Dick Francis: In the Frame

They thought about it in silence. Jik fiddled with the dispenser in the room’s in-built refrigerator and liberated another can of Fosters.

‘So what then?’ Sarah said.

‘So the Melbourne police said it was too insubstantial, but if they could tie Hudson in definitely with the gallery they might believe it. So they dangled in front of Hudson the pictures and stuff we stole from the gallery, and along he came to collect them.’

‘How? How did they dangle them?’

‘They let Wexford accidentally overhear snippets from a fake report from several hotels about odd deposits in their baggage rooms, including the paintings at the Hilton. Then after we got here they gave him an opportunity to use the telephone when he thought no one was listening, and he rang Hudson at the house he’s been staying in here for the races, and told him. So Hudson wrote himself a letter to the Hilton from me, and zoomed along to remove the incriminating evidence.’

‘He must have been crazy.’

‘Stupid. But he thought I was dead... and he’d no idea anyone suspected him. He should have had the sense to know that Wexford’s call to him would be bugged by the police... but Frost told me that Wexford would think he was using a public ‘phone booth.’

‘Sneaky,’ Sarah said.

I yawned. ‘It takes a sneak to catch a sneak.’

‘You’d never have thought Hudson would blaze up like that,’ she said. ‘He looked so... so dangerous.’ She shivered. ‘You wouldn’t think people could hide such really frightening violence under a friendly public face.’

‘The nice Irish bloke next door,’ Jik said, standing up, ‘can leave a bomb to blow the legs off children.’

He pulled Sarah to her feet. ‘What do you think I paint?’ he said. ‘Vases of flowers?’ He looked down at me. ‘Horses?’

We parted the next morning at Melbourne airport, where we seemed to have spent a good deal of our lives.

‘It seems strange, saying goodbye,’ Sarah said.

‘I’ll be coming back,’ I said.

They nodded.

‘Well...’ We looked at watches.

It was like all partings. There wasn’t much to say. I saw in their eyes, as they must have seen in mine, that the past ten days would quickly become a nostalgic memory. Something we did in our crazy youth. Distant.

‘Would you do it all again?’ Jik said.

I thought inconsequentially of surviving wartime pilots looking back from forty years on. Had their achievements been worth the blood and sweat and risk of death: did they regret?.

I smiled. Forty years on didn’t matter. What the future made of the past was its own tragedy. What we ourselves did on the day was all that counted.

‘I guess I would.’

I leaned forward and kissed Sarah, my oldest friend’s wife.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Find one of your own.’

Maisie saw me before I saw her, and came sweeping down like a great scarlet bird, wings outstretched.

Monday lunchtime at Wolverhampton races, misty and cold.

‘Hello, dear, I’m so glad you’ve come. Did you have a good trip back, because of course it’s such a long way, isn’t it, with all that wretched jet lag?’ She patted my arm and peered acutely at my face. ‘You don’t really look awfully well, dear, if you don’t mind me saying so, and you don’t seem to have collected any sun-tan, though I suppose as you haven’t been away two weeks it isn’t surprising, but those are nasty gashes on your hand, dear, aren’t they, and you were walking very carefully just now.’

She stopped to watch a row of jockeys canter past on their way to the start. Bright shirts against the thin grey mist. A subject for Munnings.

‘Have you backed anything, dear? And are you sure you’re warm enough in that anorak? I never think jeans are good for people in the winter, they’re only cotton, dear, don’t forget, and how did you get on in Australia? I mean, dear, did you find out anything useful?’

‘It’s an awfully long story...’

‘Best told in the bar, then, don’t you think, dear?’

She bought us immense brandies with ginger ale and settled herself at a small table, her kind eyes alert and waiting.

I told her about Hudson’s organisation, about the Melbourne gallery, and about the list of robbable customers.

‘Was I on it?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, you were.’

‘And you gave it to the police?’ she said anxiously.

I grinned. ‘Don’t look so worried, Maisie. Your name was crossed out already. I just crossed it out more thoroughly. By the time I’d finished, no one could ever disentangle it, particularly on a photo-copy.’

She smiled broadly. ‘No one could call you a fool, dear.’

I wasn’t so sure about that. ‘I’m afraid, though,’ I said, ‘that you’ve lost your nine thousand quid.’

‘Oh yes, dear,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Serves me right, doesn’t it, for trying to cheat the Customs, though frankly, dear, in the same circumstances I’d probably do it again, because that tax makes me so mad, dear. But I’m ever so glad, dear, that they won’t come knocking on my door this time, or rather my sister Betty’s, because of course I’m staying with her again up here at the moment, as of course the Beach told you, until my house is ready.’

I blinked. ‘What house?’

‘Well, dear, I decided not to rebuild the house at Worthing because it wouldn’t be the same without the things Archie and I bought together, so I’m selling that plot of sea-side land for a fortune, dear, and I’ve chosen a nice place just down the road from Sandown Park racecourse.’

‘You’re not going to live in Australia?’

‘Oh no, dear, that would be too far away. From Archie, you see, dear.’

I saw. I liked Maisie very much.

‘I’m afraid I spent all your money,’ I said.

She smiled at me with her well-kept head on one side and absentmindedly stroked her crocodile handbag.

‘Never mind, dear. You can paint me two pictures. One of me, and one of my new house.’

I left after the third race, took the train along the main line to Shrewsbury, and from there travelled by bus to Inspector Frost’s official doorstep.

He was in an office, chin deep in papers. Also present, the unblinking Superintendent Wall, who had so unnerved Donald, and whom I’d not previously met. Both men shook hands in a cool and businesslike manner, Wall’s eyes traversing the anorak, jeans and desert boots, and remaining unimpressed. They offered me a chair, moulded plastic and armless.

Frost said, faintly smiling, ‘You sure kicked open an ant-hill.’

Wall frowned, disliking such frivolity. ‘It appears you stumbled on an organisation of some size.’

The gaze of both men swept the mountain of paper.

‘What about Donald?’ I asked.

Frost kept his eyes down. His mouth twitched.

Wall said, ‘We have informed Mr Stuart that we are satisfied the break-in at his house and the death of Mrs Stuart were the work of outside agencies, beyond his knowledge or control.’

Cold comfort words. ‘Did he understand what he was hearing?’

The Wall eyebrows rose. ‘I went to see him myself, this morning. He appeared to understand perfectly.’

‘And what about Regina?’

‘The body of Mrs Stuart,’ Wall said correctively.

‘Donald wants her buried,’ I said.

Frost looked up with an almost human look of compassion. ‘The difficulty is,’ he said, ‘that in a murder case, one has to preserve the victim’s body in case the defence wishes to call for its own post mortem. In this case, we have not been able to accuse anyone of her murder, let alone get as far as them arranging a defence.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We’ll release Mrs Stuart’s body for burial as soon as official requirements have been met.’