Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [124]
“He’s got a gun,” Claudia said suddenly, the fear clearly apparent again in her voice.
He’d been lying on it.
I leaned down and picked it up by the barrel.
I left Shenington where he lay and went inside to call the Cheltenham Police Station.
“Can I please speak to DCI Flight?” I said to the officer who answered. “I want to give myself up.”
“What have you done?” he said.
“Ask DCI Flight,” I replied. “He’s the one who wants me.”
“He’s not here at the moment,” the officer said. “Some bloody lunatic has stolen a horse up at the racetrack and every spare man is out looking for him.”
“Ah, I might just be able to help you there,” I said. “The horse in question is tied up outside my mother’s house in Woodmancote.”
“What!” he said.
“The horse is right outside where I’m standing now,” I repeated.
“How the hell did it get there?”
“I rode him,” I said. “I think I’m the bloody lunatic that everyone is looking for.”
21
Detective Chief Inspector Flight was far from amused. He personally had spent more than an hour trudging across the dark, muddy track, looking for the horse, while wearing his best leather shoes, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, he was also soaked to the skin. As he explained to me at length and rather loudly, his coat was meant to have been waterproof but, on that count, it seemed to have failed rather badly.
“I’m tempted to put you in a cell and throw away the key,” he said.
We were in one of the interview rooms at the Cheltenham Police Station.
“How is Viscount Shenington?” I asked, ignoring his remark.
“Still alive,” he said. “But only just. They’re working on him at the hospital. The ambulance paramedics got him breathing again, but it seems his heart is now the problem.”
Just like his brother.
“And the doctor is also saying that even if he does survive, his brain is likely to have been permanently damaged due to being starved of oxygen for so long.”
Shame, I thought. Not!
“You say that you simply rugby-tackled him and you didn’t see that his nose and mouth were lying in the water?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I just thought he was winded by the fall. Only after I’d checked that Claudia was all right did I discover he was facedown in a puddle. Then, of course, I rolled him over onto his back.”
“Did you not then think of applying artificial respiration?” he asked.
I just looked at him.
“No,” he said. “I can see the problem.”
“Exactly,” I said. “The man had come there to kill me. Why would I try and save him? So that he could have another go?”
“Some people might argue that you were negligent.”
“Let them,” I said. “Whatever happened to Shenington was his own fault. You saw the gun. He wasn’t there making a social call.”
He looked up at the clock on the wall. It showed that it was well after midnight.
“We’ll have to continue this in the morning,” he said, yawning.
“I have to be at the Paddington Green Police Station by eleven,” I said.
“So do I,” Flight replied. “We can talk on the way.”
The meeting at Paddington Green lasted for more than two hours. In addition to me, there were four senior police officers present: Detective Chief Inspectors Tomlinson and Flight; a detective inspector from the City of London Police Economic Crime Department—the Fraud Squad; and Superintendent Yering, who chaired the meeting by virtue of his superior rank.
At his request, I started slowly from the beginning, outlining the events in chronological order, from the day Herb Kovak had been gunned down at Aintree right through to the previous evening at Cheltenham racetrack and at my mother’s cottage in Woodmancote. However, I decided not to include the finer details of how I had forced Shenington’s head down into the puddle on the gravel driveway.
“Viscount Shenington,” I said, “seems to have been desperate