by Dick Francis
“I locked it when I left last night, Owen.”
Mrs. Dove’s manner towards her boss was interestingly like Willy Parrott’s. All-equals-together; up to a point.
“Go and look,” he said. “And check that cupboard.”
“No one’s opened that cupboard since you moved offices up here this week. And you have the only key.”
“Go and check anyway,” he said.
She had no difficulty with obeying him. I remembered Marsha Rowse’s ingenuous statement—“Mrs. Dove says never to make Mr. Yorkshire angry.”
Mrs. Dove, self-contained, confident, was taking her own advice. She was not, I saw, in love with the man, nor was she truly afraid of him. His temper, I would have thought, was to her more of a nuisance than life—or even job—threatening.
As things stood, or rather as I sat, I saw the wisdom of following Mrs. Dove’s example for as long as I could.
She was gone a fair time, during which I worried more and more anxiously that I’d left something slightly out of place in that office, that she would know by some sixth sense that someone had been in there, that I’d left some odor in the air despite never using aftershave, that I’d closed the filing cabinets incorrectly, that I’d left visible fingerprints on a shiny surface, that I’d done anything that she knew she hadn’t.
I breathed slowly, trying not to sweat.
When she finally came back she said, “The TV crews are leaving. Everything’s ready for Monday. The florists are bringing the Lady Mayoress’s bouquet at ten o‘clock. The red-carpet people are downstairs now measuring the lobby. And, oh, the man from Intramind Imaging says they want a check.”
“What about the office?”
“The office? Oh, the office is all right.” She was unconcerned. “It was all locked. Just as I left it.”
“And the cupboard?” Yorkshire insisted.
“Locked.” She thought he was over-reacting. I was concerned only to show no relief.
“What are you going to do with him?” she asked, indicating me. “You can’t keep him here, can you? The TV crew downstairs were talking about him being here. They want to interview him. What shall I say?”
Yorkshire with black humor said, “Tell them he’s all tied up.”
She wasn’t amused. She said, “I’ll say he went out the back way. And I’ll be off, too. I’ll be here by eight, Monday morning.” She looked at me calmly and spoke to Yorkshire. “Let him go,” she said unemotionally. “What harm can he do? He’s pathetic.”
Yorkshire, undecided, said, “Pathetic? Why pathetic?”
She paused composedly half-way through the door, and dropped a pearl beyond price.
“It says so in The Pump.”
Neither of these two men, I thought, listening to them, was a full-blown criminal. Not yet. Yorkshire was too near the brink.
He still held the heavy adjustable wrench, slapping its head occasionally against his palm, as if it helped his thoughts.
“Please untie me,” I said. At least I found the fatal loquaciousness had abated. I no longer wanted to gabble, but just to talk my way out.
Tilepit himself might have done it. He clearly was unused to—and disturbed by—even this level of violence. His power base was his grandfather’s name. His muscle was his hire-and-fire clout. There were only so many top editorships in the British press, and George Godbar, editor of The Pump, wasn’t going to lose his hide to save mine. Matters of principle were all too often an unaffordable luxury, and I didn’t believe that in George Godbar’s place, or even in Kevin Mills’s or India‘s, I would have done differently.
Yorkshire said, “We wait.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out what looked bizarrely like a jar of pickles. Dumping the wrench temporarily, he unscrewed the lid, put the jar on the desk, pulled out a green finger and bit it, crunching it with large white teeth.
“Pickle?” he offered Tilepit.
The third baron averted his nose.
Yorkshire, shrugging, chewed uninhibitedly and went back to slapping his palm with the wrench.
“I’ll be missed,” I said mildly, “if you keep me much longer.”
“Let him go,” Tilepit said with a touch of impatience. “He’s right, we can’t keep him here indefinitely.”
“We wait,” Yorkshire said heavily, fishing out another pickle, and to the accompaniment of noisy munching, we waited.
I could smell the vinegar.
The door opened finally behind me and both Yorkshire and Tilepit looked welcoming and relieved.
I didn’t. The newcomer, who came around in front of me blankly, was Ellis Quint.
Ellis, in open-necked white shirt; Ellis, handsome, macho, vibrating with showmanship; Ellis, the nation’s darling, farcically accused. I hadn’t seen him since the Ascot races, and none of his radiance had waned.
“What’s Halley doing here?” he demanded, sounding alarmed. “What has he learned?”
“He was wandering about,” Yorkshire said, pointing a pickle at me. “I had him brought up here. He can’t have learned a thing.”
Tilepit announced, “Halley says he came to ask me to stop The Pump’s campaign against him.”
Ellis said positively, “He wouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” Yorkshire asked. “Look at him. He’s a wimp.”
“A wimp!”
Despite my precarious position I smiled involuntarily at the depth of incredulity in his voice. I even grinned at him sideways from below half-lowered eyelids, and saw the same private smile on his face: the acknowledgment of brotherhood, of secrecy, of shared esoteric experience, of cold winter afternoons, perils embraced, disappointments and injuries taken lightly, of indescribable triumphs. We had hugged each other standing in our stirrups, ecstatic after winning posts. We had trusted, bonded and twinned.
Whatever we were now, we had once been more than brothers. The past—our past—remained. The intense and mutual memories could not be erased.
The smiles died. Ellis said, “This wimp comes up on your inside and beats you in the last stride. This wimp could ruin us all if we neglect our inside rail. This wimp was champion jockey for five or six years and might have been still, and we’d be fools to forget it.” He put his face close to mine. “Still the same old Sid, aren’t you? Cunning. Nerveless. Win at all costs.”
There was nothing to say.
Yorkshire bit into a pickle. “What do we do with him, then?”
“First we find out why he’s here.”
Tilepit said, “He came to get The Pump to stop—”
“Balls,” Ellis interrupted. “He’s lying.”
“How can you tell?” Tilepit protested.
“I know him.” He said it with authority, and it was true.
“What, then?” Yorkshire asked.
Ellis said to me, “You’ll not get me into court, Sid. Not Monday. Not ever. You haven’t been able to break my Shropshire alibi, and my lawyers say that without that the prosecution won’t have a chance. They’ll withdraw the charge. Understand? I know you do understand. You’ll have destroyed your own reputation, not mine. What’s more, my father’s going to kill you.”
Yorkshire and Tilepit showed, respectively, pleasure and shock.
“Before Monday?” I asked.
The flippancy fell like lead. Ellis strode around behind me and yanked back the right front of my brown overalls, and the tracksuit beneath. He tore a couple of buttons off my shirt, pulling that back after, then he pressed down strongly with his fingers.
“Gordon says he broke your collarbone,” he said.
“Well, he didn’t.”
Ellis would see the remains of bruising and he could feel the bumps of callus formed by earlier breaks, but it was obvious to him that his father had been wrong.
“Gordon will kill you,” he repeated. “Don’t you care?”
Another unanswerable question.
It seemed to me as if the cruel hidden side of Ellis suddenly took ove
r, banishing the friend and becoming the threatened star who had everything to lose. He roughly threw my clothes together and continued around behind me until he stood on my left side.
“You won’t defeat me,” he said. “You’ve cost me half a million. You’ve cost me lawyers. You’ve cost me sleep.”
He might insist that I couldn’t defeat him, but we both knew I would in the end, if I tried, because he was guilty.
“You’ll pay for it,” he said.
He put his hands on the hard shell of my left forearm and raised it until my elbow formed a right angle. The tight strap around my upper arms and chest prevented me from doing anything to stop him. Whatever strength that remained in my upper left arm (and it was, in fact, quite a lot) was held in uselessness by that strap.
Ellis peeled back the brown sleeve, and the blue one underneath. He tore open my shirt cuff and pulled that sleeve back also. He looked at the plastic skin underneath.
“I know something about that arm,” he said. “I got a brochure on purpose. That skin is a sort of glove, and it comes off.”
He felt up my arm until, by the elbow, he came to the top of the glove. He rolled it down as far as the wrist and then, with concentration, pulled it off finger by finger, exposing the mechanics in all their detail.
The close-fitting textured glove gave the hand an appearance of life, with knuckles, veins and shapes like fingernails. The works inside were gears, springs and wiring. The bared forearm was bright pink, hard and shiny.
Ellis smiled.
He put his own strong right hand on my electrical left and pressed and twisted with knowledge and then, when the works clicked free, unscrewed the hand in several turns until it came right off.
Ellis looked into my eyes as at a feast. “Well?” he said.
“You shit.”
He smiled. He opened his fingers and let the unscrewed hand fall onto the carpet.
13
Tilepit looked shocked enough to vomit, but not Yorkshire: in fact, he laughed.
Ellis said to him sharply, “This man is not funny. Everything that has gone wrong is because of him, and don’t you forget it. It’s this Sid Halley that’s going to ruin you, and if you think he doesn’t care about what I’ve just done”—he put his toe against the fallen hand and moved it a few inches—“if you think it’s something to laugh at, I’ll tell you that for him it’s almost unbearable ... but not unbearable, is it, Sid?” He turned to ask me, and told Yorkshire at the same time, “No one yet has invented anything you’ve found actually unbearable, have they, Sid?”
I didn’t answer.
Yorkshire protested, “But he’s only—”
“Don’t say only,” Ellis interrupted, his voice hard and loud. “Don’t you understand it yet? What do you think he’s doing here? How did he get here? What does he know? He’s not going to tell you. His nickname’s ‘Tungsten Carbide’—that’s the hardest of all metals and it saws through steel. I know him. I’ve almost loved him. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, and we’ve got to decide what to do with him. How many people know he’s here?”
“My bodyguards,” Yorkshire said. “They brought him up.”
It was Lord Tilepit who gave him the real bad news. “It was a TV crew who told Owen that Sid Halley was in the building.”
“A TV crew!”
“They wanted to interview him. Mrs. Dove said she would tell them he’d gone.”
“Mrs. Dove!”
If Ellis had met Mrs. Dove he would know, as I did, that she wouldn’t lie for Yorkshire. Mrs. Dove had seen me, and she would say so.
Ellis asked furiously, “Did Mrs. Dove see him tied in that chair?”
“Yes,” Tilepit said faintly.
“You stupid...” Words failed Ellis, but for only a few short seconds. “Then,” he said flatly, “you can’t kill him here.”
“Kill him?” Tilepit couldn’t believe what he’d heard. His whole large face blushed pink. “I’m not... are you talking about murder?”
“Oh yes, my lord,” I said dryly, “they are. They’re thinking of putting Your Lordship behind bars as an accessory. You’ll love it in the slammer.”
I’d meant only to get Tilepit to see the enormity of what Ellis was proposing, but in doing so I’d made the mistake of unleashing Yorkshire’s rage.
He took two paces and kicked my unscrewed hand with such force that it flew across the room and crashed against the wall. Then he realized the wrench was still in his hand and swung it at my head.
I saw the blow coming but couldn’t get my head back far enough to avoid it altogether. The wrench’s heavy screw connected with my moving cheekbone and tore the skin, but didn’t this time knock me silly.
In Owen Yorkshire, the half-slipping brakes came wholly off. Perhaps the very sight of me, left-handless and bleeding and unable to retaliate, was all it took. He raised his arm and the wrench again, and I saw the spite in his face and the implacably murderous intention and I thought of nothing much at all, which afterwards seemed odd.
It was Ellis who stopped him. Ellis caught the descending arm and yanked Owen Yorkshire around sideways, so that although the heavy weapon swept on downwards, it missed me altogether.
“You’re brainless,” Ellis shouted. “I said not in here. You’re a raving lunatic. Too many people know he came here. Do you want to splatter his blood and brains all over your new carpet? You might as well go and shout from the rooftops. Get a grip on that frigging temper and find a tissue.”
“A what?”
“Something to stop him bleeding. Are you terminally insane? When he doesn’t turn up wherever he’s expected, you’re going to get the police in here looking for him. TV crew! Mrs. Dove! The whole frigging county! You get one drop of his blood on anything in here, you’re looking at twenty-five years.”
Yorkshire, bewildered by Ellis’s attack and turning sullen, said there weren’t any tissues. Verney Tilepit tentatively produced a handkerchief; white, clean and embroidered with a coronet. Ellis snatched it from him and slapped it on my cheek, and I wondered if ever, in any circumstances, I could, to save myself, deliberately kill him, and didn’t think so.
Ellis took the handkerchief away briefly, looked at the scarlet staining the white, and put it back, pressing.
Yorkshire strode about, waving the wrench as if jerked by strings. Tilepit looked extremely unhappy. I considered my probable future with gloom and Ellis, taking the handkerchief away again and watching my cheek critically, declared that the worst of the bleeding had stopped.
He gave the handkerchief back to Tilepit, who put it squeamishly in his pocket, and he snatched the wrench away from Yorkshire and told him to cool down and plan.
Planning took them both out of the office, the door closing behind them. Verney Tilepit didn’t in the least appreciate being left alone with me and went to look out of the window, to look anywhere except at me.
“Untie me,” I said with force.
No chance. He didn’t even show he’d heard.
I asked, “How did you get yourself into this mess?”
No answer.
I tried again. I said, “If I walk out of here free, I’ll forget I ever saw you.”
He turned around, but he had his back to the light and I couldn’t see his eyes clearly behind the spectacles.
“You really are in deep trouble,” I said.
“Nothing will happen.”
I wished I believed him. I said, “It must have seemed pretty harmless to you, just to use your paper to ridicule someone week after week. What did Yorkshire tell you? To save Ellis at all costs. Well, it is going to cost you.”
“You don’t understand. Ellis is blameless.”
“I understand that you’re up to your noble neck in shit.”
“I can’t do anything.” He was worried, unhappy and congenitally helpless.
“Untie me,” I said again, with urgency.
“It wouldn’t help. I couldn’t get you out.”
�
�Untie me,” I said. “I’ll do the rest.”
He dithered. If he had been capable of reasoned decisions he wouldn’t have let himself be used by Yorkshire, but he wasn’t the first or last rich man to stumble blindly into a quagmire. He couldn’t make up his mind to attempt saving himself by letting me free and, inevitably, the opportunity passed.
Ellis and Yorkshire came back, and neither of them would meet my eyes.
Bad sign.
Ellis, looking at his watch, said, “We wait.”
“What for?” Tilepit asked uncertainly.
Yorkshire answered, to Ellis’s irritation, “The TV people are on the point of leaving. Everyone will be gone in fifteen minutes.”
Tilepit looked at me, his anxieties showing plainly. “Let Halley go,” he begged.
Ellis said comfortingly, “Sure, in a while.”
Yorkshire smiled. His anger was preferable, on the whole.
Verney Tilepit wanted desperately to be reassured, but even he could see that if freeing me was the intention, why did we have to wait?
Ellis still held the wrench. He wouldn’t get it wrong, I thought. He wouldn’t spill my blood. I would probably not know much about it. I might not consciously learn the reciprocal answer to my self-searching question: Could he personally kill me, to save himself ? How deep did friendship go? Did it ever have absolute taboos? Had I already, by accusing him of evil, melted his innermost restraints? He wanted to get even. He would wound me any way he could. But kill . . . I didn’t know.
He walked around behind me.
Time, in a way, stood still. It was a moment in which to plead, but I couldn’t. The decision, whatever I said, would be his.
He came eventually around to my right-hand side and murmured, “Tungsten,” under his breath.
Water, I thought, I had water in my veins.
He reached down suddenly and clamped his hand around my right wrist, pulling fiercely upward.
I jerked my wrist out of his grasp and without warning he bashed the wrench across my knuckles. In the moment of utter numbness that resulted he slid the open jaws of the wrench onto my wrist and tightened the screw. Tightened it further, until the jaws grasped immovably, until they squeezed the upper and lower sides of my wrist together, compressing blood vessels, nerves and ligaments, bearing down on the bones inside.
