Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

‘You incited,’ I said bitterly, ‘your own son to murder. Brainwashed him.’

‘It would have been an accident,’ he said.

‘An Allardeck killing a Fielding would not have been believed as an accident.’

‘I would have sworn it,’ he said.

I loathed him. I said, ‘Go into the sitting room’ and I stood back to let him pass, keeping the gun pointing his way all the while.

He hadn’t had the courage to shoot me himself. Making Bobby do it... that crime was worse.

It hadn’t been a good idea to draw him there with the express purpose of getting rid of me once and for all. He’d too nearly succeeded. My own stupid fault.

We went down the hall and into the sitting room. Pollgate and Erskine and Lord Vaughnley were all there, standing in the centre, with Bobby and Holly, still entwined, to one side. I went in there feeling I was walking into a cageful of tigers, and Holly said later that with the gun in my hand I looked so dangerous she hardly recognised me as her brother.

‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘You,’ I pointed to Maynard, ‘over there in that chair at the end.’ It was a deep chair, enveloping, no good for springing out of suddenly. ‘You next, beside him,’ I said to Erskine. ‘Then Lord Vaughnley, on the sofa.’

Pollgate looked at the spare place beside Lord Vaughnley and took it in silence.

‘Take out the stunner,’ I said to him. ‘Put it on the floor. Kick it this way.’

I could feel the refusal in him, see it in his eyes. Then he shrugged, and took out the flat black box, and did as I’d said.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘you’re all going to watch a video.’ I glanced down at the pistol. ‘I’m not a good shot. I don’t know what Pd hit. So stay sitting down.’ I held out the anorak in Bobby’s direction. ‘The tape’s zipped into one of the pockets.’

‘Put it on now?’ he said, finding it and bringing it out. His hands were shaking, his voice unsteady. Damn Maynard, I thought.

‘Yes, now,’ I said. ‘Holly, close the curtains and put on a lamp, it’ll be dark before we’re finished.’

No one spoke while she shut out the chilly day, while Bobby switched on the video machine and the television, and fed the tape into the slot. Pollgate looked moodily at the anorak which Bobby had laid on a chair and Lord Vaughnley glanced at the gun, and at my face, and away again.

‘Ready,’ Bobby said.

‘Start it off,’ I said, ‘and you and Holly sit down and watch.’

I shut the door and leaned against it as Lord Vaughnley had done in the Guineas, and Maynard’s face came up bright and clear and smiling on the television screen.

He started to struggle up from his deep chair.

‘Sit down,’ I said flatly.

He must have guessed that what was coming was the tape he thought he’d suppressed. He looked at the gun in my hand and judged the distance he would have to cover to reach me, and he subsided into the cushions as if suddenly weak.

The interview progressed and went from smooth politeness into direct attack, and Lord Vaughnley’s mouth slowly opened.

‘You’ve not seen this before?’ I said to him.

He said, ‘No, no’ with his gaze uninterruptedly on the screen, and I supposed that Rose wouldn’t have seen any need to go running to the proprietor with her purloined tape, the two days she had had it in the Towncrier building.

I looked at all their faces as they watched. Maynard sick, Erskine blank, Lord Vaughnley riveted, Pollgate awakening to acute interest, Bobby and Holly horrified. Bobby, I thought ruefully, was in for some frightful shocks: it couldn’t be much fun to find one’s father had done so much cruel damage.

The interview finished, to be replaced by the Perrysides telling how they’d lost Metavane, with George Tarker and his son’s suicide after, and Hugh Vaughnley, begging to go home; and finally Maynard again, smugly smiling.

The impact of it all on me was still great, and in the others produced something like suspended animation. Their expressions at the end of the hour and thirteen minutes were identical, of total absorption and stretched eyes, and I thought Joe would have been satisfied with the effect of his cutting, and of his hammer blow of final silence.

The trial was over: the accused, condemned. The sentence alone remained to be delivered.

The screen ran from black into snow, and no one moved.

I peeled myself off the door and walked across and switched off the set.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘now listen.’

The eyes of all of them were looking my way with unadulterated concentration, Maynard’s dark with humiliation, his body slack and deep in the chair.

‘You,’ I said to Lord Vaughnley, ‘and you,’ I said to Nestor Pollgate. ‘You or your newspapers will each pay to Bobby the sum of fifty thousand pounds in compensation. You’ll write promissory notes, here and now, in this room, in front of witnesses, to pay the money within three days, and those notes will be legal and binding.’

Lord Vaughnley and Nestor Pollgate simply stared.

‘And in return,’ I said, ‘you shall have the wire-tap and the other evidence of Jay Erskine’s criminal activity. You shall have complete silence from me about your various assaults on me and my property. You shall have back the draft for three thousand pounds now lodged in my bank manager’s safe. And you shall have the tape you’ve just watched.’

Maynard said, ‘No’ in anguished protest, and no one took any notice.

‘You,’ I said to Maynard, ‘will write a promissory note promising to pay to Bobby within three days the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which will wipe out the overdrafts and the loans and mortgages on this house and stables, which you and your father made Bobby pay for, and which should rightfully be his by inheritance.’

Maynard’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.

‘You will also,’ I said, ‘give to Major and Mrs Perryside the one share you still own in Metavane.’

He began to shake his head weakly.

‘And in return,’ I said, ‘you will have my assurance that many copies of this tape will not turn up simultaneously in droves of sensitive places, such as with the Senior Steward of the Jockey Club, or among the patrons of the civil service charity of which you are the new chairman, or in a dozen places in the City.’ I paused. ‘When Bobby has the money safe in the bank, you will be safe from me also. But that safety will always be conditional on your doing no harm either to Bobby and Holly or to me in future. The tapes will always exist.’

Maynard found his voice, hoarse and shaken.

‘That’s extortion,’ he said aridly. ‘It’s blackmail.’

‘It’s justice,’ I said.

There was silence. Maynard shrank as if deflated into the chair, and neither Pollgate nor Lord Vaughnley said anything at all.

‘Bobby,’ I said, ‘take the tape out of the machine and out of this room and put it somewhere safe, and bring back some writing paper for the notes.’

Bobby stood up slowly, looking numb.

‘You said we could have the tape,’ Pollgate said, demurring.

‘So you can, when Bobby’s been paid. If the money’s all safely in the bank by Friday, you shall have it then, along with Erskine’s escape from going to jail.’

Bobby took the tape away, and I contemplated Pollgate’s and Lord Vaughnley’s expressionless faces and thought they were being a good deal too quiet. Maynard, staring at me blackly from his chair, was simple by comparison, his reactions expected. Erskine looked his usual chilling self, but without the smirk, which was an improvement.

Bobby came back with some large sheets of the headed writing paper he used for the bills for the owners, and gave a sheet each to Nestor Pollgate and Lord Vaughnley, and with stiff legs and an arm outstretched as far as it would go, gave the third to his father with his head turned away, not wanting to look at his face.