Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [78]
If anyone had told Arnold Roper he was a miser, he would have denied it indignantly. True, he lived frugally, but by habit rather than obsession: and he never took out his wealth just to look at it, and count, and gloat. He would not have admitted as miserliness the warm feeling that stole over him every night as he lay down to sleep, smiling from the knowledge that all round him, filling two oak-veneered sale-bargain bedroom suites, was a ton or two of negotiable paper.
It was not that Arnold Roper distrusted banks. He knew, too, that money won by betting could not be lost by tax. He would not have kept his growing gains physically around him were it not that his unbeatable system was also a splendid fraud.
The best frauds are only ever discovered by accident, and Arnold could not envisage any such accident happening to him.
Jamie Finland woke to his usual darkness and thought three disconnected thoughts within seconds of consciousness. ‘The sun is shining. It is Wednesday. They are racing today here at Ascot.’ He stretched out a hand and put his ringers delicately down on the top of his bedside tape-recorder. There was a cassette lying there. Jamie smiled, slid the cassette into the recorder, and switched on.
His mother’s voice spoke to him. ‘Jamie, don’t forget the man is coming to mend the television at ten-thirty and please put the washing into the machine, there’s a dear, as I am so pushed this morning, and would you mind having yesterday’s soup again for lunch. I’ve left it in a saucepan ready. Don’t lose all that money this afternoon or I’ll cut the plug off your stereo. Home soon after eight, love.’
Jamie Finland’s thirty-eight-year-old mother supported them both on her earnings as an agency nurse, and she had made a fair job, her son considered, of bringing up a child who could not see. He was fifteen. He studied in Braille at home and passed exams with credit.
He rose gracefully from bed and put on his clothes: blue shirt, blue jeans. ‘Blue is Jamie’s favourite colour,’ his mother would say. and her friends would say, ‘Oh yes?’ and she could see them thinking: how could he possibly know? But Jamie could identify blue as surely as his mother’s voice, and red, and yellow and every colour in the spectrum, as long as it was daylight.
‘I can’t see in the dark,’ he had said when he was six, and only his mother, from watching his sureness by day and his stumbling by night, had understood what he meant. Walking rad.ir, she called him. Like many young blind people he could sense easily the wavelength of light, and distinguish the infinitesimal changes of frequency reflected from coloured things close to him. Strangers thought him uncanny. Jamie believed everyone could see that way if they wanted to, and could not clearly understand what was meant by sight.
He made and ate some toast and thankfully opened the door to the television-fixer. ‘In my room,’ he said, leading the way. ‘We’ve got sound but no picture.’
The television-fixer looked at the blind eyes and shrugged. If the boy wanted a picture he was entitled to it, same as everyone else who paid their rental. ‘Have to take it back to the workshop,’ he said, judicially pressing buttons.
‘The races are on,’ Jamie said. ‘Can you fix it by then?’
‘Races? Oh yeah. Well, tell you what, I’ll lend you another set. Got one in the van…’ He staggered off with the invalid set and returned with the replacement. ‘Not short of radios, are you?’ he said, looking around. ‘What do you want six for?’
‘I leave them tuned to different things,’ Jamie said. ‘That one’ – he pointed accurately ndash; ‘listens to aircraft, that one to the police, those three over there are on ordinary radio stations, and this one… local broadcasts.’
‘What you need is a transmitter. Put you in touch