Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

I inwardly chastised myself for my earlier thoughts.

“So what is actually wrong with your ovaries?” I asked.

“I have a tumor in the left one,” she said. “It’s what is apparently called a germ cell tumor.”

“Is it malignant?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Yes, I’m afraid it is,” she said. “But it’s fairly small, about the size of a peanut.”

That didn’t sound that small to me. I thought whole ovaries themselves were not much bigger than that.

“And the oncologist is hopeful that it hasn’t spread. But he will find out for sure about that on Tuesday.”

“Where are you having the op?” I asked.

“University College Hospital,” she said. “It’s where I’ve been seeing the oncologist and having tests all this last week. I was there most of the day today having MRI scans so they know exactly to the millimeter where the cancer is and how big, ready for the operation.”

With her phone turned off.

“Overall, I’ve been lucky they found it so soon. Apparently, it’s quite usual for such tumors to go undetected until it’s too late because many GPs dismiss the symptoms or confuse them with other problems.”

“What can I do to help?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just be here.” She smiled. “I love you so much.”

I felt a fool and a charlatan. How could I have been so stupid?

“I love you so much more,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “Do you need to go to bed?”

“I’m not feeling ill,” she said, turning and looking up at me with a smile. “Or were you thinking of something else?”

I blushed. It must have been the gin.

“I wasn’t,” I said. “However, I could be persuaded. But, I mean, are you all right?”

“For sex?” she said. I nodded. “Absolutely. The oncologist told me on Thursday that it wouldn’t make any difference.”

It made a difference to me.

Ilay awake in the dark of the small hours, trying to get my head around this new problem.

I had feared so much the thought of losing her to another man that the news of the cancer had almost been a relief, a reprieve. But this was now a much more serious battle with the unthinkable outcome of losing her altogether if the fight was lost.

Claudia had gone to sleep around ten o’clock, and I had then spent the next couple of hours at my computer, researching ovarian cancer on the Internet.

My initial results had been far from encouraging.

Overall, ovarian cancer five-year survival rates were only about fifty percent.

That was not good, I thought. It was like tossing a coin. To live, you had to correctly call heads.

However, Claudia had said that the oncologist thought that the cancer hadn’t spread. For Stage 1a ovarian cancers, those that were confined within the affected organ only and which hadn’t spread to its surface, the survival rate was nearly ninety-two percent.

That was better.

Throw two dice. Score eleven or twelve, and you die. Anything else, you live.

For germ cell cancer, the rates were even better. Women with only Stage 1a germ cell tumors had a near ninety-seven percent chance of survival at five years.

Throw those dice again. You are dead now only with a double six.

Slightly worse than the statistical survival rate for a space shuttle flight (ninety-eight percent), much better than for a heart transplant (seventy-one percent at five years).

I could hear Claudia’s rhythmic breathing on the pillow next to me.

Funny, I thought, how it often takes a crisis to reveal one’s true feelings. Since coming home from the races I had been through the whole gamut from resentful anger to perilous joy, with apprehension, fear and overwhelming love coming in late on the side.

I was exhausted by it all, but still I couldn’t sleep.

How close had I come to making a complete fool of myself?

Too close. Much too close.

Sunday morning dawned bright and sunny, both in terms of the weather and my disposition.

I looked at Claudia soundly asleep beside me and, in spite of the uncertainty of her future treatment, I thanked my lucky stars. True, I had been tempted by Jan’s extraordinary behavior, but I had resisted. In fact, it had been Jan’s very behavior that had strengthened my resolve to sort out a problem with Claudia that in the end hadn’t existed.

Suddenly, the other problem, the coming battle against the cancer, while not easy, somehow seemed now manageable. Especially as Claudia and I would both be fighting on the same side.

I got up quietly, leaving her sleeping, and went downstairs to the kitchen, and to my computer.

I pulled up the e-mails from Uri Joram onto the screen and read them again. I wondered what I should do about them.

A hundred million euros was an awful lot of money, but it was a mere drop in the ocean compared to the European Union total budget of more than a hundred and twenty-five billion. But if the European Court of Auditors, the body that had refused to sign off on the annual audit of the EU budget for each of the past umpteen years, had themselves been unable to make a single major fraud charge stick, what chance did I have?

I decided that it simply wasn’t my fight. Claudia and I now had more pressing things on our minds. If Jolyon Roberts needed to ask any further questions about his investments, then he’d have to speak directly to Gregory.

I meanwhile turned to other matters, in particular the copies of the statements from Herb’s twenty-two credit cards.

I ordered them by date, and noticed that four of them were due for payment in the coming week. I wondered what the law was on outstanding credit card debt at death. One thing I was absolutely certain about was that none of the banks would, out of the kindness of their hearts, cancel debt. But it was the interest that I was most concerned about. Ninety-four thousand six hundred and twenty-six pounds and fifty-two pence would, if left unpaid, attract a substantial interest charge each month, not to mention late-payment fees, and it might take many months before probate was granted and I was able to pay off the debts from other assets in Herb’s estate.

I had to find the cash.

Even the eighteen thousand he collected from the MoneyHome agents the week of his death would not be enough to pay off these four most urgent ones.

And that would not be all.

The ninety-seven separate individuals who were using Herb’s accounts for their Internet and casino gambling probably didn’t know Herb was dead. If the past was anything to go by, they would be racking up further charges.

All gambling requires a degree of trust, but surely Herb must have required an up-front cash advance from each of the ninety-seven in order to allow them to operate the system. That meant the debt of ninety-four thousand six hundred and twenty-six pounds and fifty-two pence that existed on the credit cards statements may have only been the start of it. How much more did he owe?

I had to find the cash.

I decided that the very first thing I had to do was to cancel the cards so that no more charges could be made on them.

Each of the statements had a phone number on the back, and I set about calling them. Many of them did not answer because they were not open on Sundays and those that did were mostly in India and, in truth, could have been more helpful.

As soon as I said that Mr. Kovak was dead, they all required me to contact them in writing enclosing an original death certificate.

“Fine,” I said to one man called Ashwin, making a mental note to ask the police chief inspector for twenty-two originals of Herb’s death certificate. “But could you, in the meantime, make a stop on any future charges?”

“Cut up the cards,” Ashwin said, “and then there can’t be any more charges, can there?”