Come to Grief Page 3

  “Everything you do astounds me.”

  “I wish I was still racing.”

  “Yes, I know. But if you were, you’d anyway be coming to the end of it soon, wouldn’t you? How old are you now? Thirty-four?”

  I nodded. Thirty-five loomed.

  “Not many top jump jockeys go on much after that.”

  “You put things so delightfully bluntly, Charles.”

  “You’re of more use to more people the way you are.”

  Charles tended to give me pep talks when he thought I needed them. I could never work out how he knew. He’d said something once about my looking like a brick wall: that when I shut out the world and retreated into myself, things were bad. Maybe he was right. Retreat inward meant for me not retreating outwardly, and I supposed I’d learned the technique almost from birth.

  Jenny, my loved and lost wife, had said she couldn’t live with it. She’d wanted me to give up race-riding and become a softer-shelled person, and when I wouldn‘t—or couldn’t—we had shaken acridly apart. She had recently remarried, and this time she’d tied herself not to a thin, dark-haired, risk-taking bundle of complexes, but to a man to fit her needs, a safe, graying, sweet-natured uncomplicated fellow with a knighthood. Jenny, the warring unhappy Mrs. Halley, was now serenely Lady Wingham. A photograph of her with her handsome, beaming Sir Anthony stood in a silver frame next to the telephone on Charles’s desk.

  “How’s Jenny?” I asked politely.

  “Fine,” Charles answered without expression.

  “Good.”

  “He’s a bore, after you,” Charles observed.

  “You can’t say such things.”

  “I can say what I bloody well like in my own house.”

  In harmony and mutual regard we passed a peaceful evening, disturbed only by five more calls on my mobile phone, all demanding to know, with varying degrees of peremptoriness, where they could find Sid Halley.

  I said each time, “This is an answering service. Leave your number and we’ll pass on your message.”

  All of the callers, it seemed, worked for newspapers, a fact that particularly left me frowning.

  “I don’t know where they all got this number from,” I told Charles. “It’s not in any directory. I give it only to people I’m working for, so they can reach me day or night, and only to others whose calls I wouldn’t want to miss. I tell them it’s a private line for their use only. I don’t hand this number out on printed cards, and I don’t have it on my writing paper. Quite often I reroute calls to this phone from my phone in the flat, but I didn’t today because of Gordon Quint bashing away outside and preventing me from going in. So how do half the newspapers in London know it?”

  “How will you find out?” Charles asked.

  “Um ... engage Sid Halley to look into it, I dare-say.”

  Charles laughed. I felt uneasy all the same. Someone had been listening on that number, and now someone had broadcast it. It wasn’t that my phone conversations were excessively secret—and I’d started the semi-exclusive number anyway solely so that the machine didn’t buzz unnecessarily at awkward moments—but now I had a sense that someone was deliberately crowding me. Tapping into my computer—which wouldn’t get anyone far, as I knew a lot of defenses. Assaulting me electronically. Stalking.

  Enough was enough. Five newspapers were too much. Sid Halley, as I’d said, would have to investigate his own case.

  Charles’s long-time live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Cross, all dimples and delight, cooked us a simple supper and fussed over me comfortably like a hen. I guiltily found her a bit smothering sometimes, but always sent her a card for her birthday.

  I went to bed early and found that, as usual, Mrs. Cross had left warm welcoming lights on in my room and had put out fresh pajamas and fluffy towels.

  A pity the day’s troubles couldn’t be as easily cosseted into oblivion.

  I undressed and brushed my teeth and eased off the artificial hand. My left arm ended uselessly four inches below the elbow; a familiar punctuation, but still a sort of bereavement.

  My right arm now twinged violently at every use.

  Damn the lot, I thought.

  2

  The morning brought tiule improvemenl.

  I sometimes used a private chauffeur-driven car-hire firm based in London to ferry around people and things I wanted to keep away from prying eyes and consequently, waking to a couple of faulty arms, I telephoned from Charles’s secure number and talked to my friends at Teledrive.

  “Bob?” I said. “I need to get from northwest of Oxford to Kent, Canterbury. There’ll be a couple of short stops on the journey. And, sometime this afternoon, a return to London. Can anyone do it at such short notice?”

  “Give me the address,” he said briefly. “We’re on our way.”

  I breakfasted with Charles. That is to say, we sat in the dining room where Mrs. Cross, in her old-fashioned way, had set out toast, coffee and cereals and a warming dish of scrambled eggs.

  Charles thought mornings hadn’t begun without scrambled eggs. He ate his on toast and eyed me drinking coffee left-handedly. From long acquaintance with my preference for no fuss, he made no comment on the consequences of iron bars.

  He was reading a broad-sheet newspaper which, as he showed me, was making a good-taste meal of Ginnie Quint’s death. Her pleasant, smiling face inappropriately spread across two columns. I shut out of my mind any image of what she might look like sixteen floors down.

  Charles said, reading aloud, “ ‘Friends say she appeared depressed about her son’s forthcoming trial. Her husband, Gordon, was unavailable for comment.’ In other words, the press couldn’t find him.”

  Ordeal by newsprint, I thought; the latter-day torture.

  “Seriously, Sid,” Charles said in his most calm, civilized voice, “was Gordon’s rage at you transient or ... er ... obsessive?”

  “Seriously,” I echoed him, “I don’t know.” I sighed. “I should think it’s too soon to tell. Gordon himself probably doesn’t know.”

  “Do take care, Sid.”

  “Sure.” I sorted through the flurry of impressions I’d gathered in the brief seconds of violence in Pont Square. “I don’t know where Ginnie was when she jumped,” I said, “but I don’t think Gordon was with her. I mean, when he leaped at me he was wearing country clothes. Work-day clothes: mud on his boots, corduroy trousers, old tweed jacket, open-necked blue shirt. He hadn’t been staying in any sixteen-story hotel. And the metal bar he hit me with ... it wasn’t a smooth rod, it was a five-foot piece of angle iron, the sort you thread wire through for fencing. I saw the holes in it.”

  Charles stared.

  I said, “I’d say he was at home in Berkshire when he was told about Ginnie. I think if I’d loitered around to search, I would have found Gordon’s Land-Rover parked near Pont Square.”

  Gordon Quint, though a landowner, was a hands-on custodian of his multiple acres. He drove tractors, scythed weeds to clear streams, worked alongside his men to repair his boundaries, re-fence his sheep fields and thin out his woodlands, enjoying both the physical labor and the satisfaction of a job most competently done.

  I knew him also as self-admiring and as expecting—and receiving—deference from everyone, including Ginnie. It pleased him to be a generous host while leaving his guests in no doubt of his superior worth.

  The man I’d seen in Pont Square, all “squire” manner stripped away, had been a raw, hurt, outraged and oddly more genuine person than the Gordon I’d known before: but until I learned for sure which way the explosively tossed-up bricks of his nature would come down, I would keep away from fencing posts and any other agricultural hardware he might be traveling with.

  I told Charles I’d engaged Teledrive to come and pick me up. To his raised eyebrows I explained I would put the cost against expenses. Whose expenses? General running expenses, I said..

  “Is Mrs. Ferns paying you?” Charles neutrally asked.

  “Not anymore.”
>
  “Who is, exactly?” He liked me to make a profit. I did, but he seldom believed it.

  “I don’t starve,” I said, drinking my coffee. “Have you ever tried three or four eggs whipped up in mushroom soup? Instant mushroom omelette, not at all bad.”

  “Disgusting,” Charles said.

  “You get a different perspective, living alone.”

  “You need a new wife,” Charles said. “What about that girl who used to share a flat with Jenny in Oxford?”

  “Louise McInnes?”

  “Yes. I thought you and she were having an affair.”

  No one had affairs anymore. Charles’s words were half a century out of date. But though the terms might now be different, the meaning was eternal.

  “A summer picnic,” I said. “The frosts of winter killed it off.”

  “Why?”

  “What she felt for me was more curiosity than love.”

  He understood that completely. Jenny had talked about me so long and intimately to her friend Louise, mostly to my detriment, that I recognized—in retrospect—that the friend had chiefly been fascinated in checking out the information personally. It had been a lighthearted passage from mating to parting. Nice while it lasted, but no roots.

  When the car came for me I thanked Charles for sanctuary.

  “Anytime,” he said, nodding.

  We parted as usual without physically touching. Eye contact said it all.

  Getting the driver to thread his way back and forth through the maze of shopping dead ends in the town of Kingston in Surrey, I acquired six dressing-up party wigs from a carnival store and an angel fish in a plastic tub from a pet shop; and, thus armed, arrived eventually at the children’s cancer ward that held Rachel Ferns.

  Linda greeted my arrival with glittering tears, but her daughter still lived. Indeed, in one of those unpredictable quirks that made leukemia such a roller coaster of hope and despair, Rachel was marginally better. She was awake, semi-sitting up in bed and pleased at my arrival.

  “Did you bring the angel fish?” she demanded by way of greeting.

  I held up the plastic bucket, which swung from my plastic wrist. Linda took it and removed the watertight lid, showing her daughter the shining black and silver fish that swam vigorously inside.

  Rachel relaxed. “I’m going to call him Sid,” she said.

  She’d been a lively, blonde, pretty child once, according to her photographs: now she seemed all huge eyes in a bald head. Lassitude and anemia had made her frighteningly frail.

  When her mother had first called me in to investigate an attack on Rachel’s pony, the illness had been in remission, the dragon temporarily sleeping. Rachel had become someone special to me and I’d given her a fish tank complete with lights, aeration, water plants, Gothic castle arches, sand and brilliant tropical swimming inhabitants. Linda had wept. Rachel had spent hours getting to know her new friends’ habits; the ones that skulked in corners, the one who bossed all the rest. Half of the fish were called Sid.

  The fish tank stood in the Fernses’ sitting room at home and it seemed uncertain now whether Rachel would see the new Sid among his mates.

  It was there, in the comfortable middle-sized room furnished with unaggressively expensive modern sofas, with glass-topped end tables and stained-glass Tiffany lamps, that I had first met my clients, Linda and Rachel Ferns.

  There were no books in the room, only a few magazines ; dress fashions and horses. Shiny striped curtains in crimson and cream; geometrically patterned carpet in merging fawn and gray; flower prints on pale pink walls. Overall the impression was a degree of lack of coordination which probably indicated impulsive inhabitants without strongly formed characters. The Fernses weren’t “old” money, I concluded, but there appeared to be plenty of it.

  Linda Ferns, on the telephone, had begged me to come. Five or six ponies in the district had been attacked by vandals, and one of the ponies belonged to her daughter, Rachel. The police hadn’t found out who the vandals were and now months had gone by, and her daughter was still very distressed and would I please, please, come and see if I could help.

  “I’ve heard you’re my only hope. I’ll pay you, of course. I’ll pay you anything if you help Rachel. She has these terrible nightmares. Please.”

  I mentioned my fee.

  “Anything,” she said.

  She hadn’t told me, before I arrived in the far-flung village beyond Canterbury, that Rachel was ill unto death.

  When I met the huge-eyed bald-headed slender child she shook hands with me gravely.

  “Are you really Sid Halley?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Mum said you would come. Daddy said you didn’t work for kids.”

  “I do sometimes.”

  “My hair is growing,” she said; and I could see the thin fine blonde fuzz just showing over the pale scalp.

  “I’m glad.”

  She nodded. “Quite often I wear a wig, but they itch. Do you mind if I don’t?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “I have leukemia,” she said calmly.

  “I see.”

  She studied my face, a child old beyond her age, as I’d found all sick young people to be.

  “You will find out who killed Silverboy, won’t you?”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “How did he die?”

  “No, no,” Linda interrupted. “Don’t ask her. I’ll tell you. It upsets her. Just say you’ll sort them out, those pigs. And, Rachel, you take Pegotty out into the garden and push him round so that he can see the flowers.”

  Pegotty, it transpired, was a contented-looking baby strapped into a buggy. Rachel without demur pushed him out into the garden and could presently be seen through the window giving him a close-up acquaintance with an azalea.

  Linda Ferns watched and wept the first of many tears.

  “She needs a bone-marrow transplant,” she said, trying to suppress sobs. “You’d think it would be simple, but no one so far can find a match to her, not even in the international register set up by the Anthony Nolan Trust.”

  I said inadequately, “I’m sorry.”

  “Her father and I are divorced,” Linda said. “We divorced five years ago, and he’s married again.” She spoke without bitterness. “These things happen.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I was at the Ferns house early in a June of languorous days and sweet-smelling roses, a time for the lotus, not horrors.

  “A bunch of vandals,” Linda said with a fury that set her whole body trembling, “they maimed a lot of ponies in Kent ... in this area particularly ... so that poor loving kids went out into their paddocks and found their much-loved ponies mutilated. What sick, sick mind would blind a poor, inoffensive pony that had never done anyone any harm? Three ponies round here were blinded and others had had knives stuck up their back passages.” She blinked on her tears. “Rachel was terribly upset. All the children for miles were crying inconsolably. And the police couldn’t find who’d done any of it.”

  “Was Silverboy blinded?” I asked.

  “No ... No ... It was worse ... For Rachel, it was worse. She found him, you see ... out in the paddock...” Linda openly sobbed. “Rachel wanted to sleep in a makeshift stable... a lean-to shed, really. She . wanted to sleep there at nights with Silverboy tied up there beside her, and I wouldn’t let her. She’s been ill for nearly three years. It’s such a dreadful disease, and

  I feel so helpless....“ She wiped her eyes, plucking a tissue from a half-empty box. ”She keeps saying it wasn’t my fault, but I know she thinks Silverboy would be alive if I’d let her sleep out there.“

  “What happened to him?” I asked neutrally.

  Linda shook her head miserably, unable still to tell me. She was a pretty woman in a conventional thirty-something way: trim figure, well-washed short fair hair, all the health and beauty magazine tips come to admirable life. Only the dullness in the eyes and the intermittent vibrations in many of her muscles spoke plai
nly of the long strain of emotional buffeting still assailing her.

  “She went out,” she said eventually, “even though it was bitter cold, and beginning to rain ... February ... she always went to see that his water trough was filled and clean and not frozen over ... and I’d made her put on warm clothes and gloves and a scarf and a real thick woolly hat ... and she came back running, and screaming ... screaming...”

  I waited through Linda’s unbearable memories.

  She said starkly, “Rachel found his foot.”

  There was a moment of utter stillness, an echo of the stunned disbelief of that dreadful morning.

  “It was in all the papers,” Linda said.

  I moved and nodded. I’d read—months ago—about the blinded Kent ponies. I’d been busy, inattentive: hadn’t absorbed names or details, hadn’t realized that one of the ponies had lost a foot.

  “I’ve found out since you telephoned,” I said, “that round the country, not just here in Kent, there have been another half a dozen or so scattered vandalizing attacks on ponies and horses in fields.”

  She said unhappily, “I did see a paragraph about a horse in Lancashire, but I threw the paper away so that Rachel wouldn’t read it. Every time anything reminds her of Silverboy she has a whole week of nightmares. She wakes up sobbing. She comes into my bed, shivering, crying. Please, please find out why ... find out who ... She’s so ill ... and although she’s in remission just now and able to live fairly normally, it almost certainly won’t last. The doctors say she needs the transplant.”

  I said, “Does Rachel know any of the other children whose ponies were attacked?”

  Linda shook her head. “Most of them belonged to the Pony Club, I think, but Rachel didn’t feel well enough to join the club. She loved Silverboy—her father gave him to her—but all she could do was sit in the saddle while we led her round. He was a nice, quiet pony, a very nice-looking gray with a darker, smoky-colored mane. Rachel called him Silverboy, but he had a long pedigree name, really. She needed something to love, you see, and she wanted a pony so much.”

  I asked; “Did you keep any of the newspaper accounts of Silverboy and the other local ponies being attacked? If you did, can I see them?”