Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,68
would have known why there had been no call.
Messages two and three were also from Paddy Murphy, each with an increasing degree of urgency, asking, then pleading, for Alan to call him back.
“The caller’s number was plus 353 42 3842 . . .” said the disembodied voice when I pushed the right button. I wrote it down on the notepad I always kept in the glove box of the car. Plus, 353 meant it was a Republic of Ireland number. Perhaps Paddy Murphy was the man my father had flown to Dublin to visit.
So all I had to do now was find a certain Paddy Murphy in Ireland. Easy, I thought. I suppose it must be marginally more straightforward than finding someone called Chang in China.
And I had Paddy’s telephone number, which helped.
14
The rest of the telephone was less useful than I had hoped.
Unlike most people, my father had not used his mobile as his phone book. There were no entries at all on either the phone memory or on the SIM card. No handy names of contacts who might or might not have made a microcoder, and who now lay in a Melbourne hospital with a bullet in his brain.
No convenient names for my sisters with their telephone numbers.
The only useful thing was a list in the calls register of the last ten numbers he had called and five that he had received. One of them in each of the lists was the +353 number of Paddy Murphy.
I made a written note of them all, just in case the phone decided to die completely, but I wasn’t even sure if they were UK, Irish or Australian numbers, or anywhere else for that matter.
I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten in the morning in Kenilworth. It would be the same in Dublin. But I wondered what time that made it in Melbourne, Australia.
I used my father’s phone to call Paddy Murphy.
“Hello,” said a very Irish-sounding voice with the emphasis on the long final “o.”
“Is that Paddy Murphy?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?” said the voice rather cautiously. Was Paddy Murphy not his real name either?
“This is Alan Grady’s son,” I said.
There was a long pause from the other end.
“Are you still there?” I asked eventually. He was. I could hear his breathing.
“And who might Alan Grady be?” he said.
“Don’t play games with me, Mr. Murphy. Call me back on this number if you want to talk.”
I hung up.
He called back immediately, the phone ringing before I had time to put it down.
“Yes?” I said.
“And what line of business might you be in?” he asked.
“Selling,” I said.
“Selling what, exactly?” he replied.
“Depends on what you want to buy,” I said.
“Now, are you playing games with me this time, Mr. Grady?” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Are you the Garda?” he asked suddenly.
“Garda?”
“The Garda,” he repeated. “The police?”
“Why do you ask?” I said, realizing finally what he meant. “Have you been up to no good?” But the line was dead. Paddy Murphy, or whoever, had already hung up.
Damn, I thought. That hadn’t gone at all well. He was possibly my only real lead to discover what was going on, and now he had done a runner. Perhaps he believed I’d been trying to trace the call. I wish I had. My father had flown into Dublin, but Mr. Paddy Murphy, if that was his real name, could be anywhere in the more than thirty thousand square miles of the Republic of Ireland.
I sat for ten minutes, waiting and hoping for him to call. He didn’t.
So I tried him again, but he didn’t answer. How, I wondered, did one find out where a certain telephone number was situated? If it was a mobile, I might have no chance, but a landline would have an area code. I decided to ask Luca. If anyone knew, he would.
In the afternoon, I drove to Kempton Park for the evening racing. Luca had called to say he would meet me at the course as he and Betsy were spending the day somewhere in Surrey visiting friends, or something.
I’d asked him how things had gone at Leicester on the Wednesday evening.
“Fine,” he’d said. “Good crowd. Plenty of business.”
“Profitable?” I asked.
“Very,” he’d replied without explaining further.
Why did I worry so much? Would it be better or worse if Luca was my official business partner? Indeed, should I sell him the whole enterprise and be done with it? But what else could I do? I had to earn a living somehow.