The foregoing information had been made available to the police in their investigation into the shooting of Halley.
I shut the file. A drab little story, I thought, of a pathetic little man playing out of his league.
Brinton.
The Clerk of the Course at Dunstable had also been called Brinton.
I sat gazing at the short file. Brinton wasn’t an uncommon name. There was probably no connection at all. Brinton of Dunstable had died a good two years before Brinton of Reading had asked for protection. The only visible connection was that at different ends of the scale both the Dunstable Brinton and Thomas Andrews had earned their living on the racecourse. It wasn’t much. Probably nothing. But it niggled.
I went home, collected the car, and drove to Reading.
A nervous grey haired elderly man opened the front door on a safety chain, and peered through the gap.
‘Yes?’
‘Mr Brinton?’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m from Hunt Radnor Associates. I’d be most grateful for a word with you.’
He hesitated, chewing an upper lip adorned with an untidy pepper and salt moustache. Anxious brown eyes looked me up and down and went past me to the white car parked by the kerb.
‘I sent a cheque,’ he said finally.
‘It was quite in order,’ I assured him.
‘I don’t want any trouble… it wasn’t my fault that that man was shot.’ He didn’t sound convinced.
‘Oh, no one blames you for that,’ I said. ‘He’s perfectly all right now. Back at work, in fact.’
His relief showed, even through the crack. ‘Very well,’ he said, and pushed the door shut to take off the chain.
I followed him into the front room of his tall terrace house. The air smelt stale and felt still, as if it had been hanging in the same spot for days. The furniture was of the hard-stuffed and brown shellacked substantial type that in my plywood childhood I had thought the peak of living, unobtainable; and there were cases of tropical butterflies on the walls, and carved ornaments from somewhere like Java or Borneo on several small tables. A life abroad, retirement at home, I thought. From colour and heat to suburban respectability in Reading.
‘My wife has gone out shopping,’ he said, still nervously. ‘She’ll be back soon.’ He looked hopefully out of the lace curtained window, but Mrs Brinton didn’t oblige him by coming to his support.
I said, ‘I just wanted to ask you, Mr Brinton, if you were by any chance related to a Mr William Brinton, one- time Clerk of Dunstable racecourse.’
He gave me a long agonised stare, and to my consternation sat down on his sofa and began to cry, his shaking hands covering his eyes and the tears splashing down on to his tweed-clad knees.
‘Please… Mr Brinton… I’m so sorry,’ I said awkwardly.
He snuffled and coughed, and dragged a handkerchief out to wipe his eyes. Gradually the paroxysm passed, and he said indistinctly, ‘How did you find out? I told you I didn’t want anyone asking questions…’
‘It was quite accidental. Nobody asked any questions, I promise you. Would you like to tell me about it? Then I don’t think any questions will need to be asked at all, from anyone else.’
‘The police…’ he said doubtfully, on a sob. ‘They came before. I refused to say anything, and they went away.’
‘Whatever you tell me will be in confidence.’
‘I’ve been such a fool… I’d like to tell someone, really.’
I pictured the strung up, guilt-ridden weeks he’d endured, and the crying fit became not only understandable but inevitable.
‘It was the letter, you see,’ he said sniffing softly. ‘The letter William began to write to me, though he never sent it… I found it in a whole trunk of stuff that was left when he… killed himself. I was in Sarawak then, you know, and they sent me a cable. It was a shock… one’s only brother doing such a… a terrible thing. He was younger than me. Seven years. We weren’t very close, except when we were children. I wish… but it’s too late now. Anyway, when I came home I fetched all his stuff round from where it had been stored and put it up in the attic here, all his racing books and things. I didn’t know what to do with them, you see. I wasn’t interested in them, but it seemed… I don’t know… I couldn’t just burn them. It was months before I bothered to sort them out, and then I found the letter…’ His voice faltered and he looked at me appealingly, wanting to be forgiven.
‘Kitty and I had found my pension didn’t go anywhere near as far as we’d expected. Everything is so terribly expensive. The rates… we decided we’d have to sell the house again though we’d only just bought it, and Kitty’s family are all close. And then… I thought… perhaps I could sell the letter instead.’
‘And you got threats instead of money,’ I said.
‘Yes. It was the letter itself which gave me the idea…’ He chewed his moustache.
‘And now you no longer have it,’ I said matter of factly, as if I knew for certain and wasn’t guessing. ‘When you were first threatened you thought you could still sell the letter if Hunt Radnor kept you safe, and then you got more frightened and gave up the letter, and then cancelled the protection because the threats had stopped.’
He nodded unhappily. ‘I gave them the letter because that man was shot… I didn’t realise anything like that would happen. I was horrified. It was terrible. I hadn’t thought it could be so dangerous, just selling a letter… I wish I’d never found it. I wish William had never written it.’
So did I, as it happened.
‘What did the letter say?’ I asked.
He hesitated, his fear showing. ‘It might cause more trouble. They might come back.’
‘They won’t know you’ve told me,’ I pointed out. ‘How could they?’
‘I suppose not.’ He looked at me, making up his mind. There’s one thing about being small: no one is ever afraid of you. If I’d been big and commanding I don’t think he’d have risked it. As it was, his face softened and relaxed and he threw off the last threads of reticence.
‘I know it by heart,’ he said. ‘I’ll write it down for you, if you like. It’s easier than saying it.’
I sat and waited while he fetched a ball point pen and a pad of large writing paper and got on with his task. The sight of the letter materialising again in front of his eyes affected him visibly, but whether to fear or remorse or sorrow, I couldn’t tell. He covered one side of the page, then tore it off the pad and shakily handed it over.
I read what he had written. I read it twice. Because of these short desperate sentences, I reflected unemotionally, I had come within spitting distance of St Peter.
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘I wish I’d never found it,’ he said again. ‘Poor William.’
‘Did you go to see this man?’ I asked, indicating the letter as I put it away in my wallet.
‘No, I wrote to him… he wasn’t hard to find.’
‘And how much did you ask for?’
Shame-faced, he muttered, ‘Five thousand pounds.’
Five thousand pounds had been wrong, I thought. If he’d asked fifty thousand, he might have had a chance. But five thousand didn’t put him among the big-power boys, it just revealed his mediocrity. No wonder he had been stamped on, fast.
‘What happened next?’ I asked.
‘A big man came for the letter, about four o’clock one afternoon. It was awful. I asked him for the money and he just laughed in my face and pushed me into a chair. No money, he said, but if I didn’t hand over the letter at once he’d… he’d teach me a thing or two. That’s what he said, teach me a thing or two. I explained that I had put the letter in my box at the bank and that the bank was closed and that I couldn’t get it until the next morning. He said that he would come to the bank with me the next day, and then he went away…’
‘And you rang up the agency almost at once? Yes. What made you choose Hunt Radnor?’
He looked surprised. ‘It was the only one I knew about. Are there any others? I mean, most people have heard of Hunt Radnor, I should think.’
‘I see. So Hunt Radnor sent you a bodyguard, but the big man wouldn’t give up.’
‘He kept telephoning… then your man suggested setting a trap in his office, and in the end I agreed. Oh, I shouldn’t have let him, I was such a fool. I knew all the time, you see, who was threatening me, but I couldn’t tell your agency because I would have had to admit I’d tried to get money… illegally.’
