Shattered

4

All three of my assistants could let themselves in through the gallery with a personal key, and it was Pamela Jane alone whom I saw first with a slit of eyesight when I returned unwillingly to consciousness at about eight o’clock on Monday morning. I’d spent the first hour after Catherine had gone considering the comfort of a Wychwood Dragon bed (without the Dragon herself) but in the end from lack of energy had simply flopped back into the big chair in the workshop and closed my eyes on a shuddering and protesting nervous system.

Catherine herself, real and abstract, had kept me warm and mobile through the darkest hours of night, but she’d left long before dawn, and afterwards sleep, which practically never knitted up any raveled sleave of care, had made things slightly worse.

Pamela Jane said, horrified, “Honestly, you look as if you’d been hit by a steamroller. Have you been here all night?”

The answer must have been obvious. I was unshaven, for a start, and any movement set up quite awful and stiffened reactions. One could almost hear the joints creak. Never again, I promised myself.

I hadn’t considered how I was going to explain things to my little team. When I spoke to Pamela Jane, even my voice felt rough.

“Can you...” I paused, cleared my throat and tried again. “Pam... jug of tea?”

She put her coat in her locker and scurried helpfully around, making the tea and unbolting the side door, which we were obliged to use as a fire escape if necessary. By the advent of Irish I was ignoring the worst, and Hickory, arriving last, found me lifting the three wing sections of the night’s work out of the ovens and carefully fitting them together before fusing them into place. All three of my helpers wished they’d seen the separate pieces made. One day, I agreed with them, I would make duplicates to show them.

They couldn’t help but notice that I found too much movement a bad idea, but I could have done without Hickory’s cheerful assumption it was the aftermath of booze.

The first customer came. Life more or less returned to normal. Irish began building a plinth in the gallery to hold the wings. If I concentrated on blowing glass, I could forget four black jersey-wool masks with eyeholes.

Later in the morning Marigold’s Rolls drew up outside and occupied two of the parking spaces, with Worthington at the wheel looking formal in his badge-of-office cap.

Marigold herself, he reported through his wound-down window, had gone shopping with Bon-Bon in Bon-Bon’s car. Both ladies had given him the day off and the use of the Rolls, and he appreciated their generosity, he said solemnly, as he was going to take me to the races.

I looked back at him in indecision.

“I’ m not going,” I said. “And where am I not going?”

“Leicester. Jump racing. Eddie Payne will be there. Rose will be there. Norman Osprey will be there with his book. I thought you wanted to find out who gave the videotape to Martin. Do you want to know what was on it, or who stole it, and do you want to know who gassed me with the kids and the ladies, or do you want to stay here quietly and make nice little pink vases to sell to the tourists?”

I didn’t answer at once and he said judiciously, making allowances, “Mind you, I don’t suppose you want another beating like you got last night, so stay here if you like and I’ll mooch around by myself.”

“Who told you about last night?”

He took off his cap and wiped his bald crown with a white handkerchief.

“A little bird told me. A not so little bird.”

“Not... a pigeon?”

“Quick, aren’t you.” He grinned. “Yeah, a Pigeon. It seems he thinks quite a bit of you. He phoned me specially at Bon-Bon’s. He says to put it around that in future any hands laid on you are laid on him.”

I felt both grateful and surprised. I asked, “How well do you know him?”

He answered obliquely. “You know that gardener of Martin’s that was dying? That you lost your license for, speeding to get him there in time?”

“Well, yes, I remember.”

“That gardener was Tom Pigeon’s dad.”

“He didn’t die, though. Not then, anyway.”

“It didn’t matter. Are you coming to Leicester?”

“I guess so.”

I went back into the workshop, put on my outdoor clothes and told Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane to keep on making paperweights while I went to the sports. They had all known Martin alive, as my friend, and all of them in brief snatches, and in turn, had been to his sending off. They wished me luck with many winners at the races.

I sat beside Worthington for the journey. We stopped to buy me a cheap watch, and to pick up a daily racing newspaper for the runners and riders. In a section titled “News Today” on the front page I read, among a dozen little snippets, that the Leicester Stewards would be hosts that day to Lloyd Baxter (owner of star jumper Tallahassee) to honor the memory of jockey Martin Stukely.

Well, well.

After a while I told Worthington in detail about my visit to Lorna Terrace, Taunton. He frowned over the more obvious inconsistencies put forward by mother and son, but seemed struck to consternation when I said,

“Didn’t you tell me that the bookmaking firm of Arthur Robins, established 1894, was now owned and run by people named Webber, Brown... and Verity?”

The consternation lasted ten seconds. “And the mother and son in Taunton were Verity!” A pause. “It must be a coincidence,” he said.

“I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”

Worthington slid a silent glance my way as he navigated a roundabout, and after a while said, “Gerard... if you have any clear idea of what’s going on... what is it? For instance, who were those attackers in black masks last night, and what did they want?”

I said, “I’d think it was one of them who squirted you with cyclopropane and laid me out with the empty cylinder... and I don’t know who that was. I’m sure, though, that one of the black masks was the fragrant Rose.”

“I’m not saying she wasn’t, but why?”

“Who else in the world would scream at Norman Osprey — or anyone else, but I’m pretty sure it was him — to break my wrists? Rose’s voice is unmistakable. And there is the way she moves... and as for purpose... partly to put me out of business, wouldn’t you say? And partly to make me give her what I haven’t got. And also to stop me from doing what we’re aiming to do today.”

Worthington said impulsively, “Let’s go home, then.”

“You just stay beside me, and we’ll be fine.”

Worthington took me seriously and body-guarded like a professional. We confirmed one of the black-mask merchants for certain simply from his stunned reaction to my being there and on my feet when anyone with any sense would have been knocking back aspirins on a sofa with an ice pack. Martin himself had shown me how jump jockeys walked around sometimes with broken ribs and arms and other injuries. Only broken legs, he’d said, postponed actual riding for a couple of months. Bruises, to him, were everyday normal, and he dealt with pain by putting it out of his mind and thinking about something else. “Ignore it,” he’d said. I copied him at Leicester as best I could.

When he saw me, Norman Osprey had stopped dead in the middle of setting up his stand, his heavy shoulders bunching; and Rose herself made the mistake of striding up to him in a carefree bounce at that moment, only to follow his disbelieving gaze and lose a good deal of her self-satisfaction. What she said explosively was “bloody hell.”

If one imagined Norman Osprey’s shoulders in black jersey, he was recognizably the figure who’d smashed my watch with his baseball bat, while aiming at my wrist. I’d jerked at the vital moment and I’d kicked his shin very hard indeed. The sharp voice urging him to try again, had, without doubt, been Rose’s.

I said to them jointly, “Tom Pigeon sends his regards.”

Neither of them looked overjoyed. Worthington murmured something to me urgently about it not being advisable to poke a wasps’ nest with a stick. He also put distance between himself and Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, and, with unobvious speed, I followed.

“They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for,” I pointed out, slowing down. “If they knew, they would have asked for it by name last night.”

“They might have done that anyway, if Tom Pigeon hadn’t been walking his dogs.” Worthington steered us still farther away from Norman Osprey, looking back all the same to make certain we weren’t being followed.

My impression of the events of barely fifteen hours earlier was that damage, as well as information, had been the purpose. But if Tom Pigeon hadn’t arrived, and if it had been to save the multiple wrist bones that Martin had said never properly mended, and if I could have answered their questions, then would I...?

Sore as I already felt all over, I couldn’t imagine any piece of knowledge that Martin might have had that he thought was worth my virtual destruction... and I didn’t like the probability that they — the black masks — wrongly believed that I did know what they wanted, and that I was being merely stubborn in not telling them.

Mordantly I admitted to myself that if I’d known for certain what they wanted and if Tom Pigeon hadn’t arrived with his dogs, I wouldn’t at that moment be strolling around any racetrack, but would quite likely have told them anything to stop them, and have been considering suicide from shame. And I was not going to confess that to anyone at all.

Only to Martin’s hovering presence could I even admit it. Bugger you, pal, I thought. What the sod have you let me in for?

Lloyd Baxter lunched at Leicester with the Stewards. His self-regarding nature found this admirable invitation to be merely his due. He told me so, condescendingly, when our paths crossed between parade ring and stands.

To Lloyd Baxter the meeting was unexpected, but I’d spotted him early and waited through the Stewards’ roast beef, cheese and coffee, talking to Worthington outside, and stiffening uncomfortably in the cold wind.

Cold weather emphasized the Paleolithic-like weight of Baxter’s facial structure and upper body, and even after only one week (though a stressful one) his hair seemed definitely to have grayed a further notch.

He wasn’t pleased to see me. I was sure he regretted the whole Broadway evening, but he concentrated hard on being civil, and it was churlish of me, I dare say, to suspect that it was because I knew of his epilepsy. Nowhere in print or chat had his condition been disclosed, but if he were afraid I would not only broadcast but snigger, he had made a judgment of my own character which hardly flattered.

Worthington melted temporarily from my side and I walked with Lloyd Baxter while he oozed compliments about the Stewards’ lunch and discussed the worth of many trainers, excluding poor old Priam Jones.

I said mildly, “It wasn’t his fault that Tallahassee fell at Cheltenham.”

I got an acid reply. “It was Martin’s fault. He unbalanced him going into the fence. He was too confident.”

Martin had told me that it — whatever it might be — was, with a disgruntled owner, normally the jockey’s fault. “Pilot error.” He’d shrugged philosophically. “And then you get the other sort of owner, the cream to ride for, the ones who understand that horses aren’t infallible, who say, ‘That’s racing,’ when something shattering happens, and who comfort the jockey who’s just lost them the win of a lifetime... And believe me,” Martin had said, “Lloyd Baxter isn’t one of those. If I lose for him, it is, in his opinion, my fault.”

“But,” I said without heat to Lloyd Baxter during his trainer-spotting at Leicester, “if a horse falls, it surely isn’t the trainer’s fault? It wasn’t Priam Jones’s fault that Tallahassee fell and lost the Coffee Cup.”

“He should have schooled him better.”

“Well,” I reasoned, “that horse had proved he could jump. He’d already won several races.”

“I want a different trainer.” Lloyd Baxter spoke with obstinacy: a matter of instinct, I saw.

Along with lunch the Stewards had given Tallahassee’s owner an entry ticket to their guests’ vantage viewing box. Lloyd Baxter was already apologizing for shedding me at the entrance when one of the Stewards, following us, changed our course.

“Aren’t you the glass man?” he boomed genially. “My wife’s your greatest fan. We have lumps of your stuff all over our house. That splendid horse you did for her... you came to rig its spotlights, didn’t you?”

I remembered the horse and the house with enough detail to be invited into the Stewards’ guests’ viewing balcony, not entirely to Lloyd Baxter’s delight.

“This young man’s a genius, according to my wife,” the Steward said to Baxter, ushering us in. The genius merely wished he felt less weak.

Lloyd Baxter’s poor opinion of the Steward’s wife’s judgment was written plain on his heavy features, but perhaps it did eventually influence him, because, after the cheering for the next winner had faded, he surprised me very much by resting his hand lightly on my arm to indicate that I should stay and hear what he felt like telling me. He hesitated still, though, so I gave him every chance.

“I’ve often wondered,” I said mildly, “if you saw who came into my showroom on New Year’s Eve. I mean, I know you were ill... but before that... when I’d gone out into the street, did anyone come?”

After a long pause, he faintly nodded. “Someone came into that long gallery you have there. I remember he asked for you and I said you were out in the street... but I couldn’t see him properly as my eyes... my sight develops zigzags sometimes...” He stopped, but I continued for him.

“You surely have pills.”

“Of course I do!” He was irritated. “But I’d forgotten to take them because of the terrible day it had been, and I hate those very small air taxis to begin with, and I do want a different trainer.” His voice died away, but his troubles had been laid out clearly enough for a chimpanzee to understand.

I asked if, in spite of the zigzag aura, he could describe my unknown visitor.

“No,” he said. “I told him you were in the street and the next time I was properly awake I was in hospital.” He paused while I regretted the cut-short sequence, and then with diffidence he said slowly, “I am aware that I should thank you for your reticence. You could still cause me much embarrassment.”

“There’s no point in it,” I said.

He spent a while studying my face as in the past I’d learned his. The result surprised me. “Are you ill?” he said.

“No. Tired. Didn’t sleep well.”

“The man who came,” he said abruptly, making no other comment, “was thin and had a white beard and was over fifty.”

The description sounded highly improbable as a thief, and he must have seen my doubt because he added to convince me, “When I saw him, I immediately thought of Priam Jones, who’s been saying for years he’s going to grow a beard. I tell him he’d look weedy.”

I nearly laughed: the picture was true.

Baxter said the white-bearded man reminded him chiefly of a university professor. A lecturer.

I asked, “Did he speak? Was he a normal customer? Did he mention glass?”

Lloyd Baxter couldn’t remember. “If he spoke at all, I heard him only as a jumble. Quite often things seem wrong to me. They’re a sort of warning. Often I can control them a little, or at least prepare... but on that evening it was happening too fast.”

He was being extraordinarily frank, I thought. I wouldn’t have expected so much trust.

“That man with the whisker job,” I said. “He must have seen the beginning at least of your... er... seizure. So why didn’t he help you? Do you think he simply didn’t know what to do, so ran away from trouble, as people tend to, or was it he who made off with the loot... er... that money, in the canvas bag?”

“And the videotape,” Baxter said.

There was an abrupt breath-drawing silence. Then I asked, “What videotape?”

Lloyd Baxter frowned. “He asked for it.”

“So you gave it to him?”

“No. Yes. No. I don’t know.”

It became clear that in fact Lloyd Baxter’s memory of that evening in Broadway was a scrambled egg of order into chaos. It wasn’t certain that any university lecturer in any white beard existed outside fiction.

While we occupied for another ten uninterrupted minutes the most private place on a racetrack — the Stewards’ friends’ viewing balcony in between races — I managed to persuade Lloyd Baxter to sit quietly and exchange detailed memories of the first few minutes of 2000, but try as he might, he still clung to the image of the scrawny man in the white beard who probably — or maybe it was some other man at some other time — asked for a videotape... perhaps.

He was trying his best. His manner to me had taken a ninety-degree angle of change, so that he’d become more an ally than a crosspatch.

One of the things he would never have said in the past was his reassessment of my and Martin’s friendship. “I see I was wrong about you,” he admitted, heavily frowning. “Martin relied on you for strength, and I took it for granted that it was the other way round.”

“We learned from each other.”

After a pause he said, “That fellow in the white beard, he was real, you know. He did want a videotape. If I knew more than that, I would tell you.”

I finally believed him. It was just unlucky that Baxter’s fit had struck at the wrong random moment; unlucky from white-beard’s point of view that Baxter had been there at all; but it did now seem certain that during the time I was out in the street seeing the year 2000 arrive safely, a white-bearded, thin middle-aged professor-type individual had come into my showroom and had said something about a videotape, and had left before I returned, taking the tape, and incidentally the money, with him.

I hadn’t seen any white-bearded figure out in the street. It had been a week too late for the Ho-ho-ho joker from the North Pole. Lloyd Baxter said he couldn’t tell whether or not the beard was real or left over from Santa Claus.

When we parted we shook hands for the first time ever. I left him with the Stewards and fell into step with Worthington, who was shivering outside and announcing he was hungry. Accordingly we smelled out some food, which he galloped through with endless appetite.

“Why don’t you eat?” he demanded, chomping.

“Habit,” I said. A habit caught from a scales-conscious jockey. Martin seemed to have influenced my life more than I’d realized.

I told Worthington while he saw off two full plates of steak-and-kidney pie (his and mine) that we were now looking for a thin man, late middle-age, white beard, who looked like a college lecturer.

Worthington gazed at me earnestly while loading his fork with pastry. “That,” he pointed out, “doesn’t sound at all like someone who would steal a bagful of money.”

“I’m surprised at you, Worthington,” I teased him. “You of all people I thought would know that beards aren’t automatic badges of honesty! So how does this sit with you? Suppose Mr. White-Beard gives a tape to Martin, which Martin gives to Eddie Payne, who handed it on to me. Then when Martin died, Mr. White-Beard decided to take his videotape back again, so he found out where the tape would be... that’s to say he turned up in Broadway. He found the tape and took it back, and on impulse he also whisked up the bag of money that I’d stupidly left lying around, and in consequence he cannot tell anyone that he has his tape back.”

“Because he would be confessing he’d stolen the cash?”

“Dead right.”

My bodyguard sighed and scraped his plate clean. “So what next?” he said. “What happened next?”

“I can only guess.”

“Go on, then. Guess. Because it wasn’t some old guy that gassed us with that cyclopropane. Young Daniel described the sneakers that the gas man wore, and nobody but a teenager, I don’t think, would be seen dead in them.”

I found I disagreed. Eccentric white-beards might wear anything. They might also make erotic tapes. They might also tell someone the tape was worth a fortune, and that it was in Gerard Logan’s hands. A few little lies. Diversionary tactics. Beat up Logan, make him ready to cough up the tape, or, failing that, whatever information had been on it.

What had Martin been going to give me for safekeeping?

Did I any longer really want to know?

If I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell. But if they believed I knew and wouldn’t tell... dammit, I thought, we’ve almost been through that already, and I couldn’t expect Tom Pigeon and Dobermans to rescue me every time.

Not knowing the secret on the tape was perhaps worse than knowing it. So somehow or other, I decided, it wasn’t enough to discover who took it, it was essential after all to find out what they expected as well as what they’d actually got.

Once Worthington’s hunger had retreated temporarily and we had lost our money on a horse Martin should have ridden, we walked back to where the serried ranks of bookmakers were shouting their offers for the getting-out stakes, the last race.

With Worthington’s well-known muscle as guarantee of immunity from onslaught, we arrived in the living-and-breathing space of the 1894 Arthur Robins operation 2000. Norman Osprey’s raucous voice soared unselfconsciously above his neighbors’ until he realized we were listening, at which point a sudden silence gave everyone else a chance.

Close enough to see the scissor marks on the Elvis sideburns, I said, “Tell Rose...”

“Tell her yourself,” he interrupted forcefully. “She’s just behind you.”

I turned without haste, leaving Worthington at my back. Rose glared, rigid with a hatred I didn’t at that point understand. As before, the dryness of her skin echoed the lack of generosity in her nature, but earlier, at our first and last racetrack encounter, neither of us held the subsequent memory of fists, stone walls, baseball bats, a smashed watch and a whole bunch more of assaults-to-the-person, all orchestrated and encouraged as Sunday evening entertainment for the troops.

Being as close to her as a couple of yards gave my outraged skin goose bumps, but she seemed to think a black mask and leotard had made her invisible.

I asked again the question she had already refused to answer.

“Who gave a videotape to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races?”

She answered this time that she didn’t know.

I said, “Do you mean you didn’t see anyone give Martin a parcel, or that you saw the transfer but didn’t know the person’s name?”

“Dead clever, aren’t you,” Rose said sarcastically. “Take your pick.”

Rose, I thought, wasn’t going to be trapped by words. At a guess she had both seen the transfer and knew the transferrer, but even Torquemada would have had trouble with her, and I hadn’t any thumbscrews handy in Logan Glass.

I said without much hope of being believed, “I don’t know where to look for the tape you want. I don’t know who took it and I don’t know why. I haven’t got it.”

Rose curled her lip.

As we walked away Worthington sighed deeply with frustration.

“You’d think Norman Osprey would be the ‘heavy’ in that outfit. He has the voice and the build for it. Everyone thinks of him as the power behind Arthur Robins 1894. But did you see him looking at Rose? She can make any blunder she likes, but I’m told she’s still the brains. She’s the boss. She calls the tune. My low-life investigator gave me a bell. He finds her very impressive, I’m afraid to say.”

I nodded.

Worthington, a practiced world traveler, said, “She hates you. Have you noticed?”

I told him I had indeed noticed. “But I don’t know why.”

“You’d want a psychiatrist to explain it properly, but I’ll tell you for zilch what I’ve learned. You’re a man, you’re strong, you look OK, you’re successful at your job and you’re not afraid of her; and I could go on, but that’s for starters. Then she has you roughed up, doesn’t she, and here you are looking as good as new, even if you aren’t feeling it, and sticking the finger up in her face, more or less, and believe me, I’d’ve chucked a rival down the stairs for less, if they as much as yawned in my presence.”

I listened to Worthington’s wisdom, but I said, “I haven’t done her any harm.”

“You threaten her. You’re too much for her. You’ll win the tennis match. So maybe she’ll have you killed first. She won’t kill you herself. And don’t ignore what I’m telling you. There are people who really have killed for hate. People who’ve wanted to win.”

Not to mention murders because of racism or religious prejudice, I thought, but it was still hard to imagine it applying to oneself — until one had felt the watch smash, of course.

I expected that Rose would have told Eddie Payne, her father, that I was at the races, but she hadn’t. Worthington and I lay in wait for him after the last race and easily am-bushed him in a pincer movement when he came out of the changing rooms on his way to his car.

He wasn’t happy. He looked from one to the other of us like a cornered horse, and it was as if to a fractious animal that I soothingly said, “Hi, Ed. How’s things?”

“I don’t know anything I haven’t told you,” he protested.

I thought if I cast him a few artificial flies, I might startle and hook an unexpected fish; a trout, so to speak, sheltering in the reeds.

So I said, “Is Rose married to Norman Osprey?”

His face lightened to nearly a laugh. “Rose is still Rose Payne but she calls herself Robins and sometimes Mrs. Robins when it suits her, but she doesn’t like men, my Rose. Pity, really, but there it is.”

“But she likes to rule them?”

“She’s always made boys do what she wants.”

“Were you with her yesterday evening?” I asked him the question casually, but he knew instantly what I meant.

“I didn’t lay a finger on you,” he said quickly. “It wasn’t me.” He looked from me to Worthington and back again, this time with puzzlement. “Look,” he said wheedlingly, as if begging for forgiveness, “they didn’t give you a chance. I told Rose it wasn’t fair...” He wavered to a stop.

With interest I asked, “Do you mean that you yourself wore a black mask in Broadway yesterday evening?” and almost with incredulity saw in his face an expression of shame that he had.

“Rose said we would just frighten you” He stared at me with unhappy eyes. “I tried to stop her, honest. I never thought you’d be here today. So it can’t have been as bad as it looked... but I know it was awful. I went to confession first to ask forgiveness...”

“So there was you and Rose.” I said it matter-of- factly, though stunned beneath. “And Norman Osprey, and who else? One of Norman Osprey’s bookmaking clerks, was it?”

“No. Not them.”

Horror suddenly closed his mouth. He had already admitted far too much from his daughter’s point of view, and if the other so far unidentified black-mask shape were one of the other two clerks working with Norman Osprey at Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, Eddie was no longer going to admit it easily.

I tried another fly.

“Do you know anyone who could lay their hands on anesthetics?”

A blank.

Try again.

“Or anyone with a white beard, known to Martin?”

He hesitated over that, but in the end shook his head.

I said, “Do you yourself know anyone with a white beard who looks like a university lecturer?”

“No.” His reply was positive, his manner shifty.

“Was the brown-paper parcel you gave me at Cheltenham the selfsame one that Martin gave you earlier in the day?”

“Yes.” He nodded this time with no need for thought. “It was the same one. Rose was furious. She said I should have stuck onto it when Martin died, and I shouldn’t have mentioned it; we should have kept it ourselves and then there wouldn’t have been all this fuss.”

“Did Rose know what was in it?”

“Only Martin knew for sure. I did more or less ask him what was in it but he just laughed and said the future of the world, but it was a joke, of course.”

Martin’s joke sounded to me too real to be funny.

Ed hadn’t finished. “A couple of weeks before Christmas,” he said, still amused, “Martin said that what he was giving Bon-Bon — a few of the jockeys were talking about presents for their wives and girlfriends while they were changing to go home — it wasn’t a big deal — what he was giving Bon-Bon was a gold-and-glass antique necklace, but he was laughing and he said he would have to get you to make him a much cheaper and modern copy. He said you had a videotape to tell you how. But next minute he changed his mind because Bon-Bon wanted new fur-lined boots, and anyway he was mostly talking about the King George VI Chase at Kempton on December 26 and how much weight he’d have to take off by not eating turkey... I mean, he was always worried about his weight, like most of them are.”

“He talked to you a lot,” I commented. “More than most.”

Ed didn’t think so. He liked to chat with the boys, he said. He could tell us a thing or two about them. He winked on it, as if all jockeys were real sexual rogues, and with this confidence his manner more or less returned to the calm and efficient valet I’d met through Martin.

Worthington, driving us home, summed up the day’s haul of information. “I’d say Martin and the white-bearded guy were serious with this tape.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“And somehow or other, through her father, Rose may have imagined that that tape showed how to make an antique necklace.”

I said doubtfully, “It must be more than that.”

“Well... perhaps it actually says where the necklace can be found.”

“A treasure hunt?” I shook my head. “There’s only one valuable antique gold-and-glass necklace that I know of, and I do know a fair amount about antique glass, and it’s in a museum. It’s priceless. It was probably designed in Crete, or anyway somewhere round the Aegean Sea sometime about three thousand five hundred years ago. It’s called the Cretan Sunrise. I did make a copy of it, though, and I once lent it to Martin. I also made a videotape to explain the methods I used. I lent that to Martin too and he still has it — or rather, heaven knows where it is now.”

“What if there’s another one?” Worthington asked.

“Are you talking about two tapes now? Or two necklaces?”

“Why not two tapes?” Worthington reasoned, as if it had suddenly become likely. “Rose could have muddled them up.”

I thought it just as likely that it was Worthington and I who’d muddled everything up, but we arrived safely at Bon-Bon’s house richer with at least two solid new facts: first, that Rose, Norman Osprey and Eddie Payne had spent their Sunday evening in Broadway; and second, that an elderly, thin, white-bearded, university-lecture-type man had walked into my shop as the new century came in with bells, and had not stayed to help Lloyd Baxter with his epileptic fit.

As we scrunched to a halt on Bon-Bon’s gravel, Marigold came with wide-stretched arms out of the front door to greet us.

“Bon-Bon doesn’t need me anymore,” she announced dramatically. “Get out the maps, Worthington. We’re going skiing.”

“Er... when?” her chauffeur asked, unsurprised.

“Tomorrow morning of course. Fill up the gas tanks. We’ll call at Paris on the way. I need new clothes.”

Worthington looked more resigned than I felt. He murmured to me that Marigold bought new clothes most days of the week and prophesied that the skiing trip would last less than ten days overall. She would tire of it quickly, and come home.

Bon-Bon was taking the news of her mother’s departure with well-hidden relief, and asked me with hope whether “the upsetting videotape business” was now concluded. She wanted calm in her life, but I had no idea if she would get it. I didn’t tell her of Rose’s existence or the distinct lack of calm she represented.

I asked Bon-Bon about White-Beard. She said she’d never seen or heard of him. When I explained who he was, she telephoned to Priam Jones, who though with his self-esteem badly hurt by Lloyd Baxter’s ditching of him, regretted he couldn’t help.

Bon-Bon tried several more trainers, but thin, elderly, white-bearded owners of racehorses seemed not to exist. After she’d tired of it she persuaded her mother to let Worthington continue our journey, to take me where I wanted. I kissed her gratefully and chose to go straight home to my hillside house and flop.

Worthington liked skiing, he said as we drove away. He liked Paris. He liked Marigold. He regularly admired her more bizarre clothes. Sorry, he said, about leaving me with the lioness, Rose. Good luck, he said cheerfully.

“I could throttle you,” I said.

While Worthington happily chuckled at the wheel, I switched on my mobile phone again to call Irish at his home to find out how the day had finally gone in the shop, but before I could dial the number the message service called, and the disembodied voice of young Victor W. V. said briefly in my ear, “Send your e-mail address to me at vicv@freenet.com.”

Holy hell, I thought, Victor had things to say. Flopping could wait. The only computer I owned that handled e-mail was in Broadway. Worthington with resignation changed direction, at length stopping by my main glass door and insisting he come in with me, to check the place for black masks and other pests.

The place was empty. No Rose in wait. Worthington returned with me to the Rolls, shook my hand, told me to look after myself and left lightheartedly, again prophesying his swift return well within two weeks.

Almost at once I missed the muscle man, missed him as a safety umbrella and as a source of a realistic view of life. Paris and skiing attracted powerfully. I sighed over my inescapable bruises, roused my sleeping computer into action, connected it to the Internet, and sent an e-mail message to Victor, with my address.

I’d expected to have to wait a good long time to hear from Victor, but almost immediately, which meant he had been sitting at his computer, waiting, the screen of my laptop demanded, “Who are you?”

I typed and sent, “Martin Stukely’s friend.”

He asked, “Name,” and I told him, “Gerard Logan.”

His reply was “What do you want?”

“How did you know Martin Stukely?”

“I’ve known him for years, saw him often at the races with my granddad.”

I wrote, “Why did you send that letter to him? How had you heard of any tape? Please tell me the truth.”

“I heard my aunt telling my mother.”

“How did your aunt know?”

“My aunt knows everything.”

I began to lose faith in his common sense, and I remembered him saying he was playing a game.

“What is your aunt’s name?” I expected nothing much: certainly not the breath-taker that came back.

“My aunt’s name is Rose. She keeps changing her last name. She’s my mother’s sister.” There was barely an interval before his next remark. “I’d better log off now. She’s just come!”

“Wait.” Stunned by that revelation I rapidly typed, “Do you know of a thin old man with a white beard?”

A long time after I’d settled for no answer, three words appeared.

“Doctor Force. Good-bye.”