Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [72]
I think I was being told off.
“But if I hadn’t,” I said in my defense, “then you wouldn’t know that it was other Americans who were gambling using Mr. Kovak’s credit cards.”
“We still don’t know that for certain,” he said.
Maybe not, I thought, but I was sure I was right.
“So how are you going to catch this guy?” I asked him. “And before he succeeds in killing me?”
“Superintendent Yering will issue an immediate alert to all stations, including the airports and ports, with the man’s image from the tape. And we will be approaching the TV stations to run the video clip in their news broadcasts.”
It didn’t sound sufficiently proactive to me.
“Haven’t you got some mug shots or something for me to look at?” I asked. “I have to tell you I don’t feel very safe with this guy still out there on the loose.”
“You had better ask Superintendent Yering,” he said.
So I did but he wasn’t very forthcoming.
“We have literally tens of thousands of mug shots,” he said. “It would take you weeks to look through them all, and our man may not even be there. We need something else to point us in the right direction first, then it might be worthwhile. Perhaps we’ll get a fingerprint from your doorbell. Be patient, Mr. Foxton. The video image is good, and it should bear dividends when it’s shown on the news.”
If I lived that long, I thought.
“Can’t you provide me with some police protection?” I asked. “In a safe house or something?”
“MI5 or the CIA might have safe houses, but we don’t,” he said with a smile. “You’ve been watching too much TV.”
“But someone is trying to kill me,” I said in frustration. “Surely it’s your job to prevent that. I need some protection.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We simply don’t have the manpower.”
They had the manpower, I thought, to have a dozen officers crawl along the road on their hands and knees looking for a bullet but not enough to prevent a future murder. It was crazy.
“So what am I to do?” I asked him. “Just sit here and wait to be killed?”
“Perhaps it wouldn’t be sensible to stay here,” he conceded. “Have you anywhere else to go to?”
My home and my office were now off-limits. Where else?
“I’m going to go back to the hospital to see my girlfriend,” I said.
Some of the Armed Response Team agreed to wait in my house while I belatedly had a shower and changed my clothes. I then threw some things into a suitcase, including my computer, and set off for the hospital in the back of one of their police vans.
“It’s the least we can do,” they said.
At one point I insisted that the police driver go right around the big roundabout at Swiss Cottage to make sure we were not being followed.
We weren’t, of course. What sort of killer would follow a van full of heavily armed police? But what sort of killer would gun a man down with sixty thousand witnesses close to hand? Or try to kill someone on their own front doorstep?
I couldn’t help but think of Jill Dando, the British TV personality, gunned down in exactly that way in a Fulham street.
And her killer has never been identified.
Claudia was still resting when I made it back to her room at the hospital. She was neither aware nor surprised that I had been away for nearly four hours and not the one and a half I’d promised.
I had made it, unmolested and alive, from the police van outside the hospital main door to her room, but not without a nervous glance at every person I met on the way. I nearly had heart failure when, just as the lift doors were closing, a man jumped through the gap who slightly resembled my would-be killer.
If I went on like this I’d be a nervous wreck in no time.
I closed the door to Claudia’s room, but of course there was no lock on the inside.
It made me feel very uneasy.
I thought it unlikely that the gunman would give up just because he’d lost me once. I imagined he was a professional assassin, and, like most professionals, he would take pride in completing his job.
Bugger the police, I thought. I felt so vulnerable. I believed absolutely that I needed some protection