Fourth Horseman (2 page)

But Dad wasn’t so keen. They had a big flare-up one night, the worst ever, I think. I couldn’t hear what was said, but I could hear the raised voices, the chairs scraping and doors banging, the ominous silences between rounds. Alex came to my bedroom and we rode it out together, listening to music and reading junk magazines and pretending nothing was happening. In the end the row blew itself out, and in the morning Mum was bright and breezy. Dad was a bit more subdued, but they told us with a unified front that Mum was going to be taking the job with the England squad, and that Dad was going to arrange his teaching schedule around our school hours.

‘We don’t need baby-sitting,’ Alex said.

I agreed. ‘We can take care of ourselves.’ I had my arm in a sling at the time, which made that statement slightly unconvincing, but it was, in fact, quite true. Alex and I were extremely independent. We rode our bikes everywhere and we were well able to cook and clean up after ourselves.

‘It’s a done deal,’ said Dad. ‘For the time being, anyway. It’s not a problem.’

‘If your Dad gets a new research project we might have to rethink,’ Mum said, ‘but for the moment he’ll be holding the fort.’

Dad crossed his eyes and grinned and looked down the barrel of the frying pan. ‘Meanwhile, champagne tonight!’ He raised an empty hand. ‘Here’s to your mum’s new job!’

It was all a bit sudden, really. There must have been a crisis in the England squad because they wanted Mum yesterday. The Worcester management were very understanding about it. They didn’t hold her to her contract with them, and within a week she was gone, off to her new life. We were left slightly dazed, wandering around the empty space that she had left behind her. None of us had realized just how enormous it was going to be.

Dad did his best. There’s no doubt about that. While my arm was still in plaster he collected us from school every day, and even when I was able to cycle again he was nearly always there when we got home. If he couldn’t be he always let us know and made sure we were organized. He did all his usual absent-minded scientist things, like wearing different-coloured socks and picking us up from school one rainy afternoon in his dressing gown. He used to help us with our homework, and once, when he had been writing out a load of magic formulas to help me with my physics classes, he took them into college instead of his latest lecture notes. At the weekends he took us shopping, or to the cinema, or he bowled a few overs with us at home. Whatever happened he put a brave face on it, but underneath it he was deeply unhappy. I could tell.

There was one particular morning I remember. I was in a miserable mood because I had a sore throat and didn’t want to go to school. We had all got up late, and Dad was loading the dishwasher because no one had got around to doing it the night before. Our dog, Randall, was whining for a walk which, that morning at least, he wasn’t going to get, and Alex was complaining that his school shirts hadn’t been ironed. As Dad straightened up from the dishwasher the spray arm caught in his shirt cuff and the top tray got dislodged. There was an almighty crash of crockery and cutlery, and Dad stood staring at it in disbelief.

‘I wasn’t born for this,’ he said.

‘What were you born for then?’ said Alex, tactlessly, I thought.

Dad, recovering his sense of humour somehow, laughed, slightly manically. ‘Great things, boy,’ he said. ‘Monumental discoveries.’ With sudden and surprising strength he wrenched the dishwasher tray free and plonked it noisily on the worktop. ‘I was born to rattle the world in its cage,’ he said melodramatically. ‘I was born to tilt it on its axis! I was born to stride it like a colossus! The mind’—he pointed to his temple—‘it’s all in there.’

We left the havoc in the kitchen and piled into the car, and Dad was in great humour as he drove us to school. But those words of his would return, later, to haunt me.

I
STARED, WITHOUT FOCUS
, into the trees. Specks of soot and flakes of ash were sailing through all the open spaces and coming to rest silently on the rough ground. I watched them as the female officer counted the ear tags she had taken from my pocket.

‘Eleven,’ she said to the other constable, and then, to me: ‘What are these things, anyway?’

‘Ear tags,’ I said.

‘Ear tags,’ she repeated. ‘For what?’

‘Squirrels,’ I said.

‘Squirrels,’ she repeated.

There wasn’t going to be any point in lying about that. But how much more would I tell them, that was the question. Javed would know. If they took us in together I would let him do the talking. I looked across to where he too was being searched. As if he had been waiting for me to do that, he caught my eye and held it for a moment. He lifted his hand to his mouth, as though to cover a cough, and then, inconspicuously, altered the shape of it until he had one finger clearly placed across his lips in an ancient and universal sign. Say nothing. I gave a tiny nod, just as inconspicuous, I hoped. He turned his attention back to the officers and their search. They wouldn’t find anything incriminating on him, I was pretty sure. Everything of that nature was on me. I hoped he would let me take the blame. I wished there was a sign I could give him that would say as much, but if there was, I’d never seen it. His position was much more dangerous than mine. The police could make things very difficult for him, especially considering the situation with his father.

It was all so complicated. I looked over at Dad, in the sudden spontaneous hope that he would be better, and would explain it all to the police and take us all home. But the ambulance crew were settling him carefully on to a stretcher. A few metres away Alex was standing between two more of the policemen. My heart lurched when I realized that he was still in his pyjamas; the ones with the legs that were too short for him. He looked suddenly small and vulnerable. I think that upset me more than anything else, the idea that they might be unkind to my little brother. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being pushed around, and I took an involuntary step towards him.

The constable put a hand on my arm. ‘This way,’ she said, pointing with her chin towards the little huddle of waiting squad cars. ‘You’re going to the police station.’ She showed me her badge. ‘My name is PC Courtney. I’ll be coming with you.’

The stretcher was being lifted and carried towards the ambulance.

‘One of us should go with my dad,’ I said.

‘Don’t you worry about your dad,’ she said. ‘He’s going to be fine.’ She directed me to the car and protected my head with her hand as I got in. I thought they’d bring the others then, but they didn’t. The constable sat in the back with me and slammed the door behind her. The car smelled of disinfectant. Its light was still flashing, but as the driver pulled out into the quiet lane, he switched it off.

Just pulling in to the edge of the road beside the gates was a dark green car. There were two men in the front seats, watching the fire engines fighting the blaze. When he saw us coming, the man in the passenger seat raised a hand to his face, concealing it in the act of putting on a pair of sunglasses. But I knew who he was.

‘That’s the man you should be arresting,’ I said to PC Courtney. ‘He’s the mastermind.’

I regretted the stupid word as soon as it came out of my mouth.

‘Who is he then, this “mastermind”?’ she said.

I twisted in the seat and looked back. We were already past and accelerating along the narrow road but I saw the car pulling away rapidly.

‘GD zero-eight MFT,’ I said. ‘At least take down the number.’

‘Don’t you worry about it,’ said PC Courtney. ‘We’ll find him if we need to.’

But the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that they wouldn’t. In fact, there was little or no chance that any of us would be seeing Mr Davenport again.

I
BROKE MY ELBOW
playing cricket, not long before Mum got offered the new job. It wasn’t surprising, given my family history, that I was one of the best young cricketers around. I’d played on the village junior team since I was eleven, and a year later I was asked to start training with the county junior women’s team. Bowling was my speciality. I was a leg spinner and had already developed a pretty good ‘wrong ’un’, so I took plenty of wickets. But I wanted to be an all-rounder, and my batting left a lot to be desired. Mum was always on at me.

‘Watch the ball. Watch it right on to the bat. Don’t take your eyes off it.’

I tried, and it was beginning to work. Slowly but surely my batting was improving. Until it stopped.

I was thirteen when it happened and I was the youngest player that year to be picked for the under-fifteens first eleven. We were playing a warm-up match against the boys’ team when the accident happened. They had batted first and we were chasing a fairly moderate score. I had taken four wickets earlier and my confidence was high. Now, batting at number seven, I knew I could win the match for our side if I could get my eye in and stay at the crease. I defended solidly, giving myself plenty of time to get comfortable. And then, without really thinking about it, I started playing shots. For a few glorious minutes I knew what it felt like to be a batsman. I played drives, cuts, sweeps, the lot. In the space of twenty minutes I scored twenty-five runs, including four fours. My team was getting closer and closer to victory.

The boys didn’t like it. Their captain put on their fastest bowler. It wasn’t legal to bowl bouncers in our matches, but he bowled one anyway. Afterwards he said he’d just released the ball a bit late and that he hadn’t intended to do it, but I saw his face as he ran up to bowl. He meant it. And I got it wrong. All I had to do was watch it. If I’d kept my eye on it I could easily have swerved out of its path. I didn’t, though. I panicked. I turned away from it and raised my bat, almost behind me, and the unwatched ball smashed straight into my left elbow.

It felt like a small explosion. For a moment I stood still, too shocked to move. The others on the team said I was as white as my clothes. Then the pain piled in, and I dropped to the ground.

The rest of the story smells of hospitals. I had two operations to gather up the shattered bones and pin them together. Mum gave me exercises, even while I was still in plaster, and hounded me to make sure that I did them.

I did and I didn’t. When Mum was there I did. When she wasn’t I didn’t. But I made a pretty rapid recovery anyway, and the doctors were pleased. The following summer they took the pins out and said I was ready to go back to the cricket pitch. Trouble was, I didn’t want to go.

The sports teams were where my friends were, and since my injury had kept me out of the school hockey squad the previous year as well as the cricket, my social life had completely collapsed. I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that I needed to get back on to the pitch and get my life back on the rails, but I couldn’t do it. Looking back on it now, I see that I must have been in a depression, just like Dad. I had felt sorry for myself with my broken arm and my ruined social life, and now that I had a chance to fix it, some part of me didn’t really want to. I was stuck. I preferred the simplicity of self-pity to the challenges of life. It was easier to stay out of the loop than to face up to my fears on the cricket pitch.

Mum made it worse. By this stage she had been working with the England squad for a year, and she got a month’s break at the beginning of the summer, before the season hotted up. As far as I can remember she used the whole month to nag me about going back to the club. The only effect that had was to make me more determined than ever not to go. I did, though, consent to playing a few matches at home, and it was on one of those days that Mum and Alex and I learned about the change in Dad’s fortunes.

You might think that four people don’t make much of a cricket match and you might be right. But we have a secret weapon: an all-purpose fielder who plays for both sides. He is half Alsatian, half mistake, and his name is Randall. He was called something else, I can’t remember what, when we first got him as a pup. But when his particular genius became apparent, Mum decided he should be named after the best fielder she had ever seen, and that was Derek Randall.

If there’s anything behind the theory of reincarnation then Randall was a great cricketer in a former life. For some reason that we have never understood he refuses to retrieve any ball that goes behind the stumps, so one of the fielding team always has to keep wicket. But Randall is perfectly happy to cover the whole of the rest of the pitch and will even go after the fours and sixes that regularly vanish into the undergrowth at the edges of the field. When the bowler is running up Randall takes up position at mid-on, watching the batsman like a hawk. We play with a regulation ICC hard ball, but Randall has no fear of it. He has taken some spectacular, jaw-crunching catches in his time and has never seemed any the worse for it. The best thing about him though, and the thing that makes me think he must be the smartest dog in England, is that he always, always, always takes the ball back to the bowler. Even if it’s a stranger, someone he’s never met before, he remembers who’s bowling and delivers the ball straight to their feet. There’s a dark side to everything, as Mum often says, and the price we have to pay for Randall’s participation is the slimy dog drool that he leaves on the ball. We have to wipe it off on the grass before we polish the ball on our trousers, and some visitors find it a bit distasteful. But we think it’s a small price to pay. Without Randall we just couldn’t have had those small, two-a-side matches.

He was in particularly good form that day, delighted to have the family back together again and doing what, in his view at least, we had been put on earth to do. But Dad played disastrously, missing catches, misjudging his line and length, losing wicket after wicket (we all had to bat several times each) through sheer carelessness. He was so cheerful that we thought he was doing it on purpose, but he wasn’t. It was just that he had something else on his mind. When it started drizzling he tore up the stumps and led the way back to the house in a triumphant sort of way, even though he and I had lost the match by about thirty-five runs. It wasn’t until the kettle was on and we were all gathered round the table helping ourselves to sandwiches that we found out what was bothering him. That was when he told us there was something he wanted to talk to us about. That was when we first heard Mr Davenport’s name.