Straight

6

May fingers went numb and dropped the box. I swayed and spun from the force of the impact and overbalanced, toppling, thinking sharply that I mustn’t this time put my foot on the ground. I dropped the bunch of keys and grabbed at the back of an upright black leather chair with my right hand to save myself, but it turned over under my weight and came down on top of me onto the carpet in a tangle of chair legs, table legs and crutches, the green box underneath and digging into my back.

In a spitting fury I tried to orient myself and finally got enough breath for one single choice, charming and heartfelt word.

“Bitch.”

She gave me a baleful glare and picked up the telephone, pressing three fast buttons.

“Police,” she said, and in as short a time as it took the emergency service to connect her, “Police, I want to report a burglary. I’ve caught a burglar.”

“I’m Greville’s brother,” I said thickly, from the floor.

For a moment it didn’t seem to reach her. I said again, more loudly, “I’m Greville’s brother.”

“What?” she said vaguely.

“For Christ’s sake, are you deaf? I’m not a burglar, I’m Greville Franklin’s brother.” I gingerly sat up into an L shape and found no strength anywhere.

She put the phone down. “Why didn’t you say so?” she demanded.

“What chance did you give me? And who the hell are you, walking into my brother’s house and belting people?”

She held at the ready the fearsome thing she’d hit me with, looking as if she thought I’d attack her in my turn, which I certainly felt like. In the last six days I’d been crunched by a horse, a mugger and a woman. All I needed was a toddler to amble up with a coup de grace. I pressed the fingers of my right hand on my forehead and the palm against my mouth and considered the blackness of life in general.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said after a pause.

I slid the hand away and drawled, “Absolutely bloody nothing.”

“I only tapped you,” she said with criticism.

“Shall I give you a hefty clip with that thing so you can feel what it’s like?”

“You’re angry.” She sounded surprised.

“Dead right.”

I struggled up off the floor, straightened the fallen chair and sat on it. “Who are you?” I repeated. But I knew who she was: the woman on the answering machine. The same voice. The cut-crystal accent. Darling, where are you. I love you.

“Did you ring his office?” I said. “Are you Mrs. Williams?”

She seemed to tremble and crumple inwardly and she walked past me to the window to stare out into the garden.

“Is he really dead?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She was forty, I thought, perhaps more. Nearly my height. In no way tiny or delicate. A woman of decision and power, sorely troubled.

She wore a leather-belted raincoat, though it hadn’t rained for weeks, and plain black businesslike shoes. Her hair, thick and dark, was combed smoothly back from her forehead to curl under on her collar, a cool groomed look achieved only by expert cutting. There was no visible jewelry, little remaining lipstick, no trace of scent.

“How?” she said eventually.

I had a strong impulse to deny her the information, to punish her for her precipitous attack, to hurt her and get even. But there was no point in it, and I knew I would end up with more shame than satisfaction, so after a struggle I explained briefly about the scaffolding.

“Friday afternoon,” I said. “He was unconscious at once. He died early on Sunday.”

She turned her head slowly to look at me directly. “Are you Derek?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Clarissa Williams.”

Neither of us made any attempt to shake hands. It would have been incongruous, I thought.

“I came to fetch some things of mine,” she said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be here.”

It was an apology of sorts, I supposed; and if I had indeed been a burglar she would have saved the bric-a-brac.

“What things?” I asked.

She hesitated, but in the end said, “A few letters, that’s all.” Her gaze strayed to the answering machine and there was a definite tightening of muscles round her eyes.

“I played the messages,” I said.

“Oh God.”

“Why should it worry you?”

She had her reasons, it seemed, but she wasn’t going to tell me what they were; or not then, at any rate.

“I want to wipe them off,” she said. “It was one of the purposes of coming.”

She glanced at me, but I couldn’t think of any urgent reason why she shouldn’t, so I didn’t say anything. Tentatively, as if asking my forbearance every step of the way, she walked jerkily to the machine, rewound the tape and pressed the record button, recording silence over what had gone before. After a little while she rewound the tape again and played it, and there were no desperate appeals anymore.

“Did anyone else hear...?”

“I don’t think so. Not unless the cleaner was in the habit of listening. She came today, I think.”

“Oh God.”

“You left no name.” Why the hell was I reassuring her, I wondered. I still had no strength in my fingers. I could still feel that awful blow like a shudder.

“Do you want a drink?” she said abruptly. “I’ve had a dreadful day.” She went over to the tray of bottles and poured vodka into a heavy tumbler. “What do you want?”

“Water,” I said. “Make it a double.”

She tightened her mouth and put down the vodka bottle with a clink. “Soda or tonic?” she asked starchily.

“Soda.”

She poured soda into a glass for me and tonic into her own, diluting the spirit by not very much.

Ice was downstairs in the kitchen. No one mentioned it.

I noticed she’d left her lethal weapon lying harmlessly beside the answering machine. Presumably I no longer represented any threat. As if avoiding personal contact, she set my soda water formally on the table beside me between the little stone bears and the chrysanthemums and drank deeply from her own glass. Better than tranquilizers, I thought. Alcohol loosened the stress, calmed the mental pain. The world’s first anesthetic. I could have done with some myself.

“Where are your letters?” I asked.

She switched on a table light. The on-creeping dusk in the garden deepened abruptly toward night and I wished she would hurry because I wanted to go home.

She looked at a bookcase which covered a good deal of one wall.

“In there, I think. In a book.”

“Do start looking, then. It could take all night.”

“You don’t need to wait.”

“I think I will,” I said.

“Don’t you trust me?” she demanded.

“ No.”

She stared at me hard. “Why not?”

I didn’t say that because of the diamonds I didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t know who I could safely ask to look out for them, or who would search to steal them, if they knew they might be found.

“I don’t know you,” I said neutrally.

“But I...” She stopped and shrugged. “I suppose I don’t know you either.” She went over to the bookshelves. “Some of these books are hollow,” she said.

Oh Greville, I thought. How would I ever find anything he had hidden? I liked straight paths. He’d had a mind like a labyrinth.

She began pulling out books from the lower shelves and opening the front covers. Not methodically book by book along any row but always, it seemed to me, those with predominantly blue spines. After a while, on her knees, she found a hollow one which she laid open on the floor with careful sarcasm, so that I could see she wasn’t concealing anything.

The interior of the book was in effect a blue velvet box with a close-fitting lid that could be pulled out by a tab. When she pulled the lid out, the shallow blue-velvet-lined space beneath was revealed as being entirely empty.

Shrugging, she replaced the lid and closed the book, which immediately looked like any other book, and returned it to the shelves, and a few seconds later found another hollow one, this time with red velvet interiors. Inside this one lay an envelope.

She looked at it without touching it, and then at me.

“It’s not my letters,” she said. “Not my writing paper.”

I said, “Greville made a will leaving everything he possessed to me.”

She didn’t seem to find it extraordinary, although I did: he had done it that way for simplicity when he was in a hurry, and he would certainly have changed it, given time.

“You’d better see what’s in there, then,” she said calmly, and she picked the envelope out and stretched across to hand it to me.

The envelope, which hadn’t been stuck down, contained a single ornate key, about four inches long, the top flattened and pierced like metal lace, the business end narrow with small but intricate teeth. I laid it on my palm and showed it to her, asking her if she knew what it unlocked.

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen it before.” She paused. “He was a man of secrets,” she said.

I listened to the wistfulness in her voice. She might be strongly controlled at that moment, but she hadn’t been before Annette told her Greville was dead. There had been raw panicky emotion on the tape. Annette had simply confirmed her frightful fears and put what I imagined was a false calmness in place of escalating despair. A man of secrets... Greville had apparently not opened his mind to her much more than he had to me.

I put the key back into its envelope and handed it across.

“It had better stay in the book for now,” I said, “until I find a keyhole it fits.”

She put the key into the book and returned it to the shelves, and shortly afterward found her letters. They were fastened not with romantic ribbons but held together by a prosaic rubber band; not a great many of them by the look of things but carefully kept.

She stared at me from her knees. “I don’t want you to read them,” she said. “Whatever Greville left you, they’re mine, not yours.”

I wondered why she needed so urgently to remove all traces of herself from the house. Out of curiosity I’d have read the letters with interest if I’d found them myself, but I could hardly demand now to see her love letters... if they were love letters.

“Show me just a short page,” I said.

She looked bitter. “You really don’t trust me, do you? I’d like to know why.”

“Someone broke into Greville’s office over the weekend,” I said, “and I’m not quite sure what they were looking for.”

“Not my letters,” she said positively.

“Show me just a page,” I said, “so I know they’re what you say.”

I thought she would refuse altogether, but after a moment’s thought she slid the rubber band off the letters and fingered through them, finally, with all expression repressed, handing me one small sheet.

It said,

I handed the page back in silence, embarrassed at having intruded.

“Take them,” I said.

She blinked a few times, snapped the rubber band back round the small collection, and put them into a plain black leather handbag which lay beside her on the carpet.

I felt down onto the floor, collected the crutches and stood up, concentrating on at least holding the hand support of the left one, even if not putting much weight on it. Clarissa Williams watched me go over toward Greville’s chair with a touch of awkwardness.

“Look,” she said. “I didn’t realize... I mean, when I came in here and saw you stealing things... I thought you were stealing things... I didn’t notice the crutches.”

I supposed that was the truth. Bona fide burglars didn’t go around peg-legged, and I’d laid the supports aside at the time she’d come storming in. She’d been too fired up to ask questions: propelled no doubt by grief, anxiety and fear of the intruder. None of which lessened my contrary feeling that she damned well ought to have asked questions before waging war.

I wondered how she would have explained her presence to the police, if they had arrived, when she was urgent to remove all traces of herself from the house. Perhaps she would have realized her mistake and simply departed, leaving the incapacitated burglar on the floor.

I went over to the telephone table and picked up the brutal little man-tamer. The heavy handle, a black cigar-shaped cylinder, knurled for a good grip, was under an inch in diameter and about seven inches long. Protruding beyond that was a short length of solidly thick chromium-plated closely-coiled spring, with a similar but narrower spring extending beyond that, the whole tipped with a black metal knob, fifteen or sixteen inches overall. A kick as hard as a horse.

“What is this?” I said, holding it, feeling its weight.

“Greville gave it to me. He said the streets aren’t safe. He wanted me to carry it always ready. He said all women should carry them because of muggers and rapists... as a magistrate he heard so much about women being attacked. He said one blow would render the toughest man helpless and give me time to escape.”

I hadn’t much difficulty in believing it. I bent the black knob to one side and watched the close heavy spring flex and straighten fast when I let it go. She got to her feet and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve never used it before, not in anger. Greville showed me how... he just said to swing as hard as I could so that the springs would shoot out and do the maximum damage.”

My dear brother, I thought. Thank you very much.

“Does it go back into its shell?” I asked.

She nodded. “Twist the bigger spring clockwise... it’ll come loose and slide into the casing.” I did that, but the smaller spring with the black knob still stuck out. “You have to give the knob a bang against something, then it will slide in.”

I banged the knob against the wall, and like a meek lamb the narrower spring slid smoothly into the wider, and the end of the knob became the harmless-looking end of yet another gadget.

“What makes it work?” I asked, but she didn’t know.

I found that the end opposite the knob unscrewed if one tried, so I unscrewed it about twenty turns until the inch-long piece came off, and I discovered that the whole end section was a very strong magnet.

Simple, I thought. Ordinarily the magnet held the heavy springs inside the cylinder. Make a strong flicking arc, in effect throw the springs out, and the magnet couldn’t hold them, but let them go, letting loose the full whipping strength of the thing.

I screwed back the cap, held the cylinder, swung it hard. The springs shot out, flexible, shining, horrific.

Wordlessly I closed the thing up again and offered it to her.

“It’s called a kiyoga,” she said.

I didn’t care what it was called. I didn’t care if I never saw it again. She put it familiarly into her raincoat pocket, Everywoman’s ultimate reply to footpads, maniacs and assorted misogynists.

She looked unhappily and uncertainly at my face.

“I suppose I can’t ask you to forget I came here?” she said.

“It would be impossible.”

“Could you just... not speak of it?”

If I’d met her in another way I suppose I might have liked her. She had generous eyes that would have looked better smiling, and an air of basic good humor which persisted despite her jumbling emotions.

With an effort she said, “Please.”

“Don’t beg,” I said sharply. It made me uncomfortable and it didn’t suit her.

She swallowed. “Greville told me about you. I guess... I’ll have to trust to his judgment.”

She felt in the opposite pocket to the one with the kiyoga and brought out a plain key ring with three keys on it.

“You’d better have these,” she said. “I won’t be using them anymore.” She put them down by the answering machine and in her eyes I saw the shininess of sudden tears.

“He died in Ipswich,” I said. “He’ll be cremated there on Friday afternoon. Two o’clock.”

She nodded speechlessly in acknowledgment, not looking at me, and went past me, through the doorway and down the hall and out of the front door, closing it with a quiet finality behind her.

With a sigh, I looked round the room. The book box that had contained her letters still lay open on the floor and I bent down, picked it up, and restored it to the shelves. I wondered just how many books were hollow. Tomorrow evening, I thought, after Elliot Trelawney, I would come and look.

Meanwhile I picked up the fallen green stone box and put it on the table by the chrysanthemums, reflecting that the ornate key in the red-lined book-box was far too large to fit its tiny lock. Greville’s bunch of keys was down on the carpet also. I returned to what I’d been doing before being so violently interrupted, but found that the smallest of the bunch was still too big for the green stone.

A whole load of no progress, I thought moodily.

I drank the soda water, which had lost its fizz.

I rubbed my arm, which didn’t make it much better.

I wondered what judgment Greville had passed on me, that could be trusted.

There was a polished cupboard that I hadn’t investigated underneath the television set and, not expecting much, I bent down and pulled one of the doors open by its brass ring handle. The other door opened of its own accord and the contents of the cupboard slid outward as a unit: a video machine on top with, on two shelves below, rows of black boxes holding recording tapes. There were small uniform labels on the boxes bearing, not formulas this time, but dates.

I pulled one of the boxes out at random and was stunned to see the larger label stuck to its front: “Race Video Club,” it said in heavy print, and underneath, in typing, “July 7th, Sandown Park, Dozen Roses.”

The Race Video Club, as I knew well, sold tapes of races to owners, trainers, and anyone else interested. Greville, I thought in growing amazement as I looked further, must have given them a standing order: every race his horses had run in for the past two years, I judged, was there on his shelves to be watched.

He’d told me once, when I asked why he didn’t go to see his runners, that he saw them enough on television; and I’d thought he meant on the ordinary scheduled programs, live from the racetracks in the afternoons.

The front doorbell rang, jarring and unexpected. I went along and looked through a small peephole and found Brad standing on the doorstep, blinking and blinded by two spotlights shining on his face. The lights came from above the door and lit up the whole path and the gate. I opened the door as he shielded his eyes with his arm.

“Hello,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Turn the lights off. Can’t see.”

I looked for a switch beside the front door, found several, and by pressing them all upward indiscriminately, put out the blaze.

“Came to see you were OK,” Brad explained. “Those lights just went on.”

Of their own accord, I realized. Another manifestation of Greville’s security, no doubt. Anyone who came up the path after dark would get illuminated for his pains.

“Sorry I’ve been so long,” I said. “Now you’re here, would you carry a few things?”

He nodded as if he’d let out enough words already to last the evening, and followed me silently, when I beckoned him, toward the small sitting room.

“I’m taking that green stone box and as many of those video tapes as you can carry, starting from that end,” I said and he obligingly picked up about ten recent tapes, balancing the box on top.

I found a hall light, switched that on, and turned off the lamp in the sitting room. It promptly turned itself on again, unasked.

“Cor,” Brad said.

I thought that maybe it was time to leave before I tripped any other alarms wired direct after dark to the local constabulary. I closed the sitting room door and we went along the hall to the outer world. Before leaving I pressed all the switches beside the front door downward, and maybe I turned more on than I’d turned off: the spotlights didn’t go on, but a dog started barking noisily behind us.

“Strewth,” Brad said, whirling round and clutching the video tapes to his chest as if they would defend him.

There was no dog. There was a loudspeaker like a bullhorn on a low hall table emitting the deep-throated growls and barks of a determined German shepherd.

“Bleeding hell,” Brad said.

“Let’s go,” I said in amusement, and he could hardly wait.

The barking stopped of its own accord as we stepped out into the air. I pulled the door shut, and we set off to go down the steps and along the path. We’d gone barely three paces when the spotlights blazed on again.

“Keep going,” I said to Brad. “I daresay they’ll turn themselves off in time.”

It was fine by him. He’d managed to park the car not far away, and I spent the swift journey to Hungerford wondering about Clarissa Williams; her life, love and adultery.

During the evening I failed both to open the green stone box and to understand the gadgets.

Shaking the box gave me no impression of contents and I supposed it could well be empty. A cigarette box, I thought, though I couldn’t remember ever seeing Greville smoking. Perhaps a box to hold twin packs of cards. Perhaps a box for jewelry. Its tiny keyhole remained impervious to probes from nail scissors, suitcase keys and a piece of wire, and in the end I surrendered and laid it aside.

Neither of the gadgets opened or shut. One was a small black cylindrical object about the size of a thumb, with one end narrowly ridged, like a coin. Turning the ridged end a quarter-turn clockwise, its full extent of travel, produced a thin, faint high-pitched whine which proved to be the unexciting sum of the thing’s activity. Shrugging, I switched the whine off again and stood the small tube upright on the green box.

The second gadget didn’t even produce a whine. It was a flat black plastic container about the size of a pack of cards with a single square red button placed centrally on the front. I pressed the button: no results. A round chromiumed knob set into one of the sides of the cover revealed itself on further inspection as the end of a telescopic aerial. I pulled it out as far as it would go, about ten inches, and was rewarded with what I presumed was a small transmitter which transmitted I didn’t know what to I didn’t know where.

Sighing, I pushed the aerial back into its socket and added the transmitter to the top of the green box, and after that I fed Greville’s tapes one by one into my video machine and watched the races.

Alfie’s comment about in-and-out running had interested me more than I would have wanted him to know. Dozen Roses, from my own reading of the results, had had a long doldrum period followed by a burst of success, suggestive of the classic “cheating” pattern of running a horse to lose and go on losing until he was low in the handicap and unbacked, then setting him off to win at long odds in a race below his latent abilities and wheeling away the winnings in a barrow.

All trainers did that in a mild way sometimes, whatever the rules might say about always running flat out. Young and inexperienced horses could be ruined by being pressed too hard too soon: one had to give them a chance to enjoy themselves, to let their racing instinct develop fully.

That said, there was a point beyond which no modern trainer dared go. In the bad old days before universal camera coverage it had been harder to prove a horse hadn’t been trying: many jockeys had been artists at waving their whips while hauling on the reins. Under the eagle lenses and fierce discipline of the current scene even natural and unforeseen fluctuations in a horse’s form could find the trainer yanked in before the Stewards for an explanation, and if the trainer couldn’t explain why his short-priced favorite had turned leaden-footed it could cost him a depressing fine.

No trainer, however illustrious, was safe from suspicion, yet I’d never read or heard of Nicholas Loder getting himself into that sort of trouble. Maybe Alfie, I thought dryly, knew something the Stewards didn’t. Maybe Alfie could tell me why Loder had all but panicked when he’d feared Dozen Roses might not run on Saturday next.

Brad had picked up the six most recent outings of Dozen Roses, interspersed by four of Gemstones’. I played all six of Dozen Roses first, starting with the earliest, back in May, checking the details with what Greville had written in his diary.

On the screen there were shots of the runners walking round the parade ring and going down to the start, with Greville’s pink and orange colors bright and easy to see. The May race was a ten-furlong handicap for three-year-olds and upward, run at Newmarket on a Friday. Eighteen runners. Dozen Roses ridden by a second-string jockey because Loder’s chief retained jockey was riding the stable’s other runner, which started favorite.

Down at the start there was some sort of fracas involving Dozen Roses. I rewound the tape and played it through in slow motion and couldn’t help laughing. Dozen Roses, his mind far from racing, had been showing unseemly interest in a mare.

I remembered Greville saying once that he thought it a shame and unfair to curb a colt’s enthusiasm: no horse of his would ever be gelded. I remembered him vividly leaning across a small table and saying it over a glass of brandy with a gleam in which I’d seen his own enjoyment of sex. So many glimpses of him in my mind, I thought. Too few, also. I couldn’t really believe I would never eat with him again, whatever my senses said.

Trainers didn’t normally run mares that had come into season, but sometimes one couldn’t tell early on. Horses knew, though. Dozen Roses had been aroused. The mare was loaded into the stalls in a hurry and Dozen Roses had been walked around until the last minute to cool his ardor. After that, he had run without sparkle and finished midfield, the mare to the rear of him trailing in last. Loder’s other runner, the favorite, had won by a length.

Too bad, I thought, smiling, and watched Dozen Roses’ next attempt three weeks later.

No distracting attractions, this time. The horse had behaved quietly, sleepily almost, and had turned in the sort of moderate performance which set owners wondering if the game was worth it. The next race was much the same, and if I’d been Greville I would have decided it was time to sell.

Greville, it seemed, had had more faith. After seven weeks’ rest Dozen Roses had gone bouncing down to the start, raced full of zest and zoomed over the finishing line in front, netting 14/1 for anyone ignorant enough to have backed him. Like Greville, of course.

Watching the sequence of tapes I did indeed wonder why the Stewards hadn’t made a fuss, but Greville hadn’t mentioned anything except his pleasure in the horse’s return to his three-year-old form.

Dozen Roses had next produced two further copybook performances of stamina and determination which brought us up to date. I rewound and removed the last tape and could see why Loder thought it would be another trot-up on Saturday.

Gemstones’ tapes weren’t as interesting. Despite his name he wasn’t of much value, and the one race he’d won looked more like a fluke than constructive engineering. I would sell them both, I decided, as Loder wanted.