In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,66

Sarah said.

‘Rock-a-bye skyscraper…’ sang Jik, in fine voice.

The sun shone bravely, and the countryside was green with leaves I didn’t know. There were fierce bright patches and deep mysterious shadows; gorges and rocks and heaven-stretching tree trunks; feathery waving grasses, shoulder high. An alien land, wild and beautiful.

‘Get that chiaroscuro,’ Jik said, as we sped into one particularly spectacular curving valley.

‘What’s chiaroscuro?’ Sarah said.

‘Light and shade,’ Jik said. ‘Contrast and balance. Technical term. All the world’s a chiaroscuro, and all the men and women merely blobs of light and shade.’

‘Every life’s a chiaroscuro,’ I said.

‘And every soul.’

‘The enemy,’ I said, ‘is grey.’

‘And you get grey,’ Jik nodded, ‘by muddling together red, white and blue.’

‘Grey lives, grey deaths, all levelled out into equal grey nothing.’

‘No one,’ Sarah sighed, ‘would ever call you two grey.’

‘Grey!’ I said suddenly. ‘Of bloody course.’

‘What are you on about?’ Jik said.

‘Grey was the name of the man who hired the suburban art gallery in Sydney, and Grey is the name of the man who sold Updike his quote Herring unquote.’

‘Oh dear.’ Sarah’s sigh took the lift out of the spirits and the dazzle from the day.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

There were so many of them, I thought. Wexford and Greene. The boy. The woman. Harley Renbo. Two toughs at Alice Springs, one of whom I knew by sight, and one, (the one who’d been behind me) whom I didn’t. The one I didn’t know might, or might not, be Beetle-brows. If he wasn’t, Beetle-brows was extra.

And now Grey. And another one, somewhere.

Nine at least. Maybe ten. How could I possibly tangle all that lot up without getting crunched. Or worse, getting Sarah crunched, or Jik. Every time I moved, the serpent grew another head.

I wondered who did the actual robberies. Did they send their own two (or three) toughs overseas, or did they contract out to local labour, so to speak?

If they sent their own toughs, was it one of them who had killed Regina?

Had I already met Regina’s killer? Had he thrown me over the balcony at Alice?

I pondered uselessly, and added one more twist…

Was he waiting ahead in Wellington?

We reached the capital in the afternoon and booked into the Townhouse Hotel because of its splendid view over the harbour. With such marvellous coastal scenery, I thought, it would have been a disgrace if the cities of New Zealand had been ugly. I still thought there were no big towns more captivating than flat old marshy London, but that was another story. Wellington, new and cared for, had life and character to spare.

I looked up the Ruapehu Fine Arts in the telephone directory and asked the hotel’s reception desk how to get there. They had never heard of the gallery, but the road it was in, that must be up past the old town, they thought: past Thorndon.

They sold me a local area road map, which they said would help, and told me that Mount Ruapehu was a (with luck) extinct volcano, with a warm lake in its crater. If we’d come from Auckland, we must have passed nearby.

I thanked them and carried the map to Jik and Sarah upstairs in their room.

‘We could find the gallery,’ Jik said. ‘But what would we do when we got there?’

‘Make faces at them through the window?’

‘You’d be crazy enough for that, too,’ Sarah said.

‘Let’s just go and look,’ I said. ‘They won’t see us in the car, if we simply drive past.’

‘And after all,’ Jik said incautiously, ‘we do want them to know we’re here.’

‘Why?’ asked Sarah in amazement.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Jik said.

‘Why?’ she demanded, the anxiety crowding back.

‘Ask Todd, it’s his idea.’

‘You’re a sod,’ I said.

‘Why, Todd?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘I want them to spend all their energies looking for us over here and not clearing away every vestige of evidence in Melbourne. We do want the police to deal with them finally, don’t we, because we can’t exactly arrest them ourselves? Well… when the police start moving, it would be hopeless if there was no one left for them to find.’

She nodded. ‘That’s what you meant by leaving it all in working order. But… you didn’t say anything about deliberately enticing them to follow us.’

‘Todd’s got that list, and the pictures we took,’ Jik said, ‘and they’ll want them back. Todd wants them to concentrate exclusively on getting them back, because if they think they can get them back and shut us up…’

‘Jik,’ I interrupted. ‘You do go on a bit.’

Sarah looked from me to him and back again.