Dick Francis - 10 lb Penalty

A young woman sitting behind a computer stood up with unaffected welcome.

“Benedict!”

I said, “Crystal?” tentatively.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said, edging around her desk to give me a kiss. “It’s such ages since you were here.”

A great change here too had taken place. She was no longer thin and anxious, but rounded and secure; and she wore a wedding ring, I saw.

They gave me coffee and local news, and I read with interest what the Gazette had made of SHOUT! “An unfair attack on our MP through his son. No truth in this allegation... shocking... libelous... retractions and regrets are in the pipeline.”

“The by-line in SHOUT! says Usher Rudd,” Mervyn pointed. “Vicious little nerd.”

“Actually,” I said as their indignation boiled on, “I came hoping to see Orinda, but she doesn’t answer her phone.”

“Oh, dear,” Crystal said, “she isn’t here. She went away for the weekend. She won’t be back till Monday.”

They didn’t know where she’d gone.

I’d made a short list of people I aimed to see. Mervyn, helpful with addresses, knew where to find Isobel Bethune at her sister’s house in Wales, and as she — telephoned — was not only at home but would be glad to see me, I drove to Cardiff that afternoon and discovered Paul Bethune’s rejuvenated wife in a pretty town house in the suburbs.

I’d never before seen her happy. She, too, was a different woman: the gray lines of worry had smoothed into peaches and cream.

It was she, however, who exclaimed, “How you’ve changed. You’ve grown older.”

“It happens.”.

Her sister had gone shopping. I sat with Isobel and listened to her remembering for my benefit how Usher Rudd had uncovered her husband’s bimbo affair.

“Usher Rudd just dug away and wrote it up sensationally, but it was all Paul’s fault. Men are such bloody fools. He confessed to me in sniveling tears in the end that he’d boasted — boasted, I ask you — to some stranger that he was playing golf with, that he was having an affair his wife didn’t know about. Snigger, snigger. Can you believe it? And that stranger turned out to be that weird nobody that was always hanging about ’round the Nagles. He used to play golf with Dennis.”

“His name’s Wyvern.”

“Yes, I know that now. When Dennis died, that Wyvern person wanted to make sure Orinda got elected, so he arranged to play golf with Paul, to see where Paul was weakest. I hated Usher Rudd, but it wasn’t until after your father got elected that Paul broke down and told me what had happened.” She sighed. “I was shattered then, but I don’t care now, isn’t that odd?”

“How are your sons?”

She laughed. “They’ve joined the army. Best place for them. They sometimes send postcards. You’re the only one that was kind to me in those days.”

I left her with a kiss on the peaches-and-cream cheek and drove tiredly back to Hoopwestern for the night, staying in Polly’s house in the woods and eating potted shrimps from her freezer.

On Saturday morning I went to the police station and asked to see Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, whose mother drove a school bus.

Joe Duke appeared questioningly.

“George Juliard’s son? You look older.”

Joe Duke was still a detective sergeant, but his mother no longer drove a bus. “She’s into rabbits,” he said. He took me into a bare little interview room, explaining he was the senior officer on duty and couldn’t leave the station.

He thoughtfully repeated my question. “Do I know if that fire you could have died in was arson? It’s all of five years ago.”

“A bit more. But you must have files,” I said.

“I don’t need files. Mostly fires in the night are from cigarettes or electrical shorts, but none of you smoked and the place had been rewired. Is this off the record?”

“On the moon.”

A dedicated policeman in his thirties, Joe had a broad face, a Dorset accent and a realistic attitude to human failings. “Amy used to let tramps sleep above the charity shop sometimes, but not that night, she says, though that’s the official and easy theory of the cause of fire. They say a vagrant was lighting candles downstairs and knocked them over, and then ran away. Nonsense, really. But the fire did start, the firefighters reckoned, in the charity shop, and the back door there wasn’t bolted, and both shops of the old place were lined and partitioned with dry old wood, though they’ve rebuilt it with brick and concrete now, and it’s awash with smoke alarms. Anyway, I suppose you heard the theory that crazy Leonard Kitchens set light to the place to frighten your father off so that Orinda Nagle could be our MP?”

“I’ve heard. What do you think?”

“It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

“But still...”

“I think he did it. I questioned him, see? But we hadn’t a flicker of evidence.”

“And what about the gun in The Sleeping Dragon’s gutter?”

“No one knows who put it there.”

“Leonard Kitchens?”

“He swears he didn’t. And he’s heavy and slow. It needed someone pretty agile to put that gun up high.”

“Did you ever find out where the rifle came from?”

“No. we didn’t,” he said. “They’re so common. They’ve been used in the Olympics for donkey’s years. They’re licensed and locked away and accounted for these days, but in the past... and theft...” He shrugged. “It isn’t as if it had killed anyone.”

I said, “What’s the penalty for attempted murder?”

“Do you mean a deliberate attempt that didn’t come off?”

“Mm.”

“Same as murder.”

“A 10-lb. penalty?”

“Ten years,” he said.

From the police station I drove out to the ring road and stopped in the forecourt of Basil Rudd’s car-repair outfit. I walked up the stairs into his glass-walled office that gave him a comprehensive view over his wide workshop below, only half-busy on Saturday morning.

“Sorry,” he said without looking up. “We close at noon on Saturdays. Can’t do anything for you till Monday.”

He was still disconcertingly like his cousin; red hair and freckles and a combative manner.

“I don’t want my car fixed,” I said. “I want to find Usher Rudd.”

It was as though I had jabbed him with a needle. He looked up and said, “Who are you? Why do you want him?”

I told him who and why. I asked him if he remembered the Range Rover’s questionable sump plug, but his recollection was hazy. He was quite sharply aware, though, of the political damage that could be done to a father by a son’s disgrace. He had a copy of SHOUT! on his desk, inevitably open at the center pages.

“That’s me,” I said, pointing at the photograph of the jockey. “Your cousin is lying. The Gazette sacked him for lying once before, and I’m doing my best to get him finally discredited — struck off, or whatever it’s called in newspaper-speak-for what is called dishonorable conduct. So where is he?”

Basil Rudd looked helpless. “How should I know?”

“Find out,” I said forcefully. “You’re a Rudd. Someone in the Rudd clan must know where to find its most notorious son.”

“He’s brought us nothing but trouble...”

“Find him,” I said, “and your troubles may end.”

He stretched out a hand to the telephone, saying, “It may take ages. And it’ll cost you.”

“I’ll pay your phone bills,” I said. “When you find him, leave a message on the answering machine at my father’s headquarters. Here’s the number.” I gave him a card. “Don’t waste time. It’s urgent.”

I went next to The Sleeping Dragon to see the manager. He had been newly installed there at the time of the by-election, but perhaps because of that he had a satisfactorily clear recollection of the night someone had fired a gun into the cobbled square. He didn’t, of course, remember me personally, but he was honored, he said, to be on first-name terms with my father.