Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,23

them.

“No thanks,” said Luca. “Not tonight. We’ll take the train from here to Richmond. That’s where the party is.”

“Look,” I said to him, “I fancy giving it a miss tomorrow. I could do with a day off. What do you think? You’re welcome to work with Betsy if you want.”

Even though I paid Luca and Betsy a salary as my assistants, they made easily as much again from sharing the profits, assuming there were some profits. Over the last couple of days we had far more than recouped our losses from Tuesday, and the days at Royal Ascot were some of our busiest of the year.

“What about the stuff ?” he said, nodding towards my car. “We planned to stay at Millie’s place tonight. In Wimbledon.”

Luca and Betsy lived somewhere between High Wycombe and Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. I had collected them that morning, as I had often done, from a rest area just off Junction 3 on the M40.

“Isn’t your car in the rest area?” I asked. I had sometimes transferred the gear into his car there.

“No,” said Luca. “Betsy’s mum dropped us off this morning.”

Bugger, I thought. I would either have to come to Ascot again tomorrow or deprive Luca and Betsy of their day.

“OK,” I said with resignation in my voice. “I’ll be here. But I’m fed up with dressing like this. I’ll be more casual tomorrow.”

Luca smiled broadly. I knew he loved the exhilaration and energy of the big race days. I constantly reminded myself that I would lose him if I concentrated too much on the smaller tracks and stopped going to Ascot in June, Cheltenham in March and Aintree in April.

“Great,” said Luca, still grinning. “And you’d hate to miss another day like today, now wouldn’t you?”

“I can’t believe there will be another day like today. Not ever,” I said. “But, no, I wouldn’t want to miss it if there were.”

“We must dash,” said Luca. “See you here tomorrow, then. Usual time?”

“Yes, all right,” I replied. “Have fun tonight.”

They disappeared off towards the station through the gap in the hedge from where the police tent had now been removed, the gap in the hedge where my father had been stabbed.

I stood and watched them go. I couldn’t remember when I had last been to a birthday party.

Jason, the nurse, hadn’t been very happy when I called him to say that I would be late at the hospital. I had a job to do. I had hoped to do it the following day but . . .

I looked again at my watch. It was half past eight.

I’d promised Jason I’d be there in time to watch the ten o’clock news with Sophie. I still hoped I might make it, but things were not going quite as I had planned.

Having left my morning coat, vest and tie in my parked car, I was on foot in Sussex Gardens, in London, looking for a certain seedy hotel or guesthouse. The problem was not that I couldn’t find any. Quite the reverse. Everywhere I looked there were seedy little hotels and guesthouses. There were so many of them, and I hadn’t a clue which was the one I wanted.

“Near Paddington Station,” my father had said.

I imagined him getting off the Heathrow Express at Paddington with his luggage after the long flight from Australia and pitching up at the first place with a vacancy. So I had started close to the station and worked my way outwards. So far, after an hour and a half, I had drawn a complete blank, and I was getting frustrated.

“Do you, or did you, have a guest this week called Talbot?” I asked without much hope in yet another of the little places I had been in. “Or one called Grady?”

I pulled out the now-rather-creased copy of the driver’s license that Detective Sergeant Murray had made for me. A young woman behind the reception counter looked down at the picture, then up at me.

“Who wants know?” she asked in a very Eastern European accent. “Are you police?” she added, looking worried.

“No,” I assured her. “Not police.”

“Who you say you want?”

“Mr. Talbot or Mr. Grady,” I repeated patiently.

“You need ask Freddie,” she said.

“Where is Freddie?” I asked, looking around at the empty hallway.

“In pub,” she said.

“Which pub?” I asked patiently.

“I not know which pub,” she said crossly. “This pub, that pub. Always pub.”

This was going nowhere. “Thank you anyway,” I said politely, and left.

Even if my father had been staying there, I wouldn’t have known