Odds against

SEVEN

‘Chico,’ I said. ‘How would you overturn a lorry on a pre-determined spot?’

‘Huh? That’s easy. All you’d need would be some heavy lifting gear. A big hydraulic jack. A crane. Anything like that.’

‘How long would it take?’

‘You mean, supposing the lorry and the crane were both in position?’

‘Yes.’

‘Only a minute or two. What sort of lorry?’

‘A tanker.’

‘A petrol job?’

‘A bit smaller than the petrol tankers. More the size of milk ones.’

‘Easy as kiss your hand. They’ve got a low centre of gravity, mind. It’d need a good strong lift. But dead easy, all the same.’

I turned to Dolly. ‘Is Chico busy today, or could you spare him?’

Dolly leaned forward, chewing the end of a pencil and looking at her day’s chart. The cross-over blouse did its stuff.

‘I could send someone else to Kempton…’ She caught the direction of my eyes and laughed, and retreated a whole half inch. ‘Yes, you can have him.’ She gave him a fond glance.

‘Chico,’ I said. ‘Go down to Seabury and see if you can find any trace of heavy lifting gear having been seen near the racecourse last Friday… those little bungalows are full of people with nothing to do but watch the world go by… you might check whether anything was hired locally, but I suppose that’s a bit much to hope for. The road would have to have been closed for a few minutes before the tanker went over, I should think. See if you can find anyone who noticed anything like that… detour signs, for instance. And after that, go to the council offices and see what you can dig up among their old maps on the matter of drains.’ I told him the rough position of the subsiding trench which had made a slaughterhouse of the hurdle race, so that he should know what to look for on the maps. ‘And be discreet.’

‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ he grinned.

‘Our quarry is rough.’

‘And you don’t want him to hear us creep up behind him?’

‘Quite right.’

‘Little Chico,’ he said truthfully, ‘can take care of himself.’

After he had gone I telephoned Lord Hagbourne and described to him in no uncertain terms the state of Seabury’s turf.

‘What they need is some proper earth moving equipment, fast, and apparently there’s nothing in the kitty to pay for it. Couldn’t the Levy Board…?’

‘The Levy Board is no fairy godmother,’ he interrupted. ‘But I’ll see what can be done. Less than half cleared, you say? Hmm. However, I understand that Captain Oxon assured Weatherbys that the course would be ready for the next meeting. Has he changed his mind?’

‘I didn’t see him, sir. He was away for the day.’

‘Oh.’ Lord Hagbourne’s voice grew a shade cooler. ‘Then he didn’t ask you to enlist my help?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t see that I can interfere then. As racecourse manager it is his responsibility to decide what can be done and what can’t, and I think it must be left like that. Mm, yes. And of course he will consult the Clerk of the Course if he needs advice.’

‘The Clerk of the Course is Mr Fotherton, who lives in Bristol. He is Clerk of the Course there, too, and he’s busy with the meetings there tomorrow and Monday.’

‘Er, yes, so he is.’

‘You could ring Captain Oxon up in an informal way and just ask how the work is getting on,’ I suggested.

‘I don’t know…’

‘Well, sir, you can take my word for it that if things dawdle on at the same rate down there, there won’t be any racing at Seabury next week-end. I don’t think Captain Oxon can realise just how slowly those men are digging.’

‘He must do,’ he protested. ‘He assured Weatherbys…’

‘Another last minute cancellation will kill Seabury off,’ I said with some force.

There was a moment’s pause. Then he said reluctantly, ‘Yes, I suppose it might. All right then. I’ll ask Captain Oxon and Mr Fotherton if they are both satisfied with the way things are going.’

And I couldn’t pin him down to any more direct action than that, which was certainly not going to be enough. Protocol would be the death of Seabury, I thought.

Monopolising Dolly’s telephone, I next rang up the Epping police and spoke to Chief-Inspector Cornish.

‘Any more news about Andrews?’ I asked.

‘I suppose you have a reasonable personal interest.’ His chuckle came down the wire. ‘We found he did have a sister after all. We called her at the inquest yesterday for identification purposes as she is a relative, but if you ask me she didn’t really know. She took one look at the bits in the mortuary and was sick on the floor.’

‘Poor girl, you couldn’t blame her.’

‘No. She didn’t look long enough though to identify anyone. But we had your identification for sure, so we hadn’t the heart to make her go in again.’

‘How did he die? Did you find out?’

‘Indeed we did. He was shot in the back. The bullet ricocheted off a rib and lodged in the sternum. We got the experts to compare it with the one they dug out of the wall of your office. Your bullet was a bit squashed by the hard plaster, but there’s no doubt that they are the same. He was killed with the gun he used on you.’

‘And was it there, underneath him?’

‘Not a sign of it. They brought in “murder by persons unknown”. And between you and me, that’s how it’s likely to stay. We haven’t a lead to speak of.’

‘What lead do you have?’ I asked.

His voice had a smile in it. ‘Only something his sister told us. She has a bedsitter in Islington, and he spent the evening there before breaking into your place. He showed her the gun. She says he was proud of having it; apparently he was a bit simple. All he told her was that a big chap had lent it to him to go out and fetch something, and he was to shoot anyone who got in his way. She didn’t believe him. She said he was always making things up, always had, all his life. So she didn’t ask him anything about the big chap, or about where he was going, or anything at all.’

‘A bit casual,’ I said. ‘With a loaded gun under her nose.’

‘According to the neighbours she was more interested in a stream of men friends than in anything her brother did.’

‘Sweet people, neighbours.’

‘You bet. Anyway we checked with anyone we could find who had seen Andrews the week he shot you, and he hadn’t said a word to any of them about a gun or a “big chap”, or an errand in Cromwell Road.’

‘He didn’t go back to his sister afterwards?’

‘No, she’d told him she had a guest coming.’

‘At one in the morning? The neighbours must be right. You tried the racecourses, of course? Andrews is quite well known there, as a sort of spivvy odd-job messenger boy.’

‘Yes, we mainly tried the racecourses. No results. Everyone seemed surprised that such a harmless person should have been murdered.’

‘Harmless!’

He laughed. ‘If you hadn’t thought him harmless, you’d have kept out of his way.’

‘You’re so right,’ I said with feeling. ‘But now I see a villain in every respectable citizen. It’s very disturbing.’

‘Most of them are villains, in one way or another,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Keeps us busy. By the way, what do you think of Sparkle’s chances this year in the Hennessy…?’

When eventually I put the telephone down Dolly grabbed it with a sarcastic ‘Do you mind?’ and asked the switchboard girl to get her three numbers in a row, ‘without interruptions from Halley’. I grinned, got the packet of photographs out of the plywood table drawer, and looked through them again. They didn’t tell me any more than before. Ellis Bolt’s letters to Kraye. Now you see it, now you don’t. A villain in every respectable citizen. Play it secretly, I thought, close to the chest, in case the eyes looking over your shoulder give you away. I wondered why I was so oppressed by a vague feeling of apprehension, and decided in irritation that a bullet in the stomach had made me nervous.

When Dolly finished her calls I took the receiver out of her hand and got through to my bank manager.

‘Mr Hopper? This is Sid Halley… yes, fine thanks, and you? Good. Now, would you tell me just how much I have in both my accounts, deposit and current?’

‘They’re quite healthy, actually,’ he said in his gravelly bass voice. ‘You’ve had several dividends in lately. Hang on a minute, and I’ll send for the exact figures.’ He spoke to someone in the background and then came back. ‘It’s time you re-invested some of it.’

‘I do have some investments in mind,’ I agreed. ‘That’s what I want to discuss with you. I’m planning to buy some shares this time from another stockbroker, not through the bank. Er… please don’t think that I’m dissatisfied; how could I be, when you’ve done so well for me. It’s something to do with my work at the agency.’

‘Say no more. What exactly do you want?’

‘Well, to give you as a reference,’ I said. ‘He’s sure to want one, but I would be very grateful if you would make it as impersonal and as strictly financial as possible. Don’t mention either my past occupation or my present one. That’s very important.’

‘I won’t, then. Anything else?’

‘Nothing… oh, yes. I’ve introduced myself to him as John Halley. Would you refer to me like that if he gets in touch with you?’

‘Right. I’ll look forward to hearing from you one day what it’s all about. Why don’t you come in and see me? I’ve some very good cigars.’ The deep voice was amused. ‘Ah, here are the figures…’ He told me the total, which for once was bigger than I expected. That happy state of affairs wouldn’t last very long, I reflected, if I had to live for two years without any salary from Radnor. And no one’s fault but my own.

Giving Dolly back her telephone with an ironic bow, I went upstairs to Bona Fides. Jack Copeland’s mud coloured jersey had a dark blue darn on the chest and a fraying stretch of ribbing on the hip. He was picking at a loose thread and making it worse.

‘Anything on Kraye yet?’ I asked. ‘Or is it too early?’

‘George has got something on the prelim, I think,’ he answered. ‘Anybody got any scissors?’ A large area of jersey disintegrated into ladders. ‘Blast.’

Laughing, I went over to George’s desk. The prelim was a sheet of handwritten notes in George’s concertinaed style. ‘Leg mat, 2 yrs. 2 prev, 1 div, 1 sui dec.’ it began, followed by a list of names and dates.

‘Oh, yeah?’I said.

‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘Kraye was legally married to Doria Dawn, née Easterman, two years ago. Before that he had two other wives. One killed herself; the other divorced him for cruelty.’ He pointed to the names and dates.

‘So clear,’ I agreed. ‘When you know how.’

‘If you weren’t so impatient you’d have a legible typed report. But as you’re here…’ He went on down the page, pointing. ‘Geologists think him a bit eccentric… quartz has no intrinsic value, most of it’s much too common, except for the gem stones, but Kraye goes round trying to buy chunks of it if they take his fancy. They know him quite well along the road at the Geology Museum. But not a breath of any dirty work. Clubs… he belongs to these three, not over-liked, but most members think he’s a brilliant fellow, talks very well. He gambles at Crockfords, ends up about all square over the months. He travels, always first-class, usually by boat, not air. No job or profession, can’t trace him on any professional or university lists. Thought to live on investments, playing the stock market, etc. Not much liked, but considered by most a clever, cultured man, by one or two a hypocritical gasbag.’

‘No talk of him being crooked in any way?’

‘Not a word. You want him dug deeper?’

‘If you can do it without him finding out.’

George nodded. ‘Do you want him tailed?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Not at present.’ A twenty-four-hour tail was heavy on man-power and expensive to the client, quite apart from the risk of the quarry noticing and being warned of the hunt. ‘Anything on his early life?’ I asked.

George shook his head. ‘Nothing. Nobody who knows him now has known him longer than about ten years. He either wasn’t born in Britain, or his name at birth wasn’t Kraye. No known relatives.’

‘You’ve done marvels, George. All this in one day.’

‘Contacts, chum, contacts. A lot of phoning, a bit of pubbing, a touch of gossip with the local tradesmen… nothing to it.’

Jack, moodily poking his fingers through the cobweb remains of his jersey, looked at me over the half-moon specs and said that there wasn’t a prelim on Bolt yet because ex-sergeant Carter, who was working on it, hadn’t phoned in.

‘If he does,’ I said, ‘let me know? I’ve an appointment with Bolt at three thirty. It would be handy to know the set-up before I go.’

‘O.K.’

After that I went down and looked out of the windows of the Racing Section for half an hour, idly watching life go by in the Cromwell Road and wondering just what sort of mess I was making of the Kraye investigation. A novice chaser in the Grand National, I thought wryly; that was me. Though, come to think of it, I had once ridden a novice in the National, and got round, too. Slightly cheered, I took Dolly out to a drink and a sandwich in the snack bar at the Air Terminal, where we sat and envied the people starting off on their travels. So much expectation in the faces, as if they could fly away and leave their troubles on the ground. An illusion, I thought sourly. Your troubles flew with you; a drag in the mind… a deformity in the pocket.

I laughed and joked with Dolly, as usual. What else can you do?

The firm of Charing, Street and King occupied two rooms in a large block of offices belonging to a bigger firm, and consisted entirely of Bolt, his clerk and a secretary.

I was shown the door of the secretary’s office, and went into a dull, tidy, fog-coloured box of a room with cold fluorescent lighting and a close-up view of the fire-escape through the grimy window. A woman sat at a desk by the right hand wall, facing the window, with her back towards me. A yard behind her chair was a door with ELLIS BOLT painted on a frosted glass panel. It occurred to me that she was most awkwardly placed in the room, but that perhaps she liked sitting in a potential draught and having to turn round every time someone came in.

She didn’t turn round, however. She merely moved her head round a fraction towards me and said ‘Yes?’

‘I have an appointment with Mr Bolt,’ I said. ‘At three thirty.’

‘Oh, yes, you must be Mr Halley. Do sit down. I’ll see if Mr Bolt is free now.’

She pointed to an easy chair a step ahead of me, and flipped a switch on her desk. While I listened to her telling Mr Bolt I was there, in the quiet voice I had heard on the telephone, I had time to see she was in her late thirties, slender, upright in her chair, with a smooth wing of straight, dark hair falling down beside her cheek. If anything, it was too young a hair style for her. There were no rings on her fingers, and no nail varnish either. Her clothes were dark and uninteresting. It seemed as though she were making a deliberate attempt to be unattractive, yet her profile, when she half turned and told me Mr Bolt would see me, was pleasant enough. I had a glimpse of one brown eye quickly cast down, the beginning of a smile on pale lips, and she presented me again squarely with the back of her head.

Puzzled, I opened Ellis Bolt’s door and walked in. The inner office wasn’t much more inspiring than the outer; it was larger and there was a new green square of carpet on the linoleum, but the greyish walls pervaded, along with the tidy dullness. Through the two windows was a more distant view of the fire-escape of the building across the alley. If a drab conventional setting equalled respectability, Bolt was an honest stockbroker; and Carter, who had phoned in just before I left, had found nothing to suggest otherwise.

Bolt was on his feet behind his desk, hand outstretched. I shook it, he gestured me to a chair with arms, and offered me a cigarette.

‘No, thank you, I don’t smoke.’

‘Lucky man,’ he said benignly, tapping ash off one he was half through, and settling his pin-striped bulk back into his chair.

His face was rounded at every point, large round nose, round cheeks, round heavy chin: no planes, no impression of bone structure underneath. He had exceptionally heavy eyebrows, a full mobile mouth, and a smug self-satisfied expression.

‘Now, Mr Halley, I believe in coming straight to the point. What can I do for you?’

He had a mellifluous voice, and he spoke as if he enjoyed the sound of it.

I said, ‘An aunt has given me some money now rather than leave it to me in her will, and I want to invest it.’

‘I see. And what made you come to me? Did someone recommend…?’ He tailed off, watching me with eyes that told me he was no fool.

‘I’m afraid…’ I hesitated, smiling apologetically to take the offence out of the words, ‘that I literally picked you with a pin. I don’t know any stockbrokers. I didn’t know how to get to know one, so I picked up a classified directory and stuck a pin into the list of names, and it was yours.’

‘Ah,’ he said paternally, observing the bad fit of Chico’s second best suit, which I had borrowed for the occasion, and listening to me reverting to the accent of my childhood.

‘Can you help me?’ I asked.

‘I expect so, I expect so. How much is this er, gift?’ His voice was minutely patronising, his manner infinitesimally bored. His time, he suspected, was being wasted.

‘Fifteen hundred pounds.’

He brightened a very little. ‘Oh, yes, definitely, we can do something with that. Now, do you want growth mainly or a high rate of yield?’

I looked vague. He told me quite fairly the difference between the two, and offered no advice.

‘Growth, then,’ I said, tentatively. ‘Turn it into a fortune in time for my old age.’

He smiled without much mirth, and drew a sheet of paper towards him.

‘Could I have your full name?’

‘John Halley… John Sidney Halley,’ I said truthfully. He wrote it down.

‘Address?’ I gave it.

‘And your bank?’ I told him that too.

‘And I’ll need a reference, I’m afraid.’

‘Would the bank manager do?’ I asked. ‘I’ve had an account there for two years… he knows me quite well.’

‘Excellent.’ He screwed up his pen. ‘Now, do you have any idea what companies you’d like shares in, or will you leave it to me?’

‘Oh, I’ll leave it to you. If you don’t mind, that is. I don’t know anything about it, you see, not really. Only it seems silly to leave all that money around doing nothing.’

‘Quite, quite.’ He was bored with me. I thought with amusement that Charles would appreciate my continuing his strategy of the weak front. ‘Tell me, Mr Halley, what do you do for a living?’

‘Oh… um… I work in a shop,’ I said. ‘In the men’s wear. Very interesting, it is.’

‘I’m sure it is.’ There was a yawn stuck in his throat.

‘I’m hoping to be made an assistant buyer next year,’ I said eagerly.

‘Splendid. Well done.’ He’d had enough. He got cum-brously to his feet and ushered me to the door. ‘All right, Mr Halley, I’ll invest your money safely for you in good long term growth stock, and send you the papers to sign in due course. You’ll hear from me in a week or ten days. All right?’

‘Yes, Mr Bolt, thank you very much indeed,’ I said respectfully. He shut the door gently behind me.

There were now two people in the outer office. The woman with her back still turned, and a spare, middle-aged man with a primly folded mouth, and tough stringy tendons pushing his collar away from his neck. He was quite at home, and with an incurious, unhurried glance at me he went past into Bolt’s office. The clerk, I presumed.

The woman was typing addresses on envelopes. The twenty or so that she had done lay in a slithery stack on her left: on her right an open file provided a list of names. I looked over her shoulder casually, and then with quickened interest. She was working down the first page of a list of Seabury shareholders.

‘Do you want something, Mr Halley?’ she asked politely, pulling one envelope from the typewriter and inserting another with a minimum of flourish.

‘Well, er, yes,’ I said diffidently. I walked round to the side of her desk and found that one couldn’t go on round to the front of it: a large old fashioned table with bulbous legs filled all the space between the desk and the end of the room. I looked at this arrangement with some sort of understanding and with compassion.

‘I wondered,’ I said, ‘if you could be very kind and tell me something about investing money, and so on. I didn’t like to ask Mr Bolt too much, he’s a busy man. And I’d like to know a bit about it.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Halley.’ Her head was turned away from me, bent over the Seabury investors. ‘I’ve a job to do, as you see. Why don’t you read the financial columns in the papers, or get a book on the subject?’

I had a book all right. Outline of Company Law. One thing I had learned from it was that only stockbrokers — apart from the company involved — could send circulars to shareholders. It was illegal if private citizens did it. Illegal for Kraye to send letters to Seabury shareholders offering to buy them out: legal for Bolt.

‘Books aren’t as good as people at explaining things,’ I said. ‘If you are busy now, could I come back when you’ve finished work and take you out for a meal? I’d be so grateful if you would, if you possibly could.’

A sort of shudder shook her. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Halley, but I’m afraid I can’t.’

‘If you will look at me, so that I can see all of your face,’ I said, ‘I will ask you again.’

Her head went up with a jerk at that, but finally she turned round and looked at me.

I smiled. ‘That’s better. Now, how about coming out with me this evening?’

‘You guessed?’

I nodded. ‘The way you’ve got your furniture organised… Will you come?’

‘You still want to?’

‘Well, of course. What time do you finish?’

‘About six, tonight.’

‘I’ll come back. I’ll meet you at the door, down in the street.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you really mean it, thank you. I’m not doing anything else tonight…’

Years of hopeless loneliness showed raw in the simple words. Not doing anything else, tonight or most nights. Yet her face wasn’t horrific; not anything as bad as I had been prepared for. She had lost an eye, and wore a false one. There had been some extensive burns and undoubtedly some severe fracture of the facial bones, but plastic surgery had repaired the damage to a great extent, and it had all been a long time ago. The scars were old. It was the inner wound which hadn’t healed.

Well… I knew a bit about that myself, on a smaller scale.