Come to Grief

Chapter 10

Leaving Aynsford early, I drove back to London on Thursday morning and left the car, as 1 normally did, in a large public underground car park near Pont Square. From there I walked to the laundry where I usually took my shirts and waited while they fed my strip of rag from Northampton twice through the dry-cleaning cycle.

What emerged was a stringy-looking object, basically light turquoise in color, with a non-geometric pattern on it of green, brown and salmon pink. There were also black irregular stains that had stayed obstinately in place.

I persuaded the cleaners to iron it, with the only result that I had a flat strip instead of a wrinkled one.

‘What if I wash it with detergent and water?’ I asked the burly, half-interested dry cleaner.

‘You couldn’t exactly harm it,’ he said sarcastically.

So I washed it and ironed it and ended as before: turquoise strip, wandering indeterminate pattern, stubborn black stain.

With the help of the Yellow Pages I visited the wholesale showrooms of a well-known fabric designer. An infinitely polite old man there explained that my fabric pattern was woven, while theirs — the wholesaler’s — was printed. Different market, he said. The wholesaler aimed at the upper end of the middle-class market. I, he said, needed to consult an interior decorator, and with kindness he wrote for me a short list of firms.

The first two saw no profit in answering questions. At the third address I happened on an underworked twenty-year-old who ran pale long fingers through clean shoulder-length curls while he looked with interest at my offering. He pulled out a turquoise thread and held it up to the light.

‘This is silk,’ he said.

‘Real silk?’

‘No possible doubt. This was expensive fabric. The pattern is woven in. See.’ He turned the piece over to show me the back. ‘This is remarkable. Where did you get it? It looks like a very old lampas. Beautiful. The colors are organic, not mineral.’

I looked at his obvious youth and asked if he could perhaps seek a second opinion.

‘Because I’m straight out of design school?’ he guessed without umbrage. ‘But I studied fabrics. That’s why they took me on here. I know them. The designers don’t weave them, they use them.’

‘Then tell me what I’ve got.’

He fingered the turquoise strip and held it to his lips and his cheek and seemed to commune with it as if it were a crystal ball.

‘It’s a modern copy,’ he said. ‘It’s very skillfully done. It is lampas, woven on a Jacquard loom. There isn’t enough of it to be sure, but I think it’s a copy of a silk hanging made by Philippe de Lasalle in about 1760. But the original hadn’t a blue-green background, it was cream with this design of ropes and leaves in greens and red and gold.’

I was impressed. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ve just spent three years learning this sort of thing.’

‘Well… who makes it now? Do I have to go to France?’

‘You could try one or two English firms but you know what—’

He was brusquely interrupted by a severe-looking woman in a black dress and huge Aztec-type necklace who swept in and came to rest by the counter on which lay the unprepossessing rag.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘I asked you to catalog the new shipment of passementerie.’

‘Yes, Mrs Lane.’

‘Then please get on with it. Run along now.’

‘Yes, Mrs Lane.’

‘Do you want help?’ she asked me briskly.

‘Only the names of some weavers.’

On his way to the passementerie my source of knowledge spoke briefly over his shoulder. ‘It looks like a solitary weaver, not a firm. Try Saul Marcus.’

‘Where?’ I called.

‘London.’

‘Thanks.’

He went out of sight. Under Mrs Lane’s inhospitable gaze I picked up my rag, smiled placatingly and departed.

I found Saul Marcus first in the telephone directory and then in white-bearded person in an airy artist’s studio near Chiswick, West London, where he created fabric patterns.

He looked with interest at my rag but shook his head.

I urged him to search the far universe.

‘It might be Patricia Huxford’s work,’ he said at length, dubiously. ‘You could try her. She does — or did — work like this sometimes. I don’t know of anyone else.’

‘Where would I find her?’

‘Surrey, Sussex. Somewhere like that.’

‘Thank you very much.’

Returning to Pont Square, I looked for Patricia Huxford in every phone book I possessed for Surrey and Sussex and, for good measure, the bordering southern counties of Hampshire and Kent. Of the few Huxfords listed, none turned out to be Patricia, a weaver.

I really needed an assistant, I thought, saying good-bye to Mrs Paul Huxford, wife of a double-glazing salesman. This sort of search could take hours. Damn Chico, and his dolly-bird protective missus.

With no easy success from the directories I started on directory inquiries, the central computerized number-finder. As always, to get a number one had to give an address, but the computer system contemptuously spat out Patricia Huxford, Surrey, as being altogether too vague.

I tried Patricia Huxford, Guildford (Guildford being Surrey’s county town), but learned only of the two listed P. Huxfords that I’d already tried. Kingston, Surrey: same lack of results. I systematically tried all the other main areas; Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead, Dorking… Surrey might be a small county in square-mile size, but large in population. I drew a uniform blank.

Huxfords were fortunately rare. A good job she wasn’t called Smith.

Sussex, then. There was East Sussex (county town Brighton) and West Sussex (Chichester). I flipped a mental coin and chose Chichester, and could hardly believe my lucky ears.

An impersonal voice told me that the number of Patricia Huxford was ex-directory and could be accessed only by the police, in an emergency. It was not even in the C.O. grade-one class of ex-directory, where one could sweet-talk the operator into phoning the number on one’s behalf (C.O. stood for calls offered). Patricia Huxford valued absolute grade-two privacy and couldn’t be reached that way.

In the highest, third-grade, category, there were the numbers that weren’t on any list at all, that the exchanges and operators might not know even existed; numbers for government affairs, the Royal Family and spies.

I yawned, stretched and ate cornflakes for lunch.

While I was still unenthusiastically thinking of driving to Chichester, roughly seventy more miles of arm-ache, Charles phoned from Aynsford.

‘So glad to catch you in,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking to Thomas Ullaston, I thought you’d like to know.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed with interest. ‘What did he say?’

‘You know, of course, that he’s no longer Senior Steward of the Jockey Club? His term of office ended.’

‘Yes, I know.’

I also regretted it. The new Senior Steward was apt to think me a light-weight nuisance. I supposed he had a point, but it never helped to be discounted by the top man if I asked for anything at all from the department heads in current power. No one was any longer thanking me for ridding them of their villain: according to them, the whole embarrassing incident was best forgotten, and with that I agreed, but I wouldn’t have minded residual warmth.

‘Thomas was dumbfounded by your question,’ Charles said. ‘He protested that he’d meant you no harm.’

‘Ah!’ I said.

‘Yes. He didn’t deny that he’d told someone about that morning, but he assured me that it had been only one person, and that person was someone of utterly good standing, a man of the utmost probity. I asked if it was Archibald Kirk, and he gasped, Sid. He said it was early in the summer when Archie Kirk sought him out to ask about you. Archie Kirk told him he’d heard you were a good investigator and he wanted to know how good. It seems Archie Kirk’s branch of the civil service occasionally likes to employ independent investigators quietly, but that it’s hard to find good ones they can trust. Thomas Ullaston told him to trust you. Archie Kirk apparently asked more and more questions, until Thomas found himself telling about that chain and those awful marks… I mean, sorry, Sid.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘go on.’

‘Thomas told Archie Kirk that with your jockey constitution and physical resilience — he said physical resilience, Thomas did, so that’s exactly where Kirk got that phrase from — with your natural inborn physical resilience you’d shaken off the whole thing as if it had never happened.’

‘Yes,’ I said, which wasn’t entirely true. One couldn’t ever forget. One could, however, ignore. And it was odd, I thought, that I never had nightmares about whippy chains.

Charles chuckled. ‘Thomas said he wouldn’t want young master Halley on his tail if he’d been a crook.’

Young master Halley found himself pleased.

Charles asked, ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Sid?’

‘You’ve been great.’

‘Be careful.’

I smiled as I assured him I would. Be careful was hopeless advice to a jockey, and at heart I was as much out to win as ever.

On my way to the car I bought some robust adhesive bandage and, with my right forearm firmly strapped and a sufficient application of ibuprofen, drove to Chichester in West Sussex, about seven miles inland from the English Channel.

It was a fine spirits-lifting afternoon. My milk-coffee Mercedes swooped over the rolling South Downs and sped the last flat mile to the cathedral city of Chichester, wheels satisfyingly fast but still not as fulfilling as a horse.

I sought out the public library and asked to see the electoral roll.

There were masses of it: all the names and addresses of registered voters in the county, divided into electoral districts.

Where was Chico, blast him?

Resigned to a long search that could take two or three hours, I found Patricia Huxford within a short fifteen minutes. A record. I hated electoral rolls: the small print made me squint.

Huxford, Patricia Helen, Bravo House, Lowell.

Hallelujah.

I followed my road map and asked for directions in the village of Lowell, and found Bravo House, a small converted church with a herd of cars and vans outside. It didn’t look like the reclusive lair of an ex-directory hermit

As people seemed to be walking in and out of the high, heavy open west door, I walked in, too. I had arrived, it was soon clear, towards the end of a photographic session for a glossy magazine.

I said to a young woman hugging a clipboard, ‘Patricia Huxford?’

The young woman gave me a radiant smile. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ she said.

I followed the direction of her gaze. A small woman in an astonishing dress was descending from a sort of throne that had been built on a platform situated where the old transepts crossed the nave. There were bright theatrical spotlights that began to be switched off, and there were photographers unscrewing and dismantling and wrapping cables into hanks: There were effusive thanks in the air and satisfied excitement and the overall glow of a job done well.

I waited, looking about me, discovering the changes from church to modem house. The window glass, high up, was clear, not colored. The stone-flagged nave had rugs, no pews, comfortable modern sofas pushed back against the wall to accommodate the crowd, and a large-screen television set.

A white-painted partition behind the throne platform cut off the view of what had been the altar area, but nothing had been done to spoil the sweep of the vaulted ceiling, built with soaring stone arches to the glory of God.

One would have to have a very secure personality, I thought, to choose to live in that place.

The media flock drifted down the nave and left with undiminished goodwill. Patricia Huxford waved to them and closed her heavy door and, turning, was surprised to find me still inside.

‘So sorry,’ she said, and began to open the door again.

‘I’m not with the photographers,’ I said. ‘I came to ask you about something else.’

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I must ask you to go.’

‘You look beautiful,’ I told her, ‘and it will only take a minute,’ I brought my scrap of rag out and showed it to her. ‘If you are Patricia Huxford, did you weave this?’

‘Trish,’ she said absently. ‘I’m called Trish.’

She looked at the strip of silk and then at my face.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘John.’

‘John what?’

‘John Sidney.’

John Sidney were my real two first names, the ones my young mother had habitually used. ‘John Sidney, give us a kiss.’ ‘John Sidney, wash your face.’ ‘John Sidney, have you been fighting again?’

I often used John Sidney in my job: whenever, in fact, I didn’t want to be known to be Sid Halley. After the past months of all-too-public drubbing I wasn’t sure that Sid Halley would get me anything anywhere but a swift heave-ho.

Trish Huxford, somewhere, I would have guessed, in the middle to late forties, was pretty, blonde (natural?), small-framed and cheerful. Bright, observant eyes looked over my gray business suit, white shirt, unobtrusive tie, brown shoes, dark hair, dark eyes, unthreatening manner: my usual working confidence-inspiring exterior.

She was still on a high from the photo session. She needed someone to help her unwind, and I looked — and was — safe. Thankfully I saw her relax.

The amazing dress she had worn for the photographs was utterly simple in cut, hanging heavy and straight from her shoulders, floor length and sleeveless with a soft ruffled frill around her neck. It was the cloth of the dress that staggered: it was blue and red and silver and gold, and it shimmered.

‘Did you weave your dress?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘No, you wouldn’t, not nowadays. Can I do anything for you? Where did you come from?’

‘London. Saul Marcus suggested you might know who wove my strip of silk.’

‘Saul! How is he?’

‘He has a white beard,’ I said. ‘He seemed fine.’

‘I haven’t seen him for years. Will you make me some tea? I don’t want marks on this dress.’

I smiled. ‘I’m quite good at tea.’

She led the way past the throne and around the white-painted screen. There were choir stalls beyond, old and untouched, and an altar table covered by a cloth that brought me to a halt. It was of a brilliant royal blue with shining gold Greek motifs woven into its deep hem. On the table, in the place of a religious altar, stood an antique spinning wheel, good enough for Sleeping Beauty. Above the table, arched clear glass windows rose to the roof.

‘This way,’ Patricia Huxford commanded, and, leading me past the choir stalls, turned abruptly through a narrow doorway which opened onto what had once probably been a vestry and was now a small modem kitchen with a bathroom beside it.

‘My bed is in the south transept,’ she told me, ‘and my looms are in the north. You might expect us to be going to drink China tea with lemon out of a silver tea-pot, but in fact I don’t have enough time for that sort of thing, so the tea bags and mugs are on that shelf.’

I half filled her electric kettle and plugged it in, and she spent the time walking around watching the miraculous colors move and mingle in her dress.

Intrigued, waiting for the water to boil, I asked, ‘What is it made of?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Er, it looks like… well… gold.’

She laughed. ‘Quite right. Gold, silver thread and silk.’

I rather clumsily filled the mugs.

‘Milk?’ she suggested.

‘No, thank you.’

‘That’s lucky. The crowd that’s just left finished it off.’ She gave me a brilliant smile, picked up a mug by its handle and returned to the throne, where she sat neatly on the vast red velvet chair and rested a thin arm delicately along gilt carving. The dress fell into sculptured folds over her slender thighs.

‘The photographs,’ she said, ‘are for a magazine about a festival of the arts that Chichester is staging all next summer.’

I stood before her like some medieval page: stood chiefly because there was no chair nearby to sit on.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you think me madly eccentric?’

‘Not madly.’

She grinned happily. ‘Normally I wear jeans and an old smock.’ She drank some tea. ‘Usually I work. To day is play-acting.’

‘And magnificent.’

She nodded. ‘No one, these days, makes cloth of gold.’

‘The Field of the Cloth of Gold,’ I exclaimed.

‘That’s right. What do you know of it?’

‘Only that phrase.’

‘The field was the meeting place at Guines, France, in June 1520, of Henry VIII of England and Francis the First of France. They were supposed to be making peace between England and France but they hated each other and tried to outdo each other in splendor. So all their courtiers wore cloth woven out of gold and they gave each other gifts you’d never see today. And I thought it would be historic to weave some cloth of gold for the festival… so I did. And this dress weighs a ton, I may tell you. Today is the only time I’ve worn it and I can’t bear to take it off.’

‘It’s breathtaking,’ I said.

She poured out her knowledge. ‘In 1476 the Duke of Burgundy left behind a hundred and sixty gold cloths when he fled from battle against the Swiss. You make gold cloth — like I made this — by supporting the soft gold on threads of silk, and you can recover the gold by burning the cloth. So when I was making this dress, that’s what I did with the pieces I cut out to make the neck and armholes. I burnt them and collected the melted gold.’

‘Beautiful.’

‘You know something?’ she said. ‘You’re the only person who’s seen this dress who hasn’t asked how much it cost.’

‘I did wonder.’

‘And I’m not telling. Give me your strip of silk.’

I took her empty mug and tucked it under my left arm, and in my right hand held out the rag, which she took; and I found her looking with concentration at my left hand. She raised her eyes to meet my gaze.

‘Is it…?’ she said.

‘Worth its weight in gold,’ I said flippantly. ‘Yes.’

I carried the mugs back to the kitchen and returned to find her standing and smoothing her fingers over the piece of rag.

‘An interior decorator,’ I said, ‘told me it was probably a modem copy of a hanging made in 1760 by… um… I think Philippe de Lasalle.’

‘How clever. Yes, it is. I made quite a lot of it at one time.’ She paused, then said abruptly, ‘Come along,’ and dived off again, leaving me to follow.

We went this time through a door in another white-painted partition and found ourselves in the north transept, her workroom.

There were three looms of varying construction, all bearing work in progress. There was also a business section with filing cabinets and a good deal of office paraphernalia, and another area devoted to measuring, cutting and packing.

‘I make fabrics you can’t buy anywhere else,’ she said. ‘Most of it goes to the Middle East.’ She walked towards the largest of the three looms, a monster that rose in steps to double our height.

‘This is a Jacquard loom,’ she said. ‘I made your sample on this.’

‘I was told this piece was… a lampas? What’s a lampas?’

She nodded. ‘A lampas is a compound weave with extra warps and wefts which put patterns and colors on the face of the fabric only, and are tucked into the back.’ She showed me how the design of ropes and branches of leaves gleamed on one side of the turquoise silk but hardly showed on the reverse. ‘It takes ages to set up,’ she said. ‘Nowadays almost no one outside the Middle East thinks the beauty is worth the expense, but once I used to sell quite a lot of it to castles and great houses in England, and all sorts of private people. I only make it to order.’

I said neutrally, ‘Would you know who you made this piece for?’

‘My dear man. No, I can’t remember. But I probably still have the records. Why do you want to know? Is it important?’

‘I don’t know if it is important. I was given the strip and asked to find its origin.’

She shrugged. ‘Let’s find it then. You never know, I might get an order for some more.’

She opened cupboard doors to reveal many ranks of box files, and ran her fingers along the labels on the spines until she came to one that her expression announced as possible. She lifted the box file from the shelf and opened it on a table.

Inside were stiff pages with samples of fabric stapled to them, with full details of fibers, dates, amount made, names of purchasers and receipts.

She turned the stiff pages slowly, holding my strip in one hand for comparison. She came to several versions of the same design, but all in the wrong color.

‘That’s it!’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘That’s the one. I see I wove it almost thirty years ago. How time flies. I was so young then. It was a hanging for a four-poster bed. I see I supplied it with gold tassels made of gimp.’

I asked without much expectation, ‘Who to?’

‘It says here a Mrs Gordon Quint.’

I said, ‘…Er…’ meaninglessly, my breath literally taken away.

Ginnie? Ginnie had owned the material? ‘I don’t remember her or anything about it,’ Trish Huxford said. ‘But all the colors match. It must have been this one commission. I don’t think I made these colors for anyone else.’ She looked at the black stains disfiguring the strip I’d brought. ‘What a pity! I think of my fabrics as going on forever. They could easily last two hundred years. I love the idea of leaving something beautiful in the world. I expect you think I’m a sentimental old bag.’

‘I think you’re splendid,’ I said truthfully, and asked, ‘Why are you ex-directory, with a business to run?’

She laughed. ‘I hate being interrupted when I’m setting up a design. It takes vast concentration. I have a mobile phone for friends — I can switch it off — and I have an agent in the Middle East, who gets orders for me. Why am I telling you all this?’

‘I’m interested.’

She closed the file and put it back on the shelf, asking, ‘Does Mrs Quint want some more fabric to replace this damaged bit, do you think?’

Mrs Quint was sixteen floors dead.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

On the drive back to London I pulled off the road to phone Davis Tatum at the number he’d given me, his home.

He was in and, it seemed, glad to hear from me, wanting to know what I’d done for him so far.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’ll give Topline Foods a visit. Who did you get Owen Yorkshire’s name from?’

He said, stalling, ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Davis,’ I said mildly, ‘you want me to take a look at Owen Yorkshire and his company, so why? Why him?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Do you mean you promised not to, or you don’t know?’

‘I mean… just go and take a look.’

I said, ‘Sir Thomas Ullaston, Senior Steward last year of the Jockey Club, told Archie Kirk about that little matter of the chains, and Archie Kirk told you. So did the name Owen Yorkshire come to you from Archie Kirk?’

‘Hell,’ he said.

‘I like to know what I’m getting into.’

After a pause he said, ‘Owen Yorkshire has been seen twice in the boardroom of The Pump. We don’t know why.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Is that enough?’

‘To be going on with. Oh, and my mobile phone is now safe. No more leaks. See you later.’

I drove on to London, parked in the underground garage and walked along the alleyway between tall houses that led into the opposite side of the square from my flat.

I was going quietly and cautiously in any case, and came to a dead stop when I saw that the streetlight almost directly outside my window was not lit.

Boys sometimes threw stones at it to break the glass. Normally its darkness wouldn’t have sent shudders up my spine and made my right arm remember Gordon Quint from fingers to neck. Normally I might have crossed the square figuratively whistling while intending to phone in the morning to get the light fixed.

Things were not normal.

There were two locked gates into the central garden, one opposite the path I was on, and one on the far side, opposite my house. Standing in shadow, I sorted out the resident-allocated garden key, went quietly across the circling roadway and unlocked the near gate.

Nothing moved. I eased the gate open, slid through and closed it behind me. No squeaks. I moved slowly from patch to patch of shaded cover, the half-lit tree branches moving in a light breeze, yellow leaves drifting down like ghosts.

Near the far side I stopped and waited.

There could be no one there. I was foolishly afraid over nothing.

The streetlight was out.

It had been out at other times…

I stood with my back to a tree, waiting for alarm to subside to the point where I would unlock the second gate and cross the road to my front steps. The sounds of the city were distant. No cars drove into the cul-de-sac square.

I couldn’t stand there all night, I thought… and then I saw him.

He was in a car parked by one of the few meters. His head — unmistakably Gordon Quint’s head — moved behind the window. He was looking straight ahead, waiting for me to arrive by road or pavement.

I stood immobile as if stuck to the tree. It had to be obsession with him, I thought. The burning fury of Monday had settled down not into grief but revenge. I hadn’t been in my flat for about thirty hours. How long had he been sitting there waiting? I’d had a villain wait almost a week for me once, before I’d walked unsuspectingly into his trap.

Obsession — fixation — was the most frightening of enemies and the hardest to escape.

I retreated, frankly scared, expecting him to see my movement, but he hadn’t thought of an approach by garden. From tree to tree, around the patches of open grass, I regained the far gate, eased through it, crossed the road and drifted up the alleyway, cravenly expecting a bellow and a chase and, as he was a farmer, perhaps a shotgun.

Nothing happened. My shoes, soled and heeled for silence, made no sound. I walked back to my underground car and sat in it, not exactly trembling but nonetheless stirred up.

So much, I thought, for Davis Tatum’s myth of a clever, unafraid investigator.

I kept always in the car an overnight bag containing the personality-change clothes I’d got Jonathan to wear: dark two-piece tracksuit (trousers and zip-up jacket), navy blue sneakers, and a baseball cap. The bag also contained a long-sleeved open-necked shirt, two or three charged-up batteries for my arm, and a battery charger, to make sure. Habitually around my waist I wore a belt with a zipped pocket big enough for a credit card and money.

I had no weapons or defenses like mace. In America I might have carried both.

I sat in the car considering the matter of distance and ulnas. It was well over two hundred miles from my London home to Liverpool, city of my birth. Frodsham, the base town of Topline Foods, wasn’t quite as far as Liverpool, but still over two hundred miles. I had already, that day, steered a hundred and fifty — Chichester and back. I’d never missed Chico so much.

I considered trains. Too inflexible. Airline? Ditto. TeleDrive? I lingered over the comfort of TeleDrive but decided against, and resignedly set off northwards.

It was an easy drive normally; a journey on wide fast motorways taking at most three hours. I drove for only one hour, then stopped at a motel to eat and sleep, and at seven o’clock in the morning wheeled on again, trying to ignore both the obstinately slow-mending fracture and India Cathcart’s column that I’d bought from the motel’s newsstand.

Friday mornings had been a trial since June. Page fifteen in The Pump — trial by the long knives of journalism, the blades that ripped the gut.

She hadn’t mentioned at all seeing Tatum and me in the Le Meridien bar. Perhaps she’d taken my advice and pretended we hadn’t been there. What her column said about me was mostly factually true but spitefully wrong. I wondered how she could do it? Had she no sense of humanity?

Most of her page concerned yet another politician caught with his trousers at half-mast, but the far-right column said:

Christ, I thought, how much more? Why did it so bloody hurt?

My father had been killed in a fall eight months before my birth and a few days before he was due to marry my eighteen-year-old mother. She’d done her best as a single parent in hopeless surroundings. ‘Give us a kiss, John Sidney…’

I hadn’t ever run amok. I’d been a quiet child, mostly. ‘Have you been fighting again, John Sidney…?’ She hadn’t liked me fighting, though one had to sometimes, or be bullied.

And when she knew she was dying she’d taken me to Newmarket, because I’d been short for my age, and had left me with the king of trainers to be made into a jockey, as I’d always wanted.

I couldn’t possibly go back to my Liverpool ‘roots.’ I had no sense of ever having grown any there.

I had never envied Ellis Quint. I’d always liked him. I’d been a better jockey than he, and we’d both known it. If anything, the envy had been the other way around. But it was useless to protest, as it had been all along. Protests were used regularly to prove The Pump’s theories of my pitiable inadequacy.

My mobile phone buzzed. I answered it.

‘Kevin Mills,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Where are you? I tried your apartment. Have you seen today’s Pump yet?’

‘Yes.’

‘India didn’t write it,’ he said. ‘I gave her the info, but she wouldn’t use it. She filled that space with some pars on sexual stress and her editor subbed them out.’

Half of my muscles unknotted, and I hadn’t realized they’d been tense. I forced unconcern into my voice even as I thought of hundreds of thousands of readers sniggering about me over their breakfast toast.

‘Then you wrote it yourself,’ I said. ‘So who’s a shit now? You’re the only person on The Pump who’s seen my Sheraton desk.’

‘Blast you. Where are you?’

‘Going back to Liverpool. Where else?’

‘Sid, look, I’m sorry.’

‘Policy?’

He didn’t answer.

I asked, ‘Why did you phone to tell me India didn’t write today’s bit of demolition?’

‘I’m getting soft.’

‘No one’s listening to this phone anymore. You can say what you like.’

‘Jeez.’ He laughed. ‘That didn’t take you long.’ He paused. ‘You might not believe it, but most of us on The Pump don’t any more like what we’ve been doing to you.’

‘Rise up and rebel,’ I suggested dryly.

‘We have to eat. And you’re a tough bugger. You can take it.’

You just try it, I thought.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘the paper’s received a lot of letters from readers complaining that we’re not giving you a fair deal.’

‘How many is a lot?’

‘Two hundred or so. Believe me, that’s a lot. But we’re not allowed to print any.’

I said with interest, ‘Who says so?’

‘That’s just it. The ed, Godbar himself, says so, and he doesn’t like it, either, but the policy is coming from. the very top.’

‘Tilepit?’

‘Are you sure this phone’s not bugged?’

‘You’re safe.’

‘You’ve had a bloody raw mauling, and you don’t deserve it. I know that. We all know it. I’m sorry for my part in it. I’m sorry I wrote today’s venom, especially that bit about your hand. Yes, it’s Tilepit. The proprietor himself.’

‘Well… thanks.’

He said, ‘Did Ellis Quint really cut off those feet?’

I smiled ruefully. ‘The jury will decide.’

‘Sid, look here,’ he protested, ‘you owe me!’

‘Life’s a bugger,’ I said.