Shattered

12

The horse exploded into scorching fragments that flew like angry transparent wasps throughout the workshop and over the half-wall into the showroom beyond.

Adam Force, refusing to get down because it had been I who suggested it, had been hit twice, once in the upper arm, and once, more seriously, across the top of the cheekbone below the eye, taking away a chunk of surface flesh. Half fainting from shock, the doctor had dropped his syringe. Blood reddened his sleeve, but there was no spurting arterial flood.

It was the wreck of his good looks though, I thought, that would in the end grieve him most, and if he had peered into a looking glass at that moment, he would probably have collapsed altogether. The speed and sharpness of the flying glass fragment had opened a furrow that was bound to leave an untreatable scar, and like many facial cuts this one was bleeding copiously. Adam Force bled into his white beard, which was fast turning red.

Doctor Bright-Scarlet-Beard Force. Serve him right, I thought. A pity it would wash clean. Wash clean... other things would wash out too... an idea.

Glass cooled rapidly if it expanded and thinned. One could gently blow down an iron into semi-liquid glass so that it would expand until it looked like a soap bubble: a dollop of red-hot glass would cool to the cold shell of a brittle bubble in the few seconds it took to blow it from one state to the other.

The trophy horse, though, hadn’t been blown on purpose from the inside, it had split violently apart along the internal stress lines caused by the pulling and stretching as the glass cooled, the outer regions cooling faster than the inner core. The splinters had still been fiercely hot when they’d dug into the first thing they met. Adam Force had been lucky not to lose an eye.

Norman Osprey, kneeling in spite of his antipathy towards the source of good advice, had survived the shattering of the horse with his skin intact, if not his temper.

Although pale and slightly shaking, the Elvis lookalike still clung to the doctrine of “Get Logan.” In consequence he’d risen from his knees and planted his gorilla shoulders close inside the gallery-to-street door, making an exit that way a matter of hand-to-hand fighting and a toss-up whether I won or lost. A hand-to-hand fight against that visibly dramatic strength would have been daunting always but in my tottery state of that moment, even if I’d wanted to quit the scene, which I didn’t, a win would have been impossible. As long as Norman Osprey thought he was usefully stationed where he was doing me no good, however, I could count him one less trouble to deal with, and be grateful.

Eddie, who seemed not to understand what had happened, was still on his knees beside the wall. Martin’s valet who, with his stubborn misconceptions, had accompanied Rose on this whole unholy tape hunt, now looked as though he were begging absolution. To my mind he certainly failed to deserve it.

Pamela Jane heaved herself from under me in a troubled dilemma as she couldn’t decide whether to thank me for saving her from razor-sharp damage since, in the chair, she’d been in a direct line to be peppered, or to revile me for leaving Hickory to take whatever came his way in the blast.

Pamela Jane, of course, had understood the physics of stress and strain in superheated glass, and she would now be sure I’d intended to shatter the horse from the moment I’d started to make it. She would be puzzling over the nonsense of the gold delivery, both the amount and the timing, because, as she confessed to me much later, it had all been so unlike me. She had believed every word I’d said to Rose, and now she felt a fool.

“Dear Pam J,” I contentedly said, “you were sincerely a great help.”

That was afterwards. At the time, during the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the trophy horse, she still worried over the outcome for Hickory.

When I stood up and looked over the half-wall to see what shape Rose and Hickory were in, I found Rose bleeding down one leg but still shaking with determined fury while she shoved a clean punty iron into the tank and drew out a second one already tipped with white-hot hate.

Hickory, who had finally succeeded in flinging himself out of the chair altogether, lay facedown on the smooth brick floor trying to rub the adhesive off his mouth. Tears from the pain of his damaged ear seemed to be running helplessly down inside his nose, and he was trying to deal with that by sniffing.

Sharply aware that at some point somewhere Rose had succeeded in drawing a line of fire across my own lower back ribs, I felt I’d already had enough for one morning of the unequal combat.

Rose hadn’t. Rose, it seemed, had energy in stock for a third world war. As she drew her loaded iron with speed from the fire, she told me that if I didn’t get back at once into the workshop the burn to Hickory’s ear would be only the beginning. She could have freed him. She could at least have helped him, but she didn’t.

I went around the half-wall. Hickory still lay facedown on the floor, but instead of rubbing his face raw without results, he was now thrashing his legs instead. Hurting and helpless, he was in no immediate danger from Rose, who chose to advance on me, holding the silvery black five-foot-long punty iron loaded and ready to strike if I didn’t dodge fast enough.

“Adam Force’s videotape,” she said. “Where is it?”

Short of breath from evading deep burns so long, I managed dry-mouthed to reply, “He said he’d rerecorded it with horse races.”

“Rubbish.” Rose advanced towards me with the white-hot ball of glass inexorably leading the way. Had we been armed the other way around, I could with two cuts of heavy scissors have sliced the ball into a pointed spear. The spear, if one thrust it fiercely, would burn a path right through a body, searing, cauterizing and killing. Rose had no spear but a ball was bad enough. Its effect would be the same.

With at least some sort of plan I backed away from Rose and her deadly fire, cursing that I couldn’t reach the five or six punty irons lying idle to one side, irons I could at least have used to fence with, because Hickory with his shocking wound lay suffering in my way.

Rose began again to enjoy compelling me to retreat step by backwards step. Backwards past the furnace, its trapdoor shut. Backwards across the workshop, faster as she increased her pace.

“The videotape,” she demanded. “Where is it?”

At last, at last, I saw Worthington again outside the gallery door, Worthington this time flanked by Tom Pigeon, Jim, Catherine and her hobo partner, Pernickety Paul.

Norman Osprey, suddenly not liking the odds, stood back to let them in and dived fast around them out into the street. I had a last glimpse of him as he set off down the hill with Tom and his three four-legged companions in pursuit.

The two plainclothes officers and, with Worthington and Jim, filled the doorway he’d left. Furiously seeing the advent of my friends as her last chance to make me remember her for life, Rose rushed recklessly at my abdomen. I sidestepped and dodged yet again and ran and swerved, and ended where I’d aimed for, beside the wide round pots of colored powders on the stock shelves.

It was the white color I wanted, the dust the Germans called Emaill weiss. I snatched off the lid and plunged my hand into the open pot, grabbed as much dust as I could in one handful and threw it at Rose’s eyes.

Emaill weiss — white enamel ground to dust — contained arsenic... and arsenic dust made eyes blur and water and go temporarily and effectively blind. Rose, her eyes streaming, her sight gone, went on sweeping around with her petrifying length of death-bearing punty iron.

Eddie seemingly rose from his prayers and walked around the half-wall pleading with her to be still. “Rose, dear girl, it’s over...”

But nothing would stop her. Blinded for a while she might be, but she lashed out with the killing iron at where she’d last seen me, trying still to penetrate my stomach or chest, then wildly slashing at where my head had been.

Missing me didn’t stop her being more dangerous blundering about than if she could see me, and finally, disastrously, the unimaginably hot glass connected twice with living flesh.

There were screams chokingly cut off.

It was Eddie, her father, that incredibly she had hit first. She had seared the skin from his fingers as he had held them in front of his face to defend himself. There were crashes of iron against walls and a fearful soft sizzling as the worst of all calamities happened.

Pamela Jane hysterically threw herself into my arms and hid her face, but it wasn’t she who had burned. From across the workshop, where the air again smelled of funeral pyre, Paul folded to the ground and lay motionless, his limbs sprawling in the haphazardness of death.

Catherine in a state of shock and anger stared hollow-eyed in disbelief. I stretched an arm towards her and hugged both girls as if I could never let them go.

Adam Force came to stand against the safe side of the wall into the workshop and begged Rose to stand still and let someone — like himself — come to help her and her father, with the only result that she changed direction towards his voice, lashing through the air in great sweeps of the punty iron.

Catherine, a police officer to the bone, stiffened after her first need for comfort and, with Rose following the sound of her voice, walked away from me and called her station urgently for backup. Stifling human terror, she spoke tightly on her personal radio. “Officer down,” she said, pushing the transit button. “Red call. Red call. Officer in need of immediate assistance.”

She reported the address of Logan Glass, and then and with less formality, and genuine extreme emotion, added, “Come at once. Dear God.”

She dodged Rose’s rushing speed and with incredible bravery knelt down beside her silent hobo partner. The plainclothes inhabitant of doorways, whose name to me had never been more than “Pernickety Paul,” would catch no more villains. Pernickety Paul had taken a long white-hot direct hit through his neck.

I disentangled myself from Pamela Jane and half ran across the room away from Catherine and called to Rose, “I’m here, Rose. I’m over here and you’ll never catch me.”

Rose turned half circle my way and pivoted once more when I jumped past her again and yelled at her. She turned again and again and finally began to tire enough with her blurring eyes for Worthington and Jim to reach my side and for Catherine to come up behind us, and for the four of us to grab Rose at high speed and immobilize her still-slashing punty iron arm. I wrestled the iron a good safe way away from her, feeling the heat of it near my legs, but not on my skin, and still she went on struggling in Worthington’s and Jim’s grasp.

The police side of Catherine flowed in her like a strong tide. She sought and found the handcuffs carried by Pernickety Paul on a belt around his waist. She clicked them roughly onto Rose’s wrists behind her back, the metal bands squeezed tight against her skin.

Rose kicked.

“Take my belt,” Worthington shouted, and I unbuckled his pliable woven leather belt and tied it around one ankle and knotted it to the other, until she overbalanced and lay on her side on the floor, thrashing her legs still and cursing.

There was nothing about “going quietly” in the arrest of Rose Payne. An ambulance with paramedics and two cars full of bristling young police officers drew up outside the gallery and filled Logan Glass, crunching the fragments of the shattered horse to dust under their heavy boots. They talked with Catherine and fetched a blanket in which they rolled Rose like a baby in swaddling clothes and, with her struggling to the end, they manhandled her out through the showroom and gallery door and shoved her into the back of one of the police cars.

Spitting fury, she was soon joined there by the burly Norman Osprey, whose muscles had been no match for three sets of canine fangs. Tom told me later that the big man had sat in the road quivering with fear, his head and hands between his legs, begging for the police to rescue him from the black snarls circling around him.

In the workshop I watched as Catherine, dry-eyed, brought another blanket in from a police car to cover the silence of Paul.

More police arrived, some in uniform and others in plainclothes more suitable for a Sunday in front of the television than a trip to a fiery hell on earth. Off duty or not, some things demanded attendance. White overalls and gray plastic shoe covers were produced and soon the workshop took on the look of unreal science fiction.

I watched a policeman wearing surgical rubber gloves carefully lift the fallen syringe and place it gingerly in a clear plastic bag, which he sealed.

Methodically the police began to sort and list names, and it was the Dragon across the road who offered solace and recovery with a warm heart. One of the police officers removed the tape from Pamela Jane’s wrists, took her personal details, and then with a solicitous arm helped her to the hotel.

I knelt beside Hickory. I told him I was going to remove the sticky strips from his eyes and mouth. I asked him if he understood.

Hickory nodded and stopped struggling against the floor.

As humanely as possible I pulled the tape from his eyes. It painfully came off with eyelashes attached and it was several minutes before his long-obstructed sight cleared and he was staring straight at me beside him.

“I’m going to take the tape off your mouth,” I said.

He nodded.

One of the young police officers stretched a hand down over my shoulder and with a lack of sensitivity simply ripped the strong tape off. Hickory yelled and went on yelling, telling the police officer to free his taped-together hands, and to hurry up.

I left them for a moment and brought the first-aid box from the stock shelves to put a dressing on Hickory’s ear, and after a good deal of chat, the paramedics and the police decided together that he should go to the hospital along with Eddie, who was now deep in shock with hands that had already blistered badly.

Catherine stood by the ambulance’s open door watching Eddie being helped aboard for treatment.

I told her other things she ought to know, extra things about Blackmask Four that had come to me during the night, that I hadn’t mentioned in the dawn.

She said thoughtfully, “Our superintendent is that man standing beside Paul. I think you’d better talk to him. I have to go to the police station. I’ll come back here when I can...”

She took me across the room, introduced me as the owner of the place and left me to deepen the frown of the top brass.

I shook hands with Superintendent Shepherd of the West Mercia police.

First of all he looked with disenchantment at my singlet, now no longer white and clean but grubby from constant contact with workshop clutter. He took in the singed piece of cloth hanging loose in the lower ribs area where Rose’s relentless attentions had connected. He asked if the reddened skin beneath was painful and I tiredly said yes, it was, but I’d had worse burns in the past and would prefer to ignore it; but, I added to myself, burns had always before been accidentally self-inflicted.

I looked down at the blanket over Pernickety Paul, the fusspot who had cared like a father for Catherine’s safety in the violent streets.

“He was a good policeman,” I said.

The superintendent let a small silence ride by before mentioning comeuppance for the perpetrator. He would need me to proceed to the police station to make a statement which would be videotaped and in every way recorded. Judiciously he agreed I could cover the burns with dressings and restore my shirt on top, and then, reluctantly, he also agreed I could hang my coat over my shoulders so as not to freeze out of doors.

During this display of humanity George Lawson-Young arrived, and with his presence transformed the general police atmosphere from suspicion to common sense. He was the sort of deeply respected man that other men in authority instinctively trusted. When he greeted and treated me with noticeably high levels of deference, my standing with the super took a slow drift upwards. I thought he went so far after a while as to believe what I said.

George Lawson-Young asked me as if expecting the answer “Yes,” “Did you work out the identity of the fourth man who assaulted you outside here on the sidewalk two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

He knew that answer in advance, as I had told him that morning on the telephone. I had used his search-and-discard method to sort out truth from lies, and to go carefully down the cul-de-sacs, but however flatly I said the name, it would cause consternation.

The professor, tall, tidy and nearsighted, made a slow visual inspection of the damage to the most familiar of faces turned his way. No one tried to hurry him, not even the superintendent.

Adam Force, his facial bleeding down from Niagara to a trickle, had wandered dizzily into the workshop from the showroom and was standing beside Hickory, looking down on him as, on his knees, Hickory cradled his mutilated ear.

When Adam Force saw the professor he looked as if he would prefer to evaporate rather than be in the same room as his onetime boss, and George, usually the most forgiving of men, produced a thoroughly baleful glare with no pity component for his expert practitioner of treason.

One of the policemen in white overalls asked Doctor Force his name and address while another took his photograph. The flash seemed to startle him and, with a blood-red rivulet still meandering down his cheek into his beard, he looked far from the assured physician I had first met on the hill at Lynton.

A spent Force, I thought ironically.

The photographer moved on, snapping under the direction of the Scene-of-Crime Officer. Nothing was to be missed. Pernickety Paul would have been proud.

It was George Lawson-Young, saying he was hoping I’d done enough for him for the next thousand years, who related to the superintendent step by step how the data stolen from his research laboratory had caused me so much pain and trouble.

Naming each person in turn to identify them for the policeman’s sake, and referring back to me for confirmation when he needed it, George quietly threaded his way through the complexities of January 2000.

“Adam Force,” he said, pointing at Dr. Bright-Scarlet-Beard, “worked for me but jumped ship and stole the cancer research that just may be worth millions and would certainly be to the advantage of the whole world.”

I could see the superintendent begin to be skeptical but I nodded and he focused back on the professor.

“We knew,” George went on, “that he had stolen the information, had transferred it to a videotape and had destroyed all other records of our research. Understandably, we searched everywhere for it, even engaging private investigators, after the police had shown little interest.”

Superintendent Shepherd flinched not at all but continued listening intently.

“All our searches were in vain. We did not expect him to have entrusted the tape to the safekeeping of a jockey. Doctor Force had passed it to Martin Stukely but Stukely preferred to hand it on to his friend Gerard Logan here away from the fingers of his own children. As perhaps you know, Martin Stukely was killed at Cheltenham races on New Year’s Eve. But the tape had already begun its tortuous journey by then. Adam Force tried to steal it back. Tapes were stolen from here, from Gerard’s home and from the home of Martin Stukely.”

“Were we informed of those thefts?” asked the policeman.

“Yes,” I replied, “but the theft of a few videotapes for no apparent reason hardly brought the law out like today.”

“Hmm,” replied the superintendent, knowing it was true.

“One of your officers did come around here the following morning,” I said, “but there was far more interest in the money stolen with the tape.”

“Did Doctor Force steal the money as well?” asked the super, looking at Force.

“Yes,” I replied. “But I think that was just an opportunist theft which he might have thought would somehow smokescreen the removal of the tape.”

Doctor Force listened impassionately, his bloodied face giving away nothing.

“Anyway,” continued the professor, who did not welcome the interruption, “somehow all the thefts failed to get back the tape they wanted, and Doctor Force, with assistance from Rose Payne and others, has been trying here to coerce Mr. Logan to reveal its whereabouts. He tells me he hasn’t got it.”

“And have you?” asked the voice of authority.

“No,” I replied, “but I think I know who has.”

They all looked at me. Adam Force, Lawson-Young, the superintendent and even Hickory, who had been listening with his good ear, they all waited expectantly.

Into this tableau swept Marigold, floating in emerald silk with gold tassels and brushing aside the young constable who tried to stand in her way. In her wake came Bon-Bon, Victor, Daniel and the other children like the tail of a kite.

Marigold demanded to see how her trophy was getting along, but was brought up sharply by the sight of the blanket-covered form in the workshop and the mass of evidence gatherers crawling cautiously around it on their hands and knees. Bon-Bon, realizing the enormity of the situation, swept her brood back out of the door, leaving just her mother and Victor inside, both of them stock-still, transfixed, living through their eyes.

“Gerard darling,” Marigold exclaimed. “What is going on? And where is Worthington?”

“Marigold, my dear,” I said wearily, “there’s been a disaster. Please go across the road to the hotel and wait for me there.”

She seemed not to hear, her eyes steadfastly on the blanket. “Where is Worthington?” Her voice began to rise. “Where’s Worthington? Oh my God.”

I took her in my arms. “Marigold, Marigold, he’s all right. I promise. That’s not Worthington.”

She sobbed on my shoulder, near to collapse.

Victor turned to me and said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “It’s not a game anymore, is it?”

The question needed no answer, and presently the young constable led him and Marigold across to the Wychwood Dragon.

“So who is Blackmask Four?” asked Lawson-Young into the silence when they had gone.

“Who?” said the superintendent. “What are you talking about?”

The professor told him. “Gerard was attacked by four people in black masks outside his shop here. Three of them were Rose Payne, her father Eddie Payne and Norman Osprey. Gerard told me earlier today that he had worked out the identity of the fourth, so,” he turned to me and said with faith, “who is it and where is my research?”

“I don’t think Blackmask Four has the tape,” I replied.

“What!” exclaimed the professor. His shoulders dropped, his expectations had been so high and he took it now that I was leading him only to another cul-de-sac, another dead end.

I put him right. “My fourth assailant, Blackmask Four, was just a hired help and I’m not sure he even knew exactly what he was looking for.” But he knew, I thought, how to inflict maximum damage to my wrists. “He is, however, a dab hand with a baseball bat and anesthetic gas.”

“Who is it, for God’s sake?” The professor was finding it difficult to stifle his impatience, as was the superintendent, yet it wasn’t the easiest disclosure I’d ever made. Still...

“Who was the fourth man, Hickory?” I asked.

Hickory looked up from where he was kneeling on the floor, still holding a dressing to his ear.

“Why are you asking me?” he said.

“You bunched my fingers.”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“I’m afraid you did,” I said. “You held my hand against a wall ready for a baseball bat to smash my wrist.”

“You must be crazy. Why would I attack you? Why you of all people?”

It was a piercing question and one with a complex answer. He didn’t answer it. But we both knew what he had intended.

“Did you do it for money?” I asked.

I suspected that it was for more convoluted reasons than that. Something to do with my ability with glassblowing and his comparative lack of it. Envy was a strong emotion and, I reckoned, he wouldn’t have needed a whole lot of persuasion to oppose me.

He still refused to admit it. “You’re crazy, you are,” he said, getting to his feet and turning away as if looking for some quick escape.

“The green-and-white laces,” I said.

He stopped dead and turned back.

I went on, “You wore them here the day Martin Stukely was killed, and you wore them again the following day when you stole the tapes from his house, the day you hit me with the orange cylinder. Martin’s eldest son, Daniel, saw the laces and told the police about them.”

Hickory advanced a step or two, his ear clearly hurting.

His poise cracked.

“You’re so fucking clever,” he said. “I wish we had broken your wrists.”

The superintendent stopped leaning on the half-wall and stood up straight.

But Hickory had only just started.

“You and your fancy ways and your condescending comments about my work. I hate you and this workshop. I’m a damn good glassblower and I deserve more recognition.” He raised his chin and sneered.

“One day,” he went on, “John Hickory will be a name worth knowing and people will smash fucking Logan Glass to get to mine.”

Such a shame, I thought. He really did have some talent but, I suspected, it would never be allowed to develop as it should. Arrogance and a belief in skills he didn’t have would smother those he did.

“And Rose?” I asked.

“Stupid bitch,” he said, holding his hand to his throbbing ear, “bloody mad she is. Tie you up, she said; use you as a hostage, she said. Nothing about frying my effing ear. Hope she rots in hell.”

I hoped she’d rot on earth.

“She promised me my own place,” Hickory said. “Claimed she’d close you down. Her and that stupid father of hers.” He began to realize the hole he was digging for himself. “They put me up to it. It was their fault, not mine.”

He looked wretchedly at the rapt faces around him.

“It wasn’t my fault. It was their idea.”

No one believed him. It had been Hickory who had reported all to Rose. Hickory had had the “binocs” in Broadway.

“So where is the tape?” asked George Lawson-Young.

“I don’t know,” replied Hickory. “Rose said that it must have been in Stukely’s house or in Logan’s but I’ve sat through hours of bloody horse racing and glassblowing and, I’m telling you, there was no tape of medical stuff.”

I believed him. Otherwise, I thought ruefully, I might have been saved a couple of beatings and Pernickety Paul would still be lying around in shop doorways.

A paramedic appeared and said that it was time to take Hickory to the hospital to dress his burn. The superintendent, roused into action, arrested Hickory. “You do not have to say anything...”

“Too bloody late,” retorted Hickory, as he was led off to the ambulance by a white-overalled police officer and the paramedic.

The super turned his attention to Doctor Red-Beard Force, who had listened in silence throughout.

He said, his speech always in the pattern of officialese, “Well, Doctor Force, can you enlighten us as to the whereabouts of a videotape containing medical research results stolen from the professor here?”

Force said nothing. It seemed that he had at least learned one lesson from our discussion under the fir trees in Lynton.

“Come on, Adam, tell us.” The professor, I saw, still had some vestige of friendship for the man before him dripping blood from his beard onto my smooth brick floor.

Force looked at him with disdain and kept silent.

In his turn, he too was arrested and taken away for wound stitching and fingerprinting. “You do not have to say anything...” So he didn’t.

In time the gallery, showroom and workshop began to clear. The coroner’s representative arrived and supervised the relocation of Paul to the local morgue. The other officers stopped work to stand and watch the sorry procession of undertakers and their highly regarded and valued burden move through the gallery to the door. There were tears in my eyes as well as in theirs. He had been a good man as well as a good policeman.

A few more photographs were taken and a few more pieces of evidence were collected. Blue-and-white “Do Not Cross” tape was strung about, doors were locked and guarded, and the professor and I were gently eased out to the street into the gray appropriate drizzle.

The superintendent again asked me to accompany him to the police station to make a full statement, though this time, there was more warmth in his manner. I agreed, but first, I asked, could we all go over to the Wychwood Dragon Hotel as I was thirsty and needed a jug of tea. I looked at my cheap watch. Amazingly it was still morning though it felt to me more like teatime must have come and gone.

They were in the residents’ downstairs sitting room. Bon-Bon and her four sat tightly side by side on the wide sofa in descending height from the right. Coca-Colas had been bought and a line of empty bottles with straws sat on a coffee table. Marigold occupied a deep squashy armchair while Worthington perched on its arm by her side. The manner in which Marigold clung to Worthington’s hand reminded me of his fly-trap warning. He didn’t appear to protest.

The Dragon poured tea into large millennium souvenir mugs and told us that Pamela Jane, still badly shocked, had been given a pill by the police doctor and dispatched to bed upstairs.

Victor stood by the window unable to remove his eyes from Logan Glass opposite. I took my tea over and joined him.

Without turning his head he said, “I suppose my aunt Rose will be inside for a long time?”

“Yes,” I said. “A very long time.” For life, I thought, either in prison or a secure mental hospital. Police killers didn’t get early parole.

He stood in silence a moment longer, then turned and looked me straight in the eye. “Good,” he said. “It might give me and Mom a chance.”

I turned and took Bon-Bon out into the hotel lobby. I needed her to do me a favor. Certainly, she said, and trotted off to the telephone box beneath the stairs.

I went back into the sitting room to finish my tea and soon after Bon-Bon returned with a smiling nod.

I thought about the events of the morning, and wondered if there had been another way.

Punty irons in anyone’s hand had to be swung around carefully. In Rose’s hands a punty iron tipped with semi-liquid glass had been literally a lethal weapon, and it had seemed to me that as it was me she was after, however weird and mistaken her beliefs, it was I who ought to stop her.

I’d tried to stop her with the shattering horse and I hadn’t succeeded. It had torn a hole in her lover and stoked her own anger, and I’d thought then, if I could blind her she would stop, so I’d thrown the powder, but blinding her had made her worse.

Paul had died.

If I hadn’t tried to stop her, if instead I had surrendered at once to her as she’d demanded, then Paul would be alive. But, I reflected, searching for comfort, I couldn’t have given her the tape she demanded as I hadn’t known exactly where it was.

I’d done my best, and my best had killed.

The voice of the superintendent brought me back to the present. He said he was eager to get to the police station to interview his prisoners and also that he was less eager, but duty demanded it, to visit Detective Constable Paul Cratchet’s family. “Would the professor and Mr. Logan come with me now, please, sirs?” he said.

“Another cup of tea?” I replied.

The super was not happy. “Contrary to popular belief, the tea at the station house is quite drinkable. So, if you please.”

I needed more time.

Settling into another deep armchair, I said, “Just a moment to sit down? I’m exhausted. How about something to eat before we go?”

“We have a canteen at the station. You can have something there.” The voice of authority had spoken and there seemed little else to do but comply.

I rose slowly to my feet and with relief found my expected guest hurrying at last through the door.

“Hello, Priam,” I said.

He looked past me towards the tall, elegantly suited George Lawson-Young. He flicked a glance at Bon-Bon as if to say, “Is this the one?”

“Priam,” I repeated, “it’s so good of you to come. Priam Jones, can I introduce Superintendent Shepherd of the West Mercia police.”

Priam turned slowly my way and instinctively shook an offered hand.

“I’m sorry?” he said, puzzled. “I don’t quite understand. Bon-Bon called me to say that she was with a potential racehorse owner and I should get down here pronto if I wanted the business. Interrupted a good lunch too, I can tell you.”

He looked around him still searching for the elusive owner.

“Priam,” I regained his attention, “that wasn’t quite the truth. I asked Bon-Bon to make that call because I needed to talk to you.” He wasn’t pleased. Far from it.

“What’s wrong with the bloody telephone if you needed a chat, although about what I can’t imagine.” He looked down at four sets of childhood eyes staring up at him. “Hmp... sorry.”

I said, “I needed a chat about a videotape.”

“Not that bl... er... er... videotape business again,” he said. “I have told you already, I don’t have any videotape.”

Daniel said distinctly, “I know where there’s a videotape.”

“Shhhh, darling,” said Bon-Bon.

“But I do know where a tape is,” Daniel persisted.

I had learned to take Daniel very seriously indeed.

I squatted down to his level on the sofa. “Where is the videotape, Daniel?” I said.

“I think it must be worth at least three or four gold coins,” he replied.

“What does he mean?” asked Professor Lawson-Young.

“It’s a game we have been playing,” I said. “I give Daniel treasure if he gives or finds me information.” I turned back to Daniel. “I think it might indeed be worth three or four gold coins.”

“A whole bagful of treasure,” said the professor, “if it’s the right tape.”

Daniel looked positively delighted at the prospect.

“It’s in Daddy’s car,” he said. “It’s in the pocket on the back of Daddy’s seat. I saw it there yesterday when Mommy brought us to your shop.”

He looked at me questioningly and beamed when I told him, “Ten gold coins this time if the professor agrees.”

George Lawson-Young, speechless, nodded his head until it seemed it might fall off.

Daniel said, “I like finding things for Gerard. I’ll always look for things for him.”

Priam shuffled uneasily beside me.

I said to him, “Why did you switch the tapes?”

“I told you...” he started.

“I know what you told me,” I interrupted. “It was a lie.” Discard the lies, the professor had told me in Bristol, and I would be left with the truth. I asked again, “Why did you switch the tapes?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I thought,” he said, “that the tape Eddie Payne passed to you was one showing the hiding place of an antique necklace. Worth millions I’d heard from someone. I found it in your raincoat that night and I thought, with Martin dead, no one would know if I kept it.”

Half-truths and misconceptions had woven a path to death and destruction.

Priam went on, “I took another tape from Martin’s den, one with racing on it, and wrapped it in the paper and put it back in your raincoat pocket. When I played the original tape at home that night I discovered that it was all unintelligible mumbo jumbo with nothing about a necklace. So I just put it back in Martin’s car when I drove it back to Bon-Bon’s the next day.”

He looked around him. “No harm done. You have the tape back. No need for the police.”

No harm done. Oh God, how wrong he was.

It was four days before the police would allow me back into Logan Glass.

Broadway had been the center of a media circus. The Dragon from over the road had previously said, “You were always news in this town, lover” and, for filling her rooms, she allowed me use of her best suite and paraded her little glass animals along a shelf in the lobby with a notice offering duplicates for sale.

Marigold, her natural competitor in the matter of saris, caftans, eyelashes and “Darling,” wandered in and out waiting for me to start again on her trophy. Worthington, who had been upgraded from her chauffeur to her arm-in-arm companion, was dispatched with me to collect the necklace from the bank. Marigold secured total victory over the Dragon by wearing it day and night and finally buying it from me outright at huge expense.

Rose, Norman Osprey, Doctor Force and Hickory had been remanded in custody while Eddie had been remanded in the hospital, his hands a mess.

Priam, not understanding the fuss, had been given police bail, which meant that his passport had been confiscated. “Most inconvenient,” he had declared. “Why have I been treated like a common criminal?” Because he was one, Worthington had told him and anyone else who’d listen.

Professor George Lawson-Young had been given the tape from Martin’s car. There had been a few ugly moments when the superintendent had tried to hang on to it as evidence. Having once lost the information it contained, Lawson-Young had no intention of allowing it out of his sight again. The police had reluctantly consented to his taking it away briefly to make a copy.

Catherine, cuddling in my arms every night, kept me up-to-date with the news from the police station.

Rose did little else but scream abuse, most of it in my direction it seemed.

Hickory blamed me, Rose and the world in general.

Doctor Force had said a little but denied most. He had revealed, however, that Martin Stukely had not been aware that the information on the tape had been stolen. Indeed the doctor had told Martin that he was protecting the research from others trying to steal the work from Force.

I was glad of that. Had I doubted it?

On Thursday we reopened. The showroom was busier than it had ever been on a weekday in January and sales boomed. But, in truth, there was far greater interest in the bloodstains, which had proved difficult to remove from between the bricks on the floor, than in the stock.

Pamela Jane had recovered sufficiently to return in time for the weekend although she preferred to work in the showroom and made rapid transits across the workshop to her locker only when she couldn’t avoid it.

On Sunday, one week after the mayhem, I set out again to make the trophy horse.

Dependable Irish had agreed to act as my assistant and this time we had an audience of one. Catherine sat in her now familiar chair and watched as I again readied my tools and stripped down to my singlet.

I stood on the treadle to lift the door to the furnace and let the heat flood into the room.

Catherine took off her coat.

“Hang it in my locker,” I said, tossing her the locker keys.

She walked to the far end of the workshop and opened a door on the tall gray cabinet.

“What’s on this?” she said, holding up a videotape. “It has a label, ‘How to make the Cretan Sunrise.’ ”

I moved swiftly to her side. She had by mistake opened Hickory’s locker, and there inside we found not just the necklace instruction tape but also, tucked into a brown paper bag, a pair of bright laces, green-and-white-striped.

I laughed. “A tale of three tapes and one of them was under my nose all the time.”

“Three tapes?” she asked. “Two were bad enough.”

“There were three,” I replied. “The only really important, valuable and perhaps unique tape was the one Force made from the stolen cancer research results. He gave it to Martin, who via Eddie gave it to me. Priam swapped it, mistakenly thinking it a treasure finder’s dream to millions. When he found that it wasn’t, he simply left it hidden in Martin’s car. It’s the tape that Rose and Doctor Force have been trying so hard to find.”

“And the necklace tape?” Catherine asked. “This one?”

I said, “I had lent the necklace instruction tape to Martin and it remained in his den at his house until Hickory stole it with all the others. Hickory kept it because, to him, the tape had some value. He thought he could make a copy of the necklace and obviously kept the tape in his locker.”

“What’s the third tape then?” she asked.

“The tape,” I went on, “that Priam took from Martin’s den before Hickory’s theft. He put it in my raincoat pocket and it’s that tape that Force stole at midnight on New Year’s Eve thinking it was his cancer tape. I would have loved to see his face when he played it and found horse racing instead.”

I made the trophy horse. With Irish’s help I gathered the

glass from the furnace and again formed the horse’s body, its legs and tail. But this time I took time and care and applied the knowledge and talent both learned and inherited from my uncle Ron. I molded a neck and head of an intelligent animal, prominent cheekbones and a firm mouth. I gave it a mane flowing as if in full gallop and then applied it seamlessly to the body.

I had started out to make a commercial work for Marigold and Kenneth Trubshaw and his Cheltenham Trophy Committee.

In the event I made a memorial to a trusted and much missed friend. A memorial worthy of his skill and his courage.

The leaping horse stood finally on the marver table and Irish and I lifted it quickly but carefully into one of the annealing ovens. There it would cool slowly and safely, allowing the strains and stresses to ease gradually. This one was not for shattering.

I went with Catherine to the funeral of Pernickety Paul, but I abandoned her at the church door to her colleagues, uniformed or not. A small bunch of plainclothes enveloped her and mourned with her and it was a thoughtful and subdued police officer who mounted her motorcycle, paused before starting the engine, and said blankly to her future passenger, “The private cremation’s tomorrow and there are drinks in his memory in the pub this evening. I’ve been given leave for the rest of the day, so where do you want to go now?”

“To bed,” I said without hesitation, and added that surely Pernickety Paul would have approved.

Catherine shed sorrow like melting snow.

I said, “I haven’t seen where you live, remember? So how about now then?”

She smiled with a touch of mischief and then kicked down on the starter and invited me to step aboard.

Her home was maybe five minutes’ walk or less than a one-minute motorcycle ride along a straight gray road from the district police station. She stopped outside a single-storied semi-detached bungalow in a row of identical stuccoed boxes, and I knew within a second blink that this was not the place for me. Going there had been a mistake but, as Catherine was my transport, I would smile and pretend to like it.

I actually did both, and not from politeness’s sake.

Inside, the plain clothes’s one-floor living space had been allied to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where a more-than-life-size March Hare and a same-size Mad Hatter sat at the kitchen table and stuffed a dormouse into a teapot. A white rabbit consulted a watch by the bathroom door, and a red queen and a cook and a walrus and a carpenter danced a quadrille around the sitting room. All the walls, everywhere, were painted with rioting greenery and flowers.

Catherine laughed at my expression, a mixture no doubt of amusement and horror.

“These people,” she said, “came to me from a closing-down fun fair when I was six. I’ve always loved them. I know they’re silly but they’re company.” She suddenly swallowed. “They have helped me come to terms with losing Paul. He liked them. They made him laugh. They’re not the same now, without him. I think I’ve been growing up.”

In keeping with the rest of the house Catherine’s bedroom was a fantasy land of living playing cards painting rosebushes white and strong pink against puff ball clouds and vivid green leaves.

Brought to a standstill, I said weakly, “Lovely,” and Catherine laughed.

“You hate it, I can see.”

“I can shut my eyes,” I said, but we pulled the curtains closed.

We made love there in Pernickety Paul’s honor but, in the evening, after the party in the pub, when Detective Constable Dodd and her pillion rider climbed back on the saddle, it was to the big quiet house on the hill that they went.

It was like coming familiarly home.