Odds against

THREE

By the time I got to the foot of the stairs, Charles and his guests were coming across the hall from the drawing-room to the dining-room. The men all wore dinner jackets and the women, long dresses. Charles deliberately hadn’t warned me, I reflected. He knew my convalescent kit didn’t include a black tie.

He didn’t stop and introduce me to his guests, but nodded slightly and went straight on into the dining-room, talking with charm to the rounded, fluffy little woman who walked beside him. Behind came Viola and a tall dark girl of striking good looks. Viola, Charles’s elderly widowed cousin, gave me a passing half-smile, embarrassed and worried. I wondered what was the matter: normally she greeted me with affection, and it was only a short time since she had written warm wishes for my recovery. The girl beside her barely glanced in my direction, and the two men bringing up the rear didn’t look at me at all.

Shrugging, I followed them into the dining-room. There was no mistaking the place laid for me: it consisted, in actual fact, of a spoon, a mat, a glass, and a fork, and it was situated in the centre of one of the sides. Opposite me was an empty gap. Charles seated his guests, himself in his usual place at the end of the table, with fluffy Mrs van Dysart on his right, and the striking Mrs Kraye on his left. I sat between Mrs Kraye and Rex van Dysart. It was only gradually that I sorted everyone out. Charles made no introductions whatever.

The groups at each end of the table fell into animated chat and paid me as much attention as a speed limit. I began to think I would go back to bed.

The manservant whom Charles engaged on these occasions served small individual tureens of turtle soup. My tureen, I found, contained more beef juice. Bread was passed, spoons clinked, salt and pepper were shaken and the meal began. Still no one spoke to me, though the visitors were growing slightly curious. Mrs van Dysart flicked her sharp china blue eyes from Charles to me and back again, inviting an introduction. None came. He went on talking to the two women with almost overpowering charm, apparently oblivious.

Rex van Dysart on my left offered me bread with lifted eyebrows and a faint non-committal smile. He was a large man with a flat white face, heavy black rimmed spectacles and a domineering manner. When I refused the bread he put the basket down on the table, gave me the briefest of nods, and turned back to Viola.

Even before he brought quartz into his conversation I guessed it was for Howard Kraye that the show was being put on; and I disliked him on sight with a hackle-raising antipathy that disconcerted me. If Charles was planning that I should ever work for, or with, or near Mr Kraye, I thought, he could think again.

He was a substantial man of about forty-eight to fifty, with shoulders, waist and hips all knocking forty-four. The dinner jacket sat on him with the ease of a second skin, and when he shot his cuffs occasionally he did so without affectation, showing off noticeably well manicured hands.

He had tidy grey-brown hair, straight eyebrows, narrow nose, small firm mouth, rounded freshly shaven chin, and very high unwrinkled lower eyelids, which gave him a secret, shuttered look.

A neat enclosed face like a mask, with perhaps something rotten underneath. You could almost smell it across the dinner table. I guessed, rather fancifully, that he knew too much about too many vices. But on top he was smooth. Much too smooth. In my book, a nasty type of phony. I listened to him talking to Viola.

‘…So when Doria and I got to New York I looked up those fellows in that fancy crystal palace on First Avenue and got them moving. You have to give the clothes-horse diplomats a lead, you know, they’ve absolutely no initiative of their own. Look, I told them, unilateral action is not only inadvisable, its impracticable. But they are so steeped in their own brand of pragmatism that informed opinion has as much chance of osmosing as mercury through rhyolite…’

Viola was nodding wisely while not understanding a word. The pretentious rigmarole floated comfortably over her sensible head and left her unmoved. But its flashiness seemed to me to be part of a gigantic confidence trick: one was meant to be enormously impressed. I couldn’t believe that Charles had fallen under his spell. It was impossible. Not my subtle, clever, cool-headed father-in-law. Mr van Dysart, however, hung on every word.

By the end of the soup his wife at the other end of the table could contain her curiosity no longer. She put down her spoon, and with her eyes on me said to Charles in a low but clearly audible voice, ‘Who is that?’

All the heads turned towards him, as if they had been waiting for the question. Charles lifted his chin and spoke distinctly, so that they should all hear the answer.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is my son-in-law.’ His tone was light, amused, and infinitely contemptuous; and it jabbed raw on a nerve I had thought long dead. I looked at him sharply, and his eyes met mine, blank and expressionless.

My gaze slid up over and past his head to the wall behind him. There for some years, and certainly that morning, had hung an oil painting of me on a horse going over a fence at Cheltenham. In its place there was now an old-fashioned seascape, brown with Victorian varnish.

Charles was watching me. I looked back at him briefly and said nothing. I suppose he knew I wouldn’t. My only defence against his insults long ago had been silence, and he was counting on my instant reaction being the same again.

Mrs van Dysart leaned forward a little, and with waking malice murmured, ‘Do go on, Admiral.’

Without hesitation Charles obeyed her, in the same flaying voice. ‘He was fathered, as far as he knows, by a window cleaner on a nineteen-year-old unmarried girl from the Liverpool slums. She later worked, I believe, as a packer in a biscuit factory.’

‘Admiral, no!’ exclaimed Mrs van Dysart breathlessly.

‘Indeed yes,’ nodded Charles. ‘As you might guess, I did my best to stop my daughter making such an unsuitable match. He is small, as you see, and he has a crippled hand. Working class and undersized… but my daughter was determined. You know what girls are.’ He sighed.

‘Perhaps she was sorry for him,’ suggested Mrs van Dysart.

‘Maybe,’ said Charles. He hadn’t finished, and wasn’t to be deflected. ‘If she had met him as a student of some sort, one might have understood it… but he isn’t even educated. He finished school at fifteen to be apprenticed to a trade. He has been unemployed now for some time. My daughter, I may say, has left him.’

I sat like stone, looking down at the congealed puddle at the bottom of my soup dish, trying to loosen the clamped muscles in my jaw, and to think straight. Not four hours ago he’d shown concern for me and had drunk from my cup. As far as I could ever be certain of anything, his affection for me was genuine and unchanged. So he must have a good reason for what he was doing to me now. At least I hoped so.

I glanced at Viola. She hadn’t protested. She was looking unhappily down at her place. I remembered her embarrassment out in the hall, and I guessed that Charles had warned her what to expect. He might have warned me too, I thought grimly.

Not unexpectedly, they were all looking at me. The dark and beautiful Doria Kraye raised her lovely eyebrows and in a flat, slightly nasal voice, remarked, ‘You don’t take offence, then.’ It was half-way to a sneer. Clearly she thought I ought to take offence, if I had any guts.

‘He is not offended,’ said Charles easily. ‘Why should the truth offend?’

‘Is it true then,’ asked Doria down her flawless nose, ‘that you are illegitimate, and all the rest?’

I took a deep breath and eased my muscles.

‘Yes.’

There was an uncomfortable short silence. Doria said, ‘Oh,’ blankly, and began to crumble her bread.

On cue, and no doubt summoned by Charles’ foot on the bell, the manservant came in to remove the plates, and conversation trickled back to the party like cigarette smoke after a cancer scare.

I sat thinking of the details Charles had left out: the fact that my twenty-year-old father, working overtime for extra cash, had fallen from a high ladder and been killed three days before his wedding day, and that I had been born eight months later. The fact that my young mother, finding that she was dying from some obscure kidney ailment, had taken me from grammar school at fifteen, and because I was small for my age had apprenticed me to a racehorse trainer in Newmarket, so that I should have a home and someone to turn to when she had gone. They had been good enough people, both of them, and Charles knew that I thought so.

The next course was some sort of fish smothered in mushroom coloured sauce. My astronaut’s delight, coming at the same time, didn’t look noticeably different, as it was not in its pot, but out on a plate. Dear Mrs Cross, I thought fervently, I could kiss you. I could eat it this way with a fork, single-handed. The pots needed to be held; in my case inelegantly hugged between forearm and chest; and at that moment I would have starved rather than take my left hand out of my pocket.

Fluffy Mrs van Dysart was having a ball. Clearly she relished the idea of me sitting there practically isolated, dressed in the wrong clothes, and an object of open derision to her host. With her fair frizzy hair, her baby-blue eyes and her rose pink silk dress embroidered with silver, she looked as sweet as sugar icing. What she said showed that she thoroughly understood the pleasures of keeping a whipping boy.

‘Poor relations are such a problem, aren’t they?’ she said to Charles sympathetically, and intentionally loud enough for me to hear. ‘You can’t neglect them in our position, in case the Sunday papers get hold of them and pay them to make a smear. And it’s especially difficult if one has to keep them in one’s own house… one can’t, I suppose, put them to eat in the kitchen, but there are so many occasions when one could do without them. Perhaps a tray upstairs is the best thing.’

‘Ah, yes,’ nodded Charles smoothly, ‘but they won’t always agree to that.’

I half choked on a mouthful, remembering the pressure he had exerted to get me downstairs. And immediately I felt not only reassured but deeply interested. This, then, was what he had been so industriously planning, the destruction of me as a man in the eyes of his guests. He would no doubt explain why in his own good time. Meanwhile I felt slightly less inclined to go back to bed.

I glanced at Kraye, and found his greenish-amber eyes steady on my face. It wasn’t as overt as in Mrs van Dysart’s case, but it was there: pleasure. My toes curled inside my shoes. Interested or not, it went hard to sit tight before that loathsome, taunting half-smile. I looked down, away blotting him out.

He gave a sound half-way between a cough and a laugh, turned his head, and began talking down the table to Charles about the collection of quartz.

‘So sensible of you, my dear chap, to keep them all behind glass, though most tantalising to me from here. Is that a geode, on the middle shelf? The reflection, you know… I can’t quite see.’

‘Er…’ said Charles, not knowing any more than I did what a geode was. ‘I’m looking forward to showing them to you. After dinner, perhaps? Or tomorrow?’

‘Oh, tonight, I’d hate to postpone such a treat. Did you say that you had any felspar in your collection?’

‘No,’ said Charles uncertainly.

‘No, well, I can see it is a small specialised collection. Perhaps you are wise in sticking to silicon dioxide.’

Charles glibly launched into the cousinly-bequest alibi for ignorance, which Kraye accepted with courtesy and disappointment.

‘A fascinating subject, though, my dear Roland. It repays study. The earth beneath our feet, the fundamental sediment from the Triassic and Jurassic epochs, is our priceless inheritance, the source of all our life and power… There is nothing which interests me so much as land.’

Doria on my right gave the tiniest of snorts, which her husband didn’t hear. He was busy constructing another long, polysyllabic and largely unintelligible chat on the nature of the universe.

I sat unoccupied through the steaks, the meringue pudding, the cheese and the fruit. Conversations went on on either side of me and occasionally past me, but a deaf mute could have taken as much part as I did. Mrs van Dysart commented on the difficulties of feeding poor relations with delicate stomachs and choosey appetites. Charles neglected to tell her that I had been shot and wasn’t poor, but agreed that a weak digestion in dependants was a moral fault. Mrs van Dysart loved it. Doria occasionally looked at me as if I were an interesting specimen of low life. Rex van Dysart again offered me the bread; and that was that. Finally Viola shepherded Doria and Mrs van Dysart out to have coffee in the drawing-room and Charles offered his guests port and brandy. He passed me the brandy bottle with an air of irritation and compressed his lips in disapproval when I took some. It wasn’t lost on his guests.

After a while he rose, opened the glass bookcase doors, and showed the quartz to Kraye. Piece by piece the two discussed their way along the rows, with van Dysart standing beside them exhibiting polite interest and hiding his yawns of boredom. I stayed sitting down. I also helped myself to some more brandy.

Charles kept his end up very well and went through the whole lot without a mistake. He then transferred to the drawing-room, where his gem cabinet proved a great success. I tagged along, sat in an unobtrusive chair and listened to them all talking, but I came to no conclusions except that if I didn’t soon go upstairs I wouldn’t get there under my own steam. It was eleven o’clock and I had had a long day. Charles didn’t look round when I left the room.

Half an hour later, when his guests had come murmuring up to their rooms, he came quietly through my door and over to the bed. I was still lying on top in my shirt and trousers, trying to summon some energy to finish undressing.

He stood looking down at me, smiling.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘It is you,’ I said, ‘who is the dyed-in-the-wool, twenty-four carat, unmitigated bastard.’

He laughed. ‘I thought you were going to spoil the whole thing when you saw your picture had gone.’ He began taking off my shoes and socks. ‘You looked as bleak as the Bering Strait in December. Pyjamas?’

‘Under the pillow.’

He helped me undress in his quick neat naval fashion.

‘Why did you do it?’ I said.

He waited until I was lying between the sheets, then he perched on the edge of the bed.

‘Did you mind?’

‘Hell, Charles… of course. At first anyway.’

‘I’m afraid it came out beastlier than I expected, but I’ll tell you why I did it. Do you remember that first game of chess we had? When you beat me out of sight? You know why you won so easily?’

‘You weren’t paying enough attention.’

‘Exactly. I wasn’t paying enough attention, because I didn’t think you were an opponent worth bothering about. A bad tactical error.’ He grinned. ‘An admiral should know better. If you underrate a strong opponent you are at a disadvantage. If you grossly underrate him, if you are convinced he is of absolutely no account, you prepare no defence and are certain to be defeated.’ He paused for a moment, and went on. ‘It is therefore good strategy to delude the enemy into believing you are too weak to be considered. And that is what I was doing tonight on your behalf.’

He looked at me gravely. After some seconds I said, ‘At what game, exactly, do you expect me to play Howard Kraye?’

He sighed contentedly, and smiled. ‘Do you remember what he said interested him most?’

I thought back. ‘Land.’

Charles nodded. ‘Land. That’s right. He collects it. Chunks of it, yards of it, acres of it…’ He hesitated.

‘Well?’

‘You can play him,’ he said slowly, ‘for Seabury Racecourse.’

The enormity of it took my breath away.

‘What?’ I said incredulously. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m only…’

‘Shut up,’ he interrupted. ‘I don’t want to hear what you think you are only. You’re intelligent, aren’t you? You work for a detective agency? You wouldn’t want Seabury to close down? Why shouldn’t you do something about it?’

‘But I imagine he’s after some sort of take-over bid, from what you say. You want some powerful city chap or other to oppose him, not… me.’

‘He is very much on his guard against powerful chaps in the city, but wide open to you.’

I stopped arguing because the implications were pushing into the background my inadequacy for such a task.

‘Are you sure he is after Seabury?’ I asked.

‘Someone is,’ said Charles. ‘There has been a lot of buying and selling of the shares lately, and the price per share is up although they haven’t paid a dividend this year. The Clerk of the Course told me about it. He said that the directors are very worried. On paper, there is no great concentration of shares in any one name, but there wasn’t at Dunstable either. There, when it came to a vote on selling out to a land developer, they found that about twenty various nominees were in fact all agents for Kraye. He carried enough of the other shareholders with him, and the racecourse was lost to housing.’

‘It was all legal, though?’

‘A wangle; but legal, yes. And it looks like happening again.’

‘But what’s to stop him, if it’s legal?’

‘You might try.’

I stared at him in silence. He stood up and straightened the bedcover neatly. ‘It would be a pity if Seabury went the way of Dunstable.’ He went towards the door.

‘Where does van Dysart fit in?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, turning, ‘nowhere. I met them only a week or two ago. They’re on a visit from South Africa, and I was sure they wouldn’t know you. And it was Mrs van Dysart I wanted. She has a tongue like a rattlesnake. I knew she would help me tear you to pieces.’ He grinned. ‘She’ll give you a terrible week-end, I’m glad to say.’

‘Thanks very much,’ I said sarcastically.

‘I was a bit worried that Kraye would know you by sight,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But he obviously doesn’t, so that’s all right. And I didn’t mention your name tonight, as you probably noticed. I am being careful not to.’ He smiled. ‘And he doesn’t know my daughter married Sid Halley… I’ve given him several opportunities of mentioning it, because of course none of this would have been possible if he’d known, but he hasn’t responded at all. As far as Kraye is concerned,’ he finished with satisfaction, ‘you are a pathetic cypher.’

I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before? When you so carefully left me that book on company law for instance? Or at least this evening when I came back from seeing Andrews, so that I could have been prepared, at dinner?’

He opened the door and smiled across the room, his eyes blank again.

‘Sleep well,’ he said. ‘Good night, Sid.’

Charles took the two men out shooting the following morning, and Viola drove their wives into Oxford to do some shopping and visit an exhibition of Venetian glass. I took the opportunity of having a good look round the Krayes’ bedroom.

It wasn’t until I’d been there for more than ten minutes that it struck me that two years earlier I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing such a thing. Now I had done it as a matter of course, without thinking twice. I grinned sardonically. Evidently even in just sitting around in a detective agency one caught an attitude of mind. I realised, moreover, that I had instinctively gone about my search methodically and with a careful touch. In an odd way it was extremely disconcerting.

I wasn’t of course looking for anything special: just digging a little into the Krayes’ characters. I wouldn’t even concede in my own mind that I was interested in the challenge Charles had so elaborately thrown down. But all the same I searched, and thoroughly.

Howard Kraye slept in crimson pyjamas with his initials embroidered in white on the pocket. His dressing-gown was of crimson brocade with a black quilted collar and black tassels on the belt. His washing things, neatly arranged in a large fitted toilet case in the adjoining bathroom, were numerous and ornate. He used pine scented after-shave lotion, cologne friction rub, lemon hand cream, and an oily hair dressing, all from gold-topped cut-glass bottles. There were also medicated soap tablets, special formula toothpaste, talcum powder in a gilt container, deodorant, and a supersonic looking electric razor. He wore false teeth and had a spare set. He had brought a half full tin of laxatives, some fruit salts, a bottle of mouth wash, some antiseptic foot powder, penicillin throat lozenges, a spot sealing stick, digestive tablets and an eye bath. The body beautiful, in and out.

All his clothes, down to his vests and pants, had been made to measure, and he had brought enough to cover every possibility of a country week-end. I went through the pockets of his dinner-jacket and the three suits hanging beside it, but he was a tidy man and they were all empty, except for a nail file in each breast pocket. His six various pairs of shoes were hand-made and nearly new. I looked into each shoe separately, but except for trees they were all empty.

In a drawer I found neatly arranged his stock of ties, handkerchiefs, and socks: all expensive. A heavy chased silver box contained cuff links, studs, and tie pins; mostly of gold. He had avoided jewels, but one attractive pair of cuff links was made from pieces of what I now knew enough to identify as tiger-eye. The backs of his hairbrushes were beautiful slabs of the gem stone, smoky quartz. A few brown and grey hairs were lodged in between the bristles.

There remained only his luggage, four lavish suitcases standing in a neat row beside the wardrobe. I opened each one. They were all empty except for the smallest, which contained a brown calf attaché case. I looked at it carefully before I touched it, but as Kraye didn’t seem to have left any tell-tales like hairs or pieces of cotton attached, I lifted it out and put it on one of the beds. It was locked, but I had learnt how to deal with such drawbacks. A lugubrious ex-police sergeant on Radnor’s payroll gave me progressively harder lessons in lock-picking every time he came into the office between jobs, moaning all the while about the damage the London soot did to his chrysanthemums. My one-handedness he had seen only as a challenge, and had invented a couple of new techniques and instruments entirely for my benefit. Recently he had presented me with a collection of fine delicate keys which he had once removed from a burglar, and had bullied me until I carried them with me everywhere. They were in my room. I went and fetched them and without much trouble opened the case.

It was as meticulously tidy as everything else, and I was particularly careful not to alter the position or order of any of the papers. There were several letters from a stockbroker, a bunch of share transfer certificates, various oddments, and a series of typed sheets, headed with the previous day’s date, which were apparently an up to the minute analysis of his investments. He seemed to be a rich man and to do a good deal of buying and selling. He had money in oils, mines, property and industrial stocks. There was also a sheet headed simply S.R., on which every transaction was a purchase. Against each entry was a name and the address of a bank. Some names occurred three or four times, some only once.

Underneath the papers lay a large thick brown envelope inside which were two packets of new ten pound notes. I didn’t count, but there couldn’t have been fewer than a hundred of them. The envelope was at the bottom of the case, except for a writing board with slightly used white blotting paper held by crocodile and gold corners. I pulled up the board and found underneath it two more sheets of paper, both covered with dates, initials, and sums of money.

I let the whole lot fall back into place, made sure that everything looked exactly as I had found it, relocked the case, and put it back into its covering suitcase.

The divine Doria, I found, was far from being as tidy as her husband. All her things were in a glorious jumble, which made leaving them undisturbed a difficult job, but also meant that she would be less likely than her husband to notice if anything were slightly out of place.

Her clothes, though they looked and felt expensive, were bought ready-made and casually treated. Her washing things consisted of a plastic zipped case, a flannel, a tooth brush, bath essence, and a puffing bottle of talc. Almost stark beside Howard’s collection. No medicine. She appeared to wear nothing in bed, but a pretty white quilted dressing-gown hung half off a hanger behind the bathroom door.

She had not completely unpacked. Suitcases propped on chairs and stools still held stirred-up underclothes and various ultra feminine equipment which I hadn’t seen since Jenny left.

The top of the dressing-table, though the daily seemed to have done her best to dust it, was an expensive chaos. Pots of cosmetics, bottles of scent and hair spray stood on one side, a box of tissues, a scarf, and the cluttered tray out of the top of a dressing-case filled the other. The dressing-case itself, of crocodile with gold clips, stood on the floor. I picked it up and put it on the bed. It was locked. I unlocked it, and looked inside.

Doria was quite a girl. She possessed two sets of false eyelashes, spare finger nails, and a hair piece on a tortoiseshell headband. Her big jewel case, the one tidy thing in her whole luggage, contained on the top layer the sapphire and diamond earrings she had worn the previous evening, along with a diamond sunburst brooch and a sapphire ring; and on the lower layer a second necklace, bracelet, earrings, brooch and ring all of gold, platinum, and citrine. The yellow jewels were uncommon, barbaric in design, and had no doubt been made especially for her.

Under the jewel case were four paper-back novels so pornographic in content as to raise doubts about Kraye’s ability as a lover. Jenny had held that a truly satisfied woman didn’t need to read dirty sex. Doria clearly did.

Alongside the books was a thick leather covered diary to which the beautiful Mrs Kraye had confided the oddest thoughts. Her life seemed to be as untidy as her clothes, a mixture of ordinary social behaviour, dream fantasy and a perverted marriage relationship. If the diary were to be believed, she and Howard obtained deeper pleasure, both of them, from him beating her, than from the normal act of love. Well, I reflected, at least they were well matched. Some of the divorces which Hunt Radnor Associates dealt with arose because one partner alone was pain fixated, the other being revolted.

At the bottom of the case were two other objects of interest. First, coiled in a brown velvet bag, the sort of leather strap used by schoolmasters, at whose purpose, in view of the diary, it was easy to guess; and second, in a chocolate box, a gun.