Dick Francis - In the Frame

He wasted no time deliberating. The brooms crashed to the carpet inside the room, and Jik pulled the door shut after him.

Sarah and I were already running on our way to the lifts. She looked extremely pale and wild-eyed, and I knew that whatever had happened in their room had been almost too much for her.

Jik sprinted along after us. There were six lifts from the seventeenth floor, and one never had to wait more than a few seconds for one to arrive. The seconds this time seemed like hours but were actually very few indeed. The welcoming doors slid open, and we leapt inside and pushed the ‘doors closed’ button like maniacs.

The doors closed.

The lift descended, smooth and fast.

‘Where’s the car?’ I said.

‘Car park.’

‘Get it and come round to the side door.’

‘Right.’

‘Sarah...’

She stared at me in fright.

‘My satchel will be in the hall. Will you carry it for me?’

She looked vaguely at my one-armed state, my jacket swinging loosely over my left shoulder.

‘Sarah!’

‘Yes... all right.’

We erupted into the hall, which had filled with people returning from the Cup. Talkative groups mixed and mingled, and it was impossible to see easily from one side to the other. All to the good, I thought.

My suitcase and satchel stood waiting near the front entrance, guarded by a young man in porter’s uniform.

I parted with the ten dollars. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

‘No sweat,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Can I get you a taxi?’

I shook my head. I picked up the suitcase and Sarah the satchel and we headed out of the door.

Turned right. Hurried. Turned right again, round to the side where I’d told Jik we’d meet him.

‘He’s not here,’ Sarah said with rising panic.

‘He’ll come,’ I said encouragingly. ‘We’ll just go on walking to meet him.’

We walked. I kept looking back nervously for signs of pursuit, but there were none. Jik came round the corner on two wheels and tore millimetres off the tyres stopping beside us. Sarah scrambled into the front and I and my suitcase filled the back. Jik made a hair-raising U turn and took us away from the Hilton at an illegal speed.

‘Wowee,’ he said, laughing with released tension. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

‘The Marx brothers.’

He nodded. ‘Pure crazy comedy.’

‘Where are we going?’ Sarah said.

‘Have you noticed,’ Jik said, ‘How my wife always brings us back to basics?’

The city of Melbourne covered a great deal of land.

We drove randomly north and east through seemingly endless suburban developments of houses, shops, garages and light industry, all looking prosperous, haphazard, and, to my eyes, American.

‘Where are we?’ Jik said.

‘Somewhere called Box Hill,’ I said, reading it on shopfronts.

‘As good as anywhere.’

We drove a few miles further and stopped at a modern middle-rank motel which had bright coloured strings of triangular flags fluttering across the forecourt. A far cry from the Hilton, though the rooms we presently took were cleaner than nature intended.

There were plain divans, a square of thin carpet nailed at the edges, and a table lamp screwed to an immovable table. The looking glass was stuck flat to the wall and the swivelling arm chair was bolted to the floor. Apart from that, the curtains were bright and the hot tap ran hot in the shower.

‘They don’t mean you to pinch much,’ Jik said. ‘Let’s paint them a mural.’

‘No!’ Sarah said, horrorstruck.

‘There’s a great Australian saying,’ Jik said. ‘If it moves, shoot it, and if it grows, chop it down.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Sarah said.

‘Nothing. I just thought Todd might like to hear it.’

‘Give me strength.’

We were trying to, in our inconsequential way.

Jik sat in the arm chair in my room, swivelling. Sarah sat on one of the divans, I on the other. My suitcase and satchel stood side by side on the floor.

‘You do realise we skipped out of the Hilton without paying,’ Sarah said.

‘No we didn’t,’ Jik said. ‘According to our clothes, we are still resident. I’ll ring them up later.’

‘But Todd...’

‘I did pay,’ I said. ‘Before you got back.’

She looked slightly happier.

‘How did Greene find you?’ I said.

‘God knows,’ Jik said gloomily.

Sarah was astonished. ‘How did you know about Greene? How did you know there was anyone in our room besides Jik and me? How did you know we were in such awful trouble?’

‘Jik told me.’

‘But he couldn’t! He couldn’t risk warning you. He just had to tell you to come. He really did...’ Her voice quivered. The tears weren’t far from the surface. ‘They made him...’

‘Jik told me,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘First, he called me Charles, which he never does, so I knew something was wrong. Second, he was rude to me, and I know you think he is most of the time, but he isn’t, not like that. And third, he told me the name of the man who I was to guess was in your room putting pressure on you both to get me to come down and walk into a nasty little hole. He told me it was chromic oxide, which is the pigment in green paint.’

‘Green paint!’ The tearful moment passed. ‘You really are both extraordinary,’ she said.

‘Long practice,’ Jik said cheerfully.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

‘We left before the last race, to avoid the traffic, and we just came back normally to the Hilton. I parked the car, and we went up to our room. We’d only been there about a minute when there was this knock on the door, and when I opened it they just pushed in...’

‘They?’

‘Three of them. One was Greene. We both knew him straight away, from your drawing. Another was the boy from the Arts Centre. The third was all biceps and beetle brows, with his brains in his fists.’

He absentmindedly rubbed an area south of his heart.

‘He punched you?’ I said.

‘It was all so quick...’ he said apologetically. ‘They just crammed in... and biff bang... The next thing I knew they’d got hold of Sarah and were twisting her arm and saying that she wouldn’t just get turps in her eyes if I didn’t get you to come at once.’

‘Did they have a gun?’ I asked.

‘No... a cigarette lighter. Look, I’m sorry, mate. I guess it sounds pretty feeble, but Beetle-brows had her in a pretty rough grasp and the boy had this ruddy great cigarette lighter with a flame like a blow torch just a couple of inches from her cheek... and I was a bit groggy... and Greene said they’d burn her if I didn’t get you... and I couldn’t fight them all at once.’

‘Stop apologising,’ I said.

‘Yeah... well, so I rang you. I told Greene you’d be ten minutes because you were in your underpants, but I think he heard you anyway because he was standing right beside me, very wary and sharp. I didn’t know really whether you’d cottoned on, but I hoped to God... and you should have seen their faces when the waiter pushed the trolley in. Beetle-brows let go of Sarah and the boy just stood there with his mouth open and the cigarette lighter flaring up like an oil refinery...’

‘Greene said we didn’t want the champagne and to take it away,’ Sarah said. ‘But Jik and I said yes we did, and Jik asked the waiter to open it at once.’

‘Before he got the first cork out the others all began coming... and then they were all picking up glasses... and the room was filling up... and Greene and the boy and Beetle-brows were all on the window side of the room, sort of pinned in by the trolley and all those people... and I just grabbed Sarah and we ducked round the edge. The last I saw, Greene and the others were trying to push through, but our guests were pretty thick on the ground by then and keen to get their champagne... and I should think the cleaning trolley was just about enough to give us that start to the lift.’