In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,3

least three months. Why didn’t their house get robbed then, when they were safely out of the way?’

He listened to the bitterness in my voice. ‘Life is full of nasty ironies.’ He pursed his lips gingerly to the hot coffee, drew back, and blew gently across the top of the mug. ‘What would you all have been doing today? In the normal course of events?’

I had to think what day it was. Saturday. It seemed totally unreal.

‘Going to the races,’ I said. ‘We always go to the races when I come to stay.’

‘Fond of racing, were they?’ The past tense sounded wrong. Yet so much was now past. I found it a great deal more difficult than he did, to change gear.

‘Yes… but I think they only go… went… because of me.’

He tried the coffee again and managed a cautious sip. ‘In what way do you mean?’ he asked.

‘What I paint,’ I said, ‘is mostly horses.’

Donald came in through the back door, looking red-eyed and exhausted.

‘The Press are making a hole in the hedge,’ he said leadenly.

Inspector Frost clicked his teeth, got to his feet, opened the door to the hall and the interior of the house, and called out loudly.

‘Constable? Go and stop those reporters from breaking into the garden.’

A distant voice replied ‘Sir’, and Frost apologised to Donald. ‘Can’t get rid of them entirely, you know, sir. They have their editors breathing down their necks. They pester the life out of us at times like these.’

All day long the road outside Donald’s house had been lined with cars, which disgorged crowds of reporters, photographers and plain sensation-seekers every time anyone went out of the front door. Like a hungry wolf pack they lay in wait, and I supposed that they would eventually pounce on Donald himself. Regard for his feelings was nowhere in sight.

‘Newspapers listen to the radio on the police frequencies,’ Frost said gloomily. ‘Sometimes the Press arrive at the scene of a crime before we can get there ourselves.’

At any other time I would have laughed, but it wouldn’t have been much fun for Donald if it had happened in his case. The police, of course, had thought at first that it more or less had, because I had heard that the constable who had tried to eject me forcibly had taken me for a spearheading scribbler.

Donald sat down heavily on a stool and rested his elbows wearily on the table.

‘Charles,’ he said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind heating it, I’d like some of that soup now.’

‘Sure,’ I said, surprised. He had rejected it earlier as if the thought of food revolted him.

Frost’s head went up as if at a signal, and his whole body straightened purposefully, and I realised he had merely been coasting along until then, waiting for some such moment. He waited some more while I opened a can of Campbell’s condensed, sloshed it and some water and cooking brandy into a saucepan, and stirred until the lumps dissolved. He drank his coffee and waited while Donald disposed of two platefuls and a chunk of brown bread. Then, politely, he asked me to take myself off, and when I’d gone he began what Donald afterwards referred to as ‘serious digging’.

It was three hours later, and growing dark, when the Inspector left. I watched his departure from the upstairs landing window. He and his attendant plain-clothes constable were intercepted immediately outside the front door by a young man with wild hair and a microphone, and before they could dodge round him to reach their car the pack on the road were streaming in full cry into the garden and across the grass.

I went methodically round the house drawing curtains, checking windows, and locking and bolting all the outside doors.

‘What are you doing?’ Donald asked, looking pale and tired in the kitchen.

‘Pulling up the drawbridge.’

‘Oh.’

In spite of his long session with the Inspector he seemed a lot calmer and more in command of himself, and when I had finished Fort-Knoxing the kitchen-to-garden door he said, ‘The police want a list of what’s gone. Will you help me make it?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’ll give us something to do…’

‘Sure.’

‘We did have an inventory, but it was in that desk in the hall. The one they took.’

‘Damn silly place to keep it,’ I said.

‘That’s more or less what he said. Inspector Frost.’

‘What about your insurance company? Haven’t they got a list?’

‘Only of the more valuable things, like some of the paintings, and her jewellery.’ He sighed. ‘Everything else was lumped together