Silks by Dick Francis & Felix Francis

Author:Dick Francis & Felix Francis [Francis, Dick & Felix Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141889801
Publisher: Penguin Group UK
Published: 2008-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Why was it, I wondered, that I felt like I was being dangled on a string by an unknown hand, being made to dance a jig by some puppet-master hidden from the light. My house, my job, my father and even my friends were somehow under his spell. Sometimes I even began to wonder if my fall at Cheltenham had been his doing, but I knew that was ridiculous.

I sat at my desk and turned the photo of Eleanor over and over in my hands. Even if Julian Trent had seen her call and wave to me at Cheltenham, how did he know where she worked or how to get her photograph?

Photograph, photograph. Why did I keep thinking about the photograph taken from Scot Barlow’s house the day he was murdered? Why not steal the frame as well? If someone had wanted to keep that picture then, surely, wouldn’t they have taken the frame with it? Not, I supposed, if it had been highly individual and easily recognizable. But it hadn’t. It had been a simple silver frame available in any high-street jeweller or department store.

So had the photograph been taken simply to destroy it? Was the image in fact a clue to whoever had been the murderer?

I was pondering these questions when my phone rang.

I picked it up with some trepidation but there was a familiar voice at the other end, one I was beginning to hope might become more familiar still.

‘What did the doctor say?’ Eleanor asked immediately.

‘He told me I can go on living,’ I replied with a smile.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘So he must have told you that you were quite well enough to take me out to dinner tonight?’

‘He said that it was completely out of the question,’ I replied. ‘He insisted that I should eat in at my place, alone. Matter of life or death.’

‘Well, you’ll just have to die then,’ she said laughing. ‘Because you, sunshine, are taking me out to Maximillian’s tonight whether you like it or not.’

I liked it.

‘How’s the conference?’ I asked her. She was attending a two-day international equine-medicine symposium at the London Veterinary School.

‘Boring,’ she said. ‘Look, I must dash. They’re about to start a lecture about the caecum and its role in colic.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ I said.

‘Anything but,’ she said. ‘See you at the restaurant at seven thirty.’ She disconnected before I had time to say goodbye.

I think she had applied to attend the symposium only so that she could spend a night in a London hotel, and spend the evening with me.

I had seen her four or five times since my fall at Cheltenham.

‘Typical,’ she had said when she first came to see me in hospital after I had woken up.

‘What’s typical?’ I’d replied.

‘I sit here beside him trying to wake him up for nearly three whole days and nights and then, when I have to go to work, hey presto, he opens his eyes.’

I had smiled at her. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ I’d said.

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