Come to Grief (21 page)

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“With my problems, would I joke?”

“Where do I get an SIM card?”

“Ask Harrods.” He sneezed. “Ask anyone who travels for a living. Your service provider will provide.” He sniffed. “So long, Sid.”

Amused and grateful, I opened my mail and read the fax. The fax being most accessible got looked at first.

Handwritten, it scrawled simply, “Phone me,” and gave a long number.

The writing was Kevin Mills‘s, but the fax machine he’d sent it from was anonymously not The Pump’s.

I phoned the number given, which would have connected me to a mobile, and got only the infuriating instruction, “Please try later.”

There were a dozen messages I didn’t much want on my answering machine and a piece of information I
definitely
didn’t want in a large brown envelope from Shropshire.

The envelope contained a copy of a glossy county magazine, one I’d sent for as I’d been told it included lengthy coverage of the heir-to-the-dukedom’s coming-of-age dance. There were, indeed, four pages of pictures, mostly in color, accompanied by prose gush about the proceedings and a complete guest list.

A spectacular burst of fireworks filled half a page, and there in a group of heaven-gazing spectators, there in white tuxedo and all his photogenic glory, there unmistakably stood Ellis Quint.

My heart sank. The fireworks had started at three-thirty. At three-thirty, when the moon was high, Ellis had been a hundred miles northwest of the Windward Stud’s yearling.

There were many pictures of the dancing, and a page of black and white shots of the guests, names attached. Ellis had been dancing. Ellis smiled twice from the guests’ page, carefree, having a good time.

Damn it to hell, I thought. He had to have taken the colt’s foot off early. Say by one o‘clock. He could then have arrived for the fireworks by three-thirty. I’d found no one who’d seen him arrive, but several who swore to his presence after five-fifteen. At five-fifteen he had helped the heir to climb onto a table to make a drunken speech. The heir had poured a bottle of champagne over Ellis’s head. Everyone remembered that. Ellis could not have driven back to Northampton before dawn.

For two whole days the previous week I’d traipsed around Shropshire, and next-door Cheshire, handed on from grand house to grander, asking much the same two questions (according to sex): Did you dance with Ellis Quint, or did you drink/eat with him? The answers at first had been freely given, but as time went on, news of my mission spread before me until I was progressively met by hostile faces and frankly closed doors. Shropshire was solid Ellis country. They’d have stood on their heads to prove him unjustly accused. They were not going to say that they didn’t know when he’d arrived.

In the end I returned to the duchess’s front gates, and from there drove as fast as prudence allowed to the Windward Stud Farm, timing the journey at two hours and five minutes. On empty roads at night, Northampton to the duchess might have taken ten minutes less. I’d proved nothing except that Ellis had had time.

Enough time was not enough.

As always before gathering at such dances, the guests had given and attended dinner parties both locally and farther away. No one that I’d asked had entertained Ellis to dinner.

No dinner was not enough.

I went through the guest list crossing off the people I’d seen. There were still far more than half unconsulted, most of whom I’d never heard of.

Where was Chico? I needed him often. I hadn’t the time or, to be frank, the appetite to locate and question all the guests, even if they would answer. There must have been people—local people—helping with the parking of cars that night. Chico would have chatted people up in the local pubs and found out if any of the car-parkers remembered Ellis’s arrival. Chico was good at pubs, and I wasn’t in his class.

The police might have done it, but they wouldn’t. The death of a colt still didn’t count like murder.

The police.

I phoned Norman Picton’s police station number and gave my name as John Paul Jones.

He came on the line in a good humor and listened to me without protest.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want me to ask favors of the Northamptonshire police? What do I offer in return?”

“Blood in the hinges of lopping shears.”

“They’ll have made their own tests.”

“Yes, and that Northamptonshire colt is dead and gone to the glue factory. An error, wouldn’t you say? Might they not do you a favor in exchange for commiseration?”

“You’ll have my head off. What is it you actually want?”

“Er...,” I began, “I was there when the police found the lopping shears in the hedge.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking. Those shears weren’t wrapped in sacking, like the ones we took from the Quints.”

“No, and the shears weren’t the same, either. The ones at Northampton are a slightly newer model. They’re on sale everywhere in garden centers. The problem is that Ellis Quint hasn’t been reported as buying any, not in the Northamptonshire police district, nor ours.”

“Is there any chance,” I asked, “of my looking again at the material used for wrapping the shears?”

“If there are horse hairs in it, there’s nothing left to match them to, same as the blood.”

“All the same, the cloth might tell us where the shears came from. Which garden center, do you see?”

“I’ll see if they’ve done that already.”

“Thanks, Norman.”

“Thank Archie. He drives me to help you.”

“Does he?”

He heard my surprise. “Archie has
influence,”
he said, “and I do what the magistrate tells me.”

When he’d gone off the line I tried Kevin Mills again and reached the same electronic voice: “Please try later.”

After that I sat in an armchair while the daylight faded and the lights came on in the peaceful square. We were past the equinox, back in winter thoughts, the year dying ahead. Fall for me had for almost half my life meant the longed-for resurgence of major jump racing, the time of big winners and speed and urgency in the blood. Winter now brought only nostalgia and heating bills. At thirty-four I was growing old.

I sat thinking of Ellis and the wasteland he had made of my year. I thought of Rachel Ferns and Silverboy, and lymphoblasts. I thought of the press, and especially
The Pump
and India Cathcart and the orchestrated months of vilification. I thought of Ellis’s relentless jokes.

I thought for a long time about Archie Kirk, who had drawn me to Combe Bassett and given me Norman Picton. I wondered if it had been from Archie that Norman had developed a belief in a heavy presence behind the scenes. I wondered if it could possibly be Archie who had prompted Davis Tatum to engage me to find that heavyweight. I wondered if it could possibly have been Archie who told Davis Tatum about my run-in with the bad hat at the Jockey Club, and if so, how did he know?

I trusted Archie. He could pull my strings, I thought, as long as I was willing to go where he pointed, and as long as I was sure no one was pulling his.

I thought about Gordon Quint’s uncontrollable rage and the practical difficulties his fencing post had inflicted. I thought of Ginnie Quint and despair and sixteen floors down.

I thought of the colts and their chopped-off feet.

When I went to bed I dreamed the same old nightmare.

Agony. Humiliation. Both hands.

I awoke sweating.

Damn it all to hell.

In the morning, when I’d failed yet again to get an answer from Kevin Mills, I shunted by subway across central London and emerged not far from Companies House at 55 City Road, E.C.

Companies House, often my friend, contained the records of all public and private limited companies active in England, including the audited annual balance sheets, investment capital, fixed assets and the names of major shareholders and the directors of the boards.

Topline Foods, I soon learned, was an old company recently taken over by a few new big investors and a bustling new management. The chief shareholder and managing director was listed as Owen Cliff Yorkshire. There were fifteen non-executive directors, of whom one was Lord Tilepit.

The premises at which business was carried out were located at Frodsham, Cheshire. The registered office was at the same address.

The product of the company was foodstuffs for animals.

After Topline I looked up Village Pump Newspapers (they’d dropped the “Village” in about 1900, but retained the idea of a central meeting place for gossip) and found interesting items, and after Village Pump Newspapers I looked up the TV company that aired Ellis’s sports program, but found no sign of Tilepit or Owen Yorkshire in its operations.

I traveled home (safely) and phoned Archie, who was, his wife reported, at work.

“Can I reach him at work?” I asked.

“Oh, no, Sid. He wouldn’t like it. I’ll give him a message when he gets back.”

Please try later.

I tried Kevin Mills later and this time nearly got my eardrums perforated. “At last!”

“I’ve tried you a dozen times,” I said.

“I’ve been in an old people’s home.”

“Well, bully for you.”

“A nurse hastened three harpies into the hereafter.”

“Poor old sods.”

“If you’re in Pont Square,” he said, “can I call round and see you? I’m in my car not far away.”

“I thought I was
The Pump’s
number one all-time shit.”

“Yeah. Can I come?”

“I suppose so.”

“Great.” He clicked off before I could change my mind and he was at my door in less than ten minutes.

“This is
nice,”
he said appreciatively, looking around my sitting room. “Not what I expected.”

There was a Sheraton writing desk and buttoned brocade chairs and a couple of modem exotic wood inlaid tables by Mark Boddington. The overall colors were grayish-blue, soft and restful. The only brash intruder was an ancient slot machine that worked on tokens.

Kevin Mills made straight towards it, as most visitors did. I always left a few tokens haphazardly on the floor, with a bowl of them nearby on a table. Kevin picked a token from the carpet, fed it into the slot and pulled the handle. The wheels clattered and clunked. He got two cherries and a lemon. He picked up another token and tried again.

“What wins the jackpot?” he asked, achieving an orange, a demon and a banana.

“Three horses with jockeys jumping fences.”

He looked at me sharply.

“It used to be the bells,” I said. “That was boring, so I changed it.”

“And do the three horses ever come up?”

I nodded. “You get a fountain of tokens all over the floor.”

The machine was addictive. It was my equivalent of the psychiatrist’s couch. Kevin played throughout our conversation but the nearest he came was two horses and a pear.

“The trial has started, Sid,” he said, “so give us the scoop.”

“The trial’s only technically started. I can’t tell you a thing. When the adjournment’s over, you can go to court and listen.”

“That’s not exclusive,” he complained.

“You know damned well I can’t tell you.”

“I gave you the story to begin with.”

“I sought you out,” I said. “Why did
The Pump
stop helping the colt owners and shaft me instead?”

He concentrated hard on the machine. Two bananas and a blackberry.

“Why?” I said.

“Policy.”

“Whose policy?”

“The public wants demolition, they gobble up spite.”

“Yes, but—”

“Look, Sid, we get the word from on high. And don’t ask who on high, I don’t know. I don’t like it. None of us likes it. But we have the choice: go along with overall policy or go somewhere else where we feel more in tune. And do you know where that gets you? I work for The Pump because it’s a good paper with, on the whole, fair comment. OK, so reputations topple. Like I said, that’s what Mrs. Public wants. Now and then we get a request, such as ‘lean hard on Sid Halley.’ I did it without qualms, as you’d clammed up on me.”

He looked all the time at the machine, playing fast.

“And India Cathcart?” I asked.

He pulled the lever and waited until two lemons and a jumping horse came to rest in a row.

“India . . . ,” he said slowly. “For some reason she didn’t want to trash you. She said she’d enjoyed her dinner with you and you were quiet and kind. Kind! I ask you! Her editor had to squeeze the poison out of her drop by drop for that first long piece. In the end he wrote most of her page himself. She was furious the next day when she read it, but it was out on the streets by then and she couldn’t do anything about it.”

I was more pleased than I would have expected, but I wasn’t going to let Kevin see it. I said, “What about the continued stab wounds almost every week?”

“I guess she goes along with the policy. Like I said, she has to eat.”

“Is it George Godbar’s policy?”

“The big white chief himself? Yes, you could say the editor of the paper has the final say.”

“And Lord Tilepit?”

He gave me an amused glance. Two pears and a lemon. “He’s not a hands-on proprietor of the old school. Not a Beaverbrook or a Harmsworth. We hardly know he’s alive.”

“Does he give the overall policy to George Godbar?”

“Probably.” A horse, a demon and some cherries. “Why do I get the idea that you are interviewing me, instead of the other way round?”

“I cannot imagine. What do you know about Owen Cliff Yorkshire?”

“Bugger all. Who is he?”

“Quite likely a friend of Lord Tilepit.”

“Sid,” he protested, “I do my job. Rapes, murders, little old ladies smothered in their sleep. I do not chew off the fingernails of my paycheck.”