Дик Фрэнсис - Bolt

‘To save me following you home,’ I said pleasantly, ‘I’d like you to write your real name and address down for me, on a separate sheet of paper.’

I produced a clean sheet from the envelope. ‘You still have my pen,’ I reminded him. ‘Be a good fellow and write.’

He looked as if I’d punched him in the brain.

‘I came in on the bus,’ he said faintly.

‘I can follow buses,’ I said.

He looked sick.

‘I won’t tell your wife you were at the races,’ I said. ‘Not if you’ll write down your name so I won’t have to follow you.’

‘For a hundred and fifty?’ he said weakly.

‘Yes.’

He wrote a name and address in capital letters:

A. V. HODGES,

44, CARLETON AVENUE,

WIDDERLAWN, NR BRADBURY.

‘What does the A. V. stand for?’ I asked.

‘Arnold Vincent,’ he said without guile.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Here’s the rest of the money.’ I counted it out for him. ‘Don’t lose it all at once.’

He looked startled and then shamefacedly raised a laugh. ‘I can’t go racing often, see what I mean? My wife knows how much money I’ve got.’

‘She doesn’t now,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Smith.’

I had plenty of time and thought I might as well make sure. I dawdled invisibly around while John Smith bought his oil filter at a garage and caught his bus, and I followed the bus unobtrusively to Widderlawn.

John Smith descended and walked to Carleton Avenue where at number 44, a well-tended council semi-detached, he let himself in with a latchkey.

Satisfied on all counts, I drove back to London and found Litsi coming out of the library as I entered the hall.

‘I saw you coming,’ he said lazily. The library windows looked out to the street. ‘I’m delighted you’re back.’ He had been watching for me, I thought.

‘It wasn’t a trap,’ I said.

‘So I see.’

I smiled suddenly and he said, ‘A purring cat, if ever I saw one.’

I nodded towards the library. ‘Let’s go in there, and I’ll tell you.’

I carried the bag with clothes in and the big envelope into the long panelled room with its grille-fronted bookshelves, its Persian rugs, its net and red velvet curtains. A nobly proportioned room, it was chiefly used for entertaining callers not intimate enough to be invited upstairs, and to me had the lifeless air of expensive waiting-rooms.

Litsi looked down at my feet. ‘Are you squelching? ’ he asked disbelievingly.

‘Mm.’ I put down the bag and the envelope and peeled off my left shoe, into which one of the icepacks had leaked.

To his discriminating horror, I pulled the one intact bag out of my sock and emptied the contents onto a convenient potted plant. The second bag, having emptied itself, followed the first into the waste paper basket. I pulled off my drenched sock, left it folded on top of my bag, and replaced my wet shoe.

‘I suppose,’ Litsi said, ‘all that started out as mobile refrigeration.’

‘Quite right.’

‘I’d have kept a sprain warm,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘Cold is quicker.’

I took the envelope over to where a pair of armchairs stood, one on each side of a table with a lamp on it: switched on the lamp, sat in a chair. Litsi, following, took the other armchair. The library itself was perpetually dark, needing lights almost always, the grey afternoon on that day giving up the contest in the folds of cream net at the street end of the room.

‘Mr Smith,’ I said, ‘can speak for himself.’

I put the small recorder on the table, rewound the cassette, and started it going. Litsi, the distinguished looking gent, listened with wry fascination to the way he’d been set up, and towards the end his eyebrows started climbing, a sign with him which meant a degree of not understanding.

I showed him the paper John Smith had signed, and while he watched drew a circle with my pen round the head of Nanterre in the photograph.

‘Mr Smith did live where he wrote,’ I said. ‘I did follow him home, to make sure.’

‘But,’ Litsi said surprised, ‘if you followed him anyway, why did you give him the last hundred and fifty?’

‘Oh... mm... it saved me having to discover his name from the neighbours.’ Litsi looked sceptical. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he deserved it.’

‘What are you going to do with these things?’ he asked, waving a hand.

‘With a bit of luck,’ I said, ‘this.’ And I told him.

Grateful for the lift, I went up three floors to the bamboo room to stow away my gear, to shower and change, to put on dry strapping and decide on no more ice.

The palatial room was beginning to feel like home, I thought. Beatrice seemed to have given up plans for active invasion, though leaving me in no doubt about the strength of her feelings; and as my affection for the room grew, so did my understanding of her pique.

She wasn’t in the sitting room when I went down for the evening; only Danielle and the princess, with Litsi pouring their drinks.

I bowed slightly to the princess, as it was the first time I’d seen her that day, and kissed Danielle on the cheek.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked neutrally.

‘Fishing.’

‘Did you catch anything?’

‘Sharkbait,’ I said.

She looked at me swiftly, laughingly, in the eyes, the old loving Danielle there and gone in a flash. I took the glass into which Litsi had poured a scant ounce of scotch and tried to stifle regret: and Beatrice walked into the room with round dazed eyes and stood vaguely in the centre as if not sure what to do next.

Litsi began to mix her drink the way she liked it: he’d have made a good king but an even better barman, I thought, liking him. Beatrice went across to the sofa where the princess was sitting and took the place beside her as if her knees had given way.

‘There we are, Beatrice,’ Litsi said with good humour, setting the red drink down on the low table in front of her. ‘Dash of Worcestershire, twist of lemon.’

Beatrice looked at the drink unseeingly.

‘Casilia,’ she said, as if the words were hurting her throat, ‘I have been such a fool.’

‘My dear Beatrice...’ the princess said.

Beatrice without warning started to cry, not silently but with ‘Ohs’ of distress that were close to groans.

The princess looked uncomfortable, and it was Litsi who came to Beatrice’s aid with a large white handkerchief and comforting noises.

‘Tell us what’s troubling you,’ he said, ‘and surely we can help you.’

Beatrice wailed ‘Oh’ again with her open mouth twisted into an agonised circle, and pressed Litsi’s handkerchief hard to her eyes.

‘Do try to pull yourself together, Beatrice, dear,’ the princess said with a touch of astringency. ‘We can’t help you until we know what’s the matter.’

Beatrice’s faintly theatrical paroxysm abated, leaving a real distress showing. The overbid for sympathy might have misfired, but the need for it existed.

‘I can’t help it,’ she said, drying her eyes and blotting her mascara carefully, laying the folded edge of handkerchief flat over her lower eyelid and blinking her top lashes onto it, leaving tiny black streaks. No one in extremis, I thought, wiped their eyes so methodically.

‘I’ve been such a fool,’ she said.

‘In what way, dear?’ asked the princess, giving the unmistakable impression that she already thought her sister-in-law a fool in most ways most of the time.

‘I... I’ve been talking to Henri Nanterre,’ Beatrice said.

‘When?’ Litsi asked swiftly.

‘Just now. Upstairs, in my room.’

Both he and I looked at the recording telephone which had remained silent. Neither Litsi nor I had lifted a receiver at the right time after all.