In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,11

get back from the pub until nearly three. I went to lunch late. I was hung up with a client all morning…’ He stopped, gripping his tumbler as if it were a support to hold on to. ‘I can’t tell you… how awful it was.’

The mild understatement seemed somehow to make things worse.

‘They said,’ he added, ‘that eighty per cent of murdered married women are killed by their husbands.’

That statement had Frost stamped all over it.

‘They let me come home, in the end, but I don’t think…’ His voice shook. He swallowed, visibly trying to keep tight control on his hard-won calm. ‘I don’t think they’ve finished.’

It was five days since he’d walked in and found Regina dead. When I thought of the mental hammerings he’d taken on top, the punishing assault on his emotional reserves, where common humanity would have suggested kindness and consoling help, it seemed marvellous that he had remained as sane as he had.

‘Have they got anywhere with catching the thieves?’ I said.

He smiled wanly. ‘I don’t even know if they’re trying.’

‘They must be.’

‘I suppose so. They haven’t said.’ He drank some whisky slowly. ‘It’s ironic, you know. I’ve always had a regard for the police. I didn’t know they could be… the way they are.’

A quandary, I thought. Either they leaned on a suspect in the hope of breaking him down, or they asked a few polite questions and got nowhere: and under the only effective system the innocent suffered more than the guilty.

‘I see no end to it.’ Donald said. ‘No end at all.’

By mid-day Friday the police had called twice more at the house, but for my cousin the escalation of agony seemed to have slowed. He was still exhausted, apathetic, and as grey as smoke, but it was as if he were saturated with suffering and could absorb little more. Whatever Frost and his companion said to him, it rolled off without destroying him further.

‘You’re supposed to be painting someone’s horse, aren’t you?’ he said suddenly, as we shaped up to lunch.

‘I told them I’d come later.’

He shook his head. ‘I remember you saying, when I asked you to stay, that it would fit in fine before your next commission.’ He thought a bit. ‘Tuesday. You should have gone to Yorkshire on Tuesday.’

‘I telephoned and explained.’

‘All the same, you’d better go.’

He said he would be all right alone, now, and thanks for everything. He insisted I look up the times of trains, order a taxi, and alert the people at the other end. I could see in the end that the time had indeed come for him to be by himself, so I packed up my things to depart.

‘I suppose,’ he said diffidently, as we waited for the taxi to fetch me, ‘that you never paint portraits? People, that is, not horses.’

‘Sometimes,’ I said.

‘I just wondered… Gould you, one day… I mean, I’ve got quite a good photograph of Regina…’

I looked searchingly at his face. As far as I could see, it could do no harm. I unclipped the suitcase and took out the picture with its back towards him.

‘It’s still wet,’ I warned. ‘And not framed, and I can’t varnish it for at least six months. But you can have it, if you like.’

‘Let me see.’

I turned the canvas round. He stared and stared, but said nothing at all. The taxi drove up to the front door.

‘See you,’ I said, propping Regina against a wall.

He nodded and punched my arm, opened the door for me, and sketched a farewell wave. Speechlessly, because his eyes were full of tears.

I spent nearly a week in Yorkshire doing my best to immortalise a patient old steeplechaser, and then went home to my noisy flat near Heathrow airport, taking the picture with me to finish.

Saturday I downed tools and went to the races, fed up with too much nose-to-the-grindstone.

Jump racing at Plumpton, and the familiar swelling of excitement at the liquid movement of racehorses. Paintings could never do justice to them: never. The moment caught on canvas was always second best.

I would love to have ridden in races, but hadn’t had enough practice or skill; nor, I dare say, nerve. Like Donald, my childhood’s background was of middle-sized private enterprise, with my father an auctioneer in business on his own account in Sussex. I had spent countless hours in my growing years watching the horses train on the Downs round Findon, and had drawn and painted them from about the age of six. Riding itself