Dick Francis: Hot Money

Carrying the passport, I went upstairs to fetch clothes to add to his sketchy packing and out of irresistible curiosity detoured into the room which had been mine. I expected a bright Moira-style transformation, but in fact nothing at all had been changed, except that nothing of me remained. – The room was without soul; barren. The single bed, stripped, showed a bare mattress. There were no cobwebs, no dust, no smell of neglect, but the message was clear: the son who had slept there no longer existed.

Shivering slightly, I closed the door and wondered whether the absolute rejection had been Malcolm's or Moira's and, shrugging, decided I didn't now mind which.

Moira's idea of the perfect bedroom turned out to be plum and pink with louvred doors everywhere possible. Malcolm's dressing-room next door had received the same treatment, as had their joint bathroom, and I set about collecting his belongings with a strong feeling of intruding upon strangers.

I found Moira's portrait only because I kicked it while searching for pyjamas: it was underneath Malcolm's chest of drawers in the dressing-room. Looking to see what I'd damaged, I pulled out a square gold frame which fitted a discoloured patch on the wall and, turning it over, found the horrible Moira smiling at me with all her insufferable complacency.

I had forgotten how young she had been, and how pretty. Thirty years younger than Malcolm; thirty-five when she'd married him and, in the painting anyway, unlined. Reddish-gold hair, pale un freckled skin, pointed chin, delicate neck. The artist seemed to me to have caught the calculation in her eyes with disconcerting clarity, and when I glanced at the name scrawled at the bottom I understood why. Malcolm might not have given her diamonds, but her portrait had been painted by the best.

I put her back face down under the chest of drawers as I'd found her, where Malcolm, I was sure, had consigned her.

Fetching a suitcase from the box room (no decor changes there), I packed Malcolm's things and went downstairs, and in the hall came face to face with a smallish man carrying a large shotgun, the business end pointing my way.

I stopped abruptly, as one would.

"Put your hands up," he said hoarsely.

I set the suitcase on the floor and did as he bid. He wore earth- stained dark trousers and had mud on his hands, and I asked him immediately, "Are you the gardener?"

"What if I am? What are you doing here?"

"Collecting clothes for my fatherer… Mr Pembroke. I'm his son."

"I don't know you. I'm getting the police." His voice was belligerent but quavery, the shotgun none too steady in his hands.

"All right," I said.

He was faced then with the problem of how to telephone while aiming my way.

I said, seeing his hesitation, "I can prove I'm Mr Pembroke's son, and I'll open the suitcase to show you I'm not stealing anything. Would that help?"

After a pause, he nodded. "You stay over there, though," he said.

I judged that if I alarmed him there would be a further death in my father's house, so I very slowly and carefully opened the suitcase, removed the underpants and the rest, and laid them out on the hall floor. After that, I equally slowly took my own wallet out of my pocket, opened it, removed a credit card and laid it on the floor face upwards. Then I retreated backwards from the exhibits, ending with my back against the closed and locked front door.

The elderly gardener came suspiciously forward and inspected the show, dropping his- eyes only in split seconds, raising them quickly, giving me no chance to jump him.

"That's his passport," he said accusingly.

"He asked me to fetch it."

"Where is he?" he said. "Where's he gone?"

"I have to meet him with his passport. I don't know where he's going." I paused. "I really am his son. You must be new here. I haven't seen you before."

"Two years," he said defensively. "I've worked here two years." He seemed to come quite suddenly to a decision to believe me, and almost apologetically lowered the gun. "This house is supposed to be locked UP," he said. "Then I see you moving about upstairs."

"Upsetting," I agreed.

He gestured to Malcolm's things. "You'd better pack them again."

I began to do so under his still watchful eye.

"It was brave of you to come in here," I said, "if you thought I was a burglar."

He braced his shoulders in an old automatic movement. "I was in the army once." He relaxed and shrugged. "Tell you the truth, I was coming in quietly-like to phone the police, then you started down the stairs." "And… the gun?"

"Brought it with me just in case. I go after rabbits… I keep the gun handy."

I nodded. It was the gardener's own gun, I thought. Malcolm had never owned one, as far as I knew.

"Has my father paid you for the week?" I said.

His eyes at once brightened hopefully. "He paid me last Friday, same as usual. Then Saturday morning he phoned my house to tell me to come round here to see to the dogs. Take them home with me, same as I always do when he's away. So I did. But he was gone off the line before I could ask him how long he'd be wanting me to have them."

I pulled out my cheque-book and wrote him a cheque for the amount he specified. Arthur Bellbrook, he said his name was. I tore out the cheque and gave it to him and asked him if there was anyone else who needed wages.

He shook his head. "The cleaner left when Mrs Pembroke was done in… er… murdered. Said she didn't fancy the place any more."

"Where exactly was Mrs Pembroke… er… murdered?"

"I'll show you if you like." He stored the cheque away in a pocket. "Outside in the greenhouse."

He took me, however, not as I'd imagined to the rickety old familiar -greenhouse sagging against a mellowed wall in the kitchen garden, but to a bright white octagonal wrought-iron construction like a fancy bird-cage set as a summer-house on a secluded patch of lawn. From far outside, one could clearly see the flourishing geraniums within.

"Well, well," I said.

Arthur Bellbrook uttered "Huh" as expressing his disapproval and opened the metal-and-glass door.

"Cost a fortune to heat, will this place, "he observed. "And it got too hot in the summer. The only thing as will survive in it is geraniums. Mrs Pembroke's passion, geraniums."

An almost full sack of potting compost lay along one of the work surfaces, the top side of it slit from end to end to make the soil mixture easy to reach. A box of small pots stood nearby, some of them occupied by cuttings.

I looked at the compost with revulsion. "Is that where…?" I began.

"Yes," he said. "Poor lady. There's no one ought to die like that, however difficult they could be."

"No," I agreed. A thought struck me. "it was you who found her, wasn't it?"

"I went home like always at four o'clock, but I was out for a stroll about seven, and I thought I would just come in to see what state she'd left the place in. See, she played at gardening. Never cleaned the tools, things like that." He looked at the boarded floor as if still seeing her there. "She was lying face down, and I turned her over. She was dead all right. She was white like always but she had these little pink dots in her skin. They say you get those dots from asphyxiation. They found potting compost in her lungs, poor lady." He had undoubtedly been shocked and moved at the time, but there was an echo of countless repetitions in his voice now and precious little feeling. "Thank you for showing me," I said.

He nodded and we both went out, shutting the door behind US.

"I don't think Mr Pembroke liked this place much," he said unexpectedly. "Last spring, when she chose it, he said she could have it only if he couldn't see it from the house. Otherwise he wouldn't pay the bill. I wasn't supposed to hear, of course, but there you are, I did. They'd got to shouting, you see."