Dick Francis - In the Frame

‘What are you on about?’ Jik said.

‘Grey was the name of the man who hired the suburban art gallery in Sydney, and Grey is the name of the man who sold Updike his quote Herring unquote.’

‘Oh dear.’ Sarah’s sigh took the lift out of the spirits and the dazzle from the day.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

There were so many of them, I thought. Wexford and Greene. The boy. The woman. Harley Renbo. Two toughs at Alice Springs, one of whom I knew by sight, and one, (the one who’d been behind me) whom I didn’t. The one I didn’t know might, or might not, be Beetle-brows. If he wasn’t, Beetle-brows was extra.

And now Grey. And another one, somewhere.

Nine at least. Maybe ten. How could I possibly tangle all that lot up without getting crunched. Or worse, getting Sarah crunched, or Jik. Every time I moved, the serpent grew another head.

I wondered who did the actual robberies. Did they send their own two (or three) toughs overseas, or did they contract out to local labour, so to speak?

If they sent their own toughs, was it one of them who had killed Regina?

Had I already met Regina’s killer? Had he thrown me over the balcony at Alice?

I pondered uselessly, and added one more twist...

Was he waiting ahead in Wellington?

We reached the capital in the afternoon and booked into the Townhouse Hotel because of its splendid view over the harbour. With such marvellous coastal scenery, I thought, it would have been a disgrace if the cities of New Zealand had been ugly. I still thought there were no big towns more captivating than flat old marshy London, but that was another story. Wellington, new and cared for, had life and character to spare.

I looked up the Ruapehu Fine Arts in the telephone directory and asked the hotel’s reception desk how to get there. They had never heard of the gallery, but the road it was in, that must be up past the old town, they thought: past Thorndon.

They sold me a local area road map, which they said would help, and told me that Mount Ruapehu was a (with luck) extinct volcano, with a warm lake in its crater. If we’d come from Auckland, we must have passed nearby.

I thanked them and carried the map to Jik and Sarah upstairs in their room.

‘We could find the gallery,’ Jik said. ‘But what would we do when we got there?’

‘Make faces at them through the window?’

‘You’d be crazy enough for that, too,’ Sarah said.

‘Let’s just go and look,’ I said. ‘They won’t see us in the car, if we simply drive past.’

‘And after all,’ Jik said incautiously, ‘we do want them to know we’re here.’

‘Why?’ asked Sarah in amazement.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Jik said.

‘Why?’ she demanded, the anxiety crowding back.

‘Ask Todd, it’s his idea.’

‘You’re a sod,’ I said.

‘Why, Todd?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘I want them to spend all their energies looking for us over here and not clearing away every vestige of evidence in Melbourne. We do want the police to deal with them finally, don’t we, because we can’t exactly arrest them ourselves? Well... when the police start moving, it would be hopeless if there was no one left for them to find.’

She nodded. ‘That’s what you meant by leaving it all in working order. But... you didn’t say anything about deliberately enticing them to follow us.’

‘Todd’s got that list, and the pictures we took,’ Jik said, ‘and they’ll want them back. Todd wants them to concentrate exclusively on getting them back, because if they think they can get them back and shut us up...’

‘Jik,’ I interrupted. ‘You do go on a bit.’

Sarah looked from me to him and back again. A sort of hopeless calm took over from the anxiety.

‘If they think they can get everything back and shut us up,’ she said, ‘they will be actively searching for us in order to kill us. And you intend to give them every encouragement. Is that right?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Or rather, yes.’

‘They’d be looking for us anyway,’ Jik pointed out.

‘And we are going to say “Coo-ee, we’re over here”?’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘I think they may know already.’

‘God give me strength,’ she said. ‘All right. I see what you’re doing, and I see why you didn’t tell me. And I think you’re a louse. But I’ll grant you you’ve been a damn sight more successful than I thought you’d be, and here we all still are, safe and moderately sound, so all right, we’ll let them know we’re definitely here. On the strict understanding that we then keep our heads down until you’ve fixed the police in Melbourne.’

I kissed her cheek. ‘Done,’ I said.

‘So how do we do it?’

I grinned at her. ‘We address ourselves to the telephone.’

In the end Sarah herself made the call, on the basis that her Australian voice would be less remarkable than Jik’s Englishness, or mine.

‘Is that the Ruapehu Fine Arts gallery? It is? I wonder if you can help me...’ she said. ‘I would like to speak to whoever is in charge. Yes, I know, but it is important. Yes, I’ll wait.’ She rolled her eyes and put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘She sounded like a secretary. New Zealand, anyway.’

‘You’re doing great,’ I said.

‘Oh... Hello? Yes. Could you tell me your name, please?’ Her eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘ Wexford . Oh, er... Mr Wexford, I’ve just had a visit from three extraordinary people who wanted to see a painting I bought from you some time ago. Quite extraordinary people. They said you’d sent them. I didn’t believe them. I wouldn’t let them in. But I thought perhaps I’d better check with you. Did you send them to see my painting?’

There was some agitated squawking from the receiver.

‘Describe them? A young man with fair hair and a beard, and another young man with an injured arm, and a bedraggled looking girl. I sent them away. I didn’t like the look of them.’

She grimaced over the ‘phone and listened to some more squawks.

‘No of course I didn’t give them any information. I told you I didn’t like the look of them. Where do I live? Why, right here in Wellington. Well, thank you so much Mr Wexford, I am so pleased I called you.’

She put the receiver down while it was still squawking.

‘He was asking me for my name,’ she said.

‘What a girl,’ Jik said. ‘What an actress, my wife.’

Wexford. Wexford himself.

It had worked .

I raised a small internal cheer.

‘So now that they know we’re here,’ I said, ‘would you like to go off somewhere else?’

‘Oh no,’ Sarah said instinctively. She looked out of the window across the busy harbour. ‘It’s lovely here, and we’ve been travelling all day already.’

I didn’t argue. I thought it might take more than a single telephone call to keep the enemy interested in Wellington, and it had only been for Sarah’s sake that I would have been prepared to move on.

‘They won’t find us just by checking the hotels by telephone,’ Jik pointed out. ‘Even if it occurred to them to try the Townhouse, they’d be asking for Cassavetes and Todd, not Andrews and Peel.’

‘Are we Andrews and Peel?’ Sarah asked.

‘We’re Andrews. Todd’s Peel.’

‘So nice to know,’ she said.

Mr and Mrs Andrews and Mr Peel took dinner in the hotel restaurant without mishap, Mr Peel having discarded his sling for the evening on the grounds that it was in general a bit too easy to notice. Mr Andrews had declined, on the same consideration, to remove his beard.

We went in time to our separate rooms, and so to bed. I spent a jolly hour unsticking the Alice bandages from my leg and admiring the hemstitching. The tree had made tears that were far from the orderly cuts of operations, and as I inspected the long curving railway lines on a ridged backing of crimson, black and yellow skin, I reckoned that those doctors had done an expert job. It was four days since the fall, during which time I hadn’t exactly led an inactive life, but none of their handiwork had come adrift. I realised I had progressed almost without noticing it from feeling terrible all the time to scarcely feeling anything worth mentioning. It was astonishing, I thought, how quickly the human body repaired itself, given the chance.