by Dick Francis
Some of his misery abated. I touched his shoulder in parting and walked along Lorna Terrace to where Tom Pigeon waited.
Tom looked at my battered face and commentated, “You were a hell of a long time whistling.”
“Mm.” I smiled. “Silly of me.”
“You delayed it on purpose!” he exclaimed in revelation. “You let that harpy hit you.”
“You get what you pay for, on the whole,” I said.
Most bruises faded within a week, Martin had said, and also this time on the Monday I got a doctor to stick together the worst of the cuts with small adhesive strips.
“I suppose you walked into another black-masked door,” guessed Constable Dodd, horrified. “Rose may not frighten you but, from what I’ve heard, she’d terrify me.”
“Rose didn’t bother about a mask,” I said, putting together a spicy rice supper on Monday evening in the kitchen of my house on the hill. “Do you like garlic?”
“Not much. What are you planning to do about Rose Payne? You should go to the Taunton police and make a complaint against her for assault. That wound might even constitute GBH.”
Grievous Bodily Harm, I thought. Not half as grievous as she had intended.
“What would I tell them—a thin woman beat me up so a friend of mine with a criminal record smashed down her front door and set his dogs on her?”
She was not amused but simply repeated, “So what are you going to do about her?”
I didn’t answer directly. I said instead, “Tomorrow I’m going to Lynton in Devon and I’d rather she didn’t know.” I frowned over a green pepper. “It’s a wise man as knows his enemies,” I asserted, “and I do know our Rose.”
“In the biblical sense?”
“God forbid!”
“But Rose Payne is only one person,” Catherine said, drinking fizzy water routinely. “There were four black masks, you said.”
I nodded. “Norman Osprey, bookmaker, he was Number Two, and Ed Payne, who was Martin Stukely’s racetrack valet and is Rose’s father, he was Number Three and he’s sorry for it, and all those three know I recognized them. One other seemed familiar to me at the time but I can’t have been right. He was a clutcher setting me up for the others and I think of him as Number Four. He was behind me most of the time.”
Catherine listened in silence and seemed to be waiting. Skidding now and then across a half-formed recollection went the so-far unidentified figure that I called simply Blackmask Four, and I remembered him most for the inhumanity he took to his task. It had been Norman Osprey who’d smashed my watch, but it had been Black mask Four who’d bunched my fingers for him. For all Norman Osprey’s awesome strength, in retrospect it was Blackmask Four who’d scared me most, and who now, eight days later, intruded fearsomely into my dreams, nightmares in which Blackmask Four intended to throw me into the 1800 degrees Fahrenheit of the liquid glass in the tank in the furnace.
That night, while Constable Dodd slept peacefully in my arms, it was she whom Blackmask Four threw to a burning death.
I awoke sweating and cursing Rose Payne with words I’d rarely used before, and I felt more reluctant than ever to leave Catherine to the risks of her plainclothes operation.
“Come back safe yourself this time,” she said worriedly, zooming off in the dawn, and I, with every intention of carrying out her instructions, walked down to my blameless furnace and did the day’s work before my three helpers arrived.
The day before they had joked about my recurring Monday bruises, which Irish had sworn were the result of pub brawls. I hadn’t disillusioned them, and on the Tuesday cheerfully left them practicing dishes for the day while I walked out of the village for a mile to catch a bus.
Neither Rose nor Gina, nor anyone else I knew, came into sight, and I felt, when I disembarked outside a busy newsstand in the next town and climbed into another prearranged car with driver, that there could be no one on my tail. Tom Pigeon, who had designed “the simple exit for glassblowers,” had begged me at least to take one of his dogs with me, if I wouldn’t take him. Hadn’t I been bashed enough? he asked. Hadn’t I needed him to rescue me twice? Wasn’t I now being insane to insist on traveling alone?
Yes, quite likely, I agreed. So give me advice.
Thanks to him, then, I went to Lynton on the North Devon coast unmolested, and in the electoral register found the full address of Doctor Adam Force, in the Valley of Rocks Road.
The chief disappointment to this successful piece of research was that there was no one in the house.
I knocked and rang and waited and tried again, but the tall gray old building had a dead air altogether and an empty-sounding reverberation when I tried the back door. The neighbors weren’t helpful. One was out, and one was deeply deaf. A passing housewife said she thought Doctor Force worked in Bristol during the week and came to Lynton only for the weekends. Not so, contradicted a shuffling old man angrily waving a walking stick; on Tuesdays, Doctor Force could be found up Hollerday Hill, at the nursing home.
The old man’s anger, explained the housewife, was a form of madness. Doctor Force went up to Hollerday Phoenix House every Tuesday, insisted the walking stick.
My driver—“Call me Jim”—long-sufferingly reversed and returned to the town’s center when the double bull’s-eye more or less left us both laughing. Doctor Force worked in Bristol half the time and opened up his Valley of Rocks dreary house on Sundays and Mondays, and went up to Hollerday Phoenix House on Tuesdays. A small girl with plaited blond hair pointed out the road to Hollerday Phoenix House, then told us not to go there because of the ghosts.
Ghosts?
The Phoenix House was haunted, didn’t we know?
The Town Hall scoffed at the idea of ghosts, afraid of deterring holiday visitors in spring and summer.
That useful person, ‘A Spokesman,’ explained that the mansion built by Sir George Newnes on Hollerday Hill had been totally arsonized in 1913 by persons still unknown and later blown up as part of an army exercise. The Phoenix House recently built close to the grown-over ruins was a private nursing home. There were positively no ghosts. Doctor Force had patients in the nursing home whom he visited on Tuesdays.
My driver, who believed in the supernatural, cravenly balked at driving up to the Hollerday Phoenix House, but swore he would wait for me to walk there and back, which I believed, as I hadn’t yet paid him.
I thanked ‘A Spokesman’ for his help. And could he describe Doctor Force, so I would know him if I saw him?
“Oh yes,” ‘A Spokesman’ said, “you’d know him easily. He has very blue eyes, and a short white beard, and he’s wearing orange socks.”
I blinked.
“He can’t see red or green,” ‘A Spokesman’ said. “He’s color-blind.”
7
I took the quiet old back way through the woods, climbing the overgrown gently sloping carriage road that thoughtful Sir George Newnes had had blasted through rock to save his horses having to haul a coach up a heart-straining incline to his house.
On that January Tuesday I walked alone through the trees. Traffic motored sparsely along a modern road on the other side of the hill, raising not even a distant hum on its way to the new complex that had risen on the memory of the old.
There were no birds where I walked; no song. It was dark even in daylight, the close-growing evergreens crowding overhead. My feet trod noiselessly on fallen fir needles and in places there were still bare upright slabs of raw gray blasted rock. Atmospherically the hundred-year-old path raised goose bumps. There were ruins of a tennis court where long ago people had laughed and played in another world. Eerie, I thought, was the word for it, but I saw no ghosts.
I came down to Hollerday Phoenix House from above, as “A Spokesman” had foretold, and saw that much of the roof was covered with large metal-framed panes of glass, which opened and closed like roofs of greenhouses. The glass of course interested me—it was thick float glass tinted to filter out ultraviolet A and B rays of sunl
ight—and I thought of the departed days of sanataria, where people with tuberculosis most unromantically coughed their lives away in the vain hope that airy sunshine would cure them.
Hollerday Phoenix House spread wide in one central block with two long wings. I walked around to the impressive front door and found that the building I entered at the conclusion of the spooky path was definitely of the twenty-first century, and in no way the haunt of apparitions.
The entrance hall looked like a hotel, but I saw no farther into the nursing home’s depths because of the two white-coated people leaning on the reception desk. One was female and the other grew a coat-colored beard, and did indeed wear orange socks.
They glanced briefly my way as I arrived, then straightened with resigned professional interest when I presented with cuts and bruises that actually, until they peered at me, I had forgotten.
“Doctor Force?” I tried, and White-Beard satisfactorily answered, “Yes?”
His fifty-six years sat elegantly on his shoulders, and his well-brushed hair, along with the beard, gave him the sort of shape to his head that actors got paid for. Patients would trust him, I thought. I might have been pleased myself to have him on my case. His manner held authority in enough quantity to show me I was going to have difficulty jolting him the way I wanted.
Almost at once I saw, too, that the difficulty was not a matter of jolting him but of following the ins and outs of his mind. All through the time I was with him I felt him swing now and then from apparently genuine and friendly responses to evasion and stifled ill will. He was quick and he was clever, and although most of the time I felt a warm liking for him, occasionally there was a quick flash of antipathy. He was powerfully attractive overall, but the charm of Adam Force, it seemed to me, could flow in and out like a tide.
“Sir,” I said, giving seniority its due. “I’m here on account of Martin Stukely.”
He put on a sorry-to-tell-you expression, and told me that Martin Stukely was dead. At the same time there was a rigidity of shock on his facial muscles: it wasn’t a name he’d expected to hear up Hollerday Hill in Lynton. I said I knew Martin Stukely was dead.
He asked with suspicion, “Are you a journalist?”
“No,” I said. “A glassblower.” I added my name, “Gerard Logan.”
His whole body stiffened. He swallowed and absorbed the surprise and eventually pleasantly asked, “What do you want?”
I said equally without threat, “I’d quite like back the videotape you took from the Logan Glass showroom in Broadway on New Year’s Eve.”
“You would, would you?” He smiled. He was ready for the question. He had no intention of complying, and was recovering his poise. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Doctor Force made a slow survey from head to foot of my deliberately conservative suit and tie and I felt as positive as if he had said it aloud that he was wondering if I had enough clout to cause him trouble. Apparently he realistically gave himself an honest but unwelcome answer, as he suggested not that I buzz off straight away, but that we discuss the situation in the open air.
By open air it transpired he meant the path I’d just ascended. He led that way and sneaked a sideways glance to measure my discomfort level, which was nil. I smiled and mentioned that I hadn’t noticed any ghosts on the prowl on my way up.
Should he be aware of small damages to my face and so on, I said, it was as a result of Rose Payne being convinced either that I had his tape in my possession, or that I knew what was on it. “She believes that if she’s unpleasant enough, I’ll give her the tape or the knowledge, neither of which I have.” I paused and said, “What do you suggest?”
He said promptly, “Give this person anything. All tapes are alike.”
“She thinks your tape is worth a million.”
Adam Force fell silent.
“Is it?” I asked.
Under his breath Force said what sounded like the truth, “I don’t know.”
“Martin Stukely,” I murmured without hostility, “wrote a check for you with a lot of zeros on it.”
Force, very upset, said sharply, “He promised never to say...”
“He didn’t say.”
“But...”
“He died,” I said. “He left check stubs.”
I could almost feel him wondering “What else did Martin leave?” and I let him speculate. In the end in genuine-looking worry he said, “How did you find me?”
“Didn’t you think I would?”
He very briefly shook his head and faintly smiled. “It didn’t occur to me that you would bother to look. Most people would leave it to the police.”
He would have been easy to like all the time, I thought, if one could forget Lloyd Baxter’s epileptic fit, and a missing bank bag full of money.
“Rose Payne,” I said distinctly, again ... and somewhere in Adam Force this time her name touched a sensitive reaction. “Rose,” I repeated, “is convinced I know where your videotape is, and as I said before, she is certain I know what’s on it. Unless you find a way of rather literally getting her off my back, I may find her attentions too much to tolerate and I’ll tell her what she’s anxious to know.”
He asked, as if he hadn’t any real understanding of what I’d said, “Are you implying that I know this person, Rose? And are you also implying that I am in some way responsible for your ... er ... injuries?”
I said cheerfully, “Right both times.”
“That’s nonsense.” His face was full of calculation as if he weren’t sure how to deal with an awkward situation, but wouldn’t rule out using his own name, Force.
On the brink of telling him why I reckoned I could answer my own questions, I seemed to hear both Worthington and Tom Pigeon shrieking at me to be careful about sticks and wasps’ nests. The silence of the dark fir forest shook with their urgent warnings. I glanced at the benevolent doctor’s thoughtful face and changed my own expression to regret.
Shaking my head, I agreed with him that what I’d said was of course nonsense. “All the same,” I added after quizzically checking with my two absent bodyguards, “you did take the tape from my shop, so please can you at least tell me where it is now.”
He relaxed inwardly a good deal at my change of tone. Worthington and Tom Pigeon went back to sleep. Doctor Force consulted his own inner safeguards and answered the question unsatisfactorily.
“Just suppose you are right and I have the tape. As Martin could no longer keep the information safe, there was no longer any need for it. Perhaps, therefore, I ran it through to record a sports program from first to last. That tape might now show horse racing and nothing else.”
He had written to Martin that the knowledge on the tape was dynamite. If he’d wiped the dynamite out with racing, boasting he’d poured millions down the drain (or past the recording head), he still surely had whatever he needed for a clone.
No one would casually wipe out a fortune if not sure he could bring it back. Nobody would do it on purpose, that was.
So I asked him, “Did you obliterate it on purpose, or by mistake?”
He laughed inside the beard. He said, “I don’t make mistakes.”
The frisson I felt wasn’t a winter shudder from a daunting fir forest but a much more prosaic recognition of a familiar and thoroughly human failing: for all his pleasant manner, the doctor thought he was God.
He stopped by a fallen fir trunk and briefly rested one foot on it, saying he would go back from there as he had patients to see. “I find business is usually completed by this point,” he went on and his voice was dismissive. “I’m sure you’ll find your own way down to the gate.”
“‘There are just a couple of things,” I said. My voice sounded flat, the acoustics dead between the trees.
He took his foot off the log and started to go back up the hill. To his obvious irritation I went with him.
“I said,” he commented with a stab at finality, “that we’d completed our conversation, Mr. Logan.
”
“Well...” I hesitated, but Worthington and Tom Pigeon were quiet, and there wasn’t even a squeak from the dogs. “How did you get to know Martin Stukely?”
He said calmly, “That’s none of your business.”
“You knew each other but you weren’t close friends.”
“Didn’t you hear me?” he protested. “This is not your concern.”
He quickened his step a little, as if to escape.
I said, “Martin gave you a large chunk of money in return for the knowledge that you referred to as dynamite.”
“No, you’re wrong.” He walked faster, but I easily kept up with him stride for stride. “You completely do not understand,” he said, “and I want you to leave.”
I said I had no intention of leaving anytime soon, now that I saw beside me the likely answer to multiple riddles.
“Did you know,” I asked him, “that Lloyd Baxter, the man you abandoned to his epileptic fit in my showroom, is the owner of Tallahassee, the horse that killed Martin Stukely?”
He walked faster up the slope. I stayed close, accelerating.
“Did you know,” I asked conversationally, “that in spite of the onset of an epileptic seizure, Lloyd Baxter was able to describe you down to the socks?”
“Stop it.”
“And of course you know Norman Osprey and Rose and Gina are as violent as they come...”
“No.” His voice was loud, and he coughed.
“And as for my money that you whipped with that tape ...”
Adam Force quite suddenly stopped walking altogether, and in the stillness I could clearly hear his breath wheezing in his chest.
It alarmed me. Instead of pretty well bullying him I asked him anxiously if he were all right.
“No thanks to you.” The wheezing continued until he pulled from a pocket in his white coat the sort of inhaler I’d often seen used for asthma. He took two long puffs, breathing deeply while staring at me with complete dislike.
I was tempted to say “Sorry,” but in spite of his charming ways and pleasant looks he’d been the cause of my being chucked to both the black masks in Broadway and to a piece of hose in a Taunton backyard, and if that were all, I’d count myself lucky. So I let him wheeze and puff his way up the rest of the incline. I went with him to make sure he didn’t collapse on the way, and inside the reception area I checked him into a comfortable chair and went to find someone to pass him on to, for safekeeping.