as I was still reluctant to leave my mobile phone switched on, I would have no way of knowing anyway.

  My mother, with Jan helping, cooked roast beef for lunch with all the trimmings, the wonderful smells even enticing Claudia downstairs in her dressing gown.

  “I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I had a proper Sunday lunch in this house,” Jan said as we all sat down at the kitchen table. “Not since Stuart left, that’s for sure. He used to do the cooking.” She laughed. “Can’t you stay forever?”

  The lunch was accompanied by a couple of bottles of the supermarket’s finest claret, of which I had just one small glass. Someone had to keep their wits about them. I left the ladies to sleep it off on the deep sofas in the living room while I again went to make some calls from Jan’s office.

  First I used her landline to remotely access my voice mail. There were four new messages. All were from Chief Inspector Flight and each one threatening me with arrest if I didn’t come forward immediately to speak to him. He read out a number where he could always be reached, and I wrote it down on the notepad beside the telephone.

  But there was no message from Ben Roberts. Perhaps he hadn’t yet found the right moment to speak to his father.

  Next, I called DCI Tomlinson’s mobile number, taking care to dial 141 first to withhold Jan’s number from caller ID.

  He answered at th
e fourth ring, but he sounded as if I’d woken him from a Sunday-afternoon slumber.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you’d have your phone off if you weren’t working.”

  “I am working,” he said. “I’m in my office. Just having forty winks on my desk. I was up half the night.”

  “Partying?” I asked.

  “Something like that,” he said. “Or what goes for partying round these parts. An abused girlfriend finally had too much and stabbed her boyfriend to death.”

  “Nice.”

  “No,” he said, “not really. She stabbed him about thirty times with a screwdriver. He bled to death. It was not a pretty sight, and especially not at four in the morning when I should have been tucked up in my bed.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he replied. “But it’s sadly too common round here, especially after they’ve been drinking. I rarely get a full night’s sleep on a Saturday.”

  I decided against adding homicide detective to my list of possible future careers.

  “Do you have any news for me?” I asked.

  “What sort of news?” he asked back.

  “Anything,” I said. “How about the dead man? Was he Bulgarian?”

  “We don’t know yet. His image and fingerprints haven’t turned up on anything. Still waiting for the DNA analysis. But I can tell you one thing.”

  “Yes?” I said eagerly.

  “The forensic boys have been working overtime, and they tell me the gun matches.”

  “Matches what?” I asked.

  “The gun found in the bush outside your mother’s cottage was definitely the same gun that killed Herb Kovak, and they’re pretty sure the same gun was also used to shoot at you in Finchley. They can’t be a hundred percent certain without the bullets.”

  The image of the line of policemen crawling up Lichfield Grove on their hands and knees came into my mind. They obviously hadn’t found anything.

  “Does that mean that Chief Inspector Flight is now off my back?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say that,” he said. “He’s still hopping mad.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know. He’s left messages on my phone.”

  “Speak to him,” Tomlinson said. “That’s probably all he wants. He may think you’re playing with him.”

  “Does he still want to arrest me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  We disconnected.

  I looked at the number on the notepad and thought about calling DCI Flight. Ignoring him would only make him madder and then he might use more of his energies trying to find me than discovering the identity of his corpse. But I wasn’t going to call him from here. Dialing 141 might be enough to prevent the number appearing on caller ID but I was sure the police could still obtain it from the telephone company if they really wanted to.

  But I’d called Chief Inspector Tomlinson using Jan’s phone. What was the difference?

  It was a matter of trust, I thought. I trusted Chief Inspector Tomlinson not to go to the trouble of finding where I was from the call. But I didn’t trust DCI Flight.

  So, at about five o’clock, I drove into the outskirts of Swindon and stopped in a pub parking lot before switching on my mobile and calling the Gloucestershire detective.

  “DCI Flight,” he said crisply, answering at the first ring.

  “This is Nicholas Foxton,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “And about time too.”

  “Have you spoken to DCI Tomlinson and Superintendent Yering?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “I have.”

  “Good,” I said. “So who was the man at my mother’s cottage?”

  “Mr. Foxton,” he replied curtly. “It is me who needs to ask you some questions, not the other way round.”

  “Ask away,” I said.

  “What happened at your mother’s cottage last Thursday evening?”

  “A man with a gun broke in, we had a fight, and he fell down the stairs and broke his neck.”

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  “Isn’t that enough?” I asked sarcastically. “Oh yes, and he was trying to stab me at the time he fell down the stairs.”

  “We found a knife under the body,” he said. “But why did he need one? What happened to his gun?”

  “It was under the fridge,” I said.

  He paused.

  “How, exactly, did it get under the fridge?”

  “I hit it with an umbrella.”

  This time there was a lengthy pause from the other end.

  “Are you being serious, Mr. Foxton?” he asked.

  “Very,” I said. “The man cut the power and the telephone. He then broke a pane of glass in the kitchen to get in, and as he was climbing through the window I hit him with a golf umbrella. He dropped the gun, which slid under the fridge. He then took a knife from its block and tried to stab me. I managed to get upstairs, but the man followed. As he was attacking me, we struggled, and both of us fell down the stairs. He came off worse. End of story.”

  There was another pause, another lengthy pause, almost as if the chief inspector had not been listening to me.

  “Hold on,” I said suddenly. “I’ll call you back.”

  I hung up, switched my phone off and quickly drove the car out of the pub parking lot and down the road towards the city center. After about half a mile, a police car with blue flashing lights drove past me, going fast in the opposite direction. Now, was that just a coincidence?

  I went right around a roundabout and drove back to the pub, but I didn’t go in. I drove straight past without even slowing down. The police car, still with its blue flashers on, had stopped so that it was completely blocking the pub parking lot entrance, and two uniformed policemen were getting out of it.

  Was that also a coincidence? No, I decided, it was not.

  I obviously hadn’t needed to ask DCI Flight if he still wanted to arrest me. I’d just seen the answer.

  I drove north along the A419 divided highway towards Cirencester, in the opposite direction to Lambourn, and pulled over near the village of Cricklade.

  I turned my phone on again and pressed REDIAL.

  DCI Flight answered immediately.

  “Trust,” I said. “That’s what you need.”

  “Give yourself up,” he said.

  “But I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear.”

  I hung up and switched off my phone. Then I started the car and made my way back to Lambourn, being careful not to speed or in any way attract the attention of any passing policeman.

  Dammit, I thought. All I didn’t need was an overly interfering detective who was more interested in catching me than in anything else. “Give yourself up” indeed. Who did he think I was, Jimmy Hoffa?

  I caught the train from Newbury to Paddington just after seven o’clock on Monday morning, leaving the blue rental car in the station parking lot.

  As the train slowed to a stop in Reading, I turned on my phone and called my voice mail.

  “You have two new messages,” said the familiar female voice.

  The first was from DCI Flight, promising not to arrest me if I came to the Cheltenham Police Station to be interviewed.

  Why did I not believe him?

  The second was from Ben Roberts.

  “Mr. Foxton, I have spoken with my father,” his voice said. “He is not willing to meet with you or to discuss the matter further. I must also ask that you do not contact me again. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t actually sound very sorry, and I wondered if his father had been standing next to him as he had made the call.

  My investigating wasn’t exactly going very well. Where did I go from here?

  I turned off my phone and sat back in my seat as the train rushed along the metal towards London. I watched absentmindedly through the window as the Berkshire countryside gradually gave way to suburbs and then to the big city itself, and I wondered what the day wo
uld bring.

  I had to admit that I was nervous about the disciplinary meeting with Patrick and Gregory.

  Lyall & Black had been my life for five years, and I had begun to really make my mark. I had brought some high-profile, highworth clients to the firm, and some of my recommendations for investment, especially in film and theater, had become standard advice across the company.

  Over the next few years I might have expected to have expanded my own client base while giving up most of the responsibility of acting as one of Patrick’s assistants. I might even have hoped to be offered a full senior partner position when Patrick and Gregory retired, and that would be only five or six years away. That was where the real money was to be made and when my modest nest egg might start expanding rapidly. Providing, of course, that I was good enough to maintain the confidence of the clients.

  However, I was now in danger of missing out completely.

  But why? What had I done wrong?

  It wasn’t me who was defrauding the European Union of a hundred million euros, so why was it me who was attending a disciplinary meeting?

  Perhaps the only thing I had done incorrectly was to not go straight to Patrick, or to Jessica Winter the Compliance Officer, as soon as Colonel Roberts had expressed his concerns over Gregory and the Bulgarian factory project. I should never have tried to investigate things behind their backs.

  And I would rectify that mistake today.

  I caught the Circle Line Tube from Paddington to Moorgate and then walked from there towards Lombard Street.

  As I walked down Princes Street, alongside the high, imposing walls of the Bank of England, I suddenly started to feel uneasy, the hairs again standing up on the back of my neck.

  For the past four days, I had been so careful not to let anyone know where I was staying, yet here I was walking to a prearranged appointment at the offices of Lyall & Black. Furthermore, the appointment was for a meeting with one of those I believed was responsible for trying to kill me.

  I really didn’t fancy finding another gunman waiting for me in the street outside my office building.