Blood Sport

Chapter Two

They tried pretty hard in their subtle way, but it seemed ridiculous to me.

‘You know about horses,’ Keeble said. ‘Your father trained them for racing.’

‘There’s the police,’ I pointed out. ‘Also the insurance company. Also every man, woman, and child with an eye for a horse in the state of Kentucky. And I presume there’s a reward?’

Teller nodded.

‘So why me?’

‘No one found the other two.’

‘There’s a lot of land in America,’ I said. ‘They’re both probably free on a prairie somewhere having a high old time siring herds of wild horses.’

Teller said grudgingly, ‘The first one was found dead in a gully two years after he disappeared.’

‘That’s it, then.’

‘But the second one... I bought that one too. I had a one tenth share. This is second time around for me.’

I stared at him. ‘Were any of the circumstances the same?’

Reluctantly he shook his head. ‘No... except that they both got free. Allyx was never found. That’s why I want something special done about Chrysalis.’

I was silent.

Keeble stirred. ‘You’ve got nothing else to do, Gene. Why not take your holiday in the States? What will you do with yourself, if you stay in Putney?’

His eyes had stopped blinking, as they always did when he was intent. It was the surest guide I had to the complex calculations which sometimes lay beneath his most casual remarks. He couldn’t have guessed, I thought in alarm. He was a manipulator but not clairvoyant. I shrugged and answered him on the surface.

‘Walk round Kew Gardens and smell the orchids.’

‘They have no scent,’ said Teller, pointing out the obvious.

‘He knows that.’ Keeble nodded, still unblinking. ‘Any fruitless way of passing the time, is what he meant.’

‘I guess you two operate on your own private wavelength,’ Teller said with a sigh. ‘But I’d like you to come back with me, Gene, and at least take a look. What’s the harm in that?’

‘And what’s the good in it? It’s not my sort of job.’ I looked away, down into the green water. ‘And... I’m tired.’

They hadn’t a quick answer to that. I thought it would have been simple if all that was the matter with me was the straightforward tiredness of overwork, not the deadly fatigue of a struggle I wasn’t sure I could win. Chasing some crazy colt over a thousand square miles didn’t look like any sort of a cure.

Joan came out of the cabin into their defeated silence with a bowl of salad and a string of bright fussing chatter. A folding table was erected and the dishes put on to it, and we sat around in the sun eating cold chicken and hot french bread. There was a pleasant pink wine to drink and strawberries and cream afterwards, and Peter, still in wet bathing trunks despite orders from his mother, took mouthfuls and photographs by turn. Lynnie, sitting beside me, told Dave Teller an amusing story about the finishing school she attended, her warm bare arm brushing unselfconsciously against mine. I should have enjoyed that placid Sunday picnic on the river. I tried to. I smiled and answered when I was spoken to and concentrated carefully on the taste and texture of what I was eating, and all that happened was that the fat black slug of depression flexed its muscles and swelled another notch.

At four o’clock, after dishwashing and dozing, we started back towards Henley. My refusal to go to America hadn’t basically disturbed Teller or Keeble an ounce. I concluded that whatever had prompted the suggestion it wasn’t a burning conviction that I and only I could find the missing horse. I put the whole thing out of my mind. It wasn’t hard.

There was a punt in difficulties at the approach to Harbour Lock. Teller, again standing up on the bow with rope at the ready, shouted back to Keeble and pointed ahead. We looked, all of us, following his finger.

Where the river divided, going slowly into the left fork round the bend to the lock and fast on the right straight to the weir, a sturdy post in mid-stream bore a large notice, a single word: DANGER.

A girl, lying flat half in and half out of the punt with her arms round the post, was trying to tie up to it by passing a rope from one hand to the other, and making a poor job of it. On the stern, watching anxiously, punt pole in hand, stood a young man in a red-and-yellow shirt. He waved his arms when he saw us coming, and as Keeble throttled back and drifted near, he shouted across the water.

‘Could you help us, sir?’

Since the punt was full in the weir stream with only the girl’s slender arms keeping it from floating straight to destruction, he seemed remarkably cool. Keeble cursed about ignorant nitwits and edged nearer with his engine in slow reverse. The Flying Linnet, unlike the punt, was too big to go through this particular weir, a long row of separately openable gates; but the summer current was quite strong enough to crash her nastily against the thick concrete supports and pin her there for someone else humiliatingly to rescue.

Keeble shouted to the girl that we would tow them away, and to hand the mooring rope to me or Lynnie, whichever she could reach, as soon as we were nearer. The girl nodded, her arms still stretched forward round the big post, her long fair hair nearly brushing the water, her body quivering with the strain.

‘Hold on,’ Lynnie shouted urgently. ‘Oh do hold on. Just a little longer, that’s all.’ She leaned over the side as if trying to shorten the few yards of water which still lay between, her worry and fright growing as we drew nearer. With the engine doing little more than tick over, the noise of the water on the far side of the weir began to fill our ears with its threat, but Keeble at any rate remained calm and sure of himself, an easy master of his boat and the situation. With six feet still to go the girl took one arm off the post and held out the rope towards Lynnie’s groping hand. Then, disastrously she dropped it. Crying out, beating in big splashes on the water, she struggled to get her arm back round the post. Lynnie yelled to her to get hold of the rope again, it was fastened to the punt under her chest, to get hold of it again and hand it over. But the girl was now far too frightened either to listen or to let go of the post again, and the panic was rising to screams in her voice.

Out of the side of my vision I saw the young man start forward to help her, apparently at last realizing that their position was serious. The punt pole swung awkwardly in his hands, curved through the air in a clumsy arc, and hit Dave Teller on the head. With buckling knees the American fell forward off the bows and straight into the water.

I was up on the cabin roof, out of my shoes and into the river after him almost before any of the others realized what had happened. I heard Keeble’s despairing voice shouting ‘Gene’ in the second before I went under, but I was thinking simply that speed was the only chance of finding Teller, since anything that sank in a river the size of the Thames was instantly out of sight. Algae made the water opaque.

Diving in as near to where he had gone as I could judge, I kicked downwards, arms wide. I was going faster than Teller, I had to be. I had a strong impression that the punt pole had knocked him out, that he was on a slow one-way trip to the bottom.

About eight feet down my fingers hooked almost immediately into cloth. Even with my eyes open I could see nothing and with my right hand I felt for his face while I tried to kick us both to the surface. I found his face, clamped his nose between my fingers and the heel of my hand on his mouth, and turned him so that I held his head against my chest. He didn’t struggle; couldn’t feel.

From that point on the rescue operation failed to go as per scheduled. I couldn’t get back to the surface. The current underneath was much stronger, very cold, sweeping us downwards, clinging round our bodies with irresistible force. I thought; we’ll hit the weir and be pinned there down deep, and that will be that. For a treacherous instant I didn’t even care. It would solve all my problems. It was what I wanted. But not really with another life in my arms, for which I was literally the only hope.

My chest began hurting with the lack of air. When we hit the weir, I thought, I would climb my way up it. Its face might not be slippery smooth. It had to be possible...

There was a sudden tug as if some fisherman had us hooked. I felt us change direction slightly and then a tug again, stronger and continuing and stronger still. No miraculous rescue. It was the water had us, gripping tighter, sucking us fast, inexorably, into the weir. The sheer overwhelming weight and power of it made nonsense of human strength, reduced my efforts to the fluttering of a moth in a whirlwind. The seizing speed suddenly accelerated further still, and we hit. Or rather, Teller hit, with a jar which nearly wrenched him away from me. We spun in the current and my shoulder crashed into concrete and we spun again and crashed, and I couldn’t get hold of any surface with my free hand. The tumbling and crashing went on, and the pain in my chest went deeper, and I knew I wasn’t going to be climbing up any weir, I could only find it when it hit me, and when I reached for it it hit me somewhere else.

The crashing stopped, but the tumbling went on. My ears were roaring to bursting point. There was a sword embedded in my chest. The searing temptation came back more strongly just to open my mouth and be finished with it. But by my own peculiar rules I couldn’t do that, not with someone else involved, not when what I was doing was in a way what I’d been trained for. Some other time, I thought lightheadedly, some other time I’d drown myself. This time I’ll just wait until my brain packs up from lack of oxygen, which won’t be long now, and if I haven’t any choice in the matter, then I haven’t any guilt either.

The tumbling suddenly died away and the clutching current relaxed and loosened and finally unlocked itself. I was only seconds this side of blackout and at first it didn’t register: then I gave a feeble kick with legs half entwined round Teller and we shot upward as if on springs. My head broke the surface into the sun and air went down into the cramp of my lungs like silver fire.

The weir, the killing weir, was fifty yards away. Fifty yards upstream. We had come right through it under the water.

I took my freezing, stiffened fingers off Teller’s face, and held his head up to mine, and blew into his flaccid mouth. The current, gentle again and comparatively warm, carried us slowly along, frothy bubbles bursting with little winks against our necks. I trod water with my legs, and held Teller up, and went on pushing into him all my used-up breath. He showed no response. It would be exceedingly inconsiderate of him, I thought resignedly, if he had died right at the beginning and I had gone to all that trouble for nothing.

There were shouts from the banks suddenly and people pointing, and someone came after us in a dinghy with an outboard motor. It puttered noisily by my ear and hands stretched over the side to grasp.

I shook my head. ‘A rope,’ I said, and breathed into Teller. ‘Give me a rope. And pull slowly.’

One of the two men argued, but the other did as I asked. I wound the rope round my arm twice and held it, and when I nodded they let the boat drift away until we were a safe distance from its propeller and slowly began to pull us towards the bank. Teller got ten more of my ex-breaths on the way. They didn’t seem to be doing him a bit of good.

The dinghy towed us out of the weir stream side of the river and landed on the same side as the lock. People appeared in a cluster to help, and there was little doubt it was needed, but even so I was loth to part with Teller until one large calm man lay on his stomach on the grass and stretched his arms down under the American’s armpits.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll go straight on with the breathing.’

I nodded, took my mouth away from Teller’s and transferred his weight into the stranger’s arms. He began to pull him out of the water as fast as he could. I put a steadying hand on Teller’s chest and felt it heave suddenly under the clinging blue shirt. I hadn’t enough breath left myself to tell the man who was lifting him, and while I was still trying to, Teller, half out, gave a choking cough and opened his eyes. There was some water in his lungs, racking him. The stranger pulled him even more quickly out on to the grass, and as his ankles bumped over the edge his returning consciousness flooded into a stark sort of awareness which had nothing to do with a release from drowning. Somewhere between a cough and a groan he said ‘Jesus,’ and again went completely limp.

Another couple of strong wrists hauled me up on to the bank in his wake, and I knelt there beside him feeling the reassuringly small swelling on the side of his head but anxiously listening to the dragging breath bubbling in his throat.

‘Roll him over,’ I said. ‘Carefully... just so his tongue isn’t choking him.’

We put him on his side and his breathing eased immediately, but I wouldn’t let them pick him up and carry him up to the lock. Almost any injury was bound to be made worse by moving, and he’d been moved too much already. The calm man agreed and went briskly off to fetch a doctor.

The lock-keeper arrived along the towpath, followed at a rush by Keeble and all his family. Their faces were all strained with shock, and Lynnie had been crying.

‘Thank God,’ Keeble said, crouching beside me. ‘You’re both all right.’ His voice held almost more incredulity than relief.

I shook my head. ‘He’s hurt, somewhere.’

‘Badly?’

‘Don’t know... He crashed into the weir.’

‘We didn’t see you go over. We were watching...’

‘They must have gone under,’ said the lock-keeper. ‘Through one of the gates. Those gates wind upwards, same as a sash window. We’ve got two of them a couple of feet open at the bottom today, with the river a bit full after all that rain.’

I nodded. ‘Under.’

Dave Teller choked and woke up again, coughing uncontrollably through the puddle in his lungs, every cough jerking him visibly into agony. From his fluttering gesture it was clear where the trouble lay.

‘His leg,’ Keeble said. ‘He’s not bleeding... could he have broken it?’

The jar when he had hit the weir had been enough. I said so. ‘We can’t do anything for him,’ said Keeble, watching him helplessly.

The crowd around us waited, murmuring in sympathy but enjoying the disaster, listening to Teller coughing, watching him clutch handfuls of grass in rigid fingers. Not a scrap of use begging them to go away.

‘What happened to the punt?’ I asked Keeble.

‘We towed it ashore. Lynnie got hold of the rope. Those kids were terribly shocked.’ He looked round for them vaguely, but they weren’t in the crowd. ‘I suppose they’ve stayed back at the lock. The girl was nearly hysterical when you and Dave didn’t come up.’ A remembering bleakness came into his face. ‘We towed them into the lock cut and moored there. Then we ran along to the lock to get the lock-keeper... and he was already down here.’ He looked up across the river to the pretty weir. ‘How long were you under the water?’

‘A couple of centuries.’

‘Seriously.’

‘Can’t tell. Maybe three minutes.’

‘Long enough.’

‘Mm.’

He looked me over objectively, boss to employee. One shoulder of my green jersey shirt was ripped in a jagged tear.

‘Bruised,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘The weir,’ I agreed, ‘has knobs on.’

‘It’s like a flight of steps under there,’ said the lock-keeper solemnly. ‘Going down from the top level to this one, you see. The current would have rolled you right down those steps, I reckon. In fact, it’s a bleeding miracle you ever came up, if you ask me. There’s some every year fall in this river and never get seen again. Current takes them along the bottom all the way to the sea.’

‘Charming,’ Keeble said under his breath.

Dave Teller stopped coughing, rolled slightly on to his back, and put his wrist to his mouth. His strong beaky nose stuck uncompromisingly up to the sky, and the wetness on his face wasn’t from the Thames. After a while he moved his hand and asked Keeble what had happened. Keeble briefly explained, and the screwed-up eyes slid round to me.

‘Lucky you were with us,’ he said weakly, the smile in his voice making no progress on his face. He moved his hand apprehensively behind his ear, and winced when it reached the bump. ‘I don’t remember a thing.’

‘Do you remember asking me to look for your horse?’

He nodded a fraction, slowly. ‘Yuh. You said no.’

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll go.’

In the cabin of the Flying Linnet Keeble watched me slowly strip off my sodden clothes. I had never, as far as I remembered, felt so weak. I’d left half my muscles under the weir. Buttons would no longer come out of their holes.

‘You heard what the man said,’ Keeble remarked. ‘It was lucky you were with us.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Make a note of it,’ Keeble said. ‘Stick around. You never know when you’ll be needed.’

‘Sure,’ I said, refusing to acknowledge that I understood what he was talking about.

He wouldn’t be deterred. ‘You’re like Dave’s horse. Irreplaceable.’

My lips twitched. That was the crunch, all right. His job would be a little harder if he lost his head cook and bottle-washer. Personal regard didn’t come into it.

I struggled out of my jersey. He handed me a towel, glancing non-committally at the marks of this and previous campaigns.

‘I’m serious, Gene.’

‘Yeah,’ I sighed. ‘Well... I’m still here.’

It was too much of an admission, but at least it seemed to reassure him enough to change the subject.

‘Why are you going to the States?’

‘Maybe I owe it to him.’

‘Who? Dave?’

I nodded.

‘I don’t follow,’ he said, frowning. ‘Surely he owes you? If anyone owes anything.’

‘No. If I’d been quicker, he wouldn’t have gone in, wouldn’t now have a smashed thigh. Too much whisky and wine and sleeping in the sun. I was much too slow. Abysmally, shamefully slow.’

He made a gesture of impatience. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Gene. No speed on earth could have prevented an accident like that.’

I put the towel round my neck and started to take off my trousers.

‘That accident’, I said briefly, ‘was attempted murder.’

He gazed at me, eyes blinking slowly behind the mild spectacles. Then he turned, opened the cabin door, and stepped up into the cockpit. I heard him shouting to Peter.

‘Get out of that punt at once, there’s a good chap. And don’t let anyone else get in it. It’s important.’

‘Not even Lynnie?’

‘Not even Lynnie.’

‘I don’t want to,’ said Lynnie’s voice in a wail from the cockpit. ‘I never want to go in a punt again.’

She wasn’t much her father’s daughter. His mind was as tough as old boots. The chubby body which contained it came back into the cabin and shut the door.

‘Convince me,’ he said.

‘The boy and girl have scarpered.’

He raised his eyebrows and protested. ‘They were frightened.’

‘They didn’t stop to answer questions. They may quite possibly think Dave and I are dead, because they didn’t even wait to make sure. I should say they never even intended to appear at any inquest.’

He was silent, thinking about it. The boy and girl had gone from the lock when we had eventually returned to it: gone unnoticed, leaving the punt behind. No one had given them a thought until after the doctor had splinted Teller’s leg and seen him carried on a stretcher a hundred yards to an ambulance. When the doctor asked how the accident happened, the causes of it weren’t around.

‘We don’t know,’ Keeble said. ‘They may very likely have come down the towpath and seen you were all right, and they might have dozens of personal reasons for not wanting to stay.’

I finished kicking my legs out of the clammy cotton trousers and peeled off my socks.

‘The boy stood on the stern too long. He should have been helping with the rope.’

Keeble frowned. ‘Certainly he seemed unconcerned, but I don’t think he realized quite what a jam they were in. Not like the girl did.’

‘The first time he moved, he hit Dave straight on the head.’

‘Punt poles are clumsy if you aren’t careful... and he couldn’t have counted on Dave standing in so vulnerable a spot.’

‘He’d been standing there most of the way, seeing to the bow rope.’

‘The boy and girl couldn’t know that.’

‘He was certainly standing there when we approached the punt.’

‘And,’ Keeble said in a demolishing voice, ‘no one would deliberately put themselves into so much danger just to bait a trap.’

I dried my legs and wondered what to do about my underpants.

Keeble sighed down his nose and fluttered his fingers. ‘No one except you.’

He reached into a locker and produced a bundle of clothes.

‘Emergency falling-in kit,’ he explained, giving them to me. ‘I don’t suppose anything will fit.’

As there was a mixture of his own cast-offs, which were too wide, and Lynnie’s, which were too narrow, he was right. Everything, besides, was too short.

‘In addition,’ he went on, ‘how did the boy and girl know we were on the river at all and would be coming down through Harbour Lock? How long did you expect them to wait there clinging to the post? How did they know exactly which boat to hail, and how did they avoid being rescued by any other boat?’

‘The best accidents always look as if they couldn’t possibly be anything else.’

‘I grant you that,’ he said, nodding. ‘I just think that this one literally couldn’t be set up.’

‘Yes, it could. With a safe getout, in that if it didn’t work according to plan, if for instance Peter had been on the bows instead of Dave, they had no need to go into the act of yelling for help, because of course they wanted to make sure it was us before they started.’

‘They were in danger,’ Keeble protested.

‘Maybe. I’d like to take a closer look at that post.’

‘And there might have been other boats around, helping. Or watching.’

‘If Dave never came within range of the punt pole they lost nothing but an opportunity. If other boats had been watching there would simply have been more people to cry accident. The girl was screaming and splashing and dramatically dropping her rope when the boy hit Dave. We were all watching her, not him. Any sized audience would have been doing the same.’

‘And how could the boy and girl have known where Dave would be this Sunday, in the first place? And why on God’s earth should anyone want to kill him?’

I stepped into some aged grey trousers of Keeble’s and found them a foot too generous round the waist. My boss wordlessly held out a short striped elastic schoolboy belt, which took care of the problem by gripping like a tourniquet.

‘It was a simple accident, Gene. It had to be.’

The trousers ended four inches above my ankles, and the socks I slowly fumbled my way into made no effort to bridge the gap.

‘Gene!’ said Keeble, exasperated.

I sighed. ‘You’ll agree I’m a sort of specialist in arranging accidents?’

‘Not usually fatal ones,’ he protested.

‘Not often.’ And no more, if I could wriggle out of it. ‘Just a general stage managing of events, so the victim believes that what has happened to him is the merest mischance.’

Keeble smiled. ‘You’ve sprung more hares that way...’

‘So,’ I said reasonably, ‘I’m apt to spot a rig-up when I see one.’

The smile half faded and changed into speculation.

‘And no,’ I said, ‘I was not concussed in the recent boating party and I haven’t got water on the brain.’

‘Keep your telepathy to yourself,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I just think you are mistaken.’

‘OK, then I’ll spend my holiday in Putney.’

He said ‘No,’ so vehemently, so explosively, that there was no subtlety left in the situation. From his naked alarm I saw unmistakably how much he understood of my depressed mental state and how convinced he was that I wouldn’t survive three weeks of my own company. Shocked, I realized that his relief when I answered his telephone call had not been at finding me at home, but at finding me alive. He had dug me out on to the river to keep an eye on me and was prepared to send me off on any old wild goose chase so long as it kept me occupied. Then maybe, I supposed, he thought I would snap out of it.

‘The blues’, I said gently, ‘have been with me for a long time.’

‘Not like this.’

I had no answer.

After a pause he said persuasively, ‘Three world class stallions disappearing... isn’t that also the sort of accident you don’t believe in?’

‘Yes, it is. Especially when someone tries to get rid of the man who bought two of them.’

He opened his mouth and shut it again. I almost smiled.

‘It was a craftsman’s accident,’ I said. ‘It could hardly have been done better. All they didn’t bargain for was interference from someone like me.’

He still didn’t believe it, but as he was now happy that I should, since it meant that I would go to the States, he raised no more objections. With a shrug and a rueful smile he tossed me a darned brown sweater, which hung round me like a tent; and I picked up my own wet clothes and followed him out into the sunshine.

Peter and Lynnie both giggled at my baggy appearance, the nervous shock still sharp in their voices, especially Lynnie’s. I grinned at her and ruffled her hair, and made as if to kick Peter overboard, and some of the tension loosened in their eyes. In another half hour they would have reached the compulsive talking stage and an hour after that they would be back to normal. Nice, ordinary kids, with nice, ordinary reactions.

I climbed wearily up on to the cabin roof and spread out my clothes to dry. My shoes were still there where I had stepped out of them, and absentmindedly I put them on. Then, standing up, I looked across to the weir, and back to the hefty post with its notice; DANGER, and at the innocent empty punt tied up behind the Flying Linnet: and I found myself thinking about the legend of the Sirens, the sea nymphs who sat on a rock near a whirlpool and with their pretty voices drew passing sailors towards them, to lure them to their death.