Break In

Nineteen

‘Neatly done,’ Pollgate said to Lord Vaughnley.

‘It worked out well,’ he replied, his big head nodding.

He still stood four-square in front of the door. Erskine stood similarly, with folded arms, in front of the other.

There were chairs and tables round the green walls, tables with white cloths bearing bowls of nuts and cigarette-filled ashtrays. Champagne goblets all over the place, some still with bubble contents. There would be waiters, I thought, coming to clear the rubble.

‘We won’t be disturbed,’ Pollgate told Lord Vaughnley. ‘The “do not enter” signs are on both doors, and Mario says we have the room for an hour.’

‘The lunch will be before that,’ Lord Vaughnley said. ‘The films take half an hour, no more.’

‘He’s not going to the lunch,’ Pollgate said, meaning me.

‘Er, no, perhaps not. But I should be there.’

I thought numbly: catch me first.

It had taken five days... and the princess.

‘You are going to give us,’ Pollgate said to me directly, ‘The wire-tap and my journalists’ belongings. And that will be the end of it.’

The power of the man was such that the words themselves were a threat. What would happen if I didn’t comply wasn’t mentioned. My compliance was assumed; no discussion.

He walked over to Jay Erskine, producing a flat box from a pocket and taking Jay Erskine’s place guarding the door.

Jay Erskine’s smirk grew to a twisted smile of anticipation. I disliked intensely the cold eyes, the drooping moustache, his callous pen and his violent nature; and most of all I disliked the message in his sneer.

Pollgate opened the box and held it out to Jay Erskine, who took from it something that looked like the hand-held remote control of a television set. He settled it into his hand and walked in my direction. He came without the wariness one might have expected after I’d thrown him across a room, and he put the remote control thing smoothly between the open fronts of my jacket, on to my shirt.

I felt something like a thud, and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on my back on the floor, wholly disorientated, not sure where I was or what had happened.

Jay Erskine and Lord Vaughnley bent down, took my arms, helped me up, and dropped me on to a chair.

The chair had arms. I held on to them. I felt dazed, and couldn’t work out why.

Jay Erskine smiled nastily and put the black object again against my shirt.

The thud had a burn to it that time. And so fast. No time to draw breath.

I would have shot out of the chair if they hadn’t held me in it. My wits scattered instantly to the four winds. My muscles didn’t work. I wasn’t sure who I was or where I was, and nor did I care. Time passed. Time was relative. It was minutes, anyway. Not very quick.

The haze in my brain slowly resolved itself to the point where I knew I was sitting in a chair, and knew the people round me were Nestor Pollgate, Lord Vaughnley and Jay Erskine.

‘Right,’ Pollgate said. ‘Can you hear me?’

I said, after a pause, ‘Yes.’ It didn’t sound like my voice. More a croak.

‘You’re going to give us the wire-tap,’ he said. ‘And the other things.’

Some sort of electricity, I thought dimly. Those thuds were electric shocks. Like touching a cold metal doorknob after walking on nylon carpet, but magnified monstrously.

‘You understand?’ he said.

I didn’t answer. I understood, but I didn’t know whether I was going to give him the things or not.

‘Where are they?’ he said.

To hell with it, I thought.

‘Where are they?’

Silence.

I didn’t even see Jay Erskine put his hand against me the third time. I felt a great burning jolt and went shooting into space, floating for several millennia in a disorientated limbo, ordinary consciousness suspended, living as in dream-state, docile and drifting. I could see them in a way, but I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know anything. I existed. I had no form.

Whatever would be done, wherever they might take me, whatever God-awful crime they might plant me in, I couldn’t resist.

Thought came back again slowly. There were burns somewhere, stinging. I heard Lord Vaughnley’s voice saying something, and Pollgate answering, ‘Five thousand volts.’

‘He’s awake,’ Erskine said.

Lord Vaughnley leaned over me, his face close and worried. ‘Are you sure he’s all right?’

‘Yes,’ Pollgate said. ‘There’ll be no permanent harm.’

Thank you, I thought wryly, for that. I felt dizzy and sick. Just as well that with lunch in view I had missed breakfast.

Pollgate was looking at his watch and shaking his head. ‘He was dazed for twelve minutes that time. A three-second shock is too much. The two-second is better, but it’s taking too long. Twenty minutes already.’ He glared down at me. ‘I can’t waste any more time. You’ll give me those things, now, at once.’

It was he who held the electric device now, not Erskine.

I thought I could speak. Tried it. Something came out: the same sort of croak. I said ‘It will take... days.’

It wasn’t heroics. I thought vaguely that if they believed it would take days they would give up trying, right there and then. Logic, at that point, was at a low ebb.

Pollgate stepped within touching distance of me and showed me five thousand volts at close range.

‘Stun gun,’ he said.

It had two short flat metal prongs protruding five centimetres apart from one end of a flat plastic case. He squeezed some switch or other, and between the prongs leapt an electric spark the length of a thumb, bright blue, thick and crackling.

The spark fizzed for a long three seconds of painful promise and disappeared as fast as it had come.

I looked from the stun gun up to Pollgate’s face, staring straight at the shiny-bead eyes.

‘Weeks,’ I said.

It certainly nonplussed him. ‘Give us the wire-tap,’ he said; and he seemed to be looking, as I was, at a long, tiring battle of wills, much of which I would half sleep through, I supposed.

Lord Vaughnley said to Pollgate uncomfortably, ‘You can’t go on with this.’

A certain amount of coherence returned to my brain. The battle of wills, I thought gratefully, shouldn’t be necessary.

‘He’s going to give us those things,’ Pollgate said obstinately. ‘I’m not letting some clod like this get the better of me.’ Pride, loss of face, all the deadly intangibles.

Lord Vaughnley looked down at me anxiously.

‘I’ll give you,’ I said to him, ‘something better.’

‘What?’

My voice was steadier. Less hoarse, less slow. I moved in the chair, arms and legs coming back into coordination. It seemed to alarm Jay Erskine but I was still a long way from playing judo.

‘What will you give us?’ Lord Vaughnley said.

I concentrated on making my throat and tongue work properly. ‘It’s in Newmarket,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to go there for it. Now, this afternoon.’

Pollgate said with impatience, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I’ll give you,’ I said to Lord Vaughnley, ‘Maynard Allardeck.’

A short burst of stun couldn’t have had more effect.

‘How do you mean?’ he said; not with puzzlement, but with hope.

‘On a plate,’ I said. ‘In your power. Where you want him, don’t you?’

They both wanted him. I could see it in Pollgate’s face just as clearly as in Lord Vaughnley’s. I suppose that I had guessed in a way that it would be both.

Jay Erskine said aggressively, ‘Are our things in Newmarket, then?’

I said with an effort, ‘That’s where you left them.’

‘All right, then.’

He seemed to think that the purpose of their expedition had been achieved, and I didn’t tell him differently.

Nestor Pollgate said, ‘Jay, fetch the car to the side entrance, will you?’ and the obnoxious Erskine went away.

Pollgate and Lord Vaughnley agreed that Mario, whoever he was, should tell Icefall’s sponsors not to expect their guests back for lunch, saying I’d had a bilious attack and Lord Vaughnley was helping me. ‘But Mario can’t tell them until after we’ve gone,’ Lord Vaughnley said, ‘or you’ll have my wife and I daresay the princess out here in a flash to mother him.’

I sat and listened lethargically, capable of movement but not wanting to move, no longer sick, all right in my head, peaceful, extraordinarily, and totally without energy.

After a while Jay Erskine came back, the exasperating smirk still in place.

‘Can you walk?’ Pollgate asked me.

I said, ‘Yes’ and stood up, and we went out of the side door, along a short passage and down some gilded deeply carpeted backstairs, where no doubt many a Guineas visitor made a discreet entrance and exit, avoiding public eyes in the front hall.

I went down the stairs shakily, holding on to the rail.

‘Are you all right?’ Lord Vaughnley said solicitously, putting his hand supportively under my elbow.

I glanced at him. How he could think I would be all right was beyond me. Perhaps he was remembering that I was used to damage, to falls, to concussion: but bruises and fractures were different from that day’s little junket.

‘I’m all right,’ I said though, because it was true where it counted, and we went safely down to the bottom.

I stopped there. The exit door stood open ahead, a passage stretching away indoors to the right.

‘Come along,’ Pollgate said, gesturing to the door. ‘If we’re going, let’s go.’

‘My anorak,’ I said, ‘is in the cloakroom.’ I produced the ticket from my pocket. ‘Anorak,’ I said.

‘I’ll get it,’ Lord Vaughnley said, taking the ticket. ‘And I’ll see Mario. Wait for me in the car.’

It was a large car. Jay Erskine was driving. Nestor Pollgate sat watchfully beside me on the back seat, and Lord Vaughnley, when he returned, sat in the front.

‘Your anorak,’ he said, holding it out, and I thanked him and put it by my feet, on the floor.

‘The films of the races have just ended, Mario says,’ he reported to Pollgate. ‘He’s going straight in to make our apologies. It’s all settled. Off we go.’

It took ages to get out of London, partly because of thick traffic, mostly because Jay Erskine was a rotten driver, all impatience and heavy on the brakes. An hour and a half to Newmarket, at that rate: and I would have to be better by then.

No one spoke much. Jay Erskine locked all the doors centrally and Nestor Pollgate put the stun gun in its case in his right-hand jacket pocket, hidden but available; and I sat beside him in ambiguity, half prisoner, half ringmaster, going willingly but under threat, waiting for energy to return, physical, mental and psychic.

Stun guns, I thought. I’d heard of them, never seen one before. Used originally by American police to subdue dangerous violent criminals without shooting them. Instantaneous. Effective. You don’t say.

I remembered from long-ago physics lessons that if you squeezed piezo-electric crystals you got sparks, as in the flickering lighters used for gas cookers. Maybe stun guns were like that, multiplied. Maybe not. Maybe I would ask someone. Maybe not. Five thousand volts...

I looked with speculation at the back of Lord Vaughnley’s head, wondering what he was thinking. He was eager, that was for sure. They had agreed to the journey like thirsty men in a drought. They were going without knowing for sure why, without demanding to be told. Anything that could do Maynard Allardeck harm must be worth doing, in their eyes: that had to be why, at the beginning, Lord Vaughnley had been happy enough to introduce me to Rose Quince, to let me loose on the files. The destruction of Maynard’s credibility could only be helped along, he might have thought, by pinpricks from myself.

I dozed, woke with a start, found Pollgate’s face turned my way, his eyes watching. He was looking, if anything, puzzled.

In my rag-doll state I could think of nothing useful to say, so I didn’t, and presently he turned his head away and looked out of the window, and I still felt very conscious of his force, his ruthlessness, and of the ruin he could make of my life if I got the next few hours wrong.

I thought of how they had set their trap in the Guineas.

Icefall’s sponsors, on my answering machine, inviting me to lunch. The sponsors hadn’t said where, but they’d said tomorrow, Tuesday: today. The message would have been overheard and despatched to Pollgate, and sent from him to Lord Vaughnley, who would have said, Nothing simpler, my dear fellow, I’ll join forces with those sponsors, which they can hardly refuse, and Kit Fielding will definitely come, he’d do anything to please the princess...

Pollgate had known the Guineas. Known Mario. Known he could get an isolated room for an hour. The sort of place he would know, for sure.

Maybe Lord Vaughnley had suggested the Guineas to Icefall’s sponsors. Maybe he hadn’t had to. There were often racing celebration parties at the Guineas. The sponsors would very likely have chosen it themselves, knowing they could show the films there.

Unprofitable thoughts. However it had been planned, it had worked.

I thought also about the alliance between Lord Vaughnley and Nestor Pollgate, owners of snapping rival newspapers, always at each other’s throats in print, and acting in private accord.

Allies, not friends. They didn’t move comfortably around each other, as friends did.

On 1 October Lord Vaughnley had signed the charity letter recommending Maynard for a knighthood: signed it casually perhaps, not knowing him well.

Then later in October his son Hugh had confessed to his dealings with Maynard, and Lord Vaughnley, outraged, had sought to unzip Maynard’s accolade by getting Pollgate and his Flag to do the demolition; because it was the Flag’s sort of thing... and Jay Erskine, who had worked for Lord Vaughnley once, was in place there in the Flag, and was known not to be averse to an illegal sortie, now and then.

I didn’t know why Lord Vaughnley should have gone to Pollgate, should have expected him to help. Somewhere between them there was a reason. I didn’t suppose I would get an answer, if I asked.

Lord Vaughnley, I thought, could have been expected to tell the charity he wanted to recant his approval of Maynard Allardeck’s knighthood: but they might have said too bad, your son was a fool, but Allardeck definitely helped him. Lord Vaughnley might as a newspaperman have seen a few destructive paragraphs as more certain, and more revengefully satisfying, besides.

Before that, though, I guessed it had been he who had gone to the producers of How’s Trade, who said dig up what you can about Allardeck, discredit him, I’ll pay you: and had been defeated by the producer himself, who according to Rose Quince was known for taking more money in return for helping his victims off the hook.

The How’s Trade programme on Maynard had gone out loaded in Maynard’s favour, which hadn’t been the plan at all. And it was after that, I thought, that Lord Vaughnley had gone to Pollgate.

I shut my eyes and drifted. The car hummed. They had the heater on. I thought about horses; more honest than men. Tomorrow I was due to ride at Haydock. Thank God the racecourse doctor hadn’t been at the Guineas.

Takeovers, I thought inconsequentially. Always fending off takeovers.

Pollgate would bury me if I didn’t get it right.

Towards the end of the journey both mental and physical power came seeping slowly back, like a tide rising, and it was an extraordinary feeling: I hadn’t known how much power I did have until I’d both lost it and felt its return. Like not realising how ill one had been, until one was well.

I stretched thankfully with the renewed strength in my muscles and breathed deeply from the surge in my mind, and Pollgate, for whom the consciousness of power must have been normal, sensed in some way the vital recharging in me and sat up more tensely himself.

Erskine drove into Bobby’s stableyard at five minutes past three, and in the middle of what should have been a quiet snooze in the life of the horses, it seemed that there were people and movement all over the place. Erskine stopped the car with his accustomed jerk, and Pollgate having told him to unlock the doors, we climbed out.

Holly was looking distractedly in our direction, and there were besides three or four cars, a horse trailer with the ramp down and grooms wandering about with head-collars.

There was also, to my disbelief, Jermyn Graves.

Holly came running across to me and said, ‘Do something, he’s a madman, and Bobby’s indoors with Maynard, he came early and they’ve been shouting at each other and I don’t want to go in, and thank God you’re here, it’s a farce.’

Jermyn Graves, seeing me, followed Holly. His gaze swept over Pollgate, Jay Erskine and Lord Vaughnley and he said belligerently, ‘Who the hell are these people? Now see here, Fielding, I’ve had enough of your smart-arse behaviour, I’ve come for my horses.’

I put my arm around Holly. ‘Did his cheque go through?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, it bloody well did,’ Graves said furiously.

Holly nodded. ‘The feed-merchant told us. The cheque was cleared yesterday. He has his money.’

‘Just what is all this?’ Pollgate said heavily.

‘You keep out of it,’ Graves said rudely. ‘It’s you, Fielding, I want. You give me my bloody horses or I’ll fetch the police to you.’

‘Calm down, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘You shall have your horses.’

‘They’re not in their boxes.’ He glared with all his old fury; and it occurred to me that his total disregard of Pollgate was sublime. Perhaps one had to know one should be afraid of someone before one was.

‘Mr Graves,’ I said conversationally to the two proprietors and one journalist, ‘is removing his horses because of what he read in Intimate Details. You see here in action the power of the Press.’

‘Shut your trap and give me my horses,’ Graves said.

‘Yes, all right. Your grooms are going in the wrong direction.’

‘Jasper,’ Graves yelled. ‘Come here.’

The luckless nephew approached, eyeing me warily.

‘Come on,’ I jerked my head. ‘Round the back.’

Jay Erskine would have prevented my going, but Pollgate intervened. I took Jasper round to the other yard and pointed out the boxes that contained Graves’s horses. ‘Awfully sorry,’ Jasper said.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said, and I thought that but for him and his uncle we wouldn’t have rigged the bell, and but for the bell we wouldn’t have caught Jay Erskine up the ladder, and I felt quite grateful to the Graveses, on the whole.

I went back with Jasper walking behind me leading the first of the horses, and found them all standing there in much the same places, Jermyn Graves blustering on about not having faith when the trainer couldn’t meet his bills.

‘Bobby’s better off without you, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘Load your horses up and hop it.’

Apoplexy hovered. He opened and shut his mouth a couple of times and finally walked over to his trailer to let out his spleen on the luckless Jasper.

‘Thank God for that,’ Holly said. ‘I can’t stand him. I’m so glad you’re here. Did you have a good time at your lunch?’

‘Stunning,’ I said.

They all heard and looked at me sharply.

Lord Vaughnley said, mystified, ‘How can you laugh...?’

‘What the hell,’ I said. ‘I’m here. I’m alive.’

Holly looked from one to the other of us, sensing something strongly, not knowing what. ‘Something happened?’ she said, searching my face.

I nodded a fraction. ‘I’m OK.’

She said to Lord Vaughnley, ‘He risks his life most days of the week. You can’t frighten him much.’

They looked at her speechlessly, to my amusement.

I said to her, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ and she shook her head slightly, half remembering but not sure.

‘This is Lord Vaughnley who owns the Towncrier. This is Nestor Pollgate who owns the Flag. This is Jay Erskine who wrote the paragraphs in Intimate Details and put the tap on your telephone.’ I paused, and to them I said, ‘My sister, Bobby’s wife.’

She moved closer beside me, her eyes shocked.

‘Why are they here? Did you bring them?’

‘We sort of brought each other,’ I said. ‘Where are Maynard and Bobby?’

‘In the drawing room, I think.’

Jasper was crunching across the yard with the second horse, Jermyn shouting at him unabated. The other groom who had come with them was scurrying in and out of the trailer, attempting invisibility.

Nestor Pollgate said brusquely, ‘We’re not standing here watching all this.’

‘I’m not leaving Holly alone to put up with that man,’ I said. ‘He’s a menace. It’s because of you that he’s here, so we’ll wait.’

Pollgate stirred restlessly, but there was nowhere particular for him to go. We waited in varying intensities of impatience while Jasper and the groom raised the ramp and clipped it shut, and while Jermyn Graves walked back several steps in our direction and shook his fist at me with the index finger sticking out, jabbing, and said no one messed with him and got away with it, and he’d see I’d be sorry. I’d pay for what I’d done.

‘Kit,’ Holly said, distressed.

I put my arm round her shoulders and didn’t answer Graves, and after a while he turned abruptly on his heel, went over to his car, climbed in, slammed the door, and overburdened his engine, starting with a jerk that must have rocked his horses off their feet in the trailer.

‘He’s a pig,’ Holly said. ‘What will he do?’

‘He’s more threat than action.’

‘I,’ Pollgate said, ‘am not.’

I looked at him, meeting his eyes.

‘I do know that,’ I said.

The time, I thought, had inescapably come.

Power when I needed it. Give me power, I thought.

I let go of Holly and lent into the car we had come in, picking up my anorak off the floor.

I said to Holly, ‘Will you take these three visitors into the sitting room? I’ll get Bobby... and his father.’

She said with wide apprehensive eyes, ‘Kit, do be careful.’

‘I promise.’

She gave me a look of lingering doubt, but set off with me towards the house. We went in by long habit through the kitchen: I don’t think it occurred to either of us to use the formal front door.

Pollgate, Lord Vaughnley and Jay Erskine followed, and in the hall Holly peeled them off into the sitting room, where in the evenings she and Bobby watched television sometimes. The larger drawing room lay ahead, and there were voices in there, or one voice, Maynard’s, continuously talking.

I screwed up every inner resource to walk through that door, and it was a great and appalling mistake. Bobby told me afterwards that he saw me in the same way as in the stable and in the garden, the hooded, the enemy, the old foe of antiquity, of immense and dark threat.

Maynard was saying monotonously as if he had already said it over and over, ‘... And if you want to get rid of him you’ll do it, and you’ll do it today...’

Maynard was holding a gun, a hand gun, small and black.

He stopped talking the moment I went in there. His eyes widened. He saw, I supposed, what Bobby saw: Fielding, satanic.

He gave Bobby the pistol, pressing it into his hand.

‘Do it,’ he said fiercely. ‘Do it now.’

His son’s eyes were glazed, as in the garden.

He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t...

‘Bobby,’ I said explosively, beseechingly: and he raised the gun and pointed it straight at my chest.