Dick Francis - The Danger

Liberty Market as a firm consisted at that time of thirty-one partners and five secretarial employees. Of the partners, all but Gerry and myself were ex-S.A.S., ex-police, or ex-something-ultra-secret in government departments. There were no particular rules about who did which job, though if possible everyone was allowed their preferences. Some opted for the lecture tour full-time, giving seminars, pointing out dangers; all the how-to-stay-free bit. Some sank their teeth gratefully into the terrorist circuit, others, like myself, felt more useful against the simply criminal. Everyone in between times wrote their own reports, studied everyone else's, manned the office switchboard year round and polished up their techniques of coercive bargaining.

We had a Chairman (the firm's founder) for our Monday morning state-of-the-nation meetings, a Co-ordinator who kept track of everyone's whereabouts, and an Adjuster - Twinkletoes - to whom partners addressed all complaints. If their complaints covered the behaviour of any other partner, Twinkletoes passed the comments on. If enough partners disapproved of one partner's actions, Twinkletoes delivered the censure. I wasn't all that sorry he'd gone to Venezuela.

This apparently shapeless company scheme worked in a highly organised way, thanks mostly to the ingrained discipline of the ex-soldiers. They were lean, hard, proud and quite amazingly cunning, most of them preferring to deal with the action of the after-kidnap affairs. They were, in addition, almost paranoid about secrecy, as also the ex-spies were, which to begin with I'd found oppressive but had soon grown to respect.

It was the ex-policemen who did most of the lecturing, not only advising on defences but telling potential kidnap targets what to do and look for if they were taken, so that their captors could be in turn captured.

Many of us knew an extra like photography, languages, weaponry and electronics, and everyone could use a word processor, because no one liked the rattle of typewriters all day long. No one was around the office long enough for serious feuds to develop, and the Coordinator had a knack of keeping incompatibles apart. All in all it was a contented ship which everyone worked in from personal commitment, and, thanks to the kidnappers, business was healthy.

I finished my journey along the row of hutches, said a few hellos, saw I was pencilled in with a question mark for Sunday midnight on the switchboard roster, and came at length to the big room across the far end, the only room with windows to the street. It just about seated the whole strength if we were ever there together, but on that afternoon the only person in it was Tony Vine.

"Lo,' he said. 'Hear you made an effing balls of it in Bologna.'

'Yeah.'

'Letting the effing carabinieri eff up the R.V.'

'Have you tried giving orders to the Italian army?'

He sniffed as a reply. He himself was an ex-S.A.S. sergeant, now nearing forty, who would never in his service days have dreamed of obeying a civilian. He could move across any terrain in a way that made a chameleon look flamboyant, and he had three times tracked and liberated a victim before the ransom had been paid, though no one, not even the victim, was quite sure how. Tony Vine was the most secretive of the whole tight-lipped bunch, and anything he didn't want to tell didn't get told.

It was he. who had warned me about knives inside rolled up magazines, and I'd guessed he'd known because he'd carried one that way himself.

His humour consisted mostly of sarcasm, and he could hardly get a sentence out without an oiling of fuck, shit and piss. He worked nearly always on political kidnaps because he, like Pucinelli, tended to despise personal and company wealth.

'If you're effing poor,' he'd said to me once, 'and you see some capitalist shitting around in a Roller, it's not so effing surprising you think of ways of levelling things up. If you're down to your last bit of goat cheese in Sardinia, maybe, or short of beans in Mexico, a little kidnap makes effing sense.'

'You're romantic,' I'd answered. 'What about the poor Sardinians who steal a child from a poor Sardinian village, and grind all the poor people there into poorer dust, forcing them all to pay out their pitiful savings for a ransom?'

'No one's effing perfect.'

For all that he'd been against me joining the firm in the first place, and in spite of his feeling superior in every way, whenever we'd worked together it had been without friction. He could feel his way through the psyches of kidnappers as through a minefield, but preferred to have me deal with the families of the victims.

'When you're with them, they stay in one effing piece. If I tell them what to do, they fall to effing bits.'

He was at his happiest cooperating with men in uniform, among whom he seemed to command instant recognition and respect. Good sergeants ran the army, it was said, and when he wanted to he had the air about him still.

No one was allowed to serve in the S.A.S. for an extended period, and once he'd been bounced out because of age, he'd been bored. Then someone had murmured in his ear about fighting terrorists a different way, and Liberty Market had never regretted taking him.

'I put you in for Sunday midnight on the blower, did you see, instead of me?' he said.

I nodded.

'The wife's got this effing anniversary party organised, and like as not by midnight I'll be pissed.'

'All right,' I said.

He was short for a soldier: useful for passing as a woman, he'd told me once. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and light on his feet, he was a fanatic about fitness, and it was he who had persuaded everyone to furnish (and use) the iron-pumping room in the basement. He never said much about his origins: the tougher parts of London, from his accent.

'When did you get back?' I asked. 'Last I heard you were in Columbia.'

'End of the week.'

'How was it?' I said.

He scowled. 'We winkled the effing hostages out safe, and then the local strength got excited and shot the shit out of the terrorists, though they'd got their effing hands up and were coming out peaceful.' He shook his head. 'Never keep their bullets to themselves, those savages. Effing stupid, the whole shitting lot of them.'

Shooting terrorists who'd surrendered was, as he'd said, effing stupid. The news would get around, and the next bunch of terrorists, knowing they'd be shot if they did and also shot if they didn't, would be more likely to kill their victims.

I had missed the Monday meeting where that debacle would have been discussed, but meanwhile there was my own report to write for the picking over of Bologna. I spent all Saturday on it and some of Sunday morning, and then drove seventy-five miles westward to Lambourn.

Popsy Teddington proved to live in a tall white house near the centre of the village, a house seeming almost suburban but surprisingly fronting a great amount of stabling. I hadn't until that day realised that racing stables could occur actually inside villages, but when I remarked on it Popsy said with a smile that I should see Newmarket, they had horses where people in other towns had garages, greenhouses and sheds.

She was standing outside when I arrived, looming over a five-foot man who seemed glad of the interruption.

'Just see to that, Sammy. Tell them I won't stand for it,' she was saying forcefully as I opened the car door. Her head turned my way and a momentary 'who-are-you?' frown crossed her forehead. 'Oh yes, Alessia's friend. She's around the back, somewhere. Come along.' She led me past the house and behind a block of stabling, and we arrived suddenly in view of a small railed paddock, where a girl on a horse was slowly cantering, watched by another girl on foot.

The little paddock seemed to be surrounded by the backs of other stables and other houses, and the grass within it had seen better days.