Dick Francis - Silks

Or in other words, I thought, we don’t object but, oh yes, we do after all. Anything to sound reasonable, while not actually being so.

The judge, God bless him, chose to hear only the first part of the QC’s statement.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘As the prosecution have no objection, I will allow a witness summons to be issued for each name. But be warned, Mr Mason, I will take a firm line if I consider that the defence is in any way wasting the court’s time. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Absolutely, My Lord,’ I said.

‘Will these witnesses be ready to be examined by this afternoon?’ asked the judge.

‘My lord,’ said the prosecution QC rising rapidly to his feet. ‘The prosecution requests more time to consider the names of these witnesses and to prepare for cross-examination.’

It was exactly as I had hoped, because I was not in any position to call my witnesses. Not yet, anyway.

‘Would you be ready by tomorrow?’ asked the judge.

‘We would prefer Monday, My Lord,’ said the smarmy QC.

‘Any objection, Mr Mason?’ asked the judge.

‘No, My Lord,’ I said, trying hard to keep a grin off my face. ‘No objection.’

‘Very well,’ said the judge. He was probably already looking forward to an extra day on the golf course. ‘Court is adjourned until ten o’clock on Monday morning.’

Excellent, I thought. Just what I had wanted, and just what I needed.

I ordered a taxi to take all my papers back to the hotel. I had previously been to the court office to get the witness summonses issued for Monday, and Bruce Lygon had departed eagerly to try and personally deliver them into the correct hands.

As I waited inside the court building lobby, I called Nikki.

‘I now have the documentation,’ she said excitedly. ‘It all came through this morning.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Now I have something else for you to do.’

‘Fire away,’ she said.

‘I need you to go to Newbury to ask some more questions,’ I said.

‘No problem,’ she replied.

I explained to her exactly what information I wanted her to find out, and where to get it.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Call you later.’

She hung up as my taxi arrived.

The taxi took me to the hotel and then waited as the porter carried all the boxes up to my room and I packed a few clothes into one of my new suitcases. Then the taxi took me and my suitcase to Oxford station, where we caught a fast train to London.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Arthur as I walked into chambers soon after noon.

‘The case has been adjourned until Monday,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Sir James will be ready to take over from me by then.’

‘Er,’ said Arthur, floundering. ‘I believe that his case is still running on.’

‘Arthur,’ I said sarcastically. ‘I pay you to lie for me, not to me.’

‘Sir James pays me more than you do,’ he said with a smile.

‘Just so long as we know where we stand,’ I said.

I had no intention of telling Sir James Horley anything about my new witnesses. The last thing I wanted was for him to now feel that the case wasn’t such a lost cause after all, and for him to step back in and hog all the limelight. No way was I going to let that happen.

I went through to my room and set about looking a few things up in my case files and then I telephoned Bob, the driver from the car comapny. I urgently needed some transportation.

‘I’ll be there in about half an hour,’ he said.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I have some more calls to make anyway.’

One of them was to my father on the new mobile phone I had bought him.

‘Having a nice time?’ I asked him.

‘I suppose so,’ he said, rather reluctantly. ‘But everyone else here is so old.’ Just like him, I thought, rather unkindly.

I had sent him to the seaside, to stay in the Victoria Hotel in Sidmouth, Devon, where he could walk along the beach each day and get plenty of healthy fresh air, and where, I hoped, Julian Trent wouldn’t think of looking for him.

Next I called Weatherbys, the company that administered British horse racing, the company that had paid Scot Barlow his riding fees as detailed on his bank statements. I needed some different information from them this time and they were most helpful in giving me the answers.

I also called Eleanor and left a message on her mobile phone.

She had left the Oxford hotel early in the morning to get back to work in Lambourn, but not so early that we hadn’t had time for a repeat of the previous evening’s lovemaking.

She called me back on my mobile as Bob drove me away from chambers.

‘I got my time from the judge,’ I said to her. ‘And the witness summonses, too.’

‘Well done you,’ she replied.

‘I’m in London,’ I said. ‘The judge adjourned until Monday morning. I’ve already been to my chambers, and I’m now on my way to Barnes to face the mess. And I’ll probably stay there tonight.’

‘I won’t plan to go to Oxford, then,’ she said, laughing.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t be back there until Sunday night.’

‘Sunday night!’ she said. ‘Don’t I get to see you before then?’

‘You could always come to London,’ I said.

‘I’m on call again,’ she said.

‘Isn’t anyone else ever on call?’ I asked.

‘It’s only for tonight,’ she said. ‘I could come tomorrow.’

‘I have plans for during the day tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And then I thought I’d come down to you for the night, if that’s OK.’

‘Great by me,’ she said.

The state of my home was worse than I had remembered. The stuff from the fridge that Trent had poured all over the kitchen had started to smell badly. It had been a warm May week with plenty of sunshine having streamed through the large windows into the airless space. The whole place reeked of rotting food.

I was sorry for my downstairs neighbours for having to live beneath it all for the past week, and I hoped for their sake that smells rose upwards like hot air.

I opened all the windows and let some fresh air in, which was a major improvement. Next I found an industrial cleaning company in the Yellow Pages and promised them a huge bonus if they would come round instantly to do an emergency clear-up job. No problem, they said, for a price, a very high price.

While I waited for them I used a whole can of air freshener that I found, undisturbed, beneath the kitchen sink. The lavender scent did its best to camouflage the stink of decomposing fish and rancid milk, but it was fighting a losing battle.

A team of four arrived from the cleaning company. They didn’t seem to be fazed one bit by the mess that, to my eyes, was still appalling.

‘Had a teenager’s party?’ one of them asked in all seriousness.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was malicious vandalism.’

‘Same thing,’ he said, laughing. ‘Now, is there anything you want to keep from this lot?’ He waved a hand around.

‘Don’t throw out anything that looks unbroken,’ I said. ‘And keep all the paperwork, whatever condition it’s in.’

‘Right,’ he said. He gave directions to his team and they set to work.

I was amazed at how quickly things began to improve. Two of them set to work with mops, cloths and brooms, while the other two removed the torn and broken furniture and stacked it on the back of their vehicle outside.

Within just a few hours the place was unrecognizable from the disgusting state that I had returned to. Most of the furniture was out, and the carpets and rugs had been pulled up. The kitchen had been transformed from a major health hazard into gleaming chrome and a sparkling floor. Maybe they couldn’t mend the cracks in the marble worktops, but they did almost everything else.