it—and I don’t—what right do you think you have breaking into my house to look for it?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “And I didn’t break in. You left a window open. You were just asking to be burgled.”
“So that’s what you are, is it?” I said. “A burglar.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said.
I looked across at him. “I’m not the one with a broken wrist.”
“OK,” he said, “I agree. That wasn’t so clever.”
Again I drove in silence.
“Where to, then?” I asked.
“To wherever the microcoder is.”
“I told you, I don’t have it.”
“And I told you, I don’t believe you.” He turned in his seat and looked at me. “For a start, if you didn’t know what I was talking about, then you would surely have telephoned the police last night. And second, we know it was you that retrieved your father’s rucksack from the hotel in Paddington.”
“What rucksack?” I said, trying to keep my voice as level and calm as possible and wondering, once more, if this John fellow and Shifty-eyes were working together. He had said “we.” Was I, after all, on my way to meet again the man with the twelve-centimeter knife?
“Oh, come on,” he said. “We’d been looking for his luggage too, you know. And I’d been looking for your father as well, for weeks. Ever since he stole the microcoder.”
“Who are ‘we’?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He just turned back and looked out at the road.
“Why did you murder my father?” I said slowly.
“I didn’t,” he said, still looking ahead.
“But you had it done,” I said.
“No.” He turned again to face me. “That was not me.”
“Then who was it?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“And you expect me to believe you?” I said. “Perhaps we should go to the police station and you can then explain to them exactly who you are and why you were in my house last night.”
“I’ll deny it,” he said. “You vacuumed up the evidence, remember?”
I pulled the Volvo into a rest area and stopped the engine. I turned to him.
“And what is it you really want?” I asked.
“The microcoder,” he said flatly. “That’s all.”
“And what exactly is this bloody microcoder anyway?” I said.
“An electronic device.”
“Yes, but what does it do?” I asked.
He sat silently for a moment or two clearly debating with himself as to how much he should tell me.
“It writes coded information onto animal-identification tags,” he said.
“RFIDs,” I said absentmindedly.
“So you do know what it is,” he said, slapping his knee. “So where the hell is it?”
Now it was my turn to sit silently debating with myself how much I was going to tell this Just call me John mysterious stranger.
“Are you some sort of secret agent?” I asked.
He laughed. “What makes you think that?”
“You seem pretty secretive,” I said. “And you talk about ‘we’ and ‘us’ as if you were part of an organization.”
He again stared for a moment through the windshield.
“Indirectly,” he said. “I work for the Australian Racing Board.”
“Do they know you break into people’s houses?”
“They would deny any knowledge of my existence.”
“You don’t sound Australian.”
“I’m not,” he said. “English to the core. Can’t stand the Aussies. Too bloody good at cricket, if you ask me.”
“So this so-called microcoder is to do with Australian racing?”
“It’s to do with all racing, everywhere.”
“But is there much racing in Australia?” I asked. “I’ve heard of the Melbourne Cup, of course, but not much else.”
“There’s a lot more racing in Australia than that,” he said. “There are six times as many racetracks in Australia than here in Great Britain, and twice as many horses in training. It’s big business.”
“Do they have licensed bookmakers?” I asked.
“Yes, plenty of them,” he said. “But all off-track betting is through the TAB, their equivalent of the tote.”
“Well, you live and learn.”
“And you must have heard of Phar Lap?” he said. “Most famous racehorse that ever lived.”
“The name rings a bell.”
“Well, he was an Australian horse,” John said. “Back in the thirties. He won fourteen group races in a row one year, including the Melbourne Cup.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, but he was poisoned with arsenic during a visit to the United States. Some said the horse was killed on the orders of the Chicago mob to prevent him winning again and costing them a packet in illegal bets.”
“Why are bookies always cast as the villains?” I asked.
“That’s because you are,” he said, smiling at me. “Now, where’s my microcoder?”
“So it’s yours, is it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“How can I be