by Dick Francis
“You can’t climb a pole. There aren’t any footholds except at the top.”
“Why are you wondering about it after all these years? Come to bed.”
“Because of a bang on the head.”
She said, “Are you really anxious?”
“Uneasy.”
“You must be. I’ve mentioned bed three times and you’re still sitting down.”
I grinned at her and rose to my feet; and at that moment an almighty crash on the front door burst it open with splintering wood and a broken lock.
Angelo stood in the gap. Stood for less than a second regaining his balance from the kick which had brought him in, stood with the baseball bat swinging and his face rigid with ill intent.
Neither Cassie nor I had time to protest or yell. He waded straight in, laying about him, smashing anything near him, a lamp, some corn dollies, a vase, a picture . . . the television. Like a whirlwind demented he devastated the pretty interior, and when I leaped at him I met a fist in the face and a fast knee, which missed my groin, and I smelled his sweat and heard his breath rasp from exertion and took in what he was grittily saying: and it was just my name and Jonathan’s, over and over.
“Derry . . . Derry . . . fucking Derry.”
Cassie tried to help me, and he slashed at her with the heavy wooden bat and connected with her arm. I saw her stumble from the pain of it, and in a fury I put one of my own arms around his neck and tried to yank his head back, to hurt him enough to make him drop his weapon and probably if the truth were told to throttle him. But he knew more about dirty fighting than I’d ever learned and it took him about two elbow jabs and a scrunching backhand jerk of my fingers to pry me loose. He shook me off with such force that I half fell, but still clung to his clothes with octopus tentacles, not wanting to be thrown clear so that he could get another swing with that bat.
We crashed around the broken room with me sticking to him with ferocity at least equal to his and him struggling to get free; and it was Cassie, in the end, who finished it. Cassie who grabbed the brass coal scuttle from the hearth by its shining handle and swung it in an arc at arm’s length, aiming at Angelo’s head. I saw the flash of its gleaming surface and felt the jolt through Angelo’s body: and I let go of him as he fell in a sprawl on the carpet.
“Oh, God,” Cassie was saying. “Oh, God.” There were tears on her face and she was holding her left arm away from her body in a way I knew all too well.
Angelo was visibly breathing. Stunned only. Soon to awake.
“Have to tie him,” I said breathlessly. “What’ve we got?”
Cassie painfully said “Clothesline,” and before I could stop her she’d vanished into the kitchen, returning almost at once with a new line still in its package. Wire wrapped in plastic, the bright label said. Strong enough, indeed, for a bull.
While I was still uncoiling it with unsteady fingers, there was the sound outside of someone thudding up the path; and I had time for a feeling of absolute despair before I saw who it was.
Bananas came to the dark doorway with a rush and stood there stock-still taking in the ravaged scene.
“I saw his car come back. I was just closing up—”
“Help me tie him,” I said, nodding at Angelo, who was stirring ominously. “He did all this. He’s coming around.”
Bananas turned Angelo onto his face and held his hands together behind his back while I built knots around the wrists, and then continued with the job himself, leading the line down from the wrists to join it to two more knots around the ankles.
“He’s broken Cassie’s arm,” I said.
Bananas looked at her and at me and at Angelo, and walked purposefully over to where the telephone stood miraculously undamaged on its little table.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”
“But Cassie needs a doctor. And I’ll get the police.”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
“But you must.”
I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and looked remotely at the resulting smear of blood. “There’s some pethidine and a syringe in the bathroom,” I said. “It’ll do a lot to stop Cassie hurting.”
He nodded in understanding and said he would fetch it.
“Bring the box marked ‘Emergency.’ It’s on the shelf over the bath taps.”
While he went and came back with his surprising speed I helped Cassie to sit on a chair and to rest her left arm on a cushion, which I put on the telephone table. It was the forearm, I found, which was broken: both bones, probably, from the numb uselessness of her hand.
“William,” she said whitely, “don’t. It hurts. Don’t.”
“Darling . . . darling . . . it has to have support. Just let it lie there. Don’t fight it.”
She did mutely what I said and looked paler than ever.
“I didn’t feel it,” she said. “Not like this, not at first.”
Bananas brought the emergency box and opened it. I tore the syringe out of its sterile package and filled it from the ampul of pethidine. Pulled Cassie’s skirt up high over the sun-browned legs and fed the muscle-relaxing pain-killer into the long muscle of her thigh.
“Ten minutes,” I said, pulling the needle out and rubbing the place with my knuckles. “A lot of the pain will go. Then we’ll be able to take you to the casualty department of Cambridge hospital to get it set. Nowhere nearer will be open at this time of night.”
She nodded slightly with the first twitch of a smile, and on the floor Angelo started trying to kick.
Bananas again walked toward the telephone, and again I stopped him.
“But, William—”
I looked around at the jagged evidence of a passionate need for revenge; the explosion of fourteen years of pent-up hate. I said, “He did this because my brother got him jailed for murder. He’s out on parole. If we call the police he’ll be back inside—”
“Then of course,” Bananas said, picking up the receiver.
“No,” I said. “Put it down.”
He looked bewildered. Angelo on the floor began mumbling as if in delirium—a mixture of atrocious swearwords and loud incomprehensible unfinished sentences.
“That’s stir talk,” said Bananas, listening.
“You’ve heard it before?”
“You hear everything in the end in my trade.”
“Look,” I said. “I get him sent back to jail and then what happens? It wouldn’t be so long before he was out . . . and he’d have a whole new furious grudge to avenge. And by that time he might have learned some sense and not come waving a piece of wood and going off half-cocked, but wait until he’d managed a pistol, and sneak up on me one day three, four years from now, and finish me off. This”—I waved a hand—“isn’t an act of reason. I’m only Jonathan’s brother. I myself did him no harm. This is anger against life. Blind, colossal, ungovernable rage. I can do without him focusing it all on me personally in the future.” I paused. “I have to find a better—a final—solution. If I can.”
“You can’t mean—” Bananas said tentatively.
“What?”
“To . . . to . . . no, you couldn’t.”
“Not that final solution, no. Though it’s quite a thought. Cement boots and a downward trip in the North Sea.”
“Tankful of piranhas,” Cassie said.
Bananas looked at her with relief and almost laughed, and finally put the telephone receiver back in its cradle.
Angelo stopped mumbling and came full awake. When he realized where he was and in what condition, the skin which had until then been pale became redly suffused: the face, the neck, even the hands. He rolled halfway over onto his back and filled the room with the intensity of his rage.
“If you start swearing,” I said, “I’ll gag you.”
With an effort he said nothing, and I looked at his face squarely and fully for the first time. There wasn’t a great deal left of the man whose picture I had once pored over in a newspaper—not youth, not black hair, not narr
ow jaw, not long thin nose. Age, heredity, prison food, all had given him fatty deposits to blur the outlines of the head and bulk the body.
Average brains, Jonathan had said. Not clever. Relies on his frightening-power and gets his results from that. Despises everyone. Calls them creeps and mugs.
“Angelo Gilbert,” I said.
He jerked and looked surprised, as if he had thought I wouldn’t know him: nor would I have, if Jonathan hadn’t called.
“Let’s get it straight,” I said. “It was not my brother who sent you to prison. You did it to yourself.”
Cassie murmured, “Criminals in jail are there voluntarily.”
Bananas looked at her in surprise.
“My arm feels better,” she said.
I stared down at Angelo. “You chose jail when you shot Chris Norwood. Those fourteen years were your own fault, so why take it out on me?”
It made no impression. I hadn’t really thought it would. Blaming one’s troubles on someone else was average human nature.
Angelo said, “Your fucking brother tricked me. He stole what was mine.”
“He stole nothing of yours.”
“He did.” The words were bass-voiced, fierce and positive, a growl in the throat. Cassie shivered at the menace Angelo could generate even tied up in ignominy on a cottage floor.
The crock of gold, I thought suddenly, might have its uses.
Angelo seemed to be struggling within himself but in the end the words tore out of him, furious, frustrated, still bursting with an anger that had nowhere to go. “Where is he?” he said. “Where’s your fucking brother? I can’t find him.”
Saints alive . . .
“He’s dead,” I said coldly.
Angelo didn’t say whether or not he believed me, but the news did nothing for his general temper. Bananas and Cassie displayed a certain stillness but fortunately kept quiet.
I said to Bananas, “Could you watch him for a minute while I make a phone call?”
“Hours if you like.”
“Are you all right?” I asked Cassie.
“That stuff’s amazing.”
“Won’t be long.” I picked the whole telephone off the table beside her and carried it into the office, closing the door as I went.
I called California, thinking that Jonathan would be anywhere but home, that I’d get Sarah, that it would be siesta time under the golden sun. But Jonathan was in, and he answered.
“I just had a thought,” I said. “Those tapes that Angelo Gilbert wanted—have you still got them?”
“Good grief,” he said. “I shouldn’t think so.” A pause while he reflected. “No, we cleared everything out when we left Twickenham. You remember, we sold the furniture and bought new out here. I got rid of pretty well everything. Except the guns, of course.”
“Did you throw the tapes away?”
“Um,” he said. “There was a set I sent to Mrs. O’Rorke and got back again . . . oh yes, I gave them to Ted Pitts. If anyone still has them, it would be Ted. But I shouldn’t think they’d be much use after all these years.”
“The tapes themselves, or the betting system?”
“The system. It must be long out of date.”
It wouldn’t matter too much, I thought.
“There are a lot of computer programs out here now for helping you win on horses,” Jonathan said. “Some of them work, they say.”
“You haven’t tried them?”
“I’m not a gambler.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“What do you want the tapes for?” he said.
“To tie Angelo up in knots again.”
“Take care.”
“Sure. Where would I find Ted Pitts?”
He told me doubtfully to try the West Ealing School, where they’d both been teaching, but said it was unlikely that he was still there. They hadn’t been in touch with each other at all since he’d emigrated. Perhaps I could trace Ted through the Schoolmasters Union, who might have his address.
I thanked him and disconnected, and went back into the sitting room, where everyone looked much as I’d left them.
“I have a problem,” I said to Bananas.
“Just one?”
“Time.”
“Ah. The essence.”
“Mm.” I stared at Angelo. “There’s a cellar under this cottage.”
Angelo had no fear; one had to give him that. I could see quite clearly that he understood I meant not to let him go, yet his only reaction was aggressive and set him struggling violently against the clothesline.
“Watch him,” I said to Bananas. “There’s some stuff in the cellar. I’m going to clear it out. If he looks like getting free, give him another bash on the head.”
Bananas looked at me as if he’d never seen me before; and perhaps he hadn’t. I put a quick apologetic hand on Cassie’s shoulder as I went, and in the kitchen I opened the latched wooden door which led to the cellar steps.
Down there it was cool and dry: a brick-lined room with a concrete floor and a single lightbulb swinging from the ceiling. When we had come to the cottage we had found the garden chairs stacked in there, but they were now outside on the grass, leaving only oddments like a paraffin stove, some tins of paint, a stepladder and a stack of fishing gear. I carried everything in relays up the steps and dumped it all in the kitchen.
When I’d finished, there was nothing in the cellar to help a captive; yet I would still have to keep him tied because of the nature of the lockless door. It was made simply of upright planks with bracing bars across top, center and bottom, the whole screwed together with the screwheads fortunately on the kitchen side. Across near the top there were six thumb-sized holes, presumably for ventilation. A good enough barrier against most contingencies but not to be trusted to withstand the sort of kick with which the enemy had battered his initial way in.
“Right,” I said, going back into the sitting room. “Now, you, Angelo, are going into the cellar. Your only alternative is an immediate return to jail, as all this”—I indicated the room—“and that”—Cassie’s arm—“will cancel your parole and send you straight back behind bars.”
“You bloody can’t,” he said furiously.
“I bloody can. You started this. You damn well take the consequences.”
“I’ll get you busted.”
“Yeah. You try it. You got it wrong, Angelo. I’m not my brother. He was clever and wily and he tricked you silly, but he would never use physical force; and I will, you mug, I will.”
Angelo used words that made Bananas wince and glance apprehensively at Cassie.
“I’ve heard them before,” she said.
“You’ve a choice, Angelo,” I said. “Either you let my friend and me carry you carefully down the steps without you struggling, or you struggle and I pull you down by the legs.”
The loss of face in not struggling proved too much. He tried to bite me as I bent down to put my arms under his armpits, so I did what I’d said—grasped the line tying his ankles and dragged him feet foremost out of the sitting room, through the kitchen and down the cellar steps, with him yelling and swearing the whole way.
14
I tugged him well away from the stairs, let go of his legs and returned to the kitchen. He shouted after me blasphemously and I could still hear him when the door was shut. Let him get on with it, I thought callously; but I left on the single light, whose switch was outside on the kitchen wall.
I wedged the latch shut by sliding a knife handle through the slot, and for good measure stacked the stepladder, the table and a couple of chairs into a solid line between the refrigerator and the cellar door, making it impossible for it to open normally into the kitchen.
In the sitting room, and without hustling, I said, “OK Decision time, mates.” I looked at Bananas. “It’s not your fight. If you’d rather, you can go back to your dishwashing and forget this ever happened.”
He looked resignedly around the room. “I promised you’d leave this place as
you found it. Practically pledged my soul.”
“I’ll replace what I can. Pay for the rest. And grovel. Will that do?”
“You can’t manage that brute on your own.” He shook his head. “How long do you mean to keep him?”
“Until I find a man called Pitts.” I explained to him and Cassie what I wanted to do and why, and Bananas sighed and said it seemed fairly sensible in the circs, and that he would help where he could.
We shoehorned Cassie gently into my car and I drove her to Cambridge while Bananas in his effective way set himself to tidy the sitting room. There wasn’t a great deal one could do at that point about the splintered and uncloseable front door, and he promised to stay in the cottage until we got back.
In the event it was only I who returned. I sat with Cassie through the long wait in the silent hospital while they tried to find someone to X-ray her arm, but it seemed that after midnight the radiology department was firmly shut, with all the radiologists asleep in their own homes, and only the direst surgical emergency would recall them.
Cassie was given a careful splint from shoulder to fingernails and also another pain-killer and a bed; and when I kissed her and left she said, “Don’t forget to feed the bull,” which the nurses put down to drug-induced lightheadedness.
Bananas was asleep when I got back, flat out on the sofa and dreaming I dare say of palm trees. The mess I’d left behind was miraculously cleared with every broken fragment out of sight. There were many things missing but overall it looked more like a room the owners would recognize. Gratefully I went quietly into the kitchen and found my barricade altered and strengthened with four planks which had been lying in the garage, the door now wedged shut from top to bottom.
The light switch was up. Except for whatever dim rays were crawling through the ventilation holes, Angelo was lying in the dark.
Although I’d been quiet, I’d woken Bananas, who was sitting up, pinching the bridge of his nose and blinking heavy eyelids open and shut.
“All the pieces are in the garage,” he said. “Not in the trash can. I reckoned you might need them, one way or another.”
“You’re great,” I said. “Did Angelo try to get out?”
