Come to Grief

Chapter 15

India wasn’t a newspaperwoman for nothing. The front page of Monday’s Pump bore the moderately accurate headline ‘Shot in the Back,’ with, underneath, a picture taken of Gordon Quint aiming his gun unequivocally at my heart.

Gordon’s half-back view was slightly out of focus. My own face was sharp and clear, with an expression that looked rather like polite interest, not the fatalistic terror I’d actually felt.

Kevin and The Pump had gone to town. The Pump acknowledged that its long campaign of denigration of Sid Halley had been a mistake.

Policy, I saw cynically, had done a one-eighty U-turn. Lord Tilepit had come to such senses as he possessed and was putting what distance he could between himself and Ellis Quint.

There had been twenty eyewitnesses to the shooting of J. S. Halley. Kevin, arming himself with a Japanese interpreter, had listened intently, sorted out what he’d been told, and got it right. Throughout his piece there was an undercurrent of awe that no one was going to be able to dispute the facts. He hadn’t once said, ‘It is alleged.’

Gordon Quint, though still unconscious, would in due course be ‘helping the police with their inquiries.’ Kevin observed that Ellis Quint’s whereabouts were unknown.

Inside the paper there were more pictures. One showed Ellis, arms and fence post raised, on the point of striking his father. The Japanese collectively, and that one photographer in particular, had not known who Ellis Quint was. Ellis didn’t appear on the TV screens in Japan.

Why had there been so much photo coverage? Because Mr Halley, Kevin said, had been kind to the honeymooners, and many of them had been watching him as he walked away down Church Street.

I read The Pump while sitting upright in a high bed in a small white side room in Hammersmith hospital, thankfully alone except for a constant stream of doctors, nurses, policemen and people with clipboards.

The surgeon who’d dealt with my punctures came to see me at nine in the morning, before he went off duty for the day. He looked a lot worse for wear by then than I did, I thought.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked, coming in wearily in a sweat-stained green gown.

‘As you see… fine, thanks to you.’

He looked at the newspaper lying on the bed. ‘Your bullet,’ he said, ‘plowed along a rib and in and out of your arm. It tore a hole in the brachial artery, which is why you bled so much. We repaired that and transfused you with three units of blood and saline, though you may need more later. We’ll see how you go. There’s some muscle damage but with physiotherapy you should be almost as good as new. You seem to have been sideways on when he shot you.’

‘I was turning. I was lucky.’

‘You could put it like that,’ he said dryly. ‘I suppose you do know you’ve also got a half-mended fracture of the forearm? And some fairly deep trauma to the wrist?’

I nodded.

‘And we’ve put a few stitches in your face.’

‘Great.’

‘I watched you race,’ he said. ‘I know how fast jockeys heal. Ex-jockeys, too, no doubt. You can leave here when you feel ready.’

I said ‘Thanks’ sincerely, and he smiled exhaustedly and went away.

I could definitely move the fingers of my right hand, even though only marginally at present. There had been a private moment of sheer cowardice in the night when I’d woken gradually from anesthesia and been unable to feel anything in my arm from the shoulder down. I didn’t care to confess or remember the abject dread in which I’d forced myself to look. I’d awoken once before to a stump. This time the recurrent nightmare of helplessness and humiliation and no hands had drifted horrifyingly in and out, but when I did finally look, there was no spirit-pulverizing void but a long white-wrapped bundle that discernibly ended in fingernails. Even so, they didn’t seem to be connected to me. I had lain for a grim while, trying to consider paralysis, and when at length pain had roared back it had been an enormous relief: only whole healthy nerves felt like that. I had an arm… and a hand… and a life.

Given those, nothing else mattered.

In the afternoon Archie Kirk and Norman Picton argued themselves past the NO VISITORS sign on the door and sat in a couple of chairs bringing good news and bad.

‘The Frodsham police found your car,’ Norman said, ‘but I’m afraid it’s been stripped. It’s up on bricks — no wheels.’

‘Contents?’ I asked resignedly.

‘No. Nothing.’

‘Engine?’

‘Most of it’s there. No battery, of course. Everything movable’s missing.’

Poor old car. It had been insured, though, for a fortune.

Archie said, ‘Charles sends his regards.’

‘Tell him thanks.’

‘He said you would be looking as though nothing much had happened. I didn’t believe him. Why aren’t you lying down?’

‘It’s more comfortable sitting up.’

Archie frowned.

I amplified mildly. ‘There’s a bullet burn across somewhere below my shoulder blade.’

Archie said, ‘Oh.’

They both looked at the tall contraption standing beside the bed with a tube leading from a high bag to my elbow. I explained that, too.

‘It’s one of those “painkiller on demand” things,’ I said. ‘If I get a twinge I press a button, and bingo, it goes away.’

Archie picked up the copy of The Pump. ‘All of a sudden,’ he commented, ‘you’re Saint Sid who can do no wrong.’

I said, ‘It’s enough to make Ellis’s lawyers weep.’

‘But you don’t think, do you,’ Archie said doubtfully, ‘that Ellis’s lawyers connived at the hate-Halley campaign?’

‘Because they are ethical people?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

I shrugged and left it.

‘Is there any news of Ellis?’ I asked. ‘Or of Gordon?’

‘Gordon Quint,’ Norman said in a policeman’s voice, ‘was, as of an hour ago, still unconscious in a secure police facility and suffering from a depressed skull fracture. He is to have an operation to relieve the pressure on his brain. No one is predicting when he’ll wake up or what mental state he’ll be in, but as soon as he can understand, he’ll be formally charged with attempted murder. As you know, there’s a whole flock of eyewitnesses.’

‘And Ellis?’ I asked.

Archie said, ‘No one knows where he is.’

‘It’s very difficult,’ I said, ‘for him to go anywhere without being recognized.’

Norman nodded. ‘Someone may be sheltering him. But we’ll find him, don’t worry.’

‘What happened this morning,’ I asked, ‘about the trial?’

‘Adjourned Ellis Quint’s bail is rescinded as he didn’t turn up, and also he’ll be charged with grievous bodily harm to his father. A warrant for his arrest has been issued.’

‘He wanted to prevent his father from murdering,’ I said. ‘He can’t have meant to hurt him seriously.’

Archie nodded. ‘It’s a tangle.’

‘And Jonathan,’ I asked. ‘Did he go to Shropshire?’

Both of them looked depressed.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘didn’t he go?’

‘Oh yes, he went,’ Norman said heavily. ‘And he found the car parkers.’

‘Good boy,’ I said.

‘It’s not so good.’ Archie, like a proper civil servant, had brought with him a briefcase, from which he now produced a paper that he brought over to the bed. I pinned it down with the weight of my still-sluggish left hand and took in its general meaning.

The car parkers had signed a statement saying that Ellis Quint had dined with media colleagues and had brought several of them with him to the dance at about eleven-thirty. The parkers remembered him — of course — not only because of who he was (there had been plenty of other well-known people at the party, starting with members of the Royal Family) but chiefly because he had given them a tip and offered them his autograph. They knew it was before midnight, because their employment as car parkers had ended then. People who arrived later had found only one car parker — a friend of those who’d gone off duty.

Media colleagues! Dammit, I thought. I hadn’t checked those with the duchess.

‘It’s an unbreakably solid alibi,’ Norman observed gloomily. ‘He was in Shropshire when the yearling was attacked.’

‘Mm.’

‘You don’t seem disappointed, Sid,’ Archie said, puzzled.

‘No.’

‘But why not?’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘that you should phone Davis Tatum. Will he be in his office right now?’

‘He might be. What do you want him for?’

‘I want him to make sure the prosecutors don’t give up on the trial.’

‘You told him that on Saturday.’ He was humoring me, I thought.

‘I’m not light-headed from bullets, Archie, if that’s what you think. Since Saturday I’ve worked a few things out, and they are not as they may seem.’

‘What things?’

‘Ellis’s alibi, for one.’

‘But, Sid—’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘This isn’t all that easy to say, so don’t look at me, look at your hands or something.’ They showed no sign of doing so, so I looked at my own instead. I said, ‘I have to explain that I am not as I seem. When people in general look at me they see a harmless person, youngish, not big, not tall, no threat to anyone. Self-effacing. I’m not complaining about that. In fact, I choose to be like that because people then talk to me, which is necessary in my job. They tend to think I’m cozy, as your sister Betty told me, Archie. Owen Yorkshire considers me a wimp. He said so. Only… I’m not really like that.’

‘A wimp!’ Archie exclaimed.

‘I can look it, that’s the point. But Ellis knows me better. Ellis calls me cunning and ruthless, and I probably am. It was he who years ago gave me the nickname of Tungsten Carbide because I wasn’t easy to… er… intimidate. He thinks I can’t be terrified, either, though he’s wrong about that. But I don’t mind him thinking it. Anyway, unlikely though it may seem, all this past summer, Ellis has been afraid of me. That’s why he made jokes about me on television and got Tilepit to set his paper onto me. He wanted to defeat me by ridicule.’

I paused. Neither of them said a word.

I went on. ‘Ellis is not what he seems, either. Davis Tatum thinks him a playboy. Ellis is tall, good-looking, outgoing, charming and loved. Everyone thinks him a delightful entertainer with a knack for television. But he’s not only that. He’s a strong, purposeful and powerful man with enormous skills of manipulation. People underestimate both of us for various and different reasons — I look weak and he looks frivolous — but we don’t underestimate each other. On the surface, the easy surface, we’ve been friends for years. But in our time we rode dozens of races against each other, and racing, believe me, strips your soul bare. Ellis and I know each other’s minds on a deep level that has nothing to do with afternoon banter or chit-chat. We’ve been friends on that level, too. You and Davis can’t believe that it is Ellis himself who is the heavyweight, not Yorkshire, but Ellis and I both know it. Ellis has manipulated everyone — Yorkshire, Tilepit, The Pump, public opinion, and also those so-smart lawyers of his who think they’re dictating the pace.’

‘And you, Sid?’ Norman asked. ‘Has he pulled your strings, too?’

I smiled ruefully, not looking at him. ‘He’s had a go.’

‘I’d think it was impossible,’ Archie said. ‘He would have to put you underground to stop you.’

‘You’ve learned a lot about me, Archie,’ I said lazily. ‘I do like to win.’

He said, ‘So why aren’t you disappointed that Ellis’s Shropshire alibi can’t be broken?’

‘Because Ellis. set it up that way.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Ever since the Northampton yearling was attacked, Ellis’s lawyers have been putting it about that if Ellis had an unbreakable alibi for that night, which I bet he assured them he had, it would invalidate the whole Combe Bassett case. They put pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service to withdraw, which they’ve been tottering on the brink of doing. Never mind that the two attacks were separate, the strong supposition arose that if Ellis couldn’t have done one, then he hadn’t done the other.’

‘Of course,’ Norman said.

‘No,’ I contradicted. ‘He made for himself a positively unbreakable alibi in Shropshire, and he got someone else to go to Northampton.’

‘But no one would.’

‘One person would. And did.’

‘But who, Sid?’ Archie asked.

‘Gordon. His father.’

Archie and Norman both stiffened as if turned to pillars of salt.

The nerves in my right arm woke up. I pressed the magic button and they went slowly back to sleep. Brilliant. A lot better than in days gone by.

‘He couldn’t have done,’ Archie said in revulsion.

‘He did.’

‘You’re just guessing. And you’re wrong.’

‘No.’

‘But, Sid…’

‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘You, Charles and I have all been guests in his house. But he shot me last night. See it in The Pump.’

Archie said weakly, ‘But that doesn’t mean…’

‘I’ll explain,’ I said. ‘Give me a moment.’

My skin was sweating. It came and went a bit, now and then. An affronted body, letting me know.

‘A moment?’

‘I’m not made of iron.’

Archie breathed on a smile. ‘I thought it was tungsten?’

‘Mm.’

They waited. I said, ‘Gordon and Ginnie Quint gloried in their wonderful son, their only child. I accused him of a crime that revolted them. Ginnie steadfastly believed in his innocence; an act of faith. Gordon, however reluctantly, faced with all the evidence we gathered from his Land-Rover, must have come to acknowledge to himself that the unthinkable was true.’

Archie nodded.

I went on. ‘Ellis’s wretched persecution of me didn’t really work. Sure, I hated it, but I was still there, and meanwhile the time of the trial was drawing nearer and nearer. Whatever odium I drew onto myself by doing it, I was going to describe in court, with all the press and public listening, just how Ellis could have cut off the foot of Betty’s colt. The outcome of the trial — whether or not the jury found Ellis guilty, and whether or not the judge sent him to jail — that wasn’t the prime point. The trial itself, and all that evidence, would have convinced enough of the population of his guilt to destroy forever the shining-knight persona. Topline Foods couldn’t have — and, in fact, won’t be able to — use those diamond-plated round-the-world ads.’

I took a deep couple of lungfuls of air. I was talking too much. Not enough oxygen, not enough blood.

I said, ‘The idea of the Shropshire alibi probably came about gradually, and heaven knows to which of them first. Ellis received an invitation to the dance. The plan must have started from that. They saw it as the one effective way to stop the trial from taking place.’

Hell, I thought, I don’t feel well. I’m getting old.

I said, ‘You have to remember that Gordon is a farmer. He’s used to the idea of the death of animals being profitable. I dare say that the death of one insignificant yearling was as nothing to him when set beside the saving of his son. And he knew where to find such a victim. He would have to have long replaced the shears taken by the police. It must have seemed quite easy, and in fact he carried out the plan without difficulty.’

Archie and Norman listened as if not breathing.

I started again. ‘Ellis is many things, but he’s not a murderer. If he had been, perhaps he would have been a serial killer of humans, not horses. That urge to do evil — I don’t understand it, but it happens. Wings off butterflies and so on.’ I swallowed. ‘Ellis has given me a hard time, but in spite of several opportunities he hasn’t let me be killed. He stopped Yorkshire doing it. He stopped his father last night.’

‘People can hate until they make themselves ill,’ Archie nodded. ‘Very few actually murder.’

‘Gordon Quint tried it,’ Norman pointed out, ‘and all but succeeded.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘but that wasn’t to help Ellis.’

‘What was it, then?’

‘Have to go back a bit.’

I’m too tired, I thought, but I’d better finish it.

I said to Norman, ‘You remember that piece of rag you gave me?’

‘Yes. Did you do anything with it?’

I nodded.

‘What rag?’ Archie asked.

Norman outlined for him the discovery at Northampton of the lopping shears wrapped in dirty material.

‘The local police found the shears hidden in a hedge,’ I said, ‘and they brought them into the stud farm’s office while I was there. The stud farm’s owners, Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany, were there, and so was Ginnie Quint, who was a friend of theirs and who had gone there to comfort them and sympathize. Ginnie forcibly said how much she despised me for falsely accusing her paragon of a son. For accusing my friend. She more or less called me Judas.’

‘Sid!’

‘Well, that’s how it seemed. Then she watched the policeman unwrap the shears that had cut off the yearling’s foot and, quite slowly, she went white… and fainted.’

‘The sight of the shears,’ Norman said, nodding.

‘It was much more than that. It was the sight of the material.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I spent a whole day… last Thursday, it seems a lifetime away… I chased all over London with that little piece of cloth, and I finished up in a village near Chichester.’

‘Why Chichester?’ Archie asked.

‘Because that filthy old cloth had once been part of some bed hangings. They were woven as a special order by a Mrs Patricia Huxford, who’s a doll of the first rank. She has looms in Lowell, near Chichester. She looked up her records and found that that fabric had been made nearly thirty years ago especially — and exclusively — for a Mrs Gordon Quint.’

Archie and Norman both stared.

‘Ginnie recognized the material,’ I said. ‘She’d just been giving me the most frightful tongue-lashing for believing Ellis capable of maiming horses, and she suddenly saw, because that material was wrapped round shears, that I’d been right. Not only that, she knew that Ellis had been in Shropshire the night Miss Richardson’s colt was done. She knew the importance of his alibi… and she saw — she understood — that the only other person who could or would have wrapped lopping shears in that unique fabric was Gordon. Gordon wouldn’t have thought twice about snatching up any old rag to wrap his shears in — and I’d guess he decided to dump them because we might have checked Quint’s shears again for horse DNA if he’d taken them home. Ginnie saw that Gordon had maimed the yearling. It was too big a shock… and she fainted.’

Archie and Norman, too, looked shocked.

I sighed. ‘I didn’t understand that then, of course. I didn’t understand it until the night before last, when everything sort of clicked. But now… I think it wasn’t just because of Ellis’s terrible guilt that Ginnie killed herself last Monday, but because it was Gordon’s guilt and reputation as well… and then the trial was starting in spite of everything… and it was all too much… too much to bear.’

I paused briefly and went on, ‘Ginnie’s suicide sent Gordon berserk. He’d set out to help his son. He’d caused his wife’s death. He blamed me for it, for having destroyed his family. He tried to smash my brains in the morning she’d died. He lay in wait for me outside my apartment… he was screaming that I’d killed her. Then, last night, in the actual moment that the picture in The Pump was taken, he was telling me the bullets were for Ginnie… it was my life for hers. He meant… he meant to do it.’

I stopped talking.

The white room was silent.

Later in the day I phoned the hospital in Canterbury and spoke to the ward sister.

‘How is Rachel?’ I asked.

‘Mr Halley! But I thought… I mean, we’ve all read The Pump.’

‘But you didn’t tell Rachel, did you?’ I asked anxiously.

‘No… Linda — Mrs Ferns — said not to.’

‘Good.’

‘But are you—’

‘I’m absolutely OK,’ I assured her. ‘I’m in Hammersmith hospital. Du Cane Road.’

‘The best!’ she exclaimed.

‘I won’t argue. How’s Rachel?’

‘You know that she’s a very sick little girl, but we’re all hopeful of the transplant.’

‘Did she go into the bubble?’

‘Yes, very bravely. She says it’s her palace and she’s its queen.’

‘Give her my love.’

‘How soon… oh, dear, I shouldn’t ask.’

‘I’ll make it by Thursday.’

‘I’ll tell her.’

Kevin Mills and India came to visit before ten o’clock the following morning, on their way to work.

I was again sitting up in the high bed but by then felt much healthier. In spite of my protests, my shot and mending arm was still held immobile in a swaddle of splint and bandages. Give it another day’s rest, I’d been told, and just practice wiggling your fingers: which was all very well, except that the nurses had been too busy with an emergency that morning to reunite me with my left hand, which lay on the locker beside me. For all that it didn’t work properly, I felt naked without it, and could do nothing for myself, not even scratch my nose.

Kevin and India both came in looking embarrassed by life in general and said far too brightly how glad they were to see me awake and recovering.

I smiled at their feelings. ‘My dear children,’ I said, ‘I’m not a complete fool.’

‘Look, mate…’ Kevin’s voice faded. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I said, ‘Who told Gordon Quint where to find me?’

Neither of them answered.

‘India,’ I pointed out, ‘you were the only person who knew I would turn up at Kensington Place at eight o’clock on Sunday evening.’

‘Sid!’ She was anguished, as she had been in Church Street when she’d found me shot; and she wouldn’t look at my face, either.

Kevin smoothed his mustache. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

‘Yours, then?’

‘You’re right about your not being a fool,’ Kevin said. ‘You’ve guessed what happened, otherwise you’d be flinging us out of here right now.’

‘Correct.’

‘The turmoil started Saturday evening,’ Kevin said, feeling secure enough to sit down. ‘Of course, as there’s no daily Pump on Sundays there was hardly anyone in the office. George Godbar wasn’t. No one was. Saturday is our night off. The shit really hit the fan on Sunday morning at the editorial meeting. You know editorial meetings… well, perhaps you don’t. All the department editors — news, sport, gossip, features, whatever, and the senior reporters — meet to decide what stories will be run in the next day’s paper, and there was George Godbar in a positive lather about reversing policy on S. Halley. I mean, Sid mate, you should’ve heard him swear. I never knew so many orifices and sphincters existed.’

‘The boss had leaned on him?’

‘Leaned! There was a panic. Our lord the proprietor wanted you bought off.’

‘How nice,’ I said.

‘He’d suggested ten thousand smackers, George said. Try ten million, I said. George called for copies for everyone of the complete file of everything The Pump has published about you since June, nearly all of it in India’s column on Fridays. I suppose you’ve kept all those pieces?’

I hadn’t. I didn’t say so.

‘Such poison,’ Kevin said. ‘Seeing it all together like that. I mean, it silenced the whole meeting, and it takes a lot to do that.’

‘I wasn’t there,’ India said. ‘I don’t go to those meetings.’

‘Be fair to India,’ Kevin told me, ‘she didn’t write most of it. I wrote some. You know I did. Six different people wrote it.’

India still wouldn’t meet my eyes and still wouldn’t sit in the one empty chair. I knew about ‘policy’ and being burned at the stake and all that, yet week after week I’d dreaded her byline. Try as I would, I still felt sore from that savaging.

‘Sit down,’ I said mildly.

She perched uneasily.

‘If we make another dinner date,’ I said, ‘don’t tell anyone.’

‘Oh, Sid.’

‘She didn’t mean to get you shot, for Chrissakes,’ Kevin protested. ‘The Tilepit wanted you found. Wanted! He was shitting himself, George said. The Pump’s lawyer had passed each piece week by week as being just on the safe side of actionable, but at the meeting, when he read the whole file at once, he was sweating, Sid. He says The Pump should settle out of court for whatever you ask.’

‘And I suppose you’re not supposed to be telling me that?’

‘No,’ Kevin confessed, ‘but you did give me the exclusive of the decade.’

‘How did Gordon Quint find me?’ I asked again.

‘George said our noble lord was babbling on about you promising not to send him to jail if you walked out free from somewhere or other, and you had walked out free, and he wanted to keep you to your promise. George didn’t know what he was talking about, but Tilepit made it crystal that George’s job depended on finding you within the next five minutes, if not sooner. So George begged us all to find you, to say The Pump would confer sainthood immediately and fatten your bank balance, and I phoned India on the off chance, and she said not to worry, she would tell you herself… and I asked her how… and where. There didn’t seem to be any harm in it.’

‘And you told George Godbar?’ I said.

Kevin nodded.

‘And he,’ I said, ‘told Lord Tilepit? And he told Ellis, I suppose… because Ellis turned up, too.’

‘George Godbar phoned Ellis’s father’s house, looking for Ellis. He got an answering machine telling him to try a mobile number, and he reached Gordon Quint in a car somewhere… and he told Gordon where you would be, if Ellis wanted to find you.’

Round and round in circles, and the bullets come out here.

I sighed again. I was lucky to be alive. I would settle for that. I also wondered how much I would screw out of The Pump. Only enough, I decided, to keep His Lordship grateful.

Kevin, the confession over, got restlessly to his feet and walked around the room, stopping when he reached the locker on my left side.

He looked a little blankly at the prosthesis lying there and, after a moment, picked it up. I wished he wouldn’t.

He said, surprised, ‘It’s bigger than I pictured. And heavier. And hard.’

‘All the better to club you with,’ I said.

‘Really?’ he asked interestedly. ‘Straight up?’

‘It’s been known,’ I said, and after a moment he put the arm down.

‘It’s true what they say of you, isn’t it? You may not look it, but you’re one tough bugger, Sid mate, like I told you before.’

I said, ‘Not many people look the way they are inside.’

India said, ‘I’ll write a piece about that.’

‘There you are then, Sid.’ Kevin was ready to go. ‘I’ve got a rape waiting. Thanks for those Japs. Makes us even, right?’

‘Even.’ I nodded.

India stood up as if to follow him. ‘Stay a bit,’ I suggested.

She hesitated. Kevin said, ‘Stay and hold his bloody hand. Oh, shit. Well… sorry, mate. Sorry.’

‘Get out of here,’ I said.

India watched him go.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she said helplessly, ‘about getting you shot.’

‘I’m alive,’ I pointed out, ‘so forget it.’

Her face looked softer. At that hour in the morning she hadn’t yet put on the sharply outlined lipstick nor the matte porcelain make-up. Her eyebrows were as dark and positive, and her eyes as light-blue and clear, but this was the essential India I was seeing, not the worldly package. How different, I wondered, was the inner spirit from the cutting brain of her column?

She, too, as if compelled, came over to my left side and looked at the plastic arm.

‘How does it work?’ she asked.

I explained about the electrodes, as I had for Rachel.

She picked up the arm and put her fingers inside, touching the electrodes. Nothing happened. No movement in the thumb.

I swallowed. I said, ‘It probably needs a fresh battery.’

‘Battery?’

‘It clips into the side. That boxlike thing…’ I nodded towards the locker. ‘…that’s a battery charger. There’s a recharged battery in there. Change them over.’

She did so, but slowly, because of the unfamiliarity. When she touched the electrodes again, the hand obeyed the signals.

‘Oh,’ she said.

She put the hand down and looked at me.

‘Do you,’ she said, ‘have a steel rod up your backbone? I’ve never seen anyone more tense. And your forehead’s sweating.’

She picked up the box of tissues lying beside the battery charger and offered it to me.

I shook my head. She looked at the immobilized right arm and at the left one on the locker, and a wave of understanding seemed to leave her without breath.

I said nothing. She pulled a tissue out of the box and jerkily dabbed at a dribble of sweat that ran down my temple.

‘Why don’t you put this arm on?’ she demanded. ‘You’d be better with it on, obviously.’

‘A nurse will do it.’ I explained about the emergency. ‘She’ll come when she can.’

‘Let me do it,’ India said.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because.’

‘Because you’re too bloody proud.’

Because it’s too private, I thought.

I was wearing one of those dreadful hospital gowns like a barber’s smock that fastened at the back of the neck and shapelessly covered the body. A white flap covered my left shoulder, upper arm, elbow and what remained below. Tentatively India lifted and turned back the flap so that we both could see my elbow and the short piece of forearm.

‘You hate it, don’t you?’ India said.

‘Yes.’

‘I would hate it, too.’

I can’t bear this, I thought. I can bear Ellis unscrewing my hand and mocking me. I can’t bear love.

India picked up the electric arm.

‘What do I do?’ she asked.

I said with difficulty, nodding again at the locker, ‘Talcum powder.’

‘Oh.’ She picked up the white tinful of comfort for babies. ‘In the arm, or on you?’

‘On me.’

She sprinkled powder on my forearm. ‘Is this right? More?’

‘Mm.’

She smoothed the powder all over my skin. Her touch sent a shiver right down to my toes.

‘And now?’

‘Now hold it so that I can put my arm into it.’

She concentrated. I put my forearm into the socket, but the angle was wrong.

‘What do I do?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Turn the thumb towards you a bit. Not too far. That’s right. Now push up while I push down. That top bit will slide over my elbow and grip — and keep the hand on.’

‘Like that?’ She was trembling.

‘Like that,’ I said. The arm gripped where it was designed to.

I sent the messages. We both watched the hand open and close.

India abruptly left my side and walked over to where she’d left her purse, picking it up and crossing to the door.

‘Don’t go,’ I said.

‘If I don’t go, I’ll cry.’

I thought that might make two of us. The touch of her fingers on the skin of my forearm had been a caress more intimate than any act of sex. I felt shaky. I felt more moved than ever in my life.

‘Come back,’ I said.

‘I’m supposed to be in the office.’

‘India,’ I said, ‘please…’ Why was it always so impossible to plead? ‘Please…’ I looked down at my left hand. ‘Please don’t write about this.’

‘Don’t write about it?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I won’t, but why not?’

‘Because I don’t like pity.’

She came halfway back to my side with tears in her eyes.

‘Your Jenny,’ she said, ‘told me that you were so afraid of being pitied that you would never ask for help.’

‘She told you too much.’

‘Pity,’ India said, coming a step nearer, ‘is actually about as far from what I feel for you as it’s possible to get.’

I stretched out my left arm and fastened the hand on her wrist.

She looked at it. I tugged, and she took the last step to my side.

‘You’re strong,’ she said, surprised.

‘Usually.’

I pulled her nearer. She saw quite clearly what I intended, and bent her head and put her mouth on mine as if it were not the first time, as if it were natural.

A pact, I thought.

A beginning.

Time drifted when she’d gone.

Time drifted to the midday news.

A nurse burst into my quiet room. ‘Don’t you have your television on? You’re on it.’

She switched on knobs, and there was my face on the screen, with a newsreader’s unemotional voice saying, ‘Sid Halley is recovering in hospital.’ There was a widening picture of me looking young and in racing colors: a piece of old film taken years ago of me weighing in after winning the Grand National. I was holding my saddle in two hands and my eyes were full of the mystical wonder of having been presented with the equivalent of the Holy Grail.

The news slid to drought and intractable famine.

The nurse said ‘Wait,’ and twiddled more knobs, and another channel opened with the news item and covered the story in its entirety.

A woman announcer whose lugubrious voice I had long disliked put on her portentous-solemn face and intoned: ‘Police today found the body of Ellis Quint in his car, deep in the New Forest in Hampshire…’

Frozen, I heard her saying, as if from a distance, ‘Foul play is not suspected. It is understood that the popular broadcaster left a note for his father, still unconscious after an accidental blow to the head on Sunday night. Now over to our reporter in Hampshire, Buddy Bowes.’

Buddy Bowes, microphone in hand, filled the foreground of the screen with, slightly out of focus in the distance behind him, woodland and activity and a rear view of a white car.

‘This is a sad ending,’ Buddy Bowes said, appearing at least to show genuine regret, ‘to a fairytale life. Ellis Quint, thirty-eight, who gave pleasure to millions with his appearances on television, will also be remembered as the dashing champion amateur steeplechase jockey whose courage and gallantry inspired a whole generation to get out there and achieve. In recent months he has been troubled by accusations of cruelty to animals from his long-time colleague and supposed friend, Sid Halley, ex-professional top jockey. Quint was due to appear in court yesterday to refute those charges…’

There was a montage of Ellis winning races, striding about in macho riding boots, wowing a chat-show audience, looking glowingly alive and handsome.

‘Ellis will be mourned by millions,’ Buddy Bowes finished. ‘And now back to the studio…’

The nurse indignantly switched off the set. ‘They didn’t say anything about your being shot.’

‘Never mind.’

She went away crossly. The reputation Ellis had manufactured for me couldn’t be reversed in a night, whatever The Pump might now say. Slowly perhaps. Perhaps never.

Ellis was dead.

I sat in the quiet white room.

Ellis was dead.

An hour later a hospital porter brought me a letter that he said had been left by hand on the counter of the hospital’s main reception desk and overlooked until now.

‘Overlooked since when?’

Since yesterday, he thought.

When he’d gone I held the envelope in the pincer fingers and tore it open with my teeth.

The two-page letter was from Ellis, his handwriting strong with life.

It said:

The letter ended there except for three words much lower down the page:

‘You win, Sid.’

The two sheets of paper lay on the white bedclothes. No one else would see them, I thought.

I remembered Rachel saying how odd it would be to be dead. To be a space.

The whole white room was a space.

Good and evil, he had been my friend. An enemy: but finally a friend.

The sour, cruel underside of him receded.

I had the win, but there was no one standing in the stirrups to share it with.

Regret, loss, acceptance and relief; I felt them all.

I grieved for Ellis Quint.