by Dick Francis
“In the guardroom, yes.”
He didn’t say I couldn’t use it, which was invitation enough. I let go of the lamp standard and tottered a few shaky steps, lurching sideways off a straight line and trying hard to behave with more sense than I felt.
“Here,” he said roughly, grabbing my arm. “You’ll fall in again.”
“Thanks.”
He held my sleeve, not exactly supporting me but certainly a help. With feet that seemed hardly to belong to me I made a slow passage down a long dock and arrived finally at some large buildings.
“This way,” he said, tugging my sleeve.
We went through tall iron gates in a high fence and out onto a sidewalk. A car-parking area lay ahead, followed by a low wall, with a public roadway beyond that. No traffic. I tried looking at my watch to see the time and hit a slight snag: no watch.
I peered feebly along the road in both directions while the night watchman fed a key into a lock, and I found I was looking at a recognizable landmark, somewhere I’d been before, an orienting building telling me exactly where I was, if still not why.
“Come in,” the night watchman invited. “The phone’s on the wall. You’ll have to pay for it, of course.”
“Mm.” I nodded my assent, felt for wallet and coins, and found neither. Nothing in any of my pockets. The night watchman observed the search judiciously.
“Have you been mugged?”
“It looks like it.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“No.” I looked at the telephone. “I can reverse the call collect,” I said.
He made an assenting wave. I took the receiver off the wall and realized that if I phoned my own house what I would get would be my answering machine. It was possible to deactivate it from a distance but not on a reverse-charge call. Sighing, I got through to the number, listened to my voice saying I was out and to leave a message, and went through the switch-off routine. The night watchman asked crossly what I was doing.
“Getting the operator,” I said, redialing.
The operator tried my number and said there was no answer.
“Please keep trying,” I said anxiously. “I know someone’s there, but she’ll be asleep. You need to wake her.”
Lizzie’s bedroom was next to mine, where the phone would be ringing. I exhorted her silently to wake up, to tire of the ringing, to get up and answer it. Come on, Lizzie . . . come on, for God’s sake.
Ages seemed to pass before she finally said, “Hello?” thick with sleep. The operator, following my instructions, asked if she would take a call from her brother, Mr. Croft, in Southampton.
When she spoke to me direct she said, astonished, “Roger? Is that you? I thought you were in the Caribbean.”
“It’s Freddie,” I said.
“But you can’t be in Southampton. Roger’s ship goes to Southampton.”
Explaining was impossible, and besides, the night watchman was listening avidly to every word.
“Lizzie,” I said desperately, “come and collect me. I’ve been robbed of money . . . everything. I’ve been in the water and I’m freezing and I hit my head, and to be honest I feel rotten. Come in the Fourtrak, it’s outside on the tarmac. The key’s on a hook beside the back door. Please do come.”
“Heavens! Come where?”
“Go to the main road to Newbury, but turn south. That’s the A34. It goes straight to Southampton. Follow the signs to Southampton and when you get there take the road to the Docks and the Isle of Wight ferries. There are signs everywhere. I’m . . . I’m down there by the Docks. The Isle of Wight ferry terminal is just along the road. I’ll go there . . . and wait for you.”
She said, “Are you shivering?”
I coughed convulsively. “Bring me some clothes. And some money.”
“Freddie . . .” She sounded shocked and unsure.
“I know,” I said contritely, “it’s the middle of the night. It’ll take you three-quarters of an hour, about . . .”
“But what happened? I thought you were here in bed, but you didn’t answer the phone. How did you get to Southampton ?”
“I don’t know. Look, Lizzie, just come.”
She made up her mind. “Isle of Wight ferry. Southampton Docks. Forty-five minutes. Five more while I dress. Just hang in there, buddy boy. The cavalry’s coming.”
“The cinema has a lot to answer for.”
“At least your sense of humor’s still working.”
“It’s a close-run thing.”
“I’ll be there,” she said, and put down the phone.
I thanked the night watchman and told him my sister would come. He thought I should have telephoned the police.
“I’d rather go home,” I said, and realized I simply hadn’t thought of asking for police help. That would involve too many questions and I had not enough answers. And also not enough stamina left for sitting on a hard chair in a police station, or for having my bumps read. The source of my troubles lay not in Southampton but back in Pixhill, and if the transit from one to the other was wholly blank, I did vaguely remember driving the Jaguar to the farmyard and calling to Harve.
The troubles lay on my doorstep, in my farmyard, under my trucks, in my business. I wanted to go home, to sort them out.
7
Lizzie, true to form, came to rescue her little brother. The night watchman let me spend most of the wait in his underheated guardroom, even going so far as to brew me a cup of tea to alleviate my shivers, all under the baleful eyes of his attentive dog. When the hands of the clock on his wall stood at two, he said I’d have to leave as it was time for his rounds, so I thanked him and walked . . . well, shambled . . . along the road to the ferry terminal and sat in shadow on the sidewalk there at one end of the building, my spine against the wall, my arms hugging my knees. I’d known worse conditions, just.
Not far away, on the other side of an openwork metal fence, light glinted on water. I looked at the scene vaguely, then with speculation. I suppose there were many places like that, where in darkness semiconscious people could be slid into the briny with nobody noticing. There were miles of available shoreline in Southampton Docks.
The Fourtrak came, slowed, moved hesitantly into the parking area and stopped. I stood up, pressing against the wall for support, and took a few paces forward into the light. Lizzie saw me and came running from the vehicle, stopping dead a few feet from me, wide-eyed and shocked.
“Freddie!”
“I can’t look as bad as all that,” I protested.
She didn’t tell me how I looked. She came and draped one of my arms over her shoulders and walked with me to the Fourtrak.
“Take off that wet jacket,” she commanded. “You’ll die of exposure.”
Marginally better than drowning, I thought, though I didn’t say so.
Once inside the butty little vehicle I struggled out of all the wet things and put on the dry substitutes, including fleece-lined boots and the warmest padded jacket I owned. When Lizzie coped she did nothing by halves.
I got her to drive as near the guardroom as we could manage. The night watchman and his dog were at home again and issued forth suspiciously. When I offered him money for the first telephone call and for his trouble and kindness he at first refused it with indignation, raising one’s regard for the salt of the British earth.
“Take it,” I urged, “I owe you. Drink to my health.”
He took the note dubiously, only half concealing his pleasure.
“You’ll get pneumonia anyway, shouldn’t wonder,” he said.
The way I felt, he might well be right.
Lizzie drove back home the way she’d come, darting glances at me every few seconds. The cold-induced shudders and shakes gradually abated in my body until eventually even my guts felt warmed again, but conversely along with warmth came overwhelming tiredness so that all I wanted was to lie down and sleep.
“But what happened?” Lizzie asked.
“I went to the farmyard.”
“You said you were going to close the gates,” she said, nodding.
“Did I? Well . . . someone hit me on the head.”
“Freddie! Who?”
“Don’t know. When I woke up I was being dropped into water. Just as well I did wake up, really.”
She was predictably horrified. “They meant you to drown!”
“I don’t know about that.” I’d been puzzled ever since I’d been conscious. “If they wanted me dead, why not finish the job on my head? Why take me all the way to Southampton Docks? If they wanted particularly to drown me, there’s a perfectly good pond in Pixhill.”
“Don’t joke about it.”
“May as well,” I said. “All I remember about them is someone saying, ‘If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.’ ”
“But that’s nonsensical!”
“Mm.”
“How many of them?”
“There had to be two at least. If not, why bother to talk?”
“Are you sure that’s what they said?”
“Pretty sure.”
“What sort of accent? Did you know the voice?”
“No.” I answered the second first. “Not an Eton accent. Rough, sort of.”
Lizzie said, “You’ll have to tell the police.”
I was silent, and she glanced at me too lengthily, even for light traffic.
“You’ll have to,” she said.
“Keep your eyes on the road.”
“You’re a shit.”
“Yep.”
She drove, however, with more attention to getting us home safely and I wondered what good it might really do if I bothered to tell the police.
They would take a statement. They might check with the night watchman that I had in fact crawled out of Southampton Water. I could tell them that as I hadn’t known until five minutes beforehand that I was going along to the farmyard, there hadn’t been any sort of premeditated ambush. I’d walked in when I was unexpected and been smartly prevented from finding out who was there and what they were doing.
Taking me to Southampton must equally have been impulsive. Throwing me in alive but apparently unconscious meant they hadn’t much cared if I lived or died . . . almost as if they hadn’t made up their minds on that point and were leaving it to fate.
Nonsensical, as Lizzie’d said. Anyone, especially the police, would be skeptical. And what would the force do about it? They couldn’t and wouldn’t guard me day and night against illogical possible attempted murder. If I didn’t walk unexpectedly into shadows at night, why should anyone attack me again?
Probably a lot of that creaky reasoning was the result of concussion. More likely it stemmed from the usual aversion to less-than-friendly questioning, where crime was seen to be the fault of the victim.
I gingerly felt the back of my by then mutedly throbbing head, wincing at the actual contact. Any blood that had been there had been washed away. My hair had dried. There was a lump and a soreness, but no gaping cut and no dent in my skull. As injuries went, compared with the assaults of steeplechasing, it was of the “it’ll be all right tomorrow” kind. To have been knocked out racing meant to be grounded by the doctors for up to three weeks. I would ground myself for the rest of the night, I thought, and maybe I wouldn’t go to Cheltenham until Thursday. That should do it.
The Fourtrak hummed us home, the road direct. Southampton Docks was the nearest deep water to Pixhill: the nearest tidal place where unseen bodies could wash out on the ebb before dawn.
Stop thinking about it, I told myself. I was alive and dry and nightmares could wait.
Lizzie turned into the driveway and curled round the house and we found something absolutely rotten had happened while we’d been away.
My Jaguar XJS, my beautiful car, had been run at full tilt into Lizzie’s Robinson 22. The two sweet machines were tangled together, locked in deep metallic embrace, both twisted and crushed, the Jaguar’s buckled hood rising into the helicopter’s cab, whose round bubble front had been smashed into jagged pieces. The landing struts had buckled so that the aircraft’s weight sank into the car’s roof; the rotor blades were tilted at a crazy angle, one of them snapped off on the ground.
All one could say was that nothing had caught fire or exploded. In every other way, the two fast engines, our pleasure, our soul mates, were dead.
The house’s outside lights were on, raising gleams on the double wreck. It was spectacular, in a macabre sort of way; a shining union.
Lizzie braked the Fourtrak to a jolting halt and sat hand over mouth, disbelievingly stunned. I slowly stepped down from the passenger’s seat and walked towards the mess, but there was nothing to be done. It would take a crane and a tow truck to tear that marriage apart.
I walked back towards Lizzie, who was standing on the tarmac saying, “Oh my God, oh my God . . .” and trying not to weep.
I put my arms round her. She sobbed dryly against my chest.
“Why?” She choked on the word. “Why?”
I had no answer, just an ache, for her, for me, for the wanton destruction of efficiency.
In Lizzie the grief turned quickly to rage and to hatred and to hunger for revenge.
“I’ll kill the bastard. I’ll kill him. I’ll cut his throat.”
She walked round the helicopter, banging it with her fist.
“I love this bloody machine. I love it. I’ll kill the bastard . . .”
I felt much the same. I thought mutely that at least we ourselves were alive, even though in my case only just, and that perhaps that was enough.
I said, “Lizzie, come away, there’s fuel in the tanks.”
“I can’t smell any.” She came to my side, however. “I’m so furious I could burst.”
“Come inside and have a drink.”
She walked jerkily with me to the back door.
The door had a pane of glass broken.
“Oh no!” Lizzie said.
I tried the handle. Open.
“I locked it,” she said.
“Mm.”
It had to be faced. I went into the big room and tried to switch on a light. The switch had been hacked out of the wall. It was only by moonlight that one could see the devastation.
At a guess, it had been done in a frenzy, with an ax. Things weren’t just broken, but sliced open. There was light enough to see the slashes in the furniture, the smashed table lamps, the ruin of the television set, the computer monitor sliced in two, the rips in my leather chair, the raw pieces gouged out of my antique desk.
Everything, it seemed, had been attacked. Books and papers lay ripped on the floor. The daffodils I’d picked for Lizzie had been stamped on, the Waterford vase that had held them crushed to slivers.
The framed photographs of my racing days were off the walls and beyond repair. Our mother’s rare collection of china birds was history.
It was the birds that seemed to upset Lizzie most. She sat on the floor with tears running into her mouth, holding the pathetic irreplaceable pieces to her lips as if to comfort them. Grieving for our childhood, for our parents, for life gone by.
I went on a wander round the rest of the house but no other rooms had been invaded: only the heart of things, where I lived.
The telephone on my desk would never ring again. The answering machine had been hacked in two. I went out to the phone in the Fourtrak and woke Sandy Smith.
“Sorry,” I said.
He came in his car with his uniform pulled on over his pajamas, the navy blue jacket unbuttoned, hairy chest visible. He stood looking in awe at the amalgam of Jaguar and helicopter, and brought a flashlight with him into the house.
The beam shone on Lizzie, the birds, the tears.
“Done you proper,” Sandy said to me, and I nodded.
“Morning, miss,” he said to Lizzie, the polite greeting bizarre but the intention kind enough.
To me he said, “Do you know who did it?”
“No.”
“Vandalism,” h
e said. “Nasty.”
I felt the most appalling, heart-bumping apprehension and asked him to drive down with me to the farmyard.
He understood my fear and agreed to go at once. Lizzie stood up, still holding a wing and a bird’s head and said she would come with us, we couldn’t leave her alone in the house.
We went in Sandy’s car, its lights flashing but its siren silent. The farmyard gates still stood open, but to my almost sick relief the horse vans themselves were untouched.
The offices were locked. My keys had long vanished but, seen dimly through windows, the three rooms looked as orderly as usual. The canteen, door open, had been left alone.
I went along to the barn. The tool storeroom was secure. Nothing looked out of place. I went back to Sandy and Lizzie and reported: no damage and no one about.
Sandy stared at me strangely.
“Miss Croft,” he said, “tells me someone tried to kill you.”
“Lizzie!” I protested.
Lizzie said, “Constable Smith wanted to know where we were when all that . . . that wicked destruction . . . was going on at the house. I had to tell him. I couldn’t avoid it.”
“I don’t know that anyone actually meant to kill me,” I said. I told Sandy briefly about waking up in Southampton.
“Maybe the reason for taking me there was to give time for attacking my house.”
Sandy thought things over, buttoned his tunic absentmindedly and announced that all things considered he had better report to his headquarters.
“Can’t it wait till later this morning?” I said. “I could do with some sleep.”
“You’ve had two dead men on your premises since last Thursday,” Sandy pointed out. “And now this. I’ll be in trouble, Freddie, if I don’t report it at once.”
“The two dead men were accidental.”
“Your house isn’t.”
I shrugged and leaned on his car while he telephoned. No, he was saying, no one was dead, no one was injured, the damage was to property. He gave the address of my house and listened to instructions, relaying them to me after. In effect, two plainclothes detectives would come in due course.
“How long is due course?” Lizzie asked.
“There’s a major flap on in Winchester,” Sandy said. “So . . . whenever they can.”
