Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,32

about the document you witnessed. Tell her the bad news that all four of us would have to agree to the guns, and assure her that even if she drives Roland to collapse, she’ll still have to deal with me.’

‘Don’t tell her,’ Danielle begged. ‘She’ll give none of us any peace.’

Neither of them had objected to the use made of them in their absence; on the contrary, they had been pleased. ‘It makes us a family,’ Danielle had said, and it was I, the witness, who had felt excluded.

‘Upstairs,’ I said, reflecting, ‘I’ve got what I think is a duplicate of the form Henri Nanterre wanted Monsieur de Brescou to sign. It is in French. Would you like to see it?’

‘Very much,’ Litsi said.

‘Right.’

I went upstairs to fetch it and found Beatrice Bunt in my bedroom.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

‘I came to fetch something,’ I said.

She was holding the bright blue running shorts I usually slept in, which I had stored that morning in the bedside table drawer on top of Nanterre’s form. The drawer was open, the paper presumably inside.

‘These are yours?’ she said in disbelief. ‘You are using this room?’

‘That’s right.’ I walked over to her, took the shorts from her hand and returned them to the drawer. The form, I was relieved to see, lay there undisturbed.

‘In that case,’ she said with triumph, ‘there’s no problem. I shall have this room, and you can have the other. I always have the bamboo suite, it’s the accepted thing. I see some of your things are in the bathroom. It won’t take long to switch them over.’

I’d left the door open when I went in and, perhaps hearing her voice, the princess came enquiringly to see what was going on.

‘I’ve told this young man to move, Casilia,’ Beatrice said, ‘because of course this is my room, naturally.’

‘Danielle’s fiancé,’ the princess said calmly, ‘stays in this room as long as he stays in this house. Now come along, Beatrice, do, the rose room is extremely comfortable, you’ll find.

‘It’s half the size of this one, and there’s no dressing room.’

The princess gave her a bland look, admirably concealing irritation. ‘When Kit leaves, you shall have the bamboo room, of course.’

‘I thought you said his name was Christmas.’

‘So it is,’ the princess agreed. ‘He was born on Christmas day. Come along, Beatrice, let’s go down for this very delayed lunch …’ She positively shepherded her sister-in-law out into the passage, and returned a second later for one brief and remarkable sentence, half instruction, half entreaty.

‘Stay in this house,’ she said, ‘until she is gone.’

After lunch, Litsi, Danielle and I went up to the disputed territory to look at the form, Litsi observing that his money was on Beatrice to winkle me out of all this splendour before tomorrow night.

‘Did you see the dagger looks you were getting across the half-defrosted mousseline?’

‘Couldn’t miss them.’

‘And those pointed remarks about good manners, unselfishness, and the proper precedence of rank?’

The princess had behaved as if she hadn’t heard, sweetly making enquiries about Beatrice’s health, her dogs, and the weather in Florida in February. Roland de Brescou, as very often, had remained upstairs for lunch, his door barricaded, I had no doubt. The princess with soft words would defend him.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘here’s this form.’

I retrieved it from under my blue shorts and gave it to Litsi, who wandered with it over to a group of comfortable chairs near the window. He read it attentively, sitting down absent-mindedly, a big man with natural presence and unextended power. I liked him and because of Danielle feared him, a contradictory jumble of emotion, but I also trusted his overall air of amiable competence.

I moved across the room to join him, and Danielle also, and after a while he raised his head and frowned.

‘For a start,’ he said, ‘this is not an application form for a licence to make or export arms. Are you sure that’s what Nanterre said it was?’

I thought back. ‘As far as I remember, it was the lawyer Gerald Greening who said it was a government form for preliminary application for a licence. I understood that that was what Henri Nanterre had told the princess in her box at Newbury.’

‘Well, it isn’t a government form at all. It isn’t an application for any sort of licence. What it is is a very vague and general form which would be used by simple people to draw up a contract.’ He paused. ‘In England, I believe