by Dick Francis
A quarter past eleven.
He had to come. I found that all my muscles were tense, as if I were listening for him with my whole body, not only my ears. I flexed my toes inside my shoes and tried to relax. There were traffic jams, breakdowns, detours, any number of things to delay him. It was a long way, and he could easily have misjudged the time it would take.
Twenty past eleven.
Joanna sighed and stirred. Neither of us spoke for ten minutes. At eleven-thirty, she said again, ‘He isn’t coming.’
I didn’t answer.
At eleven-thirty-three, the sleek cream nose of an Aston Martin slid to a stop at the gate and Maurice Kemp-Lore stepped out. He stretched himself, stiff from driving, and glanced over the front of the cottage. He wore a beautifully cut hacking jacket and cavalry twill trousers, and there was poise and grace in his every movement.
‘Glory, he’s handsome,’ breathed Joanna in my ear. ‘What features! What colouring! Television doesn’t do him justice. It’s difficult to think of anyone who looks so young and noble doing any harm.’
‘He’s thirty-three,’ I said, ‘and Nero died at twenty-nine.’
‘You know the oddest things,’ she murmured.
Kemp-Lore unlatched the garden gate, walked up the short path and banged the knocker on the front door.
We stood up. Joanna picked a piece of hay off her skirt, swallowed, gave me a half-smile, and walked unhurriedly into the hall. I followed her and stood against the wall where I would be hidden when the front door opened.
Joanna licked her lips.
‘Go on,’ I whispered.
She put her hand on the latch, and opened the door.
‘Mrs Jones?’ the honey voice said. ‘I’m so sorry I’m a little late.’
‘Won’t you come in, Mr Kemp-Lore,’ said Joanna in her cockney suburban accent. ‘It’s ever so nice to see you.’
‘Thank you,’ he said stepping over the threshold. Joanna took two paces backwards and Kemp-Lore followed her into the hall.
Slamming the front door with my foot, I seized Kemp-Lore from behind by both elbows, pulling them backwards and forcing him forwards at the same time. Joanna opened the door of Buttonhook’s room and I brought my foot up into the small of Kemp-Lore’s back and gave him an almighty push. He staggered forwards through the door and I had a glimpse of him sprawling face downwards in the straw before I had the door shut again and the padlock firmly clicking into place.
‘That was easy enough,’ I said with satisfaction. ‘Thanks to your help.’
Kemp-Lore began kicking the door.
‘Let me out,’ he shouted. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘He didn’t see you,’ said Joanna softly.
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘I think we’ll leave him in ignorance while I take you into Newbury to catch the train.’
‘Is it safe?’ she said, looking worried.
‘I won’t be away long,’ I promised. ‘Come on.’
Before driving her down to Newbury I moved Kemp-Lore’s car along and off the lane until it was hidden in the bushes. The last thing I wanted was some stray inquisitive local inhabitant going along to the cottage to investigate. Then I took Joanna to the station and drove straight back again, a matter of twenty minutes each way, and parked in the bushes as usual.
Walking quietly I went along the side of the cottage and round to the back.
Kemp-Lore’s hands stuck out through the glassless window frames, gripping the water pipe bars and shaking them vigorously. They had not budged in their cement.
He stopped abruptly when he saw me and I watched the anger in his face change to blank surprise.
‘Who did you expect?’ I said.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘Some damn fool of a woman locked me in here nearly an hour ago and went away and left me. You can let me out. Quickly.’ His breath wheezed sharply in his throat. ‘There’s a horse in here,’ he said looking over his shoulder, ‘and they give me asthma.’
‘Yes,’ I said steadily, without moving. ‘Yes. I know.’
It hit him then. His eyes widened.
‘It was you … who pushed me …’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He stood staring at me through the criss-cross of window frames and bars.
‘You did it on purpose? You put me in here with a horse on purpose?’ His voice rose.
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘Why?’ he cried. He must have known the answer already, but when I didn’t reply he said again, almost in a whisper, ‘Why?’
‘I’ll give you half an hour to think about it,’ I said, turning to walk away.
‘No,’ he exclaimed. ‘My asthma’s bad. Let me out at once.’ I turned back and stood close to the window. His breath whistled fiercely, but he had not even loosened his collar and tie. He was in no danger.
‘Don’t you have some pills?’ I said.
‘Of course. I’ve taken them. But they won’t work with a horse so close. Let me out.’
‘Stand by the window,’ I said, ‘and breathe the fresh air.’
‘It’s cold,’ he objected. ‘This place is like an ice house.’
I smiled. ‘Maybe it is,’ I said. ‘But then you are fortunate … you can move about to keep warm, and you have your jacket on … and I have not poured three bucketfuls of cold water over your head.’
He gasped sharply, and it was then, I think, that he began to realise that he was not going to escape lightly or easily from his prison.
Certainly, when I returned to him after sitting on the hay bale for half an hour listening to him alternately kicking the door and yelling for help out of the window, he was no longer assuming that I had lured him all the way from London and gone to the trouble of converting a cottage room into a loose box merely to set him free again at his first squawk.
When I walked round to the window I found him fending off Buttonhook, who was putting her muzzle affectionately over his shoulder. I laughed callously, and he nearly choked with rage.
‘Get her away from me,’ he screamed. ‘She won’t leave me alone. I can’t breathe.’
He clung on to a bar with one hand, and chopped at Buttonhook with the other.
‘If you don’t make so much noise she’ll go back to her hay.’
He glared at me through the bars, his face distorted with rage and hate and fright. His asthma was much worse. He had unbuttoned the neck of his shirt and pulled down his tie and I could see his throat heaving.
I put the box of sugar cubes I was carrying on the inner window-sill, withdrawing my hand quickly as he made a grab at it.
‘Put some sugar on her hay,’ I said. ‘Go on.’ I added, as he hesitated, ‘this lot isn’t doped.’
His head jerked up. I looked bitterly into his staring eyes.
‘Twenty-eight horses,’ I said, ‘starting with Shantytown. Twenty-eight sleepy horses who all ate some sugar from your hand before they raced.’
Savagely he picked up the box of sugar, tore it open, and sprinkled the cubes on the pile of hay at the other end of the room. Buttonhook, following him, put her head down and began to crunch. He came back to the window, wheezing laboriously.
‘You won’t get away with this,’ he said. ‘You’ll go to jail for this. I’ll see you’re pilloried for this.’
‘Save your breath,’ I said brusquely. ‘I’ve a good deal to say to you. After that, if you want to complain to the police about the way I’ve treated you, you’re welcome.’
‘You’ll be in jail so quick you won’t know what hit you,’ he said, the breath hissing through his teeth. ‘Now, hurry up and say whatever it is you want to say.’
‘Hurry?’ I said slowly. ‘Well now, it’s going to take some time.’
‘You’ll have to let me out by two-thirty at the latest,’ he said unguardedly. ‘I’ve got rehearsals today at five.’
I smiled at him. I could feel it wasn’t a pleasant smile.
I said, ‘It isn’t an accide
nt that you are here on Friday.’
His jaw literally dropped. ‘The programme …’ he said.
‘Will have to go on without you,’ I agreed.
‘But you can’t,’ he shouted, gasping for enough breath, ‘you can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’ I said mildly.
‘It’s … it’s television,’ he shouted, as if I didn’t know. ‘Millions of people are expecting to see the programme.’
‘Then millions of people are going to be disappointed,’ I said.
He stopped shouting and took three gulping, wheezing breaths.
‘I know,’ he said, with a visible effort at moderation and at getting back to normal, ‘that you don’t really mean to keep me here so long that I can’t get to the studio in time for the programme. All right then,’ he paused for a couple of wheezes, ‘if you let me go in good time for the rehearsals, I won’t report you to the police as I threatened. I’ll overlook all this.’
‘I think you had better keep quiet and listen,’ I said. ‘I suppose you find it hard to realise that I don’t give a damn for your influence or the pinnacle the British public have seen fit to put you on, or your dazzling, synthetic personality. They are a fraud. Underneath there is only a sick mess of envy and frustration and spite. But I wouldn’t have found you out if you hadn’t doped twenty-eight horses I rode and told everyone I had lost my nerve. And you can spend this afternoon reflecting that you wouldn’t be missing your programme tonight if you hadn’t tried to stop me riding Template.’
He stood stock still, his face pallid and suddenly sweating.
‘You mean it,’ he whispered.
‘Indeed I do,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. A muscle in his cheek started twitching. ‘No. You can’t. You did ride Template … you must let me do the programme.’
‘You won’t be doing any more programmes,’ I said. ‘Not tonight or any night. I didn’t bring you here just for a personal revenge, though I don’t deny I felt like killing you last Friday night. I brought you here on behalf of Art Mathews and Peter Cloony and Grant Oldfield. I brought you because of Danny Higgs, and Ingersoll, and every other jockey you have hit where it hurts. In various ways you saw to it that they lost their jobs; so now you are going to lose yours.’
For the first time, he was speechless. His lips moved but no sound came out except the high, asthmatic whine of his breathing. His eyes seemed to fall back in their sockets and his lower jaw hung slack, making hollows of his cheeks. He looked like a death’s-head caricature of the handsome charmer he had been.
I took the long envelope addressed to him out of my pocket and held it to him through the bars. He took it mechanically, with black fingers.
‘Open it,’ I said.
He pulled out the sheets of paper and read them. He read them through twice, though his face showed from the first that he understood the extent of the disaster. The haggard hollows deepened.
‘As you will see,’ I said, ‘those are photostat copies. More like them are in the post to the Senior Steward and to your boss at Universal Telecast, and to several other people as well. They will get them tomorrow morning. And they will no longer wonder why you failed to turn up for your programme tonight.’
He still seemed unable to speak, and his hands shook convulsively. I passed to him through the bars the rolled up portrait Joanna had drawn of him. He opened it, and it was clearly another blow.
‘I brought it to show you,’ I said, ‘so that you would realise beyond any doubt that I know exactly what you have been doing. All along you have found that having an instantly recognisable face was a big handicap when it came to doing things you couldn’t explain away, like ramming an old Jaguar across Peter Cloony’s lane.’
His head jerked back, as if it still surprised him that I knew so much.
I said calmly, ‘A ticket collector at Cheltenham said you were pretty.’
I smiled faintly. He looked very far from pretty at that moment.
‘As for that Jaguar,’ I said, ‘I haven’t had time yet to find out where it came from, but it can be done. It’s only a question of asking. Advertising its number in the trade papers … tracing its former owner … that sort of thing. Tedious, I dare say, but definitely possible, and if necessary I will do it. No one would forget having you for a customer.
‘You must have bought it in the week after the tank carrier blocked Cloony’s lane, because that is what gave you the idea. Do you think you can explain away the time sequence of acquiring the Jaguar and abandoning it exactly where and when and how you did? And disappearing from the scene immediately afterwards?’
His mouth hung open and the muscle twitched in his cheek.
‘Most of your vicious rumours,’ I said, changing tack, ‘were spread for you by Corin Kellar and John Ballerton, who you found would foolishly repeat every thought that you put into their heads. I hope you know Corin well enough to realise that he never stands by his friends. When the contents of the letter he will receive in the morning sink into that rat-brain of his, and he finds that other people have had letters like it, there won’t be anyone spewing out more damaging truth about you than him. He will start telling everyone, for instance, that it was you who set him at loggerheads with Art Mathews. There won’t be any stopping him.’
‘You see,’ I finished after a pause, ‘I think it is only justice that as far as possible you should suffer exactly what you inflicted on other people.’
He spoke at last. The words came out in a wheezing croak, and he was past caring what admissions he made. ‘How did you find it out?’ he said disbelievingly. ‘You didn’t know last Friday, you couldn’t see …’
‘I did know last Friday,’ I said, ‘I knew just how far you had gone to smash Peter Cloony, and I knew you hated me enough to give yourself asthma doping my mounts. I knew the dope business had gone sour on you when it came to Turniptop at Stratford. And you may care to learn that it was no accident that James Axminster jogged your arm and stepped on the sugar lumps; I asked him to, and told him what you were doing. I knew all about your curdled, obsessive jealousy of jockeys. I didn’t need to see you last Friday to know you … there wasn’t anyone else with any reason to want me out of action.’
‘You can’t have known all that,’ he said obstinately, clinging to it as if it mattered. ‘You didn’t know the next day when I interviewed you after the race …’ His voice trailed off in a wheeze and he stared at me hopelessly through the bars.
‘You aren’t the only one who can smile and hate at the same time,’ I said neutrally. ‘I learned it from you.’
He made a sound like a high-pitched moan, and turned his back towards me with his arms bent upwards and folded over his head in an attitude of the utmost misery and despair. It may be regrettable, but I felt no pity for him at all.
I walked away from his window, round the cottage and in at the front door, and sat down again on the hay in the front room. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two. The afternoon stretched lengthily ahead.
Kemp-Lore had another spell of screaming for help through the window, but no one came; then he tried the door again, but there was no handle on his side of it for him to pull, and it was too solidly constructed for him to kick his way through. Buttonhook grew restive again from the noise and started pawing the ground, and Kemp-Lore shouted to me furiously to let him out, let him out, let him out.
Joanna’s great fear had been that his asthma would make him seriously ill, and she had repeatedly warned me to be careful; but I judged that while he had enough breath for so much yelling he was in no real danger, and I sat and listened to him without relenting. The slow hours passed, punctuated only by the bursts of fury from the back room, while I stretched myself comfortably across the hay and day-dreamed about marriage to my cousin.
At about five o’clock he was quiet for a long time. I got up and walked round the outside of the cottage and looked in through the window. He was lying face down in the straw near the door, not movin
g at all.
I watched him for a few minutes and called his name, but as he still did not stir I began to be alarmed, and decided I would have to make sure he was all right. I returned to the hall, and having shut the front door firmly behind me, I unlocked the padlock on the back room. The door swung inwards, and Buttonhook, lifting her head, greeted me with a soft whinny.
Kemp-Lore was alive, that at least was plain. The sound of his high, squeezed breath rose unmistakably from his still form. I bent down beside him to see into just how bad a spasm he had been driven, but I never did get around to turning him over or feeling his pulse. As soon as I was down on one knee beside him he heaved himself up and into me, knocking me sprawling off balance, and sprang like lightning for the door.
I caught his shoe as it zipped across three inches from my face and yanked him back. He fell heavily on top of me and we rolled towards Buttonhook, with me trying to pin him down on the floor and he fighting like a tiger to get free. The mare was frightened. She cowered back against the wall to get out of our way, but it was a small room and our struggles took us among Buttonhook’s feet and under her belly. She stepped gingerly over us and made cautiously for the open door.
Kemp-Lore’s left hand was clamped round my right wrist, a circumstance which hindered me considerably. If he’d been clairvoyant he couldn’t have struck on anything better calculated to cause me inconvenience. I hit him in the face and neck with my left hand, but I was too close to get any weight behind it and was also fairly occupied dodging the blows he aimed at me in return.
After he had lost the advantage of surprise, he seemed to decide he could only get free of me by lacing his fingers in my hair and banging my head against the wall, for this he tried repeatedly to do. He was staggeringly strong, more than I would have believed possible in view of his asthma, and the fury and desperation which fired him blazed in his blue eyes like a furnace.