Odds Against Page 23

  I looked at their faces, one by one Doria, rapt Oxon, faintly surprised. Kraye confident, flexing his muscles. And Bolt, calculating and suspicious. None of them within a mile of relenting.

  ‘Where are they?’ Kraye repeated, lifting his arm.

  ‘In the office,’ I said helplessly.

  He hit my wrist with the poker. I’d hoped he might at least try to be subtle, but instead he used all his strength and with that one first blow smashed the whole shooting match to smithereens. The poker broke through the skin. The bones cracked audibly like sticks.

  I didn’t scream only because I couldn’t get enough breath to do it. Before that moment I would have said I knew everything there was to know about pain, but it seems one can always learn. Behind my shut eyes the world turned yellow and grey, like sun shining through mist, and every inch of my skin began to sweat. There had never been anything like it. It was too much, too much. And I couldn’t manage any more.

  ‘Where are they?’ said Kraye again.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t do it.’ I could hardly speak.

  Doria sighed deeply.

  I opened my eyes a slit, my head lolling weakly back, too heavy to hold up. Kraye was smiling, pleased with his efforts. Oxon looked sick.

  ‘Well?’ said Kraye.

  I swallowed, hesitating still.

  He put the tip of the poker on my shattered bleeding wrist and gave a violent jerk. Among other things it felt like a fizzing electric shock, up my arm into my head and down to my toes. Sweat started sticking my shirt to my chest and my trousers to my legs.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t.’ It was a croak; a capitulation; a prayer.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Kraye, and jolted the poker again.

  I told them. I told them where to go.

  EIGHTEEN

  They decided it should be Bolt who went to fetch the negatives.

  ‘What is this place?’ he said. He hadn’t recognised the address.

  ‘The home of… a… girl friend.’

  He dispassionately watched the sweat run in trickles down my face. My mouth was dry. I was very thirsty.

  ‘Say… I sent you,’ I said, between jagged breaths. ‘I… asked her… to keep them safe… They… are with… several other things… The package… you want… has a name on it… a make of film… Jigoro… Kano.’

  ‘Jigoro Kano. Right,’ Bolt said briskly.

  ‘Give me…’ I said, ‘some morphine.’

  Bolt laughed. ‘After all the trouble you’ve caused us? Even if I had any, I wouldn’t. You can sit there and sweat it out.’

  I moaned. Bolt smiled in satisfaction and turned away.

  ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I have the negatives,’ he said to Kraye. ‘Then we can decide what to do with Halley. I’ll give it some thought on the way up.’ From his tone he might have been discussing the disposal of a block of worthless stocks.

  ‘Good,’ said Kraye. ‘We’ll wait for your call over in the flat.’

  They began to walk towards the door. Oxon and Doria hung back, Doria because she couldn’t tear her fascinated, dilated eyes away from watching me, and Oxon for more practical reasons.

  ‘Are you just going to leave him here?’ he asked in surprise.

  ‘Yes. Why not?’ said Kraye. ‘Come on, Doria darling. The best is over.’

  Unwilling she followed him, and Oxon also.

  ‘Some water,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘No,’ said Kraye.

  They filed past him out of the door. Just before he shut it he gave me a last look compounded of triumph, contempt and satisfied cruelty. Then he switched off all the lights and went away.

  I heard the sound of a car starting up and driving off. Bolt was on his way. Outside the windows the night was black. Darkness folded round me like a fourth dimension. As the silence deepened I listened to the low hum of the boiler roaring safely on the far side of the wall. At least, I thought, I don’t have to worry about that as well. Small, small consolation.

  The back of the chair came only as high as my shoulders and gave no support to my head. I felt deathly tired. I couldn’t bear to move: every muscle in my body seemed to have a private line direct to my left wrist, and merely flexing my right foot had me panting. I wanted to lie down flat. I wanted a long cold drink. I wanted to faint. I went on sitting in the chair, wide awake, with a head that ached and weighed a ton, and an arm which wasn’t worth the trouble.

  I thought about Bolt going to Zanna Martin’s front door, and finding that his own secretary had been helping me. I wondered for the hundredth time what he would do about that: whether he would harm her. Poor Miss Martin, whom life had already hurt too much.

  Not only her, I thought. In the same file was the letter Mervyn Brinton had written out for me. If Bolt should see that, Mervyn Brinton would be needing a bodyguard for life.

  I thought about the people who had borne the beatings and brutalities of the Nazis and of the Japanese and had often died without betraying their secrets. I thought about the atrocities still going on throughout the world, and the ease with which man could break man. In Algeria, they said, unbelievable things had been done. Behind the Iron Curtain, brain washing wasn’t all. In African jails, who knew?

  Too young for World War Two, safe in a tolerant society, I had had no thought that I should ever come to such a test. To suffer or to talk. The dilemma which stretched back to antiquity. Thanks to Kraye, I now knew what it was like at first hand. Thanks to Kraye, I didn’t understand how anyone could keep silent unto death.

  I thought: I wanted to ride round Seabury racecourse again, and to go back into the weighing room, and to sit on the scales; and I’ve done all those things.

  I thought: a fortnight ago I couldn’t let go of the past. I was clinging to too many ruins, the ruins of my marriage and my racing career and my useless hand. They were gone for good now, all of them. There was nothing left to cling to. And every tangible memory of my life had blown away with a plastic bomb. I was rootless and homeless: and liberated.

  What I refused to think about was what Kraye might still do during the next few hours.

  Bolt had been gone for a good long time when at last Kraye came back. It had seemed half eternity to me, but even so I was in no hurry for it to end.

  Kraye put the lights on. He and Doria stood just inside the doorway, staring across at me.

  ‘You’re sure there’s time?’ said Doria.

  Kraye nodded, looking at his watch. ‘If we’re quick.’

  ‘Don’t you think we ought to wait until Ellis rings?’ she said. ‘He might have thought of something better.’

  ‘He’s late already,’ said Kraye impatiently. They had clearly been arguing for some time. ‘He should have rung by now. If we’re going to do this, we can’t wait any longer.’

  ‘All right,’ she shrugged. ‘I’ll go and take a look.’

  ‘Be careful. Don’t go in.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t fuss.’

  They both came over to where I sat Doria looked at me with interest, and liked what she saw.

  ‘He looks ghastly, doesn’t he? Serves him right.’

  ‘Are you human?’ I said.

  A flicker of awareness crossed her lovely face, as if deep down she did indeed know that everything she had enjoyed that night was sinful and obscene, but she was too thoroughly addicted to turn back. ‘Shall I help you?’ she said to Kraye, not answering me.

  ‘No. I can manage. He’s not very heavy.’

  She watched with a smile while her husband gripped the back of the chair I was sitting in and began to tug it across the floor towards the wall. The jerks were almost past bearing. I grew dizzy with the effort of not yelling my head off. There was no one close enough to hear me if I did. Not the few overnight stable lads fast asleep three hundred yards away. Only the Krayes, who would find it sweet.

  Doria licked her lips, as if at a feast.

  ‘Go on,’ said Kraye. ‘Hurry.’

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nbsp; ‘Oh, all right,’ she agreed crossly, and went out through the door into the passage.

  Kraye finished pulling me across the room, turned the chair round so that I was facing the wall with my knees nearly touching it and stood back, breathing deeply from the exertion.

  On the other side of the wall the boiler gently roared. One could hear it more clearly at such close quarters. I knew I had no crashing explosion, no flying bricks, no killing steam to worry about. But the sands were running out fast, all the same.

  Doria came back and said in a puzzled voice, ‘I thought you said there would be water all down the passage.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t. Not a drop. I looked into the boiler room and it’s as dry as a bone.’

  ‘It can’t be. It’s nearly three hours since it started over-flowing. Oxon warned us it must be nearly ready to blow. You must be wrong.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she insisted. ‘The whole thing looks perfectly normal to me.’

  ‘It can’t be.’ Kraye’s voice was sharp. He went off in a hurry to see for himself, and came back even faster.

  ‘You’re right. I’ll go and get Oxon. I don’t know how the confounded thing works.’ He went straight on out of the main door, and I heard his footsteps running. There was no urgency except his own anger. I shivered.

  Doria wasn’t certain enough of the boiler’s safety to spend any time near me, which was about the first really good thing which had happened the whole night. Nor did she find the back of my head worth speaking to: she liked to see her worms squirm. Perhaps she had even lost her appetite, now things had gone wrong. She waited uneasily near the door for Kraye to come back, fiddling with the catch.

  Oxon came with him, and they were both running. They charged across the weighing room and out into the passage.

  I hadn’t much left anyway, I thought. A few tatters of pride, perhaps. Time to nail them to the mast.

  The two men walked softly into the room and down to where I sat. Kraye grasped the chair and swung it violently round. The weighing room was quiet, undisturbed. There was only blackness through the window. So that was that.

  I looked at Kraye’s face, and wished on the whole that I hadn’t. It was white and rigid with fury. His eyes were two black pits.

  Oxon held the mouse in his hand. ‘It must have been Halley,’ he said, as if he’d said it before. ‘There’s no one else.’

  Kraye put his right hand down on my left, and systematically began to take his revenge. After three long minutes I passed out.

  I clung to the dark, trying to hug it round me like a blanket, and it obstinately got thinner and thinner, lighter and lighter, noisier and noisier, more and more painful, until I could no longer deny that I was back in the world.

  My eyes unstuck themselves against my will.

  The weighing room was full of people. People in dark uniforms. Policemen. Policemen coming through every door. Bright yellow lights at long last shining outside the window. Policemen carefully cutting the rope away from my leaden limbs.

  Kraye and Doria and Oxon looked smaller, surrounded by the dark blue men. Doria in her brave white suit instinctively and unsuccessfully tried to flirt with her captors. Oxon, disconcerted to his roots, faced the facts of life for the first time.

  Kraye’s fury wasn’t spent. His eyes stared in hatred across the room.

  He shouted, struggling in strong restraining arms, ‘Where did you send him? Where did you send Ellis Bolt?’

  ‘Ah, Mr Potter,’ I said into a sudden oasis of silence. ‘Mr Wilbur Potter. Find out. But not from me.’

  NINETEEN

  Of course I ended up where I had begun, flat on my back in a hospital. But not for so long, that time. I had a pleasant sunny room with a distant view of the sea, some exceedingly pretty nurses, and a whole stream of visitors. Chico came first, as soon as they would let him, on the Sunday afternoon.

  He grinned down at me.

  ‘You look bloody awful.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Two black eyes, a scabby lip, a purple and yellow complexion and a three day beard. Glamorous.’

  ‘It sounds it.’

  ‘Do you want to look?’ he asked, picking up a hand mirror from a chest of drawers.

  I took the mirror and looked. He hadn’t exaggerated. I would have faded into the background in a horror movie.

  Sighing, I said, ‘X certificate, definitely.’

  He laughed, and put the mirror back. His own face still bore the marks of battle. The eyebrow was healing, but the bruise showed dark right down his cheek.

  ‘This is a better room than you had in London,’ he remarked, strolling over to the window. ‘And it smells O.K. For a hospital, that is.’

  ‘Pack in the small talk and tell me what happened,’ I said.

  ‘They told me not to tire you.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass.’

  ‘Well, all right. You’re a bloody rollicking nit in many ways, aren’t you?’

  ‘It depends how you look at it,’ I agreed peaceably.

  ‘Oh sure, sure.’

  ‘Chico, give,’ I pleaded. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Well, there I was harmlessly snoozing away in Radnor’s arm-chair with the telephone on one side and some rather good chicken sandwiches on the other, dreaming about a willing blonde and having a ball, when the front door bell rang.’ He grinned. ‘I got up, stretched and went to answer it. I thought it might be you, come back after all and with nowhere to sleep. I knew it wouldn’t be Radnor, unless he’d forgotten his key. And who else would be knocking on his door at two o’clock in the morning? But there was this fat geezer standing on the doorstep in his city pinstripes, saying you’d sent him. ‘Come in, then,’ I said, yawning my head off. He came in, and I showed him into Radnor’s sort of study place, where I’d been sitting.

  ‘ “Sid sent you?” I asked him, “What for?”

  ‘He said he understood your girl-friend lived here. God, mate, don’t ever try snapping your mouth shut at the top of a yawn. I nearly dislocated my jaw. Could he see her, he said. Sorry it was so late, but it was extremely important.

  ‘ “She isn’t here,” I said. “She’s gone away for a few days. Can I help you?”

  ‘ “Who are you?” he said, looking me up and down.

  ‘I said I was her brother. He took a sharpish look at the sandwiches and the book I’d been reading, which had fallen on the floor, and he could see I’d been asleep, so he seemed to think everything was O.K., and he said, “Sid asked me to fetch something she is keeping for him. Do you think you could help me find it?”

  ‘ “Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

  ‘He hesitated a bit but he could see that it would look too weird if he refused to tell me, so he said “It’s a packet of negatives. Sid said your sister had several things of his, but the packet I want has a name on it, a make of films. Jigoro Kano.”

  ‘ “Oh?” I said innocently. “Sid sent you for a packet marked Jigoro Kano?”

  ‘ “That’s right,” he said, looking round the room. “Would it be in here?”

  ‘ “It certainly would,” I said.’

  Chico stopped, came over beside the bed, and sat on the edge of it, by my right toe.

  ‘How come you know about Jigoro Kano?’ he said seriously.

  ‘He invented judo,’ I said. ‘I read it somewhere.’

  Chico shook his head. ‘He didn’t really invent it. In 1882 he took all the best bits of hundreds of versions of ju-jitsu and put them into a formal sort of order, and called it judo.’

  ‘I was sure you would know,’ I said, grinning at him.

  ‘You took a very sticky risk.’

  ‘You had to know. After all, you’re an expert. And there were all those years at your club. No risk. I knew you’d know. As long as I’d got the name right, that is. Anyway, what happened next?’

  Chico smiled faintly.

  ‘I tied him into a couple of knots. Arm locks and so on.
He was absolutely flabbergasted. It was really rather funny. Then I put a bit of pressure on. You know. The odd thumb screwing down to a nerve. God, you should have heard him yell. I suppose he thought he’d wake the neighbours, but you know what London is. No one took a blind bit of notice. So then I asked him where you were, when you sent him. He didn’t show very willing, I must say, so I gave him a bit more. Poetic justice, wasn’t it, considering what they’d just been doing to you? I told him I could keep it up all night, I’d hardly begun. There was a whole bookful I hadn’t touched on. It shook him, it shook him bad.’

  Chico stood up restlessly and walked about the room.

  ‘You know?’ he said wryly. ‘He must have had a lot to lose. He was a pretty tough cookie, I’ll give him that. If I hadn’t been sure that you’d sent him to me as a sort of S.O.S., I don’t think I’d have had the nerve to hurt him enough to bust him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘We both learnt about it, didn’t we? You on the receiving end, and me… I didn’t like it. Doing it, I mean. I mean, the odd swipe or two and a few threats, that’s usually enough, and it doesn’t worry you a bit, you don’t give it a second thought. But I’ve never hurt anyone like that before. Not seriously, on purpose, beyond bearing. He was crying, you see…’

  Chico turned his back to me, looking out of the window.

  There was a long pause. The moral problems of being on the receiving end were not so great, I thought. It was easier on the conscience altogether.

  At last Chico said, ‘He told me, of course. In the end.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t leave a mark on him, you know. Not a scratch… He said you were at Seabury racecourse. Well, I knew that was probably right, and that he wasn’t trying the same sort of misdirection you had, because you’d told me yourself that you were going there. He said that you were in the weighing room and that the boiler would soon blow up. He said that he hoped it would kill you. He seemed half out of his mind with rage about you. How he should have known better than to believe you, he should have realised that you were as slippery as a snake, he’d been fooled once before… He said he’d taken it for granted you were telling the truth when you broke down and changed your story about the negatives being in the office, because you… because you were begging for mercy and morphine and God knows what.’