10 lb Penalty (28 page)

I picked up the receiver. A voice that was not Basil Rudd’s said, “Is it you that wants to know where to find Bobby Usher Rudd?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter a damn who I am. Because of his snooping my wife left me and I lost my kids. If you want to fix that bastard Usher Rudd, at this very moment he is in the offices of the
Hoopwestern Gazette.
”

The informant at the other end disconnected abruptly.

Usher Rudd was on my doorstep.

I’d expected a longer chase, but the
Hoopwestern Gazette’s
offices and printing presses were simply down the road. I locked the party headquarters, jumped in my car, and sped through the Sunday traffic with the devil on my tail, anxious not to lose Usher Rudd now that I’d found him.

He was still at the
Gazette,
though, in mid-furious row with Samson Frazer. When I walked into the editor’s office it silenced them both with their hot words half-spoken.

They both knew who I was.

Bobby Usher Rudd looked literally struck dumb. Samson Frazer’s expression mingled pleasure, apprehension and relief.

He said, “Bobby swears the dope story’s true.”

“Bobby would swear his mother’s a chimpanzee.”

Usher Rudd’s quivering finger pointed at a copy of Thursday’s
Gazette
that lay on Samson’s desk, and found his voice, hoarse with rage.

“You know what you’ve done?” He was asking me, not Samson Frazer. “You’ve got me sacked from
SHOUT!
You frightened Rufus Crossmead and the proprietors so badly that they won’t risk my stuff anymore, and I’ve increased their bloody sales for them over the years ... it’s bloody
unfair.
So now they say they’re the laughingstock of the whole industry, printing a false story about someone whose father might be the next prime minister. They say the story has back-fired. They said it will
help
George Juliard, not finish him. And how was I to know? It’s effing unfair.”

I said bitterly, “You could have seen Vivian Durridge didn’t know what he was saying.”

“People who don’t know what they’re saying are the ones you listen to.”

That confident statement, spoken in rage, popped a lightbulb in my understanding of Usher Rudd’s success.

I said, “That day in Quindle, when I first met you, you were already trying to dig up scandal about my father.”

“Natch.”

“He tries to dig up dirt about anyone,” Samson put in.

I shook my head. “Who,” I asked Usher Rudd, “told you to attack my father?”

“I don’t need to be told.”

Though I wasn’t exactly shouting, my voice was loud and my accusation plain. “As you’ve known all about cars for the whole of your life, did you stuff up my father’s Range Rover’s sump-plug drain with a candle?”

“Did you? Who suggested you do it?”

“I’m not answering your bloody questions.”

The telephone rang on Samson Frazer’s desk.

He picked up the receiver, listened briefly, said “OK” and disconnected.

Usher Rudd, not a newspaperman for nothing, said suspiciously, “Did you give them the OK to roll the presses?”

“Yes.”

Usher Rudd’s rage increased to the point where his whole body shook. He shouted, “You’re printing without the change. I insist ... I’ll kill you ...
stop the presses ...
if you don’t print what I told you to, I’ll kill you.”

Samson Frazer didn’t believe him, and nor, for all Rudd’s passion, did I.
Kill
was a word used easily, but seldom meant.

“What change?” I demanded.

Samson’s voice was high beyond normal. “He wants me to print that you faked Sir Vivian’s letter and forged his signature and that the story about sniffing glue is a hundred percent sterling, a hundred percent kosher, and you’ll do
anything ... anything
to deny it.”

He picked a typewritten page off his desk and waved it.

“It’s Sunday, anyway,” he said. “There’s no one here but me and the print technicians. Tomorrow’s paper is locked onto the presses, ready to roll.”

“You can do the changes yourself.” Usher Rudd fairly danced with fury.

“I’m not going to,” Samson said.

“Then don’t print the paper.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Samson put the typewritten page into my hands.

I glanced down to read it and, as if all he’d been waiting for had been a flicker of inattention on my part, Bobby Rudd did one of his quickest getaways and was out through a door in a flash ... not the door to the outside world, but the swinging door into the passage leading deeper into the building ... the passage, it transpired, down to the presses.

“Stop him,” yelled Samson, aghast.

“It’s only paper,” I said, though making for the door.

“No ... sabotage ... he can destroy ... catch him.” His agitation convinced me. I sprinted after Usher Rudd and ran down a passage with small, empty individual offices to both sides and out through another door at the end and across an expanse inhabited only by huge white rolls of paper—newsprint, the raw material of newspapers—and through a small print room beyond that with two or three men tending clattering machines turning out colored pages, and finally through a last swinging door into the long, high room containing the heart and muscle of the
Hoopwestern Gazette,
the monster printing presses that every day turned out twenty thousand twenty-four-page community enlightenments to most of Dorset.

The presses were humming quietly when I reached them. There were eight in a row with a tower in the center. From each end of four, the presses put first a banner in color—red, green, blue—on the sheets that would be the front and back pages, and then came the closely edited black-and-white pages set onto rollers in an age-old, but still perfectly functional, offset litho process.

I learned afterwards how the machines technically worked. On that fraught Sunday I saw only wide white paper looping from press to press and in and out of inked rollers as it collected the news page by page on its journey to the central tower, from where it went up in single sheets and came down folded into a publish-able newspaper, cut and counted into bundles of fifty.

There were two men tending the presses, adjusting the ink flow and slowly increasing the speed of the paper over the rollers and through the mechanism. Warning bells were ringing. Noise was building.

When I ran into the long thundering area, Usher Rudd was shouting at one of the men to turn everything off. The technician blinked at him and paid no attention.

His colleague activated another alarm bell and switched the presses to a full floor-trembling roar. Monday’s edition of the
Hoopwestern Gazette,
twenty thousand copies of it, flowed from press to press and up the tower and down at a speed that reduced each separate page to a blur.

Samson Frazer, catching up with me as I watched with awe, shouted in my ear, “Don’t go near the presses while they’re running. If you get your little finger caught in any of the rollers it would pull your whole arm in—it would wrench your arm right out of your body. We can’t stop the presses fast enough to save an arm. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I yelled.

Usher Rudd was screaming at the technician.

Samson Frazer’s warning was essential.

There was a space of three or four feet between each machine where one was wholly exposed to the revolving accelerating rollers. When the presses were at rest the printers—the technicians—walked with safety into these spaces to fit the master sheets onto the cylinders and to check the state of the inking rollers. When the presses, switched on, ran even at minimum inch-by-inch speed, the danger began. An arm could be torn out, not in one jerking terror but worse, inch by excruciatingly inevitable inch.

I asked later why no guarding gates kept people away. The machines were old, built before safety standards skyrocketed, Samson Frazer said, but they did indeed now have gates. It was illegal in Britain to operate without them. These gates pulled across like trellises and locked into place, but they were fiddly, and an extra job. People who worked around these presses knew and respected the danger, and sometimes didn’t bother with the gates. He didn’t approve, but he’d had no tragedies. There were computerized programs and printers to be had, but the old technology worked perfectly, as it had for a hundred years, and he couldn’t afford to scrap the old and to install the new, which often went wrong anyway, and one couldn’t guard against maniacs like Usher Rudd. No one had to insure against lunatics.

I could have sold him a policy about that, but on that particular Sunday evening what we needed for Usher Rudd was a straitjacket, not a premium.

He was still swearing at the technician, who looked over Rudd’s shoulder and saw Samson Frazer’s arrival as deliverance.

Stopping the presses, I learned later, meant hitting one particular button on one of the control panels to be found on the end of each press that regulated the overall speed of the printing. The buttons weren’t things the size of doorbells, but scarlet three-inch-diameter flat knobs on springs. Neither the technician nor Samson Frazer pushed the overall stop control, and neither Rudd himself nor I knew which of several scarlet buttons ruled the roost. The presses went on roaring and Bobby Usher Rudd completely lost control.

He knew the terrible danger of the presses. He’d worked for the
Hoopwestern Gazette.
He’d been in and out of newspapers all his adult life.

He grabbed the technician by his overalls and swung him towards unimaginable agony.

The technician, half in and half out of one of the lethal spaces, screamed.

Samson Frazer screamed at Usher Rudd.

The second technician sprinted for refuge in the smaller print room next door.

I, from instinct, leapt at Usher Rudd and yanked him backwards. He too started screaming. Still clutched by the overalls, the technician stumbled out of the fearsome gap, ingrained awareness keeping his hands close to his body: better to fall on the floor than try to keep his balance by touching the death-dealing machinery.

Usher Rudd let go of the overalls and rerouted his uncontrolled frenzy onto me. He was no longer primarily trying to stop the print run, but to avenge himself for the cataclysms he had brought on himself.

The glare in his eyes was madness. I saw the intention there of pushing me instead of the technician onto the rollers, and had we been alone he might have managed it. But Samson Frazer jumped to grab him while the technician, saved from mutilation, gave a horror-struck final shout as he made his terrified stumbling run for the door, and by unplanned chance barged into Usher Rudd on the way, unbalancing him.

Rudd threw Samson off him like an irrelevance, but it gave me time to get space between me and the nearest press, and although Rudd grasped and lurched in an effort to get me back again into the danger zone, I was fighting more or less for my life and it was amazing how much strength ultimate fear generated.

Samson Frazer, to his supreme credit—and maybe calculating that any death on his premises would ruin him—helped me struggle with the demented kicking and punching and clutching red-haired tornado: and it was Samson who delivered a blow to Rudd’s head with a bunched fist that half dazed his target and knocked him to the ground face downwards. I sat on his squirming back while Samson found some of the wide brown sticky tape used for parcels and, with my active help, circled one of Usher Rudd’s wrists, and then the other, and fastened his arms behind his back in makeshift handcuffs. Samson tethered the wildly kicking legs in the same way and we rolled Rudd onto his back and stood over him, panting.

Then, with each of us looping an arm under Rudd’s armpits, we dragged him into the comparative quiet of the secondary print room next door and propped him in a chair.

All of the technicians were in that room, wide-eyed and upset. Samson told them unemotionally to go back to work, there was a paper to be got out, and slowly, hesitantly, they obeyed him.

In his chair, Rudd began shouting, “It’s all his fault. Wyvern did it. Wyvern’s the one you want, not me.”

“I don’t believe it,” I contradicted, though I did.

Usher Rudd tried to convince me. “Wyvern wanted your father out of the way. He wanted Orinda in Parliament. He wanted to get her promoted, like Dennis. He would have done anything to stop your father being elected.”

“Like sabotaging his car?”

“I didn’t want to do it. I would write what he wanted. I trailed Paul Bethune for weeks to find his bimbo, to please Wyvern, so that people would vote for Orinda, but messing up a Range Rover, cutting the brake lines like Wyvern wanted, that was too much. I didn’t do it.”

“Yes, you did,” I told him conclusively.

“No, I didn’t.”

“What did you do, then?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Your cousin, Basil, knows what you did.”

Usher Rudd cursed Basil with words I’d hardly ever heard even on a racecourse, and somewhere in the tirade came a description of how he’d wriggled under the Range Rover in the black tracksuit he’d worn to the meeting after the dinner in The Sleeping Dragon. The brilliant performance my father had given that evening had convinced Wyvern that he wouldn’t get rid of my father without at least injuring him badly. Wyvern had been furious with Usher Rudd that his sabotage had been so useless.

Usher Rudd’s rage slowly ran down and he began first to whine and then deny that he had ever said what Samson and I had both just heard.

Samson phoned the police. Joe Duke was not on duty, but Samson knew all the force individually and put down the receiver, reporting a promise of immediate action.

Usher Rudd shouted, “I want a lawyer.”

He got his lawyer, passed a night in the cells and on Monday morning collected a slap on the wrist from a busy magistrate (for causing a disturbance indoors at the
Hoopwestern Gazette)
who had no real conception of the speed and noise and danger involved.