Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,66

giving the grounds for her complaint and inviting our side to make a reasonable offer to Miss Aston for the distress and loss of earnings she had suffered.

I had foolishly told him that I had taken his advice to ask her out to dinner, and now a relationship had developed between us.

‘But did you sleep with her?’ he had asked persistently.

‘Well,’ I’d said finally, ‘what if I did?’

Now he was enjoying the situation hugely.

‘Did she drop the lawsuit at the same time as she dropped her knickers?’ he asked, barely able to contain his mirth.

‘Bernard,’ I said sharply. ‘That’s enough. And no, she hasn’t dropped the suit. Her agent is insisting that she perseveres with it. He wants his percentage.’

‘Perhaps he’s sleeping with her too.’ He was out of control.

‘Bernard, I said stop it, that’s enough.’ I had raised my voice.

‘You’re serious about her, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, blow me,’ he said. ‘What shall I tell her lawyers?’

‘Don’t you dare tell them anything,’ I said.

‘Not about that,’ he said. ‘What shall I tell them about an offer?’

‘Let me think about it over the weekend. I’ll speak to you on Monday. She’s away for a week now so they won’t be able to tell her anything anyway.’

‘Is she away with you?’ he asked.

‘No, she isn’t,’ I said. ‘And it would be none of your business if she was.’

‘Everything about you is my business,’ he said, laughing. ‘I’m your lawyer, remember?’ He was still laughing when he hung up. I wondered if all his clients gave him so much pleasure.

At about half past two, I called Carl to ask him to come and fetch me.

‘Thought you had to rest for a few days,’ he said.

‘I do,’ I replied. ‘I’m not coming in to work. I need to use my computer to get on the Internet.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’

There were nearly a million hits when I typed ‘Rolf Schumann’ into the search engine on my computer. Most of the hits were in German. Rolf and Schumann were obviously very common names in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and in Holland too.

I added ‘Wisconsin’ to my search criteria and was surprised that the number of hits still exceeded twenty-eight thousand. It seemed that Rolf and Schumann were quite common names in Wisconsin as well.

I discovered that more people had emigrated to the United States from Germany than from any other nation, including Ireland and England, and that many of them had settled in the state of Wisconsin as the climate and agriculture were similar to those at home. So great was the influx that, according to one website I visited, a third of the total population of the state in 1900 had been born in Germany. Milwaukee, the largest city in Wisconsin, and less than thirty miles from Delafield, had even been known as German Athens during the nineteenth century.

Adding Delafield narrowed my search down to just a few hundred, and there he was: Rolf Schumann, president of Delafield Industries Inc., with his date of birth, education details, family tree, the lot. Good old Internet.

I spent the next hour or so discovering not a great deal useful about Mr Schumann. He was sixty-one years old and had been president of Delafield Industries for seven years, having been their finance director before that. It appeared that he was a pillar of society in Delafield and was involved with various local charities, either as a donor or an administrator. I learnt that he was a leading light in the Delafield Chamber of Commerce, as well as an elder at one of the local Lutheran churches. There was absolutely nothing I found to suggest that he would be the target of a bomber four thousand miles from his home.

Back in the 1840s, Delafield Industries Inc. had been established in a local blacksmith’s forge making hand tools for the new settlers of Wisconsin to work the land and grow their corn. With the coming of the internal combustion engine, the firm had diversified, first into tractors and then into every type of agricultural machinery. According to their own website, the company was now the biggest supplier of combine harvesters to midwestern farmers, and even I knew there was an awful lot of corn in the American Midwest. Unless huge success and mammoth money-making were motives for murder for jealous competitors, I could glean no reason why Delafield Industries should be a target.

I didn’t seem to be doing very well in my new career as an