Odds against

ONE

I was never particularly keen on my job before the day I got shot and nearly lost it, along with my life. But the.38 slug of lead which made a pepper-shaker out of my intestines left me with fire in my belly in more ways than one. Otherwise I should never have met Zanna Martin, and would still be held fast in the spider-threads of departed joys, of no use to anyone, least of all myself.

It was the first step to liberation, that bullet, though I wouldn’t have said so at the time. I stopped it because I was careless. Careless because bored.

I woke up gradually in hospital, in a private room for which I got a whacking great bill a few days later. Even before I opened my eyes I began to regret I had not left the world completely. Someone had lit a bonfire under my navel.

A fierce conversation was being conducted in unhushed voices over my head. With woolly wits, the anaesthetic still drifting inside my skull like puff-ball clouds in a summer sky, I tried unenthusiastically to make sense of what was being said.

‘Can’t you give him something to wake him more quickly?’

‘No.’

‘We can’t do much until we have his story, you must see that. It’s nearly seven hours since you finished operating. Surely…’

‘And he was all of four hours on the table before that. Do you want to finish off what the shooting started?’

‘Doctor…’

‘I am sorry, but you’ll have to wait.’

There’s my pal, I thought. They’ll have to wait. Who wants to hurry back into the dreary world? Why not go to sleep for a month and take things up again after they’ve put the bonfire out? I opened my eyes reluctantly.

It was night. A globe of electric light shone in the centre of the ceiling. That figured. It had been morning when Jones-boy found me still seeping gently on to the office linoleum and went to telephone, and it appeared that about twelve hours had passed since they stuck the first blessed needle into my arm. Would a twenty-four hour start, I wondered, be enough for a panic-stricken ineffectual little crook to get himself undetectably out of the country?

There were two policemen on my left, one in uniform, one not. They were both sweating, because the room was hot. The doctor stood on the right, fiddling with a tube which ran from a bottle into my elbow. Various other tubes sprouted disgustingly from my abdomen, partly covered by a light sheet. Drip and drainage, I thought sardonically. How absolutely charming.

Radnor was watching me from the foot of the bed, taking no part in the argument still in progress between medicine and the law. I wouldn’t have thought I rated the boss himself attendant at the bedside, but then I suppose it wasn’t every day that one of his employees got himself into such a spectacular mess.

He said, ‘He’s conscious again, and his eyes aren’t so hazy. We might get some sense out of him this time.’ He looked at his watch.

The doctor bent over me, felt my pulse, and nodded. ‘Five minutes, then. Not a second more.’

The plain clothes policeman beat Radnor to it by a fraction of a second. ‘Can you tell us who shot you?’

I still found it surprisingly difficult to speak, but not as impossible as it had been when they asked me the same question that morning. Then, I had been too far gone. Now, I was apparently on the way back. Even so, the policeman had plenty of time to repeat his question, and to wait some more, before I managed an answer.

‘Andrews.’

It meant nothing to the policeman, but Radnor looked astonished and also disappointed.

‘Thomas Andrews?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Radnor explained to the police. ‘I told you that Halley here and another of my operatives set some sort of a trap intending to clear up an intimidation case we are investigating. I understand they were hoping for a big fish, but it seems now they caught a tiddler. Andrews is small stuff, a weak sort of youth used for running errands. I would never have thought he would carry a gun, much less that he would use it.’

Me neither. He had dragged the revolver clumsily out of his jacket pocket, pointed it shakily in my direction, and used both hands to pull the trigger. If I hadn’t seen that it was only Andrews who had come to nibble at the bait I wouldn’t have ambled unwarily out of the darkness of the washroom to tax him with breaking into the Cromwell Road premises of Hunt Radnor Associates at one o’clock in the morning. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that he would attack me in any way.

By the time I realised that he really meant to use the gun and was not waving it about for effect, it was far too late. I had barely begun to turn to flip off the light switch when the bullet hit, in and out diagonally through my body. The force of it spun me on to my knees and then forward on to the floor.

As I went down he ran for the door, stiff-legged, crying out, with circles of white showing wild round his eyes. He was almost as horrified as I was at what he had done.

‘At what time did the shooting take place?’ asked the policeman formally.

After another pause I said, ‘One o’clock, about.’

The doctor drew in a breath. He didn’t need to say it; I knew I was lucky to be alive. In a progressively feeble state I’d lain on the floor through a chilly September night looking disgustedly at a telephone on which I couldn’t summon help. The office telephones all worked through a switchboard. This might have been on the moon as far as I was concerned, instead of along the passage, down the curving stairs and through the door to the reception desk, with the girl who worked the switches fast asleep in bed.

The policeman wrote in his notebook. ‘Now sir, I can get a description of Thomas Andrews from someone else so as not to trouble you too much now, but I’d be glad if you can tell me what he was wearing.’

‘Black jeans, very tight. Olive green jersey. Loose black jacket.’ I paused. ‘Black fur collar, black and white checked lining. All shabby… dirty.’ I tried again. ‘He had gun in jacket pocket right side… took it with him… no gloves… can’t have a record.’

‘Shoes?’

‘Didn’t see. Silent, though.’

‘Anything else?’

I thought. ‘He had some badges… place names, skull and crossbones, things like that… sewn on his jacket, left sleeve.’

‘I see. Right. We’ll get on with it then.’ He snapped shut his notebook, smiled briefly, turned, and walked to the door, followed by his uniformed ally, and by Radnor, presumably for Andrews’ description.

The doctor took my pulse again, and slowly checked all the tubes. His face showed satisfaction.

He said cheerfully, ‘You must have the constitution of a horse.’

‘No,’ said Radnor, coming in again and hearing him. ‘Horses are really quite delicate creatures. Halley has the constitution of a jockey. A steeplechase jockey. He used to be one. He’s got a body like a shock absorber… had to have to deal with all the fractures and injuries he got racing.’

‘Is that what happened to his hand? A fall in a steeplechase?’

Radnor’s glance flicked to my face and away again, uncomfortably. They never mentioned my hand to me in the office if they could help it. None of them, that is, except my fellow trap-setter Chico Barnes, who didn’t care what he said to anyone.

‘Yes,’ Radnor said tersely. ‘That’s right.’ He changed the subject. ‘Well, Sid, come and see me when you are better. Take your time.’ He nodded uncertainly to me, and he and the doctor, with a joint backward glance, ushered each other out of the door.

So Radnor was in no hurry to have me back. I would have smiled if I’d had the energy. When he first offered me a job I guessed that somewhere in the background my father-in-law was pulling strings; but I had been in a why-not mood at the time. Nothing mattered very much.

‘Why not?’ I said to Radnor, and he put me on his payroll as an investigator, Racing Section, ignoring my complete lack of experience and explaining to the rest of the staff that I was there in an advisory capacity, owing to my intimate knowledge of the game. They had taken it very well, on the whole. Perhaps they realised, as I did, that my employment was an act of pity. Perhaps they thought I should be too proud to accept that sort of pity. I wasn’t. I didn’t care one way or the other.

Radnor’s agency ran Missing Persons, Guard, and Divorce departments, and also a section called Bona Fides, which was nearly as big as the others put together. Most of the work was routine painstaking enquiry stuff, sometimes leading to civil or divorce action, but oftener merely to a discreet report sent to the client. Criminal cases, though accepted, were rare. The Andrews business was the first for the three months.

The Racing Section was Radnor’s special baby. It hadn’t existed, I’d been told, when he bought the agency with an Army gratuity after the war and developed it from a dingy three-roomed affair into something like a national institution. Radnor printed ‘Speed, Results, and Secrecy’ across the top of his stationery; promised them, and delivered them. A lifelong addiction to racing, allied to six youthful rides in point-to-points, had led him not so much to ply for hire from the Jockey Club and the National Hunt Committee as to indicate that his agency was at their disposal. The Jockey Club and the National Hunt Committee tentatively wet their feet, found the water beneficial, and plunged right in. The Racing Section blossomed. Eventually private business outstripped the official, especially when Radnor began supplying pre-race guards for fancied horses.

By the time I joined the firm ‘Bona Fides: Racing’, had proved so successful that it had spread from its own big office into the room next door. For a reasonable fee a trainer could check on the character and background of a prospective owner, a bookmaker on a client, a client on a bookmaker, anybody on anybody. The phrase ‘O.K.’d by Radnor’ had passed into racing slang. Genuine, it meant. Trustworthy. I had even heard it applied to a horse.

They had never given me a Bona Fides assignment. This work was done by a bunch of inconspicuous middle-aged retired policemen who took minimum time to get maximum results. I’d never been sent to sit all night outside the box of a hot favourite, though I would have done it willingly. I had never been put on a racecourse security patrol. If the Stewards asked for operators to keep tabs on undesirables at race meetings, I didn’t go. If anyone had to watch for pickpockets in Tattersalls, it wasn’t me. Radnor’s two unvarying excuses for giving me nothing to do were first that I was too well known to the whole racing world to be inconspicuous, and second, that even if I didn’t seem to care, he was not going to be the one to give an ex-champion jockey tasks which meant a great loss of face.

As a result I spent most of my time kicking around the office reading other people’s reports. When anyone asked me for the informed advice I was supposedly there to give, I gave it; if anyone asked what I would do in a certain set of circumstances, I told them. I got to know all the operators and gossiped with them when they came into the office. I always had the time. If I took a day off and went to the races, nobody complained. I sometimes wondered whether they even noticed.

At intervals I remarked to Radnor that he didn’t have to keep me, as I so obviously did nothing to earn my salary. He replied each time that he was satisfied with the arrangement, if I was. I had the impression that he was waiting for something, but if it wasn’t for me to leave, I didn’t know what. On the day I walked into Andrews’ bullet I had been with the agency in this fashion for exactly two years.

A nurse came in to check the tubes and take my blood pressure. She was starched and efficient. She smiled but didn’t speak. I waited for her to say that my wife was outside asking about me anxiously. She didn’t say it. My wife hadn’t come. Wouldn’t come. If I couldn’t hold her when I was properly alive, why should my near-death bring her running? Jenny. My wife. Still my wife in spite of three years’ separation. Regret, I think, held both of us back from the final step of divorce: we had been through passion, delight, dissention, anger and explosion. Only regret was left, and it wouldn’t be strong enough to bring her to the hospital. She’d seen me in too many hospitals before. There was no more drama, no more impact, in my form recumbent, even with tubes. She wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t telephone. Wouldn’t write. It was stupid of me to want her to.

Time passed slowly and I didn’t enjoy it, but eventually all the tubes except the one in my arm were removed and I began to heal. The police didn’t find Andrews, Jenny didn’t come, Radnor’s typists sent me a get-well card, and the hospital sent the bill.

Chico slouched in one evening, his hands in his pockets and the usual derisive grin on his face. He looked me over without haste and the grin, if anything, widened.

‘Rather you than me, mate,’ he said.

‘Go to bloody hell.’

He laughed. And well he might. I had been doing his job for him because he had a date with a girl, and Andrews’ bullet should have been his bellyache, not mine.

‘Andrews,’ he said musingly. ‘Who’d have thought it? Sodding little weasel. All the same, if you’d done what I said and stayed in the washroom, and taken his photo quiet like on the old infra-red, we’d have picked him up later nice and easy and you’d have been lolling on your arse around the office as usual instead of sweating away in here.’

‘You needn’t rub it in,’ I said. ‘What would you have done?’

He grinned. ‘The same as you, I expect. I’d have reckoned it would only take the old one-two for that little worm to come across with who sent him.’

‘And now we don’t know.’

‘No.’ He sighed. ‘And the old man ain’t too sweet about the whole thing. He did know I was using the office as a trap, but he didn’t think it would work, and now this has happened he doesn’t like it. He’s leaning over backwards, hushing the whole thing up. They might have sent a bomb, not a sneak thief, he said. And of course Andrews bust a window getting in, which I’ve probably got to pay for. Trust the little sod not to know how to pick a lock.’

‘I’ll pay for the window,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he grinned. ‘I reckoned you would if I told you.’

He wandered round the room, looking at things. There wasn’t much to see.

‘What’s in that bottle dripping into your arm?’

‘Food of some sort, as far as I can gather. They never give me anything to eat.’

‘Afraid you might bust out again, I expect.’

‘I guess so,’ I agreed.

He wandered on. ‘Haven’t you got a telly then? Cheer you up a bit wouldn’t it, to see some other silly buggers getting shot?’ He looked at the chart on the bottom of the bed. ‘Your temperature was 102 this morning, did they tell you? Do you reckon you’re going to kick it?’

‘No.’

‘Near thing, from what I’ve heard. Jones-boy said there was enough of your life’s blood dirtying up the office floor to make a tidy few black puddings.’

I didn’t appreciate Jones-boy’s sense of humour.

Chico said, ‘Are you coming back?’

‘Perhaps.’

He began tying knots in the cord of the window blind. I watched him, a thin figure imbued with so much energy that it was difficult for him to keep still. He had spent two fruitless nights watching in the washroom before I took his place, and I knew that if he hadn’t been dedicated to his job he couldn’t have borne such inactivity. He was the youngest of Radnor’s team. About twenty-four, he believed, though as he had been abandoned as a child on the steps of a police station in a push-chair, no one knew for certain.

If the police hadn’t been so kind to him, Chico sometimes said, he would have taken advantage of his later opportunities and turned delinquent. He never grew tall enough to be a copper. Radnor’s was the best he could do. And he did very well by Radnor. He put two and two together quickly and no one on the staff had faster physical reactions. Judo and wrestling were his hobbies, and along with the regular throws and holds he had been taught some strikingly dirty tricks. His smallness bore no relation whatever to his effectiveness in his job.

‘How are you getting on with the case?’ I asked.

‘What case? Oh… that. Well since you got shot the heat’s off, it seems. Brinton’s had no threatening calls or letters since the other night. Whoever was leaning on him must have got the wind up. Anyway, he’s feeling a bit safer all of a sudden and he’s carping a lot to the old man about fees. Another day or two, I give it, and there won’t be no one holding his hand at night. Anyway, I’ve been pulled off it. I’m flying from Newmarket to Ireland tomorrow, sharing a stall with a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of stallion.’

Escort duty was another little job I never did. Chico liked it, and went often. As he had once thrown a fifteen stone would-be nobbier over a seven foot wall, he was always much in demand.

‘You ought to come back,’ he said suddenly.

‘Why?’ I was surprised.

‘I don’t know…’ he grinned. ‘Silly, really, when you do sweet eff-all, but everybody seems to have got used to you being around. You’re missed, kiddo, you’d be surprised.’

‘You’re joking, of course.’

‘Yeah…’ He undid the knots in the window cord, shrugged, and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘God, this place gives you the willies. It reeks of warm disinfectant. Creepy. How much longer are you going to lie here rotting?’

‘Days,’ I said mildly. ‘Have a good trip.’

‘See you.’ He nodded, drifting in relief to the door. ‘Do you want anything? I mean, books or anything?’

‘Nothing, thanks.’

‘Nothing… that’s just your form, Sid, mate. You don’t want nothing.’ He grinned and went.

I wanted nothing. My form. My trouble. I’d had what I wanted most in the world and lost it irrevocably. I’d found nothing else to want. I stared at the ceiling, waiting for time to pass. All I wanted was to get back on to my feet and stop feeling as though I had eaten a hundredweight of green apples.

Three weeks after the shooting I had a visit from my father-in-law. He came in the late afternoon, bringing with him a small parcel which he put without comment on the table beside the bed.

‘Well, Sid, how are you?’ He settled himself into an easy chair, crossed his legs and lit a cigar.

‘Cured, more or less. I’ll be out of here soon.’

‘Good. Good. And your plans are…?’

‘I haven’t any.’

‘You can’t go back to the agency without some… er… convalescence,’ he remarked.

‘I suppose not.’

‘You might prefer somewhere in the sun,’ he said, studying the cigar. ‘But I would like it if you could spend some time with me at Aynsford.’

I didn’t answer immediately.

‘Will…?’ I began and stopped, wavering.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She won’t be there. She’s gone out to Athens to stay with Jill and Tony. I saw her off yesterday. She sent you her regards.’

‘Thanks,’ I said dryly. As usual I did not know whether to be glad or sorry that I was not going to meet my wife. Nor was I sure that this trip to see her sister Jill was not as diplomatic as Tony’s job in the Corps.

‘You’ll come, then? Mrs Cross will look after you splendidly.’

‘Yes, Charles, thank you. I’d like to come for a little while.’

He gripped the cigar in his teeth, squinted through the smoke, and took out his diary.

‘Let’s see, suppose you leave here in, say, another week… No point in hurrying out before you’re fit to go… that brings us to the twenty-sixth… hm… now, suppose you come down a week on Sunday, I’ll be at home all that day. Will that suit you?’

‘Yes, fine, if the doctors agree.’

‘Right, then.’ He wrote in the diary, put it away and took the cigar carefully out of his mouth, smiling at me with the usual inscrutable blankness in his eyes. He sat easily in his dark city suit, Rear-Admiral Charles Roland, R.N., retired, a man carrying his sixty-six years lightly. War photographs showed him tall, straight, bony almost, with a high forehead and thick dark hair. Time had greyed the hair, which in receding left his forehead higher than ever, and had added weight where it did no harm. His manner was ordinarily extremely charming and occasionally patronisingly offensive. I had been on the receiving end of both.

He relaxed in the arm-chair, talking unhurriedly about steeplechasing.

‘What do you think of that new race at Sandown? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s framed rather awkwardly. They’re bound to get a tiny field with those conditions, and if Devil’s Dyke doesn’t run after all the whole thing will be a non-crowd puller par excellence.’

His interest in the game only dated back a few years, but recently to his pleasure he had been invited by one or two courses to act as a Steward. Listening to his easy familiarity with racing problems and racing jargon, I was in a quiet inward way amused. It was impossible to forget his reaction long ago to Jenny’s engagement to a jockey, his unfriendly rejection of me as a future son-in-law, his absence from our wedding, the months afterwards of frigid disapproval, the way he had seldom spoken to or even looked at me.

I believed at the time that it was sheer snobbery, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Certainly he didn’t think me good enough, but not only, or even mainly, on a class distinction level; and probably we would never have understood each other, or come eventually to like each other, had it not been for a wet afternoon and a game of chess.

Jenny and I went to Aynsford for one of our rare, painful Sunday visits. We ate our roast beef in near silence, Jenny’s father staring rudely out of the window and drumming his fingers on the table. I made up my mind that we wouldn’t go again. I’d had enough. Jenny could visit him alone.

After lunch she said she wanted to sort out some of her books now that we had a new book-case, and disappeared upstairs. Charles Roland and I looked at each other in dislike, the afternoon stretching drearily ahead and the downpour outside barring retreat into the garden and park beyond.

‘Do you play chess?’ he asked in a bored, expecting-the-answer-no voice.

‘I know the moves,’ I said.

He shrugged (it was more like a squirm), but clearly thinking that it would be less trouble than making conversation, he brought a chess set out and gestured to me to sit opposite him. He was normally a good player, but that afternoon he was bored and irritated and inattentive, and I beat him quite early in the game. He couldn’t believe it. He sat staring at the board, fingering the bishop with which I’d got him in a classic discovered check.

‘Where did you learn?’ he said eventually, still looking down.

‘Out of a book.’

‘Have you played a great deal?’

‘No, not much. Here and there.’ But I’d played with some good players.

‘Hm.’ He paused. ‘Will you play again?’

‘Yes, if you like.’

We played. It was a long game and ended in a draw, with practically every piece off the board. A fortnight later he rang up and asked us, next time we came, to stay overnight. It was the first twig of the olive branch. We went more often and more willingly to Aynsford after that. Charles and I played chess occasionally and won a roughly equal number of games, and he began rather tentatively to go to the races. Ironically from then on our mutual respect grew strong enough to survive even the crash of Jenny’s and my marriage, and Charles’ interest in racing expanded and deepened with every passing year.

‘I went to Ascot yesterday,’ he was saying, tapping ash off his cigar. ‘It wasn’t a bad crowd, considering the weather. I had a drink with that handicapper fellow, John Pagan. Nice chap. He was very pleased with himself because he got six abreast over the last in the handicap hurdle. There was an objection after the three mile chase — flagrant bit of crossing on the run-in. Carter swore blind he was leaning and couldn’t help it, but you can never believe a word he says. Anyway, the Stewards took it away from him. The only thing they could do. Wally Gibbons rode a brilliant finish in the handicap hurdle and then made an almighty hash of the novice chase.’

‘He’s heavy-handed with novices,’ I agreed.

‘Wonderful course, that.’

‘The tops.’ A wave of weakness flowed outwards from my stomach. My legs trembled under the bedclothes. It was always happening. Infuriating.

‘Good job it belongs to the Queen and is safe from the land-grabbers.’ He smiled.

‘Yes, I suppose so…’

‘You’re tired,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve stayed too long.’

‘No,’ I protested. ‘Really, I’m fine.’

He put out the cigar, however, and stood up. ‘I know you too well, Sid. Your idea of fine is not the same as anyone else’s. If you’re not well enough to come to Aynsford a week on Sunday you’ll let me know. Otherwise I’ll see you then.’

‘Yes, O.K.’

He went away, leaving me to reflect that I did still tire infernally easily. Must be old age, I grinned to myself, old age at thirty-one. Old tired battered Sid Halley, poor old chap. I grimaced at the ceiling.

A nurse came in for the evening jobs.

‘You’ve got a parcel,’ she said brightly, as if speaking to a retarded child. ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

I had forgotten about Charles’ parcel.

‘Would you like me to open it for you? I mean, you can’t find things like opening parcels very easy with a hand like yours.’

She was only being kind. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

She snipped through the wrappings with scissors from her pocket and looked dubiously at the slim dark book she found inside.

‘I suppose it is meant for you? I mean somehow it doesn’t seem like things people usually give patients.’

She put the book into my right hand and I read the title embossed in gold on the cover. Outline of Company Law.

‘My father-in-law left it on purpose. He meant it for me.’

‘Oh well, I suppose it’s difficult to think of things for people who can’t eat grapes and such.’ She bustled around, efficient and slightly bullying, and finally left me alone again.

Outline of Company Law. I riffled through the pages. It was certainly a book about company law. Solidly legal. Not light entertainment for an invalid. I put the book on the table.

Charles Roland was a man of subtle mind, and subtlety gave him much pleasure. It hadn’t been my parentage that he had objected to so much as what he took to be Jenny’s rejection of his mental standards in choosing a jockey for a husband. He’d never met a jockey before, disliked the idea of racing, and took it for granted that everyone engaged in it was either a rogue or a moron. He’d wanted both his daughters to marry clever men, clever more than handsome or well-born or rich, so that he could enjoy their company. Jill had obliged him with Tony, Jenny disappointed him with me: that was how he saw it, until he found that at least I could play chess with him now and then.

Knowing his subtle habits, I took it for granted that he had not idly brought such a book and hadn’t chosen it or left it by mistake. He meant me to read it for a purpose. Intended it to be useful to me — or to him — later on. Did he think he could manoeuvre me into business, now that I hadn’t distinguished myself at the agency? A nudge, that book was. A nudge in some specific direction.

I thought back over what he had said, looking for a clue. He’d been insistent that I should go to Aynsford. He’d sent Jenny to Athens. He’d talked about racing, about the new race at Sandown, about Ascot, John Pagan, Carter, Wally Gibbons… nothing there that I could see had the remotest connection with company law.

I sighed, shutting my eyes. I didn’t feel too well. I didn’t have to read the book, or go wherever Charles pointed. And yet… why not? There was nothing I urgently wanted to do instead. I decided to do my stodgy homework. Tomorrow.

Perhaps.