Donald to Marlborough, and you went there yourself. Donald wants the best for his boys. He’s suffering to give them what you gave him effortlessly.’
‘He’s a snob to choose Eton.’
‘Maybe, but the Marlborough fees aren’t much less.’
‘What if it was Donald and Helen who’ve been trying to kill me?’
‘If they had plenty of money they wouldn’t be tempted.’
‘You’ve said that before, or something like it.’
‘Nothing has changed.’
Malcolm looked out of the long car’s window as we were driven up through the hills of Bel Air on the way to the racetrack.
‘Do you see those houses perched on the cliffs, hanging out over space? People must be mad to live like that, on the edge.’
I smiled. ‘You do,’ I said.
He liked Santa Anita racetrack immediately and so did I; it would have been difficult not to. Royal palms near the entrances stretched a hundred feet upward, all bare trunks except for the crowning tufts, green fronds against the blue sky. The buildings were towered and rurreted, sea-green in colour, with metal tracery of stylised palm leaves along the balconies and golden shutters over rear-facing windows. It looked more like a chateau than a racecourse, at first sight.
Ramsey Osborn had given Malcolm fistfuls of instructions and introductions and, as always, Malcolm was welcomed as a kindred spirit upstairs in the Club. He was at home from the first minute, belonging to the scene as if he’d been born there. I envied him his ease and didn’t know how to acquire it. Maybe time would do it. Maybe millions. Maybe a sense of achievement.
While he talked easily to almost strangers (soon to be cronies) about the mixing of European and American bloodlines in thoroughbreds, I thought of the phone call I’d made at dawn on Monday morning to Superintendent Yale. Because of the eight-hour timedifference, it was already afternoon with him, and I thought it unlikely I would reach him at first try. He was there, however, and came on the line with unstifled annoyance.
‘It’s a week since you telephoned.’
‘Yes, sorry.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Around,’ I said. His voice sounded as clear to me as if he were in the next room, and presumably mine to him, as he didn’t at all guess I wasn’t in England, i found my father,’ I said.
‘Oh. Good.’
I told him where Malcolm had stored the detonators. ‘On top of The Old Curiosity Shop, as appropriate.’
There was a shattered silence, i don’t believe it,’ he said.
‘The books are all old and leatherbound classics standing in full editions. Poets, philosophers, novelists, all bought years ago by my grandmother. We were all allowed to borrow a book occasionally to read, but we had to put it back. My father had us well trained.’
‘Are you saying that anyone who borrowed a book from that bookcase could have seen the detonators?’
‘Yes, I suppose so, if they’ve been there for twenty years.’
‘Did you know they were there?’
‘No. I didn’t read those sort of books much. Spent my time riding.’
Lucy, I thought, had in her teens plunged into poets as a fish into its native sea, but twenty years ago she had been twenty-two and writing her own immortality. None of the rest of us had been scholars. Some of grandmother’s books had never been opened.
‘It is incredible that when someone thought of making a bomb, the detonators were to hand,’ Yale complained.
‘Other way round, wouldn’t you think?’ I said. ‘The availability of the detonators suggested the bomb.’
‘The pool of common knowledge in your family is infuriating,’ he said. ‘No one can be proved to have special access to explosives. No one has a reliable alibi… except Mrs Ferdinand… Everyone can make a timing device and nearly all of you have a motive.’
Irritating,’ I agreed.
‘That’s the wrong word,’ he said sourly. ‘Where’s your father?’
‘Safe.’
‘You can’t stay in hiding for ever.’
‘Don’t expect to see us for a week or two. What chance is there of your solving the case?’ Enquiries were proceeding, he said with starch. If I came across any further information, I would please give it to him.
Indeed, I said, I would.
‘When I was younger,’ he said to my surprise, ‘I used to think I had a nose for a villain, that I could always tell. But since then, I’ve met embezzlers I would have trusted my savings to, and murderers I’d have let marry my daughter. Murderers can look like harmless ordinary people.’ He paused. ‘Does your family know who killed Moira Pembroke?’