Straight (11 page)

“Also,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you about some projects Greville and I were working on. I’d like to have his notes.”

I said rather blankly, “What projects? What notes?”

“I could explain better face to face,” he said. “Could I ask you to meet me? Say tomorrow, early evening, over a drink? You know that pub just round the. corner from Greville’s house? The Rook and the Castle? There. He and I often met there. Five-thirty, six, either of those suit you?”

“Five-thirty,” I said obligingly.

“How shall I know you?”

“By my crutches.”

It silenced him momentarily. I let him off embarrassment.

“They’re temporary,” I said.

“Er, fine, then. Until tomorrow.”

He cut himself off, and I asked Annette if she knew him, Elliot Trelawney? She shook her head. She couldn’t honestly say she knew anyone outside the office who was known to Greville personally. Unless you counted Prospero Jenks, she said doubtfully. And even then, she herself had never really met him, only talked to him frequently on the telephone.

“Prospero Jenks... alias Fabergé?”

“That’s the one.”

I thought a bit. “Would you mind phoning him now?” I said. “Tell him about Greville and ask if I can go to see him to discuss the future. Just say I’m Greville’s brother, nothing else.”

She grinned. “No horses? Pas de gee-gees?”

Annette, I thought in amusement, was definitely loosening up.

“No horses,” I agreed.

She made the call but without results. Prospero Jenks wouldn’t be reachable until morning. She would try then, she said.

I levered myself upright and said I’d see her tomorrow. She nodded, taking it for granted that I would be there. The quicksand was winning, I thought. I was less and less able to get out.

Going down the passage, I stopped to look in on Alfie, whose day’s work stood in columns of loaded cardboard boxes waiting to be entrusted to the mail.

“How many do you send out every day?” I asked, gesturing to them.

He looked up briefly from stretching sticky tape round yet another parcel. “About twenty, twenty-five regular, but more from August to Christmas.” He cut off the tape expertly and stuck an address label deftly on the box top. “Twenty-eight so far today.”

“Do you bet, Alfie?” I asked. “Read the racing papers?”

He glanced at me with a mixture of defensiveness and defiance, neither of which feeling was necessary. “I knew you was him,” he said. “The others said you couldn’t be.”

“You know Dozen Roses too?”

A tinge of craftiness took over in his expression. “Started winning again, didn’t he? I missed him the first time, but yes, I’ve had a little tickle since.”

“He runs on Saturday at York, but he’ll be odds-on,” I said.

“Will he win, though? Will they be trying with him? I wouldn’t put my shirt on that.”

“Nicholas Loder says he’ll trot up.”

He knew who Nicholas Loder was: didn’t need to ask. With cynicism, he put his just-finished box on some sturdy scales and wrote the result on the cardboard with a thick black pen. He must have been well into his sixties, I thought, with deep lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth and pale sagging skin everywhere from which most of the elasticity had vanished. His hands, with the veins of age beginning to show dark blue, were nimble and strong however, and he bent to pick up another heavy box with a supple back. A tough old customer, I thought, and essentially more in touch with street awareness than the exaggerated Jason.

“Mr. Franklin’s horses run in and out,” he said pointedly. “And as a jock you’d know about that.”

Before I could decide whether or not he was intentionally insulting me, Annette came hurrying down the passage calling my name.

“Derek... Oh there you are. Still here, good. There’s another phone call for you.” She about-turned and went back toward Greville’s office, and I followed her, noticing with interest that she’d dropped the Mister from my name. Yesterday’s unthinkable was today’s natural, now that I was established as a jockey, which was OK as far as it went, as long as it didn’t go too far.

I picked up the receiver which was lying on the black desk and said, “Hello? Derek Franklin speaking.”

A familiar voice said, “Thank God for that. I’ve been trying your Hungerford number all day. Then I remembered about your brother...” He spoke loudly, driven by urgency.

Milo Shandy, the trainer I’d ridden most for during the past three seasons: a perpetual optimist in the face of world evidence of corruption, greed and lies.

“I’ve a crisis on my hands,” he bellowed, “and can you come over? Will you pull out all stops to come over first thing in the morning?”

“Er, what for?”

“You know the Ostermeyers? They’ve flown over from Pittsburgh for some affair in London and they phoned me and I told them Datepalm is for sale. And you know that if they buy him I can keep him here, otherwise I’ll lose him because he’ll have to go to auction. And they want you here when they see him work on the Downs and they can only manage first lot tomorrow, and they think the sun twinkles out of your backside, so for God’s sake
come
.”

Interpreting the agitation was easy. Datepalm was the horse on which I’d won the Gold Cup: a seven-year-old gelding still near the beginning of what with luck would be a notable jumping career. Its owner had recently dropped the bombshell of telling Milo she was leaving England to marry an Australian, and if he could sell Datepalm to one of his other owners for the astronomical figure she named, she wouldn’t send it to public auction and out of his yard.

Milo had been in a panic most of the time since then because none of his other owners had so far thought the horse worth the price, his Gold Cup success having been judged lucky in the absence through coughing of a couple of more established stars. Both Milo and I thought Datepalm better than his press, and I had as strong a motive as Milo for wanting him to stay in the stable.

“Calm down,” I assured him. “I’ll be there.”

He let out a lot of breath in a rush. “Tell the Ostermeyers he’s a really good horse.”

“He is,” I said, “and I will.”

“Thanks, Derek.” His voice dropped to normal decibels. “Oh, and by the way, there’s no horse called Koningin Beatrix, and not likely to be. Weatherby’s say Koningin Beatrix means Queen Beatrix, as in Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and they frown on people naming racehorses after royal persons.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks for finding out.”

“Any time. See you in the morning. For God’s sake don’t be late. You know the Ostermeyers get up before larks.”

“What I need,” I said to Annette, putting down the receiver, “is an appointments book, so as not to forget where I’ve said I’ll be.”

She began looking in the drawerful of gadgets.

“Mr. Franklin had an electric memory thing he used to put appointments in. You could use that for now.” She sorted through the black collection, but without result. “Stay here a minute,” she said, closing the drawer, “while I ask June if she knows where it is.”

She went away busily and I thought about how to convince the Ostermeyers, who could afford anything they set their hearts on, that Datepalm would bring them glory if not necessarily repay their bucks. They had had steeplechasers with Milo from time to time, but not for almost a year at the moment. I’d do a great deal, I thought, to persuade them it was time to come back.

An alarm like a digital watch alarm sounded faintly, muffled, and to begin with I paid it no attention, but as it persisted I opened the gadget drawer to investigate and, of course, as I did so it immediately stopped. Shrugging, I closed the drawer again, and Annette came back bearing a sheet of paper but no gadget.

“June doesn’t know where the Wizard is, so I’ll make out a rough calendar on plain paper.”

“What’s the Wizard?” I asked.

“The calculator. Baby computer. June says it does everything but boil eggs.”

“Why do you call it the Wizard?” I asked.

“It has that name on it. It’s about the size of a paperback book and it was Mr. Franklin’s favorite object. He took it everywhere.” She frowned. “Maybe it’s in his car, wherever that is.”

The car. Another problem. “I’ll find the car,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. Somehow or other I would have to find the car. “Maybe the Wizard was stolen out of this office in the break-in,” I said.

She stared at me with widely opening eyes. “The thief would have to have known what it was. It folds up flat. You can’t see any buttons.”

“All the gadgets were out on the floor, weren’t they?”

“Yes.” It troubled her. “Why the address book? Why the engagements for October? Why the Wizard?”

Because of diamonds, I thought instinctively, but couldn’t rationalize it. Someone had perhaps been looking, as I was, for the treasure map marked X. Perhaps they’d known it existed. Perhaps they’d found it.

“I’ll get here a couple of hours later tomorrow,” I said to Annette. “And I must leave by five to meet Elliot Trelawney at five-thirty. So if you reach Prospero Jenks, ask him if I could go to see him in between. Or failing that, any time Thursday. Write off Friday because of the funeral.”

Greville died only the day before yesterday, I thought. It already seemed half a lifetime.

Annette said, “Yes, Mr. Franklin,” and bit her lip in dismay.

I half smiled at her. “Call me Derek. Just plain Derek. And invest it with whatever you feel.”

“It’s confusing,” she said weakly, “from minute to minute.”

“Yes, I know.”

With a certain relief I rode down in the service elevator and swung across to Brad in the car. He hopped out of the front seat and shoveled me into the back, tucking the crutches in beside me and waiting while I lifted my leg along the padded leather and wedged myself into the corner for the most comfortable angle of ride.

“Home?” he said.

“No. Like I told you on the way up, we’ll stop in Kensington for a while, if you don’t mind.”

He gave the tiniest of nods. I’d provided him in the morning with a detailed large-scale map of West London, asking him to work out how to get to the road where Greville had lived, and I hoped to hell he had done it, because I was feeling more drained than I cared to admit and not ready to ride in irritating traffic-clogged circles.

“Look out for a pub called the Rook and the Castle, would you?” I asked, as we neared the area. “Tomorrow at five-thirty I have to meet someone there.”

Brad nodded and with the unerring instinct of the beer drinker quickly found it, merely pointing vigorously to tell me.

“Great,” I said, and he acknowledged that with a wiggle of the shoulders.

He drew up so confidently outside Greville’s address that I wondered if he had reconnoitered earlier in the day, except that his aunt lived theoretically in the opposite direction. In any case he handed me the crutches, opened the gate of the small front garden and said loquaciously, “I’ll wait in the car.”

“I might be an hour or more. Would you mind having a quick recce up and down this street and those nearby to see if you can find an old Rover with this number?” I gave him a card with it on. “My brother’s car,” I said.

He gave me a brief nod and turned away, and I looked up at the tall townhouse that Greville had moved into about three months previously, and which I’d never visited. It was creamy gray, gracefully proportioned, with balustraded steps leading up to the black front door, and businesslike but decorative metal grilles showing behind the glass in every window from semi-basement to roof.

I crossed the grassy garden and went up the steps, and found there were three locks on the front door. Cursing slightly I yanked out Greville’s half ton of keys and by trial and error found the way into his fortress.

Late afternoon sun slanted yellowly into a long main drawing room which was on the left of the entrance hall, throwing the pattern of the grilles in shadows on the grayish-brown carpet. The walls, pale salmon, were adorned with vivid paintings of stained-glass cathedral windows, and the fabric covering sofa and armchairs was of a large broken herringbone pattern in dark brown and white, confusing to the eye. I reflected ruefully that I didn’t know whether he’d taken it over from the past owner. I knew only his taste in clothes, food, gadgets and horses. Not very much. Not enough.

The drawing room was dustless and tidy; unlived in. I returned to the front hall from where stairs led up and down, but before tackling those I went through a door at the rear which opened into a much smaller room filled with a homely clutter of books, newspapers, magazines, black leather chairs, clocks, chrysanthemums in pots, a tray of booze and framed medieval brass rubbings on deep green walls. This was all Greville, I thought. This was home.

I left it for the moment and hopped down the stairs to the semibasement, where there was a bedroom, unused, a small bathroom and a decorator-style dining room looking out through grilles to a rear garden, with a narrow spotless kitchen alongside.

Fixed to the fridge by a magnetic strawberry was a note.

I looked around for a pencil, found a ballpoint, pulled the note from its clip and wrote on the back, asking Mrs. P. to call the following number (Saxony Franklin’s) and speak to Derek or Annette. I didn’t sign it, but put it back under the strawberry where I supposed it would stay for another week, a sorry message in waiting.

I looked in the fridge which contained little but milk, butter, grapes, a pork pie and two bottles of champagne.