Shattered

by Dick Francis

  I kept a good distance from Rose on my way out, but it was the white beard and orange socks, the gracious manners and the Phoenix House pharmacy, the hunger for a million and the belief of infallibility, these were the long-term dangers that I had most to fear.

  There were two particular videotapes missing, and both had at some time been in my care. Did Rose have the one detailing the necklace? Did Force after all retain the cancer research he’d stolen? I might believe the answers to be yes and no, but how the hell could I find out for sure?

  On the way back to Broadway we veered into Cheltenham to call on Kenneth Trubshaw, the trophy committee man, who’d said on Jim’s car phone that he would be at home. Slightly surprised by our numbers, he nevertheless generously offered the warmth of the kitchen stove to my traveling companions, plus a large tin of crackers, and shepherded me alone into his much colder drawing room. It was a large room facing north, its daylight gray and carpet green, a combination I found depressing.

  I gave him the book I’d taken along for the purpose, which contained a series of glossy colored eight-by-ten photographs, a long record of the work I’d done over maybe twelve years.

  I explained that I couldn’t in good faith repeat any of the items exactly, but I could make something similar, if he liked.

  He laid the book flat on a big table and turned the pages slowly. It mattered to me quite a lot, I discovered, that he would like at least some of the pieces, even if half of them weren’t suitable for racing trophies. Vases of odd shapes had recently been blown for trophies of all sorts, though. There was no ban these days on anything surreal.

  Trubshaw finished turning the pages. Then he closed the book, to my severe disappointment, and with too serious a tightening of his mouth gave me his verdict.

  “If you can lend me this book I’ll put it before the committee when they meet tomorrow morning. I know dear Marigold wants action. I will telephone her when the decision’s made”

  I’ll be damned, I thought. How did he look when he was altogether turning things down?

  He said, “The leaping horse is the one I’d choose. Can you do anything like it? And I’ll need to know how high it would be overall, and how heavy. The one in the photograph looks too big.”

  “Any size you like,” I promised, and told him that the leaping horse in the picture belonged to one of the Leicester races Stewards and his wife.

  While Kenneth Trubshaw exclaimed with surprise I recalled minute by minute as best I could the conversation I’d had on the Stewards’ friends’ viewing balcony, where Lloyd Baxter had first told me about a white-bearded man stealing my money along with the much traveled videotape.

  Lloyd Baxter, with his epilepsy, couldn’t be factor X. His body hadn’t the shape or the agility of Blackmask Four.

  Kenneth Trubshaw put his hand down on the book of photos and said thoughtfully, “Could you include enough gold to satisfy Marigold?”

  “Yes. Any amount.”

  “Er ... how? And would it be... well... enormously expensive?”

  “Not very expensive.”

  Kenneth Trubshaw held definite reasons for concerning himself and his committee members with the subject of cost, but he hesitated for a measurable time before he waved me to a chair, and, sitting himself, said, “I don’t know if you follow the background ins and outs of racing politics at all? I don’t mean the form of horses or speculations about their fitness, I mean the question about whether the cost of a winner’s trophy should be deducted from the prize money, as it usually has been until recently. Many owners refuse to take the trophy, preferring the whole prize to be given as money. It’s being suggested that we give the whole prize and the trophy in every case. Ask Marigold if she is giving the trophy herself outright, or if she expects the racecourse to pay for it. Warn her the debate exists.” He stopped slowly, not proud of his shunting of his dilemma onto me.

  “Well ... all right,” I said. “But don’t expect Marigold to decide. She’s terrific, but she leaves life’s really serious decisions to her chauffeur.”

  “You don’t mean it!”

  “Of course I do. Her chauffeur, Worthington, is worth his weight in cut crystal ten times over.”

  Kenneth Trubshaw absorbed the news manfully and then with relief went back to straight expense, saying, “The necklace Marigold wants is very expensive, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Very. And that necklace, if on public show, is inviting thieves. The gold is genuinely solid in that case.”

  “Isn’t solid gold always the real thing?” He looked quizzical.

  I explained, “Well ... you can paint hot glass with molten eighteen-carat gold, that’s seventy-five percent pure gold mixed with other metals. You paint what you want to look gold when it’s finished. Then you anneal the work for a second time, but only at 450 degrees Fahrenheit, and when it cools the second time the gold you painted on will have adhered completely to the glass, and it will look like solid gold, even if it isn’t.”

  Kenneth Trubshaw was fascinated, but didn’t want to be considered cheap. “Gold has to be gold,” he said. “I want Marigold to like it, of course. That is, if we decide on this sort of thing for her trophy.”

  I made murmuring agreeing noises.

  He asked curiously, “What of all those sculptures in the book was the hardest for you to make?”

  “The most difficult was the gypsy’s crystal ball.”

  It surprised him, as it did most people. He thought a crystal ball was blown up like a child’s balloon.

  “No,” I said. “It’s solid glass. And it’s extremely difficult to make a perfectly round large ball of glass without air bubbles forming in it as it cools in an annealing oven.”

  He wanted me to enlighten him about annealing, and when I told him, he said, “Could you make a leaping horse taking off from a crystal ball?”

  Nodding, I said, “It would be heavy... and difficult... but I could make sure it was unique.”

  He pondered for a while, walking to his tall sash windows and looking out into his sleeping winter garden.

  “If we decide on giving you the commission, can you make drawings for us to choose from?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I could. But actually I’ll probably make examples in glass. I’m more at home that way. Glass itself isn’t expensive, and if you don’t like the things I make, I can sell them in the shop.”

  He smiled with irony at my frugal business sense. My chances, I judged, weren’t much more than fifty-fifty.

  Kenneth Trubshaw collected my crew from his kitchen and lined them up in an elegant striped nineteenth-century hall. Carefully then he looked them over. I followed his gaze and also his mind: a tubby driver in a wrinkled gray suit, a thin anxious boy, a piratical-looking vigorous man with a black pointed little Elizabethan beard, and three large black Dobermans with watchful eyes and uncertain moods.

  I said to Ken Trubshaw with a smile, “They’re my barbed-wire fence. Don’t expect them to be pretty as well.”

  He glanced my way, then said, “It isn’t enough for you and Marigold to make, pay for and give a splendid trophy to the winning owner of a race in memory of Martin Stukely.” He stopped for reconsideration. “At least, it’s enough for that great lady Marigold, but not for you.”

  He opened his front door for my guys to leave. Tom Pigeon bowed to him with ceremony, his glimmering smile making a mockery of solemnity. His dogs crowded his ankles to give him honor, and the manager earned Tom’s allegiance forevermore by bowing back to him in return.

  The Trubshaw hand on my arm again made me stay, while the others trooped out to the car. He said, “Martin Stukely’s darling widow may not realize that his good name is in doubt just now. Marigold certainly doesn‘t, nor does the racing public; nor, thank God, does the racing press. But you do, don’t you? I saw it in your reaction to Marigold’s enthusiasm for a race in his memory. You need, don’t you, to scrub clean his honorable reputation first?”

  I felt a chilled moment of di
sbelief that anyone else besides myself had perceived the possibility that Martin could have been knowingly dishonest.

  There had been the moment when, reading through the contents of the slim hard-to-find drawer in his desk, I’d had to face the unwelcome photocopy of the letter he had written to Force. Parts of that short note had reverberated in my awareness ever since.

  “... your formulae and methods ... record onto a videotape ... and give it to me at Cheltenham races.”

  Martin had known precisely what was on that tape. Had he after all known all along that the formulae and methods had been stolen? Kind George Lawson-Young had given his assured conviction that Martin had been one hundred percent innocent in his dealings with Force. Terrible doubts all the same remained, and I didn’t like finding them alive in the Cheltenham hierarchy.

  I said to the racecourse trophy chairman, with a lightness I wasn’t altogether feeling, “Could you tell me what you mean?”

  With disillusion, he did. “As I understand it, on the day he died, Martin had possession of a videotape on which were recorded medical secrets of practically unlimited value. Medical secrets stolen by a Doctor Force, who had been known to Martin Stukely for some time. You yourself were to keep that tape hidden.”

  I took a steadying breath and asked who had told him all that. “Private investigators working for the laboratory from where the secrets were stolen interviewed all sorts of people at Cheltenham.” He looked at me curiously. “I also heard from Marigold that you had been attacked by a pack of thugs outside your shop. The bookmakers had all heard it was the doing of Rose Payne, the racecourse valet’s daughter, and she has a bit of a reputation for being violent. One of the bookmakers, a man called Norman Osprey, who looks a bit like Elvis Presley, he was boasting about the hammering they gave you. But it seems you didn’t give them any tapes anyway.”

  He waited for me to comment, but I didn’t have much to say.

  He smiled. “Apparently, the valet thought that what he’d given you was a tape you yourself had filmed, explaining how to make a striking necklace, a copy of an antique. It seems that all the jockeys, and Ed Payne as well, had seen both the necklace and its how-to-make-it instruction tape in the changing room. Ed Payne told his daughter Rose that he had given you a tape and so she tried to find it by stealing every tape she could lay her hands on, including by attacking Martin Stukely’s family with knock-out gas.”

  “Rose herself?” I asked.

  Kenneth Trubshaw didn’t know. That was also the end of his up-to-dateness, except that, in the Cheltenham Stewards’ opinion, Martin Stukely had very likely known that the scientific knowledge he’d promised to hide had been stolen from a research lab.

  “And at present,” I said with regret, “all those tapes are still missing. Whoever has them isn’t telling.”

  “I’m told you yourself are looking for them.”

  “Who tells you all these things?” I really wanted to hear, but it seemed to be a matter of general supposition and logic.

  “I’ll tell you something myself,” I said, and I gave him Victor’s latest purple home-life news.

  “Doctor Force and Rose deserve each other.” He laughed in his throat. “That will do nicely for tomorrow morning’s committee.” He walked with me to Jim’s car. “Give my warmest regards to Marigold. I’ll be in touch.”

  He shook my hand with sincerity.

  He said, “Find those tapes and clear Stukely’s name.”

  So simple, I thought.

  When I disembarked at Bon-Bon’s house, she herself with Daniel by her side came out to meet us.

  “There’s a message from Catherine Dodd for you,” Bon-Bon said to me. “She has the evening free. She wants you to go to your house, if you can.”

  I thanked her, but she, like me and also Tom, was watching with fascination the flash of understanding between Victor, fifteen, and the four-years-younger Daniel. Alienation seemed more normal for that age bracket, but those two discovered immediately that they spoke computer language with a depth that none of the rest of us could reach. Victor climbed out of Jim’s car and went indoors with Daniel as if the two of them were twins. Cyber twins, perhaps.

  Bon-Bon would keep Victor for the night, instead of Tom, she said, amused, following the boys into the house, and Jim drove Tom, the dogs and myself back to Tom’s house first, and then on to mine.

  “I never thought we’d come back in one piece.” Tom left me with that bright thought and a positively jaunty wave, and I would have cast himas Blackmask Four if I hadn’t twice owed him a rescue from crippling injury, and perhaps my life.

  Catherine’s motorcycle graced its customary spot outside the kitchen door, and she herself came out when she heard Jim’s car arrive. There was no difficulty in interpreting her reaction to my return, and Jim drove away with a vast smile (and double cash), promising his service again, “day or night.”

  Coming home to Catherine had become an event to look forward to. I’d never asked her to take me to see her own living space, and when I did, that evening, she laughed and said, “I’ll take you there tomorrow. It’s better by daylight.”

  She asked me how my day had been, and I asked about hers. She frowned over Victor’s troubles and was encouraging about a glass trophy horse. It was all very married, I thought, and we’d only known each other for three weeks.

  “Tell me about the police,” I said, as we squashed companionably into one of the oversize chairs.

  “What about them?” She was slightly defensive always about her job, but this time I especially wanted to know.

  “The priorities,” I said. “For instance, on that New Year’s Day, you in your plainish clothes and the hobo lying on the doorstep, you were both there to frighten thieves off, weren’t you, not to arrest them?”

  She shifted in my arms. “Not really,” she replied. “We like to get our man.”

  I knew better than to tease her. “Tell me about your partner, the hobo.”

  “He’s not really a hobo,” she replied, smiling. “His name is Paul Cratchet. He’s a big guy but misleadingly gentle. Paul’s a good detective. Many a villain has been surprised by his hand on their collar. He’s known as Pernickety Paul at the station because he is so fussy over his reports.”

  Smiling, I inquired plainly, “What events get most police attention?”

  “Accidental deaths, and murder, of course. Especially murder of a police officer. The murder of a fellow police officer, I’d say, gets people going most.”

  “But after that?”

  “Any physical assault.”

  “Especially of a police officer?”

  She twisted her neck and searched my purposefully straight face for levity. Satisfied, she nodded. “Especially of a police officer.”

  “And next?”

  “Aggravated theft. That’s when a weapon is used, or a severe physical threat, or violence as a means to achieve theft. It’s called robbery.”

  “And then?”

  “Actually, and in general,” Catherine said, “if someone’s bleeding, then police officers will come at once. If goods are stolen, but no one’s hurt, the officers will probably come in the morning after the nine-one-one call. If cars are stolen, the police will take the registration number and promise to inform the owner if the car is found.”

  “And that’s that? That’s all for cars?”

  “More or less. It depends. They’re usually found burnt out.”

  “And who,” I asked mildly, “would I go to if I found some stolen property?”

  “Are you talking about those old videotapes again?”

  “Yup. Those old tapes.”

  “Well ...” She let a good few seconds pass, then said, “I did inquire about this ...”

  “It sounds bad news,” I said.

  Catherine sighed. “The tapes themselves are worth practically nothing. You said they hadn’t even any covers. The information recorded on them, on both of them, even if they’re totally different from eac
h other, is called intellectual property. It has very little priority in police thinking. How to make a copy of an antique necklace? You must be joking! Industrial secrets, even medical secrets? Too bad. No one is going to waste much police time looking for them. There would be slightly more interest in your bag of cash, if you could identify a single note of it for sure. It would be much more likely, after three weeks, that it’s been spent and dispersed. It was a fair amount to you personally, but not much in world terms, do you see?” She stopped as an entirely opposite thought struck her, then said, “Does this dreadful Rose still believe you know where to find the tapes?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “But does she?” Catherine was insistent. “Does she, Gerard?”

  I told her, smiling, “I now think she’s had the necklace tape almost from the beginning, and if she has, she knows I haven’t got it.” And Rose knows, I thought, that I could repeat it any day.

  “But the other one?” Catherine begged. “The one stolen from the lab?”

  “Yes.” I felt lighthearted. “I could make a guess. Let’s go to bed.”

  I awoke first in the morning, and lay for a while watching Catherine’s calm gentle breathing. At that moment, it filled me with total contentment... but would I feel the same in ten years? ... and would she? When she stirred and opened her eyes and smiled, ten years didn’t matter. One lived now, and now went along as a constant companion, present and changing minute by minute. It was now, always, that mattered.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Same as you, I dare say.”

  She smiled again, and asked simply if I had plans for us both on her free Saturday. Relaxed, I offered the comfortable new chair in Logan Glass, and accepted a pillion ride to get there.

  Hickory had again arrived before me and was again intent on a perfect sailing boat. He greeted me like the good friend of time gone by, tentatively asking if I could assist him, as he was finding it difficult on his own.

  With uncomplicated pleasure I stripped down to a working singlet and helped Hickory, bringing a gather out of the tank when he needed it and holding the hot glass ready for his use. Hickory typically kept a running commentary for Catherine’s sake and flirted with her mildly, and seldom, I thought, had I more enjoyed a frivolous start to the morning.