Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,28

was the right term, in a residential-care home in Warwick. I went to visit her occasionally, but age and Alzheimer’s had taken their toll, and she was no longer the woman who had raised me and whom I had known for so long. Thankfully, she wasn’t unhappy with her lot, she was just mostly lost in a different existence from the rest of us.

In spite of all her troubles, I had always envied Sophie for having had several siblings and masses of cousins. Despite the rift with her parents over her choice of husband, she had remained as close to the rest of her large family as her illness had allowed. I, meanwhile, had no one other than my demented old grandmother, who sometimes didn’t recognize me anymore.

Except that I now knew I did have family after all. I had two half sisters in Australia. The only problem was that I didn’t know their names or where they lived, and they, in turn, would have absolutely no idea that I existed. I couldn’t imagine my father had told his new family that he already had a son, the offspring of a wife that he had strangled in England before fleeing by ship to the Antipodes.

I went downstairs again and back into the sitting room.

Once more I sifted through the sad piles of shirts, underwear and handkerchiefs as if I would now find something I had previously missed. But there was nothing.

I looked at the black-and-red canvas rucksack. An airline baggage label with LHR printed across it in large, bold capital letters was fastened around one of the straps with the name GRADY printed smaller on it alongside a bar code, but there was no actual indication of where the label had been attached to the strap. Once again I stared into the rucksack as if I might have somehow overlooked something. As before, it appeared to be completely empty, but, nevertheless, I tipped the whole thing upside down and gave it a good shake. It was more out of frustration than in any expectation of finding anything.

As I turned it over, back and forth, I could feel something move.

I placed it down on the floor and peered inside once more.

The rucksack had a waterproof liner sewn into the canvas with a drawstring at the top. There was a gap at the back, and I slid my hand down between the liner and the canvas. A space about two inches deep across the whole bottom of the rucksack existed between the liner and the base, and here I found the treasure that the man in the parking lot must have sought.

I pulled out three blue-plastic-wrap-covered packages and carefully used a pair of kitchen scissors to open them at one end. Each contained sizable wads of large-denomination banknotes, two in British pounds and the other in Australian dollars. I counted each pack in turn and did some rough mental arithmetic.

My father had taken lodgings in a cheap seedy one-star hotel in Sussex Gardens with about thirty thousand pounds’ worth of cash in his luggage.

And he had died for it.

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There were five other items hidden in the space, in addition to the money.

One was a South African passport in the name of Willem Van Buren.

Another was a small polythene bag containing what appeared at first to be ten grains of rice, but, on closer examination, were clearly man-made. They looked like frosted glass.

Two others were photocopied booklets about six by eight inches with DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION printed along the top of the front cover.

And the fifth was a flat black object about six inches long and two inches wide with some buttons on it. At first I thought it was a television remote control, but it didn’t appear to have VOLUME and CHANNEL buttons, just 0 to 9 plus an ENTER button. I pushed them all. Nothing happened. I turned it over. There was a battery compartment on the back that, I discovered, was empty, so I took the device through to the kitchen and scavenged the battery from the kitchen clock.

I pushed the buttons again and, this time, was rewarded by a small red light that appeared in the top right-hand corner for a moment before going out. Nothing else happened. I pointed the thing at the television and pushed again. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened other than the flash of the little red light.

I didn’t know much about electronics in general, or TV remotes in particular, but I did know that they had