To the hilt

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Chris and I drove along past the pub and came to the house with the lights. When we reached the driveway, which was full of cars, we parked in the roadway. As we climbed out, Chris stumbled and broke the heel off one of his high-heeled patents. He swore, stopped, and said he would break off the other one to level himself up. I laughed, and set off towards the house a few steps ahead of him.

It was as if the bushes themselves erupted.

One moment I was walking unsuspectingly along, and the next I was being enmeshed in nets and ropes and being overwhelmed and pushed and dragged, not into the looming shadowy house but through some sort of rustic gate from the drive into a garden.

The garden, I was hazily aware, was lit by more festoons of fairy lights and by big multicoloured bulbs installed against many trees which, shining upwards, made canopies of illuminated branches and leaves; it was all strikingly theatrical, dramatically magnificent, a brilliant setting for a party.

No party that I'd been to before had started with one of the guests being tied to the trunk of a maple tree next to a bunch of red light bulbs that shone upwards into autumn-red leaves, creating a scarlet canopy above his head. My back was against the tree. There was rope round my ankles, and round my wrists, drawing them backwards, and - worst - round my neck.

At no party that I'd attended before had there been four familiar thugs as guests, one of them busy putting on boxing gloves.

Red leather boxing gloves.

The only other guests were Patsy and Surtees and Oliver Grantchester.

Surtees looked triumphant, Grantchester serious and Patsy astounded.

I looked round the garden for possible exits and could see precious few. There was a lawn ringed with bushes, lit on the garden side, shadowy beyond. There was a flower bed with straggling chrysanthemums. There was an ornamental goldfish pond with an artificial stream running down into it over a pile of rocks.

There was a big house to the left, mostly dark, but with a brightly lit conservatory facing the garden.

There was Oliver Grantchester.

Oliver Grantchester.

The one crucial piece of information I hadn't learned was that he had a place in the country half a mile along the road from Patsy's house. The only address and telephone number for Oliver Grantchester in Ivan's address book had been in London.

Audrey Newton had firmly pointed to Oliver Grantchester's sketched head as the person who had collected her brother on the day he left Wantage to go on holiday.

I'd known who would be looking for me, but not where.

There weren't swear words bad enough to describe my stupidity.

Patsy would never change. Why had I ever thought that she would?

I'd wanted to believe that she had. I'd wanted an end to the long pointless feud.

Serve me right.

Grantchester stood six feet away from me and said, 'Where is the Kinloch hilt?'

I looked at him in bewilderment. I could think of no reason why he would want to know. He made some sort of signal to the wearer of the boxing gloves, who hit me low down, in the abdomen, which hurt.

My neck jerked forwards against the rope. Dire.

Grantchester said, 'Where is the King Alfred Gold Cup?'

Golf bag. Locker. Club house. Scotland. Out of his grasp.

A bash in the ribs. Reverberations. Altogether too much, and quite likely only the beginning. Shit.

'Ivan sent you the Cup. Where is it?'

Ask Himself.

Another fast, hard, pin-pointed bash. Shudder country.

Where the hell, I wondered, was my bodyguard?

Surtees strode to Grantchester's side.

'Where's the horse?' he yelled. 'Make him tell you where he's put the horse.'

The thug with the gloves was the one who had been demanding 'Where is it?' at the bothy.

'Where's the horse?' Grantchester said.

I didn't tell him. Painful decision.

Surtees positively jumped up and down.

'Make him tell you. Hit him harder.'

I thought detachedly that I would quite likely prefer to die than give in to Surtees.

Oliver Grantchester hadn't the same priorities as Patsy's husband.

He said to me, 'Where's your mother?'

In Devon, I thought: thank God.

Bash.

He had to be mad, if he thought I would tell him.

'Where's Emily Cox?'

Safe. Same thing.

Bash.

'Where is Norman Quorn's sister?'

I was by then fairly breathless. It would have been difficult to tell him even if I'd wanted to.

He stepped forward to within three feet of me, and with quiet intensity said, 'Where's the list?'

The list.

The point of all the battering, I supposed, was to make it more likely that I would answer the one question that really mattered.

'Where's the list?'

He had never liked me, he had seen me always as a threat to his domination of Ivan. He had encouraged Patsy's obsessive suspicions of me. I remembered his dismay and fury when Ivan had given his powers of attorney to me, not to Patsy or himself. He hadn't wanted me looking into the brewery's affairs. He had been right to fear it.

His big body, his heavy personality faced me now with thunderous malevolence. He didn't care how much he hurt me. He was enjoying it. He might not be hitting me himself, but he was swaying in a sort of ecstasy as each blow landed. He wanted my surrender, but wanted it difficult; intended that I should crumble, but not too soon.

I saw the pleasure in his eyes. The full lips smiled. I hated him. Shook with hate.

'Tell me,' he said.

I saw it was my defeat he wanted almost as much as the list itself: and I saw also that he was wholly confident of achieving both. If I could deny him… then I would.

'Where's the list?'

The boxing gloves thudded here and there. Face, ribs, belly. Head. I lost count.

'Where's the list?'

Such a pretty garden, I groggily thought.

The punch-bag practice stopped. Grantchester went away. The four thugs stood around me watchfully, as if I could slide out of their ropes and knots, which I couldn't, but not for lack of trying.

Patsy's face swam into my close vision.

'What list?' she said.

It made no sense. Surely she knew what list.

I would have said she looked worried. Horrified even. But she'd lured me there. My own fault.

'Why,' she said, 'why did Oliver ask where your mother and Emily are?'

I dredged up an answer, 'How does he know they are not at home?' My face felt stiff. The rest just felt.

'Alexander,' Patsy said in distress, not working it out, 'whatever Oliver wants, for God's sake give it to him. This… this…' she gestured to my trussed state, and to the thugs,'… this is awful.'

I agreed with her. I also couldn't believe she didn't know what her friendly neighbourhood lawyer wanted. I'd done believing Patsy. Finished for life. Finished for what was left of life.

Oliver Grantchester was playing for millions, and boxing gloves were getting him nowhere. He returned from the direction of his house, pulling behind him a barbecue cooker on wheels.

Oh God, I thought. Oh no.

I can't do this. I'll tell him. I know I will. They're not my millions.

Grantchester took the grill grid off the barbecue and propped it against one of the wheeled legs. Then he went back into his bright conservatory and returned carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes and a bottle of lighter fuel. He poured briquettes from the bag into the fire-box of the barbecue and then poured the whole bottleful of lighter fuel over the briquettes.

He struck a match and tossed it onto the fuel.

Flame rushed upward in a roaring plume, scarlet and gold and eternally untamed. The flame was reflected in Grantchester's eyes, so that for a moment it looked as if the fire were inside his head, looking out.

Then, satisfied, he picked up the grill with a pair of long tongs and settled it in place, to get hot.

I could see the thugs' faces. They showed no surprise. One showed sickened revulsion, but still no surprise.

I thought: they've seen this before.

They'd seen Norman Quorn.

Norman Quorn… burned in a garden, with grass cuttings in his clothes…

Patsy looked merely puzzled. So did Surtees.

The briquettes flamed, heating up quickly.

I would tell him, I thought. Enough was enough. My entire body already hurt abominably. There was a point beyond which it wasn't sensible to go. There were out-of-date abstractions like the persistence of the human spirit, and they might be all right for paintings but didn't apply in pretty country gardens in the evening of the second Saturday in October.

Norman Quorn had burned down to his ribs, and died, and he hadn't told.

I wasn't Norman Quorn. I hadn't millions to lose. They were Patsy's millions. God damn her soul.

Grantchester waited with lip-licking anticipation for frightful ages while the heat built up, and when the briquettes glowed a bright searing red, he lifted the barred grill off the fire with his pair of long tongs and dropped it flat on the lawn, where it sizzled and singed the grass.

'You'll lie on that if you don't tell me,' he said. He was enjoying himself. 'Where's the list?'

Cussed, rebellious, stubborn… I might be all those by nature: but I knew I would tell him.

Defeat lay there at my feet, blackening the grass. Money was of no importance. The decision was a matter of will. Of pride, even. And such pride came too expensive.

Tell him… you have to.

'Where is it?' he said.

I meant to tell him. I tried to tell him. But when it came to the point, I couldn't.

So I burned.

Some of the marks will be there always, but I can't see them unless I look in a mirror.

I could hear someone screaming and I remembered Surtees promising 'next time you'll scream', but it wasn't I, after all, who was screaming; it was Patsy.

Her high urgent voice, screaming.

'No. No. You can't. For God's sake, stop it. Oliver. Surtees. You can't do this. Stop it. For God's sake. Stop it…'

The noise I made wasn't a scream. From deep inside, like an age-old recognition of a primeval torment, starting low in my gut and ending like a growl in the throat, the sound I heard in myself, that was at one with myself, that was all there was of existence, that unified every feeling, every nerve's message into one consuming elemental protest, that noise was a deep sort of groan.

I could hear him repeating, 'Where is it? Where is it?'

Irrelevant.

It all lasted, I dare say, not much more than a minute. Two minutes, perhaps.

Half a lifetime, condensed.

I'd gone beyond speech when the scene blew apart.

With crashes and bangs and shrieking metal the driving cab and entire front half of a large travelling coach smashed down the fence and gate between the drive and the garden. Out of the bus and onto the lawn poured a half-drunk mob of football supporters, all dressed in orange (it seemed) with orange scarves and heavy boots and raucous shouting voices.

'Where's the beer, then? Where's the beer?'

Scrambling through the demolished fence came more and more orange scarves. Hooligan faces. 'Where's the beer?'

The four thugs who'd been pinning down my arms and legs decided to quit and took their weight off me so that I was blessedly able to roll off the grill and lie face down on the cool grass: and a pair of long legs in black tights appeared in my limited field of vision, with a familiar voice above me saying, 'Jesus Christ, Al,' and I tried to say, 'What took you so long?' but it didn't come out.

The brightly lit garden went on fining with noise and orange scarves and demands for beer. Surrealism, I thought.

Chris went away and came back and poured a container of cold water over me, and squatted down beside me and said, 'Your sweater was smouldering, for God's sake,' and I agreed with him silently that water was better than fire any day.

'Al,' he said worriedly, 'are you OK?'

'Yuh.'

A goldfish flapped on the grass. Poor little bugger. A goldfish out of the pond. Pond water, that Chris had used.

Goldfish pond. Cold water.

Great idea.

I made an attempt to crawl and stagger there, and Chris, seeing the point, unwound the ropes from my arms and legs and neck and hooked an arm under my armpit and gave me a haul, so that somehow or other I crossed the short distance of grass and lay down full-length in the cold pond, my head using the surrounding stones like a pillow, leaves of waterlilies on my chest, the overall relief enormous.

'Did bloody Surtees do this?' Chris demanded with fury.

'Bloody Grantchester.'

He went away.

There were more people in the garden. Policemen. Uniforms. The monstrous front half of the coach rose over the scene like a giant incarnation of Chaos, yellow, white and silver with windows like eyes. I lay in the pond and watched the football fans scurry about looking for free beer and turning violent when they couldn't find any, and I watched the police slapping handcuffs on everyone moving, including the four thugs, who had over-estimated the window of escape, and I watched Patsy's bewilderment and Surtees's swings from glee to noncomprehension and back.

I heard one of the football crowd telling policemen that it was a girl who had stolen the coach from outside the pub where they had pulled up for some refreshment; a girl who had yelled that there was free beer at the party along the road, a girl - 'a bit of all right', 'a knock-out' - who'd said she was up for grabs for the quickest pair of boots after her into the garden.

When they'd drifted away, Chris came back.

'I caught bloody Grantchester trying to sneak out through the garage,' he said with satisfaction. 'He'll be going nowhere for a while.'

'Chris,' I said. 'Get lost.'

'Do you mean it?'

'The police are looking for the young woman who drove the bus.'

A shiny object splashed down onto my chest.

A set of brass knuckles, gleaming wetly. I swept them off my chest into deeper, concealing water.

Chris's hand briefly squeezed my shoulder and I had only one more glimpse of his dark shape as he passed from the lit side of the bushes into the shadows.

The farce continued. A large uniformed policeman told me to get out of the pond, and when I failed to obey he clicked a pair of handcuffs on my wrists and walked off, deaf to protests.

It gradually appeared that a couple of people in the garden were neither uniformed police nor uniformed fanatics but the law in plain clothes or, in other words, tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.

The artificial waterfall splashed cold water over my throbbing head. I lifted my handcuffed hands and steered the water delicately over my face.

A new voice said, 'Get out of the pond.'

I opened my closed eyes. The voice held police authority. Just behind him stood Patsy.

He was a middle-aged man, not unkind, but my occupancy of the pond, the length of my wet hair and the presence of the handcuffs could hardly have been encouraging.

'Get out,' he said. 'Stand up.'

'I don't know if he can,' Patsy said worriedly. "They were hitting him…'

'Who were?'

She looked over to where bunches of handcuffed figures sat gloomily on the grass. No beer. No fun at all.

'And they burnt him,' Patsy said. 'I couldn't stop them.'

The policeman looked at the barbecue with its glowing coals.

'No,' Patsy said, pointing, 'on that grill thing, over there.'

One of the uniformed policemen bent down to pick the grill up and snatched his hand away, cursing and sucking his fingers.

I laughed.

Patsy said as if shattered, 'Alexander, it's not funny.'

The policeman said, 'Mrs Benchmark, do you know this man?'

'Of course I know him.' She stared down at me. I looked expressionlessly back, resigned to the usual abuse. 'He's… he's my brother,' she said.

It came nearer to breaking me up than all Grantchester's attentions.

She saw that it did, and it made her cry.

Patsy, my implacable enemy, wept.

She brushed the tears away brusquely and told the policeman she would point out my attackers among the football crowd, and when they moved off their place was taken by Surtees, who was very far from a change of heart and had clearly enjoyed the earlier entertainment.

'Where's the horse?' he said. He sneered. His feet quivered, I thought he might kick my head.

I said with threat, 'Surtees, any more shit from you and I'll tell Patsy where you go on Wednesday afternoons. I'll tell her the address of the little house on the outskirts of Guildford and I'll tell her the name of the prostitute who lives there, and I'll tell her what sort of sex you go there for.'

Surtees's mouth opened in absolute horror. When he could control his throat, he stuttered.

'How… how… how…? I'll deny it.'

I said, smiling, 'I paid a skinhead to follow you.'

His eyes seemed to bulge.

'So you keep your hands to yourself as far as I'm concerned, and your mouth shut, Surtees,' I said, 'and if you're still what Patsy wants, I won't disillusion her.'

He looked sick. He physically backed away from me, as if I'd touched him with the plague. I gazed up peacefully at the bright coloured lights in the trees. Life had its sweet moments, after all.

No one had actually seen Oliver Grantchester being attacked and tied up securely in his own garage. He had been swiftly knocked out and had seen no one. He was found, when he recovered consciousness, to be suffering not only from a blow to the back of the skull but also from a broken nose, a broken jaw, and extensive damage to his lower abdomen and genitals, as if he'd been well kicked while knowing nothing about it.

Whoever would do such a thing! Tut tut.

The police put him in a prison hospital and provided him with a doctor.

Patsy organised things, which she was good at.

Patsy organised me into a private hospital that specialised in burns with an elderly woman doctor able to deal with anything on a Saturday evening.

'Dear me,' she said. 'Nasty. Very painful. But you're a healthy young man. You'll heal.'

She wrapped me in bio-synthetic burn-healing artificial skin and large bandages and in her grandmotherly way enquired, 'And a couple of cracked ribs, too, wouldn't you say?'

'I would.'

She smiled. 'I'll see that you sleep.'

She efficiently drugged me out until six in the morning, when I phoned Chris's bleeper and got his return call five minutes later.

'Where the hell are you?' he demanded aggrievedly.

I told him.

'That hospital's strictly for millionaires,' he objected.

'Then get me out. Bring some clothes.'

He brought my own clothes, the ones he'd borrowed for his departure from the wake at Park Crescent three days earlier, and he arrived to find me standing by the window watching the grey dawn return to the perilous earth.

'Hospital gowns,' he said, as I turned to greet him, 'shouldn't be visited even on the damned.'

'They cut my clothes off last night.'

'Sue them.'

'Mm.'

'To be frank,' he said, almost awkwardly, 'I didn't expect you to be on your feet.'

'More comfortable,' I said succinctly. "That bus, if I may say so, was brilliant.'

He grinned. 'Yes, it was, wasn't it?'

'Go on then, tell me all.'

He dumped the carrier bag with the clothes in and came over to join me by the window, the familiar face alight with enjoyment. High cheekbones, light brown hair, bright brown eyes, natural air of impishness. Solemnity sat unnaturally upon him, and he couldn't tell me what had happened without making light-hearted jokes about it.

'Those thugs that jumped out of the bushes at you, they were the real McCoy. Brutal bastards. There was no mistaking they were the ones I'd been looking for. And to be honest, Al, I couldn't handle four of them at once on my own, any more than you could.'

I nodded, understanding.

'So,' Chris said, 'I thought the best thing to do would be to find out how big a posse would be needed to round up the outlaws, so to speak, so I shunted round in the shelter of a sort of high wooden fence that's all round that garden, until I could see through the bushes. All those lights… and there they were, your four thugs, tying you up to that tree and bashing you about, and there were three other people there too, which made seven, and I couldn't manage seven…'

'No,' I said.

'There was that big fat slob, the lawyer from your stepfather's funeral.'

'Yes,' I said.

'And bloody Surtees…'

'Yes,' I said again.

'And his wife.'

I nodded.

'So,' Chris said again, 'I had to go for reinforcements, and I ran down the road to the pub and used their telephone and told the police there was a riot going on, and those bastards told me there were a dozen riots going on every Saturday evening, and they wanted to know where exactly, so I asked the barman in the pub if he knew whose house it was with all those lights in the garden, and he said it belongs to Mr Oliver Grantchester, a very well-known lawyer, so I told the police, but they didn't show up, or anything, and to tell you the truth, mate, I was jumping up and down a bit by that time.'

So would I have been, I thought.

'So then,' Chris said, 'this bloody big coachload of fervent psychos in orange scarves invaded the bar, and I thought then, "manna dropped from heaven", so I went outside where half of them were still in the bus, and I yelled at them that there was free beer down the road at a party, and I just got into the driver's seat and drove that damned jumbo straight through Grantchester's fence into the garden.'

'It did the trick,' I said, smiling.

'Yes, but… my God…!'

'Best forgotten,' I said.

'I'll never forget it,' he said, 'and nor will you.'

'You came, though.'

'So did the bloody police, in the end. Too many of them.'

'What exactly,' I asked him contentedly, 'did you do to Oliver Grantchester?'

'Kicked him a good many times in the goolies.' Chris had been wearing, I remembered, pointed black patent shoes, sharp enough even without heels. 'And I smashed him round the face a bit with the hard knuckles. I mean, there's villains, and there's villains. Boxing gloves is one thing, but burning people… that's diabolical. I could have killed him. Lucky I didn't.'

'The police asked me,' I said, 'if I knew who had tied him up. I said how could I possibly know anything. I was lying in the pond.'

Chris laughed. 'I'll work for you any time,' he said. 'Attending to Grantchester will be extra.'

Patsy arrived silently while I was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in trousers and shirt, head hanging, feeling rotten. Of all the people I would have preferred not to see me like that, she would have been tops.

'Go away,' I said, and she went, and the next person through the door was a nurse with a syringeful of relief.

Around mid-morning I had a visit from a Detective Inspector Vernon, whom I'd met, it transpired, in the garden.

'Mrs Benchmark said you were dressed,' he remarked, not shaking hands.

'Do you know her well?'

'She's a patron of local police charities.'

'Oh.'

He joined me by the window. There were scudding clouds in the sky. A good day for mountains.

'Mrs Benchmark says that Mr Grantchester, who is another of our patrons, was instructing four other men to ill-treat you.'

'You could put it like that,' I agreed.

He was a bulky short man, going grey: never, at that rank, at that age, going to climb high in police hierarchy, but maybe a more down-to-earth and dogged investigator because of it.

'Can you tell me why?' he said.

'You'll have to ask Mr Grantchester.'

'His lower jaw's badly broken. This morning he can't speak. He's badly bruised in the abdomen, too. Doubled over. Black and blue.'

Vernon asked me again if I knew who had attacked him. I'd been in the pond, I repeated. As he knew.

I said helpfully, however, that the same four thugs had battered me earlier in Scotland, and told him where I'd given a statement to the police there. I suggested that he might also talk to Chief Inspector Reynolds of the Leicestershire police about people being burned on barbecue grills on mown grass. Vernon wrote everything down methodically. If I had recovered enough, he said, he would appreciate it if I would attend his police station the following morning. They could send an unmarked car for me, he offered.

'See you down the nick,' Chris would have said, but all I raised was 'OK'.

The day passed somehow, and the night.

Bruises blackened. The cracked ribs were all on my right side: a south-paw puncher's doing.

The burns got inspected again. No sign of infection. Very lucky, I was told, considering the unsterile nature of goldfish ponds.

On Monday morning I discharged myself from the hospital against their advice. I had too much to do, I said.

A plain-clothes police car came to transport me to Vernon's official stamping ground, where I was instantly invited to look through a window into a brightly lit room, and to say if I'd seen any of eight men at any earlier time in my life.

'No problem. Numbers one, three, seven and eight.'

'They deny they touched you.'

I gave Vernon a glowering come-off-it glare. 'You saw them yourself in that garden. You arrested them there.'

'I didn't see them in the act of committing grievous bodily harm.'

I closed my eyes briefly, took a grip on my pain-driven temper, and said, on a deep breath, 'Number three wore boxing gloves and caused the damage you can see in my face. He is left-handed. The others watched. All four assisted in compelling me to lie on that hot grill. All four also attacked me outside my home in Scotland. I don't know their names, but I do know their faces.'

It had seemed to me on other occasions that the great British police force not only never apologised, but also never saw the need for it: however, Inspector Vernon ushered me politely into a bare interview room and offered me coffee, which in his terms came into the category of tender loving care.

'Mrs Benchmark couldn't identify them for certain,' he observed.

I asked if he had talked to Sergeant Derrick in Scotland, and to Chief Inspector Reynolds in Leicestershire. They had been off duty, he said.

Bugger weekends.

Could I use a telephone, I asked.

Who did I want to talk to? Long-distance calls were not free.

'A doctor in London,' I said.

I reached, miraculously, Keith Robbiston; alert, in a hurry.

'Could I have a handful of your wipe-out pills?' I asked.

'What's happened?' he said.

'I got bashed again.'

'More thugs?'

'The same ones.'

'Oh… as bad as before?'

'Well, actually… worse.'

'How much worse?'

'Cracked ribs and some burns.'

'Burns?'

'Nothing to do with "Auld Lang Syne".'

He laughed, and talked to Inspector Vernon, and said my mother would kill him if he failed me, and pills would be motor-biked door to door within two hours.

If nothing else, Keith Robbiston's speed impressed the Inspector. He went off to telephone outside. When the coffee came, it was in a pot, on a tray.

I sat and waited for immeasurable time, thinking. When Vernon returned I told him that number seven in the line-up had been wearing what looked like my father's gold watch, stolen from me in Scotland.

'Also,' I said, 'number seven didn't relish the burning.'

That won't excuse him.'

'No… but if you could make it worth his while, he might tell you what happened to a Norman Quorn.'

The Inspector didn't say, 'Who?' He went quietly away. A uniformed constable brought me a sandwich lunch.

My pills arrived. Things got better.

After another couple of hours Inspector Vernon came into the room, sat down opposite me across the table and told me that the following conversation was not taking place. Positively not. It was his private thanks. Understood?

'OK,' I said.

'First of all, can you identify your father's gold watch?'

'It has an engraving on the back, "Alistair from Vivienne".'

Vernon faintly smiled. In all the time I spent with him it was the nearest he came to showing pleasure.

'Number seven in the line-up may be known as Bernie,' he said. 'Bernie, as you saw, is a worried man.' He paused. 'Can I totally trust you not to repeat this? Can I rely on you?'

I said dryly, 'To the hilt,' which he didn't understand beyond the simple words, but he took them as I meant them: utterly. 'But,' I added, 'why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?'

He spent a moment thinking, then said, 'In Britain one isn't, as you may or may not know, allowed to make bargains with people accused of crimes. One can't promise a light sentence in return for information. That's a myth. You can persuade someone unofficially to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like in this case, actual bodily harm, rather than grievous bodily harm, GBH, which is a far more serious crime, and can carry a long jail sentence. But some authorities can be perverse, and if they suspect a deal has been struck, they're perfectly capable of upsetting it. Follow?'

'I follow.'

'Also the business of what is and what isn't admissible evidence is a minefield.'

'So I've heard.'

'If you hadn't told me to ask Bernie questions about Norman Quorn I wouldn't have thought of doing it. But Bernie split wide open, and now my superiors here are patting me on the back and thinking of going to the Crown Prosecution Service - who, of course, decide whether or not a trial should take place - not with a GBH involving you, but with a charge against Oliver Grantchester for manslaughter. The manslaughter of Norman Quorn.'

'Hell's teeth.'

'At this point in such proceedings everyone gets very touchy indeed about who knows what, in order not to jeopardise any useful testimony. It wouldn't do for you to have heard Bernie's confession. It could have compromised the case. So I'll tell you what he said… but I shouldn't.'

'You're safe.'

He nevertheless looked around cautiously, as if listeners had entered unseen.

'Bernie said,' he finally managed, 'that they - the four you call the thugs - all go to a gym in London, east of the City, which Oliver Grantchester has been visiting for fitness sessions for the past few years. Grantchester goes on the treadmill, lifts a few weights and so on, but isn't a boxer.'

'No.'

'So when he wanted a rough job done, he recruited your four thugs. Bernie was willing. The up-front money was good. So was the pay-off afterwards, though the job went wrong.'

'Quorn died.'

Vernon nodded.

'Grantchester,' he said, 'told them to turn up at his house in the country. He told them the name of the village and said they would know his house because it had Christmas lights all over the driveway, and he would turn them on, even though it would be daylight and not Christmas. Grantchester arrived at his house with an older man, who was Norman Quorn, and he took him through the gate in the fence into the garden. The four thugs tied the man - whose name they didn't yet know - to the same tree as they tied you, but they didn't belt him, like you. Grantchester lit the barbecue and told Quorn he would burn him if he didn't come across with some information.'

Vernon paused, then went on. 'Bernie didn't know what the information was, and still doesn't. Quorn was shitting himself, Bernie says, and Grantchester waited until the fire was very hot, and then he threw the grill onto the grass, and told Quorn he would lie on it until he told him - Grantchester - what he wanted to know. Quorn told him he would tell him at once, but Grantchester got the four thugs to throw Quorn onto the grill anyway, and hold him there, and although he was screaming and hollering that he would tell, Grantchester wouldn't let him up, and seemed to be enjoying it, and when he did let him up, Quorn dropped down dead.'

Vernon stopped. I listened in fascinated horror.

'Bernie,' Vernon said, 'was near to puking, describing it.'

'I'm not surprised.'

'Grantchester was furious. There was this dead body on the ground and he hadn't found out what he wanted to know. He got Bernie and the others to put Quorn into the boot of his car in the garage, and in the house he made them put their hands round empty glasses, so that he had all their fingerprints, and he threatened that if they ever spoke of what they'd seen they would be in mortal trouble. Then he paid them and told them to go away, which they did. Bernie doesn't know what Grantchester did with Quorn's body.'

After a while I said, 'Did you ask Bernie about Scotland?'

Vernon nodded. 'Grantchester paid them again to go to your house and beat you up a bit until you gave them something to give to him. He didn't tell them what it was. He just told them to say, "Where is it?" to you, and you would know what it was. Bernie said you didn't give them anything, and Grantchester was furious, and told them they should have made sure you were dead before they threw you down the mountain.'

'Well, well,' I said.

'Bernie says he complained that beating up people was one thing, but murder was another, and Grantchester threatened that Bernie would do as he was told, because of his fingerprints.'

'Bernie is simple,' I said.

Vernon nodded. 'Just as well, from our point of view. Anyway, the pay was good, so when Grantchester told them to turn up again at his house the day before yesterday, they did.'

'Yes.'

'Grantchester told them that you would be coming, and that they were to tie you to the same tree, like Quorn before, only this time there was no talk of burning.' He paused. The one with the boxing gloves is known as Jazzo. He thought you got knocked out too soon in Scotland. He told Grantchester you wouldn't like another dose. He said he wouldn't knock you out and he would guarantee you would answer any question you were asked.'

I listened without comment.

'Of course, it didn't turn out that way,' Vernon said. 'So Grantchester brought out his barbecue again, because it had worked the first time, and that's when Bernie's bottle deserted him, he says.'

'It didn't stop him sitting on my legs,' I remarked with satire.

'He didn't mention sitting on your legs.'

'You don't say.'

'He said Mrs Benchmark was there, and she was screaming and screaming to Grantchester to stop, and he wouldn't. I asked Bernie if you were screaming too.'

'That's an unfair bloody question.'

Vernon gave me a sideways glance. 'He said the only noise you made was a sort of moan.'

Charming, I thought.

'And that's when the bus crashed into the garden.' Vernon paused and looked at me straight. 'Is Bernie's account of things accurate?'

'As far as I'm concerned, yes.'

Vernon stood up and walked around the room twice, as if disturbed.

'Mrs Benchmark,' he said, 'called you her brother, but you're not, are you?'

'Her father was married to my mother. He died a week ago.'

Vernon nodded. 'Mrs Benchmark is devastated by what happened in the garden. She doesn't understand it. The poor lady is very upset.'

I again made no comment.

'She said your girlfriend was there. We released all the football supporters yesterday, but half of them agreed that the bus was driven from the pub to the garden by a young woman. Was she your girlfriend?'

I said, 'She is a friend. She was walking a few steps behind me when the thugs hustled me into the garden. They didn't notice her. She told me yesterday that when she saw what was happening she ran down to the pub and called the police. Then, it seems, the busload of happy revellers arrived, so she drove the bus to the rescue, for which I'll always be grateful.'

'In other words,' Vernon said, 'you are not going to get her into trouble.'

'Quite right.'

He gave me a long slow look. 'And you're not going to give us her name and address.'

'She lives with a man,' I said, 'who wouldn't like to see her in court. You don't really need her, do you?'

'Probably not.'

'If there was any damage to the bus,' I said, 'I'll pay for it.'

Vernon went over to the door, opened it, and shouted to someone outside to bring tea. When he came back he said, 'We obtained a warrant yesterday to search Grantchester's house.'

He waited for me to ask if he'd found anything useful, so I did.

He didn't answer straightforwardly. He said, 'The policeman in Scotland sent us faxes today of the drawings you did of the thugs the day they attacked you at your home. Bernie almost collapsed when we showed them to him. Your policeman also sent the list of things that were stolen from you. In Grantchester's house we found four paintings of golf courses.'

'You didn't!'

Vernon nodded. 'Your policeman, Sergeant Berrick, said that the pictures had stickers on the backs, and if other stickers had been stuck over them, your name would still be visible under X-ray. So this afternoon we X-rayed the stickers.' He almost smiled. 'Your Scottish policeman said that you promised to paint a portrait of his wife if he helped to find your pictures.'

'I did,' I said. 'And I will.'

Vernon suggested, 'Mine, too?'

'A pleasure,' I said.