Dick Francis: In the Frame

‘Yes... but I think they only go... went... because of me.’

He tried the coffee again and managed a cautious sip. ‘In what way do you mean?’ he asked.

‘What I paint,’ I said, ‘is mostly horses.’

Donald came in through the back door, looking red-eyed and exhausted.

‘The Press are making a hole in the hedge,’ he said leadenly.

Inspector Frost clicked his teeth, got to his feet, opened the door to the hall and the interior of the house, and called out loudly.

‘Constable? Go and stop those reporters from breaking into the garden.’

A distant voice replied ‘Sir’, and Frost apologised to Donald. ‘Can’t get rid of them entirely, you know, sir. They have their editors breathing down their necks. They pester the life out of us at times like these.’

All day long the road outside Donald’s house had been lined with cars, which disgorged crowds of reporters, photographers and plain sensation-seekers every time anyone went out of the front door. Like a hungry wolf pack they lay in wait, and I supposed that they would eventually pounce on Donald himself. Regard for his feelings was nowhere in sight.

‘Newspapers listen to the radio on the police frequencies,’ Frost said gloomily. ‘Sometimes the Press arrive at the scene of a crime before we can get there ourselves.’

At any other time I would have laughed, but it wouldn’t have been much fun for Donald if it had happened in his case. The police, of course, had thought at first that it more or less had, because I had heard that the constable who had tried to eject me forcibly had taken me for a spearheading scribbler.

Donald sat down heavily on a stool and rested his elbows wearily on the table.

‘Charles,’ he said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind heating it, I’d like some of that soup now.’

‘Sure,’ I said, surprised. He had rejected it earlier as if the thought of food revolted him.

Frost’s head went up as if at a signal, and his whole body straightened purposefully, and I realised he had merely been coasting along until then, waiting for some such moment. He waited some more while I opened a can of Campbell’s condensed, sloshed it and some water and cooking brandy into a saucepan, and stirred until the lumps dissolved. He drank his coffee and waited while Donald disposed of two platefuls and a chunk of brown bread. Then, politely, he asked me to take myself off, and when I’d gone he began what Donald afterwards referred to as ‘serious digging’.

It was three hours later, and growing dark, when the Inspector left. I watched his departure from the upstairs landing window. He and his attendant plain-clothes constable were intercepted immediately outside the front door by a young man with wild hair and a microphone, and before they could dodge round him to reach their car the pack on the road were streaming in full cry into the garden and across the grass.

I went methodically round the house drawing curtains, checking windows, and locking and bolting all the outside doors.

‘What are you doing?’ Donald asked, looking pale and tired in the kitchen.

‘Pulling up the drawbridge.’

‘Oh.’

In spite of his long session with the Inspector he seemed a lot calmer and more in command of himself, and when I had finished Fort-Knoxing the kitchen-to-garden door he said, ‘The police want a list of what’s gone. Will you help me make it?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’ll give us something to do...’

‘Sure.’

‘We did have an inventory, but it was in that desk in the hall. The one they took.’

‘Damn silly place to keep it,’ I said.

‘That’s more or less what he said. Inspector Frost.’

‘What about your insurance company? Haven’t they got a list?’

‘Only of the more valuable things, like some of the paintings, and her jewellery.’ He sighed. ‘Everything else was lumped together as “contents”.’

We started on the diningroom and made reasonable progress, with him putting the empty drawers back in the sideboard while trying to remember what each had once contained, and me writing down to his dictation. There had been a good deal of solid silver tableware, acquired by Donald’s family in its affluent past and handed down routinely. Donald, with his warmth for antiques, had enjoyed using it, but his pleasure in owning it seemed to have vanished with the goods. Instead of being indignant over its loss, he sounded impersonal, and by the time we had finished the sideboard, decidedly bored.

Faced by the ranks of empty shelves where once had stood a fine collection of early nineteenth century porcelain, he baulked entirely.

‘What does it matter?’ he said drearily, turning away. ‘I simply can’t be bothered...’

‘How about the paintings, then?’

He looked vaguely round the bare walls. The site of each missing frame showed unmistakably in lighter oblong patches of palest olive. In this room they had mostly been works of modern British painters: a Hockney, a Bratby, two Lowrys, and a Spear for openers, all painted on what one might call the artists’ less exuberant days. Donald didn’t like paintings which he said ‘jumped off the wall and made a fuss’.

‘You probably remember them better than I do,’ he said. ‘You do it.’

‘I’d miss some.’

‘Is there anything to drink?’

‘Only the cooking brandy,’ I said.

‘We could have some of the wine.’

‘What wine?’

‘In the cellar.’ His eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘Good God, I’d forgotten about the cellar.’

‘I didn’t even know you had one.’

He nodded. ‘Reason I bought the house. Perfect humidity and temperature for long-term storage. There’s a small fortune down there in claret and port.’

There wasn’t, of course. There were three floor-to-ceiling rows of empty racks, and a single cardboard box on a plain wooden table.

Donald merely shrugged. ‘Oh well... that’s that.’

I opened the top of the cardboard box and saw the elegant corked shapes of the tops of wine bottles.

‘They’ve left these, anyway,’ I said. ‘In their rush.’

‘Probably on purpose,’ Don smiled twistedly. ‘That’s Australian wine. We brought it back with us.’

‘Better than nothing,’ I said disparagingly, pulling out a bottle and reading the label.

‘Better than most, you know. A lot of Australian wine is superb.’

I carried the whole case up to the kitchen and dumped it on the table. The stairs from the cellar led up into the utility room among the washing machines and other domesticities, and I had always had an unclear impression that its door was just another cupboard. I looked at it thoughtfully, an unremarkable white painted panel merging inconspicuously into the general scenery.

‘Do you think the burglars knew the wine was there?’ I asked.

‘God knows.’

‘I would never have found it.’

‘You’re not a burglar, though.’

He searched for a corkscrew, opened one of the bottles, and poured the deep red liquid into two kitchen tumblers. I tasted it and it was indeed a marvellous wine, even to my untrained palate. Wynn’s Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon . You could wrap the name round the tongue as lovingly as the product. Donald drank his share absentmindedly as if it were water, the glass clattering once or twice against his teeth. There was still an uncertainty about many of his movements, as if he could not quite remember how to do things, and I knew it was because with half his mind he thought all the time of Regina, and the thoughts were literally paralysing.

The old Donald had been a man of confidence, capably running a middle-sized inherited business and adding his share to the passed-on goodies. He had a blunt uncompromising face lightened by amber eyes which smiled easily, and he had considered his money well-spent on shapely hair-cuts.