Forfeit

16

I was in a dim long room with a lot of bodies laid out in white. I too was in white, being painfully crushed in a cement sandwich. My head, sticking out of it, pulsed and thumped like a steam hammer.

The components of this nightmare gradually sorted themselves out into depressing reality. Respectively, a hospital ward, a savage load of bruises, and an Emperor-sized hangover.

I dragged my arm up and squinted at my watch. Four-fifty. Even that small movement had out-of-proportion repercussions. I put my hand down gently on top of the sheets and tried to duck out by going to sleep again.

Didn’t manage it. Too many problems. Too many people would want too many explanations. I’d have to edit the truth here and there, juggle the facts a little. Needed a clear head for it, not a throbbing dehydrated morass.

I tried to sort out into order exactly what had happened the evening before, and wondered profitlessly what I would have done if I hadn’t been drunk. Thought numbly about Vjoersterod and Ross being pulled from the wreck. If they were dead, which I was sure they were, I had certainly killed them. The worst thing about that was that I didn’t care.

If I shut my eyes the world still revolved and the ringing noise in my head grew more persistent. I thought wearily that people who poisoned themselves with alcohol for pleasure had to be crazy.

At six they woke up all the patients, who shook my tender brain with shattering decibels of coughing, spitting, and brushing of teeth. Breakfast was steamed haddock and weak tea. I asked for water and something for a headache, and thought sympathetically about the man who said he didn’t like Alka-seltzers because they were so noisy.

The hospital was equipped with telephone trolleys, but for all my urging I couldn’t get hold of one until nine-thirty. I fed it with coins salvaged from my now drying trousers and rang Tonio. Caught him luckily in his consulting room after having insisted his receptionist tell him I was calling.

‘Ty! Deo gratia... where the hell have you been?’

‘Swimming,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you later. Is Elizabeth O.K.?’

‘She’s fine. But she was extremely anxious when you didn’t turn up again last night... Where are you now? Why haven’t you been to find out for yourself how she is?’

‘I’m in University College Hospital. At least, I’m here for another few hours. I got scooped in here last night, but there’s not much damage.’

‘How’s the head?’

‘Lousy.’

He laughed. Charming fellow.

I rang the nursing home and talked to Elizabeth. There was no doubt she was relieved to hear from me, though from the unusual languor in her voice it was clear they had given her some sort of tranquiliser. She was almost too calm. She didn’t ask me what happened when Tonio had driven her away; she didn’t want to know where I was at that moment.

‘Would you mind staying in the nursing home for a couple of days?’ I asked. ‘Just till I get things straight.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Couple of days. Fine.’

‘See you soon, honey.’

‘Sure,’ she said again, vaguely. ‘Fine.’

After a while I disconnected and got through instead to Luke-John. His brisk voice vibrated loudly through the receiver and sent javelins through my head. I told him I hadn’t written my Sunday column yet because I’d been involved in a car crash the night before, and held the receiver six inches away while he replied.

‘The car crash was yesterday afternoon.’

‘This was another one.’

‘For God’s sake, do you make a habit of it?’

‘I’ll write my piece this evening and come in with it in the morning before I go to Heathbury for the Lamplighter. Will that do?’

‘It’ll have to, I suppose,’ he grumbled. ‘You weren’t hurt in the second crash, were you?’ He sounded as if an affirmative answer would be highly unpopular.

‘Only bruised,’ I said, and got a noncommittal unsympathetic grunt.

‘Make that piece good,’ he said. ‘Blow the roof off.’

I put down the receiver before he could blow the roof off my head. It went on thrumming mercilessly. Ross’s target area also alternately burned and ached and made lying in bed draggingly uncomfortable. The grim morning continued. People came and asked me who I was. And who were the two men with me, who had both drowned in the car? Did I know their address?

No, I didn’t.

And how had the accident happened?

‘The chauffeur had a blackout,’ I said.

A police sergeant came with a notebook and wrote down the uninformative truth I told him about the accident. I didn’t know Mr Vjoersterod well: he was just an acquaintance. He had insisted on taking me in his car to the nursing home where my wife was at present a patient. The chauffeur had had a blackout and the car had run off the road. It had all happened very quickly. I couldn’t remember clearly, because I was afraid I had had a little too much to drink. Mr Vjoersterod had handed me something to smash our way out of the car with, and I had done my best. It was very sad about Mr Vjoersterod and the chauffeur. The man who had fetched them out ought to have a medal. The Sergeant said I would be needed for the inquest, and went away.

The doctor who came to examine me at mid-day sympathised with my various discomforts and said it was extraordinary sometimes how much bruising one could sustain through being thrown about in a somersaulting car. I gravely agreed with him and suggested I went home as soon as possible.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If you feel like it.’

I felt like oblivion. I creaked into my rough-dried crumpled shirt and trousers and left my face unshaven, my hair unbrushed and my tie untied, because lifting my arms up for those jobs was too much trouble. Tottered downstairs and got the porter to ring for a taxi, which took me the short distance to Welbeck Street and decanted me on Tonio’s doorstep. Someone had picked up the Leaning Tower and put it back in place. There wasn’t a mark on it. More than could be said for the Rolls. More than could be said for me.

Tonio gave me one penetrating look, an armchair, and a medicine glass of disprin and nepenthe.

‘What’s this made of?’ I asked, when I’d drunk it.

‘Nepenthe? A mixture of opium and sherry.’

‘You’re joking.’

He shook his head. ‘Opium and sherry wine. Very useful stuff. How often do you intend to turn up here in dire need of it?’

‘No more,’ I said. ‘It’s finished.’

He wanted to know what had happened after he had driven Elizabeth away, and I told him, save for the one detail of my having blacked out the chauffeur myself. He was no fool, however. He gave me a twisted smile of comprehension and remarked that I had behaved like a drunken idiot.

After that he fetched my jacket from his bedroom and insisted on driving me and the van back to the flat on the basis that Elizabeth needed me safe and sound, not wrapped round one of the lamp posts I had miraculously missed the night before. I didn’t argue. Hadn’t the energy. He put the van in the garage for me and walked away up the mews to look for a taxi, and I slowly went up the stairs to the flat feeling like a wet dishcloth attempting the Matterhorn.

The flat was stifling hot. I had left all the heaters on the night before and Mrs Woodward hadn’t turned them off. There was a note from her on the table. ‘Is everything all right? Have put milk in fridge. Am very anxious. Mrs W.’

I looked at my bed. Nothing on it but sheets. Remembered all the blankets and pillows were still downstairs on the stretcher in the van. Going down for them was impossible. Pinched Elizabeth’s. Spread one pink blanket roughly on the divan, lay down on it still dressed, pulled another over me, put my head down gingerly on the soft, cool pillow.

Bliss.

The world still spun. And otherwise, far too little to put out flags for. My head still manufactured its own sound track. And in spite of the nepenthe the rest of me still felt fresh from a cement mixer. But now there was luxuriously nothing more to do except drift over the edge of a precipice into a deep black heavenly sleep...

The telephone bell rang sharply, sawing the dream in half. It was Mrs Woodward, Lancashire accent very strong under stress, sounding touchingly relieved that no unbearable disaster had happened to Elizabeth.

‘It’s me that’s not well,’ I said. ‘My wife’s spending a couple of days in the nursing home. If you’ll ring again I’ll let you know when she’ll be back...’

I put the receiver down in its cradle and started across to my bed. Took two steps, yawned, and wondered if I should tell Victor Roncey to go fetch Madge and the boys. Wondered if I should tell Willie Ondroy to slacken the ultra-tight security. Decided to leave things as they were. Only twenty-four more hours to the race. Might as well be safe. Even with Vjoersterod dead, there was always Charlie Boston.

Not that Tiddely Pom would win. After all the trouble to get him there his chances were slender, because the bout of colic would have taken too much out of him. Charlie Boston would make his profit, just as if they’d nobbled him as planned.

I retraced the two steps back to the telephone and after a chat with enquiries put through a personal call to Birmingham.

‘Mr Boston?’

‘Yers.’

‘This is James Tyrone.’

There was a goggling silence at the other end punctuated only by some heavy breathing.

I asked, ‘What price are you offering on Tiddely Pom?’

No answer except a noise half way between a grunt and a growl.

‘The horse will run,’ I commented.

‘That’s all you know,’ he said. A rough, bad tempered voice. A rough, bad tempered man.

‘Don’t rely on Ross or Vjoersterod,’ I said patiently. ‘You won’t be hearing from them again. The poor dear fellows are both dead.’

I put down the receiver without waiting for the Boston reactions. Felt strong enough to take off my jacket. Made it back to bed and found the friendly precipice still there, waiting. Didn’t keep it waiting any longer.

A long while later I woke up thirsty and with a tongue which felt woolly and grass green. The nepenthe had worn off. My shoulders were heavy, stiffly sore, and insistent. A bore. All pain was a bore. It was dark. I consulted my luminous watch. Four o’clock, give or take a minute. I’d slept twelve hours.

I yawned. Found my brain no longer felt as if it was sitting on a bruise and remembered with a wide-awakening shock that I hadn’t written my column for the Blaze. I switched on the light and took a swig of Tonio’s mixture, and after it had worked went to fetch a notebook and pencil and a cup of coffee. Propped up the pillows, climbed back between the blankets, and blew the roof off for Luke-John.

‘The lawyers will have a fit,’ he said.

‘As I’ve pointed out, the man who ran the racket died this week, and the libel laws only cover the living. The dead can’t sue. And no one can sue for them. Also you can’t accuse or try the dead. Not in this world, anyway. So nothing they’ve done can be sub judice. Right?’

‘Don’t quote Blaze dictums to me, laddie. I was living by them before you were weaned.’ He picked up my typed sheets as if they would burn him.

‘Petrified owners can come out of their caves,’ he read aloud. ‘The reign of intimidation is over and the scandal of the non-starting favourites can be fully exposed.’

Derry lifted his head to listen, gave me a grin, and said, ‘Our troubleshooter loosing the big guns again?’

‘Life gets tedious otherwise,’ I said.

‘Only for some.’

Luke-John eyed me appraisingly. ‘You look more as if you’d been the target. I suppose all this haggard-eyed stuff is the result of a day spent crashing about in cars.’ He flicked his thumb against my article. ‘Did you invent this unnamed villain, or did he really exist? And if so who was he?’

If I didn’t tell, Mike de Jong in his rival newspaper might put two and two together and come up with a filling-in-the-gaps story that Luke-John would never forgive me for. And there was no longer any urgent reason for secrecy.

I said, ‘He was a South African called Vjoersterod, and he died the night before last in the second of those car crashes.’

Their mouths literally fell open.

‘Dyna... mite,’ Derry said.

I told them most of what had happened. I left Gail and Ross’s truncheon out altogether but put in the threat to Elizabeth. Left out the drunken driving and the hands over Ross’s eyes. Made it bald and factual. Left out the sweat.

Luke-John thought through the problem and then read my article again.

‘When you know what you’ve omitted, what you’ve included seems pale. But I think this is enough. It’ll do the trick, tell everyone the pressure’s off and that they can safely bet ante-post again, thanks entirely to investigations conducted by the Blaze.’

‘That’s after all what we wanted.’

‘Buy the avenging Blaze,’ said Derry only half sardonically. ‘Racket-smashing a speciality.’

Luke-John gave him a sour look for a joke in bad taste, as usual taking the Blaze’s role with unrelieved seriousness. I asked him if he would ring up a powerful bookmaking friend of his and ask him the present state of the Lamplighter market, and with raised eyebrows but no other comment he got through. He asked the question, listened with sharpening attention to the answer, and scribbled down some figures. When he had finished he gave a soundless whistle and massaged his larynx.

‘He says Charlie Boston has been trying to lay off about fifty thousand on Tiddely Pom since yesterday afternoon. Everyone smells a sewer full of rats because of your articles and the Blaze’s undertaking to keep the horse safe and they’re in a tizzy whether to take the bets or not. Only one or two of the biggest firms have done so.’

I said, ‘If Boston can’t lay off and Tiddely Pom wins, he’s sunk without trace, but if Tiddely Pom loses he’ll pocket all Vjoersterod’s share of the loot as well as his own and be better off than if we’d done nothing at all. If he manages to lay off and Tiddely Pom wins, he’ll be smiling, and if he lays off and Tiddely Pom loses he’ll have thrown away everything the crimes were committed for.’

‘A delicate problem,’ said Derry judicially. ‘Or what you might call the antlers of a dilemma.’

‘Could he know about the colic?’ Luke-John asked.

We decided after picking it over that as he was trying to lay off he probably couldn’t. Luke-John rang back to his bookmaker friend and advised him to take as much of the Boston money as he could.

‘And after that,’ he said gloomily, as he put down the receiver, ‘every other bloody horse will fall, and Tiddely Pom will win.’

Derry and I went down to Heathbury Park together on the race train. The racecourse and the sponsors of the Lamplighter had been smiled on by the day. Clear, sunny, still, frosty: a perfect December morning. Derry said that fine weather was sure to bring out a big crowd, and that he thought Zig Zag would win. He said he thought I looked ill. I said he should have seen me yesterday. We completed the journey in our usual relationship of tolerant acceptance and I wondered inconsequentially why it had never solidified into friendship.

He was right on the first count. Heathbury Park was bursting at the seams. I went first to Willie Ondroy’s office beside the weighing-room and found a scattered queue of people wanting a word with him, but he caught my eye across the throng and waved a beckoning hand.

‘Hey,’ he said, swinging round in his chair to talk to me behind his shoulder. ‘Your wretched horse has caused me more bother... that Victor Roncey, he’s a bloody pain in the neck.’

‘What’s he been doing?’

‘He arrived at ten this morning all set to blow his top if the horse arrived a minute after twelve and when he found he was there already he blew his top anyway and said he should have been told.’

‘Not the easiest of characters,’ I agreed.

‘Anyway, that’s only the half of it. The gate-man rang me at about eight this morning to say there was a man persistently trying to get in. He’d offered him a bribe and then increased it and had tried to slip in unnoticed while he, the gate-man, was having an argument with one of the stable lads. So I nipped over from my house for a reccy, and there was this short stout individual walking along the back of the stable block looking for an unguarded way in. I marched him round to the front and the gate-man said that was the same merchant, so I asked him who he was and what he wanted. He wouldn’t answer. Said he hadn’t committed any crime. I let him go. Nothing else to do.’

‘Pity.’

‘Wait a minute. My racecourse manager came towards us as the man walked away, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘What’s Charlie Boston doing here?’

‘What?’

‘Ah. I thought he might mean something to you. But he was extraordinarily clumsy, if he was after Tiddely Pom.’

‘No brains and no brawn,’ I agreed.

He looked at me accusingly. ‘If Charlie Boston was the sum total of the threat to Tiddely Pom, haven’t you been over-doing the melodrama a bit?’

I said dryly, ‘Read the next thrilling instalment in the Blaze.’

He laughed and turned back decisively to his impatient queue. I wandered out into the paddock, thinking of Charlie Boston and his futile attempt to reach the horse. Charlie Boston who thought with his muscles. With other people’s muscles, come to that. Having his boys on the sick list and Vjoersterod and Ross on the dead, he was as naked and vulnerable as an opened oyster.

He might also be desperate. If he was trying to lay off fifty thousand pounds, he had stood to lose at least ten times that — upwards of half a million — if Tiddely Pom won. A nosedive of epic proportions. A prospect to induce panic and recklessness in ever-increasing intensity as the time of the race drew near.

I decided that Roncey should share the care of his horse’s safety, and began looking out for him in the throng. I walked round the corner with my eyes scanning sideways and nearly bumped into someone standing by the Results-at-other-Meetings notice board. The apology was half way to my tongue before I realised who it was.

Gail.

I saw the pleasure which came first into her eyes, and the uncertainty afterwards. Very likely I was showing her exactly the same feeling. Very likely she, like me, felt a thudding shock at meeting. Yet if I’d considered it at all, it was perfectly reasonable that she should come to see her uncle’s horse run in the Lamplighter.

‘Ty?’ she said tentatively, with a ton less than her usual poise.

‘Surprise, surprise.’ It sounded more flippant than I felt.

‘I thought I might see you,’ she said. Her smooth black hair shone in the sun and the light lay along the bronze lines of her face, touching them with gold. The mouth I had kissed was a rosy pink. The body I had liked naked was covered with a turquoise coat. A week today, I thought numbly. A week today I left her in bed.

‘Are Harry and Sarah here?’ I said. Social chat. Hide the wound which hadn’t even begun to form scar tissue. I’d no right to be wounded in the first place. My own fault. Couldn’t complain.

‘They’re in the bar,’ she said. Where else?

‘Would you like a drink?’

She shook her head. ‘I want to... to explain. I see that you know... I have to explain.’

‘No need. A cup of coffee, perhaps?’

‘Just listen.’

I could feel the rigidity in all my muscles and realised it extended even into my mouth and jaw. With a conscious effort I loosened them and relaxed.

‘All right.’

‘Did she... I mean, is she going to divorce you?’

‘No.’

‘Ohhhh.’ It was a long sigh. ‘Then I’m sorry if I got you into trouble with her. But why did she have you followed if she didn’t want to divorce you?’

I stared at her. The wound half healed in an instant.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

I took a deep breath. ‘Tell me what happened after I left you. Tell me about the man who followed me.’

‘He came up and spoke to me in the street just outside the hotel.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He puzzled me a bit. I mean, he seemed too... I don’t know... civilised, I suppose is the word, to be a private detective. His clothes were made for him, for instance. He had an accent of some sort and a yellowish skin. Tall. About forty, I should think.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said your wife wanted a divorce and he was working on it. He asked me for... concrete evidence.’

‘A bill from the hotel?’

She nodded, not meeting my eyes. ‘I agreed to go in again and ask for one.’

‘Why, Gail?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Did he pay you for it?’

‘God, Ty,’ she said explosively. ‘Why not? I needed the money. I’d only met you three times and you were just as bad as me, living with your wife just because she was rich.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, how much?’

‘He offered me fifty pounds and when I’d got used to the idea that he was ready to pay I told him to think again, with all your wife’s money she could afford more than that for her freedom.’

‘And then what?’

‘He said... if I could give him full and substantial facts, he could raise the payment considerably.’ After a pause, in a mixture of defiance and shame, she added, ‘He agreed to a thousand pounds, in the end.’

I gave a gasp which was half a laugh.

‘Didn’t your wife tell you?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘He surely didn’t have that much money on him? Did he give you a cheque?’

‘No. He met me later, outside the Art School, and gave me a brown carrier bag... Beautiful new notes, in bundles. I gave him the bill I’d got, and told him... everything I could.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Why did he pay so much, if she doesn’t want a divorce?’ When I didn’t answer at once she went on, ‘It wasn’t really only the money... I thought if she wanted to divorce you, why the hell should I stop her. You said you wouldn’t leave her, but if she sort of left you, then you would be free, and maybe we could have more than a few Sundays...’

I thought that one day I might appreciate the irony of it.

I said, ‘It wasn’t my wife who paid you that money. It was the man himself. He wasn’t collecting evidence for a divorce, but evidence to blackmail me with.’

‘Ohh.’ It was a moan. ‘Oh no, Ty. Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ Her eyes widened suddenly. ‘You must have thought... I suppose you thought... that I sold you out for that.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ I apologised. ‘I should have known better.’

‘That makes us quits, then.’ All her poise came back at one bound. She said, with some concern but less emotional disturbance, ‘How much did he take you for?’

‘He didn’t want money. He wanted me to write my column in the Blaze every week according to his instructions.’

‘How extraordinary. Well, that’s easy enough.’

‘Would you design dresses to dictation by threat?’

‘Oh.’

‘Exactly. Oh. So I told my wife about you myself. I had to.’

‘What... what did she say?’

‘She was upset,’ I said briefly. ‘I said I wouldn’t be seeing you again. There’ll be no divorce.’

She slowly shrugged her shoulders. ‘So that’s that.’

I looked away from her, trying not to mind so appallingly much that that was that. Tomorrow was Sunday. Tomorrow was Sunday and I could be on my own, and there was nothing on earth that I wanted so much as to see her again in her smooth warm skin and hold her close and tight in the half dark...

She said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose if that man was a blackmailer it explains why I thought he was so nasty.’

‘Nasty? He was usually fantastically polite.’

‘He spoke to me as if I’d crawled out of the cracks. I wouldn’t have put up with it... except for the money.’

‘Poor Gail,’ I said sympathetically. ‘He was South African.’

She took in the implication and her eyes were furious. ‘That explains it. A beastly Afrikaner. I wish I’d never agreed.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I interrupted. ‘Be glad you cost him so much.’

She calmed down and laughed. ‘I’ve never even been to Africa. I didn’t recognise his accent or give it a thought. Stupid, isn’t it?’

A man in a check tweed suit came and asked us to move as he wanted to read the notices on the board behind us. We walked three or four steps away, and paused again.

‘I suppose I’ll see you sometimes at the races,’ she said.

‘I suppose so.’

She looked closely at my face and said, ‘If you really feel like that, why... why don’t you leave her?’

‘I can’t.’

‘But we could... you want to be with me. I know you do. Money isn’t everything.’

I smiled twistedly. I did after all mean something to her, if she could ever say that.

‘I’ll see you sometimes,’ I repeated emptily. ‘At the races.’