Outside Chance (31 page)

‘Nonsense. Why would she do that?'

‘Perhaps because she resents being told who she can and can't see.'

Truman's finger was incorporated into a fist, which shook a couple of times under extreme tension, just inches from Ben's nose, and was then withdrawn. He turned away and leant on the desk, staring at the cigar in his hand, as if trying to find the answers in the thin curl of smoke that drifted up from its tip.

‘She's too young. I'm only trying to protect her.'

Ben started to breathe again.

‘She's twenty-two. Some women are married with two or three kids by then.'

‘Yes, and divorced a couple of years later,' Truman pointed out.

‘Sometimes we have to make our own mistakes; it's the only way to learn.'

‘Oh, I know that, but it's different for Fliss. They'll be after her money –
my
money.'

‘That's not very complimentary. She's a beautiful girl. She's got a lot more to offer than just wealth.'

‘Bah! You're as naïve as she is!'

It was the first time Ben could ever remember having been called naïve, but he let it go. The man was completely blinkered where his daughters were concerned and there was no point in arguing with him.

Suddenly Truman's attention switched back to Ben.

‘And you; you went to see Lenny Salter. What for? I never asked you to.'

‘I thought he might be someone with a grudge, and I was right.' He supposed Fliss must have told her father and fervently wished that she hadn't.

Truman made a dismissive gesture.

‘He's a gutless whinger. He wouldn't have the brain, the nerve or the contacts to do something like this, even if he wasn't a cripple.'

‘I agree.'

Ben hoped that his succinct response would put Truman's mind at rest, but he still appeared uneasy. Blowing out a plume of aromatic
smoke, he regarded Ben through the resultant haze.

‘So, what did he do? Sell you some ridiculous sob story? He's a loser. You can't take him seriously.'

‘He's certainly down on his luck,' Ben agreed, ‘but he wasn't all that keen to talk.' Much as Truman deserved to worry about what his ex-jockey might have told him, he'd promised Salter a week's grace and he intended to honour that.

‘He's usually all too ready to air his grievances,' Truman commented with a touch of suspicion.

Ben shrugged. ‘He seemed jumpy; scared. I don't think he trusted me. He said the police had been sniffing round.'

‘Hmm. And what about Rackham? Anything more there?'

Ben pursed his lips and shook his head.

‘I begin to think I'm wasting my time and money with you, Mr Copperfield,' Truman remarked. ‘Ford seemed impressed with you but you haven't shown me anything much, yet.'

‘What money? I haven't had any! And the leads you've given me have been precious little use.'

‘And if I
did
pay you what I owe you? Would you take the money and go?' Truman went round his desk and opened a drawer.

‘I was promised an exclusive,' Ben reminded him.

‘What would it take to buy you off?' He placed a chequebook on the leather desktop.

‘It's not about a single pay-off – it's about reputation; my standing within the business. A scoop like this could set me up for life. And then there's the other side of it: can you really afford to cut
me loose, with what I know about you and your family?'

Truman's gaze became intent.

‘And just what do you think you know?' he asked quietly.

‘I know enough to realise there's a lot more to the Stefan Varga story than you're letting on.'

‘So, you've found out his name – I suppose that was to be expected. Who told you?'

‘I got it off the internet.'

‘And what else?'

‘I know some of the press gave you a hard time over the business.'

‘That was inevitable. They didn't know the full story. I wasn't about to tell them that my daughter had been violated by some illiterate Hungarian gypsy, was I? She'd have been ruined. We'd never have heard the last of it.'

‘Was he illiterate?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' Truman said impatiently. ‘As good as, I expect, but that's not the point.'

‘I wonder why he didn't go to the papers himself, to get his own back. He must have been gutted about the Derby, and I imagine they would have paid handsomely for a story like that.'

‘I told you; his documents weren't in order. I gave him twenty-four hours to leave the country and he went.'

‘So what exactly was wrong with them?'

‘Well, for one thing, I'm pretty sure he lied about his age. From a couple of things he said, I'm pretty sure he was younger than he claimed.'

‘How could that be? Didn't you meet him before he came over?'

‘Not exactly. I saw him ride in South Africa a couple of times and knew of his reputation, so I contacted his agent and arranged it all through him. I just wanted him to ride my horses; I saw no reason to meet the man.'

‘But he must have had a passport . . .'

‘Of course he did, but he was bloody jumpy when I started to question him.'

‘And you conveniently discovered all this at the same time as you discovered his affair with Helen? That's quite a coincidence.'

Truman began to look very uncomfortable.

‘Yes, all right. I suspected something from the start, but he'd got here with no trouble, so who was I to rock the boat?'

‘And if you'd reported him to the authorities yourself, you thought they might ask awkward questions about how long you'd known, is that it?'

‘Look, where is this leading?' Truman asked. ‘The man's gone. Nobody's heard anything of him since. Why drag it all up now, fifteen or twenty years later?'

‘Just curious, that's all.' Ben couldn't tell him that Stefan was dead without explaining how he knew, which in turn would alert him to the fact that a sizeable part of the Hungarian's family were less than thirty miles away as they spoke, and he wasn't about to do that until he was a lot more certain of his facts.

The warmth and the mesmeric movement of the flames in the grate were beginning to have a soporific effect on Ben and he decided it was time he made a move. It was noticeable that he
hadn't been offered a drink on this occasion.

‘Well, if that's all, I'll be making tracks,' he suggested, getting to his feet. His muscles were still stiff from riding, but improving all the time.

‘What are you going to do next? Are you still working for me?'

Ben shook his head wearily. ‘There doesn't seem to be much point, when you block every lead I try to follow up. Or was that your intention? Did you think that if I was going to investigate anyway, you'd rather have me on your payroll so you could monitor my progress?' he asked, reading Truman's face. ‘That's it, isn't it? What is it you're so afraid I'll find out?'

Truman gave a short laugh.

‘Well, you might be a good journalist – I wouldn't know about that – but I'll say this for you: you're certainly an imaginative one! I've made no secret of anything. I admit, I wouldn't have thought of using you if you weren't already involved, but as you were . . . And as for being afraid – it'd take more than a nosy journalist to make
me
lose any sleep. I've got ways and means of protecting my interests.'

‘Didn't do too well protecting King, though, did you?' Ben observed with debatable wisdom, irritated by the man's arrogance.

Truman's face darkened.

‘Oh, somebody will answer for that, sooner or later, I can promise you! It's not over by a long way. By the time I've finished, someone's going to wish they'd never been born.'

Ben had had enough. Shaking his head again, he moved towards the door.

‘Well, you've got my number if you want me. I'm going home.'

Emerging into the hall, he was just in time to hear the door on the opposite side click shut. Helen, he guessed, waiting to hear the result of her troublemaking. No doubt she would have been disappointed; her autocratic parent hadn't had it all his own way, by any means.

Ben was more than halfway home when he began to experience the first stirrings of unease about Lenny Salter. There was little enough about the guy to like, but it had to be said that he had done nothing to deserve such a wholesale fall from grace. From what he'd told Ben, apart from his misguided attempt to force his attentions on Fliss – which could probably be attributed to a combination of alcohol and euphoria after his win – his only mistake had been to air his grievances at the local pub. And now Salter had once again been brought to Truman's notice. Even though Ben had done his best to cover for him, there was no denying the fact that he was responsible for this.

If he'd had Salter's phone number – and always supposing his phone line hadn't been cut off long before – Ben would have considered making a quick call. But as it was, his sense of guilt deepened until, less than a mile from home, he found himself swinging the Mitsubishi into a convenient gateway and turning back to head for Tisbury.

As he turned into Salter's road, some twenty minutes later, he realised that he was already too late. The first thing he saw was a confusion of
blue flashing lights up ahead and, much as he liked to think of himself as an optimist, it was patently unrealistic to hope that this was purely coincidental.

Sure enough, as he drew closer he could see that the activity was centred firmly on Salter's bungalow. An ambulance, a fire engine and two police cars were all stopped in haphazard fashion, completely blocking the residential road, while their fluorescent-jacketed crews bustled about busily in the ex-jockey's front garden.

Good thing it wasn't one of the other plots, Ben thought, parking at a discreet distance. Such an abundance of stout footwear trampling indiscriminately over the perfection of any of the neighbouring gardens would, no doubt, have resulted in acrimony and tears.

There was, predictably, a sizeable crowd gathered, into which Ben casually integrated himself. Peering through the gap between two other onlookers, he was just in time to see two paramedics load a stretcher into the back of the waiting ambulance. It was too far away for him to identify the blanketed
figure, but then, he didn't really need to. Who else would it be but the unfortunate Lenny Salter?

The front of the ex-jockey's bungalow was illuminated by a couple of brilliant spotlights and on the patch of ground in the foreground two firefighters were in conversation with three policemen. As he watched, Ben saw another firefighter emerge from the open front door of the building with an armful of bedding. The glass in one of the windows was missing, the filthy net
curtains mercifully a casualty of the flames, and a sooty stain swept upwards from the opening.

‘What happened here, then?' he asked the nearest bystander; a stocky, bald-headed man who hadn't stopped to change out of his carpet slippers before coming to investigate.

‘Dunno exactly. Sharon, who lives next door, reckons he fell asleep and left the chip pan on. He's handicapped, you know. The place is a mess. We knew something like this would happen, sooner or later. Stands to reason.'

Ben couldn't see that, but he nodded nonetheless.

‘But he was lucky, though . . .' the man went on,‘. . .because Tony – who lives two doors down on the other side – is a fireman. He just happened to be walking past with his dog and saw the smoke, so he broke the front door down and got him out. That's him, there, talking to the crew. Brave man, that.'

‘Very brave,' Ben agreed, seeing a strongly built man of about fifty standing near the fire engine, in conversation with the station officer.

‘Not that it was something any one of us wouldn't have done, in his position, but you have to give credit where credit's due, don't you?'

‘Of course,' Ben said, backing away before the neighbour, who looked set to become tiresomely garrulous, could start up again.

Skirting the crowd of onlookers he made his way to the other side and edged amongst them again. Here, closer to the vehicles, the four sets of unsynchronised flashing blue lights produced an effect akin to a strobe light in a nightclub.

‘What happened here?' he asked a middle-aged, tweed-skirted woman.

She turned and looked him up and down, then gave it as her opinion that the lazy, good-for-nothing occupant of the bungalow had finally got his just deserts.

‘They're saying he left something draped over a gas fire. I expect he was drunk; he almost always is, as far as I can make out,' she added.

Ben thought that was a more likely explanation than the chip pan. Salter didn't strike him as the sort to do much cooking; he was more the send-out-for-a-pizza type. But that was always supposing it had been an accident at all.

‘Is the guy all right?' he asked the tweed lady, as the ambulance started up and began to nose its way out along the congested street.

‘I don't know. He looked pretty poorly,' she said. ‘Mind you, he'd have been a lot worse if that chap from down the road hadn't been passing by. I believe he's an off-duty fireman.'

Feeling that he'd gleaned about as much information as he was going to from Salter's neighbours, Ben decided to beat a retreat before the police started making enquiries and someone remembered having seen his four-wheel-drive vehicle parked outside the bungalow earlier in the day. Although he had little doubt that the production of his press card would alleviate much of the suspicion, he still had no desire to spend the evening at the station answering questions about his interest in Salter, many of which might well lead uncomfortably close to forbidden territory.

Walking back down the road he felt bad about the whole business. He had foreseen the possibility of retribution on Truman's part, but he hadn't bargained on him finding out so soon, and he had greatly underestimated the speed with which the man would, or even could, take action. If Truman was indeed responsible for the fire, he must surely have arranged it as soon as Fliss had told him of Ben's visit, without waiting to find out what, if anything, his ex-jockey had said.