Straight. Part 20

'Why,' I asked, 'would one of Nicholas Loder's owners carry a baster about at the races?'

'A what?'

'Baster. Thing that's really for cooking. You've got one. You use it as a nebuliser.'

'Simple and effective.'

He used it, I reflected, on the rare occasions when it was the best way to give some sort of medication to a horse. One dissolved or diluted the medicine in water and filled the rubber bulb of the baster with it. Then one fitted the tube onto that, slid the tube up the horse's nostril, and squeezed the bulb sharply. The liquid came out in a vigorous spray straight onto the mucous membranes and from there pa.s.sed immediately into the bloodstream. One could puff out dry powder with the same result. It was the fastest way of getting some drugs to act.

'At the races?' Milo was saying. 'An owner?'

'That's right. His horse won the five-furlong sprint.'

'He'd have to be mad. They dope-test two horses in every race, as you know. Nearly always the winner, and another at random. No owner is going to pump drugs into his horse at the races.'

'I don't know that he did. He had a baster with him, that's all.'

'Did you tell the Stewards?'

'No, I didn't. Nicholas Loder was with his owner and he would have exploded as he was angry with me already for spotting Dozen Roses's alteration.'

Milo laughed. 'So that was what all the heat was about this past week?'

'You've got it.'

'Will you kick up a storm?'

'Probably not.'

'You're too soft,' he said, 'and oh yes, I almost forgot.

There was a phone message for you. Wait a tick. I wrote it down.' He went away for a bit and returned. 'Here you are. Something about your brother's diamonds.' He sounded doubtful. 'Is that right?'

'Yes. What about them?'

He must have heard the urgency in my voice because he said, 'It's nothing much. Just that someone had been trying to ring you last night and all day today, but I said you'd slept in London and gone to York.'

'Who was it?'

'He didn't say. Just said that he had some info for you: Then he hummed and hatred and said if I talked to you would I tell you he would telephone your brother's house, in case you went there, at about ten tonight, or later. Or it might have been a she. Difficult to tell. One of those middle-range voices. I said I didn't know if you Would be speaking to me, but I'd tell you if I could.'

'Well, thanks.'

'I'm not a message service,' he said testily. 'Why don't you switch on your answer phone like everyone else?'

'I do sometimes.'

'Not enough.'

I switched off the phone with a smile and wondered who'd been trying to reach me. It had to be someone who knew Greville had bought diamonds. It might even be Annette, I thought: her voice had a mid-range quality.

I would have liked to have gone to Greville's house as soon as we got back to London, but I couldn't exactly renege on the dinner after Martha's truly marvellous idea, so the three of us ate together as planned and I tried to please them as much as they'd pleased me.

Martha announced yet another marvellous idea during dinner. She and Harley would get Simms or another of the car firm's chauffeurs to drive us all down to Lambourn the next day to take Milo out to lunch, so that they could see Datepalm again before they went back to the States on TUesday. They could drop me at my house afterwards, and then go on to visit a castle in Dorset they'd missed last time around. Harley looked resigned. It was Martha, I saw, who always made the decisions, which was maybe why the repressed side of him needed to lash out sometimes at car-park attendants who boxed him in.

Milo, again on the telephone, told me he'd do practically anything to please the Ostermeyers, definitely including Sunday lunch. He also said that my informant had rung again and he had told him/her that I'd got the message.

'Thanks,' I said.

'See you tomorrow.'

I thanked the Ostermeyers inadequately for everything and went to Greville's house by taxi. I did think of asking the taxi driver to stay, like Brad, until I'd reconnoitred, but the house was quiet and dark behind the impregnable grilles, and I thought the taxi driver would think me a fool or a coward or both, so I paid him off and, fis.h.i.+ng out the keys, opened the gate in the hedge and went up the path until the lights blazed on and the dog started barking.

Everyone can make mistakes.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

I didn't get as far as the steps up to the front door. A dark figure, dimly glimpsed in the floodlight's glare, came launching itself at me from behind in a cannonball rugger tackle and when I reached the ground something very hard hit my head.

I had no sensation of blacking out or of time pa.s.sing.

One moment I was awake, and the next moment I was awake also, or so it seemed, but I knew in a dim way that there had been an interval.

I didn't know where I was except that I was Lying face down on gra.s.s. I'd woken up concussed on gra.s.s several times in my life, but never before in the dark. They couldn't have all gone home from the races, I thought, and left me alone out on the course all night.

The memory of where I was drifted back quietly. In Greville's front garden. Alive. Hooray for small mercies.

I knew from experience that the best way to deal with being knocked out was not to hurry. On the other hand, this time I hadn't come off a horse, not on Greville's pocket handkerchief turf. There might be urgent reasons for getting up quickly, if I could think of them.

I remembered a lot of things in a rush and groaned slightly, rolling up onto my knees, wincing and groping about for the crutches. I felt stupid and went on behaving stupidly, acting on fifty per cent brainpower. Looking back afterwards, I thought that what I ought to have done was slither silently away through the gate to go to any neighbouring house and call the police. What I actually did was to start towards Greville's front door, and of course the lights flashed on again and the dog started barking and I stood rooted to the spot expecting another attack, swaying unsteadily on the crutches, absolutely dim and pathetic.

The door was ajar, I saw, with lights on in the hall, and while I stood dithering it was pulled wide open from inside and the cannonball figure shot out.

The cannonball was a motor-cycle helmet, s.h.i.+ny and black, its transparent visor pulled down over the face.

Behind the visor the face also seemed to be black, but a black balaclava, I thought, not black skin. There was an impression of jeans, denim jacket, gloves, black running shoes, all moving fast. He turned his head a fraction and must have seen me standing there insecurely, but he didn't stop to give me another unbalancing shove. He vaulted the gate and set off at a run down the street and I simply stood where I was in the garden waiting for my head to clear a bit more and start working.

When that happened to some extent, I went up the short flight of steps and in through the front door. The keys, I found, were still in the lowest of the locks; the small bunch of three keys that Clarissa had had, which I'd been using instead of Greville's larger bunch as they were easier. I'd made things simple for the intruder, I thought, by having them ready in my hand.

With a spurt of alarm I felt my trouser pocket to find if Greville's main bunch had been stolen, but to my relief they were still there, clinking.

I switched off the floodlights and the dog and in the sudden silence closed the front door. GrevilLe's small sitting room, when I reached it, looked like the path of a hurricane. I surveyed the mess in fury rather than horror and picked the tumbled phone off the floor to call the police. A burglary, I said. The burglar had gone.

Then I sat in Greville's chair with my head in my hands and said 's.h.i.+t' aloud with heartfelt rage and gingerly felt the sore b.u.mp swelling on my scalp. A b.l.o.o.d.y pushover, I thought. Like last Sunday. Too like last Sunday to be a coincidence. The cannonball had known both times that I wouldn't be able to stand upright against a sudden unexpected rush. I supposed I should be grateful he hadn't smashed my head in altogether this time while he had the chance. No knife, this time, either.

After a bit I looked wearily round the room. The pictures were off the walls, most of the gla.s.s smashed.

The drawers had been yanked out of the tables and the tables themselves overturned. The little pink and brown stone bears lay scattered on the floor, the chrysanthemum plant and its dirt were trampled into the carpet, the chrysanthemum pot itself was embedded in the smashed screen of the television, the video recorder had been torn from from its unit and dropped, the video ca.s.settes of the races lay pulled out in yards of ruined tape. The violence of it all angered me as much as my own sense of failure in letting it happen.

Many of the books were out of the bookshelves, but I saw with grim satisfaction that none of them lay open.

Even if none of the hollow books had contained diamonds, at least the burglar hadn't known the books were hollow. A poor consolation, I thought.

The police arrived eventually, one in uniform, one not. I went along the hall when they rang the doorbell, checked through the peep-hole and let them in, explaining who I was and why I was there. They were both of about my own age and they'd seen a great many breakINS.

Looking without emotion at Greville's wrecked room, they produced notebooks and took down an account of the a.s.sault in the garden. (Did I want a doctor for the b.u.mp? No, I didn't.) They knew of this house, they said. The new owner, my brother, had installed all the window grilles and had them wired on a direct alarm to the police station so that if anyone tried to enter that way they would be nicked. Police specialists had given their advice over the defences and had considered the house as secure as was possible, up to now: but shouldn't there have been active floodlights and a dog alarm? They'd worked well, I said, but before they came I'd turned them ofF 'Well, sir,' they said, not caring much, 'what's been stolen?'

I didn't know. Nothing large, I said, because the burglar had had both hands free, when he vaulted the gate.

Small enough to go in a pocket, they wrote.

What about the rest of the house? Was it in the same state?

I said I hadn't looked yet. Crutches. Bang on head.

That sort of thing. They asked about the crutches.

Broken ankle, I said. Paining me, perhaps? Just a bit.

I went with them on a tour of the house and found the tornado had blown through all of it. The long drawing room on the ground floor was missing all the pictures from the walls and all the drawers from chests and tables.

'Looking for a safe,' one of the policemen said, turning over a ruined picture. 'Did your brother have one here, do you know?'

'I haven't seen one,' I said.

They nodded and we went upstairs. The black and white bedroom had been ransacked in the same fas.h.i.+on and the bathroom also. Clothes were scattered everywhere.

In the bathroom, aspirins and other pills were scattered on the floor. A toothpaste tube had been squeezed flat by a shoe. A can of shaving cream lay in the wash basin, with some of the contents squirted out in loops on the mirror. They commented that as there was no graffiti and no excrement smeared over everything, I had got off lightly.

'Looking for something small,' the non-uniformed man said. 'Your brother was a gem merchant, wasn't he?'

'Yes.'

'Have you found any jewels here yourself?'

'No, I haven't.'

They looked into the empty bedroom on that floor, still empty, and went up the stairs to look round above, but coming down reported nothing to see but s.p.a.ce. It's one big attic room, they explained, when I said I hadn't been up there. Might have been a studio once, perhaps.

We all descended to the semi-bas.e.m.e.nt where the mess in the kitchen was indescribable. Every packet of cereal had been poured out, sugar and flour had been emptied and apparently sieved in a strainer. The fridge's door hung open with the contents gutted. AlL liquids had been poured down the sinks, the cartons and bottles either standing empty or smashed by the draining boards. The ice cubes I'd wondered about were missing, presumably melted. Half of the floor of carpet tiles had been pulled up from the concrete beneath.

The policemen went phlegmatically round looking at things but touching little, leaving a few footprints in the floury dust.

I said uncertainly, 'How long was I unconscious? If he did all this . . .'

'Twenty minutes, I'd say,' one said, and the other nodded. 'He was working fast, you can see. He was probably longest down here. I'd say he was pulling up these tiles looking for a floor safe when you set the alarms off again. I'd reckon he panicked then, he'd been here long enough. And also, if it's any use to you, I'd guess that if he was looking for anything particular, he didn't find it.'

'Good news, is that?' asked the other, shrewdly, watching me.

'Yes, of cOUrse.' I explained about the Saxony Franklin office being broken into the previous weekend. 'We weren't sure what had been stolen, apart from an address book. In view of this,' I gestured to the shambles,'

probably nothing was.'

'Reasonable a.s.sumption,' one said.

'When you come back here another time in the dark,'

the other advised,'s.h.i.+ne a good big torch all around the garden before you come through the gate. Sounds as if he was waiting there for you, hiding in the shadow of the hedge, out of range of the body-heat detecting mechanism of the lights.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'And switch all the alarms on again, when we leave.'

'Yes.'

'And draw all the curtains. Burglars sometimes wait about outside, if they haven't found what they're after, hoping that the householders, when they come home, will go straight to the valuables to check if they're there.

Then they come rampaging back to steal them.'

'I'll draw the curtains,' I said.

They looked around in the garden on the way out and found half a brick Lying on the gra.s.s near wheRe I'd woken up. They showed it to me. Robbery with violence, that made it.

'If you catch the robber,' I said.

They shrugged. They were unlikely to, as things stood. I thanked them for coming and they said they'd be putting iN- a report, which I could refer to for insurance purposes when I made a claim. Then they retreated to the police car doubled-parked outside the gate and presently drove away, and I shut the front door, switched on the alarms, and felt depressed and stupid and without energy, none of which states was normal.

The policemen had left lights on behind them everywhere.

I went slowly down the stairs to the kitchen meaning merely to turn them off, but when I got there I stood for a while contemplating the mess and the reason for it.

Whoever had come had come because the diamonds were still somewhere to be found. I supposed I should be grateful at least for that information; and I was also inclined to believe the policeman who said the burglar hadn't found what he was looking for. But could I find it, if I looked harder?

I hadn't particularly noticed on my first trip downstairs that the kitchen's red carpet was in fact carpet tiles, washable squares that were silent and warmer underfoot than conventional tiles. I'd been brought up on such flooring in our parents' house.

The big tiles, Lying flat and fitting snugly, weren't stuck to the hard surface beneath, and the intruder had had no trouble in pulling them up. The intruder hadn't been certain there was a safe, I thought, or he wouldn't have sieved the sugar. And if he'd been successful and found a safe, what then? He hadn't given himself time to do anythin' about it. He hadn't killed me. Hadn't tied me. Must have known I would wake up.

All it added up to, I thought, was a frantic and rather unintelligent search, which didn't make the b.u.mp on my head or my again knocked-about ankle any less sore. Mincing machines had no brains either. Nor, I thought dispiritedly, had the mince.

I drew the curtains as advised and bent down and pulled up another of the red tiles, thinking about Greville's security complex. It would be just like him to build a safe into the solid base of the house and cover it with something deceptive. Setting a safe in concrete, as the pamphlet had said. People tended to think of safes as being built into walls: floors were less obvious and more secure, but far less convenient. i pulled up a few more tiles, doubting my conclusions, doubting my sanity.

The same sort of feeling as in the vaults kept me going. I didn't expect to find anything but it would be stupid not to make sure, just in case. This time it took half an hour, not three days, and in the end the whole area was up except for a piece under a serving table on wheels. Under that carpet square, when I'd moved the table, I found a flat circular piece of silvery metal flush with the hard base floor, with a recessed ring in it for lifting.