Come to Grief (2 page)

The taxi still stood there, diesel engine running, the driver staring wide-mouthed and speechless, a state of affairs that continued while I yanked open the black rear door and stumbled in again onto the seat. My heart thudded. Well, it would.

“Drive,
” I said urgently. “Drive on.”

“But...”

“Just drive. Go
on.
Before he finds his feet and breaks your windows.”

The driver closed his mouth fast and meshed his gears, and wavered at something above running pace along the road.

“Look,” he said, protesting, half turning his head back to me, “I didn’t see nothing. You’re my last fare today, I’ve been on the go eight hours and I’m on my way home.”

“Just drive,” I said. Too little breath. Too many jumbled feelings.

“Well ... but, drive where
to?”

Good question. Think.

“He didn’t look like no mugger,” the taxi driver observed aggrievedly. “But you never can tell these days. D‘you want me to drop you off at the police? He hit you something shocking. You could
hear
it. Like he broke your arm.”

“Just drive, would you?”

The driver was large, fiftyish and a Londoner, but no John Butt, and I could see from his head movements and his repeated spiky glances at me in his rear-view mirror that he didn’t want to get involved in my problems and couldn’t wait for me to leave his cab.

Pulse eventually steadying, I could think of only one place to go. My only haven, in many past troubles.

“Paddington,” I said. “Please.”

“St. Mary‘s, d’you mean? The hospital?”

“No. The trains.”

“But you’ve just come from there!” he protested.

“Yes, but please go back.”

Cheering a little, he rocked round in a U-turn and set off for the return to Paddington Station, where he assured me again that he hadn’t seen nothing, nor heard nothing neither, and he wasn’t going to get involved, did I see?

I simply paid him and let him go, and if I memorized his cab-licensing number it was out of habit, not expectation.

As part of normal equipment I wore a mobile phone on my belt and, walking slowly into the high, airy terminus, I pressed the buttons to reach the man I trusted most in the world, my ex-wife’s father, Rear Admiral Charles Roland, Royal Navy, retired, and to my distinct relief he answered at the second ring.

“Charles,” I said. My voice cracked a bit, which I hadn’t meant.

A pause, then, “Is that you, Sid?”

“May I ... visit?”

“Of course. Where are you?”

“Paddington Station. I’ll come by train and taxi.”

He said calmly, “Use the side door. It’s not locked,” and put down his receiver.

I smiled, reassured as ever by his steadiness and his brevity with words. An unemotional, undemonstrative man, not paternal towards me and very far from indulgent, he gave me nevertheless a consciousness that he cared considerably about what happened to me and would proffer rocklike support if I needed it. Like I needed it at that moment, for several variously dire reasons.

Trains to Oxford being less frequent in the middle of the day, it was four in the afternoon by the time the country taxi, leaving Oxford well behind, arrived at Charles’s vast old house at Aynsford and decanted me at the side door. I paid the driver clumsily owing to stiffening bruises, and walked with relief into the pile I really thought of as home, the one unchanging constant in a life that had tossed me about, rather, now and then.

Charles sat, as often, in the large leather armchair that I found too hard for comfort but that he, in his uncompromising way, felt appropriate to accommodate his narrow rump. I had sometime in the past moved one of the softer but still fairly formal old gold brocade armchairs from the drawing room into the smaller room, his “wardroom,” as it was there we always sat when the two of us were alone. It was there that he kept his desk, his collection of flies for fishing, his nautical books, his racks of priceless old orchestral recordings and the gleaming marble-and-steel wonder of a custom-built, frictionless turntable on which he played them. It was there on the dark-green walls that he’d hung large photographs of the ships he’d commanded, and smaller photos of shipmates, and there, also, that he’d lately positioned a painting of me as a jockey riding over a fence at Cheltenham racecourse, a picture that summed up every ounce of vigor needed for race-riding, and which had hung for years less conspicuously in the dining room.

He had had a strip of lighting positioned along the top of the heavy gold frame, and when I got there that evening, it was lit.

He was reading. He put his book face down on his lap when I walked in, and gave me a bland, noncommittal inspection. There was nothing, as usual, to be read in his eyes: I could often see quite clearly into other people’s minds, but seldom his.

“Hullo,” I said.

I could hear him take a breath and trickle it out through his nose. He spent all of five seconds looking me over, then pointed to the tray of bottles and glasses which stood on the table below my picture.

“Drink,” he said briefly. An order, not invitation.

“It’s only four o‘clock.”

“Immaterial. What have you eaten today?”

I didn’t say anything, which he took to be answer enough.

“Nothing,” he said, nodding. “I thought so. You look thin. It’s this
bloody
case. I thought you were supposed to be in court today.”

“It was adjourned until tomorrow.”

“Get a drink.”

I walked obediently over to the table and looked assessingly at the bottles. In his old-fashioned way he kept brandy and sherry in decanters. Scotch—Famous Grouse, his favorite—remained in the screw-topped bottle. I would have to have scotch, I thought, and doubted if I could pour even that.

I glanced upward at my picture. In those days, six years ago, I’d had two hands. In those days I’d been British steeplechasing’s champion jockey: whole, healthy and, I dared say, fanatical. A nightmare fall had resulted in a horse’s sharp hoof half ripping off my left hand: the end of one career and the birth, if you could call it that, of another. Slow, lingering birth of a detective, while I spent two years pining for what I’d lost and drifted rudderless like a wreck that didn’t quite sink but was unseaworthy all the same. I was ashamed of those two years. At the end of them a ruthless villain had smashed beyond mending the remains of the useless hand and had galvanized me into a resurrection of the spirit and the impetus to seek what I’d had since, a myoelectric false hand that worked on nerve impulses from my truncated forearm and looked and behaved so realistically that people often didn’t notice its existence.

My present problem was that I couldn’t move its thumb far enough from its fingers to grasp the large heavy cut-glass brandy decanter, and my right hand wasn’t working too well, either. Rather than drop alcohol all over Charles’s Persian rug, I gave up and sat in the gold armchair.

“What’s the matter?” Charles asked abruptly. “Why did you come? Why don’t you pour a drink?”

After a moment I said dully, knowing it would hurt him, “Ginnie Quint killed herself.”

“This morning,” I said. “She jumped from sixteen floors up.”

His fine-boned face went stiff and immediately looked much older. The bland eyes darkened, as if retreating into their sockets. Charles had known Ginnie Quint for thirty or more years, and had been fond of her and had been a guest in her house often.

Powerful memories lived in my mind also. Memories of a friendly, rounded, motherly woman happy in her role as a big-house wife, inoffensively rich, working genuinely and generously for several charities and laughingly glowing in reflected glory from her famous, good-looking successful only child, the one that everyone loved.

Her son, Ellis, that I had put on trial.

The last time I’d seen Ginnie she’d glared at me with incredulous contempt, demanding to know how I could possibly seek to destroy the golden Ellis, who counted me his friend, who liked me, who’d done me favors, who would have trusted me with his life.

I’d let her molten rage pour over me, offering no defense. I knew exactly how she felt. Disbelief and denial and anger ... The idea of what he’d done was so sickening to her that she rejected the guilt possibility absolutely, as almost everyone else had done, though in her case with anguish.

Most people believed I had got it all wrong, and had ruined
myself,
not Ellis. Even Charles, at first, had said doubtfully, “Sid, are you sure?”

I’d said I was certain. I’d hoped desperately for a way out ... for
any
way out ... as I knew what I’d be pulling down on myself if I went ahead. And it had been at least as bad as I’d feared, and in many ways worse. After the first bombshell solution—a proposed solution—to a crime that had had half the country baying for blood (but not
Ellis’s
blood, no, no, it was
unthinkable),
there had been the first court appearance, the remand into custody (a
scandal,
he should
of course
be let out immediately on bail), and after that there had fallen a sudden press silence, while the sub judice law came into effect.

Under British sub judice law, no evidence might be publicly discussed between the remand and the trial. Much investigation and strategic trial planning could go on behind the scenes, but neither potential jurors nor John Doe in the street was allowed to know details. Uninformed public opinion had consequently stuck at the “Ellis is innocent” stage, and I’d had nearly three months, now, of obloquy.

Ellis, you see, was a Young Lochinvar in spades. Ellis Quint, once champion amateur jump jockey, had flashed onto television screens like a comet, a brilliant, laughing, able, funny performer, the draw for millions on sports quiz programs, the ultimate chat-show host, the model held up to children, the glittering star that regularly raised the nation’s happiness level, to whom everyone, from tiara to baseball cap worn backwards, responded.

Manufacturers fell over themselves to tempt him to endorse their products, and half the kids in England strode about with machismo in glamorized jockey-type riding boots over their jeans. And it was this man, this paragon, that I sought to eradicate.

No one seemed to blame the tabloid columnist who’d written, “The once-revered Sid Halley, green with envy, tries to tear down a talent he hasn’t a prayer of matching....” There had been inches about “a spiteful little man trying to compensate for his own inadequacies.” I hadn’t shown any of it to Charles, but others had.

The telephone at my waist buzzed suddenly, and I answered its summons.

“Sid ... Sid...”

The woman on the other end was crying. I’d heard her crying often.

“Are you at home?” I asked.

“No ... In the hospital.”

“Tell me the number and I’ll phone straight back.”

I heard murmuring in the background; then another voice came on, efficient, controlled, reading out a number, repeating it slowly. I tapped the digits onto my mobile so that they appeared on the small display screen.

“Right,” I said, reading the number back. “Put down your receiver.” To Charles I said, “May I use your phone?”

He waved a hand permissively towards his desk, and I pressed the buttons on his phone to get back to where I’d been.

The efficient voice answered immediately.

“Is Mrs. Ferns still there?” I said. “It’s Sid Halley.”

“Hang on.”

Linda Ferns was trying not to cry. “Sid ... Rachel’s worse. She’s asking for you. Can you come? Please.”

“How bad is she?”

“Her temperature keeps going up.” A sob stopped her. “Talk to Sister Grant.”

I talked to the efficient voice, Sister Grant. “How bad is Rachel?”

“She’s asking for you all the time,” she said. “How soon can you come?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Can you come this evening?”

I said, “Is it that bad?”

I listened to a moment of silence, in which she couldn’t say what she meant because Linda was beside her.

“Come this evening,” she repeated.

This evening. Dear God. Nine-year-old Rachel Ferns lay in a hospital in Kent a hundred and fifty miles away. III to death, this time, it sounded like.

“Promise her,” I said, “that I’ll come tomorrow.” I explained where I was. “I have to be in court tomorrow morning, in Reading, but I’ll come to see Rachel as soon as I get out. Promise her. Tell her I’m going to be there. Tell her I’ll bring six wigs and an angel fish.”

The efficient voice said, “I’ll tell her,” and then added, “Is it true that Ellis Quint’s mother has killed herself? Mrs. Ferns says someone heard it on the radio news and repeated it to her. She wants to know if it’s true.”

“It’s true.”

“Come as soon as you can,” the nurse said, and disconnected.

I put down the receiver. Charles said, “The child?”

“It sounds as if she’s dying.”

“You knew it was inevitable.”

“It doesn’t make it any easier for the parents.” I sat down again slowly in the gold armchair. “I would go tonight if it would save her life, but I ...” I stopped, not knowing what to say, how to explain that I wouldn’t go. Couldn’t go. Not except to save her life, which no one could do however much they ached to.

Charles said briefly, “You’ve only just got here.”

“Yeah.”

“And what else is there, that you haven’t told me?”

I looked at him.

“I know you too well, Sid,” he said. “You didn’t come all this way just because of Ginnie. You could have told me about her on the telephone.” He paused. “From the look of you, you came for the oldest of reasons.” He paused again, but I didn’t say anything. “For sanctuary,” he said.

I shifted in the chair. “Am I so transparent?”

“Sanctuary from what?” he asked. “What is so sudden ... and urgent?”