Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

  He said, “So why aren’t you disappointed that Ellis’s Shropshire alibi can’t be broken?”

  “Because Ellis. set it up that way.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Ever since the Northampton yearling was attacked, Ellis’s lawyers have been putting it about that if Ellis had an unbreakable alibi for that night, which I bet he assured them he had, it would invalidate the whole Combe Bassett case. They put pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service to withdraw, which they’ve been tottering on the brink of doing. Never mind that the two attacks were separate, the strong supposition arose that if Ellis couldn’t have done one, then he hadn’t done the other.”

  “Of course,” Norman said.

  “No,” I contradicted. “He made for himself a positively unbreakable alibi in Shropshire, and he got someone else to go to Northampton.”

  “But no one would.”

  “One person would. And did.”

  “But who, Sid?” Archie asked.

  “Gordon. His father.”

  Archie and Norman both stiffened as if turned to pillars of salt.

  The nerves in my right arm woke up. I pressed the magic button and they went slowly back to sleep. Brilliant. A lot better than in days gone by.

  “He couldn’t have done,” Archie said in revulsion.

  “He did.”

  “You’re just guessing. And you’re wrong.”

  “No.”

  “But, Sid . . .”

  “I know,” I sighed. “You, Charles and I have all been guests in his house. But he shot me last night. See it in The Pump.”

  Archie said weakly, “But that doesn’t mean . . .”

  “I’ll explain,” I said. “Give me a moment.”

  My skin was sweating. It came and went a bit, now and then. An affronted body, letting me know.

  “A moment?”

  “I’m not made of iron.”

  Archie breathed on a smile. “I thought it was tungsten?”

  “Mm.”

  They waited. I said, “Gordon and Ginnie Quint gloried in their wonderful son, their only child. I accused him of a crime that revolted them. Ginnie steadfastly believed in his innocence; an act of faith. Gordon, however reluctantly, faced with all the evidence we gathered from his Land-Rover, must have come to acknowledge to himself that the unthinkable was true.”

  Archie nodded.

  I went on. “Ellis’s wretched persecution of me didn’t really work. Sure, I hated it, but I was still there, and meanwhile the time of the trial was drawing nearer and nearer. Whatever odium I drew onto myself by doing it, I was going to describe in court, with all the press and public listening, just how Ellis could have cut off the foot of Betty’s colt. The outcome of the trial—whether or not the jury found Ellis guilty, and whether or not the judge sent him to jail—that wasn’t the prime point. The trial itself, and all that evidence, would have convinced enough of the population of his guilt to destroy forever the shining-knight persona. Topline Foods couldn’t have—and, in fact, won’t be able to—use those diamond-plated round-the-world ads.”

  I took a deep couple of lungfuls of air. I was talking too much. Not enough oxygen, not enough blood.

  I said, “The idea of the Shropshire alibi probably came about gradually, and heaven knows to which of them first. Ellis received an invitation to the dance. The plan must have started from that. They saw it as the one effective way to stop the trial from taking place.”

  Hell, I thought, I don’t feel well. I’m getting old.

  I said, “You have to remember that Gordon is a farmer. He’s used to the idea of the death of animals being profitable. I dare say that the death of one insignificant yearling was as nothing to him when set beside the saving of his son. And he knew where to find such a victim. He would have to have long replaced the shears taken by the police. It must have seemed quite easy, and in fact he carried out the plan without difficulty.”

  Archie and Norman listened as if not breathing.

  I started again. “Ellis is many things, but he’s not a murderer. If he had been, perhaps he would have been a serial killer of humans, not horses. That urge to do evil—I don’t understand it, but it happens. Wings off butterflies and so on.” I swallowed. “Ellis has given me a hard time, but in spite of several opportunities he hasn’t let me be killed. He stopped Yorkshire doing it. He stopped his father last night.”

  “People can hate until they make themselves ill,” Archie nodded. “Very few actually murder.”

  “Gordon Quint tried it,” Norman pointed out, “and all but succeeded.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “but that wasn’t to help Ellis.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “Have to go back a bit.”

  I’m too tired, I thought, but I’d better finish it.

  I said to Norman, “You remember that piece of rag you gave me?”

  “Yes. Did you do anything with it?”

  I nodded.

  “What rag?” Archie asked.

  Norman outlined for him the discovery at Northampton of the lopping shears wrapped in dirty material.

  “The local police found the shears hidden in a hedge,” I said, “and they brought them into the stud farm’s office while I was there. The stud farm’s owners, Miss Richardson and Mrs. Bethany, were there, and so was Ginnie Quint, who was a friend of theirs and who had gone there to comfort them and sympathize. Ginnie forcibly said how much she despised me for falsely accusing her paragon of a son. For accusing my friend. She more or less called me Judas.”

  “Sid!”

  “Well, that’s how it seemed. Then she watched the policeman unwrap the shears that had cut off the yearling’s foot and, quite slowly, she went white ... and fainted.”

  “The sight of the shears,” Norman said, nodding.

  “It was much more than that. It was the sight of the material.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I spent a whole day ... last Thursday, it seems a lifetime away ... I chased all over London with that little piece of cloth, and I finished up in a village near Chichester.”

  “Why Chichester?” Archie asked.

  “Because that filthy old cloth had once been part of some bed hangings. They were woven as a special order by a Mrs. Patricia Huxford, who’s a doll of the first rank. She has looms in Lowell, near Chichester. She looked up her records and found that that fabric had been made nearly thirty years ago especially—and exclusively—for a Mrs. Gordon Quint.”

  Archie and Norman both stared.

  “Ginnie recognized the material,” I said. “She’d just been giving me the most frightful tongue-lashing for believing Ellis capable of maiming horses, and she suddenly saw, because that material was wrapped round shears, that I’d been right. Not only that, she knew that Ellis had been in Shropshire the night Miss Richardson’s colt was done. She knew the importance of his alibi... and she saw—she understood—that the only other person who could or would have wrapped lopping shears in that unique fabric was Gordon. Gordon wouldn’t have thought twice about snatching up any old rag to wrap his shears in—and I’d guess he decided to dump them because we might have checked Quint’s shears again for horse DNA if he’d taken them home. Ginnie saw that Gordon had maimed the yearling. It was too big a shock ... and she fainted.”

  Archie and Norman, too, looked shocked.

  I sighed. “I didn’t understand that then, of course. I didn’t understand it until the night before last, when everything sort of clicked. But now... I think it wasn’t just because of Ellis’s terrible guilt that Ginnie killed herself last Monday, but because it was Gordon’s guilt and reputation as well . . . and then the trial was starting in spite of everything . . . and it was all too much ... too much to bear.”

  I paused briefly and went on, “Ginnie’s suicide sent Gordon berserk. He’d set out to help his son. He’d caused his wife’s death. He blamed me for it, for having destroyed his family. He tried to smash my brains in the morning she’d
died. He lay in wait for me outside my apartment ... he was screaming that I’d killed her. Then, last night, in the actual moment that the picture in The Pump was taken, he was telling me the bullets were for Ginnie ... it was my life for hers. He meant ... he meant to do it.”

  I stopped talking.

  The white room was silent.

  Later in the day I phoned the hospital in Canterbury and spoke to the ward sister.

  “How is Rachel?” I asked.

  “Mr. Halley! But I thought ... I mean, we’ve all read The Pump.”

  “But you didn’t tell Rachel, did you?” I asked anxiously.

  “No . . . Linda—Mrs. Ferns—said not to.”

  “Good.”

  “But are you—”

  “I’m absolutely OK,” I assured her. “I’m in Hammersmith hospital. Du Cane Road.”

  “The best!” she exclaimed.

  “I won’t argue. How’s Rachel?”

  “You know that she’s a very sick little girl, but we’re all hopeful of the transplant.”

  “Did she go into the bubble?”

  “Yes, very bravely. She says it’s her palace and she’s its queen.”

  “Give her my love.”

  “How soon ... oh, dear, I shouldn’t ask.”

  “I’ll make it by Thursday.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  Kevin Mills and India came to visit before ten o‘clock the following morning, on their way to work.

  I was again sitting up in the high bed but by then felt much healthier. In spite of my protests, my shot and mending arm was still held immobile in a swaddle of splint and bandages. Give it another day’s rest, I’d been told, and just practice wiggling your fingers: which was all very well, except that the nurses had been too busy with an emergency that morning to reunite me with my left hand, which lay on the locker beside me. For all that it didn’t work properly, I felt naked without it, and could do nothing for myself, not even scratch my nose.

  Kevin and India both came in looking embarrassed by life in general and said far too brightly how glad they were to see me awake and recovering.

  I smiled at their feelings. “My dear children,” I said, “I’m not a complete fool.”

  “Look, mate . . .” Kevin’s voice faded. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  I said, “Who told Gordon Quint where to find me?”

  Neither of them answered.

  “India,” I pointed out, “you were the only person who knew I would turn up at Kensington Place at eight o‘clock on Sunday evening.”

  “Sid!” She was anguished, as she had been in Church Street when she’d found me shot; and she wouldn’t look at my face, either.

  Kevin smoothed his mustache. “It wasn’t her fault.”

  “Yours, then?”

  “You’re right about your not being a fool,” Kevin said. “You’ve guessed what happened, otherwise you’d be flinging us out of here right now.”

  “Correct.”

  “The turmoil started Saturday evening,” Kevin said, feeling secure enough to sit down. “Of course, as there’s no daily Pump on Sundays there was hardly anyone in the office. George Godbar wasn’t. No one was. Saturday is our night off. The shit really hit the fan on Sunday morning at the editorial meeting. You know editorial meetings ... well, perhaps you don’t. All the department editors—news, sport, gossip, features, whatever, and the senior reporters—meet to decide what stories will be run in the next day’s paper, and there was George Godbar in a positive lather about reversing policy on S. Halley. I mean, Sid mate, you should’ve heard him swear. I never knew so many orifices and sphincters existed.”

  “The boss had leaned on him?”

  “Leaned! There was a panic. Our lord the proprietor wanted you bought off.”

  “How nice,” I said.

  “He’d suggested ten thousand smackers, George said. Try ten million, I said. George called for copies for everyone of the complete file of everything The Pump has published about you since June, nearly all of it in India’s column on Fridays. I suppose you’ve kept all those pieces?”

  I hadn’t. I didn’t say so.

  “Such poison,” Kevin said. “Seeing it all together like that. I mean, it silenced the whole meeting, and it takes a lot to do that.”

  “I wasn’t there,” India said. “I don’t go to those meetings.”

  “Be fair to India,” Kevin told me, “she didn’t write most of it. I wrote some. You know I did. Six different people wrote it.”

  India still wouldn’t meet my eyes and still wouldn’t sit in the one empty chair. I knew about “policy” and being burned at the stake and all that, yet week after week I’d dreaded her byline. Try as I would, I still felt sore from that savaging.

  “Sit down,” I said mildly.

  She perched uneasily.

  “If we make another dinner date,” I said, “don’t tell anyone.”

  “Oh, Sid.”

  “She didn’t mean to get you shot, for Chrissakes,” Kevin protested. “The Tilepit wanted you found. Wanted! He was shitting himself, George said. The Pump’s lawyer had passed each piece week by week as being just on the safe side of actionable, but at the meeting, when he read the whole file at once, he was sweating, Sid. He says The Pump should settle out of court for whatever you ask.”

  “And I suppose you’re not supposed to be telling me that?”

  “No,” Kevin confessed, “but you did give me the exclusive of the decade.”

  “How did Gordon Quint find me?” I asked again.

  “George said our noble lord was babbling on about you promising not to send him to jail if you walked out free from somewhere or other, and you had walked out free, and he wanted to keep you to your promise. George didn’t know what he was talking about, but Tilepit made it crystal that George’s job depended on finding you within the next five minutes, if not sooner. So George begged us all to find you, to say The Pump would confer sainthood immediately and fatten your bank balance, and I phoned India on the off chance, and she said not to worry, she would tell you herself ... and I asked her how ... and where. There didn’t seem to be any harm in it.”

  “And you told George Godbar?” I said.

  Kevin nodded.

  “And he,” I said, “told Lord Tilepit? And he told Ellis, I suppose ... because Ellis turned up, too.”

  “George Godbar phoned Ellis’s father’s house, looking for Ellis. He got an answering machine telling him to try a mobile number, and he reached Gordon Quint in a car somewhere ... and he told Gordon where you would be, if Ellis wanted to find you.”

  Round and round in circles, and the bullets come out here.

  I sighed again. I was lucky to be alive. I would settle for that. I also wondered how much I would screw out of The Pump. Only enough, I decided, to keep His Lordship grateful.

  Kevin, the confession over, got restlessly to his feet and walked around the room, stopping when he reached the locker on my left side.

  He looked a little blankly at the prosthesis lying there and, after a moment, picked it up. I wished he wouldn’t.

  He said, surprised, “It’s bigger than I pictured. And heavier. And hard.”

  “All the better to club you with,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked interestedly. “Straight up?”

  “It’s been known,” I said, and after a moment he put the arm down.

  “It’s true what they say of you, isn’t it? You may not look it, but you’re one tough bugger, Sid mate, like I told you before.”

  I said, “Not many people look the way they are inside.”

  India said, “I’ll write a piece about that.”

  “There you are then, Sid.” Kevin was ready to go. “I’ve got a rape waiting. Thanks for those Japs. Makes us even, right?”

  “Even.” I nodded.

  India stood up as if to follow him. “Stay a bit,” I suggested.

  She hesitated. Kevin said, “Stay and hold his bloody hand. Oh, shit. Well ... sorry,
mate. Sorry.”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  India watched him go.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said helplessly, “about getting you shot.”

  “I’m alive,” I pointed out, “so forget it.”

  Her face looked softer. At that hour in the morning she hadn’t yet put on the sharply outlined lipstick nor the matte porcelain makeup. Her eyebrows were as dark and positive, and her eyes as light-blue and clear, but this was the essential India I was seeing, not the worldly package. How different, I wondered, was the inner spirit from the cutting brain of her column?

  She, too, as if compelled, came over to my left side and looked at the plastic arm.

  “How does it work?” she asked.

  I explained about the electrodes, as I had for Rachel.

  She picked up the arm and put her fingers inside, touching the electrodes. Nothing happened. No movement in the thumb.

  I swallowed. I said, “It probably needs a fresh battery.”

  “Battery?”

  “It clips into the side. That boxlike thing”—I nodded towards the locker—“that’s a battery charger. There’s a recharged battery in there. Change them over.”

  She did so, but slowly, because of the unfamiliarity. When she touched the electrodes again, the hand obeyed the signals.

  “Oh,” she said.

  She put the hand down and looked at me.

  “Do you,” she said, “have a steel rod up your backbone? I’ve never seen anyone more tense. And your forehead’s sweating.”

  She picked up the box of tissues lying beside the battery charger and offered it to me.

  I shook my head. She looked at the immobilized right arm and at the left one on the locker, and a wave of understanding seemed to leave her without breath.

  I said nothing. She pulled a tissue out of the box and jerkily dabbed at a dribble of sweat that ran down my temple.

  “Why don’t you put this arm on?” she demanded. “You’d be better with it on, obviously.”

  “A nurse will do it.” I explained about the emergency. “She’ll come when she can.”

  “Let me do it,” India said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”