Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

The horse and I went right through the village of Southam without attracting any unwelcome attention, other than a curious look or two from a cat out on its nocturnal hunt for food.

Southam to Woodmancote was less than a mile, and I trotted the horse down the center of the road, using the dotted white line for guidance. At long last the rain was beginning to stop, not that it made much difference to me. I was completely soaked to the skin and cold because of it.

I skirted around the edge of the village towards the lane where my mother lived.

The lane was actually the fourth arm of a crossroads junction, and I was just approaching it from straight ahead when a car came along the other road and turned right into it. The car had to be going to my mother’s cottage, as it was the only one down there.

I kicked the horse forward and followed, keeping to the grass to deaden the noise of the hooves.

Halfway down the lane I slid off the horse’s back and tied him to a tree, moving forward silently but quickly on foot. I stayed close to the hedge as I came around the last turn.

I could now see the cottage, and Shenington was standing to one side of it by the front door, his face brightly lit by the outside light. I crept closer, across the grass, towards the gravel drive.

“Viscount Shenington,” he was saying loudly. “We met earlier at the races.”

“What do you want?” I could hear Claudia shouting back from inside.

“I’m returning Mr. Foxton’s coat,” Shenington said. “He must have left it in my box by mistake.” He was holding my coat out in front of him.

Don’t open the door, I willed Claudia. PLEASE-DON’T OPEN THE DOOR.

She did of course. I could hear her turning the lock.

Once Shenington was inside, I would have no chance. He could simply put a knife to Claudia’s neck, or a gun to her temple, and I would do exactly as he wanted. A lamb to the slaughter it would certainly be.

My only chance was to act decisively and to act now.

As the front door swung open I ran for him, crunching across the gravel. He turned slightly towards the noise, but I was on him before he had a chance to react.

At school, despite my moderate size, I’d been a regular member of the first XV rugby team and primarily for my tackling.

I caught Shenington just above the knees in a full-blown flying rugby tackle that literally lifted him off his feet.

The two of us crashed to the ground together, the whiplash causing his upper body and head to take most of the impact.

Shenington was in his mid- to late sixties and I was less than half his age, and I had the strength brought on by desperation and anger.

He really had no chance.

I jumped up quickly and sat on him, twisting my fingers in his hair and forcing his head down into a rain-filled puddle on the drive. How did he like it, I wondered, having his face held underwater?

Claudia stood, shocked and staring, in the doorway.

“Nick,” she wailed. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. You’ll drown him.”

“This is the man who has been trying to kill me,” I said, not releasing my grip.

“That doesn’t mean you can kill him ,” she said.

I reluctantly let go of his hair and rolled him over onto his back. His lips were blue, and I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not. I didn’t care. One thing was for sure. There was absolutely no way I was going to put my mouth over his to breathe air into his lungs. Even the thought of it made me feel sick.

“He’s got a gun,” Claudia said suddenly, the fear clearly apparent again in her voice.

He’d been lying on it.

I leaned down and picked it up by the barrel.

I left Shenington where he lay and went inside to call the Cheltenham Police Station.

“Can I please speak to DCI Flight?” I said to the officer who answered. “I want to give myself up.”

“What have you done?” he said.

“Ask DCI Flight,” I replied. “He’s the one who wants me.”

“He’s not here at the moment,” the officer said. “Some bloody lunatic has stolen a horse up at the racetrack and every spare man is out looking for him.”

“Ah, I might just be able to help you there,” I said. “The horse in question is tied up outside my mother’s house in Woodmancote.”

“What!” he said.

“The horse is right outside where I’m standing now,” I repeated.

“How the hell did it get there?”

“I rode him,” I said. “I think I’m the bloody lunatic that everyone is looking for.”

Detective Chief Inspector Flight was far from amused. He personally had spent more than an hour trudging across the dark, muddy track, looking for the horse, while wearing his best leather shoes, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, he was also soaked to the skin. As he explained to me at length and rather loudly, his coat was meant to have been waterproof but, on that count, it seemed to have failed rather badly.

“I’m tempted to put you in a cell and throw away the key,” he said.

We were in one of the interview rooms at the Cheltenham Police Station.

“How is Viscount Shenington?” I asked, ignoring his remark.

“Still alive,” he said. “But only just. They’re working on him at the hospital. The ambulance paramedics got him breathing again, but it seems his heart is now the problem.”

Just like his brother.

“And the doctor is also saying that even if he does survive, his brain is likely to have been permanently damaged due to being starved of oxygen for so long.”

Shame, I thought. Not!

“You say that you simply rugby-tackled him and you didn’t see that his nose and mouth were lying in the water?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I just thought he was winded by the fall. Only after I’d checked that Claudia was all right did I discover he was facedown in a puddle. Then, of course, I rolled him over onto his back.”

“Did you not then think of applying artificial respiration?” he asked.

I just looked at him.

“No,” he said. “I can see the problem.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The man had come there to kill me. Why would I try and save him? So that he could have another go?”

“Some people might argue that you were negligent.”

“Let them,” I said. “Whatever happened to Shenington was his own fault. You saw the gun. He wasn’t there making a social call.”

He looked up at the clock on the wall. It showed that it was well after midnight.

“We’ll have to continue this in the morning,” he said, yawning.

“I have to be at the Paddington Green Police Station by eleven,” I said.

“So do I,” Flight replied. “We can talk on the way.”

The meeting at Paddington Green lasted for more than two hours. In addition to me, there were four senior police officers present: Detective Chief Inspectors Tomlinson and Flight; a detective inspector from the City of London Police Economic Crime Department-the Fraud Squad; and Superintendent Yering, who chaired the meeting by virtue of his superior rank.

At his request, I started slowly from the beginning, outlining the events in chronological order, from the day Herb Kovak had been gunned down at Aintree right through to the previous evening at Cheltenham racetrack and at my mother’s cottage in Woodmancote. However, I decided not to include the finer details of how I had forced Shenington’s head down into the puddle on the gravel driveway.

“Viscount Shenington,” I said, “seems to have been desperate for money due to his gambling losses and clearly provided the five million pounds from the Roberts Family Trust in order to trigger the grants from the European Union. It appears that he even gave his brother the impression that he had needed to be convinced to make the investment.”