Дик Фрэнсис - Bolt

Nanterre was there, I thought exultantly; right there in front of my eyes, and all our planning had come to pass. Whatever should happen, I reckoned that that was a triumph.

Nanterre looked back the way he’d come, but nothing stirred behind him.

He came close to my car. He stopped beside it, about the length of a Rolls Royce away, and he coolly fiddled about and opened the passenger’s seat door with some sort of key as if he’d spent a lifetime thieving.

Well bloody well , I thought, and heard him unlatch the bonnet with the release knob inside the car. He raised the bonnet, propped it open with its strut, and leaned over the engine with a lighted torch as if working on a fault: anyone coming into the mews at that point would have paid no attention.

After a while, he switched off the torch and closed the bonnet gently, latching it by direct downward pressure of both palms, not by a more normal brisk slam. Finally he shut the open passenger door quietly; and as he turned away to leave, I saw he was smiling.

I wondered whether what he’d left by my engine was plastic, like his guns.

He’d walked several paces along the mews before I stood, slid out through the door and started after him, not wanting him to hear me too soon.

I waited until he was nearing a particular small white car parked on one side, and then I ran swiftly up behind him, quiet in rubber soles on the cobbles, and shone a torch of my own on the back of his neck.

‘Henri Nanterre,’ I said.

He was struck for a long moment into slow motion, unable to move from shock. Then he was fumbling, tearing at the front of a bloused gabardine jacket, trying to free the pistol bolstered beneath.

‘Sammy,’ I yelled, and Sammy shot like a screaming cannon-ball out of the small white car, my voice and his whooping cries filling the quiet place with nerve-breaking noise.

Nanterre, his face rigid, pulled the pistol free. He swung it towards me, taking aim... And Sammy, true to his boast, kicked it straight out of his hand.

Nanterre ran, leaving the gun clattering to the ground.

Sammy and I ran after him, and from another, larger, parked car, both Thomas and Litsi, shouting manfully and shining bright torches, emerged to stand in his way.

Thomas and Litsi stopped him and Sammy and I caught hold of him, Sammy tying Nanterre’s left wrist to Thomas’s right with nylon cord and an intriguingly nice line in knots.

Not the most elegant of captures, I thought, but effective all the same; and for all the noise we’d made, no one came with curious questions to the fracas, no one in London would be so foolish. Dark alleys were dark alleys, and with noise, even worse.

We made Nanterre walk back towards the Mercedes. Thomas half dragging him, Sammy stepping behind him and kicking him encouragingly on the calves of the legs.

When we reached the pistol, Sammy picked it up, weighed it with surprise in his hand, and briefly whistled.

‘Bullets?’ I asked.

He slid out the clip and nodded. ‘Seven,’ he said. ‘Bright little darlin’s.’

He slapped the gun together again, looked around him, and dodged off sideways to hide it under a nearby car, knowing I didn’t want to use it myself.

Nanterre was beginning to recover his usual browbeating manner and to bluster that what we were doing was against the law. He didn’t specify which law, and nor was he right. Citizens’ arrests were perfectly legal.

Not knowing what to expect, we’d had to make the best plans we could to meet anything that might happen. I’d hired the small white car and the larger dark one, both with tinted windows, and Thomas and I had parked them that morning in spaces which we knew from mews-observation weren’t going to obstruct anyone else: the larger car in the space nearest to the way in from the road, the white car half way between there and the Mercedes.

Litsi, Thomas and Sammy had entered the cars after I’d searched the whole place and telephoned reassuringly again to Litsi, and they’d been prepared to wait until one-thirty and hope.

No one had known what Nanterre would do if he came to the mews. We’d decided that if he came in past Litsi and Thomas and hid himself before he reached the white car, Litsi and Thomas would set up a racket and shine torches to summon Sammy and me to their aid, and we’d reckoned that if he came in past Sammy, I would see him, and everyone would wait for my cue, which they had.

We’d all acknowledged that Nanterre, if he came to the area, might decide to sit in his car out in the street, waiting for me to walk round from the square, and that if he did that, or if he didn’t come at all, we’d spent a long while preparing for a big anti-climax.

There had been the danger that even if he came, we could lose him, that he’d slip through our grasp and escape: and there had been the worse danger that we would panic him into shooting, and that one or more of us could be hurt. Yet when that moment had come, when he’d freed his gun and pointed it my way, the peril, long faced, had gone by so fast that it seemed suddenly nothing, not worth the consideration.

We had meant, if we captured Nanterre, to take him into the garage where I’d waited for him to come, but I did a fast rethink on the way down the alley, and stopped by my car.

The others paused enquiringly.

‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘untie your wrist and attach Mr Nanterre to the rear-view mirror beside the front passenger door.’

Thomas, unquestioning, took a loop of cord off one of his fingers and pulled it, and all the knots round his wrist fell apart: Sammy’s talents seemed endless. Thomas tied much more secure knots round the sturdy mirror assembly, and Nanterre told us very loudly and continuously that we were making punishable mistakes.

‘Shut up,’ I said equally loudly, without much effect.

‘Let’s gag him,’ Thomas said cheerfully. He produced a used handkerchief from his trousers pocket, at the sight of which Nanterre blessedly stopped talking.

‘Gag him if someone comes into the mews,’ I said, and Thomas nodded.

‘Was there enough light,’ I asked Litsi, Sammy and Thomas, ‘for you to see Mr Nanterre lift up the bonnet of my car?’

They all said that they’d seen.’

Nanterre’s mouth fell soundlessly open, and for the first time seemed to realise he was in serious trouble.

‘Mr Nanterre,’ I said conversationally to the others, ‘is an amateur who has left his fingerprints all over my paintwork. It might be a good idea at this point to bring in the police.’

The others looked impassive because they knew I didn’t want to, but Nanterre suddenly tugged frantically at Sammy’s securely tied knots.

‘There’s an alternative,’ I said.

Nanterre, still struggling under Sammy’s interested gaze, said, ‘What alternative?’ furiously.

‘Tell us why you came here tonight, and what you put in my car.’

‘ Tell you ...’

‘Yes. Tell us.’

He was a stupid man, essentially. He said violently, ‘Beatrice must have warned you. That cow. She got frightened and told you...’ He glared at me with concentration. ‘All that stood between me and my millions was de Brescou’s signature and you... you... everywhere, in my way.’

‘So you decided on a little bomb, and pouf, no obstructions?’

‘You made me,’ he shouted. ‘You drove me... If you were dead, he would sign.’

I let a moment go by, then I said, ‘We talked to the man who gave your message to Prince Litsi at Bradbury. He picked you out from a photograph. We have his signed statement.’

Nanterre said viciously, ‘I saw your advertisement. If Prince Litsi had died, no one would have known of the message.’

‘Did you mean him to die?’