Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,118

obviously wasn’t concentrating on the newspaper as I saw him restart the same article at least three times.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, sitting myself down with a mug of coffee.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and set about trying to read the article for the fourth time.

‘Yes, there is.’ I reached across the table and dragged the paper away from him. ‘What is it?’

He looked up at me. ‘Sally and I had a row.’

‘I can tell,’ I said. It had been obvious the whole time Sally was getting breakfast. ‘What about?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he stated firmly, standing up.

‘It clearly does,’ I said. ‘Is it about me?’

‘I told you, it doesn’t matter.’

‘So, it was about me,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

He didn’t answer. He turned to go out of the door, back to the stables.

‘Toby,’ I almost shouted, ‘for God’s sake, what is it?’

He stopped but he didn’t turn around. ‘Sally wants you to leave here this morning,’ he said. He now turned and looked at me. ‘She’s worried and frightened. You know, for the children.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ I said with a smile. ‘We’ll go as soon as we’re ready.’

‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I put my foot down. You’re my brother and if I can’t help you when you’re in trouble, then who will? What good am I as a brother if I throw you out of my home?’

I could hear in his voice that this was an argument well rehearsed during his row with Sally.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘She’s right. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here in the first place.’ But I was glad I had. Toby’s knowledge of horses had been the key to everything.

‘But where will you go?’ he asked.

‘Somewhere else,’ I said. Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t know. ‘We’ll be gone when you get back from second lot. I’ll call you later. And thank Sally for me, for having us.’

Surprisingly, he walked across the kitchen and gave me a huge hug.

‘Be careful,’ he said into my ear. ‘Be a shame to lose you now.’ He suddenly let me go, looked away as if in embarrassment, and went straight outside without saying another word. Maybe he was too emotional to speak. I was.

*

Caroline and I were packed up and away by nine thirty. She hadn’t been too happy when I had woken her from a deep sleep, but she hadn’t protested much either.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked as we drove out of the gate.

‘Where do you suggest?’ I said.

‘Somewhere with a nice soft bed.’ She yawned, leaned back in the passenger seat, and closed her eyes.

I thought about my mother’s cottage down the road. I didn’t have a key but I knew, as I expect everyone else in East Hendred knew, that she always kept a spare key under the third geranium-filled flowerpot to the left of the back door. I decided against it. If, before I went to Chicago, I had believed that it was too risky for my mother to stay there, then surely it was too dangerous for me and Caroline now.

I drove aimlessly for a while along roads I knew so well from my childhood. Maybe my conscious mind thought my driving was aimless, but subconsciously my brain took the Mondeo unerringly the twelve miles from East Hendred to the establishment overlooking the river Thames that had once been owned by my mother’s distant widowed cousin, and where my passion for cooking had been first awakened.

The place had changed during the six years since I had left. It was no longer the elegant sixteenth-century inn with a restaurant that I remembered. There was a new, twenty-first-century glass extension reaching down towards the river, over what had been a well-tended lawn when I last saw it. A long brass-fronted bar had been built down one side of the old dining room, and the only food now offered was what my mother’s distant widowed cousin had always referred to with distaste as ‘bar snacks’.

Caroline, Viola and I sat down at an outside table with benches set up on what had once also been part of the lawn but was now a concrete patio. Viola could not be left in the car, Caroline explained, as she was too valuable. Quite apart from the fact, Caroline added, that she felt lost without her close by, to pat. At least Viola was out of sight in her case.

It was too early for what my father had always called a proper drink, so Caroline and I had