Hot Money

CHAPTER SIX

"Stay right here," I said to all of them. "I have to go into the weighing-room to deal with a technicality. Stay right here until I come out."

They nodded with various frowns, and I dived into privacy in a desperate search for a sheet of paper and an envelope.

I wrote to Malcolm:

Half the family have turned up here, sent by Joyce. For God's sake stay where you are, keep out of sight and wait until I come to fetch you.

I stuck the note into the envelope, wrote Malcolm's name on the outside, and sought out an official who had enough rank to send someone to deliver it.

"My father is lunching in the Directors' dining-room," I said. "And it's essential that he gets this note immediately."

The official was obliging. He was going up to the Stewards' room anyway, he said, and he would take it himself. With gratitude and only a minor lessening of despair – because it would be just like Malcolm to come down contrarily to confront the whole bunch – I went out again into the sunlight and found the five of them still faithfully waiting exactly where I'd left them.

"I say," Debs said, half mocking, "you do look dashing in all that kit."

Donald looked at her in surprise, and I had a vivid impression of his saying soon in his golf club, "My brother, the amateur jockey…", knowing that if I'd been a professional he would have hushed it up if he could. A real snob, Donald: but there were worse sins.

Debs, Ferdinand's second wife, had come to the races in a black leather coat belted at the waist, with shoulder-length blond hair above and long black boots below. Her eyelids were purple, like her fingernails. The innocence I'd photographed in her a year ago was in danger of disappearing.

Ferdinand, shorter than Debs and more like Malcolm than ever, appeared to be in his usual indecision over whether I was to be loved or hated.

I smiled at him cheerfully and asked what sort of a journey he'd had.

"A lot of traffic," he said lamely.

"We didn't come here to talk about traffic,"Serena said forbiddingly. "We want to know where Daddy is."

Malcolm's little Serena, now taller than he, was dressed that day in royal blue with white frills at neck and wrists, a white woollen hat with a pompom on top covering her cap of fair hair. She looked a leggy sixteen, not ten years older. Her age showed only in the coldness of her manner towards me, which gave no sign of thawing.

In her high-pitched, girlish voice she said, "We want him to settle very substantial sums on us all right now. Then he can go to blazes with the rest."

I blinked. "Who are you quoting?" I asked.

"Myself," she said loftily, and then more probably added, "Mummy too. And Gervase."

It had Gervase's thug gish style stamped all over it.

Donald and Helen looked distinctly interested in the proposal. Ferdinand and Debs had of course heard it before.

"Gervase thinks it's the best solution," Ferdinand said, nodding.

I doubted very much that Malcolm would agree, but said only,"I'll pass on your message next time he gets in touch with me."

"But Joyce is sure you know where he is," Donald objected.

"Not exactly," I said. "Do you know that Lucy and Edwin are here too?"

They were satisfactorily diverted, looking over their shoulders to see if they could spot them in the growing crowds.

"Didn't Joyce tell you she was sending so many of you here?" I asked generally, and it was Ferdinand, sideways, his face turned away, who answered.

"She told Serena to come here. She told Serena to tell me, which she did, so we came together. I didn't know about Donald and Helen or Lucy and Edwin. I expect she wanted to embarrass you."

His eyes swivelled momentarily to my face, wanting to see my reaction. I don't suppose my face showed any. Joyce might call me "darling" with regularity but could be woundingly unkind at the same time, and I'd had a lifetime to grow armour.

Ferdinand happened to be standing next to me. I said on impulse into his ear, "Ferdinand, who killed Moira?"

He stopped looking for Lucy and Edwin and transferred his attention abruptly and wholly to me. I could see calculations going on in the pause before he answered, but I had no decoder for his thoughts. He was the most naturally congenial to me of all my brothers, yet the others were open books compared with him. He was secretive, as perhaps I was myself. He had wanted to build his own kitchen-wall hidey-hole when I'd built mine, only Malcolm had said we must share, that one was enough. Ferdinand had sulked and shunned me for a while, and smirked at Gervase's dead rats. I wondered to what extent people remained the same as they'd been when very young: whether it was safe to assume they hadn't basically changed, to believe that if one could peel back the layers of living one would come to the known child. I wanted Ferdinand to be as I had known him at ten, eleven, twelve – a boy dedicated to riding a bicycle while standing on his head on the saddle – and not in a million years a murderer.

"I don't know who killed Moira," he said finally. "Alicia says you did. She told the police it HAD to be you."

"I couldn't have."

"She says the police could break your alibi if they really tried."

I knew that they HAD really tried: they'd checked every separate five minutes of my day, and their manner and their suspicions had been disturbing. "And what do YOU think?" I asked curiously.

His eyelids flickered. "Alicia says…"

I said abruptly, "Your mother says too damned much. Can't you think for yourself?"

He was offended, as he would be. He hooked his arms through those of Debs and Serena and made an announcement. "We three are going to have a drink and a sandwich. If you fall off and kill yourself, no one will miss you."

I smiled at him, though his tone had held no joke.

"And don't be so bloody forgiving," he said.

He whirled the girls away from me and marched them off. I wondered how he'd got the day off from work, though I supposed most people could if they tried. He was a statistician, studying to be an actuary in his insurance company. What were the probabilities, I wondered, of a thirty-two-year-old statistician whose wife had purple fingernails being present when his brother broke his neck at Sandown Park?

Donald and Helen said that they too would run a sandwich to earth (Donald's words) and Helen added earnestly that SHE would care that I finished the race safely, whatever Ferdinand said.

"Thanks," I said, hoping I could believe he rand went back into the changing-room for an interval of thought.

Lucy and Edwin might leave before the end of the afternoon, and so might Donald and Helen, but Ferdinand wouldn't. He liked going racing. He'd said on one mellow occasion that he'd have been quite happy being a bookmaker; he was lightning fast at working out relative odds.

The problem of how to extract Malcolm unseen from the racecourse didn't end, either, with those members of the family I'd talked to. If they were all so certain I knew where Malcolm was, one of the others, more cunning, could be hiding behind trees, waiting to follow me when I left. There were hundreds of trees in Sandown Park.

The first race came and went, and in due course I went out to partner Young Higgins in the second.

Jo as usual had red cheeks from pleasure and hope. George was being gruffly businesslike, also as usual, telling me to be especially careful at the difficult first fence and to go easy up the hill past the stands the first time.

I put Malcolm out of my mind, and also murder and it wasn't difficult. The sky was a clear distant blue, the air crisp with the coming of autumn. The leaves on all those trees were yellowing, and the track lay waiting, green and springy, with the wide fences beckoning to be flown. Simple things; and out there one came starkly face to face with oneself, which I mostly found more exhilarating than frightening. So far, anyway.

Jo said, "Only eight runners, just a perfect number," and George said, as he always did, "Don't lie too far back coming round the last long bend."

I said I would try not to.

Jo's eyes were sparkling like a child's in her sixty-year-old face, and I marvelled that she had never in all that time lost the thrill of expectation in moments like these. There might be villains at every level in horse racing, but there were also people like Jo and George whose goodness and goodwill shone out like searchlights, who made the sport overall good fun and wholesome. Life and death might be serious in the real world, but life and death on a fast steeple chaser on a Friday afternoon in the autumn sunshine was a lighthearted toss-up, an act of health on a sick planet.

I fastened the strap of my helmet, was thrown up on Young Higgins and rode him out onto the track. Perhaps if I'd been a professional and ridden up to ten times as often I would have lost the swelling joy that that moment always gave me: one couldn't grin like a maniac, even to oneself, at a procession of bread-and-butter rides on cold days, sharp tracks, bad horses.

Young Higgins was living up to his name, bouncing on his toes and tossing his head in high spirits. We lined up with the seven others, all of whose riders I happened to know from many past similar occasions. Amateurs came in all guises: there was a mother, an aunt and a grandfather riding that afternoon, besides a journalist, an earl's son, a lieutenant-colonel, a show-jumper and myself. From the stands, only a keen eye could have told one from the other without the guidance of our colours, and that was what amateur racing was all about: the equality, the levelling anonymity of the starting gate.

The tapes went up and we set off with three miles to go, almost two whole circuits, twenty-two jumps and an uphill run to the winning post.

The aunt's horse, too strong for her, took hold of the proceedings and opened up an emphatic lead, which no one else bothered to cut down. The aunt's horse rushed into the difficult downhill first fence and blundered over it, which taught him a lesson and let his rider recover control, and for about a mile after that there were no dramatic excitements. The first race I'd ever ridden in had seemed to pass in a whirling heaving flurry leaving me breathless and exhausted, but time had stretched out with experience until one could watch and think and even talk.

"Give me room, blast you," shouted the lieutenant-colonel on one side of me.

"Nice day," said the earl's son chattily on the other always a clown who enlivened his surroundings.

"Shift your arse!" yelled the mother to her horse, giving him a crack round that part of his anatomy. She was a good rider, hated slow horses, hated not to win, weighed a muscular ten stone and was scornful of the show-jumper, whom she had accused often of incompetence.

The show-jumper, it was true, liked to set his horse right carefully before jumps, as in the show-ring, and hadn't managed to speed up in the several steeplechase races he'd ridden so far. He wasn't in consequence someone to follow into a fence and I avoided him whenever possible.

The journalist was the best jockey in the race, a professional in all but status, and the grandfather was the worst but full of splendid reckless courage. More or less in a bunch, the whole lot of us came round the bottom bend and tackled the last three jumps of the first circuit. The aunt was still in front, then came the lieutenant-colonel, myself and the earl's son in a row, then the mother just behind, with the show-jumper and the grandfather beside her. I couldn't see the journalist: somewhere in the rear, no doubt, biding his wily time.

The lieutenant-colonel's mount made a proper hash of the last of the three fences, jogging both of his rider's feet out of the irons and tipping the military backside into the air somewhere in the region of the horse's mane. Landing alongside and gathering my reins, I saw that the lieutenant-colonel's balance was hopelessly progressing down the horse's galloping shoulder as he fought without success to pull himself back into the saddle.

I put out an arm, grasped his jersey and yanked him upwards and backwards, shifting his disastrous centre of gravity into a more manageable place and leaving him slowing and bumping in my wake as he sat down solidly in the saddle, trying to put his feet back into his flying stirrups, which was never very easy at thirty miles an hour.

He had breathing space to collect things going up the hill, though, as we all did, and we swept round the top bend and down to the difficult fence again with not much change in order from the first time.

Someone had once long ago pulled me back into the saddle in that same way: it was fairly common in jump racing. Someone had also once tipped me straight into the air with an upward wrench of my heel, but that was another story. The lieutenant-colonel was saying "Thanks" and also "Move over, you're crowding me," more or less in the same breath. After crossing the water jump for the second time over on the far side of the track, the show-jumper made a spurt to the front and then slowed almost to a standstill on landing over the next fence, having jumped especially pedantically, and the aunt crashed into the back of him with some singularly un-aunt-like language.

"Lovely lady," said the earl's son, appreciatively, as we passed the debacle. "How are you going yourself?"

"Not bad," I said. "How are you?"

We jumped the last of the seven far-side fences together and in front, and put all our energies into staying there round the long last bend and over the three last fences. I could hear horses thudding behind me and the mother's voice exhorting her slow coach Approaching the Pond fence, I could sense the earl's son's horse beginning to tire, I could see that precious winning post far ahead and the way to it clear, and for at least a few moments I thought I might win. But then the lieutenant-colonel reappeared fast at my elbow, still shouting for room, and between the last two fences, as I'd feared he would, the journalist materialised from the outback and made it look easy, and Young Higgins tired into Middle-Aged Higgins on the hill.

He and I finished third, which wasn't too bad, with the earl's son, persevering, not far away fourth.

"A nice afternoon out," he said happily as we trotted back together and I looked at the lights in his eyes and saw it was the same for him as for me, a high that one couldn't put into words, an adventure of body and spirit that made of dismounting and walking on the ground a literal coming down to earth.

Jo was pleased enough, patting Young Higgins hard. "Ran a great race, didn't you, old boy? jumped like a stag."

"You'd have been second," said George, who had good binoculars, "if you'd let the lieutenant-colonel fall off."

"Yeah, well," I said, unbuckling the girths, "there were a lot of hooves down there."

George smiled. "Don't forget to weigh in." (He said it every time.) "Come for a drink in the Owners' bar when you've changed."

I accepted. It was part of the ritual, part of the bargain. They liked to re-live Young Higgins' outing fence for fence in return for having given me the ride. They were still standing in the unsaddling enclosure talking to friends when I went out again in street clothes, and with welcoming smiles waved me into their group. None of my own family being in sight, I went with them without problems and, over glasses of Jo's favourite brandy and ginger ale, earned my afternoon's fun by describing it.

I returned to the weighing-room area afterwards and found that not only were all the same family members still on the racecourse, but that they had coalesced into an angry swarm and had been joined by one of the queen bees herself, my mother Joyce.

Joyce, in fur and a green hat, was a rinsed blonde with greenish eyes behind contact lenses which seldom missed a trick in life as in cards. Dismayed but blank-faced, I gave her a dutiful peck on her smooth cheek which, it seemed, she was in no mood to receive.

"Darling," she said, the syllables sizzling with displeasure, "did you or did you not send that weasel Norman West to check up on my whereabouts last Friday?"

"Er," I said.

"Did you or did you not send him sniffing round Vivien on the same errand?"

"Well," I said, half smiling, "I wouldn't have put it as crudely, but I suppose so, yes."

The battery of eyes from the others was as friendly as napalm.

Why? "Joyce snapped.

"Didn't Norman West tell you?"

She said impatiently, "He said something nonsensical about Malcolm being attacked. I told him if Malcolm had been attacked, I would have heard of it."

"Malcolm was very nearly killed," I said flatly. "He and I asked Norman West to make sure that none of you could have done it."

Joyce demanded to be told what had happened to Malcolm, and I told her. She and all the others listened with open mouths and every evidence of shock, and if there was knowledge, not ignorance, behind any of the horrified eyes, I couldn't discern it.

"Poor Daddy!" Serena exclaimed. "How beastly."

"A matter for the police," Donald said forcefully.

"I agree," I said. "I'm surprised they haven't been to see all of you already, as they did when Moira died."

Edwin said, with a shake of the head, "How near, how near," and then, hearing the regret in his voice as clearly as I did, added hurriedly, "What a blessing he woke up."

"When the police make their enquiries," I said, "they don't exactly report the results to Malcolm. He wants to make sure for himself that none of the family was at Quantum last Friday afternoon. If you cooperate with Norman West when he gets to you, you'll set Malcolm's mind at rest."

"And what if we can't prove where we were?" Debs asked.

"Or even remember?" Lucy said.

"Malcolm will have to live with it," Joyce said crisply.

"Living with it would present him less problem," I Said dryly. "It's dying he wants to avoid."

They stared at me in silence. The reality of Moira's murder had been to them, I guessed, as to me, a slow-burning fuse, with seemingly no bad consequences at first, but with accelerating worries as time passed. Perhaps they, as I had done, had clung to the motiveless-intruder-from-outside theory at first because the alternative was surely unthinkable, but in the weeks since then, they must at least have begun to wonder. The fuse would heat soon into active suspicions, I saw, which might tear apart and finally scatter for ever the fragile family fabric.

Would I mind, I thought? Not if I still had Malcolm… and perhaps Ferdinand and Joyce… and maybe Lucy, or Thomas… Serena… would I care if I never again laid eyes on Gervase?

The answer, surprisingly enough, was yes, I would mind. Imperfect, quarrelsome, ramshackle as it was, the family were origins and framework, the geography of living. Moira, un grieved was already rewriting that map, and if her murderer remained for ever undiscovered, if Malcolm himself – I couldn't think of it – were killed, there would be no healing, no reforming, no telephone network for information, no contact, just a lot of severed galaxies moving inexorably apart.

The big bang, I thought, still lay ahead. The trick was to smother the fuse before the explosion, and that was all very well, but where was the burning point, and how long had we got?

"Buy me a drink, darling," Joyce commanded. "We're in deep trouble."

She began to move off, but the others showed no signs of following. I looked at the seven faces all expressing varying degrees of anxiety and saw them already begin to move slightly away from each other, not one cohesive group, but Donald and Helen as a couple, Lucy and Edwin, a pair, and Ferdinand, Debs and Serena, the youngest trio.

"I'll tell Malcolm your fears," I said. "And your needs."

"Oh yes, please do," Helen said intensely.

"And Gervase's plan," Ferdinand added.

"Do come on, darling," Joyce said peremptorily over her shoulder. "Which way is the bar?"

"Run along, little brother," Lucy said with irony. Serena said, "Mumsie's waiting," and Debs fairly tittered. I thought of sticking my toes in and making Joyce come back, but what did it matter? I could put up with the jibes, I'd survived them for years, and I understood what prompted them. I shrugged ruefully and went after Joyce, and could feel the pitying smiles on the back of my neck.

I steered Joyce into the busy Members' bar which had a buffet table along one side with salads and breads and a large man in chef's clothes carving from turkeys, haunches of beef and hams on the bone. I was hungry after riding and offered Joyce food, but she waved away the suggestion as frivolity. I bought her instead a large vodka and tonic with a plain ginger ale for myself, and we found spare seats at a table in a far corner where, after the merest glance around to make sure she wouldn't be overheard among the general hubbub, she leaned forward until the brim of the green hat was practically touching my forehead and launched into her inquisition.

"Where is your father?" she said.

"When did you last see your father?" I amended.

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"That picture by Orchardson."

"Stop playing games. Where is Malcolm?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You're lying."

"Why do you want to find him?"

"WHY?" She was astonished. "Because he's out of his mind." She dug into her capacious handbag and brought out an envelope, which she thrust towards me. "Read that."

I opened the envelope and found a small piece of newspaper inside, a snipped paragraph without headline or provenance.

It said:

Second-string British contender is Blue Clancy, second in last year's Derby and winner this year of Royal Ascot's King Edward VII Stakes. Owner Ramsey Osborn yesterday hedged his Arc bets by selling a half-share in his four-year-old colt to arbitrageur Malcolm Pembroke, who launched into blood stock only this week with a two million guineas yearling at the Premium Sales. -

Ouch, I thought.

"Where did it come from?" I asked.

"What does it matter where it came from? That new 'Racing Patter' column in the Daily Towncrieras a matter of fact. I was drinking coffee this morning when I read it and nearly choked. The point is, is it true?"

"Yes," I said.

"What?"

"Yes," I said again. "Malcolm bought half of Blue Clancy. Why shouldn't he?"

"Sometimes," my mother said forcefully, "you are so stupid I could hit you." She paused for breath. "And what exactly is an arbitrageur?"

"A guy who makes money by buying low and selling high."

"Oh. Gold."

"And foreign currencies. And shares. And maybe racehorses."

She was unmollified. "You know perfectly well he's just throwing his money away to spite everybody."

"He didn't like Moira being killed. He didn't like being attacked himself. I shouldn't think he'll stop spending until he knows whether we have or haven't a murderer in the family, and even then…" I smiled, "he's getting a taste for it."

Joyce stared. "Moira was murdered by an intruder," she said.

I didn't answer.

She took a large swallow of her vodka and tonic and looked at me bleakly. She had been barely twenty when I was born, barely nineteen when Malcolm had whisked her headlong from an antique shop in Kensington and within a month installed her in his house with a new wedding ring and too little to do.

Malcolm, telling me now and again about those days, had said, "She understood figures, you see. And she could beat me at cards. And she looked so damned demure. So young. Not bossy at all, like she was later. Her people thought me an upstart, did you know? Their ancestors traced back to Charles II, mine traced back to a Victorian knife-grinder. But her people weren't rich, you know. More breeding than boodle. It was an impulse, marrying Joyce. There you are, I admit it. Turned out she didn't like sex much, more's the pity. Some women are like that. No hormones. So I went on seeing Alicia. Well, I would, wouldn't I? Joyce and I got on all right, pretty polite to each other and so on, until she found out about Alicia. Then we had fireworks, all hell let loose for months on end, do you remember? Don't suppose you remember, you were only four or five."

"Five and six, actually."

"Really? Joyce liked being mistress of the house, you know. She learned about power. Grew up, I suppose. She took up bridge seriously, and started voluntary work. She hated leaving all that, didn't much mind leaving me. She said Alicia had robbed her of her self-esteem and ruined her position in the local community. She's never forgiven her, has she?"

Joyce had returned to the small Surrey town where her parents had lived and later died, their social mantle falling neatly onto her able shoulders. She bullied the local people into good works, made continual bridge-tournament forays, earned herself a measure of celebrity, and no, had never forgiven Alicia.

In the bar at Sandown she was dressed, as always, with a type of businesslike luxury: mink jacket over grey tailored suit, neat white silk shirt, long strings of pearls, high-heeled shoes, green felt hat, polished calf handbag. "A well-dressed, well-bred, brassy blonde" Alicia had once called her, which was both accurate and unfair, as was Joyce's tart tit-for-tat opinion of Alicia as "White meat of chicken aboard the gravy train".

Joyce drank most of the rest of her vodka and said, "Do you really think one of the family is capable of murder?"

"I don't know."

"But who?"

"That's the question."

"it isn't possible," she insisted.

"Well," I said. "Take them one by one. Tell me why it's impossible in each individual case, according to each person's character. Start at the beginning, with Vivien."

"No, Ian," she protested.

"Yes," I said. "Help me. Help Malcolm. Help us all."

She gave me a long worried look, oblivious to the movement and noise going on all around us. The next race was already in progress but without noticeable thinning of the crowd who were watching it on closed circuit television above our heads. "Vivien," I prompted.

"Impossible, just impossible. She's practically dim-witted. If she was ever going to murder anybody, it would have been long ago and it would have been Alicia. Alicia ruined Vivien's marriage, just like mine. Vivien's a sniffler, full of self-pity. And why would she do it? For those three wimpish offspring?"

"Perhaps," I said. "They all need money. She hasn't enough herself to bail them out of their holes."

"It's still impossible."

"All right," I said. "How about Donald? And Helen?"

Donald had been ten, more than half Joyce's age, when she had married Malcolm, and he had been in and out of Quantum, as had Lucy and Thomas, whenever Malcolm had exercised his joint- custody rights and had them to stay. Joyce's lack of interest in children had definitely extended to her stepchildren, whom she'd found noisy, bad tempered and foul mannered, though Malcolm disagreed.

"Donald's a pompous, snobbish ass," she said now, "and as insecure as hell under the bluster. Malcolm thinks Helen's as brainless as she's pretty, but I'd say you don't need brains to murder, rather the opposite. I'd think Helen would fight like a fury to save her cubs from physical harm. But Moira wasn't threatening her cubs, not directly. I'd think Helen could be only a hot-blood killer, but so could most people, driven hard enough to defend themselves or their young."

I wondered if she knew about the school-fees crisis: if they hadn't directly told her, she had got them remarkably right. "Lucy?" I said.

"Lucy thinks everyone is inferior to herself, especially if they have more money."

Poor Lucy, I thought. "And Edwin?" I said.

Joyce frowned. "Edwin…"

"Edwin isn't impossible?" I asked.

"He never gets time off from running errands. Not enough time anyway for waiting around to catch Moira alone in her glass house."

"But in character?"

"I don't know enough about him, "Joyce confessed. "He yearns for money, that's for sure, and he's earned it, picking up after Lucy all these years. I don't know his impatience level."

"All right then," I said, "what about Thomas?" Thomas! "Joyce face looked almost sad. "He wasn't as insufferable as Donald and Lucy when he was little. I liked him best of the three. But that damned Vivien screwed him up properly, didn't she? God knows why he married Berenice. She'll badger him into the grave before he inherits, and then where will she be?" Joyce finished the vodka and said, "I don't like doing this, Ian, and I'm stopping right here."

Thomas, I thought. She wasn't sure about Thomas, and she doesn't want to say so. The analysis had all of a sudden come to an unwelcome, perhaps unexpected, abyss.

"Another drink?" I suggested.

"Yes. Gervase is drinking, did you know?"

"He always drinks."

"Ursula telephoned me to ask for advice."

"Did she really?" I was surprised. "Why didn't she ask Alicia?"

"Ursula detests her mother-in-law," Joyce said. "We have that in common. Ursula and I have become quite good friends."

Amazing, I thought, and stood up to fetch the refills.

Joyce's eyes suddenly widened in disbelief, looking beyond me. "I knew you were lying," she said bitterly. "There's Malcolm."