Дик Фрэнсис - Bolt

‘How are we going to save his honour?’

‘You invent,’ Litsi said lazily, ‘and I’ll gofer.’

‘Gofer a lever,’ I said absentmindedly.

‘A lever?’

‘To move the world.’

He stretched contentedly. ‘Do you have any ideas at all?’

‘One or two. Rather vague.’

‘Which you’re not sharing?’

‘Not yet. Have to think a bit first.’ I told him I’d bought a recording telephone that morning. ‘When we get back, we’ll rig it and work out a routine.’

‘He said he would ring again this evening.’

No need to say who ‘he’ was.

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘The phone I bought is also a conference phone. It has a loudspeaker, so that everyone in the room can hear what the caller’s saying. You don’t need the receiver. So when he rings, if it’s you that answers, will you get him to speak in English?’

‘Perhaps you’d better answer, then he’d have to.’

‘All right. And the message we give is... no dice?’

‘You couldn’t just string him along?’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said, ‘but to fix him we’ve got to find him, and he could be anywhere. Beatrice knows where he is, or at least how to reach him. If we get him out in the open...’ I paused. ‘What we ideally need is a tethered goat.’

‘And just who,’ Litsi enquired ironically, ‘are you electing for that dead-end job?’

I smiled. ‘A stuffed goat with a mechanical bleat. All real goats must be guarded or careful.’

‘Aunt Casilia, Roland and Danielle, guarded.’

‘And the horses,’ I said.

‘OK. And the horses guarded. And you and I...’

I nodded. ‘Careful.’

Neither of us mentioned that Nanterre had specifically threatened each of us as his next targets: there was no point. I didn’t think he would actually try to kill either of us, but the damage would have to be more than a pin-prick to expect a result.

‘What’s he like?’ Litsi said. ‘You’ve met him. I’ve never seen him. Know your enemy... first rule for combat.’

‘Well, I think he got into all this without thinking it out first,’ I said. ‘Last Friday, I think he believed he had only to browbeat the princess heavily enough, and Roland would collapse. That’s also very nearly what happened.’

‘As I understand it, it didn’t happen because you were there.’

‘I don’t know. Anyway, on Friday night when he pulled the gun out which had no bullets in... I think that may be typical of him. He acts on impulse, without thinking things through. He’s used to getting his own way easily because of his hectoring manner. He’s used to being obeyed. Since his father died — and his father had customarily indulged him — he has run the construction company pretty well as he likes. I’d say he’s quite likely reached the stage where he literally can’t believe he can be defied, and especially not by an old, ill man long out of touch with the world. When Roland rejected him by post, I’d guess he came over thinking, “I’ll soon change all that.” I think in some ways he’s childish, which doesn’t make him less destructive: more so, probably.’

I paused, but Litsi made no comment.

‘Attacking Danielle,’ I said. ‘He thought again that he would have it all his own way. I’ll bet it never once occurred to him that she could run faster than he could. He turned up there in a city suit and polished leather shoes. It was a sort of arrogance, an assumption that he would naturally be faster, stronger, dominant. If he’d had any doubts at all, he’d have worn a jogging suit, something like that, and faster shoes.’

‘And the horses?’ Litsi said.

I hated to think of the horses: ‘They were vulnerable,’ I said. ‘And he knew how to kill them. I don’t know where he would get a humane killer, but he does deal in guns. He carries one. They attract him, otherwise he wouldn’t be wanting to make them. People mostly do what their natures urge, don’t they? He may have a real urge to see things die... wanting to make sure the slaughterers didn’t cheat him could be just the only acceptable reason he could give for a darker desire. People always think up reasonable reasons for doing what they want.’

‘Do you?’ he asked curiously.

‘Oh sure. I say I race for the money.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘I’d do it for nothing, but being paid is better.’

He nodded, having no difficulty in understanding. ‘So what do you expect next from Nanterre?’ he asked.

‘Another half-baked attack on one of us. He won’t have planned properly for contingencies, but we might find ourselves in nasty spots nevertheless.’

‘Charming,’ he said.

‘Don’t go down dark alleys to meet strangers.’

‘I never do.’

I asked him rather tentatively what he did do, back in Paris, where he lived.

‘Frightfully little, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I have an interest in an art gallery. I spend a good deal of my life looking at paintings. The Louvre expert Danielle and I went to listen to is a very old acquaintance. I was sure she would enjoy...’ He paused. ‘She did enjoy it.’

‘Yes.’

I could feel him shift in the passenger seat until he could see me better.

‘There was a group of us,’ he said. ‘We weren’t alone.’

‘Yes, I know.’

He didn’t pursue it. He said unexpectedly instead, ‘I have been married, but we are separated. Technically I am still married. If either of us wished to remarry, there would be a divorce. But she has lovers, and I also...’ he shrugged. ‘It’s common enough, in France.’

I said ‘Thank you,’ after a pause, and he nodded; and we didn’t speak of it again.

‘I would like to have been an artist,’ he said after a while. ‘I studied for years... I can see the genius in great paintings, but for myself... I can put paint on canvas, but I haven’t the great gift. And you, my friend Kit, are damn bloody lucky to have been endowed with the skill to match your desire.’

I was silent; silenced. I’d had the skill from birth, and one couldn’t say where it came from; and I hadn’t much thought what it would be like to be without it. I looked at life suddenly from Litsi’s point of view, and knew that I was in truth damn bloody lucky, that it was the root of my basic happiness, and that I should be humbly grateful.

When we got to Eaton Square, I suggested dropping him at the front door while I went to park the car, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Dark alleys, he reminded me, and being careful.

‘There’s some light in the mews,’ I said.

‘All the same, we’ll park the car together and walk back together, and take our own advice.’

‘OK,’ I said, and reflected that at one-thirty, when I went to fetch Danielle, I would be going alone into the self-same dark alley, and it would be then that I’d better be careful.

Litsi and I let ourselves in, Dawson meeting us in the hall saying the princess and Beatrice had vanished to their rooms to change and rest.

‘Where is Sammy?’ I said.

Sammy, Dawson said with faint disapproval, was walking about, and was never in any place longer than a minute. I went upstairs to fetch the new telephone and found Sammy coming down the stairs from the top floor.

‘Did you know there’s another kitchen up there?’ he said.

‘Yes, I looked.’

‘And there’s a skylight or two. I rigged a nice little pair of booby traps under those. If you hear a lot of old brass firearms crashing around up there, you get the force here pronto.’

I assured him I would, and took him downstairs with me to show him, as well as Dawson and Litsi, how the recording telephone worked.

The normal telephone arrangements in that house were both simple and complicated: there was only one line, but about a dozen scattered instruments.