Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

“I’ll try,” he said. “But I still think you ought to at least talk to him.”

“Get me his number,” I said. “Then I’ll call him.”

“How can I contact you?” he asked.

“Leave a message on this phone. I’ll pick it up.”

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Can you find out if the dead man in my mother’s cottage was Bulgarian?”

I thought about also asking him to get the fraud squad to initiate an investigation into the Balscott factory project, but, as I knew from previous experience with a former client, fraud investigations involving foreign investments started with months and months of delving into paperwork before there was any prospect of an arrest. Add to that the complexities of the European Union grants system, and it would take years.

And I’d be dead and buried long before that.

I disconnected from DCI Tomlinson, but the phone rang again in my hand almost immediately.

“This is your voice mail,” said an impersonal female voice when I answered. “You have two new messages.”

One of them was from DCI Flight, and, as the other chief inspector had said, he didn’t sound very happy. I ignored it.

The other was from Patrick Lyall, who also wasn’t pleased with me, in particular because I had left a message on his mobile saying that I wouldn’t be coming into the office today.

“Nicholas,” Patrick’s voice said, “I am sorry that you have decided not to be in the office once again. I think we need to have a talk about your commitment to the firm. I will be writing to you today formally warning you as to your future conduct. Please, would you call me and tell me where to have the letter delivered.”

It sounded to me as if the company lawyer had been advising him again on employment law-written warnings and all that.

I ignored him too.

Did I, in fact, have any future in the firm? And did I really care?

Keble College was on the north side of the city near the Oxford

University Museum of Natural History. I parked in Museum Road and walked back to the college.

“Sorry, sir,” said a man in a smart blue jersey intercepting me in the entrance archway. “The college is closed to the public. Trinity has begun.”

“Trinity?” I asked.

“Trinity term,” he said. “The students are here.”

It hadn’t even crossed my mind they wouldn’t be.

“Exactly,” I said to him. “I’ve come to see one of the students.”

“Which one?” he asked politely but firmly. He was obviously used to repelling visitors who had no good cause to be there.

“Benjamin Roberts,” I said.

“And is Mr. Roberts expecting you?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s a surprise visit.”

He looked at his watch, and I looked at mine. It was just past ten o’clock.

“It might be a bit early for Mr. Roberts,” he said. “I heard he was partying rather late last evening. But I’ll try and call him. What name shall I say?”

“Smith,” I said. “John Smith.”

The college porter looked at me somewhat skeptically.

“I get that reaction all the time,” I said. “Unimaginative parents.”

He nodded, as if making up his mind, and then disappeared into the porters’ lodge.

I waited patiently under the arch.

Presently, the porter reappeared. “Mr. Roberts asks if you could come back later, round one o’clock.”

“Could you please call Mr. Roberts again and tell him I’m from the Balscott Lighting Factory and I need to see him now.”

Benjamin Roberts appeared in three minutes flat, with his long dark hair still unbrushed, bags under his eyes and with no socks inside his black leather shoes. He was tall, probably near six-feet-four or -five, and he towered over my just five-foot-eight.

“Mr. Smith?” he asked. I nodded. “Jarvis here tells me you’re from the Balscott factory.”

We were still standing in the entrance archway, with students passing us continually in both directions, and with Jarvis, the college porter, hovering nearby.

“Is there anywhere quiet we could go and talk?” I asked.

He turned to the porter. “Thank you, Jarvis, I’ll be taking Mr. Smith up to the Dining Hall for a while.”

“All visitors have to be signed in,” Jarvis said rather officiously.

Benjamin Roberts went into the lodge for a moment and then reappeared.

“Bloody rules,” he said. “They treat us like kids.”

We walked along a gravel path down the side of a building and then up some wide steps to the college dining hall, an impressively tall space with three lines of refectory tables and benches running along its full length.

Some catering staff at the far end of the hall were laying up for lunch but Benjamin and I sat down close to the door, across one of the tables from each other.

“Now,” he said, “what’s all this about?”

“Benjamin,” I said, starting.

“Ben,” he interrupted.

“Sorry, Ben,” I said, corrected. “I was a friend of your uncle Jolyon.”

He looked down at his hands on the table. “Such a shame,” he said. “Uncle Jolyon was fun. I’ll miss him.” He looked up again at me. “But what have you to do with the factory?”

“Your uncle Jolyon told me that you’d recently been to Bulgaria.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “A group of us from the university skiing club went to Borovets during the Easter vac. It was very good value and great snow. You should try it.”

Not with my neck, I thought.

“But your uncle also said you went to see the factory.”

“There isn’t any factory, is there?” he said.

“You tell me,” I said. “You’re the one that went to see it.”

He didn’t answer but sat looking at me across the table.

“Who are you, exactly?” he said. “Is Smith your real name?”

“No,” I admitted, “it is not.”

“So who are you?” he asked, standing up and with a degree of menace in his voice. “And what are you after?”

“I’m not after anything,” I said defensively, looking up at him. “Except to be left alone.”

“So why are you here? If you want to be left alone, why don’t you just go away?”

“I would, but someone is trying to kill me,” I said, this time without looking up at his face. It was hurting my neck. “Now, will you please sit down.”

He slowly lowered his huge frame back down onto the bench. “Who is trying to kill you?” he asked in a tone that indicated disbelief. “And why?”

“I don’t know who,” I said. “Not yet. But I think I may know why. Your uncle approached me because he was worried that the family’s investment in the Bulgarian factory project was a scam. He had been shown photographs of the factory buildings, but you had then told him that they didn’t actually exist. So he asked me to look into it, to check that, in his words, it wasn’t ‘a rotten egg of an investment.’ ”

He smiled at the use of the words. They were clearly familiar to him.

“And,” I went on, “I think that it is indeed a rotten egg of an investment. Your family money was the key to everything because the private finance for the factory triggered the public funding for all the houses. Someone has been defrauding the European Union of a hundred million euros by obtaining grants towards the cost of building a lightbulb factory and hundreds of homes that don’t actually exist and never will. And that same someone is trying to kill me before I can prove it, and before I find out who they are.”

I paused, and Ben Roberts sat staring at me in silence.

“And,” I said, going on, “I believe your uncle may have been murdered for the same reason.”

Uncle Jolyon wasn’t murdered, he died of a heart attack,” Ben Roberts said unequivocally. “At least he had a heart attack and then he drowned.”