Dick Francis's Front Runner

36

‘Do they still have the death penalty for murder in the West Indies?’ I said. ‘I wonder if there’s enough time for your whole life to flash before your eyes between the trap opening and the rope breaking your neck.’

I was trying to unnerve my captors but it didn’t seem to be working. They seemed happy to let me babble on without reply.

‘Dead bodies are hard to dispose of, you know. Even here. Especially ones with bullet holes in them. The police will be knocking on your door before you know it.’

Still no response.

I tried another tactic.

‘My brother-in-law is aware of everything I know, so killing me will not stop it being passed to the relevant tax authorities.’

I now wished that I’d sent a few more e-mails, including one to the taxman.

‘Why don’t you just stop the car and let me out?’ I said. ‘Make Martin pay his tax and that will be an end to it. I’ll make no further complaint against any of you.’

Sir Richard went on driving, and the creepy Bentley said nothing. He just continued to smile at me, and the gun in his hand wavered not an iota.

We turned off the main road down little more than a track, with no visible lights from any nearby houses. What had Henri said? Most of the eastern half of the island is just deserted mangrove swamp.

It didn’t look particularly promising for my long-term prospects.

Was my good luck finally running out?

But at least now I would die knowing the reason I was being killed.

Did that make me any happier?

Probably not, but maybe it was better than being randomly knifed to death in my flat without having the slightest idea why.

The track seemed to go on for ever until we eventually stopped at the very end, where it ran out into a small beach surrounded by the mangroves. Through the windscreen, in the glow of the headlights, I could see a boat with an outboard engine, its bow pulled up on the white sand. This was no spur-of-the-moment plan, not if that boat had been pre-positioned.

The two men got out of the car, leaving the headlights on. Bentley then opened the rear door next to me. He was still aiming the gun at my chest.

‘Get out,’ he ordered.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘I said, get out.’

‘And I said, no.’

‘I’ll shoot you,’ he said, lifting the gun to his eyeline and aiming it at my face.

‘If I get out, you’ll definitely shoot me,’ I said. ‘In here, maybe not. Your car, is it? Or hired? Either way it would take too much explaining if my blood and brains were splattered all over the inside.’

‘Get out!’ He was almost screaming.

‘No,’ I repeated.

He clearly hadn’t envisaged such an impasse. He looked to Sir Richard for assistance.

‘Shoot him in the foot,’ Sir Richard said without any visible emotion.

‘He’ll still bleed,’ said Bentley.

Sir Richard walked around the car to our side and took the pistol from Bentley.

‘Get out of the car,’ he said, pointing the gun at my right leg. ‘I’ll shoot you in the foot first, then in your knee. Get out of the car now. You have three seconds.’

It was his matter-of-fact tone that was most appalling. This was clearly a man very accustomed to getting his own way, and I could detect the ruthlessness in him that would have been needed to transform the small ship-loading company of his grandfather into the multi-national corporation it was today.

I could also recall the words of the Special Forces sergeant, who had run the ‘escape and evasion’ part of the army captains’ course: Resist your captors if you can, but try to avoid leg injuries. If you can’t walk or run, then you’ll not be able to take advantage of an escape opportunity, if it arises. Lack of mobility is a sure death sentence.

‘OK,’ I said.

I got out of the car.

Sir Richard Reynard smiled broadly. Just like Dave Swinton, he always liked to win.

‘Over to the boat,’ he said, waving the gun to the left.

I walked in front of him while Bentley kept well to the side, out of reach and out of the line of fire.

There was a diver’s buoyancy compensator in the bow attached to a common-or-garden, plain grey aluminium dive tank, connected to a regulator set.

‘Not more carbon monoxide,’ I said.

‘That was Bentley’s idea,’ Sir Richard said, smiling. ‘And it almost worked.’

And it would have, I thought, if it hadn’t been for Henri pulling me up to the surface and Carson Ebanks’s timely intervention with his oxygen.

‘Put it on,’ Sir Richard said.

‘I’ll wash up somewhere on a beach. How are you going to explain away a diver with bullet wounds? Fish don’t have guns.’

‘You’ll not wash up from where you’re going,’ Bentley said with a smile. ‘Over the wall and down into the depths. They say the sea is three miles deep just a mile off-shore in these parts.’

Perhaps for the first time I was truly frightened.

I had hoped and half expected that they wouldn’t go through with it — that they would come to their senses and work out that the risks outweighed the benefits. But proving murder without a body was always difficult, if not impossible.

In 1660, three people were convicted and hanged for the murder of a local official who subsequently turned up alive and well, having been away abroad. Since that time, English common law adopted the ‘no body, no murder’ rule, maintaining that there could be no conviction for murder without the victim’s body. The rule has been overturned in only a handful of cases in recent years when other circumstantial and modern forensic evidence has been overwhelming.

I would have to try to leave some of my DNA, in the hope it would be found.

‘Put it on,’ Sir Richard repeated.

I leaned over and spat into the bottom of the boat, first scraping the inside of my cheek with my teeth to ensure that there were plenty of my cells present. Then I picked up the scuba equipment. It was heavy.

My abdomen complained, but that was the least of my worries. I knew that from the moment I was in the boat with the equipment on, my time was up. It was not easy to dress a body, even in scuba gear. And lifting my literal ‘dead weight’ into the boat would be far from easy, especially for a man of sixty-nine and his diminutive sidekick. But once I was in there, it would be a fairly simple task for even just one of them to roll my lifeless form over the side into the water.

I checked the console at the end of its hose. The pressure gauge read zero. The tank was empty. What’s more, I could see that the valve assembly was loose. As soon as this tank was submerged it would fill with water and provide the necessary ballast to take me all the way to the bottom.

I placed the tank on the edge of the boat and put my arms into the sleeves of the BC jacket.

‘I thought Martin would be here to help you,’ I said.

‘Martin is a fool,’ Sir Richard pronounced. ‘It was he who got us into this mess. Now Bentley and I have to pick up the pieces.’

‘Why not pay the tax?’ I said. ‘It can’t be that much.’

‘Shut up,’ Bentley said.

I ignored him.

‘Even the corporation tax can’t be worth murdering for,’ I said.

Although I couldn’t be sure of that.

Martin had stayed too long in the UK, which meant that, of the five main-board directors of Reynard Shipping Limited, the majority were now UK tax residents. Consequently, it would be considered by the revenue to be a UK-based company, subject to British tax on all its worldwide profits, including the eye-watering capital gain realized from the sale of the Hong Kong operation.

The tax would run into many hundreds of millions of pounds. Maybe as much as half a billion.

Was that worth murdering for?

‘I need that money for my new yacht,’ Sir Richard said.

So, I was to be sacrificed on the altar of Sir Richard Reynard’s new yacht, no doubt a huge multi-suite gin-palace with every luxury, including gold taps and a helicopter landing pad on the deck.

Even if Quentin did follow things through and report my suspicions to the tax authorities, it wouldn’t save me now from a watery grave.

It made me angry. Bloody angry.

‘Hurry up!’ Sir Richard shouted. ‘Get into the boat.’

‘What does Martin think of this little caper?’ I asked.

‘Martin will do as he’s told.’

Something about the way he said it made me realize that Martin had no idea whatsoever that this was going on.

I had been wrong.

All the time I’d thought that it was Martin who was behind the attempts on my life, but it had been his father, aided and abetted by his creepy lawyer.

No wonder Martin had been affronted when I’d accused him of deliberately filling the guest dive tank with carbon monoxide. Bentley must have done it while we were at the governor’s residence watching the carol singing.

I did up the fastening on the front of the buoyancy compensator and stood up, the weight of the tank causing me to gasp slightly at the stress on my chest.

‘Get in the boat,’ Sir Richard said again.

My time was running out fast.

I started to turn towards the boat but then turned back to face him, taking the console hose in my right hand.

‘Are you aware that your friend Bentley, here, is screwing your daughter-in-law?’

He took his eyes off me for just one second to look at Bentley.

It was enough.

I swung the console with all my might at the hand holding the gun and caught him across the wrist, just behind the base of the thumb. The impact was hard enough to break the glass face of the depth-display dial.

He screamed and dropped the gun and I fell on it like a starving dog onto a juicy steak.

Sir Richard reacted more quickly than I would have expected for a man of his age, stepping forward and taking a wild kick at my head.

The weight of the dive tank was hampering my movement, holding me down, and I desperately tore, one-handed, at the fastening on the BC. My other hand was on the gun but that was stuck beneath me.

Bentley weighed in with some footwork of his own, trying to stamp on my neck. Fortunately, all he managed to do was kick the tank valve and hurt his foot.

Finally, I was free of the scuba gear and I rolled it off my back. But the two men had teamed up. Sir Richard was trying to use my head as a rugby ball, running up and kicking at it as if to hack it off my shoulders and send it over the posts for a conversion, while Bentley had taken to stamping on my now-unprotected lower back.

‘Enough,’ I shouted, but they took no notice.

It had been only three weeks or so since my chest had been open and my heart manually massaged. I was still in no fit shape to fight, especially when the odds were not in my favour by two-to-one, even if one of them was more than twice my age.

I curled myself into a ball to protect my delicate chest and abdomen.

I still had my hand on the gun beneath me but I was loath to use it. I didn’t want to shoot anyone. Indeed, in spite of my years in the army, I had never fired a gun in anger and I wasn’t keen to start. I’d been an intelligence officer and, right now, I was trying to use my intelligence to stop this madness without any loss of life.

But Sir Richard and Bentley were clearly not reading the same script. They seemed intent on murder, as they continued to rain down brutal kicks on my body.

Then things got more serious.

Bentley went over to the boat and returned holding the anchor, a sort of grappling-iron contraption with a central rod connected to four arms set at right-angles to each other, with sharp-looking points on their ends. There was a rope attached to the central rod, and Bentley was using it to swing the anchor in a big circle over his head before aiming it right at me.

I rolled over as the anchor bit into the sand where I’d been lying just a fraction of a second earlier.

I tried to grab it but Bentley tugged it away with the rope before I could reach.

He swung the anchor over his head again for another go. I was now lying on my back and far more vulnerable to the attack.

I lifted the gun in my right hand and shot him.

I didn’t try anything fancy, I just aimed at the widest part of his trunk and pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit him just below the heart, a red star appearing vividly in the centre of his white shirt.

The anchor seemed to stop in mid swing, falling harmlessly to the sand in front of him, while Bentley himself had a look of immense surprise on his face.

He pitched forward, falling right across the sharp arms of the anchor, his body adopting a grotesquely twisted pose with the crown of his head pointing down onto the sand.

Sir Richard stopped kicking me.

He stood, unmoving, staring at Bentley, the look on his face seeming to suggest that he had, only now, grasped the true enormity of what they’d been doing. It was also a look of intense grief and I recalled what Henri had said about her uncle Richard wishing that Bentley had been his son, rather than Martin.

He went over to his trusted lawyer and pulled him off the anchor, laying him flat on the sand and going down on his knees beside him.

Bentley’s eyes were still wide open but he was no longer seeing.

‘You’ve murdered him,’ Sir Richard said, looking across at me. His tone of accusation somehow implying that Bentley trying to kill me had been all right, but the other way round was hugely wicked.

I continued to stare at him, holding the gun ready, wary that he might try to complete with the anchor what Bentley had started. But the fight seemed to have drained out of him, and he suddenly looked every one of his sixty-nine years.

He stood up and stumbled wide-eyed back to the car. I made no attempt to go after him. There was nowhere for him to run to, not on this island.

He started the engine, turned the car around and drove away down the track, leaving me in the sudden darkness.

I rolled over onto my knees and rested my head in my hands.

In spite of the warmth, I started shivering.

It was the shock of having killed someone, I told myself, and the relief of still being alive when I’d been so sure I would die.

After a couple of minutes the shivering abated and I reckoned it was time to move. I didn’t fancy still being here if Sir Richard came back with reinforcements.

As my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I could see Bentley lying on his back, motionless on the sand.

The situation didn’t seem real.

I stood up and went over to him.

To be sure, I felt for a pulse in his wrist, and also in his neck, but there was nothing. I’d come across dead bodies before but never one where I’d been so personally responsible for snuffing out the life that had once inhabited the corpse.

I felt into his trouser pocket for my iPhone.

Whom should I call?

The police for sure, but who else?

I might need someone who was an ally.

I dialled Derrick Smith’s number.