Come to Grief (7 page)

She looked at me assessingly. “It must be pretty useful to have that hand.”

“It’s brilliant,” I agreed.

“Daddy says Ellis Quint told him that you can’t tell you have a plastic hand unless you touch it.”

I asked, surprised, “Does your daddy know Ellis Quint?”

She nodded composedly. “They go to the same place to play squash. He helped Daddy buy Silverboy. He was really really sorry when he found out it was Silverboy himself that he was making his program about.”

“Yes, he would be.”

“I wish...,” she began, looking down at my hand, “I do wish Silverboy could have had a new foot ... with electrodes and a battery.”

I said prosaically, “He might have been able to have a false foot fitted, but he wouldn’t have been able to trot or canter, or jump. He wouldn’t have been happy just limping around.”

She rubbed her own fingers over the plastic ones, not convinced.

I said, “Where did you keep Silverboy?”

“The other side of that fence at the end of the garden.” She pointed. “You can’t see it from here because of those trees. We have to go through the house and out and down the lane.”

“Will you show me?”

There was a moment of drawing back, then she said, “I’ll take you if I can hold your hand on the way.”

“Of course.” I stood up and held out my real, warm, normal arm.

“No...” She shook her head, standing up also. “I mean, can I hold this hand that you can’t feel?”

It seemed to matter to her that I wasn’t whole; that I would understand someone ill, without hair.

I said lightly, “You can hold which hand you like.” She nodded, then pushed Pegotty into the house, and matter-of-factly told Linda she was taking me down to the field to show me where Silverboy had lived. Linda gave me a wild look but let us go, so the bald-headed child and the one-handed man walked in odd companionship down a short lane and leaned against a five-barred gate across the end.

The field was a lush paddock of little more than an acre, the grass growing strongly, uneaten. A nearby standing pipe with an ordinary tap on it stood ready to fill an ordinary galvanized water trough. The ground around the trough was churned up, the grass growing more sparsely, as always happened around troughs in fields.

“I don’t want to go in,” Rachel said, turning her head away.

“We don’t need to.”

“His foot was by the trough,” she said jerkily, “I mean ... you could see
blood...
and white bones.”

“Don’t talk about it.” I pulled her with me and walked back along the lane, afraid I should never have asked her to show me.

She gripped my unfeeling hand in both of hers, slowing me down.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It was a long time ago. It’s all right now when I’m awake.”

“Good.”

“I don’t like going to sleep.”

The desperation of that statement was an open appeal, and had to be addressed.

I stopped walking before we reached the door of the house. I said, “I don’t usually tell anyone this, but I’ll tell you. I still sometimes have bad dreams about my hand. I dream I can clap with two hands. I dream I’m still a jockey. I dream about my smashed wrist. Rotten dreams can’t be helped. They’re awful when they happen. I don’t know how to stop them. But one does wake up.”

“And then you have leukemia ... or a plastic arm.”

“Life’s a bugger,” I said.

She put her hand over her mouth and, in a fast release of tension, she giggled. “Mum won’t let me say that.”

“Say it into your pillow.”

“Do you?”

“Pretty often.”

We went on into the house and Rachel again pushed Pegotty into the garden. I stayed in the sitting room with Linda and watched through the window.

“Was she all right?” Linda asked anxiously.

“She’s a very brave child.”

Linda wept.

I said, “Did you hear anything at all the night Silverboy was attacked?”

“Everyone asks that. I’d have said if I had.”

“No car engines?”

“The police said they must have stopped the car in the road and walked down the lane. My bedroom window doesn’t face the lane, nor does Rachel’s. But that lane doesn’t go anywhere except to the field. As you saw, it’s only a track really, it ends at the gate.”

“Could anyone see Silverboy from the road?”

“Yes, the police asked that. You could see him come to drink. You can see the water trough from the road, if you know where to look. The police say the thugs must have been out all over this part of Kent looking for unguarded ponies like Silverboy. Whatever you say about two-year-olds, Silverboy
must
have been done by thugs. Why don’t you ask the police?”

“If you wholeheartedly believed the police, you wouldn’t have asked me for help.”

“Joe just telephoned,” she confessed, wailing, “and he says that calling you in to help is a waste of money.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

I said, “You’re paying me by the day, plus expenses. I can stop right now, if you like.”

“No. Yes. I don’t
know.”
She wiped her eyes, undecided, and said, “Rachel dreams that Silverboy is standing in the field and he’s glowing bright and beautiful in the moonlight. He’s
shining,
she says. And there’s a dark mass of monsters oozing down the lane ... ‘oozing’ is what she says ... and they are shapeless and devils and they’re going to kill Silverboy. She says she is trying to run fast to warn him, and she can’t get through the monsters, they clutch at her like cobwebs. She can’t get through them and they reach Silverboy and smother his light, and all his hair falls out, and she wakes up and screams. It’s always the same nightmare. I thought if you could find out who cut the poor thing’s foot off, the monsters would have names and faces and would be in the papers, and Rachel would know who they were and stop thinking they’re lumps that ooze without eyes and won’t let her through.”

After a pause, I said, “Give me another week.”

She turned away from me sharply and, crossing to a desk, wrote me a check. “For two weeks, one gone, one ahead.”

I looked at the amount. “That’s more than we agreed on.”

“Whatever Joe says, I want you to go on trying.”

I gave her tentatively a small kiss on the cheek. She smiled, her eyes still dark and wet. “I’ll pay anything for Rachel,” she said.

I drove slowly back to London thinking of the cynical old ex-policeman who had taught me the basics of investigation. “There are two cardinal rules in this trade,” he said. “One. Never believe everything a client tells you, and always believe they could have told you more if you’d asked the right questions. And two. Never, never get emotionally involved with your client.”

Which was all very well, except when your client was a bright, truthful nine-year-old fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of lymphoblasts.

I bought a take-out curry on the way home and ate it before spending the evening on overdue paperwork.

I much preferred the active side of the job, but clients wanted, and deserved, and paid for, detailed accounts of what I’d done on their behalf, preferably with results they liked. With the typed recital of work done, I sent also my final bill, adding a list of itemized expenses supported by receipts. I almost always played fair, even with clients I didn’t like: investigators had been known to charge for seven days’ work when, with a little application, they could have finished the job in three. I didn’t want that sort of reputation. Speed succeeded in my new occupation as essentially as in my old.

Besides bathroom and kitchen, my pleasant (and frankly, expensive) apartment consisted of three rooms: bedroom, big sunny sitting room and a third, smaller room that I used as an office. I had no secretary or helper; no one read the secrets I uncovered except the client and me, and whatever the client did with the information he’d paid for was normally his or her own business. Privacy was what drove many people to consult me, and privacy was what they got.

I listened to some unexciting messages on my answering machine, typed a report on my secure word processor, printed it and put it ready for mailing. For reports and anything personal I used a computer system that wasn’t connected to any phone line. No one could in consequence tap into it and, as a precaution against thieves, I used unbreakable passwords. It was my second system that could theoretically be accessed; the one connected by modem to the big wide world of universal information. Any snooper was welcome to anything found there.

On the subject of the management of secrecy, my cynical mentor had said, “Never, ever tell your right hand what your left hand is doing. Er ...,” he added, “whoops. Sorry, Sid.”

“It’ll cost you a pint.”

“And,” he went on later, drinking, “keep back-up copies of completed sensitive inquiries in a bank vault, and wipe the information from any computer systems in your office. If you use random passwords, and change them weekly, you should be safe enough while you’re actually working on something, but once you’ve finished, get the back-up to the bank and wipe the office computer, like I said.”

“All right.”

“Never forget,” he told me, “that the people you are investigating may go to violent lengths to stop you.”

He had been right about that.

“Never forget that you don’t have the same protection as the police do. You have to make your own protection. You have to be careful.”

“Maybe I should look for another job.”

“No, Sid,” he said earnestly, “you have a gift for this. You listen to what I tell you and you’ll do fine.”

He had taught me for the two years I’d spent doing little but drift in the old Radnor detection agency after the end of my racing life and, for nearly three years since, I’d lived mostly by his precepts. But he was dead now, and Radnor himself also, and I had to look inward for wisdom, which could be a variable process, not always ultraproductive.

I could try to comfort Rachel by telling her I had bad dreams also, but I could never have told her how vivid and liquefying they could be. That night, after I’d eased off the arm and showered and gone peacefully to bed, I fell asleep thinking of her, and descended after midnight into a familiar dungeon.

It was always the same.

I dreamed I was in a big dark space, and some people were coming to cut off both my hands.

They were making me wait, but they would come. There would be agony and humiliation and helplessness ... and no way out.

I semi-awoke in shaking, sweating, heart-thudding terror and then realized with flooding relief that it wasn’t true, I was safe in my own bed—and then remembered that it had already half happened in fact, and also that I’d come within a fraction once of a villain’s shooting the remaining hand off. As soon as I was awake enough to be clear about the present actual not-too-bad state of affairs I slid back reassured into sleep, and that night the whole appalling nightmare cycled again ... and again.

I forced myself to wake up properly, to sit up and get out of bed and make full consciousness take over. I stood under the shower again and let cool water run through my hair and down my body. I put on a terry cloth bathrobe and poured a glass of milk, and sat in an armchair in the sitting room with all the lights on.

I looked at the space where a left hand had once been, and I looked at the strong whole right hand that held a glass, and I acknowledged that often, both waking as well as sleeping, I felt, and could not repress, stabs of savage, petrifying fear that one day it would indeed be both. The trick was not to let the fear show, nor to let it conquer, nor rule, my life.

It was pointless to reflect that I’d brought the terrors on myself. I had chosen to be a jockey. I had chosen to go after violent crooks. I was at that moment actively seeking out someone who knew how to cut off a horse’s foot with one chop.

My own equivalent of the off-fore held a glass of milk.

I had to be mentally deranged.

But then there were people like Rachel Ferns.

In one way or another I had survived many torments, and much could have been avoided but for my own obstinate nature. I knew by then that whatever came along, I would deal with it. But that child had had her hair fall out and had found her beloved pony’s foot, and none of that was her fault. No nine-year-old mind could sleep sweetly under such assaults.

Oh God, Rachel, I thought, I would dream your nightmares for you if I could.

 

In the morning I made a working analysis in five columns of the Ferns pony and the three two-year-olds. The analysis took the form of a simple graph, ruled in boxes. Across the top of the page I wrote: Factors, Ferns, Cheltenham, Aintree, York, and down the left-hand column, Factors, I entered “date,” “name of owner,” “racing program,” “motive” and finally, “who knew of victim’s availability?” I found that although I could think of answers to that last question, I hadn’t the wish to write them in, and after a bit of indecision I phoned Kevin Mills at
The Pump
and, by persistence, reached him.