by Dick Francis
The trophy horse, though, hadn’t been blown on purpose from the inside, it had split violently apart along the internal stress lines caused by the pulling and stretching as the glass cooled, the outer regions cooling faster than the inner core. The splinters had still been fiercely hot when they’d dug into the first thing they met. Adam Force had been lucky not to lose an eye.
Norman Osprey, kneeling in spite of his antipathy towards the source of good advice, had survived the shattering of the horse with his skin intact, if not his temper.
Although pale and slightly shaking, the Elvis lookalike still clung to the doctrine of “Get Logan.” In consequence he’d risen from his knees and planted his gorilla shoulders close inside the gallery-to-street door, making an exit that way a matter of hand-to-hand fighting and a toss-up whether I won or lost. A hand-to-hand fight against that visibly dramatic strength would have been daunting always but in my tottery state of that moment, even if I’d wanted to quit the scene, which I didn‘t, a win would have been impossible. As long as Norman Osprey thought he was usefully stationed where he was doing me no good, however, I could count him one less trouble to deal with, and be grateful.
Eddie, who seemed not to understand what had happened, was still on his knees beside the wall. Martin’s valet who, with his stubborn misconceptions, had accompanied Rose on this whole unholy tape hunt, now looked as though he were begging absolution. To my mind he certainly failed to deserve it.
Pamela Jane heaved herself from under me in a troubled dilemma as she couldn’t decide whether to thank me for saving her from razor-sharp damage since, in the chair, she’d been in a direct line to be peppered, or to revile me for leaving Hickory to take whatever came his way in the blast.
Pamela Jane, of course, had understood the physics of stress and strain in superheated glass, and she would now be sure I’d intended to shatter the horse from the moment I’d started to make it. She would be puzzling over the nonsense of the gold delivery, both the amount and the timing, because, as she confessed to me much later, it had all been so unlike me. She had believed every word I’d said to Rose, and now she felt a fool.
“Dear Pam J,” I contentedly said, “you were sincerely a great help.”
That was afterwards. At the time, during the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the trophy horse, she still worried over the outcome for Hickory.
When I stood up and looked over the half-wall to see what shape Rose and Hickory were in, I found Rose bleeding down one leg but still shaking with determined fury while she shoved a clean punty iron into the tank and drew out a second one already tipped with white-hot hate.
Hickory, who had finally succeeded in flinging himself out of the chair altogether, lay facedown on the smooth brick floor trying to rub the adhesive off his mouth. Tears from the pain of his damaged ear seemed to be running helplessly down inside his nose, and he was trying to deal with that by sniffing.
Sharply aware that at some point somewhere Rose had succeeded in drawing a line of fire across my own lower back ribs, I felt I’d already had enough for one morning of the unequal combat.
Rose hadn’t. Rose, it seemed, had energy in stock for a third world war. As she drew her loaded iron with speed from the fire, she told me that if I didn’t get back at once into the workshop the burn to Hickory’s ear would be only the beginning. She could have freed him. She could at least have helped him, but she didn’t.
I went around the half-wall. Hickory still lay facedown on the floor, but instead of rubbing his face raw without results, he was now thrashing his legs instead. Hurting and helpless, he was in no immediate danger from Rose, who chose to advance on me, holding the silvery black five-foot-long punty iron loaded and ready to strike if I didn’t dodge fast enough.
“Adam Force’s videotape,” she said. “Where is it?”
Short of breath from evading deep burns so long, I managed dry-mouthed to reply, “He said he’d rerecorded it with horse races.”
“Rubbish.” Rose advanced towards me with the white-hot ball of glass inexorably leading the way. Had we been armed the other way around, I could with two cuts of heavy scissors have sliced the ball into a pointed spear. The spear, if one thrust it fiercely, would burn a path right through a body, searing, cauterizing and killing. Rose had no spear but a ball was bad enough. Its effect would be the same.
With at least some sort of plan I backed away from Rose and her deadly fire, cursing that I couldn’t reach the five or six punty irons lying idle to one side, irons I could at least have used to fence with, because Hickory with his shocking wound lay suffering in my way.
Rose began again to enjoy compelling me to retreat step by backwards step. Backwards past the furnace, its trapdoor shut. Backwards across the workshop, faster as she increased her pace.
“The videotape,” she demanded. “Where is it?”
At last, at last, I saw Worthington again outside the gallery door, Worthington this time flanked by Tom Pigeon, Jim, Catherine and her hobo partner, Pernickety Paul.
Norman Osprey, suddenly not liking the odds, stood back to let them in and dived fast around them out into the street. I had a last glimpse of him as he set off down the hill with Tom and his three four-legged companions in pursuit.
The two plainclothes officers and, with Worthington and Jim, filled the doorway he’d left. Furiously seeing the advent of my friends as her last chance to make me remember her for life, Rose rushed recklessly at my abdomen. I sidestepped and dodged yet again and ran and swerved, and ended where I’d aimed for, beside the wide round pots of colored powders on the stock shelves.
It was the white color I wanted, the dust the Germans called Emaill weiss. I snatched off the lid and plunged my hand into the open pot, grabbed as much dust as I could in one handful and threw it at Rose’s eyes.
Emaill weiss—white enamel ground to dust—contained arsenic ... and arsenic dust made eyes blur and water and go temporarily and effectively blind. Rose, her eyes streaming, her sight gone, went on sweeping around with her petrifying length of death-bearing punty iron.
Eddie seemingly rose from his prayers and walked around the half-wall pleading with her to be still. “Rose, dear girl, it’s over...”
But nothing would stop her. Blinded for a while she might be, but she lashed out with the killing iron at where she’d last seen me, trying still to penetrate my stomach or chest, then wildly slashing at where my head had been.
Missing me didn’t stop her being more dangerous blundering about than if she could see me, and finally, disastrously, the unimaginably hot glass connected twice with living flesh.
There were screams chokingly cut off.
It was Eddie, her father, that incredibly she had hit first. She had seared the skin from his fingers as he had held them in front of his face to defend himself. There were crashes of iron against walls and a fearful soft sizzling as the worst of all calamities happened.
Pamela Jane hysterically threw herself into my arms and hid her face, but it wasn’t she who had burned. From across the workshop, where the air again smelled of funeral pyre, Paul folded to the ground and lay motionless, his limbs sprawling in the haphazardness of death.
Catherine in a state of shock and anger stared hollow-eyed in disbelief. I stretched an arm towards her and hugged both girls as if I could never let them go.
Adam Force came to stand against the safe side of the wall into the workshop and begged Rose to stand still and let someone—like himself—come to help her and her father, with the only result that she changed direction towards his voice, lashing through the air in great sweeps of the punty iron.
Catherine, a police officer to the bone, stiffened after her first need for comfort and, with Rose following the sound of her voice, walked away from me and called her station urgently for backup. Stifling human terror, she spoke tightly on her personal radio. “Officer down,” she said, pushing the transit button. “Red call. Red call. Officer in need of immediate assistance.”
She reported the address of Logan Glass, and then and with less formality, and genuine extreme emotion, added, “Come at once. Dear God.”
She dodged Rose’s rushing speed and with incredible bravery knelt down beside her silent hobo partner. The plainclothes inhabitant of doorways, whose name to me had never been more than “Pernickety Paul,” would catch no more villains. Pernickety Paul had taken a long white-hot direct hit through his neck.
I disentangled myself from Pamela Jane and half ran across the room away from Catherine and called to Rose, “I’m here, Rose. I’m over here and you’ll never catch me.”
Rose turned half circle my way and pivoted once more when I jumped past her again and yelled at her. She turned again and again and finally began to tire enough with her blurring eyes for Worthington and Jim to reach my side and for Catherine to come up behind us, and for the four of us to grab Rose at high speed and immobilize her still-slashing punty iron arm. I wrestled the iron a good safe way away from her, feeling the heat of it near my legs, but not on my skin, and still she went on struggling in Worthington’s and Jim’s grasp.
The police side of Catherine flowed in her like a strong tide. She sought and found the handcuffs carried by Pernickety Paul on a belt around his waist. She clicked them roughly onto Rose’s wrists behind her back, the metal bands squeezed tight against her skin.
Rose kicked.
“Take my belt,” Worthington shouted, and I unbuckled his pliable woven leather belt and tied it around one ankle and knotted it to the other, until she overbalanced and lay on her side on the floor, thrashing her legs still and cursing.
There was nothing about “going quietly” in the arrest of Rose Payne. An ambulance with paramedics and two cars full of bristling young police officers drew up outside the gallery and filled Logan Glass, crunching the fragments of the shattered horse to dust under their heavy boots. They talked with Catherine and fetched a blanket in which they rolled Rose like a baby in swaddling clothes and, with her struggling to the end, they manhandled her out through the showroom and gallery door and shoved her into the back of one of the police cars.
Spitting fury, she was soon joined there by the burly Norman Osprey, whose muscles had been no match for three sets of canine fangs. Tom told me later that the big man had sat in the road quivering with fear, his head and hands between his legs, begging for the police to rescue him from the black snarls circling around him.
In the workshop I watched as Catherine, dry-eyed, brought another blanket in from a police car to cover the silence of Paul.
More police arrived, some in uniform and others in plainclothes more suitable for a Sunday in front of the television than a trip to a fiery hell on earth. Off duty or not, some things demanded attendance. White overalls and gray plastic shoe covers were produced and soon the workshop took on the look of unreal science fiction.
I watched a policeman wearing surgical rubber gloves carefully lift the fallen syringe and place it gingerly in a clear plastic bag, which he sealed.
Methodically the police began to sort and list names, and it was the Dragon across the road who offered solace and recovery with a warm heart. One of the police officers removed the tape from Pamela Jane’s wrists, took her personal details, and then with a solicitous arm helped her to the hotel.
I knelt beside Hickory. I told him I was going to remove the sticky strips from his eyes and mouth. I asked him if he understood.
Hickory nodded and stopped struggling against the floor.
As humanely as possible I pulled the tape from his eyes. It painfully came off with eyelashes attached and it was several minutes before his long-obstructed sight cleared and he was staring straight at me beside him.
“I’m going to take the tape off your mouth,” I said.
He nodded.
One of the young police officers stretched a hand down over my shoulder and with a lack of sensitivity simply ripped the strong tape off. Hickory yelled and went on yelling, telling the police officer to free his taped-together hands, and to hurry up.
I left them for a moment and brought the first-aid box from the stock shelves to put a dressing on Hickory’s ear, and after a good deal of chat, the paramedics and the police decided together that he should go to the hospital along with Eddie, who was now deep in shock with hands that had already blistered badly.
Catherine stood by the ambulance’s open door watching Eddie being helped aboard for treatment.
I told her other things she ought to know, extra things about Blackmask Four that had come to me during the night, that I hadn’t mentioned in the dawn.
She said thoughtfully, “Our superintendent is that man standing beside Paul. I think you’d better talk to him. I have to go to the police station. I’ll come back here when I can....”
She took me across the room, introduced me as the owner of the place and left me to deepen the frown of the top brass.
I shook hands with Superintendent Shepherd of the West Mercia police.
First of all he looked with disenchantment at my singlet, now no longer white and clean but grubby from constant contact with workshop clutter. He took in the singed piece of cloth hanging loose in the lower ribs area where Rose’s relentless attentions had connected. He asked if the reddened skin beneath was painful and I tiredly said yes, it was, but I’d had worse burns in the past and would prefer to ignore it; but, I added to myself, burns had always before been accidentally self-inflicted.
I looked down at the blanket over Pernickety Paul, the fusspot who had cared like a father for Catherine’s safety in the violent streets.
“He was a good policeman,” I said.
The superintendent let a small silence ride by before mentioning comeuppance for the perpetrator. He would need me to proceed to the police station to make a statement which would be videotaped and in every way recorded. Judiciously he agreed I could cover the burns with dressings and restore my shirt on top, and then, reluctantly, he also agreed I could hang my coat over my shoulders so as not to freeze out of doors.
During this display of humanity George Lawson-Young arrived, and with his presence transformed the general police atmosphere from suspicion to common sense. He was the sort of deeply respected man that other men in authority instinctively trusted. When he greeted and treated me with noticeably high levels of deference, my standing with the super took a slow drift upwards. I thought he went so far after a while as to believe what I said.
George Lawson-Young asked me as if expecting the answer “Yes,” “Did you work out the identity of the fourth man who assaulted you outside here on the sidewalk two weeks ago?”
“Yes.”
He knew that answer in advance, as I had told him that morning on the telephone. I had used his search-and-discard method to sort out truth from lies, and to go carefully down the cul-de-sacs, but however flatly I said the name, it would cause consternation.
The professor, tall, tidy and nearsighted, made a slow visual inspection of the damage to the most familiar of faces turned his way. No one tried to hurry him, not even the superintendent.
Adam Force, his facial bleeding down from Niagara to a trickle, had wandered dizzily into the workshop from the showroom and was standing beside Hickory, looking down on him as, on his knees, Hickory cradled his mutilated ear.
When Adam Force saw the professor he looked as if he would prefer to evaporate rather than be in the same room as his onetime boss, and George, usually the most forgiving of men, produced a thoroughly baleful glare with no pity component for his expert practitioner of treason.
One of the policemen in white overalls asked Doctor Force his name and address while another took his photograph. The flash seemed to startle him and, with a blood-red rivulet still meandering down his cheek into his beard, he looked far from the assured physician I had first met on the hill at Lynton.
A spent Force, I thought ironically.
The photographer moved on, snapping under the direction of the Scene-of-Crime Officer. Not
hing was to be missed. Pernickety Paul would have been proud.
It was George Lawson-Young, saying he was hoping I’d done enough for him for the next thousand years, who related to the superintendent step by step how the data stolen from his research laboratory had caused me so much pain and trouble.
Naming each person in turn to identify them for the policeman’s sake, and referring back to me for confirmation when he needed it, George quietly threaded his way through the complexities of January 2000.
“Adam Force,” he said, pointing at Dr. Bright-Scarlet-Beard, “worked for me but jumped ship and stole the cancer research that just may be worth millions and would certainly be to the advantage of the whole world.”
I could see the superintendent begin to be skeptical but I nodded and he focused back on the professor.
“We knew,” George went on, “that he had stolen the information, had transferred it to a videotape and had destroyed all other records of our research. Understandably, we searched everywhere for it, even engaging private investigators, after the police had shown little interest.”
Superintendent Shepherd flinched not at all but continued listening intently.
“All our searches were in vain. We did not expect him to have entrusted the tape to the safekeeping of a jockey. Doctor Force had passed it to Martin Stukely but Stukely preferred to hand it on to his friend Gerard Logan here away from the fingers of his own children. As perhaps you know, Martin Stukely was killed at Cheltenham races on New Year’s Eve. But the tape had already begun its tortuous journey by then. Adam Force tried to steal it back. Tapes were stolen from here, from Gerard’s home and from the home of Martin Stukely.”
“Were we informed of those thefts?” asked the policeman.
“Yes,” I replied, “but the theft of a few videotapes for no apparent reason hardly brought the law out like today.”
“Hmm,” replied the superintendent, knowing it was true.