Forfeit

13

Norton Fox was less than pleased when I got back.

He heard me rumble into the yard and came out of his house to meet me. It was by then full dark, but there were several external lights on, and more light flooded out of open stable doors as the lads bustled around with the evening chores. I parked, climbed stiffly down from the cab and looked at my watch. Five-fifty. I’d spent two hours on a roundabout return journey to fool the box driver over the distance I’d taken Tiddely Pom. Heathbury Park and back was probably the driver’s most beaten track: he would know the mileage to a hundred yards, recognise it instantly if he saw it on the clock, know for a certainty where the horse was, and make my entire afternoon a waste of time.

‘You’re in trouble, Ty,’ Norton said, reaching me and frowning. ‘What in God’s name were you thinking of? First the man delivering my hay gets here in a towering rage and says my horsebox drove straight at him with some maniac at the wheel and that there’d be an accident if he was any judge, and the next thing is we hear there has been an accident over by Long Barrow crossroads involving a horsebox and I’ve had the police here making enquiries...’

‘Yes.’ I agreed. ‘I’m very sorry, Norton. Your horsebox has a dent in it, and a broken rear light. I’ll apologise to the hay lorry driver. And I guess I’ll have to talk to the police.’

Dangerous driving. Putting it mildly. Very difficult to prove it was a case of self-preservation.

Norton looked near to explosion. ‘What on earth were you doing?’

‘Playing cowboys and Indians,’ I said tiredly. ‘The Indians bit the dust.’

He was not amused. His secretary came out to tell him he was wanted on the telephone, and I waited by the horsebox until he came back, gloomily trying to remember the distinction between careless, reckless and dangerous, and the various penalties attached. Failing to stop. Failing to report an accident. How much for those?

Norton came back less angry than he went. ‘That was the police,’ he said abruptly. ‘They still want to see you. However it seems the two men involved in the crash have vanished from the casualty department in the hospital and the police have discovered that the Cortina was stolen. They are less inclined to think that the accident was your fault, in spite of what the hay lorry driver told them.’

‘The men in the Cortina were after Tiddely Pom,’ I said flatly, ‘And they damn nearly got him. Maybe you could tell Victor Roncey that there is some point to our precautions, after all.’

‘He’s gone home,’ he said blankly. I began to walk across the dark stable yard to where I’d left my van, and he followed me, giving me directions about how to find the police station.

I stopped him. ‘I’m not going there. The police can come to me. Preferably on Monday. You tell them that.’

‘Why on Monday?’ He looked bewildered. ‘Why not now?’

‘Because,’ I spelled it out, ‘I can tell them roughly where to find those men in the Cortina and explain what they were up to. But I don’t want the police issuing any warrants before Monday, otherwise the whole affair will be sub judice and I won’t be able to get a squeak into the Blaze. After all this trouble, we’ve earned our story for Sunday.’

‘You take my breath away,’ he said sounding as if I had. ‘And the police won’t like it.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t tell them,’ I said in exasperation. ‘That was for your ears only. If and when they ask you where I am, simply say I will be getting in touch with them, that you don’t know where I live, and that they could reach me through the Blaze, if they want me.’

‘Very well,’ he agreed doubtfully. ‘If you’re sure. But it sounds to me as though you’re landing yourself in serious trouble. I wouldn’t have thought Tiddely Pom was worth it.’

‘Tiddely Pom, Brevity, Polyxenes, and all the rest... individually none of them was worth the trouble. That’s precisely why the racket goes on.’

His disapproving frown lightened into a half-smile. ‘You’ll be telling me next that the Blaze is more interested in justice than sensationalism.’

‘It says so. Often,’ I agreed sardonically.

‘Huh,’ said Norton. ‘You can’t believe everything you read in the papers.’

I drove home slowly, tired and depressed. Other times, trouble had been a yeast lightening the daily bread. A positive plus factor. Something I needed. But other times, trouble hadn’t bitterly invaded my marriage or earned me such a savage physical attack.

This time, although I was fairly confident that Tiddely Pom would start in his, race, the successful uncovering and extermination of a racing scandal was bringing me none of the usual up-surging satisfaction. This time, dust and ashes. This time, present grief and a grey future.

I stopped on the way and rang the Blaze. Luke-John had left for the day. I got him at home.

‘Tiddely Pom is in the racecourse stables at Heathbury,’ I said. ‘Guarded by an ex-policeman and a large Alsatian. The Clerk of the Course and the racecourse manager both know who he is, but no one else does. O.K.?’

‘Very, I should think.’ He sounded moderately pleased, but no more. ‘We can take it as certain now that Tiddely Pom will start in the Lamplighter. It’s made a good story, Ty, but I’m afraid we exaggerated the danger.’

I disillusioned him. ‘Charlie Boston’s boys were three miles from Norton Fox’s stable by two thirty this afternoon.’

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘So it’s really true...’

‘You’ve looked at it so far as a stunt for the Blaze.’

‘Well...’

‘Well, so it is,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, Charlie Boston’s boys had a slight accident with their car, and they are now back to square one as they don’t know where I took Tiddely Pom.’

‘What sort of accident?’

‘They ran into the back of the horsebox. Careless of them. I put the brakes on rather hard, and they were following a little too close.’

A shocked silence. Then he said, ‘Were they killed?’

‘No. Hardly bent.’ I gave him an outline of the afternoon’s events. Luke-John’s reaction was typical and expected, and the enthusiasm was alive again in his voice.

‘Keep away from the police until Sunday.’

‘Sure thing.’

‘This is great, Ty.’

‘Yeah.’ I said.

‘Knock out a preliminary version tonight and bring it in with you in the morning,’ he said. ‘Then we can discuss it tomorrow, and you can phone in the final touches from Heathbury after the Lamplighter on Saturday.’

‘All right.’

‘Oh, and give Roncey a ring, would you, and tell him the horse is only safe thanks to the Blaze.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’

I put down the receiver and felt like leaving Roncey severely alone. I was tired and I wanted to go home. And when I got home, I thought drearily, there would be no let off, only another dose of self hate and remorse.

Roncey answered the telephone at the first ring and needed no telling. Norton Fox had already been through.

‘Tiddely Pom is safe and well looked after,’ I assured him.

‘I owe you an apology,’ he said abruptly.

‘Be my guest,’ I said.

‘Look here, there’s something worrying me. Worrying me badly.’ He paused, swallowing a great deal of pride. ‘Do you... I mean, have you any idea... how those men appeared so quickly on the scene?’

‘The same idea as you.’ I agreed. ‘Your son, Pat.’

‘I’ll break his neck,’ he said, with real and unfatherly viciousness.

‘If you’ve any sense, you’ll let him ride your horses in all their races, not just the unimportant ones.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘About Pat’s outsize sense of grievance. You put up anyone except him, and he resents it.’

‘He’s not good enough,’ he protested.

‘And how will he ever be, if you don’t give him the experience? Nothing teaches a jockey faster than riding a good horse in a good race.’

‘He might lose,’ he said pugnaciously.

‘He might win. When did you ever give him the chance?’

‘But to give away the secret of Tiddely Pom’s whereabouts... what would he expect to gain?’

‘He was getting his own back, that’s all.’

‘All!’

‘There’s no harm done.’

‘I hate him.’

‘Then send him to another stable. Give him an allowance to live on and let him see if he’s going to ride well enough to turn professional. That’s what he wants. If you stamp on people’s ambitions too hard, it’s not frantically astonishing if they bite back.’

‘It’s a son’s duty to work for his father. Especially a farmer’s son.’

I sighed. He was half a century out of date and no amount of telling from me was going to change him. I said I’d see him on Sunday, and disconnected.

Like his father, I took no pleasure at all in Pat Roncey’s vengeful disloyalty. Understand, maybe. Admire, far from it.

One of the men who came to enquire at Roncey’s farm must have sensed Pat’s obvious disgruntlement and have given him a telephone number to ring if he ever found out where Tiddely

Pom had gone, and wanted to revenge himself on his father. One might give Pat the benefit of enough doubt to suppose that he’d thought he was only telling a rival newspaperman to the Blaze: but even so he must have known that a rival paper would spread the information to every corner of the country. To the ears which waited to hear. Exactly the same in the end. But because of the speed with which Charlie Boston’s boys had reached Norton Fox’s village, it must have been Raincoat or the chauffeur, or even Vjoersterod himself who had talked to Pat at the farm.

It had to be Pat. Norton Fox’s stable lads might have passed the word on to newspapers, but they couldn’t have told Vjoersterod or Charlie Boston because they didn’t know they wanted to know, and probably didn’t even know they existed.

I drove on, back to London. Parked the van in the garage downstairs. Locked up. Walked slowly and unenthusiastically up to the flat.

‘Hi,’ said Elizabeth brightly.

‘Hi yourself.’ I kissed her cheek.

It must have looked, to Mrs Woodward, a normal greeting. Only the pain we could read in each other’s eyes said it wasn’t.

Mrs Woodward put on her dark blue coat and checked the time again to make sure it was ten to, not ten after. She’d had three hours extra, but she wanted more. I wondered fleetingly if I could charge her overtime to the Blaze.

‘We’ve had our meal,’ Mrs Woodward said. ‘I’ve left yours ready to warm up. Just pop it in the oven, Mr Tyrone.’ ‘Thanks.’

‘’Night, then, luv,’ she called to Elizabeth.

‘’Night.’

I opened the door for her and she nodded briskly, smiled, and said she’d be there on the dot in the morning. I thanked her appreciatively. She would indeed be there on the dot. Kind, reliable, necessary Mrs Woodward. I hoped the Tally cheque wouldn’t be too long coming.

Beyond that first greeting Elizabeth and I could find little to say to each other. The most ordinary enquiries and remarks seemed horribly brittle, like a thin sheet of glass over a pit.

It was a relief to both of us when the door bell rang.

‘Mrs Woodward must have forgotten something,’ I said. It was barely ten minutes since she had left.

‘I expect so,’ Elizabeth agreed.

I opened the door without a speck of intuition. It swung inward with a rush, weighted and pushed by a heavy man in black. He stabbed a solid leather gloved fist into my diaphragm and when my head came forward chopped down with something hard on the back of my neck.

On my knees, coughing for breath, I watched Vjoersterod appear in the doorway, take in the scene, and walk past me into the room. A black-booted foot kicked the door shut behind him. There was a soft whistling swish in the air and another terrible thump high up between my shoulder blades. Elizabeth cried out. I staggered to my feet and tried to move in her direction. The heavy man in black, Ross, the chauffeur, slid his arm under mine and twisted and locked my shoulder.

‘Sit down, Mr Tyrone,’ Vjoersterod said calmly. ‘Sit there.’ He pointed to the tapestry-covered stool Mrs Woodward liked to knit on as there were no arms or back to get in the way of her busy elbows.

‘Ty,’ Elizabeth’s voice rose high with fear. ‘What’s happening?’

I didn’t answer. I felt stupid and sunk. I sat down on the stool when Ross released my arm and tried to work some control into the way I looked at Vjoersterod.

He was standing near Elizabeth’s head, watching me with swelling satisfaction.

‘So now we know just where we are, Mr Tyrone. Did you really have the conceit to think you could defy me and get away with it? No one does, Mr Tyrone. No one ever does.’

I didn’t answer. Ross stood beside me, a pace to the rear. In his right hand he gently swung the thing he had hit me with, a short elongated pear-shaped truncheon. Its weight and crushing power made a joke of Charlie Boston’s boys’ knuckledusters. I refrained from rubbing the aching places below my neck.

‘Mr Tyrone,’ Vjoersterod said conversationally, ‘Where is Tiddely Pom?’

When I still didn’t answer immediately he half turned, looked down, and carefully put the toe of his shoe under the switch of the electric point. From there the cable led directly to Elizabeth’s breathing pump. Elizabeth turned her head to follow my eyes and saw what he was doing.

‘No,’ she said. It was high pitched, terrified. Vjoersterod smiled.

‘Tiddely Pom?’ he said to me.

‘He’s in the racecourse stables at Heathbury Park.’

‘Ah.’ He took his foot away, put it down on the floor. ‘You see how simple it is? It’s always a matter of finding the right lever. Of applying the right pressure. No horse, I find, is ever worth a really serious danger to a loved one.’

I said nothing. He was right.

‘Check it,’ Ross said from behind me.

Vjoersterod’s eyes narrowed. ‘He couldn’t risk a lie.’

‘He wouldn’t be blackmailed. He was out to get you, and no messing. Check it.’ There was advice in Ross’s manner, not authority. More than a chauffeur. Less than an equal.

Vjoersterod shrugged but stretched out a hand and picked up the receiver. Telephone enquiries. Heathbury Park racecourse. The Clerk of the Course’s house? That would do very well.

Willie Ondroy himself answered. Vjoersterod said ‘Mr Tyrone asked me to call you to check if Tiddely Pom had settled in well...’

He listened to the reply impassively, his pale yellow face immobile. It accounted for the fact, I thought inconsequentially, that his skin was unlined. He never smiled; seldom frowned. The only wrinkles were around his eyes, which I suppose he screwed up against his native sun.

‘Thank you so much,’ he said. His best Foreign Office voice, courteous and charming.

‘Ask him which box the horse is in,’ Ross said. ‘The number.’

Vjoersterod asked. Willie Ondroy told him.

‘Sixty eight. Thank you. Goodnight.’

He put the receiver carefully back in its cradle and let a small silence lengthen. I hoped that since he had got what he came for he would decently go away again. Not a very big hope to start with, and one which never got off the ground.

He said, studying his finger nails, ‘It is satisfactory, Mr Tyrone, that you do at last see the need to co-operate with me.’ Another pause. ‘However in your case I would be foolish to think that this state of affairs would last very long if I did nothing to convince you that it must.’

I looked at Elizabeth. She didn’t seem to have followed Vjoersterod’s rather involved syntax. Her head lay in a relaxed way on the pillow and her eyes were shut. She was relieved that I had told where the horse was: she thought that everything was now all right.

Vjoersterod followed my glance and my thought. He nodded. ‘We have many polio victims on respirators in my country. I understand about them. About the importance of electricity. The importance of constant attendance. The razor edge between life and death. I understand it well.’

I said nothing. He said, ‘Many men desert wives like this. Since you do not, you would care if harm came to her. Am I right? You have, in fact, just this minute proved it, have you not? You wasted so little time in telling me correctly what I wanted to know.’

I made no comment. He waited a fraction, then went smoothly on. What he said, as Dembley had found out, was macabrely at variance with the way he said it.

‘I have an international reputation to maintain. I simply cannot afford to have pipsqueak journalists interfering with my enterprises and trying to hold me up to ridicule. I intend to make it clear to you once and for all, to impress upon you indelibly, that I am not a man to be crossed.’

Ross moved a pace at my side. My skin crawled. I made as good a job as I could of matching Vjoersterod’s immobility of expression.

Vjoersterod had more to say. As far as I was concerned, he could go on all night. The alternative hardly beckoned.

‘Charlie Boston reports to me that you have put both his men out of action. He too cannot afford such affronts to his reputation. Since all you learned from his warning attentions on the train was to strike back, we will see if my chauffeur can do any better.’

I tucked one foot under the stool, pivoted on it, and on the way to my feet struck at Ross with both hands, one to the stomach, one to the groin. He bent over, taken by surprise, and I wrenched the small truncheon out of his hand, raising it to clip him on the head.

‘Ty...’ Elizabeth’s voice rose in an agonised wail. I swung round with the truncheon in my hand and met Vjoersterod’s fiercely implacable gaze.

‘Drop it.’

He had his toe under the switch. Three yards between us.

I hesitated, boiling with fury, wanting above anything to hit him, knock him out, get rid of him out of my life and most particularly out of the next hour of it. I couldn’t risk it. One tiny jerk would cut off the current. I couldn’t risk not being able to reach the switch again in time, not with Vjoersterod in front of it and Ross behind me. Under the weight of the Spirashell she would suffocate almost immediately. If I resisted any more I could kill her. He might really do it. Let her die. Leave me to explain her death and maybe even be accused of slaughtering her myself. The unwanted wife bit... He didn’t know I knew his name or anything about him. He would think he could kill Elizabeth with reasonable safety. I simply couldn’t risk it.

I put my arm down slowly and dropped the truncheon on the carpet. Ross, breathing heavily, bent and picked it up.

‘Sit down, Mr Tyrone,’ Vjoersterod said. ‘And stay sitting down. Don’t get up again. Do I make myself clear?’

He still had his toe under the switch. I sat down, seething inside, rigid outside, and totally apprehensive. Twice in a fortnight was definitely too much.

Vjoersterod nodded to Ross, who hit me solidly with the truncheon on the back of the shoulder. It sounded horrible. Felt worse.

Elizabeth cried out. Vjoersterod looked at her without pity and told Ross to switch on the television. They both waited while the set warmed up. Ross adjusted the volume to medium loud and changed the channel from a news magazine to song and dance. No neighbours, unfortunately, would call to complain about the noise. The only ones who lived near enough were out working in a night club.

Ross had another go with his truncheon. Instinctively I started to stand up... to retaliate, to escape, heaven knows.

‘Sit down,’ Vjoersterod said.

I looked at his toe. I sat down. Ross swung his arm and that time I fell forward off the stool on to my knees.

‘Sit.’ Vjoersterod said. Stiffly I returned to where he said.

‘Don’t,’ Elizabeth said to him in a wavering voice. ‘Please don’t.’

I looked at her, met her eyes. She was terrified. Scared to death. And something else. Beseeching. Begging me. With a flash of blinding understanding I realised she was afraid I wouldn’t take any more, that I wouldn’t think she was worth it, that I would somehow stop them hurting me even if it meant switching off her pump. Vjoersterod knew I wouldn’t. It was ironic, I thought mordantly, that Vjoersterod knew me better than my own wife.

It didn’t last a great deal longer. It had anyway reached the stage where I no longer felt each blow separately but rather as a crushing addition to an intolerable whole. It seemed as though I had the whole weight of the world across my shoulders. Atlas wasn’t even in the race.

I didn’t see Vjoersterod tell Ross to stop. I had the heels of my hands against my mouth and my fingertips in my hair. Some nit on the television was advising everyone to keep their sunny side up. Ross cut him off abruptly in mid note.

‘Oh God,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Oh God.’

Vjoersterod’s smooth voice dryly comforted her. ‘My dear Mrs Tyrone, I assure you that my chauffeur knows how to be a great deal more unpleasant than that. He has, I hope you realise, left your husband his dignity.’

‘Dignity,’ Elizabeth said faintly.

‘Quite so. My chauffeur used to work in the prison service in the country I come from. He knows about humiliation. It would not have been suitable, however, to apply certain, of his techniques to your husband.’

‘Russia?’ she asked. ‘Do you come from Russia?’

He didn’t answer her. He spoke to me.

‘Mr Tyrone, should you try to cross me again, I would allow my chauffeur to do anything he liked. Anything at all. Do you understand?’

I was silent. He repeated peremptorily, ‘Do you understand?’

I nodded my head.

‘Good. That’s a start. But only a start. You will also do something more positive. You will work for me. You will write for me in your newspaper. Whatever I tell you to write, you will write.’

I detached my hands slowly from my face and rested my wrists on my knees.

‘I can’t,’ I said dully.

‘I think you will find that you can. In fact you will. You must. And neither will you contemplate resigning from your paper.’ He touched the electric switch with his brown polished toe cap. ‘You cannot guard your wife adequately every minute for the rest of her life.’

‘Very well,’ I said slowly. ‘I will write what you say.’

‘Ah.’

Poor old Bert Checkov, I thought drearily. Seven floors down to the pavement. Only I couldn’t insure myself for enough to compensate Elizabeth for having to live for ever in a hospital.

‘You can start this week,’ Vjoersterod said. ‘You can say on Sunday that what you have written for the last two weeks turns out to have no foundation in fact. You will restore the situation to what it was before you started interfering.’

‘Very well.’

I put my right hand tentatively over my left shoulder. Vjoersterod watched me and nodded.

‘You’ll remember that,’ he said judiciously. ‘Perhaps you will feel better if I assure you that many who have crossed me are now dead. You are more useful to me alive. As long as you write what I say, your wife will be safe, and my chauffeur will not need to attend to you.’

His chauffeur, did he but know it, had proved to be a pale shadow of the Boston boys. For all my fears, it now seemed to me that the knuckledusters had been worse. The chauffeur’s work was a bore, a present burden, yet not as crippling as before. No broken ribs. No all-over weakness. This time I would be able to move.

Elizabeth was close to tears. ‘How can you,’ she said, ‘How can you be so... beastly.’

Vjoersterod remained unruffled. ‘I am surprised you care so much for your husband after his behaviour with that coloured girl.’

She bit her lip and rolled her head away from him on the pillow. He stared at me calmly. ‘So you told her.’

There was no point in saying anything. If I’d told him where Tiddely Pom had been on Tuesday, when he first tried to make me, I would have saved myself a lot of pain and trouble. I would have saved Elizabeth from knowing about Gail. I would have spared her all this fear. Some of Bert Checkov’s famous last words floated up from the past... ‘It’s the ones who don’t know when to give in who get the worst clobbering... in the ring, I mean...’

I swallowed. The ache from my shoulders was spreading down my back. I was dead tired of sitting on that stool. Mrs Woodward could keep it, I thought scrappily. I wouldn’t want it in the flat any more.

Vjoersterod said to Ross, ‘Pour him a drink.’

Ross went over to where the whisky bottle stood on its tray with two glasses and the Malvern Water. The bottle was nearly half full. He unscrewed the cap, picked up one of the tumblers, and emptied into it all the whisky. It was filled to the brim.

Vjoersterod nodded. ‘Drink it.’

Ross gave me the glass. I stared at it.

‘Go on,’ Vjoersterod said. ‘Drink it.’

I took a breath to protest. He moved his toe towards the switch. I put the glass to my lips and took a mouthful. Jump through hoops when the man said.

‘All of it,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’

I had eaten nothing for more than twenty four hours. In spite of a natural tolerance, a tumbler full of alcohol on an empty stomach was not my idea of fun. I had no choice. Loathing Vjoersterod, I drank it all.

‘He seems to have learned his lesson,’ Ross said.