Come to Grief by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis [Francis, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780330492423
Publisher: Pan Books
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Reflecting that, as about thirty hours had passed since Gordon Quint had jumped me in Pont Square, he was unlikely still to be hanging about there with murderous feelings and his fencing post (not least because with Ginnie dead he would have her inquest to distract him) and also feeling that one could take self-preservation to shaming lengths, I left the Piccadilly restaurant in a taxi and got the driver to make two reconnoitring passes round the railed central garden.

All seemed quiet. I paid the driver, walked without incident up the steps to the front door, used my key, went up to the next floor and let myself into the haven of home.

No ambush. No creaks. Silence.

I retrieved a few envelopes from the wire basket clipped inside the letter box and found a page in my Fax. It seemed a long time since I'd left, but it had been only the previous morning.

My cracked arm hurt. Well, it would. I'd ridden races—and winners - now and then with cracks: disguising them, of course, because the betting public deserved healthy riders to carry their money. The odd thing was that in the heat of a race one didn't feel an injury. It was in the cooler ebbing of excitement that the discomfort returned.

The best way, always, to minimise woes was to concentrate on something else. I looked up a number and phoned the handy acquaintance who had set up my computers for me.

'Doug,' I said, when his wife had fetched him in from an oil change, 'tell me about listening in to mobile phones.'

'I'm covered in grease,' he complained. 'Won't this do another time?'

'Someone is listening to my mobile.'

'Oh.' He sniffed. 'So you want to know how to stop it?'

'You're dead right.'

He sniffed again. 'I've got a cold,' he said, 'my wife's mother is coming to dinner and my sump is filthy.'

I laughed: couldn't help it. 'Please, Doug.'

He relented. 'I suppose you've got an analog mobile. They have radio signals that can be listened to. It's difficult, though. Your average bloke in the pub couldn't do it.'

'Could you?'

'I'm not your average bloke in the pub. I'm a walking mid-life crisis halfway through an oil change. I could do it if I had the right gear.'

'How do I deal with it?'

'Blindingly simple.' He sneezed and sniffed heavily. 'I need a tissue.' There was a sudden silence on the line, then the distant sound of a nose being vigorously blown, then the hoarse voice of wisdom in my ear.

'OK,' he said. 'You ditch the analog, and get a digital.'

'I do?'

'Sid, being a jockey does not equip the modern man to live in tomorrow's world.'

'I do see that.'

'Everyone,' he sniffed, 'if they had any sense, would go digital.'

'Teach me.'

'The digital system,' he said, 'is based on two numbers, nought and one. Nought and one have been with us from the dawn of computers, and no one has ever invented anything better.'

'They haven't?'

He detected my mild note of irony. 'Has anyone,' he asked, 're-invented the wheel?'

'Er, no.

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