Dick Francis - Straight

I finally laid it aside and played the tiny tape recorder instead. There was a lot of office chat on the tapes and I couldn’t think why Greville should have bothered to take them home and hide them. Long before I reached the end of the fourth side, I was asleep.

I woke stiffly after a while, unsure for a second where I was. I rubbed my face, looking at my watch, thought about all the constructive thinking I was supposed to be doing and wasn’t, and rewound the second of the baby tapes to listen to what I’d missed. Greville’s voice, talking business to Annette.

The most interesting thing, the only interesting thing about those tapes, I thought, was Greville’s voice. The only way I would ever hear him again.

“... going out to lunch,” he was saying. “I’ll be back by two-thirty.”

Annette’s voice said, “Yes, Mr. Franklin.”

A click sounded on the tape.

Almost immediately, because of the concertinaing of time by the voice-activated mechanism, a different voice said, “I’m in his office now and I can’t find them. He hides everything, he’s security mad, you know that.” Click. “I can’t ask. He’d never tell me, and I don’t think he trusts me.” Click. “Po-faced Annette doesn’t sneeze unless he tells her to. She’d never tell me anything.” Click. “I’ll try. I’ll have to go, he doesn’t like me using this phone, he’ll be back from lunch any second.” Click.

End of tape.

Bloody hell, I thought. I rewound the end of the tape and listened to it again. I knew the voice, as Greville must have done. He’d left the recorder on, I guessed by mistake, and he’d come back and listened, with I supposed sadness, to treachery. It opened up a whole new world of questions and I went slowly to bed groping toward answers.

I lay a long time awake. When I slept, I dreamed the usual surrealist muddle and found it no help, but around dawn awake again and thinking of Greville, it occurred to me that there was one password I hadn’t tried because I hadn’t thought of him using it.

The Wizard was across the room by the armchair. Impelled by curiosity I turned on the light, rolled out of bed and hopped over to fetch it. Taking it back with me, I switched it on, pressed the buttons, found “Secret Off” and into the offered space typed the word Greville had written on the last page of his racing diary, below the numbers of his passport and national insurance.

DEREK, all in capital letters.

I typed DEREK and pressed “Enter,” and the Wizard with resignation let me into its data.

I began printing out everything in the secret files as it seemed from the manual that, particularly as regarded the expense organizer, it was the best way to get at the full information stored there.

Each category had to be printed separately, the baby printer clicking away line by line and not very fast. I watched its steady output with fascination, hoping the small roll of paper would last to the end, as I hadn’t any more.

From the Memo section, which I printed first, came a terse note, “Check, don’t trust.”

Next came a long list of days and dates which seemed to bear no relation to anything. Monday, Jan. 30, Wednesday, March 8... Mystified I watched the sequence lengthen, noticing only that most of them were Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, five or six weeks apart, sometimes less, sometimes longer. The list ended five weeks before his death, and it began... it began, I thought blankly, four years earlier. Four years ago; when he first met Clarissa.

I felt unbearable sadness for him. He’d fallen in love with a woman who wouldn’t leave home for him, whom he hadn’t wanted to compromise: he’d kept a record, I was certain, of every snatched day they’d spent together, and hidden it away as he had hidden so much else. A whole lot of roses, I thought.

The Schedule section, consulted next, contained appointments not hinted at earlier, including the delivery of the diamonds to his London house. For the day of his death there were two entries: the first, “Ipswich. Orwell Hotel, P. 3:30 P.M.,” and the second, “Meet Koningin Beatrix 6:30 P.M., Harwich.” For the following Monday he had noted “Meet C King’s Cross 12:10 Lunch Luigi’s.”

Meet C at King’s Cross... He hadn’t turned up, and she’d telephoned his house, and left a message on his answering machine, and sometime in the afternoon she’d telephoned his office to ask for him. Poor Clarissa. By Monday night she’d left the ultra-anxious second message, and on Tuesday she had learned he was dead.

The printer whirred and produced another entry, for the Saturday after. “C and Dozen Roses both at York! Could I go? Not wise. Check TV.”

The printer stopped, as Greville’s life had done. No more appointments on record.

Next I printed the Telephone sections, Private, Business and Business Overseas. Private contained only Knightwood. Business was altogether empty, but from Business Overseas I watched with widening eyes the emergence of five numbers and addresses in Antwerp. One was van Ekeren, one was Guy Servi: three were so far unknown to me. I breathed almost painfully with exultation, unable to believe Greville had entered them there for no purpose.

I printed the Expense Manager’s secret section last as it was the most complicated and looked the least promising, but the first item that emerged was galvanic.

ANTWERP SAYS 5 OF THE FIRST

BATCH OF ROUGH ARE CZ.

DON’T WANT TO BELIEVE IT,

INFINITE SADNESS.

PRIORITY I.

ARRANGE MEETING. IPSWICH?

UNDECIDED. DAMNATION!

I wished he had been more explicit, more specific, but he’d seen no need to be. It was surprising he’d written so much. His feelings must have been strong to have been entered at all. No other entries afterward held any comment but were short records of money spent on courier services with a firm called Euro-Securo, telephone number supplied. In the middle of those the paper ran out. I brought the rest of the stored information up onto the screen and scrolled through it, but there was nothing else disturbing.

I switched off both baby machines and reread the long curling strip of printing from the beginning, afterward flattening it out and folding it to fit a shirt pocket. Then I dressed, packed, breakfasted, waited for Brad and traveled to London hopefully.

The telephone calls to Antwerp had to be done from the Saxony Franklin premises because of the precautionary checking back. I would have preferred more privacy than Greville’s office but couldn’t achieve it, and one of the first things I asked Annette that morning was whether my brother had had one of those gadgets that warned you if someone was listening to your conversation on an extension. The office phones were all interlinked.

“No, he didn’t,” she said, troubled.

“He could have done with one,” I said.

“Are you implying that we listened when he didn’t mean us to?”

“Not you,” I assured her, seeing her resentment of the suggestion. “But yes, I’d think it happened. Anyway, at some point this morning I want to make sure of not being overheard, so when that call comes through perhaps you’ll all go into the stockroom and sing ‘Rule Britannia.’ ”

Annette never made jokes. I had to explain I didn’t mean sing literally. She rather huffily agreed that when I wanted it, she would go round the extensions checking against eavesdroppers.

I asked her why Greville hadn’t had a private line in any case, and she said he had had one earlier but they now used that for the fax machine.

“If he wanted to be private,” she said, “he went down to the yard and telephoned from his car.”

There, I supposed, he would have been safe also from people with sensitive listening devices, if he’d suspected their use. He had been conscious of betrayal, that was for sure.