Straight (30 page)

They considered it.

“You could get into a lot of trouble making unfounded accusations,” Phil said.

“So Nicholas Loder told me.”

“Did he? I’d think twice, then, before I did. It wouldn’t do you much good generally in the racing world, I shouldn’t think.”

“Wisdom from babes,” I said, but he echoed my thoughts.

“Yes, old man.”

“I kept the baster tube,” I said shrugging, “but I guess I’ll do just what I did at the races, which was nothing.”

“As long as Dozen Roses tests clean both at York and here, that’s likely best,” Phil said, and Milo, for all his earlier pugnaciousness, agreed.

A commotion in the darkening yard heralded the success of the urine mission and Phil went outside to unclip the special bag and close its patented seal. He wrote and attached the label giving the horse’s name, the location, date and time and signed his name.

“Right,” he said, “I’ll be off. Take care.” He loaded himself, the sample and his gear into his car and with economy of movement scrunched away. I followed soon after with Brad still driving but decided again not to go home.

“You saw the mess in London,” I said. “I got knocked out by whoever did that. I don’t want to be in if they come to Hungerford. So let’s go to Newbury instead, and try The Chequers.”

Brad slowed, his mouth open.

“A week ago yesterday,” I said, “you saved me from a man with a knife. Yesterday someone shot at the car I was in and killed the chauffeur. It may not have been your regulation madman. So last night I slept in Swindon, tonight in Newbury.”

“Yerss,” he said, understanding.

“If you’d rather not drive me anymore, I wouldn’t blame you.”

After a pause, with a good deal of stalwart resolution, he made a statement. “You need me.”

“Yes,” I said. “Until I can walk properly, I do.”

“I’ll drive you, then.”

“Thanks,” I said, and meant it wholeheartedly, and he could hear that, because he nodded twice to himself emphatically and seemed even pleased.

The Chequers Hotel having a room free, I booked in for the night. Brad took himself home in my car, and I spent most of the evening sitting in an armchair upstairs learning my way round the Wizard.

Computers weren’t my natural habitat like they were Greville’s and I hadn’t the same appetite for them. The Wizard’s instructions seemed to take it for granted that everyone reading them would be computer-literate, so it probably took me longer than it might have done to get results.

What was quite clear was that Greville had used the gadget extensively. There were three separate telephone and address lists, a world-time clock, a system for entering daily appointments, a prompt for anniversaries, a calendar flashing with the day’s date, and a provision for storing oddments of information. By plugging in the printer, and after a few false starts, I ended with long printed lists of everything held listed under all the headings, and read them with growing frustration.

None of the addresses or telephone numbers seemed to have anything to do with Antwerp or with diamonds, though the “Business Overseas” list contained many gem merchants’ names from all round the world. None of the appointments scheduled, which stretched back six weeks or more, seemed to be relevant, and there were no entries at all for the Friday he’d gone to Ipswich. There was no reference to Koningin Beatrix.

I thought of my question to June the day she’d found her way to “pearl”: what if it were all in there, stored in secret.

The Wizard’s instruction manual, two hundred pages long, certainly did give lessons in how to lock things away. Entries marked “secret” could be retrieved only by knowing the password which could be any combination of numbers and letters up to seven in all. Forgetting the password meant bidding farewell to the entries: they could never be seen again. They could be deleted unseen, but not printed or brought to the screen.

One could tell if secret files were present, the book said, by the small symbol
s
, which could be found on the lower righthand side of the screen. I consulted Greville’s screen and found the
s
there, sure enough.

It would be, I thought. It would have been totally unlike him to have had the wherewithal for secrecy and not used it.

Any combination of numbers or letters up to seven ...

The book suggested 1 2 3 4, but once I’d sorted out the opening moves for unlocking and entered 1 2 3 4 in the space headed “Secret Off,” all I got was a quick dusty answer, “Incorrect Password.”

Damn him, I thought, wearily defeated. Why couldn’t he make any of it easy?

I tried every combination of letters and numbers I thought he might have used but got absolutely nowhere. Clarissa was too long, 12Roses should have been right but wasn’t. To be right the password had to be entered exactly as it had been set, whether in capital letters or lower case. It all took time. In the end I was ready to throw the confounded Wizard across the room, and stared at its perpetual “Incorrect Password” with hatred.

I finally laid it aside and played the tiny tape recorder instead. There was a lot of office chat on the tapes and I couldn’t think why Greville should have bothered to take them home and hide them. Long before I reached the end of the fourth side, I was asleep.

I woke stiffly after a while, unsure for a second where I was. I rubbed my face, looking at my watch, thought about all the constructive thinking I was supposed to be doing and wasn’t, and rewound the second of the baby tapes to listen to what I’d missed. Greville’s voice, talking business to Annette.

The most interesting thing, the only interesting thing about those tapes, I thought, was Greville’s voice. The only way I would ever hear him again.

“... going out to lunch,” he was saying. “I’ll be back by two-thirty.”

Annette’s voice said, “Yes, Mr. Franklin.”

A click sounded on the tape.

Almost immediately, because of the concertina-ing of time by the voice-activated mechanism, a different voice said, “I’m in his office now and I can’t find them. He hides everything, he’s security mad, you know that.” Click. “I can’t ask. He’d never tell me, and I don’t think he trusts me.” Click. “Po-faced Annette doesn’t sneeze unless he tells her to. She’d never tell me anything.” Click. “I’ll try. I’ll have to go, he doesn’t like me using this phone, he’ll be back from lunch any second.” Click.

End of tape.

Bloody hell, I thought. I rewound the end of the tape and listened to it again. I knew the voice, as Greville must have done. He’d left the recorder on, I guessed by mistake, and he’d come back and listened, with I supposed sadness, to treachery. It opened up a whole new world of questions and I went slowly to bed groping toward answers.

I lay a long time awake. When I slept, I dreamed the usual surrealist muddle and found it no help, but around dawn awake again and thinking of Greville, it occurred to me that there was one password I hadn’t tried because I hadn’t thought of him using it.

The Wizard was across the room by the armchair. Impelled by curiosity I turned on the light, rolled out of bed and hopped over to fetch it. Taking it back with me, I switched it on, pressed the buttons, found “Secret Off” and into the offered space typed the word Greville had written on the last page of his racing diary, below the numbers of his passport and national insurance.

DEREK, all in capital letters.

I typed DEREK and pressed “Enter,” and the Wizard with resignation let me into its data.

I
began printing out everything in the secret files as it seemed from the manual that, particularly as regarded the expense organizer, it was the best way to get at the full information stored there.

Each category had to be printed separately, the baby printer clicking away line by line and not very fast. I watched its steady output with fascination, hoping the small roll of paper would last to the end, as I hadn’t any more.

From the Memo section, which I printed first, came a terse note, “Check, don’t trust.”

Next came a long list of days and dates which seemed to bear no relation to anything. Monday, Jan. 30, Wednesday, March 8 ... Mystified I watched the sequence lengthen, noticing only that most of them were Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, five or six weeks apart, sometimes less, sometimes longer. The list ended five weeks before his death, and it began ... it began, I thought blankly, four years earlier. Four years ago; when he first met Clarissa.

I felt unbearable sadness for him. He’d fallen in love with a woman who wouldn’t leave home for him, whom he hadn’t wanted to compromise: he’d kept a record, I was certain, of every snatched day they’d spent together, and hidden it away as he had hidden so much else. A whole lot of roses, I thought.

The Schedule section, consulted next, contained appointments not hinted at earlier, including the delivery of the diamonds to his London house. For the day of his death there were two entries: the first, “Ipswich. Orwell Hotel, P. 3:30 P.M.,” and the second, “Meet Koningin Beatrix 6:30 P.M., Harwich.” For the following Monday he had noted “Meet C King’s Cross 12:10 Lunch Luigi’s.”

Meet C at King’s Cross ... He hadn’t turned up, and she’d telephoned his house, and left a message on his answering machine, and sometime in the afternoon she’d telephoned his office to ask for him. Poor Clarissa. By Monday night she’d left the ultra-anxious second message, and on Tuesday she had learned he was dead.

The printer whirred and produced another entry, for the Saturday after. “C and Dozen Roses both at York! Could I go? Not wise. Check TV.”

The printer stopped, as Greville’s life had done. No more appointments on record.

Next I printed the Telephone sections, Private, Business and Business Overseas. Private contained only Knightwood. Business was altogether empty, but from Business Overseas I watched with widening eyes the emergence of five numbers and addresses in Antwerp. One was van Ekeren, one was Guy Servi: three were so far unknown to me. I breathed almost painfully with exultation, unable to believe Greville had entered them there for no purpose.

I printed the Expense Manager’s secret section last as it was the most complicated and looked the least promising, but the first item that emerged was galvanic.

I wished he had been more explicit, more specific, but he’d seen no need to be. It was surprising he’d written so much. His feelings must have been strong to have been entered at all. No other entries afterward held any comment but were short records of money spent on courier services with a firm called Euro-Securo, telephone number supplied. In the middle of those the paper ran out. I brought the rest of the stored information up onto the screen and scrolled through it, but there was nothing else disturbing.

I switched off both baby machines and reread the long curling strip of printing from the beginning, afterward flattening it out and folding it to fit a shirt pocket. Then I dressed, packed, breakfasted, waited for Brad and traveled to London hopefully.

The telephone calls to Antwerp had to be done from the Saxony Franklin premises because of the precautionary checking back. I would have preferred more privacy than Greville’s office but couldn’t achieve it, and one of the first things I asked Annette that morning was whether my brother had had one of those gadgets that warned you if someone was listening to your conversation on an extension. The office phones were all interlinked.

“No, he didn’t,” she said, troubled.

“He could have done with one,” I said.

“Are you implying that we listened when he didn’t mean us to?”

“Not you,” I assured her, seeing her resentment of the suggestion. “But yes, I’d think it happened. Anyway, at some point this morning I want to make sure of not being overheard, so when that call comes through perhaps you’ll all go into the stockroom and sing ‘Rule Britannia.’ ”

Annette never made jokes. I had to explain I didn’t mean sing literally. She rather huffily agreed that when I wanted it, she would go round the extensions checking against eavesdroppers.

I asked her why Greville hadn’t had a private line in any case, and she said he had had one earlier but they now used that for the fax machine.

“If he wanted to be private,” she said, “he went down to the yard and telephoned from his car.”

There, I supposed, he would have been safe also from people with sensitive listening devices, if he’d suspected their use. He had been conscious of betrayal, that was for sure.

I sat at Greville’s desk with the door closed and matched the three unknown Antwerp names from the Wizard with the full list June had provided, and found that all three were there.

The first and second produced no results, but from the third, once I explained who I was, I got the customary response about checking their files and calling back. They did call back, but the amorphous voice on the far end was cautious to the point of repression.

“We at Maarten-Pagnier cannot discuss anything at all with you, monsieur,” he said. “Monsieur Franklin gave express orders that we were not to communicate with anyone in his office except himself.”

“My brother is dead,” I said.

“So you say, monsieur. But he warned us to beware of any attempt to gain information about his affairs and we cannot discuss them.”

“Then please will you telephone to his lawyers and get their assurance that he’s dead and that I am now managing his business?”

After a pause the voice said austerely, “Very well, monsieur. Give us the name of his lawyers.”

I did that and waited for ages during which time three customers telephoned with long orders which I wrote down, trying not to get them wrong from lack of concentration.