Dick Francis - Shattered

The drizzly rain slowly stopped.

The instructions for the meeting had been “Turn left, proceed to statue,” and along the path, by a prancing copper horse, I met a tall, civilized, sensible-looking man who established to his own satisfaction that I was the person he expected.

He spoke as if to himself. “He’s six feet tall, maybe an inch or two more. Brown hair. Dark eyes. Twenty-eight to thirty-four years, I’d say. Personable except for recent injury to right side of jaw which has been medically attended to and is healing.”

He was talking into a small microphone held in the palm of his hand. I let him see that I understood that he was describing me in case I attacked him in any fashion. The notion that I might do that would have made me laugh on any other day.

“He arrived in a gray Rover.” He repeated Jim’s registration number and then described my clothes.

When he stopped I said, “He’s a glassblower named Gerard Logan and can be found at Logan Glass, Broadway, Worcestershire. And who are you?”

He was the voice on the telephone. He laughed at my dry tone and stuffed the microphone away in a pocket. He gave himself a name, George Lawson-Young, and a title, Professor of Respiratory Medicine.

“And 2355697?” I asked. “Does it have an address?”

Even with modern technology he didn’t know how I’d found him.

“Old-fashioned perseverance and guesswork,” I said. “I’ll tell you later in return for the gen on Adam Force.”

I liked the professor immediately, feeling none of the reservations that had troubled me with Force. Professor Lawson-Young had no ill will that I could see, but on the contrary let his initial wariness slip away. My first impression of good-humored and solid sense progressively strengthened, so that when he asked what my interest in Adam Force was I told him straightforwardly about Martin’s promise to keep safe Doctor Force’s tape.

“Martin wanted me to keep it for him instead,” I said, “and when he died the tape came into my hands. Force followed me to Broadway and took his tape back again, and I don’t know where it is.”

Out on the road Jim in the gray Rover drove slowly by, his pale face through the window on watch on my behalf.

“I came with a bodyguard,” I said, waving reassurance to the road.

Professor Lawson-Young, amused, confessed he had only to yell down his microphone for assistance to arrive at once. He seemed as glad as I was that he would not have to use it. His tight muscles loosened. My own Worthington-Pigeon-driven alertness went to sleep.

The professor said, “How did you cut your face so deeply?”

I hesitated. What I’d done in the backyard of 19 Lorna Terrace sounded too foolish altogether. Because I didn’t reply Lawson-Young asked again with sharper interest, pressing for the facts like any dedicated newsman. I said undramatically that I’d been in a fight and come off worst.

He asked next what I’d been fighting about, and with whom, his voice full of the authority that he no doubt needed in his work.

Evading the whole truth, I gave him at least a part of it. “I wanted to find Doctor Force, and in the course of doing that I collided with a water tap. Clumsy, I’m afraid.”

He looked at me intently with his head on one side. “You’re lying to me, I’m sorry to say.”

“Why do you think so?”

“It’s unusual to fight a water tap.”

I gave him a half-strength grin. “OK then, I got hit with one that was still on a hose. It’s unimportant. I learned how to find Adam Force, and I talked to him yesterday in Lynton.”

“Where in Lynton? In that new nursing home?”

“Phoenix House.” I nodded. “Doctor Force’s clinic looks designed for children.”

“Not for children. For mentally handicapped patients. He does good work there with the elderly, I’m told.”

“They seemed pretty happy, it’s true.”

“So what’s your take-away opinion?”

I gave it without much hesitation. “Force is utterly charming when he wants to be, and he’s also a bit of a crook.”

“Only a bit?” The professor sighed. “Adam Force was in charge here of a project aimed at abolishing snoring by using fine optical fibers and microlasers...” He briefly stopped. “I don’t want to bore you...”

My own interest, however, had awoken sharply as in the past I’d designed and made glass equipment for that sort of inquiry. When I explained my involvement, the professor was in his turn astonished. He enlarged into detail the work that Force had been busy with and had stolen.

“We’d been experimenting with shining a microlaser down a fine optical fiber placed in the soft tissues of the throat. The microlaser gently warms the tissues, which stiffens them, and that stops a person from snoring. What Adam Force stole was our results of the trials to find the optimum laser light wavelength needed to penetrate the tissues and heat them to the precise temperature necessary... do you follow?”

“More or less.”

He nodded. “A reliable way of abolishing snoring would be invaluable for severe sufferers. Adam Force stole such data and sold it to a firm of marketers whose business it is to advertise and inform prospective buyers of goods available. Force sold our latest but incomplete data to people we had dealt with occasionally before and who had no reason to suspect anything was wrong. Adam produced the right paperwork. It was weeks before the theft was discovered and really no one could believe it when we went to the marketers and they told us they had already bought the material and paid Adam Force for what we were now trying to sell them.”

“So you sacked him,” I commented.

“Well, we should have. He must have thought we might, but he was crucial to our research program.” The professor, however, looked regretful, not enraged.

I said, “Let me guess, you basically let him off. You didn’t prosecute him because you all liked him so much.”

Lawson-Young ruefully nodded. “Adam apologized more or less on his knees and agreed to pay the money back in installments, if we didn’t take him to court.”

“And did he?”

In depression the professor said, “He paid on the dot for two months, and then we found he was trying to sell some even more secret information... and I mean priceless information in world terms...” He stopped abruptly, apparently silenced by the enormity of Adam Force’s disloyalty.

Eventually he went on. “He repaid us for our generosity by stealing the most recent, the most dynamite-laden data in our whole laboratory, and we are certain that he is offering this work to the highest bid he can raise around the world. This is the information recorded on the tape Force took back from you, and it is this tape we have been praying you would find.”

I said with incredulity, “But you didn’t know that I existed.”

“We did know you existed. Our investigators have been very diligent. But we weren’t sure you hadn’t been indoctrinated by Adam, like your friend Stukely.”

“Martin?”

“Oh yes. Force can be utterly charming and persuasive, as you know. We think it likely he also swindled Stukely of a fairly large sum of money, saying it was to be applied to our research.”

“But,” I protested, “Martin wasn’t a fool.”

“It is quite likely that Stukely had no idea that the contents of the tape had been stolen. Believe me, you don’t need to be a fool to be taken in by a con man. I wouldn’t consider myself a fool, but he took me in. I treated him as a friend.”

I said, “Wherever did Martin meet Doctor Force? I don’t suppose you know.”

“I actually do. They met at a fund-raising dinner for cancer research. Adam Force was there raising money on behalf of the charity, and Stukely was there as a guest of a man for whom he raced, who was also a patron of the charity. I too as it happens am a patron, and I also saw Martin Stukely briefly on that evening.”