Whip Hand Part 43

'I seldom do.' He smoked with enjoyment, filling his lungs and inspecting the burning ash as if it were precious.

'Going off in balloons...'

I smiled. 'I got offered the post of regular co-pilot to a madman.'

'It doesn't surprise me,' he said dryly.

'How did you get on with the wax?' He wouldn't tell me until after the drinks had come, and then he wasted a lot of time asking why I was drinking Perrier water and not whisky.

'To keep a clear head for burglary,' I said truthfully, which he half believed and half didn't.

'The wax is made,' he said finally, 'in a sort of cottage industry flourishing next to a plant which processes honey.'

'Beeswax!' I said incredulously.

He nodded. 'Beeswax, paraffin wax, and turpentine, that's what's in that polish.' He smoked luxuriously, taking his time. 'A charming woman there was most obliging. We spent a long time going back over the order books. People seldom ordered as much at a time as Jenny had done, and very few stipulated that the tins should be packed in white boxes for posting.' His eyes gleamed over the cigar. 'Three people, all in the last year, to be exact.'

'Three.... Do you think... it was Nicholas Ashe, three times?'

'Always about the same amount,' he said, enjoying himself.

'Different names and addresses, of course.'

'Which you did bring away with you?' 'Which I did.' He pulled a folded paper out of an inner pocket. 'There you are.'

'Got him,' I said, with intense satisfaction. 'He's a fool.'

'There was a policeman there on the same errand,' Charles said. 'He came just after I'd written out those names. It seems they really are looking for Ashe, themselves.'

'Good. Er... did you tell them about the mailing list?'

'No, I didn't.' He squinted at his gla.s.s, holding it up to the light, as if one pink gin were not the same as the next and he wanted to memorise the colour, 'I would like it to be you who finds him first.'

'Hm.' I thought about that. 'If you think Jenny will be grateful, you'll be disappointed.'

'But you'll have got her off the hook.'

'She would prefer it to be the police.' She might even be nicer to me, I thought, if she was sure I had failed: and it wasn't the sort of niceness I would want.

Chico telephoned during the afternoon.

'What are you doing in your bedroom at this time of day?' he demanded.

'Watching Chester races on television.'

'Stands to reason,' he said resignedly. 'Well, look, I've done the recce, and we can get in all right, but you'll have to be through the main doors before four o'clock. I've scrubbed the little bleeders. Look, this is what you do. You go in through the front door, right, as if you'd got pukka business. Now, in the hall there's two lifts. One that goes to a couple of businesses that are on the first and second floors, and as far as the third, which is all Jockey Club, as you know.'

'Yes,' I said.

'When all the little workers and Stewards and such have gone home, they leave that lift at the third floor, with its doors open, so no one can use it. There's a night porter, but after he's seen to the lift he doesn't do any rounds, he just stays downstairs. And oh yes, when he's fixed the lift he goes down your actual stairs, locking a door across the stairway at each landing, which makes three in all. Got it?'

'Yes.'

'Right. Now there's another lift which goes to the top four floors of the building, and up there there's eight flats, two on each floor, with people living in them. And between those floors and the Jockey Club below, there's only one door locked across the stairway.'

'I'm with you,' I said.

'Right. Now I reckon the porter in the hall, or whatever you call him, he might just know you by sight, so he'd think it odd if you came after the offices were closed. So you'd better get there before, and go up in the lift to the flats, go right up to the top, and I'll meet you there. It's O.K., there's a sort of seat by a window, read a book or something.'

'I'll see you,' I said.

I went in a taxi, armed with a plausible reason for my visit if I should meet anyone I knew in the hall: but in fact I saw no one, and stepped into the lift to the flats without any trouble. At the top, as Chico had said, there was a bench by a window, where I sat and thought unproductively for over an hour. No one came or went from either of the two flats. No one came up in the lift. The first time its doors opened, it brought Chico.

Chico was dressed in white overalls and carried a bag of tools. I gave him a sardonic head-to-foot inspection.

'Well, you got to look the part,' he said defensively. 'I came here like this earlier, and when I left I told the chap I'd be back with spare parts. He just nodded when I walked in just now. When we go, I'll keep him talking while you gumshoe out.'

'If it's the same chap.'

'He goes off at eight. We better be finished before then.'

'Was the Jockey Club lift still working?' I said.

'Yeah.'

'Is the stairway door above the Jockey Club locked?'

'Yeah.'

'Let's go down there, then, so we can hear when the porter brings the lift up and leaves it.'

He nodded. We went through the door beside the lift, into the stair well, which was utilitarian, not plushy, and lit by electric lights, and just inside there dumped the clinking bag of tools. Four floors down we came to the locked door, and stood there, waiting.

The door was flat, made of some filling covered on the side on which we stood by a sheet of silvery metal. The keyhole proclaimed a mortice lock set into the depth of the door, the sort of barrier which took Chico about three minutes, usually, to negotiate.

As usual on these excursions, we had brought gloves. I thought back to one of the first times, when Chico had said, 'One good thing about that hand of yours, it can't leave any dabs.' I wore a glove over it anyway, as being a lot less noticeable if we were ever casually seen where we shouldn't be.

I had never got entirely used to breaking in, not to the point of not feeling my heart beat faster or my breath go shallow. Chico, for all his longer experience at the same game, gave himself away always by smoothing out the laughter lines round his eyes as the skin tautened over his cheekbones. We stood there waiting, the physical signs of stress with us, knowing the risks.

We heard the lift come up and stop. Held our breaths to see if it would go down again, but it didn't. Instead, we were electrified by the noise of someone unlocking the door we were standing behind. I caught a flash of Chico's alarmed eyes as he leapt away from the lock and joined me on the hinge side, our backs pressed hard against the wall.

The door opened until it was touching my chest. The porter coughed and sniffed on the other side of the barrier, looking, I thought, up the stairs, checking that all was as it should be.

The door swung shut again, and the key clicked in the lock. I let a long-held breath out in a slow soundless whistle, and Chico gave me the sickly grin that came from semi-released tension.

We felt the faint thud through the fabric of the building as the door on the floor below us was shut and locked. Chico raised his eyebrows and I nodded, and he applied his bunch of lock-pickers to the problem. There was a faint sc.r.a.ping noise as he sorted his way into the mechanism, and then the application of some muscle, and finally his clearing look of satisfaction as the metal tongue retracted into the door.

We went through, taking the keys but leaving the door unlocked, and found ourselves in the familiar headquarters of British racing. Acres of carpet, comfortable chairs, polished wood furniture, and the scent of extinct cigars.