Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,66

task of explaining to the chief inspector why I hadn’t given him the stuff as soon as I had found it or even given him the necessary information so that he could have found it himself. I didn’t exactly think he would be very happy about that. He might, with good reason, charge me with obstructing the police, and then what protection would they afford me against a knife man? None whatsoever.

Second, keeping hold of the microcoder and the money might give me some leverage, provided I kept alive long enough to use it.

I picked up my father’s mobile telephone and tried again to turn it on but without success. It had NOKIA written on the front. My mobile was a Samsung. I tried my charger, but the connection was wrong, naturally. I took the SIM card out of my father’s phone and put it in mine, but I seemed unable to get any details of his numbers. If there was anything there, he had stored it in the phone’s memory, not on the SIM.

I dug around in the bottom drawer of my desk, where I always put spare or old chargers, but nothing would fit.

I picked up the Alan Charles Grady passport and examined it. It had been issued nine months previously and appeared to me to be genuine, but I had no real idea of what an Australian passport should look like. I turned the pages and found a stamp from an immigration officer at Heathrow showing that he had not entered the United Kingdom until the day before he came to see me at Ascot. It was the only UK stamp in his passport, but there was also one from Dublin Airport dated the previous week. So he had flown straight out again from Heathrow after his arrival from Australia, just as John Smith had thought, and using the name Grady.

I wondered what he had been up to in Ireland for six days, and I decided it was time to find out. I couldn’t just sit and wait for Shifty-eyes to turn up demanding his money with a knife at my throat for encouragement. Or, worse still, at Sophie’s throat.

The following morning, Friday, I was waiting outside the local mobile telephone shop for it to open at nine o’clock sharp.

I’d not slept well, mostly due to imagining that I could hear creaks on the stairs. I had firmly wedged Sophie’s dressing-table chair under the bedroom door handle when I had retired, and, of course, it had still been safely there in the morning.

At ten past nine, the door was unlocked by a female shop assistant who looked about twelve years old. “Yes, sir,” she said in a bored tone. “Can I help you?”

“I need a charger for this phone,” I said, holding out my father’s Nokia and refrained from asking if her mother was in.

“No problem,” she said with a little more interest. “Mains or in-car?”

“Mains,” I said.

She went over to a display and took one of the chargers.

“This should be the one,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Could you just check that it’s the right one?” I said.

“It will be,” she reiterated.

“Could you just open it to make sure?” I said. “Please.”

She obviously thought I was mad, but she took a large pair of scissors from a drawer beneath the desk and cut through the plastic around the charger. She plugged it into a socket and took the phone from me.

“There,” she said, “it’s charging. You can see from the little lines moving on the side.”

I looked, and indeed the display was no longer completely blank as before.

“Thank you,” I said. “Can you turn it on?”

She pushed a button on the top. The screen lit up, and then the phone played a five-note tune. She handed it back to me with it still connected by the cord to the charger.

The phone had the message PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECURITY CODE displayed on the screen.

“It’s a long time since I used this phone,” I said to her, “and I can’t remember the security code. Can you bypass it for me?”

“No chance,” she said, sounding horrified at the suggestion. “I’m not allowed to do that. How do I know it’s your phone anyway?”

“So, theoretically, you could bypass the security code,” I said, “if you really wanted to?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “But I expect Carl could.”

“Who’s Carl?”

“He works out the back,” she said. “He mends mobiles. He’s very clever.”

She disappeared and returned with a young man who didn’t strike me as