Shattered

by Dick Francis

Hickory blamed me, Rose and the world in general.

  Doctor Force had said a little but denied most. He had revealed, however, that Martin Stukely had not been aware that the information on the tape had been stolen. Indeed the doctor had told Martin that he was protecting the research from others trying to steal the work from Force.

  I was glad of that. Had I doubted it?

  On Thursday we reopened. The showroom was busier than it had ever been on a weekday in January and sales boomed. But, in truth, there was far greater interest in the bloodstains, which had proved difficult to remove from between the bricks on the floor, than in the stock.

  Pamela Jane had recovered sufficiently to return in time for the weekend although she preferred to work in the showroom and made rapid transits across the workshop to her locker only when she couldn’t avoid it.

  On Sunday, one week after the mayhem, I set out again to make the trophy horse.

  Dependable Irish had agreed to act as my assistant and this time we had an audience of one. Catherine sat in her now familiar chair and watched as I again readied my tools and stripped down to my singlet.

  I stood on the treadle to lift the door to the furnace and let the heat flood into the room.

  Catherine took off her coat.

  “Hang it in my locker,” I said, tossing her the locker keys.

  She walked to the far end of the workshop and opened a door on the tall gray cabinet.

  “What’s on this?” she said, holding up a videotape. “It has a label, ‘How to make the Cretan Sunrise.’ ”

  I moved swiftly to her side. She had by mistake opened Hickory’s locker, and there inside we found not just the necklace instruction tape but also, tucked into a brown paper bag, a pair of bright laces, green-and-white-striped.

  I laughed. “A tale of three tapes and one of them was under my nose all the time.”

  “Three tapes?” she asked. “Two were bad enough.”

  “There were three,” I replied. “The only really important, valuable and perhaps unique tape was the one Force made from the stolen cancer research results. He gave it to Martin, who via Eddie gave it to me. Priam swapped it, mistakenly thinking it a treasure finder’s dream to millions. When he found that it wasn‘t, he simply left it hidden in Martin’s car. It’s the tape that Rose and Doctor Force have been trying so hard to find.”

  “And the necklace tape?” Catherine asked. “This one?”

  I said, “I had lent the necklace instruction tape to Martin and it remained in his den at his house until Hickory stole it with all the others. Hickory kept it because, to him, the tape had some value. He thought he could make a copy of the necklace and obviously kept the tape in his locker.”

  “What’s the third tape then?” she asked.

  “The tape,” I went on, “that Priam took from Martin’s den before Hickory’s theft. He put it in my raincoat pocket and it’s that tape that Force stole at midnight on New Year’s Eve thinking it was his cancer tape. I would have loved to see his face when he played it and found horse racing instead.”

  I made the trophy horse. With Irish’s help I gathered the

  glass from the furnace and again formed the horse’s body, its legs and tail. But this time I took time and care and applied the knowledge and talent both learned and inherited from my uncle Ron. I molded a neck and head of an intelligent animal, prominent cheekbones and a firm mouth. I gave it a mane flowing as if in full gallop and then applied it seamlessly to the body.

  I had started out to make a commercial work for Marigold and Kenneth Trubshaw and his Cheltenham Trophy Committee.

  In the event I made a memorial to a trusted and much missed friend. A memorial worthy of his skill and his courage.

  The leaping horse stood finally on the marver table and Irish and I lifted it quickly but carefully into one of the annealing ovens. There it would cool slowly and safely, allowing the strains and stresses to ease gradually. This one was not for shattering.

  I went with Catherine to the funeral of Pernickety Paul, but I abandoned her at the church door to her colleagues, uniformed or not. A small bunch of plainclothes enveloped her and mourned with her and it was a thoughtful and subdued police officer who mounted her motorcycle, paused before starting the engine, and said blankly to her future passenger, “The private cremation’s tomorrow and there are drinks in his memory in the pub this evening. I’ve been given leave for the rest of the day, so where do you want to go now?”

  “To bed,” I said without hesitation, and added that surely Pernickety Paul would have approved.

  Catherine shed sorrow like melting snow.

  I said, “I haven’t seen where you live, remember? So how about now then?”

  She smiled with a touch of mischief and then kicked down on the starter and invited me to step aboard.

  Her home was maybe five minutes’ walk or less than a one-minute motorcycle ride along a straight gray road from the district police station. She stopped outside a single-storied semi-detached bungalow in a row of identical stuccoed boxes, and I knew within a second blink that this was not the place for me. Going there had been a mistake but, as Catherine was my transport, I would smile and pretend to like it.

  I actually did both, and not from politeness’s sake.

  Inside, the plainclothes’s one-floor living space had been allied to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where a more-than-life-size March Hare and a same-size Mad Hatter sat at the kitchen table and stuffed a dormouse into a teapot. A white rabbit consulted a watch by the bathroom door, and a red queen and a cook and a walrus and a carpenter danced a quadrille around the sitting room. All the walls, everywhere, were painted with rioting greenery and flowers.

  Catherine laughed at my expression, a mixture no doubt of amusement and horror.

  “These people,” she said, “came to me from a closing-down fun fair when I was six. I’ve always loved them. I know they’re silly but they’re company.” She suddenly swallowed. “They have helped me come to terms with losing Paul. He liked them. They made him laugh. They’re not the same now, without him. I think I’ve been growing up.”

  In keeping with the rest of the house Catherine’s bedroom was a fantasyland of living playing cards painting rosebushes white and strong pink against puff ball clouds and vivid green leaves.

  Brought to a standstill, I said weakly, “Lovely,” and Catherine laughed.

  “You hate it, I can see.”

  “I can shut my eyes,” I said, but we pulled the curtains closed.

  We made love there in Pernickety Paul’s honor but, in the evening, after the party in the pub, when Detective Constable Dodd and her pillion rider climbed back on the saddle, it was to the big quiet house on the hill that they went.

  It was like coming familiarly home.