Knock Down

by Dick Francis

  They yawned and rolled up hoses, and smoked cigarettes which they stubbed out carefully in little flat tins. Relays of tea in thermos flasks came up from the village and a few cautious jokes grew like flowers on the ruins.

  At nine I went down to the pub to borrow the telephone and caught sight of myself in a mirror. Face streaked with black, eyes red with smoke and as weary as sin.

  I told Sophie not to come, there wouldn’t be any lunch.She would come anyway, she said, and I hadn’t the stamina to argue.

  The pub gave me a bath and breakfast. My clothes smelled horrible when I put them on again, but nothing to the house and yard when I got back. Wet burnt wood, wet burnt straw, stale smoke. The smell was acrid and depressing, but the departing firemen said nothing could be done, things always smelled like that after blazes.

  Sophie came, and she was not wearing the gold aeroplane.

  She wrinkled her nose at the terrible mess and silently put her arm through mine and kissed me. I felt more comforted than I had since childhood.

  ‘What’s left?’ she said.

  ‘Some wet furniture and a tin of peanuts.’

  ‘Let’s start with those.’

  We went through the house room by room. Watery ash and stale smoke everywhere. My bedroom had a jagged black corner open to the sky where the roof had burned right through, and everything in there was past tense. I supposed it was lucky I had had some of my clothes with me in Newmarket.

  There was an empty gin bottle in Crispin’s room, and another in the bathroom.

  In the office the ash covered everything in a thick gritty film. The walls were darkened by smoke and streaked with water and my rows of precious, expensive and practically irreplaceable form books and stud records would never be the same again.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Sophie said, standing on the filthy kitchen floor and running one finger through the dust on the table.

  ‘Emigrate,’ I said.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘No.… Seriously, the pub opens in five minutes and we might as well get drunk.’

  10

  We rolled home happily at two o’clock and found the police there. Two of them, one a constable, one with the shoulder badges of Chief Inspector.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, Mr Dereham?’ the Chief Inspector said sarcastically. ‘Celebrating on the insurance money, are you?’

  It seemed, however, that this opening was more a matter of habit than threat, because they had not after all come to accuse, but to ask and inform.

  ‘Chilly out here sir,’ the Chief Inspector said, looking up pointedly at the dull wintery sky.

  ‘Chilly indoors now too,’ I said. ‘The central heating oil tank was in the stables.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, exactly.’

  He chose all the same to go indoors, so I took them into the office and fetched a duster for the chairs. The duster merely smeared the dirt. I had to fetch others for them to spread out and sit on.

  ‘Tell us about your enemies, Mr Dereham,’ said the Chief Inspector.

  ‘What enemies?’

  ‘Exactly, sir. What enemies do you have?’

  ‘I didn’t know I had any who would set fire to my stable.’

  ‘You may not have known it before, sir, but you know it now.’

  I silently nodded.

  ‘Give us a name, sir.’

  ‘I don’t think I can. But it isn’t the first thing that’s happened.’ I told them about Hearse Puller, and about my loose two-year-old, and he asked immediately why I hadn’t reported these things to the police.

  ‘I did report the Ascot incident,’ I said, thanking Kerry’s indignation. ‘And as for the horse… some of your men came here after the accident, but I didn’t think then that the horse had deliberately been let loose, I thought I’d just been careless.’

  As they had thought the same thing they could hardly quarrel with that. The Chief Inspector also knew perfectly well that they wouldn’t have called out the reserves if I’d turned up with the unbuckled rug.

  ‘Well, sir,’ he said. ‘It seems you were lucky this time. We have a witness. A fourteen year old boy who’d been up in the woods at the end of your lane. He was going home. He says he saw what he saw from the lane, but I reckon he’d come here to help himself to what was lying around loose. He says he knew you were away in Newmarket. Anyway, he said he saw a man go into the store room in the stable block and he heard him making metallic noises in there, and thought it odd that whoever it was had not switched the lights on. He seems to know his way round your stables pretty well. He saw the man strike a match and bend down. Then the man came out of the stable and hurried away along the lane to the village. The boy didn’t try to intercept him, but went to the store room and switched on the light.’

  The Chief Inspector paused, with a fine sense of theatre. His riveted audience waited impatiently for him to get on with it.

  ‘He took one look and retreated without delay. He says the pipe from the oil storage tank at the back of the stove was broken and the oil was coming out on to the floor. Standing in the pool of oil was a cardboard box, and on that there was a large firework. A golden shower, he says. He observed that the touch paper was red and smoking. He did not advance into the store-room, he says, because in his opinion anyone who had done so would have needed his brains examined, that is if his brains hadn’t been burning with the rest of him.’

  Sophie laughed at this verbatim bit of reporting. The Chief Inspector permitted himself the smallest of smiles.

  ‘Anyway, sir, it seems he then made best speed down the village to tell his mum to call the Fire Brigade, which, once he had convinced her, she did. When the firemen arrived here the oil tank had exploded and the stables, being built internally largely of wood, were hopelessly alight. The firemen say that if they had arrived much later they could not have saved the house.’

  He smiled lopsidedly. ‘They usually ruin what they only just save.’

  ‘The house is fine,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Now what young Kenneth saw is not evidence that you didn’t set the whole thing up yourself. People often arrange to have fires start while they themselves have an unbreakable alibi.’

  Sophie started to protest. The Chief Inspector gave her an amused glance, and she stopped abruptly.

  ‘All right, miss. This time it’s different. This time we know a bit more. Young Kenneth gave us a description of the man he saw.’

  ‘But it was dark,’ I said.

  ‘Something about the man was very distinctive. Apart from that, we found the car he came in. After everyone had gone home last night there were two cars left in the village street. One was yours. One was a Zodiac station wagon, and the man Kenneth had seen here was reported as having been observed trying to start it, failing to do so, kicking its wheels in disgust, and walking towards the main road, presumably to thumb a lift. Upon examining the station wagon we found two things. One was that the starter motor had jammed and that was why it would not start. The other was that the number plates did not coincide with the number written on the licence. We checked the licence. The car belongs to a Mr Leonard Williamson who says a young fellow took it away from him. He was asked if he knew the young fellow’s name and eventually he said he did. The young fellow was a Mr Frederick Smith. We went to the home of Mr Frederick Smith and invited him to come down here and help with our enquiries.’

  ‘Or in other words,’ I said smiling, ‘Leonard Williamson shopped Fred Smith who is now swearing blue murder in one of your cells.’

  The Chief Inspector said primly, ‘We would like you to come and see if you know him.’

  It was Frizzy-hair.

  He looked hard, arrogant and unrepentant. The taunting smile he gave his victims had become a taunting sneer for his captors, and the way he sprawled on a chair with his legs spread wide was a statement of defiance.

  You could see at once why young Kenneth had been able to describe him. On his left arm from biceps to knuckles he wo
re a large white plaster cast.

  He stared boldly at me without recognition.

  ‘Hello, lover boy,’ I said.

  The Chief Inspector looked at me sharply.

  ‘So you do know him.’

  ‘Yes. He attacked me at Ascot.’

  ‘I never.’

  ‘Mrs Kerry Sanders saw you.’

  He blinked. Remembered. Narrowed his eyes with a snap and gave me a look that would have done credit to a crocodile.

  ‘You broke my bleeding elbow.’

  ‘I never,’ I said.

  ‘I hear your stable burnt,’ he said viciously. ‘Pity you weren’t in it.’

  The Chief Inspector drew me back to his office.

  ‘He’s got form as long as your arm,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Well known on his own patch, is Fred Smith.’

  ‘Someone’s paying him,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. But we’ve no chance of him telling us who it is. He’s hard as nails. The Fred Smiths of this world never grass.’ He sounded as if he admired him for it. ‘He’ll do his time, but he’ll tell us nothing.’

  Sophie came with me to see Crispin, who was sick and sorry for himself in the local hospital. His skin was pallid and sweaty, he coughed with a hand pressed to his chest, and his eyes showed that the gin level had ebbed as far as maximum agony. Like an axe chopping his brain, he’d once described it.

  The first thing he said when he saw us was, ‘Give me a bloody drink. They won’t give me a bloody drink.’

  I produced a small bottle of orange juice. He stared at it balefully.

  ‘You know what I bloody mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Vitamin C. Marvellous for hangovers.’ I poured the orange juice into a glass and gave it to him. A nurse watched approvingly from across the room. Crispin sniffed it crossly, tasted it, and drank the lot. He lay back against his pillows and closed the swimmy eyes.

  ‘Bloody orange juice,’ he said.

  He lay for a minute or two as if asleep, but then with his eyes still shut said, ‘I hear you saved my bloody life.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Near enough…. Don’t expect me to be grateful.’

  ‘No.’

  Another long pause. ‘Come and fetch me tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘About noon, they said.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘As for now, you can bugger off.’

  Sophie walked away with me down the ward with her disgust escaping like steam.

  ‘Why on earth do you put up with him?’

  ‘He’s my brother.’

  ‘You could kick him out.’

  ‘Would you?’

  She didn’t answer. When it came to the point, one couldn’t.

  I thought of him lying there in his acute self-made misery, a lonely defeated man in a private hell. He’d had girlfriends once but not any more. There was no one except me between him and the gutter, and I knew he relied on me as if I’d been a solid wall.

  ‘Isn’t there any cure?’ Sophie said.

  ‘Oh yes. One certain cure. The only one.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Wanting to be cured.’

  She looked at me dubiously. ‘Does that make sense?’

  ‘He would automatically be cured if his urge to be cured was stronger than his urge to drink.’

  ‘But sometimes it is,’ she said. ‘You said he sometimes doesn’t drink for weeks.’

  I shook my head. ‘He always means to drink again. He just postpones it, like a child saving its sweets.’

  We collected my car and drove off towards the ill-smelling cinders.

  ‘I thought it was a disease,’ she said.

  ‘An addiction. Like football.’

  ‘You’ve been at the nonsense again.’

  ‘Under the influence of football,’ I said, ‘You can tear railway carriages apart and stampede people to death.’

  ‘More people die of alcohol,’ she protested.

  ‘I expect you’re right.’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  I grinned.

  ‘I thought there was a drug that could cure it,’ she said.

  ‘You mean antabuse?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Some stuff which makes alcohol taste disgusting. Sure, it works. But you’ve got to want to stop drinking in the first place, otherwise you don’t take it.’

  ‘Crispin won’t?’

  I nodded. ‘You’re so right. Crispin won’t.’

  ‘How about Alcoholics Anonymous?’ she asked.

  ‘Same thing,’ I said. ‘If you want to stop drinking, they’re marvellous. If you don’t, you keep away from them.’

  ‘I never thought about it like that.’

  ‘Lucky old you.’

  ‘Pig.’

  We went a mile or so in companionable silence.

  ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I’ve always been told it was an illness. That you couldn’t help it. That one drink sets off a sort of chain reaction.’

  ‘It isn’t the one drink. It’s the wanting to drink. Alcoholism is in the mind.’

  ‘And in the legs.’

  I laughed. ‘O.K., it invades the body. In fact the bodies of ultra-persistent alcoholics become so adjusted chemically to the irrigation that a sudden cut-off in the supply can cause epileptic fits.’

  ‘Not… in Crispin?’

  ‘No. Not so bad. But when he says he needs a bloody drink… he needs it.’

  Which was why the drink I’d given him had been only half orange juice and the other half gin.

  We stood in the yard for a while with the last of daylight fading over the cooling embers of the stables.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Sophie said.

  ‘Oh…. That I’d like to break Fred Smith’s other elbow. Also his knees, toes, ankles and neck.’

  ‘In that order,’ she said, nodding.

  I laughed, but the inner anger remained. This time the assault had been too much. This had gone beyond a skirmish to a major act of war. If Pauli Teksa were by any chance right and Vic or someone besides him were trying to frighten me off the scene they were having the opposite effect. Far from persuading me to go along with Vic’s schemes they had killed the tolerance with which I had always regarded them. In my own way I could be as bloody minded as frizzy Fred Smith. Vic was going to wish he had left me alone.

  I turned away from the ruins. I would rebuild what had been lost. Soon, and better, I thought.

  ‘Where are you planning to sleep?’ Sophie asked.

  I looked at her in the dusk. Smooth silver hair. Calm sky-reflecting eyes. Nothing but friendly interest.

  Where I was planning to sleep was going to need more welcome than that.

  ‘Could I borrow your sofa?’ I said.

  A pause.

  ‘It’s not long enough,’ she said.

  Another pause. I looked at her and waited.

  A smile crept in around her eyes.

  ‘Oh, all right. You gave me your bed…. I’ll give you mine.’

  ‘With you in it?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you burned your bedroom just to get there?’ she asked.

  ‘I wish I could say yes.’

  ‘You look smug enough as it is,’ she said.

  We drove sedately to Esher, she in her car, me in mine. We ate a sedate dinner out of her freezer, and watched a sedate old movie on her box.

  She was also in a way sedate in bed. The inner composure persisted. She seemed to raise a mental eyebrow in amusement at the antics humans got up to. She was quiet, and passive.

  On the other hand she left me in no doubt that I gave her pleasure; and what I gave, I got.

  It was an intense, gentle love making. A matter of small movements, not gymnastics. Of exquisite lingering sensations. And done, on her part also, without reservation.

  She lay afterwards with her head on my shoulder.

  She said, ‘I can’t stay here till morning.’

  ‘Why not?’

&
nbsp; ‘Have to be at Heathrow on duty by six o’clock.’

  ‘Fine time to say so.’

  I could feel her smile. ‘Better than ten minutes ago.”

  I laughed in my nose. ‘The off-put of the century.’

  She rubbed her hand lazily over my chest. Til think of this when I’m up in the tower.’

  ‘You’ll knit the approaches.’

  ‘No.’ She kissed my skin. ‘I’m on departures. I tell them when to take off.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘And where. But not what.’

  I smiled. Shut my eyes in the warm dark.

  ‘You don’t take your strap off even for love making,’ she said, running her fingers along inside the soft crepe bandage I slept in.

  ‘Especially,’ I said. ‘Very high risk activity for dislocating shoulders.’

  ‘You speak from experience?’

  ‘You might say so.’

  ‘Serve you right.’

  We slid slowly, contentedly, to sleep.

  11

  At Ascot Sales on Wednesday Vic and his pals closed their ranks when they saw me coming, and moved in my direction in a body.

  I met them halfway. Like something out of High Noon, I thought frivolously. All we lacked were the Sheriff’s badge and the guns.

  ‘I warned you,’ Vic said.

  They all stared at me. I looked at them one by one. Vic all open aggression, the rest in various shades from satisfied spite to a trace of uneasiness.

  ‘People who play with fire get burnt,’ I said.

  Vic said, ‘We didn’t do it.’

  ‘Quite right. Fred Smith did. And he’s not telling who paid him. But you and I know, don’t we Vic?’

  He looked extraordinarily startled. ‘You know?’ he exclaimed. ‘You couldn’t.’ He considered it and shook his head. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘But you know,’ I said slowly. ‘And if it isn’t you… who is it?’

  Vic gave a fair imitation of a clam.

  ‘You just do as we tell you and nothing else will happen,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got your psychology all wrong,’ I said. ‘You bash me, I’ll bash back.’

  Jiminy Bell said to Vic ‘I told you so.’

  Vic gave him a reptilian glance. Jiminy was a great one for losing friends and not influencing people.