Dick Francis: Twice Shy

Dear God.

'So then this Angelo sort of exploded and started trying to get his stake back.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Well,' Taff said cheerfully. 'It all makes a change, though I reckon those goons in the cheap ring would have done better to keep their mouths shut. That Angelo was a bit of a golden goose and after this he won't lay no more golden eggs.'

I drove home with a feeling that the seas were closing over my head. Whatever I did to try to disentangle myself from Angelo it seemed that I slid further into the coils.

He was never, after this, going to believe that I hadn't tricked him on purpose. Even if I could at last get him the real correct system, he wouldn't forgive me the bets lost, the sneers of the bookmakers, the click of those handcuffs.

The police might hold him overnight, I thought, but not much longer: I doubted if one punch and a few yells would upset his parole. But to the tally in his mind would be added a night in the cells to rankle with those in my cellar – and if he'd come out of prison angry enough to attack me with nothing against me but the fact of my being Jonathan's brother, how much more would he now come swinging.

Cassie had long been home when I finally got there and was buoyantly pleased with the prospect of having the plaster off her arm on the following afternoon. She had arranged a whole day off from work and had thanked the groper for the last time, confident that she would be able to drive more or less at once. She was humming in the kitchen while I cooked some spaghetti for supper and I kissed her abstractedly and thought of Angelo and wished him dead with all my heart.

Before we had finished eating, the telephone rang and, most unexpectedly, it was Ted Pitts calling from Switzerland. His voice, on the whole, was as cool as the Alps.

Thought I'd better apologise,' he said.

'It's kind of you.'

'Jane's disgusted with me. She told me to ring you at once. She said it was urgent. So here I am. Sorry, and all that.'

'I just wondered,' I said hopelessly, 'why you did it.'

'Mashed up the weightings?'

'Yes.'

'You'll think I'm mean. Jane says I'm so mean she's ashamed of me. She's furious. She says all our wealth is due to Jonathan, and I've played the most rotten trick on Jonathan's brother. She's hardly speaking to me she's so cross.'

'Well… why?' I said.

He did at least seem to want me to understand. He spoke earnestly, explaining, excusing, telling me the destructive truth. 'I don't know. It was an impulse. I was making those copies and I suddenly thought I don't want to part with this system. I don't want anyone else to have it. It's mine. Not Jonathan's, just mine. He didn't even want it, and I've had it to myself all these years, and I've added to it and made it my own. It belongs to me. It's mine. And there you were, just asking for it as if I would give it to you as of right, and I suddenly thought why should I? So I just quickly changed a lot of the weightings. I didn't have time to test them. I had to guess. I altered just enough, I thought, but it seems I did too much. Otherwise you wouldn't have checked… I intended that when you used the system, you wouldn't win enough to think it worth all the work, and you'd get tired of it.' He paused. 'I was jealous of you having it, if you really want to know,'

'I wish you'd told me…'

'If I'd said I didn't want to give it to you, Jane would have made me. She says I must now. She's so cross.'

'If you would,' I said, 'you might save me a lot of grief.'

'Make your fortune, you mean.' The apology, it seemed, hadn't come from the heart: he still sounded resentful that I should be learning his secrets.

I thought again about telling him about Angelo but it still seemed to me that he might think it the best reason for not giving me the system that I could devise, so I said merely, 'It could work for two people, couldn't it? If someone else had it, it wouldn't stop you yourself winning as much as ever.'

'I suppose,' he said grudgingly, 'that that's true.'

'So… when do you come home?'

'The week after next.'

I was silent. Appalled. By the week after next heaven knew what Angelo would have done.

Ted Pitts said with half-suppressed annoyance, 'I suppose you've betted heavily on the wrong horses and lost too much, and now you need bailing out a lot sooner than the week after next?'

I didn't dispute it.

'Jane's furious. She's afraid I've cost you more than you can afford. Well, I'm sorry.' He didn't truly sound it.

'Could she find the tapes to give to me?' I said humbly.

'How soon do you need them?'

'More or less at once. Tonight, if possible.'

'Hmph.' He thought for a few moments. 'All right. All right. But you can save yourself the journey, if you like.'

'Er, how?'

'Do you have a tape recorder?'

'Yes.'

'Jane can play the tapes to you over the telephone. They'll sound like a lot of screeching. But if you've a half-way decent recorder the programs will run all right on a computer.'

'Good heavens.'

'A lot of computer programs whiz round the world on telephones every day,' he said. 'And up to the satellites and down again. Nothing extraordinary in it.'

To me it did seem extraordinary, but then I wasn't Ted Pitts. I thanked him with more intensity than he knew for his trouble in ringing me up.

'Thank Jane,' he said.

I did thank her, sincerely, five minutes later.

'You sounded in such trouble,' she said. 'I told Ted I'd sent you to Ruth because you'd wanted to check the tapes, and he groaned, so I asked him why… and when he told me what he'd done I was just furious. To think of you wasting your precious money when everything we have is thanks to Jonathan.'

Her kindness made me feel guilty. I said, 'Ted said you could play the real tapes to me over the telephone- if you wouldn't mind.'

'Oh yes, all right. I've seen Ted do it often. He and Ruth are always swopping programs that way. I've got the tapes here beside me. I made Ted tell me where to find them. I'll go and get the recorder now, if you'll hang on, and then I'll play them to you straight away.'

I had called her from the office because of the message-recorder already fitted to that telephone, and when she returned I recorded the precious programs on Luke's supply of fresh unused tapes which might not have been of prime computer standard but were all the same a better bet, I reckoned, than trying to record new machine language on top of old.

Cassie came into the office and listened to the scratchy whining noises running on and on and on.

'Horrible,' she said: but to me, sweet music. A ransom to the future. Passport to a peaceful world. In a sudden uprush of optimism entirely at variance with the gloom of my drive home from Leicester, I convinced myself that this time, now that we had the genuine article, our troubles would come to an end. The solution was still, as it had always been, to make Angelo rich, and at last it could be done.

'I'll give these tapes to Angelo,' I said, 'and we'll go away from the cottage for just a while, a few weeks, just until he's won enough not to want his revenge. And we'll be free of him at last, thank God.'

'Where shall we go?'

'Not far. Decide tomorrow.'

When three tapes were full and the noises fell quiet I switched off the recording part of the machine and spoke again to Jane.

'I'm very grateful,' I said. 'More than I can say.'

'My dear William, I'm so sorry…'

'Don't be,' I said. 'You've saved my life.' Quite literally, probably, I thought. 'Everything,' I said, 'will be all right.'

One shouldn't say such things. One really shouldn't.

Cassie came with me in the early morning to see the horses work on the Heath, shivering a little in boots, trousers and padded husky jacket, but glad, she said, to be alive in the free air and the wide spaces. Her breath, like mine, like that of all the horses, spurted out in lung-shaped plumes of condensing vapour, chilled and gone in a second and quickly renewed, cold transformed to heat within the miracle of bodies.