Dick Francis: Straight

“Yerss.” He was again affronted.

“I phoned them from the office. They’re expecting this. You don’t need to pay, they’re sending the bill. Just get a receipt. OK?”

“Yerss.”

“Then pick up my friend from the Selfridge Hotel and bring her here. She’ll phone for you, so leave it switched on.”

“Yerss.”

“Then go on home, if you like.”

He gave me a glowering look but all he said was, “Same time tomorrow?”

“If you’re not bored.”

He gave me a totally unexpected grin. Unnerving, almost, to see that gloom-ridden face break up.

“Best time o’ my life,” he said, and departed, leaving me literally gasping.

In bemusement, I went along to the little sitting room and tidied up a bit more of the mess. If Brad enjoyed waiting for hours reading improbable magazines it was all right by me, but I no longer felt in imminent danger of assault or death, and I could drive my car myself if I cared to, and Brad’s days as bodyguard/chauffeur were numbered. He must realize it, I thought: he’d clung on to the job several times.

By that Wednesday evening there was rapid improvement also in the ankle. Bones, as I understood it, always grew new soft tissue at the site of a fracture, as if to stick the pieces together with glue. After eight or nine days, the soft tissue began to harden, the bone getting progressively stronger from then on, and it was in that phase that I’d by then arrived. I laid one of the crutches aside in the sitting room and used the other like a walking stick, and put my left toe down to the carpet for balance if not to bear my full weight.

Distalgesic, I decided, was a thing of the past. I’d drink wine for dinner with Clarissa.

The front door bell rang, which surprised me. It was too early to be Clarissa: Brad couldn’t have done the errand and got to the Selfridge and back in the time he’d been gone.

I hopped along to the door and looked through the peephole, and was astounded to see Nicholas Loder on the doorstep. Behind him, on the path, stood his friend Rollo Rollway, looking boredly around at the small garden.

In some dismay I opened the door and Nicholas Loder immediately said, “Oh, good. You’re in. We happened to be dining in London so as we’d time to spare I thought we’d come round on the off-chance to discuss Gemstones, rather than negotiate on the telephone.”

“But I haven’t named a price,” I said.

“Never mind. We can discuss that. Can we come in?”

I shifted backward reluctantly.

“Well, yes,” I said, looking at my watch. “But not for long. I have another appointment pretty soon.”

“So have we,” he assured me. He turned round and waved a beckoning arm to his friend. “Come on, Rollo, he has time to see us.”

Rollway, looking as if the enterprise were not to his liking, came up the steps and into the house. I turned to lead the way along the passage, ostentatiously not closing the front door behind them as a big hint to them not to stay long.

“The room’s in a mess,” I warned them over my shoulder. “We had a burglar.”

“We?” Nicholas Loder said.

“Greville and L”

“Oh.”

He said “Oh” again when he saw the chrysanthemum pot wedged in the television, but Rollway blinked around in an uninterested fashion as if he saw houses in chaos every day of the week.

Rollway at close quarters wasn’t any more attractive than Rollway at a distance: a dull, dark lump of a man, thickset, middle-aged and humorless. One could only explain his friendship with the charismatic Loder, I thought, in terms of trainer-owner relationship.

“This is Thomas Rollway,” Nicholas Loder said to me, making belated introductions. “One of my owners. He’s very interested in buying Gemstones.”

Rollway didn’t look very interested in anything.

“I’d offer you a drink,” I said, “but the burglar broke all the bottles.”

Nicholas Loder looked vaguely at the chunks of glass on the carpet. There had been no diamonds in the bottles. Waste of booze.

“Perhaps we could sit down,” he said.

“Sure.”

He sat in Greville’s armchair and Rollway perched on the arm of the second armchair, which effectively left me the one upright hard one. I sat on the edge of it, wanting them to hurry, laying the second crutch aside.

I looked at Loder, big, light-haired with brownish eyes, full of ability and not angry with me as he had been in the recent past. It was almost with guilt that I thought of the cocaine analyses going on behind his back when his manner toward me was more normal than at any time since Greville’s death. If he’d been like that from the beginning, I’d have seen no reason to have had the tests done.

“Gemstones,” he said, “what do you want for him?”

I’d seen in the Saxony Franklin ledgers what Gemstones had cost as a yearling, but that had little bearing on his worth two years later. He’d won one race. He was no bright star. I doubled his cost and asked for that.

Nicholas Loder laughed with irony. “Come on, Derek. Half.”

“Half is what he cost Greville originally,” I said.

His eyes narrowed momentarily and then opened innocently. “So we’ve been doing our homework!” He actually smiled. “I’ve promised Rollo a reasonable horse at a reasonable price. We all know Gemstones is no world-beater, but there are more races in him. His cost price is perfectly fair. More than fair.”

I thought it quite likely was indeed fair, but Saxony Franklin needed every possible penny.

“Meet me halfway,” I said, “and he’s yours.”

Nicholas raised his eyebrows at his friend for a decision: “Rollo?”

Rollo’s attention seemed to be focused more on the crutch I’d earlier propped unused against a wall rather than on the matter in hand.

“Gemstones is worth that,” Nicholas Loder said to him judiciously, and I thought in amusement that he would get me as much as he could in order to earn himself a larger commission. Trade with the enemy, I thought: build mutual-benefit bridges.

“I don’t want Gemstones at any price,” Rollo said, and they were the first words he’d uttered since arriving. His voice was harsh and curiously flat, without inflection. Without emotion, I thought.

Nicholas Loder protested, “But that’s why you wanted to come here! It was your idea to come here.”

Thomas Rollway, as if absentmindedly, stood and picked up the abandoned crutch, turning it upside down and holding it by the end normally near the floor. Then, as if the thought had at that second occurred to him, he bent his knees and swung the crutch round forcefully in scything movement a bare four inches above the carpet.

It was so totally unexpected that I wasn’t quick enough to avoid it. The elbow-rest and cuff crashed into my left ankle and Rollway came after it like a bull, kicking, punching, overbalancing me, knocking me down.

I was flabbergasted more than frightened, and then furious. It seemed senseless, without reason, unprovoked, out of any sane proportion. Over Rollway’s shoulder I glimpsed Nicholas Loder looking dumbfounded, his mouth and eyes stretched open, uncomprehending.

As I struggled to get up, Thomas Rollway reached inside his jacket and produced a handgun; twelve inches of it at least, with the thickened shape of a silencer on the business end.

“Keep still,” he said to me, pointing the barrel at my chest.

A gun... Simms... I began dimly to understand and to despair pretty deeply.

Nicholas Loder was shoving himself out of his armchair. “What are you doing?” His voice was high with alarm, with rising panic.

“Sit down, Nick,” his friend said. “Don’t get up.” And such was the grindingly heavy tone of his unemotional voice that Nicholas Loder subsided, looking overthrown, not believing what was happening.