Dick Francis's Gamble

by Felix Francis

  I slowed to a halt on the sidewalk, with people hurrying past me in each direction late for work. I was less than a hundred yards away from Lombard Street.

  It was as near as I got.

  I turned around and retraced my path back up Princes Street to London Wall, where I went into a coffee shop and ordered a cappuccino.

  Perhaps Claudia was right and I was becoming paranoid.

  I looked at my watch. It was ten to nine. Patrick and Gregory would be expecting me in ten minutes.

  What should I do?

  My instinct at my mother’s cottage had been absolutely right when I had prevented Claudia from opening the front door to the gunman. But I desperately needed to talk to someone about my suspicions, to set in motion a proper investigation into the Bulgarian affair. Surely I would then be safe, as killing me would be too late. If Ben Roberts’s father wouldn’t talk to me, who else should I speak to? It had to be Patrick, if not to save my job, at least to save my life.

  I turned on my mobile phone and rang the office number.

  “Lyall and Black,” answered Mrs. McDowd. “Can I help you?”

  “Hello, Mrs. McDowd,” I said. “It’s Mr. Nicholas here. Can I speak to Mr. Patrick, please?”

  “He’s in the meeting room with Mr. Gregory and Andrew Mellor,” she said. “I’ll put you through.”

  Patrick came on the line. “Hello,” he said.

  “Patrick,” I said. “Please don’t say anything. It’s Nicholas. I need to talk to you alone,” I said. “And without Gregory knowing.”

  “Hold on a minute,” he said. “I’ll go to my office.”

  There were some clicks on the line and then Patrick came back on.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked quite crossly. “You are due to be here now for a disciplinary meeting.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I won’t be coming to the meeting.”

  “Nicholas,” he said formally, “I must insist that you come into the office right now. Where are you?”

  Where should I say?

  “I’m at home,” I said. “Claudia still isn’t well.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not sounding it. “But this meeting is very important.”

  So was Claudia, I thought.

  “Where can I speak to you in private?” I asked.

  “Here,” he said firmly and loudly. “I will speak to you here, in the office, at the disciplinary meeting.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I will not be coming to the office today.”

  “Listen to me,” he said. “If you don’t come into the office today, there seems little point in you coming back at all.” He paused. “Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Yes,” he said with ill-disguised anger. “You do that.”

  He hung up.

  I could imagine him going straight back into the meeting room and telling Gregory and Andrew that I wasn’t coming. I was just glad I hadn’t told him the truth about where I was.

  I caught the Tube from Moorgate Station but not back to Paddington. Instead I took the Northern Line to Hendon Central, walked down Seymour Way to number 45, and let myself into Herb Kovak’s flat.

  Sherri had gone home to America the previous Friday, and there were already a few letters lying on the mat. I picked them up and added them to the pile that she had left on the desk.

  I sat down on Herb’s desk chair and opened his mail.

  Amongst other things there were some utility bills and a letter from a building society complaining that the direct debit had been canceled and they hadn’t received the preceding month’s interest on Herb’s mortgage. It reminded me of the gym that also hadn’t been paid due to the bank canceling the direct debit. I wondered how many others there would be.

  There was so much to deal with, and the worst of it was not the domestic bills, troublesome as they were, it was the never-ending stream of demands from the twenty-two credit card companies. About half of them had sent their next statements, and not only were the previous months’ balances still outstanding, overdue and generating interest but there were more charges on the accounts.

  The American gamblers were still gambling, and still losing. But how could I stop them if I didn’t know who they were?

  There must come a time, I thought, when the credit card accounts reached their limit. That should bring it all to a stop, but at what cost?

  I used Herb’s landline telephone to call the building society and let them know why the direct debit had been stopped. They were so sorry to hear of Mr. Kovak’s death, but of course that did not mean they would stop accruing the interest on the loan. Did they not know the real meaning of mortgage? The mort referred to death, as in mortuary and mortality. A mortgage was originally a pledge to repay the loan outstanding on one’s death, not on the never-never thereafter.

  Next I called the utility companies and tried to arrange for the gas, electricity and phone to be cut off. I made the mistake of telling them that I wasn’t Herb Kovak, that he was dead and I was his executor. They all needed documentary proof that I was acting on Mr. Kovak’s behalf, and, anyway, they needed the bills paid first. I pointed out that if I didn’t pay the bills, they would cut the services off anyway. It didn’t help.

  I collected the credit card statements and the other things together and put them in a large white envelope that I found in Herb’s desk. What I really needed was a solicitor to get things moving on the job of obtaining probate. At least I would then be able to cancel the credit cards, but probably not before they were paid off as well. This apartment would also have to be sold, and if the scale of the outstanding interest payment in the building society’s letter was anything to go by, there may not be enough capital remaining after paying off the mortgage to cover the other bills. Perhaps I might need to make Herb’s estate bankrupt.

  All in all, it was not such a fine legacy.

  I knew Patrick lived in Weybridge. I knew it because Claudia and I had been to his house for dinner a few times, and also the firm’s annual summer party the previous year had been held in his expansive garden.

  I also knew that his journey from home to work involved being dropped at Weybridge Station by his wife, catching a train to Waterloo and then squeezing onto the Waterloo and City Tube line to Bank. Everyone in the office knew because Patrick was not averse to complaining loudly about public transport, or, for that matter, his wife’s driving, especially if it had made him late for work.

  I assumed his return journey would be the same but in the opposite direction, and I planned to join him for some of it.

  He usually left the office between six o’clock and half past, but I was at Waterloo waiting by five in case he was early. Even so, I still very nearly missed him.

  The main problem was that there were at least six trains an hour to Weybridge and they seemingly could leave from any of the nineteen platforms.

  I waited on the mainline station concourse opposite the bank of escalators that rose from the Underground lines beneath. During the peak evening rush hour, two of the three escalators were used for up traffic, and these, together with the stairs alongside, disgorged thousands of commuters every minute onto the concourse, all of them hurrying for their trains.

  By twenty-five past six, my eyes were so punch-drunk from scanning so many faces that my brain took several long seconds to register that I had fleetingly glimpsed a familiar one, but by then he had become lost again in the crowd walking away from me.

  I chased after, trying to spot him again, while also attempting to search the departure boards overhead for trains to Weybridge.

  I followed someone right across the concourse towards Platform 1 and only realized it wasn’t Patrick when he turned into one of the food outlets.

  Dammit, I thought. I had wasted precious minutes.

  I turned back and looked carefully at the departure board.

  There was a train for Basingstoke, via Weybridge, leav
ing from Platform 13 in two minutes. I would have to take the gamble that Patrick was on it. I rushed right back across the station, thrust my ticket into the gray automatic barrier and ran down the platform.

  I leapt aboard the train just seconds before the doors slammed shut. But I hadn’t foreseen that it would be so crowded, with more people standing in the aisles than actually sitting in the seats. As the train pulled out of Waterloo Station I began to make my apologies and work my way along the congested carriages.

  Eventually, after annoying at least half the train’s occupants, and thinking that Patrick must have caught a different one, I spotted him sitting in the relatively empty first-class section. Where else? He was reading an evening newspaper and hadn’t noticed me coming towards him. He didn’t even look up as I made my way through a sliding glass door and sat down in the empty seat next to him.

  “Hello, Patrick,” I said.

  If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t particularly show it.

  “Hello, Nicholas,” he said calmly, folding his paper in half. “I was wondering when you would turn up.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry about this, but I needed to talk to you without Gregory knowing or listening.”

  “What about?” he asked.

  “Colonel Jolyon Roberts,” I said quietly, conscious of the other passengers.

  He raised his eyebrows a little. “What about him?”

  “He spoke to me nearly two weeks ago at Cheltenham Races and again at Sandown a week last Saturday.”

  “You know he died last week?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I do know. Terrible. I spoke to you after his funeral.”

  “Of course you did,” Patrick said. “He had a heart problem, apparently.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “So, tell me, what did he speak to you about?”

  “He was worried about an investment that the Roberts Family Trust had made in a lightbulb factory in Bulgaria.”

  “In what way was he worried about it?” Patrick asked.

  “Mr. Roberts’s nephew had evidently been to the site where the factory should be, and there was nothing there. Nothing except a toxic waste dump.”

  “Perhaps it hasn’t been built yet. Or the nephew was in the wrong place.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “But apparently Gregory had shown photos of the factory to Mr. Roberts, and the nephew is adamant that he was in the right place.”

  “You have spoken to the nephew?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes, I have,” I said. “I spoke to him on Friday.”

  “And have you approached Gregory about it?”

  “No,” I said. “Gregory was so angry with me last week for all that Billy Searle business that I didn’t like to.”

  “How about Jessica?” he asked.

  “No, not her either. I know I should have done, but I haven’t had the chance.”

  The train pulled into Surbiton Station, and two of the passengers in the first-class section stood up and departed.

  “So why are you telling me?” Patrick asked as the train resumed its journey. “The Roberts Family Trust is a client of Gregory’s. You need to speak to him, or to Jessica.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just hoped you could look into it for me.”

  He laughed. “You’re not frightened of Gregory, are you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  And I was, very frightened indeed.

  “Is this what all this being away from the office has been about?”

  “Yes,” I said again.

  He turned in his seat and looked at me. “You are a strange man at times, Nicholas. Do you realize that you have placed your whole career on the line here?”

  I nodded.

  “Gregory and I agreed at the disciplinary meeting this morning, the one you were supposed to attend, that we would demand your resignation from Lyall and Black forthwith.”

  So I was being fired.

  “However,” he went on, “Andrew Mellor advised us that we were obliged to hear your side of any story before we made such a precipitous decision. So no final conclusion was reached.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “So will you be in the office tomorrow so we can sort all this out?”

  “I can’t be sure of that,” I said. “I would much rather you started an internal inquiry into the Bulgarian investment before I returned.”

  “You really are afraid of Gregory,” he said with a chuckle. “His bark is worse than his bite.”

  Maybe, I thought, but his bark had been pretty ferocious. And I also wasn’t too keen on his hired help.

  “Patrick,” I said seriously, “I have reason to think that a multimillion-euro fraud is going on here and that Gregory may be mixed up in it. Yes, I am frightened, and I feel I have good reason to be.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  “I know it sounds unlikely, but I believe that the Bulgaria business may have something to do with why Herb was killed.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Next you’ll be accusing Gregory of murder.”

  I said nothing but just sat there looking at him.

  “Oh come on, Nicholas,” he said. “That’s madness.”

  “Madness, it may be,” I said. “But I’m not coming into the office until I’m certain that I’d be safe.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “Come home with me now, and we’ll sort this out tonight. We can call Gregory from there.”

  The train pulled into Esher Station.

  Esher was the station for Sandown Park racetrack. Had it really been only nine days since I had alighted here to go to speak to Jolyon Roberts?

  And two days later Jolyon Roberts was dead.

  “No,” I said, jumping up. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning in the office.”

  I rushed through the glass dividing door and then stepped out onto the platform just before the train’s doors closed shut behind me.

  I didn’t want Patrick telling Gregory where I was—not tonight, nor any other night.

  18

  By the time I made it back to Lambourn, all three of the ladies were in bed, and the house was in darkness save for a single light left on for me in the kitchen. It was only fair, and I had called from a public phone box at Paddington to tell them not to wait up.

  I realized I was hungry.

  I looked at the clock hanging above the range. It was ten to eleven, and I’d had nothing to eat since a hurried slice of toast at six o’clock in the morning. All day my stomach had been so wound up with worry that I hadn’t even thought about food. My mother would not have been pleased.

  I raided Jan’s fridge and made myself a thick cheese sandwich.

  I then sat eating it at the kitchen table, washing it down with a glass of orange juice.

  It had been a good day, I decided. I still just had a job and I had finally spoken to Patrick about my concerns. Whether or not he believed me was another matter. But surely he was duty-bound to start an investigation and bring Jessica Winter into the loop, whatever he might think of my cloak-and-dagger tactics.

  But would I then be any safer?

  If Gregory, or whoever, was trying to kill me in order to prevent an investigation into the fraud being started, then I should be out of danger once it had because killing me then would only reinforce the need for the investigation to continue. Unless, of course, he felt he had nothing more to lose and killed me out of revenge for uncovering his scheme.

  Either way, I was going to lie low for a few more days yet.

  Tuesday dawned bright and sunny, which matched my temperament. Talking to Patrick had set my mind more at ease, and I really felt I was getting somewhere at last.

  In spite of being the final one to bed, I was the first up and downstairs, making myself instant coffee, by the time Jan appeared.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come up on the Downs to watch the horses?” she said. “It’s a beautiful day, for a ch
ange.”

  I thought about it.

  “I can lend you a hat and sunglasses,” she added with a laugh. “As a disguise.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’d love to. I’ll just take some tea up to Claudia.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” Jan said. “First lot doesn’t pull out until seven-thirty, and even then I give them a good head start. Be ready by about seven forty-five. We have breakfast afterwards.”

  I glanced up at the clock. It was only five to seven.

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll be ready.”

  I took the tea and coffee up to our room and sat on the bed.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” I said to Claudia, gently shaking her shoulder. “Time to wake up.”

  She rolled over onto her back and yawned. “What time is it?”

  “Seven,” I said. “And it’s a beautiful morning, so I’m going up on the Downs with Jan to watch the horses work.”

  “Can I come too?” Claudia asked.

  “I’d love you to,” I said. “But how are you feeling?”

  “Better every day,” she replied. “I just wish . . .” She tailed off.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But everything will be just fine. You’ll see.”

  I leaned down and gave her a hug and a kiss.

  “I do so hope you’re right,” she said.

  This cancerous Sword of Damocles seemed to cast a shadow over our every waking moment. We were living in limbo, and as far as I was concerned the sooner she started the chemotherapy, the better. These weeks of doing nothing just seemed to invite the cancer to grow within her.

  To my mind, there was nothing more revitalizing to the soul than a bright, sunny spring morning on the gallops. My only sadness was that I was watching the horses work from inside Jan’s Land Rover rather than from the saddle.

  God, how I still ached to ride, to sit again astride half a ton of Thoroughbred racehorse, and to gallop once more at full pelt with the wind in my face.

  I watched with envy as Jan’s stable staff brought the horses up the hill towards us, side by side in pairs, some racing flat out and others at half or three-quarter pace. Just to hear the sound of their hooves thudding into the turf was enough to give me goose bumps, and to raise my pulse.