Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

She was already in bed and half asleep when I went along to her room. I locked the door and climbed in beside her, and she made a great effort to wake up for my sake.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ I said, kissing her lightly. ‘There is always the morning.’

  She smiled contentedly and snuggled into my arms, and I lay there cradling her sweet soft body, her head on my chest and her hair against my mouth, and felt almost choked by the intensity with which I wanted to protect her and share with her everything I had: Henry Grey, I thought in surprise in the dark, was suddenly more than half way down the untried track to honest-to-goodness love.

  Sunday morning we strolled aimlessly round the city, talking and looking at the mountains of leather work in the shops in the arcades; Sunday afternoon we went improbably to a football match, an unexpected passion of Gabriella’s; and Sunday night we went to bed early because, as she said with her innocent giggle, we would have to be up at six to get her back to start work in the shop on time. But there was something desperate in the way she clung to me during that night, as if it were our last for ever instead of only a week or two, and when I kissed her there were tears on her cheeks.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ I said, wiping them away with my fingers. ‘Don’t cry.’

  ‘I don’t know why.’ She sniffed, half laughing. ‘The world is a sad place. Beauty bursts you. An explosion inside. It can only come out as tears.’

  I was impossibly moved. I didn’t deserve her tears. I kissed them away in humility and understood why people said love was painful, why Cupid was invented with arrows. Love did pierce the heart, truly.

  It wasn’t until we were on the early train to Milan the next morning that she said anything about money, and from her hesitation in beginning I saw that she didn’t want to offend me.

  ‘I will repay you what you lent me for my bill,’ she said matter of factly, but a bit breathlessly. I had pushed the notes into her hand on the way downstairs, as she hadn’t wanted me to pay for her publicly, and she hadn’t enough with her to do it herself.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said.

  ‘It was a much more expensive place than I’d thought of …’

  ‘Big hotels ignore you better.’

  She laughed. ‘All the same …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you don’t earn much. You can’t possibly afford it all. The hotel and the train fares, and the dinners.’

  ‘I earned some money winning a race.’

  ‘Enough?’

  ‘I’ll win another race … then it will be enough.’

  ‘Giulio doesn’t like it that you work with horses.’ She laughed. ‘He says that if you were good enough to be a jockey you’d do it all the time instead of being a groom.’

  ‘What does Giulio do?’

  ‘He works for the government in the taxation office.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, smiling. ‘Would it help if you told him my father has left me some money? Enough to come to see you, anyway, when I get it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ll tell him. He judges people too much by how much money they’ve got.’

  ‘Do you want to marry a rich man?’

  ‘Not to please Giulio.’

  ‘To please yourself?’

  ‘Not rich necessarily. But not too poor. I don’t want to worry about how to afford shoes for the children.’

  I smoothed her fingers with my own.

  ‘I think I will have to learn Italian,’ I said.

  She gave me the flashing smile. ‘Is English very difficult?’

  ‘You can practise on me.’

  ‘If you come back often enough. If your father’s money should not be saved for the future.’

  ‘I think,’ I said slowly, smiling into her dark eyes, ‘that there will be enough left. Enough to buy the children’s shoes.’

  I went to New York with the horses the following day in the teeth of furious opposition from the family. Several relatives were still staying in the house, including my three sharp tongued eldest sisters, none of whom showed much reserve in airing their views. I sat through a depressing lunch, condemned from all sides. The general opinion was, it seemed, that my unexplained absence over the week-end was disgraceful enough, but that continuing with my job was scandalous. Mother cried hysterical tears and Alice was bitterly reproving.

  ‘Consider your position,’ they all wailed, more or less in chorus.

  I considered my position and left for Yardman’s and Gatwick three hours after returning from Milan.

  Mother had again brought up the subject of my early marriage to a suitable heiress. I refrained from telling her I was more or less engaged to a comparatively penniless Italian girl who worked in a gift shop, smuggled birth control pills, and couldn’t speak English. It wasn’t exactly the moment.

  The outward trip went without a hitch. Timmie and Conker were along, together with a pair of grooms with four Anglia Bloodstock horses, and in consequence the work went quickly and easily. We were held up for thirty-six hours in New York by an engine fault, and when I rang up Yardman to report our safe return on the Friday morning he asked me to stay at Gatwick, as another bunch of brood mares was to leave that afternoon.

  ‘Where for?’

  ‘New York again,’ he said briskly. ‘I’ll come down with the papers myself, early in the afternoon. You can send Timms and Chestnut home. I’m bringing Billy and two others to replace them.’

  ‘Mr Yardman …’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If Billy tries to pick a fight, or molests me at all on the way, my employment with you ceases the instant we touch down in New York, and I will not help unload the horses or accept any responsibility for them.’

  There was a short shocked silence. He couldn’t afford to have me do what I threatened, in the present sticky state of the business.

  ‘My dear boy …’ he protested sighing. ‘I don’t want you to have troubles. I’ll speak to Billy. He’s a thoughtless boy. I’ll tell him not everyone is happy about his little practical jokes.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it,’ I said with irony at his view of Billy’s behaviour.

  Whatever Yardman said to him worked. Billy was sullen, unhelpful, and calculatingly offensive, but for once I completed a return trip with him without a bruise to show for it.

  On the way over I sat for a time on a hay bale beside Alf and asked him about Simon’s last trip to Milan. It was hard going, as the old man’s deafness was as impenetrable as seven eighths cloud.

  ‘Mr Searle,’ I shouted. ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘Eh?’

  After about ten shots the message got through, and he nodded.

  ‘He came to Milan with us.’

  ‘That’s right, Alf. Where did he go then?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Where did he go then?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said. ‘He didn’t come back.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘Eh?’

  I yelled again.

  ‘No. He didn’t say. Perhaps he told Billy. He was talking to Billy, see?’

  I saw. I also saw that it was no use my ever asking Billy anything about anything. Yardman would have asked him, anyway, so if Simon had told Billy where he was going Yardman would have known. Unless, of course, Simon had asked Billy not to tell, and he hadn’t. But Simon didn’t like Billy and would never trust him with a secret.

  ‘Where did Mr Searle go, when you left the plane?’

  I was getting hoarse before he answered.

  ‘I don’t know where he went. He was with Billy and the others. I went across on my own, like, to get a beer. Billy said they were just coming. But they never came.’

  ‘None of them came?’

  There had been the two grooms from the stud beside Simon and Billy, on that trip.

  Eventually Alf shook his head. ‘I finished my beer and went back to the plane. There was no one there as I ate my lunch.’

  I left it at that because my throat
couldn’t stand any more.

  Coming back we were joined by some extra help in the shape of a large pallid man who didn’t know what to do with his hands and kept rubbing them over the wings of his jodhpurs as if he expected to find pockets there. He was ostensibly accompanying a two-year-old, but I guessed tolerantly he was some relation of the owner or trainer travelling like that to avoid a transatlantic fare. I didn’t get around to checking on it, because the double journey had been very tiring, and I slept soundly nearly all the way back. Alf had to shake me awake as we approached Gatwick. Yawning I set about the unloading – it was by then well into Sunday morning – and still feeling unusually tired, drove home afterwards in a bee line to bed. A letter from Gabriella stopped me in the hall, and I went slowly upstairs reading it.

  She had, she said, asked every single taxi driver and all the airport bus drivers if they had taken anywhere a big fat Englishman who couldn’t speak Italian, had no luggage, and was wearing a green corduroy jacket. None of them could remember anyone like that. Also, she said, she had checked with the car hire firms which had agencies at the airport, but none of them had dealt with Simon. She had checked with all the airlines’ passenger lists for the day he went to Milan, and the days after: he had not flown off to anywhere.

  I lay in a hot bath and thought about whether I should go on trying to find him. Bringing in any professional help, even private detectives, would only set them searching in England for a reason for his disappearance, and they’d all too soon dig it up. A warrant out for his arrest was not what I wanted. It would effectively stop him coming back at all. Very likely he didn’t want to be found in the first place, or he wouldn’t have disappeared so thoroughly, or stayed away so long. But supposing something had happened to him … though what, I couldn’t imagine. And I wouldn’t have thought anything could have happened at all, were it not for Peters and Ballard.

  There were Simon’s partners in the fraud. His cousin, and the man in France. Perhaps I could ask them if they had heard from him … I couldn’t ask them, I thought confusedly: I didn’t know their names. Simon had an elderly aunt somewhere, but I didn’t know her name either … the whole thing was too much … and I was going to sleep in the bath.

  I went to the wharf building the next morning at nine thirty to collect my previous week’s pay and see what was on the schedule for the future. True to his word, Yardman had arranged no air trips for the following three days of Cheltenham races. There was a big question mark beside a trip for six circus horses for Spain that same afternoon, but no question mark, I was glad to see, about a flight to Milan with brood mares on Friday.

  Yardman, when I went down to see him, said the circus horses were postponed until the following Monday owing to their trainer having read in his stars that it was a bad week to travel. Yardman was disgusted. Astrology was bad for business.

  ‘Milan on Friday, now,’ he said, sliding a pencil to and fro through his fingers. ‘I might come on that trip myself, if I can get away. It’s most awkward, with Searle’s work to be done. I’ve advertised for someone to fill his place … anyway, as I was saying, if I can get away I think I’d better go and see our opposite numbers out there. It always pays you know, my dear boy. I go to all the countries we export to. About once a year. Keeps us in touch, you know.’

  I nodded. Good for business, no doubt.

  ‘Will you ask them … our opposite numbers … if they saw Simon Searle any time after he landed?’

  He looked surprised, the taut skin stretched over his jaw.

  ‘I could, yes. But I shouldn’t think he told them where he was going, if he didn’t have the courtesy to tell me.’

  ‘It’s only an outside chance,’ I agreed.

  ‘I’ll ask, though.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll certainly ask.’

  I went upstairs again to Simon’s room, shut his door, sat in his chair, and looked out of his window. His room, directly over Yardman’s, had the same panoramic view of the river, from a higher angle. I would like to live there, I thought idly. I liked the shipping, the noise of the docks, the smell of the river, the coming and going. Quite simply, I supposed, I liked the business of transport.

  The Finnish ship had gone from the berth opposite and another small freighter had taken her place. A limp flag swung fitfully at her mast head, red and white horizontal stripes with a navy blue triangle and a white star. I looked across at the nationality chart on Simon’s wall. Puerto Rico. Well, well, one lived and learned. Three alphabetical flags lower down, when checked, proved to be E, Q and M. Mildly curious, I turned them up in the international code of signals. ‘I am delivering.’ Quite right and proper. I shut the book, twiddled my thumbs, watched a police launch swoop past doing twenty knots on the ebb, and reflected not for the first time that the London river was a fast rough waterway for small boats.

  After a while I picked up the telephone and rang up Fenland to book a plane for Sunday.

  ‘Two o’clock?’

  ‘That’ll do me fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Harry. Mr. Wells said if you rang that he wanted a word with you.’

  ‘O.K.’

  There were some clicks, and then Tom’s voice.

  ‘Harry? Look, for God’s sake, what is this job of yours?’

  ‘I work for … a travel agency.’

  ‘Well, what’s so special about it? Come here, and I’ll pay you more.’ He sounded worried and agitated, not casually inviting as before.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said.

  ‘Everything’s up except my planes. I’ve landed an excellent contract with a car firm in Coventry ferrying their executives, technicians, salesmen and so on all round the shop. They’ve a factory in Lancashire and tie-ups all over Europe, and they’re fed-up with the airfield they’ve been using. They’re sending me three planes. I’m to maintain them, provide pilots and have them ready when wanted.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘So what’s wrong?’

  ‘So I don’t want to lose them again before I’ve started. And not only can I not find any out-of-work pilots worth considering, but one of my three regulars went on a ski-ing holiday last week and broke his leg, the silly bastard. So how about it?’

  ‘It’s not as easy as you make it sound,’ I said reluctantly.

  ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘A lot of things … if you’ll be around on Sunday, anyway, we could talk it over.’

  He sighed in exasperation. ‘The planes are due here at the end of the month, in just over a fortnight.’

  ‘Get someone else, if you can,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah … if I can.’ He was depressed. ‘And if I can’t?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could do a day a week to help out, but even then …’

  ‘Even then, what?’

  ‘There are difficulties.’

  ‘Nothing to mine, Harry. Nothing to mine. I’ll break you down on Sunday.’

  Everyone had troubles, even with success. The higher the tougher, it seemed. I wiggled the button, and asked for another number, the charter airline which Patrick worked for. The Gatwick office answered, and I asked them if they could tell me how to get hold of him.

  ‘You’re in luck. He’s actually here, in the office. Who’s speaking?’

  ‘Henry Grey, from Yardman Transport.’

  I waited, and he came on the line.

  ‘Hullo … how’s things? How’s Gabriella?’

  ‘She,’ I said, ‘is fine. Other things are not. Could you do me a favour?’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Could you look up for me the name of the pilot who flew a load of horses to Milan for us a fortnight last Thursday? Also the names of the co-pilot and engineer, and could you also tell me how or when I could talk to one or all of them?’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Oh, no trouble for your firm, none at all. But one of our men went over on that trip and didn’t come back, and hasn’t got in touch with us since. I just wanted to find out if the crew had any
idea what became of him. He might have told one of them where he was going … anyway, his work is piling up here and we want to find out if he intends to come back.’

  ‘I see. Hang on then. A fortnight last Thursday?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  He was away several minutes. The cranes got busy on the freighter from Puerto Rico. I yawned.

  ‘Henry? I’ve got them. The pilot was John Kyle, co-pilot G. L. Rawlings, engineer V. N. Brede. They’re not here, though; they’ve just gone to Arabia, ferrying mountains of luggage from London after some oil chieftain’s visit. He brought about six wives, and they all went shopping.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘When do they get back?’

  He consulted someone in the background.

  ‘Sometime Wednesday. They have Thursday off, then another trip to Arabia on Friday.’

  ‘Some shopping,’ I said gloomily. ‘I can’t get to see them on Wednesday or Thursday. I’m racing at Cheltenham. But I could ring them up on Wednesday night, if you can give me their numbers.’

  ‘Well …,’ said Patrick slowly. ‘John Kyle likes his flutter on the horses.’

  ‘You don’t think he’d come to Cheltenham, then?’

  ‘He certainly might, if he isn’t doing anything else.’

  ‘I’ll get him a member’s badge, and the others too, if they’d like.’

  ‘Fair enough. Let’s see. I’m going to Holland twice tomorrow. I should think I could see them on Wednesday, if we all get back reasonably on schedule. I’ll tell them what you want, and ring you. If they go to Cheltenham you’ll see them, and if not you can ring them. How’s that?’

  ‘Marvellous. You’ll find me at the Queen’s Hotel at Cheltenham. I’ll be staying there.’

  ‘Right … and oh, by the way, I see I’m down for a horse transport flight on Friday to Milan. Is that your mob, or not?’

  ‘Our mob,’ I agreed. ‘What’s left of it.’

  We rang off, and I leaned back in Simon’s chair, pensively biting my thumbnail and surveying the things on his desk: telephone, tray of pens, blank notepad, and a pot of paper clips and pins. Nothing of any help. Then slowly, methodically, I searched through the drawers. They were predictably packed with export forms of various sorts, but he had taken little of a personal nature to work. Some indigestion tablets, a screwdriver, a pair of green socks, and a plastic box labelled ‘spare keys’. That was the lot. No letters, no bills, no private papers of any sort.