Shattered (10 page)

Cold weather emphasized the Paleolithic-like weight of Baxter's facial structure and upper body, and even after only one week (though a stressful one) his hair seemed definitely to have grayed a further notch.

He wasn't pleased to see me. I was sure he regretted the whole Broadway evening, but he concentrated hard on being civil, and it was churlish of me, I dare say, to suspect that it was because I knew of his epilepsy. Nowhere in print or chat had his condition been disclosed, but if he were afraid I would not only broadcast but snigger, he had made a judgment of my own character which hardly flattered.

Worthington melted temporarily from my side and I walked with Lloyd Baxter while he oozed compliments about the Stewards' lunch and discussed the worth of many trainers, excluding poor old Priam Jones.

I said mildly, “It wasn't his fault that Tallahassee fell at Cheltenham.”

I got an acid reply. “It was Martin's fault. He unbalanced him going into the fence. He was too confident.”

Martin had told me that
it
—whatever
it
might be—was, with a disgruntled owner, normally the jockey's fault. “Pilot error.” He'd shrugged philosophically. “And then you get the other sort of owner, the cream to ride for, the ones who understand that horses aren't infallible, who say, ‘That's racing,' when something shattering happens, and who comfort the jockey who's just lost them the win of a lifetime.... And believe me,” Martin had said, “Lloyd Baxter isn't one of those. If I lose for him, it is, in his opinion, my fault.”

“But,” I said without heat to Lloyd Baxter during his trainer-spotting at Leicester, “if a horse falls, it surely isn't the trainer's fault? It wasn't Priam Jones's fault that Tallahassee fell and lost the Coffee Cup.”

“He should have schooled him better.”

“Well,” I reasoned, “that horse had proved he could jump. He'd already won several races.”

“I want a different trainer.” Lloyd Baxter spoke with obstinacy: a matter of instinct, I saw.

Along with lunch the Stewards had given Tallahassee's owner an entry ticket to their guests' vantage viewing box. Lloyd Baxter was already apologizing for shedding me at the entrance when one of the Stewards, following us, changed our course.

“Aren't you the glass man?” he boomed genially. “My wife's your greatest fan. We have lumps of your stuff all over our house. That splendid horse you did for her... you came to rig its spotlights, didn't you?”

I remembered the horse and the house with enough detail to be invited into the Stewards' guests' viewing balcony, not entirely to Lloyd Baxter's delight.

“This young man's a genius, according to my wife,” the Steward said to Baxter, ushering us in. The genius merely wished he felt less weak.

Lloyd Baxter's poor opinion of the Steward's wife's judgment was written plain on his heavy features, but perhaps it did eventually influence him, because, after the cheering for the next winner had faded, he surprised me very much by resting his hand lightly on my arm to indicate that I should stay and hear what he felt like telling me. He hesitated still, though, so I gave him every chance.

“I've often wondered,” I said mildly, “if you saw who came into my showroom on New Year's Eve. I mean, I know you were ill... but before that... when I'd gone out into the street, did anyone come?”

After a long pause, he faintly nodded. “Someone came into that long gallery you have there. I remember he asked for you and I said you were out in the street... but I couldn't see him properly as my eyes... my sight develops zigzags sometimes ...” He stopped, but I continued for him.

“You surely have pills.”

“Of course I do!” He was irritated. “But I'd forgotten to take them because of the terrible day it had been, and I hate those very small air taxis to begin with, and I do want a different trainer.” His voice died away, but his troubles had been laid out clearly enough for a chimpanzee to understand.

I asked if, in spite of the zigzag aura, he could describe my unknown visitor.

“No,” he said. “I told him you were in the street and the next time I was properly awake I was in hospital.” He paused while I regretted the cut-short sequence, and then with diffidence he said slowly, “I am aware that I should thank you for your reticence. You could still cause me much embarrassment.”

“There's no point in it,” I said.

He spent a while studying my face as in the past I'd learned his. The result surprised me. “Are you ill?” he said.

“No. Tired. Didn't sleep well.”

“The man who came,” he said abruptly, making no other comment, “was thin and had a white beard and was over fifty.”

The description sounded highly improbable as a thief, and he must have seen my doubt because he added to convince me, “When I saw him, I immediately thought of Priam Jones, who's been saying for years he's going to grow a beard. I tell him he'd look weedy.”

I nearly laughed: the picture was true.

Baxter said the white-bearded man reminded him chiefly of a university professor. A lecturer.

I asked, “Did he speak? Was he a normal customer? Did he mention glass?”

Lloyd Baxter couldn't remember. “If he spoke at all, I heard him only as a jumble. Quite often things seem wrong to me. They're a sort of warning. Often I can control them a little, or at least prepare... but on that evening it was happening too fast.”

He was being extraordinarily frank, I thought. I wouldn't have expected so much trust.

“That man with the whisker job,” I said. “He must have seen the beginning at least of your... er... seizure. So why didn't he help you? Do you think he simply didn't know what to do, so ran away from trouble, as people tend to, or was it he who made off with the loot... er... that money, in the canvas bag?”

“And the videotape,” Baxter said.

There was an abrupt breath-drawing silence. Then I asked, “What videotape?”

Lloyd Baxter frowned. “He asked for it:‘

“So you gave it to him?”

“No. Yes. No. I don't know.”

It became clear that in fact Lloyd Baxter's memory of that evening in Broadway was a scrambled egg of order into chaos. It wasn't certain that any university lecturer in any white beard existed outside fiction.

While we occupied for another ten uninterrupted minutes the most private place on a racetrack—the Stewards' friends' viewing balcony in between races—I managed to persuade Lloyd Baxter to sit quietly and exchange detailed memories of the first few minutes of 2000, but try as he might, he still clung to the image of the scrawny man in the white beard who probably—or maybe it was some other man at some other time—asked for a videotape... perhaps.

He was trying his best. His manner to me had taken a ninety-degree angle of change, so that he'd become more an ally than a crosspatch.

One of the things he would never have said in the past was his reassessment of my and Martin's friendship. “I see I was wrong about you,” he admitted, heavily frowning. “Martin relied on you for strength, and I took it for granted that it was the other way round.”

“We learned from each other.”

After a pause he said, “That fellow in the white beard, he was real, you know. He did want a videotape. If I knew more than that, I would tell you.”

I finally believed him. It was just unlucky that Baxter's fit had struck at the wrong random moment; unlucky from white-beard's point of view that Baxter had been there at all; but it did now seem certain that during the time I was out in the street seeing the year 2000 arrive safely, a white-bearded, thin middle-aged professor-type individual had come into my showroom and had said something about a videotape, and had left before I returned, taking the tape, and incidentally the money, with him.

I hadn't seen any white-bearded figure out in the street. It had been a week too late for the Ho-ho-ho joker from the North Pole. Lloyd Baxter said he couldn't tell whether or not the beard was real or left over from Santa Claus.

When we parted we shook hands for the first time ever. I left him with the Stewards and fell into step with Worthington, who was shivering outside and announcing he was hungry. Accordingly we smelled out some food, which he galloped through with endless appetite.

“Why don't you eat?” he demanded, chomping.

“Habit,” I said. A habit caught from a scales-conscious jockey. Martin seemed to have influenced my life more than I'd realized.

I told Worthington while he saw off two full plates of steak-and-kidney pie (his and mine) that we were now looking for a thin man, late middle-age, white beard, who looked like a college lecturer.

Worthington gazed at me earnestly while loading his fork with pastry. “That,” he pointed out, “doesn't sound at all like someone who would steal a bagful of money.”

“I'm surprised at you, Worthington,” I teased him. “You of all people I thought would know that beards aren't automatic badges of honesty! So how does this sit with you? Suppose Mr. White-Beard gives a tape to Martin, which Martin gives to Eddie Payne, who handed it on to me. Then when Martin died, Mr. White-Beard decided to take his videotape back again, so he found out where the tape would be... that's to say he turned up in Broadway. He found the tape and took it back, and on impulse he also whisked up the bag of money that I'd stupidly left lying around, and in consequence he cannot tell anyone that he has his tape back.”

“Because he would be confessing he'd stolen the cash?”

“Dead right.”

My bodyguard sighed and scraped his plate clean. “So what next?” he said. “What happened next?”

“I can only guess.”

“Go on, then. Guess. Because it wasn't some old guy that gassed us with that cyclopropane. Young Daniel described the sneakers that the gas man wore, and nobody but a teenager, I don't think, would be seen dead in them.”

I found I disagreed. Eccentric white-beards might wear anything. They might also make erotic tapes. They might also tell someone the tape was worth a fortune, and that it was in Gerard Logan's hands. A few little lies. Diversionary tactics. Beat up Logan, make him ready to cough up the tape, or, failing that, whatever information had been on it.

What had Martin been going to give me for safekeeping ?

Did I any longer really want to know?

If I didn't know, I couldn't tell. But if they believed I knew and wouldn't tell... dammit, I thought, we've almost been through that already, and I couldn't expect Tom Pigeon and Dobermans to rescue me every time.

Not knowing the secret on the tape was perhaps worse than knowing it. So somehow or other, I decided, it wasn't enough to discover who took it, it was essential after all to find out what they expected as well as what they'd actually got.

Once Worthington's hunger had retreated temporarily and we had lost our money on a horse Martin should have ridden, we walked back to where the serried ranks of bookmakers were shouting their offers for the getting-out stakes, the last race.

With Worthington's well-known muscle as guarantee of immunity from onslaught, we arrived in the living-and-breathing space of the 1894 Arthur Robins operation 2000. Norman Osprey's raucous voice soared unselfconsciously above his neighbors' until he realized we were listening, at which point a sudden silence gave everyone else a chance.

Close enough to see the scissor marks on the Elvis sideburns, I said, “Tell Rose...”

“Tell her yourself,” he interrupted forcefully. “She's just behind you.”

I turned without haste, leaving Worthington at my back. Rose glared, rigid with a hatred I didn't at that point understand. As before, the dryness of her skin echoed the lack of generosity in her nature, but earlier, at our first and last racetrack encounter, neither of us held the subsequent memory of fists, stone walls, baseball bats, a smashed watch and a whole bunch more of assaults-to-the-person, all orchestrated and encouraged as Sunday evening entertainment for the troops.

Being as close to her as a couple of yards gave my outraged skin goose bumps, but she seemed to think a black mask and leotard had made her invisible.

I asked again the question she had already refused to answer.

“Who gave a videotape to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races?”

She answered this time that she didn't know.

I said, “Do you mean you didn't see anyone give Martin a parcel, or that you saw the transfer but didn't know the person's name?”

“Dead clever, aren't you,” Rose said sarcastically. “Take your pick.”

Rose, I thought, wasn't going to be trapped by words. At a guess she had both seen the transfer and knew the transferrer, but even Torquemada would have had trouble with her, and I hadn't any thumbscrews handy in Logan Glass.

I said without much hope of being believed, “I don't know where to look for the tape you want. I don't know who took it and I don't know why. I haven't got it.”

Rose curled her lip.

 

As we walked away Worthington sighed deeply with frustration.

“You'd think Norman Osprey would be the ‘heavy' in that outfit. He has the voice and the build for it. Everyone thinks of him as the power behind Arthur Robins 1894. But did you see him looking at Rose? She can make any blunder she likes, but I'm told she's still the brains. She's the boss. She calls the tune. My low-life investigator gave me a bell. He finds her very impressive, I'm afraid to say.”

I nodded.

Worthington, a practiced world traveler, said, “She hates you. Have you noticed?”