Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,110

Caroline. ‘Caroline was also at the dinner as part of a string quartet.’ She smiled back at me. ‘Well,’ I went on, ‘nearly everyone who was at that dinner suffered from food poisoning during the night. I did, Caroline did and most of my staff did. One even ended up in hospital. Tests have since shown that the cause of the poisoning was undercooked kidney beans in the dinner.’ I paused. ‘Now everyone involved in food knows that undercooked kidney beans are very nasty, even though I didn’t realize that just one bean per person can be enough to cause terrible vomiting, and that’s what we all had. But there shouldn’t have been any kidney beans in that dinner. I made it from raw ingredients and there were no kidney beans included. But the tests were conclusive, so someone else had to have put them there.’

‘Are you saying that it was done on purpose?’ asked Bernard.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You can’t accidentally add enough kidney beans to a dinner to make over two hundred people ill. And the beans had to be ground or finely chopped otherwise they would have been visible in the sauce, which is where I think they must have been put.’

‘But why would anyone do that?’ said Toby.

‘Good question,’ I said. ‘And one that I spent days and days trying to find an answer to, and I still haven’t.’ I looked around at the faces in front of me, and no one came up with any answer. I hadn’t expected one. ‘Let’s move on. The following day I was again a guest chef, this time in the sponsor’s box at the races. We all know what happened there, and I was extremely lucky not to be killed along with the nineteen others who were, one of whom was a young waitress from my restaurant.’ I paused again, thinking about Louisa’s funeral, remembering the pain of loss for her parents and friends, recalling the awful ache in my jaw. I took a couple of deep breaths, and went on to describe just a little of what I had seen in the box that day without delving too deeply into the worst of the gory details. I could have left it all out, but I suppose I wanted to shock them a bit. They needed to be fully aware of what some people can do to others. They would later need to believe that my life, and maybe theirs, was truly in danger.

‘I never realized you were so close to it,’ said Toby. ‘Mum had said something about you being at the races but nothing about…’ He petered out. I decided that I must have successfully created the mental image I was after.

‘It’s horrible,’ said Sally, shivering. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’

‘And I don’t want to wake up in a cold sweat having had another nightmare about it either,’ I said quite forcibly. ‘But I know I will. And I will, because it was real, it happened, and it happened before my eyes to people I knew.’ Sally looked quite shocked.

‘The papers have all been saying that the bomb was aimed at an Arab prince,’ said Bernard, bringing us all back from the brink. ‘So what has it got to do with the dinner?’ He was one step ahead of the others.

‘What if the bomb was not aimed at the prince but at those people it really hit?’ I said. ‘And suppose the poisoning of the dinner was done to stop someone being at the races the following day so they wouldn’t get blown up.’

‘But if someone knew there was going to be a bomb, then they could, surely, just have not turned up to the lunch,’ said Bernard. ‘Why would they have to poison everyone the night before?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, almost angrily. I wasn’t angry with him, I was angry with myself for not knowing. I couldn’t be angry with Bernard. After all, that’s why I had asked him to come. I knew he would be sceptical and would argue. It’s what I wanted.

‘But,’ I said, ‘I do know that when I started saying this out loud, and asking around about who was meant to be at the lunch but didn’t actually show up, someone tried to kill me.’

‘How?’ asked Bernard in the sudden silence.

‘They caused the brakes to fail in my car and I hit a bus.’

‘It’s a bit hit-and-miss, if you’ll excuse the pun,’ he said. ‘Not the best way to kill