by Francis - TO THE HILT

'Urgent?'

'Ultra urgent.'

'I'm on my way.'

My mother fluttered her hands. 'What is ultra urgent?'

'Have you by any chance got a safety pin?'

She looked at me wildly.

'Have you? You always used to have, in a baby sewing kit.' She dug into her handbag and produced the credit-card-sized travelling sewing kit that she carried for emergencies from life-long habit, and speechlessly she opened it and gave me the small safety phi it contained.

I was as usual wearing a shirt under a sweater. I put the Quorn envelope in my shirt pocket, pinned it to the shirt to prevent its falling out, and pulled my sweater down over it.

'And paper,' I said. 'Have you anything I could draw on?'

She had a letter from a friend in her handbag. I took the envelope, opened it out flat, and on its clean inside, with my mother's ball point pen, had time to make nine small outline drawings of familiar people - Desmond Finch, Patsy, Surtees, Tobias included - before Audrey Newton came happily downstairs in holiday mood carrying a suitcase.

I showed her the page of small heads. 'The person who came to pick up your brother on the first day of his holiday… was it one of these?'

She looked carefully and, as if the request were nothing out of the ordinary, pointed firmly. 'That one,' she said.

'You're sure?'

'Positive.'

'Let's get going,' I said.

Audrey Newton having locked her house, we drove away and headed for Lambourn.

'Why Lambourn?' my mother asked.

'I want to talk to Emily.'

'What's wrong with a telephone?'

'Insects,' I said. 'Bugs.'

Friday lunchtime. If Emily had gone to the races it would have complicated things a little, but she was at home, in her office, busy at paperwork with her secretary.

Nothing I did surprised her any more, she said. She agreed easily to my making lunch and pouring wine for her unexpected guests but adamantly refused to join them in any flight from Egypt. She was not, she pointed out, Moses.

I persuaded her to go as far as her drawing-room and there explained the explosive dangers of the present situation.

'You're exaggerating,' she objected.

'Well, I hope so.'

'And anyway, I'm not afraid.'

'But I am,' I said.

She stared.

'Em,' I said, 'if someone were standing behind you now with a knife, threatening to cut your throat if I didn't shoot myself, and I believed it, then…' I hesitated.

'Then what?'

'Then,' I said matter-of-factly, 'I would shoot myself.'

After a long pause, she said, 'It won't come to that.'

'Please, Em.'

'What about my horses?'

'Your head lad must have a home number. You can phone him.'

'Where from?'

'I don't know yet,' I said. 'But wherever you are, use your portable phone.'

'It's all mad.'

'I wish I were in Scotland,' I said. 'I wish I were painting. But I'm here. I'm walking over an abyss that no one else seems to see. I want you safe.'

'Al…' She breathed out on a long, capitulating sigh. 'Why you?'

Why me ?

The cry of ages.

Unanswerable.

Why did I care about right and wrong?

What made a policeman a policeman?

Emily went quickly out of the room and left me looking at the painting I had given her, that was not about an amateur game of golf in bad weather, but about the persistence of the human spirit.

After a while I unpinned the Quorn envelope from my shirt pocket. I lifted the golf picture off its hook and turned it over, and I slotted the envelope between the canvas and the frame, in the lower left-hand corner, so that it was held there securely, out of sight.

I hung the picture back on its hook and went out to see how lunch and life was passing in the kitchen.

Although not natural friends my mother and Audrey were being punctiliously civil to each other and were talking about how to pot cuttings from geraniums. I listened with the disjointed unreality-perception of an alien. At any minute the brewery might be breaking into the house in Bloxham. One should dip the slant-cut stem into fertiliser, Audrey said, and stick it into a peat container full of potting compost.

A large car rolled up the drive and stopped outside the kitchen window. The driver, a chauffeur in a dark navy blue suit, flat cap with shiny peak, and black leather gloves, climbed out and looked enquiringly at the building, and I went out to talk to him.

'Where am I going?' he said.

'Somewhere like Tor Bay. Find a good hotel with a sea view. Make them happy.'

'They?'

'My mother, my wife and the sister of the man who stole the brewery's money. Hide them.'

'Safe from Surtees?'

'And other thugs.'

'Your mother and your wife might recognise me.'

'Not without the wig, the rouge, the mascara, the high heels and the white frills.'

Chris Young grinned. 'I'll phone you when I've parked them,' he said.

'What's your name today?'

'Uttley.'

When I went back into the kitchen Emily, having made herself a sandwich, was talking to the head lad on the telephone.

'I'll be away this weekend… no, I'll phone you…' She gave her instructions about the horses. 'Severance runs at Fontwell tomorrow. I'll talk to the owners, don't forget to send the colours…'

She finished the details and hung up; not happy, not reassured.

'My dears,' I said lightly, looking at all three women, 'just have a good time.'

My mother asked, 'But why are we going? I don't really understand.'

'Um… Emily knows. It's to do with hostages. A hostage is a lever. If you hold a hostage you hold a lever. I'm afraid, if any of you were taken hostage, that I might have to do what I don't want to do, so I want you safely out of sight, and if that sounds a bit improbable and melodramatic, then it's better than being sorry. So go and enjoy yourselves… and please don't tell anyone where you are, and only use Emily's mobile phone if you have to phone someone, like Emily to her head lad, because it wouldn't be much fun to be taken hostage.'

'You might get your throat cut,' Emily said nonchalantly, munching her sandwich, and although my mother and Audrey Newton looked suitably horrified, it seemed Emily's words did the trick.

'How long are we going for?' my mother asked.

'Monday or Tuesday,' I said. Or Wednesday or Thursday. I had no idea.

I hugged my mother goodbye and kissed Emily and warmly clasped Audrey Newton's soft hand.

The chauffeur's name is Mr Uttley,' I told them.

'Call me C.Y.,' he said, and winked at me, and drove them cheerfully away.

I sat in Ivan's car in a shopping centre's car park and tried to reach Margaret Morden by phone.

She was at a meeting, her office reported, and no, they couldn't break in with an urgent message, the meeting was out of town, and she would not be available until Monday, and even then she had meetings all day.

So kind.

Tobias had said he was going to Paris: back in the office on Tuesday.

I hated weekends. Other people's weekends. In my usual life, weekends flowed indistinguishably, work continuing regardless of the day. I sat indecisively, working out what to do next, and jumped when the mobile phone rang in my hand.

It was, surprisingly, Himself.

'Where are you?' he said.

'In the car somewhere. God knows where.'

'And your mother?'

'Gone away for a long weekend with friends.'

'So, if you're alone, come for a drink.'

'Do you mean in London?'

'Of course in London.'

'I'll be an hour or so.'

I drove to Chesham Place, home of the Earl in the capital, and parked on a meter.

Himself had a single malt ready, a sign of good humour.

'A good send-off, yesterday,' he observed, pouring generously. 'Ivan would have approved.'

'Yes.'

After a long silence he said, 'What's on your mind, Al?' I didn't answer at once and he said, 'I know your silences, so what gives?'