Dick Francis - Crossfire

"I've no idea what you're talking about."

It seemed we hadn't come too far in the past half-hour.

"Please yourself," I said, standing up and walking back to the kitchen table, and his computer.

There was a soccer-highlights program on the television, and I turned the volume up even higher so that Alex wouldn't hear me tapping away on his laptop keyboard.

The computer automatically connected to his wireless Internet router, so I clicked on his e-mail, and opened the inbox. Careless of him, I thought, not to have it password-protected. I highlighted all his messages received during the past two weeks and forwarded them, en masse, to my own e-mail account. Next, I did the same to his sent-items folder. One never knew how useful the information might prove to be, and it was no coincidence that the first thing the police searched when arresting someone was their computer hard drive.

I glanced up at the soccer on the television and ignored the whining from the hallway.

"Let me go," Alex bleated. "My hands hurt."

I went back to studying the computer screen.

"I need to sit up," he whinged. "My back aches."

I continued to ignore him.

I opened a computer folder called Rock Accounts. There were twenty or so files in the folder, and I highlighted them all, attached them to an e-mail and again sent them to my computer.

The soccer-highlights program finished, and the evening news had started. Fortunately, there were no reports about an ongoing case of forced imprisonment in the village of Greenham.

I clicked on the search button on the computer's start menu and asked it to search itself for files containing the terms password or user name. Obligingly, it came up with eight references, so I attached those files to another e-mail, and off they went as well.

"OK, OK!" he shouted finally. "I'll answer your question."

The messages from one further e-mail folder, one simply named Gibraltar, were also dispatched through cyberspace. I then checked that everything had gone before erasing the sent records for my forwarded files so Alex would have no knowledge that I had copied them. I closed the lid of the laptop and returned it to the flight bag, which I placed back on the floor.

I then went out into the hall, sat down once again on the upright chair and leaned forwards over him menacingly.

But I didn't ask him the same question as before. Using my best voice-of-command, I asked him something completely different.

"Why did you murder Roderick Ward?"

He was shocked.

"I-I didn't," he stammered.

"So who did?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"So he was murdered?" I said.

"No," he whined. "It was an accident."

"No, it wasn't. That car crash was far too contrived. It had to be a setup."

"The car crash wasn't the accident," he said flatly. "It was the fact that he died that was the accident. I tried to warn them, but I was too late."

" ' Them'?" I asked, intrigued.

He clammed up.

I removed a folded piece of paper from my pocket and held it out to him.

He looked at it in disbelief.

I knew the words written there by heart, so often had I looked at them during the past few days. It was the handwritten note that had been addressed to Mrs. Stella Beecher at 26 Banbury Drive in Oxford, the note I had found in the pile of mail I had taken from the cardboard box that Meals-on-Wheels Mr. Horner kept by his front door. I DON'T KNOW WHETHER THIS WILL GET THERE IN TIME, BUT TELL HIM I HAVE THE STUFF HE WANTS.

"What stuff?" I demanded.

He said nothing.

"And tell who?"

Again there was no response.

"And in time for what?"

He just stared at me.

"You will have to answer my questions, or you will leave me with no alternative but…" I trailed off.

"No alternative but what?" he asked in a panic.

"To kill you," I said calmly.

I quickly grabbed his bound feet and swiftly removed his left shoe and sock. I used the duct tape to bind his left foot upright against one of the spindles on the stairway so that it was completely immobile.

"What are you doing?" he screamed.

"Preparations," I said. "I always have to make the right preparations before I kill someone."

"Help," he yelled. But I had left the television on with the volume turned up, and his shout was drowned out by some advertisement music.

However, to be sure that he wouldn't be heard, I took a piece of the duct tape and fixed it firmly over his mouth to stop him from yelling again. Instead, he began breathing heavily through his nose, hyperventilating, his nostrils alternatively flaring and contracting below a pair of big frightened eyes.

"Now then, Alex," I said, in as calm a manner as I could manage. "You seem not to fully appreciate the rather dangerous predicament in which you have found yourself." He stared at me unblinkingly. "So let me explain it to you. You have been blackmailing my mother to the tune of two thousand pounds per week for the past seven months, to say nothing about the demands on her to fix races. Some weeks you collect the money yourself from the mailbox in Cheap Street, and sometimes you get Julie Yorke to collect it for you."

I removed the three prints of the photos I had taken of Julie through the window of the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant and held them up to him. With the tape on his mouth, it was difficult to fully gauge his reaction, but he went pale and looked from the photos to my face with doleful, pleading eyes.

"And," I went on, "you are blackmailing my mother over the knowledge you have that she has not been paying the tax that she should have been. Which means you either have her tax papers in your possession or have had access to them."

I reached down into my rucksack and again brought out the red "anti-AIDS" kit. If anything, Alex went paler.

"Now, my problem is this," I said. "If I let you go, you will still have my mother's tax papers. And even if you give me back the papers, you would still have the knowledge."

I took the large syringe out of the kit, attached a new needle, and then drew up a large quantity of the saline solution from the bag that was still hanging on the stair banister, the bag with the insulin label.

"So you see," I said, "if you won't help me, then I will have no alternative but to prevent you from speaking to the tax authorities."

I held the syringe up to the light and squirted a little of the fluid out in a fine jet.

"Did you know that insulin is essential for proper body functions?" I asked. "But that too much of it causes the glucose level in the blood to drop far too low, which in turn triggers a condition called hypoglycemia? That usually results in a seizure, followed by coma and death. Do you remember the case of that nurse, Beverley Allitt, who killed those children in Grantham hospital? Dubbed the Angel of Death by the media, she murdered some of them by injecting large overdoses of insulin."

I knew because I'd looked that up on the Internet as well.

I touched his foot.

"And do you know, Alex, if you inject insulin between someone's toes it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find the puncture mark on the skin, and the insulin would be undetectable, because you create it naturally in your body? It would appear you died of a seizure followed by a heart attack."

The statement wasn't entirely accurate. The insulin used nowadays to treat diabetics is almost exclusively synthetic insulin, and it can be detected as being different from the natural human product.

But Alex wasn't to know that.

"Now, then," I said, smiling and holding up the syringe to him again. "Between which two toes would you like it?"

I was worried that he was going to pass out. His eyes started to roll back in their sockets, and his breathing suddenly became shallower. I didn't want him to have a heart attack simply from fear. That might take some explaining.