Dick Francis: The Edge

On the night of Derry Welfram's death, I walked into the bar at ten to eight and ordered a glass of Burgundy and a couple of beef sandwiches which came promptly because of the post-cricket-season absence of a hundred devotees discussing leg-breaks and insider politics at the tops of their voices. There were still a good number of customers, but from late September to the middle of April one could talk all night without laryngitis the next day, and when the Brigadier arrived he greeted me audibly and cheerfully as a fellow member well met and began telling me his assessment of the Test team just assembled for the winter tour abroad.

'They've disregarded Withers,' he complained. 'How are they ever going to get Balping out if they leave our best in-swinger biting his knuckles at home?'

I hadn't the faintest idea, and he knew it. With a gleam of a smile he bought himself a double Scotch drowned in a large glass of water, and led the way to one of the small tables round the edge of the room, still chatting on about the whys and wherefores of the selected team.

'Now,' he said without change of speed or volume, 'Welfram's dead, Shacklebury's dead, Gideon's dead, and the problem is what do we do next?’

The question, I knew, had to be rhetorical. He never called me to the Hobbs Sandwich to ask my advice but always to direct me towards some new course of action, though he would listen and change his requirements if I put forward any huge objections, which I didn't often. He waited for a while, though, as if for an answer, and took a slow contemplative mouthful of weak whisky.

'Did Mr Gideon leave any notes?' I asked eventually.

'Not as far as we know. Nothing as helpful as telling us why he sold his horses to Filmer, if that's what you mean. Not unless a letter comes in the post next week, which I very much doubt.'

Gideon had been frightened beyond death, I thought. The threat must have been to the living, an ongoing perpetual threat.

'Mr Gideon has daughters,' I said.

The Brigadier nodded. 'Three. And five grandchildren. His wife died years ago, I suppose you know. Am I reading you *aright?'

'That the daughters and grandchildren were hostages? Yes. Do you think they could know it?'

'Positive they don't,' the Brigadier said. 'I talked with his eldest daughter today. Nice, sensible woman, about fifty. Gideon shot himself yesterday evening, around five they think, but no one found him for hours as he did it out in the woods. I went down to the house today. His daughter, Sarah, said he's been ultra-depressed lately, going deeper and deeper, but she didn't know what had caused it. He wouldn't discuss it. Sarah was in tears, of course, and also of course feeling guilty because she didn't prevent it, but she couldn't have prevented it, it's almost impossible to stop a determined suicide, you can't force people to go on living. Short of imprisonment, of course. Anyway, if she was any sort of a hostage, she didn't know it. It wasn't that sort of guilt.'

I offered him one of my so far uneaten sandwiches. He took one absentmindedly and began to chew, and I ate one myself. The problem of what to do about Filmer lay in morose wrinkles across his brow and I'd heard he considered the collapse of the conspiracy trial a personal failure.

'I went to see Ezra Gideon myself after you and John Millington flushed out Welfram,' he said. 'I showed Ezra your photograph of Welfram. I thought he would faint, he went so white, but he still wouldn't speak. And now, God damn it, in one day we've lost both contacts. We don't know who Filmer will get to next, or if he's already active again, and we'll have the devil's own job spotting another frightener.'

'He won't have found one himself yet, I shouldn't think,' I said. 'Certainly not one as effective. They aren't that common, are they?'

'The police say they're getting younger.'

He looked unusually discouraged for someone whose success rate in all other fields was impressive. The lost battle rankled: the victories had been shrugged off. I drank some wine and waited for the commanding officer to emerge from the worried man, waited for him to unfold the plan of campaign.

He surprised me, however, by saying, 'I didn't think you'd stick this job this long.'

'Why not?'

'You know damn well why not. You're not dim. Clement told me the pile your father left you simply multiplied itself for twenty years, growing like a mushroom. And still does. Like a whole field of mushrooms. Why aren't you out there picking them?'

I sat back in my chair wondering what to say. I knew very well why I didn't pick them, but I wasn't sure it would sound sensible.

'Go on,' he said. 'I need to know.'

I glanced at his intent eyes and sensed his concentration, and realized suddenly that he might mean in some obscure way to base the future plan on my answer.

'It isn't so easy,' I said slowly, 'and don't laugh, it really isn't so easy to be able to afford anything you want. Short of the Crown Jewels and trifles like that. Well… I don't find it easy. I'm like a child loose in a sweet shop. I could eat and eat… and make myself sick… and greedy… and a jellyfish. So I keep my hands off the sweets and occupy my time following crooks. Is that any sort of answer?'

He grunted noncommittally. 'How strong is the temptation?'

'On freezing cold days in sleet and wind at say Doncaster races, very strong indeed. At Ascot in the sunshine I don't feel it.'

'Be serious,' he said. 'Put it another way. How strong is your commitment to the Security Service?'

'They're really two different things,' I said. 'I don't pick too many mushrooms because I want to retain order… to keep my feet well planted. Mushrooms can be hallucinogenic, after all. I work for you, for the Service, rather than in banking or farming and so on, because I like it and I'm not all that bad at what I do, really, and it's useful, and I'm not terribly good at twiddling my thumbs. I don't know that I'd die for you. Is that what you want?'

His lips twitched. He said, 'Fair enough. How do you feel about danger nowadays? I know you did risky enough things on your travels.'

After a brief pause, I said, 'What sort of danger?'

'Physical, I suppose.' He rubbed a thumb and forefinger down his nose and looked at me with steady eyes. 'Perhaps.'

'What do you want me to do?'

We had come to the point of the meeting, but he backed away from it still.

I knew in a way that it was because of what he'd called the mushrooms that he'd grown into the way of speaking to me as he did, proposing but seldom giving straight orders. He would have been more forthright if I'd been a junior army officer in uniform. Millington, who didn't know about the mushrooms, could uninhibitedly boss me around like a sergeant-major, and did so pretty sharply under pressure.

Millington mostly called me Kelsey and only occasionally, on good days, Tor. ('Tor? What sort of name is that?' he'd demanded at the beginning. 'Short for Torquil,' I said. 'Torquil? Huh. I don't blame you. ') He always referred to himself as Millington (' Millington here,' when he telephoned) and that was how I thought of him: he had never asked me to call him John. I supposed that a man who had served in a strongly hierarchical organization for a long time found surnames natural.

The Brigadier's attention still seemed to be focused on the glass he was slowly revolving in his hands, but finally he put it down precisely in the centre of a beer mat as if coming to a precise conclusion in his thoughts.

'I had a telephone call yesterday from my counterpart in the Canadian Jockey Club.' He paused again. 'Have you ever been to Canada?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Once, for a while, for maybe three months, mostly in the west. Calgary… Vancouver… I went up by boat from there to Alaska.'