Reflex

by Dick Francis

  “Lethal?”

  “Extremely. Paralyzes the breathing. Don’t go in until we give the all clear. There’s some sort of source in there, still generating gas.”

  The policeman turned to me. “What is it?” he said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  He had asked earlier what was wrong with my face.

  “Fell in a race.”

  Everyone had accepted it. Battered jockeys were commonplace in Lambourn. The whole circus moved up the road to Harold’s house, and events became jumbled.

  Clare telephoned twice to the hospital for news of Jeremy.

  “He’s in intensive care . . . very ill. They want to know his next of kin.”

  “Parents,” I said despairingly. “In St. Albans.” The number was in my house, with the gas.

  Harold did some work with directory enquiries and got through to Jeremy’s father.

  Don’t die, I thought. Bloody well live . . . Please live.

  Policemen tramped in and out. An inspector came, asking questions. I told him, and Clare told him, what had happened. I didn’t know how hydrogen sulphide had got into my darkroom. It had been a sheer accident that it had been Jeremy who breathed it. I didn’t know why anyone should want to put gas in my darkroom. I didn’t know who.

  The inspector said he didn’t believe me. No one had death traps like that set in their houses without knowing why. I shook my head. Talking was still a trial. I’d tell him why, I thought, if Jeremy died. Otherwise not.

  How had I known so quickly that there was gas? My reaction had been instantaneous, Clare had said. Why was that?”

  “Sodium sulphide . . . used to be used in photographic studios. Still sometimes used . . . but not much . . . because of the smell. I didn’t have any. It wasn’t . . . mine.”

  “Is it a gas?” the inspector asked, puzzled.

  “No. Comes in crystals. Very poisonous. Comes in sepia toner kits. Kodak makes one called T-7A, I think.”

  “But you knew it was a gas.”

  “Because of Jeremy passing out. And I breathed it . . . it felt . . . wrong. You can make gas . . . using sodium sulphide . . . I just knew it was gas . . . I don’t know how I knew . . . I just knew.”

  “How do you make hydrogen sulphide gas from sodium sulphide crystals?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was insistent that I should answer, but I truthfully didn’t know. And now, sir, he said, about your injuries. Your obvious discomfort and weakness. The state of your face. Are you sure, sir, that these were the result of a fall in a horse race? Because they looked to him, he had to say, more like the result of a severe human attack. He’d seen a few in his time, he said.

  A fall, I said.

  The inspector asked Harold, who looked troubled but answered forthrightly, “A wicked fall, inspector. Umpteen horses kicked him. If you want witnesses . . . about six thousand people were watching.”

  The inspector shrugged but looked disillusioned. Maybe he had an instinct, I thought, which told him I’d lied on some counts. When he’d gone, Harold said, “Hope you know what you’re doing. Your face was OK when I left you, wasn’t it?”

  “Tell you one day,” I said, mumbling.

  He said to Clare, “What happened?” but she too shook her head in exhaustion and said she didn’t know anything, didn’t understand anything, and felt terrible herself. Harold’s wife gave us comfort and food and eventually beds; and Jeremy at midnight was still alive.

  Several rotten hours later Harold came into the little room where I sat in bed. Sat because I could breathe better that way, and because I couldn’t sleep, and because I still ached abominably all over. My young lady, he said, had gone off to London to work and would telephone that evening. The police wanted to see me. And Jeremy? Jeremy was still alive, still unconscious, still critically ill.

  The whole day continued wretchedly.

  The police went into my cottage, apparently opening doors and windows for the wind to blow through, and the inspector came to Harold’s house to tell me the results.

  We sat in Harold’s office, where the inspector in daylight proved to be a youngish blond man with sensible eyes and a habit of cracking his knuckles. I hadn’t taken him in much as a person the evening before, only his air of hostility; and that was plainly unchanged.

  “There’s a water filter on the tap in your darkroom,” he said. “What do you use it for?”

  “All water for photographs,” I said, “has to be clean.”

  Some of the worst swelling around my eyes and mouth was beginning to subside. I could see better, talk better: at least some relief.

  “Your water filter,” the inspector said, “is a hydrogen sulphide generator.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well . . . I used it all the time. It’s only a water softener. You regenerate it with salt . . . like all softeners. It couldn’t possibly make gas.”

  He gave me a long considering stare. Then he went away for an hour, and returned with a box and a young man in jeans and a sweater.

  “Now, sir,” the inspector said to me with the studied procedural politeness of the suspicious copper, “is this your water filter?”

  He opened the box to show me the contents. One Durst filter, with, screwed onto its top, the short rubber attachment which was normally pushed onto the tap.

  “It looks like it,” I said. “It looks just like it should. What’s wrong with it? It couldn’t possibly make gas.”

  The inspector gestured to the young man, who produced a pair of plastic gloves from a pocket and put them on. He then picked up the filter, which was a black plastic globe about the size of a grapefruit, with clear sections top and bottom, and unscrewed it around the middle.

  “Inside here,” he said, “there’s usually just the filter cartridge. But as you’ll see, in this particular object, things are quite different. Inside here there are two containers, one above the other. They’re both empty now, but this lower one contained sodium sulphide crystals, and this one”—he paused with an inborn sense of the dramatic—“this upper one contained sulphuric acid. There must have been some form of membrane holding the contents of the two containers apart, but when the tap was turned on, the water pressure broke or dissolved the membrane, and the two chemicals mixed. Sulphuric acid and sodium sulphide, propelled by water, a very highly effective sulphide generator. It would have gone on pouring out gas even if the water was turned off. Which it was, presumably by Mr. Folk.”

  There was a long, meaningful, depressing silence.

  “So you can see, sir,” the inspector said, “it couldn’t in any way have been an accident.”

  “No,” I said dully. “But I don’t know, I truthfully don’t know, who could have put such a thing there. They would have to have known what sort of filter I had, wouldn’t they?”

  “And that you had a filter in the first place.”

  “Everyone with a darkroom has a filter of some sort.”

  Another silence. They seemed to be waiting for me to tell them, but I didn’t know. It couldn’t have been den Relgan: why should be bother with such a device when one or two more kicks would have finished me? It couldn’t have been Elgin Yaxley: he hadn’t had time. It couldn’t have been any of the other people George Millace had written his letters to. Two of them were old history, gone and forgotten. One of them was still current, but I’d done nothing about it, and hadn’t told the man concerned that the letter existed. It wouldn’t anyway be him. He would certainly not kill me.

  All of which left one most uncomfortable explanation—that somebody thought I had something I didn’t have. Someone who knew I’d inherited George Millace’s blackmailing package and who knew I’d used some of it and who wanted to stop me using any more of it.

  George Millace had definitely had more in that box than I’d inherited. I didn’t have, for instance, the cigarette packet on which Dana den Relgan had written her drugs list. And I didn�
��t have . . . what else?

  “Well, sir,” the inspector said.

  “No one’s been into my cottage since I was using the darkroom on Wednesday. Only my neighbour, and the tax assessor—” I stopped, and they pounced on it.

  “What tax assessor?”

  Ask Mrs. Jackson, I said, and they said yes they would.

  “She said he didn’t touch anything.”

  “But he could have seen what type of filter . . .”

  “Is it my own filter?” I asked. “It does look like it.”

  “Probably,” the younger man said. “But our man would have had to see it for the dimensions. Then he would come back and it would take about thirty seconds, I’d reckon, to take the filter cartridge out and put the packets of chemicals in. Pretty neat job.”

  “Will Jeremy live?” I said.

  The younger man shrugged. “I’m a chemist. Not a doctor.”

  They went away after a while, taking the filter.

  I rang the hospital. No change.

  I went to the hospital myself in the afternoon, with Harold’s wife driving because she insisted I wasn’t fit.

  I didn’t see Jeremy. I saw his parents. They were abstracted with worry, too upset to be angry. Not my fault, they said, though I was afraid they would think so later. Jeremy was being kept alive by a respirator. His breathing was paralyzed. His heart was beating. His brain was alive.

  His mother wept.

  “Don’t worry so,” Harold’s wife said, driving home. “He’ll be all right.”

  She had persuaded the nurse, whom she knew, to get me to have some stitches in my face. The result felt stiffer than ever.

  “If he dies . . .”

  “He won’t die,” Harold’s wife said.

  The inspector telephoned to say I could go back to the cottage, but not into the darkroom: the police had sealed it.

  I wandered slowly around my home feeling no sort of ease. Physically wretched, morally pulverized, neck-deep in guilt.

  There were signs everywhere that the police had searched. Hardly surprising, I supposed. They hadn’t come across the few prints I still had of George Millace’s letters, which were locked in the car. They had left undisturbed on the kitchen dresser the box with the blank-looking negatives.

  I opened it. It still contained, besides the puzzles I’d solved, the one that I hadn’t. The black light-proof envelope, which contained what looked like a piece of clear plastic and two unused sheets of typing paper.

  Perhaps I thought, perhaps it’s because I have these that the gas trap was set.

  But what . . . what did I have?

  It was no good, I thought: I would have to find out . . . and pretty fast, before whoever it was had another go at killing me, and succeeded.

  18

  I begged a bed again from Harold’s wife, and in the morning telephoned again to Swindon hospital.

  Jeremy was alive. No change.

  I sat in Harold’s kitchen drinking coffee, suicidally depressed.

  Harold answered his ringing telephone for about the tenth time that morning and handed the receiver to me.

  “It’s not an owner, this time,” he said. “It’s for you.”

  It was Jeremy’s father. I felt sick.

  “We want you to know . . . he’s awake.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “He’ll still on the respirator. But they say that by now if he’d been going to die, he’d have gone. He’s still very ill, but they say he’ll recover. We thought you’d like to know.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The reprieve was almost more unbearable than the anxiety. I gave the reciver to Harold and said Jeremy was better, and went out into the yard to look at the horses. Even in the fresh air I felt stifled. In relief, overthrown. I stood in the wind waiting for the internal storm to abate, and gradually felt an incredible sense of release. I had literally been freed. Let off a life sentence. Screw you, Jeremy, I thought, dishing out such a fright.

  Clare telephoned.

  “He’s all right. He’s awake,” I said.

  “Thank God.”

  “Can I ask you a favor?” I said. “Can I dump myself on Samantha for a night or two?”

  “As in the old days?”

  “Until Saturday.”

  She swallowed a laugh and said why not, and when did I want to come.

  “Tonight,” I said. “If I may.”

  “We’ll expect you for supper.”

  Harold wanted to know when I thought I’d be fit to race.

  I would get some physiotherapy from the Clinic for Injuries in London, I said. By Saturday I’d be ready.

  “Not by the look of you.”

  “Four days. I’ll be fit.”

  “Mind you are, then.”

  I felt distinctly unfit still for driving, but less than inclined to sleep alone in my cottage. I did some minimal packing, collected George’s rubbish box from the kitchen, and set off to Chiswick, where despite wearing sunglasses I got a horrified reception. Black bruises, stitched cuts, three-day growth of beard. Hardly a riot.

  “But it’s worse,” Clare said, staring closely.

  “Looks worse, feels better.” A good job, I thought, that they couldn’t see the rest of me. My whole belly was black with the decaying remains of internal abdominal bleeding. The damage, I’d concluded, which had set off the spasms.

  Samantha was troubled. “Clare said someone had punched you, but I never thought . . .”

  “Look,” I said, “I could go somewhere else.”

  “Don’t be silly. Sit down. Supper’s ready.”

  They didn’t talk much or seem to expect me to. I wasn’t good company. Too drastically feeble. I asked with the coffee if I might telephone to Swindon.

  “Jeremy?” Clare said.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll do it. What’s the number?”

  I told her, and she got through, and consulted.

  “Still on the respirator,” she said, “but progress maintained.”

  “If you’re tired,” Samantha said calmly, “go to bed.”

  “Well . . .”

  They both came upstairs. I walked automatically, without thinking, into a small bedroom next door to the bathroom.

  They both laughed. “We wondered if you would,” Samantha said.

  Clare went to work and I spent most of Wednesday dozing in the swinging basket chair in the kitchen. Samantha came in and out, went to her part-time job in the morning, shopped in the afternoon. I waited in a highly peaceful state for energy of any sort to return to brain or limbs and reckoned I was fortunate to have a day like that to mend in.

  Thursday took me to the Clinic for Injuries for two long sessions of electric treatment, massage and exercise, with two more sessions promised for Friday.

  Between the sessions I telephoned four photographers and one acquaintance who worked on a specialist magazine, and found no one who knew how to raise pictures from plastic or typing paper. Don’t waste my time, old boy, the specialist said wearily.

  When I got back to Chiswick the sun was low on the winter horizon, and in the kitchen Samantha was cleaning the french windows.

  “They always look so filthy when the sun shines on them,” she said, busily rubbing with a cloth. “Sorry if it’s cold in here, but I won’t be long.”

  I sat in the basket chair and watched her shake liquid cleaner out of a white plastic bottle. She finished the outside of the doors and came in, pulling them after her, fastening the bolts. The plastic bottle stood on a table beside her.

  AJAX, it said, in big letters.

  I frowned at it, trying to remember. Where had I heard the word Ajax?

  I stood up out of the swinging chair and walked over for a closer look. “Ajax Window Cleaner,” it said in smaller red letters on the white plastic, “With Ammonia.” I picked the bottle up and shook it. Liquid. I put my nose to the top, and smelled the contents. Soapy. Sweet scented. Not pungent.

  “What is it?” Sa
mantha said. “What are you looking at?”

  “This cleaner . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Why would a man ask his wife to buy him some Ajax?”

  “What a question,” Samantha said. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Nor did she have,” I said. “She didn’t know why.”

  Samantha took the bottle out of my hands and continued with her task. “You can clean any sort of glass with it,” she said. “Bathroom tiles. Looking glass. Quite useful stuff.”

  I went back to the basket chair and swung in it gently. Samantha cast me a sideways glance, smiling.

  “You looked like death two days ago,” she said.

  “And now?”

  “Now one might pause before calling the undertaker.”

  “I’ll shave tomorrow,” I said.

  “Who punched you?” Her voice sounded casual. Her eyes and attention were on the window. It was, all the same, a serious question. A seeking not for a simple one-word answer, but for commitment to herself. A sort of request for payment for shelter unquestioningly given. If I didn’t tell her, she wouldn’t persist. But if I didn’t tell her, we had already gone as far as we ever would in our relationship.

  What did I want, I thought, in that house that now increasingly felt like home? I have never wanted a family: I’d wanted no loving ties. No suffocating emotional dependents. So if I nested comfortably, deeply into the lives lived in that house, wouldn’t I feel impelled in a short while to break-out with wild flapping freedom-seeking wings? Did anyone ever fundamentally change?

  Samantha read into my silence what I expected, and her manner did subtly alter, not to one of unfriendliness, but to a cut-off intimacy. Before she’d finished the window, I’d become her guest, not her . . . her what? Her son, brother, nephew . . . part of her.

  She gave me a bright surface smile and put the kettle on for tea.

  Clare returned from work with gaiety carefully layered over tiredness, and she too, though not asking, was waiting.

  I found myself, halfway through supper, telling them about George Millace. In the end it was no great hard decision. No cut-and-dried calculation. I just naturally told them.