by Joe McNally
‘Will stopping be enough?’ she said, ‘Will it keep you from harm?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I looked away from her again, closing the subject.
She stood up, ‘Would you like me to come again tomorrow?’
Our gazes held, locked in the certainty of the answer, ‘Best not,’ I said.
She nodded very slowly. Still our eyes held to each other. She said, ‘I have your jacket. I meant to bring it today. I’ll drop it in tomorrow.’
‘Where was it?’
‘In your car.’
The car. ‘Is the car still there?’
‘It was gone yesterday.’
I thought of Mac. He wouldn’t know if I was alive or dead.
’Thanks,’ I said.
‘I will bring your jacket tomorrow. No need to see me if you don’t want to.’
‘Want doesn’t come into it.’
Still she stood above me, looking into my eyes. ‘Will you say my name?’ she asked quietly.
I hesitated, then said, ’Jackie.’
She did not smile, just held my gaze and gave again that tiny nod, and left.
35
I asked if I could have a bath, and, after much discussion, they agreed. I walked beside the nurse who carried my towels. She offered to sit with me for safety’s sake.
‘I’ll be all right, thanks.’
‘There’s an emergency cord. Pull it if you feel in the least faint.’
‘I will.’
When I closed the bathroom door, the first thing I saw was a stranger in the mirror.
The image you carry of yourself is so solid that even age seems to change it only imperceptibly. To see someone you don’t recognize using your body is a hell of a shock. The first reaction is one of panic, and my brain battled to regain control.
The mirror was two paces away. After a long time fixed to the spot, I moved closer until my face was six inches from the glass.
The damage was bad. Nothing on my face looked like skin in either colour or texture.
It was made up of patches: livid pink, blood-red and colours in between. Small sections of tiny blisters bordered larger areas of egg-size blisters. My forehead and cheekbone on the right side were badly grazed. My nose and lips were grotesquely swollen.
On the remote islands of skin that had survived grew a week’s stubble. It flourished on the large swathes of uninjured skin on my neck, making me even uglier.
I had never thought about my own looks, not in the way of pride, at least. I’d been called handsome. An abiding memory was of a visit from an aunt on my twelfth birthday: “You’ll break many a heart,” she had said, and I had felt an odd mix of pride and shame. It had seemed both compliment and insult.
In my glory days of the championship, there’d been plenty of women, but I had put it down to my position rather than looks or personality.
But confronted with such damage to my face, the truth of my vanity surfaced in a spurt of rage. How dare they? How fuckingwell dare they? In the mess of wounds my eyes suddenly burned. They burned much hotter than my skin as I stared at this alien, and I ground a gob of phlegm from deep in my throat and spat in the face of the stranger…and I watched it spread and slide and obscure him and I smiled, and it hurt, so I smiled wider.
No bath for me. Not now. Not yet. I had to call McCarthy. I went to the door and I had gripped the handle when it came to me that someone would have to clean away the sticky mess on the mirror, so I turned back.
36
Two hours later, McCarthy marched down the ward, anger driving his swinging arms and his clenching jaw muscles. But when he reached my bed, the shock of seeing my face trumped all else, and his jaw muscles suddenly lost power and his mouth dropped open.
‘Hello, Mac,’ I said.
‘Dear God…’ he said quietly.
I nodded toward the chair, ‘Sit down.’
He almost felt his way over to the chair, unable to look at anything but my injuries.
I let him settle until he was ready to ask the inevitable, ‘How long have you been in here?’
‘Almost a week.’
‘A week!’ The whole ward heard it. I glared at him, ‘For God’s sake stop shouting.’
He leaned forward, lowering his head and whispering harshly, ‘Don’t order me to stop shouting! I get a call from the hire company that the police have found your car abandoned in Lambourn, I’m wondering whether you’re dead or alive and now you say you’ve been here a week and you haven’t rung me before now. Why?’
I looked away again. ‘I’ll tell you sometime.’
‘You’ll tell me now!’
Slowly I turned to face him. ‘Mac, sometime, if I ever feel human again, I’ll let you know why I didn’t contact you. I already feel like an idiot and a failure, I don’t need you making it any worse right now.’
He shook his head and sighed, ‘Okay.’ He said, relaxing, crossing his legs, ‘Can you tell me what happened then?’ There was a note of sarcasm.
I told him, though when it came to the scalding I felt my voice go and had to stop and compose myself.
McCarthy listened in silence. When I finished he leaned forward and squeezed my arm. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. So sorry it came to this. I’ll try and arrange some compensation for you. We have another meeting in the morning with the senior steward, I’ll raise it there as part of your severance package.’
‘Severance from what?’
‘You won’t be continuing, I assume?’
‘Continuing is a very soft word, Mac. No, I won’t be continuing, I’ll be running these bastards down and doing to them what they did to me. I’ll fry Roscoe’s fucking face and whoever else decided to fry mine.’
‘I’m afraid we don’t have time for that, Eddie. We are under immense pressure. Immense. The senior steward has been told by the Palace to get rid of Perlman.’
‘The Queen’s put out a hit on Perlman? How I wish I was able to laugh.’
’No, the Queen has not put out a hit, as you very well know. Raleigh bloody Tredville, the Palace’s press secretary, who seems to think he runs the country, has told the Jockey Club to find a way to warn Perlman off.’
‘Well, you need to find him first, then find a reason to warn him off. And it’s touching to know that Raleigh bloody Tredville is so upset about the attempted murder of Alan Harle.’
‘Fortunately, there’s nothing to suggest that was racing related.’
I looked at him. He concentrated on my eyes, seemingly embarrassed now at the revulsion my injuries caused him. I said, ‘Are you for real? Fortunately? The people who did this to me tried to kill Harle. They warned me to stay away from him, and to stay away from Roscoe. Harle works in the sport that you help run. He’s very probably connected to this guy Perlman who means so much to you and the senior fucking steward. And, fortunately, his attempted murder didn’t embarrass you as much as Perlman not turning up to meet the Queen Mum?’
‘That’s not the way I meant it, Eddie, you know that.’
I shook my head, ‘You need to choose your words more carefully, Mac.’
‘Anyway, my team will take over now. Once you’re out of hospital and fit again, we can see where we are.’
I bit back my protest and just nodded and looked at him and said, ‘You planning to show your team a picture of my face?’
He shifted in his chair.
‘Or to tell them what happened to me the other night?’
He crossed his arms and stared at his shoes.
’No, I didn’t think so. Well, I know most of your guys, I’ll be sure to say hello to them on the track in the next few days.’
‘You’re kidding! You won’t be out of here for a month, by the look of you.’
‘I’ll be out of here tomorrow at the latest. Tonight if you’ll take me with you.’
‘No way will they let you out. Have you seen yourself?’
‘I’ll sign my own discharge. And, yes, I’ve seen myself. That’s the reason I’m com
ing out of here.’
‘What if these same people catch you again?’
‘I’ll be ready for them.’
‘With what?’
‘I’ll be ready for them.’
He watched me. I said, ‘Are you going to get me out of here tonight and back on the job?’
He leant forward, elbows on knees, ‘Will you keep away from my boys on the track?’
‘Your boys can stay in the office, Mac, same as they did at the start and for the same reasons you had to take me on in the first place. Because they were scared.’
He ran fingers through his deep wavy hair and sighed, ‘I can’t keep them off this job any more, Eddie. It’s become a matter of pride for the senior steward that we nail Perlman, preferably along with the evidence to warn him off.’
’So, is it going to do any harm to have me out there, too? Especially when I’m now in shit or bust mode.’
He sighed long and loud this time, straightening, standing up, ‘Let me raise it at this meeting tomorrow.’
‘Okay, but I want out of here in the morning, no matter what. If you don’t come and get me, someone else will.’
‘Who?’
‘Just be here, Mac, will you? You owe me that much.’
37
Come the morning, much of the pain in my face had subsided. I asked the nurse to bring me whatever papers I needed to sign to get myself out, took my lecture from the doctor about the recklessness of my decision, though he was kind enough to order cream and painkillers from the hospital pharmacy.
I settled in the chair to wait for McCarthy.
An hour later, I was still waiting. I went to the nurse’s station and got change for the payphone. I also wrote a short letter to Jackie to say thanks and would she mind posting my jacket to me. I put some cash in the envelope and left it with the nurse.
McCarthy’s secretary said he’d left the office half an hour ago, but she did not know where he was going. I shook out another coin and I rang DS Cranley. His voice snapped down the line,
‘Malloy! Where are you?’
‘In a call box and I don’t have much change so-’
‘Where are you, Malloy?’
‘Never mind that, is Harle all right?’
‘Harle is not all right! And you’re the man I need to talk to about it.’
‘Where is he?’
‘That’s what I want to ask you. Now get to this station or tell me where you are!”
My gut sank. ‘You took that guard off him, didn’t you?’ I asked quietly.
‘Listen, Malloy-’
‘You took the guard off him, Cranley, didn’t you, you stupid, arrogant bastard?’
‘Malloy!’ He was almost screaming. ‘I’ll have you for this!’
I was so angry, I had to go outside or the staff might have had me sectioned under the Mental Health Act. I’d talked to Mac about Harle and assumed he was okay and still under guard. Mac had mentioned nothing about Harle’s disappearance.
They must have gone for him after they’d got me. But they wouldn’t have got him if that bastard Cranley had done his job.
I saw Mac’s car turning in and I started for the car park. He only had the door halfway open when I grabbed the top of it and confronted him, ‘Did you know about Harle?’
‘Know what? What’s wrong?’
I told him. He denied having any contact with Cranley or the police, and I believed him, ‘He’ll be dead by now, Mac, they’ll have killed him.’
‘Don’t say that, Eddie.’
‘He’ll be dead.’
‘Maybe that was why they warned you? Why tell you to stay away from Harle if they intended to kill him?’
‘Because when they said it, he was still under guard in hospital. Then that dickhead Cranley left him wide to the fucking world!’
‘Calm down, man, or they’ll have you back in there. Why don’t you go and get your things and I’ll take you home?’
‘These are my things, Mac,’ I opened my arms on the clothes that seemed to hang strangely now.
‘Get in.’
I strapped on the seat belt and opened the window. The breeze cooled my face as McCarthy pulled away. ‘Mac, what would you say to a gun?’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘If I wanted one.’
‘No way.’
‘Why not?’
‘No way, Eddie, it’s not on.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s going too far. It’s illegal.’
‘So’s murder.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean, for God’s sake! The two guys who attacked me, who killed Danny Gordon and probably Alan Harle, it’s called murder.’
‘That’s their problem. They’ll have to face the consequences.’
‘When? After they’ve killed me or somebody else, maybe even you?’
He was getting upset, shaking his head and rubbing the steering wheel with his left hand.
‘No, Eddie, no. I’ll get you anything else I can but no gun. I’d rather you packed it in altogether.’
‘Mac, listen!’ I clutched his arm but he jerked it free and kept staring at the road ahead muttering, ‘No gun, Eddie, no gun.’
I’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t wear it, but I’d had to try. At least it made him more amenable to my other requests: a faster car, more money and a renewal of the promise to help me regain my licence.
After half an hour without me mentioning guns, I think a trace of suspicion that he’d been conned into the other concessions was creeping up on him.
Searching for something to take his mind off the subject, I suddenly remembered when I last spoke to Harle, he’d given me a tip for the Triumph Hurdle.
‘Mac, did Roscoe’s horse win the Triumph?’
I could see the memory rewind in his eyes. ‘No, thank God, it didn’t.’
‘Why thank God?’
‘Because it would have been another embarrassment for us with Perlman.’
‘You don’t honestly believe this guy actually exists?’
‘Maybe I don’t, but what do I tell the senior steward? We’re dealing with a ghost?’
‘You can tell him that Perlman is Kruger. If he has trouble remembering the guy, just remind him he took my licence off me because he couldn’t nail Kruger. Then you can tell him that Kruger and Roscoe are running some major scam, probably from Roscoe’s place. Whether it involves heroin, horse-doping or both I don’t know yet but I’m sure as hell going to find out.’
‘Other than a hunch, how can you say Kruger and Roscoe are linked?’
I straightened my legs and dug into my trouser pocket, pulling out the tape from Roscoe’s answerphone. ‘Here,’ I offered it. Mac glanced down, then held out his hand and returned his attention to the road. I told him what it was, ‘Keep it safe,’ I said.
We traveled a mile in silence, then I said, ‘Couldn’t you have one of your men go to Roscoe’s? They must have something set up there. Did you know Skinner was Roscoe’s private vet?’
He nodded, pondering. ‘Maybe we should arrange a visit, maybe we should…’
It was late afternoon when Mac dropped me at the cottage. He came inside to make sure I had no unwelcome guests, and then left me with the address of his ex-colleague who’d recently retired. The man lived in Cheltenham and Mac told me to call there next morning and pick up my ‘new’ car, which was this guy’s Jockey Club company car.
He said, ‘And for goodness sake try not to lose this bloody car, will you?’
‘Do my best, Mac. I’ll do my level best.’
38
Next morning, I took a taxi to Mac’s friend’s house. He gave me the keys to a black 2-litre injection Cavalier parked on a concrete standing at the bottom of his long drive.
When I reached the car, I began a routine I intended to make habitual. I checked every inch of the car. Where I couldn’t see, I ran my hands over.
I was congratulating myself on thinki
ng ahead and being clever when it dawned on me that, while I was poking my head under cars, somebody could be aiming at it with ten inches of lead pipe.
Still, I would have to learn as I went along and hope my next mistake didn’t prove costlier than my first. When I was sure no one had stuck fifty pounds of gelignite on the chassis, I got in and shut the door.
It was quiet. Thinking of the last time I had driven a car, memories of the pain returned and scared me a little. But I shook them off. My mood was bright, positive. I was out, doing something, prepared to hunt this time, ready for trouble.
Taped to the steering wheel was a note from McCarthy: ‘Eddie, remember, this is a Jockey Club vehicle, for God’s sake take care of it.’
Slanting the rear-view mirror round, I saw my reflection. Still bad but getting better – even my face couldn’t depress me today.
I headed for the police station to find out exactly how much damage Cranley had done.
After his usual bluster, he admitted he’d removed the guard on day four. By noon the same day, Harle had disappeared.
Fellow patients reported he’d been wheeled away on a trolley by two male nurses wearing surgical masks. Cranley said he was now pursuing a ‘certain line of inquiry.’
He took a statement about the attack on me, and then told me I deserved all I got for playing amateur detective. The meeting ended in the usual shouting match. I walked away, my ears ringing with another warning to stay out of it.
I’d little hope of Bergmark talking, but I drove to Nottingham next to try to see him again. He sat in the same spot by the door in his wheelchair, wearing the same clothes, almost as if he’d never moved since I’d last visited.
I had to remind him who I was and he launched into the spiel about me being a good jockey, but as soon as I mentioned Danny Gordon’s name he clammed up and sat staring straight ahead.
‘You and Rask were blackmailing him, weren’t you?’ Silence. ‘Answer a few questions and I’ll leave you alone. I promise not to involve the police.’ No response. ‘The men who did this to you, did they work for Kruger?’