Dick Francis - Crossfire

"So he didn't exactly steal your savings?"

"As good as," Mr. Sutton replied. "My son was furious with me. Kept saying I'd gambled away his inheritance."

I didn't think it had been the most tactful of comments.

"And what exactly was Roderick Ward's harebrained scheme?" I asked.

He sat silently for a while, looking at me, as if deciding what to tell. Or perhaps he was trying to remember.

He again removed his false teeth and studied them closely. I wasn't at all sure that he had understood my question, but after a while he replaced his teeth in his mouth and began. "I borrowed some money against my house to invest in some fancy investment fund that Roderick Bastard Ward guaranteed would make me rich." He sighed. "All that happened was the fund went bust and I now have a bloody great mortgage, and I can't afford the interest."

I could understand why Detective Sergeant Fred had been so furious.

"What sort of investment fund was it?" I asked.

"I don't remember," he said. Perhaps he just didn't want to.

"So how come Ward threw a brick through your window?" I asked.

He smiled. "I poured tea in his lap."

"What?" I said, astonished. "How?"

"He came to tell me that I'd lost all my money. I said to him that there must be something we could do, but he just sat there, arrogantly telling me that I should have realized that investments could go down as well as up." He smiled again. "So I simply poured the hot tea from the teapot I was holding straight into his lap." He laughed, and his false teeth almost popped out of his mouth. He pushed them back in with his thumb. "You should have seen him jump. Almost ripped his trousers off. Accused me of scalding his wedding tackle. Wish now I'd cut them off completely."

"So he went out and threw the brick through your window?"

"Yeah, as he was leaving, but my son saw him do it and arrested him." He stopped laughing. "But then I had to tell Fred the whole story about losing the money."

So he had lost his money about a year ago. Before the same fate had befallen my mother.

"Mr. Sutton," I said. "Can you remember anything at all about the investment fund that went bust?"

He shook his head.

"Was it an offshore fund?" I asked.

He looked quizzically at me. The term offshore clearly hadn't rung any bells in his memory.

"I don't know about that," he said. "I don't think so."

"Did it have anything to do with Gibraltar?" I asked.

He shook his head once more. "I can't remember." He began to dribble again from the corner of his mouth, and there were tears in his eyes.

It was time for me to go.

Saturday morning dawned crisp and bright, with the winter sun doing its best to thaw the frosty ground. The radio in the kitchen reported that there was to be a second inspection of the course at Newbury at nine o'clock to decide whether racing could go ahead. Apparently, the takeoff and landing areas of every jump had been covered overnight, and the stewards were hopeful the meeting could take place.

I, meanwhile, was crossing my fingers that it would be abandoned.

I had spent more than an hour in the racing tack room on Friday afternoon doing my best to try to ensure that Scientific's reins would part during his race. My mother had shown me which one of the bridles had the Australian noseband fitted, and I had been dismayed to see its pristine condition. As my mother had said, horses from Kauri House Stables didn't go to the races with substandard tack.

I had thought that it would be an easy task to bend the leather back and forth a few times inside the nonslip rubber sleeve until it broke, leaving only the rubber holding the reins together. The rubber should then part in the hustle and bustle of the race when the jockey pulled on the reins.

Sadly, I found that it was not as simple as I had thought. The leather was far too new.

I'd looked at where the reins were attached to the metal rings on either side of the bit. The leather was sewn back on itself with multiple stitches of strong thread. I had tested it with all my strength without even an iota of separation. How about if I cut through most of the stitches? But with what? And wouldn't it show? Wouldn't Jack be sure to see it when he gathered the tack together?

There were four green first-aid boxes stacked on a shelf in the racing tack room, and I'd opened one, looking for a pair of scissors. I'd found something better. Carefully protected by a transparent plastic sheath had been a surgical scalpel.

With great care I had started to cut through the stitches on the right side of the bridle, the side that would be farthest from the stable lad when he led the horse around the parade ring. I'd been careful to cut only the stitches in the middle, leaving both ends intact so the sabotage was less obvious. In the end I had severed all but a very few stitches at either end. I had no idea if it was enough, but it would have to do.

I hovered nervously around the racing tack-room door as Jack gathered together all the equipment for the day, loading it into a huge wicker basket. I saw as he lifted the bridle with the Australian noseband and placed it in the basket.

There was no shout of discovery, no tut-tutting over the state of the reins.

So far, so good. But the real test would come when he placed the bridle on to Scientific later in the afternoon in the racetrack stables.

I had done my best to disguise the effects of the scalpel. The stiffness of the leather had helped to keep the sides together, and I had been careful not to leave any frayed ends of thread visible. It had been a matter of trying to make the reins appear to be normal and intact while, at the same time, ensuring they were sufficiently weakened to separate during the race. And I had absolutely no idea if I had managed to get the balance right.

Unfortunately, the covers had done their job in saving the meeting from the frost, and so my mother drove the three of us to Newbury in her battered old blue Ford, my stepfather sitting next to her in the front while I was in the back behind her, as I had been so often before on the way to and from the races.

Going racing had been such a huge part of my young life that at one time, my knowledge of British geography had been based solely on the locations of the racetracks. By the time I learned to drive when I was seventeen, I had no idea where the big cities might be, but I could unerringly find my way to such places as Market Rasen, Plumpton or Fakenham, and I also knew the best shortcuts to beat the race-day traffic.

Newbury is the most local course to Lambourn, being just fifteen miles away, and is thought of as "home" for most of the village's trainers, who all have as many runners here as possible, not least because of the low transport costs.

By the time my mother pulled into the trainers' parking lot it was nearly full, and I noticed with dismay how far I was going to have to walk to get into the racetrack. I was still suffering from excess fluid in the tissues of my leg, and I had promised myself to take things a little easier for a while. So much for my good intentions.

"Hello, Josephine," called a voice as we stepped out of the car. Ewen Yorke was standing just in front of us, struggling into his sheepskin overcoat.

"Oh, hello, Ewen," replied my mother without warmth.

"Hiya, Tom," Julie Yorke called as she climbed out of their top-of-the-range, brand-new white BMW, a fact not lost on my mother, who positively fumed. Now I realized why she had suddenly become so keen on upgrading her old Ford.

For once, Julie was accompanying Ewen to the races, and she was dressed in a thin figure-hugging silk dress with a matching, but equally thin, print-patterned topcoat. Rather inappropriate, I thought, for a cold and dank February afternoon, but it clearly warmed the hearts of several male admirers who walked by with smiles on their faces and sparkles in their eyes.