For Kicks

by Dick Francis

  If she hadn’t heard me kicking the door in she wouldn’t wake by being touched, but I tried. I shook her arm. She didn’t stir. Her pulse was normal, her breathing regular, her face as delicately coloured as always. Nothing looked wrong with her. I found it frightening.

  How much longer, I wondered anxiously was the doctor going to be? The door had been stubborn – or I had been weak, whichever way you looked at it – and it must have been more than ten minutes since the thin woman had gone to telephone.

  As if on cue the door swung open and a tidy solid-looking middle-aged man in a grey suit stood there taking in the scene. He was alone. He carried a suitcase in one hand and a fire hatchet in the other. Coming in, he looked at the splintered wood, pushed the door shut and put the axe down on Elinor’s desk.

  ‘That’s saved time, anyway,’ he said briskly. He looked me up and down without enthusiasm and gestured to me to get out of the way. Then he cast a closer glance at Elinor with her rucked up slip and her long bare legs, and said to me sharply, suspiciously, ‘Did you touch her clothes?’

  ‘No,’ I said bitterly. ‘I shook her arm. And felt her pulse. She was lying like that when I came in.’

  Something, perhaps it was only my obvious weariness, made him give me a suddenly professional, impartial survey. ‘All right,’ he said, and bent down to Elinor.

  I waited behind him while he examined her, and when he turned round I noticed he had decorously pulled down her rumpled slip so that it reached smoothly to her knees.

  ‘Phenobarbitone and gin,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Self-administered?’ He started opening his case.

  ‘No. Definitely not.’

  ‘This place is usually teeming with women,’ he said inconsequentially. ‘But apparently they’re all at some meeting or another.’ He gave me another intent look. ‘Are you fit to help?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He hesitated. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Tell me what to do.’

  ‘Very well. Find me a good-sized jug and a bucket or large basin. I’ll get her started first, and you can tell me how this happened later.’

  He took a hypodermic syringe from his case, filled it, and gave Elinor an injection into the vein on the inside of her elbow. I found a jug and a basin in the built-in fitment.

  ‘You’ve been here before,’ he observed, eyes again suspicious.

  ‘Once,’ I said: and for Elinor’s sake added, ‘I am employed by her father. It’s nothing personal.’

  ‘Oh. All right then.’ He withdrew the needle, dismantled the syringe and quickly washed his hands.

  ‘How many tablets did she take, do you know?’

  ‘It wasn’t tablets. Powder. A teaspoonful, at least. Maybe more.’

  He looked alarmed, but said, ‘That much would be bitter. She’d taste it.’

  ‘Gin and Campari… it’s bitter anyway.’

  ‘Yes. All right. I’m going to wash out her stomach. Most of the drug must have been absorbed already, but if she had as much as that… well, it’s still worth trying.’

  He directed me to fill the jug with tepid water, while he carefully slid a thickish tube down inside Elinor’s throat. He surprised me by putting his ear to the long protruding end of it when it was in position, and he explained briefly that with an unconscious patient who couldn’t swallow one had to make sure the tube had gone into the stomach and not into the lungs. ‘If you can hear them breathe, you’re in the wrong place,’ he said.

  He put a funnel into the end of the tube, held out his hand for the jug, and carefully poured in the water. When what seemed to me a fantastic amount had disappeared down the tube he stopped pouring, passed me the jug to put down, and directed me to push the basin near his foot. Then, removing the funnel, he suddenly lowered the end of the tube over the side of the bed and into the basin. The water flowed out again, together with all the contents of Elinor’s stomach.

  ‘Hm,’ he said calmly. ‘She had something to eat first. Cake, I should say. That helps.’

  I couldn’t match his detachment.

  ‘Will she be all right?’ My voice sounded strained.

  He looked at me briefly and slid the tube out.

  ‘She drank the stuff less than an hour before I got here?’

  ‘About fifty minutes, I think.’

  ‘And she’d eaten… Yes, she’ll be all right. Healthy girl. The injection I gave her – megimide – is an effective antidote. She’ll probably wake up in an hour or so. A night in hospital, and it will be out of her system. She’ll be as good as new.’

  I rubbed my hand over my face.

  ‘Time makes a lot of difference,’ he said calmly. ‘If she’d lain here many hours… a teaspoonful; that might be thirty grains or more.’ He shook his head. ‘She would have died.’

  He took a sample of the contents of the basin for analysis, and covered the rest with a hand towel.

  ‘How did you cut your head?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘In a fight.’

  ‘It needs stitching. Do you want me to do it?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll do it after Miss Tarren has gone to hospital. Dr Pritchard said she would ring for an ambulance. They should be here soon.’

  ‘Dr Pritchard?’

  ‘The lecturer who fetched me in. My surgery is only round the corner. She telephoned and said a violent bloodstained youth was insisting that Miss Tarren was poisoned, and that I’d better come and see.’ He smiled briefly. ‘You haven’t told me how all this happened.’

  ‘Oh… it’s such a long story,’ I said tiredly.

  ‘You’ll have to tell the police,’ he pointed out.

  I nodded. There was too much I would have to tell the police. I wasn’t looking forward to it. The doctor took out pen and paper and wrote a letter to go with Elinor to the hospital.

  There was a sudden eruption of girls’ voices down the passage, and a tramp of many scholarly feet, and the opening and shutting of doors. The students were back from their meeting: from Elinor’s point of view, too soon, as they would now see her being carried out.

  Heavier footsteps came right up to her room and knuckles rapped. Two men in ambulance uniform had arrived with a stretcher, and with economy of movement and time they lifted Elinor between them, tucked her into blankets, and bore her away. She left a wake of pretty voices raised in sympathy and speculation.

  The doctor swung the door shut behind the ambulance men and without more ado took from his case a needle and thread to sew up my forehead. I sat on Elinor’s bed while he fiddled around with disinfectant and the stitching.

  ‘What did you fight about?’ he asked, tying knots.

  ‘Because I was attacked,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ He shifted his feet to sew from a different angle, and put his hand on my shoulder to steady himself. He felt me withdraw from the pressure and looked at me quizzically.

  ‘So you got the worst of it?’

  ‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘I won.’

  He finished the stitching and gave a final snip with the scissors.

  ‘There you are, then. It won’t leave much of a scar.’

  ‘Thank you.’ It sounded a bit weak.

  ‘Do you feel all right?’ he said abruptly. ‘Or is pale fawn tinged with grey your normal colouring?’

  ‘Pale fawn is normal. Grey just about describes how I feel,’ I smiled faintly. ‘I got a bang on the back of the head, too.’

  He explored the bump behind the ear and said I would live. He was asking me how many other tender spots I had about me when another heavy tramp of footsteps could be heard coming up the corridor, and presently the door was pushed open with a crash.

  Two broad-shouldered businesslike policemen stepped into the room.

  They knew the doctor. It appeared that he did a good deal of police work in Durham. They greeted each other politely and the doctor started to say that Miss Tarren was on her way to hospital. They interrupt
ed him.

  ‘We’ve come for him, sir,’ said the taller of them, pointing at me. ‘Stable lad, name of Daniel Roke.’

  ‘Yes, he reported Miss Tarren’s illness…’

  ‘No, sir, it’s nothing to do with a Miss Tarren or her illness. We want him for questioning on another matter.’

  The doctor said, ‘He’s not in very good shape. I think you had better go easy. Can’t you leave it until later?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible, sir.’

  They both came purposefully over to where I sat. The one who had done the talking was a red-headed man about my own age with an unsmiling wary face. His companion was slightly shorter, brown eyed, and just as much on guard. They looked as if they were afraid I was going to leap up and strangle them.

  With precision they leaned down and clamped hard hands round my forearms. The red-head, who was on my right, dragged a pair of hand-cuffs from his pocket, and between them they fastened them on my wrists.

  ‘Better take it quietly, chum,’ advised the red-head, evidently mistaking my attempt to wrench my arm free of his agonising grip as a desire to escape in general.

  ‘Let… go,’ I said. ‘I’m not… running anywhere.’

  They did let go, and stepped back a pace, looking down at me. Most of the wariness had faded from their faces, and I gathered that they really had been afraid I would attack them. It was unnerving. I took two deep breaths to control the soreness of my arm.

  ‘He won’t give us much trouble,’ said the dark one. ‘He looks like death.’

  ‘He was in a fight,’ remarked the doctor.

  ‘Is that what he told you, sir?’ The dark one laughed.

  I looked down at the hand-cuffs locked round my wrists: they were, I discovered, as uncomfortable as they were humiliating.

  ‘What did he do?’ asked the doctor.

  The red-head answered, ‘He… er… he’ll be helping in enquiries into an attack on a race-horse trainer he worked for and who is still unconscious, and on another man who had his skull bust right in.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘So we are told, sir. We haven’t actually been to the stables, though they say it’s a shambles. We two were sent up from Clavering to fetch him in, and that’s where we’re taking him back to, the stables being in our area, you see.’

  ‘You caught up with him very quickly,’ commented the doctor.

  ‘Yes,’ said the red-head with satisfaction. ‘It was a nice bit of work by some of the lads. A lady here telephoned to the police in Durham about half an hour ago and described him, and when they got the general call from Clavering about the job at the stables someone connected the two descriptions and told us about it. So we were sent up to see, and bingo… there was his motor-bike, right number plate and all, standing outside the college door.’

  I lifted my head. The doctor looked down at me. He was disillusioned, disenchanted. He shrugged his shoulders and said in a tired voice, ‘You never know with them, do you? He seemed… well… not quite the usual sort of tearaway. And now this.’ He turned away and picked up his bag.

  It was suddenly too much. I had let too many people despise me and done nothing about it. This was one too many.

  ‘I fought because they attacked me,’ I said.

  The doctor half turned round. I didn’t know why I thought it was important to convince him, but it seemed so at the time.

  The dark policeman raised an eyebrow and said to the doctor, ‘The trainer was his employer, sir, and I understand the man who died is a rich gentleman whose horses were trained there. The head lad reported the killing. He saw Roke belting off on his motor-bike and thought it was strange, because Roke had been sacked the day before, and he went to tell the trainer about it, and found him unconscious and the other man dead.’

  The doctor had heard enough. He walked out of the room without looking back. What was the use of trying? Better just do what the red-head said, and take it quietly, bitterness and all.

  ‘Let’s be going, chum,’ said the dark one. They stood there, tense again, with watchful eyes and hostile faces.

  I got slowly to my feet. Slowly, because I was perilously near to not being able to stand up at all, and I didn’t want to seem to be asking for a sympathy I was clearly not going to get. But it was all right: once upright I felt better; which was psychological as much as physical because they were then not two huge threatening policemen but two quite ordinary young men of my own height doing their duty, and very concerned not to make any mistakes.

  It worked the other way with them, of course. I think they had subconsciously expected a stable lad to be very short, and they were taken aback to discover I wasn’t. They became visibly more aggressive: and I realized in the circumstances, and in those black clothes, I probably seemed to them, as Terence had once put it, a bit dangerous and hard to handle.

  I didn’t see any sense in getting roughed up any more, especially by the law, if it could be avoided.

  ‘Look,’ I sighed, ‘like you said, I won’t give you any trouble.’

  But I suppose they had been told to bring in someone who had gone berserk and smashed a man’s head in, and they were taking no chances. Red-head took a fierce grip of my right arm above the elbow and shoved me over to the door, and once outside in the passage the dark one took a similar grip on the left.

  The corridor was lined with girls standing in little gossiping groups. I stopped dead. The two policemen pushed me on. And the girls stared.

  That old saying about wishing the floor would open and swallow one up suddenly took on a fresh personal meaning. What little was left of my sense of dignity revolted totally against being exhibited as a prisoner in front of so many intelligent and personable young women. They were the wrong age. The wrong sex. I could have stood it better if they had been men.

  But there was no easy exit. It was a good long way from Elinor’s room to the outside door, along those twisting corridors and down two flights of stairs, and every single step was watched by interested female eyes.

  This was the sort of thing one wouldn’t be able to forget. It went too deep. Or perhaps, I thought miserably, one could even get accustomed to being hauled around in hand-cuffs if it happened often enough. If one were used to it, perhaps one wouldn’t care… which would be peaceful.

  I did at least manage not to stumble, not even on the stairs, so to that extent something was saved from the wreck. The police car however, into which I was presently thrust, seemed a perfect haven in contrast.

  I sat in front, between them. The dark one drove.

  ‘Phew,’ he said, pushing his cap back an inch. ‘All those girls.’ He had blushed under their scrutiny and there was a dew of sweat on his forehead.

  ‘He’s a tough boy, is this,’ said Red-head, mopping his neck with a white handkerchief as he sat sideways against the door and stared at me. ‘He didn’t turn a hair.’

  I looked straight ahead through the windscreen as the lights of Durham began to slide past and thought how little could be told from a face. That walk had been a torture. If I hadn’t shown it, it was probably only because I had by then had months of practice in hiding my feelings and thoughts, and the habit was strong. I guessed – correctly – that it was a habit I would find strength in clinging to for some time to come.

  I spent the rest of the journey reflecting that I had got myself into a proper mess and that I was going to have a very unpleasant time getting out. I had indeed killed Adams. There was no denying or ducking that. And I was not going to be listened to as a respectable solid citizen but as a murdering villain trying every dodge to escape the consequences. I was going to be taken at my face value, which was very low indeed. That couldn’t be helped. I had, after all, survived eight weeks at Humber’s only because I looked like dregs. The appearance which had deceived Adams was going to be just as convincing to the police, and proof that in fact it already was sat on either side of me in the car, watchful and antagonistic.

  Red-head’s eyes
never left my face.

  ‘He doesn’t talk much,’ he observed, after a long silence.

  ‘Got a lot on his mind,’ agreed the dark one with sarcasm.

  The damage Adams and Humber had done gave me no respite. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and the handcuffs clinked. The light-heartedness with which I had gone in my new clothes to Slaw seemed a long long time ago.

  The lights of Clavering lay ahead. The dark one gave me a look of subtle enjoyment. A capture made. His purpose fulfilled. Red-head broke another long silence, his voice full of the same sort of satisfaction.

  ‘He’ll be a lot older when he gets out,’ he said.

  I emphatically hoped not: but I was all too aware that the length of time I remained in custody depended solely on how conclusively I could show that I had killed in self-defence. I wasn’t a lawyer’s son for nothing.

  The next hours were abysmal. The Clavering police force were collectively a hardened cynical bunch suppressing as best they could a vigorous crime wave in a mining area with a high unemployment percentage. Kid gloves did not figure in their book. Individually they may have loved their wives and been nice to their children, but if so they kept their humour and humanity strictly for leisure.

  They were busy. The building was full of bustle and hurrying voices. They shoved me still hand-cuffed from room to room under escort and barked out intermittent questions. ‘Later,’ they said. ‘Deal with that one later. We’ve got all night for him.’

  I thought with longing of a hot bath, a soft bed, and a handful of aspirins. I didn’t get any of them.

  At some point late in the evening they gave me a chair in a bare brightly lit little room, and I told them what I had been doing at Humber’s and how I had come to kill Adams. I told them everything which had happened that day. They didn’t believe me, for which one couldn’t blame them. They immediately, as a matter of form, charged me with murder. I protested. Uselessly.

  They asked me a lot of questions. I answered them. They asked them again. I answered. They asked the questions like a relay team, one of them taking over presently from another, so that they all appeared to remain full of fresh energy while I grew more and more tired. I was glad I did not have to maintain a series of lies in that state of continuing discomfort and growing fatigue, as it was hard to keep a clear head, even for the truth, and they were waiting for me to make a mistake.