Dead Heat Part 35

The bullet caught him in the right leg, just above the knee. I hadn't been aiming for his leg particularly. I was right-handed but the cast had forced me to shoot with my left. I had simply pointed the gun at the middle of the target and fired. If I'd aimed at his leg I would probably have missed. Komarov dropped the detonator switch, grabbed the wound with both his hands and fell back to the floor. Blood poured out of his leg and I wondered if I had hit an artery. I didn't particularly care about him, but he was ruining my dining-room carpet. I thought about shooting him again, in the head, to stop the bleeding. There had been so much blood, bright red oxygenated blood. I decided to just let him bleed. At least the blood spilt here would not be from the innocent, and my carpet could be replaced.

Caroline was down on her knees behind me. She had finally cut through all the tape and I was free of the chair so I went to her, keeping an eye on Komarov and another on the door from the kitchen. There were still George Kealy and Gary to contend with. Caroline cradled Viola in her arms and sobbed. It was only the four strings that were keeping the pegbox and the scroll attached to what remained of the body of the instrument. The neck and fingerboard had broken through completely and the soundbox was cracked apart along its full length. The damage reflected the ferocity of the attack Caroline had made on Komarov. I was actually surprised that he had recovered from it as quickly as he had.

'Be careful, my darling,' I said. 'There are still two of them about. I'm going to find them. Go to the office and call the police.'

'What shall I tell them?' she said, visibly in shock.

'Tell them there's been a murder,' I said. 'And the murderer is still here. That should bring them quickly.'

Caroline went through the lobby and into the bar beyond, gently carrying Viola's remains in her arms.

Komarov was struggling to his feet. The bleeding from his leg had eased to a trickle and I wondered if I should shoot him again. Instead, I grabbed him by the collar and thrust him ahead of me through the swing door into the kitchen with the gun in the small of his back. If George Kealy was going to shoot me he would have to miss his boss to do it. But the kitchen was empty. George and Gary must still be searching outside.

I pushed Komarov right across the kitchen and banged him up against the wall next to the stainless-steel door of the cold-room. I bashed the back of his wounded leg with my knee and he groaned. It felt good, so I did it again.

I used the lever handle to pull open the cold-room door and then I thrust Komarov in and sent him sprawling across the slatted wooden floor. The cold-room was about ten feet square and seven feet high with four food-filled wide stainless-steel shelves running all round the walls with a s.p.a.ce about seven by four feet down the middle to walk in. It had cost a fortune to install but it had been worth every penny. I slammed the door shut. There was a push rod to open the door from the inside, to stop people getting trapped, and there was a place on the outside to apply a padlock if desired. I didn't have a padlock handy so I slipped a metal foot-long kebab skewer through the hole, thereby imprisoning Komarov.

I went into the office to find Caroline standing by the desk shaking. She was sobbing quietly and close to hysteria. I held her close to me and kissed her neck.

'Sit and wait here,' I said in her ear. 'I have others to find.' I pushed her into a chair. 'Did you call the police?' I asked her. She nodded.

I went back into the kitchen and I could hear George Kealy outside the back door shouting for Gary. I removed the skewer and held the gun up as I carefully reopened the cold-room. Komarov was sitting on the wooden slats and leaning up against the bottom shelf. He looked up at me but the broken nose, the bullet wound and the loss of blood had taken the fight out of him.

I could hear George coming back in through the scullery. So could Komarov.

'George,' he tried to shout, but it was little more than a croak.

I simply stepped behind the door and held it open as far as I could. I sensed, more than saw, George come into the kitchen and walk over to the cold-room. His gun appeared around the edge of the door then withdrew as he spotted Komarov inside. Then he walked in and I slammed the door shut behind him. I quickly replaced the skewer.

I heard George pus.h.i.+ng the rod to try to open the door, but the skewer held it closed with ease. He fired the gun but there were about three inches of insulation between the stainless steel sides of the door and there was no chance of a bullet from a handgun penetrating that.

Now I only had Gary to deal with.

It took me a while to find him. He was leaning against one of the trees on the far side of the car park. He was no trouble. In fact, he wouldn't be any trouble to anyone ever again, except perhaps to an undertaker. A fish filleter was embedded in his chest the full length of its thin, eight-inch razor-sharp blade. There was virtually no blood, just a slight trickle from the corner of his mouth. The knife looked to have pieced his heart and had probably stopped it beating almost instantly.

Who, I wondered, had done that? Surely not George Kealy. He wouldn't have had the strength.

I spun around. There must be someone else here.

Caroline suddenly screamed from inside and I hared across the car park, back into the building via the scullery door, and through the kitchen. She was standing wide-eyed in the centre of the office, and she was not alone.

Jacek was standing in front of her, and he, too, was bleeding. Large drops of blood dripped continuously from all the fingers of his left hand on to the wooden floor below and made a bright red pool by his foot. Would this bloodletting ever end? I raised the gun but it wasn't needed. Before I could say anything, he dropped to his knees and slowly rolled over on to his back. He had been shot in the shoulder.

Jacek, the man I hadn't trusted, the kitchen porter of whom I had believed there was more to than met the eye, had been one of the good guys all the time, and he had undoubtedly saved my life.

The police arrived in the end. And an ambulance. Caroline had indeed called the emergency number but she had apparently been too shocked to make herself understood properly. The operator had finally traced the call and dispatched help.

First Jacek, then Caroline were conveyed to hospital. I was a.s.sured by the paramedics that they would be fine but that both would definitely be admitted overnight. Caroline was suffering badly from shock and, it appeared, would again miss out on her stay at the Bedford Lodge Hotel.

The police who had arrived in the first patrol car had no real idea how to proceed and, it seemed to me, they spent most of their time winding blue and white plastic POLICE POLICE DO NOT CROSS DO NOT CROSStape around everything while they waited for reinforcements.

I tried to leave in the ambulance with Caroline but was prevented from doing so by a policeman who took a break from his taping long enough to insist that I stay at the restaurant to make a statement.

So, instead, I went through the office and the bar to the lobby. Richard was still lying face down on the stone floor. I moved some of the gla.s.s fragments and kneeled down next to him. I was sure he was dead but I felt his left wrist just to make sure. There was no pulse and his skin was already noticeably cold to the touch. How could such a thing happen to my caring, reliable, head waiter? I knelt there for a while, resting my hand on his back as if I could give him some comfort in death, until one of the policemen came in and told me to please leave.

The police reinforcements, when they finally arrived, took the form of some senior plainclothes detectives, a firearms squad and the bomb-disposal team from the Army.

Understandably, none of them was too eager to open the cold-room door. There was still the issue of the loaded gun inside. They decided to leave the occupants where they were for a while to cool off, literally. Three degrees centigrade would have been pretty uncomfortable even if they'd been wearing thick coats, gloves and hats. As it was, it had been a warm late-May evening and Pyotr Komarov and George Kealy had both been in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves. But, was I bothered?

The senior officer present interviewed me briefly and I tried to explain to him what had happened. But it was complicated and he seemed preoccupied with the men still in the cold-room. I would be re-interviewed, he explained, at the police station later. In the morning, I hoped, yawning.

Both the police and I were required, by the bomb-disposal team, to leave the building while they removed the explosive, so 1 sat on a white plastic chair on the gravel in front of the restaurant. One of the ambulance staff came over, wrapped a red blanket around my shoulders and asked me if I was OK.

'I'm fine,' I said. It reminded me of being at Newmarket racecourse on the day of the bombing. But this time I really was fine. The nightmare was over.

EPILOGUE.

Six months later I opened Maximilian's, a modern and exciting restaurant on the south side of Berkeley Square in Mayfair, serving mostly French food but with an English influence.

The opening night was a grand affair with lots of invited guests. There was even a string quartet playing at one end of the dining room. I looked over at them, four tall elegant young women in black dresses. I took particular notice of the viola player. She had shoulder-length light-brown hair tied back in a pony tail, bright blue eyes, high cheekbones and a longish thin nose above a broad mouth and square-shaped jaw. She was playing a new viola at least, it was new to her. As her left hand glided up and down the fingerboard I could see a diamond engagement ring glistening in the light. I had given it to her on my bended knee in the kitchen, just before the first guests had arrived.

'I'd always thought your name was Maxwell,' said a booming voice in my ear. It was Bernard Sims. 'I hear you've decided to make an honest woman of the plaintiff,' he added, shaking his head, but with a smile.

'Guilty,' I pleaded, with a grin.

My prosecution under section 7 of the Food Safety Act 1990 had been dropped and the civil poisoning case had been settled out of court with the plaintiff accepting undisclosed damages from the defendant. Caroline's agent had tried to claim his 15 per cent of the amount, which was confidential, but Bernard had explained to him that he was only ent.i.tled to commission on her earnings and the damages had been offered and accepted not for loss of earnings, but in consideration of distress caused. He hadn't been best pleased, but, there again, it would have been very difficult for Caroline to play only 85 per cent of an 1869 Stefano Scarampella viola.

DI Turner had finally returned my calls and had come eagerly in person when I'd told him I knew who had committed the racecourse bombing at Newmarket. Since then he had kept me up to date with progress in the case. Komarov had survived both the bullet wound in his leg and the hypothermia brought on by the cold-room and had been charged with a total of twenty murders, including the cold-blooded killing of Richard, my much-missed head waiter. Further charges of conspiracy to cause explosions and drug trafficking were expected to follow. George Kealy had also been charged with Richard's murder, although Turner was pretty sure that he would eventually be convicted only of being an accessory to the murders because George was singing for his freedom, or, at least, for a shorter sentence. A police search of the Kealy residence had discovered boxes of the metal b.a.l.l.s in a locked store, and a similar exploration of Gary's flat had turned up a certain silver key-fob, complete with the key to my now-burnt cottage's front door. Many of the details had been widely reported in the newspapers, and especially by Clare Harding in the Cambridge Evening News Cambridge Evening News.

As I had expected, George Kealy was Komarov's man in the UK, just as Rolf Schumann had been in the US. George had been the official link between Horse Imports Ltd and Tattersalls, the bloodstock auctioneers in Newmarket, and he had even been the chairman of the East Anglian Polo Club.

Like Rolf Schumann, George had apparently been a busy boy in the drugs market, supplying some big players with a steady stream of high-quality cocaine. The c.o.ke was then cut before being pa.s.sed down the chain to the street dealers and the users, with the proceeds pa.s.sing back up the line. Rolf had been skimming off about half of this drug cash to keep his business afloat. It took precisely three months from the Newmarket bombing until the tractor factory closed for good. The lady in the Delafield embroidered-cus.h.i.+on store wouldn't be happy.

Unlike Rolf Schumann, George, it seemed, had remained loyal to Komarov, at least until he had been arrested and charged with murder.

As a result of the information George was giving to the police, several big-time drug barons had received a dawn visit from one of Her Majesty's constabularies, and they were now languis.h.i.+ng in one of Her prisons awaiting trial. A number of other leads he had provided were also being investigated by various police forces around the world. I reckoned that the horse-breeding business in South America was about to suffer a major downturn.

Kurt and Walter, meanwhile, had been cornered by the Delafield sheriff's department, which had wanted to question them concerning criminal damage and a vicious a.s.sault at the home of Mrs Dorothy Schumann. Walter, the impetuous boy, had apparently tried to brain one of the sheriff's men with a polo mallet, and had been shot dead for his trouble. It was not a great loss.

I stood by the bar and surveyed my new domain. Mark Winsome had been as good as his word, but I think he'd had to write a cheque rather larger than he had originally intended. But the money had been well spent, with acres of gla.s.s and a forest of beech wood visible to the customers, and a further ma.s.s of stainless steel out of sight in the well-equipped kitchen. There were more than twice the number of tables as at the Hay Net and I was confident that, with the longer dinner service period in the big city, we could serve at least three times as many covers on a busy night.

In spite of opening the London venture, I had decided not to close down in Newmarket. Carl and I had worked together on his people-management skills and then I had appointed him as chef de cuisine at the Hay Net with three new a.s.sistants, one of whom was Oscar, who had accepted our profuse apologies, a substantial one-off cash payment and a permanent position as Carl's number two. Ray and Jean had decided to go elsewhere but there had been no shortage of capable staff to fill their shoes and breathe new life into the freshly recar-peted dining room. Jacek, however, also didn't stay.

I had been right about him, at least in one respect. There was, indeed, much more to my kitchen porter than had first met the eye. When he had arrived from his native Czech Republic, his English had been so limited that he had been categorized by the local job centre as only suitable for unskilled restaurant work. But Jacek proved to be highly skilled. At home, he had been not a scrubber of cooking pots, but a user of them. He did not remain at the Hay Net because, now joined by his wife and daughter, he came with me to Maximilian's as an a.s.sistant chef. After all, one never knew when a bodyguard might come in useful.

I felt a hand on my arm and turned to find Sally standing there. She and Toby had eagerly accepted my invitation to the opening, and they had brought my mother with them in their car.

'It's lovely, Max,' said Sally with a genuine smile. 'Absolutely lovely.'

'Thank you,' I said, and I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

I had seen more of Sally and Toby over the past six months than I had during the previous six years. Caroline and I had been invited to stay with them on several occasions, which was great since their house still felt like home to me, and was, for the moment, my only home. I had, by now, become quite accustomed to my nomadic existence, living constantly out of a suitcase. My cottage had been completely bulldozed, the heat of the fire having rendered the walls unsafe to reuse. The plot of land on which it had stood, complete with planning permission for a new dwelling, was currently on the market at a price that I thought was unreasonably high, but one that my estate agent was confident of obtaining.

Over the past months, when in Newmarket, I regularly stayed with Carl, except when his wife and children were there, which was increasingly often. On those occasions, I took a room at the Bedford Lodge Hotel, where I had finally managed to entertain Caroline the night after she was released from hospital.

My temporary London address was a certain lower-ground floor flat in Tamworth Street, in Fulham, where two miniature listening devices had eventually been discovered, one in the cupboard under the kitchen sink and the other hidden among the packages in the dark recesses of the bathroom cabinet.

Caroline hadn't made it to Cadogan Hall for her solo, and neither had Viola whose remains had been lovingly borne to a top violin restorer. He had tut-tutted over her condition for some time and had declared that she was beyond reasonable repair. I had asked him what he meant by 'reasonable repair', and he had replied that he could easily make Viola look all right but was highly doubtful that she would ever again sound as she should. The belly and the back had been split right through, he had explained, and bits of the ribs were missing altogether, as was the sound post - no doubt rolled up and thrown away with the bloodied Hay Net dining room carpet. He would have to replace the missing ribs and to add reinforcing materials to the inside of the body that would permanently and adversely affect the tone. So we had taken her home as she was, and had laid her on a shelf as a constant reminder to us of her sacrifice.

Caroline, meanwhile, had quickly been restored to perfection and she had even wooed the orchestra directors into adding the Benjamin Britten concerto for violin and viola, the piece she had missed at Cadogan Hall, into a Summer Soiree concert in St James's Park. It had been a wonderful, warm late-June evening, and I had been spellbound by her talent.

I looked again across the restaurant at her, and smiled. She smiled back. Miss Caroline Aston, violist and proud of it, my fiancee and my saviour.

Between them, Jacek and Caroline had given me back my life. I had been reborn after I had fully expected to die. That fateful night, as I had sat waiting for the bomb squad to remove the explosives from the Hay Net, I had resolved to grab life by the horns and hang on.

I was going to live my second life at full throttle.

Books by d.i.c.k Francis and Felix Francis DEAD HEAT.

SILKS.

EVEN MONEY.

Books by d.i.c.k Francis THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography) DEAD CERT.

NERVE.

FOR KICKS.

ODDS AGAINST.

FLYING FINISH.

BLOOD SPORT.

FORFEIT.

ENQUIRY.

RAT RACE.

BONECRACK.

SMOKESCREEN.

SLAY-RIDE.

KNOCK DOWN.

HIGH STAKES.

IN THE FRAME.

RISK.

TRIAL RUN.

WHIP HAND.

REFLEX.

TWICE SHY.

BANKER.

THE DANGER.

PROOF.

BREAK IN.

LESTER: The Official Biography BOLT.

HOT MONEY.

THE EDGE.

STRAIGHT.

LONGSHOT.

COMEBACK.

DRIVING FORCE.

DECIDER.