Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll drink to the baby. Come on, loves, businesses come and go, and this one hasn’t gone yet, but babies are for ever, God rot their dear little souls.’

I disentangled her arms and picked out the glasses while she silently wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jersey.

Bobby said dully, ‘You don’t understand,’ but I did, very well. There was no fight in him, the deflation was too great; and I’d had my own agonising disappointments now and then. It could take a great effort of will not to sit around and mope.

I said to Holly, ‘Put on some music, very loud.’

‘No,’ Bobby said.

‘Yes, Bobby. Yes,’ I said. ‘Stand up and yell. Stick two fingers up at fate. Break something. Swear your guts out.’

‘I’ll break your neck,’ he said with a flicker of savagery.

‘All right, then, do it.’

He raised his head and stared at me and then rose abruptly to his feet, power crowding back into his muscles and vigour and exasperation into his face.

‘All right then,’ he shouted, ‘I’ll break your fucking Fielding neck.’

‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘And give me something to eat.’

Instead he went over to Holly and enfolded her and the two of them stood there half weeping, half laughing, entwined in privacy and back with the living. I resignedly dug in the freezer for something fast and unfattening and transferred it to the microwave oven, and I poured some red wine and drank it at a gulp.

Over the food Bobby admitted that he’d been too depressed to walk round at evening stables, so after coffee he and I both went out into the yard for a last inspection. The night was windy and cold and moonlit behind scurrying clouds. Everything looked normal and quiet, all the horses dozing behind closed doors, scarcely moving when we looked in on them, checking.

The boxes that had contained Jermyn Graves’s horses were still empty, and the string which led to the bell had been detached from the door and hung limply from its last guiding staple. Bobby watched while I attached it to the door again.

‘Do you think it’s still necessary?’ he asked dubiously.

‘Yes, I do,’ I said positively. ‘The feed-merchant will have paid in Graves’s cheque yesterday, but it won’t have been cleared yet. I wouldn’t trust Graves out of sight and I’d rig as many strings to the bell as we can manage.’

‘He won’t come back again,’ Bobby said, shaking his head.

‘Do you want to risk it?’

He stared at me for a while and then said, ‘No.’

We ran three more strings, all as tripwires across pathways, and made sure the bell would fall if any one of them was tugged. It was perhaps not the most sophisticated of systems, but it had twice proved that it worked.

It worked for the third time at one in the morning.

My first feeling, despite what I’d said to Bobby, was of incredulity. My second, that springing out of bed was a bad idea, despite the long hot soaking I’d loosened up with earlier; and I creaked and groaned and felt sore.

As I took basic overnight things with me permanently in a bag in the car — razor, clean shirt, toothbrush — I was sleeping (as usual in other people’s houses) in bright blue running shorts. I would have dressed, I think, if I’d felt more supple. Instead I simply thrust my feet into shoes and went out on to the landing, and found Bobby there, bleary-eyed, indecisive, wearing the top half of his pyjamas.

‘Was that the bell?’ he said.

‘Yes. I’ll take the drive again. You take the yard.’

He looked down at his half-nakedness and then at mine.

‘Wait.’ He dived back into his and Holly’s bedroom and reappeared with a sweater for me and trousers for himself, and, struggling into these garments en route, we careered down the stairs and went out into the windy night. There was enough moonlight to see by, which was as well, as we hadn’t brought torches.

At a shuffle more than a run I hurried down the drive, but the string across that route was still stretched tight. If Graves had come, he hadn’t come that way.

I turned back and went to help Bobby in the yard, but he was standing there indecisively in the semi-darkness, looking around him, puzzled. ‘I can’t find Graves,’ he said. ‘Do you think the bell just blew off in the wind?’

‘It’s too heavy. Have you checked all the strings?’

‘All except the one across the gate from the garden. But there’s no one here. No one’s come that way.’

‘All the same...’ I set off down the path to the gate to the garden, Bobby following: and we found the rustic wooden barrier wide open. We both knew it couldn’t have blown open. It was held shut normally with a loop of chain, and the chain hung there on the gatepost, lifted off the gate by human hands.

We couldn’t hear much for the wind. Bobby looked doubtfully back the way we had come and made as if to return to the yard.

I said, ‘Suppose he’s in the garden.’

‘But what for? And how?’

‘He could have come through the hedge from the road into the paddock, and over the paddock fence, and then down this path, and he’d have missed all the strings except this one.’

‘But it’s pointless. He can’t get horses out through the garden. There are walls all round it. He wouldn’t try.’

I was inclined to agree, but all the same, someone had opened the gate.

The walled garden of Bobby’s house was all and only on one side, with the drive, stable yard and outhouses wrapping round the other three; and apart from the gate where we now stood, the only way into the garden was through French windows from the drawing room of the house.

Maybe Bobby was struck by the same unwelcome thought as myself. In any case he followed me instantly through the gate and off the paving-stone path inside on to the grass, which would be quieter underfoot.

We went silently, fast, the short distance towards the French windows, but they appeared shut, the many square glass frames reflecting the pale light from the sky.

We were about to go over to try them to make sure they were still locked when a faint click and a rattle reached my ears above the breeze, followed by a sharp and definite ‘Bugger’.

Bobby and I stood stock still. We could see no one, even with eyes fast approaching maximum night vision.

‘Get down,’ a voice said. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘Shut up.’

Feeling highly visible in my long bare legs and electric blue shorts I moved across the grass in the direction of the shadows which held the voices, and as policemen will tell you, you should not do that; one should go indoors and telephone the force.

We found, Bobby and I, a man standing at the bottom of a ladder, looking upwards. He wore no mask, no hood, simply an ordinary suit — incongruous as a burglar kit.

He was not Jermyn Graves, and he was not the nephew, Jasper.

He was under forty, dark haired, and a stranger.

He didn’t see us at all until we were near him, so firmly fixed upwards was his attention, and when I said loudly, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he jumped a foot.

Bobby made a flying rugby tackle at his knees and I took hold of the ladder and pushed it sideways. There was a yell from above and a good deal of clattering, and a second stranger tumbled down from the eaves and fell with a thud on to an uninhabited flower bed.

I pounced on that one and pushed his face down into the November mud and with one hand tried to search his pockets for a weapon, with him heaving and threshing about beneath me, and then when I found no weapon, for some sort of identification, for a diary or a letter, for anything. People who came to burgle dressed as for going to the office might not have taken all suitable precautions.