Dick Francis - Dead Heat

“Hello,” said Toby, looking up. “Sleep well?”

“Not really,” I said. I lifted up my arm with the cast. “Too bloody uncomfortable.”

“How did you do it?” he asked, looking back down at the calendar.

“I didn’t move out of the way quick enough,” I said.

“Of what?” he asked, not looking up.

“A polo mallet,” I said.

He glanced up at me. “I never realized you played polo.”

“I don’t,” I said flatly.

“Then why…” He tailed off and leaned back in his chair. “Are you telling me that it was deliberate? Someone broke your arm on purpose?” He looked suitably horrified.

“I don’t think they would have stopped at my arm if I hadn’t run away.”

“But that’s terrible,” he said. “Have you told the police?”

“Not yet.”

“But why on earth not?” he asked. It was a good question, I thought. Why didn’t I just leave everything to the police? Because I was very afraid that if I did, I would end up dead before they found out who it was who was trying to kill me. But I couldn’t exactly say that to Toby right out of the blue, now, could I?

“I want to explain everything to you because I need your help,” I said. “I need your knowledge of horses. I know I grew up in this house and some of it rubbed off on me, but you have forgotten more about horses than I ever knew and I believe I need that knowledge now. That’s why I’ve come here.”

“Explain away,” he said, putting his hands behind his neck and testing the tilt mechanism on his office chair to the limit.

“Not yet. I want Caroline there too. And, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve asked a lawyer to come down here later this afternoon to listen to it as well.”

“A lawyer?” he said slowly. “This is serious, then?”

“Very,” I said. “I’ve never been more serious in my life.” And Toby knew that in my life, especially since the death of my father, I had always been serious. It had often strangely annoyed him.

“OK,” he said, looking carefully at my face. “What time is this lawyer arriving?”

“He said he’d try to be here by four,” I said. “He’s coming down from London.” I was suddenly not sure if it had been such a good idea. A lawyer might make Toby rather wary. He had fought long and hard with them over the terms of my father’s will. Lawyers were not Toby’s favorite people. But, then again, he’d never met a lawyer like Bernard Sims. In truth, I hadn’t met him either. It was a pleasure yet to be enjoyed by us all.

BERNARD PROVED to be everything I had expected him to be. He was large, jovial, with a mop of wavy black hair and a huge, double-breasted pin-striped suit doing its best to hold it all together.

“Max,” he said expansively when I greeted him in the driveway. He advanced towards me with a hand outstretched that seemed to me to have far more than its fair share of fingers. Perhaps it was just because each finger was twice the width of my own. I held up my cast and declined the handshake.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Come on in.”

“But is she here?” he asked in a half whisper, almost conspiratorially.

“Who?” I said innocently. I too could play his little game.

“The viola player, of course.”

“She might be,” I said, not able to resist smiling.

“Oh good,” he said, rubbing his hands together. But then he stopped. “And bad.”

“Why bad?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I should be meeting her socially,” he said. “It might produce a conflict of interests in the poisoning case.”

“Bugger the poisoning case,” I said. “And, anyway, this is definitely not a social visit.”

“No,” he said. “But I don’t know that, do I? You didn’t actually tell me why you were so insistent that I came down here this afternoon.”

“I will. I will,” I said. “All in good time.”

“A matter of life and death, you said.”

“It is,” I replied seriously. “My life, and my death.”

W e all convened in Toby and Sally’s drawing room at four-thirty like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, with me playing the part of Hercule Poirot, except that unlike him I didn’t know all the answers, I wasn’t at all sure who done it and, for the most part, I didn’t have a clue of what it was they had done in the first place.

There were five of us in the room. I had thought that Sally would be busy caring for the children, but, after school, all three of them had gone to have tea with her sister, their aunt. So Sally sat on the settee with Toby, while Caroline and Bernard sat in armchairs on either side of them. I stood by the fireplace. All I needed, I thought, was a little mustache and a Belgian accent to complete the illusion.

I had previously threatened Bernard with excommunication from the Law Society if he misbehaved, and, to be fair, so far he had been propriety personified. He hadn’t even made any snide remarks to me when I had introduced him to Caroline. In fact, quite the reverse. He had been unusually effusive in his comments, with not a single mention of dropping the lawsuit in time with her knickers.

So now the four of them sat with expectant faces, waiting for every one of the facts to be revealed in front of them. They were going to be disappointed.

“Thank you all for being here,” I said by way of introduction. “And thank you, Toby and Sally, for allowing Caroline and me to stay here. And also, thank you, Bernard, for coming all the way from London.”

“Just get on with it,” said Toby a little impatiently. And he was right. I was procrastinating because I really didn’t know how or where to begin. Everyone laughed, and it lightened the mood.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t quite know where to start.”

“Try at the beginning,” said Caroline helpfully.

“OK,” I said, and took a deep breath. “The night before the 2,000 Guineas, I was engaged by the Newmarket racetrack caterers to be the guest chef at a gala dinner. They also engaged all my restaurant staff to be there as well, so the restaurant was closed that night. There were other staff too from a catering agency, but I was in charge of both the ordering of the food and the cooking of it.”

I smiled at Caroline. “Caroline was also at the dinner, as part of a string quartet.” She smiled back at me. “Well,” I went on, “nearly everyone who was at that dinner suffered from food poisoning during the night. I did, Caroline did and most of my staff did. One even ended up in hospital. Tests have since shown that the cause of the poisoning was undercooked kidney beans in the dinner.” I paused. “Now, everyone involved in food knows that undercooked kidney beans are very nasty, even though I didn’t realize that just one bean per person can be enough to cause terrible vomiting, and that’s what we all had. But there shouldn’t have been any kidney beans in that dinner. I made it from raw ingredients, and there were no kidney beans included. But the tests were conclusive, so someone else had to have put them there.”

“Are you saying that it was done on purpose?” asked Bernard.

“Yes,” I said. “You can’t accidentally add enough kidney beans to a dinner to make over two hundred people ill. And the beans had to be ground or finely chopped, otherwise they would have been visible in the sauce, which is where I think they must have been put.”

“But why would anyone do that?” said Toby.

“Good question,” I said. “And one that I spent days and days trying to find an answer to, and I still haven’t.” I looked around at the faces in front of me, and no one came up with any answer. I hadn’t expected one. “Let’s move on. The following day, I was again a guest chef, this time in the sponsor’s box at the races. We all know what happened there, and I was extremely lucky not to be killed along with the nineteen others who were, one of whom was a young waitress from my restaurant.” I paused again, thinking about Louisa’s funeral, remembering the pain of loss for her parents and friends, recalling the awful ache in my jaw. I took a couple of deep breaths and went on to describe just a little of what I had seen in the box that day without delving too deeply into the worst of the gory details. I could have left it all out, but I suppose I wanted to shock them a bit. They needed to be fully aware of what some people can do to others. They would later need to believe that my life, and maybe theirs, were truly in danger.