To the Hilt

by Dick Francis

  “Get out,” he said. “Stand up.”

  “I don’t know if he can,” Patsy said worriedly. “They were hitting him ...”

  “Who were?”

  She looked over to where bunches of handcuffed figures sat gloomily on the grass. No beer. No fun at all.

  “And they burned him,” Patsy said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

  The policemen looked at the barbecue with its glowing coals.

  “No,” Patsy said, pointing, “on that grill thing, over there.”

  One of the uniformed policemen bent down to pick the grill up and snatched his hand away, cursing and sucking his fingers.

  I laughed.

  Patsy said as if shattered, “Alexander, it’s not funny. ”

  The policemen said, “Mrs. Benchmark, do you know this man?”

  “Of course I know him.” She stared down at me. I looked expressionlessly back, resigned to the usual abuse. “He’s ... he’s my brother,” she said.

  It came nearer to breaking me up than all Grantchester’s attentions.

  She saw that it did, and it made her cry.

  Patsy, my implacable enemy, wept.

  She brushed the tears away brusquely and told the policeman she would point out my attackers among the football crowd, and when they moved off, their place was taken by Surtees, who was very far from a change of heart and had clearly enjoyed the earlier entertainment.

  “Where’s the horse?” he said. He sneered. His feet quivered, I thought he might kick my head.

  I said with threat, “Surtees, any more shit from you and I’ll tell Patsy where you go on Wednesday afternoons. I’ll tell her the address of the little house on the outskirts of Guildford and I’ll tell her the name of the prostitute who lives there, and I’ll tell her what sort of sex you go there for.”

  Surtees’s mouth opened in absolute horror. When he could control his throat, he stuttered.

  “How ... how ... how ... ? I’ll deny it.”

  I said, smiling, “I paid a skinhead to follow you.”

  His eyes seemed to bulge.

  “So you keep your hands to yourself as far as I’m concerned, and your mouth shut, Surtees,” I said, “and if you’re still what Patsy wants, I won’t disillusion her.”

  He looked sick. He physically backed away from me, as if I’d touched him with the plague. I gazed up peacefully at the bright colored lights in the trees. Life had its sweet moments, after all.

  No one had actually seen Oliver Grantchester being attacked and tied up securely in his own garage. He had been swiftly knocked out and had seen no one. He was found, when he recovered consciousness, to be suffering not only from a blow to the back of the skull but also from a broken nose, a broken jaw and extensive damage to his lower abdomen and genitals, as if he’d been well kicked while knowing nothing about it.

  Whoever would do such a thing! Tut tut.

  The police put him in a prison hospital ward and provided him with a doctor.

  Patsy organized things, which she was good at.

  Patsy organized me into a private hospital that specialized in bums with an elderly woman doctor able to deal with anything on a Saturday evening.

  “Dear me,” she said. “Nasty. Very painful. But you’re a healthy young man. You’ll heal.”

  She wrapped me in biosynthetic burn-healing artificial skin and large bandages and in her grandmotherly way inquired, “And a couple of cracked ribs, too, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would.”

  She smiled. “I’ll see that you sleep.”

  She efficiently drugged me out until six in the morning, when I phoned Chris’s beeper and got his return call five minutes later.

  “Where the hell are you?” he demanded aggrievedly.

  I told him.

  “That hospital’s strictly for millionaires,” he objected.

  “Then get me out. Bring some clothes.”

  He brought my own clothes, the ones he’d borrowed for his departure from the wake at Park Crescent three days earlier, and he arrived to find me standing by the window watching the gray dawn return to the perilous earth.

  “Hospital gowns,” he said, as I turned to greet him, “shouldn’t be visited even on the damned.”

  “They cut my clothes off last night.”

  “Sue them.”

  “Mm.”

  “To be frank,” he said, almost awkwardly, “I didn’t expect you to be on your feet.”

  “More comfortable,” I said succinctly. “That coach, if I may say so, was brilliant.”

  He grinned. “Yes it was, wasn’t it?”

  “Go on then, tell me all.”

  He dumped the carrier bag with the clothes in and came over to join me by the window, the familiar face alight with enjoyment. High cheekbones, light brown hair, bright brown eyes, natural air of impishness. Solemnity sat unnaturally upon him, and he couldn’t tell me what had happened without making lighthearted jokes about it.

  “Those thugs that jumped out of the bushes at you, they were the real McCoy. Brutal bastards. There was no mistaking they were the ones I’d been looking for. And to be honest, Al, I couldn’t handle four of them at once on my own, any more than you could.”

  I nodded, understanding.

  “So,” Chris said, “I thought the best thing to do would be to find out how big a posse would be needed to round up the outlaws, so to speak, so I shunted round in the shelter of a sort of high wooden fence that’s all round that garden, until I could see through the bushes. All those lights ... And there they were, your four thugs, tying you up to that tree and bashing you about; and there were three other people there too, which made seven, and I couldn’t manage seven ...”

  “No,” I said.

  “There was that big fat slob, the lawyer from your stepfather’s funeral.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And bloody Surtees ...”

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “And his wife.”

  I nodded.

  “So,” Chris said again, “I had to go for reinforcements, and I ran down the road to the pub and used their telephone and told the police there was a riot going on, and those bastards told me there were a dozen riots going on every Saturday evening, and they wanted to know where exactly, so I asked the barman in the pub if he knew whose house it was with all those lights in the garden, and he said it belongs to Mr. Oliver Grantchester, a very well known lawyer, so I told the police, but they didn’t show up, or anything, and to tell you the truth, mate, I was jumping up and down a bit by that time.”

  So would I have been, I thought.

  “So then,” Chris said, “this bloody big coachload of fervent psychos in orange scarves invaded the bar, and I thought then, manna dropped from heaven, so I went outside where half of them were still in the bus, and I yelled at them that there was free beer down the road at a party, and I just got into the driver’s seat and drove that damned jumbo straight through Grantchester’s fence into the garden.”

  “It did the trick,” I said, smiling.

  “Yes, but ... my God ... !”

  “Best forgotten,” I said.

  “I’ll never forget it,” he said, “and nor will you.”

  “You came, though.”

  “So did the bloody police, in the end. Too many of them.”

  “What exactly,” I asked him contentedly, “did you do to Oliver Grantchester?”

  “Kicked him a good many times in the goolies.” Chris had been wearing, I remembered, pointed black patent shoes, sharp enough even without heels. “And I smashed him round the face a bit with the hard knuckles. I mean, there’s villains, and there’s villains. Boxing gloves is one thing, but burning people ... that’s diabolical. I could have killed him. Lucky I didn’t.”

  “The police asked me,” I said, “if I knew who had tied him up. I said how could I possibly know anything? I was lying in the pond.”

  Chris laughed. “I’ll work for you anytime,” he said. “Attending to
Grantchester will be extra.”

  Patsy arrived silently while I was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in trousers and shirt, head hanging, feeling rotten. Of all the people I would have preferred not to see me like that, she would have been tops.

  “Go away,” I said, and she went, but the next person through the door was a nurse with a syringeful of relief.

  Around midmorning I had a visit from a Detective Inspector Vernon, whom I’d met, it transpired, in the garden.

  “Mrs. Benchmark said you were dressed,” he remarked, not shaking hands.

  “Do you know her well?”

  “She’s a patron of local police charities.”

  “Oh.”

  He joined me by the window. There were scudding clouds in the sky. A good day for mountains.

  “Mrs. Benchmark says that Mr. Grantchester, who is another of our patrons, was instructing four other men to ill-treat you.”

  “You could put it like that,” I agreed.

  He was a bulky short man, going gray: never, at that rank, at that age, going to climb high in police hierarchy; but maybe a more down-to-earth and dogged investigator because of it.

  “Can you tell me why?” he said.

  “You’ll have to ask Mr. Grantchester.”

  “His lower jaw’s badly broken. This morning he can’t speak. He’s badly bruised in the abdomen, too. Doubled over. Black-and-blue.”

  Vernon asked me again if I knew who had attacked him. I’d been in the pond, I repeated. As he knew.

  I said helpfully, however, that the same four thugs had battered me earlier in Scotland, and told him where I’d given a statement to the police there. I suggested that he might also talk to Chief Inspector Reynolds of the Leicestershire police about people being burned on barbecue grills on mown grass. Vernon wrote everything down methodically. If I had recovered enough, he said, he would appreciate it if I would attend his police station the following morning. They could send an unmarked car for me, he offered.

  “See you down the nick,” Chris would have said, but all I raised was, “OK.”

  The day passed somehow, and the night.

  Bruises blackened. The cracked ribs were all on my right side: a southpaw puncher’s doing.

  The bums got inspected again. No sign of infection. Very lucky, I was told, considering the unsterile nature of goldfish ponds.

  On Monday morning I discharged myself from the hospital against their advice. I had too much to do, I said.

  The plainclothes police car came to transport me to Vernon’s official stamping ground, where I was instantly invited to look through a window into a brightly lit room, and to say if I’d seen any of eight men at any earlier time in my life.

  No problem. Numbers one, three, seven and eight.

  “They deny they touched you.”

  I gave Vernon a glowering come-off-it glare. “You saw them yourself in that garden. You arrested them there.”

  “I didn’t see them in the act of committing grievous bodily harm.”

  I closed my eyes briefly, took a grip on my pain-driven temper, and said, on a deep breath, “Number three wore boxing gloves and caused the damage you can see in my face. He is left-handed. The others watched. All four assisted in compelling me to lie on that hot grill. All four also attacked me outside my home in Scotland. I don’t know their names, but I do know their faces.”

  It had seemed to me on other occasions that the great British police force not only never apologized, but also never saw the need for it: but Inspector Vernon ushered me politely into a bare interview room and offered me coffee, which in his terms came into the category of tender loving care.

  “Mrs. Benchmark couldn’t identify them for certain,” he observed.

  I asked if he had talked to Sergeant Berrick in Scotland, and to Chief Inspector Reynolds in Leicestershire. They had been off duty, he said.

  Bugger weekends.

  Could I use a telephone, I asked.

  Who did I want to talk to? Long-distance calls were not free.

  “A doctor in London,” I said.

  I reached, miraculously, Keith Robbiston; alert, in a hurry.

  “Could I have a handful of your wipeout pills?” I asked.

  “What’s happened?” he said.

  “I got bashed again.”

  “More thugs?”

  “The same ones.”

  “Oh . . . As bad as before?”

  “Well, actually ... worse.”

  “How much worse?”

  “Cracked ribs and some burns.”

  “Burns?”

  “Nothing to do with ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”

  He laughed, and talked to Inspector Vernon, and said my mother would kill him if he failed me, and pills would be motorbiked door to door within two hours.

  If nothing else, Keith Robbiston’s speed impressed the Inspector. He went off to telephone outside. When the coffee came, it was in a pot, on a tray.

  I sat and waited for unmeasurable time, thinking. When Vernon returned I told him that number seven in the lineup had been wearing what looked like my father’s gold watch, stolen from me in Scotland.

  “Also,” I said, “number seven didn’t relish the burning.”

  “That won’t excuse him.”

  “No ... but if you could make it worth his while, he might tell you what happened to a Norman Quorn.”

  The Inspector didn’t say, “Who?” He went quietly away. A uniformed constable brought me a sandwich lunch.

  My pills arrived. Things got better.

  After another couple of hours Inspector Vernon came into the room, sat down opposite me across the table and told me that the following conversation was not taking place. Positively not. It was his private thanks. Understood?

  “OK,” I said.

  “First of all, can you identify your father’s gold watch?”

  “It has an engraving on the back, ‘Alistair from Vivienne.’ ”

  Vernon faintly smiled. In all the time I spent with him it was the nearest he came to showing pleasure.

  “Number seven in the lineup may be known as Bernie,” he said. “Bernie, as you saw, is a worried man.” He paused. “Can I totally trust you not to repeat this? Can I rely on you ... ?”

  I said dryly, “To the hilt,” which he didn’t understand beyond the simple words, but he took them as I meant them: utterly. “But,” I added, “why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?”

  He spent a moment thinking, then said, “In Britain one isn’t, as you may or may not know, allowed to make bargains with people accused of crimes. One can’t promise a light sentence in return for information. That’s a myth. You can persuade someone unofficially to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like in this case, actual bodily harm, rather than grievous bodily harm, GBH, which is a far more serious crime, and can carry a long jail sentence. But some authorities can be perverse, and if they suspect a deal has been struck, they’re perfectly capable of upsetting it. Follow?”

  “I follow.”

  “Also the business of what is and what isn’t admissible evidence is a minefield.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “If you hadn’t told me to ask Bernie questions about Norman Quorn I wouldn’t have thought of doing it. But Bernie split wide open, and now my superiors here are patting me on the back and thinking of going to the Crown Prosecution Service—who of course decide whether or not a trial should take place—not with a GBH involving you, but with a charge against Oliver Grantchester for manslaughter. The manslaughter of Norman Quom.”

  “Hell’s teeth.”

  “At this point in such proceedings everyone gets very touchy indeed about who knows what, in order not to jeopardize any useful testimony. It wouldn’t do for you to have heard Bernie’s confession. It could have compromised the case. So I’ll tell you what he said ... but I shouldn’t.”

  “You’re safe.”

  He nevertheless looked around cautiously, as if listeners had entered unseen.

/>   “Bernie said,” he finally managed, “that they—the four you call the thugs—all go to a gym in London, east of the City, which Oliver Grantchester has been visiting for fitness sessions for the past few years. Grantchester goes on the treadmill, lifts a few weights and so on, but isn’t a boxer.”

  “No.”

  “So when he wanted a rough job done, he recruited your four thugs. Bernie was willing. The up-front money was good. So was the payoff afterwards, though the job went wrong.”

  “Quorn died.”

  Vernon nodded.

  “Grantchester,” he said, “told them to turn up at his house in the country. He told them the name of the village and said they would know his house because it had Christmas lights all over the driveway, and he would turn them on, even though it would be daylight and not Christmas. Grantchester arrived at his house with an older man, who was Norman Quorn, and he took him through the gate in the fence into the garden. The four thugs tied the man—whose name they didn’t yet know—to the same tree as they tied you, but they didn’t belt him, like you. Grantchester lit the barbecue and told Quorn he would burn him if he didn’t come across with some information.”

  Vernon paused, then went on. “Bernie didn’t know what the information was, and still doesn’t. Quorn was shitting himself, Bernie says, and Grantchester waited until the fire was very hot, and then he threw the grill onto the grass, and told Quorn he would lie on it until he told him—Grantchester—what he wanted to know. Quorn told him he would tell him at once, but Grantchester got the four thugs to throw Quorn onto the grill anyway, and hold him there, and although he was screaming and hollering that he would tell, Grantchester wouldn’t let him up, and seemed to be enjoying it, and when he did let him up, Quorn dropped down dead.”

  Vernon stopped. I listened in fascinated horror.

  “Bemie,” Vernon said, “was near to puking, describing it.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Grantchester was furious. There was this dead body on the ground and he hadn’t found out what he wanted to know. He got Bernie and the others to put Quorn into the trunk of his car in the garage, and in the house he made them put their hands round empty glasses, so that he had all their fingerprints, and he threatened that if they ever spoke of what they’d seen they would be in mortal trouble. Then he paid them and told them to go away, which they did. Bernie doesn’t know what Grantchester did with Quorn’s body.”