Bolt - By Dick Francis Page 0,94

I ran after him, and from another, larger, parked car, both Thomas and Litsi, shouting manfully and shining bright torches, emerged to stand in his way.

Thomas and Litsi stopped him and Sammy and I caught hold of him, Sammy tying Nanterre’s left wrist to Thomas’s right with nylon cord and an intriguingly nice line in knots.

Not the most elegant of captures, I thought, but effective all the same; and for all the noise we’d made, no one came with curious questions to the fracas, no one in London would be so foolish. Dark alleys were dark alleys, and with noise, even worse.

We made Nanterre walk back towards the Mercedes. Thomas half dragging him, Sammy stepping behind him and kicking him encouragingly on the calves of the legs.

When we reached the pistol, Sammy picked it up, weighed it with surprise in his hand, and briefly whistled.

‘Bullets?’ I asked.

He slid out the clip and nodded. ‘Seven,’ he said. ‘Bright little darlin’s.’

He slapped the gun together again, looked around him, and dodged off sideways to hide it under a nearby car, knowing I didn’t want to use it myself.

Nanterre was beginning to recover his usual browbeating manner and to bluster that what we were doing was against the law. He didn’t specify which law, and nor was he right. Citizens’ arrests were perfectly legal.

Not knowing what to expect, we’d had to make the best plans we could to meet anything that might happen. I’d hired the small white car and the larger dark one, both with tinted windows, and Thomas and I had parked them that morning in spaces which we knew from mews-observation weren’t going to obstruct anyone else: the larger car in the space nearest to the way in from the road, the white car half way between there and the Mercedes.

Litsi, Thomas and Sammy had entered the cars after I’d searched the whole place and telephoned reassuringly again to Litsi, and they’d been prepared to wait until one-thirty and hope.

No one had known what Nanterre would do if he came to the mews. We’d decided that if he came in past Litsi and Thomas and hid himself before he reached the white car, Litsi and Thomas would set up a racket and shine torches to summon Sammy and me to their aid, and we’d reckoned that if he came in past Sammy, I would see him, and everyone would wait for my cue, which they had.

We’d all acknowledged that Nanterre, if he came to the area, might decide to sit in his car out in the street, waiting for me to walk round from the square, and that if he did that, or if he didn’t come at all, we’d spent a long while preparing for a big anti-climax.

There had been the danger that even if he came, we could lose him, that he’d slip through our grasp and escape: and there had been the worse danger that we would panic him into shooting, and that one or more of us could be hurt. Yet when that moment had come, when he’d freed his gun and pointed it my way, the peril, long faced, had gone by so fast that it seemed suddenly nothing, not worth the consideration.

We had meant, if we captured Nanterre, to take him into the garage where I’d waited for him to come, but I did a fast rethink on the way down the alley, and stopped by my car.

The others paused enquiringly.

‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘untie your wrist and attach Mr Nanterre to the rear-view mirror beside the front passenger door.’

Thomas, unquestioning, took a loop of cord off one of his fingers and pulled it, and all the knots round his wrist fell apart: Sammy’s talents seemed endless. Thomas tied much more secure knots round the sturdy mirror assembly, and Nanterre told us very loudly and continuously that we were making punishable mistakes.

‘Shut up,’ I said equally loudly, without much effect.

‘Let’s gag him,’ Thomas said cheerfully. He produced a used handkerchief from his trousers pocket, at the sight of which Nanterre blessedly stopped talking.

‘Gag him if someone comes into the mews,’ I said, and Thomas nodded.

‘Was there enough light,’ I asked Litsi, Sammy and Thomas, ‘for you to see Mr Nanterre lift up the bonnet of my car?’

They all said that they’d seen.’

Nanterre’s mouth fell soundlessly open, and for the first time seemed to realise he was in serious trouble.

‘Mr Nanterre,’ I said conversationally to the others, ‘is an amateur who has left his fingerprints all