Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [11]
The patron, a bulky man with a bulging apron and heavy moustache, paused at Emil Jacques’ side and added his own opinion. ‘Only a devil,’ he said, pointing at Red Millbrook’s attractive picture, ‘would kill such a splendid fellow.’ He sighed at the villainy of the world, adding, ‘and there’s a letter for you, Monsieur.’ He gave Emil Jacques a conspiratorial leer and a nudge in the ribs and produced an envelope from beside the till. The patron believed the letters he occasionally passed to his most constant customer were notes of assignation made secretly by sex-starved ladies looking for fun.
Emil Jacques always accepted the letters with a wink, never disillusioning his host: and in this way, at the end of a three-cutoff go-between chain he received messages and sent them. The envelope that evening duly delivered the remainder of the agreed price for the Millbrook job: no wise man or woman ever risked withholding what they owed to a killer.
It could have been expected that the sharp Metropolitan Police Force superintendent in charge of finding Red Millbrook’s murderer would never attain soul-mate heights with Gypsy Joe Smith. Gypsy Joe was a man of instinct with a great accountant. Instinct won the races, the accountant made his client rich. Gypsy Joe operated on a deep level of intuition. The policeman and the accountant worked on fact and logical deduction.
The superintendent thought all racing people to be halfway crooks and Gypsy Joe held the same belief about the police. The superintendent took a sceptical view of Gypsy Joe’s intense and genuine grief. Gypsy Joe wondered how such a thick-brained super had reached that rank.
They engaged like bulls in Gypsy Joe’s stable office, fiercely attended also by a local high-ranking detective who seemed chiefly concerned about ‘patch’.
‘Who cares whose patch he died on,’ Gypsy Joe bellowed. ‘Put your stupid heads together and find out who did it.’
Separately and finally the two high-rankers did put their not-so-stupid heads together, but without any sudden blaze of enlightenment. They extensively interviewed the two women who’d stopped at the lights behind Red Millbrook’s car, and who’d tooted at him when the lights went green, and had gone to yell at him, and had found his slumped bloody body and would never sleep dreamlessly again.
They had seen no one, they said. They had been talking. There weren’t many people in Hyde Park. It was winter.
Emil Jacques had left no clues in Red Millbrook’s car: no fingerprints, no fibres, no hairs. The bullet, hopefully dug out of the chassis, matched nothing on anyone’s record, nor ever would. Careful Emil Jacques never killed anyone with a gun he’d used for the purpose before. For all of everyone’s efforts, the case remained unsolved.
The Metropolitan Police superintendent changed his mind about Gypsv Joe and unwillingly began to respect him. This was the man, he realised, standing with him in his windy stable yard, who was least likely in the world to have harmed the dead jockey, and that being so, he could ask his help. He didn’t believe in second sight or fortune telling, but really one never knew.… And Gypsy Joe had plucked Red Millbrook out of the air: had seen his undeveloped genius and given it springing life. Supposing… well, just supposing the gypsy’s insight could do what good detection methods couldn’t.
The superintendent shook his head to free himself from such fancies and said pragmatically, ‘I’ve asked around, you know. It seems most of the jockeys were screwed up with envy of Red Millbrook and the bookmakers hoped he’d break his neck, but that’s different from actually killing.’ He paused. ‘I’m told the person who hated him most was his second fiddle, David Rock-man, your former number one.’
‘He couldn’t have done it,’ Gypsy Joe asserted gloomily. ‘His alibi’s perfect.’
‘He couldn’t have done it,’ the superintendent nodded, ‘because at the relevant time he was hobbling