Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

  The wrench was heavy. He balanced its handle on the arm of the chair I was sitting in and held it steady so that my wrist was up at the same level. He had two strong hands. He persevered with the screw.

  I said, “Ellis,” in protest, not from anger or even fear, but in disbelief that he could do what he was doing: in a lament for the old Ellis, in a sort of passionate sorrow.

  For the few seconds that he looked into my face, his expression was flooded with awareness ... and shame. Then the feelings passed, and he returned in deep concentration to an atrocious pleasure.

  It was extraordinary. He seemed to go into a kind of trance, as if the office and Yorkshire and Tilepit didn’t exist, as if there were only one reality, which was the clench of forged steel jaws on a wrist and the extent to which he could intensify it.

  I thought: if the wrench had been lopping shears, if its jaws had been knives instead of flat steel, the whole devastating nightmare would have come true. I shut my mind to it: made it cold. Sweated, all the same.

  I thought: what I see in his face is the full-blown addiction; not the cruel satisfaction he could get from unscrewing a false hand, but the sinful fulfillment of cutting off a live hoof.

  I glanced very briefly at Yorkshire and Tilepit and saw their frozen, bottomless astonishment, and I realized that until that moment of revelation they hadn’t wholly believed in Ellis’s guilt.

  My wrist hurt. Somewhere up my arm the ulna grumbled.

  I said, “Ellis” sharply, to wake him up.

  He got the screw to tighten another notch.

  I yelled at him, “Ellis,” and again, “Ellis.”

  He straightened, looking vaguely down at fifteen inches of heavy stainless steel wrench incongruously sticking out sideways from its task. He tied it to the arm of the chair with another strap from the desk and went over to the window, not speaking, but not rational, either.

  I tried to dislodge myself from the wrench but my hand was too numb and the grip too tight. I found it difficult to think. My hand was pale blue and gray. Thought was a crushed wrist and an abysmal shattering fear that if the damage went on too long, it would be permanent. Hands could be lost.

  Both hands ... Oh, God. Oh, God.

  “Ellis,” I said yet again, but in a lower voice this time: a plea for him to return to the old self, that was there all the time, somewhere.

  I waited. Acute discomfort and the terrible anxiety continued. Ellis’s thoughts seemed far out in space. Tilepit cleared his throat in embarrassment and Yorkshire, as if in unconscious humor, crunched a pickle.

  Minutes passed.

  I said, “Ellis...”

  I closed my eyes. Opened them again. More or less prayed.

  Time and nightmare fused. One became the other. The future was a void.

  Ellis left the window and crossed with bouncing steps to the chair where I sat. He looked into my face and enjoyed what he could undoubtedly see there. Then he unscrewed and untied the wrench with violent jerks and dropped the abominable ratchet from a height onto the desk.

  No one said anything. Ellis seemed euphoric, high, full of good spirits, striding around the room as if unable to contain his exhilaration.

  I got stabbing pins and needles in my fingers, and thanked the fates for it. My hand felt dreadful but turned slowly yellowish pink.

  Thought came back from outer space and lodged again earthily in my brain.

  Ellis, coming down very slightly, looked at his watch. He plucked from the desk the cosmetic glove from my false arm, came to my right side, shoved the glove inside my shirt against my chest and, with a theatrical flourish, zipped up the front of my blue tracksuit to keep his gift from falling out.

  He looked at his watch again. Then he went across the room, picked up the unscrewed hand, returned to my side and slapped the dead mechanism into my living palm. There was a powerful impression all around that he was busy making sure no trace of Sid Halley remained in the room.

  He went around behind me and undid the strap fastening me into the chair. Then he undid the second strap that held my upper arms against my body.

  “Screw the hand back on,” he instructed.

  Perhaps because they had bent from being kicked around, or perhaps because my real hand was eighty percent useless, the screw threads wouldn’t mesh smoothly, and after three half turns they stuck. The hand looked reattached, but wouldn’t work.

  “Stand up,” Ellis said.

  I stood, swaying, my ankles still tied together.

  “You’re letting him go,” Tilepit exclaimed, with grateful relief.

  “Of course,” Ellis said.

  Yorkshire was smiling.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” Ellis told me.

  I did so, and he strapped my wrists tight together.

  Last, he undid my ankles.

  “This way.” He pulled me by the arm over to the door and through into the passage. I walked like an automaton.

  Looking back, I saw Yorkshire put his hand on the telephone. Beyond him, Tilepit was happy with foolish faith.

  Ellis pressed the call button for the elevator, and the door opened immediately.

  “Get in,” he said.

  I looked briefly at his now unsmiling face. Expressionless. That made two of us, I thought, two of us thinking the same thing and not saying it.

  I stepped into the elevator and he leaned in quickly and pressed the button for the ground floor, then jumped back. The door closed between us. The elevator began its short journey down.

  To tie together the wrists of a man who could unscrew one of them was an exercise in futility. All the same, the crossed threads and my fumbling fingers gave me trouble and some severe moments of panic before the hand slipped free. The elevator had already reached its destination by the time I’d shed the tying strap, leaving no chance to emerge from the opening door with everything anywhere near normal.

  I put the mechanical hand deep into my right-hand tracksuit trousers pocket. Surreal, I grimly thought. The long sleeve of brown overall covered the void where it belonged.

  Ellis had given me a chance. Not much of one, probably, but at least I did have the answer to my question, which was no, he wouldn’t personally kill me. Yorkshire definitely would.

  The two blue-clad bodyguards were missing from the lobby.

  The telephone on the desk was ringing, but the bodyguards were outside, busily positioning a Topline Foods van. One guard was descending from the driver’s seat. The other was opening the rear doors.

  A van, I understood, for abduction. For a journey to an unmarked grave. A bog job, the Irish called it. How much, I wondered, were they being paid?

  Ellis’s timing had given me thirty seconds. He’d sent me down too soon. In the lobby I had no future. Out in the open air ... some.

  Taking a couple of deep breaths, I shot out through the doors as fast as I could, and sprinted—and I ran not to the right, towards my own car, but veered left around the van towards the open gates.

  There was a shout from one of the blue figures, a yell from the second, and I thought for a moment that I could avoid them, but to my dismay the gatekeeper himself came to unwelcome life, emerging from his kiosk and barring my exit. Big man in another blue uniform, overconfident.

  I ran straight at him. He stood solidly, legs apart, his weight evenly balanced. He wasn’t prepared for or expecting my left foot to knock aside the inside of his knee or for my back to bend and curl like a cannonball into his stomach: he fell over backwards and I was on my way before he struggled to his knees. The other two, though, had gained ground.

  The sort of judo Chico had taught me was in part the stylized advances and throws of a regulated sport and in part an individual style for a one-handed victim. For a start, I never wore, in my private sessions with him, the loose white judogi uniform. I never fought in bare feet but always in ordinary shoes or sneakers. The judo I’d learned was how to save my life, not how to earn a black belt.

  Ordinary judo ne
eded two hands. Myoelectric hands had a slow response time, a measurable pause between instruction and action. Chico and I had scrapped all grappling techniques for that hand and substituted clubbing; and I used all his lessons at Frodsham as if they were as familiar as walking.

  We hadn’t exactly envisaged no useful hands at all, but it was amazing what one could do if one wanted to live. It was the same as it had been in races: win now, pay later.

  My opponents were straight musclemen with none of the subtlety of the Japanese understanding of lift and leverage and speed. Chico could throw me every time, but Yorkshire’s watchdogs couldn’t.

  The names of the movements clicked like a litany in my brain—shintai, randori, tai-sabaki. Fighting literally to live, I stretched every technique I knew and adapted others, using falling feints that involved my twice lying on the ground and sticking a foot into a belly to fly its owner over my head. It ended with one blue uniform lying dazed on his back, one complaining I’d broken his nose, and one haring off to the office building with the bad news.

  I stumbled out onto the road, feeling that if I went back for my car the two men I’d left on the ground would think of getting up again and closing the gates.

  In one direction lay houses, so I staggered that way. Better cover. I needed cover before anyone chased me in the Topline Foods van.

  The houses, when I reached them, were too regular, the gardens too tidy and small. I chose one house with no life showing, walked unsteadily up the garden path, kept on going, found myself in the back garden with another row of houses over the back fence.

  The fence was too high to jump or vault, but there was an empty crate lying there, a gift from the gods.

  No one came out of any of the houses to ask me what I thought I was doing. I emerged into the next street and began to think about where I was going and what I looked like.

  Brown overalls. Yorkshire would be looking for brown overalls.

  I took them off and dumped them in one of the houses’ brown-looking beech hedges.

  Taking off the overalls revealed the nonexistence of a left hand.

  Damn it, I thought astringently. Things are never easy, so cope.

  I put the pink exposed end of arm, with its bare electrical contacts, into my left-hand jacket pocket, and walked, not ran, up the street. I wanted to run, but hadn’t the strength. Weak ... Stamina a memory, a laugh.

  There was a boy in the distance roller-blading, coming towards me and wearing not the ubiquitous baseball cap but a striped woolen hat. That would do, I thought. I fumbled some money out of the zip pocket in my belt and stood in his way.

  He tried to avoid me, swerved, overbalanced and called me filthy names until his gaze fell on the money in my hand.

  “Sell me your hat,” I suggested.

  “Yer wha?”

  “Your hat,” I said, “for the money.”

  “You’ve got blood on your face,” he said.

  He snatched the money and aimed to roller-blade away. I stuck out a foot and knocked him off his skates. He gave me a bitter look and a choice of swear words, but also the hat, sweeping it off and throwing it at me.

  It was warm from his head and I put it on, hoping he didn’t have lice. I wiped my face gingerly on my sleeve and slouched along towards the road with traffic that crossed the end of the residential street ... and saw the Topline Foods van roll past.

  Whatever they were looking for, it didn’t seem to be a navy tracksuit with a striped woolen hat.

  Plan B—run away. OK.

  Plan C—where to?

  I reached the end of the houses and turned left into what might once have been a shopping street, but which now seemed to offer only realtors, building societies and banks. Marooned in this unhelpful landscape were only two possible refuges: a betting shop and a place selling ice cream.

  I chose the ice cream. I was barely through the door when outside the window my own Mercedes went past.

  Ellis was driving.

  I still had its keys in my pocket. Jonathan, it seemed, wasn’t alone in his car-stealing skill.

  “What do you want?” a female voice said behind me.

  She was asking about ice cream: a thin young woman, bored.

  “Er ... that one,” I said, pointing at random.

  “Cup or cone? Large or small?”

  “Cone. Small.” I felt disoriented, far from reality. I paid for the ice cream and licked it, and it tasted of almonds.

  “You’ve cut your face,” she said.

  “I ran into a tree.”

  There were four or five tables with people sitting at them, mostly adolescent groups. I sat at a table away from the window and within ten minutes saw the Topline van pass twice more and my own car, once.

  Tremors ran in my muscles. Fear, or over-exertion, or both.

  There was a door marked Men’s Room at the back of the shop. I went in there when I’d finished the ice cream and looked at my reflection in the small mirror over the sink.

  The cut along my left cheekbone had congealed into a blackening line, thick and all too visible. Dampening a paper towel, I dabbed gently at the mess, trying to remove the clotted blood without starting new bleeding, but making only a partial improvement.

  Locked in a cubicle, I had another try at screwing my wandering hand into place, and this time at length got it properly aligned and fastened, but it still wouldn’t work. Wretchedly depressed, I fished out the long covering glove and with difficulty, because of no talcum powder and an enfeebled right hand, pulled that too into the semblance of reality.

  Damn Ellis, I thought mordantly. He’d been right about some things being near to unbearable.

  Never mind. Get on with it.

  I emerged from the cubicle and tried my cheek again with another paper towel, making the cut paler, fading it into skin color.

  Not too bad.

  The face below the unfamiliar woolen hat looked strained. Hardly a surprise.

  I went out through the ice cream shop and walked along the street. The Topline Foods van rolled past quite slowly, driven by one of the blue-clad guards, who was intently scanning the other side of the road. That body-guard meant, I thought, that Yorkshire himself might be out looking for me in a car I couldn’t recognize.

  Perhaps all I had to do was go up to some sensible-looking motorist and say, “Excuse me, some people are trying to kill me. Please will you drive me to the police station?” And then, “Who are these people?” “The managing director of Topline Foods, and Ellis Quint.” “Oh yes? And you are ... ?”

  I did go as far as asking someone the way to the police station—“Round there, straight on, turn left—about a mile”—and for want of anything better I started walking that way; but what I came to first was a bus shelter with several people standing in a line, waiting. I added myself to the patient half dozen and stood with my back to the road, and a woman with two children soon came up behind me, hiding me well.

  Five long minutes later my Mercedes pulled up on the far side of the road with a white Rolls-Royce behind it. Ellis stepped out of my car and Yorkshire out of the Rolls. They conferred together, furiously stabbing the air, pointing up and down the street while I bent my head down to the children and prayed to remain unspotted.

  The bus came while the cars were still there.

  Four people got off. The waiting line, me included, surged on. I resisted the temptation to look out of the window until the bus was traveling again, and then saw with relief that the two men were still talking.

  I had no idea where the bus was going.

  Who cared? Distance was all I needed. I’d paid to go to the end of the line, wherever that was.

  Peaceful Frodsham in Cheshire, sometime Saturday, people going shopping in the afternoon. I felt disconnected from that sort of life; and I didn’t know what the time was, as the elastic metal bracelet watch I normally wore on my left wrist had come off in Yorkshire’s office and was still there, I supposed.

  The bus slowly filled a
t subsequent stops. Shopping baskets. Chatter. Where was I going?

  The end of the line proved to be the railway depot in Runcom, halfway to Liverpool, going north when I needed to go south.

  I got off the bus and went to the depot. There was no Mercedes, no Rolls-Royce, no Topline Foods van in sight, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t think of buses and trains eventually. Runcorn railway depot didn’t feel safe. There was a train to Liverpool due in four minutes, I learned, so I bought a ticket and caught it.

  The feeling of unreality continued, also the familiar aversion to asking for help from the local police. They didn’t approve of outside investigators. If I ever got into messes, besides, I considered it my own responsibility to get myself out. Norman Pictons were rare. In Liverpool, moreover, I was probably counted a local boy who’d been disloyal to his “roots.”

  At the Liverpool railway depot I read the well-displayed timetable for trains going south.

  An express to London, I thought; then backtrack to Reading and get a taxi to Shelley Green, Archie Kirk’s house.

  No express for hours. What else, then?

  The incredible words took a time to penetrate: Liverpool to Bournemouth, departing at 3:10 p.m. A slow train, meandering southwards across England, right down to the Channel, with many stops on the way ... and one of the stops was Reading.

  I sprinted, using the last shreds of strength. It was already, according to the big depot clock, ticking away at 3:07. Whistles were blowing when I stumbled into the last car in the long train. A guard helped thrust me in and closed the door. The wheels rolled. I had no ticket and little breath, but a marvelous feeling of escape. That feeling lasted only until the first of the many stops, which I discovered with horror to be Runcorn.

  Square one: where I’d started. All fear came flooding back. I sat stiff and immobile, as if movement itself would give me away.

  Nothing happened. The train quietly rolled onwards. Out on the platform a blue-clad Topline Foods security guard was speaking into a hand-held telephone and shaking his head.

  Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Leamington Spa, Banbury, Oxford, Didcot, Reading.