Dick Francis: In the Frame

The new Donald was a tentative man shattered with shock, a man trying to behave decently but unsure where his feet were when he walked upstairs.

We spent the evening in the kitchen, talking desultorily, eating a scratch meal, and tidying all the stores back on to the shelves. Donald made a good show of being busy but put half the tins back upside down.

The front door bell rang three times during the evening but never in the code pre-arranged with the police. The telephone, with its receiver lying loose beside it, rang not at all. Donald had turned down several offers of refuge with local friends and visibly shook at the prospect of talking to anyone but Frost and me.

‘Why don’t they go away?’ he said despairingly, after the third attempt on the front door.

‘They will, once they’ve seen you,’ I said. And sucked you dry, and spat out the husk, I thought.

He shook his head tiredly. ‘I simply can’t.’

It felt like living through a siege.

We went eventually again upstairs to bed, although it seemed likely that Donald would sleep no more than the night before, which had been hardly at all. The police surgeon had left knock-out pills, which Donald wouldn’t take. I pressed him again on that second evening, with equal non-results.

‘No, Charles. I’d feel I’d deserted her. D... ducked out. Thought only of myself, and not of... of how awful it was for her... dying like that... with n... no one near who I... loved her.’

He was trying to offer her in some way the comfort of his own pain. I shook my head at him, but tried no more with the pills.

‘Do you mind,’ he said diffidently, ‘if I sleep alone tonight?’

‘Of course not.’

‘We could make up a bed for you in one of the other rooms.’

‘Sure.’

He pulled open the linen-cupboard door on the upstairs landing and gestured indecisively at the contents. ‘Could you manage?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

He turned away and seemed struck by one particular adjacent patch of empty wall.

‘They took the Munnings,’ he said.

‘What Munnings?’

‘We bought it in Australia. I hung it just there... only a week ago. I wanted you to see it. It was one of the reasons I asked you to come.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Inadequate words.

‘Everything,’ he said helplessly. ‘Everything’s gone.’

Frost arrived tirelessly again on Sunday morning with his quiet watchful eyes and non-committal manner. I opened the front door to his signal, and he followed me through to the kitchen, where Donald and I seemed to have taken up permanent residence. I gestured him to a stool, and he sat on it, straightening his spine to avoid future stiffness.

‘Two pieces of information you might care to have, sir,’ he said to Donald, his voice at its most formal. ‘Despite our intensive investigation of this house during yesterday and the previous evening, we have found no fingerprints for which we cannot account.’

‘Would you expect to?’ I asked.

He flicked me a glance. ‘No, sir. Professional housebreakers always wear gloves.’

Donald waited with a grey patient face, as if he would find whatever Frost said unimportant. Nothing, I judged, was of much importance to Donald any more.

‘Second,’ said Frost, ‘our investigations in the district reveal that a removal van was parked outside your front door early on Friday afternoon.’

Donald looked at him blankly.

‘Dark coloured, and dusty, sir.’

‘Oh,’ Donald said, meaninglessly.

Frost sighed. ‘What do you know of a bronze statuette of a horse, sir? A horse rearing up on its hind legs?’

‘It’s in the hall,’ Donald said automatically; and then, frowning slightly, ‘I mean, it used to be. It’s gone.’

‘How do you know about it?’ I asked Frost curiously, and guessed the answer before I’d finished the question. ‘Oh no...’ I stopped, and swallowed. ‘I mean, perhaps you found it... fallen off the van...?’

‘No, sir.’ His face was calm. ‘We found it in the sitting-room, near Mrs Stuart.’

Donald understood as clearly as I had done. He stood up abruptly and went to the window, and stared out for a while at the empty garden.

‘It is heavy,’ he said at last. ‘The base of it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It must have been... quick.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Frost said again, sounding more objective than comforting.

‘P... poor Regina.’ The words were quiet, the desolation immense. When he came back to the table, his hands were trembling. He sat down heavily and stared into space.

Frost started another careful speech about the sitting-room being kept locked by the police for a few days yet and please would neither of us try to go in there.

Neither of us would.

Apart from that, they had finished their enquiries at the house, and Mr Stuart was at liberty to have the other rooms cleaned, if he wished, where the fingerprint dust lay greyish-white on every polished surface.

Mr Stuart gave no sign of having heard.

Had Mr Stuart completed the list of things stolen?

I passed it over. It still consisted only of the diningroom silver and what I could remember of the paintings. Frost raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.

‘We’ll need more than this, sir.’

‘We’ll try again today,’ I promised. ‘There’s a lot of wine missing, as well.’

‘Wine?’

I showed him the empty cellar and he came up looking thoughtful.

‘It must have taken hours to move that lot,’ I said.

‘Very likely, sir,’ he said primly.

Whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t telling. He suggested instead that Donald should prepare a short statement to read to the hungry reporters still waiting outside, so that they could go away and print it.

‘No,’ Don said.

‘Just a short statement,’ Frost said reasonably. ‘We can prepare it here and now, if you like.’

He wrote it himself, more or less, and I guessed it was as much for his own sake as Donald’s that he wanted the Press to depart, as it was he who had to push through them every time. He repeated the statement aloud when he had finished. It sounded like a police account, full of jargon, but because of that so distant from Donald’s own raw grief that my cousin agreed in the end to read it out.

‘But no photographs,’ he said anxiously, and Frost said he would see to it.

They crowded into the hall, a collection of dry-eyed fact-finders, all near the top of their digging profession and inured from sensitivity by a hundred similar intrusions into tragedy. Sure, they were sorry for the guy whose wife had been bashed, but news was news and bad news sold papers, and if they didn’t produce the goods they’d lose their jobs to others more tenacious. The Press Council had stopped the brutal bullying of the past, but the leeway still allowed could be a great deal too much for the afflicted.

Donald stood on the stairs, with Frost and myself at the foot, and read without expression, as if the words applied to someone else.

‘... I returned to the house at approximately five p.m. and observed that during my absence a considerable number of valuable objects had been removed... I telephoned immediately for assistance... My wife, who was normally absent from the house on Fridays, returned unexpectedly... and, it is presumed, disturbed the intruders.’

He stopped. The reporters dutifully wrote down the stilted words and looked disillusioned. One of them, clearly elected by pre-arrangement, started asking questions for them all, in a gentle, coaxing, sympathetic tone of voice.

‘Could you tell us which of these closed doors is the one to the room where your wife...’

Donald’s eyes slid briefly despite himself towards the sittingroom. All the heads turned, the eyes studied the uninformative white painted panels, the pencils wrote.