Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [71]
“So you say you saw a man standing outside your front door?” asked the response team superintendent as we stood in Mr. Patel’s shop.
“Yes,” I said. “He was ringing the doorbell.”
“And he had a gun?”
“Yes,” I said again, “with a silencer.”
There was something about his demeanor that said that he too didn’t really believe me. Mr. Patel hadn’t seen any gun nor, it seemed, had anyone else.
“He shot at me,” I said. “As I ran up Lichfield Grove. He shot at least twice. I heard the bullets whizz past my head.”
A team was dispatched to search and in due course one of them returned with two brass empty cases in a plastic bag.
Suddenly, everything became more serious. They believed me now.
“You will have to come to the police station,” said the superintendent. “To give a statement.”
“Can’t I do it here?” I asked.
“I need to reopen my shop,” said Mr. Patel anxiously.
“At my house, then?” I asked. “I need to get back to University College Hospital. My girlfriend had an operation this morning and she’s expecting me.”
Reluctantly the superintendent agreed to do it at my house, and we walked down Lichfield Grove together. The road had been closed to traffic, and about a dozen police officers in dark blue coveralls were moving up the road in line abreast, crawling on all fours.
“Looking for the bullets,” the superintendent informed me before I asked. “Don’t touch the door,” he said as we arrived at my house, “or the doorbell.”
I carefully opened the door with my key, and we went into the kitchen.
“Now, Mr. Foxton,” the superintendent said formally, “tell me why a gunman would come calling at your front door.”
It was the question I’d been asking myself for the past hour.
“I’m sure he was here to kill me,” I said.
“That’s very dramatic. Why?”
Why, indeed, when he could have done it so easily at Aintree at the same time as he killed Herb. What, I wondered, had changed in the intervening ten days that meant that I needed to be killed now but hadn’t needed to be then?
I told the superintendent all about the murder at the Grand National, and it was then that I again suggested calling DCI Tomlinson.
“My goodness, Mr. Foxton,” the chief inspector said with a laugh. “You seem to be making a habit of being interviewed by the police.”
“I can assure you it’s a habit I intend to give up at the earliest opportunity,” I replied.
The two senior policemen then spoke together for some time, and it was frustrating for me listening to only half of the conversation. Mostly they spoke about the videotape that the superintendent had removed from Mr. Patel’s recorder. The superintendent and I had watched it on the small black-and-white screen in the storeroom behind the shop. Just seeing the grainy image of the man as he had come through the shop door made the hairs on the back of my neck stand upright. He had advanced a couple of paces in and stood there, looking around. Then he had walked down the length of the store, putting his head through the plastic curtain into the storeroom behind. He then retraced his steps and went out the door, closing it behind him. Unfortunately the angle of the CCTV camera didn’t show what he did next. And none of the images showed his gun, which he must have been holding in his anorak’s pocket.
I shivered. How close had I come to hiding in the back room? Very close.
“Chief Inspector Tomlinson would like another word,” the superintendent said to me finally, handing over the phone.
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you think of any reason why someone would want you killed?”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “And, if they did, why wait until now? Why not do it at Aintree at the same time as killing Herb? Something must have changed since then.”
“What?” he said. “Have you been trying to find out whose initials are on those sheets?”
“No, I haven’t. But I did go into a MoneyHome agent and ask about the pay slips, but that was last Friday.”
“Leave the investigating to the professionals,