by Dick Francis
A young woman sitting behind a computer stood up with unaffected welcome.
“Benedict!”
I said, “Crystal?” tentatively.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she said, edging around her desk to give me a kiss. “It’s such ages since you were here.”
A great change here too had taken place. She was no longer thin and anxious, but rounded and secure; and she wore a wedding ring, I saw.
They gave me coffee and local news, and I read with interest what the Gazette had made of SHOUT! “An unfair attack on our MP through his son. No truth in this allegation ... shocking ... libelous ... retractions and regrets are in the pipeline.”
“The by-line in SHOUT! says Usher Rudd,” Mervyn pointed. “Vicious little nerd.”
“Actually,” I said as their indignation boiled on, “I came hoping to see Orinda, but she doesn’t answer her phone.”
“Oh, dear,” Crystal said, “she isn’t here. She went away for the weekend. She won’t be back till Monday.”
They didn’t know where she’d gone.
I’d made a short list of people I aimed to see. Mervyn, helpful with addresses, knew where to find Isobel Bethune at her sister’s house in Wales, and as she—telephoned—was not only at home but would be glad to see me, I drove to Cardiff that afternoon and discovered Paul Bethune’s rejuvenated wife in a pretty town house in the suburbs.
I’d never before seen her happy. She, too, was a different woman: the gray lines of worry had smoothed into peaches and cream.
It was she, however, who exclaimed, “How you’ve changed. You’ve grown older.”
“It happens.” .
Her sister had gone shopping. I sat with Isobel and listened to her remembering for my benefit how Usher Rudd had uncovered her husband’s bimbo affair.
“Usher Rudd just dug away and wrote it up sensationally, but it was all Paul’s fault. Men are such bloody fools. He confessed to me in sniveling tears in the end that he’d boasted—boasted, I ask you—to some stranger that he was playing golf with, that he was having an affair his wife didn’t know about. Snigger, snigger. Can you believe it? And that stranger turned out to be that weird nobody that was always hanging about ’round the Nagles. He used to play golf with Dennis.”
“His name’s Wyvern.”
“Yes, I know that now. When Dennis died, that Wyvern person wanted to make sure Orinda got elected, so he arranged to play golf with Paul, to see where Paul was weakest. I hated Usher Rudd, but it wasn’t until after your father got elected that Paul broke down and told me what had happened.” She sighed. “I was shattered then, but I don’t care now, isn’t that odd?”
“How are your sons?”
She laughed. “They’ve joined the army. Best place for them. They sometimes send postcards. You’re the only one that was kind to me in those days.”
I left her with a kiss on the peaches-and-cream cheek and drove tiredly back to Hoopwestern for the night, staying in Polly’s house in the woods and eating potted shrimps from her freezer.
On Saturday morning I went to the police station and asked to see Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, whose mother drove a school bus.
Joe Duke appeared questioningly.
“George Juliard’s son? You look older.”
Joe Duke was still a detective sergeant, but his mother no longer drove a bus. “She’s into rabbits,” he said. He took me into a bare little interview room, explaining he was the senior officer on duty and couldn’t leave the station.
He thoughtfully repeated my question. “Do I know if that fire you could have died in was arson? It’s all of five years ago.”
“A bit more. But you must have files,” I said.
“I don’t need files. Mostly fires in the night are from cigarettes or electrical shorts, but none of you smoked and the place had been rewired. Is this off the record?”
“On the moon.”
A dedicated policeman in his thirties, Joe had a broad face, a Dorset accent and a realistic attitude to human failings. “Amy used to let tramps sleep above the charity shop sometimes, but not that night, she says, though that’s the official and easy theory of the cause of fire. They say a vagrant was lighting candles downstairs and knocked them over, and then ran away. Nonsense, really. But the fire did start, the firefighters reckoned, in the charity shop, and the back door there wasn’t bolted, and both shops of the old place were lined and partitioned with dry old wood, though they’ve rebuilt it with brick and concrete now, and it’s awash with smoke alarms. Anyway, I suppose you heard the theory that crazy Leonard Kitchens set light to the place to frighten your father off so that Orinda Nagle could be our MP?”
“I’ve heard. What do you think?”
“It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”
“But still ...”
“I think he did it. I questioned him, see? But we hadn’t a flicker of evidence.”
“And what about the gun in The Sleeping Dragon’s gutter?”
“No one knows who put it there.”
“Leonard Kitchens?”
“He swears he didn’t. And he’s heavy and slow. It needed someone pretty agile to put that gun up high.”
“Did you ever find out where the rifle came from?”
“No. we didn’t,” he said. “They’re so common. They’ve been used in the Olympics for donkey’s years. They’re licensed and locked away and accounted for these days, but in the past ... and theft ...” He shrugged. “It isn’t as if it had killed anyone.”
I said, “What’s the penalty for attempted murder?”
“Do you mean a deliberate attempt that didn’t come off?”
“Mm.”
“Same as murder.”
“A 10-1b. penalty?”
“Ten years,” he said.
From the police station I drove out to the ring road and stopped in the forecourt of Basil Rudd’s car-repair outfit. I walked up the stairs into his glass-walled office that gave him a comprehensive view over his wide workshop below, only half-busy on Saturday morning.
“Sorry,” he said without looking up. “We close at noon on Saturdays. Can’t do anything for you till Monday.”
He was still disconcertingly like his cousin; red hair and freckles and a combative manner.
“I don’t want my car fixed,” I said. “I want to find Usher Rudd.”
It was as though I had jabbed him with a needle. He looked up and said, “Who are you? Why do you want him?”
I told him who and why. I asked him if he remembered the Range Rover’s questionable sump plug, but his recollection was hazy. He was quite sharply aware, though, of the political damage that could be done to a father by a son’s disgrace. He had a copy of SHOUT! on his desk, inevitably open at the center pages.
“That’s me,” I said, pointing at the photograph of the jockey. “Your cousin is lying. The Gazette sacked him for lying once before, and I’m doing my best to get him finally discredited—struck off, or whatever it’s called in newspaper-speak-for what is called dishonorable conduct. So where is he?”
Basil Rudd looked helpless. “How should I know?”
“Find out,” I said forcefully. “You’re a Rudd. Someone in the Rudd clan must know where to find its most notorious son.”
“He’s brought us nothing but trouble. . . .”
“Find him,” I said, “and your troubles may end.”
He stretched out a hand to the telephone, saying, “It may take ages. And it’ll cost you.”
“I’ll pay your phone bills,” I said. “When you find him, leave a message on the answering machine at my father’s headquarters. Here’s the number.” I gave him a card. “Don’t waste time. It’s urgent.”
I went next to The Sleeping Dragon to see the manager. He had been newly installed there at the time of the by-election, but perhaps because of that he had a satisfactorily clear recollection of the night someone had fired a gun into the cobbled square. He didn’t, of course, remember me personally, but
he was honored, he said, to be on first-name terms with my father.
“There were so many people coming and going on that night, and I was only beginning to know who was who. Someone left a set of golf clubs in my office and said they were Dennis Nagle’s but, of course, the poor man was dead and I didn’t know what to do with them, but I offered them to Mrs. Nagle and she said she thought they belonged to her husband’s friend, Mr. Wyvern, so I gave them to him.” He frowned. “It was so long ago. I’m afraid I’m not being much help.”
I left him and walked upstairs and from the little lounge over the main lobby looked down again onto the cobbled square where, on that first night, my father and I had by good luck not been shot.
Golf clubs ...
Mervyn Teck, at the end of a busy morning surgery, told me where to find Leonard and Mrs. Kitchens, and on Saturday afternoon, without enthusiasm, I found their semi-detached substantial house on the outskirts of the town.
The house, its lack of imagination, and the disciplined front garden were all somehow typical of a heavy worthiness: no manic sign of an arsonist.
Mrs. Kitchens opened the front door at my ring, and after a moment’s hesitation for recognition, said, “My Leonard isn’t in, I’m afraid.”
She took me into a front sitting room where the air smelled as if it had been undisturbed for weeks, and talked with bitterness and freedom about “her Leonard’s” infatuation for Orinda.
“My Leonard would have done anything for that woman. He still would.”
“Er ... ,” I said, “looking back to that fire at the party headquarters ...”
“Leonard said,” Mrs. Kitchens interrupted, “that he didn’t do it.”
“But you think ... ?”
“The silly old fool did it,” she said. “I know he did. But I’m not going to say it to anyone except you. It was that Wyvern who put him up to it, you know. And it was all pointless, as your father is much better for the country than Orinda would have been. Everyone knows that now.”
“People say,” I said gently, “that Leonard shot a rifle at my father and then put the gun up into the gutter of The Sleeping Dragon.”
Clumsy, large, unhappy Mrs. Kitchens wouldn’t hear of it. “My Leonard doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other!”
“And does your Leonard change the oil in his own car?”
She looked utterly bewildered. “He can make plants grow, but he’s hopeless at anything else.”
I left poor Mrs. Kitchens to her unsatisfactory marriage, and slept again in Polly’s house.
For most of Sunday I sat alone in the party’s headquarters wishing and waiting for Basil Rudd to dislike his cousin enough to help me, but it wasn’t until nearly six in the evening that the telephone rang.
I picked up the receiver. A voice that was not Basil Rudd’s said, “Is it you that wants to know where to find Bobby Usher Rudd?”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter a damn who I am. Because of his snooping my wife left me and I lost my kids. If you want to fix that bastard Usher Rudd, at this very moment he is in the offices of the Hoopwestern Gazette. ”
The informant at the other end disconnected abruptly.
Usher Rudd was on my doorstep.
I’d expected a longer chase, but the Hoopwestern Gazette’s offices and printing presses were simply down the road. I locked the party headquarters, jumped in my car, and sped through the Sunday traffic with the devil on my tail, anxious not to lose Usher Rudd now that I’d found him.
He was still at the Gazette, though, in mid-furious row with Samson Frazer. When I walked into the editor’s office it silenced them both with their hot words half-spoken.
They both knew who I was.
Bobby Usher Rudd looked literally struck dumb. Samson Frazer’s expression mingled pleasure, apprehension and relief.
He said, “Bobby swears the dope story’s true.”
“Bobby would swear his mother’s a chimpanzee.”
Usher Rudd’s quivering finger pointed at a copy of Thursday’s Gazette that lay on Samson’s desk, and found his voice, hoarse with rage.
“You know what you’ve done?” He was asking me, not Samson Frazer. “You’ve got me sacked from SHOUT! You frightened Rufus Crossmead and the proprietors so badly that they won’t risk my stuff anymore, and I’ve increased their bloody sales for them over the years ... it’s bloody unfair. So now they say they’re the laughingstock of the whole industry, printing a false story about someone whose father might be the next prime minister. They say the story has back-fired. They said it will help George Juliard, not finish him. And how was I to know? It’s effing unfair.”
I said bitterly, “You could have seen Vivian Durridge didn’t know what he was saying.”
“People who don’t know what they’re saying are the ones you listen to.”
That confident statement, spoken in rage, popped a lightbulb in my understanding of Usher Rudd’s success.
I said, “That day in Quindle, when I first met you, you were already trying to dig up scandal about my father.”
“Natch.”
“He tries to dig up dirt about anyone,” Samson put in.
I shook my head. “Who,” I asked Usher Rudd, “told you to attack my father?”
“I don’t need to be told.”
Though I wasn’t exactly shouting, my voice was loud and my accusation plain. “As you’ve known all about cars for the whole of your life, did you stuff up my father’s Range Rover’s sump-plug drain with a candle?”
“What?”
“Did you? Who suggested you do it?”
“I’m not answering your bloody questions.”
The telephone rang on Samson Frazer’s desk.
He picked up the receiver, listened briefly, said “OK” and disconnected.
Usher Rudd, not a newspaperman for nothing, said suspiciously, “Did you give them the OK to roll the presses?”
“Yes.”
Usher Rudd’s rage increased to the point where his whole body shook. He shouted, “You’re printing without the change. I insist ... I’ll kill you ... stop the presses ... if you don’t print what I told you to, I’ll kill you.”
Samson Frazer didn’t believe him, and nor, for all Rudd’s passion, did I. Kill was a word used easily, but seldom meant.
“What change?” I demanded.
Samson’s voice was high beyond normal. “He wants me to print that you faked Sir Vivian’s letter and forged his signature and that the story about sniffing glue is a hundred percent sterling, a hundred percent kosher, and you’ll do anything ... anything to deny it.”
He picked a typewritten page off his desk and waved it.
“It’s Sunday, anyway,” he said. “There’s no one here but me and the print technicians. Tomorrow’s paper is locked onto the presses, ready to roll.”
“You can do the changes yourself.” Usher Rudd fairly danced with fury.
“I’m not going to,” Samson said.
“Then don’t print the paper.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Samson put the typewritten page into my hands.
I glanced down to read it and, as if all he’d been waiting for had been a flicker of inattention on my part, Bobby Rudd did one of his quickest getaways and was out through a door in a flash ... not the door to the outside world, but the swinging door into the passage leading deeper into the building ... the passage, it transpired, down to the presses.
“Stop him,” yelled Samson, aghast.
“It’s only paper,” I said, though making for the door.
“No ... sabotage ... he can destroy ... catch him.” His agitation convinced me. I sprinted after Usher Rudd and ran down a passage with small, empty individual offices to both sides and out through another door at the end and across an expanse inhabited only by huge white rolls of paper—newsprint, the raw material of newspapers—and through a small print room beyond that with two or three men t
ending clattering machines turning out colored pages, and finally through a last swinging door into the long, high room containing the heart and muscle of the Hoopwestern Gazette, the monster printing presses that every day turned out twenty thousand twenty-four-page community enlightenments to most of Dorset.
The presses were humming quietly when I reached them. There were eight in a row with a tower in the center. From each end of four, the presses put first a banner in color—red, green, blue—on the sheets that would be the front and back pages, and then came the closely edited black-and-white pages set onto rollers in an age-old, but still perfectly functional, offset litho process.
I learned afterwards how the machines technically worked. On that fraught Sunday I saw only wide white paper looping from press to press and in and out of inked rollers as it collected the news page by page on its journey to the central tower, from where it went up in single sheets and came down folded into a publish-able newspaper, cut and counted into bundles of fifty.
There were two men tending the presses, adjusting the ink flow and slowly increasing the speed of the paper over the rollers and through the mechanism. Warning bells were ringing. Noise was building.
When I ran into the long thundering area, Usher Rudd was shouting at one of the men to turn everything off. The technician blinked at him and paid no attention.
His colleague activated another alarm bell and switched the presses to a full floor-trembling roar. Monday’s edition of the Hoopwestern Gazette, twenty thousand copies of it, flowed from press to press and up the tower and down at a speed that reduced each separate page to a blur.
Samson Frazer, catching up with me as I watched with awe, shouted in my ear, “Don’t go near the presses while they’re running. If you get your little finger caught in any of the rollers it would pull your whole arm in—it would wrench your arm right out of your body. We can’t stop the presses fast enough to save an arm. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I yelled.
Usher Rudd was screaming at the technician.
Samson Frazer’s warning was essential.