Дик Фрэнсис - Rat Race

Saturday afternoon. The Board of Trade had gone home to its lawn mowing and the wife and kids. I put down the telephone and considered the police.

The police were there, on the racecourse, all ready and able. But willing? Hardly. They were there to direct the traffic; a crime not yet committed would not shift them an inch.

Both lots, if they believed me, might eventually arrive on Carthy-Todd’s doorstep. By appointment, probably; especially the Board of Trade.

There would be no Carthy-Todd to welcome them in. No records. No Fund. Possibly no Duke...

I always told myself to stay out of trouble.

Never listened.

No clocks ticked in Carthy Todd’s office. The silence was absolute. But it was only in my mind that it was ominous and oppressive. Carthy-Todd was safe at the races and I should have a clear hour at least: or so my brain told me. My nerves had other ideas.

I found myself tiptoeing across to the desk. Ridiculous. I half laughed at myself and put my feet down flat on the soundless carpet.

Nothing on the desk top except a blotter without blots, a tray of pens and pencils, a green telephone, a photograph of a woman, three children and a dog in a silver frame, a desk diary, closed, and the red and gold tin of chocolate orange peel.

The drawers contained stationery, paper clips, stamps, and a small pile of the ‘insure against bombs on the way home’ brochures. Two of the four drawers were completely empty.

Two filing cabinets. One unlocked. One locked. The top of the three drawers of the unlocked cabinet contained the packets of proposal forms and insurance certificates, and a third packet containing claim forms; in the second, the completed and returned forms of those insured, filed in a rank of folders from A — Z; and the third, almost empty, contained three folders only, one marked ‘Claims settled’; one ‘Claims pending’, and the other ‘Receipts.’

‘Claims settled’ embraced the records of two separate outgoing payments of one thousand pounds, one to Acey Jones and one to a trainer in Kent who had been kicked in the face at evening stables. Three hundred pounds had been paid to a stable girl in Newmarket in respect of fracturing her wrist in a fall from a two-year-old at morning exercise. The claim forms, duly filled in, and with doctor’s certificates attached, were stamped ‘paid’ with a date.

‘Claims pending’ was fatter. There were five letters of application for claim forms, annotated ‘forms sent’, and two forms completed and returned, claiming variously for a finger bitten off by a hungry hurdler and a foot carelessly left in the path of a plough. From the dates, the claimants had only been waiting a month for their money, and few insurance companies paid out quicker than that.

The thin file ‘Receipts’ was in many ways the most interesting. The record took the form of a diary, with the number of new insurers entered against the day they paid their premiums. From sporadic twos and threes during the first week of operation the numbers had grown like a mushroom.

The first great spurt was labelled in the margin in small tidy handwriting ‘A. C. Jones, etc.’ The second, an astronomical burst, was noted ‘Bomb!’ The third, a lesser spurt, ‘Pamphlet’. The fourth, a noticeable upthrust, ‘Electric failure’. After that, the daily average had gone on climbing steadily. The word, by then, had reached pretty well every ear.

The running total in two months had reached five thousand, four hundred and seventy-two. The receipts, since some insurers had paid double premiums for double benefits, stood at £28,040.

With the next inrush of premiums after the Kitch-Ambrose accident (which Carthy-Todd certainly had not engineered, as only non-claiming accidents were any good to him) there would almost have been enough in the kitty to settle all the claims. I sighed, frowning. It was, as Colin had said, a bloody shame. The Duke’s view of the Fund was perfectly valid. Run by an honest man, and with its ratio of premiums to pay-off slightly adjusted, it could have done good all round.

I slammed the bottom drawer shut with irritation and felt the adrenalin race through my veins as the noise reverberated round the empty room.

No one came. My nerves stopped registering tremble; went back to itch.

The locked second cabinet was proof only against casual eyes. I tipped it against the wall and felt underneath, and sure enough it was the type worked on one connecting rod up the back: pushed the rod up from the bottom and all the drawers became unlocked.

I looked through all of them quickly, the noise I had made seeming to act as an accelerator. Even if I had all the time in the world, I wanted to be out of there, to be gone.

The top drawer contained more folders of papers. The middle drawer contained a large grey metal box. The bottom drawer contained two cardboard boxes and two small square tins.

Taking a deep breath I started at the top. The folders contained the setting-up documents of the Fund and the papers which the Duke had so trustingly signed. The legal language made perfect camouflage for what Carthy-Todd had done. I had to read them twice, to take a strong grip and force myself to concentrate, before I understood the two covenants the Duke had given him.

The first, as the Duke had said, transferred one hundred thousand pounds from his estate into a guarantee trust for the Fund, in the event of his death. The second one at first sight looked identical, but it certainly wasn’t. It said in essence that if the Duke died within the first year of the Fund, a further one hundred thousand pounds from his estate was to be paid into it.

In both cases, Carthy-Todd was to be sole Trustee.

In both cases, he was given absolute discretion to invest or use the money in any way he thought best.

Two hundred thousand pounds... I stared into space. Two hundred thousand pounds if the Duke died. A motive to make tongue-silencing look frivolous.

The twenty-eight thousand of the Fund money was only the beginning. The bait. The jackpot lay in the dead Duke.

His heirs would have to pay. Young Matthew, to be precise. The papers looked thoroughly legal, with signatures witnessed and stamped, and in fact it seemed one hundred per cent certain that Carthy-Todd wouldn’t have bothered with them at all if they were not foolproof.

He wouldn’t waste much more time, I thought. Not with the claims for the Ambrose accident coming in. With the Duke dead, the two hundred thousand would have to be paid almost at once, because the covenants would be a first charge on his estate, like debts. There would be no having to wait around for probate. If Carthy-Todd could stave off the claims for a while, he could skip with both the Duke’s money and the whole Fund.

I put the papers back in their folder, back in the drawer. Closed it. Gently. My heart thumped.

Second drawer. Large metal box. One could open it without removing it from the cabinet. I opened it. Lots of space, but few contents. Some cottonwool, cold cream, glue, and a half used stick of greasepaint. I shut the lid, shut the drawer. Only to be expected.

Bottom drawer. Knelt on the floor. Two small square tins, one empty, one full and heavy and fastened all round with adhesive tape. Looked inside the two cardboard boxes first and felt the breath go out of my body as if I’d been kicked.

The cardboard boxes contained the makings of a radio bomb. Solonoids, transmitters, fuse wire, a battery and a small container of gunpowder in the first box. Plastic explosive wrapped in tin foil in the other.

I sat on my heels looking at the small square heavy tin. Heard in my mind the tall man from the Board of Trade: the tighter you pack a bomb the more fiercely it explodes.

Decided not to open the small square tin. Felt the sweat stand out in cold drops on my forehead.