Even Money

16

Mr. John Smith, or whoever, was waiting for me next to my car in the Uttoxeter racetrack parking lot at the end of the day.

“Haven’t you got anything better to do than hang round in racetrack parking lots?” I asked him sarcastically.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said, ignoring me.

“How very observant of you,” I replied.

“Don’t you be funny with me,” he said. “Your friend is back from holiday tomorrow, and I want the microcoder.”

“I don’t know what time she lands,” I said. “I’ll call you when I’ve heard from her.”

“Make sure you do,” he said threateningly.

“You should be nice to me,” I said, “or you won’t get it back at all.”

“Watch it,” he said with real menace.

“Are you threatening me?” I asked.

“You’d better believe it,” he said.

“Well, I must warn you, I don’t respond well to threats.”

“Take my advice, Mr. Talbot,” he said, “respond to this one.”

Gone was the patient good humor of last Wednesday afternoon. Mr. John Smith, I imagined, was under pressure to get results.

He suddenly turned and walked away across the parking lot. I tried to see where he went, but I lost sight of him amongst the departing crowd, and I couldn’t tell if it was the dark blue Ford from the rest area that he climbed into.

“What was all that about?” asked Luca, who had been silently watching the exchange. Betsy had been standing next to him throughout, and her eyes were now wide with surprise and inquisition.

“Nothing,” I said, and started to load the equipment into the car.

“It didn’t look like nothing to us,” Luca said.

I looked him in the eye, and then shot a quick glance at Betsy, hoping Luca would get the message that I didn’t want to discuss the matter within her hearing.

“Just who was that man?” said Betsy. “He didn’t seem very nice.”

“It was nothing,” I said again. “He wants something I have, and we have been negotiating about the price. That’s all.”

Luca looked at me with disbelief showing all over his face, but he too glanced briefly at Betsy, telling me that he did indeed understand not to discuss the matter further with her there. Betsy, meanwhile, had not got the same message.

“What?” she said.

“What ‘what’?” I asked.

“What have you got that he wants?” she persisted.

“Nothing much,” I said. “A type of television remote. Forget it.”

She looked like she was about to ask me another question when Luca interrupted her thought process. “Where do you want to go for dinner tonight, Betsy?” he said.

“What?” she said angrily, turning towards him.

“Where shall we go for dinner tonight?” he repeated.

“We’re going to my mother’s,” she said sharply.

“Oh yes,” said Luca. “I forgot.”

He winked at me as we climbed into the car. Luca was nobody’s fool, he forgot nothing.

Within ten minutes I could see in the rearview mirror that Betsy was again listening to her iPod and dozing with her head against the window.

“Betsy, please, could you pass me a tissue?” I asked fairly quietly.

She didn’t move.

Luca began to turn around.

“Leave her,” I said to him.

“So was this TV remote thing that the man wanted that RFID writer you showed me?” Luca asked me quietly.

“Yes,” I said. “He calls himself John Smith, but I very much doubt that’s his real name. He also says he’s working for the Australian Racing Board.”

“Why don’t you just give it to him, then?” Luca said.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “For some reason I don’t altogether trust him, so I made up a story about giving it to a friend who had then gone on holiday.”

“Nice one,” said Luca sarcastically. “Where to?”

“Greece, I think,” I said. “I can’t really remember. I told him she was back on Sunday, that’s tomorrow.”

“She?” he said, almost laughing. “So where did the RFID writer come from in the first place?”

“I was given it,” I said.

“Who by?” he asked.

“A man from Australia.”

“Not John Smith?” he said.

“No. Another man from Australia.”

“Hence the Australian Racing Board’s interest in it?”

“Exactly.”

“So who was this other man from Australia?” Luca asked persistently. I began to wish we had never started this.

“Just a man,” I said evasively.

“So a mystery man from Australia just gave you a device for writing RFIDs and now the Australian Racing Board wants it back?”

It sounded implausible even to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“But is it theirs?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you ask the mystery man who gave it to you?”

“I can’t,” I said. “He’s gone away.”

“Back to Australia?”

“Not exactly,” I replied. Farther than that, I thought.

“So are you going to give it to the man in the parking lot, this John Smith?” Luca asked.

“I might,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

“Well, it’s not yours, is it? So why not give it to him? And I tend to think that next time he comes asking, you might just get another dose of fists and steel toe caps if you refuse. He seemed quite determined.”

“Yes, you’re probably right,” I said. “But there’s still something about him I don’t like. And I feel that giving up the microcoder is like giving up my trump card.”

“ ‘Microcoder’?” Luca said.

“That’s what the man calls it. But I know my father called it a ‘chip writer.’”

“Your father?” Luca said surprised. “I thought your father was dead.”

“He is,” I said without further elaboration. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t told Luca that the man murdered at Ascot had been my father. As far as Luca was concerned, my father had always been dead, and he knew I had been raised from babyhood by my grandparents.

“So how come your father knew about this microcoder thing?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” I said, trying to close the discussion.

“It’s a long journey,” he said.

“Yeah, well, not long enough.”

“So what’s next?” said Luca.

“Days off tomorrow and Monday, then Towcester on Tuesday evening,” I said.

“No,” he said, irritated.“I meant what’s next with this microcoder thing?”

“How difficult would it be to make another one exactly the same?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “As far as I remember, it’s just a radio transmitter that concentrates the radio signal at a point where you would put the RFID. It didn’t appear that sophisticated.”

“Could you make another one?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said slowly.

“I don’t want you to,” I added quickly. “I just wondered if you could.”

“Yeah, I reckon I might,” he said. “Or if I couldn’t, one of the little hooligans from the electronics club would probably be able to do it in no time. They are like bloody magic when it comes to electronics. One of them even made a device that fooled the authorities into thinking he was at home wearing his court-ordered ankle tag when he was really out all night breaking into people’s cars. He said it gave him the best alibi anyone could ever want. Even the coppers were impressed.”

“How did they find out?” I asked.

“Oh, these lads may be damn clever when it comes to electronics,” he said. “But they can be pretty dense otherwise. The bloody idiot broke into an unmarked police car that was parked right outside the police station, and everything he did was recorded on an in-car video camera.”

I laughed.“Almost as bad as that bank robber recently who wrote his demand note on the back of a check from his own checkbook. It had his name printed on it.”

“It’s a good thing villains are stupid or we’d all be victims,” Luca said with a laugh.

“But they are not all stupid,” I said, becoming serious. “Remember, we never hear about the clever ones because they don’t get caught.”

“Good point,” he said.

Talking about not getting caught reminded me of the stash of banknotes still hidden in the cupboard under my stairs. Who did they belong to? Were they meant to be payment for Shifty-eyes for killing horses? Or maybe they were his cut for approving the insurance claims after the horses were dead. Either way, I was pretty sure they weren’t actually mine, even if I did have a sort of claim to inherit them after my father’s death, for they had been in his luggage.

“So do you want a copy of this microcoder?” Luca said, bringing me back from my daydreams.

“No, not really,” I said. “I just wondered why it was so important to get this particular one back if any half-witted juvenile delinquent could simply make another.”

“But they would have to have something to copy,” he said. “And they would have to know the right frequency to set it at.”

“Is that difficult?” I asked.

“Not if you have the original,” he said.“But much more difficult, maybe impossible, without it.”

“So if our Mr. John Smith-or whatever his name is-is so keen to get his hands on the original, is it because he doesn’t have access to another one?” I said. “But you would have thought that the Australian Racing Board had access to whatever resources they needed. I think that’s why I don’t trust him. It doesn’t ring quite true.”

“So does that mean you won’t give it to him?” Luca asked.

“No,” I said slowly. “But I might just ensure it doesn’t work properly before I hand it over.”

“That might be dangerous,” said Luca, grinning.

“You think so?” I asked.

“Yeah, but why not? Live dangerously.”

Or not at all, I thought.

Sophie came home on Sunday, and her younger sister, Alice, came to stay at our house in Station Road to help out.

“I don’t need any help,” Sophie said.

But we both knew she did. The change from institutional life to being at home was a huge step. Not least because there would be no one there to call on for help, for a chat or for a word of encouragement, especially when I was away at the races.

Alice was just the person we needed. She was busy, efficient, loving and free. And I was very fond of her, but in small doses. One week of busy domestic efficiency was enough for any man.

On Sunday morning, Alice arrived-very early, of course-from her home in Surrey and tut-tutted about the state of the house, especially the cobwebs in the bathroom and the unmentionable leftovers in the deeper recesses of the refrigerator. In no time, she had donned a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves and was transforming the place.

She wasn’t in any way angry about my domestic shortcomings, and she made no snide remarks about how men couldn’t keep themselves tidy, let alone the house, but Alice sometimes had a way of making me feel totally inadequate, and this was one of those times.

When we left together in my Volvo for the hospital at noon, the house was sparkling and fresh, and I was grateful. It wasn’t just that Alice wanted everything to be clean and neat for her sister’s homecoming, which of course she did, it was that she, and I, knew that Sophie would otherwise feel pressured into doing the house-work and that, in turn, would make her feel guilty about having been in the hospital. That guilt could be enough to restart the whole sorry manic-depressive sequence all over again. Sophie’s mania had always begun with obsessive cleaning of the house.

However, I was more confident that this time the drugs were doing their thing. But it was vitally important to make sure Sophie kept taking them. All too often in the past, she would eventually begin to crave the manic highs, flushing her medication down the lavatory, seemingly unconcerned and indifferent about the dire consequences and the prospect of another extended period of hospitalization.

She was packed and ready when we arrived. Her room, which had become so familiar to me, was now bare of her possessions and back to its “hospital ward” status. Jason, her favorite nurse, was there to wish her good-bye and to help take her bags down to my car outside the front door.

“Thank you,” she said to him, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek. “Thank you to all the staff.”

Jason looked embarrassed by this show of affection, but he took it in good grace.

“I won’t say it’s been a pleasure,” he said to me. “But Mrs. Talbot has been a model patient.”

He stood by the door and waved as we drove down the driveway, through the high gates and out into the real world.

Mr. John Smith, or whoever, was waiting outside our house when we arrived home about an hour later. As I parked the Volvo, he climbed out of the dark blue Ford that I had last seen disappearing ahead of me from the rest area near Stratford. He had not been sitting in the driver’s seat, so I assumed there must be another man with him, but again I couldn’t see properly against the reflection from the windshield.

Dammit, I thought. I really didn’t want to have to start explaining to Sophie about microcoders, bundles of banknotes and murder in the Ascot racetrack parking lot.

The last thing we needed was for him to force his way through my front door and disrupt Sophie’s longed-for return home, so I marched straight across the road to talk to him. He came forward to meet me.

“Is that your friend?” he asked, nodding towards the house.

I turned and saw Alice lifting Sophie’s suitcase from the car. It must have appeared to Mr. Smith that someone was arriving back from holiday.

“Yes,” I said, turning back to him.

“Where’s the microcoder?” he demanded.

“In her baggage, I expect,” I said. “You wait here, and I’ll go and get it for you.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No,” I said quickly. “If you want me to hand it over, you will have to wait here.”

I turned to walk back across the road, and he began to follow. “No,” I said again, this time more forcefully. “Either you wait here for me to get it or I will have to explain to my friend what you are doing here and about how I broke your wrist in my house. And she works for the police.”

He stopped. “You told me she was an electronics specialist,” he said.

Had I? I thought. I couldn’t recall.

“She maintains police radios,” I said. The trouble with telling lies is that they get more complicated as time goes on and more difficult to remember.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll wait here, but you have just two minutes. Understand?”

“Five,” I said. “I’ll bring it out in five.”

It wasn’t just threats I didn’t like. I didn’t respond particularly well to orders either.

I didn’t wait for him to reply but strode straight back across the road to follow Sophie and Alice through the front door. This time, he didn’t follow me.

“Who’s that man?” asked Sophie, turning in the doorway and looking back.

“Just a bookmaking friend. He’s come to collect something.”

“Aren’t you going to ask him in?” she said.

“I did,” I replied, “but he’s in a hurry to get home. He said he’d wait while I fetched it.”

“What is it?” she said.

“Just a TV remote that Luca has been fixing.” I went to the cupboard under the stairs and took out the microcoder. “This,” I said, holding it up to her.

She lost interest. “Fancy some tea?” she asked.

“Love some,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Sophie went into the kitchen with Alice to put the kettle on, and I waited a while in the hall, studying my watch, until its hands had moved slowly around a full five minutes. I didn’t want to give Mr. Smith, or whoever he was, the pleasure of having me come running at his command.

He was still standing where I’d left him. I held out the microcoder to him, and he took it.

“Thank you, Mr. Talbot,” he said. “And the chips?”

“You didn’t ask for the chips,” I said.

“Well, I am now.”

“Wait here.”

I went back across the road, collected the little bag of glass grains from the cupboard and went out to hand them to him. He studied the bag.

“Where are the rest of them?” he said.

“That’s all I have,” I said. “That’s all there ever were.”

“There should be twelve of them.”

“And how many are there now?” I asked innocently.

“Eight.”

“Sorry, that’s all I have,” I said.

He didn’t seem very happy. “Are you sure?” he demanded.

“Yes, I’m certain,” I said. “If I had any more, I’d give them to you. They’re no good to me, are they?” That might be true, I thought, but it hadn’t stopped me keeping a couple of them back: one complete chip and the one I had broken with the knife, just in case.

But there had definitely been only ten chips in the bag when I had found it in my father’s rucksack. So if there really had been twelve originally, two of them were indeed unaccounted for. Perhaps Paddy Murphy could enlighten me as to their whereabouts.

“It will have to do,” he said, as if to himself. Then he looked up at me. “Mr. Talbot, I won’t say I’ve enjoyed our little business together”-he held up his still-plastered right wrist-“but thank you nevertheless for returning the microcoder.”

He turned, walked over to the dark blue Ford, climbed in and was driven swiftly away by his unidentified chauffeur.

He might not still be thanking me, I thought, when he found out that his precious microcoder now wouldn’t work.

I hadn’t been lying when I told Sophie that Luca had fixed it. He’d fixed it, good and proper, by scratching right through the minute connectors on the printed circuit boards using a box cutter.

Sophie’s first night home was not quite an unbridled success, nor was it a disaster either. In fact, far from it.

There was the expected little spat between the sisters when Alice refused point-blank to allow Sophie to help prepare our supper.

“It’s my house,” Sophie complained to me. “And she won’t let me do anything in my own damn kitchen.”

“Let her do it,” I replied soothingly. “You know that she means well.” I stroked Sophie’s hand, and she slowly relaxed. “Come and sit down. Enjoy having someone cook for you.”

“I’ve done enough of that over the past five months, thank you very much,” she said. However, she still came and sat next to me on the sofa to watch the television.

I knew why Alice was so determined to do it all and why she was so worried. The memory of Sophie’s manic cleaning in that kitchen was fresh in both our minds.

“It’s good to be home,” Sophie said, snuggling into me.

“It’s good to have you home, my darling.”

We cuddled closer together on the sofa while watching experts on antiques trying to appear interested about dusty old junk salvaged from people’s attics while the junk’s owners tried to look surprised, and not too disappointed, by the meagerness of the valuations.

“It’s ready,” said Alice, putting her head around the living-room door.

The three of us sat at the kitchen table eating grilled salmon fillets, with penne pasta and peas.

“That was lovely,” I said, laying down my knife and fork.

“Mmm,” said Sophie, agreeing. “And much better than hospital food. Thank you, darling Alice.” Sophie smiled at her sister and winked at me. I positively beamed back at her.

My Sophie of old was back. But for how long? How I wished it was forever.

Needless to say, Sophie was not allowed to help with the washing up either, which amused her no end. I couldn’t remember a time when she had come home from a stay in the hospital so aware and with such an acute sense of humor.

But coming home had tired her, and we all turned in early, me taking Sophie up to our bed almost as I had done on our wedding night, and to do again the same things that all newlywed couples do.

For the first time in almost a week, due to having my mind on other matters, I went to sleep without wedging Sophie’s dressing-table chair under the bedroom door handle.