Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

  “Thanks a bunch.”

  “Sid, seriously, look out for yourself.”

  I felt as prepared as one could be for some sort of catastrophic pulverization to come my way, but in the event the process was subtler and long drawn out.

  As if nothing had happened, Ellis resumed his television program and began making jokes about Sid Halley—“ Sid Halley? That friend of mine! Have you heard that he comes from Halifax? Halley facts—he makes them up.”

  And “I like halibut—I eat it.” And the old ones that I was used to, “halitosis” and “Hallelujah.”

  Hilarious.

  When I went to the races, which I didn’t do as often as earlier, people either turned their backs or laughed, and I wasn’t sure which I disliked more.

  I took to going only to jumping meetings, knowing Ellis’s style took him to the most fashionable meetings on the flat. I acknowledged unhappily to myself that in my avoidance of him there was an element of cringe. I despised myself for it. All the same, I shrank from a confrontation with him and truly didn’t know whether it was because of an ever-deepening aversion to what he had done, or because of the fear—the certainty—that he would publicly mock me.

  He behaved as if there were never going to be a trial; as if awkward details like Land-Rovers, lopping shears and confirmed matching DNA tests tying the shears to the Bracken colt were never going to surface once the sub judice silence ended.

  Norman, Archie and also Charles Roland worried that, for all the procedural care we had taken, Ellis’s lawyers would somehow get the Land-Rover disallowed. Ellis’s lawyers, Norman said, backed by the heavy unseen presence that was motivating them and possibly even paying the mounting fees, now included a defense counsel whose loss rate for the previous seven years was nil.

  Surprisingly, despite the continuing barrage of ignominy, I went on being offered work. True, the approach was often tentative and apologetic—“Whether you’re right or pigheaded about Ellis Quint ... ” and “Even if you’ve got Ellis Quint all wrong...”—but the nitty gritty seemed to be that they needed me and there was no one else.

  Well hooray for that. I cleaned up minor mysteries, checked credit ratings, ditto characters, found stolen horses, caught sundry thieves, all the usual stuff.

  July came in with a deluge that flooded rivers and ruined the shoes of racegoers, and no colt was attacked at the time of the full moon, perhaps because the nights were wet and windy and black, dark with clouds.

  The press finally lost interest in the daily trashing of Sid Halley and Ellis Quint’s show wrapped up for the summer break. I went down to Kent a couple of times, taking new fish for Rachel, sitting on the floor with her, playing checkers. Neither Linda nor I mentioned Ellis. She hugged me good-bye each time and asked when I would be coming back. Rachel, she said, had had no more nightmares. They were a thing of the past.

  August came quietly and left in the same manner. No colts were attacked. The hotline went cold. India Cathcart busied herself with a cabinet member’s mistress but still had a routinely vindictive jab at me each Friday. I went to America for two short weeks and rode horses up the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, letting the wide skies and the forests work their peace.

  In September, one dew-laden early-fall English Saturday morning after a calm moonlit night, a colt was discovered with a foot off.

  Nauseated, I heard the announcement on the radio in the kitchen while I made coffee.

  Listeners would remember, the cool newsreader said, that in June Ellis Quint had been notoriously accused by ex-jockey Sid Halley of a similar attack. Quint was laughing off this latest incident, affirming his total ignorance on the matter.

  There were no hotline calls from The Pump, but Norman Picton scorched the wires.

  “Have you heard?” he demanded.

  “Yes. But no details.”

  “It was a yearling colt this time. Apparently there aren’t many two-year-olds in the fields just now, but there are hundreds of yearlings.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “The yearling sales are starting.”

  “The yearling in question belonged to some people near Northampton. They’re frantic. Their vet put the colt out of his misery. But get this. Ellis Quint’s lawyers have already claimed he has an alibi.”

  I stood in silence in my sitting room, looking out to the unthreatening garden.

  “Sid?”

  “Mm.”

  “You’ll have to break that alibi. Otherwise, it will break you.”

  “Mm.”

  “Say something else, dammit.”

  “The police can do it. Your lot.”

  “Face it. They’re not going to try very hard. They’re going to believe in his alibi, if it’s anything like solid.”

  “Do you think, do you really think,” I asked numbly, “that an ultra-respected barrister would connive with his client to mutilate ... to kill ... a colt—or pay someone else to do it—to cast doubt on the prosecution’s case in the matter of a different colt?”

  “Put like that, no.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “So Ellis Quint has set it up himself, and what he has set up, you can knock down.”

  “He’s had weeks—more than two months—to plan it.”

  “Sid,” he said, “it’s not like you to sound defeated.”

  If he, I thought, had been on the receiving end of a long, pitiless barrage of systematic denigration, he might feel as I did, which, if not comprehensively defeated, was at least battle weary before I began.

  “The police at Northampton,” I said, “are not going to welcome me with open arms.”

  “That’s never stopped you before.”

  I sighed. “Can you find out from the Northampton police what his alibi actually is?”

  “Piece of cake. I’ll phone you back.”

  I put down the receiver and went over to the window. The little square looked peaceful and safe, the railed garden green and grassy, a tree-dappled haven where generations of privileged children had run and played while their nursemaids gossiped. I’d spent my own childhood in Liverpool’s back streets, my father dead and my mother fighting cancer. I in no way regretted the contrast in origins. I had learned self-sufficiency and survival there. Perhaps because of the back streets I now valued the little garden more. I wondered how the children who’d grown up in that garden would deal with Ellis Quint. Perhaps I could learn from them. Ellis had been that sort of child.

  Norman phoned back later in the morning.

  “Your friend,” he said, “reportedly spent the night at a private dance in Shropshire, roughly a hundred miles to the northwest of the colt. Endless friends will testify to his presence, including his hostess, a duchess. It was a dance given to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the heir.”

  “Damn.”

  “He could hardly have chosen a more conspicuous or more watertight alibi.”

  “And some poor bitch will swear she lay down for him at dawn.”

  “Why dawn?”

  “It’s when it happens.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Never you mind,” I said.

  “You’re a bad boy, Sid.”

  Long ago, I thought. Before Jenny. Summer dances, dew, wet grass, giggles and passion. Long ago and innocent.

  Life’s a bugger, I thought.

  “Sid,” Norman’s voice said, “do you realize the trial is due to start two weeks on Monday?”

  “I do realize.”

  “Then get a move on with this alibi.”

  “Yes, sir, Detective Inspector.”

  He laughed. “Put the bugger back behind bars.”

  On Tuesday I went to see the Shropshire duchess, for whom I had ridden winners in that former life. She even had a painting of me on her favorite horse, but I was no longer her favorite jockey.

  “Yes, of course Ellis was here all night,” she confirmed. Short, thin, and at first unwelcoming, she led me through the armor-dotted entrance hall of her drafty old house to the sit
ting room, where she had been watching the jump racing on television when I arrived.

  Her front door had been opened to me by an arthritic old manservant who had hobbled away to see if Her Grace was in. Her Grace had come into the hall clearly anxious to get rid of me as soon as possible, and had then relented, her old kindness towards me resurfacing like a lost but familiar habit.

  A three-mile steeplechase was just finishing, the jockeys kicking side by side to the finish line, the horses tired and straining, the race going in the end to the one carrying less weight.

  The duchess turned down the volume, the better to talk.

  “I cannot believe, Sid,” she said, “that you’ve accused dear Ellis of something so disgusting. I know you and Ellis have been friends for years. Everyone knows that. I do think he’s been a bit unkind about you on television, but you did ask for it, you know.”

  “But he was here ... ?” I asked.

  “Of course. All night. It was five or later when everyone started to leave. The band was playing still... we’d all had breakfast...”

  “When did the dance start?” I asked.

  “Start? The invitations were for ten. But you know how people are. It was eleven or midnight before most people came. We had the fireworks at three-thirty because rain was forecast for later, but it was fine all night, thank goodness.”

  “Did Ellis say good night when he left?”

  “My dear Sid, there were over three hundred people here last Friday night. A succès fou, if I say it myself.”

  “So you don’t actually remember when Ellis left?”

  “The last I saw of him he was dancing an eightsome with that gawky Raven girl. Do drop it, Sid. I’m seeing you now for old times’ sake, but you’re not doing yourself any good, are you?”

  “Probably not.”

  She patted my hand. “I’ll always know you, at the races and so on.”

  “Thank you,” ! I said.

  “Yes. Be a dear and find your own way out. Poor old Stone has such bad arthritis these days.”

  She turned up the volume in preparation for the next race, and I left.

  The gawky Raven girl who had danced an eightsome reel with Ellis turned out to be the third daughter of an earl. She herself had gone off to Greece to join someone’s yacht, but her sister (the second daughter) insisted that Ellis had danced with dozens of people after that, and wasn’t I, Sid Halley, being a teeny-weeny twit?

  I went to see Miss Richardson and Mrs. Bethany, joint owners of the Windward Stud Farm, home of the latest colt victim: and to my dismay found Ginnie Quint there as well.

  All three women were in the stud farm’s office, a building separate from the rambling one-story dwelling house. A groom long-reining a yearling had directed me incuriously and I drew up outside the pinkish brick new-looking structure without relish for my mission, but not expecting a tornado.

  I knocked and entered, as one does with such offices, and found myself in the normal clutter of desks, computers, copiers, wall charts and endless piles of paper.

  I’d done a certain amount of homework before I went there, so it was easy to identify Miss Richardson as the tall, bulky, dominant figure in tweed jacket, worn cord trousers and wiry gray short-cropped curls. Fifty, I thought; despises men. Mrs. Bethany, a smaller, less powerful version of Miss Richardson, was reputedly the one who stayed up at night when the mares were foaling, the one on whose empathy with horses the whole enterprise floated.

  The women didn’t own the farm’s two stallions (they belonged to syndicates) nor any of the mares: Windward Stud was a cross between a livery stable and a maternity ward. They couldn’t afford the bad publicity of the victimized yearling.

  Ginnie Quint, sitting behind one of the desks, leaped furiously to her feet the instant I appeared in the doorway and poured over me an accumulated concentration of verbal volcanic lava, scalding, shriveling, sticking my feet to the ground and my tongue in dryness to the roof of my mouth.

  “He trusted you. He would have died for you.”

  I sensed Miss Richardson and Mrs. Bethany listening in astonishment, not knowing who I was nor what I’d done to deserve such an onslaught; but I had eyes only for Ginnie, whose long fondness for me had fermented to hate.

  “You’re going to go into court and try to send your best friend to prison... to destroy him ... pull him down ... ruin him. You’re going to betray him. You’re not fit to live.”

  Emotion twisted her gentle features into ugliness. Her words came out spitting.

  It was her own son who had done this. Her golden, idolized son. He had made of me finally the traitor that would deliver the kiss.

  I said absolutely nothing.

  I felt, more intensely than ever, the by now accustomed and bitter awareness of the futility of rebellion. Gagged by sub judice, I’d been unable all along to put up any defense, especially because the press had tended to pounce on my indignant protests and label them as “whining” and “diddums,” and “please, Teacher, he hit me ...” and “it’s not fair, I hit him first.”

  A quick check with a lawyer had confirmed that though trying to sue one paper for libel might have been possible, suing the whole lot was not practical. Ellis’s jokes were not actionable and, unfortunately, the fact that I was still profitably employed in my chosen occupation meant that I couldn’t prove the criticism had damaged me financially.

  “Grit your teeth and take it,” he’d advised cheerfully, and I’d paid him for an opinion I gave myself free every day.

  As there was no hope of Ginnie’s listening to anything I might say, I unhappily but pragmatically turned to retreat, intending to return another day to talk to Miss Richardson and Mrs. Bethany, and found my way barred by two new burly arrivals, known already to the stud owners as policemen.

  “Sergeant Smith reporting, madam,” one said to Miss Richardson.

  She nodded. “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “We’ve found an object hidden in one of the hedges round the field where your horse was done in.”

  No one objected to my presence, so I remained in the office, quiet and riveted.

  Sergeant Smith carried a long, narrow bundle which he laid on one of the desks. “Could you tell us, madam, if this belongs to you?”

  His manner was almost hostile, accusatory. He seemed to expect the answer to be yes.

  “What is it?” Miss Richardson asked, very far from guilty perturbation.

  “This, madam,” the sergeant said with a note of triumph, and lifted back folds of filthy cloth to reveal their contents, which were two long wooden handles topped by heavy metal clippers.

  A pair of lopping shears.

  Miss Richardson and Mrs. Bethany stared at them unmoved. It was Ginnie Quint who turned slowly white and fainted.

  8

  So here we were in October, with the leaves weeping yellowly from the trees.

  Here I was, perching on the end of Rachel Ferns’s bed, wearing a huge, fluffy orange clown wig and a red bulbous nose, making sick children laugh while feeling far from merry inside.

  “Have you hurt your arm?” Rachel asked conversationally.

  “Banged it,” I said.

  She nodded. Linda looked surprised. Rachel said, “When things hurt it shows in people’s eyes.”

  She knew too much about pain for a nine-year-old. I said, “I’d better go before I tire you.”

  She smiled, not demurring. She, like the children wearing the other wigs I’d brought, all had very short bursts of stamina. Visiting was down to ten minutes maximum.

  I took off the clown wig and kissed Rachel’s forehead. ‘“Bye.” I said.

  “You’ll come back?”

  “Of course.”

  She sighed contentedly, knowing I would. Linda walked with me from the ward to the hospital door.

  “It’s ... awful,” she said, forlorn, on the exit steps. Cold air. The chill to come.

  I put my arms around her. Both arms. Hugged her.

  “Rachel asks for yo
u all the time,” she said. “Joe cuddles her and cries. She cuddles him, trying to comfort him. She’s her daddy’s little girl. She loves him. But you ... you’re her friend. You make her laugh, not cry. It’s you she asks for all the time—not Joe.”

  “I’ll always come if I can.”

  She sobbed quietly on my shoulder and gulped, “Poor Mrs. Quint.”

  “Mm,” I said.

  “I haven’t told Rachel about Ellis...”

  “No. Don‘t,” I said.

  “I’ve been beastly to you.”

  “No, far from it.”

  “The papers have said such dreadful things about you.” Linda shook in my arms. “I knew you weren’t like that ... I told Joe I have to believe you about Ellis Quint and he thinks I’m stupid.”

  “Look after Rachel, nothing else matters.”

  She went back into the hospital and I rode dispiritedly back to London in the Teledrive car.

  Even though I’d returned with more than an hour to spare, I decided against Pont Square and took the sharp memory of Gordon Quint’s attack straight to the restaurant in Piccadilly, where I’d agreed to meet the lawyer Davis Tatum.

  With a smile worth millions, the French lady in charge of the restaurant arranged for me to have coffee and a sandwich in the tiny bar while I waited for my friend. The bar, in fact, looked as if it had been wholly designed as a meeting place for those about to lunch. There were no more than six tables, a bartender who brought drinks to one’s elbow, and a calm atmosphere. The restaurant itself was full of daylight, with huge windows and green plants, and was sufficiently hidden from the busy artery of Mayfair downstairs as to give peace and privacy and no noisy passing trade.

  I sat at a bar table in the corner with my back to the entrance, though in fact few were arriving: more were leaving after long hours of talk and lunch. I took some ibuprofen, and waited without impatience. I spent hours in my job, sometimes, waiting for predators to pop out of their holes.