Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,79

to hear, you’ll double it.’

‘If you tell me the truth, yes.’

‘Huh.’ he said sourly. ‘Right then … you’re in London, aren’t you? That’s a London number.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll meet you in Bradbury,’ he said. ‘In the town, not the racecourse. You get to Bradbury by twelve o’clock, I’ll meet you in the pub there … the King’s Head, half way along the High Street.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I said. ‘How will I know you?’

He thought, breathing heavily. ‘I’ll take the Sporting Life with your ad in it.’

‘And … er … what’s your name?’ I asked.

He had the answer to that question all ready. ‘John Smith,’ he said promptly. ‘I’ll see you, then, Mr Christmas. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

He disconnected and I lay back on the pillows feeling more apprehensive than delighted. The fish, I thought, hadn’t sounded securely on the hook. He’d nibbled at the bait, but was full of reservations. I just hoped to hell he’d turn up where and when he’d said, and that he’d be the right man if he did.

His accent had been country English, not broad, just the normal local speech of Berkshire which I heard every day in Lambourn. He hadn’t seemed over-bright or cunning, and the amount he’d asked for, I thought, revealed a good deal about his income and his needs.

Large reward … When I hadn’t objected to one hundred, he’d doubled it to two. But to him, two hundred equated large.

He was a gambler: Litsi had described him as having a sporting paper, a form book and binoculars. What was now certain was that he gambled small, a punter to whom a hundred was a substantial win. I supposed I should be glad he didn’t think of a hundred as a basic stake: a large reward to someone like that might have been a thousand.

Thankfully I set about the business of getting up, which on the mornings after a crunch was always slow and twingy. The icepacks from bedtime had long melted, but the puffball my ankle had swollen to on the previous afternoon had definitely contracted. I took the strapping off, inspected the blackening bruising, and wrapped it up again snugly; and I could still get my shoe on, which was lucky.

In trousers, shirt and sweater I went down by lift to the basement and nicked more ice cubes from the fridge, fastening them into plastic bags and wedging them down inside my sock. Dawson appeared in his dressing-gown to see what was going on in his kitchen and merely raised his eyebrows much as he had the evening before when I’d pinched every ice cube in the house.

‘Did I do right,’ he asked, watching, ‘putting that phone call through to you?’

‘You certainly did.’

‘He said it was to do with the advertisement: he said he was in a hurry as he was using a public telephone.’

‘Was he?’ I pushed the trouser leg down over the loaded sock, feeling the chill strike deep through the strapping.

‘Yes,’ Dawson said, ‘I could hear the pips. Don’t you give yourself frostbite, doing that?’

‘Never have, yet.’

Breakfast, he said a shade resignedly, would be ready in the morning room in half an hour, and I thanked him and spent the interval waking up Litsi, who said bleary-eyed that he was unaccustomed to life before ten on Sunday mornings.

‘We’ve had a tug on the line,’ I explained, and told him about John Smith.

‘Are you sure it isn’t Nanterre setting a trap?’ Litsi said, waking up thoroughly. ‘Don’t forget, Nanterre could have seen that advertisement too. He could be reeling you in, not the other way round … I suppose you did think of that?’

‘Yes, I did. But I think John Smith is genuine. If he’d been a trap, he would’ve been different, more positive.’

He frowned. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘I’d like your company but Sammy has the day off because we’re all here, and if we both go …’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But don’t go onto balconies. How’s your ankle? Or am I not supposed to ask?’

‘Half way to normal,’ I said. ‘Danielle exaggerates.’

‘Not so much.’ He rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘Have you enough cash for John Smith?’

‘Yes, in my house. I’ll go there on the way. I’ll be back here this afternoon, sometime.’

‘All being well,’ he said dryly.

I drove to Lambourn after a particularly thorough inspection of the car. It was still possible that John Smith was a trap, though on balance I didn’t believe it. Nanterre couldn’t have found an actor to