Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

  Click. Flash. The film wound on, quietly whirring.

  All the newlyweds beamed.

  I was presented, one by one, with nine more cameras. Nine more bows. I took nine more photos. Flash. Flash. Group euphoria.

  What was it about me, I wondered, that encouraged such trust? Even without language there seemed to be no doubt on their part of my willingness to give pleasure. I mentally shrugged. I had the time, so what the hell. I took their pictures and bowed, and waited for eight o‘clock.

  I left the happy couples on Waterstone’s corner and, carrying my bag, walked fifty yards down Church Street towards the restaurant. There was a narrow side street beside it, and opposite, on the other side of Church Street, one of those quirks of London life, a small recessed area of sidewalk with a patch of scrubby grass and a park bench, installed by philanthropists for the comfort of footsore shoppers and other vagrants. I would sit there, I decided, and watch for India. The restaurant doors were straight opposite the bench. A green-painted bench made of horizontal slats.

  I crossed Church Street to reach it. The traffic on Sunday evening was sporadic to nonexistent. I could see a brass plate on the back of the bench: the name of the benefactor who’d paid for it.

  I was turning to sit when at the same time I heard a bang and felt a searing flash of pain across my back and into my right upper arm. The impact knocked me over and around so that I ended sprawling on the bench, half lying, half sitting, facing the road.

  I thought incredulously, I’ve been shot.

  I’d been shot once before. I couldn’t mistake the thud. Also I couldn’t mistake the shudder of outrage that my invaded body produced. Also . . . there was a great deal of blood.

  I’d been shot by Gordon Quint.

  He walked out of the shadows of the side street opposite and came towards me across Church Street. He carried a hand-gun with its black, round mouth pointing my way. He was coming inexorably to finish what he’d started, and he appeared not to care if anyone saw him.

  I didn’t seem to have the strength to get up and run away.

  There was nowhere to run to.

  Gordon looked like a farmer from Berkshire, not an obsessed murderer. He wore a checked shirt and a tie and a tweed jacket. He was a middle-aged pillar of the community, a judge and jury and a hangman... a raw, primitive walking act of revenge.

  There was none of the screaming out-of-control obscenity with which he’d attacked me the previous Monday. This killer was cold and determined and reckless.

  He stopped in front of me and aimed at my chest.

  “This is for Ginnie,” he said.

  I don’t know what he expected. He seemed to be waiting for something. For me to protest, perhaps. To plead.

  His voice was hoarse.

  “For Ginnie,” he repeated.

  I was silent. I wanted to stand. Couldn’t manage it.

  “Say something!” he shouted in sudden fury. The gun wavered in his hand, but he was too close to miss. “Don’t you understand?”

  I looked not at his gun but at his eyes. Not the best view, I thought inconsequentially, for my last on earth.

  Gordon’s purpose didn’t waver. I might deny him any enjoyment of my fear, but that wasn’t going to stop him. He stared at my face. He didn’t blink. No hesitancy there. No withdrawal or doubt. None.

  Now, I thought frozenly. It’s going to be now.

  A voice was shouting in the road, urgent, frantic, coming nearer, far too late.

  The voice shouted one despairing word.

  “Dad.”

  Ellis ... Ellis . . . Running across the road waving a five-foot piece of black angle-iron fencing and shouting in frenzy at his father, “Dad . . . Dad ... Don’t ... Don’t do it.”

  I could see him running. Nothing seemed very clear. Gordon could hear Ellis shouting but it wasn’t going to stop him. The demented hatred simply hardened in his face. His arm straightened until his gun was a bare yard from my chest.

  Perhaps I won’t feel it, I thought.

  Ellis swung the iron fencing post with two hands and all his strength and hit his father on the side of the head.

  The gun went off. The bullet hissed past my ear and slammed into a shop window behind me. There were razor splinters of glass and flashes of light and shouting and confusion everywhere.

  Gordon fell silently unconscious, face down on the scrubby patch of grass, his right hand with the gun underneath him. My blood ran into a scarlet and widening pool below the slats of the bench. Ellis stood for an eternity of seconds holding the fencing post and staring at my eyes as if he could see into my soul, as if he would show me his.

  For an unmeasurable hiatus blink of time it seemed there was between us a fusing of psyche, an insight of total understanding. It could have been a hallucination, a result of too much stress, but it was unmistakably the same for him.

  Then he dropped the fencing post beside his father, and turned, and went away at a slow run, across Church Street and down the side road, loping, not sprinting, until he was swallowed by shadow.

  I was suddenly surrounded by Japanese faces all asking unintelligible questions. They had worried eyes. They watched me bleed.

  The gunshots brought more people, but cautiously. Gordon’s attack, that to me had seemed to happen in slow motion, had in reality passed to others with bewildering speed. No one had tried to stop Ellis. People thought he was going to bring help.

  I lost further account of time. A police car arrived busily, lights flashing, the first manifestation of all that I most detested—questions, hospitals, forms, noise, bright lights in my eyes, clanging and banging and being shoved around. There wasn’t a hope of being quietly stitched up and left alone.

  I told a policemen that Gordon, though unconscious at present, was lying over a loaded gun.

  He wanted to know if Gordon had fired the shots in self-defense.

  I couldn’t be bothered to answer.

  The crowd grew bigger and an ambulance made an entrance.

  A young woman pushed the uniforms aside, yelling that she was from the press. India... India... come to dinner.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Sid . . .” Horror in her voice and a sort of despair.

  “Tell Kevin Mills . . . ,” I said. My mouth was dry from loss of blood. I tried again. She bent her head down to mine to hear above the hubbub.

  With humor I said, “Those Japanese people took a load of photos ... I saw the flashes ... so tell Kevin to get moving ... Get those photos ... and he can have ... his exclusive.”

  15

  India. wasn’t a newspaperwoman for nothing. The front page of Monday’s Pump bore the moderately accurate headline “Shot in the Back,” with, underneath, a picture taken of Gordon Quint aiming his gun unequivocally at my heart.

  Gordon’s half-back view was slightly out of focus. My own face was sharp and clear, with an expression that looked rather like polite interest, not the fatalistic terror I’d actually felt.

  Kevin and The Pump had gone to town. The Pump acknowledged that its long campaign of denigration of Sid Halley had been a mistake.

  Policy, I saw cynically, had done a one-eighty U-turn. Lord Tilepit had come to such senses as he possessed and was putting what distance he could between himself and Ellis Quint.

  There had been twenty eyewitnesses to the shooting of J. S. Halley. Kevin, arming himself with a Japanese interpreter, had listened intently, sorted out what he’d been told, and got it right. Throughout his piece there was an undercurrent of awe that no one was going to be able to dispute the facts. He hadn’t once said, “It is alleged.”

  Gordon Quint, though still unconscious, would in due course be “helping the police with their inquiries.” Kevin observed that Ellis Quint’s whereabouts were unknown.

  Inside the paper there were more pictures. One showed Ellis, arms and fence post raised, on the point of striking his father. The Japanese collectively, and that one photographer in particular, had not known who
Ellis Quint was. Ellis didn’t appear on the TV screens in Japan.

  Why had there been so much photo coverage? Because Mr. Halley, Kevin said, had been kind to the hon eymooners, and many of them had been watching him as he walked away down Church Street.

  I read The Pump while sitting upright in a high bed in a small white side room in Hammersmith hospital, thankfully alone except for a constant stream of doctors, nurses, policemen and people with clipboards.

  The surgeon who’d dealt with my punctures came to see me at nine in the morning, before he went off duty for the day. He looked a lot worse for wear by then than I did, I thought.

  “How are you doing?” he asked, coming in wearily in a sweat-stained green gown.

  “As you see... fine, thanks to you.”

  He looked at the newspaper lying on the bed. “Your bullet,” he said, “plowed along a rib and in and out of your arm. It tore a hole in the brachial artery, which is why you bled so much. We repaired that and transfused you with three units of blood and saline, though you may need more later. We’ll see how you go. There’s some muscle damage but with physiotherapy you should be almost as good as new. You seem to have been sideways on when he shot you.”

  “I was turning. I was lucky.”

  “You could put it like that,” he said dryly. “I suppose you do know you’ve also got a half-mended fracture of the forearm? And some fairly deep trauma to the wrist?”

  I nodded.

  “And we’ve put a few stitches in your face.”

  “Gteat.”

  “I watched you race,” he said. “I know how fast jockeys heal. Ex-jockeys, too, no doubt. You can leave here when you feel ready.”

  I said “Thanks” sincerely, and he smiled exhaustedly and went away.

  I could definitely move the fingers of my right hand, even though only marginally at present. There had been a private moment of sheer cowardice in the night when I’d woken gradually from anesthesia and been unable to feel anything in my arm from the shoulder down. I didn’t care to confess or remember the abject dread in which I’d forced myself to look. I’d awoken once before to a stump. This time the recurrent nightmare of helplessness and humiliation and no hands had drifted hor rifyingly in and out, but when I did finally look, there was no spirit-pulverizing void but a long white-wrapped bundle that discernibly ended in fingernails. Even so, they didn’t seem to be connected to me. I had lain for a grim while, trying to consider paralysis, and when at length pain had roared back it had been an enormous relief: only whole healthy nerves felt like that. I had an arm ... and a hand... and a life.

  Given those, nothing else mattered.

  In the afternoon Archie Kirk and Norman Picton argued themselves past the No Visitors sign on the door and sat in a couple of chairs bringing good news and bad.

  “The Frodsham police found your car,” Norman said, “but I’m afraid it’s been stripped. It’s up on bricks—no wheels.”

  “Contents?” I asked resignedly.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Engine?”

  “Most of it’s there. No battery, of course. Everything movable’s missing.”

  Poor old car. It had been insured, though, for a fortune.

  Archie said, “Charles sends his regards.”

  “Tell him thanks.”

  “He said you would be looking as though nothing much had happened. I didn’t believe him. Why aren’t you lying down?”

  “It’s more comfortable sitting up.”

  Archie frowned.

  I amplified mildly. “There’s a bullet burn across somewhere below my shoulder blade.”

  Archie said, “Oh.”

  They both looked at the tall contraption standing beside the bed with a tube leading from a high bag to my elbow. I explained that, too.

  “It’s one of those ‘painkiller on demand’ things,” I said. “If I get a twinge I press a button, and bingo, it goes away.”

  Archie picked up the copy of The Pump. “All of a sudden,” he commented, “you’re Saint Sid who can do no wrong.”

  I said, “It’s enough to make Ellis’s lawyers weep.”

  “But you don’t think, do you,” Archie said doubtfully, “that Ellis’s lawyers connived at the hate-Halley campaign?”

  “Because they are ethical people?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I shrugged and left it.

  “Is there any news of Ellis?” I asked. “Or of Gordon?”

  “Gordon Quint,” Norman said in a policeman’s voice, “was, as of an hour ago, still unconscious in a secure police facility and suffering from a depressed skull fracture. He is to have an operation to relieve the pressure on his brain. No one is predicting when he’ll wake up or what mental state he’ll be in, but as soon as he can understand, he’ll be formally charged with attempted murder. As you know, there’s a whole flock of eyewitnesses.”

  “And Ellis?” I asked.

  Archie said, “No one knows where he is.”

  “It’s very difficult,” I said, “for him to go anywhere without being recognized.”

  Norman nodded. “Someone may be sheltering him. But we’ll find him, don’t worry.”

  “What happened this morning,” I asked, “about the trial?”

  “Adjourned Ellis Quint’s bail is rescinded as he didn’t turn up, and also he’ll be charged with grievous bodily harm to his father. A warrant for his arrest has been issued.”

  “He wanted to prevent his father from murdering,” I said. “He can’t have meant to hurt him seriously.”

  Archie nodded. “It’s a tangle.”

  “And Jonathan,” I asked. “Did he go to Shropshire?”

  Both of them looked depressed.

  “Well,” I said, “didn’t he go?”

  “Oh yes, he went,” Norman said heavily. “And he found the car parkers.”

  “Good boy,” I said.

  “It’s not so good.” Archie, like a proper civil servant, had brought with him a briefcase, from which he now produced a paper that he brought over to the bed. I pinned it down with the weight of my still-sluggish left hand and took in its general meaning.

  The car parkers had signed a statement saying that Ellis Quint had dined with media colleagues and had brought several of them with him to the dance at about eleven-thirty. The parkers remembered him—of course—not only because of who he was (there had been plenty of other well-known people at the party, starting with members of the Royal Family) but chiefly because he had given them a tip and offered them his autograph. They knew it was before midnight, because their employment as car parkers had ended then. People who arrived later had found only one car parker—a friend of those who’d gone off duty.

  Media colleagues! Dammit, I thought. I hadn’t checked those with the duchess.

  “It’s an unbreakably solid alibi,” Norman observed gloomily. “He was in Shropshire when the yearling was attacked.”

  “Mm.”

  “You don’t seem disappointed, Sid,” Archie said, puzzled.

  “No.”

  “But why not?”

  “I think,” I said, “that you should phone Davis Tatum. Will he be in his office right now?”

  “He might be. What do you want him for?”

  “I want him to make sure the prosecutors don’t give up on the trial.”

  “You told him that on Saturday.” He was humoring me, I thought.

  “I’m not light-headed from bullets, Archie, if that’s what you think. Since Saturday I’ve worked a few things out, and they are not as they may seem.”

  “What things?”

  “Ellis’s alibi, for one.”

  “But, Sid—”

  “Listen,” I said. “This isn’t all that easy to say, so don’t look at me, look at your hands or something.” They showed no sign of doing so, so I looked at my own instead. I said, “I have to explain that I am not as I seem. When people in general look at me they see a harmless person, youngish, not big, not tall, no threat to
anyone. Self-effacing. I’m not complaining about that. In fact, I choose to be like that because people then talk to me, which is necessary in my job. They tend to think I’m cozy, as your sister Betty told me, Archie. Owen Yorkshire considers me a wimp. He said so. Only... I’m not really like that.”

  “A wimp!” Archie exclaimed.

  “I can look it, that’s the point. But Ellis knows me better. Ellis calls me cunning and ruthless, and I probably am. It was he who years ago gave me the nickname of Tungsten Carbide because I wasn’t easy to... er... intimidate. He thinks I can’t be terrified, either, though he’s wrong about that. But I don’t mind him thinking it. Anyway, unlikely though it may seem, all this past summer, Ellis has been afraid of me. That’s why he made jokes about me on television and got Tilepit to set his paper onto me. He wanted to defeat me by ridicule.”

  I paused. Neither of them said a word.

  I went on. “Ellis is not what he seems, either. Davis Tatum thinks him a playboy. Ellis is tall, good-looking, outgoing, charming and loved. Everyone thinks him a delightful entertainer with a knack for television. But he’s not only that. He’s a strong, purposeful and powerful man with enormous skills of manipulation. People underestimate both of us for various and different reasons—I look weak and he looks frivolous—but we don’t underestimate each other. On the surface, the easy surface, we’ve been friends for years. But in our time we rode dozens of races against each other, and racing, believe me, strips your soul bare. Ellis and I know each other’s minds on a deep level that has nothing to do with afternoon banter or chit-chat. We’ve been friends on that level, too. You and Davis can’t believe that it is Ellis himself who is the heavyweight, not Yorkshire, but Ellis and I both know it. Ellis has manipulated everyone—Yorkshire, Tilepit, The Pump, public opinion, and also those so-smart lawyers of his who think they’re dictating the pace.”

  “And you, Sid?” Norman asked. “Has he pulled your strings, too?”

  I smiled ruefully, not looking at him. “He’s had a go.”

  “I’d think it was impossible,” Archie said. “He would have to put you underground to stop you.”

  “You’ve learned a lot about me, Archie,” I said lazily. “I do like to win.”