Dick Francis's Gamble

So did I.

“Did you get your dress?” I asked.

“What dress?” she said.

“Come on, darling,” I said, slightly irritated. “You know. The one you were going to buy for the opening night on Wednesday.”

“Oh, that,” she said, clearly distracted. “Perhaps I’ll go tomorrow. Something came up this afternoon.”

I didn’t like to think what, so I didn’t ask.

“How long did Patrick say you had to stay away from the office?” Claudia asked into the silence.

“Maybe a week,” I said, wondering if she was asking for reasons other than worries over my reputation and career. “Perhaps I’ll go to the races instead.”

“Great idea,” she said. “Give your mind a rest from all those figures.”

Perhaps it was time to start looking at figures of a different kind.

9

On Saturday afternoon I put on my thick skin and went to Sandown Park Races on the train from Waterloo.

“Bloody hell,” said Jan Setter. “I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you’d been sent to the Tower.”

“Not quite,” I said.

I was standing on the grass close to the parade ring, near the statue of the horse Special Cargo.

“Did you do it?” Jan asked in all seriousness.

“No, of course I didn’t,” I said. “The police wouldn’t have let me go if they still thought I’d tried to kill Billy. I have an alibi.”

“Who did do it, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it wasn’t me.”

“Blimey,” she said. “Then there’s still a would-be murderer out there on the loose.”

“Lots of them,” I said. “Not just Billy’s but Herb Kovak’s too.”

“Who’s Herb Kovak?” she asked.

“Chap who was shot at Aintree last Saturday,” I said. “He was a colleague of mine at work.”

“Did you kill him then?”

“Jan,” I said forcefully, “I didn’t kill anyone, or try to. OK?”

“Then why were you arrested?”

I sighed. People, even good friends, really did believe what they read in the papers. “Someone told the police that Billy had shouted at me at Cheltenham, demanding to know why I was going to murder him. They put two and two together and made five. That’s all. They got it wrong.”

“So why did Billy shout at you?”

“It was to do with his investments,” I said.

Jan raised a questioning eyebrow.

“It’s confidential,” I said. “You wouldn’t want me telling everyone about your investments, now would you?”

“No,” she agreed. “But then I haven’t been deliberately knocked off my bike.”

“That’s a fair point, but confidentiality rules still apply,” I said. “Severely injured or not, he’s still my client.”

Mind you, I thought, there was a limit to confidentiality.

The Wiltshire Police had called me on Friday evening to make an appointment, and I had spent time with two of their number earlier, going over in minute detail all the events of Tuesday and Wednesday at Cheltenham Races, with particular reference to Billy Searle’s investments.

“Was it true that you owe Mr. Searle over a hundred thousand pounds?” one of them had asked me as his opening shot.

“No,” I’d replied calmly. “Not personally. I’m a financial adviser and Billy Searle is a client of mine, which means I manage the investment of his money. In total, he has about a hundred and fifty thousand invested through me, and he told me on Tuesday that he urgently wanted all his money out in cash. He became very distressed and angry when I told him it would take a few days to realize the cash through the sale of his stocks and shares.”

“Why do you think Mr. Searle needed such a large sum so quickly?” the other policeman had asked.

“He told me he owed some guy a hundred thousand and he needed to pay it back by Wednesday night at the very latest, or else.”

“Or else what?” they’d both asked in unison.

“Billy seemed frightened, and when I told him that his money wouldn’t be in his bank until Friday, he said he hoped he would still be alive by Friday.”

“Those were his exact words?”

“Pretty much,” I’d said.

“Did he give you any indication who this guy was?”

“None, but he was clearly terrified of him. Why don’t you ask Billy?”

“Mr. Searle is in a critical condition,” one of them had replied.

“He has severe head injuries, and it is far from certain yet whether he will ever recover consciousness.”

How dreadful, I thought. Billy had survived all those racing falls over all those years only to have head injuries due to someone knocking him off his bike. It didn’t seem fair.

“I wouldn’t have thought that knocking someone off their bicycle was a very sure way of killing them,” I’d said. “How would someone know he would be riding his bike at that time?”

“Mr. Searle rode his bicycle to Lambourn every day at the same time. Apparently, it was part of his fitness regime, and well known. And the car seems to have struck him with considerable force.”

“Yes, but, even so, it is not as certain as a shooting.” I had been thinking of Herb the previous Saturday. “Are you sure it was attempted murder?”

“We are treating the attack as attempted murder,” one of them had replied rather unhelpfully.

Yes, I’d thought, but that didn’t necessarily make it so.

“Can we go back to this man to whom Mr. Searle owed money? Are you sure that Mr. Searle gave you no indication who it was?”

“Positive,” I’d said. “All Billy told me was that he owed the money to some guy.”

But why would you try to kill someone because they owed you money? Then there would be no chance of getting it back. Maybe the attack had meant to be a warning, or a reminder to pay up, and had simply gone too far. Or had it been a message to others: Pay up or else-just as Billy had been afraid of.

“The Racing Post seems to have implied it was a bookmaker.”

“I think that was probably speculation on their part,” I’d said. “Billy never mentioned anything like that to me. In fact, he said that he couldn’t tell me why he owed the money.”

“So why did he claim that it was you who was murdering him?”

“I now realize that he must have believed he might be murdered because I couldn’t get his money together by Wednesday night and it would therefore be my fault if he was killed. But obviously I didn’t think that at the time.”

The two policemen had then effectively asked me the same questions over and over again in slightly different ways, and I had answered them each time identically, with patience and good grace.

Eventually, after more than an hour, they had been satisfied that I had nothing else to tell them and had gone away, but not before they’d had a close inspection of my car to see if there were any dents or scratches caused by Billy Searle’s bicycle. So much for my alibi.

As soon as they had gone, I had rushed away from home, just making it to Sandown in time for the first race. I’d had to endure a few stares on my way into the racetrack, together with a few indelicate and abusive comments, but, even so, it felt good to be in a familiar environment, as well as free in the fresh air.

It would have been better still if I’d been riding.