Knock Down

by Dick Francis

  It took five minutes.

  ‘Is that right?’ she said.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Now do I pull your elbow across?’

  ‘Mm.’

  Always the worst part. When she’d gone only a short way I could feel her trembling. Her fingers under my elbow shook with irresolution.

  I said, ‘If you… drop my elbow… now… elbow’ll scream.’

  ‘Oh….’ She sounded shattered but her grip tightened blessedly. We proceeded, with no sound but heavy breathing on both sides. There was always a point at which progress seemed to end and yet the arm was still out. Always a point of despair.

  We reached it.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘It isn’t working.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Another… half inch.’

  ‘Oh, no….’ But she screwed herself up and went on trying.

  The jolt and the audible scrunch when the bone started to go over the edge of the socket astounded her.

  ‘Now…’ I said. ‘Wrist up and over… not too fast.’

  Two more horrible crunches, the sweetest sounds on earth. Hell went back into its box. I stood up. Smiled like the sun coming out.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  She was bewildered. ‘Do you mean… the pain goes away… just like that.’

  ‘Just like that.’

  She looked at the transformation she’d wrought in me.Her eyes filled with tears. I put my right arm round her and held her close.

  ‘Why don’t you get the bloody thing fixed?’ she said.

  ‘You won’t catch me having any more orthopaedic operations if I don’t absolutely have to.’

  She sniffed the tears away. ‘You’re a coward.’

  ‘All the way.’

  I walked with her to Vic’s-office. We stood in the doorway, looking in. He lay by the window, face down, the back of his purple shirt a glistening crimson obscenity.

  Whatever he had done to me, I had done worse to him. Because of the pressure I’d put on him, he was dead. I supposed I would never outlive a grinding sense of responsibility and regret.

  ‘I half saw who killed him,’ I said.

  ‘Half?’

  ‘Enough.’

  The indelible impression made sense. The pattern had become plain.

  We turned away.

  There was a sound of a car drawing up outside, doors slamming, two or three pairs of heavy feet.

  ‘The police,’ Sophie said in relief.

  I nodded. ‘Keep it simple, though. If they start on Vic’s and my disagreements we’ll be here all night.’

  ‘You’re immoral.’

  ‘No… lazy.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  The police were their usual abrasive selves, saving their store of sympathy for worthier causes like old ladies and lost kids. They looked into the office, telephoned for reinforcements and invited us in a fairly hectoring manner to explain what we were doing there. I stifled an irritated impulse to point out that if we’d chosen we could have gone quietly away and left someone else to find Vic dead. Virtue’s own reward was seldom worth it.

  Both then and later, when the higher ranks arrived, we gave minimum information and kept quiet in between. In essence I said, ‘There were no lights on in the front of the house when I arrived. I know the house slightly. I walked round to the side to see if Vic was in his office. I had a tentative arrangement to see him for five or six minutes at six o’clock. I was driving Miss Randolph home to Esher and called in at Vic’s on the way, parking outside on the road and walking up the drive. I saw him in his office. I saw him fall against the window, and then collapse. I hurried round to the front to try to get into the house to help him. A light-coloured Ford Cortina was starting up. It shot away in a hurry but I caught a glimpse of the driver. I recognised the driver.’

  They listened to my identification impassively, neither pleased nor sceptical. Did I see a gun, they asked. There was no gun in Vic’s office.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing but the driver’s head.’

  They grunted and turned to Sophie.

  ‘Jonah left me in his car,’ she said. ‘Then this other car came crashing out of the drive at a reckless speed. I decided to see if everything was all right. I walked up here and found Jonah in front of the house. The house door was open, so we went inside. We found Mr Vincent lying in his office. We telephoned immediately to you.’

  We sat for nearly three hours in Vic’s beautiful dining-room while the end of his life was dissected by the prosaic professionals for whom murder was all in the day’s work. They switched on every light and brought more of their own, and the glare further dehumanised their host.

  Maybe it was necessary for them to think of him as a thing, not a person. I still couldn’t.

  I was finally allowed to take Sophie home. I parked outside and we went up to her flat, subdued and depressed. She made coffee, which we drank in the kitchen.

  ‘Hungry?’ she said. ‘There’s some cheese, I think.’

  We ate chunks of cheese in our fingers, absent-mindedly.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she said.

  ‘Wait for them to catch him, I suppose.’

  ‘He won’t run… he doesn’t know you saw him.’

  ‘No.’

  She said anxiously, ‘He doesn’t… does he?’

  ‘If he’d seen me he’d have come back and shot us both.’

  ‘You think the nicest thoughts.’

  The evening had left smudgy circles round her eyes. She looked more than tired: over-stretched, over-strained. I yawned and said I ought to be going home, and she couldn’t disguise her flooding relief.

  I smiled. ‘You’ll be all right alone?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Absolute certainty in her voice. Solitude offered her refuge, healing, and rest. I didn’t. I had brought her a car crash, a man with a pitchfork, a bone-setting and a murder. I’d offered an alcoholic brother, a half-burnt home and a snap engagement. None of it designed for the well-being of someone who needed the order and peace of an ivory control tower.

  She came with me down to the car.

  ‘You’ll come again?’ she said.

  ‘When you’re ready.’

  ‘A dose of Dereham every week…’

  ‘Would be enough to frighten any woman?’

  ‘Well, no.’ She smiled. ‘It might be bad for the nerves, but at least I’d know I was alive.’

  I laughed and gave her an undemanding brotherly kiss. ‘It would suit me fine.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And truly.’

  ‘I don’t ask for that,’ she said.

  ‘Then you damn well should.’

  She grinned. I slid into the driving seat. Her eyes looked calmer in her exhausted face.

  ‘Sleep well,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  It seemed a long way home. My shoulder ached: a faint echo, but persistent. I thought with longing of a stiff brandy and stifled a sigh at the less reviving prospect of coke.

  When I got back the house was dark.

  No lights, no Crispin.

  Hell, I thought. He had no car any more; no transport but his feet. The one place his feet could be trusted to take him was straight to the source of gin.

  I parked outside the kitchen as usual, opened the unlocked back door, went in, switched on the lights, and shouted through the house.

  ‘Crispin?’ No answer. ‘Crispin.’

  Total silence.

  Swearing under my breath I went along to the office, intending to telephone the pub to ask what state he was in. If he were too far gone, I’d drive up and fetch him. I had picked up the receiver and begun to dial when I heard the door behind me squeak on its hinges.

  So he hadn’t gone after all. I turned with the beginnings of a congratulatory smile.

  It wasn’t Crispin who had come in. I looked at the heavy pistol with its elongated silencer
, and like Vic the urgent words which shaped in my mind were no and my God and wait.

  17

  ‘Put the telephone down,’ he said.

  I looked at the receiver in my hand. I’d dialled only half the number. Pity. I did as he said.

  ‘I saw you at Vic’s,’ I said. ‘I told the police.’

  The gun merely wavered a fraction. The round black hole still faced my heart. I’d seen what it had made of Vic, and I had no illusions.

  ‘I guessed you were there,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘A car parked by the hedge… Saw it when I left. About twelve miles on I realised it was yours. I went back… the place was crawling with police.’

  My tongue felt huge and sluggish. I looked at the gun and could think of nothing useful to say.

  ‘You and Vic,’ he said. ‘You thought you had me in a corner. Too bad. Your mistake.’

  I swallowed with difficulty. ‘I saw you,’ I repeated, ‘and the police know.’

  ‘Maybe. But they’ll have trouble making it stick when you’re not alive to give evidence.’

  I looked desperately around for a way of diverting him. For a weapon to attack him with.

  He smiled faintly. ‘It’s no good, Jonah. It’s the end of the road.’

  He straightened his arm to the firing position adopted by people who knew what they were about.

  ‘You won’t feel much,’ he said.

  The door behind him swung on its hinges while he was already beginning to squeeze the trigger. The sudden shift of my attention from sick fascination at the round hole from which death was coming to a point behind his back was just enough to jerk his hand.

  Enough was enough.

  The flame spat out and the bullet missed me.

  Crispin stood in the doorway looking with horror at the scene. In one hand he waved a heavy green bottle of gin.

  ‘The old heave-ho,’ he said distinctly.

  He wasn’t drunk, I thought incredulously. He was telling me to go right back to a rugger tackle we’d perfected in boyhood. Instinctively, faster than thought, I feinted at our visitor’s knees.

  The gun came round and down towards me and Crispin hit him hard on the head with the gin bottle.

  The pistol swung away from me and fired, and I snapped up and lifted the only heavy object within reach, which was my typewriter. I crashed it down with all my strength in the wake of the gin bottle, and the visitor sprawled on the floor with blood gushing from his scalp and the typewriter ribbon rolling across his unconscious face and away to the wall.

  ‘You old crazy loon,’ I said breathlessly, turning to Crispin. ‘You old blessed…’

  My voice died away. Crispin half sat, half lay on the floor with his hand pressed to his side.

  ‘Crispin!’

  ‘I’m… not… drunk,’ he said.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I think… he shot me.’

  Speechlessly I knelt beside him.

  He said, ‘Was he the one… who burnt the yard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hope… you killed him.’

  His body sagged. I caught him. Eased him down to the floor and with one hand grabbed a cushion for his head. His pressing fingers relaxed and fell away, and there on the waist band of his trousers was the spreading patch of blood.

  ‘I’m… floating,’ he said. He smiled. ‘It’s better… than… being drunk.’

  ‘I’ll get a doctor,’ I said.

  ‘No… Jonah… Don’t leave me… you sod.’

  I didn’t leave him. Three minutes later, without speaking again, he left me.

  I closed his eyes gently and got stiffly to my feet, trying to fold numbness around me like a coat.

  The pistol lay where it had fallen. I pushed it carefully with my toe until it was completely out of sight under the low-slung armchair. I didn’t want the visitor waking to grab it again.

  The visitor hadn’t moved. I sat on the edge of my desk and looked down at the two of them, the unconscious and the dead.

  Time enough, I thought, to call in those more or less constant companions, the busy and probing police. A quarter of an hour sooner or later, what did it matter. There was nothing any more to be gained. Too much had been irrevocably lost.

  I didn’t care how much damage I’d done with the typewriter. The head I’d busted with it looked more bloody than dented, but I felt a strong aversion to exploring. In all my life I had never wanted to kill anyone; had never thought I could come within a mile of it. I had not even intended to kill with the typewriter, but only to stun. I sat quietly on the desk and shook with fury inside, and wished I could have that blow back again, so that I could make it heavier, avenging and fatal.

  Whatever my brother had been, he had been my brother. No one had the right to kill him. I think at that moment I felt as primitive as the Sicilians.

  From greed the visitor had set out to destroy me. Not because I’d done him any harm. Simply because I stood in his plundering way. He’d sent me a message; join or be flattened, an ultimatum as old as tyranny.

  My own fault, as they had tirelessly pointed out, if the answer I’d chosen was flatten and be damned.

  Kerry Sanders had been only a convenient door. Had she not thought of her equine birthday present, another way would have been found. The intention was the activating force. The means were accidental.

  I remembered what Pauli Teksa had said at dinner that evening at Newmarket. I remembered his exact words. The classic law of the invader was to single out the strongest guy around and smash him, so that the weaker crowd would come to heel like lambs.

  At various times I had thought of the man who lay on my carpet as ‘someone’, as the expert, as Vic’s friend, as the driver, and as the visitor; Pauli’s word – the invader – suited him best.

  He had invaded the bloodstock game with gangster ethics. Invaded Vic’s life and business as a dangerous ally. Invaded mine as a destroyer.

  The fact that I did not feel that I filled the role he’d cast me in had not mattered. It was the invader’s view which had mattered. My bad luck that he’d seen me as the strongest guy around.

  There was no way of winning against a determined invader. If you gave in at once, you lost. If you fought to the death you still lost, even if you won. The price of victory was sore.

  Pauli Teksa had said, just before he went back to America, that it was easier to start things than to stop them. He had been warning me that if I lashed back at Vic I could find myself in even more trouble than before.

  He had been right.

  But he had been speaking also of himself.

  Pauli Teksa, the invader, lay face down on my carpet, my broken typewriter beside his bloody head.

  The stocky tough wide-shouldered body looked a solid hunk of bull muscle. The crinkly black hair was matted and running with red. I could see half of his face; the strong distinctive profile with the firm mouth now slackly open, the swift eye shut.

  His hands lay loosely on the floor, one each side of his head. He wore two thick gold rings. A gold and platinum wrist-watch. Heavy gold cufflinks. The tip of the gold mountain he had siphoned off through Vic.

  I thought it likely that his British venture had been an extension of activities at home. The super-aggressive kickback operation had been too polished to be a trial run. Maybe he had set up Vic-equivalents in other countries. Maybe Vies in South America and Italy and Japan were rooking the local Constantines and Wilton Youngs for him and driving the Antonia Huntercombes to despair.

  Vic and Fynedale had been amateurs, compared with him. Fynedale working himself into a white murdering manic state. Vic nearing apoplexy with easy rage. Pauli stayed cool and used his eyes and made his snap decisions, and when he saw the need to kill he did it without histrionics. An unfortunate necessity, best done quickly.

  He had even with macabre kindness told me I wouldn’t feel much, and I believed him. I’d heard shot people say all they had felt was a sort of thud, a
nd hadn’t realised they were wounded until afterwards. If you were shot through the heart there was no afterwards, and that was that.

  He had himself urged me several times to throw in my lot with Vic, and to go along with the crowd. He’d warned me of the dangers of holding out. He’d given me the advice as a friend, and behind the smile there had been an enemy as cold as bureaucracy.

  I realised slowly that perhaps at one point he had in fact done his best to stop what he’d started. He had said no to some demand of Vic’s, and he had gone home to America. But by then it was too late because in burning my stable he had switched me from tolerance to retaliation. Bash me, I bash back. The way wars started, big and small.

  * * *

  On the floor, Pauli stirred.

  Not dead.

  Across the room the gin bottle lay where Crispin had dropped it. I shoved myself off the desk and went over to pick it up. If Pauli were to return to consciousness, groggy or not, I’d trust him as far as I could throw the Empire State Building. A reinforcing clunk with green glass would be merely prudent.

  I looked closer at the bottle. It was full. In addition the seal was unbroken.

  I returned to the desk and set the bottle on it, and looked down with impossible grief at my brother. I knew that I had needed him as much as he needed me. He was at the roots of my life.

  Pauli stirred again. The urge to finish off what I’d started was almost overwhelming. No one would know. No one could tell whether he’d been hit twice or three times. Killing someone who was trying to kill you was justifiable in law, and who was to guess that I’d killed him ten minutes later.

  The moment passed. I felt cold suddenly, and old and lonely and as tired as dust. I stretched out a hand to the telephone, to call the cops.

  It rang before I touched it. I picked up the receiver and said dully, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mr Crispin Dereham?’ A man’s voice, educated.

  ‘I’m his brother,’ I said.

  ‘Could I speak to him?’

  ‘I’m afraid…’ I said, ‘He’s… unavailable.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ The voice sounded warmly sympathetic. ‘Well… this is Alcoholics Anonymous. Your brother telephoned us earlier this evening asking for help, and we promised to ring him back again for another chat…’