Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,94
hotel concierge was most helpful. Delafield, Wisconsin, he said, was under two hours’ drive away. Yes, of course, he could organize a rental car, all he needed was a credit card. Caroline lent me hers. Better safe than dead.
Interstate highway 94 conveniently ran directly from Chicago to Delafield and, as the hotel concierge had said, it took us less than two hours in our rented Buick.
We turned off the interstate at the Delafield exit and found ourselves in an urban environment repeated thousands of times across the United States. The junction was surrounded on all sides by flat-roofed commercial and retail development, including gas stations, drugstores, supermarkets and the ubiquitous fast-food outlets each with an over-tall sign designed to be visible for miles along the highway in each direction. I thought back to when I had opened the Hay Net and the flurry of objections that had been raised by the local planners over the modest sign I had wanted to erect next to the road. In the end I had been given my permission, on the condition that the top of the sign was not more than two metres from the ground. I smiled to myself. The Cambridge-shire County Council planning officer would have had palpitations in this neck of the woods.
Beyond the retail areas with their acres of tarmac car park, and sitting on a small hill, I could see some substantial industrial buildings with the words DELAFIELD INDUSTRIES INC. in big bold black letters on a yellow sign sticking up from the roof. Below the sign, painted large on the side wall of the factory in fading paint, was the legend THE FINEST AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY IN AMERICA.
I wasn’t really sure what I hoped to achieve by coming all the way up to Delafield from Chicago. It just seemed to me to be an obvious thing to do, having discovered that it was so close. I had no idea what I would find. Indeed, I had no idea what I was even looking for. But if I was right and Delafield Industries was indeed the intended target, then if anyone knew the motive for the bombing, it would surely be Rolf Schumann. Whether he would tell me or not was another matter.
We drove up to the main gate where a sturdy-looking barrier blocked our path.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked a security guard, who appeared from the glass-fronted grey booth on my left. He wore a dark blue uniform complete with flat-topped cap and a belt around his waist with more gadgets hung from it than I believed was prudent. Surely, I thought, a belt with all that weight would pull his trousers down, rather than hold them up.
‘I was passing and wondered if Mr Rolf Schumann was in,’ I said.
‘And your name, sir?’ the guard asked. He, himself, wore a plastic name badge with BAKER embossed on it.
‘Butcher,’ I said, deciding against ‘candlestick maker’. ‘Max and Caroline Butcher.’ I had no idea why I didn’t tell him my real name. If Mr Schumann was, in fact, in, then he might just remember me from Newmarket racecourse and wonder why I had given a false name to his security guard. But it didn’t matter.
‘Do you have an appointment, Mr Butcher?’ asked the guard politely.
‘No, I’m afraid we don’t,’ I replied, equally politely.
‘Then I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We don’t accept visitors without an appointment.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But is Mr Schumann actually here?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ he said.
‘Couldn’t or won’t?’ I asked.
‘Couldn’t.’ He had lost the politeness from his voice.
‘Why not?’ I asked him.
‘Please, sir,’ he said, not amused and not wanting to play the game any longer, ‘turn your vehicle around and depart these premises.’ He pronounced ‘vehicle’ as if it were two words – ‘veer-hickle’, with the emphasis on the ‘hickle’. ‘Otherwise I shall have you forcibly removed.’
He didn’t appear to be joking. I resisted the temptation to say that I was still owed some money by his company for having cooked a lunch at which his boss had been blown up. Instead, I did as he asked, turned my ‘veer-hickle’ around and pulled away. I could see him large in the rear-view mirror. He was standing in the road with his hands on his hips, and he watched us all the way down the hill until we disappeared round the bend at the bottom.
‘That didn’t seem to go too well,’ said Caroline somewhat sarcastically. ‘What do you suggest we do now? Climb their fence?’