10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [87]
It was she, however, who exclaimed, “How you’ve changed. You’ve grown older.”
“It happens.” .
Her sister had gone shopping. I sat with Isobel and listened to her remembering for my benefit how Usher Rudd had uncovered her husband’s bimbo affair.
“Usher Rudd just dug away and wrote it up sensationally, but it was all Paul’s fault. Men are such bloody fools. He confessed to me in sniveling tears in the end that he’d boasted—boasted, I ask you—to some stranger that he was playing golf with, that he was having an affair his wife didn’t know about. Snigger, snigger. Can you believe it? And that stranger turned out to be that weird nobody that was always hanging about ’round the Nagles. He used to play golf with Dennis.”
“His name’s Wyvern.”
“Yes, I know that now. When Dennis died, that Wyvern person wanted to make sure Orinda got elected, so he arranged to play golf with Paul, to see where Paul was weakest. I hated Usher Rudd, but it wasn’t until after your father got elected that Paul broke down and told me what had happened.” She sighed. “I was shattered then, but I don’t care now, isn’t that odd?”
“How are your sons?”
She laughed. “They’ve joined the army. Best place for them. They sometimes send postcards. You’re the only one that was kind to me in those days.”
I left her with a kiss on the peaches-and-cream cheek and drove tiredly back to Hoopwestern for the night, staying in Polly’s house in the woods and eating potted shrimps from her freezer.
On Saturday morning I went to the police station and asked to see Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, whose mother drove a school bus.
Joe Duke appeared questioningly.
“George Juliard’s son? You look older.”
Joe Duke was still a detective sergeant, but his mother no longer drove a bus. “She’s into rabbits,” he said. He took me into a bare little interview room, explaining he was the senior officer on duty and couldn’t leave the station.
He thoughtfully repeated my question. “Do I know if that fire you could have died in was arson? It’s all of five years ago.”
“A bit more. But you must have files,” I said.
“I don’t need files. Mostly fires in the night are from cigarettes or electrical shorts, but none of you smoked and the place had been rewired. Is this off the record?”
“On the moon.”
A dedicated policeman in his thirties, Joe had a broad face, a Dorset accent and a realistic attitude to human failings. “Amy used to let tramps sleep above the charity shop sometimes, but not that night, she says, though that’s the official and easy theory of the cause of fire. They say a vagrant was lighting candles downstairs and knocked them over, and then ran away. Nonsense, really. But the fire did start, the firefighters reckoned, in the charity shop, and the back door there wasn’t bolted, and both shops of the old place were lined and partitioned with dry old wood, though they’ve rebuilt it with brick and concrete now, and it’s awash with smoke alarms. Anyway, I suppose you heard the theory that crazy Leonard Kitchens set light to the place to frighten your father off so that Orinda Nagle could be our MP?”
“I’ve heard. What do you think?”
“It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”
“But still ...”
“I think he did it. I questioned him, see? But we hadn’t a flicker of evidence.”
“And what about the gun in The Sleeping Dragon’s gutter?”
“No one knows who put it there.”
“Leonard Kitchens?”
“He swears he didn’t. And he’s heavy and slow. It needed someone pretty agile to put that gun up high.”
“Did you ever find out where the rifle came from?”
“No. we didn’t,” he said. “They’re so common. They’ve been used in the Olympics for donkey’s years. They’re licensed and locked away and accounted for these days, but in the past ... and theft ...” He shrugged. “It isn’t as if it had killed anyone.”
I said, “What’s the penalty for attempted murder?”
“Do you mean a deliberate attempt that didn’t come off?”
“Mm.”
“Same as murder.”
“A 10-1b. penalty?”
“Ten years,” he said.
From the police station I drove out to the ring road and stopped in the