by Dick Francis
I turned away from Victor so that he shouldn’t see the absolute horror that flooded my mind and assuredly appeared on my face. Just the idea of Rose using teeth for torture melted at once any theoretical resistance I might have thought to be within my own capacity.
Teeth.
Teeth and wrists and hell knew what else ...
The need intensified to a critical level to find out what secrets I was supposed to know, and then to decide what to do with the knowledge. Victor, I thought, might be able to dig from the semi-conscious depths of his memory the scraps I still needed if I were to glue together a credible whole. I had pieces. Not enough.
I asked with an inward shudder, “Where is your auntie Rose today? Did she too visit your dad?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know where she is. She didn’t go to the jail because Dad’s not talking to her since she shopped him.” He paused, and then said passionately, “I wish I belonged to an ordinary family. I wrote to Martin once and asked if I could stay with him for a while but he said they didn’t have room. I begged him...:‘ His voice cracked. ”What can I do?“
It seemed clear that Victor’s need for someone to advise him stretched very far back. It wasn’t odd that he was now close to breakdown.
“Come for a ride?” I suggested with friendliness, and held open for him the door behind the estate car driver. “I’ll get you back home before you’re missed, and before that we can talk about what you need.”
He hesitated only briefly. He had, after all, brought me there to help him, and it appeared he was reaching out to someone he trusted even though his family considered that person to be an enemy. Victor couldn’t invent or act at this level of desperation.
If this were an ambush, then Victor was the lamb who didn’t know it.
I asked him if he knew where I could find Adam Force. The question caused a much longer hesitation and a shake of the head. He knew, I thought, but perhaps telling me came under the category of squealing.
Tom Pigeon sat beside the driver, making him nervous simply by being himself. Victor and I sat in the rear passenger seats with the dogs behind us, separated from us by a netting divider. The driver, taciturn from first to last, set off as soon as we were all aboard and headed at first through winding Somerset country roads and then out to the wide expanses of Exmoor. Even in the summer, I imagined, it would be a bare and daunting place, grim with sunny dreams unfulfilled and long skylines blurring into drizzly mist. On that Sunday in January the cloudless air was bright, cold and crisp and on the move. The driver pulled off the road onto an area consolidated for tourist parking, and with a few spare words pointed to a just perceptible path ahead, telling me it led onto trackless moor-land if I went far enough.
He would wait for us, he said, and we could take our time. He had brought a packed picnic lunch for all of us, as I had arranged.
Tom Pigeon’s dogs disembarked and bounded free ecstatically, sniffing with unimaginable joy around heather roots in rich dark red earth. Tom himself stepped out of the car and stretched his arms and chest wide, filling his lungs with deep breaths of clean air.
Victor’s face, transformed by the exchange of terrace-house Taunton for wide-open sky, looked almost carefree, almost happy.
Tom and his black familiars set off fast along the track and were soon swallowed into the rolling scenery. Victor and I followed him but eventually more slowly, with Victor pouring out his devastating home life and difficulties, as I guessed he’d never done before.
“Mom’s all right,” he said. “So’s Dad really, except when he comes home from the pub. Then if Mom or I get too near him he belts us one.” He swallowed. “No, I didn’t mean to say that. But last time he broke her ribs and her nose and her face was black all down one side; and when Auntie Rose saw it she went to the cops, and it was funny, really, because other times I’d seen her hit my dad. She’s got fists like a boxer when she gets going. She can deal it out until the poor buggers beg her to stop, and that’s when she laughs at them, and often when she’s clouted them once or twice more, she’ll step back a bit and smile... And then sometimes she’ll kiss them.” He glanced at me anxiously, sideways, to see what I made of his aunt Rose’s behavior.
I thought that possibly I’d got off fairly lightly at the hands of the black masks, thanks to Rose having met her equal in ferocity, my friend with his dogs ahead now on the moor.
I asked Victor, “Has Rose ever attacked you, personally?”
He was astonished. “No, of course not. She’s my aunt.”
I’d give him perhaps another two years, I thought, before his aunt looked on him as a grown man, not a child.
We walked another length of track while I thought how little I understood of the psychology of women like Rose. Men who enjoyed being beaten by women weren’t the sort that attracted Rose. For her to be fulfilled they had to hate it.
The track had narrowed until I was walking in front of Victor, which made talking difficult, but then suddenly the ground widened into a broader flat area from which one could see distant views in most directions. Tom Pigeon stood out below us, his Dobermans zigzagging around him with unfettered joy.
After watching them for several moments I gave life to an ear-splitting whistle, a skill taught me by my father and brother, who had both been able to accomplish the near-impossible of summoning taxis in London in the rain.
Tom stopped fast, turned towards me from lower down the rolling hills, waved acknowledgment, and began to return to where I stood. His dogs aimed towards me without a single degree of deviation.
“Wow,” Victor said, impressed. “How do you do that?”
“Curl your tongue.” I showed him how, and I asked him again to tell me more about Doctor Force. I needed to talk to him, I said.
“Who?”
“You know damn well who. Doctor Adam Force. The man who wrote the letter you copied and sent to Martin.”
Victor, silenced, took a while to get going again.
In the end he said, “Martin knew it was a game.”
“Yes, I’m sure he did,” I agreed. “He knew you well, he knew Adam Force, and Adam Force knows you.” I watched Tom Pigeon trudge towards us up the hill. “You may know their secret, that one that was on the tape everyone’s talking about.”
“No,” Victor said, “I don’t.”
“Don’t lie,” I told him. “You don’t like liars.”
He said indignantly, “I’m not lying. Martin knew what was on the tape, and so did Doctor Force, of course. When I sent that letter to Martin I was just pretending to be Doctor Force. I often pretend to be other people, or sometimes animals. It’s only a game. Sometimes I talk to people who don’t really exist.”
Harvey the rabbit, I thought, and I’d been engine drivers and jockeys in my time. Victor would grow out of it soon, but not soon enough for now in January 2000.
I asked him how he had obtained a copy of Doctor Force’s letter, which he had sent to Martin with his own name attached instead of Force’s.
He didn’t reply but just shrugged his shoulders.
I asked him yet again if he knew where I could find his Doctor Force, but he said dubiously that Martin had for sure written it down somewhere.
Probably he had. Victor knew where, but he still wasn’t telling that either. There had to be some way of persuading him. Some way of bringing him to the point of wanting to tell.
Tom Pigeon and his three bouncing companions reached us at the flattened viewing area, all clearly enjoying the day.
“That’s some whistle,” Tom commented admiringly, so I did it again at maximum loudness, which stunned the dogs into pointing their muzzles in my direction, their noses twitching, their eyes alert, Tom patting them, with their stumpy tails wagging excessively.
Walking back towards the car Victor did his breathy best at a whistle that would equally affect the dogs, but they remained unimpressed. Water in dishes and handfuls of dog biscuits, brought from home by their owner, suited them be
tter as a prelude to lying down for a doze.
Tom himself, the driver, Victor and I ate sandwiches inside the car, out of the wind, and afterwards sleep came easily to the other three. I left the car and walked back slowly along the track sorting out and simplifying Victor’s muddling game of pretense and reducing the Verity-Payne videotape roundabout to probabilities. Still, the absolutely first thing to do next, I concluded, was to find Adam Force, and the path to him still lay with Victor.
What I needed was to get Victor to trust me so instinctively that his most deeply secret thoughts would pop out of him without caution. Also I needed to get him to that state fast, and I didn’t know if that sort of total brainwash were possible, let alone ethical.
When there was movement around the car I returned to tell the yawning passengers that according to my new cheap watch it was time to leave if we were to get back to Lorna Terrace in advance of the time that Victor was expecting his mom.
Tom walked off to find comfort behind bushes, and jerked his head for me to go with him.
Contingency planning was in his mind. The day had gone too smoothly. Had I considered a few “What ifs”?
We considered them together and returned to the car, where the taciturn driver had taken a liking to Victor and was deep in esoteric chat about computers.
The contentment of the day high on the moor slowly sank and evaporated as the estate car inevitably drew nearer to Lorna Terrace. Victor’s nervous tremor reasserted itself and he watched me anxiously for signs of thrusting him back into his unsatisfactory life. He knew pretty well that at fifteen he would be at the mercy of the courts, and that the courts’ mercy would undoubtedly be to consign him to the care of his mother. Gina, his mother, even a Gina chain-smoking in large pink curlers, would quite likely be seen as the badly-done-by parent of a thankless child. Gina Verity, unlike her sister Rose, who couldn’t help radiating a faint air of menace, would be seen by any court in the way that I had seen her at first, as a relaxed, tolerant and fond mother doing her best in difficult circumstances.
The driver stopped the car where Tom Pigeon asked him, which was around the bend that kept him out of sight of No. 19. Victor and I disembarked at that point, and I sympathized very much with the misery and hope lessness reappearing in the droop of his shoulders. I went with him to the front door of No. 19, which as in many terraced houses opened from a concrete path across a small square front garden of dusty grass. Victor produced a key from a pocket and let us in, leading me as before down the passage to the bright little kitchen where life was lived, and where I had promised to stay as company until his mother came back, even though she might not like it.
The door from the kitchen brought Victor to a standstill of puzzlement and unease.
He said, “I’m sure I bolted the door before I went out.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I know I bolted that gate from the backyard into the lane. Mom gets furious if I forget it.”
He opened the unbolted kitchen door and stepped out into a small high-walled square of backyard. Across the weeds and dead-looking grass a tall brown-painted door was set into the high brick wall, and it was this door that freshly upset Victor by again not having its bolts, top and bottom, firmly slid into place.
“Bolt them now,” I said urgently about the door from the lane, but Victor stood still in front of me in puzzlement and dismay, and although understanding flashed like lightning through my mind, I couldn’t get around Victor fast enough. The door from the lane opened the moment I stepped towards it across the grass from the kitchen.
Rose had come into the backyard from the lane. Gina and the quasi gorilla Norman Osprey marched out triumphantly from the house. Both Rose and Osprey were armed with a cut-off section of garden hose. Rose’s piece had a tap on it.
Victor at my side stood like a rock, not wanting to believe what he was seeing. When he spoke, the words addressed to his mother were a scramble of “You’ve come back early.”
Rose prowled like a hunting lioness between me and the door to the lane, swinging the heavy brass tap on the supple green hose, and almost licking her lips.
Gina, for once without curlers and pretty as a result, tried to justify the prospect ahead by whining to Victor that his caged father had told her to eff off, he wasn’t in the mood for her silly chatter. In her anger she told Victor for the first time that his father was “inside,” and deserved it.
“He can be a mean brute, your dad,” Gina said. “And when we’d gone all that way! So Rose drove me home again, and that bitch next door told me you’d sneaked off craftily to the station, because she followed, as she was going that way anyhow, and you met that fellow, that one over there, that Rose says is stealing a million from us. How can you, young Vic? So Rose says this time she’ll make him tell us what we want to know, but it’s no thanks to you, Rose says.”
I heard only some of it. I watched Victor’s face, and saw with relief his strong alienation from Gina’s smug voice. The more she said, the more he didn’t like it. Teenage rebellion visibly grew.
The present and future scene here hadn’t been exactly one of the “what ifs” that Tom and I had imagined in the bushes, but now what if ... if I could think it out fast enough ... if I could use Victor’s horrified reaction to his mother’s outpouring ... if I could put up with a bit of Rose’s persuasion ... then perhaps—on top of the carefree day on the moor—perhaps Victor would indeed feel like telling me what I was sure he knew. Perhaps the sight of his aunt Rose’s cruelty in action would impel him to offer a gift in atonement ... to offer me the one thing he knew I wanted. Maybe the prize was worth a bit of discomfort. So get on with it, I told myself. If you’re going to do it, do it fast.
Last Sunday, I thought, the black masks had jumped me unawares. It was different this Sunday. I could invite the assault head-on, and I did, at a run towards the door to the lane, straight towards Rose and her swinging tap.
She was fast and ruthless and managed to connect twice before I caught her right arm and bent it up behind her, her face close to mine, her dry skin and freckles in sharp focus, hate and sudden pain drawing her lips back from her teeth. Gina, yelling blasphemy, tore at my ear to free her sister.
I caught a glimpse of Victor’s horror an instant before Norman Osprey lashed out at me from behind with his own length of hose. Rose wrenched herself out of my grip, pushed Gina out of her way and had another swing at me with her tap. I managed a circular kickbox which temporarily put the gorilla Norman facedown on the grass, and in return got another fearful clout from Rose along the jaw, which ripped the skin open.
Enough, I thought. Far and away too much. Blood dripped everywhere. I used my only real weapon, the piercing whistle for help, which Tom and I in the bushes had agreed meant “come at once.”
What if I whistle and he doesn’t come ... ?
I whistled again, louder, longer, calling not for a taxi in the rain in London, but quite likely for life without deformity and certainly for self-respect. I couldn’t have told Rose from direct knowledge where to find that videotape, but if I’d needed to badly enough I would have invented something. Whether or not she would have believed me was another matter and one I hoped not to find out.
I fortunately also didn’t find out what conclusion Rose intended for her Sunday afternoon sports. There was a vast crashing and tinkling noise and Tom’s voice roaring at his dogs, and then three snarling Doberman pinschers poured like a torrent out of the house’s wide-open kitchen door into the confined space of the backyard.
Tom carried an iron bar he’d borrowed from local town railings. Norman Osprey backed away from him, his hose soft and useless in opposition, his Sunday pleasure no longer one long laugh.
Rose, the quarry of the dogs, turned tail and ignominiously left the scene through the gate into the lane, sliding through a small opening and pulling it shut behind her.
Trusting that the dogs knew me well enough to keep their fangs to themselves, I walked among them and slid the bolts across on the wall-to-
lane door, blocking Rose’s immediate way back.
Gina screeched at Tom only once and without much conviction, Tom’s fierce physical closeness reducing her protests to nil. She was silent even when she discovered Tom’s mode of entry had been to smash open her front door. She didn’t try to stop her son when he ran past her along the passage from backyard to front, and called to me in the few steps before I reached the road.
Tom and the Dobermans were already out on the sidewalk on their way back to the car.
I stopped at once when Victor called me, and waited until he came up. Either he would tell me or he wouldn’t. Either the hose and tap had been worth it, or they hadn’t. Payoff time.
“Gerard ...” He was out of breath, not from running but from what he’d seen in the yard. “I can’t bear all this. If you want to know ... Doctor Force lives in Lynton,” he said. “Valley of Rocks Road.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Victor unhappily watched me use tissues scrounged from his mother’s kitchen to blot the oozing blood on my face. I said, “There’s always e-mail, don’t forget.”
“How can you even speak to me?”
I grinned at him. “I still have all my teeth.”
“Look out for Rose,” he warned me anxiously. “She never gives up.”
“Try to arrange to live with your grandfather,” I suggested. “It would be safer than here.”