Hot Money

CHAPTER ELEVEN

One of Malcolm's dogs came bounding across the grass towards him, followed a few seconds later by the other. Malcolm put a hand out of his blanket and patted them, but with more absent mindedness than welcome. After them came Arthur Bellbrook with a face of consternation and concern which lightened considerably when he set eyes on Malcolm. In his grubby trousers and ancient tweed jacket, he came at a hobbling run in old army boots and fetched up very out of breath at Malcolm's side.

"Sir! You're alive! I went to Twyford to fetch some weed killer When I got back, they told me in the village…"

"Gross exaggeration," Malcolm said, nodding.

Arthur Bellbrook turned to me, panting. "They said you were both dead. I couldn't get down the road… had to come across the fields. Look at the house!"

I explained about our going to London, and asked him what time he'd gone home the previous day.

"Four o'clock, same as always. Say three-forty, then. About then." He was beginning to get his breath back, his eyes round with disbelief as he stared at the damage.

Nearer to three-thirty, I privately reckoned, if he was admitting to going home early at all.

"Did you go in the house at any time during the day?" I asked.

He switched his gaze from the ruins to me and sounded aggrieved. "No, I didn't. you know I couldn't have. You've been locking the place like it's a fortress since you came back, and I didn't have a key. Where could I have got a key from?"

I said placatingly, "It' just that we're anxious… someone got in, they must have."

"Not me." He was Slightly mollified. "I was working in the kitchen garden all day, digging potatoes and such like. I had the two dogs with me, tied up on their leads. If anyone had tried to get in the house, they'd have barked for sure, but they didn't."

Malcolm said, "Arthur, could you keep the dogs with you for another day or two?"

"Yes, I…" He looked helplessly at the heap of rubble spilling out across the terrace and onto the lawn. "What do you want me to do about the garden?"

"Just… carry on," Malcolm said. "Keep it tidy." It didn't seem incongruous to him to polish the setting, though I thought that perhaps, left to its own, nature would scatter leaves and grow longer grass and soften the raw brutality of the jagged edges.

The superintendent, seeing Arthur Bellbrook, came across to him and asked the same questions that I had. Again, they seemed to know each other well, undoubtedly from Moira's investigations, and if there didn't seem to be friendship, there was clearly a mutual respect.

The reporters, having sucked the nectar from Gervase, advanced on Malcolm and on the gardener and the superintendent. I moved away, leaving them to it, and tried to talk to Ferdinand.

He was unfriendly and answered with shrugs and monosyllables.

"I suppose," I said bitterly, "you would rather I was lying in shreds and bloody tatters under all that lot."

He looked at the tons of fallen masonry. "Not really," he said coolly.

"That's something."

"You can't expect us to like it that you've an inside edge with Malcolm!"

"You had three years," I pointed out, "during which he wouldn't speak to me. Why did You waste them? Why didn't you get an inside edge yourself?"

"We couldn't get past Moira."

I half smiled. "Nor could I."

"It's now we're talking about," he said. He looked greatly like Malcolm, right down to the stubbornness in the eyes.

"What do you want me to do, walk away and let him be murdered?" I said.

"Walk away…?"

"That's why he wants me with him, to try to keep him safe. He asked me to be his bodyguard, and I accepted."

Ferdinand stared. "Alicia said…"

"Alicia is crazy," I interrupted fiercely. "So are you. Take a look at yourself. Greed, jealousy and spite, you've let them all in. I won't cut you out with Malcolm, I'd never attempt it. Try believing that instead, brother and save yourself a lot of anxiety!"

I turned away from him in frustration. They were all illogical, I thought. They had almost begged me to use any influence I had with Malcolm to stop him spending and bale them out, and at the same time they believed I would ditch them to my own advantage. But then people had always been able to hold firmly to two contradictory ideas at the same time, as when once, in racing's past, Stewards, Press and public alike had vilified one brilliant trainer as "most crooked", and elected one great jockey as "most honest", blindly and incredibly ignoring that it was the self-same trusted jockey who for almost all of his career rode the brilliant trainer's horses. I'd seen a cartoon once that summed it up neatly: "Entrenched belief is never altered by the facts."

I wished I hadn't lashed out at Ferdinand. My idea of detection from the inside wasn't going to be a riotous success if I let my own feelings get in the way so easily. I might think the family unjust, they might think me conniving: OK, I told myself, accept all that and forget it. I'd had to put up with their various resentments for much of my life and it was high time I developed immunity.

Easier said than done, of course.

Superintendent Yale had had enough of the reporters. The family had by this time divided into two larger clumps, Vivien's and Alicia's, with Joyce and I hovering between them, belonging to neither. The superintendent went from group to group asking that everyone should adjourn to the police station. "As you are all here," he was saying, "we may as well take your statements straight away, to save you being bothered later."

"Statements?" Gervase said, eyebrows rising.

"Your movements yesterday and last night, sir."

"Good God," Gervase said. "You don't think any of us would have done this, do you?"

"That's what we have to find out."

"It's preposterous!"

None of the others said anything, not even Joyce.

The superintendent conferred with a uniformed colleague who was busy stationing his men round the house so that the ever- increasing, spectators shouldn't get too close. The word must have spread, I thought. The free peepshow was attracting the next villages, if not Twyford itself.

Much of the family, including Malcolm, Joyce and myself, packed into the three police cars standing in the front drive, and Gervase, Ferdinand and Serena set off on foot to go back to the transport they had come in.

"I wouldn't put it past Alicia," Joyce said darkly to the superintendent as we drove past them towards the gate, "to have incited that brood of hers to blow up Quantum."

"Do you have any grounds for that statement, Mrs Pembroke?"

"Statement? It's an opinion. She's a bitch." In the front passenger seat, Yale's shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.

The road outside was still congested with cars, with still more people coming on foot. Yale's driver stopped beside Joyce's car, which she'd left in the centre of the road in her haste, and helped to clear room for her to turn in. With her following, we came next to the hired car Malcolm and I had arrived in, but as it was hopelessly shut in on three sides by other locked vehicles, we left it there and went on in the police car.

In his large modern police station with its bullet-proofed glass enquiry desk, the superintendent ushered us through riot-proofed doors to his office and detailed a policewoman to take Joyce off for some tea. Joyce went protestingly, and Yale with another sigh sat us down in his bare-looking Scandinavian-type place of business.

He looked at us broodingly from behind a large desk. He looked at his nails. He cleared his throat. Finally he said to Malcolm, "All right. You don't have to say it. I do not believe you would blow up your house just to make me believe that someone is trying to kill you." There was a long pause.

"That being so," he said, as we both sat without speaking, "we must take the attack in the garage more seriously."

He was having a hard time, I thought. He ran a finger and thumb down his large black moustache and waited for comments from us that still didn't come.

He cleared his throat again. "We will redouble our efforts to find Mrs Moira Pembroke's killer."

Malcolm finally stirred, brought out his cigar case, put a cigar in his mouth and patted his pockets to find matches. There was a plastic notice on Yale's desk saying NO SMOKING. Malcolm, his glance resting on it momentarily, lit the match and sucked the flame into the tobacco. Yale decided on no protest and produced a glass ashtray from a lower drawer in his desk.

"I would be dead twice over," Malcolm said, "if it weren't for Ian."

He told Yale about the car roaring straight at us at Newmarket.

"Why didn't you report this, sir?" Yale said, frowning.

"Why do you think?"

Yale groomed his moustache and didn't answer.

Malcolm nodded. "I was tired of being disbelieved."

"And… er… last night?" Yale asked.

Malcolm told him about our day at Cheltenham, and about Quantum's inner doors. "I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I was tired. Ian absolutely wouldn't have it, and drove us to London."

Yale looked at me steadily. "Did you have a premonition?"

"No, I don't think so." I hadn't felt a shiv eras I had in my flat. Perhaps the premonition in the flat had been for the house. "I was just… frightened," I said.

Malcolm glanced at me with interest.

Yale said, "What of?"

"Not of bombs," I said. "I never considered that. Frightened there was someone in the house. I couldn't have slept there, that's all." I paused. "I saw the way the car drove at my father at Newmarket – it hit my leg, after all – and I believed him, of course, about being attacked and gassed in the garage. I knew he wouldn't have murdered Moira, or have had her murdered by anyone else. I believe absolutely in his extreme danger. We've been moving around, letting no one know where to find us, until this week."

"My fault," Malcolm said gloomily. "I insisted on coming back here. Ian didn't want to."

"When the doors were moved," I said, "it was time to go."

Yale thought it over without comment for a while and then said, "When you were in the house looking round, did you see anything unusual except for the doors?"

"No, nothing."

"Nothing where it shouldn't be? Or absent from where it should have been?"

I thought back to that breathless heart-thumping search. Whoever had moved the doors must at least have looked into the office and the sitting-room. I hadn't bothered with the position of any of the other doors except closing the one from the kitchen to the hall. Someone could have looked into all the rooms in the house, for all I knew. "No," I said in the end. "Nothing else seemed out of place."

Yale sighed again. He sighed a lot, it seemed to me. "If you think of anything later, let me know."

"Yes, all right."

"The time-frame we're looking at,"he said, "is between about three- forty p.m., when the gardener went home taking the dogs, and ten- thirty p.m., when you returned from Cheltenham." He pursed his lips. "If you hadn't stayed out to dinner, what time would you have been home?"

"We meant to stay out to dinner," Malcolm said. "That's why Arthur had the dogs."

"Yes, but if…"

"About six-thirty," I said. "if we'd gone straight home after the last race."

"We had a drink at the racecourse after the last race," Malcolm said. "I had scotch, Ian had some sort of fizzy gut-rot." He tapped ash into the ashtray. He was enjoying having Yale believe him at last, and seemed to be feeling expansive.

"Ian thinks," he said, "that I was probably knocked out just outside the kitchen door that day, and that I was carried from there straight into the garage, not dragged, and that it was someone the dogs knew, as they didn't bark. They were jumping up and down by the kitchen door, I can remember that, as they do if someone they know has come. But they do that anyway when it's time for their walk, and I didn't give it a thought." He inhaled a lot of smoke and let it out into the superintendent's erstwhile clean air. "Oh yes, and about the fingerprints…" He repeated what I'd said about firemen's lifts.

Yale looked at me neutrally and polished his moustache. He was difficult to read, I thought, chiefly because he didn't want to be read. All policemen, I supposed, raised barriers and, like doctors and lawyers, tended not to trust what they were told, which could be bitterly infuriating to the truthful.

He must have been forty or forty-five, I supposed, and had to be competent to have reached that rank. He looked as if he habitually had too little exercise and too many sandwiches, and gave no impression of wallowing in his own power. Perhaps now he'd dropped his over-smart suspicions of Malcolm, he could actually solve his case, though I'd heard the vast majority of criminals were in jail because of having been informed on, not detected. I did very much want him to succeed. I wished he could spontaneously bring himself to share what he was thinking, but I supposed he'd been trained not to. He kept his counsel anyway on that occasion, and I kept mine, and perhaps it was a pity. A policewoman came in and said, looking harassed, that she didn't know where to put the Pembroke family.

Yale thought briefly and told her to show them all to his office. Malcolm said, "Oh God," and dragged on his cigar, and presently the whole troop arrived.

I got to my feet and Alicia immediately sat on my chair. Vivien and Joyce both glared at Malcolm, still seated, willing him to rise, which he didn't. Which of them could he possibly give his chair to, I thought, stifling laughter, without causing ex-marital bloodshed?

With a straight face, Yale asked the policewoman to fetch two more chairs, and I couldn't even tell if he were amused or simply practical. When Vivien and Joyce were suitably enthroned, he looked around and counted us all: thirteen.

"Who's missing?" he asked.

He got various answers: "My wife, Debs", "Thomas, my husband", "Ursula, of course."

"Very well. Now, if any of you know anything or guess anything about the explosion at Quantum House, I want to hear about it."

"Terrorists," Vivien said vaguely.

Everyone ignored her and no one else made any suggestion.

"While you are here," Yale said, "I'll ask you all to answer certain questions. I'll have my personnel write down your answers, and of course after that you can leave. The questions are, what were you doing yesterday between three in the afternoon and midnight, what were you doing a week last Tuesday between the same hours, and what were you doing two weeks ago today, Friday, also between three p.m. and midnight."

Edwin said crossly, "We've already answered most of those questions for that wretched man, West it's too much to go over it all again."

Several of the others nodded.

Yale looked blank. "Who is West?"

"A detective," Berenice said. "I sent him away with a flea in his ear, I can tell you."

"He was awfully persistent," Helen said, not liking the memory. "I told him I couldn't possibly remember exactly, but he went on prying."

"Dreadful little man," Serena said.

"He said I was illegitimate," Gervase complained sourly. "It's thanks to Joyce that he knew."

Yale's mouth opened and closed again and he took a deep breath. "Who is West?" he asked intensely.

"Fellow I hired," Malcolm said. "Private detective. Hired him to find out who was trying to kill me, as I reckoned the police weren't getting anywhere."

Yale's composure remained more or less intact. "All the same," he said, "Please answer the questions again. And those of you without husband and wife here, please answer for them as best you can." He looked around at all the faces, and I would have sworn he was puzzled. I looked to see what he had seen, and I saw the faces of ordinary people, not murderers. Ordinary people with problems and hang-ups, with quirks and grievances. People anxious and disturbed by the blasting of the house that most had lived in and all had visited. Not one of them could possibly be a murderer, I thought. It had after all to be someone from outside.

I felt a lot of relief at this conclusion until I realised I was raising any excuse not to have to find a murderer among ourselves; yet we did have to find one, if Malcolm were to live. The dilemma was permanent.

"That's all for now," Yale said, rising to his feet. "My staff will take your statements in the interview rooms. And Mr Pembroke senior, will you stay here a moment? And Mr Ian Pembroke also? There are the arrangements to be made about the house."

The family left me behind with bad grace. "It's my job, not Ian's, to see to things. I am the eldest." That was Donald.

"You need someone with know-how." That was Gervase, heavily.

"It's not Ian's house." Petulance from Edwin.

Yale managed however to shovel them all out, and immediately the door had closed, I said, "While they're all in the interview rooms, I'm taking my father out of here."

"The house…" Malcolm began.

"I'll see to the house later. We're leaving here now, this minute. If Superintendent Yale will lend us a police car, fine; otherwise we'll catch buses or taxis."

"You can have a police car within reason," Yale said.

"Great. Then… um… just take my father to the railway station. I'll stay here."

"All right."

To Malcolm, I said, "Go to London. Go to where we were last night. Use the same name. Don't telephone anyone. Don't for God's sake let anyone know where you are."

"You're bloody arrogant."

"Yes. This time, listen to me."

Malcolm gave me a blue glare, stubbed out his cigar, stood up and let the red blanket drop from his shoulders to the floor. "Where will you be?" Yale asked him.

"Don't answer," I said brusquely.

Malcolm looked at me, then at the superintendent. "Ian will know where I am. If he doesn't want to tell you, he won't. Gervase tried to burn some information out of him once, and didn't succeed. He still has the scars" – he turned to me- "don't you?"

"Malcolm!" I protested.

Malcolm said to Yale, "I gave Gervase a beating he'll never forget."

"And he's never forgiven me," I said.

"Forgiven you? For what? You didn't snitch to me. Serena did. She was so young she didn't really understand what she'd been seeing. Gervase could be a proper bully."

"Come on," I said, "we're wasting time."

Superintendent Yale followed us out of his office and detailed a driver to take Malcolm.

"I'll come in the car, once I can move it," I said to him. "Don't go shopping, I'll buy us some things later. Do be sensible, I beg you."

"I promise," he said; but promises with Malcolm weren't necessarily binding. He went out with the driver and I stood on the police station steps watching his departure and making sure none of the family had seen him or could follow.

Yale made no comment but waved me back to his office. Here he gave me a short list of reputable building contractors and the use of his telephone. I chose one of the firms at random and explained what was needed, and Yale took the receiver himself and insisted that they were to do minimum weather-proofing only, and were to move none of the rubble until the police gave clearance.

"When the driver returns from taking your father," he said to me, disconnecting, "we can spare him to ferry you back to your car."

"Thank you."

"I'm trusting you, you know, to maintain communications between me and your father."

"I'll telephone here every morning, if you like."

"I'd much rather know where he is."

I shook my head. "The fewer people know, the safer." He couldn't exactly accuse me of taking unreasonable precaution, so he left it, and asked instead, "What did your half-brother burn you with?"

"A cigarette. Nothing fancy."

"And what information did he want?"

"Where I'd hidden my new cricket bat," I answered: but it hadn't been about cricket bats, it had been about illegitimacy, which I hadn't known at the time but had come to understand since.

"How old were you both?"

"I was eleven. Gervase must have been thirteen."

"Why didn't you give him the bat?" Yale asked.

"It wasn't the bat I wouldn't give him. It was the satisfaction. is this part of your enquiries?"

"Everything is," he said laconically.

The hired car was movable when I got back to it, and as it was pointing in that direction, I drove it along to Quantum. There were still amazing numbers of people there, and I couldn't get past the now more substantial barrier across the drive until the policeman guarding it had checked with Superintendent Yale by radio.

"Sorry, sir," one of them said, finally letting me in. "The superintendent's orders."

I nodded and drove on, parking in front of the house beside two police cars which had presumably returned from taking the many family members to their various cars.

I had already grown accustomed to the sight of the house; it still looked as horrific but held no more shocks. Another policeman walked Purposefully towards me as I got Out of the car and asked what I wanted. To look through the downstairs windows, I said.

He checked by radio. The superintendent replied that I could look through the windows as long as the constable remained at my side, and as long as I would point out to him anything I thought looked wrong. I readily agreed to that. With the constable beside me, I walked towards the place where the hall could still be discerned, skirting the heavy front door, which had been blown outwards, frame and all, when the brickwork on either side of it had given way. QUANTUM IN ME FUIT lay face downwards on the gravel. I DID THE BEST I COULD. Someone's best, I thought, grateful to be alive, hadn't quite been good enough.

"Don't go in, sir," the young constable said warningly. "There's more could come down."

I didn't try to go in. The hall was full of ceilings and floors and walls from upstairs, though one could see daylight over the top of the heap, the daylight from the back garden. Somewhere in the heap were all of Malcolm's clothes except the ones he'd worn to Cheltenham, all his vicuna coats and handmade shoes, all of the gold-and-silver brushes he'd packed on his flight to Cambridge, and somewhere, too, the portrait of Moira.

Jagged arrows of furniture stuck up from the devastation like the arms of the drowning, and pieces of dusty unrecognisable fabric flapped forlornly when a gust of wind took them. Tangled there, too, was everything I'd brought with me from my flat, save only my racing kit – saddle, helmet and holdall – which was still in the boot of the car along with Malcolm's briefcase. Everything was replaceable, I supposed; and I felt incredibly glad I hadn't thought of bringing the silver-framed picture of Coochie and the boys.

There was glass everywhere along the front of the house, fallen from the shattered windows. With the constable in tow, I crunched along towards the office, passing the ruins of the downstairs cloakroom on the way, where a half-demolished wall had put paid to the plumbing.

The office walls themselves, like those of the kitchen, were intact, but the office door that I'd set at such a careful angle was wide open with another brick and plaster glacier spilling through it. The shockwave that must have passed through the room to smash its way out through the windows had lifted every un weighted sheet of paper and redistributed it on the floor. Most of the pictures and countless small objects were down there also, including, I noticed, the pen pot holding the piece of wire. Apart from the ancient bevelled glass of a splendid breakfront bookcase which stood along one wall, everything major looked restorable, though getting rid of the dust would be a problem in itself.

I spent a good deal of time gazing through the open spaces of the office windows, but in the end had to admit defeat. The positions of too much had been altered for me to see anything inexplicably wrong. I'd seen nothing significant in there the previous evening when I'd fetched Malcolm's briefcase, when I'd been wide awake with alarm to such things.

Shaking my head I moved on round the house, passing the still shut and solidly bolted garden door which marked the end of the indoor Passage. The blast hadn't shifted it, had dissipated on nearer targets. Past it lay the long creeper-covered north wall of the old playroom, and I walked along there and round into the rear garden.

The police had driven stakes into the lawn and tied ropes to them, making a line for no one to cross. Behind the rope the crowd Persisted, open-eyed, chattering, pointing, coming to look and moving away to trail back over the fields. Among them Arthur Bellbrook, the dogs at his side, was holding a mini-court in a semi-circle of respectful listeners. The reporters and press photographers seemed to have vanished, but other cameras still clicked in a barrage. There was a certain restrained orderliness about everything which struck me hard as incongruous.

Turning my back to the gawpers, I looked through the playroom window, seeing it, like the office, from the opposite angle to the Previous night. Apart from the box room and my bedroom, it was the only room un metamorphosed by Moira, and it still looked what it had been for forty years, the private domain of children.

The old battered armchairs were still there, and the big table that with a little imagination had been fort, boat, spaceship and dungeon in its time. The long shelves down the north wall still bore generations of train sets, building sets, board games and stuffed toys. Robin and Peter's shiny new bicycles were still propped there, that had been the joy of their lives in the week before the crash. There were Posters of pop groups pinned to the walls and a bookcase bulging with reprehensible tastes.

The explosion on the other side of the thick load-bearing wall had done less damage to the playroom than to anywhere else I'd seen; only the broken windows and the ubiquitous dust, which had flooded in from the passage, showed that anything had happened. A couple of teddy bears had tumbled off the shelves, but the bicycles were still standing.

Anything there that shouldn't be there, anything not there that should be, Yale had said. I hadn't seen anything the night before in those categories, and I still couldn't.

With a frustrated shrug, I skirted the poured-out guts of the house and on the far side looked through the dining-room windows. Like the playroom, the dining-room was relatively undamaged, though here the blast had blown in directly from the hall, leaving the now familiar tongue of rubble and covering everything with a thick grey film. For ever after, I would equate explosions with dust.

The long table, primly surrounded by high-backed chairs, stood unmoved. Some display plates held in wires on the wall had broken and fallen off. The sideboard was bare, but then it had been before. Malcolm had said the room had hardly been used since he and Moira had taken to shouting.

I continued round to the kitchen and went in through the door, to the agitation of the constable. I told him I'd been in there earlier to fetch the pine chair, which someone had since brought back, and he relaxed a very little.

"That door," I said, pointing to one in a corner, "leads to the cellars. Do you know if anyone's been down there?"

He didn't think so. He was pretty sure not. He hadn't heard anyone mention cellars.

The two underground rooms lay below the kitchen and dining-room, and without electric lights I wasn't keen to go down there. Still… what excuse did I have not to?

Malcolm kept some claret in racks there, enough to grieve him if the bottles were broken. Coochie had used the cellars romantically for candlelit parties with red-checked tablecloths and gypsy music, and the folding tables and chairs were still stacked there, along with the motley junk of ages that was no longer used but too valuable to throw away.

"Do you have a torch, constable?" I asked.

No, he hadn't. I went to fetch the one I'd installed by habit in the hired car and, in spite of his disapproval, investigated downstairs. He followed me, to do him justice.

To start with, the cellars were dry, which was a relief as I'd been afraid the water from the storage tank and the broken pipes would have drained down and flooded them.

None of Malcolm's bottles was broken. The chimney wall, continuing downwards as sturdy foundations, had sheltered everything on its outer side as stalwartly below as it had above.

The dire old clutter of pensioned-off standard lamps, rocking- chair, pictures, tin trunk, tiger skin, bed headboard, tea-trolley – all took brief life in the torchlight and faded back to shadow. Same old junk, undisturbed.

All that one could say again was that nothing seemed to be there in the cellar that shouldn't be, and nothing not there that should. Shrugging resignedly, I led the way upstairs and closed the door.

Outside again, I looked into the garage, which seemed completely untouched, and walked round behind it to the kitchen garden. The glass in the old greenhouse was broken, and I supposed Moira's little folly, away on the far side of the garden, would have suffered the same fate.

I dearly wanted to go down to the far end of the kitchen garden to make sure the gold store was safe, but was deterred by the number of interested eyes already swivelled my way, and particularly by Arthur Bellbrook's.

The wall itself looked solid enough. The crowds were nowhere near it, as it was away to the left, while they were coming in from the fields on the right.

The constable stood by my side, ready to accompany me everywhere.

Shrugging, I retreated. Have faith, I thought, and drove away to London.