To The Hilt by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780425196816
Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
Published: 2004-06-01T02:58:29+00:00

CHAPTER 9

I walked to the office of Young and Uttley, half expecting to find it locked, but when I knocked and turned the handle, the door opened.

I walked in. The occupant that day wasn't a skinhead or a secretary or Mr Young with moustache or even the football coach Uttley, but a straightforward-looking man of about my own age dressed much as I was myself in jeans, shirt and sweater: no tie, unaggressive trainers and clean hands. The chief difference between us was that he had very short light brown hair, while mine still curled on my shoulders.

I smiled at him slowly, and I said, 'Hello.'

'Hello.'

'What's your name?' I asked.

'Chris.'

'Chris Young?'

He nodded. 'I've done a bit of let-your-fingers-do-the- walking for you,' he said.

His accent was unchanged. The skinhead, the secretary and Chris Young all spoke with the same voice.

'And?' I asked.

'There was a goldsmith name of Maxim working in London in the eighteen hundreds. Like Garrard's or Asprey's today. Good name. Ritzy. Made fancy things like peacocks for table ornaments, gold filigree feathers with real jewels in.'

'Tobe promised me you were good,' I said.

'Just good?'

'Brilliant. A genius, actually.'

He grinned immodestly. 'Tobe told me you were a walking brain and not to be put off by your good manners.'

'I'll kill him.'

'Tobe told me you were raised in a castle.'

'It was cold.'

'Yeah. I drew an orphanage. Warm.'

We got on fine. I made a drawing of King Alfred's golden chalice, and he phoned back to his goldsmith informant with a detailed description. 'And it has engraved lines round it that look just like random patterns but are some sort of verse in Anglo-Saxon. Yeah, yeah, that's what I said, Anglo-bloody-Saxon. See what you can do.'

He put down the receiver. 'Those specs you gave me,' he said, 'you can buy them anywhere.'

I nodded.

'I'd use them myself for disguises, if I could see through them.'

'I reckon that's why the robber took them off.'

'That's another thing,' Chris Young said. 'Boxing gyms. Your spanking pal Surtees never goes near a gym. He's as unfit as a leaking balloon. I've tailed him until I've had it up to here with him, and besides, none of the gyms in his area have ever heard of him.'

Fingers doing the walking?

Sure.

'Suppose he uses a different name?'

Chris Young sighed. 'He's not the gym type, I'm telling you. Which leaves me - and don't point it out - with no option but to flash your drawings of your robbers all over the place hoping for a fist in the guts.'

I stared.

'An adverse reaction,' he said carefully, in his incongruous voice, 'is a positive indication of a nerve touched.'

'You've been reading books!'

'I've been bashed a few times. It always tells me something. Like being bashed told you quite a lot, didn't it?'

'I suppose it did.'

'See? If anyone bashes you again, learn from it.'

'I don't intend to be bashed again.'

'No? That's why you asked about bodyguards?'

'Exactly why.'

He grinned. 'I've a friend who's a jockey over the jumps. He's broken his bones about twenty times. It'll never happen again, he says.

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