Hands Down: A Dick Francis Novel

by Felix Francis

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

“The master of suspense and intrigue” (Country Life) is back with the next powerful installation in the Dick Francis series, featuring Sid Halley, perfect for fans of Harlan Coben and Michael Connelly.

Sid Halley, a private investigator, has a new left hand, having had a transplant since his last appearance in Refusal. After receiving death threats, an ex-jockey trainer friend calls Sid to ask for his help, but Sid has his own problems to deal with; like recovering from surgery and saving his crumbling marriage.  
 
When his friend’s stable yard is torched, horses killed, and the friend is found dead, Sid can only blame himself for not helping sooner. The police think it’s suicide, but Sid is not convinced after his friend’s terrified phone calls. Heavy with a guilty heart, Sid starts to investigate and soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy that cuts to the very heart of the integrity of British horse racing.


Can Sid figure out what happened to his friend, or will he be the next one that the killer targets?

 

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Release date: November 8, 2022

Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Print pages: 299

Sample

CHAPTER

1

‘SID, IT’S OVER.’

‘What’s over?’

‘Our marriage.’

I stared at Marina.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘What I say. There are three of us in this relationship and it’s too crowded. So I’m leaving.’

‘But I love you.’

‘Not as much as you love that!’

Marina pointed at my left hand.

I say ‘my left hand’, but the reality is that it is someone else’s, or at least it was before it was surgically attached to my own forearm below the elbow.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Ever since that thing arrived, I’ve been shunted down the pecking order, and I’ve had enough. Over the last few years, I’ve tried my best to love it, but every time you reach out for me with it, I still feel I’m being touched up by a complete stranger, and it makes me shudder.’

I was stunned. What was she talking about? My new left hand was now fully part of me. It might have once been part of another person, but it was now totally mine, and it was a fully integrated part of my own body.

Only then did I spot the suitcase standing behind her.

‘You mean you’re leaving right now?’

She nodded, choking back tears.

‘Darling, please …’ I took a step towards her, arms outstretched.

‘Don’t!’ She put up her hand, palm facing me, and I stopped. ‘I’ve made my decision. I have to get away. At least for a bit.’

To my ears that sounded a tad more promising than ‘it’s over’.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To my parents. My dad’s not very well and Mamma could do with some help.’ Marina’s parents lived in Fryslân, a northern province of the Netherlands.

Both of us knew it was a valid reason for her to go, but also that it was not the main reason.

‘What about Saskia?’ I asked.

Saskia, or Sassy as she was known, was our nine-year-old daughter.

‘I’m taking her with me. I’ve booked a flight from Heathrow. I’ll pick Sassy up from school on the way. I’ve packed her things.’ She pointed down at the suitcase. ‘I called Mrs Squire. She said it was okay. There’s only a few days left of term anyway.’ Mrs Squire was the head teacher of the school in the next village. ‘I didn’t go into the details. I just said I had to go and look after my father.’

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of Saskia being taken out of the country, but what could I do? Forcing Marina to leave her here with me would be worse. It would mean having to explain too much to her, and to everyone else.

‘How long for?’ I asked, maybe not wanting to hear the answer.

‘I don’t know. I’m due some leave from work. A while, certainly.’ She paused. ‘Then we’ll see.’

‘Please don’t go.’ I was now also choking back tears.

‘I have to.’

Through the window I could see a white taxi sweep into our driveway.

‘At least let me take you to the airport.’

‘No, Sid,’ Marina said. ‘It’s better this way. I’ll tell Sassy you’re busy.’

‘Why don’t I follow you to the school? To say goodbye.’

‘No, Sid,’ she said again, more firmly this time. ‘I’ll call you when we get to Fryslân.’

She then wheeled her suitcase out to the taxi, climbed in, and disappeared through the gateway without so much as a backwards glance.

I stood there for quite some time staring down the road, perhaps forlornly hoping she would turn the taxi round and come back. But, of course, she didn’t.

Had I seen this coming?

I knew things hadn’t been perfect between us for the past few months.

When Saskia had turned nine last August, and with no likelihood of a second child on the horizon, Marina had gone back to working four days a week in the Cancer Research UK laboratories in Lincoln’s Inn, staying over with a colleague in London on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights and only taking the train out of town to our home near Banbury on Thursday evenings.

I hadn’t been very keen on the arrangement, and that was putting it mildly. I’d argued that Saskia needed her mother at home every night, to say nothing of how much I needed her too. But Marina was totally committed to her work, trying to develop a single blood test to detect multiple cancers. ‘The world has needs too,’ she would say. ‘Hence, you and Sassy will simply have to share me.’

And she wasn’t being arrogant or conceited. She was a major player in an international team of molecular chemists sequencing floating fragments of methylated DNA in the blood as an indicator of a whole range of different cancers, and long before there were any physical symptoms. ‘Early detection is the magic key to successful treatment,’ she would often say. ‘One day, not so far away now, everyone will take a simple blood test and then, if it’s positive, swallow an appropriate pill to empower the person’s own immune system to kill off those particular cancer cells before they can do any damage. It’s the Holy Grail.’

But being separated from her for half of every week had certainly put a strain on our relationship. I’d still thought we would get through it okay, and all would be fine. I had no idea it had got so bad that she would leave me.

I looked down at my left hand.

Was it really to blame?

My real left hand, the one I’d been born with, had been severely injured in a racing fall, so much so that it had totally ceased to function. The fall itself had been easy enough—I had simply rolled off my falling mount onto the turf. It had been the horse jumping the fence behind me that had done the damage. In order to save a few pence, the trainer had fitted it with old racing plates, the lightweight aluminium horseshoes used only in races. The edge of one shoe had been worn down so much that it had become as sharp as a razor, and it had landed slap bang onto my outstretched palm, severing muscles, bones and tendons so badly that a team of plastic surgeons had been unable to rebuild it.

Indeed, they had wanted to amputate my hand there and then, but I had insisted they sew everything together as best they could, in the expectation I would regain some use of it over time. But that had been a forlorn hope, and my race-riding days were suddenly over for good.

However, the final coup de grâce for my by-then useless limb had come a couple of years later as a result of the less-than-delicate handiwork of a sadistic villain. He had been trying to compel me to tell him the whereabouts of some incriminating photographic negatives, the location of which I would rather have kept a secret. With his considerable strength, plus the use of an iron poker, he had totally destroyed the surgeons’ former repair job and, this time, the medics had had no choice but to remove my hand altogether.

For many years after that, I had been fitted with a fibreglass, steel and plastic myoelectric hand that, while very sophisticated and top of the range, was no proper substitute for real flesh. Electrical impulses in my forearm could make the prosthetic wrist rotate and the thumb and fingers move, but there had been no sensations involved, and hence I could just as easily let a wineglass slip out of my grasp as crush it into a thousand fragments.

When I’d been selected as a possible recipient of a hand transplant, I’d jumped at the opportunity and, for the most part, my new hand had been a life-changing revelation.

But was it now more life-changing than I had expected, or wanted?

Was this new hand of mine really that of an alien being, capable of causing my wife to shudder at its touch? Or was there something more, some compelling other reason? Was my hand simply the excuse?

I’d had my new hand for almost three years.

In many ways I had been fortunate to be offered it. I’d been asked to be part of a research project to start hand transplants in the UK, after some successes with the treatment in France and the United States. But, since my operation, it was now being offered only to those with a double hand amputation.

According to my surgeon, it was something to do with the risk/benefit ratio. There was not only the immediate risk to life of nonessential major surgery, there was also the risk—and the cost—of lifelong anti-rejection medication, something that reduces the patient’s immune response, making them more susceptible to possible life-threatening infections such as sepsis and Covid-19, or even simple pneumonia and flu.

The medical number crunchers had decided that the benefit from gaining a second hand, if you already had one, was not worth the risks. I’m not sure I agreed with them, but, so far, I have been happily free of any infection worse than the common cold.

I have seen film of some people born without arms, many of whom can do amazing things using their feet—there is even a professional concert soloist who plays the French horn using the toes on his left foot to control the valves—but there are so many actions that need two hands—actions that most of us take for granted.

You can certainly eat one-handed, but you can’t cut up your steak. Shoes can go on one-handed, but the laces won’t get tied. You can hold scissors in one hand, but who holds the thing you are cutting? And as for knotting a tie, zipping up the front of a waterproof jacket, uncorking a bottle of wine, or playing the violin, forget it. Even drawing a straight line on paper with a pencil and ruler is bimanual.

Whereas I had never been able to play the violin, I could now do all the other things once again. Indeed, the day I could tie my own shoelaces, twenty months after my transplant, was the day I realised that my post-surgery physiotherapy was complete.

But was it really worth it?

Did the risk/benefit calculation take into account the fact that one’s wife might leave you because she felt she was being touched up by a stranger?

The phone in my pocket rang.

I grabbed at it, thinking it might be Marina having second thoughts, but I didn’t recognise the number displayed on the screen.

I answered it anyway.

‘Is that Sid Halley?’ asked a voice in a rather squeaky northern accent.

‘Who wants to know?’ I responded blandly in my usual manner to cold callers.

‘Ah, Sid, it is you. I’d know your voice anywhere.’

‘Who is this?’ I asked.

‘It’s Gary. Gary Bremner.’

A name from my past. We had once been jockeys together. Fierce competitors rather than really firm friends.

‘Hi, Gary. Long time no see.’

‘Too long.’ He paused. ‘Look, Sid, the thing is, I need your help. I’ve been watching you ever since … well, you know why.’

I did know why. Gary had been riding the horse that had destroyed my hand, but it hadn’t been his fault, and we both also knew that.

‘So I’m well aware you do that investigating stuff.’

‘I used to,’ I said, correcting him. ‘I’m now retired from all that.’

After the disastrous encounter with the over-sharpened horseshoe had destroyed my racing career, I had spent many years earning a living as a private investigator, first at a London detective agency called Hunt Radnor Associates, and then as a freelancer. But that was all in the past.

‘Look, Sid, I’m worried,’ Gary said, ignoring me. ‘Someone’s threatening me.’

‘Threatening you? How?’

‘I can’t talk about it over the phone but, to be honest, Sid, I’m shit-scared.’

His voice quivered.

Jump jockeys are a breed apart from the norm. Almost every day, sometimes six or more times, they take their lives in their hands sitting atop half a ton of racehorse galloping at thirty miles per hour over huge obstacles. When the horses fall, as they invariably do at some stage, the jockeys tend to break things—collarbones in particular. If they don’t have the courage to get back up on the next horse in the next race, they might as well quit there and then.

In his youth, Gary had been a jockey for more than ten years—never quite the champion but always fairly near the top of the list. He wasn’t short of courage, but here he was with his voice trembling with fear.

‘Can you come and see me?’ he said in a rush, his voice now a tone higher.

Gary was a trainer at Middleham in Yorkshire, two hundred miles away.

‘Sorry, mate. No way. Like I told you, I’m retired from investigating. Anyway, I have to be at home for family reasons.’

‘Come on, Sid. I need to see you. Just to get some advice.’

I sighed. ‘Okay. But if you won’t talk on the phone, you’ll have to come here.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t leave the yard. I need to be here to look after the horses.’

I thought it was a poor excuse. He could surely leave his horses for a day if he really wanted to. His stable staff could tend to them.

‘In that case, Gary,’ I said, ‘I can’t help you.’

There was a little whimper from the other end of the line.

‘Please, Sid,’ he pleaded.

How could I tell him that I had my problems too? The last thing I wanted was to be two hundred miles away if Marina and Saskia came back.

‘No. Not at the moment.’

He hung up abruptly, without even saying goodbye.

I stood staring into space, wondering what that was all about, when the phone suddenly rang again in my hand.

‘Look, Gary—’

‘Who’s Gary?’ asked a different voice, one I recognised.

‘Oh, hello, Charles. I’m sorry about that, I thought you were someone else.’

‘Clearly,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Marina just called me.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you fancy a tot of whisky?’

‘What? Now? It’s not even midday.’

‘The sun will be over the yardarm somewhere. I thought you might need one.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘Not much. Just that she’s gone home to her mother. And she’s worried about you.’

That was something, I suppose.

‘Come on over. I have a new bottle of single malt for you to try.’

I didn’t really feel like going. Getting drunk on single malt whisky was hardly going to make things any better in the long run.

‘Do I have to come and collect you?’ Charles asked in a mock stern tone.

‘No, Charles. You do not.’ I sighed. ‘Okay. Give me about half an hour. I’ll come on my bike.’

‘Good. I’ll be waiting.’

CHAPTER

2

JUST OVER AN hour later, I rode my aged Raleigh the two miles over the hill to Charles’s house at Aynsford, all the while worried that I wouldn’t be at home if Marina returned.

But she wouldn’t return.

By now she and Saskia would be at Heathrow, waiting for their flight to Amsterdam.

I felt wretched. How could it have come to this?

‘I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,’ Charles said, meeting me at his front door, glass in hand.

‘I nearly didn’t.’

‘But it was an order.’

Charles Roland, retired Royal Navy admiral, was well used to giving orders, and he expected them to be carried out.

My ex-father-in-law from a former marriage to his daughter, he was my muse, my best friend and my mentor, and now, it seemed, also my commanding officer. In his mid-eighties, he had finally started to slow down a bit, not least due to the unwanted attentions of a particularly nasty former Northern Irish terrorist who had fractured his skull while trying unsuccessfully to beat some information out of him.

I followed him across the hallway into his drawing room, where he handed me a cut-glass tumbler containing at least three fingers of malt whisky.

‘From Dalwhinnie, in the Highlands,’ he said, lowering himself into his favourite armchair with his own glass. ‘One of my favourites.’ He took a sip. ‘Now, tell me what’s going on.’

‘I wish I knew.’

‘Is there anyone else?’

I looked across the room at him. The same question had, of course, crossed my mind.

‘I don’t think so but … I don’t know. I didn’t even see that she was so unhappy with me until it was too late.’

‘Is it too late?’

I could feel the emotion building up in me again, with tears welling in my eyes. I turned away. In spite of not being a blood relation, Charles was the nearest I had ever had to a father, my biological one having carelessly fallen to his death from a ladder eight months before I was born. But even Charles would have had difficulty coping with a surrogate son in tears. All those years in the Navy had taught him to keep his upper lip very stiff, and he would expect the same from me.

I gathered myself and turned back.

‘I hope it’s not too late.’

‘What did she say?’

Part of me thought that it was none of his business, but I suppose it was. With Marina’s family living across the water in Fryslân, Charles had become a surrogate father not only to me but also to her, plus a much-loved honorary grandfather to Saskia. Indeed, just before she’d been born, we had moved out of London to the house in West Oxfordshire just so we could be near him.

‘She said I loved my new hand more than I loved her.’

‘And do you?’

‘Of course not. They’re different things. But she said that whenever I touch her with it, she shudders with revulsion.’

‘Oh dear.’

It certainly was oh dear.

I slumped down into the armchair facing Charles and took a large swig of the Dalwhinnie malt, enjoying, as always, that first searing heat in the throat as the alcohol descended.

I loved my wife more than anything else in the whole world, with the possible exception of my daughter. But I also adored having two hands again. It made me feel whole and normal after so many years as an oddity—someone who hadn’t even been able to join in applause.

Okay, I had to admit the hand wasn’t perfect.

For the transplant to occur in the first place, the team at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton had had to find a left hand that matched not just with my blood group but also with the size, colour and hair patterns of my right. While they had done their best, it wasn’t like plugging in a new light bulb that matched exactly the one that had blown. There were differences, not least in my skin, where there was an obvious zigzag join in my arm between the real me and the newcomer.

It had taken fifteen hours of surgery to splice everything together.

First the two forearm bones were joined with stainless-steel plates at just the right length. Next, twenty-three separate tendons needed to be attached with the correct tension balance back to front to allow the hand to operate—too tight at the back and the hand wouldn’t close, too tight at the front and it would be a permanently useless clawed fist. Then the multitude of nerves had to be joined, with no convenient colour-coding to show which had to be connected to which. And finally all the blood vessels—arteries and veins, right down to the capillaries, some of them less than half a millimetre across—were sewn together under a microscope using thread much finer than a human hair. Only then could the skin be finally closed. And all of it done at an icy temperature to keep the hand ‘fresh’.

One doesn’t realise how the human hand does far more than allow you to stick two fingers up at the motorist who cuts you off at a roundabout or indicate that you are ‘okay’ by touching your thumb to your index finger. A hand has the grasp and strength to swing on a trapeze or to brandish a sword, but also the precision of touch to pick up a stray needle or play Scott Joplin ragtime on the piano. It can be an organ of sight, reading Braille for the blind, and what would sex be without a sensual touch?

Except that Marina hadn’t found my touch sensual, at least not with that left hand. Quite the reverse.

I had known that she didn’t much like looking at the scars, lumps and bumps on my forearm, so I had taken to wearing a thin tubular flesh-coloured bandage, even to bed.

In spite of the surgeon’s best efforts, the skin tones were not an exact match, with my new wrist and hand somewhat paler than further up my arm. It was a mixture of strange sensations—the hand felt and behaved like my own, but it didn’t quite look the part.

I had to admit that I might have been insensitive to how the differences in appearance may have affected the way Marina regarded it.

Each potential transplant recipient undergoes a series of intense psychological tests to discover whether they are a suitable candidate. The whole series of probing questions is designed to reveal any potential future emotional problems.

Perhaps they should also submit the patient’s partner to the same examination.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ Charles asked, bringing me back to the present.

‘What can I do?’ I asked.

‘Well, you could go after her to Holland and beg, but I’m not sure it would work, especially if there is someone else.’

‘It wouldn’t work either way.’

Marina was nothing if not stubborn. She would do things only when she was ready, and not because someone else was telling her to. It had been one of the traits that had attracted me to her in the first place, not least because I was exactly the same. But it had caused a few fireworks when we both wanted to do the complete opposite to the other.

Did I really think there was someone else?

Being away in London for three nights every week would certainly have given her the opportunity. Was I even sure that Sam, the colleague she stayed with, was a Samantha, as she had assured me, and not a Samuel?

What had she said before she left? There are three of us in this relationship and it’s too crowded. But hadn’t she meant that my new hand was the third one, not some other lover?

‘So what then?’ Charles asked.

‘What do you suggest?’ I took another hefty gulp of my whisky.

‘Well, I wouldn’t just sit there on my arse getting drunk and feeling sorry for myself.’

I laughed. ‘That’s rich. It was your idea for me to come here for a drink in the first place. Indeed, you told me it was an order.’

‘To get you here, yes,’ he said. ‘So that we could devise a strategy and form a detailed plan to defeat the enemy.’

He was clearly getting carried away with memories of past sea battles.

‘But Marina is not the enemy,’ I pointed out.

‘An unknown lover might be.’

Good point, I thought … but was attacking another man she loved more than me, if he even existed, the best way to get my wife back? Hardly.

I sat glumly looking at the bottom of my empty glass.

‘Marina will do what Marina wants to do,’ I said profoundly. ‘I simply have to make life with Sid Halley in it more attractive than life without him.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’ Charles asked, standing up to pour more Scotch into both our glasses.

‘I’m not sure yet. I need to speak to her first to find out what I’m up against.’

Charles nodded, as if agreeing to the strategy. Detailed planning would have to wait for the intelligence to be collected.

In the meantime, I continued to sit on my arse, get drunk and feel sorry for myself.

---

At six o’clock, I cycled a meandering path back over the hill to my house in the village of Nutwell as the late March light was beginning to fail. Only two more days, I thought, and the clocks would go forward and the longer evenings would be here.

Spring had arrived. A time for renewal and rebirth. But would it be a renewal of my marriage or a rebirth of living alone?

‘You could always stay the night,’ Charles had said as I unsteadily applied cycle clips to my trousers. ‘Did you know you can get fined a thousand pounds for being drunk and disorderly in control of a bicycle?’

‘I’m sure I’ll be okay.’ At least I hoped so.

‘I could open another bottle if you like. I have a particularly fine single malt from the Island of Jura.’

All those nights spent in ships’ wardrooms had clearly given Charles hollow legs.

‘I think I’ve had enough already, don’t you? And anyway, I have to get back to feed the dog.’

And the dog was waiting for me just inside the back door, hungry as always, and not just a little cross that it was well past her usual supper time.

‘Good girl, Rosie,’ I said, patting her red head. ‘Supper time now.’

I went into the kitchen and was suddenly struck by how empty and lonely the place felt. At this time on a normal Friday evening, all the lights would be on, music would play loudly from the built-in speaker system as Marina prepared dinner on the Aga hot plates, and Saskia would be sitting at the breakfast bar, either reading a book or playing games on her electronic tablet.

But not on this particular Friday.

Today it was all dark and quiet in the kitchen because Marina and Saskia were both in the Netherlands on their way to Fryslân, and who knew when, or even if, they would ever come back.

I turned on the lights, put my hands up over my eyes and leaned down, resting my elbows on the worktop.

What should I do?

Only when Rosie nudged my leg did I realise I still hadn’t fed her.

I measured out some dog biscuits from the tin under the stairs and added some of her usual wet food on top, mixing it all together in her bowl with a fork.

‘Here you are, Rosie,’ I said, putting the bowl on the floor.

Dogs are so unquestioning as long as they’re fed. There were no histrionics about where Marina had gone and why, or where was Saskia, although Rosie would normally follow her around the house wherever she went, even to bed.

I wondered if all dogs were as loyal to their owners. Maybe it was just a matter of loving the person that feeds them—except that Saskia never did feed Rosie. It had always somehow been a job for either Marina or me, mostly me.

And dogs, it seemed, were far more accepting of change than human beings. When I’d arrived home from hospital with a new hand, Rosie had given it a couple of quick sniffs and then embraced it without question—if it was attached to me, then that was fine by her, even if it did look a little strange and, no doubt, smelled a bit different too.

I looked at my watch, which, even after the transplant, I continued to wear on my right wrist.

Quarter to seven here, quarter to eight in the Netherlands.

If Marina and Saskia had caught the three o’clock British Airways flight from Heathrow to Amsterdam, as we usually did when visiting her parents, they should soon be at the family home, depending on delays due to immigration, customs, or heavy traffic on the motorway going north.

I made myself a strong coffee and tried to sober up a bit. It wouldn’t do to be slurring my words if and when Marina called.

My phone rang and I grabbed at it, but it wasn’t Marina.

‘Hello, Sid,’ said a mumbling, squeaky, northern voice.

Gary Bremner.

He too had been drinking, and by the sound of him, he’d had far more than I.

‘Hello, Gary,’ I said with slight irritation. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want you, mate,’ he slurred. ‘Come and sort out my life.’

‘I told you to come down here and we would talk.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’ My irritation was rising. I didn’t want to miss a call from Marina because I was talking to a drunken Yorkshireman.

‘I daren’t leave the horses.’

‘Why not?’ I repeated.

‘Because someone will bloody kill them, that’s why not.’

He was getting quite agitated.

‘Why would anyone do that?’ I asked in as civil a tone as I could muster.

‘Because they said they would.’

‘Who did? ...