Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

So was that a vote of confidence in my ability, I wondered, or a decision born simply out of necessity?

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t take too long about it,” Patrick said. “It’s time to put other things out of your mind and get back to work.”

“I’m still not happy about things,” I said. “Especially the fraud.”

“Suspected fraud,” he corrected. “If you ask me, it is a shame you ever went to see Roberts’s nephew in Oxford.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Well, go now and get on with your work, I have things to do.”

It was a dismissal, so I stood up and went back to my desk.

I was still greatly troubled by Patrick’s and Jessica’s seeming brush-off of such a serious situation.

Herb had accessed the file and then he was killed.

Shenington and his gunmen knew more about my movements than they could have done without someone in the firm passing on the information.

Something wasn’t right. I could tell because the hairs on my neck refused to lie down. Something definitely wasn’t right. Not right at all.

I took out a sheet of paper from a drawer and wrote out again a copy of the note I had found in Herb’s coat pocket.

YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE WHAT YOU WERE

TOLD. YOU MAY SAY YOU REGRET IT, BUT

YOU WONT BE REGRETTING IT FOR LONG.

I wrote it out in capital letters, using a black ballpoint pen, so that it looked identical to the original.

I picked up my mobile phone and the note and went down the corridor. I walked into Patrick’s office, closing the door behind me.

“Yes?” he asked, showing some surprise at my unannounced entrance.

I stood in front of his desk, looking down at him as if it was the first time I had ever seen him properly.

“What did you tell Herb to do?” I asked him quietly.

“What do you mean?” he replied with a quizzical expression.

“You told him that he should have done what he was told,” I said.

I laid the note down on the table, facing him, so that he could read the words.

“What was it you told Herb to do?”

“Nicholas,” he said, looking up at me and betraying a slight nervousness in his voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” I said with some menace. “It was you all along, not Gregory. You devised the fraud, you found Shenington to put up the five million from his family trust, and you saw to it that you weren’t found out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said again, but his eyes showed me he did.

“And you had Herb killed,” I said. “You even wrote this note to him as a sort of apology. Everyone liked Herb, including you. But he had to die, didn’t he? Because he had accessed the Roberts file and he’d worked out what was going on. What did you do? Offer him a piece of the action? Try and buy his silence? But Herb wasn’t having any of that, was he? Herb was going to go to the authorities, wasn’t he? So he had to die.”

Patrick sat in his chair, looking up at me. He said nothing.

“And it was you that tried to have me killed as well,” I said. “You sent the gunman to my house in Finchley and then, when that didn’t work, you sent him to my mother’s cottage to kill me there.”

He remained in his chair, staring at me through his oversized glasses.

“But that didn’t work either,” I said. “So you arranged for me to come here on Monday for a meeting with you and Gregory.” I laughed. “A meeting with my Maker, more like. But I didn’t come, although you tried hard to convince me to. Then I saw you on the train, and you said, ‘Come home with me now, and we’ll sort this out tonight.’ But I’d have been dead if I had, wouldn’t I?” I paused and stared back at him. He still said nothing. “So then Shenington changed his mind about talking to me and invited me to be his guest at the races in order to complete the job.”

“Nicholas,” Patrick said, finally finding his voice, “what is all this nonsense?”

“It’s not nonsense,” I said. “I never told you that I’d been to see Mr. Roberts’s nephew in Oxford. In fact, I’d purposely not told you because I didn’t want anyone knowing my movements. I just told you that I’d spoken to him. For all you knew, it could have been on the telephone. But Shenington told you that I went to Oxford to meet his son, didn’t he? And you repeated it to me just now.”

“You have no proof,” he said, changing his tune.

“Did you know that you can get fingerprints from paper?” I asked, picking up the note carefully by the corner.

He wasn’t to know that the original had already been tested by the Merseyside Police forensic department and found to have only my and Herb’s prints on it.

His shoulders sagged just a fraction, and he looked down at the desk.

“What did Herb say he regretted?” I asked.

“He said he regretted finding out,” Patrick said wistfully with a sigh. “I was careless. I stupidly left a document under the flap of the photocopier. Herb found it.”

“So what did you tell him to do?” I asked for a third time.

“To accept what he’d been offered,” he said, looking up at me. “But he wanted more. Much more. It was too much.”

Herb had clearly not been as much of a saint as I’d made out.

“So you had him killed.”

He nodded. “Herb was a fool,” he said. “He should have accepted my offer. It was very generous, and you can have the same-a million euros.”

“You make me sick,” I said.

“Two million,” he said quickly. “It would make you a rich man.”

“Blood money,” I said. “Is that the going rate these days for covering up fraud, and murder?”

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about Herb. I liked him, and I argued against having him killed, but the others insisted.”

“Others?” I said. “You must mean Uri Joram and Dimitar Petrov.”

He stared at me with his mouth open.

“Oh yes,” I said. “The police know all about Joram and Petrov because I told them. I told them everything.”

“You bastard,” he said with feeling. “I wish Petrov had killed you at the same time he shot Herb Kovak.”

Throughout the encounter I’d been holding my mobile phone in my left hand. It was one of those fancy new do-anything smart phones, and one of its functions was the ability to act as a voice recorder.

I’d recorded every word that had been said.

I pushed the buttons and played back the last bit. Patrick sat very still in his executive leather chair, listening, and staring at me with a mixture of hatred and resignation in his eyes.

“I wish Petrov had killed you at the same time he shot Herb Kovak.”

It sounded rather metallic out of the telephone’s tiny speaker, but there was no doubt that it was Patrick Lyall’s voice.

“You bastard,” he said again.

I folded the note, turned away from him and walked back along the corridor to my desk to call Chief Inspector Tomlinson. But I’d only just picked up the telephone when there was a piercing scream from outside the building.

I stuck my head out through the window.

Patrick was lying faceup in the middle of the road, and there was already a small pool of blood spreading out around his head.

He had taken the quick way down from our fourth-floor offices.

Straight down.

And it had been the death of him.

Six weeks later Claudia and I went to Herb Kovak’s funeral at Hendon Crematorium, the Liverpool Coroner finally having given his permission.

There were just five mourners, including the two of us.

Sherri had returned from Chicago and would be taking Herb’s ashes back to the States with her. The previous day, she and I had attended the solicitors’ offices of Parc Bean & Co., just off Fleet Street, to swear affidavits in order for the court to confirm a Deed of Variance to Herb’s will, making her, his twin sister, rather than me, the sole beneficiary of his estate. It would surely have been what he would have wanted. I, however, was to remain as his executor in order to complete the sale of his flat and to do the other things that were still outstanding.