Dick Francis - Shattered

I gladly handed over another installment of treasure, as the hidden drawer proved to stretch across the whole width of the desk under the top surface, and to be about four inches deep. Daniel patiently showed me how it opened and closed. Observant and quick-witted, he offered other discoveries with glee, especially when I gave him a coin for every good hiding place with nothing in it. He found four. He jingled the coins.

Bon-Bon, searching the desk drawer, found with blushing astonishment a small bunch of love letters from her that Martin had saved. She took them over to the black leather sofa and wept big slow tears, while I told her that her son knew the so-called secret drawer wasn’t a secret at all but was a built-in feature of the modern desk.

“It’s designed to hold a laptop computer,” I told Bon-Bon. “Martin just didn’t keep a laptop in it, as he used that tabletop one over there, the one with the full keyboard and the screen.”

“How do you know?”

“Daniel says so.”

Bon-Bon said through her tears, “How disappointing it all is,” and picked up a tissue for mopping.

I, however, found the laptop drawer seething with interest, if not with secrets, as apart from Adam Force’s letter to Martin, there was a photocopy of Martin’s letter to Force, an affair not much longer than the brief reply.

It ran:

Dear Adam Force,

I have now had time to consider the matter of your formulae and methods. Please will you go ahead and record these onto the videotape as you suggested and take it to Cheltenham races on New Year’s Eve. Give it to me there, whenever you see me, except, obviously, not when I’m on my way out to race.

Yours ever,

I stared not just at the letter, but at its implications.

Daniel looked over my shoulder, and asked what formulae were. “Are they secrets?” he said.

“Sometimes.”

When Bon-Bon had read the last loving letter and had dried her tears, I asked her how well Martin had known Doctor Adam Force.

With eyes darkened from crying, she said she didn’t know. She regretted desperately all the hours the two of them had spent in pointless arguing. “We never discussed anything without quarreling. You know what we were like. But I loved him... and he loved me, I know he did.”

They had quarreled and loved, both intensely, throughout the four years I’d known them. It was too late to wish that Martin had confided more in her, even in spite of her chattering tongue, but together for once they had decided that it should be I and not Bon-Bon who held Martin’s secret for safekeeping.

What secret? What secret? Dear God.

Alone in the den since Bon-Bon and Daniel had gone upstairs to the other children, I sorted through everything in the drawer, putting many loose letters in heaps according to subject. There were several used old checkbooks with sums written on the stubs but quite often not dates or payees. Martin must have driven his accountant crazy. He seemed simply to have thrust tax papers, receipts, payments and earnings haphazardly into his out-of-sight drawer.

Semi-miracles occasionally happen, though, and on one stub, dated November 1999 (no actual day), I came across the plain name Force (no Doctor, no Adam). On the line below there was the single word BELLOWS, and in the box for the amount of money being transferred out of the account there were three zeros, 000, with no whole numbers and no decimal points.

Searches through three other sets of stubs brought to light a lot of similar unfinished records: Martin deserved secrets, curse him, when he wrote so many himself.

The name Force appeared again on a memo pad, when a Martin handwriting scrawl said, “Force, Bristol, Wednesday if P. doesn’t declare Legup at Newton Abbot.”

Legup at Newton Abbot... Say Legup was a horse and Newton Abbot the racetrack where he was entered... I stood up from Martin’s desk and started on the form books in his bookcase, but although Legup had run in about eight races in the fall and spring over four or five years, and seldom, as it happened, on Wednesdays, there wasn’t any mention of days he’d been entered but stayed at home.

I went back to the drawer.

A loose-leaf notebook, the most methodically kept of all his untidy paperwork, appeared as a gold mine of order compared with all the rest. It listed, with dates, amounts given by Martin to Eddie Payne, his racetrack valet, since the previous June 1. It included even the day he died, when he’d left a record of his intentions.

As there was, to my understanding, a pretty rigid scale of pay from jockeys to valets, the notebook at first sight looked less important than half the neglected rest, but on the first page Martin had doodled the names of Ed Payne, Rose Payne, Gina Verity and Victor. In a box in a corner, behind straight heavy bars, he’d written Waltman. There were small sketches of Ed in his apron, Gina in her curlers, Victor with his computer and Rose... Rose had a halo of spikes.

Martin had known this family, I reflected, for almost as long as Ed had been his valet. When Martin had received the letter from Victor Waltman Verity, he would have known it was a fifteen-year-old’s game. Looking back, I could see I hadn’t asked the right questions, because I’d been starting from the wrong assumptions.

With a sigh I put down the notebook and read through the letters, most of which were from the owners of horses that Martin’s skill had urged first past the post. All the letters spoke of the esteem given to an honest jockey and none of them had the slightest relevance to secrets on videotapes.

A 1999 diary came next, though I found it not in the drawer but on top of the desk, put there by one of the children. It was a detailed jockey’s diary, with all race meetings listed. Martin had circled everywhere he’d ridden, with the names of his mounts. He had filled in Tallahassee on the last day of the century, the last day of his life.

I lolled in Martin’s chair, both mourning him and wishing like hell that he could come back alive just for five minutes.

My mobile phone, lying on the desk, gave out its brisk summons and, hoping it was Catherine, I pushed “send.”

It wasn’t Catherine.

Victor’s cracked voice spoke hurriedly.

“Can you come to Taunton on Sunday? Please say you will catch the same train as before. I’m running out of money for this phone. Please say yes.”

I listened to the urgency, to the virtual panic.

I said, “Yes, OK,” and the line went dead.

I would have gone blithely unwarned to Taunton on that Sunday if it hadn’t been for Worthington shouting in alarm over crackling lines from a mountaintop.

“Haven’t you learned the first thing about not walking into an ambush?”

“Not Victor,” I protested. “He wouldn’t lure me into a trap.”

“Oh yeah? And does the sacrificial lamb understand he’s for the chop?”

Lamb chop or not, I caught the train.

Tom Pigeon, who lived within walking distance with his three energetic Dobermans, strolled to the gallery door of Logan Glass late on Saturday morning and invited me out for a beer in a local pub. Any bar, but not the Dragon’s across the road, he said.

With the dogs quietly tied to a bench outside, Tom Pigeon drank deep on a pint in a crowded dark inn and told me that Worthington thought that I had more nerve than sense when it came to the Verity-Paynes.

“Mm. Something about a wasps’ nest,” I agreed. “When, exactly, did he talk to you?”

Tom Pigeon looked at me over the rim of his glass as he swallowed the dregs. “He said you were no slouch in the brain box. He told me this morning.” He smiled. “He phoned from Gstaad. Only the best for his lady employer, of course.”