Banker

by Dick Francis

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I want to be with her.’

  The young doctor nodded, and he and I and the nurse stepped outside the cubicle, drawing the curtains behind us. The doctor looked in a brief pause of stillness towards the three or four stretchers arriving at the entrance, taking a breath, seeming to summon up energy from deep reserves.

  ‘I’ve been on duty for thirty hours,’ he said to me. ‘And now the pubs are out. Ten o’clock, Sundays. Drunk drivers, drunk pedestrians. Always the same.’

  He walked away to his alive and bleeding patients and the nurse pinned a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign onto the curtains of Ginnie’s cubicle, saying she would be taken care of later.

  I sat drearily on a chair, waiting for Oliver. The white plastic bottle had a label stuck onto one side saying ‘Shampoo’. I put it into my jacket pocket and wondered if it was just through overwork that the doctor hadn’t asked how Ginnie’s skull had been fractured, asked whether she’d fallen onto a rock or a kerb… or been hit.

  The rest of the night and all the next day were in their own way worse, a truly awful series of questions, answers, forms and officialdom, with the police slowly taking over from the hospital and Oliver trying to fight against a haze of grief.

  It seemed to me wicked that no one would leave him alone. To them he was just one more in a long line of bereaved persons, and although they treated him with perfunctory sympathy, it was for their own paperwork and not for his benefit that they wanted signatures, information and guesses.

  Large numbers of policemen descended on the farm early in the morning, and it gradually appeared that that area of the country was being plagued by a stalker of young girls who jumped out of bushes, knocked them unconscious and sexually assaulted them.

  ‘Not Ginnie…’ Oliver protested in deepening horror.

  The most senior of the policemen shook his head. ‘It would appear not. She was still wearing her clothing. We can’t discount, though, that it was the same man, and that he was disturbed by your grooms. When young girls are knocked unconscious at night, it’s most often a sexual attack.’

  ‘But she was on my own land,’ he said, disbelieving.

  The policeman shrugged. ‘It’s been known in suburban front gardens.’

  He was a fair-haired man with a manner that was not exactly brutal but spoke of long years of acclimatisation to dreadful experiences. Detective Chief Inspector Wyfold, he’d said, introducing himself. Forty-fivish, I guessed, sensing the hardness within him at sight and judging him through that day more dogged than intuitive, looking for results from procedure, not hunches.

  He was certain in his own mind that the attack on Ginnie had been sexual in intent and he scarcely considered anything else, particularly since she’d been carrying no money and had expressly said she wouldn’t leave the farm.

  ‘She could have talked to someone over the gate,’ he said, having himself spent some time on the lower drive. ‘Someone walking along the road. And there are all your grooms that we’ll need detailed statements from, though from their preliminary answers it seems they weren’t in the hostel but down at the village, in the pubs.’

  He came and went and reappeared again with more questions at intervals through the day and I lost track altogether of the hours. I tried, in his presence and out, and in Oliver’s the same, not to think much about Ginnie herself. I thought I would probably have wept if I had, of no use to anyone. I thrust her away into a defensive compartment knowing that later, alone, I would let her out.

  Some time in the morning one of the lads came to the house and asked what they should do about one of the mares who was having difficulty foaling, and Lenny also arrived wanting to know when he should take Rotaboy to the breeding pen. Each of them stood awkwardly, not knowing where to put their hands, saying they were so shocked, so sorry, about Ginnie.

  ‘Where’s Nigel?’ Oliver said.

  They hadn’t seen him, they said. He hadn’t been out in the yards that morning.

  ‘Didn’t you try his house?’ Oliver was annoyed rather than alarmed: another burden on a breaking back.

  ‘He isn’t there. The door’s locked and he didn’t answer.’

  Oliver frowned, picked up the telphone and pressed the buttons: listened: no reply.

  He said to me, ‘There’s a key to his bungalow over there on the board, third hook from the left. Would you go and look… would you mind?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I walked down there with Lenny who told me repeatedly how broken up the lads were over what had happened, particularly Dave and Sammy, who’d found her. They’d all liked her, he said. All the lads who lived in the hostel were saying that perhaps if they’d come back sooner, she wouldn’t have been attacked.

  ‘You don’t live in the hostel, then?’ I said.

  ‘No. Down in the village. Got a house. Only the ones who come just for the season, they’re the ones in the hostel. It’s shut up, see, all winter.’

  We eventually reached Nigel’s bungalow where I rang the doorbell and banged on the knocker without result. Shaking my head slightly I fitted the key in the lock, opened the door, went in.

  Curtains were drawn across the windows, shutting out a good deal of daylight. I switched on a couple of lights and walked into the sitting room, where papers, clothes and dirty cups and plates were strewn haphazardly and the air smelled faintly of horse.

  There was no sign of Nigel. I looked into the equally untidy kitchen and opened a door which proved to be that of a bathroom and another which revealed a room with bare-mattressed twin beds. The last door in the small inner hall led into Nigel’s own bedroom… and there he was, face down, fully clothed, lying across the counterpane.

  Lenny, still behind me, took two paces back.

  I went over to the bed and felt Nigel’s neck behind the ear Felt the pulse going like a steam-hammer. Heard the rasp of air in the throat. His breath would have anaesthetised a crocodile, and on the floor beside him lay an empty bottle of gin. I shook his shoulder unsympathetically with a complete lack of result.

  ‘He’s drunk,’ I said to Lenny. ‘Just drunk.’

  Lenny looked all the same as if he was about to vomit. ‘I thought… I thought.’

  ‘I know,’ I said: and I’d feared it also, instinctively, the one because of the other.

  ‘What will we do, then, out in the yard?’ Lenny asked.

  ‘I’ll find out.’

  We went back into the sitting room where I used Nigel’s telephone to call Oliver and report.

  ‘He’s flat out,’ I said. ‘I can’t wake him. Lenny wants instructions.’

  After a brief silence Oliver said dully, ‘Tell him to take Rotaboy to the breeding shed in half an hour. I’ll see to things in the yards. And Tim?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can I ask you… would you mind… helping me here in the office?’

  ‘Coming straight back.’

  The disjointed, terrible day wore on. I telephoned to Gordon in the bank explaining my absence and to Judith also, a: Gordon’s suggestion, to pass on the heartbreak, and I took countless incoming messages as the news spread. Outside on the farm nearly two hundred horses got fed and watered, and birth and procreation went inexorably on.

  Oliver came back stumbling from fatigue at about two o’clock, and we ate some eggs, not tasting them, in the kitchen. He looked repeatedly at his watch and said finally, ‘What’s eight hours back from now? I can’t even think.’

  ‘Six in the morning,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I suppose I should have told Ginnie’s mother last night.’ His face twisted. ‘My wife… in Canada…’ He swallowed. ‘Never mind, let her sleep. In two hours I’ll tell her.’

  I left him alone to that wretched task and took myself upstairs to wash and shave and lie for a while on the bed. It was in taking my jacket off for those purposes that I came across the plastic bottle in my pocket, and I took it out and stood it on the shelf in the bathroom while I
shaved.

  An odd sort of thing, I thought, for Ginnie to have tucked into her waistband. A plastic bottle of shampoo; about six inches high, four across, one deep, with a screw cap on one of the narrow ends. The white label saying ‘Shampoo’ had been handwritten and stuck on top of the bottle’s original dark brown, white-printed label, of which quite a bit still showed round the edges.

  ‘Instructions,’ part of the underneath label said. ‘Shake well. Be careful not to get the shampoo in the dog’s eyes. Rub well into the coat and leave for ten or fifteen minutes before rinsing.’

  At the bottom, below the stuck-on label, were the words, in much smaller print, ‘Manufactured by Eagle Inc., Michigan, U.S.A. List number 29931.

  When I’d finished shaving I unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle gently over the basin.

  A thick greenish liquid appeared, smelling powerfully of soap.

  Shampoo: what else.

  The bottle was to all intents full. I screwed on the cap again and put it on the shelf, and thought about it while I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head.

  Shampoo for dogs.

  After a while I got up and went down to the kitchen, and in a high cupboard found a small collection of empty, washed, screw-top glass jars, the sort of thing my mother had always saved for herbs and picnics. I took one which would hold perhaps a cupful of liquid and returned upstairs, and over the washbasin I shook the bottle well, unscrewed the cap and carefully poured more than half of the shampoo into the jar.

  I screwed the caps onto both the bottle and the jar, copied what could be seen on the original label into the small engagement diary I carried with me everywhere, and stowed the now half full round glass container from Oliver’s kitchen inside my own sponge-bag: and when I went downstairs again I took the plastic bottle with me.

  ‘Ginnie had it?’ Oliver said dully, picking it up and squinting at it. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘The nurse at the hospital said it was tucked into the waistband of her skirt.’

  A smile flickered. ‘She always did that when she was little. Plimsols, books, bits of string, anything. To keep her hands free, she said. They all used to slip down into her little knickers, and there would be a whole shower of things sometimes when we undressed her.’ His face went hopelessly bleak at this memory, I can’t believe it, you know,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll walk through the door.’ He paused. ‘My wife is flying over. She says she’ll be here tomorrow morning.’ His voice gave no indication as to whether that was good news or bad. ‘Stay tonight, will you?’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Chief Inspector Wyfold turned up again at that point and we gave him the shampoo bottle, Oliver explaining about Ginnie’s habit of carrying things in her clothes.

  ‘Why didn’t you give this to me earlier?’ he asked me.

  ‘I forgot I had it. It seemed so paltry at the time, compared with Ginnie dying.’

  The Chief Inspector picked up the bottle by its serrated cap and read what one could see of the label, and to Oliver he said, ‘Do you have a dog?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would this be what you usually use, to wash him?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I don’t wash him myself. One of the lads does.’

  ‘The lads being the grooms?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Which lad washed your dog?’ Wyfold asked.

  ‘Um… any. Whoever I ask.’

  The Chief Inspector produced a thin white folded paper bag from one of his pockets and put the bottle inside it. ‘Who to your knowledge has handled this, besides yourselves?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘the nurse at the hospital… and Ginnie.’

  ‘And it spent from last night until now in your pocket?’ He shrugged. ‘Hopeless for prints, I should think, but we’ll try.’ He fastened the bag shut and wrote on a section of it with a ball pen. To Oliver, almost as an aside, he said, i came to ask you about your daughter’s relationship with men.’

  Oliver said wearily, ‘She didn’t have any. She’s only just left school.’

  Wyfold made small negative movements with head and hands as if amazed at the naiveté of fathers. ‘No sexual relationship to your knowledge?’

  Oliver was too exhausted for anger. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘And you sir?’ he turned to me. ‘What were your relations with Virginia Knowles?’

  ‘Friendship.’

  ‘Including sexual intercourse?’

  ‘No.’

  Wyfold looked at Oliver who said tiredly, ‘Tim is a business friend of mine. A financial adviser, staying here for the weekend, that’s all.’

  The policeman frowned at me with disillusion as if he didn’t believe it. I gave him no amplified answer because I simply couldn’t be bothered, and what could I have said? That with much affection I’d watched a child grow into an attractive young woman and yet not wanted to sleep with her? His mind ran on carnal rails, all else discounted.

  He went away in the end taking the shampoo with him, and Oliver with immense fortitude said he had better go out into the yards to catch the tail end of evening stables. ‘Those mares,’ he said. ‘Those foals… they still need the best of care.’

  ‘I wish I could help,’ I said, feeling useless.

  ‘You do.’

  I went with him on his rounds, and when we reached the foaling yard, Nigel, resurrected, was there.

  His stocky figure leaned against the doorpost of an open box as if without its support he would collapse, and the face he slowly turned towards us had aged ten years. The bushy eyebrows stood out starkly over charcoal shadowed eyes, puffiness in his skin swelling the eylids and sagging in deep bags on his cheeks. He was also unshaven, unkempt and feeling ill.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Heard about Ginnie. Very sorry.’ I wasn’t sure whether he was sympathising with Oliver or apologising for the drunkenness. ‘A big noise of a policeman came asking if I’d killed her. As if I would.’ He put a shaky hand on his head, almost as if physically to support it on his shoulders. ‘I feel rotten. My own fault. Deserve it. This mare’s likely to foal tonight. That shit of a policeman wanted to know if I was sleeping with Ginnie. Thought I’d tell you… I wasn’t.’

  Wyfold, I reflected, would ask each of the lads individually the same question. A matter of time, perhaps, before he asked Oliver himself; though Oliver and I, he had had to concede, gave each other a rock-solid alibi.

  We walked on towards the stallions and I asked Oliver if Nigel often got drunk, since Oliver hadn’t shown much surprise.

  ‘Very seldom,’ Oliver said. ‘He’s once or twice turned out in that state but we’ve never lost a foal because of it. I don’t like it, but he’s so good with the mares.’ He shrugged. ‘I overlook it,’

  He gave carrots to all four stallions but scarcely glanced at Sandcastle, as if he could no longer bear the sight.

  ‘I’ll try the Research people tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Forgot about it, today.’

  From the stallions he went, unusually, in the direction of the lower gate, past Nigel’s bungalow and the hostel, to stand for a while at the place where Ginnie had lain in the dark on the night before.

  The asphalt driveway showed no mark. Oliver looked to where the closed gate sixty feet away led to the road and in a drained voice said, ‘Do you think she could have talked to someone out there?’

  ‘She might have, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned to go back. ‘It’s all so senseless. And unreal. Nothing feels real.’

  Exhaustion of mind and body finally overtook him after dinner and he went grey-faced to bed, but I in the first quiet of the long day went out again for restoration: for a look at the stars, as Ginnie had said.

  Thinking only of her I walked slowly along some of the paths between the paddocks, the way lit by a half-moon with small clouds drifting, and stopped eventually at the place where on the previous morning I’d held her tight in her racking distres
s. The birth of the deformed foal seemed so long ago, yet it was only yesterday: the morning of the last day of Ginnie’s life.

  I thought about that day, about the despair in its dawn and the resolution of its afternoon. I thought of her tears and her courage, and of the waste of so much goodness. The engulfing, stupefying sense of loss which had hovered all day swamped into my brain until my body felt inadequate, as if it wanted to burst, as if it couldn’t hold in so much feeling.

  When Ian Pargetter had been murdered I had been angry on his behalf and had supposed that the more one loved the dead person the greater one’s fury against the killer. But now I understood that anger could simply be crowded out by something altogether more overwhelming. As for Oliver, he had displayed shock, daze, desolation and disbelief in endless quantities all day, but of anger, barely a flicker.

  It was too soon to care who had killed her. The fact of her death was too much. Anger was irrelevant, and no vengeance could give her life.

  I had loved her more than I’d known, but not as I loved Judith, not with desire and pain and longing. I’d loved Ginnie as a friend; as a brother. I’d loved her, I thought, right back from the day when I’d returned her to school and listened to her fears. I’d loved her up on the hill, trying to catch Sand castle, and I’d loved her for her expertise and for her growing adult certainty that here, in these fields, was where her future lay.

  I’d thought of her young life once as being a clear stretch of sand waiting for footprints, and now there would be none, now only a blank, chopping end to all she could have been and done, to all the bright love she had scattered around her.

  ‘Oh… Ginnie,’ I said aloud, calling to her hopelessly in tearing body-shaking grief. ‘Ginnie… little Ginnie… come back.’

  But she was gone from there. My voice fled away into darkness, and there was no answer.

  MAY

  On and off for the next two weeks I worked on Oliver’s financial chaos at my desk in the bank, and at a special board meeting argued the case for giving him time before we foreclosed and made him sell all he had.

  I asked for three months, which was considered scandalously out of the question, but got him two, Gordon chuckling over it quietly as we went down together afterwards in the lift.