In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,67

A sort of hopeless calm took over from the anxiety.

‘If they think they can get everything back and shut us up,’ she said, ‘they will be actively searching for us in order to kill us. And you intend to give them every encouragement. Is that right?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Or rather, yes.’

‘They’d be looking for us anyway,’ Jik pointed out.

‘And we are going to say “Coo-ee, we’re over here”?’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘I think they may know already.’

‘God give me strength,’ she said. ‘All right. I see what you’re doing, and I see why you didn’t tell me. And I think you’re a louse. But I’ll grant you you’ve been a damn sight more successful than I thought you’d be, and here we all still are, safe and moderately sound, so all right, we’ll let them know we’re definitely here. On the strict understanding that we then keep our heads down until you’ve fixed the police in Melbourne.’

I kissed her cheek. ‘Done,’ I said.

‘So how do we do it?’

I grinned at her. ‘We address ourselves to the telephone.’

In the end Sarah herself made the call, on the basis that her Australian voice would be less remarkable than Jik’s Englishness, or mine.

‘Is that the Ruapehu Fine Arts gallery? It is? I wonder if you can help me…’ she said. ‘I would like to speak to whoever is in charge. Yes, I know, but it is important. Yes, I’ll wait.’ She rolled her eyes and put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘She sounded like a secretary. New Zealand, anyway.’

‘You’re doing great,’ I said.

‘Oh… Hello? Yes. Could you tell me your name, please?’ Her eyes suddenly opened wide. ‘Wexford. Oh, er… Mr Wexford, I’ve just had a visit from three extraordinary people who wanted to see a painting I bought from you some time ago. Quite extraordinary people. They said you’d sent them. I didn’t believe them. I wouldn’t let them in. But I thought perhaps I’d better check with you. Did you send them to see my painting?’

There was some agitated squawking from the receiver.

‘Describe them? A young man with fair hair and a beard, and another young man with an injured arm, and a bedraggled looking girl. I sent them away. I didn’t like the look of them.’

She grimaced over the ‘phone and listened to some more squawks.

‘No of course I didn’t give them any information. I told you I didn’t like the look of them. Where do I live? Why, right here in Wellington. Well, thank you so much Mr Wexford, I am so pleased I called you.’

She put the receiver down while it was still squawking.

‘He was asking me for my name,’ she said.

‘What a girl,’ Jik said. ‘What an actress, my wife.’

Wexford. Wexford himself.

It had worked.

I raised a small internal cheer.

‘So now that they know we’re here,’ I said, ‘would you like to go off somewhere else?’

‘Oh no,’ Sarah said instinctively. She looked out of the window across the busy harbour. ‘It’s lovely here, and we’ve been travelling all day already.’

I didn’t argue. I thought it might take more than a single telephone call to keep the enemy interested in Wellington, and it had only been for Sarah’s sake that I would have been prepared to move on.

‘They won’t find us just by checking the hotels by telephone,’ Jik pointed out. ‘Even if it occurred to them to try the Townhouse, they’d be asking for Cassavetes and Todd, not Andrews and Peel.’

‘Are we Andrews and Peel?’ Sarah asked.

‘We’re Andrews. Todd’s Peel.’

‘So nice to know,’ she said.

Mr and Mrs Andrews and Mr Peel took dinner in the hotel restaurant without mishap, Mr Peel having discarded his sling for the evening on the grounds that it was in general a bit too easy to notice. Mr Andrews had declined, on the same consideration, to remove his beard.

We went in time to our separate rooms, and so to bed. I spent a jolly hour unsticking the Alice bandages from my leg and admiring the hemstitching. The tree had made tears that were far from the orderly cuts of operations, and as I inspected the long curving railway lines on a ridged backing of crimson, black and yellow skin, I reckoned that those doctors had done an expert job. It was four days since the fall, during which time I hadn’t exactly led an inactive life, but none of their handiwork had come adrift. I realised I had progressed almost without noticing it from feeling terrible all the time to scarcely feeling anything worth