Dick Francis - The Danger

'We were never going to get five million, stupid. Like Peter said, you 'demand five to frighten the dads and take half a million nice and easy, no bones broken.'

What if Nerrity calls in the Force, and they jump us?'

'No sign of them, is there? Be your age. Terry and Kevin, they'd spot the law the minute it put its size twelves over the doorstep. Those two, they got antennae where you've got eyes. No one at the hotel. No one at the house in Sutton. Right?'

The second voice gave an indistinguishable grumble, and the first answered. 'Peter knows what he's doing. He's done it before. He's an expert. You just do what you're bleeding told and we'll all get rich, and I've had a bellyful of your grousing, I have, straight up.'

Tony put the single oar over the stern of the boat and without fuss or hurry paddled us off towards where we'd set out, against the swirling incoming tide. I rolled up the fishing lines and unbaited the hooks, my fingers absentminded while my thoughts positively galloped.

'Don't let's tell Eagler until…" I said.

'No,' Tony answered.

He looked across at me, half-smiling. 'And let's not tell the Chairman either,' I said. 'Or Gerry Clayton.'

Tony's smile came out like the sun. 'I was afraid you'd insist.'

'No.' I paused. 'You watch from the water and I'll watch from the land, OK? And this evening we'll tell Eagler. On our terms.'

'And the low profile can rest in effing peace.'

'You just get that vacuum pump purring like a cat and don't fall off any high walls.'

'In our report,' Tony said, 'we will write that the police found the hideout.'

'Which they did,' I said reasonably.

'Which they did,' he repeated with satisfaction.

Neither Tony nor I were totally committed to the advice-only policy of the firm, though we both adhered to it more or less and agreed that in most circumstances it was prudent. Tony with his exceptional skills tended always to be more actively involved than I, and his reports were peppered with phrases like 'it was discovered' and 'as it happened' and never with the more truthful 'I planted a dozen illegal bugs and heard…' or 'I let off a smoke canister and under its cover…'

Tony steered the boat back to where we'd left the car and rapidly set up a duplicate receiver to work through the car's aerial.

'There you are,' he said, pointing. 'Left switch for the lower floor bug, middle switch for the top floor. Don't touch the dials. Right switch, up for me to talk to you, down for you to talk to me. OK?'

He dug around in the amazing stores he called his gear and with a nod of pleasure took out a plastic lunch box. 'Long term subsistence supplies,' he said, showing me the contents. 'Nut bars, beef jerky, vitamin pills - keep you fighting fit for weeks.'

'This isn't the South American outback,' I said mildly.

'Saves a lot of shopping, though.' He grinned and stowed the lunch box in the rowing boat along with a plastic bottle of water. 'If the worst should happen and they decide to move the kid, we're in dead trouble.'

I nodded. Trouble with the law, with Liberty Market and with our own inescapable guilt.

'And let's not forget,' he added slowly, 'that somewhere around we have Terry and Kevin and Peter, all with their antennae quivering like effing mad, and you never know whether that crass bastard Rightsworth won't drive up to Nerrity's house with his blue light flashing.'

'He's not that crazy.'

'He's smug. Self satisfied. Just as dangerous.

He put his head on one side, considering. 'Anything else?'

'I'll go back to the hotel, pay the bill, collect the cases.'

'Right. Give me a buzz when you're on station.' He stepped into the boat and untied its painter. 'And, by the way, do you have a dark sweater? Black, high neck?'

'Yes, I brought one.'

'Good. See you tonight.'

I watched him paddle away, a shortish figure of great physical economy, every movement deft and sure. He waved goodbye briefly, and I turned the car and got on with the day.

The hours passed slowly with the mixture of tension and boredom that I imagined soldiers felt when waiting for battle. Half of the time my pulse rate was up in the stratosphere, half the time I felt like sleep. At only one point did the watch jerk from stand-by to nerve-racking, and that was at midday.

For most of the morning I had been listening to the bug on the lower of the two floors, not parking the whole time in one place but moving about and stopping for a while in any of the streets within range. The two kidnappers had repeated a good deal of what we'd already heard; grouse, grouse, shut up.

Dominic at one point had been crying.

'The kid's whining,' the first voice said.

I switched to the top floor bug and heard the lonely heartbreaking grizzle, the keening of a child who'd lost hope of being given what he wanted. No one came to talk to him, but presently his voice was obliterated by pop music, playing loudly.

I switched to the lower bug again and felt my muscles go into knots.

A new voice was speaking. '… a bloke sitting in a car a couple of streets away, just sitting there. I don't like it. And he's a bit like one of the people staying in the hotel.'

The first-voice kidnapper said decisively, 'You go and check him out, Kev. If he's still there, come right back. We're taking no bleeding risks. The kid goes down the chute.'

The second-voice kidnapper said, 'I've been sitting at this ruddy window all morning. There's been no one in sight here, sussing us out. Just people walking, out looking.'

'Where did you leave the car?' Kevin demanded. 'You've moved it.'

'It's in Turtle Street.'

'That's where this bloke is sitting.'

There was a silence among the kidnappers. The bloke sitting in the car in Turtle Street, his heart lurching, started his engine and removed himself fast.

A red light on Tony's radio equipment began flashing, and I pressed the switch to talk to him. 'I heard,' I said. 'Don't worry, I'm on my way. Talk to you when I can.'

I drove a mile and pulled up in the car park of a busy pub, and bent my ears to catch the much fainter transmissions.

'The bloke's gone,' a voice eventually said.

'What do you reckon, Kev?'

The reply was indistinguishable.

There hasn't been a smell of the Force. Not a flicker.' The first-voice kidnapper sounded as if he were trying to reassure himself as much as anyone else. 'Like Peter said, they can't surround this place without us seeing, and it takes eight seconds, that's all, to put the kid down the chute. You know it, I know it, we practised. There's no way the police would find anything here but three blokes having a bleeding holiday and a little gamble on the cards.'

There were some more indecipherable words, then the same voice. 'We'll both watch, then. I'll go upstairs, ready. You, Kev, you walk round the bleeding town and see if you can spot that bloke hanging about. If you see him, give us a bell, then we'll decide. Peter won't thank us if we panic. We got to give the goods back breathing, that's what he said. Otherwise we get nothing, savvy, and I don't want to have gone through all this aggravation for a hole in the bleeding pocket.'

I couldn't hear the replies, but first-voice seemed to have prevailed. 'Right then. Off you go, Kev. See you later.'

I went inside the pub where I was parked and ate a sandwich with fingers not far from trembling. The low profile, I judged, had never been more justified or more essential, and I'd risked Dominic's life by not sticking to the rules.

The problem with dodging Kevin was that I didn't know what he looked like while he could spot me easily, and probably he knew the colour, make and number of my car. Itchenor was too small for handy hiding places like multi-storey parks. I concluded that as I couldn't risk being seen I would have to give the place a miss altogether, and drove by a roundabout route to reach Itchenor Creek at a much higher point, nearer Chichester. I could no longer hear the bugs, but hoped to reach Tony down the water; and he responded to my first enquiry with a faint voice full of relief.