Shattered (17 page)

I said, “Martin gave you a large chunk of money in return for the knowledge that you referred to as dynamite.”

“No, you're wrong.” He walked faster, but I easily kept up with him stride for stride. “You completely do not understand,” he said, “and I want you to leave.”

I said I had no intention of leaving anytime soon, now that I saw beside me the likely answer to multiple riddles.

“Did you know,” I asked him, “that Lloyd Baxter, the man you abandoned to his epileptic fit in my showroom, is the owner of Tallahassee, the horse that killed Martin Stukely?”

He walked faster up the slope. I stayed close, accelerating.

“Did you know,” I asked conversationally, “that in spite of the onset of an epileptic seizure, Lloyd Baxter was able to describe you down to the socks?”

“Stop it.”

“And of course you know Norman Osprey and Rose and Gina are as violent as they come...”

“No.” His voice was loud, and he coughed.

“And as for my money that you whipped with that tape ...”

Adam Force quite suddenly stopped walking altogether, and in the stillness I could clearly hear his breath wheezing in his chest.

It alarmed me. Instead of pretty well bullying him I asked him anxiously if he were all right.

“No thanks to you.” The wheezing continued until he pulled from a pocket in his white coat the sort of inhaler I'd often seen used for asthma. He took two long puffs, breathing deeply while staring at me with complete dislike.

I was tempted to say “Sorry,” but in spite of his charming ways and pleasant looks he'd been the cause of my being chucked to both the black masks in Broadway and to a piece of hose in a Taunton backyard, and if that were all, I'd count myself lucky. So I let him wheeze and puff his way up the rest of the incline. I went with him to make sure he didn't collapse on the way, and inside the reception area I checked him into a comfortable chair and went to find someone to pass him on to, for safekeeping.

I heard his wheezy voice behind me demanding my return, but by then I'd hurried halfway down one of the wings of the building and seen no human being at all, whether nurse, patient, doctor, cleaner, flower arranger or woman pushing a comforts cart. It wasn't that there weren't any beds in the rooms that lined the wing. In all the rooms there were beds, tray tables, armchairs and bathrooms, but no people. Each room had glass French doors opening to a well-swept area of garden tiles and parts of the glass roof were as wide open as they would go.

I stopped briefly at a room marked PHARMACY, which had an open skylight and a locked door of openwork grating to the passage. There was a host of visibly named pharmacy items inside, but still no people.

There had to be someone somewhere, I thought, and through the only closed door, at the end of the wing, I found a comparative beehive coming and going.

Twenty or more elderly men and women in thick white toweling bathrobes were contentedly taking part in comprehensive physical assessments, each test being brightly presented in play-school lettering, like “Your blood pressure measured here” and “Where does your cholesterol stand today?” A very old lady walked fast on a “jolly treadmill,” and on the wall of a separate hard-sided booth was the notice “X rays here. Please keep out unless asked to step in.”

Results were carefully written onto clipboards and then filed into computers at a central desk. An air of optimism prevailed.

My entrance brought to my side a nurse who'd been drawing curtains around a cubicle simply called UROLOGY. Squeaking across a polished floor on rubber soles, she smilingly told me I was late, and said only, “Oh dear,” when I mentioned that the good Doctor Force might be gasping his last.

“He often does have attacks when he has visitors,” the motherly nurse confided. “When you've gone, I expect he'll lie down and sleep.”

The good Doctor Force was planning nothing of the sort. Registering annoyance like a steaming boiler, he wheezed to my side and pointed to a door coyly labeled “Here it is,” then “Way out too.” I explained as if harmlessly that I'd only come to find help for his asthma and he replied crossly that he didn't need it. He walked towards me with a syringe in a metal dish, advancing until I could see it was almost full of liquid. He picked up the highly threatening syringe and then jabbed it towards me and the exit; and this time I thanked him for his attention and left.

The door out of the medical examination hall led past lavish changing rooms to a generous lobby, and from there to a forecourt outside.

Unexpectedly I found the Rover waiting there, Jim, my driver, nervously pacing up and down beside it. He held the door open for me while explaining that his concern for my welfare had overcome his natural instincts. I thanked him with true feeling.

Doctor Force followed me out and waited until I was in the car and went indoors only after I'd given him a cheerfully innocent farewell wave, which he did not return.

“Is that the guy you came to see?” asked Jim.

“Yes.”

“Not very friendly, is he.”

I couldn't identify exactly what was wrong with that place, and was little further enlightened when a large bus turned smoothly through the entrance gate and came to a gentle halt. The title AVON PARADISE TOURS read black and white on lilac along the coach's sides, with smaller letters underneath giving an address in Clifton, Bristol.

Jim drove rapidly downhill until we had returned to, in his eyes, the supernatural safety of the town center. He did agree, though, subject to no further mention of things that go bump in the night, to drive around Lynton simply to enjoy it as a visitor.

Truth to tell, I was dissatisfied with myself on many counts and I wanted time to think before we left. I badly missed having my own car and the freedom it allowed; but there it was, I had indeed broken the speed limit often and got away with it before I'd been caught on the way to the dying gardener, and I could see that if Policewoman Catherine Dodd had a permanent toe in my future, I would have to ration my foot on the accelerator.

Meanwhile I persuaded Jim to stop in a side road. From there, Town Hall map in hand, I found my way to North Walk, a path around a seaward side of a grassy cliff, cold in the January wind and more or less deserted.

There were benches at intervals. I sat for a while on one and froze, and thought about the Adam Force who was color-blind, asthmatic, volatile and changeable in nature, and who visited an obscure nursing home only to do good. A minor practitioner, it seemed, though with a string of qualifications and a reputation for sparkling research. A man wasting his skills. A man who took a visitor outside to talk on a noticeably cold day and gave himself an asthmatic attack.

I trudged slowly around soaking up the spectacular views of the North Walk, wishing for summer. I thought of inconsequential things like coincidence and endurance and videotapes that were worth a million and could save the world. I also thought of the jewel I had made of glass and gold that not only looked truly old, but couldn't be distinguished from a three-thousand-five-hundred-year-old original. A necklace worth a million ... but only one had that value, the genuine antiquity in a museum. The copy I had made once and could make again would be literally and only worth its weight in eighteen-carat gold, plus the cost of its colored glass components, and as much again, perhaps, for the knowledge and ability it took to make it.

Like many an artist of any sort, I found that it was to my own self alone that I could admit to the level I'd reached in my trade. It was also thanks to my uncle Ron's embargo on arrogance that I let the things I made achieve birth without trumpets.

That the existence of the tape explaining how to make the necklace was in common knowledge among jockeys in the changing rooms didn't trouble me. I'd made it myself. It had my voice and hands on it, describing and demonstrating step by step what to do. I'd recorded it the way my uncle Ron had taught me in my teens. The actual gold necklace I'd made was in my bank, where I normally kept the tape as well. I'd better check on that, I supposed. I'd lent the instruction tape to Martin and didn't care if he'd shown it to anyone else, although I dearly wished he had returned it before it disappeared, along with all the others from his den.

I made a fairly brisk return to the end of the walk to find Jim striding up and down again and trying to warm his fingers. I thought perhaps he might not want to double the experience on the following day, but to my surprise, he agreed. “Tom Pigeon'll set his dogs on me if I don‘t,” he said. “He phoned me just now in the car to check on you.”

I swallowed a laugh. I prized those bodyguards, not resented them.

Jim apologized for not being in the same class as Worthington and Tom at kickboxing.

“I can bash heads against walls,” he said.

I smiled and said that would do fine.

“I didn't know anything about you when I picked you up,” Jim confessed. “I thought you were some useless sort of git. Then Tom tells me this and that on the phone and where Tom says he'll put his fists, you can count on mine.”

“Well, thanks,” I said weakly.

“So where do we go tomorrow?”

I said, “How does Bristol grab you? A hospital area, best of all?”

He smiled broadly, transforming his face in one second from dour to delighted. He knew his way around Bristol. Up Horfield Road we would find a hospital, or on Commercial Road down by the river. No problem at all. He drove an ambulance there one year, he said.

Jim said to count him out when it came to fists or feet, but no one could catch him in a car. We shook hands on it, and I acquired bodyguard number three, one who could slide around corners faster than Formula One.

 

 

Jim took me home and, apparently on Tom Pigeon's urging, came indoors with me and checked all ten rooms for uninvited occupants.

“You need a smaller pad,” he judged, finishing the inspection of the window locks. “Or...”—he looked sideways—“ a swarm of children.”

Catherine arrived at that moment on her motorbike. The driver gave her a leer, and I had to explain ... a swarm of children. Police Constable Dodd seemed not to think it a bad idea.

Much amused, the driver left. Catherine fussed over my fresher crop of trouble and said she'd been bored by the class reunion from registration to wrap.

I said, “Next time ditch the boredom and come home.”

The words slid out as if on their own. I hadn't intended to say “home.” I'd been going simply to offer the house as a refuge, I explained. She nodded. It was later, holding her in bed, that I thought of Sigmund Freud and his tell-tale slip.

Bristol was wet with drizzle.

My driver—“Call me Jim”—was short and stout and pronounced himself shocked that I preferred quiet in the car to perpetual radio.

Quite reasonably he asked where we were going exactly in the city. To find a phone book, I replied, and in the yellow pages singled out Avon Paradise Tours without trouble. They advertised that they operated adventures throughout Cornwall, Devon and Somerset and all points to London.

Jim, with his ambulance memory, more useful than any paper map, drove us unerringly to their lilac headquarters and with a flamboyant gesture drew the busy bus depot to my attention like a rabbit from an abracadabra top hat.

Once they understood what I was asking, the women in the Avon Paradise Tours office were moderately helpful but reluctant to say too much in case they broke house rules.

I did understand, didn't I?

I did.

They then opened the harmless floodgates and told me all.

On Tuesdays members of a Bristol area Health Clubs Association went on a scenic bus tour to the Hollerday Phoenix House nursing home in Lynton for medical checkups and advice on healthy living. Doctor Force, who ran the clinic because he lived in Lynton, was paid jointly by the health clubs and Avon Paradise Tours for his one day's work per week. After extra consultation together, the office staff admitted they'd been told Doctor Force had been “let go” (given the sack, did I understand?) by the research lab he used to work for.

Which research lab? They didn't know. They shook their heads in general, but one of them said she'd heard he'd been working on illnesses of the lungs.

Another phone book—listing all things medical—borrowed from the Avon Paradise ladies, had me trying all the remotely possible establishments, asking them via Paradise Tours phone if they knew a Doctor Force. Doctor Force? Unknown, unknown, unknown. The forever unknown Doctor Force had me looking out of the window at the distant sheen of the River Avon at high tide and wondering what to try next.