Dick Francis - Straight

“At the races?” Milo was saying. “An owner?”

“That’s right. His horse won the five-furlong sprint.”

“He’d have to be mad. They dope test two horses in every race, as you know. Nearly always the winner, and another at random. No owner is going to pump drugs into his horse at the races.”

“I don’t know that he did. He had a baster with him, that’s all.”

“Did you tell the Stewards?”

“No, I didn’t. Nicholas Loder was with his owner and he would have exploded as he was angry with me already for spotting Dozen Roses’ alteration.”

Milo laughed. “So that was what all the heat was about this past week?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Will you kick up a storm?”

“Probably not.”

“You’re too soft,” he said, “and oh yes, I almost forgot. There was a phone message for you. Wait a tick. I wrote it down.” He went away for a bit and returned. “Here you are. Something about your brother’s diamonds.” He sounded doubtful. “Is that right?”

“Yes. What about them?”

He must have heard the urgency in my voice because he said, “It’s nothing much. Just that someone had been trying to call you last night and all day today, but I said you’d slept in London and gone to York.”

“Who was it?”

“He didn’t say. Just said that he had some info for you. Then he hummed and hahed and said if I talked to you would I tell you he would telephone your brother’s house, in case you went there, at about ten tonight, or later. Or it might have been a she. Difficult to tell. One of those middle-range voices. I said I didn’t know if you would be speaking to me, but I’d tell you if I could.”

“Well, thanks.”

“I’m not a message service,” he said testily. “Why don’t you switch on your answer phone like everyone else?”

“I do sometimes.”

“Not enough.”

I switched off the phone with a smile and wondered who’d been trying to reach me. It had to be someone who knew Greville had bought diamonds. It might even be Annette, I thought: her voice had a mid-range quality.

I would have liked to have gone to Greville’s house as soon as we got back to London, but I couldn’t exactly renege on the dinner after Martha’s truly marvelous idea, so the three of us ate together as planned and I tried to please them as much as they’d pleased me.

Martha announced yet another marvelous idea during dinner. She and Harley would get Simms or another of the car firm’s chauffeurs to drive us all down to Lambourn the next day to take Milo out to lunch, so that they could see Datepalm again before they went back to the States on Tuesday. They could drop me at my house afterward, and then go on to visit a castle in Dorset they’d missed last time around. Harley looked resigned. It was Martha, I saw, who always made the decisions, which was maybe why the repressed side of him needed to lash out sometimes at car-park attendants who boxed him in.

Milo, again on the telephone, told me he’d do practically anything to please the Ostermeyers, definitely including Sunday lunch. He also said that my informant had rung again and he had told him/her that I’d got the message.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you tomorrow.”

I thanked the Ostermeyers inadequately for everything and went to Greville’s house by taxi. I did think of asking the taxi driver to stay, like Brad, until I’d reconnoitered, but the house was quiet and dark behind the impregnable grilles, and I thought the taxi driver would think me a fool or a coward or both, so I paid him off and, fishing out the keys, opened the gate in the hedge and went up the path until the lights blazed on and the dog started barking..

Everyone can make mistakes.

I didn’t get as far as the steps up to the front door. A dark figure, dimly glimpsed in the floodlight’s glare, came launching itself at me from behind in a cannonball rugger tackle and when I reached the ground something very hard hit my head.

I had no sensation of blacking out or of time passing. One moment I was awake, and the next moment I was awake also, or so it seemed, but I knew in a dim way that there had been an interval.

I didn’t know where I was except that I was lying facedown on grass. I’d woken up concussed on grass several times in my life, but never before in the dark. They couldn’t have all gone home from the races, I thought, and left me alone out on the course all night.

The memory of where I was drifted back quietly. In Greville’s front garden. Alive. Hooray for small mercies.

I knew from experience that the best way to deal with being knocked out was not to hurry. On the other hand, this time I hadn’t come off a horse, not on Greville’s pocket handkerchief turf. There might be urgent reasons for getting up quickly, if I could think of them.

I remembered a lot of things in a rush and groaned slightly, rolling up onto my knees, wincing and groping about for the crutches. I felt stupid and went on behaving stupidly, acting on fifty percent brain power. Looking back afterward, I thought that what I ought to have done was slither silently away through the gate to go to any neighboring house and call the police. What I actually did was to start toward Greville’s front door, and of course the lights flashed on again and the dog started barking and I stood rooted to the spot expecting another attack, swaying unsteadily on the crutches, absolutely dim and pathetic.

The door was ajar, I saw, with lights on in the hall, and while I stood dithering it was pulled wide open from inside and the cannonball figure shot out.

The cannonball was a motorcycle helmet, shiny and black, its transparent visor pulled down over the face. Behind the visor the face also seemed to be black, but a black balaclava, I thought, not black skin. There was an impression of jeans, denim jacket, gloves, black running shoes, all moving fast. He turned his head a fraction and must have seen me standing there insecurely, but he didn’t stop to give me another unbalancing shove. He vaulted the gate and set off at a run down the street and I simply stood where I was in the garden waiting for my head to clear a bit more and start working.

When that happened to some extent, I went up the short flight of steps and in through the front door. The keys, I found, were still in the lowest of the locks; the small bunch of three keys that Clarissa had had, which I’d been using instead of Greville’s larger bunch as they were easier. I’d made things simple for the intruder, I thought, by having them ready in my hand.

With a spurt of alarm I felt my trousers pocket to find if Greville’s main bunch had been stolen, but to my relief they were still there, clinking.

I switched off the floodlights and the dog and in the sudden silence closed the front door. Greville’s small sitting room, when I reached it, looked like the path of a hurricane. I surveyed the mess in fury rather than horror and picked the tumbled phone off the floor to call the police. A burglary, I said. The burglar had gone.

Then I sat in Greville’s chair with my head in my hands and said “shit” aloud with heartfelt rage and gingerly felt the sore bump swelling on my scalp. A bloody pushover, I thought. Like last Sunday. Too like last Sunday to be a coincidence. The cannonball had known both times that I wouldn’t be able to stand upright against a sudden unexpected rush. I supposed I should be grateful he hadn’t smashed my head in altogether this time while he had the chance. No knife, this time, either.

After a bit I looked wearily round the room. The pictures were off the walls, most of the glass smashed. The drawers had been yanked out of the tables and the tables themselves overturned. The little pink and brown stone bears lay scattered on the floor, the chrysanthemum plant and its dirt were trampled into the carpet, the chrysanthemum pot itself was embedded in the smashed screen of the television, the video recorder had been tom from its unit and dropped, the video cassettes of the races lay pulled out in yards of ruined tape. The violence of it all angered me as much as my own sense of failure in letting it happen.