He took his filled glass and slumped down in one of the red leather armchairs, staring into space. I hitched a hip on to the table, which like so much in that house was protected by a sheet of plate glass. We both waited, neither of us enjoying our thoughts. We waited nearly an hour.
Nothing violent, I told myself numbly, would happen in that genteel house. Violence occurred in back alleys and dark corners. Not in a well-to-do sitting-room on a Monday evening. I felt the flutter of apprehension in every nerve and thought about eyes black with the lust for revenge.
A car drew up outside. A door slammed. There were footsteps outside on the gravel. Footsteps crossing the threshold, coming through the open front door, treading across the parquet, coming to the door of the snug. Stopping there.
‘Trevor?’ he said.
Trevor looked up dully. He waved a hand towards me, where I sat to one side, masked by the open door.
He pushed the door wider. Stepped into the room.
He held a shotgun; balanced over his forearm, butt under the armpit, twin barrels pointing to the floor.
I took a deep steadying breath, and looked into his firm familiar face.
Jossie’s father. William Finch.
‘Shooting me,’ I said, ‘won’t solve anything. I’ve left photostats and all facts with a friend.’
‘If I shoot your foot off, you’ll ride no more races.’
His voice already vibrated with the smashing hate: and this time I saw it not from across a courtroom thick with policemen, but from ten feet at the wrong end of a gun.
Trevor made jerky calming gestures with his hands.
‘William... surely you see. Shooting Ro would be disastrous. Irretrievably disastrous.’
‘The situation is already irretrievable.’ His voice was thick, roughened and deepened by the tension in throat and neck. ‘This little creep has seen to that.’
‘Well,’ I said, and heard the tension in my own voice, ‘I didn’t make you steal.’
It wasn’t the best of remarks. Did nothing to reduce the critical mass: and William Finch was like a nuclear reactor with the rods too far out already. The barrels of the gun swung up into his hands and pointed at my loins.
‘William, for God’s sake,’ Trevor said urgently, climbing ponderously out of his armchair. ‘Use your reason. If he says killing him would do no good, you must believe him. He’d never have risked coming here if it wasn’t true.’
Finch vibrated with fury through all his elegant height. The conflict between hatred and commonsense was plain in the bunching muscles along his jaw and the claw-like curve of his fingers. There was a fearful moment when I was certain that the blood-lust urge to avenge himself would blot out all fear of consequences, and I thought disconnectedly that I wouldn’t feel it. . you never felt the worst of wounds in the first few seconds. It was only after, if you lived, that the tide came in. I wouldn’t know... I wouldn’t feel it, and I might not even know...
He swung violently away from me and thrust the shotgun into Trevor’s arms.
‘Take it. Take it,’ he said through his teeth. ‘I don’t trust myself.’
I could feel the tremors down my legs, and the prickling of sweat over half my body. He hadn’t killed me at the very start, when it would have been effective, and it was all very well risking he wouldn’t do it now when he’d nothing to gain. It had come a good deal too close.
I leaned my behind weakly against the table, and worked some saliva into my mouth. Tried to set things out in a dry-as-dust manner, as if we were discussing a small point of policy.
‘Look...’ It came out half-strangled. I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Tomorrow I will have to telephone to New York, to talk to the Nantucket family. Specifically, to talk to one of the directors on the board of their family empire; the director to whom Trevor sends the annual Axwood audited accounts.’
Trevor took the shotgun and stowed it away out of sight behind the ornate bar. William Finch stood in the centre of the room with unreleased energy quivering through all his frame. I watched his hands clench and unclench, and his legs move inside his trousers, as if wanting to stride about.
‘What will you tell them, then?’ he said fiercely. ‘What?’
‘That you’ve been... er... defrauding the Nantucket family business during the past financial year.’
For the first time some of the heat went out of him.
‘During the past...’ He stopped.
‘I can’t tell,’ I said, ‘about earlier years. I didn’t do the audits. I’ve never seen the books, and they are not in our office. They have to be kept for three years, of course, so I expect you have them.’
There was a lengthy silence.
‘I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘that the Nantucket director will tell me to go at once to the police. If it was old Naylor Nantucket who was involved, it might be different. He might just have hushed everything up, for your sake. But this new generation, they don’t know you. They’re hard-nosed businessmen who disapprove of the stable anyway. They never come near the place. They do look upon it as a business proposition, though, and they pay you a good salary to manage it, and they undoubtedly regard any profits as being theirs. However mildly I put it, and I’m not looking forward to it at all, they are going to have to know that for this financial year their profits have gone to you.’
My deadpan approach began to have its results. Trevor poured two drinks and thrust one into William Finch’s hand. He looked at it unseeingly and after a few moments put it down on the bar.
‘And Trevor?’ he said.
‘I’ll have to tell the Nantucket director,’ I said regretfully, ‘that the auditor they appointed has helped to rip them off.’
‘Ro,’ Trevor said, protesting, I gathered, at the slang expression more than the truth of it.
‘Those Axwood books are a work of fiction,’ I said to him. ‘Cash books, ledgers, invoices... all ingenious lies. William would never have got away with such a wholesale fraud without your help. Without, anyway...’ I said, modifying it slightly, ‘without you knowing, and turning a blind eye.’
‘And raking off a bloody big cut,’ Finch said violently, making sure he took his friend down with him.
Trevor made a gesture of distaste, but it had to be right. Trevor had a hearty appetite for money, and would never have taken such a risk without the gain.
‘These books look all right at first sight,’ I said. ‘They would have satisfied an outside auditor, if the Nantuckets had wanted a check from a London firm, or one in New York. But as for Trevor, and as for me, living here...’ I shook my head. ‘Axwood Stables have paid thousands to forage merchants who didn’t receive the money, to saddlers who don’t exist, to maintenance men, electricians and plumbers who did no work. The invoices are there, all nicely printed, but the transactions they refer to are thin air. The cash went straight to William Finch.’
Some of the slowly evaporating heat returned fast to Finch’s manner, and I thought it wiser not to catalogue aloud all the rest of the list of frauds.
He’d charged the Nantuckets wages for several more lads than he’d employed: a dodge hard to pin down, as the stable-lad population floated from yard to yard.
He’d charged the Nantucket company more than nine thousand pounds for the rent of extra loose boxes and keep for horses by a local farmer, when I knew he had paid only a fraction of that, as the farmer was one of my clients.
He’d charged much more for shares in jockeys’ retainers than the jockeys had received; and had invented travelling expenses to the races for horses which according to the form books had never left the yard.
He had pocketed staggering sums from a bloodstock agent in the form of commission on the sales of Nantucket horses to outside owners: fifty thousand or so in the past year, the agent had confirmed casually on the telephone, not knowing that Finch had no right to it.