I phoned The Pump, asking for India Cathcart. Silly me.
Number one, she was never in the office on Fridays. Number two, The Pump never gave private numbers to unknown callers.
‘Tell her Sid Halley would like to talk to her,’ I said, and gave the switchboard operator my mobile number, asking him to repeat it so I could make sure he had written it down right.
No promises, he said.
I sat for a good while thinking about what I’d seen and learned, and planning what I would do the next day. Such plans got altered by events as often as not, but I’d found that no plan at all invited nil results. If all else failed, try Plan B. Plan B, in my battle strategy, was to escape with skin intact. Plan B had let me down a couple of times, but disasters were like falls in racing; you never thought they’d happen until you were nose down to the turf.
I had some food sent up and thought some more, and at ten-fifteen my mobile buzzed.
‘Sid?’ India said nervously.
‘Hello.’
‘Don’t say anything! I’ll cry if you say anything.’ After a pause she said, ‘Sid! Are you there?’
‘Yes. But I don’t want you to cry so I’m not saying anything.’
‘Oh, God.’ It was half a choke, half a laugh. ‘How can you be so… so civilized?’
‘With enormous difficulty,’ I said. ‘Are you busy on Sunday evening? Your restaurant or mine?’
She said disbelievingly, ‘Are you asking me out to dinner?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not a proposal of marriage. And no knife through the ribs. Just food.’
‘How can you laugh?’
‘Why are you called India?’ I asked.
‘I was conceived there. What has that got to do with anything?’
‘I just wondered,’ I said.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘Unfortunately not. I’m sitting soberly in an armchair contemplating the state of the universe, which is C minus, or thereabouts.’
‘Where? I mean, where is the armchair?’
‘On the floor,’ I said.
‘You don’t trust me!’
‘No,’ I sighed, ‘I don’t. But I do want to have dinner with you.’
‘Sid,’ she was almost pleading, ‘be sensible.’
Rotten advice, I’d always thought. But then if I’d been sensible I would have two hands and fewer scars, and I reckoned one had to be born sensible, which didn’t seem to have happened in my case.
I said, ‘Your proprietor — Lord Tilepit — have you met him?’
‘Yes.’ She sounded a bit bewildered. ‘He comes to the office party at Christmas. He shakes everyone’s hand.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Do you mean to look at?’
‘For a start.’
‘He’s fairly tall. Light-brown hair.’
‘That’s not much,’ I said when she stopped.
‘He’s not part of my day-to-day life.’
‘Except that he burns saints,’ I said.
A brief silence, then, ‘Your restaurant, this time.’
I smiled. Her quick mind could reel in a tarpon where her red mouth couldn’t. ‘Does Lord Tilepit,’ I asked, ‘wear an obvious cloak of power? Are you aware of his power when you’re in a room with him?’
‘Actually… no.’
‘Is anyone… Could anyone be physically in awe of him?’
‘No.’ It was clear from her voice that she thought the idea laughable.
‘So his leverage,’ I said, ‘is all economic?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Is there anyone that he is in awe of?’
‘I don’t know. Why do you ask?’
‘That man,’ I said, ‘has spent four months directing his newspaper to… well… ruin me. You must allow, I have an interest.’
‘But you aren’t ruined. You don’t sound in the least ruined. And anyway, your ex-wife said it was impossible.’
‘She said what was impossible?’
‘To… to…’
‘Say it.’
‘To reduce you to rubble. To make you beg.’
She silenced me.
She said, ‘Your ex-wife’s still in love with you.’
‘No, not anymore.’
‘I’m an expert on ex-wives,’ India said. ‘Wronged wives, dumped mistresses, women curdled with spite, women angling for money. Women wanting revenge, women breaking their hearts. I know the scenery. Your Jenny said she couldn’t live in your purgatory, but when I suggested you were a selfish brute she defended you like a tigress.’
Oh God, I thought. After nearly six years apart the same old dagger could pierce us both.
‘Sid?’
‘Mm.’
‘Do you still love her?’
I found a calm voice. ‘We can’t go back, and we don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I regret a lot, but it’s now finally over. She has a better husband, and she’s happy.’
‘I met her new man,’ India said. ‘He’s sweet.’
‘Yes.’ I paused. ‘What about your own ex?’
‘I fell for his looks. It turned out he wanted an admiration machine in an apron. End of story.’
‘Is his name Cathcart?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Patterson.’
Smiling to myself, I said, ‘Will you give me your phone number?’
She said, ‘Yes,’ and did so.
‘Kensington Place restaurant. Eight o’clock.’
‘I’ll be there.’
When I was alone, which was usual nowadays, since Louise McInnes and I had parted, I took off my false arm at bedtime and replaced it after a shower in the morning. I couldn’t wear it in showers, as water wrecked the works. Taking it off after a long day was often a pest, as it fitted tightly and tended to cling to my skin. Putting it on was a matter of talcum powder, getting the angle right and pushing hard.
The arm might be worth its weight in gold, as I’d told Trish Huxford, but even after three years, whatever lighthearted front I might now achieve in public, in private the management of amputation still took me a positive effort of the ‘get on with it’ ethos. I didn’t know why I continued to feel vulnerable and sensitive. Too much pride, no doubt.
I’d charged up the two batteries in the charger overnight, so I started the new day, Saturday, with a fresh battery in the arm and a spare in my pocket.
It was by then five days since Gordon Quint had cracked my ulna, and the twinges had become less acute and less frequent. Partly it was because one naturally found the least painful way of performing any action, and partly because the ends of bone were beginning to knit. Soft tissue grew on the site of the break, and on the eighth day it would normally begin hardening, the whole healing process being complete within the next week. Only splintered, displaced ends caused serious trouble, which hadn’t occurred in this case.
When I’d been a jockey the feel of a simple fracture had been an almost twice-yearly familiarity. One tended in jump racing to fall on one’s shoulder, quite often at thirty miles an hour, and in my time I’d cracked my collarbones six times each side: only once had it been distinctly bad.
Some jockeys had stronger bones than others, but I didn’t know anyone who’d completed a top career unscathed. Anyway, by Saturday morning, Monday’s crack was no real problem.
Into my overnight bag I packed the battery charger, washing things, pajamas, spare shirt, business suit and shoes. I wore both pieces of the tracksuit, white shirt, no tie and the dark sneakers. In my belt I carried money and a credit card, and in my pocket a bunch of six keys on a single ring, which bore also a miniature flashlight. Three of the keys were variously for my car and the entry doors of my flat. The other three, looking misleadingly simple, would between them open any ordinary lock, regardless of the wishes of the owners.
My old teacher had had me practice until I was quick at it. He’d shown me also how to open the simple combination locks on suitcases; the method used by airport thieves.
I checked out of the hotel and found the way back to Frodsham, parking by the curb within sight of Topline Foods’ wire-mesh gates.
As before, the gates were wide open and, as before, no one going in and out was challenged by the gatekeeper. No one, in fact, seemed to have urgent business in either direction and there were far fewer cars in the central area than on the day before. It wasn’t until nearly eleven o’clock that the promised film crews arrived in force.
When getting on for twenty assorted vans and private cars had come to a ragged halt all over the place, disgorging film cameras (Intramind Imaging), a television camera (local station) and dozens of people looking purposeful with heavy equipment and chest-hugged clipboards, I got out of my car and put on the ill-fitting brown overalls, complete with identity badge. Into the trunk I locked my bag and also the mobile phone, first taking the SIM card out of it and stowing it in my belt. ‘Get into the habit of removing the SIM card,’ my supplier had advised. ‘Then if someone steals your phone, too bad, they won’t be able to use it.’
‘Great,’ I’d said.
I started the car, drove unhesitatingly through the gates, steered a course around the assorted vans and stopped just beyond them, nearest to the unloading bays. Saturday or not, a few other brown overall hands were busy on the rollers and the shelf escalator, and I simply walked straight in past them, saying ‘Morning’ as if I belonged.
They didn’t answer, didn’t look up, took me for granted.
Inside, I walked up the stairs I’d come down with Willy Parrott and, when I reached the right level, ambled along the gallery until I came to his office.
The sliding glass door was closed and locked and there was no one inside.
The paddles were silent in the vats. None of the day before’s hum and activity remained, and almost none of the smells. Instead, there were cameras being positioned below, with Owen Yorkshire himself directing the director, his authoritative voice telling the experts their job.
He was too busy to look up. I went on along the gallery, coming to the fire-door up the flight of metal stairs. The fire-doors were locked at night, Willy had said By day, they were open. Thankful, I reached in the end the plush carpet of the offices.
There was a bunch of three media people in there, measuring angles and moving potted plants. Office work, I gathered, was due for immortality on Monday. Cursing internally at their presence, I walked on towards the elevator, passing the open door of Customer Relations. No Marsha Rowse.
To the right of the elevator there was a door announcing Office Manager, A. Dove, fastened with businesslike locks.
Looking back, I saw the measuring group taking their damned time. I needed them out of there and they infuriatingly dawdled.
I didn’t like to hover. I returned to the elevator and, to fill in time, opened a nearby door which proved to enclose fire-stairs, as I’d hoped.
Down a floor, and through the fire-door there, I found an expanse of open space, unfurnished and undecorated, the same in area as the office suite above. Up two stories, above the offices, there was similar quiet, undivided, clean-swept space. Owen Yorkshire had already built for expansion, I gathered.
Cautiously, I went on upward to the fifth floor, lair of the boss.
Trusting that he was still down among the vats, I opened the fire-door enough to put my head through.
More camera people moved around. Veritable banks of potted plants blazed red and gold. To the left, open, opulently gleaming double doors led into an entertaining and boardroom area impressive enough for a major industry of self-importance. On the right, more double doors led to Yorkshire’s own new office; not, from what I could see, a place of paperwork. Polished wood gleamed. Plants galore. A tray of bottles and glasses.
I retreated down the unvarnished nitty-gritty fire-stairs until I was back on the working-office floor, standing there indecisively, wondering if the measurers still barred my purpose.
I heard voices, growing louder and stopping on the other side of the door. I was prepared to go into a busy-employee routine, but it appeared they preferred the elevator to the stairs. The lifting machinery whirred on the other side of the stairwell, the voices moved into the elevator and diminished to zero. I couldn’t tell whether they’d gone up or down, and I was concerned only that they’d all gone and not left one behind.
There was no point in waiting. I opened the fire-door, stepped onto the carpet and right towards Mrs Dove’s domain.
I had the whole office floor to myself.
Great.
Mrs Dove’s door was locked twice: an old-looking mortise and a new knob with a keyhole in the center. These were locks I liked. There could be no nasty surprises like bolts or chains or wedges on the inside: also the emphatic statement of two locks probably meant that there were things of worth to guard.
The mortise lock took a whole minute, with the ghost of my old master breathing disapprovingly down my neck. The modem lock took twenty seconds of delicate probing. One had to ‘feel’ one’s way through. False fingers for that, as for much else, were useless.
Once inside Mrs Dove’s office, I spent time relocking the door so that anyone outside trying it for security would find it as it should be. If anyone came in with keys, I would have warning enough to hide.
Mrs Dove’s cote was large and comfortable, with a wide desk, several of the Scandinavian-design armchairs and grainy blow-up black and white photographs of racing horses around the walls. Along one side there were the routine office machines — fax, copier, and large print-out calculator, and, on the desk, a computer, shrouded for the weekend in a fitted cover. There were multiple filing cabinets and a tall white-painted and — as I discovered — locked cupboard.
Mrs Dove had a window with louvered blinds and a. distant view of the Mersey. Mrs Dove’s office was managing director stuff.
I had only a vague idea of what I was looking for. The audited accounts I’d seen in Companies House seemed not to match the actual state of affairs at Frodsham. The audit did, of course, refer to a year gone by, to the first with Owen Yorkshire in charge, but the fragile bottom-line profit, as shown, would not suggest or justify expensive publicity campaigns or televised receptions for the notables of Liverpool.
The old French adage ‘look for the lady’ was a century out of date, my old teacher had said. In modem times it should be ‘look for the money,’ and shortly before he died, he had amended that to ‘follow the paper.’ Shady or doubtful transactions, he said, always left a paper trail. Even in the age of computers, he’d insisted that paper showed the way; and over and over again I’d proved him right.
The paper in Mrs Dove’s office was all tidied away in the many filing cabinets, which were locked.
Most filing cabinets, like these, locked all drawers simultaneously with a notched vertical rod out of sight within the right-hand front comer, operated by a single key at the top. Turning the key raised the rod, allowing all the drawers to open. I wasn’t bad at opening filing cabinets.
The trouble was that Topline Foods had little to hide, or at least not at first sight. Pounds of paper referred to orders and invoices for incoming supplies; pounds more to sales, pounds more to the expenses of running an industry, from insurance to wages, to electricity to general maintenance.
The filing cabinets took too long and were a waste of time. What they offered was the entirely respectable basis of next year’s audit.
I locked them all again and, after investigating the desk drawers themselves, which held only stationery, took the cover off the computer and switched it on, pressing the buttons for List Files, and Enter. Scrolls of file names appeared and I tried one at random: ‘Aintree.’
Onto the screen came details of the lunch given the day before the Grand National, the guest list, the menu, a summary of the speeches and a list of the coverage given to the occasion in the press.
Nothing I could find seemed any more secret. I switched it off, replaced the cover and turned my lock pickers to the tall white cupboard.
The feeling of time running out, however irrational, shortened my breath and made me hurry. I always envied the supersleuths in films who put their hands on the right papers in the first ten seconds and, this time, I didn’t know if the right paper even existed.
It turned out to be primarily not a paper but a second computer.
Inside the white cupboard, inside a drop-down desk arrangement in there, I came across a second keyboard and a second screen. I switched the computer on and nothing happened, which wasn’t astounding as I found an electric lead lying alongside, disconnected. I plugged it into the computer and tried again, and with a grumble or two the machine became ready for business.
I pressed List Files again, and this time found myself looking not at individual subjects, but at Directories, each of which contained file names such as ‘Formula A.’
What I had come across were the more private records, the electronic files, some very secret, some not.
In quick succession I highlighted the ‘Directories’ and brought them to the screen until one baldly listed ‘Quint’: but no amount of button pressing got me any further.
Think.
The reason I couldn’t get the Quint information onto the screen must be because it wasn’t in the computer.
OK? OK. So where was it?
On the shelf above the computer stood a row of box files, numbered 1 to 9, but not one labeled Quint.
I lifted down № 1 and looked inside. There were several letters filed in there, also a blue computer floppy disk in a clear cover. According to the letters, box-file № 1 referred to loans made to Topline Foods, loans not repaid on the due date. There was also a mention of ‘sweeteners’ and ‘quid pro quos.’ I fed the floppy disk into the drive slot in the computer body and got no further than a single, unhelpful word on the screen: PASSWORD?
Password? Heaven knew. I looked into the box files one by one and came to Quint in № 6. There were three floppies in there, not one.
I fed in the first.
PASSWORD?
Second and third disks — PASSWORD?
Bugger, I thought.
Searching for anything helpful, I lifted down a heavy white cardboard box, like a double-height shoebox, that filled the rest of the box-file shelf. In there was a row of big black high-impact plastic protective coverings. I picked out one and unlatched its fastenings, and found inside it a videotape, but a tape of double the ordinary width. A label on the tape said Broadcast Quality Videotape. Underneath that was a single word, BETACAM. Under that was the legend ‘Quint Series. 15 X 30 secs.’
I closed the thick black case and tried another one. Same thing. Quint series. 15 X 30 secs. All of the cases held the same.
These double-size tapes needed a special tape player not available in Mrs Dove’s office. To see what was on these expensive tapes meant taking one with me.
I could, of course, simply put one of them inside my tracksuit jacket and walk out with it. I could take all the ‘PASSWORD’ disks. If I did I was a) stealing, b) in danger of being found carrying the goods, and c) making it impossible for any information they held to be used in any later legal inquiry. I would steal the information itself, if I could, but not the software.
Think.
As I’d told Charles at Aynsford, I’d had to learn a good deal about computers just to keep a grip on the accelerating world, but the future became the present so fast that I could never get ahead.
Someone tried to open the door.
There was no time to restore the room to normal. I could only speed across the carpet and stand where I would be hidden by the door when it swung inward. Plan B meant simply running — and I was wearing running shoes.
The knob turned again and rattled, but nothing else happened. Whoever was outside had presumably been either keyless or reassured: in either case it played havoc with my breathing.
Oddly, the pumping adrenaline brought me my computer answer, which was, if I couldn’t bring the contents of a floppy disk to the screen, I could transfer it whole to another computer, one that would give me all the time I needed to crack the password, or to get help from people who could.
Alongside the unconnected electric cable there had been a telephone cable, also unattached. I snapped it into the telephone socket on the computer, thereby connecting Mrs Dove’s modem to the world-wide Internet.
It needed a false start or two while I desperately tried to remember half-learned techniques, but finally I was rewarded by the screen prompting: ‘Enter telephone number.’
I tapped in my own home number in the apartment in Pont Square, and pressed Enter, and the screen announced nonchalantly ‘dialing in progress,’ then ‘call accepted,’ then ‘transfer,’ and finally ‘transfer complete.’
Whatever was on the first guarded ‘Quint’ disk was now in my own computer in London. I transferred the other two ‘Quint’ floppies in the same way, and then the disk from box-file № 1, and for good measure another from box 3, identified as ‘Tilepit.’
There was no way that I knew of transferring the BETACAM tapes. Regretfully I left them alone. I looked through the paper pages in the ‘Quint’ box and made a photocopy of one page — a list of unusual racecourses — folding it and hiding it within the zipped pocket of my belt.
Finally I disconnected the electric and telephone cables again, closed the computer compartment, checked that the box files and BETACAM tapes were as they should be, relocked the white cupboard, then unlocked and gently opened the door to the passage.
Silence.
Breathing out with relief, I relocked Mrs Dove’s door and walked along through the row of cabby-hole offices and came to the first setback: the fire-door leading to brown-overalls territory was not merely locked but had a red light shining above it.
Shining red lights often meant alarm systems switched on with depressingly loud sirens ready to screech.
I’d been too long in Mrs Dove’s office. I retreated towards her door again and went down the fire-stairs beside the elevator, emerging into the ground-floor entrance hall with its glass doors to the parking area beyond.
One step into the lobby proved to be one step too far. Something hit my head rather hard, and one of the beefy bodyguards in blue flung a sort of strap around my body and effectively pinned my upper arms to my sides.
I plunged about a bit and got another crack on the head, which left me unable to help myself and barely able to think. I was aware of being in the elevator, but wasn’t quite sure how I’d got there. I was aware of having my ankles strapped together and of being dragged ignominiously over some carpet and dropped in a chair.
Regulation Scandinavian chair with wooden arms, like all the others.
‘Tie him up,’ a voice said, and a third strap tightened across my chest, so that when the temporary mist cleared I woke to a state of near physical immobility and a mind full of curses.
The voice belonged to Owen Yorkshire. He said, ‘Right. Good. Well done. Leave the wrench on the desk. Go back downstairs and don’t let anyone up here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Wait,’ Yorkshire commanded, sounding uncertain. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right man?’
‘Yes, sir. He’s wearing the identity badge we issued to him yesterday. He was supposed to return it when he left, but he didn’t.’
‘All right. Thanks. Off you go.’
The door closed behind the bodyguards and Owen Yorkshire plucked the identity badge from my overalls, read the name and flung it down on his desk.
We were in his fifth-floor office. The chair I sat in was surrounded by carpet. Marooned on a desert island, feeling dim and stupid.
The man-to-man, all-pals-together act was in abeyance. The Owen Yorkshire confronting me was very angry, disbelieving and, I would have said, frightened.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded, bellowing.
His voice echoed and reverberated in the quiet room. His big body loomed over me, his big head close to mine. All his features, I thought, were slightly oversized: big nose, big eyes, wide forehead, large flat cheeks, square jaw, big mouth. The collar-length black wavy hair with its gray-touched wings seemed to vibrate with vigor. I would have put his age at forty; maybe a year or two younger.
‘Answer,’ he yelled. ‘What are you doing here?’
I didn’t reply. He snatched up from his desk a heavy fifteen-inch-long silvery wrench and made as if to hit my head with it. If that was what his boys-in-blue had used on me, and I gathered it was, then connecting it again with my skull was unlikely to produce any answer at all. The same thought seemed to occur to him, because he threw the wrench down disgustedly onto the desk again, where it bounced slightly under its own weight.
The straps around my chest and ankles were the sort of fawn close-woven webbing often used around suitcases to prevent them from bursting open. There was no elasticity in them, no stretch. Several more lay on the desk.
I felt a ridiculous desire to chatter, a tendency I’d noticed in the past in mild concussions after racing falls, and sometimes on waking up from anesthetics. I’d learned how to suppress the garrulous impulse, but it was still an effort, and in this case, essential.
Owen Yorkshire was wearing man-to-man togs; that is to say, no jacket, a man-made-fiber shirt (almost white with vertical stripes made of interlocking beige-colored horseshoes), no tie, several buttons undone, unmissable view of manly hairy chest, gold chain and medallion.
I concentrated on the horseshoe stripes. If I could count the number of horseshoes from shoulder to waist I would not have any thoughts that might dribble out incautiously. The boss was talking. I blanked him out and counted horseshoes and managed to say nothing.
He went abruptly out of the room, leaving me sitting there looking foolish. When he returned he brought two people with him: they had been along in the reception area, it seemed, working out table placements for Monday’s lunch.
They were a woman and a man; Mrs Dove and a stranger. Both exclaimed in surprise at the sight of my trussed self. I shrank into the chair and looked mostly at their waists.
‘Do you know who this is?’ Yorkshire demanded of them furiously.
The man shook his head, mystified. Mrs Dove, frowning, said to me, ‘Weren’t you here yesterday? Something about a farmer?’
‘This,’ Yorkshire said with scorn, ‘is Sid Halley.’
The man’s face stiffened, his mouth forming an O.
‘This, Verney,’ Yorkshire went on with biting sarcasm, ‘is the feeble creature you’ve spent months thundering on about. This! And Ellis said he was dangerous! Just look at him! All those big guns to frighten a mouse.’
Verney Tilepit. I’d looked him up in Burke’s Peerage. Verney Tilepit, Third Baron, aged forty-two, a director of Topline Foods, proprietor — by inheritance — of The Pump.
Verney Tilepit’s grandfather, created a baron for devoted allegiance to the then prime minister, had been one of the old roistering, powerful opinion makers who’d had governments dancing to their tune. The first Verney Tilepit had put his shoulder to history and given it a shove. The third had surfaced after years of quiescence, primarily, it seemed, to discredit a minor investigator. Policy! His bewildered grandfather would have been speechless.
He was fairly tall, as India had said, and he had brown hair. The flicking glance I gave him took in also a large expanse of face with small features bunched in the middle: small nose, small mouth, small sandy mustache, small eyes behind large, light-framed glasses. Nothing about him seemed physically threatening. Perhaps I felt the same disappointment in my adversary as he plainly did about me.
‘How do you know he’s Sid Halley?’ Mrs Dove asked.
Owen Yorkshire said disgustedly, ‘One of the TV crew knew him. He swore there was no mistake. He’d filmed him often. He knows him.’
Bugger, I thought.
Mrs Dove pulled up the long left sleeve of my brown overalls, and looked at my left hand. ‘Yes. It must be Sid Halley. Not much of a champion now, is he?’
Owen Yorkshire picked up the telephone, pressed numbers, waited and forcefully spoke.
‘Get over here quickly,’ he said. ‘We have a crisis. Come to my new office.’ He listened briefly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘just get over here.’ He slammed down the receiver and stared at me balefully. ‘What the sod are you doing here?’
The almost overwhelming urge to tell him got as far as my tongue and was over-ridden only by clamped-shut teeth. One could understand why people confessed. The itch to unburden outweighed the certainty of retribution.
‘Answer,’ yelled Yorkshire. He picked up the wrench again. ‘Answer, you little cuss.’
I did manage an answer of sorts.
I spoke to Verney Tilepit directly in a weak, mock-respectful tone. ‘I came to see you… sir.’
‘My lord,’ Yorkshire told me. ‘Call him my lord.’
‘My lord,’ I said.
Tilepit said, ‘What for?’ and ‘What made you think I would be here?’
‘Someone told me you were a director of Topline Foods, my lord, so I came here to ask you to stop and I don’t know why I’ve been dragged up here and tied up like this.’ The last twenty words just dribbled out. Be careful, I thought. Shut up.
‘To stop what?’ Tilepit demanded.
‘To stop your paper telling lies about me.’ Better.
Tilepit didn’t know how to answer such naivety. Yorkshire properly considered it barely credible. He spoke to Mrs Dove, who was dressed for Saturday morning, not in office black and white, but in bright red with gold buttons.
‘Go down and make sure he hasn’t been in your office.’
‘I locked it when I left last night, Owen.’
Mrs Dove’s manner towards her boss was interestingly like Willy Parrott’s. All-equals-together; up to a point.
‘Go and look,’ he said. ‘And check that cupboard.’
‘No one’s opened that cupboard since you moved offices up here this week. And you have the only key.’
‘Go and check anyway,’ he said.
She had no difficulty with obeying him. I remembered Marsha Rowse’s ingenuous statement — ‘Mrs Dove says never to make Mr Yorkshire angry.’
Mrs Dove, self-contained, confident, was taking her own advice. She was not, I saw, in love with the man, nor was she truly afraid of him. His temper, I would have thought, was to her more of a nuisance than life — or even job — threatening.
As things stood, or rather as I sat, I saw the wisdom of following Mrs Dove’s example for as long as I could.
She was gone a fair time, during which I worried more and more anxiously that I’d left something slightly out of place in that office, that she would know by some sixth sense that someone had been in there, that I’d left some odor in the air despite never using aftershave, that I’d closed the filing cabinets incorrectly, that I’d left visible fingerprints on a shiny surface, that I’d done anything that she knew she hadn’t.
I breathed slowly, trying not to sweat.
When she finally came back she said, ‘The TV crews are leaving. Everything’s ready for Monday. The florists are bringing the Lady Mayoress’s bouquet at ten o’clock. The red-carpet people are downstairs now measuring the lobby. And, oh, the man from Intramind Imaging says they want a check.’
‘What about the office?’
‘The office? Oh, the office is all right.’ She was unconcerned. ‘It was all locked. Just as I left it.’
‘And the cupboard?’ Yorkshire insisted.
‘Locked.’ She thought he was over-reacting. I was concerned only to show no relief.
‘What are you going to do with him?’ she asked, indicating me. ‘You can’t keep him here, can you? The TV crew downstairs were talking about him being here. They want to interview him. What shall I say?’
Yorkshire with black humor said, ‘Tell them he’s all tied up.’
She wasn’t amused. She said, ‘I’ll say he went out the back way. And I’ll be off, too. I’ll be here by eight, Monday morning.’ She looked at me calmly and spoke to Yorkshire. ‘Let him go,’ she said unemotionally. ‘What harm can he do? He’s pathetic.’
Yorkshire, undecided, said, ‘Pathetic? Why pathetic?’
She paused composedly half-way through the door, and dropped a pearl beyond price.
‘It says so in The Pump.’
Neither of these two men, I thought, listening to them, was a full-blown criminal. Not yet. Yorkshire was too near the brink.
He still held the heavy adjustable wrench, slapping its head occasionally against his palm, as if it helped his thoughts.
‘Please untie me,’ I said. At least I found the fatal loquaciousness had abated. I no longer wanted to gabble, but just to talk my way out.
Tilepit himself might have done it. He clearly was unused to — and disturbed by — even this level of violence. His power base was his grandfather’s name. His muscle was his hire-and-fire clout. There were only so many top editorships in the British press, and George Godbar, editor of The Pump, wasn’t going to lose his hide to save mine. Matters of principle were all too often an unaffordable luxury, and I didn’t believe that in George Godbar’s place, or even in Kevin Mills’ or India’s, I would have done differently.
Yorkshire said, ‘We wait.’
He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out what looked bizarrely like a jar of pickles. Dumping the wrench temporarily, he unscrewed the lid, put the jar on the desk, pulled out a green finger and bit it, crunching it with large white teeth.
‘Pickle?’ he offered Tilepit.
The third baron averted his nose.
Yorkshire, shrugging, chewed uninhibitedly and went back to slapping his palm with the wrench.
‘I’ll be missed,’ I said mildly, ‘if you keep me much longer.’
‘Let him go,’ Tilepit said with a touch of impatience. ‘He’s right, we can’t keep him here indefinitely.’
‘We wait,’ Yorkshire said heavily, fishing out another pickle, and to the accompaniment of noisy munching, we waited.
I could smell the vinegar.
The door opened finally behind me and both Yorkshire and Tilepit looked welcoming and relieved.
I didn’t. The newcomer, who came around in front of me blankly, was Ellis Quint.
Ellis, in open-necked white shirt; Ellis, handsome, macho, vibrating with showmanship; Ellis, the nation’s darling, farcically accused. I hadn’t seen him since the Ascot races, and none of his radiance had waned.
‘What’s Halley doing here?’ he demanded, sounding alarmed. ‘What has he learned?’
‘He was wandering about,’ Yorkshire said, pointing a pickle at me. ‘I had him brought up here. He can’t have learned a thing.’
Tilepit announced, ‘Halley says he came to ask me to stop The Pump’s campaign against him.’
Ellis said positively, ‘He wouldn’t have done that.’
‘Why not?’ Yorkshire asked. ‘Look at him. He’s a wimp.’
‘A wimp!’
Despite my precarious position I smiled involuntarily at the depth of incredulity in his voice. I even grinned at him sideways from below half-lowered eyelids, and saw the same private smile on his face: the acknowledgment of brotherhood, of secrecy, of shared esoteric experience, of cold winter afternoons, perils embraced, disappointments and injuries taken lightly, of indescribable triumphs. We had hugged each other standing in our stirrups, ecstatic after winning posts. We had trusted, bonded and twinned.
Whatever we were now, we had once been more than brothers. The past — our past — remained. The intense and mutual memories could not be erased.
The smiles died. Ellis said, ‘This wimp comes up on your inside and beats you in the last stride. This wimp could ruin us all if we neglect our inside rail. This wimp was champion jockey for five or six years and might have been still, and we’d be fools to forget it.’ He put his face close to mine. ‘Still the same old Sid, aren’t you? Cunning. Nerveless. Win at all costs.’
There was nothing to say.
Yorkshire bit into a pickle. ‘What do we do with him, then?’
‘First we find out why he’s here.’
Tilepit said, ‘He came to get The Pump to stop—’
‘Balls,’ Ellis interrupted. ‘He’s lying.’
‘How can you tell?’ Tilepit protested.
‘I know him.’ He said it with authority, and it was true.
‘What, then?’ Yorkshire asked.
Ellis said to me, ‘You’ll not get me into court, Sid. Not Monday. Not ever. You haven’t been able to break my Shropshire alibi, and my lawyers say that without that the prosecution won’t have a chance. They’ll withdraw the charge. Understand? I know you do understand. You’ll have destroyed your own reputation, not mine. What’s more, my father’s going to kill you.’
Yorkshire and Tilepit showed, respectively, pleasure and shock.
‘Before Monday?’ I asked.
The flippancy fell like lead. Ellis strode around behind me and yanked back the right front of my brown overalls, and the tracksuit beneath. He tore a couple of buttons off my shirt, pulling that back after, then he pressed down strongly with his fingers.
‘Gordon says he broke your collarbone,’ he said.
‘Well, he didn’t.’
Ellis would see the remains of bruising and he could feel the bumps of callus formed by earlier breaks, but it was obvious to him that his father had been wrong.
‘Gordon will kill you,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t you care?’
Another unanswerable question.
It seemed to me as if the cruel hidden side of Ellis suddenly took over, banishing the friend and becoming the threatened star who had everything to lose. He roughly threw my clothes together and continued around behind me until he stood on my left side.
‘You won’t defeat me,’ he said. ‘You’ve cost me half a million. You’ve cost me lawyers. You’ve cost me sleep.’
He might insist that I couldn’t defeat him, but we both knew I would in the end, if I tried, because he was guilty.
‘You’ll pay for it,’ he said.
He put his hands on the hard shell of my left forearm and raised it until my elbow formed a right angle. The tight strap around my upper arms and chest prevented me from doing anything to stop him. Whatever strength that remained in my upper left arm (and it was, in fact, quite a lot) was held in uselessness by that strap.
Ellis peeled back the brown sleeve, and the blue one underneath. He tore open my shirt cuff and pulled that sleeve back also. He looked at the plastic skin underneath.
‘I know something about that arm,’ he said. ‘I got a brochure on purpose. That skin is a sort of glove, and it comes off.’
He felt up my arm until, by the elbow, he came to the top of the glove. He rolled it down as far as the wrist and then, with concentration, pulled it off finger by finger, exposing the mechanics in all their detail.
The close-fitting textured glove gave the hand an appearance of life, with knuckles, veins and shapes like fingernails. The works inside were gears, springs and wiring. The bared forearm was bright pink, hard and shiny.
Ellis smiled.
He put his own strong right hand on my electrical left and pressed and twisted with knowledge and then, when the works clicked free, unscrewed the hand in several turns until it came right off.
Ellis looked into my eyes as at a feast. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘You shit.’
He smiled. He opened his fingers and let the unscrewed hand fall onto the carpet.