Dick Francis: Hot Money

"Yes," I said, "I do see." Shouting, slammed doors, the lot.

"They were all lovey-dovey when I first came here," he said, "but then I reckon her little ways got to him, like, and you could see it all going downhill like a runaway train. I'm here all day long, see, and in and out of the house, and you couldn't miss it."

"What little ways?" I asked casually.

He glanced at me sideways with reawakening suspicions. "I thought you were his son. You must have known her."

"I didn't come here. I didn't like her."

He seemed to find that easily believable.

"She could be as sweet as sugar…" He paused, remembering. "I don't know what you'd call it, really, what she was. But for instance, last year, as well as the ordinary vegetables for the house, I grew a special little patch separately… fed them, and so on… to enter in the local show. just runner beans, carrots and onions, for one of the produce classes. I'm good at that, see? Well, Mrs Pembroke happened to spot them a day or two before I was ready to harvest. On the Thursday, with the show on the Saturday. What huge vegetables,' she says, and I tell her I'm going to exhibit them on Saturday. And she looks at me sweet as syrup and says, Oh no, Arthur. Mr Pembroke and I both like vegetables, as you know. We'll have some of these for dinner tomorrow and I'll freeze the rest. They are our vegetables, aren't they, Arthur? If you want to grow vegetables to show, you must do it in your own garden in your own time.' And blow me, when I came to work the next morning, the whole little patch had been picked over, beans, carrots, onions, the lot. She'd taken them, right enough. Pounds and pounds of them, all the best ones. Maybe they ate some, but she never did bother with the freezing. On the Monday, I found a load of the beans in the dustbin."

"Charming," I said.

He shrugged. "That was her sort of way. Mean, but within her rights."

"I wonder you stayed," I said.

"It's a nice garden, and I get on all right with Mr Pembroke."

"But after he left?"

"He asked me to stay on to keep the place decent. He paid me extra, so I did."

Walking slowly, we arrived back at the kitchen door. He smelled faintly of compost and old leaves and the warm fertility of loam, like the gardener who'd reigned in this place in my childhood.

"I grew up here," I said, feeling nostalgia.

He gave me a considering stare. "Are you the one who built the secret room?"

Startled, I said, "It's not really a room. just a sort of triangular-shaped space."

"How do you open it?"

"You don't."

"I could use it," he said obstinately, "for an apple store."

I shook my head. "It's too small. It's not ventilated. It's useless, really. How do you know of it?"

He pursed his lips and looked knowing. "I could see the kitchen garden wall looked far too thick from the back down at the bottom corner and I asked old Fred about it, who used to be gardener here before he retired. He said Mr Pembroke's son once built a sort of shed there. But there's no door, I told him. He said it was the son's business, he didn't know anything about it himself, except that he thought it had been bricked up years ago. So if it was you who built it, how do you get in?"

"You can't now," I said. "I did brick it up soon after I built it to stop one of my half-brothers going in there and leaving dead rats for me to find."

"Oh." He looked disappointed. "I've often wondered what was in there."

"Dead rats, dead spiders, a lot of muck."

He shrugged. "Oh well, then."

"You've been very helpful," I said. "I'll tell my father."

His lined face showed satisfaction. "You tell him I'll keep the dogs, and everything in good nick until he comes back."

"He'll be grateful."

I picked up the suitcase from inside the kitchen door, gave a last look at Moira's brilliant geraniums, vibrantly alive, shook the grubby hand of Arthur Bellbrook, and (in the car hired that morning in London) drove away towards Epsom.

Collecting my own things from my impersonal suburban flat took half the time. Unlike Malcolm, I liked things bare and orderly and, meaning always to move to somewhere better but somehow never going out to search, I hadn't decked the sitting-room or the two small bedrooms with anything brighter than new patterned curtains and a Snaffles print of Sergeant Murphy winning the 1923 Grand National.

I changed from Malcolm's trousers into some of my own, packed a suitcase and picked up my passport. I had no animals to arrange for, nor any bills pressing. Nothing anywhere to detain me.

The telephone answering machine's button glowed red, announcing messages taken. I rewound the tape and listened to the disembodied voices while I picked out of the fridge anything that would go furry and disgusting before my return.

Something, since I'd left the day before, had galvanised the family into feverish activity, like stirring an anthill with a stick.

A girlish voice came first, breathless, a shade anxious.

"Ian, this is Serena. Why are you always out? Don't you sleep at home? Mummy wants to know where Daddy is. She knows you and he aren't speaking, she's utterly thick to expect you to know, but anyway she insisted I ask you. So if you know, give me a ring back, OK?"

Serena, my half-sister, daughter of Alicia, the one child born to Alicia in wedlock. Serena, seven years my junior, lay in my distant memory chiefly as a small fair-haired charmer who'd followed me about like a shadow, which had flattered my twelve-year-old ego disgracefully. She liked best to sit on Malcolm's lap, his arms protectively around herand from him, it had seemed to me, she could conjure a smile when he was angry and pretty dresses when she had a cupboardful.

Alicia, in sweeping out of the house when Serena was six, taking with her not only Serena but her two older boys, had left me alone in the suddenly quiet house, alone in the frilly kitchen, alone and un tormented in the garden. There had been a time then when I would positively have welcomed back Gervase, the older boy, despite his dead rats and other rotten tricks; and it had actually been in the vacuum after his departure that I contrived the bricking up of my kitchen-wall room, not while he was there to jeer at it.

Grown up, Gervase still displayed the insignia of a natural bully: mean tightening of the mouth, jabbing forefinger, cold patron ising stare down the nose, visible enjoyment of others' discomfiture. Serena, now tall and slim, taught aerobic dancing for a living, bought clothes still by the cartload and spoke to me only when she wanted something done.

"Mummy wants to know where Daddy is…" The childish terms sat oddly in the ear, somehow, coming from someone now twenty-six; and she alone of all his children had resisted calling Malcolm, Malcolm.

The next caller was Gervase himself. He started crossly, "I don't like these message contraptions. I tried to get you all evening yesterday and I hear nothing but your priggish voice telling me to leave my name and telephone number, so this time I'm doing it, but under protest. This is your brother Gervase, as no doubt you realise, and it is imperative we find Malcolm at once. He has gone completely off his rocker. It's in your own interest to find him, Ian. We must all bury our differences and stop him spending the family money in this reckless way." He paused briefly. "I suppose you do know he has given half a million… HALF A MILLION… to a busload of retarded children? I got a phone call from some stupid gushing female who said, 'Oh Mr Pembroke, however can we thank you?' and when I asked her what for, she said wasn't I the Mr Pembroke who had solved all their problems, Mr Malcolm Pembroke? Madam, I said, what are you talking about? So she told me. Half a million pounds. Are you listening, Ian? He's irresponsible. It's out of Proportion. He's got to be prevented from giving way to such ridiculous impulses. If you ask me, it's the beginning of senility. You must find him and tell us where he's got to, because so far as I can discover he hasn't answered his telephone since last Friday morning when I rang him to say Alicia's alimony had not been increased by the rate of inflation in this last quarter. I expect to hear from you without delay."