Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

Not to mention becoming the executor and beneficiary of someone that I hardly knew who then turned out to have a twin sister. And then, to top it all, I’d been propositioned for sex by a woman nearly twenty years older than me, and I’d also discovered the real heartbreaking reason for my parents’ unhappy marriage.

It was enough to keep even the most tired of men from sleeping. I lay awake in the dark wondering what I should do next and also whether I would still have a job to go to in the morning.

Iwoke late after a restless night, the space in the bed next to me already empty and cold.

I rolled over and looked at the bedside clock. It was gone eight o’clock, and I was usually on the Tube by now.

The phone rang. I decided I didn’t want to talk to anyone so I didn’t pick it up. However, it stopped ringing when Claudia answered it downstairs.

I turned on the television for the news. Billy Searle’s attempted murder had been downgraded from the top story by a government U-turn on schools’ policy, but it still warranted a report from Baydon village, and they still managed to mention me by name and show my picture in spite of my release.

At this rate the whole bloody world would believe me guilty.

Claudia came into the room. “It’s your mother,” she said.

I picked up the phone. “Hello, Mum,” I said.

“Darling,” she said. “What the hell’s going on? You’re in all the papers and on the TV.” She sounded very upset, as if she was in tears.

“It’s all right, Mum,” I said. “Calm down. I didn’t do anything, and the police know it. Otherwise they wouldn’t have released me. I promise you, all is fine.”

It took me about five minutes to calm my mother down completely. I knew when I’d succeeded because she told me to get up and have a good breakfast. Eventually I put the phone down and laid my head back on the pillow.

“Aren’t you going to the office today?” Claudia asked, coming back into the bedroom carrying two cups of steaming coffee.

It was an innocent enough question, so why did I straightaway wonder if she was checking on my movements in order to plan her own?

“I don’t know,” I said, taking one of the cups from her. “What do you think?”

“Things could be worse,” she said. “You could still be in that police station, or in court. Let’s look on the bright side.”

“What plans do you have?” I asked.

“Nothing much,” she said. “I might go shopping later.”

“For food?”

“No,” she said. “I need a new dress for the show next week.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”

The thought of attending the opening night of a new West End musical with all the associated press coverage did not now fill me with great joy. Claudia and I had accepted an invitation from Jan Setter to join her at the star-studded event, and at the after-show party. I wondered if, after my clumsy brush-off at Cheltenham, Jan would now be so keen for me to be there, to say nothing of my subsequent arrest.

Look on the bright side, Claudia had said, things could indeed have been worse. I could have still been stuck in that unwelcome cell or I might have been lying in a Liverpool mortuary refrigerator like Herb or in a Swindon hospital intensive care bed like Billy. Things could have been a lot worse.

“Right,” I said with determination. “It’s time to show a defiant face to the world. I’m going to get up and go in to work, and bugger what anyone thinks. I’m innocent and I’m going to act like it.”

“That’s my boy,” said Claudia with a huge grin. “Bugger the lot of them.”

She lay down on the bed and snuggled up to me, slipping her hand down under the sheets in search of me.

“But do you have to go immediately? Or…” She grinned again. “Can you wait a while longer?”

Now I was really confused.

Had I been reading the signals incorrectly?

“Hmm, let me think,” I said, laughing with joy as well as expectation. “Work or sex? Sex or work? Such difficult decisions.”

Not really.

Sex won-easily.

Ididn’t go into the office until after lunch, but that was not solely due to having fun and games in bed with Claudia. It was because I went to Hendon on the way to check on Sherri and to collect my laptop computer that I’d left on Herb’s desk.

“What happened to you?” she said, opening the door. “I thought you were coming back yesterday afternoon.”

“I was,” I said. “But I was detained elsewhere.” I decided not to elaborate. “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve started going through Herb’s things in his bedroom,” she said. “I got fed up doing nothing, and it somehow seems to help.”

“Did you find anything of interest?” I asked as I followed her down the corridor to the bedroom.

“Only this,” she replied, picking up something from the bed. “It was at the back of his wardrobe, hanging on a hook behind his coats.”

She handed me a small blue plastic box with a clip-on lid. Inside the box, all neatly held together by a rubber band, were twenty-two credit cards. I rolled off the band and shuffled through them. As far as I could tell, they matched the statements, right down to the variations in Herb’s name.

“Why would anyone have so many credit cards?” Sherri asked. “And why would they all be in a box hidden in his wardrobe? They all look brand-new to me.”

And to me, I thought. Herb hadn’t even bothered signing them on the back. These cards had been obtained solely for use on the Internet. But I knew that. I’d seen the statements.

Underneath the cards were four pieces of folded-up paper similar to the ones that Chief Inspector Tomlinson had shown me the previous morning. I looked at the lists of numbers and letters. The first columns on each side were definitely dates but they were written in the American way, with the month first and then the day, so “2/10” was the tenth of February. All the dates on these pieces started 1, 2 or 12, so were from January, February or December.

Sherri was sitting on the floor busily looking through a chest of drawers, lifting out neat piles of T-shirts and stacking them on the bed. I left her and went out of the bedroom, along the corridor and into the living room.

The handwritten lists I had photocopied yesterday were still on the desk next to my computer along with the photocopied bank and credit card statements. The dates on those lists all started with a “3,” for March.

I took them back to the bedroom.

On all of the lists, the second and third columns definitely looked like amounts of money. And the fourth column was a list of capital letters, possibly initials. I counted them. There were ninety-seven different sets of letters.

“What are you looking at?” Sherri said.

“I don’t know, exactly,” I replied. “Lists of numbers and letters. Have a look.” I handed her the sheets. “I think the first column on each side are dates and the next two are probably amounts of money.”

“In dollars or pounds?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. Was that why, I wondered, the amounts on the credit card statements didn’t match the amounts on the sheets. Were one lot in dollars and the other in pounds?

I left Sherri studying the lists while I went back to the desk for the statements and Herb’s calculator.

“What’s the exchange rate for the U.S. dollar to the pound?” I asked, coming back into the bedroom.

“About one-point-six dollars to the pound,” Sherri said. “At least it was last week, but it changes all the time.”

I multiplied some of the amounts on the credit card statements by 1.6 and tried to match the new figure against any on the handwritten lists. It was a hopeless task. I didn’t know the exact exchange rate, and there were over five hundred different entries on the twenty-two statements. Some of the amounts were close, but none were exactly the same. The best I could say was that they might have been related.