Come to Grief

Chapter 13

Tilepit looked shocked enough to vomit, but not Yorkshire: in fact, he laughed.

Ellis said to him sharply, ‘This man is not funny. Everything that has gone wrong is because of him, and don’t you forget it. It’s this Sid Halley that’s going to ruin you, and if you think he doesn’t care about what I’ve just done’ — he put his toe against the fallen hand and moved it a few inches — ‘if you think it’s something to laugh at, I’ll tell you that for him it’s almost unbearable… but not unbearable, is it, Sid?’ He turned to ask me, and told Yorkshire at the same time, ‘No one yet has invented anything you’ve found actually unbearable, have they, Sid?’

I didn’t answer.

Yorkshire protested, ‘But he’s only—’

‘Don’t say only,’ Ellis interrupted, his voice hard and loud. ‘Don’t you understand it yet? What do you think he’s doing here? How did he get here? What does he know? He’s not going to tell you. His nickname’s “Tungsten Carbide” — that’s the hardest of all metals and it saws through steel. I know him. I’ve almost loved him. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, and we’ve got to decide what to do with him. How many people know he’s here?’

‘My bodyguards,’ Yorkshire said. ‘They brought him up.’

It was Lord Tilepit who gave him the real bad news. ‘It was a TV crew who told Owen that Sid Halley was in the building.’

‘A TV crew!’

‘They wanted to interview him. Mrs Dove said she would tell them he’d gone.’

‘Mrs Dove!’

If Ellis had met Mrs Dove he would know, as I did, that she wouldn’t lie for Yorkshire. Mrs Dove had seen me, and she would say so.

Ellis asked furiously, ‘Did Mrs Dove see him tied in that chair?’

‘Yes,’ Tilepit said faintly.

‘You stupid…’ Words failed Ellis, but for only a few short seconds. ‘Then,’ he said flatly, ‘you can’t kill him here.’

‘Kill him?’ Tilepit couldn’t believe what he’d heard. His whole large face blushed pink. ‘I’m not… are you talking about murder?’

‘Oh yes, my lord,’ I said dryly, ‘they are. They’re thinking of putting Your Lordship behind bars as an accessory. You’ll love it in the slammer.’

I’d meant only to get Tilepit to see the enormity of what Ellis was proposing, but in doing so I’d made the mistake of unleashing Yorkshire’s rage.

He took two paces and kicked my unscrewed hand with such force that it flew across the room and crashed against the wall. Then he realized the wrench was still in his hand and swung it at my head.

I saw the blow coming but couldn’t get my head back far enough to avoid it altogether. The wrench’s heavy screw connected with my moving cheekbone and tore the skin, but didn’t this time knock me silly.

In Owen Yorkshire, the half-slipping brakes came wholly off. Perhaps the very sight of me, left-handless and bleeding and unable to retaliate, was all it took. He raised his arm and the wrench again, and I saw the spite in his face and the implacably murderous intention and I thought of nothing much at all, which afterwards seemed odd.

It was Ellis who stopped him. Ellis caught the descending arm and yanked Owen Yorkshire around sideways, so that although the heavy weapon swept on downwards, it missed me altogether.

‘You’re brainless,’ Ellis shouted. ‘I said not in here. You’re a raving lunatic. Too many people know he came here. Do you want to splatter his blood and brains all over your new carpet? You might as well go and shout from the rooftops. Get a grip on that frigging temper and find a tissue.’

‘A what?’

‘Something to stop him bleeding. Are you terminally insane? When he doesn’t turn up wherever he’s expected, you’re going to get the police in here looking for him. TV crew! Mrs Dove! The whole frigging county! You get one drop of his blood on anything in here, you’re looking at twenty-five years.’

Yorkshire, bewildered by Ellis’s attack and turning sullen, said there weren’t any tissues. Verney Tilepit tentatively produced a handkerchief; white, clean and embroidered with a coronet. Ellis snatched it from him and slapped it on my cheek, and I wondered if ever, in any circumstances, I could, to save myself, deliberately kill him, and didn’t think so.

Ellis took the handkerchief away briefly, looked at the scarlet staining the white, and put it back, pressing.

Yorkshire strode about, waving the wrench as if jerked by strings. Tilepit looked extremely unhappy. I considered my probable future with gloom and Ellis, taking the handkerchief away again and watching my cheek critically, declared that the worst of the bleeding had stopped.

He gave the handkerchief back to Tilepit, who put it squeamishly in his pocket, and he snatched the wrench away from Yorkshire and told him to cool down and plan.

Planning took them both out of the office, the door closing behind them. Verney Tilepit didn’t in the least appreciate being left alone with me and went to look out of the window, to look anywhere except at me.

‘Untie me,’ I said with force.

No chance. He didn’t even show he’d heard.

I asked, ‘How did you get yourself into this mess?’

No answer.

I tried again. I said, ‘If I walk out of here free, I’ll forget I ever saw you.’

He turned around, but he had his back to the light and I couldn’t see his eyes clearly behind the spectacles.

‘You really are in deep trouble,’ I said.

‘Nothing will happen.’

I wished I believed him. I said, ‘It must have seemed pretty harmless to you, just to use your paper to ridicule someone week after week. What did Yorkshire tell you? To save Ellis at all costs. Well, it is going to cost you.’

‘You don’t understand. Ellis is blameless.’

‘I understand that you’re up to your noble neck in shit.’

‘I can’t do anything.’ He was worried, unhappy and congenitally helpless.

‘Untie me,’ I said again, with urgency.

‘It wouldn’t help. I couldn’t get you out.’

‘Untie me,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the rest.’

He dithered. If he had been capable of reasoned decisions he wouldn’t have let himself be used by Yorkshire, but he wasn’t the first or last rich man to stumble blindly into a quagmire. He couldn’t make up his mind to attempt saving himself by letting me free and, inevitably, the opportunity passed.

Ellis and Yorkshire came back, and neither of them would meet my eyes.

Bad sign.

Ellis, looking at his watch, said, ‘We wait.’

‘What for?’ Tilepit asked uncertainly.

Yorkshire answered, to Ellis’s irritation, ‘The TV people are on the point of leaving. Everyone will be gone in fifteen minutes.’

Tilepit looked at me, his anxieties showing plainly. ‘Let Halley go,’ he begged.

Ellis said comfortingly, ‘Sure, in a while.’

Yorkshire smiled. His anger was preferable, on the whole.

Verney Tilepit wanted desperately to be reassured, but even he could see that if freeing me was the intention, why did we have to wait?

Ellis still held the wrench. He wouldn’t get it wrong, I thought. He wouldn’t spill my blood. I would probably not know much about it. I might not consciously learn the reciprocal answer to my self-searching question: Could he personally kill me, to save himself? How deep did friendship go? Did it ever have absolute taboos? Had I already, by accusing him of evil, melted his innermost restraints? He wanted to get even. He would wound me any way he could. But kill… I didn’t know.

He walked around behind me.

Time, in a way, stood still. It was a moment in which to plead, but I couldn’t. The decision, whatever I said, would be his.

He came eventually around to my right-hand side and murmured, ‘Tungsten,’ under his breath.

Water, I thought, I had water in my veins.

He reached down suddenly and clamped his hand around my right wrist, pulling fiercely upward.

I jerked my wrist out of his grasp and without warning he bashed the wrench across my knuckles. In the moment of utter numbness that resulted he slid the open jaws of the wrench onto my wrist and tightened the screw. Tightened it further, until the jaws grasped immovably, until they squeezed the upper and lower sides of my wrist together, compressing blood vessels, nerves and ligaments, bearing down on the bones inside.

The wrench was heavy. He balanced its handle on the arm of the chair I was sitting in and held it steady so that my wrist was up at the same level. He had two strong hands. He persevered with the screw.

I said, ‘Ellis,’ in protest, not from anger or even fear, but in disbelief that he could do what he was doing: in a lament for the old Ellis, in a sort of passionate sorrow.

For the few seconds that he looked into my face, his expression was flooded with awareness… and shame. Then the feelings passed, and he returned in deep concentration to an atrocious pleasure.

It was extraordinary. He seemed to go into a kind of trance, as if the office and Yorkshire and Tilepit didn’t exist, as if there were only one reality, which was the clench of forged steel jaws on a wrist and the extent to which he could intensify it.

I thought: if the wrench had been lopping shears, if its jaws had been knives instead of flat steel, the whole devastating nightmare would have come true. I shut my mind to it: made it cold. Sweated, all the same.

I thought: what I see in his face is the full-blown addiction; not the cruel satisfaction he could get from unscrewing a false hand, but the sinful fulfillment of cutting off a live hoof.

I glanced very briefly at Yorkshire and Tilepit and saw their frozen, bottomless astonishment, and I realized that until that moment of revelation they hadn’t wholly believed in Ellis’s guilt.

My wrist hurt. Somewhere up my arm the ulna grumbled.

I said, ‘Ellis’ sharply, to wake him up.

He got the screw to tighten another notch.

I yelled at him, ‘Ellis,’ and again, ‘Ellis.’

He straightened, looking vaguely down at fifteen inches of heavy stainless steel wrench incongruously sticking out sideways from its task. He tied it to the arm of the chair with another strap from the desk and went over to the window, not speaking, but not rational, either.

I tried to dislodge myself from the wrench but my hand was too numb and the grip too tight. I found it difficult to think. My hand was pale blue and gray. Thought was a crushed wrist and an abysmal shattering fear that if the damage went on too long, it would be permanent. Hands could be lost.

Both hands… Oh, God. Oh, God.

‘Ellis,’ I said yet again, but in a lower voice this time: a plea for him to return to the old self, that was there all the time, somewhere.

I waited. Acute discomfort and the terrible anxiety continued. Ellis’s thoughts seemed far out in space. Tilepit cleared his throat in embarrassment and Yorkshire, as if in unconscious humor, crunched a pickle.

Minutes passed.

I said, ‘Ellis…’

I closed my eyes. Opened them again. More or less prayed.

Time and nightmare fused. One became the other. The future was a void.

Ellis left the window and crossed with bouncing steps to the chair where I sat. He looked into my face and enjoyed what he could undoubtedly see there. Then he unscrewed and untied the wrench with violent jerks and dropped the abominable ratchet from a height onto the desk.

No one said anything. Ellis seemed euphoric, high, full of good spirits, striding around the room as if unable to contain his exhilaration.

I got stabbing pins and needles in my fingers, and thanked the fates for it. My hand felt dreadful but turned slowly yellowish pink.

Thought came back from outer space and lodged again earthily in my brain.

Ellis, coming down very slightly, looked at his watch. He plucked from the desk the cosmetic glove from my false arm, came to my right side, shoved the glove inside my shirt against my chest and, with a theatrical flourish, zipped up the front of my blue tracksuit to keep his gift from falling out.

He looked at his watch again. Then he went across the room, picked up the unscrewed hand, returned to my side and slapped the dead mechanism into my living palm. There was a powerful impression all around that he was busy making sure no trace of Sid Halley remained in the room.

He went around behind me and undid the strap fastening me into the chair. Then he undid the second strap that held my upper arms against my body.

‘Screw the hand back on,’ he instructed.

Perhaps because they had bent from being kicked around, or perhaps because my real hand was eighty per cent useless, the screw threads wouldn’t mesh smoothly, and after three half turns they stuck. The hand looked re-attached, but wouldn’t work.

‘Stand up,’ Ellis said.

I stood, swaying, my ankles still tied together.

‘You’re letting him go,’ Tilepit exclaimed, with grateful relief.

‘Of course,’ Ellis said.

Yorkshire was smiling.

‘Put your hands behind your back,’ Ellis told me.

I did so, and he strapped my wrists tight together.

Last, he undid my ankles.

‘This way.’ He pulled me by the arm over to the door and through into the passage. I walked like an automaton.

Looking back, I saw Yorkshire put his hand on the telephone. Beyond him, Tilepit was happy with foolish faith.

Ellis pressed the call button for the elevator, and the door opened immediately.

‘Get in,’ he said.

I looked briefly at his now unsmiling face. Expressionless. That made two of us, I thought, two of us thinking the same thing and not saying it.

I stepped into the elevator and he leaned in quickly and pressed the button for the ground floor, then jumped back. The door closed between us. The elevator began its short journey down.

To tie together the wrists of a man who could unscrew one of them was an exercise in futility. All the same, the crossed threads and my fumbling fingers gave me trouble and some severe moments of panic before the hand slipped free. The elevator had already reached its destination by the time I’d shed the tying strap, leaving no chance to emerge from the opening door with everything anywhere near normal.

I put the mechanical hand deep into my right-hand tracksuit trousers pocket. Surreal, I grimly thought. The long sleeve of brown overall covered the void where it belonged.

Ellis had given me a chance. Not much of one, probably, but at least I did have the answer to my question, which was no, he wouldn’t personally kill me. Yorkshire definitely would.

The two blue-clad bodyguards were missing from the lobby.

The telephone on the desk was ringing, but the bodyguards were outside, busily positioning a Topline Foods van. One guard was descending from the driver’s seat. The other was opening the rear doors.

A van, I understood, for abduction. For a journey to an unmarked grave. A bog job, the Irish called it. How much, I wondered, were they being paid?

Ellis’s timing had given me thirty seconds. He’d sent me down too soon. In the lobby I had no future. Out in the open air… some.

Taking a couple of deep breaths, I shot out through the doors as fast as I could, and sprinted — and I ran not to the right, towards my own car, but veered left around the van towards the open gates.

There was a shout from one of the blue figures, a yell from the second, and I thought for a moment that I could avoid them, but to my dismay the gatekeeper himself came to unwelcome life, emerging from his kiosk and barring my exit. Big man in another blue uniform, overconfident.

I ran straight at him. He stood solidly, legs apart, his weight evenly balanced. He wasn’t prepared for or expecting my left foot to knock aside the inside of his knee or for my back to bend and curl like a cannonball into his stomach: he fell over backwards and I was on my way before he struggled to his knees. The other two, though, had gained ground.

The sort of judo Chico had taught me was in part the stylized advances and throws of a regulated sport and in part an individual style for a one-handed victim. For a start, I never wore, in my private sessions with him, the loose white judogi uniform. I never fought in bare feet but always in ordinary shoes or sneakers. The judo I’d learned was how to save my life, not how to earn a black belt.

Ordinary judo needed two hands. Myoelectric hands had a slow response time, a measurable pause between instruction and action. Chico and I had scrapped all grappling techniques for that hand and substituted clubbing; and I used all his lessons at Frodsham as if they were as familiar as walking.

We hadn’t exactly envisaged no useful hands at all, but it was amazing what one could do if one wanted to live. It was the same as it had been in races: win now, pay later.

My opponents were straight muscle men with none of the subtlety of the Japanese understanding of lift and leverage and speed. Chico could throw me every time, but Yorkshire’s watchdogs couldn’t.

The names of the movements clicked like a litany in my brain — shintai, randori, tai-sabaki. Fighting literally to live, I stretched every technique I knew and adapted others, using falling feints that involved my twice lying on the ground and sticking a foot into a belly to fly its owner over my head. It ended with one blue uniform lying dazed on his back, one complaining I’d broken his nose, and one haring off to the office building with the bad news.

I stumbled out onto the road, feeling that if I went back for my car the two men I’d left on the ground would think of getting up again and closing the gates.

In one direction lay houses, so I staggered that way. Better cover. I needed cover before anyone chased me in the Topline Foods van.

The houses, when I reached them, were too regular, the gardens too tidy and small. I chose one house with no life showing, walked unsteadily up the garden path, kept on going, found myself in the back garden with another row of houses over the back fence.

The fence was too high to jump or vault, but there was an empty crate lying there, a gift from the gods.

No one came out of any of the houses to ask me what I thought I was doing. I emerged into the next street and began to think about where I was going and what I looked like.

Brown overalls. Yorkshire would be looking for brown overalls.

I took them off and dumped them in one of the houses’ brown-looking beech hedges.

Taking off the overalls revealed the nonexistence of a left hand.

Damn it, I thought astringently. Things are never easy, so cope.

I put the pink exposed end of arm, with its bare electrical contacts, into my left-hand jacket pocket, and walked, not ran, up the street. I wanted to run, but hadn’t the strength. Weak… Stamina a memory, a laugh.

There was a boy in the distance roller-blading, coming towards me and wearing not the ubiquitous baseball cap but a striped woolen hat. That would do, I thought. I fumbled some money out of the zip pocket in my belt and stood in his way.

He tried to avoid me, swerved, overbalanced and called me filthy names until his gaze fell on the money in my hand.

‘Sell me your hat,’ I suggested.

‘Yer wha?’

‘Your hat,’ I said, ‘for the money.’

‘You’ve got blood on your face,’ he said.

He snatched the money and aimed to roller-blade away. I stuck out a foot and knocked him off his skates. He gave me a bitter look and a choice of swear words, but also the hat, sweeping it off and throwing it at me.

It was warm from his head and I put it on, hoping he didn’t have lice. I wiped my face gingerly on my sleeve and slouched along towards the road with traffic that crossed the end of the residential street… and saw the Topline Foods van roll past.

Whatever they were looking for, it didn’t seem to be a navy tracksuit with a striped woolen hat.

Plan B — run away. OK.

Plan C — where to?

I reached the end of the houses and turned left into what might once have been a shopping street, but which now seemed to offer only realtors, building societies and banks. Marooned in this unhelpful landscape were only two possible refuges: a betting shop and a place selling ice cream.

I chose the ice cream. I was barely through the door when outside the window my own Mercedes went past.

Ellis was driving.

I still had its keys in my pocket. Jonathan, it seemed, wasn’t alone in his car-stealing skill.

‘What do you want?’ a female voice said behind me.

She was asking about ice cream: a thin young woman, bored.

‘Er… that one,’ I said, pointing at random.

‘Cup or cone? Large or small?’

‘Cone. Small.’ I felt disoriented, far from reality. I paid for the ice cream and licked it, and it tasted of almonds.

‘You’ve cut your face,’ she said.

‘I ran into a tree.’

There were four or five tables with people sitting at them, mostly adolescent groups. I sat at a table away from the window and within ten minutes saw the Topline van pass twice more and my own car, once.

Tremors ran in my muscles. Fear, or over-exertion, or both.

There was a door marked Men’s Room at the back of the shop. I went in there when I’d finished the ice cream and looked at my reflection in the small mirror over the sink.

The cut along my left cheekbone had congealed into a blackening line, thick and all too visible. Dampening a paper towel, I dabbed gently at the mess, trying to remove the clotted blood without starting new bleeding, but making only a partial improvement.

Locked in a cubicle, I had another try at screwing my wandering hand into place, and this time at length got it properly aligned and fastened, but it still wouldn’t work. Wretchedly depressed, I fished out the long covering glove and with difficulty, because of no talcum powder and an enfeebled right hand, pulled that too into the semblance of reality.

Damn Ellis, I thought mordantly. He’d been right about some things being near to unbearable.

Never mind. Get on with it.

I emerged from the cubicle and tried my cheek again with another paper towel, making the cut paler, fading it into skin color.

Not too bad.

The face below the unfamiliar woolen hat looked strained. Hardly a surprise.

I went out through the ice cream shop and walked along the street. The Topline Foods van rolled past quite slowly, driven by one of the blue-clad guards, who was intently scanning the other side of the road. That body-guard meant, I thought, that Yorkshire himself might be out looking for me in a car I couldn’t recognize.

Perhaps all I had to do was go up to some sensible-looking motorist and say, ‘Excuse me, some people are trying to kill me. Please will you drive me to the police station?’ And then, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘The managing director of Topline Foods, and Ellis Quint.’ ‘Oh yes?? And you are…?’

I did go as far as asking someone the way to the police station — ‘Round there, straight on, turn left — about a mile’ — and for want of anything better I started walking that way; but what I came to first was a bus shelter with several people standing in a line, waiting. I added myself to the patient half dozen and stood with my back to the road, and a woman with two children soon came up behind me, hiding me well.

Five long minutes later my Mercedes pulled up on the far side of the road with a white Rolls-Royce behind it. Ellis stepped out of my car and Yorkshire out of the Rolls. They conferred together, furiously stabbing the air, pointing up and down the street while I bent my head down to the children and prayed to remain unspotted.

The bus came while the cars were still there.

Four people got off. The waiting line, me included, surged on. I resisted the temptation to look out of the window until the bus was traveling again, and then saw with relief that the two men were still talking.

I had no idea where the bus was going.

Who cared? Distance was all I needed. I’d paid to go to the end of the line, wherever that was.

Peaceful Frodsham in Cheshire, sometime Saturday, people going shopping in the afternoon. I felt disconnected from that sort of life; and I didn’t know what the time was, as the elastic metal bracelet watch I normally wore on my left wrist had come off in Yorkshire’s office and was still there, I supposed.

The bus slowly filled at subsequent stops. Shopping baskets. Chatter. Where was I going?

The end of the line proved to be the railway depot in Runcorn, halfway to Liverpool, going north when I needed to go south.

I got off the bus and went to the depot. There was no Mercedes, no Rolls-Royce, no Topline Foods van in sight, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t think of buses and trains eventually. Runcorn railway depot didn’t feel safe. There was a train to Liverpool due in four minutes, I learned, so I bought a ticket and caught it.

The feeling of unreality continued, also the familiar aversion to asking for help from the local police. They didn’t approve of outside investigators. If I ever got into messes, besides, I considered it my own responsibility to get myself out. Norman Pictons were rare. In Liverpool, moreover, I was probably counted a local boy who’d been disloyal to his ‘roots.’

At the Liverpool railway depot I read the well-displayed timetable for trains going south.

An express to London, I thought; then backtrack to Reading and get a taxi to Shelley Green, Archie Kirk’s house.

No express for hours. What else, then?

The incredible words took a time to penetrate: Liverpool to Bournemouth, departing at 3:10 p.m. A slow train, meandering southwards across England, right down to the Channel, with many stops on the way… and one of the stops was Reading.

I sprinted, using the last shreds of strength. It was already, according to the big depot clock, ticking away at 3:07. Whistles were blowing when I stumbled into the last car in the long train. A guard helped thrust me in and closed the door. The wheels rolled. I had no ticket and little breath, but a marvelous feeling of escape. That feeling lasted only until the first of the many stops, which I discovered with horror to be Runcorn.

Square one: where I’d started. All fear came flooding back. I sat stiff and immobile, as if movement itself would give me away.

Nothing happened. The train quietly rolled onwards. Out on the platform a blue-clad Topline Foods security guard was speaking into a hand-held telephone and shaking his head.

Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Leamington Spa, Banbury, Oxford, Didcot, Reading.

It took four hours. Slowly, in that time, the screwed-tight wires of tension slackened to manageable if not to ease. At every stop, however illogical I might tell myself it was, dread resurfaced. Oversize wrenches could kill when one wasn’t looking… Don’t be a fool, I thought. I’d bought a ticket from the train conductor between Runcorn and Crewe, but every subsequent appearance of his dark uniform as he checked his customers bumped my heart muscles.

It grew dark. The train clanked and swayed into realms of night. Life felt suspended.

There were prosaically plenty of taxis at Reading. I traveled safely to Shelley Green and rang Archie Kirk’s bell.

He came himself to open the door.

‘Hello,’ I said.

He stood there staring, then said awkwardly, ‘We’d almost given you up.’ He led the way into his sitting room. ‘He’s here,’ he said.

There were four of them. Davis Tatum, Norman Picton, Archie himself, and Charles.

I paused inside the doorway. I had no idea what I looked like, but what I saw on their faces was shock.

‘Sid,’ Charles said, recovering first and standing up. ‘Good. Great. Come and sit down.’

The extent of his solicitude always measured the depth of his alarm. He insisted I take his place in a comfortable chair and himself perched on a hard one. He asked Archie if he had any brandy and secured for me a half-tumblerful of a raw-tasting own brand from a supermarket.

‘Drink it,’ he commanded, holding out the glass.

‘Charles…’

‘Drink it. Talk after.’

I gave in, drank a couple of mouthfuls and put the glass on a table beside me. He was a firm believer in the life-restoring properties of distilled wine, and I’d proved him right oftener than enough.

I remembered that I still wore the soft, stripey hat, and took it off; and its removal seemed to make my appearance more normal to them, and less disturbing.

‘I went to Topline Foods,’ I said.

I thought: I don’t feel well; what’s wrong with me?

‘You’ve cut your face,’ Norman Picton said.

I also ached more or less all over from the desperate exertions of the judo. My head felt heavy and my hand was swollen and sore from Ellis’s idea of entertainment. On the bright side, I was alive and home, safe… and reaction was all very well but I was not at this point going to faint.

‘Sid!’ Charles said sharply, putting out a hand.

‘Oh… yes. Well, I went to Topline Foods.’

I drank some brandy. The weak feeling of sickness abated a bit. I shifted in my chair and took a grip on things.

Archie said, ‘Take your time,’ but sounded as if he didn’t mean it.

I smiled. I said, ‘Owen Yorkshire was there. So was Lord Tilepit. So was Ellis Quint.’

‘Quint!’ Davis Tatum exclaimed.

‘Mm. Well… you asked me to find out if there was a heavyweight lumbering about behind the Quint business, and the answer is yes, but it is Ellis Quint himself.’

‘But he’s a playboy,’ Davis Tatum protested. ‘What about the big man, Yorkshire?’ Tatum’s own bulk quivered. ‘He’s getting known. One hears his name.’

I nodded. ‘Owen Cliff Yorkshire is a heavyweight in the making.’

‘What do you mean?’

I ached. I hadn’t really noticed the wear and tear until then. Win now, pay later.

‘Megalomania,’ I said. ‘Yorkshire’s on the edge. He has a violent, unpredictable temper and an uncontrolled desire to be a tycoon. I’d call it incipient megalomania because he’s spending far beyond sanity on self-aggrandizement. He’s built an office block fit for a major industry — and it’s mostly empty — before building the industry first. He’s publicity mad — he’s holding a reception for half of Liverpool on Monday. He has plans — a desire — to take over the whole horse-feed nuts industry. He employs at least two bodyguards who will murder to order because he fears his competitors will assassinate him… which is paranoia.’

I paused, then said, ‘It’s difficult to describe the impression he gives. Half the time he sounds reasonable, and half the time you can see that he will simply get rid of anyone who stands in his way. And he is desperate… desperate… to save Ellis Quint’s reputation.’

Archie asked ‘Why?’ slowly.

‘Because,’ I said, ‘he has spent a colossal amount of money on an advertising campaign featuring Ellis, and if Ellis is found guilty of cutting off a horse’s foot, that campaign can’t be shown.’

‘But a few advertisements can’t have cost that much,’ Archie objected.

‘With megalomania,’ I said, ‘you don’t make a few economically priced advertisements. You really go to town. You engage an expensive, highly prestigious firm — in this case, Intramind Imaging of Manchester — and you travel the world.’

With clumsy fingers I took from my belt the folded copy of the paper in the ‘Quint’ box file in Mrs Dove’s office.

‘This is a list of racecourses,’ I said. ‘These racecourses are where they filmed the commercials. A thirty-second commercial gleaned from each place at phenomenal expense.’

Archie scanned the list uncomprehendingly and passed it to Charles, who read it aloud.

‘Flemington, Germiston, Sha Tin, Churchill Downs, Woodbine, Longchamps, K. L., Fuchu…’

There were fifteen altogether. Archie looked lost.

‘Flemington,’ I said, ‘is where they run the Melbourne Cup in Australia. Germiston is outside Johannesburg. Sha Tin is in Hong Kong. Churchill Downs is where they hold the Kentucky Derby. K. L. is Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Woodbine is in Canada, Longchamps is in Paris, Fuchu is where the Japan Cup is run in Tokyo.’

They all understood.

‘Those commercials are reported to be brilliant,’ I said, ‘and Ellis himself wants them shown as much as Yorkshire does.’

‘Have you seen them?’ Davis asked.

I explained about the box of BETACAM tapes. ‘Making those special broadcast-quality tapes themselves must have been fearfully expensive — and they need special playing equipment, which I didn’t find at Topline Foods, so no, I haven’t seen them.’

Norman Picton, with his policeman’s mind, asked, ‘Where did you see the tapes? Where did you get that list of racecourses?’

I said without emotion, ‘In an office at Topline Foods.’

He gave me a narrow inspection.

‘My car,’ I told him, ‘is still somewhere in Frodsham. Could you get your pals up there to look out for it?’ I gave him its registration number, which he wrote down.

‘Why did you leave it?’ he asked.

‘Er… I was running away at the time.’ For all that I tried to say it lightly, the grim reality reached them.

‘Well,’ I sighed, ‘I’d invaded Yorkshire’s territory. He found me there. It gave him the opportunity to get rid of the person most likely to send Ellis to jail. I accepted that possibility when I went there but, like you, I wanted to know what was causing terrible trouble behind the scenes. And it is the millions spent on those ads.’ I paused, and went on, ‘Yorkshire and Ellis set out originally, months ago, not to kill me but to discredit me so that nothing I said would get Ellis convicted. They used a figurehead, Topline Foods director Lord Tilepit, because he owned The Pump. They persuaded Tilepit that Ellis was innocent and that I was all that The Pump has maintained. I don’t think Tilepit believed Ellis guilty until today. I don’t think The Pump will say a word against me from now on.’ I smiled briefly. ‘Lord Tilepit was duped by Ellis, and so, also, to some extent, was Owen Yorkshire himself.’

‘How, Sid?’ Davis asked.

‘I think Yorkshire, too, believed in Ellis. Ellis dazzles people. Knowing Ellis, to Yorkshire, was a step up the ladder. Today they planned together to… er… wipe me out of the way. Yorkshire would have done it himself in reckless anger. Ellis stopped him, but left it to chance that the bodyguards might do it… but I escaped them. Yorkshire now knows Ellis is guilty, but he doesn’t care. He cares only to be able to show that brilliant ad campaign, and make himself king of the horse nuts. And of course it’s not just horse nuts that it’s all about. They’re a stepping-stone. It’s about being the Big Man with the power to bring mayors to his doorstep. If Yorkshire isn’t stopped you’ll find him manipulating more than The Pump. He’s the sort of man you get in the kitchens of political clout.’

After a moment, Archie asked, ‘So how do we stop him?’

I shifted wearily in the chair and drank some brandy, and said, ‘I can, possibly, give you the tools.’

‘What tools?’

‘His secret files. His financial manoeuvrings. His debts. Details of bribes, I’d guess. Bargains struck. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Evidence of leverage. Details of all his dealings with Ellis, and all his dealings with Tilepit. I’ll give you the files. You can take it from there.’

‘But,’ Archie said blankly, ‘where are these files?’

‘In my computer in London.’

I explained the Internet transfer and the need for password cracking. I couldn’t decide whether they were gladdened or horrified by what I’d done. A bit of both, I thought.

Charles looked the most shocked, Archie the least.

Archie said, ‘If I ask you, will you work for me another time?’

I looked into the knowing eyes, and smiled, and nodded.

‘Good,’ he said.