Twice Shy

CHAPTER 12

I put my hand on Cassie's breast, and she said 'No, William. No.'

'Why not?' I said.

'Because it's never good for me, twice, so soon. You know that.'

'Come on,' I said.

'No.'

'You're lazy,' I said.

'And you're greedy.' She picked my hand off and gave it back to me.

I replaced it. 'At least, let me hold you,' I said.

'No.' She threw my hand off again. 'With you, one thing leads to another. I'm going to get some orange juice and run the bath, and if you're not careful, you'll be late.'

I rolled onto my back and watched her walk about the bedroom, a tall thin girl with too few curves and very long feet. Seen like that in all her angular nakedness, she still had the self-possessed quality which had first attracted me: a natural apartness, a lack of cling. Her self-doubts, if any, were well hidden, even from me. She went downstairs and came back carrying two glasses of orange.

'William,' she said, 'stop staring.'

'I like to.'

She walked to the bathroom to turn on the taps and came back brushing her teeth.

'It's seven o'clock,' she said.

'So I've noticed.'

'You'll lose that cushy job of yours if you're not out on the gallops in ten minutes.'

'Twenty will do.'

I rose up, however, and pinched the bath first, drinking the orange juice as I went. Count your blessings, I said to myself, soaping. Count Cassandra Morris, a better girl than I'd ever had before; seven months bedded, growing more essential every day. Count the sort of job that no one could expect to be given at twenty-nine. Count enough money, for once, to buy a car that wasn't everyone's cast-off held together by rust and luck.

The old ache to be a jockey was pretty well dead, but I supposed there would always be regret. It wasn't as if I'd never ridden in races; I had, from sixteen to twenty, first as an amateur, then a professional, during which time I'd won eighty-four steeplechases, twenty-three hurdle races, and wretchedly cursed my unstoppably lengthening body. At six foot one I'd broken my leg in a racing fall, been imprisoned in traction for three months, and grown two more inches in bed.

It had been practically the end. There had been very tall jump jockeys in the past, but I'd progressively found that even if I starved to the point of weakness I couldn't keep my weight reliably below eleven stone. Trainers began saying I was too tall, too heavy, sorry lad, and employing someone else. So at twenty I'd got myself a job as an assistant trainer, and at twenty-three I'd worked for a bloodstock agent, and at twenty-six on a stud farm, which kept me off the racecourse too much. At twenty-seven I'd been employed in a sort of hospital for sick racehorses which went out of business because too many owners preferred to shoot their liabilities, and after that there had been a spell of selling horse cubes, and then a few months in the office of a bloodstock auctioneer, which had paid well but bored me to death; and each time between jobs I'd spent the proceeds of the last one in wandering round the world, drifting homewards when the cash ran out and casting around for a new berth.

It had been at one of the points of no prospects that Jonathan had sent the cable.

'Catch the next flight. Good job in English racing possible if you interview here immediately. Jonathan.'

I'd turned up on his Californian doorstep sixteen hours later and early the next morning he had sent me off to see 'a man I met at a party'. A man, it transpired, of middle height, middle years and middling grey hair: a man I knew instantly by sight. Everyone in racing, worldwide, knew him by sight. He ran his racing as a big business, taking his profits in the shape of bloodstock, selling his stallions for up to a hundred times more than they'd earned on the track.

'Luke Houston,' he said neutrally, extending his hand.

'Yes, sir,' I said, retrieving some breath. 'Er… William Derry.'

He offered me breakfast on a balcony overlooking the Pacific, eating grapefruit and boiled eggs and giving me smiling genial glances which were basically as casual as X-rays.

'Warrington Marsh, my racing manager in England, had a stroke four days ago,' he said. 'Poor guy, he's doing well- I have bulletins every a.m.- but it is going to be some time, a long time, I'm afraid, before he'll be active again.' He gestured to my untouched breakfast. 'Eat your toast.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Tell me why I should give you his job. Temporarily, of course.'

Good grief, I thought. I hadn't the experience or the connections of the stricken revered maestro. 'I'd work hard,' I said.

'You know what it entails?'

'I've seen Warrington Marsh everywhere, on the racecourse, at the sales. I know what he does, but not the extent of his authority.'

He cracked his second egg. 'Your brother says you've gotten a lot of general know-how. Tell me about it.'

I listed the jobs, none of which sounded any more impressive than they had in fact been.

He said, 'College degrees?' pleasantly.

'No, I left school at seventeen, and didn't go to university.'

'Private income?' he said. 'Any?'

'My godfather left some money for my schooling. There's still enough for food and clothes. Not enough to live on.'

He drank some coffee and hospitably poured me a second cup.

'Do you know which trainers I have horses with in the British Isles?'

'Yes, sir. Shell, Thompson, Miller, and Sandlache in England and Donavan in Ireland.'

'Call me Luke,' he said. 'I prefer it.'

'Luke,' I said.

He stirred sweetener into his coffee.

'Could you handle the finance?' he said. ' Warrington always has full responsibility. Do millions frighten you?'

I looked out at the vast blue ocean and told the truth. 'I think they do in a way, yes. It's too easy in the upper reaches to think of a nought or two as not mattering one way or another.'

'You need to spend to buy good horses,' he said. 'Could you do it?'

'Yes.'

'Go on,' he said mildly.

'Buying potentially good horses isn't the problem. Looking at a great yearling, seeing it move, knowing its breeding is as near perfect as you can predict, and being able to afford it, that's almost easy. It's picking the excellent from among the second rank and the unknowns, that's where the judgement comes in.'

'Could you guarantee that every horse you bought for me, or advised my trainers to buy, would win?'

'No, I couldn't,' I said. 'They wouldn't.'

'What-percentage would you expect to win?'

'About fifty per cent. Some would never race, others would disappoint.'

He unaggressively, quietly, slowly and without pressure asked me questions for almost an hour, sorting out what I'd done, what I knew, how I felt about taking ultimate powers of decision over trainers who were older than myself, how I felt about dealing with the racing authorities, what I'd learnt about book-keeping, banking and money markets, whether I could evaluate veterinarian and nutritive advice. By the end I felt inside out; as if no cranny of my mind stayed gently unprobed. He would choose someone older, I thought.

'How do you feel,' he said finally, 'about a steady job, nine to five, weekends off, pension at the end of it?'

I shook my head from deep instinct, without thinking it out. 'No,' I said.

'That came from the heart, fella,' he observed.

'Well

'I'll give you a year and a ceiling beyond which you're not to spend. I'll be looking over your shoulder, but I won't interfere unless you get in a fix. Want to take it?'

I drew a deep breath and said, 'Yes.'

He leaned smilingly forward to shake my hand. 'I'll send you' a contract,' he said, 'but go right on home now and take over at once. Things can fall apart too fast with no one in charge. So you go straight to Warrington 's house, see his wife Nonie, I'll call her you're coming, and you operate from the office he's gotten there until you find a place of your own. Your brother told me you're a wanderer, but I don't mind that.' He smiled again. 'Never did like tame cats.'

Like so much else in American life the contract, when it swiftly followed me over the Pond, was in complete contrast to the relaxed approach of the man who'd offered it. It set out in precise terms what I must do, what I had discretion to do, what I must not do. It stated terms of reference I'd never have thought of. He had given me a great deal of freedom in some ways and none at all in others; but that, I supposed, was fair enough. He wouldn't want to stake his whole British operation on an unknown factor without enforceable safeguards. I took it to a solicitor who read it and whistled and said it had been drawn up by corporation lawyers who were used to munching managers as snacks.

'But do I sign it?' I said.

'If you want the job, yes. It's tough, but as far as I can see, fair.'

That had been eight months ago. I had come home to widespread and understandable disbelief that such a plum should have fallen my way. I had survived Nonie Marsh's resentment and Warrington 's incoherent unhelpfulness; had sold several of Luke's unpromising two-year-olds without great loss, had cajoled the trainers into provisionally accepting me and done nothing sweat-makingly disastrous. Despite all the decisions and responsibility, I'd enjoyed every minute.

Cassie appeared in the doorway.

'Aren't you going to get out of that bath?' she demanded. 'Just sitting there smiling.'

'Life's good.'

'And you'll be late.'

I stood up in the water and as she watched me straighten she said automatically, 'Mind your head.' I stepped out onto the floor, and kissed her, dripping down her neck.

'For God's sake, get dressed,' she said. 'And you need a shave.' She gave me a towel. 'The coffee's hot, and we're out of milk.'

I flung on a few clothes and went downstairs, dodging beams and low doorways on the way. The cottage we'd rented in the village of Six Mile Bottom (roughly six miles south of Newmarket) had been designed for seventeenth-century man, who hadn't suffered the dietetic know-how of the twentieth. And would seven feet, I wondered, ducking into the kitchen, be considered normal in the twenty-fifth?

We had lived in the cottage all summer and in spite of its low ceilings it suited us fine. There were apples now in the garden, and mists in the mornings, and sleepy wasps trying to find warm cracks in the eaves. Red tiled floors and rugs downstairs, dining-room surrendered to office, sitting-room cosy round an as yet untried hearth; red-checked curtains, rocking chairs, corn dollies and soft lights. A townspeople's country toy, but enough, I sometimes thought, to make one want to put down roots.

Bananas Frisby had found it for us. Bananas, long-time friend, who kept a pub in the village. I'd called in there one day on my way back to Newmarket and told him I was stuck for somewhere to live.

'What's wrong with your old boat?'

'I've grown out of it.'

He gave me a slow glance. 'Mentally?'

'Yeah. I've sold it. And I've met a girl.'

'And this one,' he suggested, 'isn't ecstatic about rubbing down dead varnish?'

'Far from.'

'I'll keep it in mind,' he said, and indeed he called me a week later at Warrington's house and said there was a tarted-up cottage down the road from him that I could go and look at: the London-based owners didn't want to sell but could do with some cash, and they'd be willing to let it to someone who wouldn't stay for ever.

'I told them you'd the wanderlust of an albatross,' he said. 'I know them, they're nice people, don't let me down.'

Bananas personally owned his almost equally old pub, which was very slowly crumbling under his policy of neglect. Bananas had no family, no heirs, no incentive to preserve his worldly goods; so when each new patch of damp appeared inside his walls he bought a luxurious green potted plant to hide it. Since I'd known him, the shiny-leafed camouflage had multiplied from three to eight: and there was a vine climbing now through the windows. If anyone ever remarked about the dark patches on the walls, Bananas said the plants had caused them, and strangers never realised it was the other way round.

Bananas' main pride and joy was the small restaurant, next door to the bar, in which he served cuisine minceur of such perfection that half the passing jockeys of England ate there religiously. It had been over his dried, crisp, indescribable roast duck that I'd first met him, and like a mark well hooked had become an addict. Couldn't count the delices I'd paid for since.

He was already up as usual when I waved to him on my way to the gallops: sweeping out, cleaning up, opening his windows wide to get rid of the overnight fug. A fat man himself, he nonetheless had infinite energy, and ran the whole place with the help of two women, one in the bar and one in the kitchen, both of whom he bossed around like a feudal lord. Betty in the kitchen cooked stolidly under his eagle eye and Bessie in the bar served drinks with speed bordering on sleight-of-hand. Bananas was head-waiter and every other sort of waiter, collecting orders, delivering food, presenting bills, cleaning and relaying tables, all with a deceptive show of having all day to chat. I'd watched him at it so often that I knew his system; he practically never wasted time by going into the kitchen. Food appeared from Betty through a vast serving hatch shielded from the public view, and dirty dishes disappeared down a gentle slide.

'Who washes up?' I'd said once in puzzlement.

'I do,' Bananas said. 'After closing time I feed it all through the washer.'

'Don't you ever sleep?'

'Sleep's boring.'

He needed, it seemed, only four hours a night.

'And why work so hard? Why not have more help?'

He looked at me pityingly. 'Staff cause as much work as they do,' he said. And I'd found out later that he closed the restaurant every year towards the end of November and took off to the West Indies, returning in late March when the Flat racing stirred back to life. He hated the cold, he said: worked at a gallop for eight months for four months' palm trees and sun.

That morning on the Limekilns, Simpson Shell was working his best young prospect and looking smug. The eldest of Luke Houston's five trainers, he had been resigned to me least and still had hang-ups which showed on his face every day.

'Morning, William,' he said, frowning.

'Morning, Sim.' I watched him with the rangy colt upon whom the Houston hope of a classic next season was faintly pinned. 'He's moving well,' I said.

'He always does.' The voice was slighting and impatient. I smiled to myself. Neither compliments nor soft soap, he was saying, were going to change his opinion of the upstart who had overruled him in the matter of selling two two-year-olds. He had told me he disagreed strongly with my weeding-out policy, even though I'd put it to him beforehand and discussed every dud to be discarded. ' Warrington never did that,' he'd thundered, and he'd warned me he was writing to Luke to complain.

I never heard the result. Either he'd never written or Luke had backed me up; but it had consolidated his Derry-wards hostility, not least because although I had saved Luke Houston a stack of pointless training fees I had at the same time deprived Simpson Shell. He was waiting, I knew, for the duds to win for their new owners so that he could crow, and it was my good luck that so far they hadn't.

Like all Luke's trainers, he trained for many other owners besides. Luke's horses at present constituted about a sixth of his string, which was too high a percentage for him to risk losing them altogether: so he was civil to me, but only just.

I asked him about a filly who had had some heat in her leg the previous evening, and he grumpily said it was better. He hated me to take a close interest in his eight Houston horses, yet I guessed that if I didn't, another letter would be winging to California complaining that I was neglecting my duties. Sim Shell, I thought ruefully, couldn't be pleased.

Over in the Bury Road, Mort Miller, younger, neurotic, fingers snapping like firecrackers, told me that Luke's ten darlings were eating well and climbing the walls with eagerness to slaughter the opposition. Mort had considered the sale of three no-gooders a relief, saying he hated the lazy so-and-sos and grudged them their oats. Mort's horses were always as strung up as he was, but they certainly won when it mattered.

I dropped in on Mort most days because it was he, for all his positive statements, who in fact asked my opinion most.

Once a week, usually fitting in with race meetings, I visited the other two trainers, Thompson and Sandlache, who lived thirty miles from each other on the Berkshire Downs, and about once a month I spent a couple of days with Donavan in Ireland. With them all, I had satisfactory working arrangements, they on their part admitting that the two-year-olds I'd got rid of were of no benefit to themselves, and I promising that I would spend the money I'd saved on the training fees on extra yearlings in October.

I would be sorry, I thought, when my year was over.

Driving home from Mort's, I stopped in the town to collect a radio I'd been having repaired, and again to fill up with petrol, and again at Bananas' pub to pick up some beer.

Bananas was in the kitchen prodding some marinating veal. Opening time still lay an hour ahead. Everything in the place was gleaming and fresh and the plants grew damply in their pots.

'There was a fellow looking for you,' Bananas said.

'What sort of fellow?'

'Big man. Didn't know him. I told him where your cottage was.'

He scowled at Betty, who was obliviously peeling grapes. 'I told him you were out.'

'Did he say what he wanted?'

'Nope.'

He shed an apron and took his bulk into the bar. 'Too early for you?' he said, easing behind the counter.

'Sort of.'

He nodded and methodically assembled his usual breakfast; a third of a tumbler of brandy topped up with two scoops of vanilla-walnut ice cream.

'Cassie went off to work,' he said, reaching for a spoon.

'You don't miss much.'

He shrugged. 'You can see that yellow car a mile off, and I was out front cleaning the windows.' He stirred the ice cream into the brandy and with gourmand enjoyment shovelled the first instalment into his mouth. 'That's better,' he said.

'It's no wonder you're fat.'

He merely nodded. He didn't care. He told me once that his size made his fat customers feel better and spend more, and that his fat customers in search of a miracle outnumbered the thin.

He was a natural eccentric, himself seeing nothing unusual in anything he did. In various late-night sessions, he'd unbuttoned a little of his inner self, and under the surface geniality I'd had glimpses of a deep pessimism, a moroseness which looked with despair at the inability of the human race to live harmoniously on the beautiful earth. He had no politics, no god, no urge to agitate. People, he said, were known to starve on rich fertile tropical earth; people stole their neighbours' lands; people murdered people from racial hate; people tortured and murdered in the name of freedom. It sickened him, he said. It had been going on from pre-history, and it would go on until the vindictive ape was wiped out.

'But you yourself seem happy enough,' I'd once said.

He looked at me darkly. 'You're a bird. Always on the wing. You'd be a sparrowhawk if you hadn't such long legs.'

'And you?'

'The only option is suicide,' he said. 'But right now it's not necessary.' He'd deftly poured himself another brandy, and lifted the glass in a sort of salute. 'Here's to civilisation, damn it.'

His real fore-names, written over the pub doorway, were John James, but his nickname was a pudding. 'Bananas Frisby', a hot fluffy confection of eggs, rum, bananas and orange, was an item nearly always on his menu, and 'Bananas' he himself had become. It suited his outer persona well, but his inner, not at all.

'You know what?' he said.

'What?'

'I'm growing a beard.'

I looked at the faint shadow on the dark jaw. 'It needs compost,' I said.

'Very funny. The days of the big fat slob are over. What you see is the start of the big fat distinguished innkeeper.' He took a large spoonful of ice cream and drank some of the liquid as a chaser, wiping the resulting white moustache off on the back of his hand.

He wore his usual working clothes: open-necked shirt, creaseless grey flannels, old tennis shoes. Thinning dark hair scattered his scalp haphazardly, with one straight lock falling over an ear, and as Frisby in the evenings wasn't all that different from Frisby in the mornings I couldn't see a beard transforming the image. Particularly not, I thought interestedly, while it grew.

'Can you spare a tomato or two?' I said. Those Italian ones?'

'For your lunch?'

'Yeah.'

'Cassie doesn't feed you.'

'It's not her job.'

He shook his head over the waywardness of our domestic arrangements, but if he had had a wife I wondered which one of them would have cooked. I paid for the beer and the tomatoes, promised to bring Cassie to admire the whiskers, and drove home.

Life for me was good, as I'd told Cassie. Life at that moment was a long way from Bananas' world of horrors.

I parked in front of the cottage and walked up the path juggling radio, beer and tomatoes in one hand and fishing for keys with the other.

One doesn't expect people to leap out of nowhere waving baseball bats. I had merely a swift glimpse of him, turning my head towards the noise of his approach, seeing the solid figure, the savagery, the raised arm. I hadn't even the time to think incredulously that he was going to hit me before he did it.

The crashing blow on my moving head sent me dazed and headlong, shedding radio, beer cans, tomatoes on the way. I fell half on the path and half on a bed of pansies and lay in a pulsating semi-consciousness in which I could smell the earth but couldn't think.

Rough fingers twined themselves into my hair and pulled my head up from its face-down position. As if from a great distance away from my closed eyes a harsh deep voice spoke nonsensical words.

'You're not-' he said. 'Fuck it.'

He dropped my head suddenly and the second small knock finished the job. I wasn't aware of it. In my conscious mind, things simply stopped happening.

The next thing that impinged was that someone was trying to lift me up, and that I was trying to stop him.

'All right, lie there,' said a voice. 'If that's how you feel.'

How I felt was like a shapeless form spinning in a lot of outer space. He tried again to pick me up and things inside the skull suddenly shook back into order.

'Bananas,' I said weakly, recognising him.

'Who else? What happened?'

I tried to stand up and staggered a bit, trampling a few more long-suffering pansies.

'Here,' Bananas said, catching me by the arm, 'come into the house.' He semi-supported me, and found the door was locked.

'Keys,' I mumbled.

'Where are they?'

I waved a vague arm, and he let go of me to look for them. I leant against the doorpost and throbbed. Bananas found the keys and came towards me and said in anxiety. 'You're covered in blood.'

I looked down at my red-stained shirt. Fingered the cloth. 'That blood's got pips in.' I said.

Bananas peered at my chest. 'Your lunch.' He sounded relieved. 'Come on.'

We went into the cottage where I collapsed into a chair and began to sympathise with migraine sufferers. Bananas searched in random cupboards and asked plaintively for the brandy.

'Can't you wait until you get home?' I said without criticism.

'It's for you.'

'None left.'

He didn't press it. He may have remembered that it had been he, a week ago, who'd emptied the bottle.

'Can you make tea?' I said.

He said resignedly, 'I suppose so,' and did.

While I drank the resulting nectar, he told me that he'd seen a car driving away from the direction of the cottage at about eighty miles an hour down the country road. It was the car, he said, of the man who'd asked for me earlier. He had been at first puzzled and then disquieted, and had finally decided to amble down to see if everything was all right.

'And there you were,' he said, 'looking like a pole-axed giraffe.'

'He hit me,' I said.

'You don't say.'

'With a baseball bat.'

'So you saw him,' Bananas said.

'Yeah. Just for a second.'

'Who was he?'

'No idea.' I drank some tea. 'Mugger.'

'How much did he take?'

I put down the tea and patted the hip pocket in which I carried a small notecase. The wallet was still there. I pulled out and looked inside. Nothing much in there, but also nothing missing.

'Pointless,' I said. 'What did he want?'

'He asked for you,' Bananas said.

'So he did.' I shook my head which wasn't a good idea as it sent little daggers in all cranial directions. 'What exactly did he say?'

Bananas gave it some thought. 'As far as I can remember, he said, "Where does Derry live?"'

'Would you know him again?' I asked.

He pensively shook his head. 'I shouldn't think so. I mean, I've a general impression- not young, not old, roughish accent- but I was busy, I didn't pay all that much attention.'

Oddly enough, though I'd seen him for only a fraction of the time Bananas had, I had a much clearer recollection of my attacker. A freeze view, like a snapshot, standing framed in my mind. A thick-set man with yellowish skin, greyish about the head, intent eyes darkly shadowed. The blur on the edge of the snapshot was the downward slash of his arm. Whether the memory was reliable, or whether I'd know him again, I couldn't tell.

Bananas said, 'Are you all right to leave?'

'Sure.'

'Betty will finish those grapes and stare into space,' he said. 'The old cow's working to rule. That's what she says. Working to rule, I ask you. She doesn't belong to a union. She's invented her own bloody rules. At the moment rule number one is that she doesn't do anything I don't directly tell her to.'

'Why not?'

'More pay. She wants to buy a pony to ride on the Heath. She can't ride, and she's damn near sixty.'

'Go on back,' I said smiling. I'm OK.'

He semi-apologetically made for the door. 'There's always the doctor, if you're pushed.'

'I guess so.'

He opened the door and peered out into the garden. 'There are beer cans in your pansies.'

He went out saying he would pick them up, and I shoved myself off the chair and followed him. When I got to the door he was standing on the path holding three beer cans and a tomato and staring intently at the purple and yellow flowers.

'What is it?' I said.

'Your radio.'

'I've just had it fixed.'

He looked up at me. 'Too bad.'

Something in his tone made me totter down the path for a look. Sure enough, my radio lay in the pansies: what was left of it. Casing, dials, circuits, speaker, all had been comprehensively smashed.

'That's nasty,' Bananas said.

'Spite,' I agreed. 'And a baseball bat.'

'I think,' I said slowly, 'that maybe he thought I was someone else. After he'd hit me, he seemed surprised. I remember him swearing.'

'Violent temper,' said Bananas, looking at the radio.

'Mm.'

'Tell the police,' he said.

'Yeah.'

I took the beer from him and sketched a wave as he walked briskly up the road. Then I stared for a while at the shattered radio thinking slightly disturbing thoughts: like what would my head have looked like if he hadn't stopped after one swipe.

With a mental shiver, I went back indoors and applied my concussion to writing up my weekly report sheet for Luke Houston.

CHAPTER 13

I never did get around to consulting the doctor or calling the police. I couldn't see anything productive coming from spending the time.

Cassie took the whole affair philosophically but said that my skull must be cracked if I didn't want to make love.

'Double ration tomorrow,' I said.

'You'll be lucky.'

I functioned on two cylinders throughout the next day and in the evening Jonathan rang, as he sometimes did, keeping a long-distance finger on little brother's pulse. He had never grown out of the in loco parentis habit and nor, to be honest, did I want him to. Jonathan, six thousand miles away, was still my anchor, my most trusted friend.

A pity about Sarah, of course. I would have seen more of Jonathan if I could have got on better with Sarah. She irritated me like an allergy rash with her bossiness and her sarcasm, and I'd never been able to please her. I'd thought at one time that their marriage was on the way to the cemetery and I hadn't grieved much, but somehow or other they'd retreated from the brink. She certainly seemed softer with Jonathan nowadays, but when I was around the old acid rose still in her voice, and I never stayed long in their house. Never staying long in one place was in fact, according to her, one of my least excusable faults. I ought to buckle down, she said, and get a proper job.

She was looking splendid these days, slender as a girl and tawny with the sun. Many, I supposed, seeing the fair hair, the good bones, the still tight jawline, the grace of movement, would have envied Jonathan his young-at-forty-five wife. And all, as far as I knew, without the plastic surgeon's knife.

'How's Sarah?' I said automatically. I'd been asking after her religiously most of my life, and not caring a jot. The truce she and I maintained for Jonathan's sake was fragile; a matter of social form, of empty politeness, of unfelt smiles, of asking after health.

'She's fine,' he said. 'Just fine.' His voice after all these years had taken on a faint inflection and many of the idioms of his adopted country. 'She sends you her best.'

'Thanks.'

'And you?' he said.

'Well enough considering some nutter hit me on the head.'

'What nutter?'

'Some guy who came here and lay in wait, and took a bash at me.'

'Are you all right?'

'Yeah. No worse than a racing fall.'

'Who was he?' he asked.

'No idea. He asked for directions from the pub, but he'd got the wrong man. Maybe he asked for Terry… it sounds much the same. Anyway, he blasted off when he found he'd made a slight error, so that's that.'

'And no harm done?' he asked insistently.

'Not to me, but you should see my radio.'

'What?'

'When he found I was the wrong guy, he took it out on my radio. I wasn't awake, mind you, at that point. But when I came round, there it was, smashed.'

There was a silence on the other end, and I said, 'Jonathan? Are you still there?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Did you see the man? What did he look like?'

I told him: fortyish, greyish, yellowish. 'Like a bull,' I said.

'Did he say anything?'

'Something about me not being who he expected, and fuck it.'

'How did you hear him if you were knocked out?'

I explained. 'But all that's left is a sore spot for the hair brush,' I said, 'so don't give it another thought.'

We talked about this and that for the rest of our customary six minutes, and at the end he said, 'Will you be in tomorrow night?'

'Yes, I should think so.'

'I might call you back,' he said.

'OK.' I didn't bother to ask him why. He had a habit of not answering straightforward questions with straightforward answers if it didn't suit him, and his noncommittal announcement told me that this was one of those times.

We said amicable goodbyes and Cassie and I went to bed and renewed our normal occupation.

'Do you think we'll ever be tired of it?' she said.

'Ask me when we're eighty.'

'Eighty is impossible,' she said, and indeed it seemed so to us both.

Cassie went to Cambridge every day in her little yellow car to spend eight hours behind a building society desk discussing mortgages. Cassie's mind was full of terms like with-profits endowment and early redemption charges, and I thought it remarkable, sometimes, that she'd never suggested a twenty-five year millstone round my own neck.

I'd once before tried living with someone: nearly a year with a cuddly blonde who wanted marriage and nestlings. I'd felt stifled and gone off to South America and behaved abominably, according to her parents. But Cassie wasn't like that: if she wanted the same things she didn't say so, and maybe she realised, as I did, that I always came back to England, that the homing instinct was fairly strong. One day, I thought, one distant day… and maybe with Cassie… I might, just perhaps, and with all options open, buy a house.

One could always sell it again, after all.

Jonathan did telephone again the following evening, and came straight to the point.

'Do you,' he said, 'remember that summer when Peter Keithly got killed in his boat?'

'Of course, I do. One doesn't actually forget one's own brother being tangled up in a murder.'

'It's fourteen years ago,' he said doubtfully.

'Things that happen when you're fifteen stay sharp in your mind for ever.'

'I guess you're right. Anyway, you know who I mean by Angelo Gilbert.'

'The bumper-off,' I said.

'As you say. I think the man who hit you on the head may be Angelo Gilbert.'

A great one, my brother, for punching the air out. On a distinctly short breath I said, 'You sound very calm about it.' But then of course he would. He was always calm. In the scariest crisis it would be Jonathan who spoke and acted as if nothing unusual was happening. He'd carried me out of a fire once as a small child and I'd thought that somehow nothing was the matter, nothing was really wrong with the flames and the roaring and crashing all around us, because he'd looked down at me and smiled.

'I checked up,' he said. 'Angelo Gilbert got out of prison seventeen days ago, on parole.'

'Out-'

'It would take him a while to orientate himself and to find you. I mean, if it was him, he would have thought you were me.'

I sorted my way through that and said, 'What makes you think it was him?'

'Your radio, really. He seemed to enjoy destroying things like that. Televisions. Stereos. And he'd be forty now, and his father reminded me of a bull. What you said took me right back.'

'Good grief.'

'Yes.'

'You really think it was him?'

'I'm afraid it's possible.'

'Well,' I said, 'now that he knows he got the wrong guy, maybe he won't bother me again.'

'Monsters don't go away if you don't look at them.'

'What?'

'He may come back.'

'Thanks very much.'

'William, take it seriously. Angelo was dangerous in his twenties and it sounds as if he still is. He never did get the computer programs he killed for, and he didn't get them because of me. So take care.'

'It might not have been him.'

'Act as if it was.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'So long, Professor.' The wryness in my voice must have been plain to him.

'Keep off horses,' he said.

I put the receiver down ruefully. Horses, to him, meant extreme risk.

'What's the matter?' Cassie said. 'What did he say?'

'It's all a very long story.'

Tell it.'

I told it on and off over the next few hours, remembering things in pieces and not always in the other they'd happened, much as Jonathan had told it to me all those years ago. Before going off to Canada to shoot he had collected me straight from school at the end of that summer term and we'd gone to Cornwall, just the two of us, for a few days' sailing. We'd had great holidays there two or three times before, but that year it blew a gale and poured with rain continuously, and to amuse me while we sat and stared through the dripping yacht club windows waiting for the improvement which never came, he'd told me about Mrs O'Rorke and Ted Pitts and the Gilberts, and how he'd stuck magnets in the cassettes. I'd been so fascinated that I hadn't minded missing the sailing.

I wasn't sure that I'd been shown every alley of the labyrinth; my quiet schoolmasterly brother had been reticent in patches and I'd always guessed that it was because probably in some way he'd used his guns. He never would let me touch them, and the only thing I ever knew him to be scared of was having his precious firearms certificate taken away.

'So there you are,' I said finally. 'Jonathan got Angelo tossed into clink. And now he's out.'

Cassie had listened with alternating alarm and amusement, but it was doubt that remained in the end.

'So what now?' she said.

'So now, if Angelo's on the rampage, hostilities may be resumed.'

'Oh no.'

'And there are certain disadvantages that Derry number two may have to contend with.' I ticked them off on my fingers. 'One, I can't shoot. Two, I know practically nothing about computers. And three, if Angelo's come charging out of jail intending to track down his lost crock of gold, I've no idea where it is or even if it still exists.'

She frowned. 'Do you think that's what he wants?'

'Wouldn't you?' I said gloomily. 'You spend fourteen years in a cell brooding over what you lost and dreaming of vengeance and yes, you're going to come out looking for both – and a small detail like having attacked the wrong man isn't going to put you off.'

'Come to bed,' Cassie said.

'I wonder if he thinks the way he used to.' I looked at her increasingly loved face. 'I don't want him busting in here to hold you hostage.'

'With no Jonathan to cut the telephone wires and send for the posse? Come to bed.'

'I wonder how he did it?'

'What?'

'Cut the wires. It isn't that easy.'

'Climbed the pole with a pair of scissors,' she said.

'You can't climb a pole. There aren't any footholds except at the top.'

'Why are you wondering about it after all these years? Come to bed.'

'Because of a bang on the head.'

She said, 'Are you really anxious?'

'Uneasy.'

'You must be. I've mentioned bed three times and you're still sitting down.'

I grinned at her and rose to my feet- and at that moment an almighty crash on the front door burst it open with splintering wood and a broken lock.

Angelo stood in the gap. Stood for less than a second regaining his balance from the kick which had brought him in, stood with the baseball bat swinging and his face rigid with ill intent.

Neither Cassie nor I had time to protest or yell. He waded straight in, laying about him, smashing anything near him, a lamp, some corn dollies, a vase, a picture… the television. Like a whirlwind demented, he devastated the pretty interior, and when I leapt at him I met a fist in the face and a fast knee which missed my groin, and I smelled his sweat and heard his breath rasp from exertion and took in what he was grittily saying: and it was just my name and Jonathan's, over and over.

'Derry-Derry-Fucking Derry?

Cassie tried to help me, and he slashed at her with the heavy wooden bat and connected with her arm. I saw her stumble from the pain of it and in a fury I put one of my own arms round his neck and tried to yank his head back, to hurt him enough to make him drop his weapon and probably if the truth were told to throttle him. But he knew more about dirty fighting than I'd ever learned and it took him about two elbow jabs and a scrunching backhand jerk of my fingers to prise me loose. He shook me off with such force that I half fell, but still clung to his clothes with octopus tentacles, not wanting to be thrown clear so that he could get another swing with that bat.

We crashed around the broken room with me sticking to him with at least his equal ferocity and him struggling to get free; and it was Cassie, in the end, who finished it. Cassie who had grabbed the brass coal scuttle from the hearth by its shining handle and swung it in an arc at arm's length, aiming at Angelo's head. I saw the flash of its gleaming surface and felt the jolt through Angelo's body: and I let go of him as he fell in a sprawl on the carpet.

'Oh, God,' Cassie was saying. 'Oh, God.' There were tears on her face and she was holding her left arm away from her body in a way I knew all too well.

Angelo was visibly breathing. Stunned only. Soon to awake.

'Have to tie him,' I said breathlessly. 'What've we got?'

Cassie painfully said, 'Washing line,' and before I could stop her she'd vanished into the kitchen, returning almost at once with a new line still in its package. Wire wrapped in plastic, the bright label said. Strong enough, indeed, for a bull.

While I was still uncoiling it with unsteady ringers, there was the sound outside of someone thudding up the path and I had time for a feeling of absolute despair before I saw who it was.

Bananas came to the dark doorway with a rush and there stood stock still taking in the ravaged scene.

'I saw his car come back. I was just closing up…'

'Help me tie him,' I said, nodding at Angelo, who was stirring ominously. 'He did all this. He's coming round.'

Bananas turned Angelo onto his face and held his hands together behind his back while I built knots around the wrists, and then continued with the job himself, leading the line down from the wrists to join it to two more knots round the ankles.

'He's broken Cassie's arm,' I said.

Bananas looked at her and at me and at Angelo, and walked purposefully over to where the telephone stood miraculously undamaged on its little table.

'Wait,' I said. 'Wait.'

'But Cassie needs a doctor. And I'll get the police…'

'No,' I said, 'not yet.'

'But you must.'

I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and looked remotely at the resulting smear of blood. 'There's some pethedine and a syringe in the bathroom,' I said. 'It'll do a lot to stop Cassie hurting.'

He nodded in understanding and said he would fetch it.

'Bring the box marked "Emergency". It's on the shelf over the bath taps.'

While he went and came back with his ever-surprising speed, I helped Cassie to sit on a chair and to rest her left arm on a cushion which I put on the telephone table. It was the forearm, I found, which was broken: both bones, probably, from the numb uselessness of her hand.

'William,' she said whitely, 'don't. It hurts. Don't.'

'Darling… darling… It has to have support. Just let it lie there. Don't fight it.'

She did mutely what I said and looked paler than ever.

'I didn't feel it,' she said. 'Not like this… not at first.'

Bananas brought the emergency box and opened it. I tore the syringe out of its sterile package and filled it from the ampoule of pethedine. Pulled Cassie's skirt up high over the sun-browned legs and fed the muscle-relaxing pain-killer into the long muscle of her thigh.

'Ten minutes,' I said, pulling the needle out and rubbing the place with my knuckles. 'A lot of the pain will go. Then we'll be able to take you to the casually department of Cambridge hospital to get it set. Nowhere nearer will be open at this time of night.'

She nodded slightly with the first twitch of a smile, and on the floor Angelo started trying to kick.

Bananas again walked towards the telephone and again I stopped him.

'But William-'

I looked around at the jagged evidence of a passionate need for revenge; the explosion of fourteen years of pent-up hate.

I said, 'He did this because my brother got him jailed for murder. He's out on parole. If we call the police he'll be back inside.'

Then, of course,' Bananas said, picking up the receiver.

'No,' I said. 'Put it down.'

He looked bewildered. Angelo on the floor began mumbling as if in delirium; a mixture of atrocious swear words and loud incomprehensible unfinished sentences.

'That's stir talk,' said Bananas, listening.

'You've heard it before?'

'You hear everything in the end in my trade.'

'Look,' I said. 'I get him sent back to jail and then what happens? It wouldn't be so long next time before he was out, and he'd have a whole new furious grudge to avenge. And by that time he might have learned some sense and not come waving a piece of wood and going off half-cock, but wait until he'd managed to get a pistol, and sneak up on me one day three, four years from now, and finish me off. This…' I waved a hand, 'isn't an act of reason. I'm only Jonathan's brother. I myself did him no harm. This is anger against life. Blind, colossal, ungovernable rage. I can do without him focussing it all on me personally in the future.' I paused. 'I have to find a better… a final solution. If I can.'

'You can't mean…' Bananas said tentatively.

'What?'

'To… to… No, you couldn't.'

'Not that final solution, no. Though it's quite a thought. Cement Wellingtons and a downwards trip in the North Sea.'

'Tankful of piranhas,' Cassie said.

Bananas looked at her with relief and almost laughed, and finally put the telephone receiver back in its cradle.

Angelo stopped mumbling and came fully awake. When he realised where he was and in what condition, the skin, which had until then been pale, became redly suffused: the face, the neck, even the hands. He rolled halfway over onto his back and filled the room with the intensity of his rage.

'If you start swearing,' I said, 'I'll gag you.'

With an effort he said nothing, and I looked at his face squarely and fully for the first time. There wasn't a great deal left of the man whose picture I had once pored over in a newspaper; not youth, not black hair, not narrow jaw, not long thin nose. Age, heredity, prison food, all had given him fatty deposits to blur the outlines of the head and bulk the body.

Average brains, Jonathan had said. Not clever. Relies on his frightening-power, and gets his results from that. Despises everyone. Calls them creeps and mugs.

'Angelo Gilbert,' I said.

He jerked, and looked surprised, as if he had thought I wouldn't know him: and nor would I have, if Jonathan hadn't called.

'Let's get it straight,' I said. 'It was not my brother who sent you to prison. You did it to yourself.'

Cassie murmured, 'Criminals in jail are there voluntarily.'

Bananas looked at her in surprise.

'My arm feels better,' she said.

I stared down at Angelo. 'You chose jail when you shot Chris Norwood. Those fourteen years were your own fault, so why take it out on me?'

It made no impression. I hadn't really thought it would. Blaming one's troubles on someone else was average human nature.

Angelo said, 'Your fucking brother tricked me. He stole what was mine.'

'He stole nothing of yours.'

'He did.' The words were bass-voiced, fierce and positive, a growl in the throat. Cassie shivered at the menace Angelo could generate even tied up in ignominy on a cottage floor.

The crock of gold, I thought suddenly, might have its uses.

Angelo seemed to be struggling within himself but in the end the words tore out of him, furious, frustrated, still bursting with an anger that had nowhere to go. 'Where is he?' he said. 'Where's your fucking brother? I can't find him.'

Saints alive…

'He's dead,' I said coldly.

Angelo didn't say whether or not he believed me but the news did nothing for his general temper. Bananas and Cassie displayed a certain stillness, but thankfully kept quiet.

I said to Bananas, 'Could you watch him for a minute while I make a phone call?'

'Hours if you like.'

'Are you all right?' I asked Cassie.

'That stuff's amazing.'

'Won't be long.' I picked the whole telephone off the table beside her and carried it into the office, closing the door as I went.

I called California, thinking that Jonathan would be anywhere but home, that I'd get Sarah, that it would be siesta time under the golden sun. But Jonathan was in, and he answered.

'I just had a thought,' I said. 'Those tapes that Angelo Gilbert wanted, have you still got them?'

'Good grief,' he said. 'I shouldn't think so,' A pause while he reflected. 'No, we cleared everything out when we left Twickenham. You remember, we sold the furniture and bought new out here. I got rid of pretty well everything. Except the guns, of course.'

'Did you throw the tapes away?'

'Um,' he said. 'There was a set I sent to Mrs O'Rorke and got back again. Oh yes, I gave them to Ted Pitts. If anyme still has them it would be Ted. But I shouldn't think they'd be much use after all these years.'

'The tapes themselves, or the betting system?'

'The system. It must be long out of date.'

It wouldn't matter too much, I thought.

'There are a lot of computer programs out here now for helping you win on horses,' Jonathan said. 'Some of them work, they say.'

'You haven't tried them?'

'I'm not a gambler.'

'Oh yeah?'

'What do you want the tapes for?' he said.

To tie Angelo up in knots again.'

'Take care.'

'Sure. Where would I find Ted Pitts?'

He told me doubtfully to try the East Middlesex Comprehensive, where they'd both been teaching, but said it was unlikely he was still there. They hadn't been in touch with each other at all since he'd emigrated. Perhaps I could trace Ted through the Schoolmasters Union, who might have his address.

I thanked him and disconnected, and went back into the sitting-room, where everyone looked much as I'd left them.

'I have a problem,' I said to Bananas.

'Just one?'

Time.'

'Ah. The essence.'

'Mm.' I stared at Angelo. 'There's a cellar under this cottage.'

Angelo had no fear: one had to give him that. I could see quite clearly that he understood I meant not to let him go, yet his only reaction was aggressive and set him struggling violently against the washing line.

'Watch him,' I said to Bananas. There's some stuff in the cellar. I'm going to clear it out. If he looks like getting free, give him another bash on the head.'

Bananas looked at me as if he'd never seen me before; and perhaps he hadn't. I put a quick apologetic hand on Cassie's shoulder as I went, and in the kitchen opened the latched wooden door which led to the steps to the cellar.

Down there it was cool and dry: a brick-lined room with a concrete floor and a single light bulb swinging from the ceiling. When we had come to the cottage we had found the garden chairs stacked in there, but they were now outside on the grass, leaving only oddments like a paraffin stove, some tins of paint, a step-ladder and a stack of fishing gear. I carried everything in relays up the steps and dumped it all in the kitchen.

When I'd finished there was nothing in the cellar to help a captive; yet I would still have to keep him tied because of the nature of the lockless door. It was made simply of upright planks with bracing bars across the top, centre and bottom, the whole screwed together with the screwheads thankfully on the kitchen side. Across near the top there were six thumb-sized holes, presumably for ventilation. A good enough barrier against most contingencies, but not to be trusted to withstand the sort of kick with which the enemy had battered his initial way in.

'Right,' I said, going back into the sitting-room. 'Now you, Angelo, are going into the cellar. Your only alternative is an immediate return to jail, as all this…' I indicated the room '… and that…' Cassie's arm '… will cancel your parole and send you straight back behind bars.'

'You bloody can't,' he said furiously.

'I bloody can. You started this. You damn well take the consequences.'

'I'll get you busted.'

'Yeah. You try it. You got it wrong, Angelo. I'm not my brother. He was clever and wily and he tricked you silly, but he would never use physical force; and I will, you mug, I will.'

Angelo used words that made Bananas wince and glance apprehensively at Cassie.

'I've heard them before,' she said.

'You've a choice, Angelo,' I said. 'Either you let my friend and me carry you carefully down the steps without you struggling, or you struggle and I pull you down by the legs.'

The loss of face in not struggling proved too much. He tried to bite me as I bent down to put my arms under his armpits, so I did what I'd said; grasped the line tying his ankles and dragged him feet foremost out of the sitting-room, through the kitchen and down the cellar steps, with him yelling and swearing the whole way.

CHAPTER 14

I tugged him well away from the stairs, let go of his legs and returned to the kitchen. He shouted after me blasphemously and I could still hear him when the door was shut. Let him get on with it, I thought callously; but I left on the single light, whose switch was outside on the kitchen wall.

I wedged the latch shut by sliding a knife handle through the slot, and for good measure stacked the step-ladder, the tabble and a couple of chairs into a solid line between the refrigerator and the cellar door, making it impossible for it to open normally into the kitchen.

In the sitting-room and without hustling, I said, 'OK. Decision time, mates.' I looked at Bananas. 'It's not your fight. If you'd rather, you can go back to your dishwashing and forget this ever happened.'

He looked resignedly round the room. 'I promised you'd leave this place as you found it. Practically pledged my soul.'

'I'll replace what I can. Pay for the rest. And grovel. Will that do?'

'You can't manage that brute on your own.' He shook his head. 'How long do you mean to keep him?'

'Until I find a man called Pitts.' I explained to him and Cassie what I wanted to do and why, and Bananas sighed and said it seemed fairly sensible in the circs, and that he would help where he could.

We shoe-horned Cassie gently into my car and I drove her to Cambridge while Bananas in his effective way set himself to tidy the sitting-room. There wasn't a great deal one could do at that point about the splintered and unclosable front door, and he promised to stay in the cottage until we got back.

In the event it was only I who returned. I sat with Cassie through the long wait in the silent hospital while they tried to find someone to X-ray her arm, but it seemed that after midnight the radiology department was firmly shut, with all the radiologists asleep in their own homes, and only the direst surgical emergency would recall them.

Cassie was given a careful splint from shoulder to fingernails and also another pain-killer and a bed: and when I kissed her and left she said, 'Don't forget to feed the bull,' which the nurses put down to drug-induced light-headedness.

Bananas was asleep when I got back, flat out on the sofa and dreaming I dare say of palm trees. The mess I'd left behind was miraculously cleared with every broken fragment out of sight. There were many things missing but overall it looked more like a room the owners would recognise. Gratefully I went quietly into the kitchen and found my barricade altered and strengthened with four planks which had been lying in the garage, the door now wedged shut from top to bottom.

The light switch was up. Except for whatever dim rays were crawling through the ventilation holes, Angelo was lying in the dark.

Although I'd been quiet I'd woken Bananas, who was sitting up pinching the bridge of his nose and blinking heavy eyelids open and shut.

'All the pieces are in the garage,' he said. 'Not in the dustbin. I reckoned you might need them, one way or another.'

'You're great,' I said. 'Did Angelo try to get out?'

Bananas made a face. 'He's a horrible man, that.'

'You talked to him?'

'He was shouting through the door that you'd stopped his circulation by tying his wrists too tight. I went to see, but you hadn't, his fingers were pink. He was halfway up the stairs and he tried to knock me over. Tried to sweep my legs from under me and make me fall. God knows what he thought it would achieve.'

'Probably to scare me into letting him go.'

Bananas scratched himself around the ribs. 'I came up into the kitchen and shut the door on him, and switched his light off, and he went on howling for ages about what he'd do to you when he got out.'

Keeping his courage up, I thought.

I looked at my watch. Five o'clock. Soon be light. Soon be Friday with all its problems. 'I guess,' I said yawning, 'that a couple of hours shut-eye would do no harm.'

'And that one?' He jerked his head towards the kitchen.

'He won't suffocate.'

'You're a revelation to me,' Bananas said.

I grinned at him and I think he thought me as ruthless as our visitor. But he was wrong. I was fairly sure that Angelo that night had come back to kill, to finish off what he had earlier started, knowing by then who I was and not expecting a Cassie. I was soft compared with him.

Bananas walked home to his dishwasher and I took his place on the sofa, feeling the bedroom too far away out of touch. Despite the hectic night I went to sleep immediately and woke with mind-protesting reluctance to switch off the alarm clock at seven o'clock. The horses would be working on the Heath. Simpson Shell had set up a trial of two late-developing three-year-olds, and if I wasn't there to watch he'd be writing to Luke Houston to say I was a shirker… and I wanted anyway, Angelo or no Angelo, to see how those horses went.

I loved the Heath in the early mornings with the manes blowing under the wide skies. My affection for horses was so deep and went back so far that I couldn't imagine life without them. They were a friendly foreign nation living in our land, letting their human neighbours tend them and feed them, accepting them as servants as much as masters. Fast, fascinating, essentially untamed, they were my landscape, my old shoes, the place to where my heart returned, as necessary to me as the sea to sailors.

Even on that morning they lifted my spirits and I watched the trial with a concentration Angelo couldn't disrupt. One of the three-year-olds finished most decisively fast and Simpson said with careful civility that he hoped I would report to Luke how well the colt was looking.

'I'll tell Luke you've done wonders with him. Remember how unbalanced he looked in May? He'll win next week, don't you think?'

He gave me the usual ambivalent stare, needing my approbation but hating it. I smiled internally and left him to drive the short distance to where Mort was directing his string.

'All OK?' I asked.

'Well, yes,' Mort said. 'Genotti's still shaping up well for the Leger.' He flicked his fingers six times rapidly. 'Can you come back to the house for breakfast? The Bungay filly is still not eating well, and I thought we might discuss what we could do. You sometimes have ideas. And there's Luke's bill. I want to explain one or two items before you query them.'

'Mort,' I interrupted him regretfully, 'could we postpone it for a day or two? Something's come up that I'll have to deal with first.'

'Oh? Oh,' he sounded put out, because I'd never refused him before. 'Are you sure?'

'Really sorry,' I said.

'I might see you this afternoon,' he said, fidgetting badly.

'Um, yes. Of course.'

He nodded with satisfaction and let me go with good grace, and I doubted whether I would in fact turn up on Newmarket racecourse for that day's programme, even though three of Luke's horses were running.

On my way back through the town I stopped at a few shops which were open early and did some errands on my prisoner's account, buying food and one or two small comforts. Then I rocketed the six miles to the village and stopped first at the pub.

Bananas, looking entirely his usual self, had done his dishes, cleaned the bar, and put Betty's back up by saying she was too old to start learning to ride.

'The old cow's refusing to make the celery mousse for lunch. Working to her stupid rules.' He disgustedly assembled his breakfast, adding chopped ginger as a topping to the ice cream and pouring brandy lavishly over the lot. I went down to the cottage again. Not a peep from our friend.' He stirred his mixture with anticipation. 'You can't hear him from outside, however loud he yells. I found that out last night. You'll be all right if you keep any callers in the garden.'

Thanks.'

'When I've finished this, I'll come and help you.'

'Great.'

I hadn't wanted to ask him, but I was most thankful for his offer. I drove on down to the cottage and unloaded all the shopping into the kitchen, and Bananas appeared in his tennis shoes while I was packing food into a carrier. He looked at the small heap of things I'd put ready by the door.

'Let's get it over,' he said. 'I'll carry this lot.'

I nodded. 'He'll be blinded at first by the light, so even if he's got himself free we should have the advantage.'

We began to remove the barricade from against the door, and when it would open satisfactorily I took the knife out of the latch, picked up the carrier, switched on the cellar light and went into the cage.

Angelo was lying face down in the middle of the floor, still trussed the way we'd left him: arms behind his back, white clothes line leading slackly between tied wrists and tied ankles.

'It's morning,' I said cheerfully.

Angelo barely moved. He said a few low words of which 'turd' was the only one distinguishable.

'I've brought you some food.' I dumped in one corner the carrier bag which in fact contained two sliced loaves, several cartons of milk, some water in a plastic bottle, two large cooked chickens, some apples and a lot of various candy bars and chocolate. Bananas silently dumped his own load which consisted of a blanket, a cheap cushion, some paperback books and two disposal polystyrene chamber pots with lids.

'I'm not letting you out,' I said to Angelo, 'but I'll untie you.'

'Fuck you,' he said.

'Here's your watch.' I had slipped it off his wrist the evening before to make the tying easier. I took it out of my pocket and put it on the floor near his head. 'Lights out tonight at eleven,' I said.

It seemed prudent at that point to search Angelo's pockets, but all he was carrying was money. No knives, no matches, no keys: nothing to help him escape.

I nodded to Bananas and we both began to untie the knots, I the wrists, Bananas the ankles, but Angelo's struggles had so tightened our original work that it took time and effort to remove it. Once Angelo was free we coiled the line and retreated up the stairs, from where I watched him move stiffly into a kneeling position with his arms loose and not yet working properly.

The air in the cellar had seemed quite fresh. I closed the door and fixed the latch and Bananas restacked the barricade with methodical thoroughness.

'How much food did you give him?' he asked.

'Enough for two to four days. Depends on how fast he eats it.'

'He's used to being locked up, there's that about it.'

Bananas, I thought, was busy stifling remaining doubts. He shoved the four planks into place between the cellar door and the refrigerator, casually remarking that during the night he'd sawn the wood to fit.

'More secure that way,' he said. 'He'll not get out.'

'Hope you're right.'

Bananas stood back, hands on hips, to contemplate his handiwork, and indeed I was as sure as one could be that Angelo couldn't kick his way out, particularly as he would have to try it while standing on the stairs.

'His car must be here somewhere,' I said. 'I'll look for it after I've phoned the hospital.'

'You phone, I'll look,' Bananas said, and went on the errand.

Cassie, I was told, would be having her arm set under anaesthetic during the morning. I could collect her at six that evening if all went well.

'May I speak to her?'

'One moment.'

Her voice came slowly and sleepily onto the line. 'I'm pie-eyed with pre-med,' she said. 'How's our guest?'

'Happy as a kangaroo with blisters.'

'Hopping… mad?'

'That pre-med isn't working,' I said.

'Sure is. My body's floating but my brain's fizzing along in zillions of sparks. It's weird.'

'They say I can fetch you at six.'

'Don't… be late.'

'I might be,' I said.

'You don't love me.'

'Yeah.'

'Sweet William,' she said. 'A pretty flower.'

'Cassie, go to sleep.'

'Mm.'

She sounded infinitely drowsy. 'Goodbye,' I said, but I don't think she heard.

I telephoned next to her office, told her boss she'd fallen down the cellar steps and broken her arm, and that she'd probably be back at work sometime the next week.

'How irritating,' he said. 'Er… for her, of course.'

'Of course.'

Bananas came back as I was putting down the receiver and said that Angelo's car was parked harmlessly at the top of the lane where the hard surface petered out into muddy cart track. Angelo had left the keys in the ignition. Bananas dumped them on the table.

'Want anything, shout,' he said. I nodded gratefully and he padded off, a power-house in a suit of blubber.

I set about the task of finding Ted Pitts, telephoning first to Jonathan's old school, the East Middlesex Comprehensive. A female voice there crisply told me that no one of that name was presently on the staff, and that none of the present staff could help me as they were not there: the new term would not start for another week. The only master who had been teaching in the school fourteen years ago would be, she imagined, Mr Ralph Jenkins, assistant headmaster, but he had retired at the end of the summer term and in any case it would be unlikely that any of his past assistants would have kept in touch with him.

'Why not?' I asked curiously.

After the faintest of hesitations the voice said levelly, 'Mr Jenkins himself would have discouraged it.'

Or in other words, I thought, Mr Jenkins had been a cantankerous old bastard. I thanked her for as little as I had realistically expected and asked if she could tell me the address of the Schoolmasters Union.

'Do you want their number as well?'

'Yes please.'

She told me both, and I put through a call to their offices. Ted Pitts? Edward? I suppose so, I said. Could I wait? Yes, I could.

The answering voice, a man's this time, shortly told me that Edward Farley Pitts was no longer a member. He had resigned his membership five years previously. His last known address was still in Middlesex. Did I want it? Yes please, I said.

Again I was given a telephone number along with the address. Another female voice answered it, this time with music and children's voices loud in the background.

'What?' she said, 'I can't hear you.'

'Ted Pitts,' I shouted. 'Can you tell me where he lives?'

'You've got the wrong number.'

'He used to live in your house.'

'What? Wait a minute… shut up, you lousy kids. What did you say?'

Ted Pitts…'

Terry, shut off that bleeding stereo. Can't hear myself think. Shut if off. Go on, shut it off.'

The music suddenly stopped.

'What did you say?' she said again.

I explained that I wanted to find my lost friend, Ted Pitts.

'Guy with three daughters?'

That's right.'

'We bought this house off of him. Terry, you knock Michelle's head on that wall one more time and I'll rattle your teeth. Where was I? Oh yes, Ted Pitts. He gave us an address to send things on to but it's years ago and I don't know where my husband put it.'

It was really important, I said.

'Well if you hold on I'll look. Terry, Terry!' There was the sound of a slap and a child's wail. The joys of motherhood, I thought.

I held on for an age listening to the scrambled noise of the squabbling siblings, held on so long that I thought she had forgotten all about me and simply left me off the hook, but in the end she did come back.

'Sorry I've been so long, but you can't put your hand on a thing in this house. Anyway, I've found where he moved to.'

'You're a doll,' I said, writing it down.

She laughed in a pleased fashion. 'Want to call round? I'm fed up to the teeth with these bloody kids.'

'School starts next week.'

Thank the Lord.'

I disconnected and tried the number she had given me, but to this one there was no reply. Ten minutes later, again no reply.

I went to the kitchen. All quiet from the cellar. I ate some cornflakes, padded restlessly about and tried the number again.

Zilch.

There was something, I thought, looking at it, that I could immediately do about the front door. It wouldn't at the moment even fit into the frame, but given a chisel and some sandpaper… I fetched them from the tool-rack in the garage and reduced the sharply splintered patches to smooth edges, shutting the door finally by totally removing the broken lock. It looked all right from the outside but swung inward at a touch: and we had sweet but inquisitive neighbours who called sometimes to sell us honey.

I again dialled Ted Pitts's possible number. No reply.

Shrugging, I tugged a small chest of drawers across inside the front door and climbed out through the dining-room window. Drove down to the pub: told Bananas the way in.

'Do you expect me-?'

'Not really. Just in case.'

'Where are you going?' he asked.

I showed him the address. 'It's a chance.'

The address was in Mill Hill on the northern outskirts of London. I drove there with my mind resolutely on the traffic and not on Cassie, unconscious, and Angelo, captive. Crunching the car at that point could be the ultimate disaster.

The house, when I found it, proved to be a middle-sized detached affair in a street of trees and somnolence; and it was empty.

I went up the driveway and looked through the windows. Bare wall, bare floors, no curtains.

With sinking spirits I rang the bell of the house next door, and although it was clearly occupied there was no one in there either. I tried several more houses, but none of the people I spoke to knew anything more of Ted Pitts than yes, perhaps they had seen some girls going in and out, but of course with all the shrubs and trees one was shielded from one's neighbours, which meant, of course, that also one couldn't see them.

It was in one of the houses obliquely opposite, from where only a corner of the Pittses' front garden was visible, that in the end I found some help. The front door was opened a foot by a large woman in pink hair rollers with a pack of assorted small dogs roaming round her legs.

'If you're selling, I don't want it,' she said.

I exercised on her the story I had by then invented, saying that Ted Pitts was my brother, he'd sent me his new address but I'd lost it, and I wanted to get in touch with him urgently. After six repetitions, I almost believed it.

'I didn't know him,' she said, not opening the door any wider. 'He didn't live there long. I never even saw him, I don't think.'

'But, er, you noticed them move in… and out.'

'Walking the dogs, you see.' She looked fondly down at the pack. 'I go past there every day.'

'Do you remember how long ago they left?'

'It must be ages. Funny your brother didn't tell you. The house was for sale for weeks after they'd gone. It's only just been sold, as a matter of fact. I saw the agents taking the board down just last week.'

'You don't happen to remember,' I said carefully, 'the name of the agents?'

'Goodness,' she said. 'I must have walked past it a hundred times. Just let me think.' She stared at her pets, her brow wrinkled with concentration. I could still see only half of her body but I couldn't tell whether the forbidding angle of the door was designed to keep the dogs in or me out.

'Hunt bleach' she exclaimed.

'What?'

'Hunt comma BLEACH.' She spelled it out. 'The name of the agents. A yellow board with black lettering. You'll see it all over the place, if you look.'

I said fervently, 'Thank you very much.'

She nodded the pink rollers and shut herself in, and I drove around until I found a yellow board with Hunt, Bleach's local address: Broadway, Mill Hill.

The brother story brought its by now familiar crop of sympathetic and/or pitying looks, but finally gained results. A slightly sullen-looking girl said she thought, the house had been handled by their Mr Jackman who was now away on his holidays.

'Could you look in the files?'

She took advice from various colleagues, who doubtfully agreed under my urging that perhaps in the circumstances she might. She went into an inner office, and I heard cabinet drawers begin to open and shut.

'Here you are, Mr Pitts,' she said, returning, and it took me a fraction to realise that of course I too would be Pitts. 'Ridge View, Oaklands Road.'

She didn't give me a town. I thought; he's still here.

'Could you tell me how to get there?' I said.

She shook her head unhelpfully, but one of the colleagues said, 'You go back up the Broadway, right round the roundabout until you're pointing towards London, then first left, up the hill, turn right, that's Oaklands Road.'

'Terrific.' I spoke with heartfelt relief which they took as appropriate, and I followed their directions faithfully and found the house. It looked a small brown affair; brownish bricks, brown tiled roof, a narrow window each side of an oak front door, bushes screening much else. I parked in what seemed an oversized driveway outside a closed double garage, and doubtfully rang the doorbell.

There was no noise from inside the house. I listened to the distant hum of traffic and the nearer hum of bees round a tub of dark red flowers, and pressed the bell again.

No results. If I hadn't wanted to find Ted Pitts so much I would have given up and driven away at that point. It wasn't even the sort of road where one could enquire at a neighbour's: there were houses only on one side, with a steep wooded hillside rising on the other, and the houses themselves were far-spaced and reclusive, drawing themselves back from public view.

I rang a third time out of indecisiveness, thinking that I could wait, or come back, or leave a note begging Pitts to call me.

The door opened. A pleasant-looking girl-woman stood there; not young, not yet middle-aged, wearing a loosely flowing green sundress with broad straps over suntanned shoulders.

'Yes?' she said enquiringly. Dark curly hair, blue eyes, the brown glowing face of summer leisure.

'I'm looking for Ted Pitts,' I said.

'This is his house.'

'I've been trying to locate him. I'm the brother of an old friend of his. A friend he had years ago, I mean. Could I see him, do you think?'

'He isn't here at the moment.' She looked at me doubtfully. 'What's your brother's name?'

'Jonathan Derry.'

After the very slightest pause her face changed from watchfulness to welcome; a smile in remembrance of time past.

'Jonathan! We haven't heard from him for years.'

'Are you-… Mrs Pitts?'

She nodded. 'Jane. She opened the door wide and stepped back. 'Come in.'

'I'm William,' I said.

'Weren't you…' she frowned, 'away at school?'

'One does tend to grow.'

She looked up at me, 'I'd forgotten how long it was.' She led me across a cool dark hall. 'This way.'

We came to a wide stairway of shallow green-carpeted steps leading downwards, and I saw before me what had been totally invisible from the higher roadway, that the house was large, ultramodern, built into the side of the hill and absolutely stunning.

The stairs led directly down to a huge room whose ceiling was half-open to the sky and whose floor was partly green carpet and partly swimming pool. There were sofas and coffee tables nearest the stairs and lounging chairs, bamboo with pink, white and green cushions, dotting the far poolside, out in the sun; and on either side wings of house spread out protectively, promising bedrooms and comfort and a life of delight. I looked at the spectacular and pretty room and thought no schoolmaster on earth could afford it.

'I was sitting over there,' Jane Pitts said, pointing to the sunny side. 'I nearly didn't answer the doorbell. I don't always bother.'

We walked around there, passing white trellised alcoves filled with plants and cushioned bamboo sofas with bathing towels casually thrown down. The pool water looked sea-green and peaceful, gleaming and inviting after my trudging search.

'Two of the girls are around somewhere,' Jane said. 'Melanie, our eldest, is married, of course. Ted and I will be grandparents quite soon.'

'Incredible.'

She smiled. 'We married at college.' She gestured to the chairs and I sat on the edge of one of the loungers while she spread out voluptuously on another. Beyond the house the lawn sloped grassily away to a wide sweeping view over north-west London, the horizon lost in misty purples and blues.

'This place is fantastic,' I said.

She nodded. 'We were so lucky to get it. We've only been here three months, but I think we'll stay for ever.' She pointed to the open roof. This all closes over, you know. There are solar panels that slide across. They say the house is warm all winter.'

I admired everything sincerely and asked if Ted were still teaching. She said without strain that he sometimes taught University courses in computer programming and that unfortunately he wouldn't be home until quite late the following evening. He would be so sorry to have missed me, she said.

'I would quite urgently like to talk to him.'

She gently shook her head. 'I don't honestly know where he is, except somewhere up near Manchester. He went this morning, but he didn't know where he'd be staying. In a motel somewhere, he said.'

'What time would he be back tomorrow?'

'Late. I don't know.'

She looked at the concern which must have shown plainly on my face and said apologetically, 'You could come early on Sunday, if you like, if it's that important.'

CHAPTER 15

Saturday crawled.

Cassie wandered around with her plastered arm in a sling and Bananas jogged down to the cottage three or four times, both of them worried by the delay and not saying so. It had seemed reasonable on Thursday night to incarcerate Angelo with his handiwork still appalling us in the sitting-room and Cassie in pain, but by Saturday evening she and Bananas had clearly progressed through reservations and uneasiness to downright anxiety.

'Let him go,' Bananas said when he came late after closing time. 'You'll be in real trouble if anyone finds out. He knows now that you're no pushover. He'd be too scared to come back.'

I shook my head. 'He's too arrogant to be scared. He'd want his revenge, and he'd come back to take it.'

They str-ed miserably at each other. 'Cheer up,' I said. 'I was ready to keep him for a week- two weeks- as long as it took.'

'I just don't know,' Bananas said, 'how you could calmly go to the races.'

I'd gone uncalmly to the races. Also to the gallops in the morning and to Mort's for breakfast, but no one I had seen could have guessed what was going on at home. Behind a public front I found it was fairly easy to hide an ongoing crime: hundreds of people did it, after all.

'I suppose he's still alive,' Cassie said.

'He was up by the door swearing at four o'clock.' Bananas looked at his watch. 'Nine and a half hours ago. I shouted at him to shut up.'

'And did he?'

'Just swore back.'

I smiled. 'He's not dead.'

As if to prove it Angelo started kicking the door and letting go with the increasingly familiar obscenities. I went into the kitchen and stood close to the barricade, and when he drew breath for the next verbal onslaught I said loudly, 'Angelo.'

There was a brief silence, then a fierce furious growling shout: 'Bastard.'

'The light's going out in five minutes,' I said.

'I'll kill you.'

Maybe the heavily savage threat should have raised my goose bumps, but it didn't. He had been murderous too long, was murderous by nature, and I already knew it. I listened to his continuing rage and felt nothing.

'Five minutes,' I said again, and left him.

In the sitting-room Bananas was looking mildly piratical in his open-necked shirt and his sneakers and his four days' growth of harsh black beard, but he himself would never have made anyone walk the plank. The gloom and doom in his mind deplored what I was doing even while he condoned it, and I could almost sense him struggling anew with the old anomaly that to defeat aggression one might have to use it.

He sat on the sofa and in short order drank two stiff brandies with his arm round Cassie, who never minded. He was tired, he'd said, of us being out of his favourite tipple: he'd brought the bottle himself. 'Have some ice-cream with it?' Cassie had suggested, and he'd said seriously, 'What flavour?'

I gave Angelo his five minutes and switched off the light, and there was a baleful silence from the cellar.

Bananas gave Cassie a bristly kiss, said she looked tired, said every plate in the pub needed washing, said ' Barbados!' as a toast, and tossed back his drink. 'God rest all prisoners. Good night.'

Cassie and I watched his disappearing back. 'He's half sorry for Angelo,' she said.

'Mm. A fallacy always to think that because you feel sorry for the tiger in the zoo he won't eat you, given the chance. Angelo doesn't understand compassion. Not other people's for him. He feels none himself. In others he sees it as a weakness. So never, my darling, be kind to Angelo expecting kindness in return.'

She looked at me. 'You mean that as a warning, don't you?'

'You've a soft heart.'

She considered for a moment, then found a pencil and wrote a message to herself in large letters on the white plaster.

REMEMBER TIGERS.

'Will that do?'

I nodded. 'And if he says his appendix is bursting or he's suffering from bubonic plague feed him some aspirins through the ventilation holes, and do it in a roll of paper, and not with your fingers.'

'He hasn't thought of that yet.'

'Give him time.'

We went upstairs to bed but as on the previous night I slept only in brief disturbed snatches, attuned the whole time to any noise from the cellar. Cassie slept more peacefully than before, the cast becoming less of a problem as she grew used to it. Her arm no longer hurt, she said; she simply felt tired. She said play would be resumed when the climate got better.

I watched the dark sky lighten to streaks of navy-blue clouds across a sombre orange glow, a strange brooding dawn like the aura of the man downstairs. Never before, I thought, had I entered a comparable clash of wills; never tested so searchingly my willingness to command. I had never thought of myself as a leader, and yet, looking back, I'd never had much stomach to be led.

In recent months I had found it easier than I'd expected to deal with Luke's five trainers, the power seeming to develop as the need arose. The power to keep Angelo in the cellar, that too had arisen, not merely physically, but also in my mind. Perhaps one's capacity always expanded to meet the need: but what did one do when the need was gone? What did generals do with their full-grown hubris when the war was over? When the whole world no longer obeyed when they said jump?

I thought: unless one could adjust one's power-feelings perpetually to the current need, one could be headed for chronic dissatisfaction with the fall of fate. One could grow sour, power-hungry, despotic. I would shrink back, I thought, to the proper size, once Angelo was solved, once Luke's year was over. If one saw that one had to, perhaps one might.

The fierce sky slowly melted to mauve-grey clouds drifting over a sea of gold and lingeringly then to gentle white over palest blue, and I got up and dressed, thinking that the sky's message was false: problems didn't fade with the sun and Cain was still downstairs.

Cassie's eyes, when I left, were saying all that her tongue wasn't. Hurry. Come back. I don't feel safe here with Angelo.

'Sit by the telephone,' I said. 'Bananas will run.'

She swallowed. I kissed her and drove away, burning up the empty Sunday-early roads to Mill Hill. It was still only eight-thirty when I turned into Oaklands Road, the very earliest that Jane Pitts had said I could arrive, but she was already up and in a wet bathing dress to answer the doorbell.

'Come in,' she said. 'We're in the pool.'

'We' were two lithely beautiful teenage girls and a stringy man going bald who swam without splashing, like a seal. The roof was open to the fair sky and a waiting breakfast of cereals and fruit stood ready on one of the low bamboo tables, and none of the Pittses seemed to mind or notice that the new day was still cool.

The stringy man slithered out onto the pool's edge in a sleek economical movement and stood shaking the water from his head and looking approximately in my direction.

'I'm Ted Pitts,' he said, holding out a wet hand. 'I can't see a damn thing without my glasses.'

I shook the hand and smiled into the unfocussed eyes. Jane walked round with some heavy black frames which converted the brown fish into an ordinary short-sighted mortal, and he dripped round the pool beside me to where his towel lay on a lounging chair.

'William Derry?' he said, blotting water out of his ears.

That's right.'

'How's Jonathan?'

'Sends his regards.'

Ted Pitts nodded, towelled his chest vigorously and then stopped abruptly and said, 'It was you who told me where to get the form books.'

All those years ago… information so casually given. I glanced around the amazing house and asked the uppermost question. 'The betting system on those tapes,' I said. 'Did it really work?'

Ted Pitts's smile was of comprehensive contentment. 'What do you think?' he said.

'All this-'

'All this.'

'I never believed in it,' I said, 'until I came here the other day.'

He towelled his back. 'It's fairly hard work, of course. I shunt around a good deal. But with this to come back to… most rewarding.'

'How long…' I said slowly.

'How long have I been gambling? Ever since Jonathan gave me the tapes. That first Derby… I borrowed a hundred quid with my car as security to raise some stake-money. It was madness, you know. I couldn't have afforded to lose. Sometimes in those days we had hardly enough to eat. It was pretty well desperation that made me do it, but of course the system looked mathematically OK and it had already worked for years for the man who invented it.'

'And you won?'

He nodded, 'Five hundred. A fortune. I'll never forget that day, never. I felt so sick.' He smiled vividly, the triumph still childlike in its simplicity. 'I didn't tell anybody. Not Jonathan. Not even Jane. I didn't mean to do it again, you see. I was so grateful it had turned out all right, but the strain…' He dropped the damp towel over the arm of a chair. 'And then, you know, I thought, why not?'

He watched his daughters dive into the pool with their arms round each other's waists. 'I only taught for one more term,' he said calmly. 'I couldn't stand the head of the Maths department. Jenkins, his name was.' He smiled, 'It seems odd now, but I felt oppressed by that man. Anyway, I promised myself that if I won enough during the summer holidays to buy a computer, I would leave at Christmas, and if I didn't, I'd stay and use the school's computer still, and be content with a wager now and then.'

Jane joined us, carrying a pot of coffee. 'He's telling you how he started betting? I thought he was crazy.'

'But not for long.'

She shook her head, smiling. 'When we moved out of our caravan into a house – bought it outright with Ted's winnings – then I began to believe it would last, that it was safe. And now here we are, so well off it's embarrassing, and it's all thanks to your dear brother Jonathan.'

The girls climbed dripping out of the pool and were introduced as Emma and Lucy, hungry for breakfast. I was offered bran flakes, natural yoghurt, wheat germ and fresh peaches, which they all ate sparingly but with enjoyment.

I ate as well, but thought inescapably of Angelo and of Cassie alone with him in the cottage. Those planks would hold… they'd kept him penned in for two whole days. No reason to think they'd fail this morning… no reason, just a strong feeling that I should have persuaded her to wait with Bananas.

It was over coffee, when the girls were again swimming and Jane had disappeared into the house, that Ted said, 'How did you find me?'

I looked at him. 'Don't you mean why?'

'I suppose so. Yes.'

'I came to ask you to let me have copies of those tapes.'

He breathed deeply and nodded. 'That's what I thought.'

'And will you?'

He looked at the shimmering pool for a while and then said, 'Does Jonathan know you're asking?'

'Yeah. I asked him where the tapes were now, and he said if anyone knew, you would. You and only you, he said.'

Ted Pitts nodded again and made up his mind. 'It's fair. They're his, really. But I haven't any spare tapes.'

'I brought some,' I said. They're out in the car. Can I fetch them?'

'All right.' He nodded decisively. 'I'll change into dry clothes while you're getting them.'

I fetched the computer-type tapes I'd brought for the purpose, and he said, 'Six? You'll only need three.'

'Two sets?' I suggested.

'Oh. Well, why not?' He turned away. 'The computer's downstairs. Would you like to see it?'

'Very much.'

He led the way into the body of the house and we went down some carpeted stairs to a lower floor. 'Office,' he said succinctly, leading the way into a normal-sized room from which one could see the same wide view of London as upstairs. 'It's a bedroom really. Bathroom through there,' he pointed. 'Spare bedroom beyond.'

The office was more accurately a sitting-room with armchairs, television, bookshelves and pinewood panelling. On an upright chair by one wall stood a pair of well-used mountain climbing boots, with the latest in thermal sleeping bags still half in its carton on the floor beside them. Ted followed my glance. 'I'm off to Switzerland in a week or two. Do you climb?'

I shook my head.

'I don't attempt the peaks,' he said earnestly. 'I prefer walking, mostly.' He pulled open a section of the pine panelling to reveal a long counter upon which stood a host of electronic equipment. 'I don't need all this for the racing programs,' he said, 'but I enjoy computers…' and he ran his fingers caressingly over the metal surfaces with the ardour of a lover.

'I've never seen those racing programs,' I said.

'Would you like to?'

'Please.'

'All right.' With the speed of long dexterity he fed a tape into a cassette recorder and explained he was putting the machine to search for the file 'Epsom'. 'How much do you know about computers?' he said.

'There was one at school, way back. We played "Space Invader" on it.'

He glanced at me pityingly. 'Everyone in this day and age should be able to write a simple program. Computer language is the universal tongue of the new world, as Latin was of the old.'

'Do you tell your students that?'

'Eh… yes.'

The small screen suddenly announced 'READY?' Ted pressed some keys on the keyboard and the screen asked 'WHICH RACE AT EPSOM?' Ted typed DERBY, and the screen in a flash presented: EPSOM: THE DERBY. NAME OF HORSE?

He put in his own name and randomly answered the ensuing questions, ending with:

TED PITTS. WIN FACTOR: 24

'Simple,' I said.

He nodded. 'The secret is in knowing which questions to ask, and in the weighting given to the answers. There's nothing mysterious about it. Anyone could evolve such a system, given the time.'

'Jonathan says there are several of them in the United States.'

Ted nodded. 'I've got one of them here.' He opened a drawer and brought out what looked like a pocket calculator. 'It's a baby computer with quite elegant programs,' he said. 'I bought it out of curiosity. It only works on American racing, of course, because one of its bases is that all tracks are identical in shape, left-handed ovals. It is geared chiefly to prize money. I understand that if you stick to its instruction book religiously you can certainly win, but of course like Liam O'Rorke's system you have to work at it to get results.'

'And never back a hunch?'

'Absolutely not,' he said seriously. 'Hunches are hopelessly unscientific.'

I looked at him curiously. 'How often do you go to the races?'

'To the races themselves? Practically never. I watch them, of course, on television, sometimes. But you don't need to, to win. All you need are the form books and objectivity.'

It seemed to me a dry view of the world where I spent my life.

Those beautiful creatures, their speed, their guts, their determination, all reduced to statistical probabilities and microchips.

'These copies of yours,' he said, 'do you want them open, so that anyone can use them?'

'How do you mean?'

'If you like, you can have them with passwords, so that they wouldn't work if anyone stole them from you.'

'Are you serious?'

'Of course,' he said, as if he were never anything else. 'I've always put passwords on all my stuff.'

'Er, how do you do it?'

'Easiest thing in the world. I'll show you.' He flicked a few switches and the screen suddenly announced 'READY?'

'You see that question mark,' Ted said. 'A question mark always means that the computer operator must answer it by typing something. In this case, if you don't type in the correct sequence of letters the program will stop right there. Try it. See what happens.'

I obediently typed EPSOM. Ted pressed the key marked 'Enter'. The screen gave a sort of flick and went straight back to 'READY?'

Ted smiled. 'The password on this tape is QUITE. Or it is at the moment. One can change the password easily.' He typed QUITE and pressed 'Enter' and the screen flashed into WHICH RACE AT EPSOM?

'See the question mark?' Ted said. 'It always needs an answer.'

I thought about question marks and said I'd better not have passwords, if he didn't mind.

'Whatever you say.'

He typed BREAK and LIST 10-80, and the screen suddenly produced a totally different looking format.

'This is the program itself,' Ted said. 'See Line 10?'

Line 10 read INPUT A$: IF A$ = "QUITE" THEN 20 ELSE PRINT "READY?"

Line 20 read PRINT "WHICH RACE AT EPSOM?"

'If you don't type QUITE,' Ted said, 'You never get to line 20.'

'Neat,' I agreed. 'But what's to prevent you looking at the program, like we are now, and seeing that you need to type QUITE?'

'It's quite easy to make it impossible for anyone to List the program. If you buy other people's programs, you can practically never List them. Because if you can't List them you can't make copies, and no one wants their work pinched in that way.'

'Um,' I said. 'I'd like tapes you can List, and without passwords.'

'OK.'

'How do you get rid of the password?'

He smiled faintly, typed 10 and then pressed 'Enter'. Then he typed LIST 10-80 again, but this time when the program appeared on the screen there was no Line 10 at all. Line 20 was the first.

'Elementary, you see,' he said.

'So it is.'

'It will take me quite a while to get rid of the passwords and make the copies,' he said. 'So why don't you go and sit upstairs by the pool. To be honest, I'd get on faster on my own.'

Pleased enough to agree, I returned to the lazy bamboo loungers and listened to Jane talking about her daughters. An hour crawled by before Ted reappeared bearing the cassettes, and even then I couldn't leave without an instructional lecture.

'To run those tapes, you'll need either an old Grantley personal computer, and there aren't many of them about nowadays, they're obsolete, or any type of company computer, as long as it will load from a cassette recorder.'

He watched my incomprehension and repeated what he'd said.

'Right,' I said.

He told me how to load Grantley BASIC, which was the first item on Side 1 of the tapes, into a company computer, which had no language of its own built in. He again told me twice.

'Right.'

'Good luck with them,' he said.

I thanked him wholeheartedly, and Jane also, and as quickly as decently possible set off on the drive home.

Half a mile down the road, compelled by a feeling of dread, I stopped by a telephone box and called Cassie. She answered at the very first ring and sounded uncharacteristically shaky.

'I'm so glad it's you,' she said. 'How long will you be?'

'About an hour.'

'Do hurry.'

'Is Angelo…?'

'He's been banging ever since you left and wrenching at the door. I've been in the kitchen. He's shaking those planks, he'll have the door off its hinges if he goes on and on. I can't strengthen the barricade. I've tried, but with one arm-'

'Cassie,' I said. 'Go up to the pub.'

'But-'

'Darling, go. Please do.'

'What if he gets out?'

'If he gets out I want you safe up the road with Bananas.'

'All right.'

'I'll see you,' I said, and disconnected. Drove like the furies towards home, taking a chance here and there and getting away with it. Across Royston Heath like a streak, weaving through pottering Sunday-outing traffic. Through the town itself; snarling down the last stretch crossing the Mil motorway, and finally branching off the main road into Six Mile Bottom village.

Wondering all the way what Angelo would do if he did get free. Smash up the cottage? Set fire to it? Lie in wait somewhere for me to return.

The one thing he would not do was to go meekly away.

CHAPTER 16

I walked carefully up the path to the lockless front door which we now no longer guarded with the chest because Cassie found climbing through the window too difficult.

The birds were singing in the garden. Would they sing if Angelo were among them, hidden in the bushes? No they wouldn't. I reached the door and pushed it open.

The cottage lay silent as if long deserted, and with spirits sinking I went through to the kitchen.

Angelo had ripped away one of the main timbers of the door and had dislodged two of the extra planks which had been wedging it shut. The door in fact was still closed, but the knife had gone from the latch.

The hole in the door was large enough to shove an arm through, but not to allow the passage of a grown man. The table and chairs and the two lowest planks hadn't shifted, but with the progress he'd made their stopping power was temporary. I had come not a minute too soon.

'Angelo,' I said.

He appeared almost instantly at the hole in the door, scowling furiously at my return. He put both hands into the gap and violently tried to wrench away the wood from each side, and I saw that he had already been bleeding from his exertions.

'I'm going to let you out,' I said. 'You can save your strength.'

'I'll get you.' The deep growl again. The statement of intent.

'Yeah,' I said. 'I dare say. Now listen, because you'll want to hear.'

He waited, eyes black with ferocity in the shadows.

I said, 'You believe that my brother cheated you out of some computer tapes. They weren't yours to start with, but we'll not argue about that. At this moment I have those tapes. They're here in the cottage. It's taken me a good while to get them, which is why you've stayed here this long in the cellar. I'll give you those tapes. Are you listening?'

He wouldn't say so, but his attention was rivetted.

'You spent fourteen years brooding over the fortune you lost. I'll give it to you. Fourteen years swearing to kill my brother. He's dead. You came here to do violent damage, and for that you could lose your parole. I'm prepared not to report you. In return for the computer tapes and for your continued freedom you can clear out of here and henceforward leave me strictly alone.'

He stared through the door with little change of expression; certainly without joy.

I said, 'You may have been brooding over your revenge for so many years that you can't face not having the prospect of it there any longer to keep you going. You may fall apart from lack of purpose.' I shrugged. 'But if I give you liberty and the treasure you want, I'll expect the slate to be wiped clean between you and me.' I paused. 'Do you understand?'

He still said absolutely nothing.

'If you agree that what I'm offering is OK,' I said, 'you can throw out that knife you took from the door latch, and I will give you the three tapes and the keys to your car, which is still where you left it.'

Silence.

'If you choose not to accept that offer,' I said, 'I'll telephone to the police to come and fetch you, and they'll hear all about you breaking my friend's arm.'

'They'll have you for keeping me in here.'

'Maybe. But if they do, you'll never get those tapes. And I mean it. Never. I'll destroy them immediately.'

He went away from behind the door but after a long minute he reappeared.

'You'll trick me,' he said. 'Like your brother.'

I shook my head. 'It's not worth it. I want you out of my life altogether and permanently.'

He made a fierce thrusting movement with his unshaven chin, a gesture which could be taken as assent.

'All right, then,' he said. 'Hand them over.'

I nodded. Turned away from him. Went into the sitting-room and sorted out one copy of each tape, shutting the three spares into a chest drawer. When I returned Angelo was still standing by the door; still suspicious, still wary.

'Tapes.' I showed him. 'Car keys.' I held them up. 'Where's the knife?'

He raised his hand and let me see it: a dinner knife, not very sharp, but destructive enough to be counted.

I laid the three cassettes on a small tray and held it out to him, and he put his arm through the hole to snatch them up.

'Now the knife,' I said.

He dropped it out onto the tray. I slid it into my hand and replaced it with the keys.

'All right,' I said. 'Go down the steps. I'll undo the barricade. Then you can come up and go out. And if you've any thoughts of rushing me, just remember your parole.'

He nodded sullenly.

'Have you still got that computer you bought fourteen years ago?'

'Dad smashed it. When I got sent down. Out of rage.'

Like son, like father… The tapes are still in the same computer language,' I said. 'Grantley Basic. The language itself is there, on Side 1. You'll need to know that.'

He scowled. Beyond him entirely to be placated, let alone pleased.

'Go on,' I said. 'I'll unbar the door.'

He disappeared from the impromptu window and I tugged away the effective planks and pulled the table and chairs from their stations, and stood finally out of his arms' reach behind them.

'Come up,' I called. 'Undo the latch and be on your way.'

He came out fast, clutching the cassettes in one blood-stained hand and the keys in the other: gave me a brief hard stare which nonetheless held little of the former menace, and disappeared through the sitting-room towards the front door. I followed and watched him go down the path, first quickening his step and almost running as he turned into the lane and then fairly sprinting out of sight towards where he'd left his car. In short time he came blasting back again, driving as if he feared I would still somehow stop him; but in truth all I did want was to be rid of him once and for all.

The empty cellar stank like a lair of an animal.

I looked into it briefly and decided it was a job for a shovel, a hose, a broom and some strong disinfectant, and while I was collecting those things Bananas and Cassie walked anxiously along from the pub.

'We saw you come,' she said, 'and we saw him go. I wanted to be here but Bananas said it might snarl things up.'

'He was right.' I kissed her soundly, both from love and tension released. 'Angelo hates to lose face.'

'You gave him the tapes?' Bananas asked.

'Yeah.'

'And may they choke him,' Cassie said.

I smiled. 'They may not. I'd guess Ted Pitts is worth a million.'

'Really?' Her eyebrows shot up. 'Then why don't we-?'

'It takes time and work. Ted Pitts lives right at the London end of the Ml, half a mile off the country's biggest artery. I'll bet he spends countless days beating up that road to towns in the north, traipsing round betting shops, sucking his honey. It's what I guess he does, anyway. He was near Manchester yesterday, his wife said. A different town every day, so that no one gets to know him.'

'What difference would that make?' Bananas said.

I explained what happened to constant winners. 'I'll bet there isn't a single bookie who knows Ted Pitts by sight.'

'If you did it,' Bananas said thoughtfully, 'I suppose they'd know you at once.'

I shook my head. 'Only on the racecourse. Round the backstreet betting shops in any big town I'd be just another mug.'

They both looked at me expectantly.

'Yeah,' I said. 'I can just see me spending my life that way.'

'Think of the loot,' Bananas said.

'And no tax,' said Cassie.

I thought of Ted Pitts's splendid house and of my own lack of amassed goods. Thought of him walking the upper slopes of Swiss mountains, restoring his spirit, wandering but coming home. Thought of my lack of a settled life-pattern and my hatred of being tied down. Thought of the way I'd enjoyed the past months, making decisions, running a business, knowing all the time it was just for a year, not a lifetime, and being reassured by such impermanency. Thought of spending hot summer days and wet winter afternoons in betting shops, playing the percentages, joylessly, methodically making a million.

'Well?' Bananas said.

'Maybe one day, when I'm hungry.'

'You've no sense.'

'You do it then,' I said. 'Give up the pub. Give up the cooking. Take to the road.'

He stared at me while he thought about it, then grimaced and said,

'There's more to life than making money. Not a lot, but some.'

'One of these days,' said Cassie with sweet certainty, 'you'll both do it. Not even a saint could sit on a goldmine and be too lazy to pick up the nuggets.'

'You think it's just lazy-?'

'I sure do. Where's your buccaneering heart? Where's the glint of piracy? What about the battlecry of those old north-country industrialists- where there's muck there's brass?' She looked alight with enthusiasm, a glow I guessed derived as much from Angelo's absence as from the thought of an available fortune.

'If you feel the same when I've finished for Luke Houston,' I said, 'I'll give it a trial. Just for a while.'

'Picky,' she said. 'That's what you are.'

All the same it was in better spirits that I set about cleaning the cellar and making it fit for fishing gear to live in; and in the late afternoon, all three of us sat in the sun on the cottage grass while Cassie and Bananas discussed how they would spend the lolly they thought I would inevitably chase.

They already felt as I did that Angelo's revengeful lust had been at last dissipated, and they said he had even done us a favour as without his violent attack I would never have sought out Ted Pitts.

'Good can come of bad,' Cassie said with satisfaction.

And bad of good, I thought. Jonathan's conjuring tricks had trapped Angelo thoroughly and made it certain that he would be convicted empty handed. Had ensured that for fourteen years Angelo would be unable to kill anyone else. But that particular good sequence of actions which had seemed so final at the time had proved to be only a plug for a simmering volcano. The psychopathic young man had at length erupted as a full-blown coarsened thug, no longer as Jonathan had described him, occasionally high on the drug of recklessness, but more plainly, comprehensively, violent.

Time changed perspectives. From disasters could come successes, and from successes, disasters. A pity, I thought, that one could never perceive whether to weep or cheer at the actual event.

Our lives gradually quietened to sensible proportions. Cassie went back to work in a sling and Bananas invented a new delight involving liquid spiced beef: and I began a series of forays to stud farms to take preliminary peeks at the yearlings soon to be offered at the sales, all too aware that the climax of my year was approaching, the test by which Luke would judge me, looking back. To buy young stock that would win would be satisfactory; to buy a colt to sire a dynasty would be luck. Somewhere between the two lay an area in which judgment would turn out to have been good, indifferent or absent, and it was there that I hoped to make as few mistakes as possible.

For about a week I mosied around all over the place with detours to race meetings and to Luke's two trainers in Berkshire, and spent every spare waking minute with the Stud Book. Sim Shell said severely that he wished to be present and in full consultation whenever I bought anything for him personally to train, and Mort with every nerve twitching asked for Sir Ivor, Nijinsky and Northern Dancer, all at once, and at the very least.

Cassie came with me to the evening session on the first day of the sales, roaming about on the forever legs and listening engrossed to the gossip. Every year Newmarket sale ring saw fortunes lost quicker than crashing stock markets, but the talk was all of hope and expectation, of slashing speed and breeding potential, all first-day euphoria and unspent cheques.

'What excitement,' Cassie said. 'You can see it in every face.'

'The joy of acquisition. Disillusion comes next week. Then optimistic gloom. Then, if you're lucky, complacent relief.'

'But today…'

'Today,' I nodded. 'There's still the chance of buying the winner of the Derby.'

I bought two colts and a filly on that evening for staggering sums, reassured to a point by having competed against top echelons of bloodstock agents but pursued by the sapping fear that it was I who had pressed on too far, not they who had stopped too soon.

We stayed to the end of the programme, partly because of Cassie's fascination with a new world but also because it was when the big buyers had gone home that a bargain sometimes arose, and I did in fact buy the last lot of the day, a thin-looking pony-like creature, because I liked his bright eyes.

The breeder thanked me. 'Is it really for Luke Houston?'

'Yes,'I said.

'He won't be sorry. He's intelligent, that little colt.'

'He looks it.'

'He'll grow, you know,' he told me earnestly. 'His dam's family are all late growers. Come and have a drink. It isn't every day I sell one to Luke Houston.'

We went back, however, to drink and eat with Bananas, and from there to the cottage, where I sent off a telexed report to Luke, for whom our midnight was three in the afternoon.

Luke liked telexes. If he wanted to discuss what I'd sent he would telephone after his evening dinner, catching me at six in the morning before I left for the gallops, but more normally he would reply by telex or not at all.

The dining-room was filled with equipment provided by Luke: a video-disc recorder for re-watching and analysing past races, a printout calculator, photo-copier, a row of filing cabinets, an electric typewriter, the telex machine and a complicated affair which answered the telephone, took messages, gave messages, and recorded every word it heard, including my own live conversations. It worked on a separate line from the telephone in the sitting room, a good arrangement which most simply divorced our private calls from his business, allowing me to pay for one and him the other. All he hadn't given me – or had had me collect from an unwilling Warrington Marsh-was a computer.

When I came down the following morning I found the telex had chattered during the night.

'Why didn't you buy the Fisher colt? Why did you buy the cheap colt? Give my best to Cassie.'

He had never actually met Cassie but only talked to her a few times on the telephone. The politeness was his way of saying that his questions were simply questions, not accusations. Any telexes which came without 'best to Cassie' were jump-to-it matters.

I telexed back. 'Two private owners who detest each other, Schubman and Mrs Crickington, beat each other up to three hundred and forty thousand for the Fisher colt, way beyond its sensible value. The cheap colt might surprise you yet. Regards, William.'

Cassie these days was being collected and brought back by a slightly too friendly man who lived near the pub and worked a street away from Cassie in Cambridge. She said he was putting his hand on her knee instead of the steering wheel increasingly often and she would be extremely glad to be rid of both him and the plaster. In other respects than driving the cast had been accommodated, and our night-time activities were back to their old joy.

By day we slowly repaired or replaced everything which had been smashed, using as references the pieces Bananas had stacked in the garage. Television, vases, lamps, all as near as possible to the originals. Even six corn dollies hung again in their mobile group, dollies freshly and intricately woven from the shiny stalks of the new harvest by an elderly ethnic-smock lady who said you had to cut the corn for them specially nowadays by hand, because combine harvesters chopped the straw too short.

Bananas thought that replacing the corn dollies might be going too far, but Cassie said darkly that they represented pagan gods who should be placated – and deep in the countryside you never knew.

I carpentered new pieces into both the damaged doors and fitted a new lock to the front. All traces of Angelo gradually vanished, all except his baseball bat which lay along the sill of the window which faced the road. We had consciously kept it there to begin with as a handy weapon in case he should come back, but even as day after peaceful day gave us a growing sense of ease we let it lie: another hostage to the evil eye, perhaps.

Jonathan telephoned me one evening and although I was sure he wouldn't approve of what I'd done I told him everything that had happened.

'You kept him in the cellar?

'Yeah.'

'Good God.'

'It seems to have worked.'

'Mm. I can't help being sorry that Angelo has that system after all.'

'I know. I'm sorry too, after all you did to keep it from him. I really hated giving it to him. But you were right, he's dangerous, and I don't want to vanish to California, the life I want is right here on the English turf. And about the system… Don't forget, it isn't enough just to possess it, you'd have to operate it discreetly. Angelo knows just about nothing about racing, and he's impetuous and undisciplined, not cunning and quiet.'

'He may also,' Jonathan said, 'think that the system gives a winner every time, which it doesn't. Old Mrs O'Rorke said it steadily gave an average of one winner in three.'

'Angelo versus the bookies should be quite a match. And by the way, I told him you were dead.'

'Thanks very much.'

'Well you didn't want him turning up one day on your sunny doorstep, did you?'

'He'd never get a visa.'

'You can walk across the Canadian border,' I said, 'without anyone being the wiser.'

'And the Mexican,' he agreed.

I told him in detail about Ted Pitts's house, and he sounded truly pleased. 'And the little girls? How are they?'

'Grown up and pretty.'

'I envied him those children.'

'Did you?' I said.

'Yes. Well… there you are. It's the way life turns out.'

I listened to the regret in his voice and understood how much he himself had wanted a daughter, a son… and I thought that I too would regret it one day if I didn't… and that maybe it would be terrific fun if Cassie…

'Are you still there?' he said.

'Yeah. If I get married, will you come over to the wedding?'

'I don't believe it.'

'You never know. I haven't asked her yet. She might not want to.'

'Keep me posted.' He sounded amused.

'Yeah. How's Sarah?'

'Fine, thanks.'

'So long,' I said, and he said, 'So long,' and I put down the receiver with the usual feeling of thankfulness that I had a brother, and specifically that he was Jonathan.

More days passed. By the end of the first week's sales I'd bought twelve yearlings for Luke and lost five more to higher bidders, and I'd consulted with Sim until he was sick of it and given Mort a filly that was on her toes if not actually a dancer, and spent two evenings in the Bedford Arms with the Irish trainer Donavan, listening to his woes and watching him get drunk.

'There's more good horses in Ireland than ever come out,' he said, wagging an unsteady finger under my nose.

'I'm sure.'

'You want to come over, now. You want to poke around them studs, now, before you go to the sales.'

'I'll come over soon,' I said. 'Before the next sales, two weeks from now.'

'You do that.' He nodded sagely. 'There's a colt I have my eye on, way down below Wexford. I'd like to train that colt, now. I'd like for you to buy that little fella for Luke, that I would.'

In that particular year, as a trial, the first Newmarket Yearling Sales had been held early, at the beginning of September. The Premium Sales, when most of the bluest-blooded youngsters would come under the hammer, were as usual at the end of the month. The colt Donavan had his eye on was due to be sold two weeks ahead, but unfortunately not only Donavan had his eye on it. The whole of Ireland and most of England seemed also to have their optics swivelled that way. Even allowing for Irish exaggeration, that colt seemed the best news of the season.

'Luke would want that fella, now,' Donavan said.

'I'll bid for it,' I said mildly.

He peered boozily into my face. 'What you want to do, now, is to get Luke to say there's no ceiling. No ceiling, that's the thing.'

'I'll go to Luke's limit.'

'You're a broth of a boy, now. And it's write to Luke I did, I'll admit it, to say you were as green as a pea and no good to man nor horse, not in the job he'd given you.'

'Did you?'

'Well now, if you get me that little colt I'll write again and say I was wrong.' He nodded heavily and half fell off the bar stool. He was never drunk on the gallops or at the races or indeed by the sale-ring itself, but at all other times- probably. The owners didn't seem to mind and nor did the horses: drunk or sober, Donavan produced as many winners year by year as anyone in Ireland. I didn't like or dislike him. I did business with him before ten in the morning and listened intently in the evenings, the time when through clouds of whisky he spoke the truth. Many thought him uncouth, and so he was. Many thought Luke would have chosen a smoother man with tidier social manners, but perhaps Luke had seen and heard Donavan's intimate way with horses, as I now had, and preferred the priceless goods to a gaudier package. I had come to respect Donavan. Two solid days of his company were quite enough.

When the flood of purchasing trainers and agents and go-it-alone owners had washed out of the town temporarily, Sim gave a brown short-necked filly a final work-out and afterwards rather challengingly told me she was as ready as could be to win the last race on St Leger day, on Saturday.

'She looks great,' I said. 'A credit to your care.'

Sim half scowled. 'You'll be going to Doncaster, I suppose?'

I nodded. 'Staying up there, Friday night. Mort's running Genotti in the St Leger.'

'Will you help me saddle mine up?' Sim said.

I tried to hide my astonishment at this olive branch of epic proportions. He usually attempted to keep me as far from the runners as possible.

'Be glad to,' I said.

He nodded with customary brusqueness. 'See you there, then.'

'Good luck.'

He was going up on the Wednesday for the whole of the four-day meeting but I didn't particularly want to, not least because Cassie still found it difficult to manage on her own with the rigid arm. I left her on the Friday, though, and drove to Doncaster, and almost the first person I saw as I walked through the racecourse gates was Angelo.

I stopped abruptly and turned aside, willing him not to spot me, not to speak.

He was buying two racecards from one of the booths near the entrance, holding up the queue while he sorted out coins.

I supposed it was inevitable I would one day see him if he took to racegoing at all often, but somehow it was still a shock. I was glad when he turned away from the booth in the opposite direction to where I stood: there might be a truce between us but it was fragile at best.

I watched while he barged his way through the swelling crowd with elbows like battering rams and thighs like rocks: he was heading not to anywhere where he could place a bet but towards the less populated area near the rails of the track itself, where supporters had not yet flocked to see the first race. Reaching the rails, he stopped beside an elderly man in a wheelchair and unceremoniously thrust one of the racecards into his hands. Then he turned immediately on his heel and bulled his way purposefully towards the serried ranks of bookmakers inside the stands, where I lost sight of him, thankfully, for the rest of the day.

He was back, however, on the Saturday. Although I seldom bothered with gambling, I decided to have a small bet on Genotti in the St Leger, infected no doubt by Mort's fanatical eagerness, and as I stood near a little Welsh bookmaker whom I'd long known, I saw Angelo, thirty feet away, frowning heavily over a small notebook.

'Genotti,' my bookmaker friend said to his clerk who wrote down (in the book) every transaction, 'Three tenners at fives, William Derry.'

'Thanks, Taff,' I said.

Along the row Angelo began arguing about a price on offer, which was apparently less than he thought fair.

'Everyone else is at five to one.' His voice was a growl which I knew all too well.

'Try someone else, then. It's fours to you, Mister Gilbert.'

With half my mind I was satisfied that Angelo was indeed rushing in stupidly with the system where Liam O'Rorke and Ted Pitts had taken care not to tread, but also I was uneasy that he should be arousing opposition so soon. I positively needed for him to win for a while. I'd never envisaged him sticking to the anonymous drudgery required for long-term success, but the honeymoon period should not already have been over.

Taff-the-bookmaker glanced over his shoulder at the altercation and gave his clerk an eyes-to-heaven gesture.

'What's all the fuss about?' I asked.

'He's a right git, that man.' Taff divided his comment impartially between him, his clerk, and the world in general.

'Angeio Gilbert.'

Taff's gaze sharpened on me directly. 'Know him, do you?'

'Somebody pointed him out… he murdered somebody, years ago.'

'That's right. Just out of jug, he is. And stupid – you wouldn't credit it.'

'What's he done?'

'He came up to York last week with a fistful of banknotes, laying it about as if there were no tomorrow, and us not knowing who he was at that moment. And there's us thinking we were all taking lollipops off a baby when whammo, this outsider he'd invested about six big ones on comes cantering in from nowhere and we're all paying out and wincing and scratching our heads over where he got the info, because the trainer hadn't had as much as a quid on, as far as we knew. So Lancer, that bloke along there arguing with this Gilbert, he asks this geezer straight out who'd put him onto the winner, and the stupid git smirked and said Liam O'Rorke did.'

Taff peered at my face, which I felt must have mirrored my feeling of inner shock, but apparently it merely looked blank because Taff, who was a good sixty-plus, made a clicking sound with his mouth and said, 'Before your time, I suppose.'

'What was?'

Taff's attention was torn away by several customers who crowded to place bets, and he seemed vaguely surprised to see me still there when they'd gone.

'Are you that interested?' he asked.

'Got nothing else to do.'

Taff glanced along to where Angelo had been, but Angelo had gone. 'Thirty years ago. Thirty-five. Time does go quick. There was this old Irishman, Liam O'Rorke, he'd invented the only system I ever knew that would guarantee you'd win. Course, once we'd cottoned to him we weren't all that keen to take his bets. I mean, we wouldn't be, would we, knowing he had the edge on us somehow. Anyway, he would never part with his secret, how he did it, and it went with him to the grave, and good riddance, between you and me.'

'And now?'

'And now here's this geezer rocking us back on our heels with this huge win at York and then he's sneering at us and calling us mugs, and saying we don't know what's hit us yet, and what he's using on us is Liam O'Rorke's old system resurrected, and now he's all indignant and complaining that we won't give him a good price. Acting all hurt and angry.' Taff laughed contemptuously. 'I mean, how stupid can you get?'

CHAPTER 17

Genotti won the St Leger by an easy four lengths.

Mort's excitement afterwards seemed to levitate him visibly off the ground, the static electricity about him crackling in the dry September sunshine. He wrung my hand with bone-scrunching enthusiasm and danced round the unsaddling enclosure giving rapturous responses to all who congratulated him, reacting with such uncomplicated delight to his victory that he had all the crowd smiling. It was easy, I reflected, to think of Mort as simple through and through, whereas, as I had gradually discovered, he traversed mental mazes of tortuous routes where pros battled cons like moves on a chessboard, and the plans and solutions which seemed so obvious once they had turned out to be right were the fruits of the mazes.

I collected my winnings from Taff, who gloomily said he would never have given anyone five to one if he'd known beforehand that Genotti was Angelo Gilbert's fancy.

'Did Angelo win?' I asked.

'Of course, he did. He must have had a grand on. None of us would take his money at the finish.'

'So he didn't get fives?'

'More like evens,' he said sourly.

At evens, Angelo would still have doubled his money, but for Angelo that might not be enough. Grievance, I could see, might raise a very ugly head.

'No system could win every single time,' I said. 'Angelo won't.'

'I dare say not,' Taff said with obstinancy. 'But you can take it from me that no bookie on the racecourse will in future give that arrogant so-and-so much more than evens, even if what he's backing is lame on three legs, carrying two stone overweight and ridden by my old dad.'

'At evens, he wouldn't win over all,' I said.

'So who's crying? We're not in the loving-kindness business, you know.'

'Fleece the mugs?'

'You got it.'

He began paying out other successful punters with the rapidity of long practice but it was seldom that he would go home from a racetrack with less cash than he'd brought. Few bookmakers were gamblers at heart and only the good mathematicians survived.

I drifted away from him and drank some champagne with the similarly fizzing Mort and a little later helped Sim to saddle the filly, who made it another hooray-for-Houston day by a short head. Sim took it more calmly than Mort, but with a satisfaction at least as deep, and he seemed to be admitting and acknowledging at last that I was not an ignorant bossy upstart but a well-meaning colleague and that all Luke's successes worked for our joint good. I wasn't sure how or why his attitude had changed, I knew only that a month earlier a friendly drink together in a racecourse bar to celebrate a Houston winner would have been unthinkable.

Thinking more of Mort and Sim and the horses than of the still active spectre of Angelo, I drove from Doncaster to collect Cassie, and from there to a late dinner with Bananas. He too, it appeared, had backed Genotti, more than doubling my own winnings.

'I had a hundred on,' he said.

'I didn't know you ever bet.'

'On the quiet, now and then. Hearing all I do, how could I not?'

'So what did you hear about Genotti?'

He looked at me pityingly. 'Every time you've seen that colt work on the gallops, you've come back like a kid with tickets to the Cup Final.'

'More to the point,' Cassie said, 'if you'd used Liam O'Rorke's system, would it have come up with Genotti?'

'Ah.' I read Bananas's new menu and wondered what he meant by Prisoner Chicken. Said casually, 'Angelo Gilbert backed him.'

'What?'

I explained about Angelo, the bookmakers, and stupidity in general.

'He's blown it,' Cassie said, not without satisfaction.

I nodded. 'Into fragments.'

Bananas looked at me thoughtfully. 'What's it going to do for the dear man's temper?'

'It's not William's fault,' Cassie said.

'That trifle didn't stop him before.'

Cassie looked frowningly alarmed. 'What's Prisoner Chicken?' I said.

Bananas smirked. 'Breast of chicken marinated in lemon juice and baked under match-stick thin bars of herb pastry.'

'It sounds dry,'! said with jaundice.

'Bread and water are optional extras.'

Cassie laughed and Angelo retreated a little. We ate the Prisoner Chicken which was predictably a delight of juice and flavour and reminded us not at all of its inspiration.

I'm going to Ireland tomorrow,' I said to Cassie. 'Like to come?'

' Ireland? There and back?'

I nodded. 'To see a man about a horse.'

'What else?'

So we spent some of my winnings on her fare, and went down south of Wexford to see the colt all the world wanted: and half the world, it seemed, was there on the same errand, standing around an untidy stable yard with blank faces all carefully not expressing identical inner thoughts.

Cassie watched as the beautifully coupled brown yearling skittered around under the calming hands of the stud groom and unprofessionally pronounced him 'sweet'.

'A money machine on the hoof,' I said. 'Look at the greed in all those shuttered faces.'

'They just seem uninterested to me.'

'Enthusiasm puts the price up.'

One or two of the bored-looking onlookers advanced to run exploratory hands down the straight young bones, stepping back with poker-playing non-committal eyes, the whole procedure hushed as if in church.

'Aren't you going to feel its legs?' Cassie asked.

'Might as well.'

I took my turn in the ritual, and found like everyone else that the young limbs were cool and firm with tendons like fiddle strings in all the right places. There was also a good strong neck, a well-shaped quarter and most importantly a good depth of chest. Quite apart from his pedigree, which resounded with Classic winners, one couldn't, I thought, even imagine a better-looking animal: all of which meant that the bidding at the sale on Wednesday would rise faster than Bananas Frisby.

We flew thoughtfully back to England and I sent a telex to Luke. 'Bidding for the Hansel colt will be astronomical. I've seen him. He is without fault. How high do you want me to go?'

To which, during the night, I received a reply. 'It's your job, fella. You decide.'

Ouch, I thought. Where is the ceiling? How high is disaster?

Newmarket filled up again for the new week of sales, the most important programme of yearling sales of the whole season. Everyone in racing with money to spend brought determination and dreams, and the four-legged babies came in horseboxes from just up the road, from Kent and the Cotswolds, from Devon and Scotland, from across the Irish Sea.

The Hansel colt from Wexford was due to be sold at the prime time of seven-thirty on the Wednesday evening and by seven the high-rising banks of seats of the sale ring were invisible under a sea of bodies, Cassie somewhere among them. Down near the floor in the pen reserved for probable bidders, Donavan was breathing heavily at my elbow as he had been all afternoon, determinedly sober and all the gloomier for it.

'Now you get that little colt, now, you get him for me.' If he'd said it once he'd said it a hundred times, as if repetition of desire could somehow make the purchase certain.

They brought the colt into the ring in the sudden hush of a host of lungs holding back their breath all at once, and the light gleamed on the walking gem and he did in truth look like a prince who could sire a dynasty.

The bidding for him started not in thousands but in tens of thousands, leaping in seconds to the quarter million and racing away beyond. I waited until the first pause and raised the price by a giant twenty-five thousand, to be immediately capped by a decisive nod from an agent along to my right. I raised another twenty-five and lost it as quickly, and another, and another: and I could go on nodding, I thought, until my head fell off. Nothing easier in the world than spending someone else's money as fast as noughts running through the meter on a petrol pump.

At eight hundred thousand guineas I just stopped. The auctioneer looked at me enquiringly. I didn't blink. 'Against you, sir,' he said.

'Go on,' said Donavan, thinking I'd merely overlooked that it was my turn. 'Go on, go on.'

I shook my head. Donavan turned and literally punched me on the arm in an agony of fear that my dithering would lose him the colt. 'Go on, it's you. Bid, you bugger, bid.'

'Any more, sir?' the auctioneer said.

I again shook my head. Donavan kicked my leg. The auctioneer looked around the silent sale ring. 'All done, then?' he said: and after a lifetime's pause his gavel came down sharply, the clap of opportunity gone for ever. 'Sold to Mr O'Flaherty. Next lot, please.'

Under the buzz of comment that followed the super-colt out of the ring, Donavan thrust a furious purple face towards mine and yelled uninhibitedly, 'You buggering bastard. Do you know who bought that colt?'

'Yes I do.'

'I'll kill you, so I will.'

Shades of Angelo…

'There's no reason,' I said, 'why Luke should pay for your feud with Mick O'Flaherty.'

'That colt will win the Derby.'

I shook my head. 'You're afraid it will.'

'I'll write to Luke, so I will. I'll tell him it's you who's afraid. Bloody English. I'd kill the lot of you.'

He stalked away with rage pouring visibly from every pore, and I watched him with regret because I would indeed have liked to buy him his little fellow and seen him croon over him to make him a champion.

'Why did you stop?' Cassie asked, taking my arm.

'Does it worry you?'

She blinked. 'You know what they're saying?'

'That I didn't have the nerve to go on?'

'It was just that I heard…'

I smiled lop-sidedly. 'My first big battle, and I retreated. Something like that?'

'Something.'

'O'Flaherty and Donavan hate each other so much it curdles their judgment. I meant to go as far as seven hundred and fifty thousand guineas and I thought I'd get the colt, I really did, because that's an extremely high price for any yearling. I went one bid higher still, but it wasn't enough. O'Flaherty was standing behind his agent prodding him in the back to make him carry on. I could see him. O'Flaherty was absolutely determined to buy the colt. To spite Donavan, I think. It isn't sense to go on bidding against someone compelled by raw emotion, so I stopped.'

'But what if he does win the Derby?'

'About ten thousand thoroughbred colts were born last year in the British Isles alone. Then there's France and America too. One colt from that huge crop will win the Derby the year after next, when he's three. The odds are against it being this one.'

'You're so cool.'

'No,' I said truthfully. 'Bruised and disgruntled.'

We drove home and I sent the telex to Luke. 'Regret underbidder at eight hundred and forty thousand pounds excluding tax for Hansel colt. Donavan's deadly rival Mick O'Flaherty successful at eight hundred and sixty-six thousand two fifty. Donavan furious. Sack me if you like. Regards, William.'

The return message came within an hour. 'If the colt wins the Derby you owe me ten million pounds otherwise you are still employed. Best to Cassie.'

'Thank God for that,' she said. 'Let's go to bed.'

Two busy days later I dropped her at work and drove on south-westwards to Berkshire to visit Luke's other trainers during the morning and to go on to see three of their horses race atNewbury in the afternoon; and there again on the racecourse was Angelo.

This time he saw me immediately before I had time to dodge: came charging across a patch of grass, took roughly hold of my lapel, and told me the betting system didn't work.

'You sold me a pup. You'll be sorry.' He looked quickly around as if hoping to find us both on deserted moorland, but as there was only concrete well populated, he smothered his obvious wish to slaughter me there and then. He was physically tougher, I thought. Less pale, less puffy; the effects of long imprisonment giving way to a healthy tan and tighter muscles, the bull-like quality of the body intensifying. The black eyes… cold as ever. I looked at his re-emerging malevolence and didn't like it a bit.

I pulled his hand off my lapel and dropped it. 'There's nothing wrong with the system,' I said. 'It's not my fault you've been trampling all over it like a herd of elephants.'

His voice came back in the familiar bass register, 'If I'm still losing by five tomorrow, I'll know you've conned me. And I'll come after you. That's a promise.'

He turned away abruptly and strode off towards the stands, and in a while I went in search of Taff among the bookmakers.

'The latest on Angelo Gilbert?' He looked down at me from his raised position on an inverted beer crate. 'He's nuts.'

'Are you still offering him rotten odds?'

'Look you, Mr Derry, I'm too busy to talk now.' He was indeed surrounded by eager customers holding out cash. 'If you want to know, buy me a pint after the last race.'

'Right,' I said, 'it's a deal.' And at the end of the afternoon he came with me into the crowded bar and shouted the unexpected news into my attentive ear.

'That man Angelo's gone haywire. He won big money at York, like I told you, and a fair amount at Doncaster, but before York it seems he lost a packet at Epsom and last Monday he kissed goodbye to a fortune at Goodwood, and today he's plunged on two horses who finished out of sight. So we're all back to giving him regular odds. Old Lancer – he works for Joe Glickstein, Honest Joe, you must have seen his stands at all the tracks?' I nodded. 'Well, Old Lancer, he took a thousand in readies this afternoon off that Angelo on Pocket Handbook, what couldn't win if it started yesterday. I mean, the man's a screwball. He's no more playing Liam O'Rorke's system than I'm a bleeding fairy.'

I watched him drink his beer, feeling great dismay that Angelo couldn't manage the system even to the extent of letting it find him the right horses. He had to be guessing some of the answers to the multifarious questions instead of looking them up accurately in the form books: skipping the hard work out of laziness and still trusting the scores which the computer returned. But a computer couldn't advise him, couldn't tell him that omitting an answer here and an answer there would upset all those delicately balanced weightings and inevitably distort the all-important win factors.

Angelo was dumb, dim, stupid.

Angelo would think it was my fault.

'They say his father's getting tired of it,' Taff said.

'Who?'

'That Angelo person's father. Old Harry Gilbert. Made a packet out of bingo halls, they say, before he got struck.'

'Er, struck?'

Taff brought a lined brown outdoor face out of the beer mug. 'Struck down with arthritis, I think it is. He can't hardly walk, anyway. Comes to the races sometimes in a wheel chair, and it's him what has the cash.'

Enlightened, I thought back to the previous week at Doncaster, seeing in memory Angelo giving a racecard to an elderly chairbound man. Angelo's father, still indulgent, still supportive, still paying for his deadly middle-aged son.

I thanked Taff for his information. 'What's this Angelo to you?' he said.

'A long-time no friend of my brother's.'

He made an accepting motion with his head, looked at his watch and finished his beer at a gulp, saying he'd left his clerk looking after the day's takings and he'd be happier having his mitts on them himself. 'We've all had a good day,' he said cheerfully, 'with those two odds-on favourites getting stuffed.'

I drove homewards and collected Cassie who was waiting at the hospital after a what they had called a progress assessment.

'Plaster off next week,' she complained. 'I wanted it off this afternoon, but they wouldn't.'

The plaster was by then itching badly, the 'REMEMBER TIGERS' was fading, Cassie was insisting that her arm felt mended and impatience had definitely set in.

We again went to the sales: I seemed to have spent half a lifetime round that sale ring, and Luke now owned twenty-eight yearlings he had not yet seen. I had signed cheques on his behalf for nearly two million pounds and was tending to dream about it at night. There was only the Saturday morning left now, an undistinguished programme according to the catalogue, the winding-down after the long excitements of the week. I went early by habit and with only short premeditation bought very cheaply the first lot of the day, an undistinguished-looking liver chestnut colt whose blood lines were sounder to the inspection than his spindly legs. One couldn't have foretold on that misty autumn morning that this was the prince who would sire a dynasty, but that in the end was what happened. My mind, as I signed for him and arranged for him to be sent along the road to Mort's stable, was more immediately on the conversation I'd had with Jonathan on the telephone the evening before.

'I want to talk to Angelo's father,' I said. 'Do you remember where he lived?'

'Of course I do. Welwyn Garden City. If you give me a minute, I'll find the street and the number.' There was a pause while he searched.

'Here we are. Seventeen, Pemberton Close. He may have moved, of course, and don't forget, William, he won't be in the least pleasant. I heard he was threatening all sorts of dire revenges against me after Angelo was convicted, but I didn't hang around long enough for him to get going.'

'Angelo seems to depend on him for cash,' I said.

'That figures.'

'Angelo's making a right balls-up of the betting system. He's losing his father's money and he's blaming me for it, and stoking up again towards volcanic eruption with me as the designated target for the lava flow.'

'He's an absolute pest.'

'He sure is. How does one rid oneself of a monster that won't go away? Don't answer that. Engineering Angelo back into jail permanently is all I can think of, and even then I would need to do it so that he didn't know who'd done it, and would it even on the whole be fair?'

'Provocation? Put a crime in his way and invite him to commit it?'

'As you say.'

'No, it wouldn't exactly be fair.'

'I was afraid you wouldn't think so,' I said.

'Nothing much short of murder would put him back inside for the whole of his life. Anything less and he'd be out breathing fire again, as you said before. And however could you line up a living victim?'

'Mm,' I said, 'it's impossible. I still think the only lasting solution is to make Angelo prosper, so I'll see if I can persuade his old dad to that effect.'

'His old dad is an old rattlesnake, don't forget.'

'His old dad is in a wheelchair.'

'Is he?' Jonathan seemed surprised. 'All the same, remember that rattlesnakes don't have legs.'

I reckoned that on that Saturday afternoon Angelo would still be blundering around the bookies on Newbury racecourse and that his father might have stayed at home, so it was then that I drove to Welwyn Garden City, leaving Cassie wandering around the cottage with a duster and an unaccustomedly domestic expression.

The house at number seventeen Pemberton Close proved to be inhabited not by Harry Gilbert but by a stockbroker, his chatty wife and four noisy children on roller skates, all of them out in the garden.

'Harry Gilbert?' said the wife, holding a basket of dead roses. 'He couldn't manage the stairs with his illness. He built himself a bungalow full of ramps.'

'Do you know where?'

'Oh sure. On the golf course. He used to play, poor man. Now he sits at a window and watches the foursomes go by on the fourteenth green. We often wave to him, when we're playing.'

'Does he have arthritis?' I asked.

'Good Lord, no.' She made a grimace of sympathy. 'Multiple sclerosis. He's had it for years. We've seen him slowly get worse… We used to live four doors away, but we always liked this house. When he put it up for sale, we bought it.'

'Could you tell me how to find him?'

'Sure.' She gave me brisk and clear instructions. 'You do know, don't you, not to talk about his son?'

'Son?' I said vaguely.

'His only son is in prison for murder. So sad for the poor man. Don't talk about it, it distresses him.'

'Thanks for warning me,' I said.

She nodded and smiled from a kind and unperceiving heart and went back to tidying her pretty garden. Surely goodness and mercy all thy days shall follow thee, I thought frivolously, and no monsters who won't go away shall gobble thee up. I left the virtuous and went in search of the sinner, and found him, as she'd said, sitting in his wheelchair by a big bay window, watching the earnest putters out on the green.

The wide double front doors of the large and still new-looking one-storey building were opened to me by a man so like Angelo at first sight that I thought for a fearsome moment that he hadn't after all gone to the races; but it was only the general shape and colouring that was the same, the olive skin, greying hair, unfriendly dark eyes, tendency to an all-over padding of fat.

'Eddy,' a voice called. 'Who is it? Come in here,'

The voice was as deep and harsh as Angelo's, the words themselves slightly slurred. I walked across the polished wood of the entrance hall and then across the lush drawing room with its panoramic view, and not until I was six feet away from Harry Gilbert did I stop and say I was William Derry.

Vibrations could almost be felt. Eddy, behind me, audibly hissed from the air leaving his lungs. The much older version of Angelo's face which looked up from the wheelchair went stiff with strong but unreadable emotions, guessed at as anger and indignation, but possibly not. He had thinning grey hair, a grey moustache, a big body in a formal grey suit with a waistcoat. Only in the lax hands was the illness visible, and only then when he moved them; and from his polished shoes to the neat parting across his scalp it seemed to me that he was denying his weaknesses, presenting an outwardly un-crumbled facade so as to announce to the world that authority still lived within.

'You're not welcome in my house,' he said.

'If your son would stop threatening me, I wouldn't be here.'

'He says you have tricked us like your brother.'

'No.'

'The betting system doesn't work.'

'It worked for Liam O'Rorke,' I said. 'Liam O'Rorke was quiet, clever, careful and a statistician. Is Angelo any of those things?'

He gave me a cold stare. 'A system should work for everyone alike.'

'A horse doesn't run alike for every jockey,' I said.

'There's no similarity.'

'Engines run sweetly for some drivers and break down for others. Heavy-handedness is always destructive. Angelo is trampling all over that system. No wonder it isn't producing results.'

The system is wrong,' he said stubbornly.

'It may,' I said slowly, 'be slightly out of date.' Yet for Ted Pitts it was purring along still: but then Ted Pitts too was quiet, clever; a statistician.

It seemed that I had made the first impression upon Harry Gilbert. He said with a faint note of doubt, 'It should not have changed with the years. Why should it?'

'I don't know. Why shouldn't it? There may be a few factors that Liam O'Rorke couldn't take into account because in his time they didn't exist.'

A depressed sort of grimness settled over him.

I said, 'And if Angelo has been hurrying through the programs, skipping some of the questions or answering them inaccurately, the scores will come out wrong. He's had some of the answers right. You won a lot at York, so I'm told. And you'd have won more on the St Leger if Angelo hadn't scared the bookmakers with his boastfulness.'

'I don't understand you.' The slur in his speech, the faint distortion of all his words was, I realised, the effect of his illness. Articulation might be damaged but the chill awareness in his eyes said quite clearly that his intelligence wasn't.

'Angelo told all the bookmakers at York that he would henceforth fleece them continually, because it was he who possessed Liam O'Rorke's infallible system.'

Harry Gilbert closed his eyes. His face remained unmoved.

Eddy said belligerently, 'What's wrong with that? You have to show people who's boss.'

'Eddy,' Harry Gilbert said, 'you don't know anything about anything and you never will.' He slowly opened his eyes. 'It makes a difference,' he said.

'They gave him evens on the St Leger winner. The proper price was five to one.'

Harry Gilbert would never thank me: not if I gave him life-saving advice, not if I helped him win a fortune, not if I kept his precious son out of jail. He knew, all the same, what I was saying. Too much of a realist, too old a businessman, not to. Angelo in too many ways was a fool, and it made him more dangerous, not less.

'What do you expect me to do?' he said.

'I expect you to tell your son that if he attacks me again, or any of my friends or any of my property, he'll be back behind bars so fast he won't know what hit him. I expect you to make him work the betting system carefully and quietly, so that he wins. I expect you to warn him that the system guarantees only one win in three, not a winner every single time. Making the system work is a matter of strict application and careful persistence, not of flamboyance and anger.'

He stared at me expressionlessly.

'Angelo's character,' I said, 'is as far different from Liam O'Rorke's as it's possible to get. I expect you to make Angelo aware of that fact.'

They were all expectations, I saw, that were unlikely to be achieved. Harry Gilbert's physical weakness, though he disguised it, was progressive, and his imperfect control of Angelo would probably only last at all for exactly as long as Angelo needed financing.

A tremor shook his body but no emotion showed in his face. He said however with a sort of throttled fury, 'All our problems are your brother's fault.'

The uselessness of my visit swamped me. Harry Gilbert was after all only an old man blindly clinging like his son to an old obsession.

Harry Gilbert was not any longer a man of reason, even if he had ever been.

I tried all the same, once more. I said, 'If you had paid Mrs O'Rorke all those years ago, if you had bought Liam's system from her, as you had agreed, you would legally have owned it and could have profited from it ever since. It was because you refused to pay Mrs O'Rorke that my brother saw to it that you didn't get the system.'

'She was too old,' he said coldly.

I stared at him. 'Are you implying that her age was a reason for not paying her?'

He didn't answer.

'If I stole your car from you,' I said, 'would you consider me justified on the grounds that you were too ill to drive it?'

'You prattle,' he said. 'You are nothing.'

'Mug,' Eddy said, nodding.

Harry Gilbert said wearily, 'Eddy, you are good at pushing wheelchairs and cooking meals. On all other subjects, shut up.'

Eddy gave him a look which was half-defiant, half-scared, and I saw that he too was dependent on Harry for his food and shelter, that it couldn't be all that easy out in the big cynical world for murderers' assistants to earn a cushy living, that looking after Harry wasn't a job to be lightly lost.

To Harry Gilbert I said, 'Why don't you do what you once intended? Why don't you buy Angelo a betting shop and let the system win for him there?'

I got another stretch of silent unmoving stare. Then he said, 'Business is a talent. I have it. It is, however, uncommon.'

I nodded. It was all the answer he would bring himself to make. Certainly he wouldn't admit to me of all people that he thought Angelo would bankrupt any sensible business in a matter of weeks.

'Keep your son away from me,' I said. 'I've done more for you in getting you that system than you deserve. You've no rights to it. You've no right to demand that it makes you a fortune in five minutes. You've no right to blame me if it doesn't. You keep your son away from me. I can play as rough as he does. For your own sake, and for his, you keep him off me.'

I turned away from him without waiting for any sort of answer, and walked unhurriedly out of the room and across the hall.

Footsteps pattered after me on the polished wood.

Eddy.

I didn't look round. He caught up with me as I opened the front doors and stepped outside, and he put his hand on my arm to make me pause. He looked back guiltily over his shoulder to where his uncle sat mutely by his splendid window, knowing the old man wouldn't approve of what he was doing. Then as he saw Harry was looking out again steadfastly to the golf, he turned on me a nasty self-satisfied smirk.

'Mug,' he said, speaking with prudent quietness, 'Angelo won't like you coming here.'

'Too bad.' I shook his hand off my sleeve. He sneered back in a poisonous mixture of slyness and malice and triumph, and half-whispered his final enjoyable words.

'Angelo's bought a pistol,' he said.

CHAPTER 18

'Why are you so thoughtful?' Cassie asked.

'Uneasy.'

We were sitting as so often at a table in Bananas' dining room with him moving about light-footedly in his sneakers seeming never to hurry yet keeping everyone fed. The plants grew with shining healthy leaves in the opulent gloom of his designedly intimate lighting, glasses and silverware gleaming in candlelight and mould spreading slowly in the dark.

'It's not like you,' Cassie said.

I smiled at her thin sun-tanned uncomplicated face and said that I didn't want above all things a return visit from Angelo.

'Do you really think he'd come?'

'I don't know.'

'We'd never get any more corn dollies,' she said. 'It's too late now for decent straw.'

Her arm in its plaster lay awkwardly on the table. I touched the bunched fingertips peeping out. 'Would you consider leaving me for a while?' I asked.

'No, I wouldn't.'

'Suppose I said I was tired of you?'

'You're not.'

'Are you so sure?'

'Positive,' she said contentedly. 'And anyway, for how long?'

I drank some wine. For how long was an absolute puzzle. 'Until I get Angelo stabilised,' I said. 'And don't ask me how long, because I don't know. But the first thing to do, I think, is persuade Luke he needs a computer right here in Britain.'

'Would that be difficult?'

'It might be. He has one in California… he might say he didn't need two.'

'What do you want it for, the betting system?'

I nodded. 'I think,' I said,'that I'll try to rent one. Or some time on one. I want to find out what the winners should be according to O'Rorke, and what Angelo's doing wrong. And if I can put him right, perhaps that will keep him quiet.'

'You'd have thought just giving him the tapes would be enough.'

'Yes, you would.'

'He's like a thistle,' she said. 'You're sure you've got rid of him and he grows right back.'

Thistles, I thought, didn't go out to buy guns.

Bananas reverently bore his eponymous souffle to the people at the next table, the airy peaks shining light and luscious and pale brown. The old cow, whose skill had produced it, must have stopped working to rule: Bananas himself, joining us later for coffee, gloomily admitted it. 'She took an hour to shred carrots. Did them by hand. Ten seconds in the processor. She said processors were dangerous machinery and she'd have to negotiate a new rate for all jobs with machinery.'

Bananas' new beard had grown curly which was unforseen in view of the lank straight locks further up but seemed to me to be in accord with the doubleness of his nature.

'Historically,' he said, 'it's seldom a good idea to appease a tyrant.'

The old cow?'

'No. Angelo Gilbert.'

'What do you suggest, then?' I asked. 'Full-scale war?'

'You have to be sure you'll win. Historically, full scale war's a toss up.'

'The old cow might leave,' Cassie said, smiling.

Bananas nodded. 'Tyrants always want more next time. I dare say next year she'll turn to motor racing.'

'I suppose you don't know anyone who has a computer you can feed any language into?' I said.

'Turkish? Indo-Chinese? That sort of stuff?'

'Yeah. Gibberish, double-speak, jargonese and gobble-de-gook.'

'Try the sociologists.'

I tried, however, Ted Pitts, early the following morning, and reached Jane instead.

'Ted isn't here,' she said, 'I'm afraid he's still in Switzerland. Can I help?'

I explained I wanted to borrow a good computer to run a check on the racing programs and she said sadly that she couldn't really lend me Ted's, not without him being there; she knew he was working on a special program for his classes and if anyone touched the computer at present his work could be lost, and she couldn't risk that.

'No,' I agreed. Did she know of anyone else whose computer I could use?

She thought it over. There's Ruth,' she said doubtfully. 'Ruth Quigley.'

'Who?'

'She was a pupil of Ted's. Actually he says there's nothing he can teach her now, and when she comes here I can't understand a word they say to each other, it's like listening to creatures from outer space.'

'Would she have a computer of her own?'

'She's got everything,' Jane said without envy. 'Born rich. Only child. Only has to ask, and it's hers. And on top of that, she's brainy. Doesn't seem fair, does it?'

'Beautiful as well?'

'Oh.' She hesitated. 'Not bad. I don't really know. It's not the sort of thing you notice about Ruth.'

'Well, um, where could I find her?'

'In Cambridge. That's why I thought of her, because she lives over your way. She writes programs for teaching-machines. Would you like me to ring her? When do you want to go?'

I said 'Today', and half an hour later I'd had my answer and was on my way, seeking out a flat in a modern block on the outskirts of the town.

Ruth Quigley proved to be young: very early twenties, I guessed. I could see also what Jane meant about not noticing her looks, because the first, overpowering and lasting impression she gave was of the speed of her mind. There were light eyes, light brown extra-curly hair and long slender neck, but mostly there was an impatient jerk of the head and a stumblingly rapid diction as if to her utter disgust her tongue couldn't speak her thoughts fast enough.

'Yes. Come in. Did you bring your tapes?' She wasted no precious words on any other greeting. 'This way. Old Grantley Basic, Jane said. You've got the language with you. Do you want to load it, or shall I?'

'I'd be glad if-'

'Hand them over, then. Which side?'

'Er, first program on Side 1.'

'Right. Come along.'

She moved with the same inborn rapidity, disappearing down a short passage and through a doorway before I'd even managed a step. She must always find, I thought, that the rest of the world went along intolerably in slow motion.

The room into which I finally followed her must originally'have been designed as a bedroom, which it now in no way resembled. There was a quiet, felt-like pale green floor covering, track-lighting with spotlights, a roller blind at the window, matt white walls-and long benches of machines more or less like Ted Pitts's, only double.

'Workroom,' Ruth Quigley said.

'Eh, yes.'

It was cooler in there than out on the street. I identified a faint background hum as air-conditioning, and remarked on it.

She nodded, not lifting her eyes from the already almost completed job of loading Grantley Basic into a machine that would accept it. 'Dust is like gravel to computers. Heat, damp, all makes them temperamental. They're thoroughbreds, of course.'

Racing programs… thoroughbred computers. Excellence won. Pains taken gave one the edge. I was beginning to think like her, I thought.

'I'm wasting your time,' I said apologetically.

'Glad to help. Always do anything for Jane and Ted. They know that. Did you bring the form books? You'll need them. Simple programs, but facts must be right. Most teaching-machines, just the same. They bore me quite often. Multiple-choice questions. Then the child takes half an hour to get it right and I put it in a bright remark like, "Well done, aren't you clever." Nothing of the sort. Encouragement, they say, is all. What do you think?'

'Are they gifted children?'

She gave me a flashing glance. 'All children are gifted. Some more so. They need the best teaching. They often don't get it. Teachers are jealous, did you know?'

'My brother always said it was intensely exciting to have a very bright boy in the class.'

'Like Ted, generous. There you are, fire away. I'll be in and out, don't let me disturb you. I'm working on a sort-listing of string arrays. They said it was taking them eighteen minutes, I ask you. I've got it down to five seconds, but only one dimension, I need two dimensions if I'm not to scramble the data. I'm poking a machine-language program into the memory from BASIC, then converting the machine code into assembly-language economics. Am I boring you?'

'No,' I said. 'I just don't understand a word of it.'

'Sorry. Forgot you weren't like Ted. Well, carry on.'

I had brought in a large briefcase the tapes, the racing form books, all sorts of record books and all the recent copies of a good racing paper, and with a feeling that by Ruth Quigley's standards it was going to take me a very long time I set about working out which horses were likely to have won according to Liam O'Rorke, and checking them against those which had actually reached the post first. I still needed a list of the horses which Angelo had backed, but I thought I might get that from Taff and from Lancer on the following day: and then I might be able to figure out where Angelo had messed everything up.

FILE NAME?

CLOAD DONCA, I typed. Pressed the 'Enter' key, and watched the asterisks; waited for READY. Pressed 'Enter' again and got my reward.

WHICH RACE AT DONCASTER?

ST LEGER, I typed.

DONCASTER: ST LEGER. TYPE NAME OF HORSE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

GENOTTI, I typed. Pressed 'Enter'.

DONCASTER: ST LEGER.

GENOTTI.

ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS YES OR NO OR WITH A NUMBER AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

HAS HORSE WON AS A TWO YEAR OLD?

YES, I typed. The screen flashed a new question leaving the headings intact.

HAS HORSE WON AS A THREE YEAR OLD?

YES, I typed.

HOW MANY DAYS SINCE HORSE LAST RAN?

I consulted the daily newspaper which always gave that precise information, and typed in the number which had appeared there on St Leger day: 23.

HAS HORSE WON OVER DISTANCE: ONE MILE SIX FURLONGS?

NO, I typed.

HAS HORSE RUN OVER DISTANCE: ONE MILE SIX FURLONGS?

NO.

TYPE LONGEST DISTANCE IN FURLONGS OVER WHICH HORSE HAS WON.

12

HAS HORSE RUN ON COURSE? NO.

TYPE IN PRIZE MONEY WON IN CURRENT SEASON.

I consulted the form books and typed Genotti's winnings, which had been fairly good but not stupendous.

HAS HORSE'S SIRE SIRED WINNERS AT THE DISTANCE?

I looked it up in the breeding records, which took much longer, but the answer was YES.

DAM ditto? YES.

IS HORSE QUOTED ANTE-POST AT TWELVE TO ONE OR LESS?

YES.

HAS JOCKEY PREVIOUSLY WON A CLASSIC?

YES.

HAS TRAINER PREVIOUSLY WON A CLASSIC?

YES.

ANY MORE HORSES?

YES.

I found myself back at the beginning and repeated the program for every horse which had run in the race. The questions weren't always precisely the same, because different answers produced alternative queries, and for some horses there were far more questions than for Others. It took me a good hour to look everything up, and I thought that if I ever did begin to do it all seriously I would make myself a whole host of more easily accessible tables than those available in the record books. When I at last answered NO to the final question ANY MORE HORSES? I got the clear reply that left no doubt about Liam O'Rorke's genius.

Genotti headed the win factor list. An outsider turned up on it in second place, with the horse that had started favourite in third: and the St Leger result had been those three horses in that order exactly. I could hardly believe it.

Ruth Quigley said suddenly, 'Got the wrong result? You look flummoxed.'

'No – the right one.'

'Disturbing.' She grinned swiftly. 'If I get the results I expect, I check and check and check. Doesn't do to be complacent. Like some coffee?'

I accepted and she made it as fast as she did everything else.

'How old are you?' I said.

'Twenty-one. Why?'

'I'd have thought you'd have been at the university.'

'Degree at twenty plus one month. Nothing unusual. Cheated my way in, of course. Everything's so slow nowadays. Forty years ago, degrees at nineteen or less were possible. Now they insist on calendar age. Why? Why hold people back? Life's terribly short as it is. Masters degree at twenty plus six months. Did the two courses simultaneously. No one knew. Don't spread it around. Doing my doctorate now. Are you interested?'

'Yes,' I said truthfully.

She smiled like a summer's day, come and gone. 'My father says I'm a bore.'

'He doesn't mean it.'

'He's a surgeon,' she said, as if that explained much. 'So's my mother. Guilt complexes, both of them. Give to mankind more than you take. That sort of thing. They can't help it.'

'And you?'

'I don't know yet. I can't give much. I can't get jobs I can do. They look at the years I've been alive and make judgments. Quite deadly. Time has practically nothing to do with anything. They'll give me the jobs when I'm thirty that I could do better now. Poets and mathemeticians are best before twenty-five. What chance have they got?'

'To work alone,' I said.

'My God. Do you understand? You're wasting time, get on with your programs. Don't show me what I should do. I've got a research fellowship. What do I seek for? What is there to seek? Where is the unknown, what is not known, what's the question?'

I shook my head helplessly, 'Wait for the apple to fall on your head.'

'It's true. I can't contemplate. Sitting under the apple trees. Metaphorical apple trees. I've tried. Get on with your nags.'

Philosophically I loaded YORK and worked through the three races for which there were programs, and found that in two of them the highest-scoring horse had won. Three winners from the four races I'd worked through. Incredible.

With a feeling of unreality I loaded EPSOM and went painstakingly through the four races for which there were programs; and this time came up with no winners at all. Frowning slightly I loaded NEWBU for Newbury and from a good deal of hard accurate work came up with the win factors of the race in which Angelo had backed the absolute no-hoper Pocket Handbook.

Pocket Handbook, who had finished exhausted and tailed-off by at least thirty lengths, was at the top of the win-factor list by a clear margin.

I stared distrustfully at the rest of the scores, which put the race's actual winner second from the bottom with negligible points.

'What's the matter?' Ruth Quigley said, busy at her own machine and not even glancing my way.

'Parts of the system are haywire.'

'Really?'

I loaded GOODW and sorted through five races. All the top scorers were horses which in the events had finished no nearer than second.

'Are you hungry?' Ruth said. 'Three-thirty. Sandwich?'

I thanked her and went with her into her small kitchen where I was interested to see that her speed stopped short of dexterity with slicing tomatoes. She quite slowly, for her, made fat juicy affairs of cheese, chutney, tomatoes and corned beef which toppled precariously on the plate and had to be held in both hands for eating.

'Logical explanations exist,' she said, looking at my abstracted expression. 'Human logic's imperfect. Absolute logic isn't.'

'Mm,' I said. 'Ted showed me how easy it is to add and delete passwords.'

'So?'

'It would be pretty easy, wouldn't it, to change other things besides?'

'Unless it's in ROM. Then it's difficult.'

'ROM?'

'Read only Memory. Sorry.'

'He showed me how to List things.'

'You've got RAM, then. Random Access Memory. Change what you like. Kids' stuff.'

We finished the sandwiches and returned to the keyboards. I loaded the Newbury file, chose the Pocket Handbook race and listed the program piece by piece.

LIST 1200-1240 I typed, and in front of the resulting screenful of letters, numbers and symbols sat figuring out the roots of trouble.

1200 PRINT "TYPE IN PRIZE MONEY IN CURRENT SEASON"

1210 INPUT W: IF W

1220 IF W› 1000 THEN T=T: IF W› 5000 T=T

1230 IF W › 10000 THEN T=T: IF W › 15000 THEN T=T

1240 GOSUB

Even to my ignorant and untutored eyes it was nonsense. Liam O'Rorke wouldn't have meant it, Peter Keithly wouldn't have written it, Ted Pitts would never have used it. In plain language, what it was saying was that if the season's winnings of a horse were less than one thousand pounds, the win factor score should be increased by 20, and if they were more than one thousand, and however much more, the win factor score would not increase at all. The least successful horses would therefore score most highly on that particular point. The weighting was topsy-turvy and the answers would come out wrong.

With the hollow certainty of what had happened staring me in the face, I loaded the Epsom file and searched the Lists of the programs for the four races on which Angelo had lost. In two cases the weightings for prize money were upside down.

Tried Goodwood. In three of the five listed races, the same thing.

Depressed beyond measure, I loaded the files for Leicester and Ascot, where races were to be held during the week ahead. Typed in the names of all the races to be run there and found there were programs for eight of them: one at Leicester, seven at Ascot. Listed each of the eight programs in sections, and found that in four of them the score for amassing much prize money was nought, and the score for prize money of under one thousand pounds was anything up to 20.

There were programs for some races at all the tracks which I knew for a certainty were not fourteen years old. Modern races, introduced since Liam O'Rorke had died.

The programs were no longer pure O'Rorke, but O'Rorke according to Pitts. O'Rorke updated, expanded, renewed. O'Rorke, on these particular tapes, interfered with, falsified, mangled. Ted Pitts- one had to face it- had wrecked the system before he'd handed it to me… and had delivered me defenceless to the wrath of Angelo Gilbert.

I thanked the frustrated and brilliant Miss Quigley for her day-long patience and drove home to Cassie.

'What's the matter?' she said immediately.

I said wearily, The ess aitch I tee has hit the fan.'

'What do you mean?

'Angelo thinks I've tricked him. That the betting system I gave him is wrong. That it produces too many losers. Well so it does. Normally it must be all right but on these tapes it's been altered. Ted Pitts has rigged so many of the programs that anyone using them will fall flat on his greedy face.' And I explained about the reversed scores for winning, which produced scatty results. 'He may also have changed some of the other weightings to get the same effect. I've no way of knowing.'

She looked as stunned as I felt. 'Do you mean Ted Pitts did it on purpose?

'He sure did.' I thought back to the time he'd taken to make me 'copies'; to the hour I'd spent sitting by his pool talking to Jane, leaving him, at his own request, to work alone.

'But why?' Cassie said.

'I don't know.'

'You didn't tell him, did you, what you wanted the tapes for?'

'No, I didn't.'

She said doubtfully, 'Perhaps it might have been better if you'd said how vital they were.'

'And perhaps he wouldn't have given them to me at all if he'd known I had Angelo locked in the cellar. I mean, I thought he might not want to be involved. Most people wouldn't, with something like that. And then, if he was like Jonathan, he might have changed the weightings anyway, just to prevent Angelo from profiting. You never know. Jonathan himself would somehow have tricked Angelo again. I'm sure of it.'

'You don't think Ted Pitts asked Jonathan what he should do, do you?'

I thought back and shook my head. 'It was before nine in the morning when I went to the Pitts's house. That would make it about one a.m. in California. Even if he had his number, which I doubt, I don't think he would have telephoned Jonathan in the middle of the night… and Jonathan anyway sounded truly disappointed when I told him I'd given Angelo the tapes. No, Ted must have done it for his own reasons, and by himself.'

'Which doesn't help much.'

I shook my head,

I thought of the certainty with which I'd gone to Harry Gilbert's house on the previous day. Hell's teeth, how wrong could one be, how naive could one get?

If I warned Angelo not to use the tapes in the week ahead he would be sure I had tricked him and was scared to death of his revenge.

If I didn't warn him not to use the tapes, he would most likely lose again and be more sure than ever that I'd tricked him…

If I wrung the right answers out of Ted Pitts and told them to Angelo, he would still think I had deliberately given him useless tapes – on which he had already lost.

Ted Pitts was in Switzerland walking up mountains.

'Would you care,' I said to Cassie, 'for a long slow cruise to Australia?'

CHAPTER 19

Jane Pitts on the telephone said, 'No, terribly sorry, he moves about and stops in different places every night. Quite often he sleeps in his tent. Is it important?'

'Horribly,' I said.

'Oh dear. Could I help?'

'There's something wrong with those tapes he made for me. Could you by any chance lend me his own?'

'No, I simply can't. I'm frightfully sorry but I don't know where he keeps anything in that room and he positively hates his things being touched.' She thought for a few minutes, puzzled but not unwilling, friendly, anxious to help. 'Look, he's sure to call me one day soon to say when he'll be home. Would you like me to ask him to ring you?'

'Yes please,' I said fervently. 'Or ask him where I can reach him, and I'll call him. Do tell him it's really urgent, beg him for me, would you? Say it's for Jonathan's sake more than mine.'

'I'll tell him,' she promised, 'as soon as he rings.'

'You're unscrupulous,' Cassie said as I put down the receiver. 'It's for your sake, not Jonathan's.'

'He wouldn't want to weep on his brother's grave.'

'William!'

'A joke,' I said hastily. 'A joke.'

Cassie shivered, however. 'What are you going to do?'

'Think,' I said.

The basic thought was that the more Angelo lost, the angrier he would get, and that the first objective was therefore to stop him betting. Taff and the others could hardly be persuaded not to accept such easy pickings, which left the source of the cash, Harry Gilbert himself. Precisely what, I wondered, could I say to Harry Gilbert which would cut off the stake money without sending Angelo straight round to vent his rage?

I could tell him that Liam O'Rorke's system no longer existed: that I'd got the tapes in good faith but had been tricked myself. I could tell him a lot of half-truths, but whether he would believe me, and whether he could restrain Angelo even if he himself were convinced, of those imponderables there was no forecast.

Realistically there was nothing else to do.

I didn't particularly want to try to trap Angelo into being sent back to jail: fourteen years was enough for any man. I only wanted, as I had all along, for him to leave me alone. I wanted him deflated, defused… docile. What a hope.

A night spent with my mind on pleasanter things produced no cleverer plan. A paragraph in the Sporting Life, read over a quick breakfast after an hour with the horses on the Heath, made me wish that Angelo would solve my problems himself by bashing someone else on the head: about as unlikely as him having a good week on the system. Lancer the bookmaker, said the paper, had been mugged on his own doorstep on returning from Newbury races on Friday evening. His wallet, containing approximately fifty-three pounds, had been stolen. Lancer was OK, police had no leads: poor old Lancer, too bad.

I sighed. Who, I wondered, could I get Angelo to bash?

Besides, of course, myself.

On account of the knee-groper, I was driving Cassie to work whenever possible, and on that morning after I'd dropped her I went straight on to Welwyn Garden City, not relishing my prospects but with not much alternative. I hoped to persuade both Harry Gilbert and Angelo that the havoc the years had caused to the O'Rorke system couldn't be undone, that it was blown, no longer existed, couldn't be recovered. I was going to tell them again that any violence from Angelo would find him back in a cell; to try to make them believe it… to fear it.

I was taller than Angelo and towered over a man in a wheel-chair. I intended slightly to crowd them, faintly to intimidate, certainly to leave a physical impression that it was time for them to back off. Even on Angelo, who must have known how to frighten from childhood, it might have some effect.

Eddy opened the front doors and tried at once to close them again when he saw who had called. I pushed him with force out of my way.

'Harry isn't dressed,' he said fearfully, though whether the fear was of me or of Harry wasn't clear.

'He'll see me,' I said.

'No. You can't.' He tried to bar my way to one of the wide doors at the side of the entrance hall, thereby showing me which way to go, and I walked over there with Eddy trying to edge me out of my path by leaning on me.

I thrust him again aside and opened the door, and found myself in a short passage which led into a large bedroom which was equipped first and most noticeably with another vast window looking out to the golf.

Harry Gilbert lay in a big bed facing the window, ill and growing old but still in some indefinable way not defenceless, even in pyjamas.

'I tried to stop him,' Eddy was saying ineffectually.

'Take this tray and go away,' Harry Gilbert said to him, and Eddy picked off the bedclothes the half-eaten breakfast which I had interrupted. 'Shut the door.' He waited until Eddy had retreated and then frostily to me said, 'Well?'

'I've discovered,' I said with urgency, 'that Liam O'Rorke's betting system has the equivalent of smallpox. It should be treated like the plague. It'll bring trouble to all who touch it. The old system has been through too many hands, been adulterated by the years. It's gone bad. If you want to save your cash, you'll stop Angelo using it, and it's pointless getting angry with me on any counts. I got the system for you in good faith and I'm furious to find it's useless. Bring Angelo in here and let me tell him.'

Harry Gilbert stared at me with his usual unreadable face, and it was without any visible consternation that he said in his semi-slurred way, 'Angelo isn't here. He is cashing my cheque at the bank. He is going to Leicester races.'

'He will lose,' I said. 'I didn't need to warn you. I'm warning you. Your money will be lost.'

Thoughts must have traversed the brain behind the cold eyes but nothing much showed. Finally, and it must have been with an inner effort, he said, 'Can you stop him?'

'Stop the cheque,' I said. 'Call the bank.'

He glanced at a clock beside him. 'Too late.'

'I can go to Leicester,' I said. 'I'll try to find him.'

After a pause he said, 'Very well.'

I nodded briefly and left him, and drove towards Leicester feeling that even if I had managed to convince Harry, which was in itself uncertain, I was facing the impossible with Angelo. The impossible all the same had to be tried: and at least, I thought, he wouldn't actually attack me on a busy racecourse.

Leicester races on that cold autumn day turned out to be as busy as a well-smoked beehive, with only a scattering of dark-coated figures trudging about doggedly, head-down to the biting wind. As sometimes happened on city-based tracks on weekdays, the crowd was thin to the point of embarrassment, the whole proceedings imbued with the perfunctory and temporary air of a ritual taking place without fervour.

Taff was stamping about by his beer crate, blowing on his fingers and complaining that he would have done better business if he'd gone to the day's other meeting at Bath.

'But there's the Midlands Cup here,' he said. 'It'll be a good race. I thought it would pull them- and look at them, not enough punters to sing auld lang syne round a tea-pot.' The Welsh accent was ripe with disgust.

'What are you making favourite?' I said smiling.

'Pink Flowers.'

'And what about Terrybow?'

'Who?'

'Runs in the Midlands Cup,' I said patiently. Terrybow, the computer's choice, top of the win factors. Terrybow with a habit of finishing tenth of twelve, or seventh of eight, or fifteenth of twenty: never actually last but a long way from success.

'Oh, Terrybow.' He consulted a notebook. 'Twenties, if you like.'

'Twenty to one?'

'Twenty-fives then. Can't say fairer than twenty-five. How much do you want?'

'How much would you take?'

'Whatever you like,' he said cheerfully. 'No limit. Not unless you know something I don't, like it's stuffed to the eyeballs with rocket dust.'

I shook my head and looked along the row of cold disgruntled bookmakers who were doing a fraction of their usual trade. If Angelo had been among them I would have seen him easily, but there was no sign of him. The Midlands Cup was the fourth race on the programme and still an hour ahead, and if Angelo was sticking rigidly to the disaster-laden system, Terrybow would be the only horse he would back.

'Have you seen Angelo Gilbert here today, Taff?' I asked.

'No.' He took a bet from a furtive-looking man in a raincoat and gave him a ticket. 'Ten at threes, Walkie-Talkie,' he told his clerk.

'How's Lancer?' I asked. 'Can't see him here.'

'Cursing muggers and rubbing a lump.' He took another tenner from a purposeful woman in glasses. Ten at eights, Engineer. Some kids rolled old Lancer on his own doorstep. I ask you, he carries thousands around the racecourse, pays it in to his firm at the end of the day, and then goes and gets himself done for fifty quid.'

'Did he see who robbed him?'

'One of Joe Click's other boys who's here says it was a bunch of teenagers.'

Not Angelo, I thought. Well, it wouldn't have been. But if only he would…

I looked speculatively at Taff, who worked for himself and did carry his takings home at the end of the day. Pity one couldn't catch Angelo in the act of trying to retrieve his stake money after Terrybow had lost… pity one couldn't arrange for the police to be on hand when Angelo mugged Taff on the way home.

I'm down to fantasies, I thought: it's depressing.

The time passed and Angelo, who had been so ubiquitous when I had been trying to avoid him, was nowhere to be seen. I walked among the bookmakers and asked others besides Taff, but none of them had seen Angelo at all that afternoon, and there was still no sign of him during the run-up to the Midlands Cup. If he had gone to Bath after all, I thought, I was wasting my time – but the only race that day on the O'Rorke tapes was the Midlands Cup; its only designated horse, Terrybow.

With less than five minutes to go, when the horses were already cantering down to the start, a tremendous burst of tic-tac activity galvanised the men with white gloves high on the stands who semaphored changes of odds. With no direct link like telephones or radio the bookmakers relied on tic-tac to tell them if large sums had been placed with their firms on any particular horse, so that they could bring down the offered price. Taff, watching his man signalling frenziedly, rubbed out the 20 written against Terrybow on his blackboard and with his piece of chalk wrote in 14. Along the row all the other bookies were similarly engaged. Terrybow fell again to 12.

'What's happening?' I said to Taff urgently.

He cast an abstracted eye in my direction. 'Someone down in the cheap ring is piling a stack on Terrybow.'

'Damn,' I said bitterly. I hadn't thought of looking for Angelo anywhere but round his usual haunts: certainly not in the comfortless far enclosure away down the course where the entrance fee was small, the view of the races moderate, and the expectation of the few-bookmakers trading there modest to the point of not being worth standing in the cold all afternoon. And even if I'd thought of it I wouldn't have gone there, because it would have meant risking missing Angelo in the paddock. Damn and blast, I thought. Damn Angelo today and all days and for the whole of his life.

'You knew something about this Terrybow,' Taff said to me accusingly.

'I didn't back it,' I said.

'Yeah, that's right, so you didn't. So what's going on?'

'Angelo Gilbert,' I said. 'He's betting where he isn't known in case you wouldn't give him a good price up here.'

'What? Really?' He laughed, rubbed out the 12 against Terrybow and replaced it with 20. A small rush of punters resulted and he took their money with relish.

I went up on the stands and watched in a fury while Terrybow ran true to his form and drifted in twelfth of fifteen. Ted Pitts, I thought bleakly, might as well have shoved me under the wheels of a truck.

I did see Angelo that afternoon, and so did practically everyone else who hadn't gone home before the sixth race.

Angelo was the angrily shouting epicentre of a fracas going on near the weighing-room; a row involving several bookmakers, a host of racegoers and some worried looking officials. Disputes between bookmakers and clients were traditionally dealt with on that spot by one particular Jockey Club official, the Ring Inspector. Angelo appeared to have punched him in the face.

The milling crowd parted a little and shifted and I found myself standing near the front of the onlookers with a clear view of the performance. The Ring Inspector was holding his jaw and trying to argue round his winces, six bookmakers were declaring passionately that money once wagered was lost for ever, and Angelo, waving his hard bunched fist, was insisting they gave it back.

'You tricked me,' he shouted. 'The whole bloody lot of you, you stole my cash.'

'You bet it fair and square,' yelled a bookmaker, wagging a finger forcefully in Angelo's face.

Angelo bit the finger. The bookmaker yelled all the harder.

A man standing next to me laughed but most of the onlookers had less objectively taken sides and it seemed that a general brawl needed only a flashpoint. Into the ugliness and among the angrily gesturing hands and violent voices walked two uniformed policemen, both very young, both slight, both looking poor opponents in size and in forcefulness for the prison-taught Angelo. The Ring Inspector said something to one of them which was inaudible to me in the hubbub and to his immense and visible surprise Angelo suddenly found himself wearing, on the wrist he happened not to be waving in the air at that moment, a handcuff.

His bellow of rage fluttered the pigeons off the weighing room roof. He tugged with his whole weight and the boy-policeman whose own wrist protruded from the other cuff was jerked off his feet onto his knees. It looked not impossible that Angelo could pick him up bodily and simply run off with him, but the second constable came to his rescue, saying something boldly to Angelo and pulling his radio-communicator out of the front of his uniform jacket to bring up reinforcements.

Angelo looked at the ring of spectators through which he had little real hope of pushing and at his unexpectedly adroit captor, now rising from his knees, and at the seething bookmakers who were showing signs of satisfaction, and finally straight at me.

He took a step towards me with such strength that the half-risen policeman lost his balance again and fell on his back, his arm twisting awkwardly over his head, stretching in the handcuff. There was about Angelo suddenly such an extraordinary growth of menace, something so different from a mere racecourse argument, that the thronging voices fell away to silence and eyes looked at him with age-old fright. The monstrous recklessness seemed to swell his whole body, and even if his words were banal his gritty voice vibrated with a darkness straight out of myth.

'You,' he said deliberately, 'you and your fucking brother.'

There was an awareness in his face of the attentive crowd of witnesses around us and he didn't say aloud what was in his mind, but I could hear it as clearly as if he'd woken the sleeping hills.

I'll kill you. I'll kill you.

It was a message not so much new as newly intense. More than ever implacable. A promise, not a threat.

I stared back at him as if I hadn't heard, as if it wasn't there looking at me out of his eyes. He nodded however as if savagely satisfied and turned with a contemptuous shrug to the rising policeman, jerking him the last few inches upright; and he went, after that, without fighting, walking away between the two constables towards a police car which was driving in through the gates. The car halted. They put him in the back seat between them and presently rolled away, and the now strangely quiet crowd began to spread open and disperse.

A voice in my ear, the Welsh voice of Taff, said, 'You know what set all that off?'

'What?' I asked.

'The bookies down in the cheap ring told Angelo he was a right mug. They were laughing at him, it seems. Joshing him, but friendly like to start with. They said they'd be happy to keep on taking his money because if he thought he'd bought Liam O'Rorke's old system he'd been robbed, duped, bamboozled, made a fool of and generally conned from here to Christmas.'

Dear God.

'So then this Angelo sort of exploded and started trying to get his stake back.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Well,' Taff said cheerfully. 'It all makes a change, though I reckon those goons in the cheap ring would have done better to keep their mouths shut. That Angelo was a bit of a golden goose and after this he won't lay no more golden eggs.'

I drove home with a feeling that the seas were closing over my head. Whatever I did to try to disentangle myself from Angelo it seemed that I slid further into the coils.

He was never, after this, going to believe that I hadn't tricked him on purpose. Even if I could at last get him the real correct system, he wouldn't forgive me the bets lost, the sneers of the bookmakers, the click of those handcuffs.

The police might hold him overnight, I thought, but not much longer: I doubted if one punch and a few yells would upset his parole. But to the tally in his mind would be added a night in the cells to rankle with those in my cellar – and if he'd come out of prison angry enough to attack me with nothing against me but the fact of my being Jonathan's brother, how much more would he now come swinging.

Cassie had long been home when I finally got there and was buoyantly pleased with the prospect of having the plaster off her arm on the following afternoon. She had arranged a whole day off from work and had thanked the groper for the last time, confident that she would be able to drive more or less at once. She was humming in the kitchen while I cooked some spaghetti for supper and I kissed her abstractedly and thought of Angelo and wished him dead with all my heart.

Before we had finished eating, the telephone rang and, most unexpectedly, it was Ted Pitts calling from Switzerland. His voice, on the whole, was as cool as the Alps.

Thought I'd better apologise,' he said.

'It's kind of you.'

'Jane's disgusted with me. She told me to ring you at once. She said it was urgent. So here I am. Sorry, and all that.'

'I just wondered,' I said hopelessly, 'why you did it.'

'Mashed up the weightings?'

'Yes.'

'You'll think I'm mean. Jane says I'm so mean she's ashamed of me. She's furious. She says all our wealth is due to Jonathan, and I've played the most rotten trick on Jonathan's brother. She's hardly speaking to me she's so cross.'

'Well… why?' I said.

He did at least seem to want me to understand. He spoke earnestly, explaining, excusing, telling me the destructive truth. 'I don't know. It was an impulse. I was making those copies and I suddenly thought I don't want to part with this system. I don't want anyone else to have it. It's mine. Not Jonathan's, just mine. He didn't even want it, and I've had it to myself all these years, and I've added to it and made it my own. It belongs to me. It's mine. And there you were, just asking for it as if I would give it to you as of right, and I suddenly thought why should I? So I just quickly changed a lot of the weightings. I didn't have time to test them. I had to guess. I altered just enough, I thought, but it seems I did too much. Otherwise you wouldn't have checked… I intended that when you used the system, you wouldn't win enough to think it worth all the work, and you'd get tired of it.' He paused. 'I was jealous of you having it, if you really want to know,'

'I wish you'd told me…'

'If I'd said I didn't want to give it to you, Jane would have made me. She says I must now. She's so cross.'

'If you would,' I said, 'you might save me a lot of grief.'

'Make your fortune, you mean.' The apology, it seemed, hadn't come from the heart: he still sounded resentful that I should be learning his secrets.

I thought again about telling him about Angelo but it still seemed to me that he might think it the best reason for not giving me the system that I could devise, so I said merely, 'It could work for two people, couldn't it? If someone else had it, it wouldn't stop you yourself winning as much as ever.'

'I suppose,' he said grudgingly, 'that that's true.'

'So… when do you come home?'

'The week after next.'

I was silent. Appalled. By the week after next heaven knew what Angelo would have done.

Ted Pitts said with half-suppressed annoyance, 'I suppose you've betted heavily on the wrong horses and lost too much, and now you need bailing out a lot sooner than the week after next?'

I didn't dispute it.

'Jane's furious. She's afraid I've cost you more than you can afford. Well, I'm sorry.' He didn't truly sound it.

'Could she find the tapes to give to me?' I said humbly.

'How soon do you need them?'

'More or less at once. Tonight, if possible.'

'Hmph.' He thought for a few moments. 'All right. All right. But you can save yourself the journey, if you like.'

'Er, how?'

'Do you have a tape recorder?'

'Yes.'

'Jane can play the tapes to you over the telephone. They'll sound like a lot of screeching. But if you've a half-way decent recorder the programs will run all right on a computer.'

'Good heavens.'

'A lot of computer programs whiz round the world on telephones every day,' he said. 'And up to the satellites and down again. Nothing extraordinary in it.'

To me it did seem extraordinary, but then I wasn't Ted Pitts. I thanked him with more intensity than he knew for his trouble in ringing me up.

'Thank Jane,' he said.

I did thank her, sincerely, five minutes later.

'You sounded in such trouble,' she said. 'I told Ted I'd sent you to Ruth because you'd wanted to check the tapes, and he groaned, so I asked him why… and when he told me what he'd done I was just furious. To think of you wasting your precious money when everything we have is thanks to Jonathan.'

Her kindness made me feel guilty. I said, 'Ted said you could play the real tapes to me over the telephone- if you wouldn't mind.'

'Oh yes, all right. I've seen Ted do it often. He and Ruth are always swopping programs that way. I've got the tapes here beside me. I made Ted tell me where to find them. I'll go and get the recorder now, if you'll hang on, and then I'll play them to you straight away.'

I had called her from the office because of the message-recorder already fitted to that telephone, and when she returned I recorded the precious programs on Luke's supply of fresh unused tapes which might not have been of prime computer standard but were all the same a better bet, I reckoned, than trying to record new machine language on top of old.

Cassie came into the office and listened to the scratchy whining noises running on and on and on.

'Horrible,' she said: but to me, sweet music. A ransom to the future. Passport to a peaceful world. In a sudden uprush of optimism entirely at variance with the gloom of my drive home from Leicester, I convinced myself that this time, now that we had the genuine article, our troubles would come to an end. The solution was still, as it had always been, to make Angelo rich, and at last it could be done.

'I'll give these tapes to Angelo,' I said, 'and we'll go away from the cottage for just a while, a few weeks, just until he's won enough not to want his revenge. And we'll be free of him at last, thank God.'

'Where shall we go?'

'Not far. Decide tomorrow.'

When three tapes were full and the noises fell quiet I switched off the recording part of the machine and spoke again to Jane.

'I'm very grateful,' I said. 'More than I can say.'

'My dear William, I'm so sorry…'

'Don't be,' I said. 'You've saved my life.' Quite literally, probably, I thought. 'Everything,' I said, 'will be all right.'

One shouldn't say such things. One really shouldn't.

CHAPTER 20

Cassie came with me in the early morning to see the horses work on the Heath, shivering a little in boots, trousers and padded husky jacket, but glad, she said, to be alive in the free air and the wide spaces. Her breath, like mine, like that of all the horses, spurted out in lung-shaped plumes of condensing vapour, chilled and gone in a second and quickly renewed, cold transformed to heat within the miracle of bodies.

We had already in a preliminary fashion left the cottage, having packed clothes and necessaries and stowed the suitcases in my car. I had also brought along a briefcase containing the precious tapes and a lot of Luke's paperwork and had re-routed my telephone calls by a message on the answer-system, and it remained only to make a quick return trip to pick up the day's mail and arrange for future postal deliveries to be left at the pub.

We hadn't actually decided where we would sleep that night or for many nights to come, but we did between us have a great many friends who might be cajoled, and if the traditional open-house generosity of the racing world failed us, we could for a while afford a hotel. I felt freer and more light-hearted than I had for weeks.

Sim was positively welcoming on the gallops and Mort asked us to breakfast. We shivered gratefully into his house and warmed up with him on toast and coffee while he slit open his letters with a paper-knife and made comments on what he was at the same time reading in the Sporting Life. Mort never did one thing at a time if he could do three.

'I've re-routed my telephone messages to you,' I told him. 'Do you mind?'

'Have you? No, of course not. Why?'

'The cottage,' I said, 'is at the moment uninhabitable.'

'Decorators?' He sounded sympathetic and it seemed simplest to say yes.

'There won't be many calls,' I promised. 'Just Luke's business.'

'Sure,' he said. He sucked in a boiled egg in two scoops of a spoon. 'More coffee?'

'How are the yearlings settling?' I asked.

'Come and see them. Come this afternoon, we'll be lungeing them in the paddock.'

'What's lungeing?' Cassie said.

Mort gave her a fast forgiving smile and snapped his fingers a few times. 'Letting them run round in a big circle on the end of a long rein. Gives them exercise. No one rides them yet. They've never been saddled. Too young.'

'I'd like that,' Cassie said, looking thoughtfully at the plaster and clearly wondering about the timing.

'Where are you staying?' Mort asked me. 'Where can I find you?'

'Don't know yet,' I said.

'Really? What about here? There's a bed here, if you like.' He crunched his teeth across half a piece of toast and ate it in one gulp. 'You could answer your own phone calls. Makes sense.'

'Well,' I said. 'For a night or two… very grateful.'

'Settled then.' He grinned cheerfully at Cassie. 'My daughter will be pleased. Got no wife, you know. She scarpered. Miranda gets bored, that's my daughter. Sixteen, needs a girl's company. Stay for a week. How long do you need?'

'We don't know,' Cassie said.

He nodded briskly. 'Take things as they come. Very sensible.' He casually picked up the paperknife and began cleaning his nails with it, reminding me irresistibly of Jonathan who throughout my childhood had done his with the point of a rifle bullet.

'I thought I'd go to Ireland at the weekend,' I said, 'and try to make peace with Donavan.'

Mort gave me a blinding grin, 'I hear you're a turd and an ignorant bastard, and should be dragged six times round the Curragh by your heels. At the least.'

The telephone standing on the table by his elbow rang only once, sharply, before Mort was shouting 'Hullo?' down the receiver. 'Oh,' he said, 'Hullo, Luke.' He made signalling messages to me with his eyebrows. 'Yes, he's here right now, having breakfast.' He handed over the receiver, saying, 'Luke rang your number first, he says.'

'William,' Luke said, sounding relaxed and undemanding. 'How are the new yearlings?'

'Fine. No bad reports.'

Thought I'd come over to see them. See what you've gotten me. I feel like a trip. Listen fella, do me a favour, make me some reservations at the Bedford Arms for two nights, fourteenth and fifteenth October?'

'Right' I said.

'Best to Cassie,' he said. 'Bring her to dinner at the Bedford on the fourteenth, OK? I'd sure like to meet her. And fella, I'll be going on to Dublin. You aiming to go to the Ballsbridge Sales?'

'Yeah, I thought to. Ralph Finnigan died… they're selling all his string.'

Luke sounded appreciative. 'What would you pick, fella? What's the best?'

'Oxidise. Two years old, well bred, fast, a prospect for next June's Derby and bound to be expensive.'

Luke gave a sort of rumbling grunt. 'You'd send it to Donavan?'

'I sure would.'

The grunt became a chuckle. 'See you, fella, on the fourteenth.'

There was a click and he was gone. Mort said, 'Is he coming?' and I nodded and told him when. 'Most years he comes in October,' Mort said.

He asked if we'd like to see the second lot exercise but I was anxious to be finished at the cottage so Cassie and I drove the six miles back to the village and stopped first at the pub. Mine host, who had been invisible earlier, was now outside in his shirtsleeves sweeping dead leaves off his doorstep.

'Aren't you cold?' Cassie said.

Bananas, perspiring in contrast to our huskies, said he had been shifting beer barrels in his cellar.

We explained about going away for a while, and why.

'Come inside,' he said, finishing the leaves. 'Like some coffee?'

We drank some with him in the bar but without the ice cream and brandy he stirred into his own. 'Sure,' he said amiably. 'I'll take in your mail. Also papers, milk, whatever you like. Anything else?'

'How absolutely extravagantly generous are you feeling?' Cassie said.

He gave her a sideways squint over his frothy mugful, 'Spill it,' he said.

'My little yellow car is booked in today for a service and its road test, and I just wondered…'

'If I'd drive it along to that big garage for you?'

'William will bring you back,' she said persuasively.

'For you, Cassie, anything,' he said. 'Straightaway.'

'Plaster off this afternoon,' she said happily, and I looked at her clear grey eyes and thought that I loved her so much it was ridiculous. Don't ever leave me, I thought. Stay around for ever. It would be lonely now without you… It would be agony.

We all went in my car along to the cottage and I left it out in the road because of Cassie wanting Bananas to back her little yellow peril out of the garage onto the driveway. She and he walked towards the garage doors to open them and I, half watching them, went across to unlock the front door and retrieve the letters which would have fallen on the mat just inside.

The cottage lay so quiet and still that our precautions seemed unnecessary, like crowd barriers on the moon.

Angelo is unpredictable, I told myself. Unstable as Mount St Helens. One might as well expect reasonable behaviour from an earthquake, even if one does ultimately wish him to prosper.

REMEMBER TIGERS.

There was a small banging noise out by the garage. Nothing alarming. I paid little attention.

Six envelopes lay on the mat. I bent down, picked them up, shuffled through them. Three bills for Luke, a rate demand for the cottage, an advertisement for books and a letter to Cassie from her mother in Sydney. Ordinary mundane letters, not worth dying for.

I gave one final glance round the pretty sitting-room, seeing the red check frills on the curtains and the corn dollies moving gently in the breeze through the door. It wouldn't be so long, I thought, before we were back.

The kitchen door stood open, the light from the kitchen window lying in a reflecting gleam on the white paint: and across the gleam a shadow moved.

Bananas and Cassie, I thought automatically, coming in through the kitchen door. But they couldn't. It was locked.

There was hardly time even for alarm, even for primaeval instinct, even for rising hair. The silencer of a pistol came first into the room, a dark silhouette against the white paint, and then Angelo, dressed in black, balloon-high with triumph, towering with malice, looking like the devil.

There was no point in speech. I knew conclusively that he was going to shoot me, that I was looking at my own death. There was about him such an intention of action, such a surrender to recklessness, such an intoxication of destructiveness, that nothing and no one could have talked him out of it.

With a thought so light-fast that it wasn't even conscious, I reached out to the baseball bat which still lay on the window sill. Grasped its handle end with the dexterity of desperation and swung towards Angelo in one continuous movement from twisting foot through legs, trunk, arm and hand to bat, bringing the weight of the wood down towards the hand which held the pistol with the whole force of my body.

Angelo fired straight at my chest from six feet away. I felt a jerking thud and nothing else and wasn't even astonished and it didn't even a fraction deflect my swing. A split second later the bat crunched down onto Angelo's wrist and hand and broke them as thoroughly as he'd broken Cassie's arm.

I reeled from the force of that impact and spun across the room, and Angelo dropped the gun on the carpet and hugged his right arm to his body, yelling one huge shout at the pain of it and doubling over and running akwardly out of the front door and down the path to the road.

I watched him through the window. I stood in a curious sort of inactivity, knowing that there was a future to come that had not yet arrived, a consequence not yet felt but inexorable, the fact of a bullet through my flesh.

I thought: Angelo has finally bagged his Derry. Angelo has taken his promised revenge. Angelo knows his shot hit me straight on target. Angelo will be convinced that he has done right, even if it costs him a lifetime in prison. In Angelo, despite his smashed wrist, despite his prospects, there would be at that moment an overpowering, screaming, unencompassable delirium of joy.

The battle was over, and the war. Angelo would be satisfied that in every physical, visible way, he had won.

Bananas and Cassie came running through the front door and looked enormously relieved to see me standing there, leaning a little against a cupboard but apparently unhurt.

'That was Angelo!' Cassie said.

'Yeah.'

Bananas looked at the baseball bat which lay on the floor and said, 'You bashed him.'

'Yeah.'

'Good,' Cassie said with satisfaction. 'His turn for the dreaded plaster.'

Bananas saw Angelo's gun and leaned to pick it up.

'Don't touch it,' I said.

He looked up enquiringly, still half bent.

'Fingerprints,' I said. 'Jail him for life.'

'But-'

'He shot me,' I said.

I saw the disbelief on their faces begin to turn to anxiety.

'Where?' Cassie said.

I made a fluttery movement with my left hand towards my chest. My right arm felt heavy and without strength, and I thought unemotionally that it was because some of the muscles needed to lift it were torn.

'Shall I get an ambulance?' Bananas said.

'Yes.'

They didn't understand, I thought, how bad it was. They couldn't see any damage, and I was concerned mostly about how to tell them without frightening Cassie to death.

It wasn't that at that point it felt so terrible, but I still knew in a detached fashion that it soon would be. There was an internal disintegration going on like the earth shifting, like foundations slipping away. Accelerating, but still slowly.

I said, 'Ring Cambridge hospital.'

It all sounded so calm.

I slid down, without meaning to, to my knees, and saw the anxiety on their faces turn to horror.

'You're really hurt,' Cassie said with spurting alarm.

'It's… er… er…' I couldn't think what to say.

She was suddenly beside me, kneeling, finding with terrified scarlet fingers that the entry wound that didn't show through the front of my padded husky jacket led to a bigger bleeding exit at the back.

'Oh my God,' she said in stunned absolute shock.

Bananas strode over for a look and I could see from both their faces that they did know now, there was no longer any need to seek the words.

He turned grim-faced away and picked up the telephone, riffling urgently through the directory and dialling the number.

'Yes,' he was saying. 'Yes, it's an emergency. A man's been shot. Yes, I did say shot… through the chest… Yes, he's alive… Yes, he's conscious… No, the bullet can't be in him.' He gave the address of the cottage and brief directions. 'Look, stop asking damn fool questions… tell them to shift their arse… Yes, it does look bloody serious, for God's sake stop wasting time… My name? Christ Almighty, John Frisby.' He crashed the receiver down in anger and said, 'They want to know if we've reported it to the police. What the hell does it matter?'

I couldn't be bothered to tell him that all gunshot wounds had to be reported. Breathing, in fact, was becoming more difficult. Only words that needed to be said were worth the effort.

'That pistol,' I said. 'Don't put it… in a plastic bag. Condensation… destroys… the prints.'

Bananas looked surprised and I thought that he didn't realise I was telling him because quite soon I might not be able to. I was beginning to feel most dreadfully ill, with clamminess creeping over my skin and breaking into a sweat on my forehead. I gave a smallish cough and wiped a red streak from my mouth onto the back of my hand. An enveloping wave of weakness washed through me and I found myself sagging fairly comprehensively against the cupboard and then half lying on the floor.

'Oh, William,' Cassie said. 'Oh no.'

If I'd ever doubted she loved me, I had my answer. No one could have acted or feigned the extremity of despair in her voice and in her body.

'Don't… worry,' I said. I tried a smile. I don't suppose it came off. I coughed again, with worse results.

I was trying to breathe, I thought, through a lake. A lake progressively filling, fed by many springs. It was happening faster now. Much faster. Too fast. I wasn't ready. Who was ever ready?

I could hear Bananas saying something urgent but I didn't know-quite what. My wits started drifting. Existence was ceasing to be external. I'm dying, I thought, I really am. Dying too fast.

My eyes were shut and then open again. The daylight looked odd. Too bright. I could see Cassie's face wet with tears.

I tried to say, 'Don't cry,' but I couldn't get the breath. Breathing was becoming a sticky near-impossibility.

Bananas was still talking, distantly.

There was a feeling of everything turning to liquid, of my body dissolving, of a deep subterranean river overflowing its banks and carrying me away.

Dim final astringent thought… I'm drowning, God damn it, in my own blood.

CHAPTER 21

Cassie's face was the next thing I saw, but not for more than a day, and it was no longer weeping but asleep and serene. She was sitting by a bed with me in it, surrounded by white things and glass and chromium and a lot of lights. Intensive care, and all that.

I woke by stages over several hours to the pain I hadn't felt from the shot, and to tubes carrying liquids into and away from my log of clay and to voices telling me over and over that I was lucky to be there; that I had died and was alive.

I thanked them all, and meant it.

Thanked Bananas, who had apparently picked me up and put me in my own car and driven me at about a hundred miles an hour to Cambridge because it was quicker than waiting for the ambulance.

Thanked two surgeons who it seemed had worked all day and then again half the night to staunch and tidy the wreckage of my right lung and stop blood dripping out of the drainage as fast as the transfusions flowed into my arm.

Thanked the nurses who clattered about with deft hands and noisy machinery, and in absentia thanked the donors of blood type 'O' who had refilled my veins.

Thanked Cassie for her love and for sitting beside me whenever they'd let her.

Thanked the fates that the destructive lump of metal had missed my heart. Thanked everyone I could for anything I could think of in gratitude for my life.

The long recurring dreams that had come during unconsciousness faded, receded, seemed no longer to be vivid fact. I no longer saw the Devil pacing beside me, quiet but implacable, the master waiting for my soul. I no longer saw him, the Fallen Angel, the Devil with Angelo's face, the yellow face with frosted hair and black empty holes where the eyes should have been. The Presence had gone. I was back to the daft real enjoyable world where tubes were what mattered, not concepts of evil.

I didn't say how close I had been to death because they were saying it for me, roughly every five minutes. I didn't say I had looked on the spaces of eternity and seen the everlasting Darkness and had known it had a meaning and a face. The visions of the dying and the snatched-from-death were suspect. Angelo was a living man, not the Devil, not an incarnation or a house or a dwelling place. It was delirium, the confusion of the brain's circuits, that had shown me the one as the other, the other as the One. I said nothing for fear of ridicule: and later nothing from feeling that I had in truth been mistaken and that the dreams were indeed… merely dreams.

'Where is Angelo?' I said.

'They said not to tire you.'

I looked at the evasion in Cassie's face. 'I'm lying down,' I pointed out. 'So give.'

She said reluctantly, 'Well… he's here.'

'Here? In this hospital?'

She nodded. 'In the room next door.'

I was bewildered. 'But why?'

'He crashed his car.' She looked at me anxiously for signs I supposed of relapse, but was seemingly reassured. 'He drove into a bus about six miles from here.'

'After he left the cottage?'

She nodded. 'They brought him here. They brought him into the emergency unit while Bananas and I were waiting there. We couldn't believe it.'

It wasn't over. I closed my eyes. It was never ever going to be over. Wherever I went, it seemed that Angelo would follow, even onto the slab.

'William?' Cassie said urgently.

'Mm?'

'Oh. I thought…'

'I'm all right.'

'He was nearly dead,' she said. 'Just like you. He's still in a coma.'

'What?'

'Head injuries,' she said.

I learned bit by bit over the next few days that the hospital people hadn't believed it when Bananas and Cassie told them it was Angelo who had shot me. They had fought as long and hard to save his life as mine, and apparently we had been placed side by side in the Intensive Care Unit until Cassie told them I'd have a heart attack if I woke and found him there.

The police had more moderately pointed out that if it was Angelo who woke first he might complete the job of murdering me: and Angelo was now in his unwaking sleep along the hallway, guarded by a constable night and day.

It was extraordinary to think of him being there, lying there so close. Unsettling in a fundamental way. I wouldn't have thought it would have affected me so badly, but my pulse started jumping every time anyone opened the door. Reason said he wouldn't come. The subconscious feared it.

Bodies heal amazingly quickly. I was free of tubes, moved to a side ward, on my feet, walking about within a week: creeping a bit, sure, and stiff and sore, but positively, conclusively alive. Angelo too, it seemed, was improving. On the way up from the depths. Opening unseeing eyes, showing responses.

I heard it from the nurses, from the cleaners, from the woman who pushed a trolley of comforts, and all of them watched me curiously to see how I would take it. The piquancy of the situation hit first the local paper and then the national dailies, and the constables guarding Angelo started drifting in to chat.

It was from one of them that I learned how Angelo had lost control of his car while going round a roundabout, how a whole queue of people at a bus stop had seen him veer towards the bus as if unable to turn the steering wheel, how he'd been going too fast in any case, and how he had seemed at first to be laughing.

Bananas, when he heard it, said trenchantly, 'He crashed because you broke his wrist.'

'Yes,' I said.

He sighed deeply. 'The police must know it.'

'I expect so.'

'Have they bothered you?'

I shook my head. 'I told them what happened. They wrote it down. No one has said much.'

They collected the pistol.' He smiled. They put it in a paper bag.'

I left the hospital after twelve days, walking slowly past Angelo's room but not going in. Revulsion was too strong even though I knew he was still lightly unconscious and wouldn't be aware I was there. The damage he had caused in my life and Cassie's might be over but my body carried his scars, livid still and still hurting, too immediate for detachment.

I dare say I hated him. Perhaps I feared him. I certainly didn't want to see him again, then or ever.

For the next three weeks I mooched around the cottage doing paperwork, getting fitter every day and persuading Bananas at first to drive me along to the Heath to watch the gallops. Cassie went to work, the plastered arm a memory. My blood had washed almost entirely off the sitting-room carpet and the baseball bat was in the cellar. Life returned more or less to normal.

Luke came over from California, inspected the yearlings, met Cassie, listened to Sim and Mort and the Berkshire trainers, visited Warrington Marsh, and went off to Ireland. It was he, not I, who bid for Oxidise at Ballsbridge and sent the colt to Donavan, and he who in some way smoothed the Irish trainer's feelings.

He came back briefly to Newmarket before leaving for home, calling in at the cottage and drinking a lunchtime scotch.

'Your year's nearly through,' he said.

'Yeah.'

'Have you enjoyed it?'

'Very much.'

'Want another?'

I lifted my head. He watched me through a whole minute of silence. He didn't say, and nor did I, that Warrington Marsh was never going to be strong enough again to do the job. That wasn't the point: the point was permanence… captivity.

'One year,' Luke said. 'It's not for ever.'

After another pause I said, 'One year, then. One more.'

He nodded and drank his drink, and it seemed to me that somewhere he was smiling. I had a presentiment of him coming over again the next year and offering the same thing. One year. One year's contract at a time, leaving the cage door open but keeping his bird imprisoned: and as long as I could go, I thought, I might stay.

Cassie, when she came home, was pleased. 'Mort told him he'd be mad to lose you.'

'Did he?'

'Mort likes you.'

'Donavan doesn't.'

'You can't have everything,' she said.

I had quite a lot, it was true; and then the police telephoned and asked me to see Angelo.

'No,' I said.

'That's a gut reaction,' a voice said calmly. 'But I'd like you to listen.'

He talked persuasively for a long time, cajoling again every time I protested, wearing down my opposition until in the end I reluctantly agreed to do what he wanted.

'Good,' he said finally. 'Wednesday afternoon.'

'That's only two days-'

'We'll send a car. We don't expect you to be driving yet.'

I didn't argue. I could drive short distances but I tended to get tired. In another month, they'd said, I'd be running.

'We're grateful,' the voice said.

'Yeah

I told Cassie and Bananas, in the evening.

'How awful,' Cassie said. 'It's too much.'

The three of us were having dinner alone in the dining-room as the restaurant didn't officially open these days on Mondays: the old cow had negotiated Mondays off. Bananas had done the cooking himself, inventing a souffle of white fish, herbs, orange and nuts to try out on Cassie and me: a concoction typically and indescribably different, an unknown language, a new horizon of taste.

'You could have said you wouldn't go,' Bananas said, heaping his plate to match ours.

'With what excuse?'

'Selfishness,' Cassie said. The best reason in the world for not doing things.'

'Never thought of it.'

Bananas said, 'I hope you insisted on a bullet-proof vest, a six-inch-thick plate glass screen and several rolls of barbed wire.'

'They did assure me,' I said mildly, 'that they wouldn't let him leap at my throat.'

'Too kind,' Cassie murmured.

We poured Bananas's exquisite sauce over his souflee and said that when we had to leave the cottage we would camp in his garden.

'And will you bet?' he asked.

'What do you mean?'

'On the system.'

I thought blankly that I'd forgotten all about that possibility: but we did have the tapes. We did have the choice.

'We don't have a computer,' I said.

'We could soon pay for one,' Cassie said.

We all looked at each other. We were happy enough with our own jobs; with what we had. Did one always, inevitably, stretch out for more?

Yes, one did.

'You work the computer,' Bananas said, 'and I'll do the betting. Now and then. When we're short.'

'As long as it doesn't choke us.'

'I don't want diamonds,' Cassie said judiciously, 'or furs, or a yacht… but how soon can we have a pool in our sitting-room?'

Whatever Luke said to my brother when he got home to California I never knew, but it resulted in Jonathan telephoning that night to say he would be arriving at Heathrow on Wednesday morning.

'What about your students?'

'Sod the students. I've got laryngitis.' His voice bounced the distance strong and healthy. 'I'll see you.'

He came in a hired car looking biscuit-coloured from the sun and anxious about what he would find, and although I was by then feeling well again it didn't seem to reassure him.

'I'm alive,' I pointed out. 'One thing at a time. Come back next month.'

'What exactly happened?'

'Angelo happened.'

'Why didn't you tell me?' he demanded.

'I'd have told you if I'd died. Or someone would.'

He sat in one of the rockers and looked at me broodingly.

'It was all my fault,' he said.

'Oh, sure.' I was ironic.

'And that's why you didn't tell me.'

I'd probably have told you one day.'

'Tell me now.'

I told him, however, where I was going that afternoon, and why, and he said in his calm positive way that he would come with me. I had thought he would: had been glad he was coming. I told him over the next few hours pretty well everything which had happened between Angelo and me, just as he had told me all those years ago in Cornwall.

'I'm sorry,'he said, at the end.

'Don't be.'

You'll use the system?'

I nodded. 'Pretty soon.'

'I think old Mrs O'Rorke would be glad. She was proud of Liam's worlc. She wouldn't want it wasted.' He reflected for a bit and then said, 'What make of pistol, do you know?'

'I believe… the police said… a Walther. 22?'

He smiled faintly. True to form. And just as well. If it had been a. 38 of something like that you'd have been in trouble.'

'Ah,' I said dryly. 'Just as well.'

The car came for us as threatened and took us to a large house in Buckinghamshire. I never did discover exactly what it was: a cross between a hospital and a civil service institution, all long wide corridors and closed doors and hush.

'Down there,' we were directed. 'Right along at the end. Last door on the right.'

We walked unhurriedly along the parquet flooring, our heels punctuating the silence. At the far end there was a tall window, floor to ceiling, casting not quite enough daylight; and silhouetted against the window were two figures, a man in a wheelchair with another man pushing him.

Those two and Jonathan and I in due course approached each other, and as we drew nearer I saw with unwelcome shock that the man in the wheelchair was Harry Gilbert. Old, grey, bowed, ill Harry Gilbert who still consciously repelled compassion.

Eddy, who was pushing, faltered to a halt, and Jonathan and I also stopped, we staring at Harry and Harry staring at us over a space of a few feet. He looked from me to Jonathan, glancing at him briefly at first and then looking longer, more carefully, seeing what he didn't believe.

He switched to me. 'You said he was dead,' he said.

I nodded slightly.

His voice was cold, dry, bitter, past passion, past hope, past strength to avenge. 'Both of you,' he said. 'You destroyed my son.'

Neither Jonathan nor I answered. I wondered about the genetics of evil, the chance that bred murder, the predisposition which lived already at birth. The biblical creation, I thought, was also the truth of evolution. Cain existed, and in every species there was survival of the ruthless.

It was only by luck that I had lived; by Bananas's speed and surgeons' dedication. Abel and centuries of other victims were dead: and in every generation, in many a race, the genes still threw up the killer. The Gilberts bred their Angelos for ever.

Harry Gilbert jerked his head back, aiming at Eddy, signalling that he wanted to go; and Eddy the look-alike, Eddy the easily led, Eddy the sheep from the same flock, wheeled his uncle quietly away.

'Arrogant old bastard,' Jonathan said under his breath, looking back at them.

'The breeding of racehorses,' I said, 'is interesting.'

Jonathan's gaze came round very slowly to my face. 'And do rogues,' he asked, 'beget rogues?'

'Quite often.'

He nodded and we went on walking along the corridor, up to the window, to the last door on the right.

The room into which we went must once have been finely proportioned but with the insensitivity of government departments it had been hacked into two for utility. The result was one long narrow room with a window and another inner long narrow room without one.

In the outer room, which was furnished only by a strip of mud-coloured carpet on the parquet leading to a functional desk and two hard chairs, were two men engaged in what looked like unimportant passing of the time. One sat behind the desk, one sat on it, both fortyish, smallish, smooth, bored-looking and with an air of wishing to be somewhere else.

They looked up enquiringly as we went in.

I'm William Derry,'I said.

'Ah.'

The man sitting on the desk rose to his feet, came towards me, shook hands, and looked enquiring at Jonathan.

'My brother, Jonathan Derry,' I said.

'Ah.'

He shook hands with him too. 'I don't think,' he said neutrally, 'that we'll need to bother your brother.'

I said,' Angelo is more likely to react violently to Jonathan than to me.'

'But it was you he tried to kill.'

'Jonathan got him jailed… fourteen years ago.'

'Ah.'

He looked from one of us to the other, his head tilted slightly back to accommodate our height. We seemed to be in some way not what he'd expected, though I didn't know why. Jonathan did certainly look pretty distinguished, especially since age had given him such an air of authority, and he had always of the two of us had the straighter features; and I, I supposed, looked less a victim than I might have. I wondered vaguely if he'd been expecting a shuffling little figure in a dressing gown and hadn't reckoned on clothes like his own.

'I think I'll just go and explain about your brother,' he said at last. 'Will you wait?'

We nodded and he opened the door to the inner room parsimoniously and eeled himself through the gap, closing it behind him. The man behind the desk went on looking bored and offered no comment of any sort, and presently his colleague slid back through the same sized opening and said they were ready for us inside and would we please go in.

The inner room was lit brightly and entirely by electricity and contained four people and a great deal of electrical equipment with multitudinous dials and sprouting wires. I saw Jonathan give them a swift sweep of the eyes and supposed he could identify the lot, and he said afterwards that they had all seemed to be standard machines for measuring body changes – cardiograph, encephalograph, gauges for temperature, respiration and skin moisture – and there had been at least two of each.

One of the four people wore an identifying white coat and introduced himself quietly as Tom Course, doctor. A woman in similar white moved among the machines, checking their faces. A third person, a man, seemed to be there specifically as an observer, since that was what he did, without speaking, during the next strange ten minutes.

The fourth person, sitting in a sort of dentist's chair with his back towards us, was Angelo.

We could see only the top of his bandaged head, but also his arms, which were strapped by the wrists to the arms of the chair.

There was no sign of any plaster on the arm I'd broken: mended no doubt. His arms were bare and covered sparsely with dark hairs, the hands lying loose, without tension. From every part of his body it seemed that wires led backwards to the machines, which were all ranked behind him. In front of him there was nothing but a stretch of empty brightly lit room.

Dr Course, young, wiry, bolstered by certainties, gave me an enquiring glance and said in the same quiet manner, 'Are you ready?'

As ready, I supposed, as I ever would be.

'Just walk round in front of him. Say something. Anything you like. Stay there until we tell you it's enough.'

I swallowed. I had never wanted to do anything less in all my life. I could see them all waiting, polite, determined, businesslike… and too damned understanding. Even Jonathan, I noticed, was looking at me with a sort of pity.

Intolerable.

I walked slowly round the machines and the chair and stopped in front of Angelo, and looked at him.

He was naked to the waist. On his head, below a cap of fawn crepe bandage, there was a band of silvery metal like a crown. His skin everywhere gleamed with grease and to his face, his neck, his chest, arms and abdomen were fastened an army of electrodes. No one, I imagined, could have been more comprehensively wired; no flicker of change could have gone unmonitored.

He seemed as well-fleshed and as healthy as ever, despite his earlier two weeks in a coma. The muscles looked as strong, the trunk as tank-like, the mouth as firm. The hard man. The frightener. The despiser of mugs. Apart from his headdress and the wires he looked just the same. I breathed a shade deeply and looked straight into his black eyes, and it was there that one saw the difference. There was nothing in the eyes, nothing at all. It was extraordinary, like seeing a stranger in a long-known face. The house was the same… but the monster slept.

It was five weeks all but a day since we had last faced each other; since we had brought each other near to death, one way or another. Even though I had been prepared, seeing him again affected me powerfully. I could feel my heart thudding: could actually hear it in the expectant room.

'Angelo,' I said. My tongue felt sticky in my dry mouth. 'Angelo, you shot me.'

In Angelo, nothing happened.

He was looking at me in complete calm. When I took a pace to one side, his eyes followed. When I stepped back he still watched.

'I am… William Derry,' I said. 'I gave you… Liam O'Rorke's betting system.' I said the words slowly, clearly, deliberately, trying to control my own uneven breath.

From Angelo there was no reaction at all.

'If you hadn't shot me… you'd have been free now… and rich.'

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I found Jonathan standing beside me and after a pause Angelo's gaze wandered from me to him.

'Hullo, Angelo,' Jonathan said. 'I'm Jonathan, do you remember? William told you I was dead. It wasn't true.'

Angelo said nothing.

'Do you remember?' Jonathan said. 'I tricked you sideways.'

Silence. A dull absence of all we had endured for so long. No fury. No sneers, no threats, no towering hurricane of hate.

Silence, it seemed to me, was all that was appropriate. Jonathan and I stood there together in front of the shell of our enemy and there was nothing in the world left to say.

'Thank you,' Tom Course said, coming round the chair to join us. 'That should do it.'

Angelo looked at him.

'Who are you?' he said.

'Dr Course. We talked earlier, while we were fixing the electrodes.'

Angelo made no comment but instead looked directly at me.

'You were talking,' he said. 'Who are you?'

'William Derry.'

'I don't know you.'

'No.'

His voice was as deep and as gritty as ever, the only remnant, it seemed, of the old foe.

Dr Course said heartily, 'We'll take all those wires off you now. I expect you'll be glad to get rid of them.'

'Who did you say you are?' Angelo said, frowning slightly.

'Dr Course.'

'Who?'

'Never mind. I'm here to take the wires off.'

'Can I have tea?' Angelo said.

Dr Course left the taking-off of the wires to his woman colleague and led us round to look at the results on the machines. The observer, I noticed, was also consulting them acutely, but Course paid him scant attention.

'There we are,' he said, holding out a yard long strip of paper. 'Not a flicker. We had him stabilised for an hour before his visitors carne. Breathing, pulse rate, everything rock steady. Quiet in here, you see. No interruptions, no intrusions, no noise. That mark, that's the point at which he saw you,' he nodded at me, 'and as you can see, nothing altered. This is the skin temperature chart. Always rises if someone's lying. And here…' he moved across to a different machine. 'Heart rate unchanged. And here…' to another. 'Brain activity, very faint alteration. He couldn't have seen you, his hated victim, suddenly and unexpectedly standing in front of him, and yet show no strong body or brain changes, not if he'd known you. Absolutely impossible.'

I thought of my own unrecorded but pretty extreme responses, and knew that it was true.

'Is this state permanent?' Jonathan asked.

Tom Course gave him a swift look.'I think so. It's my opinion, yes. See, they dug pieces of skull out of his brain tissue. Brilliant repair job on the bone structure, have to hand it to them. But there you are, you can see, no memory. Many functions unimpaired. Eat, talk, walk, he can do all that. He's continent. He'll live to be old. But he can't remember anything for longer than about fifteen minutes, sometimes not even that. He lives in the absolute present. Loss of capacity for memory is not all that rare, you know, after severe brain damage. But with this one, there were doubts. Not my doubts, official doubts. They said he was faking, that he knew he'd go to a hospital, not a prison, if he could persuade everyone he'd lost his memory.'

Tom Course waved a hand around the machines. 'He couldn't have faked today's results. Conclusive. Settle the arguments once and for all. Which is why we're all here, of course. Why they gave us this facility.'

His woman colleague had taken the silver band off Angelo's forehead and the straps off his wrists, and was wiping the grease from his skin with pieces of cotton wool.

'Who are you?' he said to her, and she answered, 'Just a friend.'

'Where will he go?' I said.

Tom Course shrugged. 'Not my decision. But I'd be careful. I'm not a civil servant. My advice, I don't suppose, will be taken.' His remark was clearly aimed at the observer, who remained obstinately impassive.

I said slowly, 'Could he still be violent?'

Tom Course gave me a swift sideways glance. 'Can't tell. He might be. Yes, he might be. He looks harmless. He'll never hate anyone, he can't remember anyone long enough. But the sudden impulse…' he shrugged again. 'Let's say, I wouldn't turn my back on him if we were alone.'

'Not ever?'

'How old is he? Forty?' He pursed his mouth. 'Not for another ten years. Twenty perhaps. You can't tell.'

'Lightning?' I said.

'Just like that.'

The woman finished wiping the grease and was holding out a grey shirt for Angelo to put on.

'Have we had tea?'he said.

'Not yet.'

'I'm thirsty.'

'You'll have tea soon.'

I said to Tom Course, 'His father was outside… did Angelo see him?'

Course nodded. 'No reaction. Nothing on the machines. Conclusive tests, the whole lot of them.' He looked slyly at the observer. 'They can stop all the arguing.'

Angelo stood up out of the chair, stretching upright, seeming strong with physical life but fumbling with the buttons of his shirt, moving without total coordination, looking around vaguely as if not quite sure what he should be doing next.

His wandering gaze came to rest on Jonathan and me.

'Hullo,' he said.

The doors from the outer room opened wide and two white-coated male nurses and a uniformed policeman came through it.

'Is he ready?' the policeman said.

'All yours.'

'Let's be off, then.'

He fastened a handcuff round Angelo's left wrist and attached him to one of the nurses.

Angelo didn't seem to mind. He looked at me uninterestedly for the last time with the black holes where the eyes should have been and walked as requested to the door.

Diminished, defused… perhaps even docile.

'Where's my tea?' he said.