Dick Francis - Crossfire

"I had to wait for my bloody husband to drop off," she said. "I've taken a bloody big chance coming here, I can tell you. I tried to call, but it was permanently engaged and Alex's cell went straight to voice mail."

I looked across the kitchen at the house phone still lying off the hook on the countertop, and at the switched-off cell alongside it.

"I thought I told you not to contact Alex," I said sharply, pointing to her.

"You said not in the next thirty-six hours," she replied in a pained tone. "That ran out at ten forty-five this evening."

I hadn't been counting, but she obviously had.

"So what happens now?" Alex asked into the silence.

"Well," I said, "for a start, you return all the blackmail money to my mother. I reckon that's about sixty thousand pounds."

"I can't," he said. "We've spent it. And anyway, why would I?"

"Because you obtained it illegally," I pointed out.

"But your mother should have paid it to the tax man."

"And so she will when you give it back."

"Dream on," he said again, with a laugh.

"OK," I said. "If that's your attitude, I will have to go to Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway and ask them for it."

"You'll be lucky," he said, still laughing. "They're the most tightfisted pair of bastards I've ever met."

"I'll tell them you said that."

The laughter died in his throat.

"Now, don't you go telling them anything of the sort, or I'll be straight on the blower to the Revenue."

Mutually assured destruction-it was what nuclear deterrence was all about.

"And what about my pictures?" Julie demanded, gaining some confidence from Alex.

"They prove nothing,"Alex said. "All they show is that you were in the mailbox shop. That doesn't mean you were blackmailing anyone."

"Not those pictures," Julie said, irritated. "The other pictures he took of me yesterday."

"What other pictures?" Alex demanded, turning to me.

Oh dear, I thought. This could get really nasty. How might Alex react to my taking explicit images of his naked girlfriend? I sensed that Julie had also worked it out that if Alex hadn't already seen them, it might be much better for her if he didn't do so now.

"Er," she said, backtracking fast. "They're not that important."

"But pictures of what?" Alex persisted, still looking at me.

Should I tell him? Should I show him just the sort of girl she was? Or could the pictures still be useful to me as a lever to apply to Julie?

"Just some photos I took outside the Yorkes' house yesterday afternoon."

"Show me," he said belligerently.

I thought of my camera, still safely out of sight in my little rucksack.

"I can't," I said. "I don't have the camera with me."

"But why were you taking photos of Julie outside her house?" he demanded.

I thought quickly. "To record her reaction when I showed her the prints of her in the mailbox shop. That's when I told her not to contact you for thirty-six hours."

Julie seemed relieved, and Alex appeared satisfied by the answer, even if he was a tad confused.

"So what happens now?" he asked again.

It was a good question.

I thought about asking Julie if she knew anything of Warren and Garraway's other little fiddle, the tax one, but I decided I might get more from her without Alex being there, especially if I were to use my photo lever on her.

"Well, I don't know about you two," I said, standing up, "but I'm going home to bed." And, I thought, to read Alex's e-mails.

I collected my "insulin" bag from the stairs, slung my rucksack onto my back and left the two lovebirds in the kitchen as I left the house by the front door. But I didn't walk off down the road. I removed the camera from my rucksack and went quickly down the side of the house to the rear garden and the kitchen window.

I had purposely left a small space at the bottom when I'd closed the blind, and I now put my eyes up close to the glass and looked in.

Alex and Julie really weren't very discreet. Making sure the flash was switched off, I took twenty or more photos through the window of them kissing, him sliding his hands inside her coat and pulling up her nightdress. Even though Julie's back was mostly towards the window, there was little doubt where Alex was placing his fingers, and my eighteen-times optical zoom Leica lens captured everything.

Presently, Julie cut the plastic ties from around Alex's ankles and they went, hand-in-hand, out of the kitchen and, I presumed, up the stairs to bed. Short of shinning up a drainpipe, I would see nothing more, and in spite of being called Tom, my artificial leg didn't lend itself readily to climbing up to peep through bedroom windows.

Even then I didn't return to Ian's car and go home. Instead, I went back down the side of the house and out into Bush Close, to where Julie had parked the white BMW. It was some way down the road, well beyond the glow from the streetlight outside number twelve. I tried the doors, but she had locked them, so I sat down on the pavement, leaned up against the passenger door and waited.

I was getting quite used to waiting, and thinking.

Alex Reece clearly received more than an average bonus after being away for five days in Gibraltar, and I was just beginning to think that Julie was staying for the whole night when, about an hour after I left, I saw her coming towards me through the pool of light produced by the solitary streetlamp.

I pulled myself to my feet using the car's door handle but I remained crouched down below the window level so Julie couldn't see me as she walked along the road. When she was about ten yards away, she pushed the remote unlock button on her key and the indicator lights flashed once in response. As she opened the driver's door to get in, I opened the passenger one to do likewise, so we ended up sitting down side by side with both doors slamming shut in unison.

Startled, she immediately tried to open the door again, but I grabbed her arm on the steering wheel.

"Don't," I said in my voice-of-command. "Just drive."

"Where to?" she said.

"Anywhere," I said with authority. "Now. Drive out of this road."

Julie started the car and reversed it into one of the driveways to turn around. In truth, it was not the best-performed driving-test maneuver, and there would probably be BMW tire marks on the front lawn of number eight in the morning, but at least she didn't hit anything, and I wasn't an examiner.

She pulled out into Water Lane and turned right towards Newbury, towards home. We went a few hundred yards in silence.

"OK," I said. "Pull over here."

She stopped the car at the side of the road.

"What do you want?" she said, rather forlornly.

"Just a little more help," I said.

"Can't you just leave us alone?"

"But why should I?" I exclaimed. "My mother has paid you more than sixty thousand pounds over the past seven months, and I think that entitles me to demand something from you."

"But Alex told you," she said. "You can't have it back. We've spent it."

"On what?" I asked.

She looked across at me. "What do you mean 'on what'?"

"What have you spent my mother's money on?"

"You mean you don't know?"

"No. How could I?"

She laughed. "Coke, of course. Lots of lovely coke."

I didn't think she meant Coca-Cola.

"And bottles of bubbly. Only the best, you know. Cases and cases of lovely Dom." She laughed again.

I realized that she must have been sampling one or the other during the past hour with Alex. It was not only fear that had caused her to drive on the grass. I couldn't smell alcohol on her breath, so it had to have been the coke.

"Does Ewen know you take cocaine?" I asked.

"Don't be fucking stupid," she said. "Ewen wouldn't know a line of coke if it ran up his nose. If it hasn't got four legs and a mane, Ewen couldn't care less. I think he'd much rather screw the bloody horses than me."