Shattered by Dick Francis Page A

wants.”
    â€œWere you with her yesterday evening?” I asked him the question casually, but he knew instantly what I meant.
    â€œI didn’t lay a finger on you,” he said quickly. “It wasn’t me.” He looked from me to Worthington and back again, this time with puzzlement. “Look,” he said wheedlingly, as if begging for forgiveness, “they didn’t give you a chance. I told Rose it wasn’t fair...” He wavered to a stop.
    With interest I asked, “Do you mean that you yourself wore a black mask in Broadway yesterday evening?” and almost with incredulity saw in his face an expression of shame that he had.
    â€œRose said we would just frighten you” He stared at me with unhappy eyes. “I tried to stop her, honest. I never thought you’d be here today. So it can’t have been as bad as it looked... but I know it was awful. I went to confession first to ask forgiveness...”
    â€œSo there was you and Rose.” I said it matter-of- factly, though stunned beneath. “And Norman Osprey, and who else? One of Norman Osprey’s bookmaking clerks, was it?”
    â€œNo. Not them.”
    Horror suddenly closed his mouth. He had already admitted far too much from his daughter’s point of view, and if the other so far unidentified black-mask shape were one of the other two clerks working with Norman Osprey at Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, Eddie was no longer going to admit it easily.
    I tried another fly.
    â€œDo you know anyone who could lay their hands on anesthetics?”
    A blank.
    Try again.
    â€œOr anyone with a white beard, known to Martin?”
    He hesitated over that, but in the end shook his head.
    I said, “Do you yourself know anyone with a white beard who looks like a university lecturer?”
    â€œNo.” His reply was positive, his manner shifty.
    â€œWas the brown-paper parcel you gave me at Cheltenham the selfsame one that Martin gave you earlier in the day?”
    â€œYes.” He nodded this time with no need for thought. “It was the same one. Rose was furious. She said I should have stuck onto it when Martin died, and I shouldn’t have mentioned it; we should have kept it ourselves and then there wouldn’t have been all this fuss.”
    â€œDid Rose know what was in it?”
    â€œOnly Martin knew for sure. I did more or less ask him what was in it but he just laughed and said the future of the world, but it was a joke, of course.”
    Martin’s joke sounded to me too real to be funny.
    Ed hadn’t finished. “A couple of weeks before Christmas,” he said, still amused, “Martin said that what he was giving Bon-Bon—a few of the jockeys were talking about presents for their wives and girlfriends while they were changing to go home—it wasn’t a big deal—what he was giving Bon-Bon was a gold-and-glass antique necklace, but he was laughing and he said he would have to get you to make him a much cheaper and modern copy. He said you had a videotape to tell you how. But next minute he changed his mind because Bon-Bon wanted new fur-lined boots, and anyway he was mostly talking about the King George VI Chase at Kempton on December 26 and how much weight he’d have to take off by not eating turkey... I mean, he was always worried about his weight, like most of them are.”
    â€œHe talked to you a lot,” I commented. “More than most.”
    Ed didn’t think so. He liked to chat with the boys, he said. He could tell us a thing or two about them. He winked on it, as if all jockeys were real sexual rogues, and with this confidence his manner more or less returned to the calm and efficient valet I’d met through Martin.
    Worthington, driving us home, summed up the day’s haul of information. “I’d say Martin and the white-bearded guy were serious with this tape.”
    â€œYes,” I agreed.
    â€œAnd somehow or other,