Knock Down

by Dick Francis

  He hadn’t. He was winded. He lay for a while with his sides heaving, and then he stood up.

  I had put the halter on him while he was down, and now led him and the ‘chaser, one in each hand, along the lane to the yard. Both of them steamed with sweat and blew down their nostrils; and the hack having been bridled dropped foamy saliva from his mouth; but neither of them walked lame.

  The moonlight was calming, quiet and cool. In the yard I hitched the ‘chaser to a railing and led the two-year-old back to his box, and realised there for the first time that he was no longer wearing his rug. Somewhere on his escapade he had rid himself of it. I fetched another and buckled it on. By rights I should have walked him round for another half hour to cool him down, but I hadn’t time. I went out, shut his door, and slammed home the bolt, and simply could not understand how I could have left it undone.

  I backed the car out of the garage and drove through the village and down the main road. There was a fair crowd now at the scene of the crash, and people waving torches to direct the traffic. When I pulled on to the grass and stopped one of the self-elected traffic directors told me to drive on, there were enough onlookers already. I told him I lived nearby and perhaps could help, and left him to move along the next fellow.

  Across in the north-bound lane also the traffic was on the move, as the wreckage was all on the near side. With something like dread I crossed over and joined the group at the heart of things. Car headlights threw them into sharp relief, bright on one side, dark on the other. All men, all on their feet. And one girl.

  It was her car that was most smashed. One side of it seemed to have hit the metal post of the advance signpost to the village and the backside of it had been rammed by a dark green Rover which stood askew across the roadway spilling water from its dented radiator and frosty fragments from its windscreen.

  The owner of the Rover was stamping about in loquacious fury, shouting about women drivers and that it was not his fault.

  The girl stood looking at the orange remains of an MGB GT which had buried itself nose first into the ditch. She wore a long dress of a soft floaty material, white with a delicate black pattern and silver threads glittering in the lights. She had silver shoes and silver-blonde hair which hung straight to her shoulders, and she was bleeding.

  At first I was surprised that she was standing there alone, that the masculine onlookers were not wrapping her in rugs, binding up her wounds and generally behaving protectively, but when I spoke to her I saw why. She was in icy command of herself, as cool and silver as the moonlight. Despite the oozing cut on her forehead and the smears she had made trying to wipe it, despite the much heavier stain on her right arm and the scarlet splashes down the front of the pretty dress, she somehow repelled help. And she was not as young as she looked at first sight.

  ‘She cut right across me,’ the Rover driver was shouting. ‘Swerved right across me. I didn’t have a chance. She went to sleep. That’s what she did. And now she gives us all this crap about a horse. I ask you. A horse! Swerved to avoid a horse. She went to sleep. She dreamed the horse. The silly bitch.’

  Shock took people like that sometimes, and to be fair he had had a bad fright.

  I said to the girl, ‘There was a horse.’

  She looked at me without eagerness.

  ‘Of course there was,’ she said.

  ‘Yes… He got loose from my stable and strayed up here on to the road.’

  I was immediately the focus of a hedge of accusing eyes and also the new target for the Rover driver’s ire. He had really been quite restrained with the girl. He knew a lot of words one seldom heard even on a racecourse.

  In a gap in the tirade the girl spoke. She had one hand pressed against her abdomen and a strained look on her face.

  ‘I need,’ she said distinctly, ‘to go to the bathroom.’

  ‘I’ll take you to my house,’ I said. ‘It’s not far.’

  The Rover driver was against it. She should stay until the police arrived, which would be at any second, he said.But some of the men showed that they understood what such an occasion could do to the viscera and silently parted to let her go with me across to my car.

  ‘If the police want her,’ I said, ‘Tell them she’s at Jonah Dereham’s house. First turn left, through the village, a house and stable yard out on the far side, on the right.’

  They nodded. When I looked back I could see most of them returning to their own cars and driving away, and only one or two staying to support the Rover man.

  She said nothing on the short journey. There was sweat on her face as well as blood. I drew up outside the kitchen and led her inside without delay.

  ‘The cloakroom is there,’ I said, showing her the door.

  She nodded and went inside. White walls, bright unshaded light bulb, gumboots, waterproofs, two framed racing photographs and an ancient shotgun. I left her to this uncosy decor and went outside again to where my ‘chaser still patiently stood hitched to the railing.

  I patted him and told him he was a great fellow. Fetched him a couple of apples from the tackroom and led him back to his paddock. He hadn’t galloped so fast or felt such excitement since the day they cheered him home up the hill at Cheltenham. He snorted with what was easy to read as pride when I released him and trotted away on springy ankles like a yearling.

  She was coming out of the cloakroom when I returned. She had washed the streaked blood off her face and was dabbing the still unclotted cut on her forehead with a towel. I invited her with a gesture back to the kitchen and she came with the same marked and unusual composure.

  ‘What you can give me now,’ she said, ‘is a large drink.’

  ‘Er… How about some hot strong tea?’

  She stared. ‘No. Brandy.’

  ‘I haven’t any.’

  She gestured impatiently. ‘Whiskey, then. Gin. Anything will do.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I said apologetically, ‘that I haven’t anything at all.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ she said in disbelief, ‘that you have no alcohol of any sort in this house?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said blankly. She sat down suddenly on the kitchen chair as if her knees had given way.

  I said, ‘Tea is honestly better when you’re injured. I’ll make you some.’

  I went over to the kettle and picked it up to fill it.

  ‘You bloody fool,’ she said. Her voice was a mixture of scorn, anger, and, surprisingly, despair.

  ‘But…’

  ‘But nothing,’ she said. ‘You let your stupid horse out and it nearly kills me and now you can’t even save me with a bloody drink.’

  ‘Save you?’ I echoed.

  She gave me a cutting glance. Same mix; scorn, anger, despair. She explained the despair.

  ‘Look… I’ve been to a party. I was driving myself home. Now thanks to you and your stupid horse there’s been an accident and even though it wasn’t my fault the police will be along with their little breath tests.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ she said unnecessarily. ‘Nowhere near it. But I’d be over the eighty milligrammes. Even eight-one is enough. And I can’t afford to lose my driving licence.’

  My horse had got her into the mess. I suppose I should do my best to get her out.

  ‘All right,’ I said. Til fix it.’

  ‘Wake a neighbour,’ she said. ‘But do it quick, or the police will be here.’

  I shook my head. I went out to the dustbin and retrieved the empty Scotch bottle.

  ‘No time for neighbours,’ I said. ‘And it would look too deliberate.’ I fetched a glass and gave it to her. Then I held the empty bottle under the tap, splashed in a thimbleful of water, swilled the water around and finally dripped it into the glass.

  ‘Do you think,’ she said ominously, ‘that this is going to fool anybody?’

  ‘Don’t see why not.’

  I put the empty bottle on the kitchen table and r
eturned to the kettle. ‘And we’d better get your cuts seen to.’

  She blotted her forehead again and looked indifferently at the crimson state of her right forearm. ‘I suppose so,’ she said.

  While the kettle boiled I telephoned my own doctor and explained the situation.

  ‘Take her to the Casualty Department at the Hospital,’ he said. ‘That’s what they’re there for.’

  ‘She’s pretty,’ I said. ‘And you’d make a better job of it.’

  ‘Dammit, Jonah, it’s half past one,’ he said, but he agreed to come.

  The tea was made and brewing by the time the police arrived with their little breath tests. They accepted mugs with sugar and milk and sniffed sourly into the whiskey bottle and the glass in the girl’s hand. Didn’t she know she shouldn’t have a drink before she had blown into the breathalyser? She shook her head tiredly and indicated that she hadn’t given it a thought.

  Tests within fifteen minutes of alcohol intake were not acceptable as evidence. They filled in the time by taking down her view of the facts.

  ‘Name, miss?’

  ‘Sophie Randolph.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’ No feminine hesitation. Just a fact.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Primrose Court, Scilly Isles Drive, Esher, Surrey.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Air traffic controller.’

  The policeman’s pen remained stationary in the air for five seconds before he wrote it down. I looked at the girl; at Sophie Randolph, unmarried, thirty-two, air traffic controller, a woman accustomed to working on equal terms among males, and I remembered her instinctive reaction to the men at the scene of the crash: even in a crisis she repelled protective cosseting because in everyday life she could not afford it.

  She gave them a straightforward statement. She had been to dinner with friends near Brighton. She left at twelve fifteen. At about twelve fifty she was driving in good visibility at forty-five miles an hour, listening to all-night radio. A horse suddenly emerged into the road from the central area of bushes. She braked hard but had no chance to stop. She steered sharply to the left to avoid the horse. She had passed the Rover a mile or so back and did not realise he was still so close behind her. The Rover struck the back of her car, slewing it round. Her car then bounced off a signpost at the side of the road, and slid to a stop in the ditch. She had been shaken. She had been wearing a seat belt. She had been slightly cut by broken glass.

  One of the policemen asked what she had had to drink during the evening. In the same calm factual voice she itemised sherry before dinner, wine with.

  Eventually they got her to blow into the bag. She did so without anxiety.

  The policeman who took the bag from her gave the crystals a sharp scrutiny and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Well, miss,’ he said. ‘Unofficially I can tell you that if you hadn’t drunk that whiskey you’d have been on the right side. It isn’t much over, even now.’

  ‘I’m not really surprised,’ she said, and that at least was true.

  ‘You’d be amazed the number of people who try to drink before we test them.’

  ‘Do they really?’ She sounded tired, and as if evasive tactics had never come into her orbit. The police packed up their notes and their bottle kit, gave me a lecture about letting animals get loose, and in their own good time went away.

  Sophie Randolph gave me the beginnings of a smile.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  4

  She slept in my bed and I slept in Crispin’s, and Crispin slept on, unknowing, on the sofa.

  She had been stitched up neatly by the doctor but had been more concerned that he should take care of her dress. She had insisted that he unpick the seam of her sleeve rather than rip the material to get to her wound, and I had smiled at the meticulous way he had snipped through the tiny threads to please her.

  ‘My arm will mend itself,’ she explained. ‘But the dress won’t, and it was expensive.’

  The cut, once revealed, had been jagged and deep, with fragments of glass embedded. She watched with interest while he anaesthetised it locally and worked on the repairs, and by the end I was wondering just what it would take to smash up such practised self-command.

  The morning found her pale and shaky but still basically unruffled. I had been going to tell her to stay in bed but when I came in at eight thirty after feeding and mucking out the lodgers she was already down in the kitchen. Sitting at the table, wearing my dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. There were dark smudges round her eyes and most of the thirty-two years were showing in her skin. I thought that very probably her bandaged arm was hurting.

  She looked up calmly when I came in.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Like some coffee?’

  ‘Very much.’

  I made it in the filter pot. ‘I was going to bring it to you upstairs,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t sleep too well.’

  ‘Not madly surprising.’

  ‘I heard you out in the yard. Saw you from the window, and thought I might as well come down.’

  ‘How about some toast?’ I asked.

  She said yes to the toast and yes also to three strips of crispy bacon to go with it. While I cooked she looked round the workmanlike kitchen and finally asked the hovering question. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Some years ago, I would guess.’

  I grinned. ‘Quite right.’ Married, repented, divorced, and in no hurry to make another mistake.

  ‘Can you lend me any clothes I won’t look ridiculous in?’

  ‘Oh… a jersey. Jeans. Would that do?’

  ‘Lovely with silver shoes,’ she said.

  I sat down beside her to drink my coffee. She had a face more pleasant than positively beautiful, a matter of colouring and expression more than bone structure. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were brownish blonde, eyes hazel, mouth softly pink without lipstick.

  Her composure, I began to understand, was not aggressive. It was just that she gave no one any chance to patronise or diminish her because she was female. Understandable if some men didn’t like it. But her colleagues, I thought, must find it restful.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘about my horse.’

  ‘So you damn well ought to be.’ But there was none of the rancour she would have been entitled to.

  ‘What can I do to make amends?’

  ‘Are you offering a chauffeur service?’

  ‘By all means,’ I said.

  She munched the toast and bacon. ‘Well… I’ll need to see about getting my car towed away. What’s left of it. Then I’d be grateful if you could drive me to Gatwick Airport.’

  ‘Do you work there, then?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘No. At Heathrow. But I can hire a car at Gatwick. Special discount… goes with the job.’

  She was using her right hand to cut the toast with, and I saw her wince.

  ‘Do you have to work today?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing wrong with my voice,’ she said. ‘But probably not. I’m on stand-by from four this afternoon for twelve hours. That means I just have to be home in my fiat, ready to take over at an hour’s notice in case anyone is ill or doesn’t turn up.’

  ‘And what are the chances?’

  ‘Of working? Not high. Most stand-bys are just a bore.’

  She drank her coffee left handed.

  ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a bloodstock agent.’

  She wrinkled her forehead. ‘I have an aunt who says all bloodstock agents are crooks.’

  I smiled. ‘The big firms wouldn’t thank her for that.’

  ‘Do you work for a firm?’

  I shook my head. ‘On my own.’

  She finished the toast and fished a packet of cigarettes out of my dressing-gown pocket.

  ‘At least you sm
oke,’ she said, flicking my lighter. ‘I found these in your bedroom… I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Take what you like,’ I said.

  She looked at me levelly and with a glint of amusement.

  ‘I’ll give you something instead. That man in the Rover, do you remember him?’

  ‘Who could fail to!’

  ‘He was doing about forty until I tried to pass him. When I was level with him he speeded up.’

  ‘One of those.’

  She nodded. ‘One of those. So I put my foot down and passed him and he didn’t like it. He kept weaving around close behind me and flashing his headlights and generally behaving like an idiot. If he hadn’t been distracting me I might have seen your horse a fraction sooner. The crash was just as much his fault as your horse’s.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you too.’

  We smiled at each other, and all the possibilities suddenly rose up like question marks, there in the kitchen over the crumbs of toast.

  Into this subtle moment Crispin barged with the sensitivity of a tank. The kitchen door crashed open and in he came, crumpled, unshaven, ill and swearing.

  ‘Where the bloody hell have you hidden the whiskey?’

  Sophie looked at him with predictable calm. Crispin didn’t seem to notice she was there.

  ‘Jonah, you vicious sod, I’ll cut your bloody throat if you don’t give it back at bloody once.’ It was his tragedy that he was more than half serious.

  ‘You finished it last night,’ I said. ‘The empty bottle’s in the dustbin.’

  ‘I did no such bloody thing. If you’ve poured it down the drain I’ll bloody strangle you.’

  ‘You poured it down your throat,’ I said. ‘And you’d better have some coffee.’

  ‘Stuff your effing coffee.’ He strode furiously round the kitchen, wrenching open cupboards and peering inside. ‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where have you put it, you stinking little stable boy?’

  He picked up a bag of sugar and threw it on the floor. The paper burst and the crystals scattered in a frosty swathe. He pulled several tins out to look behind them, dropping them instead of putting them back.

  ‘Jonah, I’ll kill you,’ he said.

  I heated him some coffee and put the mug on the table. A packet of rice and another of cornflakes joined the mess on the floor.