Shattered

2

The resident Dragon of the Wychwood Dragon Hotel being its fierce lady manager, I could ooze in and out of the halls unseen (as it were), owing both to the collection of small colored glass animals marching around her dressing table, and to her occasional invitations to bed. The glass animals weren’t so much trophies as apologies, however, as she was fortunately resigned to accepting that a thirty years’ difference in age was a fair enough reason for me to say no. Her habit of calling me “lover” in public was embarrassment enough, though, and I knew that most of Broadway believed she ate me with eggs for breakfast.

Anyway, no one questioned my takeover of Lloyd Baxter’s room. In the morning I packed his belongings and, explaining all to the Dragon, arranged for the hotel to send them to the hospital. Then I walked down and across to the workshop, where Martin, though vivid in my mind, refused to fly as a statement in glass. Inspiration operated at its own good speed, and many a time I’d found that trying to force it didn’t work.

The furnace roared in its firebox. I sat beside the stainless-steel table (called a marver) on which I should have been rolling eternity into basic balls of liquid glass, and thought only of Martin alive in the body, Martin laughing and winning races, and Martin’s lost message on videotape. Where was that tape, what did it contain and who thought it worth stealing?

These profitless thoughts were interrupted by the doorbell ringing early at nine o’clock, when we’d said we’d open at ten.

On the doorstep stood no recognizable customer but a young woman in a vast sloppy sweater hanging around her knees, topped by a baseball cap over a shock of brassily dyed streaky hair. We stared at each other with interest, her brown eyes alive and curious, her jaw rhythmic with chewing gum.

I said politely, “Good morning.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” She laughed. “Happy New Century and all that rubbish. Are you Gerard Logan?”

Her accent was Estuary, Essex or Thames: take your pick.

“Logan.” I nodded. “And you?”

“Detective Constable Dodd.”

I blinked. “Plainclothes?”

“You may laugh,” she said, chewing away. “You reported a theft at twelve thirty-two this A.M. Can I come in?”

“Be my guest.”

She stepped into the gallery spotlights and glowed. From habit I dramatized her in glass in my mind, an abstract essence as a conduit of feeling and light, exactly the instinctive process I’d tried in vain to summon up for Martin.

Oblivious, Detective Constable Dodd produced a down-to-earth warrant card identifying her in uniform and adding a first name, Catherine. I handed the warrant card back and answered her questions, but the police opinion was already firm. Too bad I’d left a bagful of money lying around, she said. What did I expect? And videotapes came by the dozen. No one would think twice about snapping one up.

“What was on it?” she asked, pencil poised over a notepad.

“I’ve no idea.” I explained how it had come to me originally in a brown-paper parcel.

“Pornography. Bound to be.” Her pronouncement was brisk, world-weary and convinced. “Unidentified.” She shrugged. “Would you know it from any other tape if you saw it again?”

“It hadn’t any labels.”

I dug the wrapping out of the rubbish bin and gave her the wrinkled and torn paper. “This came to me by hand,” I said. “There’s no postmark.”

She took the paper dubiously, enclosed it in a further bag, got me to sign across the fold and tucked it away somewhere under the extra-loose sweater.

My answers to her questions about the stolen money caused her eyebrows to rise over the amount, but she obviously thought I’d never again see the canvas bag or the mini-bonanza inside. I still had checks and credit card slips, of course, but most of my tourist customers paid in cash.

I told her then about Lloyd Baxter and his epileptic fit. “Maybe he saw the thief,” I said.

She frowned. “Maybe he was the thief. Could he have faked the fit?”

“The paramedics didn’t seem to think so.”

She sighed. “How long were you out in the street?”

“Bells. ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ fireworks, happy new thousand years...”

“Getting on for half an hour?” She consulted her notebook. “You phoned the ambulance service at twelve twenty-seven.”

She wandered through the showroom looking at the small colorful vases, the clowns, sailing boats, fishes and horses. She picked up a haloed angel and disapproved of the price sticker under the feet. Her swath of hair fell forward, framing her intent face, and I again clearly saw the bright analytical intelligence inside the sloppy hippie-type disguise. She was through and through a police officer, not primarily a come-hither female.

Replacing the angel with decision on the shelf, she folded her notebook, stored it out of sight and with body language announced that the investigation, despite its lack of results, was over. It was the go-to-work version of Constable Dodd that prepared to step into the street.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?” She concentrated on her change of character..

“Why the too-big sweater and the baseball cap?”

She flashed me an aware, amused glance and turned back to the world outside. “You happened to have been robbed on my allotted beat. My assignment in Broadway is to spot the gang stealing cars on bank holidays in this area. Thanks for your time.”

She grinned with cheerfulness and shuffled off down the hill, pausing to talk to a homeless-looking layabout sitting in a shop doorway, huddling against the chill of morning.

A pity the hippie and the hobo hadn’t been car-thief spotting at midnight, I thought vaguely, and telephoned to the hospital to inquire about Baxter.

Awake and grumbling, I gathered. I left a message of goodwill.

Bon-Bon next.

She wailed miserably into my ear. “But darling Gerard, of course I didn’t tell Priam not to bring you with him. How could you believe it? You are the first person Martin would want to come here. Please, please come as soon as you can, the children are crying and everything’s dreadful.” She drew a shaky breath, the tears distorting her voice. “We were going to a midnight party... and the baby-sitter came and said she wanted her full money anyway, even if Martin was dead, can you believe it? And Priam talked about the inconvenience of finding another jockey halfway through the season. He’s an old fool and he kept patting me...”

“He was seriously upset,” I assured her. “A matter of tears.”

“Priam?”

I frowned at the memory, but the tears had looked real.

“How long did he stay with you?” I asked.

“Stay? He didn’t stay long. Ten to fifteen minutes, maybe. My mother descended on us while he was here, and you’ve met her, you know what she’s like. Priam was mostly in Martin’s den, I think. He kept saying he had to be back for evening stables, he couldn’t sit still.” Bon-Bon’s despair overflowed. “Can’t you come? Please, please come. I can’t deal with my mother by myself.”

“As soon as I’ve done one job, and found some transport. Say... about noon.”

“Oh yes, I forgot your bloody car. Where are you? Did you get home?”

“I’m in my workshop.”

“I’ll come and fetch you...”

“No. First, fill your mama with gin and let the children loose on her, then shut yourself in Martin’s den and watch the tapes of him winning three Grand Nationals, but don’t drive anywhere while you’re so upset. I’ll find transport, but at the worst we could persuade your remarkable parent to lend me Worthington and the Rolls.”

Bon-Bon’s mother’s versatile chauffeur raised his eyebrows to heaven frequently at Marigold’s odd requirements, but had been known to drive a roofless Land Rover at breakneck speed at night across stubble fields, headlights blazing in the dark, while his employer stood balancing behind him with a double-barreled shotgun loosing off at mesmerized rabbits over his head. Martin said he’d been afraid to watch, but Worthington and Marigold had achieved a bag of forty and freed her land of a voracious pest.

Worthington, bald and fifty, was more an adventure than a last resort.

On New Year’s Day 2000 in England the world in general came to a stop. Saturday’s running of one of the best steeplechasing afternoon programs of the whole midwinter season was stuck in a silly halt because the people who worked the betting machines wanted to stay at home. There was no racing — and no football — to entertain the non-workers on or off the television.

Logan Glass astounded the other residents of Broadway by opening its doors to the day-before’s customers, who arrived to collect their overnight-cooled souvenirs. To my own astonishment two of my assistants turned up, even though bleary-eyed, saying they couldn’t leave me to pack the whole delivery job alone; so it was with speed and good humor that my new century began. I looked back later at the peace of that brief morning with a feeling of unreality that life could ever have been so safe and simple.

Pamela Jane, twittery, anxious, stick-thin and wanly pretty, insisted on driving me to Bon-Bon’s place herself, leaving me in the driveway there and departing with a wave, hurrying back to the shop, as she’d left Irish alone there.

Martin and Bon-Bon had agreed at least on their house, an eighteenth-century gem that Marigold had helped them buy. I admired it every time I went there.

A small van stood on the gravel, dark blue with a commercial name painted on it in yellow: THOMPSON ELECTRONICS. I supposed it was because I’d been working myself that I didn’t immediately remember that that day was a national holiday; definitely a moratorium for television repair vans.

Chaos was too weak a word to describe what I found inside Martin’s house. For a start, the front door was visibly ajar and, when I touched it, it swung wide, although it was only the kitchen door the family left hospitably unlocked, both for friends and for visiting tradesmen.

Beginning to feel a slight unease, I stepped through the heavily carved front doorway and shouted, but without response, and a pace or two later I learned why I had misgivings.

Bon-Bon’s mother, Marigold, frothy gray hair and floaty purple dress in disarray as usual, lay unconscious on the stairs. Worthington, her eccentric chauffeur, sprawled like a drugged medieval guard dog at her feet.

The four children, out of sight, were uncannily quiet, and the door to Martin’s room, his den, was closed on silence.

I opened this door immediately and found Bon-Bon there, lying full-length on the wood block floor. Again, as with Lloyd Baxter, I knelt to feel for a pulse in the neck, but this time with sharp anxiety; and I felt the living ga-bump ga-bump with a deeper relief. Concentrating on Bon-Bon, I saw too late in peripheral sight a movement behind my right shoulder... a dark figure speeding from where he’d been hiding behind the door.

I jerked halfway to standing but wasn’t quick enough on my feet. There was a short second in which I glimpsed a small metal gas cylinder — more or less like a quarter-sized fire extinguisher. But this cylinder wasn’t red. It was orange. It hit my head. Martin’s den turned gray, dark gray, and black. A deep well of nothing.

I returned slowly to a gallery of watchers. To a row of eyes dizzily in front of my own. I couldn’t think where I was or what was happening. It had to be bad, though, because the children’s eyes looked huge with fright.

I was lying on my back. Into the blank spaces of memory slowly crept the picture of an orange gas cylinder in the hands of a figure in a black head mask with holes cut out for eyes.

As a return to awareness grew clearer I focused on Bon-Bon’s face and tried to stand up. Bon-Bon, seeing this minor revival, said with great relief, “Thank God you’re all right. We’ve all been gassed and we’ve all been sick since we woke up. Totter to the loo next door, there’s a chum. Don’t throw up in here.”

I had a headache, not nausea. My head had collided with the outside of a metal gas cylinder, not with the contents. I felt too lethargic to explain the difference.

Worthington, notwithstanding the muscular physique he painstakingly developed by regular visits to a punch-bag gym, looked pale and shaky and far from well. He held each of the two youngest children by the hand, though, giving them what comfort and confidence he could. In their eyes he could do everything, and they were nearly right.

Bon-Bon had once mentioned that Worthington’s top value to her mother was his understanding of bookmakers’ methods, because, as Marigold herself disliked walking along between the rows of men shouting the odds, Worthington got her the best prices. A versatile and compulsive good guy, Worthington, though he didn’t always look it.

Only Marigold herself was now missing from the sick parade. I asked about her, and the eldest of the children, a boy called Daniel, said she was drunk. She was snoring on the stairs, the elder girl said. So pragmatic, 2000-year children.

While I peeled myself slowly off the wood blocks Bon-Bon, with annoyance, remarked that her doctor had announced he no longer made house calls, even for those recovering from bereavement. He said all would be well with rest and fluid. “Water,” he’d said.

“Gin,” corrected one of the children dryly.

I thought it scandalous that Bon-Bon’s doctor should have refused to tend her and had a go at him myself. Capitulating with apologetic grace, he promised he would “look in,” New Year’s Day holiday notwithstanding. He hadn’t understood Mrs. Stukely, he excused himself. He didn’t realize she’d been attacked. She’d been partly incoherent. Had we informed the police?

It did seem obvious that robbery had been the purpose of the mass anesthesia. Three television sets with integral tape players were missing. Bon-Bon had been angry enough to count things.

Also gone was a separate video player on which she’d been watching Martin, together with dozens of tapes. Two laptop computers, with printers and racks of filing disks, were missing too, but Worthington prophesied that the police would offer little hope of recovering these things, as Martin had apparently not recorded any identifying numbers anywhere.

Bon-Bon began crying quietly from the strain of it all and it was Worthington, recovering and worth his weight in videotapes, who talked to the overburdened local police station. My constable, Catherine Dodd, he found, was attached to a different branch. Detectives, however, would arrive on the Stukely doorstep soon.

Not surprisingly, the THOMPSON ELECTRONICS van had gone.

Marigold went on snoring on the stairs.

Worthington made calming sandwiches of banana and honey for the children.

Feeling queasy, I sat in Martin’s black leather chair in his den, while Bon-Bon, on an opposite sofa, dried her complicated grief on tissues and finally gave no complete answer to my repeated question, which was, “What was on the tape that Martin meant to give me after the races, and where did it come from? That’s to say, who gave it to Martin himself at Cheltenham?”

Bon-Bon studied me with wet eyes and blew her nose. She said, “I know Martin wanted to tell you something yesterday, but he had those other men in the car, and I know he wanted to talk to you without Priam listening, so he planned to take you home last, after the others, even though you live nearest to the racetrack...” Even in distress she looked porcelain pretty, the plumpness an asset in a curvy black wool suit cut to please a living husband rather than a mourning neighborhood.

“He trusted you,” she said finally.

“Mm. ” I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t.

“No, you don’t understand.” Bon-Bon hesitated and went on slowly. “He knew a secret. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said I would fret. But he wanted to tell someone. We did discuss that, and I agreed it should be you. You should be his backup. Just in case. Oh dear... He had what he wanted you to know put onto a plain old-fashioned recording tape, not onto a CD or a computer disk, and he did that, I think, because whoever was giving him information preferred it that way. I’m not sure. And also it was easier to play, he said. Better on video than computer because, darling Gerard, you know I never get things right when it comes to computers. The children laugh at me. I can play a videotape easily. Martin wanted me to be able to do that if he died, but of course... of course... he didn’t think he’d die, not really.”

I asked, “Could you yourself make a home movie on a videotape?”

She nodded. “Martin gave me a video camera for Christmas. It makes your own home films but I’ve hardly had time to learn how to use it.”

“And he didn’t say anything about what was on that tape he meant for me?”

“He was awfully careful not to.”

I shook my head in frustration. The tape stolen from the glass showroom was surely the one with the secret on it. The one passed to Martin, then to Eddie the valet, and then to me. Yet if the Broadway thieves, or thief, had viewed it — and they’d had all night to do so — why were they needing to rob Martin’s house ten hours later?

Did the tape taken from the showroom actually contain Martin’s secret?

Perhaps not.

Was the second robbery carried out by a different thief, who didn’t know about the first one?

I had no answers, only guesses.

Marigold at that point tottered into the den as if coming to pieces in all directions. I had been used to Marigold for the four years since Martin had straightfacedly presented me to his buxom mother-in-law, a magnified version of his pretty wife. Marigold could be endlessly witty or tiresomely belligerent according to the gin level, but this time the effect of gas on alcohol seemed to have resulted in pity-me pathos, a state that aroused genuine sympathy, not serve-you-right.

In Bon-Bon’s house it was the police that turned up first, and Bon-Bon’s children who described down to the laces on his shoes the clothes worn by their attacker. He had stared with wide eyes through his black head mask while he’d pointed the orange cylinder at them and squirted a nearly invisible but fierce mist, sweeping from face to face and knocking them out before they’d realized what was happening. Asked about it, Daniel, the eldest child, described the black-masked man having something white tied over his face underneath. An elementary gas mask, I surmised. Something to prevent the robber from inhaling his own gas.

Worthington had been attacked most strongly and had fallen unconscious first, and Bon-Bon — in the den — last. The gas had perhaps been exhausted by the time I arrived; a direct bang on the head had sufficed.

Worthington had been right in guessing the police would offer no hope of Bon-Bon ever again seeing the missing goods. She felt less pain than I would have expected over the loss of tapes showing Martin winning the Grand National because, as she explained, she could get duplicates.

Scarcely had the police notebooks been folded away than Bon-Bon’s doctor hurried in without apology, giving the impression he was making an exception, out of the goodness of his heart.

It was the color orange that slowed him into frowns and more thorough care. He and the police all listened to Daniel, brought out paper, and took notes. The doctor told the departing detectives to look for villains with access to the anesthetic gas cyclopropane, which came in orange cylinders, and wasn’t much used because of being highly flammable and explosive.

Slowly, after decently thorough peerings into eyes and throats and careful stethoscope chest checks, each of the family was judged fit to go on living. Sweet Bon-Bon, when her house was finally free of official attention, sat sprawling on the office sofa telling me she was utterly exhausted and needed help. Specifically she needed my help and Martin would have asked for it.

So I stayed and looked after things, and because of that I saved myself at least another sore head, as thieves broke into my house on the hill that night and stole everything that could remotely be called a videotape.

On Monday, after an early-morning session in the workshop making new little items for stock, I went to Cheltenham races again (by taxi) to talk to Martin’s valet, Eddie Payne.

Ed or Eddie (he answered to both) was ready to help, he said, but he couldn’t. He’d spent all weekend thinking it over and he said, his gaze darting over my shoulder and back again to my face, he couldn’t — however hard he tried — remember any more than he’d told me on Friday. I thought back to the moment of empathy between us, when we had each realized what we’d lost. That moment of genuine emptiness had gone.

The difference between Friday and Monday was a fierce-eyed woman approaching forty, now standing a pace or two behind me, a woman Ed referred to as his daughter. He slid a second glance at her expressionlessly and like a ventriloquist not moving his lips, said to me almost too quietly for me to hear, “She knows the man who gave Martin the tape.”

The woman said sharply, “What did you say, Dad? Do speak up.”

“I said we’d miss Martin badly,” Eddie said, “and I’m due back in the changing room. Tell Gerard — Mr. Logan — what he wants to know, why don’t you?”

He walked away with a worried shuffle, apologetically saying to me as he went, “Her name’s Rose; she’s a good girl really.”

Rose, the good girl, gave me such a bitter flash of hate that I wondered what I’d ever done to annoy her, as I hadn’t known of her existence until moments earlier. She was angularly bony and had mid-brown hair with frizzy sticking-out curls. Her skin was dry and freckled, and although her clothes looked too big for the thin body inside, there was about her an extraordinary air of magnetism.

“Er... Rose...” I started.

“Mrs. Robins,” she interrupted abruptly.

I cleared my throat and tried again.

“Mrs. Robins, then, could I buy you some coffee, or a drink in the bar?”

She said, “No, you could not.” She bit the words off with emphasis. She said, “You’d do better to mind your own business.”

“Mrs. Robins, did you see who gave a brown paper-wrapped parcel to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races last Friday?”

Such a simple question. She primped her lips together tightly, swiveled on her heel, and walked away with an air of not intending to come back.

After a short pause, I followed her. Looking down from time to time at my racecard as any prospective punter would, I trickled along in her wake as she made for the ranks of bookmakers’ pitches in front of the open-to-the-public Tattersalls stands. She stopped at a board announcing ARTHUR ROBINS, PRESTWICK, ESTABLISHED 1894, and talked to an Elvis Presley lookalike with heavy black side whiskers, who was standing on a box, leaning down to take money from the public and dictating his transactions to a clerk, who was punching the bets into a computer.

Rose Robins, established long after 1894, had a fair amount to say. The Elvis lookalike frowned, listening, and I retreated: I might have strength and reasonable agility but Rose’s contact made my muscle power look the stuff of kindergartens. Whichever Robins filled the shoes of Arthur nowadays, if he were the Elvis lookalike, he weighed in with grandfather-gorilla shoulders.

Patiently I climbed the stands and waited while the Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, bookmakers — three of them — took bets on the final two races of the afternoon, and then I watched their chief, the Elvis lookalike, pack up the board and take charge of the money bag and walk towards the exit with Rose and his two helpers beside him. I watched them go out of sight. As far as I could tell, they all left the racetrack. As a group, they equaled an armored tank.

From experience with Martin, I knew that jockeys’ valets finished their work after most of the crowds had gone home. A valet was the man who helped the jockeys change rapidly between races. He also looked after and cleaned their gear, saddles, britches, boots and so on, so it was all ready for the next time they raced. Martin had told me that a single valet would look after a whole bunch of jockeys and the valets would work as a team to cover all the race meetings. While Eddie packed up his hamper of saddles, kit and clothes for laundering, I waited with hope for him to reappear out of the changing room at the end of his day.

When he came out and saw me, he was at first alarmed, and then resigned.

“I suppose,” he said, “Rose wouldn’t tell you.”

“No,” I agreed. “So would you ask her something, for Martin’s sake?”

“Well...” He hesitated. “It depends.”

I said, “Ask her if the tape Martin gave you was the one he thought it was.”

He took a few seconds to work it out.

“Do you mean,” he asked doubtfully, “that my Rose thinks Martin had the wrong tape?”

“I think,” I confessed, “that if Martin’s tape ever surfaces after all the muddle and thieving, it’ll be a matter of luck.”

He protested self-righteously that he’d given me Martin’s tape in good faith. I insisted that I believed him. No more was said about Rose.

Eddie knew, as did the whole racing world after that day’s newspapers, that Martin’s funeral was planned for Thursday, provided no jinx upset Wednesday’s inquest. Eddie, eyes down, mumbled a few words about seeing me there, he supposed, and in discomfort hurried away to the inner realms of the changing rooms, from where the public with awkward questions were banned.

Rose Robins and her enmity added complexity to an already tangled situation.

I caught a bus from the racetrack which wound its way from village to village and, in the end, to Broadway. In spite of my having spent all the time tossing around in my mind the unexpected involvement of Eddie’s scratchy daughter I came to no more satisfactory or original conclusion than that someone had given some tape or other to Martin, who had given it to Eddie, who had given it to me, who had carelessly lost it to a thief.

Still drifting in outer space was whatever confidential data Martin had meant to entrust to me. In some respects that didn’t matter, and never would, just as long as the hidden nugget of information didn’t heat up or collide with an inconvenient truth. Additionally, as I had no road map to the ingredients of the nugget, I had no way of either foreseeing or preventing trouble.

Unrealistically, I simply hoped that Martin’s secret would remain forever hidden in uncharted orbit, and all of us could return to normal.

It was after five-thirty by the time I reached the doors of Logan Glass, and again my assistants were there, two of them making paperweights with enthusiasm and the third keeping shop. Bon-Bon had telephoned, they told me, saying she was begging me to go on organizing her household in return for transport; at least until after the funeral, and, much to the amusement of my assistants, the transport she sent that afternoon wasn’t her own runabout, but was Marigold’s Rolls.

Whenever we were alone together, I sat beside Worthington as he drove. He had offered me the comfort and prestige of the rear seat usually taken by his employer, but I felt wrong there. Moreover, on the showing of the last few days, if I sat in the back he tended both to call me “Sir” and to favor respectful silence instead of pithy and irreverent observation. When I sat in the front, Marigold was “Marigold”; when in the back, “Mrs. Knight.” When I sat beside her chauffeur, he showed his inner self.

In addition to being bald, fifty and kind to children, Worthington disliked the police force as a matter of principle, referred to marriage as bondage and believed in the usefulness of being able to out-kick any other muscle man in sight. It wasn’t so much as a chauffeur that I now valued Worthington at my elbow, but as a prospective bodyguard. The Elvis lookalike had radiated latent menace at an intensity that I hadn’t met before and didn’t like; and for a detonator there was fierce, thorny Rose, and it was with her in mind that I casually asked Worthington if he’d ever placed a bet at the races with Arthur Robins, Est. 1894.

“For a start,” he said with sarcasm, fastening his seat belt as if keeping to the law were routine, “the Robins family don’t exist. That bunch of swindlers known as Arthur Robins are mostly Veritys and Webbers, with a couple of Browns thrown in. There hasn’t been a bona fide Arthur Robins ever. It’s just a pretty name.”

Eyebrows raised in surprise, I asked, “How do you know all that?”

“My old man ran a book,” he said. “Fasten your seat belt, Gerard, the cops in this town would put eagles out of business. Like I said, my old man was a bookmaker, he taught me the trade. You’ve got to be real sharp at figures, though, to make a profit, and I never got quick enough. But Arthur Robins, that’s the front name for some whizzers of speed merchants. Don’t bet with them, that’s my advice.”

I said, “Do you know that Eddie Payne, Martin’s valet, has a daughter called Rose who says her last name is Robins and who’s on cuddling terms with an Elvis Presley lookalike taking bets for Arthur Robins?”

Worthington, who had been about to start the car outside Logan Glass to drive us to Bon-Bon, sat back in his seat, letting his hands fall laxly on his thighs.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I didn’t know that.” He thought for a while, his forehead troubled. “That Elvis fellow,” he said finally, “that’s Norman Osprey. You don’t want to mix with him.”

“And Rose?”

Worthington shook his head. “I don’t know her. I’ll ask around.” He roused himself and started the car.

By Thursday, the day of Martin’s funeral, the police as predicted hadn’t found one identifiable videotape in a country awash with them.

On the day before the funeral a young woman on a motorbike — huge helmet, black leather jacket, matching pants, heavy boots — steered into one of the five parking spaces at the front of Logan Glass. Outside in the January chill she pulled off the helmet and shook free a cap of fair fine hair before walking without swagger into the gallery and showroom as if she knew the way well.

I was putting the pre-annealing final touches to a vase, with Pamela Jane telling a group of American tourists how it was done, but there was something attention-claiming about the motorcyclist, and as soon as I thought of her in terms of glass, I knew her infallibly.

“Catherine Dodd,” I said.

“Most people don’t recognize me.” She was amused, not piqued.

With interest I watched the tourists pack somewhat closer together as if to elbow out the stranger in threatening clothes.

Pamela Jane finished her spiel and one of the American men said the vases were too expensive, even if they were handmade and handsome. He collected nods and all-around agreement, and there was relief in the speed with which the tourists settled instead on simple dolphins and little dishes. While Hickory wrapped the parcels and wrote out bills, I asked the motorcyclist if there were any news of my lost tape.

She watched me handle the vase in heatproof fiber and put it to cool in the annealing oven.

“I’m afraid,” said Detective Constable Dodd in plain — well, plainer — clothes, “your tape is gone for good.”

I told her it held a secret.

“What secret?”

“That’s the point, I don’t know. Martin Stukely told his wife he was giving me a secret on tape for safekeeping — that’s a bit of a laugh — in case he was killed in a car crash, or something like that.”

“Like a steeplechase?”

“He didn’t expect it.”

Catherine Dodd’s detective mind trod the two paths I’d reluctantly followed myself since Norman Osprey and his Elvis sideburns had appeared on my horizon. First, someone knew Martin’s secret, and second, someone, and maybe not the same someone, could infer that, one way or another, that secret was known to me. Someone might suppose I’d watched that tape during the evening of Martin’s death, and for safety had wiped it off.

I hadn’t had a tape player on the Logan Glass premises, but the Dragon over the road made one available generously to the paying guests, and she distributed brochures by the hundred advertising this.

“If I’d had a tape player handy,” I said, “I probably would have run that tape through early in the evening, and if I thought it awful I might have wiped it off.”

“That’s not what your friend Martin wanted.”

After a brief silence I said, “If he’d been sure of what he wanted he wouldn’t have fiddled about with tapes, he would just have told me this precious secret.” I stopped abruptly. “There are too many ifs. How about you coming out for a drink?”

“Can’t. Sorry. I’m on duty.” She gave me a brilliant smile. “I’ll call in another day. And oh! There’s just one loose end.” She produced the ever essential notebook from inside her jacket. “What are your assistants’ names?”

“Pamela Jane Evans and John Irish and John Hickory. We leave off John for the men and use their last names, as it’s easier.”

“Which is the elder?”

“Irish. He’s about ten years older than both Hickory and Pamela Jane.”

“And how long have they all worked for you?”

“Pamela Jane about a year, Irish and Hickory two to three months longer. They’re all good guys, believe me.”

“I do believe you. This is just for the records. This is actually... er... what I dropped in for.”

I looked at her straightly. She all but blushed.

“I’d better go now,” she said.

With regret I walked with her as far as the door, where she paused to say good-bye as she didn’t want to be seen with me too familiarly out in the street. She left, in fact, in the bunch of winter tourists, all of them overshadowed by the loud voice of a big man who judged the whole afternoon a waste of time and complained about it all the way back to the group’s warm tour bus. His broad back obscured my view of the departure of Detective Constable Dodd, and I surprised myself by minding about that quite a lot.

On Bon-Bon’s telephone, the night before Martin’s funeral, I learned from the Dragon herself that Lloyd Baxter had deemed it correct to fly down for “his jockey’s last ride” (as he put it) but hadn’t wanted to stay with Priam Jones, whom he was on the point of ditching as his trainer. The Dragon chuckled and went on mischievously, “You didn’t have to go all that way to stay with Bon-Bon Stukely, if you didn’t fancy sleeping in your burgled house, lover boy. You could have stayed here with me.”

“News gets around,” I said dryly.

“You’re always news in this town, lover, didn’t you know?”

In truth I did know it, but I didn’t feel it.

On the evening before Martin’s funeral Priam Jones telephoned, meaning to talk to Bon-Bon, but reaching me instead. I had been fielding commiserations for her whenever I was around. Marigold, Worthington and even the children had grown expert at thanks and tact. I thought how Martin would have grinned at the all-around grade-A improvement in his family’s social skills.

Priam blustered on a bit, but was, I gathered, offering himself as an usher in the matter of seating. Remembering his spontaneous tears I put him on the list and asked him if, before he’d picked me up from my home on Friday morning, Martin had by any chance mentioned that he was expecting delivery of a tape at the races.

“You asked me that the day after he died,” Priam said impatiently. “The answer is still yes, he said we wouldn’t leave the racetrack until he’d collected some package or other to give to you. And I did give it to you, don’t you remember? I brought it back to Broadway after you’d left it in your raincoat in the car... Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Gerard. Give my regards to Bon-Bon.”

Also on the evening before Martin’s funeral, Eddie Payne went to his local Catholic church and in the confessional recited his past and present sins, asking for pardon and absolution. He told me this with self-righteousness when I intercepted his condolences to Bon-Bon. He’d tried and tried to get someone else to do his racetrack work, he said, but such was life, he hadn’t succeeded, and he’d have to miss the funeral, and it grieved him sorely as he’d been Martin’s racetrack valet for six or seven years. Eddie, to my disparaging ear, had plucked up half a bottle of dutch courage before stretching out his hand to the phone, and wouldn’t remain long in a state of grace owing to his distance from the fact that he could have more easily got stand-ins to free him to go to that particular funeral than if it had been for his own grandmother.

On the same evening, before Martin’s funeral (though I didn’t learn of it until later), Ed Payne’s daughter, Rose, described to a small group of fascinated and ruthless knaves how to force Gerard Logan to tell them the secret he’d been given at Cheltenham races.