Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [54]
“It’s confidential,” I said. “You wouldn’t want me telling everyone about your investments, now would you?”
“No,” she agreed. “But then I haven’t been deliberately knocked off my bike.”
“That’s a fair point, but confidentiality rules still apply,” I said. “Severely injured or not, he’s still my client.”
Mind you, I thought, there was a limit to confidentiality.
The Wiltshire Police had called me on Friday evening to make an appointment, and I had spent time with two of their number earlier, going over in minute detail all the events of Tuesday and Wednesday at Cheltenham Races, with particular reference to Billy Searle’s investments.
“Was it true that you owe Mr. Searle over a hundred thousand pounds?” one of them had asked me as his opening shot.
“No,” I’d replied calmly. “Not personally. I’m a financial adviser and Billy Searle is a client of mine, which means I manage the investment of his money. In total, he has about a hundred and fifty thousand invested through me, and he told me on Tuesday that he urgently wanted all his money out in cash. He became very distressed and angry when I told him it would take a few days to realize the cash through the sale of his stocks and shares.”
“Why do you think Mr. Searle needed such a large sum so quickly?” the other policeman had asked.
“He told me he owed some guy a hundred thousand and he needed to pay it back by Wednesday night at the very latest, or else.”
“Or else what?” they’d both asked in unison.
“Billy seemed frightened, and when I told him that his money wouldn’t be in his bank until Friday, he said he hoped he would still be alive by Friday.”
“Those were his exact words?”
“Pretty much,” I’d said.
“Did he give you any indication who this guy was?”
“None, but he was clearly terrified of him. Why don’t you ask Billy?”
“Mr. Searle is in a critical condition,” one of them had replied.
“He has severe head injuries, and it is far from certain yet whether he will ever recover consciousness.”
How dreadful, I thought. Billy had survived all those racing falls over all those years only to have head injuries due to someone knocking him off his bike. It didn’t seem fair.
“I wouldn’t have thought that knocking someone off their bicycle was a very sure way of killing them,” I’d said. “How would someone know he would be riding his bike at that time?”
“Mr. Searle rode his bicycle to Lambourn every day at the same time. Apparently, it was part of his fitness regime, and well known. And the car seems to have struck him with considerable force.”
“Yes, but, even so, it is not as certain as a shooting.” I had been thinking of Herb the previous Saturday. “Are you sure it was attempted murder?”
“We are treating the attack as attempted murder,” one of them had replied rather unhelpfully.
Yes, I’d thought, but that didn’t necessarily make it so.
“Can we go back to this man to whom Mr. Searle owed money? Are you sure that Mr. Searle gave you no indication who it was?”
“Positive,” I’d said. “All Billy told me was that he owed the money to some guy.”
But why would you try to kill someone because they owed you money? Then there would be no chance of getting it back. Maybe the attack had meant to be a warning, or a reminder to pay up, and had simply gone too far. Or had it been a message to others: Pay up or else—just as Billy had been afraid of.
“The Racing Post seems to have implied it was a bookmaker.”
“I think that was probably speculation on their part,” I’d said. “Billy never mentioned anything like that to me. In fact, he said that he couldn’t tell me why he owed the money.”
“So why did he claim that it was you who was murdering him?”
“I now realize that he must have believed he might be murdered because I couldn’t get his money together by Wednesday night and it would therefore be my fault if he was killed. But obviously I didn’t think that at the time.”
The two policemen had then effectively asked me the same questions over and over again in slightly different ways, and I had answered them each time identically, with patience and good