Rat Race - By Dick Francis Page 0,59

iceberg,’ she said, mistakenly, ‘Relax. Your virtue is quite safe. I only came down, to start with, to tell you there was a phone call for you, and would you please ring back.’

‘Who…?’ I tried hard to keep it casual.

‘Colin Ross,’ Honey said matter-of-factly. ‘He wants you to call some time this evening, if you can. I said if it was about a flight I could deal with it, but apparently it’s something personal.’ She finished the sentence half way between an accusation and a question and left me ample time to explain.

I didn’t. I said, ‘I’ll go up now, then, and use the telephone in the lounge.’

She shrugged. ‘All right.’

She walked up with me, but didn’t quite have the nerve to hover close enough to listen. I shut the lounge door in front of her resigned and humorously rueful face.

Got the number.

‘Colin? Matt.’

‘Oh good, he said. ‘Look. Nancy rang up today while Midge and I were along at the races… I took Midge along on the Heath because she was so miserable at home, and now of course she’s even more miserable that she missed Nancy… anyway, our cleaning woman answered the telephone, and Nancy left a message.’

‘Is she… I mean, is she all right?’

‘Do you mean, is she with Chanter?’ His voice was strained. ‘She told our cleaner she had met an old art school friend in Liverpool and was spending a few days camping with her near Warwick.’

‘Her?’ I exclaimed.

‘Well, I don’t know. I asked our Mrs Williams, and she then said she thought Nancy said “her”, but of course she would think that, wouldn’t she?’

‘I’m afraid she would.’

‘But anyway, Nancy had been much more insistent that Mrs Williams tell me something else… it seems she has seen Major Tyderman.’

‘She didn’t!’

‘Yeah… She said she saw Major Tyderman in the passenger seat of a car on the Stratford road out of Warwick. Apparently there were some roadworks, and the car stopped for a moment just near her.’

‘He could have been going anywhere… from anywhere…’

‘Yes,’ he agreed in depression. ‘I rang the police in Cambridge to tell them, but Nancy had already been through to them, when she called home. All she could remember about the driver was that he wore glasses. She thought he might have had dark hair and perhaps a moustache. She only glanced at him for a second because she was concentrating on Tyderman. Also she hadn’t taken the number, and she’s hopeless on the make of cars, so altogether it wasn’t a great deal of help.’

‘No…

‘Anyway, she told Mrs Williams she would be coming home on Saturday. She said if I would drive to Warwick races instead of flying, she would come home with me in the car.’

‘Well… thank God for that.’

‘If for nothing else,’ he said aridly.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I flew the customers from Wiltshire to Newmarket and parked the Six as far as possible from the Polyplane. When the passengers had departed standwards, I got out of the fuggy cabin and into the free air, lay propped on one elbow on the grass, loosened my tie, opened the neck of my shirt. Scorching hot day, a sigh of wind over the Heath, a couple of small cumulus clouds defying evaporation, blue sky over the blue planet.

A suitable day for camping.

Wrenched my thoughts away from the profitless grind: Nancy despised me, despised herself, had chosen Chanter as a refuge, as a steadfast known quantity, had run away from the near-stranger who had not seemed what he seemed, and gone to where she knew she was wanted. Blind, instinctive, impulsive flight. Reckless, understandable, forgivable flight…

I could take Chanter, I thought mordantly. I could probably take the thought and memory of Chanter, if only she would settle for me in the end.

It was odd that you had to lose something you didn’t even know you had, before you began to want it more than anything on earth.

Down at the other end of the row of aircraft the Polyplane pilot was strolling about, smoking again. One of these fine days he would blow himself up. There was no smile in place that afternoon: even from a hundred yards one could detect the gloom in the heavy frowns he occasionally got rid of in my direction.

Colin had booked with Harley for the week ahead. Poly-planes must have been wondering what else they would have to do to get him back.

They played rough, no doubt of that. Informing on Derry-downs to the Board of Trade, discrediting their pilot, spreading smears