Hot Money

CHAPTER TWO

It was the second time someone had tried to kill him, he said.

I was driving towards Cambridge a shade more slowly than usual, searching anxiously in the rear-view mirrors for satanically-minded followers but so far thankfully without success. My right leg was stiffening depressingly from the impact of twenty minutes ago, but I was in truth fairly used to that level of buffet through having ridden over the years in three or four hundred jump races, incurring consequent collisions with the ground.

Malcolm didn't like driving for reasons Coochie had deftly diagnosed as impatience. Coochie hadn't liked his driving either, for reasons (she said) of plain fear, and had taken over as family chauffeur. I too had been used to driving Malcolm from the day I gained my licence: I would need to have been delirious to ask him to take the wheel just because of some grazed skin.

The second time someone had tried to kill him…

"When was the first time?" I asked.

"Last Friday."

It was currently Tuesday evening.

"What happened?" I said.

He took a while over answering. When he did there was more sadness in his voice than angerand I listened to his tone behind the words and slowly understood his deepest fears.

"One moment I was walking the dogs… well, I think I was, but that's it, I don't really remember." He paused. "I think I had a bang on the head… Anyway, the last thing I remember is calling the dogs and opening the kitchen door. I meant to take them through the garden to that field with the stream and the willows. I don't know how far I went. I shouldn't think far. Anyway, I woke up in Moira's car in the garage… it's still there… and it's damn lucky I woke up at all… the engine was running -He stopped for a few moments.

"It's funny how the mind works. I knew absolutely at once that I had to switch off the engine. Extraordinary. Like a flash. I was in the back seat, sort of tumbled… toppled over… half lying. I got up and practically fell through between the front seats to reach the key in the ignition, and when the engine stopped I just lay there, you know, thinking that I was bloody uncomfortable but not having any more energy to move."

"Did anyone come?" I said, when he paused.

"No… I felt better after a while. I stumbled out of the car and was sick."

"Did you tell the police?"

"Sure, I told them." His voice sounded weary at the recollection. "it must have been about five when I set off with the dogs. Maybe seven by the time I called the police. I'd had a couple of stiff drinks by then and stopped shaking. They asked me why I hadn't called them sooner. Bloody silly. And it was the same lot who came after Moira. They think I did it, you know. Had her killed."

"I know."

"Did the witches tell you that too?"

"Joyce did. She said you couldn't have. She said you might have… er…" I baulked from repeating my mother's actual words, which were "throttled the little bitch in a rage", and substituted more moderately, "… been capable of killing her yourself, but not of paying someone else to do it."

He made a satisfied noise but no comment, and I added, "That seems to be the family consensus."

He sighed. it's not the police consensus. Far from it. I don't think they believed anyone had tried to kill me. They made a lot of notes and took samples… I ask you… of my vomit, and dusted over Moira's car for fingerprints, but it was obvious they were choked with doubts. I think they thought I'd been going to commit suicide and thought better of it… or else that I'd staged it in the hope people would believe I couldn't have killed Moira if someone was trying to kill me…" He shook his head. "I'm sorry I told them at all, and that's why we're not reporting tonight's attempt either."

He had been adamant, in the sales car-park, that we shouldn't.

"What about the bump on your head?" I asked.

"I had a swelling above my ear. Very tender, but not very big. The word I heard the police use about that was inconclusive'."

"And if you'd died…" I said thoughtfully.

He nodded. "If I'd died, it would have wrapped things up nicely for them. Suicide. Remorse. Implicit admission of guilt."

I drove carefully towards Cambridge, appalled and also angry. Moira's death hadn't touched me in the slightest, but the attacks on my father showed me I'd been wrong. Moira had had a right to live. There should have been rage, too, on her behalf.

"What happened to the dogs?" I said.

"What? Oh, the dogs. They came back… they were whining at the kitchen door. I let them in while I was waiting for the police. They were muddy… heaven knows where they'd been. They were tired anyway. I fed them and they went straight to their baskets and went to sleep."

"Pity they couldn't talk."

"What? Yes, I suppose so. Yes." He fell into silence, sighing occasionally as I thought over what he'd told me.

"Who," I said eventually, "knew you were going to Newmarket Sales?"

"Who?" He sounded surprised at the question, and then understood it. "I don't know." He was puzzled. "I've no idea. I didn't know myself until yesterday."

"Well, what have you been doing since the police left you on Friday night?"

"Thinking." And the thoughts, it was clear, had been melancholic: the thoughts now saddening his voice.

"Mm," I said, "along the lines of why was Moira killed?"

"Along those lines."

I said it plainly. "To stop her taking half your possessions?"

He said unwillingly, "Yes."

"And the people who had a chief interest in stopping her were your likely heirs. Your children."

He was silent.

I said, "Also perhaps their husbands and wives, also perhaps even the witches."

"I don't want to believe it," he said. "How could I have put a murderer into the world."

"People do," I said.

"Ian!"

The truth was that, apart from poor Robin, I didn't know my half- brothers and half-sisters well enough to have any certainty about any of them. I was usually on speaking terms with them all, but didn't seek them out. There had been too much fighting, too many rows: Vivien's children disliked Alicia's, Alicia's disliked them and me, Vivien hated Joyce and Joyce hated Alicia very bitterly indeed. Under Coochie's reign, the whole lot had been banned from sleeping in the house, if not from single-day visits, with the result that a storm of collective resentment had been directed at me whom she had kept and treated as her own.

"Apart from thinking," I said, "what have you been doing since Friday night?"

"When the police had gone, I… I…" he stopped.

"The shakes came back?" I suggested. "Yes. Do you understand that?"

"I'd have been scared silly," I said. "Stupid not to be. I'd have felt that whoever had tried to kill me was prowling about in the dark waiting for me to be alone so he could have another go."

Malcolm audibly swallowed. "I telephoned to the hire firm I use now and told them to send a car to fetch me. Do YOU know what panic feels like?"

"Not that sort, I guess."

"I was sweating, and it was cold. I could feel my heart thumping… banging away at a terrible rate. it was awful. I Packed some things… I couldn't concentrate."

He shifted in his seat as the outskirts of Cambridge came up in the headlights and began to give me directions to the hotel where he said he'd spent the previous four nights.

"Does anyone know where you're staying?" I asked, turning corners. "Have you seen any of your old chums?"

Malcolm knew Cambridge well, had been at university there and still had friends at high tables. It must have seemed to him a safe city to bolt to, but it was where I would have gone looking for him, if not much else failed.

"Of course I have," he said in answer to my question. "I spent Sunday with the Rackersons, dined with old Digger in Trinity last night… it's nonsense to think they could be involved."

"Yes," I agreed, pulling up outside his hotel. "All the same, go and pack and check out of here, and we'll go somewhere else."

"It's not necessary," he protested.

"You appointed me as minder, so I'm minding," I said.

He gave me a long look in the dim light inside the car.

The doorman of the hotel stepped forward and opened the door beside me, an invitation to step out.

"Come with me," my father said.

I was both astounded by his fear and thought it warranted. I asked the doorman where I should park, and turned at his suggestion through an arch into the hotel's inner court way From there, through a back door and comfortable old-fashioned hallways, Malcolm and I went up one flight of red-carpeted stairs to a lengthy winding corridor. Several people we passed glanced down at my torn trouser-leg with the dried-blood scenery inside, but no one said anything: was it still British politeness, I wondered, or the new creed of not getting involved? Malcolm, it seemed, had forgotten the problem existed.

He brought his room key out of his pocket and, with it raised, said abruptly, "I suppose you didn't tell anyone I would be at the sales."

"No, I didn't."

"But you knew." He paused. "Only you knew."

He was staring at me with the blue eyes and I saw all the sudden fear-driven question marks rioting through his mind.

"Go inside," I said. "The corridor isn't the place for this."

He looked at the key, he looked wildly up and down the now empty corridor, poised, almost, to run.

I turned my back on him and walked purposefully away in the direction of the stairs.

"Ian," he shouted.

I stopped and turned round.

"Come back," he said.

I went back slowly.

"You said you trusted me," I said.

"I haven't seen you for three years… and I broke your nose…"

I took the key out of his hand and unlocked the door. I supposed I might have been suspicious of me if I'd been attacked twice in five days, considering I came into the high-probability category of son. I switched on the light and went forward into the room which was free from lurking murderers that time at least.

Malcolm followed, only tentatively reassured, closing the door slowly behind him. I drew the heavy striped curtains across the two windows and briefly surveyed the spacious but old-fashioned accommodation: reproduction antique furniture, twin beds, pair of armchairs, door to bathroom.

No murderer in the bathroom.

"Ian…" Malcolm said.

"Did you bring any scotch?" I asked. In the old days, he'd never travelled without it.

He waved a hand towards a chest of drawers where I found a half- full bottle nestling among a large number of socks. I fetched a glass from the bathroom and poured him enough to tranquillise an elephant.

"For God's sake…" he said.

"Sit down and drink it."

"You're bloody arrogant."

He did sit down, though, and tried not to let the glass clatter against his teeth from the shaking of his hand.

With much less force, I said, "If I'd wanted you dead, I'd have let that car hit you tonight. I'd have jumped the other way… out of trouble."

He seemed to notice clearly for the first time that there had been any physical consequences to our escape.

"Your leg," he said, "must be all right?"

"Leg is. Trousers… can I borrow a pair of yours?"

He pointed to a cupboard where I found a second suit almost identical to the one he was wearing. I was three inches taller than he and a good deal thinner but, belted and slung round the hips, whole cloth was better than holey.

He silently watched me change and made no objection when I telephoned down to the reception desk and asked them to get his bill ready for his departure. He drank more of the scotch, but nowhere was he relaxed.

"Shall I pack for you?" I asked.

He nodded, and watched some more while I fetched his suitcase, opened it on one of the beds and began collecting his belongings. The things he'd brought spoke eloquently of his state of mind when he'd packed them: about ten pairs of socks but no other underwear, a dozen shirts, no pyjamas, two to welling bath-robes, no extra shoes. The clearly new electric razor in the bathroom still bore a stick-on price tag, but he had brought his antique gold-and-silver- backed brushes, all eight of them, including two clothes brushes. I put everything into the case, and closed it.

"Ian," he said.

"Mm?"

"People can pay assassins… You could have decided not to go through with it tonight… at the last moment…"

"it wasn't like that," I protested. Saving him had been utterly instinctive, without calculation or counting of risks: I'd been lucky to get off with a graze.

He said almost beseechingly, with difficulty, "it wasn't you, was it, who had Moira… Or me, in the garage…? Say it wasn't you."

I didn't know really how to convince him. He'd known me better, lived with me longer than with any of his other children, and if his trust was this fragile then there wasn't much future between us.

"I didn't have Moira killed," I said. "if you believe it of me, you could believe it of yourself." I paused. "I don't want you dead, I want you alive. I could never do you harm."

It struck me that he really needed to hear me say I loved him, so although he might scoff at the actual words, and despite the conditioned inhibitions of my upbringing, I said, feeling that desperate situations needed desperate remedies, "You're a great father… and… er… I love you."

He blinked. Such a declaration pierced him, one could see. I'd probably overdone it, I thought, but his distrust had been a wound for me too.

I said much more lightly, "I swear on the Coochie Pembroke Memorial Challenge Trophy that I would never touch a hair on your head… nor Moira's either, though I did indeed loathe her."

I lifted the suitcase off the bed.

"Do I go on with you or not?" I said. "if you don't trust me, I'm going home."

He was looking at me searchingly, as if I were a stranger, which I suppose in some ways I was. He had never before, I guessed, had to think of me not as a son but as a man, as a person who had led a life separate from his, with a different outlook, different desires, different values. Sons grew from little boys into their own adult selves: fathers tended not to see the change clearly. Malcolm, I was certain, thought of me basically as still having the half-formed personality I'd had at fifteen.

"You're different," he said.

"I am the same. Trust your instinct."

Some of the tension at last slackened in his muscles. His instinct had been trust, an instinct strong enough to carry him to the telephone after three silent years.

He finished the scotch and stood up, filling his lungs with a deep breath as if making resolves.

"Come with me then," he said.

I nodded.

He went over to the chest of drawers and from the bottom drawer, which I hadn't checked, produced a briefcase. I might have guessed it would be there somewhere: even in the direst panic, he wouldn't have left behind the lists of his gold shares or his currency exchange calculator. He started with the briefcase to the door, leaving me to bring the suitcase, but on impulse I went over again to the telephone and asked for a taxi to be ready for us.

"But your car's here," Malcolm said.

"Mm. I think I'll leave it here, for now."

"But why?"

"Because if I didn't tell anyone you were going to Newmarket Sales, and nor did you, then it's probable you were followed there, from… er… here. If you think about it… the car that tried to kill you was waiting in the sales car-park, but you didn't have a car. You went there by taxi. Whoever drove at you must have seen you and Me togetherand known who I was, and guessed you might leave with me, so although I didn't see anyone following us tonight from Newmarket, whoever-it-was probably knew we would come here, to this hotel, so… well… so they Might be hanging about in the courtyard where we parked, where it's nice and dark outside the back door, waiting to see if we come out again."

"my God!"

"It'S possible," I said. "So we'll leave through the front door, with the doorman in attendance, don't you think?"

"If you say so," he said weakly.

"From now on," I said, "we take every exaggerated precaution we can think of."

"Well, where are we going in this taxi?"

"How about somewhere where we can rent a car?"

The taxi-driver, however, once we'd set off without incident from the hotel, bill paid, luggage loaded, doorman tipped, informed us doubtfully that nine o'clock on a Tuesday night wasn't going to be easy. All the car-hire firms' offices would be closed.

"Chauffeur-driven car, then," Malcolm said. "Fellows who do weddings, that sort of thing. Twenty quid in it for you if you fix it."

Galvanised by this offer, the taxi-driver drove us down some back streets, Stopped outside an unpromising little terraced house and banged on the door. It opened, shining out a melon-slice of light, and gathered the taxi-driver inside.

"We're going to be mugged," Malcolm said.

The taxi-driver returned harmlessly, howeveraccompanied by a larger man buttoning the jacket of a chauffeur's uniform and carrying a reassuring peaked cap.

"The firm my brother-in-law works for does mostly weddings and funerals," the taxi-driver said. "He wants to know where you want to go."

" London," I said.

London appeared to be no problem at all. The driver and his brother-in-law climbed into the front of the taxi which started off, went round a corner or two, and pulled up again outside a lock-up garage. We sat in the taxi as asked while the two drivers opened the garage, disclosing its contents. Which was how Malcolm and I Proceeded to London in a very large highly-polished black Rolls-Royce, the moonlighting chauffeur separated from us discreetly by a glass partition.

"Why did You go to the sales at all?"I asked Malcolm. "I mean, why Newmarket? Why the sales?"

Malcolm frowned. "Because of Ebury's, I suppose."

"The jewellers?"

"Yes… well… I knew they were going to have a showroom there. They told me so last week when I went to see them about Coochie's jewellery. I mean, I know them pretty well, I bought most of her things from there. I was admiring a silver horse they had, and they said they were exhibiting this week at Newmarket Sales. So then yesterday when I was wondering what would fetch you… where you would meet me… I remembered the sales were so close to Cambridge, and I decided on it not long before I rang you."

I pondered a bit. "How would you set about finding where someone was, if you wanted to, so to speak?"

To my surprise he had a ready answer. "Get the fellow I had for tailing Moira."

"Tailing…" "My lawyer said to do it. It might save me something, he said, if Moira was having a bit on the side, see what I mean?"

"I do indeed," I agreed dryly. "But I suppose she wasn't?"

"No such luck." He glanced at me. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well… I just wondered if he could check where everyone in the family was last Friday and tonight."

"Everyone!" Malcolm exclaimed. "It would take weeks."

"it would put your mind at rest."

He shook his head gloomily. "You forget about assassins."

"Assassins aren't so frightfully easy to find, not for ordinary people. How would you set about it, for instance, if you wanted someone killed? Put an ad in The Times?"

He didn't seem to see such a problem as I did, but he agreed that "the fellow who tailed Moira" should be offered the job of checking the family.

We discussed where we should stay that night: in which hotel, in fact, as neither of us felt like returning home. Home, currently, to me, was a rather dull suburban flat in Epsom, not far from the stable I'd been working for. Home for Malcolm was still the house where I'd been raised, from which Moira had apparently driven him, but to which he had returned immediately after her death. "Home" for all the family was that big house in Berkshire which had seen all five wives come and go: Malcolm himself had been brought up there, and I could scarcely imagine what he must have felt at the prospect of losing it.

"What happened between you and Moira?" I said.

"None of your goddam business."

We travelled ten miles in silence. Then he shifted, sighed, and said, "She wanted Coochie's jewellery and I wouldn't give it to her. She kept on and on about it, rabbit. rabbit. Annoyed me, do you see? And then… well…" he shrugged, "she caught me out."

"With another woman?" I said-without surprise.

He nodded, unashamed. He'd never been monogamous and couldn't understand why it should be expected. The terrible rows in my childhood had all been cent red on his affairs: while he'd been married to Vivien and then to Joyce, he had maintained Alicia all the time as his mistress. Alicia bore him two children while he was married to Vivien and Joyce, and also one subsequently, when he'd made a fairly honest woman of herat her insistence.

I liked to think he had been faithful finally to Coochie, but on the whole it was improbable, and I was never going to ask.

Malcolm favoured our staying at the Dorchester, but I persuaded him he was too well known there, and we settled finally on the Savoy.

"A suite," Malcolm said at the reception desk. "Two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sitting-room, and send up some Bollinger right away."

I didn't feel like drinking champagne, but Malcolm did. He also ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for us both from room- service, with a bottle of Hine Antique brandy and a box of Havana cigars for comforts.

Idly I totted up the expenses of his day: one solid silver trophy, one two-million-guinea thoroughbred, insurance for same, Cambridge hotel bill, tip for the taxi-driver, chauffeured Rolls-Royce, jumbo suite at the Savoy with trimmings. I wondered how much he was really worth, and whether he intended to spend the lot.

We ate the food and drank the brandy still not totally in accord with each other. The three years' division had been, it seemed, a chasm not as easy to cross as I'd thought. I felt that although I'd meant it when I said I loved him, it was probably the long memories of him that I really loved, not his physical presence here and now, and I could see that if I was going to stay close to him, as I'd promised, I would be learning him again and from a different viewpoint; that each of us, in fact, would newly get to know the other.

"Any day now," Malcolm said, carefully dislodging ash from his cigar, "we're going to Australia."

I absorbed the news and said, "Are we?"

He nodded. "We'll need visas. Where's your passport?"

"in my flat. Where's yours?"

"in the house."

"Then I'll get them both tomorrow," I said, "and you stay here." I paused. "Are we going to Australia for any special reason?"

"To look at gold mines," he said. "And kangaroos."

After a short silence, I said, "We don't just have to escape. We do have to find out who's trying to kill you, in order to stop them succeeding."

"Escape is more attractive," he said. "How about a week in Singapore on the way?"

"Anything you say. Only… I'm supposed to ride in a race at Sandown on Friday."

"I've never understood why you like it. All those cold wet days. All those falls."

"You get your rush from gold," I said.

"Danger?" His eyebrows rose. "Quiet, well-behaved, cautious Ian? Life is a bore without risk, is that it?"

"It's not so extraordinary," I said.

I'd ridden always as an amateur, unpaid, because something finally held me back from the total dedication needed for turning professional. Race riding was my deepest pleasure, but not my entire life, and in consequence I'd never developed the competitive drive necessary for climbing the pro ladder. I was happy with the rides I got, with the camaraderie of the changing-room, with the wide skies and the horses themselves, and yes, one had to admit it, with the risk.

"Staying near me," Malcolm said, "as you've already found out, isn't enormously safe."

"That's why I'm staying," I said.

He stared. He said, "My God," and he laughed. "I thought I knew you. Seems I don't."

He finished his brandy, stubbed out his cigar and decided on bed; and in the morning he was up before me, sitting on a sofa in one of the bathrobes and reading the Sporting Life when I ambled out in the underpants and shirt I'd slept in.

"I've ordered breakfast," he said. "And I'm in the paper – how about that?"

I looked where he pointed. His name was certainly there, somewhere near the end of the detailed lists of yesterday's sales. " Lot 79, ch. colt, 2,070,000 gns. Malcolm Pembroke".

He put down the paper, well pleased. "Now, what do we do today?"

"We summon your private eye, we fix a trainer for the colt, I fetch our passports and some clothes, and you stay here."

Slightly to my surprise, he raised no arguments except to tell me not to be away too long. He was looking rather thoughtfully at the healing graze down my right thigh and the red beginnings of bruising around it.

"The trouble is," he said, "I don't have the private eye's phone number. Not with me." "We'll get another agency, then, from the yellow pages."

"Your mother knows it, of course. Joyce knows it."

"How does she know it?"

"She used him," he said airily, "to follow me and Alicia."

There was nothing, I supposed, which should ever surprise me about my parents.

"When the lawyer fellow said to have Moira tailed, I got the private eye's name from Joyce. After all, he'd done a good job on me and Alicia all those years ago. Too bloody good, when you think of it. So get through to Joyce, Ian, and ask her for the number."

Bemused, I did as he said.

"Darling," my mother shrieked down the line. "Where's your father?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Darling, do you know what he's bloody done?"

"No… what?"

"He's given a fortune, darling, I mean literally hundreds of thousands, to some wretched little film company to make some absolutely ghastly film about tadpoles or something. Some bloody fool of a man telephoned to find out where your father was, because it seems he promised them even more money which they'd like to have… I ask you! I know you and Malcolm aren't talking, but you've got to do something to stop him."

"Well," I said, "it's his money."

"Darling, don't be so naive. Someone's going to inherit it, and if only you'd swallow all that bloody pride, as I've told you over and over, it would be yours. If you go on and on with this bloody quarrel, he'll leave it all to Alicia's beastly brood, and I cannot bear the prospect of her gloating for ever more. So make it up with Malcolm at once, darling, and get him to see sense."

"Calm down," I said. "I have."

"What?"

"Made it up with him."

"Thank God, at last!" my mother shrieked. "Then, darling, what are you waiting for? Get onto him straight away and stop him spending your inheritance."