Дик Фрэнсис - Decider

I didn’t deny the charge. I looked past him and his gun to the photograph Marjorie held, and he followed my gaze. He recognised the picture and the look he gave me was as murderous as any of Keith’s. The barrels aimed straight at my chest.

‘Conrad,’ Marjorie said sharply, ‘calm down.’

‘Calm down? Calm down? This despicable person broke into my private cupboard and stole from me.’

‘However, you may not shoot him in my house.’

In a way it was funny, but farce was too close to tragedy always. Even Dart didn’t laugh.

I said to Conrad, ‘I’ll free you from blackmail.’

‘What?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Marjorie demanded.

‘I’m talking about Wilson Yarrow blackmailing Conrad into giving him the go-ahead for the new grandstand.’

Marjorie exclaimed, ‘So you did find out!’

‘Is that gun loaded?’ I asked Conrad.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Would you mind... uh... pointing it somewhere else?’

He stood four-square, bullish, unwavering: unmoving.

‘Father,’ Dart protested.

‘You shut up,’ his father said grittily. ‘You abetted him.’

I said, risking things, ‘Wilson Yarrow told you that if he didn’t get the commission for the stands, he would see that Rebecca was warned off as a jockey.’

Dart goggled. Marjorie said, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘No. Not ridiculous. That photograph is a picture of Rebecca receiving a wad of money on a racecourse from a man who might be a bookmaker.’

I tried to work saliva into my mouth. I’d never before had a loaded gun pointed at me in anger. Even though I clung to the belief that Conrad’s inner restraints existed where Keith’s didn’t, I could feel my scalp sweating.

‘I listened to the tape,’ I said.

‘You stole it.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I stole it. It’s damning.’

‘So now it’s you who’ll blackmail me.’ His trigger hand tightened.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Conrad,’ I said, almost exasperated. ‘Use some sense. I’ll not blackmail you. I’ll see that Yarrow doesn’t.’

‘How?’

‘If you’ll put that bloody gun down, I’ll tell you.’

‘What tape?’ Dart asked.

‘The tape you helped him steal from my cupboard.’

Dart looked blank.

‘Dart didn’t know,’ I said. ‘He was outside in his car.’

‘But Keith searched your jacket,’ Dart protested.

I put my hand into my trousers pocket and brought out the tape. Conrad flicked a glance at it and went on scaring me silly.

‘This tape,’ I told Marjorie, ‘is a recording of a telephone call of Rebecca selling information about the horses she would be riding. It’s the worst of racing crimes. Sending it and that photograph to the racing authorities would end her career. She’d be warned off. The Stratton name would be mud.’

‘But she wouldn’t do that,’ Dart wailed.

Conrad said, as if the words hurt his tongue, ‘She admitted it.’

‘No!’ Dart moaned.

‘I challenged her,’ Conrad said. ‘I played her the tape. She can be so hard. She listened like stone. She said I wouldn’t let Yarrow use it.’ Conrad swallowed. ‘And... she was right.’

‘Put the gun down,’ I said.

He didn’t.

I threw the tape to Dart, who fumbled it, dropped it and picked it up again.

‘Give it to Marjorie,’ I said and, blinking, he obeyed.

‘If you’ll unload the gun and put it against the wall,’ I said to Conrad, ‘I’ll tell you how to get rid of Yarrow, but I’m not doing it with your hand on the trigger.’

‘Conrad,’ Marjorie said crisply, ‘you’re not going to shoot him. So put the gun down in case you do it by accident.’

Blessed bodyguard. Conrad woke to realities as if in a cold shower, looking down indecisively at his hands. He undoubtedly would have laid down his fire power were it not that Rebecca, at that moment, swept in like a whirlwind, having outrun the manservant altogether.

‘What’s going on here?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve a right to know!’

Marjorie stared at her with her customary disfavour. ‘Considering what you’ve done, you’ve no right to anything .’

Rebecca looked at the photograph of herself and the tape in Marjorie’s hand, and at the shotgun in her father’s, and at me, threatened.

‘Keith told me that this... this...’ she pointed at me, not finding words bad enough, ‘stole enough to get me warned off...’

I said fiercely to Conrad, ‘That tape is a fake .’

The effect on Rebecca was an increase in fury. While the rest of the family tried to understand what I’d said, she snatched the gun from her father, swung it round at shoulder height, took a quick aim at me and without pause pulled the trigger.

I saw the intention in her eyes and flung myself sideways full length onto the carpet, rolling onto my stomach, missing the ball of fizzing pellets by fractions, conscious of two barrels, two cartridges, and no way of escaping a shot in the back.

The room had filled with a thunderous cracking noise, with flame and smoke, with the acrid smell of cordite at close quarters. Jesus , I thought. God almighty. Not Keith, but Rebecca.

The second shot didn’t come. I cringed on the floor — no other word for it. There was the smell, the ringing echo, and beyond that... silence.

I stirred, turned my head, saw her shoes, crawled my gaze upwards as far as her hands.

She was not pointing the second of the barrel holes at me.

Her hands were empty.

Eyes slowly right... Conrad himself held his gun.

Dart came down on his knees by my head, saying, ‘Lee,’ helplessly.

I said thickly, ‘She missed me.’

‘God, Lee.’

I felt breathless, but I couldn’t stay there for ever. I rolled into a sitting position; felt too shaken to stand.

The shot had shocked them all, even Rebecca.

Marjorie, straight-backed, looked over-white, her mouth open, fixed, animation suspended. Conrad’s eyes stared darkly at a bloody mess too narrowly averted. I couldn’t... yet... look straight at Rebecca.

‘She didn’t mean to,’ Conrad said.

But she had indeed meant it; an act beyond caution.

I coughed once, convulsively. I said again, ‘The tape is a fake.’ And this time, no one tried to kill me for it.

Conrad said, ‘I don’t understand.’

I breathed deeply, slowly, trying to steady the racket of my pulse.

‘She couldn’t have done it,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t put in jeopardy the... the citadel of her most inner self.’

Conrad said, in perplexity, ‘I don’t really follow.’

I looked at last at Rebecca. She stared back, her face hard and expressionless.

‘I saw you race,’ I said. ‘You exalt in it. And the other day, I listened to you say you would be in the top five this year on the jockeys’ list. You were passionate about it. You’re a Stratton, you’re infinitely proud, and you’re rich and don’t need the money. There’s no way you’re ever going to sell sleazy information that could bring you unbearable disgrace.’

Rebecca’s eyes slitted narrowly under lowered eyelids, her face rigid.

‘But she confirmed it was true!’ Conrad said again.

I said regretfully, ‘She made the tape herself to put pressure on you to get new stands built, and she tried to shoot me to stop me telling you.’

‘Rebecca!’ Conrad couldn’t believe it. ‘This man’s lying. Tell me he’s lying.’

Rebecca said nothing.

‘You’ve been showing all the signs of intolerable strain,’ I said to her. ‘I would think it seemed a good idea to you to begin with, to let your father believe he was being blackmailed to save you from being warned off, but once you’d done it, and he had in fact allowed himself to be blackmailed, I’d guess you regretted it sorely. But you didn’t confess that to him. You went straight on with your obsessive and drastic plan to modernise Stratton Park radically, and it’s been tearing you apart for weeks and making you... lose balance.’