Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

I had written to all the American names I had found in Herb’s dark blue bag, informing them of his untimely death and that their little scheme to use his credit card accounts for their Internet gambling had died with him. I’d told them that they shouldn’t worry about me going to the authorities and they wouldn’t be hearing from me again. But I also told them that I had no expectation of hearing from them either even if they had paid Herb in advance more than they had subsequently lost. Then I’d used the cash from the bag to pay off all the credit card balances and used my letter from the Coroner to close the accounts.

Detective Chief Inspector Tomlinson had come down from Merseyside for the funeral service and he sat in front of Claudia and me in the chapel, wearing the same ill-fitting suit he’d worn when I’d first met him in the offices of Lyall & Black. That had been less than three months ago, but it felt like a lifetime.

Lyall & Black and Co. Ltd was no more.

Gregory Black had been quickly released by the police, but he had taken early retirement. Without Patrick, he hadn’t had the incentive to carry on and he had heeded his heart doctor’s advice to put his feet up in his Surrey garden.

I, meanwhile, had quit before I was fired, walking out of 64 Lombard Street for the last time before the paramedics had even had a chance to scrape Patrick’s lifeless corpse from the pavement.

I still didn’t know what I would do, so I was currently living off my savings and looking after Claudia.

We stood up to sing the hymn “The Lord’s My Shepherd,” and I took her hand in mine.

The last six weeks had been very difficult for her. She had undergone two sessions of chemotherapy, each for three days and three weeks apart.

Her hair had fallen out in handfuls immediately after the second treatment, and by now she was completely bald. Today, as usual, she was wearing a headscarf, mostly to prevent other people from staring at her. Strangely, it had not been the loss of hair on her head that had upset her the most but the loss of her lovely long eyelashes with it.

However, Dr. Tomic, the oncologist, was pleased with her progress and reckoned that the two sessions were enough. As he’d said, “We don’t want to jeopardize your fertility, now do we?”

On that count we would just have to wait and see. With cancer, there were never any guarantees.

The fifth mourner at the funeral was Mrs. McDowd, who had arrived just before the undertakers had carried in the plain oak coffin. I wondered how she had known about the funeral. But, of course, Mrs. McDowd knew about everything.

I stood out at the front to utter a few words about Herb, as it somehow seemed wrong to allow him to go forever without at least marking his passing.

I tried hard to visualize in my head the features of the man lying in the wooden box beside me. The unraveling of the enigmas of his life had seemingly brought us closer together, and, in a strange way, he had become more of a friend to me after his death than he ever had before it.

I didn’t really know what I should say, so I made some banal comments about his love of life and his wish to help others less fortunate than himself, but without actually pointing out that the others he helped were lawbreaking American Internet gamblers.

In all, the service took less than twenty minutes. Sherri sobbed quietly, and the rest of us stood in silence as the priest pushed a hidden button and the electrically operated red curtains closed around my colleague, my friend-my free-spending, greedy friend.

Then the five of us went outside into the warm June sunshine.

Claudia and Mrs. McDowd consoled Sherri while the chief inspector and I moved a little distance away.

“The European Union have started an internal inquiry,” he said, “into the whole Bulgarian lightbulb factory affair.”

“Any arrests?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said. “And between you and me, I don’t think there will be. There didn’t seem to be the slightest urgency at the meeting I had with the administrator from the European Court of Auditors. He seemed to think that a hundred million euros was hardly big enough to worry about. I ask you. A hundred million euros could build us a new hospital in Liverpool or several new schools.”

“Any news on Shenington?” I asked him.

“No change,” he said. “And I doubt if there will be. The medics are now saying he has entered what they call a persistent vegetative state. It’s a sort of half-comatose, half-awake condition.”

“What’s the prognosis?”

“They say he’s unlikely ever to make any improvement, and he’ll certainly never stand trial. In cases of severe brain damage like this, if patients show no change for a whole year the doctors usually recommend to their families that artificial nutrition should be withdrawn to let them die.”

Ben Roberts would clearly have some difficult decisions to make in the months ahead. And I also wondered what effect the actions of his father might have on his planned life in politics. He would surely now become the Earl of Balscott rather earlier than he might have expected.

“Have you managed to identify the dead gunman as Dimitar Petrov?” I asked.

“We’re still working on it,” he said. “It seems that both Dimitar and Petrov are very common names in Bulgaria.”

“Can’t Uri Joram in Brussels help you?”

“Apparently, he denies any knowledge of anything,” he said. “Claims his e-mail address must have been used by others.”

“Why am I not surprised?” I said. “How about Shenington’s heavies at Cheltenham?”

“Not a sniff,” he said. “I expect they vanished into the night as soon as their boss ended up in the hospital.”

It reminded me of Billy Searle, who was now in fact out of the hospital, recuperating at home with the fixator on his broken leg. Officially, he was still denying any knowledge of who had knocked him off his bicycle, but he had confirmed to me privately that the nob responsible had indeed been Viscount Shenington. “I’m so glad the f-ing bastard got what was coming to him” had been his exact words when I’d told him of Shenington’s medical condition. And he had giggled uncontrollably and repeatedly punched the air.

The chief inspector and I rejoined the others.

“Rosemary says she’s lost her job,” said Claudia, sounding affronted on her behalf.

“Everyone at Lyall and Black have lost their jobs,” said Rosemary McDowd with bitterness.

Her tone also implied an accusation, and I took it to be towards me. Why was it, I wondered, that the blame often fell not on the wrongdoers but on the person who exposed them?

It wasn’t me who Mrs. McDowd should blame for the demise of Lyall & Black. It was Patrick Lyall, and maybe Gregory Black too, for not being sufficiently diligent in his management of the Roberts Family Trust.

And I surely had more right to be angry with her than vice versa.

After all, it had been she who had told Patrick that I’d been staying at my mother’s house, which had then allowed him and Shenington to send a gunman there to try to kill me.

“So what are you going to do now?” I asked her.

“I have absolutely no idea,” she said flatly. “How about you?”

“I thought I might try my hand at working in the movies or in the theater,” I said. “I’ve written to a few companies, offering my services as a funding specialist to help them find the production money for films and plays. I think it looks quite interesting.”

“But isn’t that a bit of a gamble?” she said.

I smiled at her.

With ovarian cancer, life itself was a bit of a gamble.

Heads you win, tails you die.