by Dick Francis
‘Both right.’
He tossed off his drink neat in two gulps, army fashion, and put down the glass.
‘We can’t give your boys beds, not enough room, but we could do food.’
‘Thanks, Roger. I’m grateful. But there’s enough food in this bus for a battalion, and the battalion’s had a good deal of practice in do-it-yourself.’
Despite his assurances I could see his relief. He was indeed, if anything, more exhausted than myself.
I said, ‘Do me a favour, though?’
‘If I can.’
‘Be vague about my whereabouts tonight? If, say, the police or the Strattons should ask.’
‘Somewhere to the left of Mars do you?’
‘One day,’ I said, ‘I’ll repay you.’
The real world, as Toby would have said, had a go in the morning.
Travelling uncomfortably, I went along with Roger in his jeep to his office beside the parade ring, having left the five boys washing the outside of the bus with buckets of detergent, long-handled brushes and mops and the borrowed use of the Gardners’ outdoor tap and garden hose.
Such mammoth splashy activity terminated always in five contentedly soaked children (they loved water-clown acts in circuses) and an at least half-clean bus. I’d advised Mrs Gardner to go indoors and close her eyes and windows, and after the first bucketful of suds had missed the windscreen and landed on Alan, she’d given me a wild look and taken my advice.
‘Don’t you mind their getting wet?’ Roger asked as we left the scene of potential devastation.
‘They’ve a lot of compressed steam to get rid of,’ I said.
‘You’re an extraordinary father.’
‘I don’t feel it.’
‘How are the cuts?’
‘Ghastly.’
He chuckled, stopped beside the office door and handed me the walking frame once I was on my feet. I would have preferred not to have needed it, but the only strength left anywhere, it seemed, was in my arms.
Although it was barely eight-thirty, the first car-load of trouble drew up on the tarmac before Roger had finished unlocking his office door. He looked over his shoulder to see who had come, and said a heartfelt ‘Bugger!’ as he recognised the transport. ‘Bloody Keith.’
Bloody Keith had not come alone. Bloody Keith had brought with him his Hannah, and Hannah, it transpired, had brought with her her son Jack. The three of them climbed out of Keith’s car and began striding purposefully round to Roger’s office.
He finished unlocking, opened the door, and said to me abruptly, ‘Come inside.’
At walking-frame pace I willingly followed him round towards the far side of his desk where, as it happened, my jacket still hung over the back of his chair, abandoned since the previous morning. A lifetime, almost a deathtime, ago.
Keith, Hannah and Jack crowded in through the door, all three faces angry. Keith had reacted to the sight of me as if to an allergy, and Hannah wouldn’t have admired her own shrewish expression. Jack, a loose-lipped teenager, mirrored his grandfather too thoroughly: handsome and mean.
Keith said, ‘Gardner, get that damned man out of here! And you’re sacked. You’re incompetent. I’m taking over your job, and you can clear out. As for you…’ he turned his glare fully my way, ‘your bloody children had no right to be anyway near the grandstands, and if you’re thinking of suing us because you were stupid enough to get yourself blown up you’ve another think coming.’
I hadn’t thought of it at all, actually. ‘You’ve given me ideas,’ I said rashly.
Roger, too late, made a warning movement with his hand, telling me to cool it, not stir. I had myself seen the speed with which Keith’s violence had risen in him at the shareholders’ meeting, and I remembered the complacency with which I’d reflected that he’d have no physical chance against Madeline’s thirty-five-year-old son.
Things had changed slightly since then. I now needed a walking frame if I were to stay upright. And besides, there were three of them.
CHAPTER 7
Roger said ‘Hell’ under his breath.
I muttered to him similarly, ‘Get out of here.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Keep your job.’
Roger stayed.
Keith kicked the office door shut and though he, for a second or two, seemed to hesitate, Hannah had no doubts or restraints. I was, to her, the hated symbol of every resentment she’d fed and festered on for forty years. Keith, who could and should have soothed from childhood her hurt feelings, had no doubt encouraged them. Hannah’s loathing was beyond her control. A dagger between the shoulder blades… it was there in her eyes.
She came towards me fast in the same leonine stride I’d seen in Rebecca and used her full weight to thrust me back against the wall while at the same time aiming with sharp-clawed fingernails to rip my face.
Roger tried civilised protest. ‘Miss Stratton –’
The stalking cat pounced, oblivious.
I’d have liked to have punched her hard at the base of the sternum and to have slapped her into concussion, but hindering taboos bristled in my subconscious, and maybe I couldn’t floor that particular woman because of Keith’s hitting my mother. My mother, Hannah’s mother. A jumble. In any case, I tried merely to grasp my wretched half-sister’s wrists, which involved taking both my hands off the walking frame, and this gave Keith an opportunity he had no qualms in seizing.
He tweaked up the frame, barged Hannah out of the way and delivered a damaging clout in my direction in the shape of sturdy chromium tubing with black rubber-tipped feet. Not good. On the clipped-shut cuts, rotten.
Roger held onto Keith’s arm to prevent a second strike and I held Hannah’s wrists and tried to avoid her spitting in my face. All in all it had developed into a poorish Saturday morning.
It got worse.
Keith lashed out at Roger with the frame. Roger ducked. Keith swung the tubes round my way and again connected and, what with Hannah tugging furiously to get free and Keith crowding in with the four black-tipped legs aimed roughly now at my stomach, my legs inefficiently decided against continued support and to all intents buckled, so that I wavered and wobbled and in the end folded up ignominiously onto the floor.
Hannah yanked her wrists out of my grasp and put her boot in. Her son, who didn’t even know me, stepped into the fracas and kicked me twice with equal venom, but also without considering any consequences to himself. I grabbed the foot coming forward for a third time and jerked hard, and with a yell of surprise he overbalanced, falling down within my reach.
His bad luck. I grabbed him and hit him crunchingly in the face and banged his head on the floor, which set Hannah screeching over us like a banshee. Her shoes, I learned, had sharp toes and spikes for heels.
I was aware that Roger, somewhere above, was trying to stop the fray, but what the Colonel really needed was a gun.
Keith took his heavy feet to me, stamping and kicking. There were deep shudders in my body under his weight and his savagery. Roger, to his credit, did his best to pull him off, and roughly at that time, and not a moment too soon, the outer door opened again, bringing a welcome interruption.
‘I say,’ a man’s voice bleated, ‘what’s going on here?’
Keith, shaking off Roger’s clutch and undeterred, said, ‘Go away, Ivan. It’s none of your business.’
Ivan, I supposed, might have done as he was told, but on his heels came a much tougher proposition.
Marjorie’s imperious voice rose above the general noise of battle.
‘Keith! Hannah! What on earth do you think you’re doing? Colonel, call the police. Call the police this minute.’
The threat worked instantaneously. Hannah stopped kicking and screeching. Keith, panting, stepped back. Jack slithered away from me on all fours. Roger put the walking frame next to me and stretched out a hand to haul me to my feet. It took him more effort than he’d expected, but by martial perseverance he succeeded. I propped myself upright
on the frame by force of arms and leaned wearily against the wall, and found that not only Ivan and Marjorie had arrived, but also Conrad and Dart.
For a moment of speechlessness Marjorie took stock of things, noting the still scorching fury in Hannah’s manner, the brutish force unspent in Keith and the sullen nose-bleeding vindictiveness of Jack. She glanced at Roger and lastly flicked her gaze over me, head to foot, coming to rest on my face.
‘Disgraceful,’ she said accusingly. ‘Fighting like animals. You ought to know better.’
‘He shouldn’t be here,’ Keith said thickly, and added, lying easily, ‘He punched me. He started it.’
‘He’s broken my nose,’ Jack complained.
‘Don’t tell me he attacked all three of you,’ Dart mocked. ‘Serves you right.’
‘You shut up,’ Hannah told him with bile.
Conrad gave his opinion. ‘He must have done something to start all this. I mean, it’s obvious.’ He became the examining magistrate, the heavyweight of the proceedings, the accuser; pompous.
‘Well, Mr Morris, why precisely did you punch my brother and attack his family? What have you to say?’
Time, I thought, for the prisoner at the bar to defend himself. I swallowed. I felt weak. Also angry enough not to give in to the weakness, or to let them all see it and enjoy it.
When I could trust my voice not to come out as a croak, I said neutrally, ‘I didn’t punch your brother. I did nothing. They had a go at me for being who I am.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Conrad said. ‘People don’t get attacked just for being who they are.’
‘Tell that to the Jews,’ Dart said.
It shocked them all, but not much.
Marjorie Binsham said, ‘Go outside, the lot of you. I will deal with Mr Morris, in here.’ She turned her head to Roger. ‘You too, Colonel. Out.’
Conrad said, it’s not safe –’
‘Rubbish!’ Marjorie interrupted. ‘Off you go.’
They obeyed her, shuffling out without looking at each other, losing face.
‘Close the door,’ she commanded, and Roger, last out, closed it.
She sat down composedly, wearing that day a narrow tailored navy blue overcoat with a white band of collar again showing beneath. The waved white hair, the fragile looking complexion and the piercing hawk eyes, all those were as before.
She inspected me critically. She said, ‘You got yourself blown up yesterday and trampled today. Not very clever, are you?’
‘No.’
‘And get off the wall. You’re bleeding on it.’
‘I’ll paint it, later.’
‘From where, exactly, are you bleeding?’
I explained about the multitude of bruises, cuts and clips. ‘Some of those,’ I said, ‘feel as if they’ve popped open.’
‘I see.’
She seemed for a few moments undecided, not her usual force. Then she said, ‘I will free you, if you like, from our agreement.’
‘Oh?’ I was surprised. ‘No, the agreement stands.’
‘I did not expect you to be hurt.’
I briefly considered things. Hurt, even if grievous, was in some ways immaterial. I ignored it as best I could. Concentrated on anything else.
‘Do you know,’ I asked, ‘who set the explosive?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Which Strattons could have the knowledge?’
‘None of them.’
‘What about Forsyth?’
Shutters came down in her, too.
‘Whatever Forsyth is or isn’t,’ she said, ‘he is not expert in blowing things up.’
‘Does he have a motive for getting someone else to do it?’
After a pause, she said, ‘I don’t think so.’
My forehead was sweating. I put a hand up automatically to wipe it and started swaying, and regripped the walking frame urgently, fighting to regain balance and not to fall down. Too many crushed muscles, too many cut fibres, too much damned battering overall. I stood quietly, breathing deeply, crisis over, my weight on my arms.
‘Sit down,’ Marjorie commanded.
‘That might be worse.’
She stared. I smiled. ‘My children think it funny.’
‘But not.’
‘Not very.’
She said slowly, ‘Are you going to charge Keith with assault? Hannah also?’
I shook my head.
‘Why not? They were kicking you. I saw them.’
‘And would you say so in court?’
She hesitated. She had used the police as a threat to end the fight, but that was all it had been, a threat.
I thought of the pact my mother had made with Lord Stratton, to keep quiet about Keith’s violent behaviour. I had hugely benefited from that silence. My unthought-out instinct was to do the same as my mother.
I said, ‘I will even things one day, with Keith. But not by embroiling you against your family in public. It will be a private matter, between him and me.’
With evident relief and formality, she said, ‘I wish you well.’
There was a brief single wail of a siren outside the window, more an announcement of arrival than of hurry.
The police had arrived anyway. Marjorie Binsham looked not enchanted and I felt very tired, and presently the office door opened to let in far more people than the space had been designed for.
Keith was making abortive attempts to persuade the law that I had caused actual bodily harm to his grandson, Jack.
‘Jack,’ observed Roger calmly, ‘shouldn’t try to kick people when they’re down.’
‘And you,’ Keith said to him viciously, ‘you can clear out. I told you. You’re sacked.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Marjorie snapped. ‘Colonel, you are not sacked. We need you. Please stay here. Only by a majority vote of the board can you be asked to leave, and there will be no such majority.’
‘One of these days, Marjorie,’ Keith said, his voice heavy and shaking with humiliation, ‘I will get rid of you.’
‘Look here, Keith – ’ Conrad began.
‘And you shut up,’ Keith said with hatred, ‘It was you or your blackmailing architect that put paid to the stands.’
Into the shocked silence, which left all Stratton mouths dropping open, the police with bathos consulted a notebook full of pre-arranged agenda and asked which of the family normally drove a dark green six-year-old Granada with rusted near wings.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Dart demanded.
Without answering that question the police presence repeated their own.
‘I do, then,’ Dart said. ‘So what?’
‘And did you drive that car through the main gates of the racecourse at eight-twenty yesterday morning, and did you oblige Mr Harold Quest to leap out of your path to avoid serious injury, and did you make an obscene gesture to him when he protested?’
Dart nearly laughed, and prudently thought better of it at the last moment.
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said.
‘Didn’t do what, sir? Didn’t drive through the gates? Didn’t make Mr Quest leap out of the way? Didn’t make an obscene gesture?’
Dart said unworriedly, ‘I didn’t drive through the main gates at twenty past eight yesterday morning.’
‘But you identified the car, sir…’
‘I wasn’t driving it at eight-twenty yesterday morning. Not through the main gates, here. Not anywhere.’
The police asked the inevitable question, politely.
‘I was in my bathroom, since you ask,’ Dart said, and left his actual activity there to the collective imagination.
I asked, ‘Is Mr Quest a large man with a beard, a knitted hat and a placard reading “HORSES RIGHTS COME FIRST“?’
The policeman admitted, ‘He does answer to that description, yes, sir.’
‘That man!’ exclaimed Marjorie.
‘Should be shot,’ Conrad said.
‘He walks straight out in front of one’s
car,’ Marjorie told the policemen severely. ‘He will, no doubt, achieve his aim in the end.’
‘Which is, madam?’
‘To be knocked down, of course. To fall down artistically at the slightest contact. To suffer for the cause. One has to be j rightfully careful with that sort of man.’
I asked, ‘Are you sure that Mr Quest was actually outside the gates himself at twenty past eight yesterday morning?’
‘He insisted that he was,’ said the policeman.
‘On Good Friday? It’s a day when no one goes to racecourses.’
‘He said he was there.’
I left it. Lack of energy. Dart and the car had gone in and out of the gates often enough for every picketer to be able to describe it down to its tattered rear bumper-sticker, which read, if you can read this, drop back’. Dart had annoyed big beard the day I’d been with him. Big beard, Harold Quest, felt compelled to make trouble. Where lay the truth?
‘And you, Mr Morris…’ The notebook’s pages were flipped over and were consulted. ‘We were told you were to be detained in hospital but when we went to interview you they said you had discharged yourself. They hadn’t officially released you.’
‘Such punitive words!’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Detained and released. As in prison.’
‘We couldn’t find you,’ he complained. ‘No one seemed to know where you’d gone.’
‘Well, I’m here now.’
‘And… er… Mr Jack Stratton alleges that at approximately eight-fifty this morning you attacked him and broke his nose.’
‘Jack Stratton alleges nothing of the sort,’ Marjorie said with certainty. ‘Jack, speak up.’
The sullen young man, dabbing his face with a handkerchief, took note of Marjorie’s piercing displeasure and mumbled he might have walked into a door, like. Despite Keith’s and Hannah’s protestations, the policeman resignedly drew a line across the entry in his notebook and said his superiors wanted information from me on the whereabouts of the explosive charges ‘prior to detonation’. Where, they asked, could I be found?