Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,131

open the cold-room door. There was still the issue of the loaded gun inside. They decided to leave the occupants where they were for a while to cool off, literally. Three degrees centigrade would have been pretty uncomfortable even if they’d been wearing thick coats, gloves and hats. As it was, it had been a warm late-May evening and Pyotr Komarov and George Kealy had both been in shirt-sleeves. But, was I bothered?

The senior officer present interviewed me briefly and I tried to explain to him what had happened. But it was complicated and he seemed preoccupied with the men still in the cold-room. I would be re-interviewed, he explained, at the police station later. In the morning, I hoped, yawning.

Both the police and I were required, by the bomb-disposal team, to leave the building while they removed the explosive, so 1 sat on a white plastic chair on the gravel in front of the restaurant. One of the ambulance staff came over, wrapped a red blanket around my shoulders and asked me if I was OK.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. It reminded me of being at Newmarket racecourse on the day of the bombing. But this time I really was fine. The nightmare was over.

EPILOGUE

Six months later I opened Maximilian’s, a modern and exciting restaurant on the south side of Berkeley Square in Mayfair, serving mostly French food but with an English influence.

The opening night was a grand affair with lots of invited guests. There was even a string quartet playing at one end of the dining room. I looked over at them, four tall elegant young women in black dresses. I took particular notice of the viola player. She had shoulder-length light-brown hair tied back in a pony tail, bright blue eyes, high cheekbones and a longish thin nose above a broad mouth and square-shaped jaw. She was playing a new viola – at least, it was new to her. As her left hand glided up and down the fingerboard I could see a diamond engagement ring glistening in the light. I had given it to her on my bended knee in the kitchen, just before the first guests had arrived.

‘I’d always thought your name was Maxwell,’ said a booming voice in my ear. It was Bernard Sims. ‘I hear you’ve decided to make an honest woman of the plaintiff,’ he added, shaking his head, but with a smile.

‘Guilty,’ I pleaded, with a grin.

My prosecution under section 7 of the Food Safety Act 1990 had been dropped and the civil poisoning case had been settled out of court with the plaintiff accepting undisclosed damages from the defendant. Caroline’s agent had tried to claim his 15 per cent of the amount, which was confidential, but Bernard had explained to him that he was only entitled to commission on her earnings and the damages had been offered and accepted not for loss of earnings, but in consideration of distress caused. He hadn’t been best pleased, but, there again, it would have been very difficult for Caroline to play only 85 per cent of an 1869 Stefano Scarampella viola.

DI Turner had finally returned my calls and had come eagerly in person when I’d told him I knew who had committed the racecourse bombing at Newmarket. Since then he had kept me up to date with progress in the case. Komarov had survived both the bullet wound in his leg and the hypothermia brought on by the cold-room and had been charged with a total of twenty murders, including the cold-blooded killing of Richard, my much-missed head waiter. Further charges of conspiracy to cause explosions and drug trafficking were expected to follow. George Kealy had also been charged with Richard’s murder, although Turner was pretty sure that he would eventually be convicted only of being an accessory to the murders because George was singing for his freedom, or, at least, for a shorter sentence. A police search of the Kealy residence had discovered boxes of the metal balls in a locked store, and a similar exploration of Gary’s flat had turned up a certain silver key-fob, complete with the key to my now-burnt cottage’s front door. Many of the details had been widely reported in the newspapers, and especially by Clare Harding in the Cambridge Evening News.

As I had expected, George Kealy was Komarov’s man in the UK, just as Rolf Schumann had been in the US. George had been the official link between Horse Imports Ltd and Tattersalls, the bloodstock auctioneers in