by Dick Francis
I asked, “Why didn’t you just wipe ticks straight onto Benjy’s colt?”
“He wants it to race again when its leg gets healed.”
The admission slipped painlessly out. Lewis’s voice was hoarse. He didn’t even try to protest innocence.
“So now,” I said, “we’re going to take the rabbit straight to Centaur Care, where the two old horses destined for Benjy’s field are waiting. This time you are not going to have to retrieve the rabbit from the tube at eleven o’clock at night, and hit me on the head when I catch you at it.”
“I never,” he said fiercely. “I never hit you.”
“You did drop me into the water, though. And you said ‘If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.’ ”
Lewis seemed to have gone beyond being astounded and had reached the stage of anxiety to salvage whatever he could.
“I needed the money,” he said, “for my kid’s education.”
One more shock, I thought, and he would really start talking.
I said, “If it came to a choice, which would you prefer, to drive Irkab Alhawa to the Derby and maybe bring him back as the winner in your own van on the television to this village, or to infect him with ticks to stop him even running?”
“He’d never do that!” he said. His horror, indeed, looked genuine.
“He’s violent and spiteful,” I said, “so why not?”
“No!” He stared at me, belatedly thinking. “Who are you talking about?”
“John Tigwood, of course.”
Lewis closed his eyes.
“Benjy’s reward is winning,” I said. “Yours is money. Tigwood’s is the power to spoil other people’s achievements. That’s a commoner sin than you may think. Knocking people is a major sport.”
To win by cheating. Ambition for one’s child. Malice and secretly enjoyed destructive power, bolstering an inadequate personality. To each his driving force.
And mine? Ah, mine. Who ever understood his own? Lewis looked sick.
“Does Benjy Usher pay Tigwood?” I asked.
Lewis said without humor, “He gives him wads of the stuff in one of those collecting tins, right out in public.”
After a pause I said, “Tell me what happened the night you chucked me in the water.”
He practically moaned, “I’m no squealer.”
“You’re a witness,” I said. “Witnesses get off lighter.”
“I didn’t do your car.”
“You didn’t kill Jogger,” I pointed out, “because you were in France. But as for my car, you certainly could have done it.”
“I didn’t. I never. He did.”
“Well . . . why?”
Lewis stared at me, his eyes deep in their sockets.
“See, he was like a wild thing. Going on about you having everything so easy. Why should you have everything, he said, when he had nothing. There you were, he said, with your house and your money and your looks and your business and being a top jockey all that time and everyone liking you, and what did he have, people never looked pleased to see him, they turned away from him. Whatever he did, he would never be you. He absolutely hated you. It turned my stomach, like, but I reckoned he might turn on me if I contradicted him so I went along with him . . . and he had the ax with him in his car . . .”
“Did he hit me with the ax?” I asked incredulously.
“No. A rusty old tire iron. He had a lot of tools in his car, he said. When he hit you we put you in the trunk of my car, as there was more room and he told me to drive to the Docks. He was laughing, see!”
“Did you think I was dead?”
“I didn’t know, like. But you weren’t. You were talking, sort of delirious, when we got there. I never meant to kill you. Honest.”
“Mm.”
“He said we were in it together. He said how would I like him to get me in trouble. How would I like to lose my job and not drive the best horses anymore.”
Lewis stopped talking, looking now at a future which meant all those things.
“Bloody bugger,” he said.
“So you came back from Southampton,” I said, taking it for granted, “and collected the ax and chopped up my house and my car and my sister’s helicopter.”
“He did that. He did it. He was shouting and raving and laughing. He chopped all the stuff in your room. So bloody strong. I’ll tell you, he frightened me rigid.”
“You watched him?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“And enjoyed it?”
“Never.”
But he had, I saw. He might just possibly have been frightened by the vigor of that attack but deep down there had been an awestruck guilty pleasure.
Ruefully, I restarted the engine.
“Like,” Lewis said, “how did you know about the journeys?”
“They’re in the computer.”
“He said he’d wiped out your records on the Sunday with a Michelangelo or something, and not to worry.”
“I had copies,” I said succinctly.
Tigwood had been in the pub the night everyone heard Jogger say he’d found the secret containers. From spite he must have stolen Jogger’s tools. Then if Jogger found Tigwood tampering with my computer on the Sunday . . . I could see Tigwood going to his car for Jogger’s own tire iron, walking along to the barn after him and aiming just one lethal blow. Jogger wouldn’t have expected it. He knew of no reason to fear.
I released the brakes and started down the road.
“I suppose,” I said, “that it was Tigwood with all his medical journals who understood about ticks? And who knew what you needed for bringing the virus from Yorkshire for Tessa Watermead to infect Jericho Rich’s horses? You couldn’t give the Jericho Rich horses tick fever, because by then you hadn’t been over to collect this year’s ticks.”
He was again speechless. I glanced at him.
I said, “You haven’t much chance if you’re not willing to be a witness. Tessa told me and her father what you did.”
I phoned Sandy Smith’s number and, finding him at home, invited him to drive along to Centaur Care. “Bring your handcuffs,” I said.
It took Lewis a slow painful mile to make up his mind, but as I turned through the gates of the crumbling headquarters of a disgraced charity, he said, mumbling, “All right. A witness.”
The decrepit place was alive with people.
Lorna Lipton’s Range Rover stood in the driveway. Lorna was talking to Tigwood and there were children—children—running about. Maudie’s two youngest children . . . and Cinders.
Aziz was out of the Fourtrak, also Nina, also Guggenheim. They stood indeterminately, not knowing what to expect.
John Tigwood looked bewildered.
I stopped the van and jumped to the ground. Sandy Smith joined the crowd, lights flashing, uniform buttoned, no siren.
“What’s going on?” Tigwood asked.
I wasn’t sure how he would react. The trail he’d left with his ax on my property urged any defense I could think of. Keeping the children safe was a first priority.
I said to Maudie’s young ones, “Take Cinders and wriggle under the van and play being in a pirate’s cave there, or something.”
They giggled.
“Go on,” I said, urging them. “Crawl in there.”
They did, all three of them. Lorna, watching, said merely, “Won’t they get dirty?”
“They’ll clean.”
Tigwood said, “Why are you here?”
I answered him. “We brought back your rabbit.”
“What?”
“Lewis and I,” I said, “have brought back the rabbit—with ticks.”
Tigwood strode to the passenger-seat side and yanked open the door.
“Lewis!” he yelled. It came out as a screech, all fruitiness gone.
Lewis shrank away from him. “He knows it all,” he said desperately. “Freddie knows everything.”
Tigwood stretched an arm into the cab and pulled Lewis out. Tigwood’s
weedy-looking appearance was misleading. Everyone could see the stringy power that tweaked the bigger man out onto the ground with a crash. Lewis’s shoulders landed first, then his head, then his legs.
Lewis, rolling in pain, took a rough swing at Tigwood. Tigwood kicked him in the face and turned his attention to me.
“You bastard,” he said, white faced, intent. “I’ll kill you.”
He meant it. He tried. He rushed me, smashing me by sheer speed against the side of the van.
He hadn’t an ax, however, or a tire iron, but only his hands; and they, had we been alone, might have indeed been enough.
Aziz came up behind him and hauled him off. Aziz displayed a timely and useful skill in twisting a man’s arm up behind his back until it reached the point of cracking.
Tigwood screamed. Sandy produced his handcuffs portentously and with help from Aziz locked Tigwood’s wrists together behind his back.
Sandy said to me out of the side of his mouth, “What’s going on?”
“I think you’ll find that John Tigwood axed my house.”
“Bastard,” Tigwood said, his voice a snarl.
I asked Sandy, “I don’t suppose you have a search warrant handy?”
He shook his head bemusedly.
“I don’t need one,” Aziz said. “What am I looking for?”
“An ax. A rusty tire iron. A thing for sliding under trucks. A bunch of tools in a red plastic crate. And perhaps a gray metal cash box with a round bright patch amid the dirt. They might be in his car. If you find them, don’t touch them.”
His smile shone out, bright, white and happy. “Got you,” he said. He left Tigwood to Sandy and bounced away out of sight.
Lorna bleated in bafflement, “John? I don’t understand . . .”
“Shut up,” he said furiously.
“What’ve you done?” Lorna wailed.
No one told her.
Tigwood stared at me with unnerving naked hatred and in a taut white rage called me a bastard again, among other things, repeating what Lewis had told me. I’d never imagined the overpowering strength of his murderous corrosive loathing, not even with his ax’s handiwork all around me. I felt shriveled by it, and weak. Sandy, who had seen so many dreadful things, looked deeply shocked.
Lorna swung round at me with loathing of her own. “What did you do to him?” she accused me.
“Nothing.”
She didn’t believe me, and never would.
Aziz reappeared from the direction of the ramshackle stables.
“Everything’s there,” he reported, beaming. “They’re in one of the stalls, under a horse rug.”
Sandy smiled at me briefly, pushing Tigwood hard against the horse van. “Reckon it’s time to call my colleagues.”
“Reckon it is,” I agreed. “They can take it from here on.”
“And the Jockey Club can take on Benjy Usher,” said Aziz.
Another car joined the melee. Not the colleagues yet, but Susan and Hugo Palmerstone, with Maudie. Michael had told them that the children were here with Lorna, they said. They’d come to take them home.
Tigwood in handcuffs appalled them. Lorna told them it was my fault. Hugo believed her easily.
“Where are the children?” Susan asked. “Where’s Cinders?”
“They’re safe.” I bent down and looked under the horse van. “You can come out now,” I said.
Guggenheim touched my arm as I straightened. “Did you . . . I mean . . .” he said. “Is the rabbit there?”
“I think so.”
He, at least, looked happy. He was carrying a white plastic small-animal carrier and wearing protective gloves.
Maudie’s two children wriggled out on their backs and stood up, brushing off dirt. One of them said to me, in a quiet little voice, “Cinders doesn’t like it under there. She’s crying.”
“Is she?” I went down on my knees and looked underneath. She was lying flat on her stomach, her faced pressed to the ground, her whole body quivering. “Come on out,” I said.
She didn’t move.
I lay down on the ground on my back and put my head under the side of the horse van. I shuffled backwards on heels, hips and shoulders, until I reached her. I found there were things I could go under tons of steel for without a second thought.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll go out together.”
She said, shivering, “I’m frightened.”
“Mm. But there’s nothing to be afraid of,” I looked up at the steel of the chassis not far above my face. “Turn onto your back,” I said. “Hold my hand and we’ll wriggle out together.”
“It’ll fall on me.”
“No . . . it won’t.” I swallowed. “Turn over, Cinders. It’s easier on your back.”
“I can’t.”
“Your mother and father are here.”
“There’s a man shouting . . .”
“He’s stopped now,” I said. “Come on, darling, everything’s fine. Hold my hand.”
I touched her hand with mine and she grabbed it tightly.
“Turn over,” I said.
She turned slowly onto her back and looked upwards to the steel struts.
“It’s pretty dirty under here,” I said prosaically. “Keep your head down or you’ll make your hair filthy. Now, our toes are pointing to where your parents are, so just shunt along beside me and we’ll be out in no time.”
I began to wriggle out, and she wriggled, sobbing, beside me.
It was after all only a few feet. It can’t have seemed much to the people outside.
When we were out I knelt beside her, brushing dirt from her clothes and her hair. She clung to me. Her little face, close to mine, was so like the pictures of myself at her age. The tenderness I felt for her was devastating.
Her gaze slid beyond me to where her parents stood. She let go of me and ran to them. Ran to Hugo.
“Daddy!” she said, hugging him.
He put protective arms around her and glared at me with the green eyes.
I said nothing. I stood up: brushed some grit off myself; waited.
Susan put one arm round Hugo’s waist and with the other enclosed Cinders; the three of them a family.
Hugo brusquely turned them away with him towards their car, looking fiercely over his shoulder. He shouldn’t fear me, I thought. Perhaps in time he wouldn’t. I would never upset that child.
I was aware that Guggenheim and Aziz were slithering under the horse van. Guggenheim scrambled out with visions of immortality in his eyes, cuddling the white plastic carrier as if it contained the Holy Grail.
“The rabbit’s here,” he said joyfully, “and it’s got ticks!”
“Great.”
Nina came to stand beside me. I put my arm round her shoulders. It felt right there. Eight and a half years didn’t matter.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“Mm.”
We watched the Palmerstones’ car drive away.
“Freddie . . . ?” Nina murmured tentatively, “that little girl . . . when your heads were together, she looked . . . almost . . .”
“Don’t say it,” I said.
