Dead Heat

“Why bad?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I should be meeting her socially,” he said. “It might produce a conflict of interests in the poisoning case.”

“Bugger the poisoning case,” I said. “And, anyway, this is definitely not a social visit.”

“No,” he said. “But I don’t know that, do I? You didn’t actually tell me why you were so insistent that I came down here this afternoon.”

“I will. I will,” I said. “All in good time.”

“A matter of life and death, you said.”

“It is,” I replied seriously. “My life, and my death.”

18

W e all convened in Toby and Sally’s drawing room at four-thirty like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, with me playing the part of Hercule Poirot, except that unlike him I didn’t know all the answers, I wasn’t at all sure who done it and, for the most part, I didn’t have a clue of what it was they had done in the first place.

There were five of us in the room. I had thought that Sally would be busy caring for the children, but, after school, all three of them had gone to have tea with her sister, their aunt. So Sally sat on the settee with Toby, while Caroline and Bernard sat in armchairs on either side of them. I stood by the fireplace. All I needed, I thought, was a little mustache and a Belgian accent to complete the illusion.

I had previously threatened Bernard with excommunication from the Law Society if he misbehaved, and, to be fair, so far he had been propriety personified. He hadn’t even made any snide remarks to me when I had introduced him to Caroline. In fact, quite the reverse. He had been unusually effusive in his comments, with not a single mention of dropping the lawsuit in time with her knickers.

So now the four of them sat with expectant faces, waiting for every one of the facts to be revealed in front of them. They were going to be disappointed.

“Thank you all for being here,” I said by way of introduction. “And thank you, Toby and Sally, for allowing Caroline and me to stay here. And also, thank you, Bernard, for coming all the way from London.”

“Just get on with it,” said Toby a little impatiently. And he was right. I was procrastinating because I really didn’t know how or where to begin. Everyone laughed, and it lightened the mood.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t quite know where to start.”

“Try at the begi

“OK,” I said, and took a deep breath. “The night before the 2,000 Guineas, I was engaged by the Newmarket racetrack caterers to be the guest chef at a gala di

I smiled at Caroline. “Caroline was also at the di

“Are you saying that it was done on purpose?” asked Bernard.

“Yes,” I said. “You can’t accidentally add enough kidney beans to a di

“But why would anyone do that?” said Toby.

“Good question,” I said. “And one that I spent days and days trying to find an answer to, and I still haven’t.” I looked around at the faces in front of me, and no one came up with any answer. I hadn’t expected one. “Let’s move on. The following day, I was again a guest chef, this time in the sponsor’s box at the races. We all know what happened there, and I was extremely lucky not to be killed along with the nineteen others who were, one of whom was a young waitress from my restaurant.” I paused again, thinking about Louisa’s funeral, remembering the pain of loss for her parents and friends, recalling the awful ache in my jaw. I took a couple of deep breaths and went on to describe just a little of what I had seen in the box that day without delving too deeply into the worst of the gory details. I could have left it all out, but I suppose I wanted to shock them a bit. They needed to be fully aware of what some people can do to others. They would later need to believe that my life, and maybe theirs, were truly in danger.

“I never realized you were so close to it,” said Toby. “Mum had said something about you being at the races, but nothing about…” He petered out. I decided that I must have successfully created the mental image I was after.

“It’s horrible,” said Sally, shivering. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“And I don’t want to wake up in a cold sweat having had another nightmare about it either,” I said quite forcibly. “But I know I will. And I will because it was real, it happened and it happened before my eyes to people I knew.” Sally looked quite shocked.

“The papers have all been saying that the bomb was aimed at an Arab prince,” said Bernard, bringing us all back from the brink. “So what has it got to do with the di

“What if the bomb was not aimed at the prince but at those people it really hit?” I said. “And suppose the poisoning of the di

“But if someone knew there was going to be a bomb, then surely they could just have not turned up to the lunch,” said Bernard. “Why would they have to poison everyone the night before?”

“I don’t know,” I said almost angrily. I wasn’t angry with him, I was angry with myself for not knowing. I couldn’t be angry with Bernard. After all, that’s why I had asked him to come. I knew he would be skeptical and would argue. It’s what I wanted.

“But,” I said, “I do know that when I started saying this out loud and asking around about who was meant to be at the lunch but didn’t actually show up, someone tried to kill me.”

“How?” asked Bernard in the sudden silence.

“They caused the brakes to fail in my car and I hit a bus.”

“It’s a bit hit-and-miss, if you’ll excuse the pun,” he said. “Not the best way to kill someone.”

“It was designed to look like an accident,” I said.

“Are you absolutely sure it wasn’t?” he asked.

“No, I’m not,” I confessed. “For a while, I thought I was just being paranoid. I couldn’t think why anyone would want to do me harm. But then someone burned my house down with me in it. And I am certain that was another attempt on my life.”

“Have the fire brigade confirmed that it was arson?” Bernard asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said, “but I know it was.”

“How?” he asked again.

“Because someone went into my house and removed the battery from my smoke alarm before they set the house on fire and I know for sure that there had been a battery in there. And I’m also sure that the fire was started at the bottom of the old wooden stairs to prevent me getting out.” In my mind, I could still see the flames roaring up the stairwell, cutting off my escape route. “It is only due to luck, and a few hefty blows on my bedroom window frame with a bedside table, that I am here now. And I wasn’t sure how much longer my luck would last, so I ran away to America.”