Risk

12

They took a good long while getting me out, because, as the disembodied voice explained, they would have to take photographs and notes for use in any future prosecution. Also there was the matter of fingerprints, which would mean further delay.

‘And we can’t get you out without moving the van, you see, sir,’ said the voice. ‘On account of it’s backed hard up against a brick pillar, and we can’t open the rear doors. On top of that the driving cab doors are both locked, and the brake’s hard on, and there’s no key in the ignition. So if you’ll be patient, sir, we’ll have you out as soon as we can.’

He sounded as if he were reassuring a small child who might scream the place down at any minute, but I found it easy to be patient, if only he knew.

There were several voices outside after a while, and from time to time they asked me if I was all right, and I said yes; and in the end they started the van’s engine and drove it forward a few feet, and pulled off the canvas cover.

The return of sight was extraordinary. The two small windows appeared as oblongs of grey, and I had difficulty in focusing. A face looked in, roundly healthy, enquiring and concerned, topped by a uniform cap.

‘Have you out in a jiffy now, sir,’ he said. ‘We’re having a bit of difficulty with these doors, see, as the handle’s been sabotaged.’

‘Fine,’ I said vaguely. The light was still pretty dim, but to me a luxury like no other on earth. A half-forgotten joy, newly discovered. Like meeting a dead friend. Familiar, lost, precious, and restored.

I sat on the floor and looked around my prison. It was smaller than I’d imagined: cramped and claustrophobic, now that I could see the grey enclosing walls.

The jerry-can of water was of white plastic, with a red cap. The carrier was brown, as I’d imagined it. The little calendar stack of five empty packets lay in its corner, and the hardening pieces of cheese from my counting machine, in another. There was nothing else, except me and dust.

They opened the doors eventually and helped me out, and then took notes and photographs of where I’d been. I stood a pace or two away and looked curiously at my surroundings.

The van was indeed the white one from Cheltenham, or one exactly like. An old Ford. No tax disc, and no numberplates. The canvas which had covered it was a huge dirty dark grey tarpaulin, the sort used for sheeting loads on lorries. The van had been wrapped in it like a parcel, and tied with ropes threaded through eyelets in the tarpaulin’s edges.

The van, the police and I were all inside a building of about a hundred feet square. All round the walls rose huge lumpy heaps of dust-covered unidentifiable bundles, grey shapes of boxes and things that looked like sandbags. Some of the piles reached the low flat ceiling, which was supported at strategic points by four sturdy brick pillars.

It was against one of these, in the small clear area in the centre, that the van had been jammed.

‘What is this place?’ I said to the policeman beside me.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ he said. He shivered slightly. ‘It’s cold in here.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where exactly are we?’

‘It used to be one of those army surplus stores, selling stuff to the public. Went bust a while back, though, and no one’s ever shifted all the muck.’

‘Oh. Well... whereabouts is it?’

‘Down one of those tracks beside what used to be the railway branch line, before they closed it.’

‘Yes,’ I said apologetically. ‘But what town?’

‘Eh?’ He looked at me in surprise. ‘Newbury, of course, sir.’

The town clocks pointed to five o’clock when the police drove me down to the station. My body’s own time had proved remarkably constant, I thought. Much better than on the boat, where noise and tossing and sickness had upset things.

I was given a chair in the office of one of the same policemen as before, who showed no regrets at having earlier thought I was exaggerating.

‘How did you find me?’ I said.

He tapped his teeth with a pencil, a hard-working Detective-Inspector with an air of suspecting the innocent until they were found guilty.

‘Scotland Yard had a call,’ he said grudgingly. ‘We’ll want a statement from you, sir, if you don’t mind.’

‘A cup of tea first,’ I suggested.

His gaze wandered over my face and clothes. I must have looked a wreck. He came somewhere near a smile, and sent a young constable on the errand.

The tea tasted marvellous, though I daresay it wasn’t. I drank it slowly and told him fairly briefly what had happened.

‘So you didn’t see their faces at all, this time?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Pity.’

‘Do you think,’ I said tentatively, ‘that someone could drive me back to the motel, so I can collect my car?’

‘No need, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s parked beside your cottage.’

‘What?’

He nodded. ‘With a lot of your possessions in it. Suitcase. Wallet. Shoes. Keys. All in the boot. Your assistants notified us on Monday that you were missing again. We sent a man along to your cottage. He reported your car was there, but you weren’t. We did what you asked, sir. We did look for you. The whole country’s been looking for you, come to that. The motel rang us yesterday to say you’d booked in there last Saturday but hadn’t used the room, but apart from that there was nothing to go on. No trace at all. We thought you might have been taken off on another boat, to be frank.’

I finished the tea, and thanked him for it.

‘Will you run me back to the cottage, then?’

He thought it could be arranged. He came with me out to the entrance hall, to fix it.

A large man with an over-anxious expression came bustling in from the street, swinging the door wide and assessing rapidly the direction from which he would get most satisfaction. My partner at his most bombastic, his deep voice echoing round the hall as he demanded information.

‘Hello, Trevor,’ I said. ‘Take it easy.’

He stopped in mid-commotion, and stared at me as if I were an intrusive stranger. Then he recognised me, and took in my general appearance, and his face went stiff with shock.

‘Ro!’ He seemed to have trouble with his voice. ‘Ro, my dear fellow. My dear fellow. I’ve just heard... My God, Ro...’

I sighed. ‘Calm down, Trevor. All I need is a razor.’

‘But you’re so thin.’ His eyes were appalled. I reflected that I was probably a good deal thinner than when he’d seen me last, some time in the dim, distant, and safe past.

‘Mr King has been bombarding us all day,’ said the Detective Inspector with a touch of impatience.

‘My dear Ro, you must come back with me. We’ll look after you. My God, Ro...’

I shook my head. ‘I’m fine, Trevor. I’m grateful to you, but I’d really rather go home.’

‘Alone?’ he said anxiously. ‘Suppose... I mean... do you think it’s safe?’

‘Oh yes,’ I nodded. ‘Whoever put me in, let me out. It’s all over, I think.’

‘What’s all over?’

‘That,’ I said soberly, ‘is a whole new ball game.’

The cottage embraced me like a balm.

I had a bath, and shaved, and a grey face of gaunt shadows looked at me out of the mirror. No wonder Trevor had been shocked. Just as well, I thought, that he hadn’t seen the black and yellow blotches of fading bruises which covered me from head to foot.

I shrugged, and thought the same as before: nothing that a few days’ freedom wouldn’t fix. I put on jeans and a jersey and went downstairs in search of a large Scotch, and that was the last peaceful moment of the evening.

The telephone rang non-stop. Reporters, to my amazement, arrived at the doorstep. A television camera appeared. When they saw I was astounded, they said hadn’t I read the papers.

‘What papers?’

They produced them, and spread them out.

The Sporting Life: headline on Tuesday: ‘Where is Roland Britten?’ followed by an article about my sea trip, as told by me to friends. I had not been seen since Towcester. Friends were worried.

On Wednesday, paragraphs in all the dailies: ‘Tapestry’s rider again missing’ in one of the staider, and ‘Fun Jock Twice Removed?’ from a tits-and-bums.

Thursday — that day — many front pages carried a broadly smiling picture of me, taken five minutes after the Gold Cup. ‘Find Roland Britten’ ordered one, and ‘Fears for Jockey’s Life’ gloomed another. I glanced over them in amazement, remembering ironically that I’d been afraid no one would really look for me at all.

The telephone rang beside my hand. I picked up the receiver and said hello.

‘Ro? Is that you?’ The voice was fresh and unmistakable.

‘Jossie!’

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘Have dinner with me tomorrow, and I’ll tell you.’

‘Pick me up at eight,’ she said. ‘What’s all that noise?’

‘I’m pressed by Press,’ I said. ‘Journalists.’

‘Good grief.’ She laughed. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, fine.’

‘It was on the news, that you’d been found.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Big stuff, buddy boy.’ The mockery was loud and clear.

‘Did you start it... all this publicity?’ I said.

‘Not me, no. Moira Longerman. Mrs Tapestry. She tried to get you Sunday, and she tried your office on Monday, and they told her you were missing, and they thought you might have been kidnapped again, so she rang up the editor of The Sporting Life, who’s a friend of hers, to ask him to help.’

‘A determined lady,’ I said gratefully.

‘She didn’t run Tapestry yesterday, you know. There’s a sobstuff bit in The Sporting Life. “How can I run my horse while Roland is missing” and all that guff. Fair turns your stomach.’

‘Fair turned Binny Tomkins’s, I’ll bet.’

She laughed. ‘I can hear the wolves howling for you. See you tomorrow. Don’t vanish before eight.’

I put the telephone down, but the wolves had to wait a little longer, as the bell immediately rang again.

Moira Longerman, excited and twittering, coming down the wire like an electric current.

‘Thank heavens you’re free. Isn’t it marvellous? Are you all right? Can you ride Tapestry on Saturday? Do tell me all about the horrible place where they found you... and Roland, dear, I don’t want you listening to a word Binny Tomkins says about you not being fit to ride after all you’ve been through.’

‘Moira,’ I said, vainly trying to stop the flow. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘it was rather fun, getting everyone mobilised. Of course I was truly dreadfully worried that something awful had happened to you, and it was quite clear that somebody had to do something, otherwise you might stay kidnapped for weeks, and it seemed to me that a jolly good fuss was what was wanted. I thought that if the whole country was looking for you, whoever had taken you might get cold feet and turn you loose, and that’s precisely what happened, so I was right and the silly police were all wrong.’

‘What silly police?’ I said.

‘Telling me I might have put you in danger by getting The Sporting Life to say you’d vanished again. I ask you! They said if kidnappers get panicky they could kill their victim. Anyway, they were wrong, weren’t they?’

‘Fortunately,’ I agreed.

‘So do tell me all about it,’ she said. ‘Is it true you were shut up in a van? What was it like?’

‘Boring,’ I said.

‘Roland, really. Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘I thought about you all day on Wednesday, imagining you’d be furious when I didn’t turn up at Ascot.’

‘That’s better.’ She laughed her tinkly laugh. ‘You can make up for it on Saturday. Tapestry’s in the Oasthouse Cup at Kempton, though of course he’s got top weight there, which was why we wanted to run at Ascot instead. But now we’re going to Kempton.’

‘I’m afraid...’ I said, ‘that Binny’s right. This time, I’m really not fit enough. I’d love to ride him, but... well... at the moment I couldn’t go two rounds with a kitten.’

There was a short silence at the other end.

‘Do you mean it?’ she demanded doubtfully.

‘I hate to say so, but I do.’

The doubt in her voice subsided. ‘I’m sure you’ll be a hundred per cent after a good night’s sleep. After all, you’ll have nearly two days to recover, and even Binny admits you’re pretty tough as amateurs go... so please, Roland, please ride on Saturday, because the horse is jumping out of his skin, and the opposition is not so strong as it will be in the Whitbread Gold Cup in two weeks’ time, and I feel in my bones that he’ll win this race but not the other. And I don’t want Binny putting up any other jockey, as to be frank I only trust you, which you know. So please say you will. I was so thrilled when I heard you were free, so that you could ride on Saturday.’

I rubbed my hand across my eyes. I knew I shouldn’t agree, and that I was highly unlikely to be fit enough even to walk the course on my feet, let alone control half a ton of thoroughbred muscle on the rampage. Yet to her, if I refused, it would seem like gross ingratitude after her lively campaign to free me, and I too suspected that if Tapestry started favourite with a different jockey of Binny’s choice, he wouldn’t win. There was also the insidious old desire to race which raised its head in defiance of common sense. Reason told me I’d fall off from weakness at the first fence, and the irresistible temptation of a go at another of the season’s top ’chases kidded me not to believe it.

‘Well...’ I said, hesitating.

‘Oh, you will,’ she said delightedly. ‘Oh Roland, I’m so glad.’

‘I shouldn’t.’

‘If you don’t win,’ she said gaily, ‘I promise I won’t blame you.’

I’d blame myself, I thought, and I’d deserve it.

I went to the office at nine the next morning, and Trevor fussed about a great deal too much.

‘You need rest, Ro. You should be in bed.’

‘I need people and life and things to do.’

He sat in the clients’ armchair in my office and looked worried. The sun-tan of his holiday suited him, increasing his air of distinction. His silvery hair was fluffier than usual, and his comfortable stomach looked rounder.

‘Did you have a good time,’ I said, ‘in Spain?’

‘What? Oh yes, splendid. Splendid. Until the car broke down, of course. And all the time, while we were enjoying ourselves, you...’ He stopped and shook his head.

‘I’m afraid,’ I said wryly. ‘That I’m dreadfully behind with the work.’

‘For heaven’s sake...’

‘I’ll try to catch up,’ I said.

‘I wish you’d take it easy for a few days.’ He looked as if he meant it, his eyes full of troubled concern. ‘It won’t do either of us any good if you crack up.’

My lips twitched. That was more like the authentic Trevor.

‘I’m made of Plasticine,’ I said; and despite his protests I stayed where I was and once again tried to sort out the trail of broken appointments.

Mr Wells was in a worse mess than ever, having sent a cheque which had promptly bounced. A prosecution for that was in the offing.

‘But you knew the bank wouldn’t pay it,’ I protested when he telephoned with this latest trouble.

‘Yes... but I thought they might.’

His naivety was frightening: the same stupid hopefulness which had got him enmeshed in the first place. He blanked out reality and believed in fantasies. I’d known others like him, and I’d never known them change.

‘Come on Monday afternoon,’ I said resignedly.

‘Supposing someone kidnaps you again.’

‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘Two-thirty, Monday.’

I went through the week’s letters with Debbie and sorted out the most urgent. Their complexity made me wilt.

‘We’ll answer them on Monday morning,’ I said.

Debbie fetched some coffee and said at her most pious that I wasn’t fit to be at work.

‘Did we get those postponements from the Commissioners for Axwood Stables and Coley Young?’ I said.

‘Yes, they came on Wednesday.’

‘And what about Denby Crest’s certificate?’

‘Mr King said he’d see about that this morning.’

I rubbed a hand over my face. No use kidding myself. However much I disliked it, I did feel pathetically weak. Agreeing to ride Tapestry had been a selfish folly. The only sensible course was to ring Moira Longerman at once, and cry off: but when it came to race-riding, I’d never been sensible.

‘Debbie,’ I said, ‘please would you go down to the store in the basement, and bring up all the old files on Connaught Powys, and on Glitberg and Ownslow.’

‘Who?’

I wrote the names down for her. She glanced at them, nodded, and went away.

Sticks Elroy telephoned, words tumbling out in a rush, incoherent and thick with Oxfordshire accent. A lot more talkative than he’d been at dinner in the pub, when overshadowed by his bull-like dad.

‘Stop,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear a word. Say it slowly.’

‘I said I was ever so sorry you got shut up in that van.’

‘Well... thanks.’

‘My old man couldn’t have done it, you know.’ He sounded anxious, more seeking to convince than convinced.

‘Don’t you think so?’

‘I know he said... Look, well, he went on cursing all evening, and I know he’s got a van, and all, which is off somewhere getting the gearbox fixed, or something, and I know he was that furious, and he said you should be locked up, but I don’t reckon he could have done it, not for real.’

‘Did you ask him?’ I said curiously.

‘Yeah.’ He hesitated. ‘See... we had a bloody big row, him and me.’ Another pause. ‘He always knocked us about when we were kids. Strap, boots, anything.’ A pause. ‘I asked him about you... he punched me in the face.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘What did you decide to do about that cash?’

‘Yeah, well, that’s what the row was about, see. I reckoned you were right and I didn’t want any trouble with the law, and Dad blew his top and said I’d never been grateful for everything he’d done for me. He says if I declare that cash and pay tax on it he’ll be in trouble himself, see, and I reckon he was mad enough to do anything.’

I reflected a bit. ‘What colour is his van?’

‘White, sort of. An old Ford.’

‘Um. When did you decide to go to that pub for dinner?’

‘Dad drove there straight from the races, for a drink, like, and then he phoned and said they could fix us all in for dinner, and we might as well celebrate my win.’

‘Would he be likely,’ I said, ‘to be able to lay his hands on sixty packets of cheese slices?’

‘Whatever are you on about?’

I sighed. ‘They were in the van with me.’

‘Well, I don’t know, do I? I don’t live with him any more. I wouldn’t reckon on him going to a supermarket, though. Women’s work, see?’

‘Yes. If you’ve decided to declare that cash, there are some legitimate expenses to set off against the profit.’

‘Bloody tax,’ he said. ‘Sucks you dry. I’m not going to bother sweating my guts out on any more schemes. Not bloody worth it.’

He made an appointment for the following week and grumbled his way off the phone.

I sat and stared into space, thinking of Sticks Elroy and his violent father. Heavy taxation was always self-defeating, with the country losing progressively more for every tightening of the screw. Overtime and enterprise weren’t worth it. Emigration was. The higher the tax rates, the less there was to tax. It was crazy. If I’d been Chancellor, I’d have made Britain a tax-haven, and welcomed back all the rich who had taken their money and left. A fifty per cent tax on millions would be better for the country than a ninety-eight per cent tax on nothing. As it was, I had to interpret and advise in accordance with what I thought of as bad economics; uphold laws which I thought irrational. If the fury the Elroys felt against the system took the form of abuse of the accountant who forced them to face nasty facts, it wasn’t unduly surprising. I did doubt though that even Elroy senior would make his abuse physical. Calling me a bastard was a long way from imprisonment.

Debbie came in with her arms full of files and her face full of fluster.

‘There’s a lady outside who insists on seeing you. She hasn’t got an appointment and Mr King said you were definitely not to be worried today, but she won’t go away. Oh!’

The lady in question was walking into the office in Debbie’s wake. Tall, thin, assured, and middle-aged.

I stood up, smiling, and shook hands with Hilary Margaret Pinlock.

‘It’s all right, Debbie,’ I said.

‘Oh, very well.’ She shrugged, put down the files, and went out.

‘How are you?’ I said. ‘Sit down.’

Margaret Pinlock sat in the clients’ chair and crossed her thin legs.

‘You,’ she said, ‘look half dead.’

‘A half-empty bottle is also half-full.’

‘And you’re an optimist?’

‘Usually,’ I said.

She was wearing a brownish-grey flecked tweed coat, to which the sunless April day added nothing in the way of life. Behind the spectacles the eyes looked small and bright, and coral-pink lipstick lent warmth to her mouth.

‘I’ve come to tell you something,’ she said. ‘Quite a lot of things, I suppose.’

‘Good or bad?’

‘Facts.’

‘You’re not pregnant?’

She was amused. ‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Would you like some sherry?’

‘Yes, please.’

I stood up and produced a bottle and two glasses from a filing cupboard. Poured. Handed her a generous slug of Harvey’s Luncheon Dry.

‘I came home yesterday,’ she said. ‘I read about you being kidnapped again, on the aeroplane coming back. They had newspapers. Then I heard on the news that you were found, and safe. I thought I would come and see you myself, instead of taking my information to the police.’

‘What information?’ I said. ‘And I thought you were due back home last Saturday.’

She sipped her sherry sedately.

‘Yes, I was. I stayed on, though. Because of you. It cost me a fortune.’ She looked at me over her glass. ‘I was sorry to read you had been recaptured after all. I had seen... your fear of it.’

‘Mm,’ I said ruefully.

‘I found out about that boat for you,’ she said.

I almost spilled the sherry.

She smiled. ‘About the man, to be more exact. The man in the dinghy, who was chasing you.’

‘How?’ I said.

‘After you’d gone, I hired a car and drove to all the places on Minorca where they said yachts could be moored. The nearest good harbour to Cala St Galdana was Ciudadela, and I should think that’s where the boat went after they lost you, but it had gone by the time I started looking.’ She drank some sherry. ‘I asked some English people on a yacht there, and they said there had been an English crew on a sixty-footer there the night before, and they’d overheard them talking about wind for a passage to Palma. I asked them to describe the captain, and they said there didn’t seem to be a proper captain, only a tall young man who looked furious.’ She stopped and considered, and explained further. ‘All the yachts at Ciudadela were moored at right angles to the quayside, you see. Stern on. So that they were all close together, side by side, and you walked straight off the back of them on to dry land.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’

‘So I just walked along the whole row, asking. There were Spaniards, Germans, French, Swedes... all sorts. The English people had noticed the other English crew just because they were English, if you see what I mean.’

‘I do,’ I said.

‘And also because it had been the biggest yacht that night in the harbour.’ She paused. ‘So instead of flying home on Saturday, I went to Palma.’

‘It’s a big place,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘It took me three days. But I found out that young man’s name, and quite a lot about him.’

‘Would you like some lunch?’ I said.