Shattered

by Dick Francis

  Hickory this time remembered to put the finished boat in the annealing oven, and if he accepted Catherine’s unstinted praise with smugness, he had at least taken a satisfactory step forward in his training.

  Irish arrived and brewed tea. Pamela Jane tidied and refilled the tubs of colored powder that we would use during that session, to restock the shelves. The rest of the regular Saturday morning unwound in work from nine to twelve o‘clock.

  At a few minutes past noon the shop embraced first Bon-Bon and the two boys, Daniel and Victor, for whom glassblowing had temporarily become a greater draw than e-mail.

  Not long after them, Marigold swooped in, batting the eyelashes, grinning at Hickory, smothering Daniel in a bright pink gold-smocked cloudlike dress and telling Bon-Bon at the top of her voice that “Darling Trubby” would be with them right away.

  “Darling Trubby,” Kenneth Trubshaw, swam through the bright pink experience and emerged with lipstick on his cheek. The trophy chairman of Cheltenham races was carrying my book of photographs, and besides being apparently unnerved by the chattering din, he eyed my half-undress with a degree of disbelief and suggested that the Wychwood Dragon might be better for a business meeting.

  “Darling Trubby, what a great idea!” Marigold’s immediate enthusiasm resulted in herself, Kenneth Trubshaw, Bon-Bon, Catherine, myself, and of course Worthington (Marigold insisted) occupying a quiet corner of the dining room to listen to the opinions of that morning’s meeting of the Cheltenham Racecourse Company’s trophy committee.

  Irish was dispatched down the hill to fill the two boys with hamburgers and Cokes, and Hickory and Pamela Jane were left in peace to deal with that less demanding breed, the January tourist.

  When six of us were neatly seated and listening, Kenneth Trubshaw began his spiel. “First of all, dear Marigold,” he said, “everyone on the committee wants me to thank you for your splendid generosity....” He gave flattery a good name. Marigold glowed. Worthington caught my eye and winked.

  “The committee voted ...,” the chairman came at last to the point. “We decided unanimously to ask you, Gerard Logan, to design and make a Martin Stukely memorial of a horse rearing on a crystal ball, like the one in the book. If it pleases Marigold and the committee...” His final words got temporarily lost in a bright pink Marigold hug, but came out the other side with provisos about cost. To Marigold, cost was a bore. Worthington bargained, and I telephoned a jeweler who promised enough gold.

  “Can you make it today, darling Gerard?” Marigold enthused. “It’s barely three o‘clock.”

  “Tomorrow would be difficult,” I said. “Next week would be better. Today, I’m sorry, is impossible.” Sooner rather than later, I thought, to keep her happy.

  The Marigold pout appeared, but I wasn’t going to help it. I needed time for thinking if it were to be a good job, and a good job was what I needed to do for Bon-Bon, for Marigold, for Cheltenham racecourse and for Martin himself.

  “I’ll do them tomorrow,” I said. “The crystal ball and the rearing horse. I’ll do them on my own, alone except for one assistant. They will be ready on Monday for the gold to be added, and on Tuesday afternoon I’ll join them together onto a plinth. By Wednesday the trophy will be finished.”

  “Not until then?” Marigold protested, and urged me to think again.

  “I want to get it right for you,” I said.

  And also I wanted to give my enemies time.

  11

  Marigold objected to my wanting no audience to the making of the rearing horse and the crystal ball. Kenneth Trubshaw understood, he said.

  “Darling Trubby,” substantial, gray-haired and very much a businessman, mentioned to me the one quiet word, “Fees?”

  “Worthington and I,” I said, “will fix a price with Marigold, then you can haggle if you like.”

  He shook my hand wryly. “The Leicester Steward whose wife owns several of your things is also a Steward of Cheltenham, and he told our committee this morning that five years ago we could have bought this trophy for peanuts.”

  “Five years ago,” I agreed. “Yes, you could.”

  “And he said,” Trubshaw added, “five years from now works by Gerard Logan will at least cost double again.”

  Uncle Ron would have loved it. Well ... so did I. It was surviving the next five days that caught my attention.

  By midafternoon everyone had collected and split apart again. Bon-Bon and Marigold left the boys in my care while they browsed the antique shops, and Worthington and Kenneth Trubshaw developed a strong mutual regard in a stroll.

  In the workshop, Victor, utterly impressed, watched Hickory show off with two gathers of red-hot glass that he rolled competently in white powder and then colored powder and tweaked into a small wavy-edged one-flower vase. Pamela Jane expertly assisted in snapping the vase off the punty iron and Hickory with false modesty lifted it into an annealing oven as if it were the Holy Grail.

  Daniel, for whom the workshop was a familiar stamping ground, mooned around looking at the shelves of bright little animals, pointing out to me the scarlet giraffe his father had promised him the day before he died. That story was most unlikely, I thought, remembering Martin’s absentmindedness towards all his children, but I gave Daniel the giraffe anyway, a gift that would have displeased his grandmother.

  Giving to Daniel, though, always reaped a worthwhile crop. This time he wanted me to go outside with him, and, seeing the stretched size of his eyes, I went casually, but at once.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “There’s a shoe shop down the road,” he said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Come and look.”

  He set off, and I followed.

  “Victor and I came down here with Irish, looking for hamburgers,” he said, “but we came to the shoe shop first.”

  The shoe shop duly appeared on our left, a small affair mostly stocked with walking shoes for tourists. Daniel came to an abrupt halt by its uninspiring window.

  “I should think it might be worth two gold coins,” he said.

  “For two gold coins it had better be good.”

  “See those sneakers?” he said. “Those up there at the back with green-and-white-striped laces? The man with that gas, those are his laces.”

  I stared disbelievingly at the shoes. They were large with thick rubberlike soles, triangular white flashed canvas sections and, threaded in precision through two rows of eyeholes, the fat bunched laces of Daniel’s certainty.

  He said again, “The man who gassed us wore those shoes.”

  “Come into the shop, then,” I said, “and we’ll ask who bought some like them.”

  He agreed, “OK,” and then added, “It might cost two more gold coins, to go into the shop.”

  “You’re an extortionist.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Greedy. And I’ve no more coins.”

  Daniel grinned and shrugged, accepting fate.

  The shop had a doorbell that jingled when we went in, and contained a grandfatherly salesman who proved useless from our point of view, as he was standing in for his daughter whose baby was sick. She might be back some day next week, he vaguely thought, and he knew nothing about previous sales.

  When we went back into the street, Bon-Bon, away up the hill, was beckoning Daniel to her car, to go home. Only the fact that she had already loaded Victor, having offered him another night’s computer hacking, persuaded her son to join her, and presently, when Marigold and “Darling Trubby” had gone their separate ways, only Catherine and my little team were left, and those three, as it was Saturday afternoon, were setting things straight as if for a normal winter Sunday of no action. They departed with my blessing at four-thirty, leaving only myself and Catherine to lock up; and I gave her too a bunch of keys for the future.

  I also told police officer Dodd about the laces, which sent her on a brief reconnaissance only, as first of all she said she needed another officer with her if she were to qu
estion the shop owner, and second, the grandfather salesman had shut up shop and left it dark.

  Catherine, like Martin before her, grew minute by minute more interested in the technical details and the chemical complexities of bright modern glass. Old glass could look gray or yellow, fine to my eyes but dingy on racecourses.

  Catherine asked which I would make first, the horse or the ball, and I told her the horse. I asked her whether, even though they would not be on duty the next day, she could persuade her Pernickety Paul hobo partner to come and walk up and down Broadway with her a couple of times? She naturally asked why.

  “To mind my back,” I joked, and she said she thought he might come if she asked him.

  “He might be busy,” I said.

  “I doubt it,” she replied. “He seems rather lonely since his wife left him.”

  We rode her motorbike to a hotel deep in the country and ate there and slept there, and I avoided Blackmask Four and explained to my increasingly loved police officer, before I kissed her, that she and the hobo might find handcuffs a good idea on the morrow. “He always carries them,” Catherine said.

  In the morning she said, “All this walking up and down Broadway ... is it the tapes?”

  “Sort of.” I nodded. I didn’t mention life or death. One couldn’t somehow.

  All the same, I woke Tom Pigeon, who woke his dogs, who all growled (Tom included) that Sunday was a day of rest.

  I phoned Jim. At my service all day, he said. His wife was going to church.

  Worthington was already awake, he said, and had I noticed that Sundays weren’t always healthy for Gerard Logan?

  “Mm. What’s Marigold doing today?”

  “I’ve got the day free, if that’s what you’re asking. Where do you want me to turn up when? And most of all, why?”

  I hesitated over the last answer but replied in order: “Wychwood Dragon lobby, soon as possible, on account of fear.”

  “Whose fear?”

  “Mine.”

  “Oh yeah?” His laugh traveled with bass reverberation. “You’ll be alone in that workshop of yours, is that it? In that case, I’ll be with you soon.”

  “I won’t exactly be alone. Catherine and her partner officer will probably be in the town, and in the workshop there will be Pamela Jane, who’s going to assist.”

  “The girl? Why not that bright young man, what’s his name ... Hickory?”

  “Pamela Jane doesn’t argue.”

  Worthington’s deep voice arrived as a chuckle. “I’m on my way.”

  I made one more phone call, this time to the home of George Lawson-Young, apologizing for the eight-thirty wake-up.

  “The hour doesn’t matter”—he yawned—“if you bring good news.”

  “It depends,” I said, and told him what he might expect.

  He said, “Well done.”

  “More to do.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.” His smile came across the air. “I’ll see you later.”

  Catherine and her motorcycle took me to Logan Glass, where local inhabitants could have seen a display of affection to wag tongues for a week. I unlocked the doors, being there intentionally before Pamela Jane, and again read the notes I’d made (and filed in the locked bookcase) last time I’d tried my hand at a rearing horse.

  This one would take me about an hour to complete, if I made the whole trophy, including plinth and ball. At a little less than half a meter high, it would weigh roughly twenty kilos, heavy because solid glass itself weighed a good deal, let alone the added gold. Marigold had with wide-sweeping arms insisted on magnificence. It was to be Martin’s memorial, she proclaimed, and she had been exceedingly fond of her son-in-law. Both Bon-Bon and Worthington thought this much-to-be-publicized admiration a little retrospective, but “Darling Trubby” might think the trophy handsome in the sun.

  I had filled the tank with clear crystal and put ready at hand the punty irons I’d need, also the small tools for shaping muscles, legs and head. Tweezers too, essential always. I set the furnace temperature to the necessary 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.

  By then I “saw” the sculpture complete. A pity they hadn’t wanted Martin himself on the rearing horse’s back. I saw him there clearly now, at last. Perhaps I would repeat the horse with Martin riding. Perhaps one night ... for Bon-Bon, and for the friend I’d lost and still trusted.

  While I waited for Pamela Jane to arrive, I thought about the wandering videotape that had raised so many savage feelings, and like curtains parting, the deductive faculty Professor Lawson-Young had put his faith in continued to open vistas in my mind. I had at last added in his factor X, and the mask had dropped from Blackmask Four.

  Out of doors it started raining.

  I stood looking at the furnace and listening to its heart of flame. Looking at the raisable trapdoor that kept 1800 degrees Fahrenheit at bay. Irish, Hickory, Pamela Jane and myself were so accustomed to the danger of the extreme heat roaring within the firebricks that taking care was automatic, was second nature.

  I knew at last the sequence of the roads in the cul-de-sacs. I listened in my mind to Catherine’s list of punishable crimes and their penalties, and reckoned that Rose and Adam Force should, if they had any sense at all, just leave the videotapes where they rested and save themselves the grief of prosecution.

  Thieves never had any sense.

  I’d surrounded myself with as many bodyguards as I could muster that Sunday simply because neither Rose nor Adam Force had shown any sense or restraint so far, and because the making of the trophy horse left me wide open to any mayhem they might invent. I could have filled the workroom with a crowd of onlookers and been safe ... safe for how long?

  I knew now where the danger lay. I couldn’t forever look over my shoulder fearfully, and, however rash it might seem, I saw a confrontation as the quickest path to resolution.

  If I were disastrously wrong, Professor Lawson-Young could say good-bye to his millions. The breakthrough that would save the world in the cure for cancer would be published under someone else’s name.

  When my enemies came, it wasn’t just time, I found, that I had given them, as much as an opportunity to outthink me.

  I was still listening to the furnace when sounds behind me announced the arrival of Pamela Jane. She had entered through the side door, though usually she came in through the front.

  “Mr. Logan...” Her voice quavered high with fright, and besides, she normally called me Gerard.

  I turned at once to see how bad things were, and found that in many unforeseen ways they were extremely bad indeed.

  Pamela Jane, dressed for work in her usual white overalls cinched around the waist, was coming to a standstill in the center of the workshop, trembling from a situation far beyond her capabilities. Her raincoat lay dropped in a bundle on the floor and her wrists were fastened together in front of her by sticky brown packing tape. Simpler and cheaper than handcuffs, the tape was equally immobilizing, and more effective still in Pamela Jane’s case as the charming Adam Force held a full syringe in one hand and, with the other, had dragged down a clutch of female overalls to reveal a patch of bare skin below the needle. Thin and frightened, she began to cry.

  A step or two behind Pamela Jane came Rose, every muscle triumphant, her whole face a sneer. She too came quietly, in soft shoes, and fast

  Rose, strong, determined and full of spite aimed powerfully my way, held in a pincer grip the upper arm of Hickory. My bright assistant stood helplessly swaying, his eyes and his mouth stuck out of action by strips of brown packing tape. The same tape had been used to bind his hands behind his back and also to form a makeshift hobble between his ankles.

  Roughly steadying Hickory’s balance loomed the bookmaker Norman Osprey, more bully beef than beauty, but arithmetically as fast as a computer chip. Just inside the side door, keeping guard and shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, was, of all people, Eddie Payne. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He took instructions steadfastly from Rose.

&nb
sp; The actions of all four intruders had been whirlwind fast, and I had arranged little in any way of retaliation. All the bodyguards were simply to roam the street outside. Catherine and her hobo were to patrol their normal disjointed beat. Rose and her cohorts had somehow slid past them in the rain.

  I was wearing, as usual, a white singlet which left my arms, neck and much of my shoulder area bare. The heat from the furnace roared almost unbearably beyond the trapdoor, if one weren’t used to it. I put my foot and my weight sideways on the treadle, which duly opened the trap and let a huge gust of Sahara heat blow out over Norman Osprey’s wool suit and reddening face. Furious, he made a snatch towards hurling me onto the trapdoor itself, but I sidestepped and tripped him, and unbalanced him onto his knees.

  Rose yelled to Norman, “Stop it, you stupid asshole, we don’t want him damaged this time; you know bloody well we’ll get nowhere if he can’t talk.”

  I watched as Rose tugged my blindfolded assistant across a good length of floor, with Norman Osprey holding him upright in a fierce grip. Hickory stumbled and felt tentatively forwards step by step until he reached the chair I’d bought for Catherine. At that point Rose revolved Hickory roughly until he fell into the chair on his side and had to struggle to turn and sit upright.

  Behind me now I could hear the distressed breathing of Pamela Jane, and also the unmistakable heavy wheeze of Adam Force’s asthma. He said nothing at all about his near miss with insulin at Bristol. He definitely needed an inhaler but had no free hands.

  Rose said to Hickory with malignant satisfaction, “Now you sit there, buddy boy, and it will teach you not to put your nose in where it isn’t wanted.” She redirected the pleased venom back my way while Hickory tried hard to talk but produced only a throttled tenor protest.

  “Now you,” she told me, “will hand over everything I want. Or your friend here will get holes burned in him.”