Come to Grief (33 page)

There was a boy in the distance roller-blading, coming towards me and wearing not the ubiquitous baseball cap but a striped woolen hat. That would do, I thought. I fumbled some money out of the zip pocket in my belt and stood in his way.

He tried to avoid me, swerved, overbalanced and called me filthy names until his gaze fell on the money in my hand.

“Sell me your hat,” I suggested.

“Yer wha?”

“Your hat,” I said, “for the money.”

“You’ve got blood on your face,” he said.

He snatched the money and aimed to roller-blade away. I stuck out a foot and knocked him off his skates. He gave me a bitter look and a choice of swear words, but also the hat, sweeping it off and throwing it at me.

It was warm from his head and I put it on, hoping he didn’t have lice. I wiped my face gingerly on my sleeve and slouched along towards the road with traffic that crossed the end of the residential street ... and saw the Topline Foods van roll past.

Whatever they were looking for, it didn’t seem to be a navy tracksuit with a striped woolen hat.

Plan B—run away. OK.

Plan C—where to?

I reached the end of the houses and turned left into what might once have been a shopping street, but which now seemed to offer only realtors, building societies and banks. Marooned in this unhelpful landscape were only two possible refuges: a betting shop and a place selling ice cream.

I chose the ice cream. I was barely through the door when outside the window my own Mercedes went past.

Ellis was driving.

I still had its keys in my pocket. Jonathan, it seemed, wasn’t alone in his car-stealing skill.

“What do you want?” a female voice said behind me.

She was asking about ice cream: a thin young woman, bored.

“Er ... that one,” I said, pointing at random.

“Cup or cone? Large or small?”

“Cone. Small.” I felt disoriented, far from reality. I paid for the ice cream and licked it, and it tasted of almonds.

“You’ve cut your face,” she said.

“I ran into a tree.”

There were four or five tables with people sitting at them, mostly adolescent groups. I sat at a table away from the window and within ten minutes saw the Topline van pass twice more and my own car, once.

Tremors ran in my muscles. Fear, or over-exertion, or both.

There was a door marked Men’s Room at the back of the shop. I went in there when I’d finished the ice cream and looked at my reflection in the small mirror over the sink.

The cut along my left cheekbone had congealed into a blackening line, thick and all too visible. Dampening a paper towel, I dabbed gently at the mess, trying to remove the clotted blood without starting new bleeding, but making only a partial improvement.

Locked in a cubicle, I had another try at screwing my wandering hand into place, and this time at length got it properly aligned and fastened, but it still wouldn’t work. Wretchedly depressed, I fished out the long covering glove and with difficulty, because of no talcum powder and an enfeebled right hand, pulled that too into the semblance of reality.

Damn Ellis, I thought mordantly. He’d been right about some things being near to unbearable.

Never mind. Get on with it.

I emerged from the cubicle and tried my cheek again with another paper towel, making the cut paler, fading it into skin color.

Not too bad.

The face below the unfamiliar woolen hat looked strained. Hardly a surprise.

I went out through the ice cream shop and walked along the street. The Topline Foods van rolled past quite slowly, driven by one of the blue-clad guards, who was intently scanning the other side of the road. That body-guard meant, I thought, that Yorkshire himself might be out looking for me in a car I couldn’t recognize.

Perhaps all I had to do was go up to some sensible-looking motorist and say, “Excuse me, some people are trying to kill me. Please will you drive me to the police station?” And then, “Who are these people?” “The managing director of Topline Foods, and Ellis Quint.” “Oh yes? And
you
are ... ?”

I did go as far as asking someone the way to the police station—“Round there, straight on, turn left—about a mile”—and for want of anything better I started walking that way; but what I came to first was a bus shelter with several people standing in a line, waiting. I added myself to the patient half dozen and stood with my back to the road, and a woman with two children soon came up behind me, hiding me well.

Five long minutes later my Mercedes pulled up on the far side of the road with a white Rolls-Royce behind it. Ellis stepped out of my car and Yorkshire out of the Rolls. They conferred together, furiously stabbing the air, pointing up and down the street while I bent my head down to the children and prayed to remain unspotted.

The bus came while the cars were still there.

Four people got off. The waiting line, me included, surged on. I resisted the temptation to look out of the window until the bus was traveling again, and then saw with relief that the two men were still talking.

I had no idea where the bus was going.

Who cared? Distance was all I needed. I’d paid to go to the end of the line, wherever that was.

Peaceful Frodsham in Cheshire, sometime Saturday, people going shopping in the afternoon. I felt disconnected from that sort of life; and I didn’t know what the time was, as the elastic metal bracelet watch I normally wore on my left wrist had come off in Yorkshire’s office and was still there, I supposed.

The bus slowly filled at subsequent stops. Shopping baskets. Chatter. Where was I going?

The end of the line proved to be the railway depot in Runcom, halfway to Liverpool, going north when I needed to go south.

I got off the bus and went to the depot. There was no Mercedes, no Rolls-Royce, no Topline Foods van in sight, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t think of buses and trains eventually. Runcorn railway depot didn’t feel safe. There was a train to Liverpool due in four minutes, I learned, so I bought a ticket and caught it.

The feeling of unreality continued, also the familiar aversion to asking for help from the local police. They didn’t approve of outside investigators. If I ever got into messes, besides, I considered it my own responsibility to get myself out. Norman Pictons were rare. In Liverpool, moreover, I was probably counted a local boy who’d been disloyal to his “roots.”

At the Liverpool railway depot I read the well-displayed timetable for trains going south.

An express to London, I thought; then backtrack to Reading and get a taxi to Shelley Green, Archie Kirk’s house.

No express for hours. What else, then?

The incredible words took a time to penetrate: Liverpool to Bournemouth, departing at 3:10 p.m. A slow train, meandering southwards across England, right down to the Channel, with many stops on the way ... and one of the stops was
Reading.

I sprinted, using the last shreds of strength. It was already, according to the big depot clock, ticking away at 3:07. Whistles were blowing when I stumbled into the last car in the long train. A guard helped thrust me in and closed the door. The wheels rolled. I had no ticket and little breath, but a marvelous feeling of escape. That feeling lasted only until the first of the many stops, which I discovered with horror to be
Runcorn.

Square one: where I’d started. All fear came flooding back. I sat stiff and immobile, as if movement itself would give me away.

Nothing happened. The train quietly rolled onwards. Out on the platform a blue-clad Topline Foods security guard was speaking into a hand-held telephone and shaking his head.

 

 

Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Leamington Spa, Banbury, Oxford, Didcot, Reading.

It took four hours. Slowly, in that time, the screwed-tight wires of tension slackened to manageable if not to ease. At every stop, however illogical I might tell myself it was, dread resurfaced. Oversize wrenches could kill when one wasn’t looking.... Don’t be a fool, I thought. I’d bought a ticket from the train conductor between Runcom and Crewe, but every subsequent appearance of his dark uniform as he checked his customers bumped my heart muscles.

It grew dark. The train clanked and swayed into realms of night. Life felt suspended.

There were prosaically plenty of taxis at Reading. I traveled safely to Shelley Green and rang Archie Kirk’s bell.

He came himself to open the door.

“Hello,” I said.

He stood there staring, then said awkwardly, “We’d almost given you up.” He led the way into his sitting room. “He’s here,” he said.

There were four of them. Davis Tatum, Norman Picton, Archie himself, and Charles.

I paused inside the doorway. I had no idea what I looked like, but what I saw on their faces was shock.

“Sid,” Charles said, recovering first and standing up. “Good. Great. Come and sit down.”

The extent of his solicitude always measured the depth of his alarm. He insisted I take his place in a comfortable chair and himself perched on a hard one. He asked Archie if he had any brandy and secured for me a half-tumblerful of a raw-tasting own brand from a supermarket.

“Drink it,” he commanded, holding out the glass.

“Charles . . .”

“Drink it. Talk after.”

I gave in, drank a couple of mouthfuls and put the glass on a table beside me. He was a firm believer in the life-restoring properties of distilled wine, and I’d proved him right oftener than enough.

I remembered that I still wore the soft, stripey hat, and took it off; and its removal seemed to make my appearance more normal to them, and less disturbing.

“I went to Topline Foods,” I said.

I thought: I don’t feel well; what’s wrong with me?

“You’ve cut your face,” Norman Picton said.

I also ached more or less all over from the desperate exertions of the judo. My head felt heavy and my hand was swollen and sore from Ellis’s idea of entertainment. On the bright side, I was alive and home, safe ... and reaction was all very well but I was
not
at this point going to faint.

“Sid!” Charles said sharply, putting out a hand.

“Oh ... yes. Well, I went to Topline Foods.”

I drank some brandy. The weak feeling of sickness abated a bit. I shifted in my chair and took a grip on things.

Archie said, “Take your time,” but sounded as if he didn’t mean it.

I smiled. I said, “Owen Yorkshire was there. So was Lord Tilepit. So was Ellis Quint.”

“Quint!” Davis Tatum exclaimed.

“Mm. Well ... you asked me to find out if there was a heavyweight lumbering about behind the Quint business, and the answer is yes, but it is Ellis Quint himself.”

“But he’s a playboy,” Davis Tatum protested. “What about the big man, Yorkshire?” Tatum’s own bulk quivered. “He’s getting known. One hears his name.”

I nodded. “Owen Cliff Yorkshire is a heavyweight in the making.”

“What do you mean?”

I ached. I hadn’t really noticed the wear and tear until then. Win now, pay later.

“Megalomania,” I said. “Yorkshire’s on the edge. He has a violent, unpredictable temper and an uncontrolled desire to be a tycoon. I’d call it incipient megalomania because he’s spending far beyond sanity on self-aggrandizement. He’s built an office block fit for a major industry—and it’s mostly empty—before building the industry first. He’s publicity mad—he’s holding a reception for half of Liverpool on Monday. He has plans—a
desire—
to take over the whole horse-feed nuts industry. He employs at least two bodyguards who will murder to order because he fears his competitors will assassinate him ... which is paranoia.”

I paused, then said, “It’s difficult to describe the impression he gives. Half the time he sounds reasonable, and half the time you can see that he will simply get rid of anyone who stands in his way. And he is desperate ...
desperate . . .
to save Ellis Quint’s reputation.”

Archie asked “Why?” slowly.

“Because,” I said, “he has spent a colossal amount of money on an advertising campaign featuring Ellis, and if Ellis is found guilty of cutting off a horse’s foot, that campaign can’t be shown.”

“But a few advertisements can’t have cost that much,” Archie objected.

“With megalomania,” I said, “you don’t make a few economically priced advertisements. You really go to town. You engage an expensive, highly prestigious firm—in this case, Intramind Imaging of Manchester—and you travel the world.”

With clumsy fingers I took from my belt the folded copy of the paper in the “Quint” box file in Mrs. Dove’s office.

“This is a list of racecourses,” I said. “These racecourses are where they filmed the commercials. A thirty-second commercial gleaned from each place at phenomenal expense.”

Archie scanned the list uncomprehendingly and passed it to Charles, who read it aloud.

“Flemington, Germiston, Sha Tin, Churchill Downs, Woodbine, Longchamps, K. L., Fuchu ...”

There were fifteen altogether. Archie looked lost.

“Flemington,” I said, “is where they run the Melbourne Cup in Australia. Germiston is outside Johannesburg. Sha Tin is in Hong Kong. Churchill Downs is where they hold the Kentucky Derby. K. L. is Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Woodbine is in Canada, Longchamps is in Paris, Fuchu is where the Japan Cup is run in Tokyo.”

They all understood.

“Those commercials are reported to be brilliant,” I said, “and Ellis himself wants them shown as much as Yorkshire does.”

“Have you seen them?” Davis asked.

I explained about the box of Betacam tapes. “Making those special broadcast-quality tapes themselves must have been fearfully expensive—and they need special playing equipment, which I didn’t find at Topline Foods, so no, I haven’t seen them.”