Dick Francis's Gamble (32 page)

A lot too much, I thought. But, what the hell, it was Friday afternoon, and it had been quite a week.

I left them refilling their glasses and went upstairs to fetch my computer. I then used Jan's broadband to connect to the Internet and checked my e-mails. As always, there were the usual collection from fund managers, but nestling amongst them, was one from Patrick Lyall. It was timed at three-fifty p.m. He had clearly become fed up waiting for me to return his call, telling him where to send the letter. I could almost feel the anger as I read it.

“Nicholas,” he had written, “As you have obviously decided not to reply to my telephone call asking for your whereabouts, I have no option but to deliver the attached letter to you by e-mail. I find the whole situation most unsatisfactory. I hope that you soon come to your senses and start giving the firm the priority it deserves. Patrick.”

I clicked on the attachment. It was a letter from the lawyer, Andrew Mellor, acting on behalf of Lyall & Black. There were no niceties, and the letter was very much to the point.

It sounded to me that, this time, I really was about to be fired.

Strangely, I didn't seem to care anymore. Perhaps that policeman at Aintree had been right all along—becoming a financial adviser had been a bit of a comedown from the thrill of being a jump jockey.

Maybe it was time for me to look for more excitement in my life?

Like being shot at? Or stabbed?

I think not. I'd had enough of that.

 

 

O
n Saturday morning I left the three women nursing their hangovers while I went to visit Billy Searle in the Great Western Hospital in Swindon.

“So who knocked you off your bike?” I asked him.

“Don't you bloody start,” he said. “The fuzz have been asking me nothing else but that since I woke up.”

“So why don't you tell them?” I said.

“Are you f-ing stupid or something?” he said. “I'd rather go on living, thank you very much.”

“So it wasn't an accident?” I said.

“I didn't say that. It might have been.”

“Now who's being f-ing stupid?” I said.

He stuck a finger up at me and said nothing.

We were in a single room, hidden away at the far end of one of the wards. It had taken me three separate requests to find him as well as a security escort that had only departed after Billy had vouched for me as his friend, not foe.

“How much longer are you going to be here?” I asked him. He clearly wasn't going anywhere soon as he was firmly attached to the bed by a weights contraption that was pulling on his right leg.

“About another week,” he said. “At least that's what they tell me. They need to apply something called a fixator to my leg, but they can't do that until the traction has pulled everything straight. Then I'll be able to get up.”

“I thought they pinned and plated broken legs these days.”

“I did too,” he said. “But the doc here says that this is the best way, and who was I to argue?” He grinned. Both he and I knew that Billy Searle argued all the time. “Anyway, I was f-ing unconscious at the time.”

“They thought you were going to die,” I said.

“No bloody chance,” he replied, still grinning.

“And
I
was arrested for your attempted murder.”

“Yeah,” he said. “So I heard. Serves you right.”

“What for?” I said.

He laughed. “For being such a boring bastard.”

Was I really boring?

“I'm sorry.”

“You were much more fun as a jock,” Billy said. “Do you remember that time we all got thrown out of that f-ing hotel in Torquay after your big win at Newton Abbot?”

I smiled. I remembered it well. “It was all your fault,” I said. “You poured champagne into their grand piano.”

“Yeah, well, so maybe I did,” he said. “But it was a crap piano anyway. And it was you throwing those potted plants round that did for us in the end.”

It was true, I thought. The plants had come out of their pots, and the earth had spread all over the new carpet. The hotel manager had not been at all pleased. We had been politely asked to leave, and never to come back, or else he would call the police.

Billy and I laughed together at the memory.

“Those were the days,” he said. “Carefree and bloody stupid, we were.”

“But such fun,” I said, still laughing.

For both of us, it seemed, fun had been on the wane recently.

“So to whom do you owe a hundred grand?” I asked. The laughter died in Billy's throat. But he didn't answer. “Was it the same guy who tried to kill you?”

He still didn't answer. He just looked at me.

“Or was he just trying to give you a gentle reminder to pay up, a reminder that went too far?”

“Did the bloody cops tell you to ask me that?” he said crossly.

“No, of course not,” I said. “They don't even know I'm here.”

“So why are you so bloody interested in me all of a sudden?” The bonhomie of just a couple of minutes previously had disappeared completely.

“Billy. I'm just trying to help you,” I said.

“I don't need your fucking help,” he said explosively, just as he'd done outside the Weighing Room at Cheltenham.

“That's what you said to me once before and you ended up in here. Next time, it might be the morgue.”

He lay back against the hospital pillows and said nothing.

“All right,” I said. “If you won't tell me who, at least tell me why you owe someone a hundred thousand. Then I can properly advise you about your financial dealings.”

“I can't,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “Even if I didn't end up dead, which I probably would, I'd have no bloody job left.”

“Against the rules of racing,” I quoted, somewhat self-righteously.

He turned his head and gave me a sideways look.

“Actually, no. At least not that time. That's what's so bloody ironic.”

He paused.

“What's ironic?” I prompted.

“Are you sure you're not working for the fuzz?”

“I swear on a bottle of champagne in a grand piano,” I said with a smile.

“And some separated f-ing plants?” he asked, smiling also.

“Them too,” I said, placing my right hand over my heart.

He thought for a while longer, as if still debating whether or not to tell me.

“I won a race I should have lost,” he said finally.

“What do you mean, a race you should have lost?”

“I told him I'd lose, but then I went and bloody won it,” he said.

“That was rather careless of you.”

“No, not really,” he said. “I did it on purpose. I was so fed up with that bastard Vickers overtaking me in the championship, I was trying to win on everything I rode. Fat lot of good it did me. I've come bloody second yet again.”

“So who was it that you told you'd lose the race?”

He thought for a moment.

“Sorry, mate,” he said. “I can't tell you that. My f-ing life wouldn't be worth tuppence.”

“Is he a bookie?” I asked.

“No,” he said with certainty. “He's a bloody nob.”

I expect, to Billy, anyone who spoke the Queen's English without a liberal scattering of swear words would be classed as a nob.

“Which nob in particular?” I asked.

“I'm not saying,” he said. “But even if I did you wouldn't f-ing believe it.”

“And does this nob still want his hundred thousand?”

“I expect so,” he said. “That's what he claims he lost because I won the race. But I haven't actually talked to him since this little caper. Perhaps I'll tell him to bugger off. A broken leg must be worth a hundred grand at least.”

“Tell him you'll enlighten the cops as to the identity of your attacker if he doesn't leave you alone.”

“Don't be bloody naïve,” he said. “These sort of guys don't mess about. Telling him that would get me killed for sure.”

“Sounds to me like you're in trouble if you do say who attacked you, and also if you don't.”

“You are so right,” he said. “Once you say
yes
to them the first time, you're bloody hooked for life. They've got you by the balls, and there's no way out.” He leaned his head back against the white pillows, and I thought there were tears in his eyes.

“Billy,” I said. “There never will be a way out unless you fight back.”

“Well, count me out,” he said adamantly without moving. “I am not going to be first over-the-top to be shot down. I value my jockey's license.”

“So how often have you stopped one?” I asked.

“Too bloody often,” he said.

I was surprised. Billy didn't have a reputation as being a fixer.

“About ten times altogether, I suppose,” he said. “Spread over the past three years or so. But I decided there would be no more when Frank Miller broke his leg in December and I finally had the chance to be champion jockey.”

“But then young Mark Vickers pops up to beat you.”

“The bastard,” he said with feeling. “It's not bloody fair.”

Life wasn't fair, I thought. Ask anyone with cancer.

 

 

J
an Setter had already left for Uttoxeter races by the time I arrived back at her house at noon. I would have loved to have gone with her, but I was worried that my enemies might have seen us together and worked out where I was staying.

Claudia was beginning to think I was becoming paranoid, but I would rather be paranoid than dead. And I only had to mention the dead gunman for her to agree to almost anything.

“But how much longer do we need to stay here?” she asked. “I want to go home.”

“I do too, my darling,” I said. “We will go home just as soon as it is safe.”

I had asked Jan over breakfast how much longer we could stay.

“How long do you need?” she'd asked.

“I don't know. Another few days at least.”

“I'll need you out by next Friday at the latest,” she'd said. “I've got my sister and her family coming for the weekend.”

By next Friday we would have been here for eight nights.

“I sincerely hope it won't be as long as that,” I'd said. But, in truth, I had no real idea when it might be safe to go home.

“That's a shame,” Jan had said. “I'm quite enjoying the company. I get so bored here on my own since my divorce.”

I logged on to the Internet and checked my e-mails. There were none—it had to be the weekend. With the exception of dealings on foreign markets, which could extend the working week for a few hours at either end, all financial services in the UK usually went to sleep at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon and awoke again at eight on Monday morning, as if the weekend had never been.

Except, of course, for interest, which was charged daily on loans whatever day of the week it was.

I used online banking to check on my personal accounts.

Things might be going to get quite tight if I did lose my job at Lyall & Black. I had managed to save quite well over the previous five years, but much of it had been used to pay off the debts that I'd run up as a student.

Whilst I might regularly handle investments for others of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of pounds, my own nest egg was much more modest.

Historically, the stock market has always outperformed fixed-interest investments, such as bank accounts, certificates of deposit, and government bonds. However, stock markets are very susceptible to even minor changes in investor confidence and can fluctuate quite dramatically, especially downwards. For long-term investment, say over ten or twenty years or more, the stock market is considered to be the best, but if you need your money out sooner, the risk that the market may go down suddenly just before you need it would be too great and more lower-risk assets may be better. Consequently, as an investor gets older, and the time for buying a pension becomes nearer, the balance tends to move away from high-risk stocks and further towards the “safer” bonds.

In my case, with my expected pension requirement still a long way over the horizon, my savings were almost totally in equities. I would ride the stock market roller coaster but hope, and expect, the underlying trend to be upwards.

If I did get fired from my job, I might need to live off my savings for a while. And then what would I do? Billy had accused me of being boring, but it wasn't me that was boring, I decided, it was my job. I needed more excitement in my life, more adrenaline rushing through my veins, but not necessarily due to having a silenced pistol pointed at me.

But what could I do? I was trained and qualified only to be a financial adviser. But what I wanted to be most was a jockey or a rodeo rider or a free-fall-skydiving instructor or a crocodile fighter or . . .