10 lb Penalty

Twelve

It wasn’t enough, I thought, to defend.

I should have written in that pact, “I will attack my father’s attackers.”

I should have written that I’d go to war for him if I saw the need.

At almost eighteen, I’d written from easy sentiment. At twenty-three, I saw that, if the pact meant anything at all, it pledged an allegiance that could lead to death. And if that were so, I thought, it would be feeble just to sit around waiting for the ax.

It had been Tuesday when SHOUT! had hit the newstands, and late afternoon on Wednesday when I’d crashed into Rufus Crossmead’s editorial office. On Friday I drove from Wellingborough to Hoopwestern, and spent the journey looking back to the end of that confrontation and the answers I’d been given.

I’d asked SHOUT!’s editor why he had sent Usher Rudd to see Vivian-Durridge, and he’d said he hadn’t, it had been Usher Rudd’s own idea.

“Usher — well, his name is Bobby — said he’d been asked to dig into everything you’d ever done, and come up with some dirt. He was getting ultra-frustrated because he couldn’t find any sludge. He went blasting on a bit that no one could be as careful to stay out of trouble as you had been, and then there was this announcement of Sir Vivian Durridge’s retirement, which said you had ridden for his stable, so Bobby went off on the off chance, and he came back laughing. Crowing. He said he’d got you at last. So he wrote the story and I printed it.”

“And you didn’t check.”

“If I had to check every word I print,” the editor had said with world-weariness, “our sales would plummet.”

On Wednesday, early evening, I’d phoned Samson Frazer, the editor of the Hoopwestern Gazette.

“If you’re thinking of reprinting a story about me from SHOUT!” I’d said, “don’t do it. Usher Rudd wrote it. It’s not true and it’ll get you into court for libel.”

Gloomy silence.

Then, “I’ll reset the front page,” he’d said.

On Thursday, with prudent speed, SHOUT!’s proprietors had acted to avoid the heavy expenses of a libel action and had written and mailed the retractions I’d asked for to the members of Parliament.

My father, attending a meeting at the House on Friday morning, found that several certified letters had already reached their targets. In addition, he gave everyone — from the prime minister downwards — a copy of Vivian Durridge’s letter to me, along with a brief confirmation from himself that he’d asked Durridge to think of a way of persuading me to leave. Apparently the general reaction had been relief and relaxation, though Hudson Hurst had insisted there had to be some truth in the dope story somewhere.

“Why do you think so?” my father related that he’d asked, and the only reply had been stutter and dismay.

My father said, “I asked Hudson Hurst if he himself had sent Usher Rudd to Vivian Durridge. He denied it. He looked bewildered. I don’t think he did it.”

“No, I agree.”

I now negotiated a roundabout. Fourteen more miles to Hoopwestern.

I thought about Hudson Hurst, the ugly duckling converted to swan by scissors and razor. On television he was smooth, convincing and read his speeches from a teleprompter. No inner fire. A puppet.

Alderney Wyvern pulled his strings.

How to prove it? How to stop him?

Attacking Alderney Wyvern could destroy the attacker. I sensed it strongly. History was littered with the laments of failed invasions.

I arrived in Hoopwestern at noon and parked in the car park behind the old party headquarters. Polly had told me that the charity, which had owned the whole of the burned double bow-fronted building, had chosen to rebuild it much as before, with new bow windows fronting onto the cobbled square and new shops matching the row at the rear. When I walked in from the parking lot, all that seemed different were heavy fire doors and a rash of big scarlet extinguishers.

Mervyn Teck was there, and greeted me with ambivalent open arms and wary eyes.

“Benedict!” He was plumper than ever. Rotund, nowadays.

“Hi, Mervyn.”

He shook hands awkwardly, and glanced past me to where, on his desk, lay two newspapers, both SHOUT! and the Hoopwestern Gazette.

“I didn’t expect you,” Mervyn said.

“No, well, I’m sorry. I expect my father telephoned to say he couldn’t get down this weekend for the ‘surgery’?” Most Saturday mornings the public came to headquarters with their complaints. “I expect you’ll do fine without him.”

My father, in fact, was busy in London with secretive little lunches and private dinners, with hurried hidden meetings and promises and bargains, all the undercover maneuvering of shifts of power. I hoped and trusted that A. L. Wyvern was fully occupied in doing the same.

A young woman sitting behind a computer stood up with unaffected welcome.

“Benedict!”

I said, “Crystal?” tentatively.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said, edging around her desk to give me a kiss. “It’s such ages since you were here.”

A great change here too had taken place. She was no longer thin and anxious, but rounded and secure; and she wore a wedding ring, I saw.

They gave me coffee and local news, and I read with interest what the Gazette had made of SHOUT! “An unfair attack on our MP through his son. No truth in this allegation... shocking... libelous... retractions and regrets are in the pipeline.”

“The by-line in SHOUT! says Usher Rudd,” Mervyn pointed. “Vicious little nerd.”

“Actually,” I said as their indignation boiled on, “I came hoping to see Orinda, but she doesn’t answer her phone.”

“Oh, dear,” Crystal said, “she isn’t here. She went away for the weekend. She won’t be back till Monday.”

They didn’t know where she’d gone.

I’d made a short list of people I aimed to see. Mervyn, helpful with addresses, knew where to find Isobel Bethune at her sister’s house in Wales, and as she — telephoned — was not only at home but would be glad to see me, I drove to Cardiff that afternoon and discovered Paul Bethune’s rejuvenated wife in a pretty town house in the suburbs.

I’d never before seen her happy. She, too, was a different woman: the gray lines of worry had smoothed into peaches and cream.

It was she, however, who exclaimed, “How you’ve changed. You’ve grown older.”

“It happens.”.

Her sister had gone shopping. I sat with Isobel and listened to her remembering for my benefit how Usher Rudd had uncovered her husband’s bimbo affair.

“Usher Rudd just dug away and wrote it up sensationally, but it was all Paul’s fault. Men are such bloody fools. He confessed to me in sniveling tears in the end that he’d boasted — boasted, I ask you — to some stranger that he was playing golf with, that he was having an affair his wife didn’t know about. Snigger, snigger. Can you believe it? And that stranger turned out to be that weird nobody that was always hanging about ’round the Nagles. He used to play golf with Dennis.”

“His name’s Wyvern.”

“Yes, I know that now. When Dennis died, that Wyvern person wanted to make sure Orinda got elected, so he arranged to play golf with Paul, to see where Paul was weakest. I hated Usher Rudd, but it wasn’t until after your father got elected that Paul broke down and told me what had happened.” She sighed. “I was shattered then, but I don’t care now, isn’t that odd?”

“How are your sons?”

She laughed. “They’ve joined the army. Best place for them. They sometimes send postcards. You’re the only one that was kind to me in those days.”

I left her with a kiss on the peaches-and-cream cheek and drove tiredly back to Hoopwestern for the night, staying in Polly’s house in the woods and eating potted shrimps from her freezer.

On Saturday morning I went to the police station and asked to see Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, whose mother drove a school bus.

Joe Duke appeared questioningly.

“George Juliard’s son? You look older.”

Joe Duke was still a detective sergeant, but his mother no longer drove a bus. “She’s into rabbits,” he said. He took me into a bare little interview room, explaining he was the senior officer on duty and couldn’t leave the station.

He thoughtfully repeated my question. “Do I know if that fire you could have died in was arson? It’s all of five years ago.”

“A bit more. But you must have files,” I said.

“I don’t need files. Mostly fires in the night are from cigarettes or electrical shorts, but none of you smoked and the place had been rewired. Is this off the record?”

“On the moon.”

A dedicated policeman in his thirties, Joe had a broad face, a Dorset accent and a realistic attitude to human failings. “Amy used to let tramps sleep above the charity shop sometimes, but not that night, she says, though that’s the official and easy theory of the cause of fire. They say a vagrant was lighting candles downstairs and knocked them over, and then ran away. Nonsense, really. But the fire did start, the firefighters reckoned, in the charity shop, and the back door there wasn’t bolted, and both shops of the old place were lined and partitioned with dry old wood, though they’ve rebuilt it with brick and concrete now, and it’s awash with smoke alarms. Anyway, I suppose you heard the theory that crazy Leonard Kitchens set light to the place to frighten your father off so that Orinda Nagle could be our MP?”

“I’ve heard. What do you think?”

“It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

“But still...”

“I think he did it. I questioned him, see? But we hadn’t a flicker of evidence.”

“And what about the gun in The Sleeping Dragon’s gutter?”

“No one knows who put it there.”

“Leonard Kitchens?”

“He swears he didn’t. And he’s heavy and slow. It needed someone pretty agile to put that gun up high.”

“Did you ever find out where the rifle came from?”

“No. we didn’t,” he said. “They’re so common. They’ve been used in the Olympics for donkey’s years. They’re licensed and locked away and accounted for these days, but in the past... and theft...” He shrugged. “It isn’t as if it had killed anyone.”

I said, “What’s the penalty for attempted murder?”

“Do you mean a deliberate attempt that didn’t come off?”

“Mm.”

“Same as murder.”

“A 10-lb. penalty?”

“Ten years,” he said.

From the police station I drove out to the ring road and stopped in the forecourt of Basil Rudd’s car-repair outfit. I walked up the stairs into his glass-walled office that gave him a comprehensive view over his wide workshop below, only half-busy on Saturday morning.

“Sorry,” he said without looking up. “We close at noon on Saturdays. Can’t do anything for you till Monday.”

He was still disconcertingly like his cousin; red hair and freckles and a combative manner.

“I don’t want my car fixed,” I said. “I want to find Usher Rudd.”

It was as though I had jabbed him with a needle. He looked up and said, “Who are you? Why do you want him?”

I told him who and why. I asked him if he remembered the Range Rover’s questionable sump plug, but his recollection was hazy. He was quite sharply aware, though, of the political damage that could be done to a father by a son’s disgrace. He had a copy of SHOUT! on his desk, inevitably open at the center pages.

“That’s me,” I said, pointing at the photograph of the jockey. “Your cousin is lying. The Gazette sacked him for lying once before, and I’m doing my best to get him finally discredited — struck off, or whatever it’s called in newspaper-speak-for what is called dishonorable conduct. So where is he?”

Basil Rudd looked helpless. “How should I know?”

“Find out,” I said forcefully. “You’re a Rudd. Someone in the Rudd clan must know where to find its most notorious son.”

“He’s brought us nothing but trouble...”

“Find him,” I said, “and your troubles may end.”

He stretched out a hand to the telephone, saying, “It may take ages. And it’ll cost you.”

“I’ll pay your phone bills,” I said. “When you find him, leave a message on the answering machine at my father’s headquarters. Here’s the number.” I gave him a card. “Don’t waste time. It’s urgent.”

I went next to The Sleeping Dragon to see the manager. He had been newly installed there at the time of the by-election, but perhaps because of that he had a satisfactorily clear recollection of the night someone had fired a gun into the cobbled square. He didn’t, of course, remember me personally, but he was honored, he said, to be on first-name terms with my father.

“There were so many people coming and going on that night, and I was only beginning to know who was who. Someone left a set of golf clubs in my office and said they were Dennis Nagle’s but, of course, the poor man was dead and I didn’t know what to do with them, but I offered them to Mrs. Nagle and she said she thought they belonged to her husband’s friend, Mr. Wyvern, so I gave them to him.” He frowned. “It was so long ago. I’m afraid I’m not being much help.”

I left him and walked upstairs and from the little lounge over the main lobby looked down again onto the cobbled square where, on that first night, my father and I had by good luck not been shot.

Golf clubs...

Mervyn Teck, at the end of a busy morning surgery, told me where to find Leonard and Mrs. Kitchens, and on Saturday afternoon, without enthusiasm, I found their semi-detached substantial house on the outskirts of the town.

The house, its lack of imagination, and the disciplined front garden were all somehow typical of a heavy worthiness: no manic sign of an arsonist.

Mrs. Kitchens opened the front door at my ring, and after a moment’s hesitation for recognition, said, “My Leonard isn’t in, I’m afraid.”

She took me into a front sitting room where the air smelled as if it had been undisturbed for weeks, and talked with bitterness and freedom about “her Leonard’s” infatuation for Orinda.

“My Leonard would have done anything for that woman. He still would.”

“Er...” I said, “looking back to that fire at the party headquarters...”

“Leonard said,” Mrs. Kitchens interrupted, “that he didn’t do it.”

“But you think...?”

“The silly old fool did it,” she said. “I know he did. But I’m not going to say it to anyone except you. It was that Wyvern who put him up to it, you know. And it was all pointless, as your father is much better for the country than Orinda would have been. Everyone knows that now.”

“People say,” I said gently, “that Leonard shot a rifle at my father and then put the gun up into the gutter of The Sleeping Dragon.”

Clumsy, large, unhappy Mrs. Kitchens wouldn’t hear of it. “My Leonard doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other!”

“And does your Leonard change the oil in his own car?”

She looked utterly bewildered. “He can make plants grow, but he’s hopeless at anything else.”

I left poor Mrs. Kitchens to her unsatisfactory marriage, and slept again in Polly’s house.

For most of Sunday I sat alone in the party’s headquarters wishing and waiting for Basil Rudd to dislike his cousin enough to help me, but it wasn’t until nearly six in the evening that the telephone rang.

I picked up the receiver. A voice that was not Basil Rudd’s said, “Is it you that wants to know where to find Bobby Usher Rudd?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter a damn who I am. Because of his snooping my wife left me and I lost my kids. If you want to fix that bastard Usher Rudd, at this very moment he is in the offices of the Hoopwestern Gazette. ”

The informant at the other end disconnected abruptly.

Usher Rudd was on my doorstep.

I’d expected a longer chase, but the Hoopwestern Gazette’s offices and printing presses were simply down the road. I locked the party headquarters, jumped in my car, and sped through the Sunday traffic with the devil on my tail, anxious not to lose Usher Rudd now that I’d found him.

He was still at the Gazette, though, in mid-furious row with Samson Frazer. When I walked into the editor’s office it silenced them both with their hot words half-spoken.

They both knew who I was.

Bobby Usher Rudd looked literally struck dumb. Samson Frazer’s expression mingled pleasure, apprehension and relief.

He said, “Bobby swears the dope story’s true.”

“Bobby would swear his mother’s a chimpanzee.”

Usher Rudd’s quivering finger pointed at a copy of Thursday’s Gazette that lay on Samson’s desk, and found his voice, hoarse with rage.

“You know what you’ve done?” He was asking me, not Samson Frazer. “You’ve got me sacked from SHOUT! You frightened Rufus Crossmead and the proprietors so badly that they won’t risk my stuff anymore, and I’ve increased their bloody sales for them over the years... it’s bloody unfair. So now they say they’re the laughingstock of the whole industry, printing a false story about someone whose father might be the next prime minister. They say the story has back-fired. They said it will help George Juliard, not finish him. And how was I to know? It’s effing unfair.”

I said bitterly, “You could have seen Vivian Durridge didn’t know what he was saying.”

“People who don’t know what they’re saying are the ones you listen to.”

That confident statement, spoken in rage, popped a lightbulb in my understanding of Usher Rudd’s success.

I said, “That day in Quindle, when I first met you, you were already trying to dig up scandal about my father.”

“Natch.”

“He tries to dig up dirt about anyone,” Samson put in.

I shook my head. “Who,” I asked Usher Rudd, “told you to attack my father?”

“I don’t need to be told.”

Though I wasn’t exactly shouting, my voice was loud and my accusation plain. “As you’ve known all about cars for the whole of your life, did you stuff up my father’s Range Rover’s sump-plug drain with a candle?”

“What?”

“Did you? Who suggested you do it?”

“I’m not answering your bloody questions.”

The telephone rang on Samson Frazer’s desk.

He picked up the receiver, listened briefly, said “OK” and disconnected.

Usher Rudd, not a newspaperman for nothing, said suspiciously, “Did you give them the OK to roll the presses?”

“Yes.”

Usher Rudd’s rage increased to the point where his whole body shook. He shouted, “You’re printing without the change. I insist... I’ll kill you... stop the presses... if you don’t print what I told you to, I’ll kill you.”

Samson Frazer didn’t believe him, and nor, for all Rudd’s passion, did I. Kill was a word used easily, but seldom meant.

“What change?” I demanded.

Samson’s voice was high beyond normal. “He wants me to print that you faked Sir Vivian’s letter and forged his signature and that the story about sniffing glue is a hundred percent sterling, a hundred percent kosher, and you’ll do anything... anything to deny it.”

He picked a typewritten page off his desk and waved it.

“It’s Sunday, anyway,” he said. “There’s no one here but me and the print technicians. Tomorrow’s paper is locked onto the presses, ready to roll.”

“You can do the changes yourself.” Usher Rudd fairly danced with fury.

“I’m not going to,” Samson said.

“Then don’t print the paper.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Samson put the typewritten page into my hands.

I glanced down to read it and, as if all he’d been waiting for had been a flicker of inattention on my part, Bobby Rudd did one of his quickest getaways and was out through a door in a flash... not the door to the outside world, but the swinging door into the passage leading deeper into the building... the passage, it transpired, down to the presses.

“Stop him,” yelled Samson, aghast.

“It’s only paper,” I said, though making for the door.

“No... sabotage... he can destroy... catch him.” His agitation convinced me. I sprinted after Usher Rudd and ran down a passage with small, empty individual offices to both sides and out through another door at the end and across an expanse inhabited only by huge white rolls of paper — newsprint, the raw material of newspapers — and through a small print room beyond that with two or three men tending clattering machines turning out colored pages, and finally through a last swinging door into the long, high room containing the heart and muscle of the Hoopwestern Gazette, the monster printing presses that every day turned out twenty thousand twenty-four-page community enlightenments to most of Dorset.

The presses were humming quietly when I reached them. There were eight in a row with a tower in the center. From each end of four, the presses put first a banner in color — red, green, blue — on the sheets that would be the front and back pages, and then came the closely edited black-and-white pages set onto rollers in an age-old, but still perfectly functional, offset litho process.

I learned afterwards how the machines technically worked. On that fraught Sunday I saw only wide white paper looping from press to press and in and out of inked rollers as it collected the news page by page on its journey to the central tower, from where it went up in single sheets and came down folded into a publish-able newspaper, cut and counted into bundles of fifty.

There were two men tending the presses, adjusting the ink flow and slowly increasing the speed of the paper over the rollers and through the mechanism. Warning bells were ringing. Noise was building.

When I ran into the long thundering area, Usher Rudd was shouting at one of the men to turn everything off. The technician blinked at him and paid no attention.

His colleague activated another alarm bell and switched the presses to a full floor-trembling roar. Monday’s edition of the Hoopwestern Gazette, twenty thousand copies of it, flowed from press to press and up the tower and down at a speed that reduced each separate page to a blur.

Samson Frazer, catching up with me as I watched with awe, shouted in my ear, “Don’t go near the presses while they’re running. If you get your little finger caught in any of the rollers it would pull your whole arm in — it would wrench your arm right out of your body. We can’t stop the presses fast enough to save an arm. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I yelled.

Usher Rudd was screaming at the technician.

Samson Frazer’s warning was essential.

There was a space of three or four feet between each machine where one was wholly exposed to the revolving accelerating rollers. When the presses were at rest the printers — the technicians — walked with safety into these spaces to fit the master sheets onto the cylinders and to check the state of the inking rollers. When the presses, switched on, ran even at minimum inch-by-inch speed, the danger began. An arm could be torn out, not in one jerking terror but worse, inch by excruciatingly inevitable inch.

I asked later why no guarding gates kept people away. The machines were old, built before safety standards skyrocketed, Samson Frazer said, but they did indeed now have gates. It was illegal in Britain to operate without them. These gates pulled across like trellises and locked into place, but they were fiddly, and an extra job. People who worked around these presses knew and respected the danger, and sometimes didn’t bother with the gates. He didn’t approve, but he’d had no tragedies. There were computerized programs and printers to be had, but the old technology worked perfectly, as it had for a hundred years, and he couldn’t afford to scrap the old and to install the new, which often went wrong anyway, and one couldn’t guard against maniacs like Usher Rudd. No one had to insure against lunatics.

I could have sold him a policy about that, but on that particular Sunday evening what we needed for Usher Rudd was a straitjacket, not a premium.

He was still swearing at the technician, who looked over Rudd’s shoulder and saw Samson Frazer’s arrival as deliverance.

Stopping the presses, I learned later, meant hitting one particular button on one of the control panels to be found on the end of each press that regulated the overall speed of the printing. The buttons weren’t things the size of doorbells, but scarlet three-inch-diameter flat knobs on springs. Neither the technician nor Samson Frazer pushed the overall stop control, and neither Rudd himself nor I knew which of several scarlet buttons ruled the roost. The presses went on roaring and Bobby Usher Rudd completely lost control.

He knew the terrible danger of the presses. He’d worked for the Hoopwestern Gazette. He’d been in and out of newspapers all his adult life.

He grabbed the technician by his overalls and swung him towards unimaginable agony.

The technician, half in and half out of one of the lethal spaces, screamed.

Samson Frazer screamed at Usher Rudd.

The second technician sprinted for refuge in the smaller print room next door.

I, from instinct, leapt at Usher Rudd and yanked him backwards. He too started screaming. Still clutched by the overalls, the technician stumbled out of the fearsome gap, ingrained awareness keeping his hands close to his body: better to fall on the floor than try to keep his balance by touching the death-dealing machinery.

Usher Rudd let go of the overalls and rerouted his uncontrolled frenzy onto me. He was no longer primarily trying to stop the print run, but to avenge himself for the cataclysms he had brought on himself.

The glare in his eyes was madness. I saw the intention there of pushing me instead of the technician onto the rollers, and had we been alone he might have managed it. But Samson Frazer jumped to grab him while the technician, saved from mutilation, gave a horror-struck final shout as he made his terrified stumbling run for the door, and by unplanned chance barged into Usher Rudd on the way, unbalancing him.

Rudd threw Samson off him like an irrelevance, but it gave me time to get space between me and the nearest press, and although Rudd grasped and lurched in an effort to get me back again into the danger zone, I was fighting more or less for my life and it was amazing how much strength ultimate fear generated.

Samson Frazer, to his supreme credit — and maybe calculating that any death on his premises would ruin him — helped me struggle with the demented kicking and punching and clutching red-haired tornado: and it was Samson who delivered a blow to Rudd’s head with a bunched fist that half dazed his target and knocked him to the ground face downwards. I sat on his squirming back while Samson found some of the wide brown sticky tape used for parcels and, with my active help, circled one of Usher Rudd’s wrists, and then the other, and fastened his arms behind his back in makeshift handcuffs. Samson tethered the wildly kicking legs in the same way and we rolled Rudd onto his back and stood over him, panting.

Then, with each of us looping an arm under Rudd’s armpits, we dragged him into the comparative quiet of the secondary print room next door and propped him in a chair.

All of the technicians were in that room, wide-eyed and upset. Samson told them unemotionally to go back to work, there was a paper to be got out, and slowly, hesitantly, they obeyed him.

In his chair, Rudd began shouting, “It’s all his fault. Wyvern did it. Wyvern’s the one you want, not me.”

“I don’t believe it,” I contradicted, though I did.

Usher Rudd tried to convince me. “Wyvern wanted your father out of the way. He wanted Orinda in Parliament. He wanted to get her promoted, like Dennis. He would have done anything to stop your father being elected.”

“Like sabotaging his car?”

“I didn’t want to do it. I would write what he wanted. I trailed Paul Bethune for weeks to find his bimbo, to please Wyvern, so that people would vote for Orinda, but messing up a Range Rover, cutting the brake lines like Wyvern wanted, that was too much. I didn’t do it.”

“Yes, you did,” I told him conclusively.

“No, I didn’t.”

“What did you do, then?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Your cousin, Basil, knows what you did.”

Usher Rudd cursed Basil with words I’d hardly ever heard even on a racecourse, and somewhere in the tirade came a description of how he’d wriggled under the Range Rover in the black tracksuit he’d worn to the meeting after the dinner in The Sleeping Dragon. The brilliant performance my father had given that evening had convinced Wyvern that he wouldn’t get rid of my father without at least injuring him badly. Wyvern had been furious with Usher Rudd that his sabotage had been so useless.

Usher Rudd’s rage slowly ran down and he began first to whine and then deny that he had ever said what Samson and I had both just heard.

Samson phoned the police. Joe Duke was not on duty, but Samson knew all the force individually and put down the receiver, reporting a promise of immediate action.

Usher Rudd shouted, “I want a lawyer.”

He got his lawyer, passed a night in the cells and on Monday morning collected a slap on the wrist from a busy magistrate (for causing a disturbance indoors at the Hoopwestern Gazette) who had no real conception of the speed and noise and danger involved.

No actual damage had been done. The newspaper had appeared as usual. Usher Rudd, meek and respectful, walked out free.

I talked to Joe Duke.

I said, “It was Usher Rudd who stuffed wax in the sump drain of the Range Rover, and Leonard Kitchens who started the fire. Both of them were put up to it by Alderney Wyvern.”

Joe Duke slowly nodded. “But they didn’t stop your father, did they? And as for you” — he gave a half smile — “I’ll never forget you that night of the fire, sitting there half-naked on the cobbles with that red blanket over your shoulders and no sign of pain, though you’d burns on your hands and feet and you’d smashed down into the square. Don’t you ever feel pain?”

“Of course, but there was so much happening...”

“And you’re used to falling off horses?”

“Horses fall... Anyway, I suppose so. I’ve hit the ground quite a lot.”

The smile broadened. “Then why do it?”

“Speed,” I told him. “Nothing like it.” I paused. “If you want something badly enough, you can risk your life for it and consider it normal behavior.”

He pondered. “If you want Orinda Nagle enough to be an MP, you’ll risk...”

“Almost anything. I think it was Wyvern who shot at my father.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. He could have carried a rifle in his golf bag, with one of those covers on it that they use for clubs.”

“Yes.”

“And he’d had to have had murder in his mind to do that.”

“Uh huh. And when he heard and saw my father’s success at that meeting, he judged he needed to get rid of him at once.”

“He was crazy.”

“He still is.”

Joe Duke knew my father was engaged in a serious power struggle but was dismayed when I explained about Hudson Hurst.

“You don’t think,” Joe said, horrified, “that Wyvern would try again to kill your father?”

“Wyvern’s stakes are higher now, and my father still stands in his way. If my father is chosen to lead his party, I’m sure he’ll be in appalling danger. It frightens me badly, to be honest.”

Joe said thoughtfully, “You know what?”

“What?”

“Just in case we’re doing Wyvern a great injustice, thinking it was he that shot at you... I mean, so far we’ve only got theory to go on, really. Why don’t you and I do an unofficial walk through... a reconstruction? I’ll use a walking stick for a gun. I’ll transport it in a golf bag. And I’ll carry it up into the little lounge, and aim it at you while you’re crossing the square, like you did that night, and I’ll see how difficult it will be to put the walking stick up in the gutter. What do you think?”

“Can’t do any harm.”

“We might come across something we haven’t thought of. It often works that way with reconstructions.”

“OK.”

“We’ll have to do it at night,” Joe said.

“It was after midnight.”

“After midnight, then. I’ll be off duty. It will be just the two of us.”

I agreed that we would meet that evening in The Sleeping Dragon, and that Joe would tell the manager what we were doing.

I went to see Orinda, who had finally returned from her weekend and answered the telephone.

Five years had been kind to her. She looked as striking as ever, the green eyes black-lashed, the greasepaint makeup smooth and blended. She was less brittle, less stressed, more fulfilled.

She called me darling with only two or three a’s. “Daaarling.”

“Orinda.” I hugged her.

“How you’ve grown,” she exclaimed. “I mean, not just upwards, but older.”

She had made us a salad lunch with Diet Coke and coffee after.

She knew about the power struggle going on in the party and mentioned that every time there was this sort of ballot, the politicians changed the rules.

“They invent whatever procedure they think will give a result that everyone thinks is fair, even if not everyone is happy with the eventual winner. I don’t think they’ve ever before done a vote like today’s. It’s now all up to the party’s MPs, the members of Parliament.”

I had forgotten how much Orinda knew about governments.

“I suppose Dennis told you how it all works.”

“No, it was Alderney Wyvern.” She frowned. “I never want to see that man again.”

I said neutrally, “Did you know that Wyvern now controls Hudson Hurst, like he used to control you and Dennis? Do you realize that if Hurst wins the ballot and becomes prime minister, it will be Alderney Wyvern who effectively governs this country?”

Orinda looked horrified but shook her head. “Your father’s more popular in the country.”

“Don’t forget schadenfreude.”

Orinda laughed. “You mean the malicious enjoyment of someone else’s misfortune?”

I nodded. “Half the Cabinet would like to see my father come a cropper after his spectacular way of fighting the fish war.”

“It will be marvelous for this constituency if he wins.” She smiled widely. “I never thought I would say that, but it’s true.”

I told Orinda about the reconstruction that Joe Duke and I had planned.

I asked, “Do you remember much about that evening?”

“Of course, I do. I was furious at not being chosen as candidate.”

“How much were you with Alderney Wyvern after the political meeting?”

“I wasn’t. I was angry and miserable and drove straight home.”

“Do you know if Alderney Wyvern had his golf clubs with him at the meeting in the hall?”

“What an extraordinary question! He always used to have them in the back of the car.”

Orinda might have hated my father that night, but not enough to do him harm. She had no wickedness in her nature.

I spent a comfortable hour or two longer with her and then drove to Polly’s house to wait for my father to telephone from London with the result of the ballot.

He gave me news from his car. “It was all indecisive,” he reported. “It was basically a three-way split. All that’s certain is that we have to vote again tomorrow.”

“Do explain,” I begged him.

He described a day that had been full of doubt and maneuvering, but it seemed that what had finally happened was that neither my father nor Hudson Hurst had received enough votes to secure victory outright. Jill Vinicheck, the third candidate, had received the fewest votes and had been eliminated. The next ballot would be a straight fight between Hurst and Juliard, and no one was predicting who would win.

My father sounded tired. He said he and Polly were on their way to join me at the house for a quiet night. He had done all he could behind the scenes to sway the vote his way: now it was up to his colleagues to choose whom they wanted.

I explained about Joe Duke and the reconstruction and, after a brief discussion with Polly by his side, he said they would meet me in The Sleeping Dragon and we would eat together.

Any thought that we might have had about a peaceful evening disappeared between the soup and the apple pie.

While neither Joe Duke nor I had made any particular secret about our plan for the reconstruction, we had not expected the manager of the hotel to broadcast the scenario. He appeared to have told the whole town. The hotel was buzzing, as it had on the night of the dinner, and people came up to my father in droves to shake his hand and wish him well.

Samson Frazer came from the Hoopwestern Gazette with his cameraman and gave my horrified father extra details of how Usher Rudd had spent his Sunday.

Usher Rudd himself came — free, unrepentant, bitter-eyed and steaming with malice, glaring at my father and talking into a mobile phone.

When Joe Duke came, he looked at first aghast at the bustle and movement, but my father resignedly told him, as he joined us for coffee, that the hotel had been packed on the night we were reproducing, and the present crowd would make everything seem more real.

Moreover, my father said he would walk with me across the square as he had done before, and although I didn’t like the idea, Joe Duke nodded enthusiastically.

Why wait for midnight? people asked. Everyone was ready now, and now was eleven-thirty.

Because, Joe explained, half of the streetlights in the square switched off automatically at twelve o’clock, and if the reconstruction was to mean anything, the conditions had to be as near as possible to what they had been before.

Joe Duke brought in a bag of golf clubs from his car and showed everyone the long walking stick with the tartan cover that disguised it.

The manager frowned in puzzlement, and I wanted to ask him if he had remembered something significant, but Joe and the crowd swept all before them, anxious to get started. I would ask him later, I thought.

Midnight came. Half the lights in the square faded to darkness. All that were left glowing threw shadows on the cobbles. Over at the far side of the square a few lights showed dimly in the party headquarters and the charity shop.

When my father and I walked out into the square, the only lights blazing brightly were those of The Sleeping Dragon at our back.

It was planned that my father and I would walk halfway across the square and wait while Joe aimed his walking stick out of the window and yelled, “BANG,” and then reached or climbed up to put the stick in the gutter. People would hurry from The Sleeping Dragon towards my father, as they had done before.

It all felt alarmingly real to me, but everyone was smiling.

Joe, surrounded by encouraging crowds, turned to go towards the staircase while I and my father walked out across the cobbles. I stopped after a while to look back at the hotel but my father walked on, calling over his shoulder, “Come on, Ben, we haven’t reached the spot yet.”

I looked up at the hotel. Joe’s walking stick was pointing out of one of the windows, half hidden by the seemingly perpetual geraniums.

Three thoughts jammed into my consciousness simultaneously.

First, Joe hadn’t had time to get up the stairs and walk along to the lounge and hide behind the curtain.

Second, the stick was pointing out of the wrong window.

Third, there was a gleam on the stick and a hole, a black round hole in the end of it.

It wasn’t a stick. It was a gun.

My father was ten yards ahead of me across the square. I sprinted as I had for Orinda and for the technician in the presses, without pause, without thought, with raw intuition, and I jumped in a flying football tackle to knock my father down.

The bang was real enough. The bullet was real enough, but the happy crowd which poured out of the hotel still thought it was a game.

The bullet hit me while I was still in the air, jumping and colliding with my father, and it would have gone into his back if I hadn’t been there.

It entered high on my right thigh and traveled down inside my leg to the knee, the kinetic energy bursting apart all muscles and soft tissue in its path.

The force of it whirled me around so that when I crashed to the cobbles I was facing The Sleeping Dragon, half-lying, propped on my left elbow, shuddering throughout all my body with my brain disoriented and protesting with universal outrage.

There was enough pain everywhere to satisfy Joe Duke. My eyes watered with it and my skin sweated. I’d been injured now and then in racing falls, and I’d felt shivery and sore the night of the fire, but nothing had even begun to warn me that there was an unimaginable dimension far beyond cuts and breaks.

It didn’t really help that I knew the physics of high-velocity bullets and the damage they could do. I’d fired hundreds of them at targets. I shot in a world where all one hit was paper. I didn’t know that I’d ever be able to fire a rifle again.

My father was on his knees beside me, his face screwed up with anxiety. My right trouser leg was dark and saturated with blood. The crowd from The Sleeping Dragon were running now, with Polly at their head. I could hear her agonized voice: “George... oh, George.”

It was all right, I thought. It wasn’t George.

My father held my hand.

Besides the encompassing pain, I felt remarkably ill.

I wanted to lie down, to stand up, to move somehow, and I couldn’t. I wanted someone to come along and shoot me again, but in the head; to give me oblivion, like they did with horses.

Time passed. Nothing got better.

Although ordinary traffic was banned from the square, police cars, ambulances and fire engines weren’t. Two police cars and one ambulance arrived, roof lights flashing. People from the police cars went into the hotel. Someone from the ambulance came and, with large scissors, cut open my right trouser leg.

I went on wishing for oblivion.

My leg, exposed to the dim light in the square, looked literally a bloody mess. I gathered that the bullet hadn’t severed the femoral artery, because if it had I would have already bled to death. There was, however, somewhere in my mangled muscles, a hard white finger-shaped length of what I understood with shock to be bone. Femur. Uncovered, but also unbroken.

The man from the ambulance hid the devastation with a large padded dressing and went back to the ambulance. He’d gone to summon a doctor, my father said: there were all sorts of rules and regulations about gunshot wounds.

It didn’t cross my mind that I might lose my leg and, in fact, I didn’t. What I lost, once everything was stitched and repaired, was the strength to ride half-ton steeplechasers over the black birch. What I lost was speed.

People came out of the hotel and got into the police cars. One of them was Alderney Wyvern, in handcuffs.

When the cars had driven away, Joe Duke walked across the square and sat on his heels to talk to my father and me.

He said to me, “Can you take in what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

Joe said, “When I went up the stairs to position the walking stick, the hotel manager hurried up after me and caught me before I reached the little lounge. He said he didn’t know if it was just a coincidence, but not long before, in fact at about eleven o’clock, a man had booked in as a guest at the hotel and he too was carrying a bag of golf clubs. And what was slightly odd about him, the manager said, was that he was wearing gloves.”

Joe stood up to stretch his legs for a moment, and then sat back on his heels. “Are you taking in what I’m saying?” he said.

“Yes,” I groggily replied.

“We heard that cracking bang of the gun going off, and the manager used his passkey to open a bedroom door, and inside we found Alderney Wyvern coming towards the door carrying his bag of golf clubs, but when the manager snatched it from him and emptied them out onto the floor, all that was in it was golf clubs.”

Joe went on, “He hadn’t had time to put the rifle up in the gutter, but it was there with him, all right. He’d put the gun butt in the hanging basket with the geraniums, with the barrel pointing skywards, among the chains hanging the basket. I then used the room telephone to bring my colleagues from the police station. While we waited for them to arrive I asked, out of curiosity, how Wyvern had known about the reconstruction. How had he known that he would have a chance to shoot George Juliard?”

Joe smiled lopsidedly. “Wyvern had said Usher Rudd had phoned him and told him.” He stood up again.

My father said, “How did Wyvern think he would get away with it?”

Joe shrugged. “He did last time. In the commotion, he simply walked away. If it hadn’t been for the hotel manager, he quite likely would have done it again. But it was odd. He seemed just plain tired. There was no fight left in him. He could see he hadn’t managed to finish either of you, and he simply gave up. We had no trouble arresting him.”

“And what are you charging him with?” my father asked.

“Attempted murder,” Joe said.

I faintly smiled. “A 10-lb. penalty.”

“Ten years,” Joe said.

The next prime minister held my hand.

I gripped his tight, as if he would give me comfort and security when I needed them badly.

I gripped his hand as if I’d been a little boy.