Dead Heat Part 29

'I asked her that,' said Caroline. 'Apparently, they didn't. Seems they knocked on her door and asked her if she knew where I was. She asked them why they wanted to know, and that's when they said something about a possible water leak in my flat. That's when she told them about having a key. Apparently they didn't bother checking her flat for anything, though.'

'Then we shall a.s.sume that one of them was Mr Komarov, or, at least, that he sent them even if he wasn't there himself,' I said. 'I wonder who the other one was?'

By the time we reached East Hendred, my wrist was hurting badly again, and I could hardly keep my eyes open due to tiredness. I had driven down the motorway watching the cars behind me almost as much as the road in front, and Caroline had gone to sleep, in spite of promising she wouldn't. I, meanwhile, had continually speeded up, then slowed down all the way from London, and had even left the motorway at Reading to go twice round the roundabout at junction n, to ensure that no one was following us.

I wakened Caroline as we approached the village, and Toby came out to meet us as the car scrunched across the gravel driveway in front of the house. It was always a strange experience for me to come back here, my childhood home, to find that it was my brother and his family, rather than my parents, who were the residents. Perhaps it was another of the reasons why Toby and I saw so little of each other.

'Toby,' I said, climbing out of the car, 'may I introduce Caroline, Caroline Aston.'

They shook hands. 'You're so alike,' Caroline said, looking back and forth at us both.

'No, we're not,' I said, purposely sounding offended. 'He's much older than me.'

'And more distinguished,' said Toby, laughing. He put a hand on my shoulder 'Come on in, little brother.'

It was as good a greeting as we had shared in years.

I went in through the so familiar front door and was greeted by Sally in the hallway. We kissed, cheek to cheek. Politeness only.

'Sally,' I said, 'how lovely to see you. This is Caroline.'

They smiled at each other and Sally, ever well-mannered, leaned forward for a kiss.

'Max,' she said, 'how lovely.' I didn't know whether she meant it was lovely to see me, or whether Caroline was lovely. I didn't particularly care, just as long as we weren't fighting. 'I'm so sorry to hear about your house,' she said, almost sincerely. 'And your arm.' She looked at the end of the cast sticking out below the cuff of my shirt. I smiled my thanks to her. I had told Toby on the phone that I had a broken wrist, but not how I came by it.

'Where are the children?' I asked, looking around.

'At school, of course,' said Sally. 'Philippa, our youngest, is now six.'

'Really,' I said. It must have been a long time since I was there. My niece had been a toddler on my last visit.

Toby jumped into the awkward pause. 'Well, I expect you two would like to get your heads down for a few hours.' I had explained to him from the airport that we had both hardly slept on our flights.

'Thank you,' said Caroline. 'I think we would.'

On my way upstairs I looked briefly into the room that had been mine for the first eighteen years of my life. It didn't really appear much different. My elder nephew was the current occupant, as was clear from the JACK'S ROOM JACK'S ROOM plaque screwed firmly to the door. His bed was in the same position as mine had always been and his chest of drawers in the corner was the very same one that had held my clothes for so long. It made me yearn for my childhood, for the happy years spent growing up in this house, and for the a.s.surance of youth that nothing nasty can ever happen. That Utopia had lasted only until the brick lorry had broken the spell. plaque screwed firmly to the door. His bed was in the same position as mine had always been and his chest of drawers in the corner was the very same one that had held my clothes for so long. It made me yearn for my childhood, for the happy years spent growing up in this house, and for the a.s.surance of youth that nothing nasty can ever happen. That Utopia had lasted only until the brick lorry had broken the spell.

Caroline and I went to bed, and straight to sleep, in the guest bedroom.

I slept sporadically for a couple of hours or so before the discomfort of the cast woke me up for good. I dressed quietly, left Caroline sleeping peacefully, and went downstairs in my stockinged feet. Toby was in his office off the main hallway. I stood silently in the doorway watching him as he studied the Racing Calendar Racing Calendar, as my father had done every single day of the year without fail. The Racing Calendar Racing Calendar was the industry bible for trainers, allowing them to look at the terms and conditions of every upcoming race so that they could determine which of their horses to enter, and where. In my father's day, it had been a weekly broadsheet printed on yellow paper that he would spread out wide on his desk and study for hours on end. Now Toby sat looking through a smaller stapled booklet with blue type on white paper, yet it performed much the same function as the old newspaper version. But the computer age was taking over and, no doubt, the booklet version would soon be consigned to history as well. was the industry bible for trainers, allowing them to look at the terms and conditions of every upcoming race so that they could determine which of their horses to enter, and where. In my father's day, it had been a weekly broadsheet printed on yellow paper that he would spread out wide on his desk and study for hours on end. Now Toby sat looking through a smaller stapled booklet with blue type on white paper, yet it performed much the same function as the old newspaper version. But the computer age was taking over and, no doubt, the booklet version would soon be consigned to history as well.

'h.e.l.lo,' said Toby, looking up. 'Sleep well?'

'Not really,' I said. I lifted up my arm with the cast. 'Too b.l.o.o.d.y uncomfortable.'

'How did you do it?' he asked, looking back down at the calendar.

'I didn't move out of the way quick enough,' I said.

'Of what?' he asked, not looking up.

'A polo mallet,' I said.

He glanced up at me. 'I never realized you played polo.'

'I don't,' I said flatly.

'Then why...' He tailed off and leaned back in his chair. 'Are you telling me that it was deliberate? Someone broke your arm on purpose?' He looked suitably horrified.

'I don't think they would have stopped at my arm if I hadn't run away.'

'But that's terrible,' he said. 'Have you told the police?'

'Not yet.'

'But why on earth not?' he asked. It was a good question, I thought, why didn't I just leave everything to the police? Because I was very afraid that if I did, I would end up dead before they found out who it was who was trying to kill me. But I couldn't exactly say that to Toby right out of the blue, now could I?

'I want to explain everything to you because I need your help,' I said. 'I need your knowledge of horses. I know I grew up in this house and some of it rubbed off on me but you have forgotten more about horses than I ever knew, and I believe I need that knowledge now. That's why I've come here.'

'Explain away,' he said, putting his hands behind his neck and testing the tilt mechanism on his office chair to the limit.

'Not yet. I want Caroline there too. And, I hope you don't mind, but I've asked a lawyer to come down here later this afternoon to listen to it as well.'

'A lawyer?' he said slowly. 'This is serious then?'

'Very,' I said. 'I've never been more serious in my life.' And Toby knew that in my life, especially since the death of my father, I had always been serious. It had often strangely annoyed him.

'OK,' he said, looking carefully at my face. 'What time is this lawyer arriving?'

'He said he'd try to be here by four,' I said. 'He's coming down from London.' I was suddenly not sure if it had been such a good idea. A lawyer might make Toby rather wary. He had fought long and hard with them over the terms of my father's will. Lawyers were not Toby's favourite people. But, there again, he'd never met a lawyer like Bernard Sims. In truth, I hadn't met him, either. It was a pleasure yet to be enjoyed by us all.

Bernard proved to be everything I had expected him to be. He was large, jovial, with a mop of wavy black hair and a huge, double-breasted pin-striped suit doing its best to hold it all together.

'Max,' he said expansively when I greeted him in the driveway. He advanced towards me with a hand outstretched that seemed to me to have far more than its fair share of ringers. Perhaps it was just because each finger was twice the width of my own. I held up my cast and declined the handshake.

'How did you do that?' he asked.

'I'll tell you later,' I said. 'Come on in.'

'But is she here?' he asked in a half whisper, almost conspiratorially.

'Who?' I said innocently. I, too, could play his little game.

'The viola player, of course.'

'She might be,' I said, not able to resist smiling.

'Oh good,' he said, rubbing his hands together. But then he stopped. 'And bad.'

'Why bad?' I asked.

'I'm not sure I should be meeting her socially,' he said. 'It might produce a conflict of interests in the poisoning case.'

'b.u.g.g.e.r the poisoning case,' I said. 'And, anyway, this is definitely not a social visit.'

'No,' he said. 'But I don't know that, do I? You didn't actually tell me why you were so insistent that I came down here this afternoon.'

'I will. I will,' I said. 'All in good time.'

'A matter of life and death, you said.'

'It is,' I replied seriously. 'My life, and my death.'

CHAPTER 18.

We all convened in Toby and Sally's drawing room at four thirty like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, with me playing the part of Hercule Poirot, except that, unlike him, I didn't know all the answers, I wasn't at all sure who had done it and, for the most part, I didn't have a clue of what it was they had done in the first place.

There were five of us in the room. I had thought that Sally would be busy caring for the children but, after school, all three of them had gone to have tea with her sister, their aunt. So Sally sat on the settee with Toby, while Caroline and Bernard sat in armchairs on either side of them. I stood by the fireplace. All I needed, I thought, was a little moustache and a Belgian accent to complete the illusion.

I had previously threatened Bernard with excommunication from the Law Society if he misbehaved and, to be fair, so far, he had been propriety personified. He hadn't even made any snide remarks to me when I had introduced him to Caroline. In fact, quite the reverse. He had been unusually effusive in his comments, with not a single mention of dropping the lawsuit in time with her knickers.

So now the four of them sat with expectant faces waiting for every one of the facts to be revealed before them. They were going to be disappointed.

'Thank you all for being here,' I said by way of introduction. 'And thank you, Toby and Sally, for allowing Caroline and me to stay. And also, thank you, Bernard, for coming all the way from London.'

'Just get on with it,' said Toby, a little impatiently. And he was right. I was procrastinating because I really didn't know where or how to begin. Everyone laughed and it lightened the mood.

'Sorry,' I said. 'I don't quite know where to start.'

'Try at the beginning,' said Caroline, helpfully.

'OK,' I said, and took a deep breath. 'The night before the 2000 Guineas I was engaged by the Newmarket racecourse caterers to be the guest chef at a gala dinner. They engaged all my restaurant staff to be there as well, so the restaurant was closed that night. There were other staff, too, from a catering agency, but I was in charge of both the ordering of the food and the cooking of it.'

I smiled at Caroline. 'Caroline was also at the dinner as part of a string quartet.' She smiled back at me. 'Well,' I went on, 'nearly everyone who was at that dinner suffered from food poisoning during the night. I did, Caroline did and most of my staff did. One even ended up in hospital. Tests have since shown that the cause of the poisoning was undercooked kidney beans in the dinner.' I paused. 'Now everyone involved in food knows that undercooked kidney beans are very nasty, even though I didn't realize that just one bean per person can be enough to cause terrible vomiting, and that's what we all had. But there shouldn't have been any kidney beans in that dinner. I made it from raw ingredients and there were no kidney beans included. But the tests were conclusive, so someone else had to have put them there.'

'Are you saying that it was done on purpose?' asked Bernard.

'Yes,' I said. 'You can't accidentally add enough kidney beans to a dinner to make over two hundred people ill. And the beans had to be ground or finely chopped otherwise they would have been visible in the sauce, which is where I think they must have been put.'

'But why would anyone do that?' said Toby.

'Good question,' I said. 'And one that I spent days and days trying to find an answer to, and I still haven't.' I looked around at the faces in front of me, and no one came up with any answer. I hadn't expected one. 'Let's move on. The following day I was again a guest chef, this time in the sponsor's box at the races. We all know what happened there, and I was extremely lucky not to be killed along with the nineteen others who were, one of whom was a young waitress from my restaurant.' I paused again, thinking about Louisa's funeral, remembering the pain of loss for her parents and friends, recalling the awful ache in my jaw. I took a couple of deep breaths, and went on to describe just a little of what I had seen in the box that day without delving too deeply into the worst of the gory details. I could have left it all out, but I suppose I wanted to shock them a bit. They needed to be fully aware of what some people can do to others. They would later need to believe that my life, and maybe theirs, was truly in danger.

'I never realized you were so close to it,' said Toby. 'Mum had said something about you being at the races but nothing about...' He petered out. I decided that I must have successfully created the mental image I was after.

'It's horrible,' said Sally, shivering. 'I don't want to hear any more.'

'And I don't want to wake up in a cold sweat having had another nightmare about it either,' I said quite forcibly. 'But I know I will. And I will, because it was real, it happened, and it happened before my eyes to people I knew.' Sally looked quite shocked.

'The papers have all been saying that the bomb was aimed at an Arab prince,' said Bernard, bringing us all back from the brink. 'So what has it got to do with the dinner?' He was one step ahead of the others.

'What if the bomb was not aimed at the prince but at those people it really hit?' I said. 'And suppose the poisoning of the dinner was done to stop someone being at the races the following day so they wouldn't get blown up.'

'But if someone knew there was going to be a bomb, then they could, surely, just have not turned up to the lunch,' said Bernard. 'Why would they have to poison everyone the night before?'

'I don't know,' I said, almost angrily. I wasn't angry with him, I was angry with myself for not knowing. I couldn't be angry with Bernard. After all, that's why I had asked him to come. I knew he would be sceptical and would argue. It's what I wanted.

'But,' I said, 'I do know that when I started saying this out loud, and asking around about who was meant to be at the lunch but didn't actually show up, someone tried to kill me.'

'How?' asked Bernard in the sudden silence.

'They caused the brakes to fail in my car and I hit a bus.'

'It's a bit hit-and-miss, if you'll excuse the pun,' he said. 'Not the best way to kill someone.'

'It was designed to look like accident,' I said.

'Are you absolutely sure it wasn't?' he asked.

'No, I'm not,' I confessed. 'For a while I thought I was just being paranoid. I couldn't think why anyone would want to do me harm. But then someone burnt my house down with me in it. And I am certain that it was another attempt on my life.'

'Have the fire brigade confirmed that it was arson?' Bernard asked.

'Not that I'm aware of,' I said, 'but I know it was.'

'How?' he asked again.

'Because someone went into my house and removed the battery from my smoke alarm before they set the house on fire, and I know for sure that there had been a battery in there. And I'm also sure that the fire was started at the bottom of the old wooden stairs to prevent me getting out.' In my mind, I could still see the flames roaring up the stairwell, cutting off my escape route. 'It is only due to luck, and a few hefty blows on my bedroom window frame with a beside table, that I am here now. And I wasn't sure how much longer my luck would last so I ran away to America.'

'Unlike you to run away,' said Toby. I was surprised, and pleased. It was indeed unlike me to run away, but I hadn't expected him to know it, let alone to say it.

'No,' I said, 'but I was frightened. I still am. And with good reason, if what happened in America is anything to go by.'

'What did happen?' asked Sally.

'Someone broke my arm with a polo mallet,' I said.

'What? Surely not on purpose?' said Sally.