Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

“MI5 or the CIA might have safe houses, but we don’t,” he said with a smile. “You’ve been watching too much TV.”

“But someone is trying to kill me,” I said in frustration. “Surely it’s your job to prevent that. I need some protection.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We simply don’t have the manpower.”

They had the manpower, I thought, to have a dozen officers crawl along the road on their hands and knees looking for a bullet but not enough to prevent a future murder. It was crazy.

“So what am I to do?” I asked him. “Just sit here and wait to be killed?”

“Perhaps it wouldn’t be sensible to stay here,” he conceded. “Have you anywhere else to go to?”

My home and my office were now off-limits. Where else?

“I’m going to go back to the hospital to see my girlfriend,” I said.

Some of the Armed Response Team agreed to wait in my house while I belatedly had a shower and changed my clothes. I then threw some things into a suitcase, including my computer, and set off for the hospital in the back of one of their police vans.

“It’s the least we can do,” they said.

At one point I insisted that the police driver go right around the big roundabout at Swiss Cottage to make sure we were not being followed.

We weren’t, of course. What sort of killer would follow a van full of heavily armed police? But what sort of killer would gun a man down with sixty thousand witnesses close to hand? Or try to kill someone on their own front doorstep?

I couldn’t help but think of Jill Dando, the British TV personality, gunned down in exactly that way in a Fulham street.

And her killer has never been identified.

Claudia was still resting when I made it back to her room at the hospital. She was neither aware nor surprised that I had been away for nearly four hours and not the one and a half I’d promised.

I had made it, unmolested and alive, from the police van outside the hospital main door to her room, but not without a nervous glance at every person I met on the way. I nearly had heart failure when, just as the lift doors were closing, a man jumped through the gap who slightly resembled my would-be killer.

If I went on like this I’d be a nervous wreck in no time.

I closed the door to Claudia’s room, but of course there was no lock on the inside.

It made me feel very uneasy.

I thought it unlikely that the gunman would give up just because he’d lost me once. I imagined he was a professional assassin, and, like most professionals, he would take pride in completing his job.

Bugger the police, I thought. I felt so vulnerable. I believed absolutely that I needed some protection or else I’d wind up dead. Maybe I might be killed even if I had a bodyguard, but at least it would make me feel a little safer. However, Mrs. Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, had been shot dead by one of her bodyguards, so armed protection wasn’t always the best policy.

What should I do?

I couldn’t hide forever. But what was the alternative? Perhaps I should buy a bulletproof vest.

My main objective had to be to find out who was trying to have me killed and stop them, or at least remove the need, as they saw it, for my life to be terminated.

Easy.

But why, exactly, would anyone want me dead? It seemed a very extreme solution to a problem.

I must know something, or have something, that someone didn’t want me to tell or show to somebody else. Hence I needed to be killed to prevent it.

So what was it that I had, or knew?

The police already had the credit card statements and the MoneyHome payment slips so surely it couldn’t be them. Was there something else I had inherited from Herb that was so incriminating that murder was the only answer?

Claudia groaned a little and woke up.

“Hello, my darling,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Bloody awful,” she said. “And really thirsty.”

I poured some water from the jug on her bedside cabinet into a plastic glass and held it out to her.

“Just go easy,” I said. “The nurse said to drink just small sips.”

She drank several large ones and then handed back the glass.

“I feel so sore and bloated,” she said.

“Dr. Tomic said you might. It’ll pass in a day or so.”

She didn’t seem much reassured.

“Can you help me sit up a bit?” she asked. “I’m so uncomfortable in this bloody bed.”

I did as she asked, but it didn’t really improve matters. Nothing would, I realized, for as long as she was in pain.

“Let’s get you some painkillers,” I said, and pushed the nurse call bell.

They gave her an injection of morphine that deadened the pain but also sent Claudia back to sleep. It was probably the best thing for her.

I put on the television to watch the news, but I kept the sound down to a minimum so as not to disturb the patient.

The gunman in a London newsagent’s was the lead story, and, true to their word, the police had convinced the TV company to play the whole video clip of Herb’s killer coming into the shop, looking around, and then leaving again. They even showed a blown-up still of the man’s face as he had glanced directly up at the camera.

Just looking at his image made me nervous once more.

The news reporter then warned the viewers not to approach the man if they saw him but to report his presence to the police. The man is armed and very dangerous, the reporter said, but he didn’t mention anything about Herb Kovak or the killing at Aintree.

Did the news report and the video make it safer for me or not?

I also wondered if it put Mr. Patel at risk. After all, he was the one who’d had the best view of the gunman. I suddenly went quite cold just thinking about how much I had placed Mr. Patel in mortal danger by hiding behind his counter. But what else could I have done? Stayed out in the street and been killed?

I switched over to another channel and watched the whole thing once more, trying my best to recognize the face staring out at me from the screen. I knew I didn’t know him, other than at Aintree and in a Finchley street, but I tried to find some semblance or likeness. There was none.

Thankfully, Claudia slept soundly through both bulletins. She had enough worries on her own plate for the time being without being burdened with something else. After all, there was nothing she could do about it.

While she went on sleeping, I tried to work out where I could spend the night. I wasn’t going back to Finchley, that was for sure, but a second night sitting upright in the chair in Claudia’s hospital room wasn’t a very attractive proposition either.

As I still had the key in my pocket, I thought of going to Herb’s flat in Hendon, but I didn’t want to turn up there late at night and frighten Sherri after her traumatic trip to Liverpool. So instead I used my phone to find a cheap room near the hospital in a hotel located around the corner in Euston Square Gardens. They had plenty of availability, so I didn’t leave my name. I just planned to turn up there when I left the hospital. That somehow seemed safer.

One of the nurses came into Claudia’s room to once more take her vital signs and to settle her in for the night. I took it as my cue to leave.

“Night-night, my darling,” I said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

“What about your job?” she said sleepily.

“I’ll call the office and tell them I’m not coming in,” I said. “The work will have to wait.”

She smiled and laid her head back on the pillow. She looked very vulnerable with her pale face almost matching the slight grayness of the hospital linen. We had to beat this impostor within her body, this cancer that would eat away at our happiness. If chemotherapy was what was needed, so be it. Short-term discomfort for long-term gain, that was what we had to think, what we had to believe.