Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

The tax would run into many hundreds of millions of pounds. Maybe as much as half a billion.

Was that worth murdering for?

‘I need that money for my new yacht,’ Sir Richard said.

So, I was to be sacrificed on the altar of Sir Richard Reynard’s new yacht, no doubt a huge multi-suite gin-palace with every luxury, including gold taps and a helicopter landing pad on the deck.

Even if Quentin did follow things through and report my suspicions to the tax authorities, it wouldn’t save me now from a watery grave.

It made me angry. Bloody angry.

‘Hurry up!’ Sir Richard shouted. ‘Get into the boat.’

‘What does Martin think of this little caper?’ I asked.

‘Martin will do as he’s told.’

Something about the way he said it made me realize that Martin had no idea whatsoever that this was going on.

I had been wrong.

All the time I’d thought that it was Martin who was behind the attempts on my life, but it had been his father, aided and abetted by his creepy lawyer.

No wonder Martin had been affronted when I’d accused him of deliberately filling the guest dive tank with carbon monoxide. Bentley must have done it while we were at the governor’s residence watching the carol singing.

I did up the fastening on the front of the buoyancy compensator and stood up, the weight of the tank causing me to gasp slightly at the stress on my chest.

‘Get in the boat,’ Sir Richard said again.

My time was running out fast.

I started to turn towards the boat but then turned back to face him, taking the console hose in my right hand.

‘Are you aware that your friend Bentley, here, is screwing your daughter-in-law?’

He took his eyes off me for just one second to look at Bentley.

It was enough.

I swung the console with all my might at the hand holding the gun and caught him across the wrist, just behind the base of the thumb. The impact was hard enough to break the glass face of the depth-display dial.

He screamed and dropped the gun and I fell on it like a starving dog onto a juicy steak.

Sir Richard reacted more quickly than I would have expected for a man of his age, stepping forward and taking a wild kick at my head.

The weight of the dive tank was hampering my movement, holding me down, and I desperately tore, one-handed, at the fastening on the BC. My other hand was on the gun but that was stuck beneath me.

Bentley weighed in with some footwork of his own, trying to stamp on my neck. Fortunately, all he managed to do was kick the tank valve and hurt his foot.

Finally, I was free of the scuba gear and I rolled it off my back. But the two men had teamed up. Sir Richard was trying to use my head as a rugby ball, running up and kicking at it as if to hack it off my shoulders and send it over the posts for a conversion, while Bentley had taken to stamping on my now-unprotected lower back.

‘Enough,’ I shouted, but they took no notice.

It had been only three weeks or so since my chest had been open and my heart manually massaged. I was still in no fit shape to fight, especially when the odds were not in my favour by two-to-one, even if one of them was more than twice my age.

I curled myself into a ball to protect my delicate chest and abdomen.

I still had my hand on the gun beneath me but I was loath to use it. I didn’t want to shoot anyone. Indeed, in spite of my years in the army, I had never fired a gun in anger and I wasn’t keen to start. I’d been an intelligence officer and, right now, I was trying to use my intelligence to stop this madness without any loss of life.

But Sir Richard and Bentley were clearly not reading the same script. They seemed intent on murder, as they continued to rain down brutal kicks on my body.

Then things got more serious.

Bentley went over to the boat and returned holding the anchor, a sort of grappling-iron contraption with a central rod connected to four arms set at right-angles to each other, with sharp-looking points on their ends. There was a rope attached to the central rod, and Bentley was using it to swing the anchor in a big circle over his head before aiming it right at me.

I rolled over as the anchor bit into the sand where I’d been lying just a fraction of a second earlier.

I tried to grab it but Bentley tugged it away with the rope before I could reach.

He swung the anchor over his head again for another go. I was now lying on my back and far more vulnerable to the attack.

I lifted the gun in my right hand and shot him.

I didn’t try anything fancy, I just aimed at the widest part of his trunk and pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit him just below the heart, a red star appearing vividly in the centre of his white shirt.

The anchor seemed to stop in mid swing, falling harmlessly to the sand in front of him, while Bentley himself had a look of immense surprise on his face.

He pitched forward, falling right across the sharp arms of the anchor, his body adopting a grotesquely twisted pose with the crown of his head pointing down onto the sand.

Sir Richard stopped kicking me.

He stood, unmoving, staring at Bentley, the look on his face seeming to suggest that he had, only now, grasped the true enormity of what they’d been doing. It was also a look of intense grief and I recalled what Henri had said about her uncle Richard wishing that Bentley had been his son, rather than Martin.

He went over to his trusted lawyer and pulled him off the anchor, laying him flat on the sand and going down on his knees beside him.

Bentley’s eyes were still wide open but he was no longer seeing.

‘You’ve murdered him,’ Sir Richard said, looking across at me. His tone of accusation somehow implying that Bentley trying to kill me had been all right, but the other way round was hugely wicked.

I continued to stare at him, holding the gun ready, wary that he might try to complete with the anchor what Bentley had started. But the fight seemed to have drained out of him, and he suddenly looked every one of his sixty-nine years.

He stood up and stumbled wide-eyed back to the car. I made no attempt to go after him. There was nowhere for him to run to, not on this island.

He started the engine, turned the car around and drove away down the track, leaving me in the sudden darkness.

I rolled over onto my knees and rested my head in my hands.

In spite of the warmth, I started shivering.

It was the shock of having killed someone, I told myself, and the relief of still being alive when I’d been so sure I would die.

After a couple of minutes the shivering abated and I reckoned it was time to move. I didn’t fancy still being here if Sir Richard came back with reinforcements.

As my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I could see Bentley lying on his back, motionless on the sand.

The situation didn’t seem real.

I stood up and went over to him.

To be sure, I felt for a pulse in his wrist, and also in his neck, but there was nothing. I’d come across dead bodies before but never one where I’d been so personally responsible for snuffing out the life that had once inhabited the corpse.

I felt into his trouser pocket for my iPhone.

Whom should I call?

The police for sure, but who else?

I might need someone who was an ally.

I dialled Derrick Smith’s number.

I didn’t catch the flight for which I’d made a reservation. In fact, I didn’t leave Cayman until four days later, boarding a commercial red-eye to London at seven o’clock on New Year’s Eve.

I slept through the actual moment of change from December to January, somewhere over the mid-Atlantic at thirty-six thousand feet.

As a journey, it couldn’t have been more different from that which had brought me to the islands. This was no private jet, more like a knees-to-the-chest charter. And Henrietta Shawcross was becoming a distant memory.