Odds against

EIGHTEEN

They decided it should be Bolt who went to fetch the negatives.

‘What is this place?’ he said. He hadn’t recognised the address.

‘The home of… a… girl friend.’

He dispassionately watched the sweat run in trickles down my face. My mouth was dry. I was very thirsty.

‘Say… I sent you,’ I said, between jagged breaths. ‘I… asked her… to keep them safe… They… are with… several other things… The package… you want… has a name on it… a make of film… Jigoro… Kano.’

‘Jigoro Kano. Right,’ Bolt said briskly.

‘Give me…’ I said, ‘some morphine.’

Bolt laughed. ‘After all the trouble you’ve caused us? Even if I had any, I wouldn’t. You can sit there and sweat it out.’

I moaned. Bolt smiled in satisfaction and turned away.

‘I’ll ring you as soon as I have the negatives,’ he said to Kraye. ‘Then we can decide what to do with Halley. I’ll give it some thought on the way up.’ From his tone he might have been discussing the disposal of a block of worthless stocks.

‘Good,’ said Kraye. ‘We’ll wait for your call over in the flat.’

They began to walk towards the door. Oxon and Doria hung back, Doria because she couldn’t tear her fascinated, dilated eyes away from watching me, and Oxon for more practical reasons.

‘Are you just going to leave him here?’ he asked in surprise.

‘Yes. Why not?’ said Kraye. ‘Come on, Doria darling. The best is over.’

Unwilling she followed him, and Oxon also.

‘Some water,’ I said. ‘Please.’

‘No,’ said Kraye.

They filed past him out of the door. Just before he shut it he gave me a last look compounded of triumph, contempt and satisfied cruelty. Then he switched off all the lights and went away.

I heard the sound of a car starting up and driving off. Bolt was on his way. Outside the windows the night was black. Darkness folded round me like a fourth dimension. As the silence deepened I listened to the low hum of the boiler roaring safely on the far side of the wall. At least, I thought, I don’t have to worry about that as well. Small, small consolation.

The back of the chair came only as high as my shoulders and gave no support to my head. I felt deathly tired. I couldn’t bear to move: every muscle in my body seemed to have a private line direct to my left wrist, and merely flexing my right foot had me panting. I wanted to lie down flat. I wanted a long cold drink. I wanted to faint. I went on sitting in the chair, wide awake, with a head that ached and weighed a ton, and an arm which wasn’t worth the trouble.

I thought about Bolt going to Zanna Martin’s front door, and finding that his own secretary had been helping me. I wondered for the hundredth time what he would do about that: whether he would harm her. Poor Miss Martin, whom life had already hurt too much.

Not only her, I thought. In the same file was the letter Mervyn Brinton had written out for me. If Bolt should see that, Mervyn Brinton would be needing a bodyguard for life.

I thought about the people who had borne the beatings and brutalities of the Nazis and of the Japanese and had often died without betraying their secrets. I thought about the atrocities still going on throughout the world, and the ease with which man could break man. In Algeria, they said, unbelievable things had been done. Behind the Iron Curtain, brain washing wasn’t all. In African jails, who knew?

Too young for World War Two, safe in a tolerant society, I had had no thought that I should ever come to such a test. To suffer or to talk. The dilemma which stretched back to antiquity. Thanks to Kraye, I now knew what it was like at first hand. Thanks to Kraye, I didn’t understand how anyone could keep silent unto death.

I thought: I wanted to ride round Seabury racecourse again, and to go back into the weighing room, and to sit on the scales; and I’ve done all those things.

I thought: a fortnight ago I couldn’t let go of the past. I was clinging to too many ruins, the ruins of my marriage and my racing career and my useless hand. They were gone for good now, all of them. There was nothing left to cling to. And every tangible memory of my life had blown away with a plastic bomb. I was rootless and homeless: and liberated.

What I refused to think about was what Kraye might still do during the next few hours.

Bolt had been gone for a good long time when at last Kraye came back. It had seemed half eternity to me, but even so I was in no hurry for it to end.

Kraye put the lights on. He and Doria stood just inside the doorway, staring across at me.

‘You’re sure there’s time?’ said Doria.

Kraye nodded, looking at his watch. ‘If we’re quick.’

‘Don’t you think we ought to wait until Ellis rings?’ she said. ‘He might have thought of something better.’

‘He’s late already,’ said Kraye impatiently. They had clearly been arguing for some time. ‘He should have rung by now. If we’re going to do this, we can’t wait any longer.’

‘All right,’ she shrugged. ‘I’ll go and take a look.’

‘Be careful. Don’t go in.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t fuss.’

They both came over to where I sat Doria looked at me with interest, and liked what she saw.

‘He looks ghastly, doesn’t he? Serves him right.’

‘Are you human?’ I said.

A flicker of awareness crossed her lovely face, as if deep down she did indeed know that everything she had enjoyed that night was sinful and obscene, but she was too thoroughly addicted to turn back. ‘Shall I help you?’ she said to Kraye, not answering me.

‘No. I can manage. He’s not very heavy.’

She watched with a smile while her husband gripped the back of the chair I was sitting in and began to tug it across the floor towards the wall. The jerks were almost past bearing. I grew dizzy with the effort of not yelling my head off. There was no one close enough to hear me if I did. Not the few overnight stable lads fast asleep three hundred yards away. Only the Krayes, who would find it sweet.

Doria licked her lips, as if at a feast.

‘Go on,’ said Kraye. ‘Hurry.’

‘Oh, all right,’ she agreed crossly, and went out through the door into the passage.

Kraye finished pulling me across the room, turned the chair round so that I was facing the wall with my knees nearly touching it and stood back, breathing deeply from the exertion.

On the other side of the wall the boiler gently roared. One could hear it more clearly at such close quarters. I knew I had no crashing explosion, no flying bricks, no killing steam to worry about. But the sands were running out fast, all the same.

Doria came back and said in a puzzled voice, ‘I thought you said there would be water all down the passage.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, there isn’t. Not a drop. I looked into the boiler room and it’s as dry as a bone.’

‘It can’t be. It’s nearly three hours since it started over-flowing. Oxon warned us it must be nearly ready to blow. You must be wrong.’

‘I’m not,’ she insisted. ‘The whole thing looks perfectly normal to me.’

‘It can’t be.’ Kraye’s voice was sharp. He went off in a hurry to see for himself, and came back even faster.

‘You’re right. I’ll go and get Oxon. I don’t know how the confounded thing works.’ He went straight on out of the main door, and I heard his footsteps running. There was no urgency except his own anger. I shivered.

Doria wasn’t certain enough of the boiler’s safety to spend any time near me, which was about the first really good thing which had happened the whole night. Nor did she find the back of my head worth speaking to: she liked to see her worms squirm. Perhaps she had even lost her appetite, now things had gone wrong. She waited uneasily near the door for Kraye to come back, fiddling with the catch.

Oxon came with him, and they were both running. They charged across the weighing room and out into the passage.

I hadn’t much left anyway, I thought. A few tatters of pride, perhaps. Time to nail them to the mast.

The two men walked softly into the room and down to where I sat. Kraye grasped the chair and swung it violently round. The weighing room was quiet, undisturbed. There was only blackness through the window. So that was that.

I looked at Kraye’s face, and wished on the whole that I hadn’t. It was white and rigid with fury. His eyes were two black pits.

Oxon held the mouse in his hand. ‘It must have been Halley,’ he said, as if he’d said it before. ‘There’s no one else.’

Kraye put his right hand down on my left, and systematically began to take his revenge. After three long minutes I passed out.

I clung to the dark, trying to hug it round me like a blanket, and it obstinately got thinner and thinner, lighter and lighter, noisier and noisier, more and more painful, until I could no longer deny that I was back in the world.

My eyes unstuck themselves against my will.

The weighing room was full of people. People in dark uniforms. Policemen. Policemen coming through every door. Bright yellow lights at long last shining outside the window. Policemen carefully cutting the rope away from my leaden limbs.

Kraye and Doria and Oxon looked smaller, surrounded by the dark blue men. Doria in her brave white suit instinctively and unsuccessfully tried to flirt with her captors. Oxon, disconcerted to his roots, faced the facts of life for the first time.

Kraye’s fury wasn’t spent. His eyes stared in hatred across the room.

He shouted, struggling in strong restraining arms, ‘Where did you send him? Where did you send Ellis Bolt?’

‘Ah, Mr Potter,’ I said into a sudden oasis of silence. ‘Mr Wilbur Potter. Find out. But not from me.’