Dick Francis - Crossfire

"Alex," I shouted at him, bringing his eyes back into focus on my face. "You can prevent this, you know. All you have to do is cooperate and answer all my questions. But you have to be completely candid and tell me everything. Do you understand?"

He nodded eagerly.

"And do you agree to answer everything?"

He nodded again.

"Nothing held back?"

He shook his head from side to side, so I stepped forwards and tore off the tape from across his mouth.

"Now, for a start," I said, "who killed Roderick Ward?"

He still wouldn't answer.

"I won't give you another chance," I said seriously.

"How do I know you won't kill me anyway, after I've told you?"

"You don't," I said. "But do you have any choice? And if I gather enough incriminating information about you, so that you would also be in big trouble if you told the tax man about my mother, then we would both have a weapon of mass destruction, as it were. Either of us telling the authorities would result in the very thing we were trying so hard to prevent. We would both have the safety of mutually assured annihilation, a bit like nuclear deterrence. Neither of us would use the information for fear of the retaliation."

"But you could still kill me," he said.

"Yes," I agreed, "I suppose I could, but why would I? There would be no need, and even I don't kill people without a reason."

He didn't look terribly reassured, so I untaped his foot from the spindle and then pulled him across the floor so he was sitting up with his back against the wall by the kitchen door.

"Now," I said, sitting down once more on the upright chair. "If you didn't kill Roderick Ward, who did?"

I still wasn't sure he would tell me, so seemingly absentmindedly, I picked up the syringe and made another fine spray of fluid shoot from the needle.

"His sister," Alex said.

I looked at him. "Stella Beecher?"

He seemed surprised I knew her name, but I'd already shown him the note he had sent to her. He nodded.

"Now, why would she kill her own brother?"

"She didn't mean to," he said. "It was an accident."

"You mean the car crash?"

"No," he said. "He was already dead when he went into the river. He drowned in a bath."

"What on earth was Stella Beecher doing giving him a bath?"

"She wasn't exactly giving him a bath. They were trying to get him to tell them where the money had gone."

"What money?" I asked.

"Fred's father's money."

I was confused. "Fred?"

"Fred Sutton," he said.

Old Man Sutton's son. The man I had seen in the public gallery at Roderick Ward's inquest.

"So Fred Sutton and Stella Beecher know each other?" I asked.

"Know each other!" He laughed. "They live together. They're almost married."

In Andover, I thought, close to Old Man Sutton and his nursing home. So it had been no coincidence at all that Stella Beecher had moved to Andover.

It took more than an hour, but in the end, Alex told me how, and why, Roderick Ward was found dead in his car, submerged in the River Windrush.

Ward had been introduced to Old Man Sutton by Stella Beecher, who had been in a relationship with Detective Sergeant Fred for some time. Unbeknownst to either Fred or Stella, Roderick had somehow conned the old man into borrowing against his house and investing the cash in a nonexistent hedge fund in Gibraltar. Fred found out about it only after he'd seen the brick being thrown through his father's window. It was like a soap opera.

"How do you know all this?" I asked Alex. "What's your connection?"

"I worked with Roderick Ward."

"So you are implicated in this sham hedge-fund business?"

He didn't really want to admit it. He must have known that my mother had been conned in the same way. He looked away from my face, but he nodded.

"So who's the brains behind it?" I asked.

He turned his eyes back to mine. "Do you think I'm stupid or something?" he said. "If I told you who it was then you wouldn't need to kill me because they'd do it for you."

Actually, I did think him stupid. But not as stupid as Roderick Ward. Fancy stealing from the father of your sister's boyfriend, especially when the boyfriend just happened to be a police detective-now, that was really stupid!

"Let's go back to Roderick Ward," I said. "Why did you send a note to Stella Beecher saying you had the stuff? What stuff? And how did you know Stella anyway?"

"I didn't," he said. "But I knew her address, because Roderick had said it was the same address he used, the one in Oxford."

"So what was all this about having the stuff? And hoping it was in time?"

"Fred Sutton had been harassing Roderick and me at an office we'd rented in Wantage, threatening us and so on."

I didn't blame him, I thought.

"He told me that he'd get a warrant for my arrest, and he'd use his police contacts to fit me up good and proper. He said I'd get ten years unless I gave him some papers he wanted about where his dad's money had gone."

"So why the note?" I asked.

"I made the copies of the papers, but he didn't come to collect them on the Monday morning as he'd said he would. He told me he'd definitely be at the office by eight, and I was waiting. But he didn't come all day, and Roderick didn't show up, either. I thought the two of them must have done a deal, and I would end up carrying the can. I was shit scared, I can tell you. And I had no other way of contacting him, so I sent the note."

So I had been wrong about "the stuff " being something to do with my mother's tax papers, and also "in time" had not been about before Roderick Ward's "accident," but about before getting an arrest warrant issued.

Never assume anything, I reminded myself.

But I'd been right about one thing: Alex Reece was indeed stupid.

"So how do you know that Fred Sutton and Stella killed Roderick Ward?" I asked him.

"Fred pitches up first thing the next day and demands the papers, but I told him to get stuffed. If he thought I was going to take the blame for what Roderick had been doing, he had another think coming. But he says Roderick's dead and I'll go the same way if I didn't give him the papers."

He paused only to draw breath.

"So I says to him that I didn't believe him that Roderick was dead. I told him he was only saying it to frighten me. He tells me that I should be frightened because they murdered him in the bath, but then he thinks better of it and claims it was an accident, that they'd only meant to scare him into telling them where the money had gone. But Fred says that Stella pulled his feet and his head went under and he just… died. Killed her own brother, just like that, Fred said. One minute they were asking him questions, the next he was dead."

"So did you give Fred the papers he wanted?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "But they wouldn't have done him much good. It's been ages since his money went, and they change the numbers and stuff all the time."

"'They'?" I asked.

He clammed up tight, pursing his lips and shaking his head at me.

But I'd been doing a lot of thinking while I'd sat waiting in Greystone Stables and in the Newbury coffee shop, and the more I had thought about it, the more convinced I had become.

"You mean Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway," I said. It was a statement rather than a question.

He stared at me with his mouth hanging open. So I was right.

But it had to be them.

"And who is Mr. Cigar?" I asked him.

He laughed. "No one," he said. "That was Roderick's idea. They all thought it a great joke as they puffed on their own great big Havanas."

"And Rock Bank Ltd?" I said. "Is that a myth too?"

"Oh no, that exists, all right," he said. "But it's not really a bank. It's just a Gibraltar holding company. When money comes in, it sits there for a while, and then leaves again."