Dick Francis - Shattered

“My aunt’s name is Rose. She keeps changing her last name. She’s my mother’s sister.” There was barely an interval before his next remark. “I’d better log off now. She’s just come!”

“Wait.” Stunned by that revelation I rapidly typed, “Do you know of a thin old man with a white beard?”

A long time after I’d settled for no answer, three words appeared.

“Doctor Force. Good-bye.”

To my considerable delight Catherine Dodd again stood her motorbike by my curb and pulled off her helmet before walking across the sidewalk to the door I held open for her. It seemed natural to us both to kiss hello, and for her to stand in front of the soaring flight of wings that I had barely finished lighting.

“It’s tremendous.” She meant it. “It’s too good for Broadway.”

“Flattery will get you an awfully long way,” I assured her, and took her into the workshop, where it was warmest.

The sheet printed of my e-mail conversation with Victor lay folded on the marver table and I passed it to her to read. “What do you think?” I asked.

“I think you need better painkillers.”

“No... Think about Victor.”

She sat this time in the armchair on my promise that on the next day I would walk down the hill looking in secondhand and antique furniture shops to buy another one.

“If,” I amended to the promise, “if you will come and sit in it.”

She nodded as if it were an “of course” decision and read Victor’s e-mail. When she’d finished she laid the sheet on her black leather-clad knees and asked her own questions.

“OK,” she said. “First of all, remind me, who is Victor?”

“The fifteen-year-old grandson of Ed Payne, Martin Stukely’s racetrack valet. Ed gave me the videotape that was stolen from here, which you came to see about. Victor sent this letter to Martin.” I gave her the letter to read, which raised her eyebrows in doubt.

“Victor said he was playing games,” I acknowledged.

“You can’t believe a word he says!” Catherine agreed.

“Well, yes you can, actually. He’s made a game of actual bits of fact. Or anyway, he’s done what everyone does at some point — he’s heard one thing and thought it meant another.”

“The wrong end of the stick?” Catherine suggested. “How about the right end?”

“Well... the stick as I see it, then.” I stopped for a minute or two to make coffee, which in spite of her being off duty she said she preferred to wine. No milk, no sugar, cool rather than hot.

“Have to begin with a ‘suppose,’ ” I said.

“Suppose away.”

“Start with a white-bearded man who looks like a university lecturer and who might be called Doctor Force. Suppose that this Doctor Force has somehow got to know Martin. Doctor Force has some information he wants to put into safekeeping so he takes it to Cheltenham races and gives it to Martin.”

“Crazy.” Catherine sighed. “Why didn’t he put it in a bank?”

“We’ll have to ask him.”

“And you are crazy too. How do we find him?”

“It’s you,” I pointed out, smiling, “that is the police officer.”

“Well, I’ll try.” She smiled back. “And what then?”

“Then Doctor Force went to the races as planned. He gave his tape to Martin. After Martin crashed, our Doctor Force must have gone through a lot of doubt and worry, and I’d guess he stood around near the changing rooms wondering what to do. Then he saw Ed Payne give the tape in its brown-paper parcel to me, and he knew it was the right tape as he’d packed it himself.”

“You should join the police,” Catherine teased. “So OK, Doctor Force finds out who you are and takes himself here to Broadway, and when you leave your door unlocked for a spell in the new-age air, he nips in and takes back his own tape.”

“Right.”

“And steals your cash on impulse.”

“Right. But up to that point he hasn’t realized that there is someone else in the depths of the shop; and that’s Lloyd Baxter, who proceeds to have an epileptic fit.”

“Upsetting for Doctor White-Beard Force.” She spoke dryly.

I nodded. “He did a bunk.”

Catherine said thoughtfully, “One of our detective constables interviewed Lloyd Baxter in hospital. Mr. Baxter said he didn’t see anyone at all come into the showroom.”

“Lloyd Baxter didn’t care about getting the tape back, nor the money either. He did care very much about keeping his illness as private as possible.”

Catherine showed irritation. “However can we solve cases if people don’t give us the facts?”

“You must be used to it.”

She said that being used to something wrong didn’t make it right. The starchy disapproval common to her profession had surfaced briefly. Never forget, I told myself, that the inner crime fighter is always there, always on duty, and always part of her. She shook herself free of the moment and made a visible gear change back to a lighter approach.

“OK.” She nodded. “So Doctor Force has his tape back. Fine. So who squirted anesthetic at the Stukelys and took their TVs, and who ransacked your own house, and beat you up last night? And I don’t really understand how this boy Victor got involved.”

“I can’t answer everything, but think Rose.”

“Pink?”

“Rose. She is Ed Payne’s daughter, and Victor’s aunt. She’s sharp-featured, sharp-tongued, and I think is on the edge of criminal. She jumps a bit to conclusions, and she’s all the more dangerous for that.”

“For instance?”

“For instance... I’d guess it was she who stole all the videotapes in Bon-Bon’s house and mine because they could possibly have been mixed up with the one I brought from the racetrack.”

“But heavens!” Catherine exclaimed. “Tapes do so easily get mixed up.”

“Rose probably thought so too. I would think it likely that Rose chatters to her sister (Victor’s mother) quite a lot and I think it’s fairly certain that Victor did overhear her when she said she knew of a tape worth a fortune.”

If only Martin had explained what he was doing! There was too much guesswork, and definitely too much Rose.

Sighing, Catherine gave me back Victor’s printout and stood up, saying with apparent reluctance, “I have to go. I was so glad to find you here, but I’ve promised to be with my parents tonight. I was wondering, though, if you by any chance want to go to your house now, then — um — you don’t need a license to ride pillion.”

She necessarily shed the police half of herself. I got on the bike and clasped her close around her waist, having more or less strapped on her spare helmet, which was too small and into wobble. We set off insecurely, but the bike had guts enough to take us both up the hills without stuttering, and she was laughing when she stopped by the weedy entrance to my drive.

I thanked her for the ride. She roared off still laughing. I was conscious of wishing that Worthington, or failing him, Tom Pigeon and his Dobermans, were by my side, but there were no thorny briar Roses lying in wait this time. When I unlocked a side door and let myself in, it seemed that the house gave back in peace the years the Logan family had prospered there, father, mother and two sons, each in a different way. I was the only one left, and with its ten rooms still filled with sharp memories, I’d made no move to find a smaller or more suitable lair. One day, perhaps. Meanwhile the house felt like home in all senses: home to me, the home of all who’d lived there.

I walked deliberately through all the rooms thinking of Catherine, wondering both if she would like the place, and whether the house would accept her in return. Once in the past the house had delivered a definite thumbs-down, and once I’d been given an ultimatum to smother the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper as a condition of marriage, but to the horror of her family I’d backed out of the whole deal, and as a result, I now used the house as arbiter and had disentangled myself from a later young woman who’d begun to refer to her and me as “an item” and to reply to questions as “we.” We think.