by Dick Francis
Catherine Dodd’s detective mind trod the two paths I’d reluctantly followed myself since Norman Osprey and his Elvis sideburns had appeared on my horizon. First, someone knew Martin’s secret, and second, someone, and maybe not the same someone, could infer that, one way or another, that secret was known to me. Someone might suppose I’d watched that tape during the evening of Martin’s death, and for safety had wiped it off.
I hadn’t had a tape player on the Logan Glass premises, but the Dragon over the road made one available generously to the paying guests, and she distributed brochures by the hundred advertising this.
“If I’d had a tape player handy,” I said, “I probably would have run that tape through early in the evening, and if I thought it awful I might have wiped it off.”
“That’s not what your friend Martin wanted.”
After a brief silence I said, “If he’d been sure of what he wanted he wouldn’t have fiddled about with tapes, he would just have told me this precious secret.” I stopped abruptly. “There are too many ifs. How about you coming out for a drink?”
“Can’t. Sorry. I’m on duty.” She gave me a brilliant smile. “I’ll call in another day. And oh! There’s just one loose end.” She produced the ever essential notebook from inside her jacket. “What are your assistants’ names?”
“Pamela Jane Evans and John Irish and John Hickory. We leave off John for the men and use their last names, as it’s easier.”
“Which is the elder?”
“Irish. He’s about ten years older than both Hickory and Pamela Jane.”
“And how long have they all worked for you?”
“Pamela Jane about a year, Irish and Hickory two to three months longer. They’re all good guys, believe me.”
“I do believe you. This is just for the records. This is actually ... er ... what I dropped in for.”
I looked at her straightly. She all but blushed.
“I’d better go now,” she said.
With regret I walked with her as far as the door, where she paused to say good-bye as she didn’t want to be seen with me too familiarly out in the street. She left, in fact, in the bunch of winter tourists, all of them overshadowed by the loud voice of a big man who judged the whole afternoon a waste of time and complained about it all the way back to the group’s warm tour bus. His broad back obscured my view of the departure of Detective Constable Dodd, and I surprised myself by minding about that quite a lot.
On Bon-Bon’s telephone, the night before Martin’s funeral, I learned from the Dragon herself that Lloyd Baxter had deemed it correct to fly down for “his jockey’s last ride” (as he put it) but hadn’t wanted to stay with Priam Jones, whom he was on the point of ditching as his trainer. The Dragon chuckled and went on mischievously, “You didn’t have to go all that way to stay with Bon-Bon Stukely, if you didn’t fancy sleeping in your burgled house, lover boy. You could have stayed here with me.”
“News gets around,” I said dryly.
“You’re always news in this town, lover, didn’t you know?”
In truth I did know it, but I didn’t feel it.
On the evening before Martin’s funeral Priam Jones telephoned, meaning to talk to Bon-Bon, but reaching me instead. I had been fielding commiserations for her whenever I was around. Marigold, Worthington and even the children had grown expert at thanks and tact. I thought how Martin would have grinned at the all-around grade-A improvement in his family’s social skills.
Priam blustered on a bit, but was, I gathered, offering himself as an usher in the matter of seating. Remembering his spontaneous tears I put him on the list and asked him if, before he’d picked me up from my home on Friday morning, Martin had by any chance mentioned that he was expecting delivery of a tape at the races.
“You asked me that the day after he died,” Priam said impatiently. “The answer is still yes, he said we wouldn’t leave the racetrack until he’d collected some package or other to give to you. And I did give it to you, don’t you remember? I brought it back to Broadway after you’d left it in your raincoat in the car ... Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Gerard. Give my regards to Bon-Bon.”
Also on the evening before Martin’s funeral, Eddie Payne went to his local Catholic church and in the confessional recited his past and present sins, asking for pardon and absolution. He told me this with self-righteousness when I intercepted his condolences to Bon-Bon. He’d tried and tried to get someone else to do his racetrack work, he said, but such was life, he hadn’t succeeded, and he’d have to miss the funeral, and it grieved him sorely as he’d been Martin’s racetrack valet for six or seven years. Eddie, to my disparaging ear, had plucked up half a bottle of dutch courage before stretching out his hand to the phone, and wouldn’t remain long in a state of grace owing to his distance from the fact that he could have more easily got stand-ins to free him to go to that particular funeral than if it had been for his own grandmother.
On the same evening, before Martin’s funeral (though I didn’t learn of it until later), Ed Payne’s daughter, Rose, described to a small group of fascinated and ruthless knaves how to force Gerard Logan to tell them the secret he’d been given at Cheltenham races.
3
On the first Thursday of January, the sixth day of the next thousand years, I, with Priam Jones and four senior jump jockeys, carried Martin into church in his coffin and later delivered him to his grave.
The sun shone on frosty trees. Bon-Bon looked ethereal, Marigold stayed fairly sober, Worthington took off his chauffeur’s cap, baring his bald pate in respect, the four children knocked with their knuckles on the coffin as if they could wake their father inside, Lloyd Baxter read a short but decent eulogy and all the racing world, from the Stewards of the Jockey Club to the men who replaced the divots, everyone crowded into the pews in church and packed the wintry churchyard grass outside, standing on the moss-grown ancient slabs of stone. Martin had been respected, and respects were paid.
The new burial ground lay on a hillside a mile away by hearse and heavy limousines. Among banks of flowers there Bon-Bon cried as the man who’d quarreled with her daily sank into the quiet embracing earth, and I, who’d stage-managed the second farewell party in a month (my mother the other), prosaically checked that the caterers had brought enough hot toddy and that the choristers were paid, along with other mundane greasings of the expensive wheels of death.
After the hundreds who had turned up for Martin had drunk and eaten and had kissed Bon-Bon and left, I sought her out to say my own good-bye. She was standing with Lloyd Baxter, asking about his health. “Do take the pills,” she was saying, and he with embarrassment promised he would. He nodded to me coldly as if he had never brought Dom Pérignon to me for company.
I congratulated Baxter on his eulogy. He received the praise as his due, and stiffly invited me to dine with him in the Wychwood Dragon.
“Don’t go,” Bon-Bon exclaimed to me, alarmed. “Stay here one more night. You and Worthington have tamed the children. Let’s have this one more night of peace.”
Thinking of Martin, I excused myself to Baxter and stayed to help Bon-Bon, and after midnight, when only I was awake, I sat in Martin’s squashy chair in his den and thought intently of him. Thought of his life and of what he’d achieved, and thought eventually about that last day at Cheltenham, and about the videotape and whatever he’d had recorded on it.
I had no minutest idea what he could have known that needed such complex safekeeping. I did see that, much as I thought Bon-Bon a darling and as sweet as her name, she wasn’t the most reticent person on earth. To Bon-Bon a secret would be safe until her next nice chat with her best friend. Many of hers and Martin’s shouting matches had been the result of Bon-Bon repeating publicly what she’d been privately told or overheard about some horse or other’s prospects.
I slouched in Martin’s chair, deep in regret. One had so few close friends in life. None to spare. His personality filled the room to the extent that it seemed that if I tur
ned I would see him standing by his bookcase, looking up some race’s result in the form book. The feeling of his presence was so intense that I actually swiveled his chair around to see, but of course there were only books, row on row, and no Martin.
It was time, I supposed, to make sure the outside doors were locked and to sleep away the last hours in Martin’s house. I’d lent him a couple of books a few weeks earlier on ancient glass-making techniques, and as they were lying on the long table by the sofa, it seemed a good time to pick them up to take home without bothering Bon-Bon too much. One of the things I would most miss was, I thought nostalgically, Martin’s constant interest in historic difficult-to-make goblets and bowls.
In the morning, saying good-bye, I mentioned I was taking the books. “Fine, fine,” Bon-Bon said vaguely. “I wish you weren’t going.”
She was lending me Worthington to drive me in her white runabout to Broadway. “If you weren’t getting your butt out of that house pronto,” Worthington said bluntly as we drove away, “Bon-Bon would catch you like a Venus flytrap.”
“She’s unhappy,” I protested.
“Sticky, attractive, and once caught, you can’t escape.” Worthington grinned. “Don’t say I haven’t warned you.”
“And Marigold?” I teased him. “How’s the Marigold flytrap?”
“I can leave her any day I want,” he protested, and drove for miles smiling, as if he believed it.
Stopping to unload me at my gallery door in Broadway, he said more seriously, “I got a low-life investigator to ask about that woman, Rose.” He paused. “He didn’t get much further than you did. Eddie Payne thinks she saw who gave that damned tape to Martin, but I wouldn’t rely on it. Eddie’s afraid of his own daughter, if you ask me.”
I agreed with him on that, and we left it there. My three assistants welcomed me back to a regular workday, and I taught Hickory—as I’d taught Pamela Jane before Christmas—how to collect a third gather of glass, so hot that it was red and semi-liquid, and fell in a heavy teardrop shape that drooped towards the floor (and one’s feet) if one didn’t marver it fast enough on the steel table. He knew how to press its lengthened tip into long heaps of dustlike colors before returning the revolving head into the heat of the furnace to keep the now-heavy chunk of glass at working temperature. I showed him how to gather glass neatly on the end of a blowing iron, before lifting it into the air ready to blow, and how to keep the resulting slightly ballooned shape constant while he continued to develop his ideas towards a final goal.
Hickory watched the continuous process with anxious eyes and said that, like Pamela Jane when she’d tried it, he couldn’t go the whole way.
“Of course not. Practice handling three gathers. You can do two now easily.”
A gather was the amount of molten glass that could be brought out of the tank at one time on the tip of the steel punty rod. A gather could be of any size, according to the skill and strength of the glassblower. Glass in bulk, very heavy, demanded muscle.
Owing to the space limitation of tourist suitcases, few pieces of “Logan Glass” sold in the shop were of more than three gathers. Pamela Jane, to her sorrow, had never quite mastered the swing-upwards-and-blow technique. Irish, in spite of enthusiasm, would never be a top-rated glassblower. Of Hickory, though, I had hopes. He had ease of movement and, most important, a lack of fear.
Glassblowers were commonly arrogant people, chiefly because the skill was so difficult to learn. Hickory already showed signs of arrogance but if he became a notable expert he would have to be forgiven. As for myself, my uncle (as arrogant as they came) had insisted that I learn humility first, second and third, and had refused to let me near his furnace until I’d shed every sign of what he called “cockiness.”
“Cockiness” had broken out regularly after his death, humbling me when I recognized it. It had taken perhaps ten years before I had it licked, but vigilance would be necessary for life.
Irish had grown accustomed to brewing the large jugs of hot tea to replace the sweat lost to the furnace. I sat on a box and drank thirstily and all day watched my apprentice improve considerably, even though, with exhausted rests, there was generally a lot of swearing and a whole heap of shattered glass.
There were, of course, few customers to interrupt the lesson and by five o‘clock on this bleakly cold January afternoon I sent my three helpers home and with gloom did some long-overdue paperwork. The cash stolen on New Year’s Eve left a depressing hole in what was otherwise a cheerful season. It wasn’t difficult after a while to lay aside the minus figures and pick up the books I’d lent to Martin.
My favorite of all historic goblets was a glowing red cup, six and a half inches high (16.5 centimeters), constructed around the year three hundred and something A.D. (a fair time ago, when one looked back from two thousand). It was made of lumps of glass, held fast in an intricate gold cage (a technique from before blowing was invented), and would appear green in different lights. Flicking through the early pages in one of the books, I came across the goblet’s picture with my usual pleasure and a few pages later smiled over the brilliant gold and blue glass Cretan sunrise necklace that I’d once spent days copying. Sleepily, I by accident let the book begin to slide off my knees towards the smooth brick floor and, by luck, caught it without damage to its glossy construction.
Relieved at the catch, and berating myself for such clumsiness in not holding on more tightly to a valued treasure, I didn’t notice at first a thin buff envelope that lay at my feet. With a reaction accelerating from puzzlement to active curiosity I laid the old book down carefully and picked up the new-looking envelope, which I supposed had been held within the leaves and had fallen out when I made my grab.
The envelope from inside my book was addressed by computer printer not to me but to Martin Stukely, Esq., Jockey.
I had no qualms at all in taking out the single-page letter inside, and reading it.
Dear Martin,
You are right, it is the best way. I will take the
tape, as you want, to Cheltenham races on New
Year’s Eve.
This knowledge is dynamite.
Take care of it.
Victor Waltman Verity.
The letter too was written on a computer, though the name given as signature had been printed in a different font. There was no address or telephone number on the letter itself, but faintly across the stamp on the envelope there was a round postmark. After long concentration with a magnifying glass, the point of origin seemed to me only “xet” around the top and “evo” around the bottom. The date alone was easily readable, though looking ane mic as to ink.
The letter had been sent on 17. xii.99.
December 17. Less than a month ago.
xet
evo
There weren’t after all many places in Great Britain with an x in their name, and I could think of nowhere else that fitted the available letters other than Exeter, Devon.
When I reached Directory Inquiries, I learned that there was indeed a Victor Verity in Exeter. A disembodied voice said, “The number you require is ...” I wrote it down, but when I called Victor Verity I spoke not to him, but to his widow. Her dear Victor had passed away during the previous summer. Wrong Verity.
I tried Inquiries again.
“Very sorry,” said a prim voice, not sounding it, “there is no other Victor or V. Verity in the Exeter telephone area which covers most of Devon.”
“How about an ex-directory number?”
“Sorry, I can’t give you that information.”
Victor Waltman Verity was either ex-directory or had mailed his letter far from home.
Cursing him lightly I glanced with reluctance at the money job half done on my computer... and there, of course, lay the answer. Computers. Internet.
The Internet among other miracles might put an address to a name anywhere, that’s to say it would if I could remember the open sesame code. I entered my Internet-access number and typed in my passw
ord, and sat hopefully, flicking mentally through possibilities as the machine burped and whined until a connection was made.
After a while a website address drifted into my mind, but it was without certainty that I tried it: www.192.com.
192.com was right.
I started a search for Verity in Devon, and as if eager to be of service, the Internet, having surveyed every fact obtainable in the public domain (such as the electoral registers), came up with a total of twenty-two Devon-based Veritys, but none of them any longer was Victor.
Dead end.
I tried Verity in Cornwall: sixteen but still no Victor.
Try Somerset, I thought. Not a Victor Verity in sight.
Before reaching to switch off, I skimmed down the list and at the end of it noticed that at No. 19 Lorna Terrace, Taunton, Somerset, there lived a Mr. Waltman Verity. Good enough to try, I thought.
Armed with the address I tried Directory Inquiries again, but ran up against the same polite barrier of virtual nonexistence. Ex-directory. Sorry. Too bad.
Although Saturday was a busier day in the showroom, my thoughts returned continuously to Taunton and Victor Waltman Verity.
Taunton... Having nothing much else urgently filling my Sunday, I caught a westbound train the next morning, and asked directions to Lorna Terrace.
Whatever I expected Victor Waltman Verity to look like, it was nothing near the living thing. Victor Waltman Verity must have been all of fifteen.
The door of No. 19 was opened by a thin woman dressed in pants, sweater and bedroom slippers, with a cigarette in one hand and big pink curlers in her hair. Thirty something, perhaps forty, I thought. Easygoing, with a resigned attitude to strangers on her doorstep.
“Er... Mrs. Verity?” I asked.
“Yeah. What is it?” She sucked smoke, unconcerned.
“Mrs. Victor Waltman Verity?”
She laughed. “I’m Mrs. Waltman Verity, Victor’s my son.” She shouted over her shoulder towards the inner depths of the narrow terraced house. “Vic, someone to see you,” and while we waited for Victor Waltman Verity to answer the call, Mrs. Verity looked me over thoroughly from hair to sneakers and went on enjoying a private giggle.