Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,79

too glanced briefly at Betsy, telling me that he did indeed understand not to discuss the matter further with her there. Betsy, meanwhile, had not got the same message.

“What?” she said.

“What ‘what’?” I asked.

“What have you got that he wants?” she persisted.

“Nothing much,” I said. “A type of television remote. Forget it.”

She looked like she was about to ask me another question when Luca interrupted her thought process. “Where do you want to go for dinner tonight, Betsy?” he said.

“What?” she said angrily, turning towards him.

“Where shall we go for dinner tonight?” he repeated.

“We’re going to my mother’s,” she said sharply.

“Oh yes,” said Luca. “I forgot.”

He winked at me as we climbed into the car. Luca was nobody’s fool, he forgot nothing.

Within ten minutes I could see in the rearview mirror that Betsy was again listening to her iPod and dozing with her head against the window.

“Betsy, please, could you pass me a tissue?” I asked fairly quietly.

She didn’t move.

Luca began to turn around.

“Leave her,” I said to him.

“So was this TV remote thing that the man wanted that RFID writer you showed me?” Luca asked me quietly.

“Yes,” I said. “He calls himself John Smith, but I very much doubt that’s his real name. He also says he’s working for the Australian Racing Board.”

“Why don’t you just give it to him, then?” Luca said.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “For some reason I don’t altogether trust him, so I made up a story about giving it to a friend who had then gone on holiday.”

“Nice one,” said Luca sarcastically. “Where to?”

“Greece, I think,” I said. “I can’t really remember. I told him she was back on Sunday, that’s tomorrow.”

“She?” he said, almost laughing. “So where did the RFID writer come from in the first place?”

“I was given it,” I said.

“Who by?” he asked.

“A man from Australia.”

“Not John Smith?” he said.

“No. Another man from Australia.”

“Hence the Australian Racing Board’s interest in it?”

“Exactly.”

“So who was this other man from Australia?” Luca asked persistently. I began to wish we had never started this.

“Just a man,” I said evasively.

“So a mystery man from Australia just gave you a device for writing RFIDs and now the Australian Racing Board wants it back?”

It sounded implausible even to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“But is it theirs?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you ask the mystery man who gave it to you?”

“I can’t,” I said. “He’s gone away.”

“Back to Australia?”

“Not exactly,” I replied. Farther than that, I thought.

“So are you going to give it to the man in the parking lot, this John Smith?” Luca asked.

“I might,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

“Well, it’s not yours, is it? So why not give it to him? And I tend to think that next time he comes asking, you might just get another dose of fists and steel toe caps if you refuse. He seemed quite determined.”

“Yes, you’re probably right,” I said. “But there’s still something about him I don’t like. And I feel that giving up the microcoder is like giving up my trump card.”

“ ‘Microcoder’?” Luca said.

“That’s what the man calls it. But I know my father called it a ‘chip writer.’”

“Your father?” Luca said surprised. “I thought your father was dead.”

“He is,” I said without further elaboration. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t told Luca that the man murdered at Ascot had been my father. As far as Luca was concerned, my father had always been dead, and he knew I had been raised from babyhood by my grandparents.

“So how come your father knew about this microcoder thing?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” I said, trying to close the discussion.

“It’s a long journey,” he said.

“Yeah, well, not long enough.”

“So what’s next?” said Luca.

“Days off tomorrow and Monday, then Towcester on Tuesday evening,” I said.

“No,” he said, irritated.“I meant what’s next with this microcoder thing?”

“How difficult would it be to make another one exactly the same?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “As far as I remember, it’s just a radio transmitter that concentrates the radio signal at a point where you would put the RFID. It didn’t appear that sophisticated.”

“Could you make another one?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said slowly.

“I don’t want you to,” I added quickly. “I just wondered if you could.”

“Yeah, I reckon I might,” he said. “Or if I couldn’t, one of the little hooligans from the electronics club would probably be able to do it in no time. They are like bloody magic when it comes to electronics. One