by Дик Фрэнсис
'A toss-up.'
I tossed up mentally, heads you win, tails you lose, and lost.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Chris and I drove along past the pub and came to the house with the lights. When we reached the driveway, which was full of cars, we parked in the roadway. As we climbed out, Chris stumbled and broke the heel off one of his high-heeled patents. He swore, stopped, and said he would break off the other one to level himself up. I laughed, and set off towards the house a few steps ahead of him.
It was as if the bushes themselves erupted.
One moment I was walking unsuspectingly along, and the next I was being enmeshed in nets and ropes and being overwhelmed and pushed and dragged, not into the looming shadowy house but through some sort of rustic gate from the drive into a garden.
The garden, I was hazily aware, was lit by more festoons of fairy lights and by big multicoloured bulbs installed against many trees which, shining upwards, made canopies of illuminated branches and leaves; it was all strikingly theatrical, dramatically magnificent, a brilliant setting for a party.
No party that I'd been to before had started with one of the guests being tied to the trunk of a maple tree next to a bunch of red light bulbs that shone upwards into autumn-red leaves, creating a scarlet canopy above his head. My back was against the tree. There was rope round my ankles, and round my wrists, drawing them backwards, and - worst - round my neck.
At no party that I'd attended before had there been four familiar thugs as guests, one of them busy putting on boxing gloves.
Red leather boxing gloves.
The only other guests were Patsy and Surtees and Oliver Grantchester.
Surtees looked triumphant, Grantchester serious and Patsy astounded.
I looked round the garden for possible exits and could see precious few. There was a lawn ringed with bushes, lit on the garden side, shadowy beyond. There was a flower bed with straggling chrysanthemums. There was an ornamental goldfish pond with an artificial stream running down into it over a pile of rocks.
There was a big house to the left, mostly dark, but with a brightly lit conservatory facing the garden.
There was Oliver Grantchester.
Oliver Grantchester.
The one crucial piece of information I hadn't learned was that he had a place in the country half a mile along the road from Patsy's house. The only address and telephone number for Oliver Grantchester in Ivan's address book had been in London.
Audrey Newton had firmly pointed to Oliver Grantchester's sketched head as the person who had collected her brother on the day he left Wantage to go on holiday.
I'd known who would be looking for me, but not where.
There weren't swear words bad enough to describe my stupidity.
Patsy would never change. Why had I ever thought that she would?
I'd wanted to believe that she had. I'd wanted an end to the long pointless feud.
Serve me right.
Grantchester stood six feet away from me and said, 'Where is the Kinloch hilt?'
I looked at him in bewilderment. I could think of no reason why he would want to know. He made some sort of signal to the wearer of the boxing gloves, who hit me low down, in the abdomen, which hurt.
My neck jerked forwards against the rope. Dire.
Grantchester said, 'Where is the King Alfred Gold Cup?'
Golf bag. Locker. Club house. Scotland. Out of his grasp.
A bash in the ribs. Reverberations. Altogether too much, and quite likely only the beginning. Shit.
'Ivan sent you the Cup. Where is it?'
Ask Himself.
Another fast, hard, pin-pointed bash. Shudder country.
Where the hell, I wondered, was my bodyguard?
Surtees strode to Grantchester's side.
'Where's the horse?' he yelled. 'Make him tell you where he's put the horse.'
The thug with the gloves was the one who had been demanding 'Where is it?' at the bothy.
'Where's the horse?' Grantchester said.
I didn't tell him. Painful decision.
Surtees positively jumped up and down.
'Make him tell you. Hit him harder.'
I thought detachedly that I would quite likely prefer to die than give in to Surtees.
Oliver Grantchester hadn't the same priorities as Patsy's husband.
He said to me, 'Where's your mother?'
In Devon, I thought: thank God.
Bash.
He had to be mad, if he thought I would tell him.
'Where's Emily Cox?'
Safe. Same thing.
Bash.
'Where is Norman Quorn's sister?'
I was by then fairly breathless. It would have been difficult to tell him even if I'd wanted to.
He stepped forward to within three feet of me, and with quiet intensity said, 'Where's the list?'
The list.
The point of all the battering, I supposed, was to make it more likely that I would answer the one question that really mattered.
'Where's the list?'
He had never liked me, he had seen me always as a threat to his domination of Ivan. He had encouraged Patsy's obsessive suspicions of me. I remembered his dismay and fury when Ivan had given his powers of attorney to me, not to Patsy or himself. He hadn't wanted me looking into the brewery's affairs. He had been right to fear it.
His big body, his heavy personality faced me now with thunderous malevolence. He didn't care how much he hurt me. He was enjoying it. He might not be hitting me himself, but he was swaying in a sort of ecstasy as each blow landed. He wanted my surrender, but wanted it difficult; intended that I should crumble, but not too soon.
I saw the pleasure in his eyes. The full lips smiled. I hated him. Shook with hate.
'Tell me,' he said.
I saw it was my defeat he wanted almost as much as the list itself: and I saw also that he was wholly confident of achieving both. If I could deny him… then I would.
'Where's the list?'
The boxing gloves thudded here and there. Face, ribs, belly. Head. I lost count.
'Where's the list?'
Such a pretty garden, I groggily thought.
The punch-bag practice stopped. Grantchester went away. The four thugs stood around me watchfully, as if I could slide out of their ropes and knots, which I couldn't, but not for lack of trying.
Patsy's face swam into my close vision.
'What list?' she said.
It made no sense. Surely she knew what list.
I would have said she looked worried. Horrified even. But she'd lured me there. My own fault.
'Why,' she said, 'why did Oliver ask where your mother and Emily are?'
I dredged up an answer, 'How does he know they are not at home?' My face felt stiff. The rest just felt.
'Alexander,' Patsy said in distress, not working it out, 'whatever Oliver wants, for God's sake give it to him. This… this…' she gestured to my trussed state, and to the thugs,'… this is awful.'
I agreed with her. I also couldn't believe she didn't know what her friendly neighbourhood lawyer wanted. I'd done believing Patsy. Finished for life. Finished for what was left of life.
Oliver Grantchester was playing for millions, and boxing gloves were getting him nowhere. He returned from the direction of his house, pulling behind him a barbecue cooker on wheels.
Oh God, I thought. Oh no.
I can't do this. I'll tell him. I know I will. They're not my millions.
Grantchester took the grill grid off the barbecue and propped it against one of the wheeled legs. Then he went back into his bright conservatory and returned carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes and a bottle of lighter fuel. He poured briquettes from the bag into the fire-box of the barbecue and then poured the whole bottleful of lighter fuel over the briquettes.
He struck a match and tossed it onto the fuel.
Flame rushed upward in a roaring plume, scarlet and gold and eternally untamed. The flame w
as reflected in Grantchester's eyes, so that for a moment it looked as if the fire were inside his head, looking out.
Then, satisfied, he picked up the grill with a pair of long tongs and settled it in place, to get hot.
I could see the thugs' faces. They showed no surprise. One showed sickened revulsion, but still no surprise.
I thought: they've seen this before.
They'd seen Norman Quorn.
Norman Quorn… burned in a garden, with grass cuttings in his clothes…
Patsy looked merely puzzled. So did Surtees.
The briquettes flamed, heating up quickly.
I would tell him, I thought. Enough was enough. My entire body already hurt abominably. There was a point beyond which it wasn't sensible to go. There were out-of-date abstractions like the persistence of the human spirit, and they might be all right for paintings but didn't apply in pretty country gardens in the evening of the second Saturday in October.
Norman Quorn had burned down to his ribs, and died, and he hadn't told.
I wasn't Norman Quorn. I hadn't millions to lose. They were Patsy's millions. God damn her soul.
Grantchester waited with lip-licking anticipation for frightful ages while the heat built up, and when the briquettes glowed a bright searing red, he lifted the barred grill off the fire with his pair of long tongs and dropped it flat on the lawn, where it sizzled and singed the grass.
'You'll lie on that if you don't tell me,' he said. He was enjoying himself. 'Where's the list?'
Cussed, rebellious, stubborn… I might be all those by nature: but I knew I would tell him.
Defeat lay there at my feet, blackening the grass. Money was of no importance. The decision was a matter of will. Of pride, even. And such pride came too expensive.
Tell him… you have to.
'Where is it?' he said.
I meant to tell him. I tried to tell him. But when it came to the point, I couldn't.
So I burned.
Some of the marks will be there always, but I can't see them unless I look in a mirror.
I could hear someone screaming and I remembered Surtees promising 'next time you'll scream', but it wasn't I, after all, who was screaming; it was Patsy.
Her high urgent voice, screaming.
'No. No. You can't. For God's sake, stop it. Oliver. Surtees. You can't do this. Stop it. For God's sake. Stop it…'
The noise I made wasn't a scream. From deep inside, like an age-old recognition of a primeval torment, starting low in my gut and ending like a growl in the throat, the sound I heard in myself, that was at one with myself, that was all there was of existence, that unified every feeling, every nerve's message into one consuming elemental protest, that noise was a deep sort of groan.
I could hear him repeating, 'Where is it? Where is it?'
Irrelevant.
It all lasted, I dare say, not much more than a minute. Two minutes, perhaps.
Half a lifetime, condensed.
I'd gone beyond speech when the scene blew apart.
With crashes and bangs and shrieking metal the driving cab and entire front half of a large travelling coach smashed down the fence and gate between the drive and the garden. Out of the bus and onto the lawn poured a half-drunk mob of football supporters, all dressed in orange (it seemed) with orange scarves and heavy boots and raucous shouting voices.
'Where's the beer, then? Where's the beer?'
Scrambling through the demolished fence came more and more orange scarves. Hooligan faces. 'Where's the beer?'
The four thugs who'd been pinning down my arms and legs decided to quit and took their weight off me so that I was blessedly able to roll off the grill and lie face down on the cool grass: and a pair of long legs in black tights appeared in my limited field of vision, with a familiar voice above me saying, 'Jesus Christ, Al,' and I tried to say, 'What took you so long?' but it didn't come out.
The brightly lit garden went on fining with noise and orange scarves and demands for beer. Surrealism, I thought.
Chris went away and came back and poured a container of cold water over me, and squatted down beside me and said, 'Your sweater was smouldering, for God's sake,' and I agreed with him silently that water was better than fire any day.
'Al,' he said worriedly, 'are you OK?'
'Yuh.'
A goldfish flapped on the grass. Poor little bugger. A goldfish out of the pond. Pond water, that Chris had used.
Goldfish pond. Cold water.
Great idea.
I made an attempt to crawl and stagger there, and Chris, seeing the point, unwound the ropes from my arms and legs and neck and hooked an arm under my armpit and gave me a haul, so that somehow or other I crossed the short distance of grass and lay down full-length in the cold pond, my head using the surrounding stones like a pillow, leaves of waterlilies on my chest, the overall relief enormous.
'Did bloody Surtees do this?' Chris demanded with fury.
'Bloody Grantchester.'
He went away.
There were more people in the garden. Policemen. Uniforms. The monstrous front half of the coach rose over the scene like a giant incarnation of Chaos, yellow, white and silver with windows like eyes. I lay in the pond and watched the football fans scurry about looking for free beer and turning violent when they couldn't find any, and I watched the police slapping handcuffs on everyone moving, including the four thugs, who had over-estimated the window of escape, and I watched Patsy's bewilderment and Surtees's swings from glee to noncomprehension and back.
I heard one of the football crowd telling policemen that it was a girl who had stolen the coach from outside the pub where they had pulled up for some refreshment; a girl who had yelled that there was free beer at the party along the road, a girl - 'a bit of all right', 'a knock-out' - who'd said she was up for grabs for the quickest pair of boots after her into the garden.
When they'd drifted away, Chris came back.
'I caught bloody Grantchester trying to sneak out through the garage,' he said with satisfaction. 'He'll be going nowhere for a while.'
'Chris,' I said. 'Get lost.'
'Do you mean it?'
'The police are looking for the young woman who drove the bus.'
A shiny object splashed down onto my chest.
A set of brass knuckles, gleaming wetly. I swept them off my chest into deeper, concealing water.
Chris's hand briefly squeezed my shoulder and I had only one more glimpse of his dark shape as he passed from the lit side of the bushes into the shadows.
The farce continued. A large uniformed policeman told me to get out of the pond, and when I failed to obey he clicked a pair of handcuffs on my wrists and walked off, deaf to protests.
It gradually appeared that a couple of people in the garden were neither uniformed police nor uniformed fanatics but the law in plain clothes or, in other words, tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.
The artificial waterfall splashed cold water over my throbbing head. I lifted my handcuffed hands and steered the water delicately over my face.
A new voice said, 'Get out of the pond.'
I opened my closed eyes. The voice held police authority. Just behind him stood Patsy.
He was a middle-aged man, not unkind, but my occupancy of the pond, the length of my wet hair and the presence of the handcuffs could hardly have been encouraging.
'Get out,' he said. 'Stand up.'
'I don't know if he can,' Patsy said worriedly. "They were hitting him…'
'Who were?'
She looked over to where bunches of handcuffed figures sat gloomily on the grass. No beer. No fun at all.
'And they burnt him,' Patsy said. 'I couldn't stop them.'
The policeman looked at the barbecue with its glowing coals.
'No,' Patsy said, pointing, 'on that grill thing, over there.'
One of the uniformed policemen bent down to pick the grill up and snatched his hand away, cursing and sucking his fingers.
&n
bsp; I laughed.
Patsy said as if shattered, 'Alexander, it's not funny.'
The policeman said, 'Mrs Benchmark, do you know this man?'
'Of course I know him.' She stared down at me. I looked expressionlessly back, resigned to the usual abuse. 'He's… he's my brother,' she said.
It came nearer to breaking me up than all Grantchester's attentions.
She saw that it did, and it made her cry.
Patsy, my implacable enemy, wept.
She brushed the tears away brusquely and told the policeman she would point out my attackers among the football crowd, and when they moved off their place was taken by Surtees, who was very far from a change of heart and had clearly enjoyed the earlier entertainment.
'Where's the horse?' he said. He sneered. His feet quivered, I thought he might kick my head.
I said with threat, 'Surtees, any more shit from you and I'll tell Patsy where you go on Wednesday afternoons. I'll tell her the address of the little house on the outskirts of Guildford and I'll tell her the name of the prostitute who lives there, and I'll tell her what sort of sex you go there for.'
Surtees's mouth opened in absolute horror. When he could control his throat, he stuttered.
'How… how… how…? I'll deny it.'
I said, smiling, 'I paid a skinhead to follow you.'
His eyes seemed to bulge.
'So you keep your hands to yourself as far as I'm concerned, and your mouth shut, Surtees,' I said, 'and if you're still what Patsy wants, I won't disillusion her.'
He looked sick. He physically backed away from me, as if I'd touched him with the plague. I gazed up peacefully at the bright coloured lights in the trees. Life had its sweet moments, after all.
No one had actually seen Oliver Grantchester being attacked and tied up securely in his own garage. He had been swiftly knocked out and had seen no one. He was found, when he recovered consciousness, to be suffering not only from a blow to the back of the skull but also from a broken nose, a broken jaw, and extensive damage to his lower abdomen and genitals, as if he'd been well kicked while knowing nothing about it.
Whoever would do such a thing! Tut tut.
The police put him in a prison hospital and provided him with a doctor.