Dick Francis: Hot Money

Galvanised by this offer, the taxi-driver drove us down some back streets, Stopped outside an unpromising little terraced house and banged on the door. It opened, shining out a melon-slice of light, and gathered the taxi-driver inside.

"We're going to be mugged," Malcolm said.

The taxi-driver returned harmlessly, howeveraccompanied by a larger man buttoning the jacket of a chauffeur's uniform and carrying a reassuring peaked cap.

"The firm my brother-in-law works for does mostly weddings and funerals," the taxi-driver said. "He wants to know where you want to go."

" London," I said.

London appeared to be no problem at all. The driver and his brother-in-law climbed into the front of the taxi which started off, went round a corner or two, and pulled up again outside a lock-up garage. We sat in the taxi as asked while the two drivers opened the garage, disclosing its contents. Which was how Malcolm and I Proceeded to London in a very large highly-polished black Rolls-Royce, the moonlighting chauffeur separated from us discreetly by a glass partition.

"Why did You go to the sales at all?"I asked Malcolm. "I mean, why Newmarket? Why the sales?"

Malcolm frowned. "Because of Ebury's, I suppose."

"The jewellers?"

"Yes… well… I knew they were going to have a showroom there. They told me so last week when I went to see them about Coochie's jewellery. I mean, I know them pretty well, I bought most of her things from there. I was admiring a silver horse they had, and they said they were exhibiting this week at Newmarket Sales. So then yesterday when I was wondering what would fetch you… where you would meet me… I remembered the sales were so close to Cambridge, and I decided on it not long before I rang you."

I pondered a bit. "How would you set about finding where someone was, if you wanted to, so to speak?"

To my surprise he had a ready answer. "Get the fellow I had for tailing Moira."

"Tailing…" "My lawyer said to do it. It might save me something, he said, if Moira was having a bit on the side, see what I mean?"

"I do indeed," I agreed dryly. "But I suppose she wasn't?"

"No such luck." He glanced at me. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well… I just wondered if he could check where everyone in the family was last Friday and tonight."

"Everyone!" Malcolm exclaimed. "It would take weeks."

"it would put your mind at rest."

He shook his head gloomily. "You forget about assassins."

"Assassins aren't so frightfully easy to find, not for ordinary people. How would you set about it, for instance, if you wanted someone killed? Put an ad in The Times?"

He didn't seem to see such a problem as I did, but he agreed that "the fellow who tailed Moira" should be offered the job of checking the family.

We discussed where we should stay that night: in which hotel, in fact, as neither of us felt like returning home. Home, currently, to me, was a rather dull suburban flat in Epsom, not far from the stable I'd been working for. Home for Malcolm was still the house where I'd been raised, from which Moira had apparently driven him, but to which he had returned immediately after her death. "Home" for all the family was that big house in Berkshire which had seen all five wives come and go: Malcolm himself had been brought up there, and I could scarcely imagine what he must have felt at the prospect of losing it.

"What happened between you and Moira?" I said.

"None of your goddam business."

We travelled ten miles in silence. Then he shifted, sighed, and said, "She wanted Coochie's jewellery and I wouldn't give it to her. She kept on and on about it, rabbit. rabbit. Annoyed me, do you see? And then… well…" he shrugged, "she caught me out."

"With another woman?" I said-without surprise.

He nodded, unashamed. He'd never been monogamous and couldn't understand why it should be expected. The terrible rows in my childhood had all been cent red on his affairs: while he'd been married to Vivien and then to Joyce, he had maintained Alicia all the time as his mistress. Alicia bore him two children while he was married to Vivien and Joyce, and also one subsequently, when he'd made a fairly honest woman of herat her insistence.

I liked to think he had been faithful finally to Coochie, but on the whole it was improbable, and I was never going to ask.

Malcolm favoured our staying at the Dorchester, but I persuaded him he was too well known there, and we settled finally on the Savoy.

"A suite," Malcolm said at the reception desk. "Two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sitting-room, and send up some Bollinger right away."

I didn't feel like drinking champagne, but Malcolm did. He also ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for us both from room- service, with a bottle of Hine Antique brandy and a box of Havana cigars for comforts.

Idly I totted up the expenses of his day: one solid silver trophy, one two-million-guinea thoroughbred, insurance for same, Cambridge hotel bill, tip for the taxi-driver, chauffeured Rolls-Royce, jumbo suite at the Savoy with trimmings. I wondered how much he was really worth, and whether he intended to spend the lot.

We ate the food and drank the brandy still not totally in accord with each other. The three years' division had been, it seemed, a chasm not as easy to cross as I'd thought. I felt that although I'd meant it when I said I loved him, it was probably the long memories of him that I really loved, not his physical presence here and now, and I could see that if I was going to stay close to him, as I'd promised, I would be learning him again and from a different viewpoint; that each of us, in fact, would newly get to know the other.

"Any day now," Malcolm said, carefully dislodging ash from his cigar, "we're going to Australia."

I absorbed the news and said, "Are we?"

He nodded. "We'll need visas. Where's your passport?"

"in my flat. Where's yours?"

"in the house."

"Then I'll get them both tomorrow," I said, "and you stay here." I paused. "Are we going to Australia for any special reason?"

"To look at gold mines," he said. "And kangaroos."

After a short silence, I said, "We don't just have to escape. We do have to find out who's trying to kill you, in order to stop them succeeding."

"Escape is more attractive," he said. "How about a week in Singapore on the way?"

"Anything you say. Only… I'm supposed to ride in a race at Sandown on Friday."

"I've never understood why you like it. All those cold wet days. All those falls."

"You get your rush from gold," I said.

"Danger?" His eyebrows rose. "Quiet, well-behaved, cautious Ian? Life is a bore without risk, is that it?"

"It's not so extraordinary," I said.

I'd ridden always as an amateur, unpaid, because something finally held me back from the total dedication needed for turning professional. Race riding was my deepest pleasure, but not my entire life, and in consequence I'd never developed the competitive drive necessary for climbing the pro ladder. I was happy with the rides I got, with the camaraderie of the changing-room, with the wide skies and the horses themselves, and yes, one had to admit it, with the risk.

"Staying near me," Malcolm said, "as you've already found out, isn't enormously safe."

"That's why I'm staying," I said.

He stared. He said, "My God," and he laughed. "I thought I knew you. Seems I don't."

He finished his brandy, stubbed out his cigar and decided on bed; and in the morning he was up before me, sitting on a sofa in one of the bathrobes and reading the Sporting Life when I ambled out in the underpants and shirt I'd slept in.

"I've ordered breakfast," he said. "And I'm in the paper – how about that?"

I looked where he pointed. His name was certainly there, somewhere near the end of the detailed lists of yesterday's sales. " Lot 79, ch. colt, 2,070,000 gns. Malcolm Pembroke".