Free Reflex by Dick Francis

tenancies, but presumably if the real estate agents could still furnish the list, they would have kept some other details. If I was right about when my mother had written her desperate letter, I should at least be able to find out which bunch of kooks she had been staying with.
    If I wanted to, of course.
    Sighing, I read on.
    Copies of the photograph of Amanda Nore had been extensively displayed in public places (newsstands’ shop windows) in the vicinity of the small town of Mindle Bridge, but no one had come forward to identify either the child or the stable yard or the pony.
    Advertisements had been inserted (accounts attached) in various periodicals and one national Sunday newspaper (for six weeks) stating that if Amanda Nore wished to hear something to her advantage she should write to Folk, Langley, Son and Folk, solicitors, of St. Albans, Herts.
    One of the detectives, the one who had persisted with the tenants, had also enterprisingly questioned the Pony Club, but to no avail. They had never had a member called Amanda Nore. He had furthermore written to the British Show Jumping Association, with the same result.
    A canvass of schools in a wide area around Mindle Bridge had produced no one called Amanda Nore on the registers, past or present.
    She had not come into council care in Sussex. She was on no official list of any sort. No doctor or dentist hadheard of her. She had not been confirmed, married, buried or cremated within the county.
    The reports all came to the same conclusion: that she had been, or was being, brought up elsewhere (possibly under a different name), and was no longer interested in riding.
    I shuffled the typed sheets together and returned them to the envelope. They had tried, one had to admit. They had also indicated their willingness to continue to search through each county in the land, if the considerable expenditure should be authorized; but they couldn’t in any way guarantee success.
    Their collective fee must already have been fearful. The authorization, anyway, seemed not to have been forthcoming. I wondered sardonically if the old woman had thought of me to look for Amanda because it would cost so much less. A promise, a bribe . . . no foal, no fee.
    I couldn’t understand her late interest in her long-ignored grandchildren. She’d had a son of her own, a boy my mother had called “my hateful little brother.” He would have been about ten when I was born, which made him now about forty, presumably with children of his own.
    Uncle. Cousins. Half-sister. Grandmother.
    I didn’t want them. I didn’t want to know them or be drawn into their lives. I was in no way whatever going to look for Amanda.
    I stood up with decision and went down to the kitchen to do something about cheese and eggs; and to stave off the thought of Harold a bit longer I fetched George Millace’s box of trash in from the car and opened it on the kitchen table, taking out the items and looking at them one by one.
    On a closer inspection it didn’t seem to make much sense that he should have kept these particular odds and ends. They didn’t have the appearance of interesting or unique mistakes. Sorting my way through them Iconcluded with disappointment that it had been a waste of time after all to bring them home.
    I picked up the folder which contained the dark print of a shadowy man sitting at a table and thought vaguely that it was odd to have bothered to put such an overexposed mess into a mount.
    Shrugging, I slid the dark print out onto my hand . . . and it was then that I found George’s private pot of gold.

5
    I t was not, at first sight, very exciting.
    Taped onto the back of the print there was an envelope made of the special sort of sulphur-free paper used by careful professionals for the long-term storage of developed film. Inside the envelope, a negative.
    It was the negative from which the print had been made, but whereas the print was mostly