To the Hilt

Physical description; 322 pages ; 24 cm. Subject; Horse racing -- Fiction.

A New York Times Bestseller

“EXCITING.”—The New York Times Book Review

“FRANCIS HAS ADDED ANOTHER WINNER TO HIS STABLE.”—The Indianapolis Star

“DELIGHTFUL . . . The Mystery Writers of America honored Francis as a Grand Master; this novel again shows why.”
—Publishers Weekly

TO THE HILT

Hailed as the “master of crime fiction and equine thrills” (Newsday), New York Times bestselling author Dick Francis delivers one of his most engrossing novels—the story of a self-imposed outcast who must refresh his detection skills in order to save himself and his family . . .

The black sheep of a prominent family, Alexander Kinloch is content to paint pictures and play the bagpipes in his ramshackle Scottish home. But the artist’s peaceful life is suddenly interrupted—first by a savage, mysterious beating, and then by a sudden call from his near-bankrupt family, asking for his help. Now Alexander is trying to keep several family treasures safe from harm—including a steeplechaser called Golden Malt. But if he wants to prevent a cold-blooded killer from sending him straight to his grave, he’s going to have to get the hang of the art of detection . . .

“NOBODY SETS UP A MYSTERY BETTER THAN DICK FRANCIS.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“FEW THINGS ARE MORE CONVINCING THAN DICK FRANCIS AT A FULL GALLOP.”
—Chicago Tribune

MORE PRAISE FOR To the Hilt . . .

“STEPS OUT SMARTLY ON THE VERY FIRST PAGE . . . To the Hilt delivers the pleasures people pay for.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“DICK FRANCIS’S BOOKS KEEP GETTING BETTER . . . Kinloch is altruistic and warmly likable, like all of Francis’s heroes, but he becomes a real person on the pages, not a generic good guy.”

—The Associated Press

“TYPICALLY ENJOYABLE. Francis keeps the action bouncing from heather to hearth, painting a delightful portrait of his own luscious British countryside and a doddering aristocracy.”

—Chicago Tribune

“LIKABLE CHARACTERS ABOUND.”

—Publishers Weekly

“REMARKABLY, AFTER MORE THAN THIRTY-FIVE NOVELS, DICK FRANCIS IS STILL GETTING BETTER.”

—Booklist

“BY TURNS UNEXPECTEDLY HUMOROUS AND MOVING.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“THE PLOT SKIPS RIGHT ALONG . . . just what Dick Francis fans expect.”

—San Antonio Express-News

“BRAVE AND RESOURCEFUL, level-headed and modest, Alexander makes an engaging hero . . . a host of winning characters . . . Like his hero, Francis is steadfast and dependable, someone you can always turn to when in need of a good rousing mystery.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

. . . AND RAVE REVIEWS FOR DICK FRANCIS

“It’s either hard or impossible to read Mr. Francis without growing pleased with yourself: not only the thrill of vicarious competence imparted by the company of his heroes, but also the lore you collect as you go, feel like a field trip with the perfect guide.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“One of the most reliable mystery writers working today . . . Francis’s secret weapons are his protagonists. They are the kind of people you want for friends.”

—Detroit News and Free Press

“After writing dozens of thrillers, Dick Francis always retains a first-novel freshness.”

—The Indianapolis Star

“He writes about the basic building blocks of life—obligation, honor, love, courage, and pleasure. Those discussions come disguised in adventure novels so gripping that they cry out to be read in one gulp—then quickly reread to savor the details skipped in the first gallop through the pages.”

—Houston Chronicle

“Dick Francis stands head and shoulders above the rest.”

—Ottawa Citizen

“Francis just gets better and better . . . It can’t be as easy as he makes it look, or all mystery writers would be as addictive.”

—The Charlotte Observer

“[Francis] has the uncanny ability to turn out simply plotted yet charmingly addictive mysteries.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“A rare and magical talent . . . who never writes the same story twice . . . Few writers have maintained such a high standard of excellence for as long as Dick Francis.”

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

FICTION BY DICK FRANCIS & FELIX FRANCIS

Dead Heat

FICTION BY DICK FRANCIS

ANTHOLOGY

Win, Place, or Show

NONFICTION

A Jockey’s Life
The Sport of Queens

TO THE HILT

DICK FRANCIS

Table of Contents

BEDE’S DEATH SONG

Fore thaem neidfaerae    naenig uuirthit
thoncsnotturra,    than him tharf sie
to ymbhycggannae aer    his hiniongae
hwaet his gastae    godaes aeththae yflaes
aefter deothdaege    doemid uueorthae

Before that sudden journey no one is wiser in thought than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be adjudged to his soul, of good or evil, after his death-day

ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY MICHAEL ALEXANDER

chapter 1   

I don’t think my stepfather much minded dying. That he almost took me with him wasn’t really his fault.

My mother sent me a postcard—“Perhaps I’d better tell you your stepfather has had a heart attack”—which I read in disbelief outside the remote Scottish post office where I went every two weeks to collect my letters. The postcard had lain there unread for approximately ten days.

Somewhat distractedly, though my stepfather and I were hardly intimate, I went back into the cluttered little shop and begged use of the telephone.

“You’ll be reimbursing us as usual, Mr. Kinloch?”

“Of course.”

Dour old Donald Cameron, nodding, lifted a flap of counter and allowed me through to his own jealously protected and wall-mounted instrument. As the official public telephone, thoughtfully provided outside for the few surrounding inhabitants, survived vandalism for roughly thirty minutes each time it was mended, old Donald was accustomed to extending to customers the courtesy of his own phone. Since he charged an extra fee for its use, I privately reckoned it was Donald himself who regularly disabled the less profitable technology on his doorstep.

“Mother?” I said, eventually connected to her in London. “This is Al.”

“Alexander,” she corrected automatically, not liking my abbreviation, “are you in Scotland?”

“I am, yes. What about the old man?”

“Your stepfather,” she said reprovingly, “is resting.”

“Er . . . where is he resting?” In hospital? In peace?

“In bed,” she said.

“So he is alive.”

“Of course he’s alive.”

“But your postcard . . .”

“There’s nothing to panic about,” she said calmly. “He had some chest pains and spent a week in the Clinic for stabilization and tests, and now he is home with me, resting.”

“Do you want me to come?” I asked blankly. “Do you need any help?”

“He has a nurse,” she said.

My mother’s unvarying composure, I sometimes thought, stemmed from a genuine deficiency of emotion. I had never seen her cry, had never heard tears in her voice, not even after her first husband, my father, had been killed in a shooting accident out on the moors. To me, at seventeen, his sudden loss had been devastating. My mother, dry-eyed, had told me to pull myself together.

A year later, still cool at the ceremony, she had married Ivan George Westering, baronet, brewer, pillar of the British Jockey Club, my stepfather. He was not domineering; had been generous, even; but he disapproved of the way I lived. We were polite to each other.

“How ill is he?” I asked.

“You can come if you like,” my mother said. “It’s entirely up to you.”

Despite the casual voice, the carefully maintained distance, it sounded closer to a plea than I was used to.

“I’ll arrive tomorrow,” I said, making up my mind.

“If you’re sure?” She betrayed no relief however; no welcome.

“I’m sure.”

“Very well.”

I paid the phone call’s ransom into Donald’s stringy outstretched palm and returned to my laden, ancient and battered four-wheel drive outside. It had good gears, good brakes, good tires and little remaining color on its thin metal flanks. It contained, at that moment, food for two weeks, a big cylinder of butane gas, supplies of batteries, bottled water and insect killer and three brown cardboard boxes, parcel delivery, replenishing the tools of my trade.

I painted pictures. I lived in a broken-down long-deserted shepherd’s hut, known as a bothy, out on a windy Scottish mountainside, without electricity. My hair grew to my shoulders. I played the bagpipes. My many and fairly noble relations thought me weird.

Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them. I preferred solitude and paint to outthinking salmon and shooting for food; I had only half inherited the country skills and courtesies of my ancestors. I was the twenty-nine-year-old son of the (dead) fourth son of an earl and I had no unearned wealth. I had three uncles, four aunts and twenty-one cousins. Someone in such a large (and conventional) family had to be weird, and it seemed I’d been elected.

I didn’t mind. Mad Alexander. Messes about with paints. And not even oils, my dear, but those frightfully common acrylics.

If Michelangelo could have laid his hands on acrylics, I said, he would have joyfully used them. Acrylics were endlessly versatile and never faded. They outlived oils by furlongs.

Don’t be ridiculous, Alexander.

I paid my uncle (the present earl, known as “Himself”) a painting a year as rent for the ruin I inhabited on his estate. The painting was done to his choice. He mostly asked for portraits of his horses or dogs. I quite liked to please him.

Outside the post office, on that dry cloudy cold morning in September, I sat in my old jeep-type jalopy and did my paperwork, opening my letters, answering them and sending off the replies. There were two checks that day for work delivered, which I dispatched to the bank, and an order from America for six more paintings to be done at once—like yesterday. Ridiculous, mad Alexander, in his weird way, actually, quietly prospered; and I kept that fact to myself.

The paperwork done, I drove my wheels northwards, at first along a recognizable road, then a roughly graveled stretch, then up a long rutted and indistinct track which led nowhere but to my unnamed home in the Monadhliath Mountains. “Between Loch Ness and Aviemore,” I usually explained, and no, I hadn’t seen the monster.

Whoever in the mists of time had first built my bothy had chosen its position well: it backed straight into an elbowed granite outcrop that sheltered it from the north and east, so that winter blizzards mostly leapfrogged over the top. In front lay a sort of small stony plateau that on the far side dropped away steeply, giving me long views of valleys and rocky hills and of a main road far below.

The only problem with the road that served to remind me that an outside world existed was that my dwelling was visible from it, so that far too often I found strangers on my doorstep, hikers equipped with shorts, maps, half-ton walking boots and endless energy. There was nowhere left in the world unpenetrated by inquisitive legs.

On the day of my mother’s postcard I returned to find four of the nosy species poking around without inhibitions. Male. Blue, scarlet, orange backpacks. Glasses. English regional voices.

The days when I’d offered tea, comforts and conversation were long gone. Irritated by the invasion, I drove onto the plateau, stopped the engine, removed my keys from the ignition and walked towards my front (and only) door.

The four men stopped peering into things and ranged themselves into a ragged line ahead of me, across my path.

“There’s no one in,” one of them called. “It’s all locked up.”

I replied without heat, “What do you want?”

“Him as lives here,” one said loudly.

“Maybe that’s you,” said another.

I felt the first tremble of something wrong. Their manner subtly wasn’t the awkwardness of trespassers caught in the act. There was no shuffling from foot to foot. They met my eyes not with placating apology, but with fierce concentration.

I stopped walking and said again, “What do you want?”

The first speaker said, “Where is it?”

I felt a strong primitive impulse to turn tail and run, and wished afterwards that I’d listened to the wisdom of prehistory, but somehow one doesn’t easily equate knobbly-kneed hikers with positive danger.

I said, “I don’t know what you mean,” and I made the mistake of turning my back on them and retracing my steps towards the jeep.

I heard their heavy feet scrunching on the stony ground behind me but still didn’t truly believe in disaster until they clutched and spun me round and purposefully and knowledgeably punched. I had a sort of splintered composite view of intent malevolent faces, of gray daylight reflecting on their incongruous glasses, of their hard bombarding fists and of a wildly slanting horizon of unhelpful mountains as I doubled forwards over a debilitating pain in the abdomen. Neck chop. Jabs to the ribs. Classic pattern. Over and over. Thud, merciless thud.

I was wearing jeans, shirt and sweater: they might as well have been gossamer for all the protection they offered. As for meaningful retaliation, read nonexistent. I couldn’t find breath. I swung at them in anger but fought an octopus. Bad news.

One of the men kept saying insistently, “Where is it? Where is it?” but his colleagues made it impossible for me to answer.

I wondered vaguely if by “it” they meant money, of which I carried little. They were welcome to it, I thought groggily, if they would stop their attentions. I unintentionally dropped my small bunch of keys and lost it to a hand that grabbed it up with triumph.

Somehow or other I ended with my back against the jeep: no further retreat. One of them snatched handfuls of my hair and banged my head against metal. I clawed blood down his cheek and got a head butt in return that went straight from my skull to my knees, buckling them like butter.

Events became unclear. I slid to the ground, facedown. I had a close view of gray granite stones and short dry struggling blades of grass, more brown than green.

“Where is it?”

I didn’t answer. Didn’t move. Shut my eyes. Drifted.

“He’s out,” a voice said. “Fat lot of help you are.”

I felt hands roughly searching my pockets. Resistance, as an option, promised only more bruises. I lay still, not wholly conscious, inertia pervading, angry but willy-nilly passive, nothing coordinating, no stren...