In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,80

if they could tie Hudson in definitely with the gallery they might believe it. So they dangled in front of Hudson the pictures and stuff we stole from the gallery, and along he came to collect them.’

‘How? How did they dangle them?’

‘They let Wexford accidentally overhear snippets from a fake report from several hotels about odd deposits in their baggage rooms, including the paintings at the Hilton. Then after we got here they gave him an opportunity to use the telephone when he thought no one was listening, and he rang Hudson at the house he’s been staying in here for the races, and told him. So Hudson wrote himself a letter to the Hilton from me, and zoomed along to remove the incriminating evidence.’

‘He must have been crazy.’

‘Stupid. But he thought I was dead… and he’d no idea anyone suspected him. He should have had the sense to know that Wexford’s call to him would be bugged by the police… but Frost told me that Wexford would think he was using a public ‘phone booth.’

‘Sneaky,’ Sarah said.

I yawned. ‘It takes a sneak to catch a sneak.’

‘You’d never have thought Hudson would blaze up like that,’ she said. ‘He looked so… so dangerous.’ She shivered. ‘You wouldn’t think people could hide such really frightening violence under a friendly public face.’

‘The nice Irish bloke next door,’ Jik said, standing up, ‘can leave a bomb to blow the legs off children.’

He pulled Sarah to her feet. ‘What do you think I paint?’ he said. ‘Vases of flowers?’ He looked down at me. ‘Horses?’

We parted the next morning at Melbourne airport, where we seemed to have spent a good deal of our lives.

‘It seems strange, saying goodbye,’ Sarah said.

‘I’ll be coming back,’ I said.

They nodded.

‘Well…’ We looked at watches.

It was like all partings. There wasn’t much to say. I saw in their eyes, as they must have seen in mine, that the past ten days would quickly become a nostalgic memory. Something we did in our crazy youth. Distant.

‘Would you do it all again?’ Jik said.

I thought inconsequentially of surviving wartime pilots looking back from forty years on. Had their achievements been worth the blood and sweat and risk of death: did they regret?.

I smiled. Forty years on didn’t matter. What the future made of the past was its own tragedy. What we ourselves did on the day was all that counted.

‘I guess I would.’

I leaned forward and kissed Sarah, my oldest friend’s wife.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Find one of your own.’

17

Maisie saw me before I saw her, and came sweeping down like a great scarlet bird, wings outstretched.

Monday lunchtime at Wolverhampton races, misty and cold.

‘Hello, dear, I’m so glad you’ve come. Did you have a good trip back, because of course it’s such a long way, isn’t it, with all that wretched jet lag?’ She patted my arm and peered acutely at my face. ‘You don’t really look awfully well, dear, if you don’t mind me saying so, and you don’t seem to have collected any sun-tan, though I suppose as you haven’t been away two weeks it isn’t surprising, but those are nasty gashes on your hand, dear, aren’t they, and you were walking very carefully just now.’

She stopped to watch a row of jockeys canter past on their way to the start. Bright shirts against the thin grey mist. A subject for Munnings.

‘Have you backed anything, dear? And are you sure you’re warm enough in that anorak? I never think jeans are good for people in the winter, they’re only cotton, dear, don’t forget, and how did you get on in Australia? I mean, dear, did you find out anything useful?’

‘It’s an awfully long story…’

‘Best told in the bar, then, don’t you think, dear?’

She bought us immense brandies with ginger ale and settled herself at a small table, her kind eyes alert and waiting.

I told her about Hudson’s organisation, about the Melbourne gallery, and about the list of robbable customers.

‘Was I on it?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, you were.’

‘And you gave it to the police?’ she said anxiously.

I grinned. ‘Don’t look so worried, Maisie. Your name was crossed out already. I just crossed it out more thoroughly. By the time I’d finished, no one could ever disentangle it, particularly on a photo-copy.’

She smiled broadly. ‘No one could call you a fool, dear.’

I wasn’t so sure about that. ‘I’m afraid, though,’ I said, ‘that you’ve lost your nine thousand quid.’

‘Oh yes, dear,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Serves me right, doesn’t it, for trying to cheat