Dick Francis - Odds against

‘Sit on Dolly’s, she’s kept it dusted for you.’

Dolly looked at Chico, smiling, the mother-hunger showing too vividly in her great blue eyes. She might be the second best head of department the agency possessed, with a cross-referencing filing-index mind like a computer, she might be a powerful, large, self-assured woman of forty-odd with a couple of marriages behind her and an ever hopeful old bachelor at her heels, but she still counted her life a wasteland because her body couldn’t produce children. Dolly was a terrific worker, overflowing with intensely female vitality, excellent drinking company, and very, very sad.

Chico didn’t want to be mothered. He was prickly about mothers. All of them in general, not just those who abandoned their tots in push-chairs at police stations near Barnes Bridge. He jollied Dolly along and deftly avoided her tentative maternal invitations.

I hitched a hip on to a long accustomed spot on the edge of Dolly’s desk, and swung my leg.

‘Well, Dolly my love, how’s the sleuthing trade?’ I said.

‘What we need,’ she said with mock tartness, ‘is a bit more work from you and a lot less lip.’

‘Give me a job, then.’

‘Ah, now.’ She pondered. ‘You could…’ she began, then stopped. ‘Well, no… perhaps not. And it had better be Chico who goes to Lambourn; some trainer there wants a doubtful lad checked on…’

‘So there’s nothing for me?’

‘Er… well…’ said Dolly. ‘No.’ She had said no a hundred times before. She had never once said yes.

I made a face at her, picked up her telephone, pressed the right button, and got through to Radnor’s secretary.

‘Joanie? This is Sid Halley. Yes… back from Beyond, that’s it. Is the old man busy? I’d like a word with him.’

‘Big deal,’ said Chico.

Joanie’s prim voice said, ‘He’s got a client with him just now. When she’s gone I’ll ask him, and ring you back.’

‘O.K.’ I put down the receiver.

Dolly raised her eyebrows. As head of the department she was my immediate boss, and in asking direct for a session with Radnor I was blowing agency protocol a raspberry. But I was certain that her constant refusal to give me anything useful to do was a direct order from Radnor. If I wanted the drain unblocked I would have to go and pull out the plug. Or go on my knees to stay at all.

‘Dolly, love, I’m tired of kicking my heels. Even against your well-worn desk, though the view from here is ravishing.’ She was wearing, as she often did, a cross-over cream silk shirt: it crossed over at a point which on a young girl would have caused a riot. On Dolly it still looked pretty potent, owing to the generosity of nature and the disposal of her arrangements.

‘Are you chucking it in?’ said Chico, coming to the point.

‘It depends on the old man,’ I said. ‘He may be chucking me out.’

There was a brief, thoughtful silence in the department. They all knew very well how little I did. How little I had been content to do. Dolly looked blank, which wasn’t helpful.

Jones-boy clattered in with a tray of impeccable unchipped tea mugs. He was sixteen; noisy, rude, anarchistic, callous, and probably the most efficient office boy in London. His hair grew robustly nearly down to his shoulders, wavy and fanatically clean, dipping slightly in an expensive styling at the back. From behind he looked like a girl, which never disconcerted him. From in front his bony, acned face proclaimed him unprepossessingly male. He spent half his pay packet and his Sundays in Carnaby Street and the other half on week nights chasing girls. According to him, he caught them. No girls had so far appeared in the office to corroborate his story.

Under the pink shirt beat a stony heart; inside the sprouting head hung a big ‘So What?’ Yet it was because this amusing, ambitious, unsocial creature invariably arrived well before his due hour to get his office arrangements ready for the day that he had found me before I died. There was a moral there, somewhere.

He gave me a look. ‘The corpse has returned, I see.’

‘Thanks to you,’ I said idly, but he knew I meant it. He didn’t care, though.

He said, ‘Your blood and stuff ran through a crack in the linoleum and soaked the wood underneath. The old man was wondering if it would start dry rot or something.’

‘Jones-boy,’ protested Dolly, looking sick. ‘Get the hell out of here, and shut up.’

The telephone rang on her desk. She picked it up and listened, said, ‘All right,’ and disconnected.

‘The old man wants to see you. Right away.’

‘Thanks.’ I stood up.

‘The flipping boot?’ asked Jones-boy interestedly.

‘Keep your snotty nose out,’ said Chico.

‘And balls to you…’

I went out smiling, hearing Dolly start to deal once again with the running dog fight Chico and Jones-boy never tired of. Downstairs, across the hall, into Joanie’s little office and through into Radnor’s.

He was standing by the window, watching the traffic doing its nut in the Cromwell Road. This room, where the clients poured out their troubles, was restfully painted a quiet grey, carpeted and curtained in crimson and furnished with comfortable arm-chairs, handy little tables with ashtrays, pictures on the walls, ornaments, and vases of flowers. Apart from Radnor’s small desk in the corner, it looked like an ordinary sitting-room, and indeed everyone believed that he had bought the room intact with the lease, so much was it what one would expect to find in a graceful, six-storeyed, late Victorian town house. Radnor had a theory that people exaggerated and distorted facts less in such peaceful surroundings than in the formality of a more orthodox office.

‘Come in, Sid,’ he said. He didn’t move from the window, so I joined him there. He shook hands.

‘Are you sure you’re fit enough to be here? You haven’t been as long as I expected. Even knowing you…’ he smiled slightly, with watching eyes.

I said I was all right. He remarked on the weather, the rush-hour and the political situation, and finally worked round to the point we both knew was at issue.

‘So, Sid, I suppose you’ll be looking around a bit now?’

Laid on the line, I thought.

‘If I wanted to stay here…’

‘If? Hm, I don’t know.’ He shook his head very slightly.

‘Not on the same terms, I agree.’

‘I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out.’ He sounded genuinely regretful, but he wasn’t making it easy.

I said with careful calm. ‘You’ve paid me for nothing for two years. Well, give me a chance now to earn what I’ve had. I don’t really want to leave.’

He lifted his head slightly like a pointer to a scent, but he said nothing. I ploughed on.

‘I’ll work for you for nothing, to make up for it. But only if it’s real, decent work. No more sitting around. It would drive me mad.’

He gave me a hard stare and let out a long breath like a sigh.

‘Good God. At last,’ he said. ‘And it took a bullet to do it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sid, have you ever seen a zombie wake up?’

‘No,’ I said ruefully, understanding him. ‘It hasn’t been as bad as that?’

He shrugged one shoulder. ‘I saw you racing, don’t forget. You notice when a fire goes out. We’ve had the pleasant, flippant ashes drifting round this office, that’s all.’ He smiled deprecatingly at his flight of fancy: he enjoyed making pictures of words. It wasted a lot of office time, on the whole.

‘Consider me alight again, then,’ I grinned. ‘And I’ve brought a puzzle back with me. I want very much to sort it out.’

‘A long story?’

‘Fairly, yes.’

‘We’d better sit down, then.’