Twice Shy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - JONATHAN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART TWO - WILLIAM

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  THE DICK FRANCIS COMPANION

  “A THRILLER LIKE A HITCHCOCK FILM… A LOT OF SUSPENSE.”

  —People

  “AN EXHILARATING FRIGHT RIDE…A CUNNING REVENGE SCHEME…ANOTHER GOOD FRANCIS RUN.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  TWICE SHY

  A friend thrusts three musical cassettes into Jonathan Derry’s hands and then is violently killed, launching the young teacher into a terrifying nightmare. It turns out that these seemingly harmless tapes contain a computerized horse-betting system that could make whoever possesses them a very rich man—or a very dead one. Now Jonathan must track down the tape’s rightful owners before the odds of him outrunning a cold-blooded killer become slim to none…

  “TOP-NOTCH, NONSTOP ENTERTAINMENT: IRONIC, CLEVER, EXCITING, AND—EVEN WHEN RIP-ROARING VIOLENT—THOROUGHLY WARMHEARTED.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  MORE ACCLAIM FOR DICK FRANCIS’S Twice Shy

  “A down-to-the-wire thriller about the exotic world of horse racing…Thoroughly frightening…Vivid and diverse.”—The Houston Post

  “There seems to be no end to the plot variations and extraordinary suspense that Francis can generate…His ability to tell a story and orchestrate tension is almost hypnotic.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Splendid…A finely crafted caper…The super-goon of the decade is a figure of such sheer nightmare that you won’t want to read Twice Shy when you’re home alone.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  “It’s no gamble to bet on Dick Francis, and sure enough, he trots in with another winner…In true Francis tradition, the villains are mean and violent, and the protagonists…are alive with human virtues and failings…A galloping good book.”—Publishers Weekly

  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

  “[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

  “Few things are more convincing than Dick Francis at a full gallop.”—Chicago Tribune

  “[The] master of crime fiction and equine thrills.”

  —Newsday

  “Nobody sets up a mystery better than Dick Francis.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “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

  “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

  Fiction by Dick Francis

  SHATTERED

  SECOND WIND

  FIELD OF THIRTEEN

  10 LB. PENALTY

  TO THE HILT

  COME TO GRIEF

  WILD HORSES

  DECIDER

  DRIVING FORCE

  COMEBACK

  LONGSHOT

  STRAIGHT

  THE EDGE

  HOT MONEY

  BOLT

  BREAK IN

  PROOF

  THE DANGER

  BANKER

  TWICE SHY

  REFLEX

  WHIP HAND

  TRIAL RUN

  RISK

  IN THE FRAME

  HIGH STAKES

  KNOCKDOWN

  SLAY RIDE

  SMOKESCREEN

  BONECRACK

  RAT RACE

  ENQUIRY

  FORFEIT

  BLOOD SPORT

  FLYING FINISH

  ODDS AGAINST

  FOR KICKS

  NERVE

  DEAD CERT

  Nonfiction by Dick Francis

  A JOCKEY’S LIFE

  THE SPORT OF QUEENS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TWICE SHY

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / 1982

  Fawcett Books edition / 1983

  Jove edition / March 2003

  Berkley edition / October 2004

  Copyright © 1982 by Dick Francis.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-46468-7

  BERKLEY
®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  With love and thanks

  to my son

  Felix

  an excellent shot

  who teaches physics

  PART ONE

  JONATHAN

  1

  I told the boys to stay quiet while I went to fetch my gun. It usually worked. For the five minutes that it took me to get to the locker in the common room and to return to the classroom, thirty fourteen-year-old semi-repressed hooligans could be counted on to be held in a state of fragile good behavior, restrained only by the promise of a lesson they’d actually looked forward to. Physics in general they took to be unacceptably hard mental labor, but what happened when a gun spat out a bullet . . . that was interesting.

  Jenkins delayed me for a moment in the common room: Jenkins with his sour expression and bad-tempered moustache, telling me I could teach momentum more clearly with chalk on a blackboard, and that an actual firearm was on my part simply self-indulgent dramatics.

  “No doubt you’re right,” I said blandly, edging around him.

  He gave me his usual look of frustrated spite. He hated my policy of always agreeing with him, which was, of course, why I did it.

  “Excuse me,” I said, retreating. “The boys are waiting.”

  The boys, however, weren’t waiting in the hoped-for state of gently simmering excitement. They were, instead, in collective giggles fast approaching mild hysteria.

  “Look,” I said flatly, sensing the atmosphere with one foot through the door, “steady down, or you’ll copy notes . . .”

  This direst of threats had no result. The giggles couldn’t be stifled. The eyes of the class darted between me and my gun and the blackboard, which was still out of my sight behind the open door, and upon every young face there was the most gleeful anticipation.

  “OK,” I said, closing the door, “so what have you writ—”

  I stopped.

  They hadn’t written anything.

  One of the boys stood there, in front of the blackboard, straight and still: Paul Arcady, the wit of the class. He stood straight and still because, balanced on his head, there was an apple.

  The giggles all around me exploded into laughter, and I couldn’t myself keep a straight face.

  “Can you shoot it off, sir?”

  The voices rose above a general hubbub.

  “William Tell could, sir.”

  “Shall we call an ambulance, sir, just in case?”

  “How long will it take a bullet to get through Paul’s skull, sir?”

  “Very funny,” I said repressively, but indeed it was very funny, and they knew it. But if I laughed too much I’d lose control of them, and control of such a volatile mass was always precarious.

  “Very clever, Paul,” I said. “Go and sit down.”

  He was satisfied. He’d produced his effect perfectly. He took the apple off his head with a natural elegance and returned in good order to his place, accepting as his due the admiring jokes and the envious catcalls.

  “Right then,” I said, planting myself firmly where he had stood. “By the end of this lesson you’ll all know how long it would take for a bullet traveling at a certain speed to cross a certain distance ...”

  The gun I had taken to the lesson had been a simple air gun, but I told them also how a rifle worked, and why in each case a bullet or a pellet came out fast. I let them handle the smooth metal: the first time many of them had seen an actual gun, even an air gun, at close quarters. I explained how bullets were made, and how they differed from the pellets I had with me. How loading mechanisms worked. How the grooves inside a rifle barrel rotated the bullet, to send it out spinning. I told them about air friction, and heat.

  They listened with concentration and asked the questions they always did.

  “Can you tell us how a bomb works, sir?”

  “One day,” I said.

  “A nuclear bomb?”

  “One day.”

  “A hydrogen . . . cobalt . . . neutron bomb?”

  “One day.”

  They never asked how radio waves crossed the ether, which was to me a greater mystery. They asked about destruction, not creation; about power, not symmetry. The seed of violence born in every male child looked out of every face, and I knew how they were thinking, because I’d been there myself. Why else had I spent countless hours at their age practicing with a .22 cadet rifle on a range, improving my skill until I could hit a target the size of a thumbnail at fifty yards, nine times out of ten? A strange, pointless, sublimated skill, which I never intended to use on any living creature but had never since lost.

  “Is it true, sir,” one of them said, “that you won an Olympic medal for rifle shooting?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “What, then, sir?”

  “I want you all to consider the speed of a bullet compared to the speed of other objects you are all familiar with. Now, do you think that you could be flying along in an airplane, and look out of the window, and see a bullet keeping pace with you, appearing to be standing still just outside the window?”

  The lesson wound on. They would remember it all their lives, because of the gun. Without the gun, whatever Jenkins might think, it would have faded into the general dust they shook from their shoes every afternoon at four o’clock. Teaching, it often seemed to me, was as much a matter of imagery as of imparting actual information. The facts dressed up in jokes were the ones they got right in exams.

  I liked teaching. Specifically I liked teaching physics, a subject I suppose I embraced with passion and joy, knowing full well that most people shied away in horror. Physics was only the science of the unseen world, as geography was of the seen. Physics was the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities—of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays . . . Physics was the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?

  I had been for three years head of the physics department of the West Ealing School, with four masters and two technicians within my domain. My future, from my present age of thirty-three, looked like a possible deputy headmaster-ship, most likely with a move involved, and even perhaps a headship, though if I hadn’t achieved that by forty I could forget it. Headmasters got younger every year; mostly, cynics suggested, because the younger the man they appointed, the more the authorities could boss him about.

  I was, all in all, contented with my job and hopeful of my prospects. It was only at home that things weren’t so good.

  The class learned about momentum and Arcady ate his apple when he thought I wasn’t looking. My peripheral vision after ten years of teaching was, however, so acute that at times they thought I could literally see out of the back of my head. It did no harm: it made control easier.

  “Don’t drop the core on the floor, Paul,” I said mildly. It was one thing to let him eat the apple—he’d deserved it—but quite another to let him think I hadn’t seen. Keeping a grip on the monsters was a perpetual psychological game, but also priority number one. I’d seen stronger men than myself reduced to nervous breakdowns by the hunting-pack instincts of children.

  When the end-of-lesson bell rang they did me the ultimate courtesy of letting me finish what I was saying before erupting into the going-home stampede. It was, after all, the last lesson on Friday . . . and God be thanked for weekends.

  I made my way slowly around the four physics laboratories and the two equipment rooms, checking that everything was in order. The two technicians, Louisa and David, were dismantling and putting away all apparatus not needed on Monday, picking Five E’s efforts at radio circuitry to pieces and returning the bat
teries, clips, bases and transistors to the countless racks and drawers in the equipment room.

  “Shooting anyone special?” Louisa said, eyeing the gun which I was carrying with me.

  “Didn’t want to leave it unattended.”

  “Is it loaded?” Her voice sounded almost hopeful. By late Fridays one never asked her for an extra favor: not, that is, unless one was willing to endure a weepy ten minutes of “you don’t realize how much this job entails,” which, on most occasions, I wasn’t. Louisa’s tantrums, I reckoned, were based on her belief that life had cheated her, finding her at forty as a sort of storekeeper (efficient, meticulous and helpful) but not a Great Scientist. “If I’d gone to college ...” she would say, leaving the strong impression that if she had, Einstein would have been relegated to second place. I dealt with Louisa by retreating at the warning signs of trouble, which was maybe weak, but I had to live with her professionally, and bouts of sullenness made her slow.

  “My list for Monday,” I said, handing it to her.

  She glanced disparagingly down it. “Martin has ordered the oscilloscopes for third period.”

  The school’s shortage of oscilloscopes was a constant source of friction.

  “See what you can manage,” I said.

  “Can you make do with only two?”

  I said I supposed so, smiled, hoped it would keep fine for her gardening, and left for home.

  I drove slowly with the leaden feeling of resignation clamping down, as it always did on the return journey. Between Sarah and me there was no joy left, no springing love. Eight years of marriage, and nothing to feel but a growing boredom.