'I don't see why you should worry about a conflict of interests,' I said. 'After all, you've worked pretty comprehensively for various Pembrokes. You worked for my mother, Joyce Pembroke, to catch my father with the lady who gave her grounds for divorce. You worked for my father, to try to catch his fifth wife having a similar fling. You worked for the unspecified Mrs Pembroke to trace my father's whereabouts. So now he wants you to find out where all his family were last Friday and yesterday so as to be sure it was none of his close relatives who tried to kill him, as it would make him very unhappy if it were. If you can't square that with your conscience, of course with great regret he'll have to retain the services of someone else.'
Norman West eyed me with a disillusionment which again encouraged me to think him not as dim as he looked. Malcolm was glimmer-eyed with amusement.
'Pay you well, of course,' he said.
'Danger money,' I said, nodding.
Malcolm said, 'What?'
'We don't want him to step on a rattlesnake, but in fairness he has to know he might.'
Norman West looked at his short and grimy nails. He didn't seem unduly put out, nor on the other hand eager.
'Isn't this a police job?' he asked.
'Certainly,' I said. 'My father called them in when someone tried to kill him last Friday, and he'll tell you all about it. And you have to bear in mind that they're also enquiring into the murder of Moira Pembroke, whom you followed through blameless days. But you would be working for my father, not for the police, if you take his cash.'
'Pretty decisive, aren't you, sir?' he said uneasily.
'Bossy,' Malcolm agreed, 'in his quiet way.'
All those years, I thought, of getting things done in a racing stable, walking a tightrope between usurping the power of the head lad on one hand and the trainer himself on the other, like a lieutenant between a sergeant- major and a colonel. I'd had a lot of practice, one way and anotherat being quietly bossy.
Malcolm unemotionally told West about his abortive walk with the dogs and the brush with carbon monoxide, and after that described also the near-miss at Newmarket.
Norman West listened attentively with slowly blinking eyes and at the end said, 'The car at Newmarket could have been accidental. Driver looking about for cigarettes, say. Not paying enough attention. Seeing you both at the last minute… swerving desperately.'
Malcolm looked at me. 'Did it seem like that to you?'
'No.'
'Why not?' West asked.
'The rate of acceleration, I suppose.'
'Foot on accelerator going down absent -mindedly during search for cigarettes?'
'Headlights, full beam,' I said.
'A sloppy driver? Had a few drinks?'
'Maybe.' I shook my head. 'The real problem is that if the car had hit us – or Malcolm – there might have been witnesses. The driver might have been stopped before he could leave the sales area. The car number might have been taken.'
West smiled sorrowfully. 'It's been done successfully before now, in broad daylight in a crowded street.'
'Are you saying,' Malcolm demanded of me, 'that the car wasn't trying to kill me?'
'No, only that the driver took a frightful risk.'
'Did any witnesses rush to pick us up?' Malcolm asked forcefully. 'Did anyone so much as pass a sympathetic remark? No, they damned well didn't. Did anyone try to stop the driver or take his number? The hell they did.'
'All the same, 'West said, 'your son is right. Hit-and-run in a public place has its risks. If it was tried here, and sirs, I'm not saying it wasn't, the putative gain must have outweighed the risk, or, erin other words -'
'in other words,' Malcolm interrupted with gloom, 'Ian is right to think they'll try again.'
Norman West momentarily looked infinitely weary, as if the sins of the world were simply too much to contemplate. He had seen, I supposed, as all investigators must, a lifetime's procession of sinners and victims; and, moreover, he looked roughly seventy and hadn't slept all night.
'I'll take your job,' he said without enthusiasm, radiating minimum confidence, and I glanced at Malcolm to see if he really thought this was the best we could do in detectives, signs of intelligence or not. Malcolm appeared to have no doubts, howeverand spent the next five minutes discussing fees which seemed ominously moderate to me.
'And I'll need a list,' West said finally, 'of the people you want checked. Names and addresses and normal habits.'
Malcolm showed unexpected discomfort, as if checking that amorphous entity 'the family' was different from checking each individual separately, and it was I who found a piece of Savoy writing paper to draw up the list.
'OK,' I said, 'first of all there's Vivien, my father's first wife. Mrs Vivien Pembroke.'
'Not her,' Malcolm objected. 'It's ridiculous.'
'Everyone,' I said firmly. 'No exceptions. That makes it fair on everyone… because there are going to be some extremely angry relations when they all realise what's happening.'
'They won't find out,' Malcolm said.
Fat chance, I thought.
To West, I said, 'They all telephone each other all the time, not by any means always out of friendship but quite often out of spite. They won't gang up against you because they seldom form alliances among themselves. Some of them are pretty good liars. Don't believe everything they say about each other.'
'Ian!' Malcolm said protestingly.
'I'm one of them, and I know,' I Said.
After Vivien's name on the list I wrote the names of her children: Donald
Lucy
Thomas
'Thomas,' I said, 'is married to Berenice.' I added her name beside his. 'He is easy to deal with, she is not.'
'She's a five-star cow,' Malcolm said.
West merely nodded.
'Lucy,' I Said, 'married a man called Edwin Bugg. She didn't like that surname, and persuaded him to change it to hers, and she is consequently herself a Mrs Pembroke.'
West nodded.
'Lucy is a poet,' I said. 'People who know about poetry say her stuff is the real thing. She makes a big production of un worldliness which Edwin, I think, has grown to find tiresome.'
'Huh,' Malcolm said. 'Edwin's an out-and-out materialist, always tapping me for a loan.'
'Do you give them to him?' I said interestedly.
'Not often. He never pays me back.'
'Short of money, are they?' West asked.
'Edwin Bugg,' Malcolm said, 'married Lucy years ago because he thought she was an heiress, and they've scraped along ever since on the small income she gets from a trust fund I set up for her. Edwin's never done a stake of work in his parasitic life and I can't stand the fellow.'
'They have one teenage schoolboy son,' I said, smiling, 'who asked me the last time I saw him how to set about emigrating to Australia.'
West looked at the list and said to Malcolm, 'What about Donald, your eldest?'
'Donald,' said his father, 'married a replica of his mother, beautiful and brainless. A girl called Helen. They live an utterly boring virtuous life in Henley-on-Thames and are still billing and cooing like newlyweds although Donald must be nearly forty-five, I suppose.'
No one commented. Malcolm himself, rising sixty-nine, could bill and coo with the best, and with a suppressed shiver I found myself thinking for the first time about the sixth marriage, because certainly, in the future, if Malcolm survived, there would be one. He had never in the past lived long alone. He liked rows better than
