Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

  Davis Tatum arrived late and out of breath from having apparently walked up the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. He wheezed briefly behind my back, then came around into view and lowered his six-feet-three-inch bulk into the chair opposite.

  He leaned forward and held out his hand for a shake. I gave him a limp approximation, which raised his eyebrows but no comment.

  He was a case of an extremely agile mind in a totally unsuitable body. There were large cheeks, double chins, fat-lidded eyes and a small mouth. Dark, smooth hair had neither receded nor grayed. He had flat ears, a neck like a weight lifter, and a charcoal pin-striped suit straining over a copious belly. He might have difficulty, I thought, in catching sight of certain parts of his own body. Except in the brain-box, nature had dealt him a sad hand.

  “First of all,” he said, “I have some bad news, and I possibly shouldn’t be here talking to you at all, according to how you read Archbold.”

  “Archbold being the dos and don‘ts manual for trial lawyers?”

  “More or less.”

  “What’s the bad news, then?” I asked. There hadn’t been much that was good.

  “Ellis Quint has retracted his ‘guilty’ plea, and has gone back to ’not guilty.‘ ”

  “Retracted?” I exclaimed. “How can one retract a confession?”

  “Very easily.” He sighed. “Quint says he was upset yesterday about his mother’s death, and what he said about feeling guilty was misinterpreted. In other words, his lawyers have got over the shock and have had a rethink. They apparently know you have so far not been able to break Ellis Quint’s alibi for the night that last colt was attacked in Northamptonshire, and they think they can therefore get the Bracken colt charge dismissed, despite the Land-Rover and circumstantial evidence, so they are aiming for a complete acquittal, not psychiatric treatment, and, I regret to tell you, they are likely to succeed.”

  He didn’t have to tell me that my own reputation would never recover if Ellis emerged with his intact.

  “And Archbold?”

  “If I were the Crown Prosecuting counsel in this case I could be struck off for talking to you, a witness. As you know, I am the senior barrister in the chambers where the man prosecuting Ellis Quint works. I have seen his brief and discussed the case with him. I can absolutely properly talk to you, though perhaps some people might not think it prudent.”

  I smiled. “‘Bye-’bye, then.”

  “I may not discuss with you a case in which I may be examining you as a witness. But of course I will not be examining you. Also, we can talk about anything else. Like, for instance, golf.”

  “I don’t play golf.”

  “Don’t be obtuse, my dear fellow. Your perceptions are acute.”

  “Are we talking about angles?”

  His eyes glimmered behind the folds of fat. “I saw the report package that you sent to the CPS.”

  “The Crown Prosecution Service?”

  “The same. I happened to be talking to a friend. I said your report had surprised me, both by its thoroughness and by your deductions and conclusions. He said I shouldn’t be surprised. He said you’d had the whole top echelon of the Jockey Club hanging on your every word. He said that, about a year ago, you’d cleared up two major racing messes at the same time. They’ve never forgotten it.”

  “A year last May,” I said. “Is that what he meant?”

  “I expect so. He said you had an assistant then that isn’t seen around anymore. The job I’d like you to do might need an assistant for the leg-work. Don’t you have your assistant nowadays?”

  “Chico Bames?”

  He nodded. “A name like that.”

  “He got married,” I said briefly. “His wife doesn’t like what I do, so he’s given it up. He teaches judo. I still see him—he gives me a judo lesson most weeks, but I can’t ask him for any other sort of help.”

  “Pity.”

  “Yes. He was good. Great company and bright.”

  “And he got deterred. That’s why he gave it up.”

  I went, internally, very still. I said, “What do you mean?”

  “I heard,” he said, his gaze steady on my face, “that he got beaten with some sort of thin chain to deter him from helping you. To deter him from all detection. And it worked.”

  “He got married,” I said.

  Davis Tatum leaned back in his chair, which creaked under his weight.

  “I heard,” he said, “that the same treatment was doled out to you, and in the course of things the Jockey Club mandarins made you take your shirt off. They said they had never seen anything like it. The whole of your upper body, arms included, was black with bruising, and there were vicious red weals all over you. And with your shirt hiding all that you’d calmly explained to them how and why you’d been attacked and how one of their number, who had arranged it, was a villain. You got one of the big shots chucked out.”

  “Who told you all that?”

  “One hears things.”

  I thought in unprintable curses. The six men who’d seen me that day with my shirt off had stated their intention of never talking about it. They’d wanted to keep to themselves the villainy I’d found within their own walls; and nothing had been more welcome to me than that silence. It had been bad enough at the time. I didn’t want continually to be reminded.

  “Where does one hear such things?” I asked.

  “Be your age, Sid. In the clubs ... Bucks, the Turf, the RAC, the Garrick ... these things get mentioned.”

  “How often ... do they get mentioned? How often have you heard that story?”

  He paused as if checking with an inner authority, and then said, “Once.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I gave my word.”

  “One of the Jockey Club?”

  “I gave my word. If you’d given your word, would you tell me?”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “I asked around about you. And that’s what I was told. Told in confidence. If it matters to you, I’ve heard it from no one else.”

  “It matters.”

  “It reflects to your credit,” he protested. “It obviously didn’t stop you.”

  “It could give other villains ideas.”

  “And do villains regularly attack you?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “Physically no one’s laid a finger on me since that time.” Not until yesterday, I thought. “If you’re talking about nonphysical assaults ... Have you read the papers?”

  “Scurrilous.” Davis Tatum twisted in his seat until he could call the barman. “Tanqueray and tonic, please—and for you, Sid?”

  “Scotch. A lot of water.”

  The barman brought the glasses, setting them out on little round white mats.

  “Health,” Davis Tatum toasted, raising his gin.

  “Survival,” I responded, and drank to both.

  He put down his glass and came finally to the point.

  “I need someone,” he said, “who is clever, unafraid and able to think fast in a crisis.”

  “No one’s like that.”

  “What about you?”

  I smiled. “I’m stupid, scared silly a good deal of the time and I have nightmares. What you think you see is not what you get.”

  “I get the man who wrote the Quint report.”

  I looked benignly at my glass and not at his civilized face. “If you’re going to do something to a small child that you know he won’t like,” I said, “such as sticking a needle into him, you first tell him what a brave little boy he is—in the hope that he’ll then let you make a pincushion of him without complaint.”

  There was a palpable silence, then he chuckled, the low, rich timbre filling the air. There was embarrassment in there somewhere; a ploy exposed.

  I said prosaically, “What’s the job?”

  He waited while four businessmen arrived, arranged their drinks and sank into monetary conversation at the table farthest from where we sat.

  “Do yo
u know who I mean by Owen Yorkshire?” Tatum asked, looking idly at the newcomers, not at me.

  “Owen Yorkshire.” I rolled the name around in memory and came up with only doubts. “Does he own a horse or two?”

  “He does. He also owns Topline Foods.”

  “Topline ... as in sponsored race at Aintree? As in Ellis Quint, guest of honor at the Topline Foods lunch the day before the Grand National?”

  “That’s the fellow.”

  “And the inquiry?”

  “Find out if he’s manipulating the Quint case to his own private advantage.”

  I said thoughtfully, “I did hear that there’s a heavyweight abroad.”

  “Find out who it is, and why.”

  “What about poor old Archbold? He’d turn in his grave.”

  “So you’ll do it!”

  “I’ll try. But why me? Why not the police? Why not the old-boy internet?”

  He looked at me straightly. “Because you include silence in what you sell.”

  “And I’m expensive,” I said.

  “Retainer and refreshers,” he promised.

  “Who’s paying?”

  “The fees will come through me.”

  “And it’s agreed,” I said, “that the results, if any, are yours. Prosecution or otherwise will normally be your choice.”

  He nodded.

  “In case you’re wondering,” I said, “when it comes to Ellis Quint, I gave the client’s money back, in order to be able to stop him myself. The client didn’t at first believe in what he’d done. I made my own choice. I have to tell you that you’d run that risk.”

  He leaned forward and extended his pudgy hand.

  “We’ll shake on it,” he said, and grasped my palm with a firmness that sent a shock wave fizzing clear up to my jaw.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, sensing it.

  “Nothing.”

  He wasn’t getting much of a deal, I thought. I had a reputation already in tatters, a cracked ulna playing up, and the prospect of being chewed to further shreds by Ellis’s defense counsel. He’d have done as well to engage my pal Jonathan of the streaky hair.

  “Mr. Tatum,” I began.

  “Davis. My name’s Davis.”

  “Will you give me your assurance that you won’t speak of that Jockey Club business around the clubs?”

  “Assurance?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I told you ... it’s to your credit.”

  “It’s a private thing. I don’t like fuss.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. He said, “You have my assurance.” And I wanted to believe in it, but I wasn’t sure that I did. He was too intensely a club man, a filler of large armchairs in dark paneled rooms full of old exploded reputations and fruitily repeated secrets: “Won’t say a word, old boy.”

  “Sid.”

  “Mm?”

  “Whatever the papers say, where it really counts, you are respected.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The clubs are good for gossip, but these days that’s not where the power lies.”

  “Power wanders round like the magnetic North Pole.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I just did,” I said.

  “No, I mean, did you make it up?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Power, these days, is fragmented,” he said.

  I added, “And where the power is at any one time is not necessarily where one would want to be.”

  He beamed proprietorially as if he’d invented me himself.

  There was a quick rustle of clothes beside my ear and a drift of flowery scent, and a young woman tweaked a chair around to join our table and sat in it, looking triumphant.

  “Well, well, well,” she said. “Mr. Davis Tatum and Sid Halley! What a surprise!”

  I said, to Davis Tatum’s mystified face, “This is Miss India Cathcart, who writes for The Pump. If you say nothing you’ll find yourself quoted repeating things you never thought, and if you say anything at all, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  “Sid,” she said mock-sorrowfully, “can’t you take a bit of kicking around?”

  Tatum opened his mouth indignantly and, as I was afraid he might try to defend me, I shook my head. He stared at me, then with a complete change of manner said in smooth, lawyerly detachment, “Miss Cathcart, why are you here?”

  “Why? To see you, of course.”

  “But why?”

  She looked from him to me and back again, her appearance just as I remembered it: flawless porcelain skin, light-blue eyes, cleanly outlined mouth, black shining hair. She wore brown and red, with amber beads.

  She said, “Isn’t it improper for a colleague of the Crown Prosecutor to be seen talking to one of the witnesses?”

  “No, it isn‘t,” Tatum said, and asked me, “Did you tell her we were meeting here?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how ... why, Miss Cathcart, are you here?”

  “I told you. It’s a story.”

  “Does The Pump know you’re here?” I asked.

  A shade crossly she said, “I’m not a child. I’m allowed out on my own, you know. And anyway, the paper sent me.”

  “The Pump told you we’d be here?” Tatum asked.

  “My editor said to come and see. And he was right!”

  Tatum said, “Sid?”

  “Mm,” I said. “Interesting.”

  India said to me, “Kevin says you went to school in Liverpool.”

  Tatum, puzzled, asked, “What did you say?”

  She explained, “Sid wouldn’t tell me where he went to school, so I found out.” She looked at me accusingly. “You don’t sound like Liverpool.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “You sound more like Eton. How come?”

  “I’m a mimic,” I said.

  If she really wanted to, she could find out also that between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one I’d been more or less adopted by a Newmarket trainer (who had been to Eton) who made me into a good jockey and by his example changed my speech and taught me how to live and how to behave and how to manage the money I earned. He’d been already old then, and he died. I often thought of him. He opened doors for me still.

  “Kevin told me you were a slum child,” India said.

  “Slum is an attitude, not a place.”

  “Prickly, are we?”

  Damn, I thought. I will not let her goad me. I smiled, which she didn’t like.

  Tatum, listening with disapproval, said, “Who is Kevin?”

  “He works for The Pump,” I told him.

  India said, “Kevin Mills is The Pump’s chief reporter. He did favors for Halley and got kicked in the teeth.”

  “Painful,” Tatum commented dryly.

  “This conversation’s getting nowhere,” I said. “India, Mr. Tatum is not the prosecutor in any case where I am a witness, and we may talk about anything we care to, including, as just now before you came, golf.”

  “You can’t play golf with one hand.”

  It was Tatum who winced, not I. I said, “You can watch golf on television without arms, legs or ears. Where did your editor get the idea that you might find us here?”

  “He didn’t say. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It is of the essence,” Tatum said.

  “It’s interesting,” I said, “because to begin with, it was The Pump that worked up the greatest head of steam about the ponies mutilated in Kent. That was why I got in touch with Kevin Mills. Between us we set up a hotline, as a ‘Save the Tussilago faifara’ sort of thing.”

  India demanded, “What did you say?”

  “Tussilago farfara,” Tatum repeated, amused. “It’s the botanical name of the wildflower coltsfoot.”

  “How did you know that?” she asked me fiercely.

  “I looked it up.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, the minute I linked Ellis Quint, even tentatively, to the colts, and to Rachel Fems’s pony, The Pump
abruptly changed direction and started tearing me apart with crusading claws. I can surely ask, India, why do you write about me so ferociously? Is it just your way? Is it that you do so many hatchet jobs that you can’t do anything else? I didn’t expect kindness, but you are ... every week ... extreme.”

  She looked uncomfortable. She did what she had one week called me “diddums” for doing: she defended herself.

  “My editor gives me guidelines.” She almost tossed her head.

  “You mean he tells you what to write?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “Which?”

  She looked from me to Tatum and back.

  She said, “He subs my piece to align it with overall policy.”

  I said nothing. Tatum said nothing. India, a shade desperately, said, “Only saints get themselves burned at the stake.”

  Tatum said with gravitas, “If I read any lies or in nuendos about my having improperly talked to Sid Halley about the forthcoming Quint trial, I will sue you personally for defamation, Miss Cathcart, and I will ask for punitive damages. So choose your stake. Flames seem inevitable.”

  I felt almost sorry for her. She stood up blankly, her eyes wide.

  “Say we weren’t here,” I said.

  I couldn’t read her frozen expression. She walked away from us and headed for the stairs.

  “A confused young woman,” Tatum said. “But how did she—or her paper—know we would be here?”

  I asked, “Do you feed your appointments into a computer?”

  He frowned. “I don’t do it personally. My secretary does it. We have a system which can tell where all the partners are, if there’s a crisis. It tells where each of us can be found. I did tell my secretary I was coming here, but not who I was going to meet. That still doesn’t explain ...”

  I sighed. “Yesterday evening you phoned my mobile number.”

  “Yes, and you phoned me back.”

  “Someone’s been listening on my mobile phone’s frequency. Someone heard you call me.”

  “Hell! But you called me back. They heard almost nothing.”

  “You gave your name ... How secure is your office computer?”

  “We change passwords every three months.”

  “And you use passwords that everyone can remember easily?”