Dick Francis - Straight

The same sort of feeling as in the vaults kept me going. I didn’t expect to find anything but it would be stupid not to make sure, just in case. This time it took half an hour, not three days, and in the end the whole area was up except for a piece under a serving table on wheels. Under that carpet square, when I’d moved the table, I found a flat circular piece of silvery metal flush with the hard base floor, with a recessed ring in it for lifting.

Amazed and suddenly unbearably hopeful, I knelt and pulled the ring up and tugged, and the flat piece of metal came away and off like the lid of a biscuit tin, revealing another layer of metal beneath: an extremely solid-looking circular metal plate the size of a dinner plate in which there was a single keyhole and another handle for lifting.

I pulled the second handle. As well tried to pull up the house by its roots. I tried all of Greville’s bunch of keys in the keyhole but none of them came near to fitting.

Even Greville, I thought, must have kept the key reasonably handy, but the prospect of searching anew for anything at all filled me with weariness. Greville’s affairs were a maze with more blind alleys than Hampton Court.

There were keys in the hollow books, I remembered. Might as well start with those. I shifted upstairs and dug out With a Mule in Patagonia and the others, rediscovering the two businesslike keys and also the decorative one which looked too flamboyant for sensible use. True to Greville’s mind, however, it was that one whose wards slid easily into the keyhole of the safe and under pressure turned the mechanism inside.

Even then the circular lid wouldn’t pull out. Seesawing between hope and frustration I found that, if one turned instead of pulling, the whole top of the safe went round like a wheel until it came against stops; and at that point it finally gave up the struggle and came up loose in my grasp.

The space below was big enough to hold a case of champagne but to my acute disappointment it contained no nestegg, only a clutch of businesslike brown envelopes. Sighing deeply I took out the top two and found the first contained the freehold deeds of the house and the second the paperwork involved in raising a mortgage to buy it. I read the latter with resignation: Greville’s house belonged in essence to a finance company, not to me.

Another of the envelopes contained a copy of his will, which was as simple as the lawyers had said, and in another there was his birth certificate and our parents’ birth and marriage certificates. Another yielded an endowment insurance policy taken out long ago to provide him with an income at sixty-five: but inflation had eaten away its worth and he had apparently not bothered to increase it. Instead, I realized, remembering what I’d learned of his company’s finances, he had plowed back his profits into expanding his business which would itself ride on the tide of inflation and provide him with a munificent income when he retired and sold.

A good plan, I thought, until he’d knocked the props out by throwing one point five million dollars to the winds. Only he hadn’t, of course. He’d had a sensible plan for a sober profit. Deal with honor... He’d made a good income, lived a comfortable life and run his racehorses, but he had stacked away no great personal fortune. His wealth, whichever way one looked at it, was in the stones.

Hell and damnation, I thought. If I couldn’t find the damned diamonds I’d be failing him as much as myself. He would long for me to find them, but where the bloody hell had he put them?

I stuffed most of the envelopes back into their private basement, keeping out only the insurance policy, and replaced the heavy circular lid. Turned it, turned the key, replaced the upper piece of metal and laid a carpet tile on top. Fireproof the hiding place undoubtedly was, and thiefproof it had proved, and I couldn’t imagine why Greville hadn’t used it for jewels.

Feeling defeated, I climbed at length to the bedroom where I found my own overnight bag had, along with everything else, been tipped up and emptied. It hardly seemed to matter. I picked up my sleeping shorts and changed into them and went into the bathroom. The mirror was still half covered with shaving cream and by the time I’d wiped that off with a face cloth and swallowed a Distalgesic and brushed my teeth and swept a lot of the crunching underfoot junk to one side with a towel, I had used up that day’s ration of stamina pretty thoroughly.

Even then, though it was long past midnight, I couldn’t sleep. Bangs on the head were odd, I thought. There had been one time when I’d dozed for a week afterward, going to sleep in midsentence as often as not. Another time I’d apparently walked and talked rationally to a doctor but hadn’t any recollection of it half an hour later. This time, in Greville’s bed, I felt shivery and unsettled, and thought that that had probably as much to do with being attacked as concussed.

I lay still and let the hours pass, thinking of bad and good and of why things happened, and by morning felt calm and much better. Sitting on the lid of the loo in the bathroom, I unwrapped the crepe bandage and by hopping and holding on to things took a long, luxurious and much needed shower, washing my hair, letting the dust and debris and the mental tensions of the week run away in the soft bombardment of water. After that, loinclothed in a bath towel, I sat on the black and white bed and more closely surveyed the ankle scenery.

It was better than six days earlier, one could confidently say that. On the other hand it was still black, still fairly swollen and still sore to the touch. Still vulnerable to knocks. I flexed my calf and foot muscles several times: the bones and ligaments still violently protested, but none of it could be helped. To stay young the muscles had to move, and that was that. I kneaded the calf muscle a bit to give it some encouragement and thought about borrowing an apparatus called Electrovet which Milo had tucked away somewhere, which he used on his horses’ legs to give their muscles electrical stimuli to bring down swelling and get them fit again. What worked on horses should work on me, I reckoned.

Eventually I wound the bandage on again, not as neatly as the surgeon, but I hoped as effectively. Then I dressed, borrowing one of Greville’s clean white shirts and, down in the forlorn little sitting room, telephoned to Nicholas Loder.

He didn’t sound pleased to hear my voice.

“Well done with Dozen Roses,” I said.

He grunted.

“To solve the question of who owns him,” I continued, “I’ve found a buyer for him.”

“Now look here!” he began angrily. “I...”

“Yes, I know,” I interrupted, “you’d ideally like to sell him to one of your own owners and keep him in your yard, and I do sympathize with that, but Mr. and Mrs. Ostermeyer, the people I was with yesterday at York, they’ve told me they would like the horse themselves.”

“I strongly protest,” he said.

“They want to send him to Milo Shandy to be trained for jumping.”

“You owe it to me to leave him here,” he said obstinately. “Four wins in a row... it’s downright dishonorable to take him away.”

“He’s suitable for jumping, now that he’s been gelded.” I said it without threat, but he knew he was in an awkward position. He’d had no right to geld the horse. In addition, there was in fact nothing to stop Greville’s executor selling the horse to whomever he pleased, as Milo had discovered for me, and which Nicholas Loder had no doubt discovered for himself, and in the racing world in general the sale to the Ostermeyers would make exquisite sense as I would get to ride the horse even if I couldn’t own him.

Into Loder’s continued silence I said, “If you find a buyer for Gemstones, though, I’ll give my approval.”