Dead Heat

15

I was frightened. Very frightened. Twice I had cheated an assassin. I didn’t like to think “third time lucky” or “if at first you don’t succeed-try, try again.”

“Who could it be?” I asked myself yet again. “Who on earth could want me dead, and why?”

It was six o’clock in the evening, and I sat in the rented Mondeo in the empty parking lot of the Newmarket racetrack. I didn’t know why I chose there, particularly. I just wanted to be somewhere away from anyone else, and with enough space to see someone coming. The lot was deserted, save for my Mondeo in the center of it. I looked all around. There was no one about.

Who could I trust? Could I, in fact, trust anyone?

Caroline, I thought. I would trust her with my life. I suddenly realized that indeed it was my life I would lose if I made a mistake and trusted the wrong person.

The safest course was to trust no one. Not even my kindly neighbor, dear.

But I couldn’t stay sitting here in this parking lot forever.

Could I trust Carl? Was I safe to sleep in his house? Was he safe if I was sleeping in his house? I had witnessed only too clearly what a fire could do and how close I had come to joining my smoke detector as its victim. I really didn’t want to take that risk again.

Should I now go to the police? But would they believe me? It all seemed so unreal, even to me. Would they take me seriously enough to give me protection? It was not worth going to the police if they simply took a statement and then sent me away to my death. It wouldn’t help if they only believed me after I was dead.

I used my new cell phone to call the Hay Net. Martin, my barman, answered, and I asked him to get Carl for me.

“He’s in the kitchen, Chef,” said Martin. “I’ll get him.”

I waited.

“Hello,” Carl said finally. “Everything OK?”

“No, not exactly,” I said. “I’ve got to go away for a few days.”

“Where to?” he said.

Where to indeed? I thought. “Er, I’m not sure.”

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “My mother is unwell, and I need to be with her. Can you cope without me for the rest of the week?”

“Sure,” he said rather uncertainly. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be fine. But has anything arrived for me, by messenger?”

“Yes,” he replied, “about half an hour ago. Do you want me to bring it somewhere?”

“No, it’s all right. I’ll come and collect it.”

“How about your stuff at my place?” he said. I had left my overnight bag and shaving kit at his house.

“Don’t worry about them,” I said. “I’ll buy myself a new toothbrush and razor.”

“I can fetch them, if you like,” he said, still sounding a little unsure.

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I have to go right now. Leave the package by the front door, will you?”

“All right, if you say so.” He clearly thought I was crazy.

I drove down the familiar road to the restaurant, looking left and right for any danger. There was none, at least none that I could see. I left the engine running as I jumped out and dashed inside the restaurant. The package was where I had asked Carl to leave it, and I grabbed it and went straight back out to the car.

“Max,” called Carl, following me outside. “Max, wait.”

I stood by the open door of the car.

“I’m sorry, Carl, I’ve got to go.”

“Call me, then,” he said.

“Later,” I said. “I’ll try to call you later.”

I climbed in and drove off, checking my rearview mirror every few seconds to see if I was being followed. I wasn’t. I was running away, and even I wasn’t sure where I was going.

THE FOLLOWING morning, I ran farther away. I caught the ten-fifty a.m. flight to Chicago.

After leaving the restaurant the previous evening, I had driven aimlessly down the A14 to Huntingdon and had stopped in the deserted parking lot of a closed carpet store.

Someone once told me that it was possible to trace the location from which a cell phone call was made. I had taken the risk, and first called my mother. Second, I called Caroline.

“Have you told the police?” she’d asked after I had told her everything.

“Not yet,” I’d said. “I’m worried they won’t take me seriously.”

“But someone has tried to kill you twice. Surely they will take that seriously.”

“Both attempts were designed to look like accidents. Maybe the police will think I’m irrational or something.” I was beginning to suspect as much myself.

“How could someone have got into your house to tamper with the smoke alarm?” she’d asked.

“I’m not sure,” I’d said. “But I’m absolutely certain that someone did. My front door key was on the fob with my car keys that went missing after the crash. Whoever removed the battery and set light to my cottage must have it.”

As I had told her the full story, it had all seemed less and less plausible. I had no firm idea who the “someone” could be who was trying to kill me, or even why. Would the police believe me or dismiss it all as some crazed, circumstantial conspiracy theory? I would have had to tell them I believed that the someone may be a Russian polo pony importer that I suspected only because he hadn’t turned up at a lunch to which he had been invited. If that was a crime, then half the population would be in court.

“You can go and stay at my flat, if you like,” Caroline had said. “My upstairs neighbor has a key, and I can call her to let you in.”

“I’m not sure that’s safe either. Suppose someone has been following me. They would have seen me go there last weekend. I’m not taking that chance.”

“You really are frightened, aren’t you?” she’d said.

“Very,” I’d said.

“Then come here. Come to Chicago. We can discuss everything through. Then we’ll decide what to do and who to tell.”

I had driven to one of the hotels on the northern edge of Heathrow and had booked myself in for the night under a false name, using cash to pay in advance for my room. The staff raised a questioning eyebrow, but they accepted my fictional explanation that I had stupidly left my passport and credit cards at home and that my wife was bringing them to me at the airport in the morning. Maybe I was being rather overdramatic, but I was taking no chances that I could be traced through my credit card. If someone really had been in my house at three in the morning to start a fire at the bottom of my stairs, then it didn’t stretch the imagination much further to realize they might have taken my old phone and credit cards, with all the access that the numbers could bring to my accounts, and maybe my whereabouts if I used them. I had turned off my new phone just in case.

On Wednesday morning, I had left the rented Mondeo in the hotel parking lot, where, according to the hotel reception staff, it would be quite safe but would incur charges. Fine, I’d said, and I had paid them up front for one week’s parking with the remains of my cash. I then had taken the hotel shuttle bus to the airport and had reluctantly used my new credit card to purchase the airline ticket. If someone could then find out I was at Heathrow buying a ticket, that was too bad. I just hoped that they wouldn’t be able to get to the airport before my flight departed. If they could further discover that the ticket was to Chicago, well…it’s a big city. I planned to stay hidden.

I had decided not to sit in some dark corner of the departure lounge while I waited for the flight. Instead, I’d sat in the open next to an American family with three small children who played around my feet with brmmm-brmmm noises and miniature London black taxis, souvenir toys of their trip. It had felt safer.

Departure had been uneventful, and I now dozed at forty thousand feet above the Atlantic. I had not slept particularly well in the hotel, and three times during the night had checked that the chair I had propped under the door handle was still there. So as the airplane rushed westwards, I lay back and caught up on my lack of sleep from the previous two nights, and had to be woken by one of the cabin staff as we made our final approach to O’Hare airport in Chicago.

I KNEW that Caroline would not be waiting for me at the airport. She had told me that she had a rehearsal all afternoon, ready for that evening’s first night, and I had told her not to try to come anyway. I had somehow thought it might be safer. However, I still looked for her when I emerged from immigration and customs.

She wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t there. I hadn’t really expected her to be there, but I felt a little disappointed nevertheless. There were several couples greeting each other with hugs and kisses, with I LOVE YOU or WELCOME HOME printed helium-filled balloons attached to their wrists or to the handles of strollers full of smiling babies. Airport arrival concourses are joyful places, good for the soul.

However, the source of my particular joy was not there. I knew that she would be deep into Elgar and Sibelius, and I was jealous of them, jealous of long-dead composers. Was that another example of irrational behavior?

I took a yellow cab from the airport to downtown, specifically to the Hyatt Hotel, where I knew the orchestra was staying, and sank into a deep leather armchair in the lobby that faced the entrance. I sat and waited for Caroline to return, and promptly went straight back to sleep.

She woke me by stroking my head and running her hands through my hair.

“Hello, my sleeping beauty,” she said.

“You’re the beautiful one,” I said, slowly opening my eyes.

“I see you’re keeping a good lookout for potential murderers,” she said.

“Don’t even joke about it,” I said. But she was right. Going to sleep in plain view of the hotel entrance and the street beyond was not the most clever thing I had done in the last twenty-four hours if I wanted to stay alive.

“Where are the rest of the orchestra?” I asked.

“Some are upstairs. Others-boring, boring-are still hanging around at the concert hall. And a few have gone shopping.”

I looked at my new watch. It read eleven-thirty. Six-hour time difference, so it was five-thirty in the afternoon. “What time is the performance?” I asked.

“Seven-thirty,” she said. “But I have to be back, changed and ready by six forty-five, and the hall is a five-minute taxi ride away.”

We had an hour and ten minutes. Was she thinking what I was thinking?

“Let’s go to bed for an hour,” she said.

Obviously, she was.

I MANAGED to stay awake for the whole concert. I remembered my father having seriously advised me, when I was aged about eight or nine, that you never, ever clap at a concert unless others did so first. He didn’t tell me, but there must have been an embarrassing moment in his life when he had burst into applause, isolated and alone, during the silent pause between orchestral movements. I sat on my hands to prevent a repeat.

Caroline had worked a miracle to find me a seat. A single house seat in the center of the eighth row. It was an excellent position, ruined only by the fact that the conductor, a big man with annoyingly broad shoulders, stood between me and Caroline, and I couldn’t see her.

Even though I wouldn’t have admitted so to Caroline, I wouldn’t have known which piece was by whom without the program telling me that it was all Elgar before the intermission and Sibelius after. But I did recognize some of it, especially “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations. Listening to it reminded me so much of my father’s funeral. My mother had chosen “Nimrod” to be played at the conclusion of the service, as my father, in his simple oak coffin, had been solemnly carried out of East Hendred Church to the graveyard for burial, an image that was so sharp and vivid in my memory that it could have happened yesterday. Caroline had told me how powerful music could be, and, now, I felt its force.

For the first time, I cried for my dead father. I sat in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall surrounded by more than two thousand others and wept in my personal, private grief for a man who had been dead for thirteen years, a condition unexpectedly brought on in me by the music of a man who had been dead for more than seventy. I cried for my own loss, and my mother’s loss too, and I cried because I so longed to tell him about my Caroline and my happiness. What would we give to spend just one hour more with our much-loved and departed parents?

By the time the intermission came, I felt completely drained. I was sure that those alongside me had no idea of what had taken place right next to them. And that was as it should be, I thought. Grief is a solitary experience, and the presence of others can lead to discomfiture and embarrassment for all parties.

Caroline had told me that she wouldn’t be able to get out to see me during the intermission, as the directors frowned upon such behavior and she wasn’t in the mood for crossing them at the moment, not after missing the original flight. It was probably a good thing, I thought. Even though we had met only last week, Caroline knew me all too well already, and I didn’t yet feel comfortable with every one of my innermost thoughts and emotions being open to her scrutiny. So I remained in my seat and decided against buying a cardboard cup of ice cream to eat with a miniature plastic shovel, as everyone around me seemed to be doing.

The second half of the concert was the Sibelius symphony, and I didn’t find it so dark and gloomy as Caroline had warned me to expect. In fact, I loved it. Somehow, as I sat there absorbing the music, I felt released from the past and fully alive for the future. I had no house, no car and precious few belongings to worry about. I was about to embark on two new and exciting journeys, one with a new London restaurant and the other with a new companion whom I adored. And someone was trying to kill me, either for what I knew or for what I had said, neither of which seemed that important to me. I had run away to America and was now enjoying the heady excitement of having left my troubles behind. The troubles in question may not have been resolved, but they were out of sight and, for an hour or so, out of mind too.

The audience stood and cheered. They even whooped with delight and put fingers in their mouths and whistled. Anything, it seemed, to make a noise. There was no decorum or restraint here. Unlike we British, who sit and politely applaud, the Americans’ way of expressing their approval is to holler and shout and dance on their feet.

The orchestra smiled and the conductor bowed, repeatedly. The ovation lasted for at least five minutes, with the conductor leaving the stage and reappearing six or seven times. Some in the audience even bellowed for more, for an encore, as if this were a pop concert. Eventually, the conductor shook the hand of the orchestra leader, and they left the stage together, putting an end to the acclaim and allowing the players to retire gracefully for the night.

I met Caroline outside the stage door, and she was as high as a kite.

“Did you hear them?” she said breathlessly. “Did you hear the noise?”

“Hear it?” I said, laughing. “I was making it.”

She threw her arms around my neck. “I love you,” she said.

“You’re just saying that,” I said, mocking her slightly.

“I’ve never said that to anyone in my life before,” she said rather seriously. “And yet it seems so simple and obvious to say it to you.”

I kissed her. I loved her too.

“It made such a difference,” she said, “to have you in the audience. But I spent the whole concert trying to find you in the sea of faces.”

“I was behind the conductor,” I said. “I couldn’t see you either.”

“I thought you must have gone back to the hotel.”

“Never,” I said. “I really enjoyed it.”

“Now, you’re just saying that,” she said, mocking me a little too.

“I’m not,” I said. “I loved it, and…I love you.”

“Oh goodie,” she squealed, and hugged me. I hugged her back.

I STAYED the night in Caroline’s room without telling the hotel or giving them my name. Even though it was very unlikely that anyone would have traced me, I took no chances and propped the chair from the desk under the door handle when we went to bed.

No one tried to get in, at least I didn’t hear anyone trying. But, then again, by the time we finally went to sleep at midnight I was so tired that I don’t think I would have heard if someone had tried blasting their way through the wall with a hand grenade.

In the morning, we lay in bed and watched breakfast television, which wasn’t very good and full of far too many commercial breaks for my liking.

“What do you have to do today?” I asked Caroline while running my finger down her spine.

“Nothing until four o’clock,” she said. “We will have a run-through of a couple of movements. Then tonight’s performance is at seven-thirty, like last night.”

“Can I come again?” I asked.

“Oh, I hope so.” She giggled.

“I meant to the concert,” I said.

“You can if you want to,” she said. “Are you sure? It’ll be just the same as last night.”

“You could surely eat the same dinner two nights running?” I said.

“Only if you cooked it.”

“Well, then,” I said, “I want to come and hear you play again tonight.”

“I’ll see if I can find you a ticket.”

“So what do you want to do until four o’clock?” I asked.

She grinned. “We could stay in bed.”

But we didn’t. We decided to get up and go have some breakfast at the restaurant on the ninety-fifth floor of the John Hancock Building, which, according to the tourist guide in the room, was the second-highest building in the Midwest, after the Sears Tower.

I took the elevator down to the lobby while Caroline went to put a note under the door of a fellow violist with whom she had agreed to go shopping, explaining that her plans had changed. As I waited for her, I asked the concierge for a map of the area and found the John Hancock Building clearly marked. I also found O’Hare airport to the northwest of the city center. And something else on the map caught my eye.

Caroline arrived, having delivered her note.

“Are you aware,” I asked, “that the state of Wisconsin starts only a few miles north of Chicago?”

“So?” she said.

“Wisconsin is where Delafield is, and that’s where Delafield Industries, Inc., is based.”

“But how far away?” she said. “Some of the states are huge.”

I found out. The hotel concierge was most helpful. Delafield, Wisconsin, he said, was under two hours’ drive away. Yes, of course, he could arrange for a rental car, all he needed was a credit card. Caroline lent me hers. Better safe than dead.

INTERSTATE HIGHWAY 94 conveniently ran directly from Chicago to Delafield, and, as the hotel concierge had said, it took us less than two hours in our rented Buick.

We turned off the Interstate at the Delafield exit and found ourselves in an urban environment repeated thousands of times across the United States. The junction was surrounded on all sides by flat-roofed commercial and retail development, including gas stations, drugstores, supermarkets and the ubiquitous fast-food outlets, each with an over-tall sign designed to be visible for miles along the highway in each direction. I thought back to when I had opened the Hay Net and the flurry of objections that had been raised by the local planners over the modest sign I had wanted to erect next to the road. In the end, I had been given my permission, on the condition that the top of the sign be not more than two meters from the ground. I smiled to myself. The Cambridgeshire County Council planning officer would have had palpitations in this neck of the woods.

Beyond the retail areas, with their acres of tarmac parking lot, and sitting on a small hill, I could see some substantial industrial buildings with DELAFIELD INDUSTRIES, INC. in big bold black letters on a yellow sign sticking up from the roof. Below the sign, painted large on the wall of the factory in fading paint, was THE FINEST AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY IN AMERICA.

I wasn’t really sure what I hoped to achieve by coming all the way up to Delafield from Chicago. It just seemed to me to be an obvious thing to do, having discovered that it was so close. I had no idea what I would find. Indeed, I had no idea what I was even looking for. But if I was right and Delafield Industries was indeed the intended target, then if anyone knew the motive for the bombing it would surely be Rolf Schumann. Whether he would tell me or not was another matter.

We drove up to the main gate, where a sturdy-looking barrier blocked our path.

“Can I help you, sir?” asked a security guard who appeared from the glass-fronted gray booth on my left. He wore a dark blue uniform, complete with flat-topped cap and a belt around his waist with more gadgets hung from it than I thought was prudent. Surely, I thought, a belt with all that weight would pull his trousers down rather than hold them up.

“I was passing and wondered if Mr. Rolf Schumann was in,” I said.

“And your name, sir?” the guard asked. He himself wore a plastic name badge with BAKER embossed on it.

“Butcher,” I said, deciding against “candlestick maker.” “Max and Caroline Butcher.” I had no idea why I didn’t tell him my real name. If Mr. Schumann was in fact in, then he might just remember me from Newmarket racetrack and wonder why I had given a false name to his security guard. But it didn’t matter.

“Do you have an appointment, Mr. Butcher?” asked the guard politely.

“No, I’m afraid we don’t,” I replied equally politely.

“Then I’m sorry,” he said. “We don’t accept visitors without an appointment.”

“OK,” I said. “But is Mr. Schumann actually here?”

“I couldn’t say,” he said.

“Couldn’t or won’t?” I asked.

“Couldn’t.” He had lost the politeness from his voice.

“Why not?” I asked him.

“Please, sir,” he said, not amused and not wanting to play the game any longer, “turn your vehicle around and leave the premises.” He pronounced “vehicle” as if it were two words, “veerhickle,” with the emphasis on the “hickle.” “Otherwise, I shall have you forcibly removed.”

He didn’t appear to be joking. I resisted the temptation to say that I was still owed some money by his company for having cooked a lunch at which his boss had been blown up. Instead, I did as he asked, turned my veer-hickle around and pulled away. I could see him large in the rearview mirror. He was standing in the road with his hands on his hips, and he watched us all the way down the hill until we disappeared around the bend at the bottom.

“That didn’t seem to go too well,” said Caroline somewhat sarcastically. “What do you suggest we do now? Climb their fence?”

“Let’s go get that breakfast we’ve been promising ourselves.”

We parked the Buick on Main Street and sat in the window of Mary’s Café, drinking coffee and eating blueberry muffins.

Delafield was somewhat topsy-turvy. What was known as Delafield Town was all the new development near the interstate highway, including the shopping malls and the agricultural machinery factory, while the city of Delafield was a delightful old-world village set alongside Lake Nagawicka. Nagawicka, we were reliably informed by the café owner, meant “there is sand,” in the language of the local Native Americans, the Ojibwe Indians, although we couldn’t actually see any sand on the lakeshore.

“More coffee?” asked Mary, coming out from behind her counter and holding up a black thermos pot.

“Thank you,” said Caroline, pushing our mugs towards her.

“Have you heard of someone called Rolf Schumann?” I asked Mary as she poured the steaming liquid.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Everyone around here knows the Schumanns.”

“I understand he’s president of Delafield Industries,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “At least, he was. It’s such a shame.”

“What’s a shame?” asked Caroline.

“About his condition,” Mary said.

“What about his condition?” I asked.

Mary looked around, as if checking that no one else was listening. There was only the three of us in the café. “You know,” she said, shaking her head from side to side, “he’s not all there.”

“How do you mean?” I said. Mary was embarrassed. I was surprised, and I helped her out. “Is the problem to do with his injuries?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “That’s right. Due to his injuries.”

“Do you know if he’s still in the hospital?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “I believe so.” She looked around again and then continued in a hushed tone. “He’s in Shingo.”

“Shingo?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Shingo. You know, the mental hospital.” She said the last two words in little more than a whisper.

“Where exactly is Shingo?” I asked her, in the same manner.

“In Milwaukee, on Masterton Avenue.”

“Do the Schumanns live in Milwaukee?” I asked more normally.

“No, of course not,” she said. “They live here. Up on Lake Drive.”

We took our leave of Mary and her muffins, not because I had gained enough information-I hadn’t-but because I felt that she was just as likely to tell the Schumanns about us, and our questions, as she was willing to tell us about them. Discretion, I thought, was not one of her strong points.

The city of Delafield, the village, had numerous shops full of stuff that one has no good use for but just has to have anyway. We visited each in turn and marveled at the decorative glass and china, the novelty sculptures, the storage boxes of every size, shape and decoration, the homemade greeting cards and the rest. There was a lovely shop with racks of old-fashioned-looking signs, one with fancy notebooks and another with legend-embroidered cushions for every conceivable occasion, and more. There were toys for boys and toys for girls, and lots of toys for their parents too. Delafield was a stocking-stuffer’s paradise. Not that it was cheap. Caroline’s credit card took quite a battering, as she bought far too much to easily get into her suitcase for the flight home. Presents, she explained, for her family, although we both knew that she wanted it all for herself.

Everywhere we went, I managed to bring the Schumanns into the conversation. In the embroidered-cushion store, the lady appeared to be almost in tears over them.

“Such nice people,” she said. “Very generous. They have done so much for the local community. Mrs. Schumann is always coming in here. She’s bought no end of my cushions. It’s so sad.”

“About Mr. Schumann’s injuries?” I prompted.

“Yes,” she said. “And all those other people killed in England. They all lived around here, you know. We used to see them all the time.”

“Terrible,” I said, sympathizing.

“And we’re all dreadfully worried about the future,” she went on.

“About what, exactly?” I asked her.

“About the factory,” she said.

“What about it?” I prompted again.

“It’s not doing so well,” she said. “They laid off a third of the workers last November. Devastating, it was, just before the holidays and all. Something about the Chinese selling tractors for half the price that we could make them for here. There’s talk in the town of the whole plant closing. My husband works there, and my son. I don’t know what we’ll do in these parts if they close down.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “And then that disaster happens in England, and poor Mr. Schumann and the others…” She tailed off, unable to continue.

The 2,000 Guineas excursion had obviously been a last-ditch effort to try to find a new market for the ailing giant. The resulting carnage, with the loss of key personnel, might prove to be the final nail in the company’s coffin.

“Is there much unemployment around here?” I asked her.

“No, not at the moment,” she said. “But three thousand still work at the tractor factory. No small community can absorb that number laid off at once. Many of them will have to leave and go to Milwaukee to make beer or motorcycles.”

“Beer or motorcycles?” I asked. It seemed a strange combination.

“Miller beer and Harley-Davidsons,” she said. “Both are made in Milwaukee.”

“And how far away is that?” I said.

“About thirty miles.”

“Maybe they will be able to continue living here and commute,” I said, trying to cheer her up. “It won’t be so bad.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said, clearly not believing it.

“I wonder what will happen to the Schumanns,” I said during a pause.

“Don’t you worry about them,” she said. “They’ve got lots of money. Just built themselves a new house. More like a mansion. It’s never the bosses who end up broke. They’ll make sure they get their bonuses and pensions sorted before the plant closes. You watch.”

She obviously wasn’t as keen on the Schumanns as she had originally implied. After her husband and son are laid off, I thought, she probably won’t have a good word left for anyone to do with Delafield Industries, Inc.

Only one person we spoke to knew of MaryLou Fordham. It was the man in the novelty sculpture shop.

“Nice legs,” he’d said with a knowing smile. I had smiled back at him, but it was not her legs that I remembered. It was the lack of them.

WE DROVE slowly along Lake Drive, staring at each of the impressive residences. This was millionaires’ row for Delafield. Each house sat in the center of its own large garden, with impressive fences, walls and gates to keep out the unwanted. From the road, it wasn’t very easy to see the buildings due to the many pine trees and the bountiful rhododendrons, but Caroline and I had previously driven over to the far side of the lake and had looked back to identify the Schumann home. As the cushion lady had said, it was quite a mansion: a modern, three-story house in gray stone with a red roof, set above a sweeping, well-tended lawn that ran down to the water and a dock, complete with boat.

Was this the home of the true target of the Newmarket bombing? Was this the home of a victim, or a villain? Was this the home of a friend, or a foe?

Only one way to find out, I thought, and I pushed the button on the intercom beside the eight-foot-high wrought-iron security gates.