To the hilt

by Дик Фрэнсис

  To the hilt

  Дик Фрэнсис

  From the acclaimed master of mystery and suspense comes the story of a self-imposed outcast who must refresh his detection skills in order to save himself and his family.

  Dick Francis

  TO THE HILT

  BEDE'S DEATH SONG

  Fore thaem neidfaerae naenig uuirthit

  thoncsnotturra, than him tharf sie

  to ymbhycggannae aer his hiniongae

  hwaet his gastae godaes aeththae yflaes

  aefter deothdaege doemid uueorthae.

  Before that sudden journey no one is wiser in

  thought than he needs to be, in considering,

  before his departure, what will be adjudged to

  his soul, of good or evil, after his death-day.

  From The Earliest English Poems, translated by Michael Alexander (Penguin Books, Third Edition 1991)

  CHAPTER ONE

  I don't think my stepfather much minded dying. That he almost took me with him wasn't really his fault.

  My mother sent me a postcard - 'Perhaps I'd better tell you your stepfather has had a heart attack' - which I read in disbelief outside the remote Scottish post office where I went every two weeks to collect my letters. The postcard had lain there unread for approximately ten days.

  Somewhat distractedly, though my stepfather and I were hardly intimate, I went back into the cluttered little shop and begged use of the telephone.

  'You'll be reimbursing us as usual, Mr Kinloch?'

  'Of course.'

  Dour old Donald Cameron, nodding, lifted a flap of counter and allowed me through to his own jealously protected and wall-mounted instrument. As the official public telephone, thoughtfully provided outside for the few surrounding inhabitants, survived vandalism for roughly thirty minutes each time it was mended, old Donald was accustomed to extending to customers the courtesy of his own phone. Since he charged an extra fee for its use, I privately reckoned it was Donald himself who regularly disabled the less profitable technology on his doorstep.

  'Mother?' I said, eventually connected to her in London. "This is Al.'

  'Alexander,' she corrected automatically, not liking my abbreviation, 'are you in Scotland?'

  'I am, yes. What about the old man?'

  'Your stepfather,' she said reprovingly, 'is resting.'

  'Er… where is he resting?' In hospital? In peace?

  'In bed,' she said.

  'So he is alive?'

  'Of course he's alive.'

  'But your postcard…'

  'There's nothing to panic about,' she said calmly. 'He had some chest pains and spent a week in the Clinic for stabilisation and tests, and now he is home with me, resting.'

  'Do you want me to come?' I asked blankly. 'Do you need any help?'

  'He has a nurse,' she said.

  My mother's unvarying composure, I sometimes thought, stemmed from a genuine deficiency of emotion. I had never seen her cry, had never heard tears in her voice, not even after her first husband, my father, had been killed in a shooting accident out on the moors. To me, at seventeen, his sudden loss had been devastating. My mother, dry-eyed, had told me to pull myself together.

  A year later, still cool at the ceremony, she had married Ivan George Westering, baronet, brewer, pillar of the British Jockey Club, my stepfather. He was not domineering; had been generous, even; but he disapproved of the way I lived. We were polite to each other.

  'How ill is he?' I asked.

  'You can come if you like,' my mother said. 'It's entirely up to you.'

  Despite the casual voice, the carefully maintained distance, it sounded closer to a plea than I was used to.

  'I'll arrive tomorrow,' I said, making up my mind.

  'If you're sure?' She betrayed no relief, however; no welcome.

  'I'm sure.'

  'Very well.'

  I paid the phone call's ransom into Donald's stringy outstretched palm and returned to my laden, ancient and battered four-wheel drive outside. It had good gears, good brakes, good tyres and little remaining colour on its thin metal flanks. It contained, at that moment, food for two weeks, a big cylinder of butane gas, supplies of batteries, bottled water and insect killer and three brown cardboard boxes, parcel delivery, replenishing the tools of my trade.

  I painted pictures. I lived in a broken down long-deserted shepherd's hut, known as a bothy, out on a windy Scottish mountainside, without electricity. My hair grew to my shoulders. I played the bagpipes. My many and fairly noble relations thought me weird.

  Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them. I preferred solitude and paint to out-thinking salmon and shooting for food; I had only half inherited the country skills and courtesies of my ancestors. I was the twenty-nine-year-old son of the (dead) fourth son of an earl and I had no unearned wealth. I had three uncles, four aunts and twenty-one cousins. Someone in such a large (and conventional) family had to be weird, and it seemed I'd been elected.

  I didn't mind. Mad Alexander. Messes about with paints. And not even oils, my dear, but those frightfully common acrylics.

  If Michelangelo could have laid his hands on acrylics, I said, he would have joyfully used them. Acrylics were endlessly versatile and never faded. They out-virtued oils by furlongs.

  Don't be ridiculous, Alexander.

  I paid my uncle (the present earl, known as 'Himself') a painting a year as rent for the ruin I inhabited on his estate. The painting was done to his choice. He mostly asked for portraits of his horses and dogs. I quite liked to please him.

  Outside the post office, on that dry cloudy cold morning in September, I sat in my old jeep-type jalopy and did my paperwork, opening my letters, answering them and sending off the replies. There were two cheques that day for work delivered, which I despatched to the bank, and an order from America for six more paintings to be done at once - like yesterday. Ridiculous, mad Alexander, in his weird way, actually, quietly prospered; and I kept that fact to myself.

  The paperwork done, I drove my wheels northwards, at first along a recognisable road, then a roughly gravelled stretch, then up a long, rutted and indistinct track which led nowhere but to my unnamed home in the Monadhliath Mountains. 'Between Loch Ness and Aviemore,' I usually explained, and no, I hadn't seen the monster.

  Whoever in the mists of time had first built my bothy had chosen its position well: it backed straight into an elbowed granite outcrop that sheltered it from the north and east, so that winter blizzards mostly leapfrogged over the top. In front lay a sort of small stony plateau that on the far side dropped away steeply, giving me long views of valleys and rocky hills and of a main road far below.

  The only problem with the road, that served to remind me that an outside world existed, was that my dwelling was visible from it, so that far too often I found strangers on my doorstep, hikers equipped with shorts, maps, half-ton walking boots and endless energy. There was nowhere left in the world unpenetrated by inquisitive legs.

  On the day of my mother's postcard I returned to find four of the nosy species poking around without inhibitions. Male. Blue, scarlet, orange backpacks. Glasses. English regional voices.

  The days when I'd offered tea, comforts and conversation were long gone. Irritated by the invasion I drove onto the plateau, stopped the engine, removed my keys from the ignition and walked towards my front (and only) door.

  The four men stopped peering into things and ranged themselves into a ragged line ahead of me, across my path.

  'There's no one in,' one of them called. 'It's all locked up.'

  I replied without heat, 'What do you want?'

  'Him as lives here,' one said loudly.

  'Maybe that's you,' said another.

  I felt the
first tremble of something wrong. Their manner wasn't the awkwardness of trespassers caught in the act. There was no shuffling from foot to foot. They met my eyes not with placating apology, but with fierce concentration.

  I stopped walking and said again, 'What do you want?'

  The first speaker said, 'Where is it?'

  I felt a strong primitive impulse to turn tail and run, and wished afterwards that I'd listened to the wisdom of prehistory, but somehow one doesn't easily equate knobbly-kneed hikers with positive danger.

  I said, 'I don't know what you mean,' and I made the mistake of turning my back on them and retracing my steps towards the jeep.

  I heard their heavy feet scrunching on the stony ground behind me but still didn't truly believe in disaster until they clutched and spun me round and purposefully and knowledgeably punched. I had a sort of splintered composite view of intent malevolent faces, of grey daylight reflecting on their incongruous glasses, of their hard bombarding fists and of a wildly slanting horizon of unhelpful mountains as I doubled forward over a debilitating pain in the abdomen. Neck chop. Jabs to the ribs. Classic pattern. Over and over. Thud, merciless thud.

  I was wearing jeans, shirt and sweater: they might as well have been gossamer for all the protection they offered. As for meaningful retaliation, read nonexistent. I couldn't find breath. I swung at them in anger but fought an octopus. Bad news.

  One of the men kept saying insistently, 'Where is it? Where is it?' but his colleagues made it impossible for me to answer.

  I wondered vaguely if by 'it' they meant money, of which I carried little. They were welcome to it, I thought groggily, if they would stop their attentions. I unintentionally dropped my small bunch of keys and lost it to a hand that grabbed it up with triumph.

  Somehow or other I ended with my back against the jeep: no further retreat. One of them snatched handfuls of my hair and banged my head against metal. I clawed blood down his cheek and got a head-butt in return that went straight from my skull to my knees, buckling them like butter.

  Events became unclear. I slid to the ground, face down. I had a close view of grey granite stones and short dry struggling blades of grass, more brown than green.

  'Where is it?'

  I didn't answer. Didn't move. Shut my eyes. Drifted.

  'He's out,' a voice said. 'Fat lot of help you are.'

  I felt hands roughly searching my pockets. Resistance, as an option, promised only more bruises. I lay still, not wholly conscious, inertia pervading, angry but helplessly passive, nothing coordinating, no strength, no will.

  After a time of floating I felt their hands on me again.

  'Is he alive?'

  'No thanks to you, but yes, he is. He's breathing.'

  'Just leave him.'

  'Chuck him over there.'

  'Over there' turned out to be the edge of the plateau, but I didn't realise it until I'd been dragged across the stones and lifted and flung over. I went rolling fast and inexorably down the steep mountain slope, almost bouncing from rock to rock, still incapable of helping myself, unable to stop, dimly aware of flooding with whirling comprehensive pain.

  I slammed down onto a larger rock and did stop there, half on my side, half on my stomach. I felt no gratitude. I felt pulverised. Winded. Dazed. Thought vanished.

  Some sort of consciousness soon came crazily back, but orderly memory took much longer.

  Those bastard hikers, I thought eventually. I remembered their faces. I could draw them. They were demons in a dream.

  The accurate knowledge of who I was and where I was arrived quietly.

  I tried to move. A mistake.

  Time would take care of it, perhaps. Give it time.

  Those bastards had been real, I realised, demons or not. Their fists had been real. 'Where is it?' had been real. In spite of everything, I ruefully smiled. I thought it possible that they hadn't known what they were actually looking for. 'It' could have been whatever their victim valued most. There was no guarantee in any case that delivering up 'it' would save one from being thrown down a mountain.

  It occurred to me to wonder what time it was. I looked at my left wrist, but my watch had gone.

  It had been about eleven o'clock when I'd got back from the post office…

  Hell's teeth, I thought abruptly. Mother. Ivan. Heart attack. I was supposed to be going to London. Or the moon.

  The worst thing I might feel, I considered, was nothing.

  Not the case.

  With fierce concentration, I could move all my fingers and all my toes. Anything more hurt too much for enthusiasm. Outraged muscles went into breath-stopping spasms to protect themselves.

  Wait. Lie still. I felt cold.

  Bloody stupid, being mugged on one's own doorstep. Embarrassing. A helpless little old lady I was not, but a pushover - literally - just the same.

  I found the casual callousness of the walkers extraordinary. They had appeared not to care whether I lived or died, and had in fact left it to chance. I supposed they could truthfully say, 'He was alive when we saw him last.' They could dodge the word murder.

  The ebb tide in my body finally turned. Movement could at last be achieved without spasm. All I had to do from then on was scrape myself off the mountain and go and catch a train. Even the thought was exhausting.

  I was sure, after a while, that by immense good fortune I had broken no bones in my helter-skeltering fall. I'd been a rag doll. Babies got lucky through not trying to help themselves. Same principle, I supposed.

  With an unstoical groan, I raised from prone to kneeling on my rock and took a look up at where I'd come down. The edge of the plateau was hidden behind outcrops but was alarmingly far above. Looking down was almost worse, though from five or more years of living there, I understood at once where I was in relation to the bothy above. If I could traverse to the right without losing my footing and plunging down another slope, I would come eventually to the uneven but definable path that meandered from the road below up to my home: the challenging half-hidden ascent that brought walkers to my door.

  The four hiker-demons had probably come up that way. I certainly didn't want to meet them if they were on their way down. Hours had probably passed, though. I knew I had lain helpless for a long tune. They must surely by then have left.

  Realistically, I was going nowhere except uncontrollably downwards again unless I could reach that path. Hikers or not, it was the only possible route. Trying to go in the opposite direction, to reach the track up from post office, was pointless, as it involved an overhang and a perpendicular rock climb, neither of which could be managed without gear.

  I was well used to moving alone in the mountains, and I was always careful. I would never normally have attempted what now confronted me without an axe and crampons, let alone with every move a wince, but fear of a less lucky fall, of a broken leg or worse, kept me stuck like glue, with fingernails and tiny cautious shifts of weight, to every protruding scrap of solid rock. Loose stones rattled and bounced away. Scrubby earth gave too little purchase. Rock was all.

  I made the journey sitting down, looking out over the perilous drops to the valley, digging in with my heels; careful, careful… careful.

  The path, when at last I reached it, was by comparison a broad highway. I sat on one of its rocky steps and felt as weak as thankful: sat with my forearms on my knees, head hanging, trying to be cool about a degree of strain and discomfort far beyond the easily bearable.

  Those bastards, I thought. The helpless rage of all victims shook in my gut. My physical state was shaming and infuriating. Somehow or other I should surely have put up a better fight.

  From where I sat I could see most of the long path down to the road. No scarlet, orange or blue backpacks moved on it anywhere. Curse them, I thought; and damn them; and shit.

  There was silence behind and above me and I had no sense of anyone being there. The inescapability of having to go up for a look was only a shade worse than actually making the effort; but I co
uldn't stay where I was for ever.

  With reluctant muscles and a fearful mind I got laboriously to my feet and began the climb.

  No evil faces grinned over the plateau above. My instinct that I was alone proved a true one, and I crawled the last bit on hands and knees and raised my head for a cautious look without anyone pouncing on me with a yell and kicking me back into space.

  The reason for the silence and the absence of attackers was immediately obvious: my jeep had gone.

  I stood erect on the plateau, figuratively groaning. Not only had I lost my transport, but the door of my home stood wide open with heaps of my belongings spilling out of it - a chair, clothes, books, bedclothes. I walked wearily across the plateau and looked in at a sickening mess.

  Like all who live purposefully alone without provision for guests, my actual household goods were few. I tended to eat straight out of the frying pan, and to drink all liquids from a mug. Living without electricity, I owned none of the routinely stolen things like television, stereo or computer, nor did I have a mobile phone because of not being able to recharge the batteries. I did own a portable radio cassette for checking that interstellar war hadn't broken out, and for playing taped music if I felt like it, but it was no grand affair with resale value. I had no antique silver. No Chippendale chairs.

  What I did have was paint.

  When I'd moved into the tumbledown building five and a half years earlier I'd made only the centre and largest of its three divisions habitable. About fifteen feet by nine, my room had been given a businesslike new roof, a large double-glazed window, and a host of anti-damp preservation measures in its rebuilt walls and flooring. Light, heat and cooking were achieved with gas. Running water came from a small clear burn trickling through nearby rocks, and for a bathroom I had a weathered privy a short walk away. I'd meant at first to stay on the mountain only during the long northern summer days, but in the end had left my departure later and later that first year until suddenly the everlasting December nights were shortening again, and I'd stayed snug through a freezing January and February and had never since considered leaving.