Dick Francis
Blood Sport
Chapter One
I awoke with foreboding. My hand closed in a reflex on the Luger under the pillow. I listened, acutely attentive. No sound. No quick surreptitious slither, no rub of cloth on cloth, no half-controlled pulse-driven breath. No enemy hovering. Slowly, relaxing, I turned half over and squinted at the room. A quiet, empty, ugly room. One-third of what for want of a less cosy word I called home.
Bright sunshine by-passed the thin pink curtains, spilling a gold slash on the faded brown Wilton. I didn’t like pink. Also I didn’t have the energy it would take to argue the landlord into changing to blue. After eight months I knew he never renewed anything until it had fallen to bits.
In spite of the prevailing calm the feeling of foreboding deepened and then identified itself and dissolved into a less threatening, more general state of gloom. Sunday morning, June 20th. The beginning of three weeks’ leave.
I rolled back on to my stomach and shut my eyes against the sun, and took my hand six inches from the Luger, which was far enough, and wondered how long a man could sleep if he really put his mind to it. Even a man who never slept soundly to start with. Three weeks, the three obligatory overdue weeks could be got through more easily asleep.
Three millenniums of sleep lay under the pillow. The nine millimetre equalizer, my inseparable friend. It went with me everywhere, to beaches, to bathrooms, to beds other than my own. It was there to save my life. Not to take it. I had lived through a lot of temptations, and I lived with that too.
The telephone bell put paid to the three weeks before they had gone half an hour.
‘’Lo,’ I said blearily, balancing the receiver on the pillow.
‘Gene?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘You haven’t gone away then.’ There was relief in the voice, the voice of my boss. I looked at my watch. Ten o’clock.
‘No,’ I said unnecessarily. He knew I wasn’t going away. I didn’t understand his relief. It was missing when he spoke again.
‘How about a day on the river?’
He had a motor cruiser somewhere on the upper Thames. I’d never seen it. Hadn’t been asked before.
‘Invitation or order?’ I said, yawning.
He hesitated. ‘Whichever you’ll accept.’
What a man. You did more for him than you believed you would, every time.
‘Where do I go, and when?’
‘My daughter will fetch you,’ he said. ‘She’ll be there in about half an hour. Family party. Boating clothes. Come as you are.’
‘Sure,’ I said. Complete with stubble, Luger, and shorts. A riot. I never wore pyjamas. They slowed you up too much.
Boating clothes, I decided, were greyish brown cotton trousers and an olive green nylon jersey shirt. I carried the Luger with me in the left hand pocket when the doorbell rang. One never really knew. But a look through the wide-angled spyhole showed it was only Keeble’s daughter, as arranged. I opened up.
‘Mr Hawkins?’ she said hesitantly, looking from me to the dingy brass six screwed on to the solid dark stained wood.
‘That’s right,’ I smiled. ‘Come in.’
She walked past me and I shut the door, interested to notice that four flights of stairs hadn’t left her breathless, as they did most visitors. I lived high up for that purpose.
‘I was just finishing my coffee,’ I said. ‘Would you like some?’
‘It’s very kind of you, but Daddy said not to waste time, he wants to be off up river as soon as possible.’
Keeble’s daughter was just like her photograph on Daddy’s desk. Half woman, still at school. Short bouncy dark hair, and watchful dark eyes, a rounded body slimming down, a self-possessed touch-me-not expression, and an endearing gaucheness in her present situation.
She looked cautiously round the sitting room, which neither she nor I nor anyone else would have classed as elegant living. The landlord’s furniture was junkshop stuff and I had made no effort to improve it. My total contributions to the scene were two rows of books on the shelves and in one corner a tin trunk of oddments which I had never bothered to unpack. A drawn back curtain revealed the kitchen alcove and its entire contents: cupboard, refrigerator, sink, and cooker, all of them showing their age.
One went through the sitting room to the bedroom, through the bedroom to the bathroom, and through the bathroom to the fire escape. The flat had everything but a drawbridge and a moat, and it had taken me weeks to find it. Only the tiny spyglass had been lacking, and the landlord had been furious when he finally noticed I had installed it. It had cost me three months’ rent in advance to convince him it wasn’t there for the sole purpose of being out when he came.
I watched Keeble’s daughter search for something nice to say about my living quarters and give up the struggle with a defeated shake of her young head. I could have told her that I had once had a better flat, a spacious comfortable first-floor front with a balcony overlooking a tree-dotted square. It had proved too accessible to unwanted guests. I had vacated it on a stretcher.
‘I’ll fetch my jacket,’ I said, finishing the coffee. ‘And then we’ll go.’
She nodded, looking relieved, oppressed already by the emptiness of my home life. Five minutes of it had been enough, for her.
I went into the bedroom, picked the jacket off the bed, and transferred the Luger from my trousers into its built-in under-arm holster, fastening it there with a press stud on a strap. Then, coat over arm, I dumped the dirty coffee cup in the sink, pulled the curtain across the kitchen, opened the front door, and let myself and Miss Keeble out.
Four uneventful storeys down we emerged into the quiet sunlit Putney street, and she looked back and up at the solid old converted house. It needed paint and oozed respectability, exactly like its row of neighbours.
‘I wasn’t sure I’d come to the right place. Daddy just said the fourth house along.’
‘He gives me a lift home, sometimes.’
‘Yes, he said so.’ She turned to the white Austin standing at the kerb and paused with the key in her hand. ‘Do you mind if I drive?’
‘Of course not.’
She smiled for the first time since she’d arrived, a quick flashing affair which verged on friendliness. She unlocked her door, climbed in, and reached over to unlatch the opposite one for me. The first thing I noticed as I bent to get in were the L plates lying on the back seat.
‘When did you pass the test?’ I said mildly.
‘Well...’ the smile lingered, ‘as a matter of fact, yesterday.’
For all that, she drove very well, careful but confident, quiet with the gears though a bit heavy with the hand signals. She crept somewhat tentatively around the Chiswick roundabout and up the slope to the M4. The big blue motorway sign said no L drivers, and her nose twitched mischievously as we passed it.
‘Did you come this way to fetch me?’ I asked idly.
She edged into the slow lane and hit forty.
‘Er, no. I live in a hostel with about sixty other girls in South Ken. Daddy just rang me and said as I’d got the car up in London this weekend I could collect you and meet him in Henley. Sort of spur of the moment thing.’
‘I see.’
We came to the end of the fifty mile an hour limit and her foot went down with determination.
‘Do I scare you?’ The needle quivered on sixty-five.
I smiled wryly. ‘No.’
‘Actually...’ Her hands gripped the wheel with the tension of inexperience. ‘Actually, you don’t look as if you’d scare easily.’
I glanced at her in surprise. I look ordinary. Quiet and ordinary. And very useful it is, too.
‘Anyway,’ she went on frankly, ‘I asked Daddy about coming this way, and he said he guessed your nerves would stand it. He seemed to find it very funny, for some reason or other.’