Dick Francis - Silks

She was absolutely horrified at the damage and I was pleased that she cared. For me, over the past couple of hours since I had first discovered it, I had grown somehow accustomed to the mess, anaesthetized by its familiarity. Seen through a fresh pair of eyes, the true scale of the devastation was indeed shocking.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my stuff – I cared a lot. It was just that the loss of everything fitted in quite well with the feeling I had of moving on, of starting again. Perhaps it might even make things easier.

‘Have you called the police?’ she asked.

‘They’ve just left,’ I said. ‘They didn’t hold out much hope of catching whoever did this.’

‘But Geoffrey,’ she said seriously. ‘This isn’t some random attack by an opportunistic vandal. This was targeted directly at you personally.’ She paused and fingered a tear in my sofa. ‘You must have some idea who did this.’

I said nothing. It was answer enough.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

We sat amid the wreckage of my home for two hours while I told her what I knew about Julian Trent and his apparent connection with the murder of Scot Barlow. I told her how I shouldn’t be acting in this case and how I had withheld information from the police and from my colleagues. I told her about Josef Hughes and George Barnett. And I told her about seeing Trent standing behind her at Cheltenham races before the Fox-hunter Chase. I showed her the photograph I had received in the white envelope showing her walking down the path near the hospital in Lambourn. I had kept it in the pocket of the jacket I’d been wearing, and it had consequently survived the demolition.

She held the photograph in slightly shaking hands and went quite pale.

I dug around in the kitchen and finally found a pair of unbroken plastic mugs and a bottle of mineral water from the fridge.

‘I’d rather have some wine,’ Eleanor said.

My designer chrome wine rack, along with its dozen bottles of expensive claret that a client had given me as a gift for getting him off a drink-driving charge of which he had really been guilty, lay smashed and mangled, a red stain spreading inexorably across the mushroom-coloured rug that lay in my hallway.

I went back to the fridge and discovered an unbroken bottle of champagne nestling in a door rack. So we sat on my ruined sofa next to the damp ceiling plaster and amongst the other carnage, and drank vintage Veuve Clicquot out of plastic mugs. How romantic was that?

‘But why didn’t you tell me about this photo sooner?’ she asked accusingly. ‘I might have been in danger.’

‘I don’t believe you are in real danger as long as Trent, or whoever is behind him, still thinks I will do as they say. It’s the threat of danger that’s their hold.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Eleanor asked. ‘How can you defeat this Trent man? Surely you have to go to the police and tell them.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said inadequately.

‘Darling,’ she said, using the term for the first time, and raising my eyebrows. ‘You absolutely have to go to the authorities and explain everything to them. Let them deal with the little horror.’

‘It really isn’t that simple,’ I said to her. ‘In an ideal world, then yes, that would be the best route, but we don’t live in an ideal world. For a start, doing that might cost me my career.’

‘Surely not,’ she said.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I have been very economical with the truth in a business where it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. In fact I have told outright lies to the police, and the law is pretty unforgiving of lies. I may have even been guilty of holding the court in contempt. I have certainly misled the court and that is the most heinous of crimes for a barrister. That alone is enough to get disbarred.’

‘But you have a good reason,’ she said.

‘Yes, indeed I have,’ I said. ‘I was scared. And I still am. When I saw Trent outside my chambers yesterday I was so scared I nearly wet myself. But all that will have little bearing for the court. I know. I have dealt with intimidation in some form or other almost every week of my working life and, until recently, I was like every other lawyer who would tell their client not to be such a wimp and to tell the truth no matter what the consequences. The courts are not very forgiving of those who fail to tell the truth, even if they are frightened out of their wits. I’ve seen witnesses sent to prison for the night because they refuse to tell the judge something they know but are too afraid to say. People don’t understand until it happens to them. And it’s happening to me now. Look around you. Do you think I wanted this to happen?’

I was almost in tears. And they were tears of frustration.

‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked finally.

‘I am going to defeat him by getting Steve Mitchell acquitted,’ I said. ‘The only problem is that I’m not quite sure how I’m going to manage it.’

‘But then what?’ she said. ‘He won’t just go away.’

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,’ I said with a laugh. But it wasn’t really a laughing matter.

‘But won’t that get you even deeper into trouble?’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But at least if Mitchell gets convicted he would then have grounds for an appeal. And I’m sure he didn’t murder anyone.’

‘Does the picture of Millie help?’ she asked.

‘It might,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

‘Here,’ she said, pulling out a digital camera from her handbag. ‘It’s not that good. That photo frame was in the background of some pictures I took in Millie’s room when we had a drinks party there for her birthday. I thought about it during a boring lecture this morning after what you said last night. I checked when I got home and there it was.’ She smiled in triumph.

She turned on the camera and scrolled through the pictures until she arrived at one of three girls standing with glasses in their hands in front of a mantelpiece. And there between the heads of two of them could be clearly seen the frame and the missing photo. Eleanor zoomed in on the image.

‘Amazing things, these cameras,’ she said. ‘Over eight million pixels, whatever that means.’

It meant that she could zoom right in and fill the whole screen with the picture of Millie Barlow with Peninsula’s head in her lap with the mare standing behind with the stud groom. At such a magnification it was a little blurred but it was just as Eleanor had described it.

‘Well?’ she said as I studied the image.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It surely has to be important, otherwise why was it stolen from Barlow’s house? But I just can’t see why. It must be something to do with the stud groom, but I don’t recognize him. You can see his face quite clearly in spite of the blurring, but I’m certain I’ve never seen him before. It’s not Julian Trent, that’s for sure.’ Somehow I had suspected that it might have been.

Eleanor spent her second night in my house and, this time, she didn’t sleep in the room with the teddy bears’ picnic wallpaper. She slept alone in my bed, or what was left of it, while I dozed fully clothed on the torn-up sofa downstairs with my crutches close to hand. Neither of us felt that it had been the right circumstance to make any further moves towards each other and I was still worried that, with a broken window in the utility room, my castle was far from secure.

I woke early with the daylight, and what it revealed was no better than it had been the night before.

Julian Trent had been vindictive in his approach to the destruction and had even cut up my passport. It wasn’t that I couldn’t replace what he had destroyed, but he had made my life so much more complicated and annoying. Where did one start to get rid of all this mess?