Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,109
my father, I had always been serious. It had often strangely annoyed him.
‘OK,’ he said, looking carefully at my face. ‘What time is this lawyer arriving?’
‘He said he’d try to be here by four,’ I said. ‘He’s coming down from London.’ I was suddenly not sure if it had been such a good idea. A lawyer might make Toby rather wary. He had fought long and hard with them over the terms of my father’s will. Lawyers were not Toby’s favourite people. But, there again, he’d never met a lawyer like Bernard Sims. In truth, I hadn’t met him, either. It was a pleasure yet to be enjoyed by us all.
Bernard proved to be everything I had expected him to be. He was large, jovial, with a mop of wavy black hair and a huge, double-breasted pin-striped suit doing its best to hold it all together.
‘Max,’ he said expansively when I greeted him in the driveway. He advanced towards me with a hand outstretched that seemed to me to have far more than its fair share of ringers. Perhaps it was just because each finger was twice the width of my own. I held up my cast and declined the handshake.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said. ‘Come on in.’
‘But is she here?’ he asked in a half whisper, almost conspiratorially.
‘Who?’ I said innocently. I, too, could play his little game.
‘The viola player, of course.’
‘She might be,’ I said, not able to resist smiling.
‘Oh good,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. But then he stopped. ‘And bad.’
‘Why bad?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure I should be meeting her socially,’ he said. ‘It might produce a conflict of interests in the poisoning case.’
‘Bugger the poisoning case,’ I said. ‘And, anyway, this is definitely not a social visit.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know that, do I? You didn’t actually tell me why you were so insistent that I came down here this afternoon.’
‘I will. I will,’ I said. ‘All in good time.’
‘A matter of life and death, you said.’
‘It is,’ I replied seriously. ‘My life, and my death.’
CHAPTER 18
We all convened in Toby and Sally’s drawing room at four thirty like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, with me playing the part of Hercule Poirot, except that, unlike him, I didn’t know all the answers, I wasn’t at all sure who had done it and, for the most part, I didn’t have a clue of what it was they had done in the first place.
There were five of us in the room. I had thought that Sally would be busy caring for the children but, after school, all three of them had gone to have tea with her sister, their aunt. So Sally sat on the settee with Toby, while Caroline and Bernard sat in armchairs on either side of them. I stood by the fireplace. All I needed, I thought, was a little moustache and a Belgian accent to complete the illusion.
I had previously threatened Bernard with excommunication from the Law Society if he misbehaved and, to be fair, so far, he had been propriety personified. He hadn’t even made any snide remarks to me when I had introduced him to Caroline. In fact, quite the reverse. He had been unusually effusive in his comments, with not a single mention of dropping the lawsuit in time with her knickers.
So now the four of them sat with expectant faces waiting for every one of the facts to be revealed before them. They were going to be disappointed.
‘Thank you all for being here,’ I said by way of introduction. ‘And thank you, Toby and Sally, for allowing Caroline and me to stay. And also, thank you, Bernard, for coming all the way from London.’
‘Just get on with it,’ said Toby, a little impatiently. And he was right. I was procrastinating because I really didn’t know where or how to begin. Everyone laughed and it lightened the mood.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t quite know where to start.’
‘Try at the beginning,’ said Caroline, helpfully.
‘OK,’ I said, and took a deep breath. ‘The night before the 2000 Guineas I was engaged by the Newmarket racecourse caterers to be the guest chef at a gala dinner. They engaged all my restaurant staff to be there as well, so the restaurant was closed that night. There were other staff, too, from a catering agency, but I was in charge of both the ordering of the food and the cooking of it.’