Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

  I opened the box of keys. There were about twenty or more, the silt of years. Suitcase keys, a heavy old iron key, car keys. I stirred them up with my finger. A Yale key. I picked it out and looked at it. It was a duplicate, cut for a few shillings from a blank, and had no number. The metal had been dulled by time, but not smoothed, from use. I tapped it speculatively on the edge of the desk, thinking that anyway there would be no harm in trying.

  Chapter Nine

  Simon’s home address, obtained off his insurance card via the dim typist, proved to be located in a dingy block of flats in the outer reaches of St. John’s Wood. The grass on patchy lawns had remained uncut from about the previous August, which gave the graceless building a mournful look of having been thoughtlessly dumped in a hayfield. I walked through spotted glass entrance doors, up an uninspiring staircase, met no one, and came to a halt outside number fifteen in white twopenny plastic letters screwed on to cheap green painted deal.

  The Yale key slid raspingly into the lock as if it had never been there before, but it turned under my pressure and opened the door. There was a haphazard foot-high pile of newspapers and magazines just inside. When I pushed the door against them they slithered away, and I stepped in and round them, and shut the door behind me.

  The flat consisted only of a tiny entrance hall, a small bedroom, poky kitchen and bathroom and a slightly larger sitting-room. The prevailing colour was maroon, which I found depressing, and the furniture looked as if it had been bought piece by piece from second-class second-hand shops. The total effect could have been harmonious, but it wasn’t: not so much through lack of taste as lack of imagination. He had spent the minimum of trouble on his surroundings, and the result was gloomy. Cold dead air and a smell of mustiness seeped up my nose. There were unwashed, mould-growing dishes on the draining board in the kitchen, and crumpled thrown-back bedclothes on the bed. He had left his shaving water in the washbasin and the scum had dried into a hard grey line round the edge. Poor Simon, I thought forlornly, what an existence. No wife, no warmth: no wonder he liked pubs.

  One wall in the sitting-room was lined with bookcases, and the newest, most obviously luxurious object in the flat was a big stereophonic radiogram standing behind the door. No television. No pictures on the dull coffee walls. Not a man of visual pleasures. Beside a large battered arm-chair, handy to perpetual reach, stood a wooden crate of bottled beer.

  Wandering round his flat I realised what a fearful comment it was on myself that I had never been there before. This big tolerant dishonest man I would have counted my only real friend, yet I’d never seen where he lived. Never been asked; never thought of asking him to my own home. Even where I had wanted friendship, I hadn’t known how to try. I felt as cold inside as Simon’s flat; as uninhabited. Gabriella seemed very far away.

  I picked up the heap of papers inside the front door and carried them into the sitting-room. Sorted into piles, they consisted of sixteen dailies, three Sundays, three Horse and Hounds, three Sporting Life weeklies and one Stud and Stable. Several letters in brown unstuck envelopes looked unpromising, and with very little hesitation I opened all the rest. There were none from France, and none from the accomplice cousin. The only one of any help was written in spiky black hand on dark blue paper. It began ‘Dear Simon,’ thanked him for a birthday present, and was signed ‘your loving aunt Edna.’ The handwritten address at the top said 3 Gordon Cottages, East Road, Potter’s Green, Berks., and there was no telephone number.

  There was no desk as such in his flat. He kept his bills and papers clipped into labelled categories in the top drawer of a scratched chest in his bedroom, but if his cousin’s name and address was among them, I couldn’t recognise them. Alongside the papers lay a Horse and Hound rolled tightly into a tube and bound with wide brown sticky paper, ready to be posted. I picked it up and turned it round in my hands. It bore no address. The thick layers of brown sticky paper were tough, and even though I was careful with my penknife it looked as though a tiger had been chewing it when I finally hacked my way through. The magazine unrolled reluctantly, and I picked it up and shook it. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until one looked at it page by page that the money showed, five pound notes stuck on with sellotape. They were used notes, not new, and there were sixty of them. I rolled the Horse and Hound up again and laid it back in the drawer, seeing a vivid mental picture, as I picked up the brown pieces of gummed strips and put them in the wastebasket, of Simon listening to his radiogram and sticking his money into the journals, night after night, an endless job, working for his old age.

  Potter’s Green turned out to be a large village spreading out into tentacles of development around the edges. East Road was a new one, and Gordon Cottages proved to be one of several identical strips of council-built bungalows for old people. Number three like all the rest still looked clean and fresh, with nothing growing yet in the bathmat sized flower bed under the front window. There was bright yellow paint clashing with pale pink curtains and a bottle of milk standing on the concrete doorstep.

  I rang the bell. The pink curtains twitched, and I turned my head to see myself being inspected by a pair of mournful, faded eyes set in a large pale face. She flapped a hand at me in a dismissing movement, shooing me away, so I put my finger on the bell and rang again.

  I heard her come round to the other side of the door.

  ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘I’m not selling,’ I said through the letter-box. ‘I’m a friend of Simon’s, your nephew Simon Searle.’

  ‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’

  ‘Henry Grey … I work with Simon at Yardman’s. Could I please talk to you inside, it’s very difficult like this, and your neighbours will wonder what’s going on.’ There were in truth several heads at the front windows already, and it had its effect. She opened the door and beckoned me in.

  The tiny house was crammed with the furniture she must have brought with her from a much larger place, and every available surface was covered with useless mass-produced ornaments. The nearest to me as I stood just inside the doorway was a black box decorated with ‘A present from Brighton’ in shells. And next to that a china donkey bore panniers of dried everlasting flowers. Pictures of all sorts crowded the walls, interspersed by several proverbs done in poker-work on wood. ‘Waste not, Want not’ caught my eye, and further round there was ‘Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of you’; an improvement on the original.

  Simon’s stout aunt had creaking corsets and wheezing breath and smelled of mentholated cough pastilles. ‘Simon isn’t here, you know. He lives in London, not here.’

  ‘I know, yes.’ Hesitatingly, I told her about Simon going away and not coming back. ‘I wondered,’ I finished, ‘if by any chance he has written to you. Sent you a picture postcard. That sort of thing.’

  ‘He will do. He’s sure to.’ She nodded several times. ‘He always does, and brings me a little souvenir when he’s been away. Very considerate is Simon.’

  ‘But you haven’t had a postcard yet.’

  ‘Not yet. Soon, I expect.’

  ‘If you do, would you write to me and let me know? You see, he hasn’t said when he’ll be back, and Mr Yardman is advertising for someone to fill his job.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ She was troubled. ‘I hope nothing has happened to him.’

  ‘I don’t expect so; but if you hear from him, you will let us know?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Dear oh dear, I wonder what he is up to.’

  Her choice of phrase reminded me of what in fact he was up to, and I asked her if she knew Simon’s cousin’s name and address. Unhesitatingly she reeled it off. ‘He’s my poor dead sister’s son,’ she said. ‘But a surly man. I don’t get on with him at all. Not easy, like Simon, now. Simon stayed with me a lot when he was little, when I kept the village shop. He never forgets my birthday, and always brings me nice little mementoes like these.’ She looked proudly round her overflowing possessions. ‘
Simon’s very kind. I’ve only my old age pension, you know, and a little bit put by, and Simon’s the only one who bothers with me much. Oh I’ve got my two daughters, of course, but one’s married in Canada and the other’s got enough troubles of her own. Simon’s given me a hundred pounds for my birthday every year for the last three years; what do you think of that?’

  ‘Absolutely splendid.’ A hundred pounds of tax payers’ money. Robin Hood stuff. Oh well.

  ‘You’ll let me know, then,’ I said, turning to go. She nodded, creaking as she moved round me to open the street door. Facing me in the little hall hung more time-worn poker work. ‘See a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. See a pin and let it lie, you will want before you die.’ So there, I thought, smiling to myself, was the origin of Simon’s pin tidying habit, a proverb stretching back to childhood. He didn’t intend to want before he died.

  The accomplice cousin farmed in Essex, reasonably handy for Cambridge airport, but a long haul for Gatwick. It was evident at once, however, that I could expect no easy help from him.

  ‘You,’ he said forcefully, ‘you’re the interfering bastard who’s fouled up the works, aren’t you? Well you can damn well clear off, that’s what you can do. It’s no business of yours where Simon’s gone and in future you keep your bloody nose out of things that don’t concern you.’

  ‘If,’ I said mildly, ‘you prefer me to ask the police to find him, I will.’

  He looked ready to explode, a large red faced man in khaki clothes and huge gum boots, standing four square in a muddy yard. He struggled visibly between the pleasure of telling me to go to hell and fear of the consequences if he did so. Prudence just won.

  ‘All right. All right. I don’t know where he is and that’s straight. He didn’t tell me he was going, and I don’t know when he’s coming back.’

  Depressed, I drove home to Bedfordshire. The bulk and grandeur of the great house lay there waiting as I rolled slowly up the long drive. History in stone; the soul of the Creggans. Earl upon earl had lived there right back to the pirate who brought Spanish gold to Queen Bess, and since my father died I had only to enter to feel the chains fall heavily on me like a net. I stopped in the sweep of gravel in front instead of driving round to the garages as usual, and looked at what I had inherited. There was beauty, I admitted, in the great façade with its pillars and pediments and the two wide flights of steps sweeping up to meet at the door. The Georgian Palladian architect who had grafted a whole new mansion on to the Elizabethan and Stuart one already existing had produced a curiously satisfactory result, and as a Victorian incumbent had luckily confined his Gothic urges to a ruined folly in the garden, the only late addition had been a square red-bricked block of Edwardian plumbing. But for all its splendid outer show it had those beetles in the roof, miles of draughty passages, kitchens in the basement, and twenty bedrooms mouldering into dust. Only a multi-millionaire could maintain and fill such a place now with servants and guests, whereas after death duties I would be hard put to it to find a case of champagne once the useless pile had voraciously gulped what it cost just to keep standing.

  Opening it to the public might have been a solution if I had been any sort of a showman. But to someone solitary by nature that way meant a lifetime of horrifying square-peggery. Slavery to a building. Another human sacrifice on the altar of tradition. I simply couldn’t face it. The very idea made me wilt.

  Since it was unlikely anyone would simply let me pull the whole thing down, the National Trust, I thought, was the only hope. They could organise the sight-seeing to their heart’s content and they might let Mother live there for the rest of her life, which she needed.

  Mother usually used the front entrance while Alice and I drove on and went in through one of the doors at the side, near the garages. That early evening, however, I left my little car on the gravel and walked slowly up the shallow steps. At the top I leaned against the balustrade and looked back over the calm wide fields and bare branched trees just swelling into bud. I didn’t really own all this, I thought. It was like the baton in a relay race, passed on from one, to be passed on to the next, belonging to none- for more than a lap. Well, I wasn’t going to pass it on. I was the last runner. I would escape from the track at a tangent and give the baton away. My son, if I ever had one, would have to lump it.

  I pushed open the heavy front door and stepped into the dusk-filled house. I, Henry Grey, descendant of the sea pirate, of warriors and explorers and empire builders and of a father who’d been decorated for valour on the Somme, I, the least of them, was going to bring their way of life to an end. I felt one deep protesting pang for their sakes, and that was all. If they had anything of themselves to pass on to me, it was already in my genes. I carried their inheritance in my body, and I didn’t need their house.

  Not only did John Kyle and his engineer come to Cheltenham, but Patrick as well.

  ‘I’ve never been before,’ he said, his yellow eyes and auburn hair shining as he stood in the bright March sun. ‘These two are addicts. I just came along for the ride.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ I said, shaking hands with the other two. John Kyle was a bulky battered looking young man going prematurely thin on top. His engineer, tall and older, had three racing papers and a form sheet tucked under his arm.

  ‘I see,’ he said, glancing down at them, ‘th … that you won the United Hunts Ch … Challenge Cup yesterday.’ He managed his stutter unselfconsciously. ‘W … w … well done.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I was a bit lucky. I wouldn’t have won if Century hadn’t fallen at the last.’

  ‘It d … d … d … does say that, in the p … p … paper,’ he agreed disarmingly.

  Patrick laughed and said, ‘What are you riding in today?’

  ‘The Gold Cup and the Mildmay of Flete Challenge Cup.’

  ‘Clobber and Boathook,’ said John Kyle readily.

  ‘I’ll back you,’ Patrick said.

  ‘M … m … money down the drain b … backing Clobber,’ said the engineer seriously.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ I said with irony.

  ‘F … form’s all haywire. V … v … very inconsistent,’ he explained.

  ‘Do you think you’ve got a chance?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘No, not much. I’ve never ridden him before. The owner’s son usually rides him, but he’s got jaundice.’

  ‘N … not a b … betting proposition,’ nodded the engineer.

  ‘For God’s sake don’t be so depressing, man,’ protested Kyle.

  ‘How about Boathook?’ I asked, smiling.

  The engineer consulted the sky. The result wasn’t written there, as far as I could see.

  ‘B … B … Boathook,’ he remarked, coming back to earth, ‘m … m … might just do it. G … good for a p … place anyway.’

  ‘I shall back both, just the same,’ said Patrick firmly.

  I took them all to lunch and sat with them while they ate.

  ‘Aren’t you having any?’ said Patrick.

  ‘No. It makes you sick if you fall after eating.’

  ‘How often do you fall, then?’ asked Kyle curiously, cutting into his cold red beef.

  ‘On average, once in a dozen rides, I suppose. It varies. I’ve never really counted.’

  ‘When did you fall last?’

  ‘Day before yesterday.’

  ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ asked Patrick, shaking salt. ‘The prospect of falling?’

  ‘Well, no. You never think you’re going to, for a start. And a lot of falls are easy ones; you only get a bruise, if that. Sometimes when the horse goes right down you almost step off.’

  ‘And sometimes you break your bones,’ Kyle said dryly.

  I shook my head. ‘Not often.’

  Patrick laughed. I passed him the butter for his roll, looked at my watch, and said, ‘I’ll have to go and change soon. Do you think we could talk about the day you took Simon Searle to Milan?’

  ‘Shoot,’
said Kyle. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything you can think of that happened on the way there and after you landed.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be much help,’ he said apologetically. ‘I was in the cockpit most of the time, and I hardly spoke to him at all. I went aft to the karzy once, and he was sitting in one of those three pairs of seats that were bolted on at the back.’

  I nodded. I’d bolted the seats on to the anchorages myself, after we had loaded all the horses. There was usually room for a few seats, and they made a change from hay bales.

  ‘Was he alone?’

  ‘No, there was a young fellow beside him. Your friend Searle was on the inside by the window, I remember, because this young chap had his legs sprawled out in the gangway and I had to step over them. He didn’t move.’

  ‘Billy,’ I nodded.

  ‘After I came out I asked them if they were O.K. and said we’d be landing in half an hour. The young one said “thanks Dad” as if he was bored to death, and I had to step over his legs again to get past. I can’t say I took to him enormously.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ I said sardonically. ‘Did Simon say anything?’

  He hesitated. ‘It’s three weeks ago. I honestly can’t remember, but I don’t think so. Nothing special, anyway.’

  I turned to the engineer. ‘How about you?’

  He chewed, shook his head, swallowed, and took a sip of beer.

  ‘D … d … don’t think I’m much better. I w … w … was talking to him q … q … quite a lot at the beginning. In the g … g … galley. He said he’d come at the l … l … last minute instead of you. He t … t … talked about you quite a lot.’

  The engineer took a mouthful of salad and stuttered through it without embarrassment. A direct man, secure in himself. ‘He s … said you were ice on a v … volcano. I said th …th …that didn’t make sense, and he said it w … was the only w … way to describe you.’