by Dick Francis
“Thanks very much indeed, Sandy.”
“The Ogden inquest’s first thing on Thursday, same place, that’s to say the coroner’s court, which is a room in the police station in Winchester. The verdict will be natural causes. They won’t adjourn that one. Bruce Farway will give his report. Mrs. Ogden’s identified her husband. Seems Ogden had heart trouble on and off but was bad at taking pills. Dave had better attend, though they might not call him. I’ll be there too, of course.”
“Great, Sandy. Thanks again.”
“I drank to Jogger last night in the pub,” he said. “There was quite a turnout. Loads of people signing his memorial. You’ll get an astronomical bill.”
“All in a good cause.”
“Poor old Jogger.”
“Yes,” I said.
LIZZIE AND I settled for dinner in an old country inn ten miles from Pixhill where the specialty was duck roasted in a honey glaze to a crisp blackened skin with succulence inside. La Potinière it was not, but an old favorite place of Lizzie’s, who liked the heavy oak beams, the authentically crooked walls and the low-to-dim lighting.
As Pixhill people often ate there, I was not much surprised to see Benjy and Dot Usher side by side at a booth table across the room from us. Impervious to their surroundings they were in midquarrel as usual, the two faces tight with fury six inches apart.
“Who are they?” Lizzie asked, following my gaze.
“A Pixhill millionaire who plays at training and his i nseparable wife.”
“Ask a silly question . . .”
“And you get a dead accurate answer.”
“Really?”
“I reckon if they ever stop fighting that marriage will collapse from boredom.”
I told her about my day with them at Sandown races and about Benjy’s odd habit of not touching horses.
“And he’s a trainer?”
“Of sorts. But he’s also a customer, which makes him OK by me.”
She studied my face with elder-sister indulgence. “I remember you once saying,” she said, “that if you rode races only for people you liked you’d have missed winning the Gold Cup.”
“Mm. Same theory. I’ll hire out my skills to anyone for the prospect of reward.”
“It sounds like prostitution.”
“What isn’t?”
“Pure research, for one thing. You’re an absolute philistine.”
“Goliath was a Philistine . . . a giant of a man.”
“Brought down by a slingshot.”
“Sneaky.”
Lizzie smiled with pleasure. “I miss you,” she said.
“Me too. Tell me about Professor Quipp.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have said that about everyone finding me. You never miss a trick.”
“Well, go on.”
“He’s nice.” She sounded fond, not defensive. A good sign, given the characters of some of the past beards. “He’s five years younger than I am and he adores skiing. We went to Val d’Isère for a week.” Lizzie positively purred. “We raced each other down mountains.”
“Um . . . What color beard?”
“No beard. You’re a beast. No mustache either.”
It sounded serious. “What subject?” I asked.
“Actually, organic chemistry.”
“Ah.”
“Any more ahs and you won’t get your tubes analyzed.”
“Not another ah shall pass my lips.”
We ate the crisp black duck and during our coffee Benjy Usher took his attention off Dot long enough to notice me across the room.
“Freddie!” he shouted uninhibitedly, turning every other diner’s head his way. “Come over here, you bugger.”
It seemed easiest to go. I stopped at their table and said hello to Dot.
“Come and join us,” Benjy commanded. “Bring the bird.”
“She’s my sister.”
“Oh sure, pull the other one.”
Benjy had had one drink too many. Dot looked embarrassed. It was for her sake, really, that I went and persuaded Lizzie to cross the carpet.
We accepted coffee from Dot and resisted Benjy’s offer of huge glasses of port. When Benjy summoned another for himself, Dot said conversationally, “He’s now at impotence. Paralysis next.”
“Vicious bitch,” Benjy said.
Lizzie’s eyes widened.
Dot remarked, “Followed by vomiting, ending in tears of maudlin self-pity. He calls himself a man.”
“Premenstrual tension,” Benjy mocked. “Chronic case.”
Lizzie looked at their handsome faces and casually good clothes, at the diamonds on Dot’s fingers and at Benjy’s gold watch. No comment was possible. None was needed. Their pleasure depended not on money but on spite.
“When are you going to Italy for my colt?” Benjy asked me.
“Monday,” I suggested. “It’ll take us three days. He could be here by Wednesday evening.”
“Which driver? Not that one called Brett. Michael says never Brett.”
“He’s left. It won’t be Brett.”
“Send Lewis. Michael swears by him, and he’s driven my horses a lot. That colt’s valuable, you know. And send someone to look after him on the journey. Send that man of yours, that Dave. He can handle him.”
“Is he difficult to handle?”
“You know colts,” Benjy said expansively. “You send Dave. He’ll be all right.”
Dot said, “I don’t know why you don’t stand him at stud in Italy.”
“You keep your tongue off what doesn’t concern you,” her husband replied.
To try to stop their argument, I mentioned that we’d that day brought the load of old horses from Yorkshire and I gathered he was giving a home to two of them.
“Those old wrecks!” Dot exclaimed. “Not more of them.”
“Do you have some already?” Lizzie asked.
“They died,” Dot told her. “I hate it. I don’t want any more.”
“Don’t look at them,” Benjy said.
“You put them outside the drawing room window.”
“I’ll put them in the drawing room. That should please you.”
“You’re utterly childish.”
“You’re utterly stupid.”
Lizzie said sweetly, “It’s been terribly nice meeting you,” and stood up to leave, and when we were out in the Jaguar asked, “Do they always go on like that?”
“I can testify to fifteen years of it.”
“Good grief.” She yawned, well fed and relaxed, sleepy. “Beautiful moon tonight. Terrific for flying.”
“But you’re not going tonight!”
“No, it’s just a habit of mind. I think of the sky in flying terms, you think of the ground as hard or soft for horses.”
“I suppose I do.”
She sighed pleasurably. “Lovely car, this.”
The Jaguar hummed through the night, powerful, intimate, the best wheels I’d owned. The jockeys lately seemed to have stopped buying speed in favor of middle-rank family sedans, ultrareliable but rather dull. My bit of flamboyance, alive in my hands, was no longer politically correct with the new serious lot in the changing room.
Bad luck for them, I thought. Looking back, I seemed to have laughed a lot in those years. And cursed and ached and seethed at injustices. And had a sizzling good time.
The last stretch of the road from dinner to bed went past the farmyard. I slowed automatically to glance at the row of transports gleaming in the moonlight. The gates were open, which meant that one or more vans were still out on the road, and I completed the short distance to the house wondering which one it was.
Lizzie’s Robinson 22 shone in the moonlight, standing on the tarmac where the nine-van had stood with Kevin Keith Ogden on board.
“I’ll leave about nine in the morning,” she said, “and get your analysis started in the afternoon.”
“Great.” I must have sounded preoccupied. She turned her head to study me.
“What’
s the matter?” she asked.
“Nothing really. You go in, go to bed. I’ll just nip back to the farmyard to lock the gates. There aren’t any vans still out, or anyway there shouldn’t be. I won’t be long.”
She yawned. “See you in the morning, then.”
“Thanks for coming.”
“I’ve enjoyed it.”
We hugged briefly and she went in smiling. I hoped Professor Quipp would love her for a long time, as I’d never known her so at peace.
I drove the Jaguar back to the farmyard and stopped outside the gates. Someone was walking about in the yard, as Harve often did, taking care of things, and I walked towards the half-seen figure, calling “Harve?”
No answer. I walked on, reaching the nearest van, Harve’s own, and passing into a patch of shadow.
“Harve,” I shouted.
I heard nothing, but something hit me very hard on the back of the head.
I WORKED OUT later how long I spent unaware of the world: one hour, forty minutes.
The first sensation of the daze I awoke to was a pain in the head. The second sensation was of being carried. The third was a matter of hearing, with a voice making a nonsensical remark.
“If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.”
I was dreaming, of course.
Of course.
Soon I would wake up.
I felt I was falling. I hated dreams about falling: they were always about falling off buildings, never off horses.
I fell into water. Breathtakingly cold.
I went down into it without struggling. Wholly immersed. Went down deep.
Terrible dream.
Instinct, perhaps, switched me to reality. This was no dream, this was Freddie Croft, in his clothes, drowning.
The first awful compulsion was to take a deep breath, and it was again subconscious knowledge, no present thought, that stopped me.
I kicked, seeking to go upwards, and felt sucked to one side and clutched by currents, a rag doll in limbo.
I kicked again with growing horror, urgency flooding finally into a response from arms and legs, muscles bunching, working hard, chest hurting, head hammering.
Swim up, for God’s sake.
Swim . . . up.
I swam up in crazy panic-driven breaststrokes. Swam as if horizontal, arms sweeping, legs kicking, knowing I was also going sideways, being swept without choice.
Probably I spent barely more than a minute underwater. I breaststroked through the surface into the night and gulped air into my starved lungs with a whooping roar, and the moment I stopped swimming my heavily saturated clothes and water-filled shoes dragged me down again, down like a seesaw, ultimate terror.
The drowning come up twice, and the third time stay down . . . the bad news wisdom. I swam with ebbing strength to the surface against the weight of my clothes and the drag of the water, and its inexorable swirling suction, seeing no light anywhere, only darkness enough for one struggling gasp, and my head went under again, willpower urging me up and the salt sea claiming me for its own.
Salt sea . . . I swallowed it, gagging. Pretty well every vestige of athleticism went into lifting my nose above the surface, and kicking to stay there. In a way I knew it was a losing battle, but I couldn’t accept it. If I’d been dropped off a boat, if I were alone far from land, an end would come soon, and it was intolerable. I protested furiously, vainly, against being murdered.
I saw a glitter on the water, a flash of light. The current was taking me into it, out of darkness.
Electric light.
A lamp . . . high above the water . . . on a lamp standard. I hadn’t realized how far I’d lost hope until the knowledge that electric lamp standards didn’t grow in midocean hit my brain like a more friendly blow on the skull. Lamp standards equaled land. Land meant life. Life meant swimming to the lamp standard.
Simple.
Not so simple. It was all I could do to stay up. All the same, the current that had floated me from darkness to light continued its benign work, taking me towards the lamp standard, but slowly, casually, indifferent to its flotsam.
Two lamp standards.
They were above me, on top of a wall. I bumped eventually into the wall, no longer able to see the lights on their tall stalks, but knowing they were there. I was in shadow again by the wall but, looking back, I could see little lights everywhere, bright, unmoving, a whole forest of lamp standards.
The wall was smooth and slimy, without handholds. The water carried me along it slowly, sucking me away and slapping me back against it, while I kicked fearfully and with insidiously growing feebleness to stay up to breathe.
I tried shouting for help. The suck and slap and gurgle of the eddies smothered my voice. When I took a deep breath to shout again, the salt water rushed into my mouth and set me choking.
It seemed ridiculous to drown when I could actually touch land, while the swell lifted me against safety and pulled me away again, while ten feet above me there was a dry place to walk.
I lived by luck. Lived thanks to the designer who’d built a staircase into his wall. One surge of water lifted me into a sort of hollow in the smooth cliff and the retreating ebb all but floated me out again. Almost too late I thrust my arms and hands against slippery concrete, desperate not to be dragged away, waiting . . . waiting . . . for the water to lift me again into the hollow and knowing it was the last chance, the miracle of deliverance if only I had the strength.
I rolled with the water into the hollow and pressed my body onto a sharp step; felt the tug of the receding swell and rolled against it, using the killing weight of shoes, trousers and jacket as anchor. With the next swell of water I rose to the step above and lay there immobile, head and shoulders out of the water, legs and feet still submerged. The next wave achieved for me one more step up so that I was lying on the slope of stairs, feeling hard land embrace me as if in forgiveness, as if saying, “All right, then, not yet.”
The stairs were inset, parallel with the wall, the seaward side being always wide open to the water. I crawled up one step more and simply lay there, exhausted, shuddering, frozen and concussed, with almost nil activity going on in the brain box. My feet, still in the water, lifted and fell with liquid rhythm and it wasn’t until one wave slapped over my knees and tried to float me out again that I sluggishly realized that the tide had to be rising and that if I didn’t climb upwards I would be back where I’d come from with no strength for another fight.
I slithered up two steps. Three steps. At the top, as I looked up, stood a lamp standard.
When some semblance of strength oozed back I continued crawling, pressing myself against the inner wall, cravenly frightened of dropping off the open black edge back into the sea. True nightmares weren’t about falling off buildings, I thought, they were about falling off steps built for embarking onto boats.
The endless-seeming climb ended. I slithered onto hard dusty flat dry road-surface, crawled weakly to the lamp standard and lay full length beside it, facedown, one arm hooked round it as if to convince myself that this, at least, was no dream.
I had no idea where I was. I’d been too busy trying to survive to worry about such minor details. My head throbbed. When I tried to work out why, memory got lost in a fog.
There were footsteps approaching, grittily scrunching. For a shattering moment I thought the people who’d thrown me had found me again, but the voice that spoke above me carried a different sort of threat, the heavy resentment of affronted petty authority.
“You can’t lie here,” he said. “Clear off.”
I rolled onto my back and found myself staring straight into the eyes of a large purposeful dog. The dog pulled against a leash held by a burly figure in a navy uniform with a peaked cap and a glinting silver badge. The dog wore a light muzzle which looked inadequate for the job.
“Did you hear what I said? Clear off.”
I tried to speak and achieved only an incoherent croak.
Authority looked displ
eased. The dog, an unfriendly rottweiler, lowered his head to mine hungrily.
Trying again, I said, “I fell in.” This time the message reached its target but with moderate results.
“I don’t care if you swam the Channel, get up and clear off.”
I made an effort to sit up. Got as far as one elbow. The dog warily retreated a step, leaving his options open.
“Where am I?” I said.
“In the Docks, of course.”
“Which docks?” I said. “Which port?”
“What?”
“I . . . I don’t know where I am.”
He was far from reassured by my obvious weakness. With the dog at the ready he said suspiciously, “Southampton, of course.”
Southampton Docks. Why Southampton Docks? My bewilderment grew.
“Come on. Get going. No one’s allowed on here when the dock’s shut. And I can’t stand drunks.”
“I hit my head,” I said.
He opened his mouth as if to say he didn’t care if I’d been decapitated, but instead said grudgingly, “Did you fall off a ship?”
“I don’t really know.”
“You can’t lie here, all the same.”
I wasn’t so sure I could get up and walk and he must, I thought, have seen it, as he suddenly thrust down a reaching hand to be grasped. He pulled me vigorously to my feet and I held on to the lamp standard and felt dizzy.
“You want a doctor,” he said accusingly.
“Just give me a minute.”
“You can’t stay here. It’s against orders.”
Seen at level height, he was a truculent-looking fiftyish individual with a large nose and small eyes and the thin grim mouth of perpetual wariness. He’d been afraid of me, I saw.
I didn’t mind the manner. To be a night watchman in a dock area was to face dangers from knaves and thieves, and a man lying where he shouldn’t had to be treated as a hazard until proved to be harmless.
“Do you have a telephone?” I asked.
