Shattered

5

To my considerable delight Catherine Dodd again stood her motorbike by my curb and pulled off her helmet before walking across the sidewalk to the door I held open for her. It seemed natural to us both to kiss hello, and for her to stand in front of the soaring flight of wings that I had barely finished lighting.

“It’s tremendous.” She meant it. “It’s too good for Broadway.”

“Flattery will get you an awfully long way,” I assured her, and took her into the workshop, where it was warmest.

The sheet printed of my e-mail conversation with Victor lay folded on the marver table and I passed it to her to read. “What do you think?” I asked.

“I think you need better painkillers.”

“No... Think about Victor.”

She sat this time in the armchair on my promise that on the next day I would walk down the hill looking in secondhand and antique furniture shops to buy another one.

“If,” I amended to the promise, “if you will come and sit in it.”

She nodded as if it were an “of course” decision and read Victor’s e-mail. When she’d finished she laid the sheet on her black leather-clad knees and asked her own questions.

“OK,” she said. “First of all, remind me, who is Victor?”

“The fifteen-year-old grandson of Ed Payne, Martin Stukely’s racetrack valet. Ed gave me the videotape that was stolen from here, which you came to see about. Victor sent this letter to Martin.” I gave her the letter to read, which raised her eyebrows in doubt.

“Victor said he was playing games,” I acknowledged.

“You can’t believe a word he says!” Catherine agreed.

“Well, yes you can, actually. He’s made a game of actual bits of fact. Or anyway, he’s done what everyone does at some point — he’s heard one thing and thought it meant another.”

“The wrong end of the stick?” Catherine suggested. “How about the right end?”

“Well... the stick as I see it, then.” I stopped for a minute or two to make coffee, which in spite of her being off duty she said she preferred to wine. No milk, no sugar, cool rather than hot.

“Have to begin with a ‘suppose,’ ” I said.

“Suppose away.”

“Start with a white-bearded man who looks like a university lecturer and who might be called Doctor Force. Suppose that this Doctor Force has somehow got to know Martin. Doctor Force has some information he wants to put into safekeeping so he takes it to Cheltenham races and gives it to Martin.”

“Crazy.” Catherine sighed. “Why didn’t he put it in a bank?”

“We’ll have to ask him.”

“And you are crazy too. How do we find him?”

“It’s you,” I pointed out, smiling, “that is the police officer.”

“Well, I’ll try.” She smiled back. “And what then?”

“Then Doctor Force went to the races as planned. He gave his tape to Martin. After Martin crashed, our Doctor Force must have gone through a lot of doubt and worry, and I’d guess he stood around near the changing rooms wondering what to do. Then he saw Ed Payne give the tape in its brown-paper parcel to me, and he knew it was the right tape as he’d packed it himself.”

“You should join the police,” Catherine teased. “So OK, Doctor Force finds out who you are and takes himself here to Broadway, and when you leave your door unlocked for a spell in the new-age air, he nips in and takes back his own tape.”

“Right.”

“And steals your cash on impulse.”

“Right. But up to that point he hasn’t realized that there is someone else in the depths of the shop; and that’s Lloyd Baxter, who proceeds to have an epileptic fit.”

“Upsetting for Doctor White-Beard Force.” She spoke dryly.

I nodded. “He did a bunk.”

Catherine said thoughtfully, “One of our detective constables interviewed Lloyd Baxter in hospital. Mr. Baxter said he didn’t see anyone at all come into the showroom.”

“Lloyd Baxter didn’t care about getting the tape back, nor the money either. He did care very much about keeping his illness as private as possible.”

Catherine showed irritation. “However can we solve cases if people don’t give us the facts?”

“You must be used to it.”

She said that being used to something wrong didn’t make it right. The starchy disapproval common to her profession had surfaced briefly. Never forget, I told myself, that the inner crime fighter is always there, always on duty, and always part of her. She shook herself free of the moment and made a visible gear change back to a lighter approach.

“OK.” She nodded. “So Doctor Force has his tape back. Fine. So who squirted anesthetic at the Stukelys and took their TVs, and who ransacked your own house, and beat you up last night? And I don’t really understand how this boy Victor got involved.”

“I can’t answer everything, but think Rose.”

“Pink?”

“Rose. She is Ed Payne’s daughter, and Victor’s aunt. She’s sharp-featured, sharp-tongued, and I think is on the edge of criminal. She jumps a bit to conclusions, and she’s all the more dangerous for that.”

“For instance?”

“For instance... I’d guess it was she who stole all the videotapes in Bon-Bon’s house and mine because they could possibly have been mixed up with the one I brought from the racetrack.”

“But heavens!” Catherine exclaimed. “Tapes do so easily get mixed up.”

“Rose probably thought so too. I would think it likely that Rose chatters to her sister (Victor’s mother) quite a lot and I think it’s fairly certain that Victor did overhear her when she said she knew of a tape worth a fortune.”

If only Martin had explained what he was doing! There was too much guesswork, and definitely too much Rose.

Sighing, Catherine gave me back Victor’s printout and stood up, saying with apparent reluctance, “I have to go. I was so glad to find you here, but I’ve promised to be with my parents tonight. I was wondering, though, if you by any chance want to go to your house now, then — um — you don’t need a license to ride pillion.”

She necessarily shed the police half of herself. I got on the bike and clasped her close around her waist, having more or less strapped on her spare helmet, which was too small and into wobble. We set off insecurely, but the bike had guts enough to take us both up the hills without stuttering, and she was laughing when she stopped by the weedy entrance to my drive.

I thanked her for the ride. She roared off still laughing. I was conscious of wishing that Worthington, or failing him, Tom Pigeon and his Dobermans, were by my side, but there were no thorny briar Roses lying in wait this time. When I unlocked a side door and let myself in, it seemed that the house gave back in peace the years the Logan family had prospered there, father, mother and two sons, each in a different way. I was the only one left, and with its ten rooms still filled with sharp memories, I’d made no move to find a smaller or more suitable lair. One day, perhaps. Meanwhile the house felt like home in all senses: home to me, the home of all who’d lived there.

I walked deliberately through all the rooms thinking of Catherine, wondering both if she would like the place, and whether the house would accept her in return. Once in the past the house had delivered a definite thumbs-down, and once I’d been given an ultimatum to smother the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper as a condition of marriage, but to the horror of her family I’d backed out of the whole deal, and as a result, I now used the house as arbiter and had disentangled myself from a later young woman who’d begun to refer to her and me as “an item” and to reply to questions as “we.” We think.

No, we don’t think.

I knew that several people considered me heartless. Also promiscuous, also fickle. Catherine would be advised not to get herself involved with that fellow whose reputation was as brittle as his glass. I knew quite well what the gossips said, but it wasn’t going to be to please any gossip that the house and I one day would settle on a mate for life.

The burglars who’d taken all my videotapes hadn’t made a lot of mess. There had been television sets with video recorders in three rooms: in the kitchen, and in each of the sitting rooms in which for nearly ten years my mother and I had lived our semi-separate lives.

As I hadn’t yet done anything about the rooms since her death, it seemed as if she would soon come out of her bedroom, chiding me for having left my dirty clothes on the floor.

There wasn’t a single tape left anywhere that I could find. My parent had had a radically different taste from me in films and recorded TV programs, but it no longer mattered. Out of my own room I’d lost a rather precious bunch of glassblowing instruction tapes that I might be able to replace if I could find copies. I’d been commissioned to make some of them myself for university courses. Those courses were basic and mostly dealt with how to make scientific equipment for laboratories. I couldn’t imagine those teaching tapes being the special target of any thief.

In the kitchen there had been game shows, tennis, American football and cooking. All gone. The police had suggested I list them all. What a hope!

There wasn’t much left to tidy, except for patches of dust and a couple of dead spiders here and there, where once the TVs had stood.

With the Rose-induced bruises growing gradually less sore, I slept safely behind bolted doors, and in the morning walked (as usual while sans car) downhill to Logan Glass, getting there before Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane. Relief was the emotion I chiefly felt about the soaring wings; relief that somehow someone hadn’t managed to smash them overnight.

Irish’s pedestal and my lighting system had combined to make accidental breakage very difficult, but one couldn’t easily guard against hurricane or ax.

I made a fleet of little ornamental sailing ships all morning and bought a comfortable armchair at lunchtime which minimized every remaining wince. Followed by a brown-overalled chair pusher (with chair), I returned to Logan Glass and rearranged the furniture. My assistants grinned knowingly.

I straightened out the worst of Hickory’s growing hubris by giving him a sailing boat as an exercise, which resulted in a heap of sad lumps of stunted mast and a mainsail that no breeze would ever fill.

Hickory’s good looks and general air of virility would always secure him jobs he couldn’t do. In less than the first week of his attractive company I’d learned more of his limitations than his skills, but every customer liked him and he was a great salesman.

“It’s all right for you,” he now complained, looking from the little boat I’d made in demonstration to the heap of colored rubble he’d painstakingly achieved, “you know what a sailing boat looks like. When I make them they come out flat.”

Half the battle in all I did, as I tried to explain to him without any “cockiness” creeping in, was the draftsman’s inner eye that saw an object in three-dimensional terms. I could draw and paint all right, but it was the three-dimensional imagination that I’d been blessed with from birth that made little sailboats a doddle.

As Hickory’s third try bit the dust amid commiserating murmurs from the rest of us, the telephone interrupted the would-be star glass-blower’s explanation of how drops of water had unfairly fallen on his work at the crucial moment and splintered it, which was definitely not his fault...

I didn’t listen. The voice on the line was Catherine’s.

“I’ve been a police officer all morning,” she said. “Did you really get another chair?”

“It’s here waiting for you.”

“Great. And I’ve collected some news for you. I’ll be along when I go off duty, at six o’clock.”

To fill in time I e-mailed Victor, expecting to have to wait for a reply, as he should have been at school, but as before, he was ready.

He typed, “Things have changed.”

“Tell me.”

There was a long gap of several minutes.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“My dad’s in jail.”

E-mail messages crossed the ether without inflection. Victor’s typed words gave no clues to his feelings.

I sent back, “Where? What for? How long? I’m very sorry.”

Victor’s reply had nothing to do with the questions.

“I hate her.”

I asked flatly, “Who?”

A pause, then, “Auntie Rose, of course.”

I itched for faster answers but got only a feeling that if I pressed too hard I would lose him altogether.

Without the tearing emotion I could imagine him trying to deal with, he wrote, “He’s been there ten weeks. They sent me to stay with my uncle Mac in Scotland when the trial was on, so I wouldn’t know. They told me my dad had gone on an Antarctic expedition as a chef. He is a chef, you see. He got sent down for a year, but he’ll be out before that. Will you go on talking to me?”

“Yes,” I sent back. “Of course.”

A long pause again, then “Rose sneaked on Dad.” I waited, and more came. “He hit Mom. He broke her nose and some ribs.” After an even longer pause, he sent, “E-mail me tomorrow,” and I replied fast, while he might still be on-line, “Tell me about Doctor Force.”

Either he’d disconnected his phone line or didn’t want to reply, because Doctor Force was a nonstarter. Victor’s silence lasted all day.

I went back to the teaching session. Hickory finally fashioned a boat that might have floated had it been full-size and made of fiberglass with a canvas sail. He allowed himself a smirk of satisfaction, which none of us begrudged him. Glassblowing was a difficult discipline even for those like Hickory, who apparently had everything on their side — youth, agility, imagination. Hickory put the little boat carefully in the annealing oven, knowing I would give him the finished ornament to keep, in the morning.

By six I’d managed to send them all home, and by six plus twenty-three Detective Constable Dodd was approving the new armchair and reading Victor Waltman Verity’s troubles.

“Poor boy,” she said.

I said ruefully, “As he hates his aunt Rose for grassing on his pa, he might not tell me anything else himself. Sneaking appears to be a mortal sin, in his book.”

“Mm.” She read the printed pages again, then cheerfully said, “Well, whether or not you have Victor’s help, your Doctor Force is definitely on the map.” It pleased her to have found him. “I chased him through a few academic Who’s Whos with no results. He’s not a university lecturer, or not primarily, anyway. He is, believe it or not, a medical doctor. Licensed, and all that.” She handed me an envelope with a grin. “One of my colleagues spends his time chasing struck-off practitioners. He looked for him, and in the end he did find him.”

“Is he struck off?” It would make sense, I thought, but Catherine shook her head.

“No, not only is he not struck off, he was working in some research lab or other until recently. He took a lot of finding, because of that. It’s all in this envelope.”

“And is he fiftyish with a white beard?”

She laughed. “His date of birth will be in the envelope. A white beard’s expecting too much.”

Both of us at that point found that there were more absorbing facets to life than chasing obscure medics.

I suggested food from the takeout; she offered another pillion ride up the hill: we saw to both. I’d left central heating on for comfort, and Catherine wandered all over the house, smiling.

“I’ve been warned that you’ll dump me,” she said casually.

“Not in a hurry.”

I still held the envelope of Doctor Force details, and I opened it then with hope, but it told me very few useful facts. His name was Adam Force, age fifty-six, and his qualifications came by the dozen.

I said blankly, “Is that all?”

She nodded. “That’s all, folks, when it comes to facts. As to hearsay — well — according to a bunch of rumors he’s a brilliant researcher who has published star-spangled work since his teens. No one could tell my colleague about a white beard. He didn’t speak to anyone who’d actually met the subject.”

I asked, “Does Doctor Force have an address?”

“Not in these notes,” she answered. “In the Who’s Who we used, it gives only the information provided by the people themselves. Those reference books leave people out if they don’t want to be in.”

“Utterly civilized.”

“No, very annoying.”

She didn’t sound very annoyed, however, as she knew all about the Internet The next morning, she decided, we could catch him on the Web.

We ate the takeout food, or a little of it, owing to a change of appetite, and I switched up the heating a little in my bedroom without any need for explanation.

She’d shed somewhere in her life whatever she had ever suffered in the way of overpowering shyness. The Catherine who came into my bed came with confidence along with modesty, an intoxicating combination as far as I was concerned. We both knew enough, anyway, to give to each other as much pleasure as we received, or at least enough to feel slumberous and fulfilled in consequence.

The speed of development of strong feelings for one another didn’t seem to me to be shocking but natural, and if I thought about the future it unequivocally included Catherine Dodd. “If you wanted to cover the pale plain walls with brightly patterned paper, go ahead,” I said.

She laughed. “I like the peace of pale walls. Why should I want to change them?”

I said merely, “I’m glad you don’t,” and offered her thirst quenchers. Like Martin, it seemed she preferred fizzy water to alcohol, though in her case the cause wasn’t weight but the combination of a police badge and a motorbike. She went soberly home before dawn, steady on two wheels. I watched her red rear light fade into what was left of the night and quite fiercely wanted her to stay with me instead.

I walked restlessly downhill through the slow January dawn, reaching the workshop well before the others. The Internet, though, when I’d accessed it, proved less obliging about Adam Force than the address of Waltman Verity in Taunton. There had been a whole clutch of Veritys. Adam Force wasn’t anywhere in sight.

Hickory arrived at that point, early and eager to take his precious sailboat out of the Lehr annealing oven. He unbolted the oven door and lifted out his still-warm treasure. Although he would get the transparent colors clearer with practice, it wasn’t a bad effort, and I told him so. He wasn’t pleased, however. He wanted unqualified praise. I caught on his face a fleeting expression of contempt for my lack of proper appreciation of his ability. There would be trouble ahead if he tackled really difficult stuff, I thought; but as I’d done once in the past with someone of equal talent, I would give him good references when he looked for a different teacher, as, quite soon now, he would.

I would miss him most in the selling department for results and in the humor department for good company.

Irish, more humble about his skills, and Pamela Jane, twittery and positively self-deprecating, came sweeping in together in the cold morning and gave the sailboat the extravagant admiration Hickory thought it deserved. Harmony united the three of them as usual, but I hadn’t much faith in its lasting much longer.

Watched and helped by all three of them I spent the day replacing the minaret-shaped scent bottles we’d sold at Christmas, working fast at eight pieces an hour, using blue, turquoise, pink, green, white and purple in turn and packing the finished articles in rows in the ovens to cool. Speed was a commercial asset as essential as a three-dimensional eye, and winter in the Cotswold Hills was the time to stock up for the summer tourists. I consequently worked flat out from morning to six in the evening, progressing from sailboats via scent bottles to fishes, horses, bowls and vases.

At six in the evening when my semi-exhausted crew announced all six ovens to be packed, I sent them off home, tidied the workshop and put everything ready for the morrow. In the evening Catherine Dodd, straight off duty, rode her bike to Broadway, collected a pillion passenger and took him to his home. Every night possible that week Detective Constable Dodd slept in my arms in my bed but left before the general world awoke, and, during that time, no one managed to stick an address on Adam Force.

Glassblowing aside, by Friday afternoon, three days after Worthington and Marigold had joyfully left for Paris, the weekend held no enticements, as Catherine had departed on Friday morning as promised to a school-friends’ reunion.

On the same Friday, aching, I dare say, from the absence of their daily quarrel, Bon-Bon filled her need of Martin by driving his BMW, bursting at the seams with noisy children, to pick me up at close of day in Broadway.

“Actually,” Bon-Bon confessed as we detoured to my hill house for mundane clean shirts and socks, “Worthington didn’t like you being out here alone.”

“Worthington didn’t?”

“No... He phoned from somewhere south of Paris and specially told me a whole gang of people jumped on you in Broadway last Sunday evening when there were dog-walkers about, and this place of yours out here is asking for trouble, he said. He also said Martin would have taken you home.”

“Worthington exaggerated,” I protested, but after we’d all unloaded at Bon-Bon’s house, I used the evening there to invent a game for the children to compete in, a game called “Hunt the orange cylinder and the shoelaces.”

Bon-Bon protested. “But they told everything they know to the police! They won’t find anything useful.”

“And after that game,” I said, gently ignoring her, “we’ll play ‘Hunt the letters sent to Daddy by somebody called Force’ and there are prizes for every treasure found, of course.”

They played until bedtime with enthusiasm on account of the regular handouts of gold coin treasure (money), and when they’d noisily departed upstairs I laid out their final offerings all over Martin’s desk in the den.

I had watched the children search uninhibitedly in places I might have left untouched so that their haul was in some ways spectacular. Perhaps most perplexing was the original of the letter Victor had sent a copy of to Martin.

Dear Martin, it said, and continued word for word as far as the signature, which didn’t say Victor Waltman Verity in computer-print, but was scrawled in real live handwriting, Adam Force.

“The kids found that letter in a secret drawer in Martin’s desk,” Bon-Bon said. “I didn’t even know there was a secret drawer, but the children did.”

“Um,” I pondered. “Did any of these other things come out of the drawer?”

She said she would go and ask, and presently returned with Daniel, her eleven-year-old eldest, who opened a semi-hidden drawer in the desk for us with an easy twiddle, and asked if it were worth another handout. He hadn’t emptied the drawer, he explained, as he’d found the letter straightaway, the letter that was the point of the whole game, the letter sent to Daddy by someone called Force.

Of course, no one had found any trace of an orange cylinder or of recognizable laces for sneakers.

I gladly handed over another installment of treasure, as the hidden drawer proved to stretch across the whole width of the desk under the top surface, and to be about four inches deep. Daniel patiently showed me how it opened and closed. Observant and quick-witted, he offered other discoveries with glee, especially when I gave him a coin for every good hiding place with nothing in it. He found four. He jingled the coins.

Bon-Bon, searching the desk drawer, found with blushing astonishment a small bunch of love letters from her that Martin had saved. She took them over to the black leather sofa and wept big slow tears, while I told her that her son knew the so-called secret drawer wasn’t a secret at all but was a built-in feature of the modern desk.

“It’s designed to hold a laptop computer,” I told Bon-Bon. “Martin just didn’t keep a laptop in it, as he used that tabletop one over there, the one with the full keyboard and the screen.”

“How do you know?”

“Daniel says so.”

Bon-Bon said through her tears, “How disappointing it all is,” and picked up a tissue for mopping.

I, however, found the laptop drawer seething with interest, if not with secrets, as apart from Adam Force’s letter to Martin, there was a photocopy of Martin’s letter to Force, an affair not much longer than the brief reply.

It ran:

I stared not just at the letter, but at its implications.

Daniel looked over my shoulder, and asked what formulae were. “Are they secrets?” he said.

“Sometimes.”

When Bon-Bon had read the last loving letter and had dried her tears, I asked her how well Martin had known Doctor Adam Force.

With eyes darkened from crying, she said she didn’t know. She regretted desperately all the hours the two of them had spent in pointless arguing. “We never discussed anything without quarreling. You know what we were like. But I loved him... and he loved me, I know he did.”

They had quarreled and loved, both intensely, throughout the four years I’d known them. It was too late to wish that Martin had confided more in her, even in spite of her chattering tongue, but together for once they had decided that it should be I and not Bon-Bon who held Martin’s secret for safekeeping.

What secret? What secret? Dear God.

Alone in the den since Bon-Bon and Daniel had gone upstairs to the other children, I sorted through everything in the drawer, putting many loose letters in heaps according to subject. There were several used old checkbooks with sums written on the stubs but quite often not dates or payees. Martin must have driven his accountant crazy. He seemed simply to have thrust tax papers, receipts, payments and earnings haphazardly into his out-of-sight drawer.

Semi-miracles occasionally happen, though, and on one stub, dated November 1999 (no actual day), I came across the plain name Force (no Doctor, no Adam). On the line below there was the single word BELLOWS, and in the box for the amount of money being transferred out of the account there were three zeros, 000, with no whole numbers and no decimal points.

Searches through three other sets of stubs brought to light a lot of similar unfinished records: Martin deserved secrets, curse him, when he wrote so many himself.

The name Force appeared again on a memo pad, when a Martin handwriting scrawl said, “Force, Bristol, Wednesday if P. doesn’t declare Legup at Newton Abbot.”

Legup at Newton Abbot... Say Legup was a horse and Newton Abbot the racetrack where he was entered... I stood up from Martin’s desk and started on the form books in his bookcase, but although Legup had run in about eight races in the fall and spring over four or five years, and seldom, as it happened, on Wednesdays, there wasn’t any mention of days he’d been entered but stayed at home.

I went back to the drawer.

A loose-leaf notebook, the most methodically kept of all his untidy paperwork, appeared as a gold mine of order compared with all the rest. It listed, with dates, amounts given by Martin to Eddie Payne, his racetrack valet, since the previous June 1. It included even the day he died, when he’d left a record of his intentions.

As there was, to my understanding, a pretty rigid scale of pay from jockeys to valets, the notebook at first sight looked less important than half the neglected rest, but on the first page Martin had doodled the names of Ed Payne, Rose Payne, Gina Verity and Victor. In a box in a corner, behind straight heavy bars, he’d written Waltman. There were small sketches of Ed in his apron, Gina in her curlers, Victor with his computer and Rose... Rose had a halo of spikes.

Martin had known this family, I reflected, for almost as long as Ed had been his valet. When Martin had received the letter from Victor Waltman Verity, he would have known it was a fifteen-year-old’s game. Looking back, I could see I hadn’t asked the right questions, because I’d been starting from the wrong assumptions.

With a sigh I put down the notebook and read through the letters, most of which were from the owners of horses that Martin’s skill had urged first past the post. All the letters spoke of the esteem given to an honest jockey and none of them had the slightest relevance to secrets on videotapes.

A 1999 diary came next, though I found it not in the drawer but on top of the desk, put there by one of the children. It was a detailed jockey’s diary, with all race meetings listed. Martin had circled everywhere he’d ridden, with the names of his mounts. He had filled in Tallahassee on the last day of the century, the last day of his life.

I lolled in Martin’s chair, both mourning him and wishing like hell that he could come back alive just for five minutes.

My mobile phone, lying on the desk, gave out its brisk summons and, hoping it was Catherine, I pushed “send.”

It wasn’t Catherine.

Victor’s cracked voice spoke hurriedly.

“Can you come to Taunton on Sunday? Please say you will catch the same train as before. I’m running out of money for this phone. Please say yes.”

I listened to the urgency, to the virtual panic.

I said, “Yes, OK,” and the line went dead.

I would have gone blithely unwarned to Taunton on that Sunday if it hadn’t been for Worthington shouting in alarm over crackling lines from a mountaintop.

“Haven’t you learned the first thing about not walking into an ambush?”

“Not Victor,” I protested. “He wouldn’t lure me into a trap.”

“Oh yeah? And does the sacrificial lamb understand he’s for the chop?”

Lamb chop or not, I caught the train.