Come to Grief (37 page)

“Contents?” I asked resignedly.

“No. Nothing.”

“Engine?”

“Most of it’s there. No battery, of course. Everything movable’s missing.”

Poor old car. It had been insured, though, for a fortune.

Archie said, “Charles sends his regards.”

“Tell him thanks.”

“He said you would be looking as though nothing much had happened. I didn’t believe him. Why aren’t you lying down?”

“It’s more comfortable sitting up.”

Archie frowned.

I amplified mildly. “There’s a bullet burn across somewhere below my shoulder blade.”

Archie said, “Oh.”

They both looked at the tall contraption standing beside the bed with a tube leading from a high bag to my elbow. I explained that, too.

“It’s one of those ‘painkiller on demand’ things,” I said. “If I get a twinge I press a button, and bingo, it goes away.”

Archie picked up the copy of
The Pump.
“All of a sudden,” he commented, “you’re Saint Sid who can do no wrong.”

I said, “It’s enough to make Ellis’s lawyers weep.”

“But you don’t think, do you,” Archie said doubtfully, “that Ellis’s lawyers
connived
at the hate-Halley campaign?”

“Because they are ethical people?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I shrugged and left it.

“Is there any news of Ellis?” I asked. “Or of Gordon?”

“Gordon Quint,” Norman said in a policeman’s voice, “was, as of an hour ago, still unconscious in a secure police facility and suffering from a depressed skull fracture. He is to have an operation to relieve the pressure on his brain. No one is predicting when he’ll wake up or what mental state he’ll be in, but as soon as he can understand, he’ll be formally charged with attempted murder. As you know, there’s a whole flock of eyewitnesses.”

“And Ellis?” I asked.

Archie said, “No one knows where he is.”

“It’s very difficult,” I said, “for him to go anywhere without being recognized.”

Norman nodded. “Someone may be sheltering him. But we’ll find him, don’t worry.”

“What happened this morning,” I asked, “about the trial?”

“Adjourned Ellis Quint’s bail is rescinded as he didn’t turn up, and also he’ll be charged with grievous bodily harm to his father. A warrant for his arrest has been issued.”

“He wanted to prevent his father from murdering,” I said. “He can’t have meant to hurt him seriously.”

Archie nodded. “It’s a tangle.”

“And Jonathan,” I asked. “Did he go to Shropshire?”

Both of them looked depressed.

“Well,” I said, “didn’t he go?”

“Oh yes, he went,” Norman said heavily. “And he found the car parkers.”

“Good boy,” I said.

“It’s not so good.” Archie, like a proper civil servant, had brought with him a briefcase, from which he now produced a paper that he brought over to the bed. I pinned it down with the weight of my still-sluggish left hand and took in its general meaning.

The car parkers had signed a statement saying that Ellis Quint had dined with media colleagues and had brought several of them with him to the dance at about eleven-thirty. The parkers remembered him—of course—not only because of who he was (there had been plenty of other well-known people at the party, starting with members of the Royal Family) but chiefly because he had given them a tip and offered them his autograph. They knew it was before midnight, because their employment as car parkers had ended then. People who arrived later had found only one car parker—a friend of those who’d gone off duty.

Media colleagues!
Dammit, I thought. I hadn’t checked those with the duchess.

“It’s an unbreakably solid alibi,” Norman observed gloomily. “He was in Shropshire when the yearling was attacked.”

“Mm.”

“You don’t seem disappointed, Sid,” Archie said, puzzled.

“No.”

“But why not?”

“I think,” I said, “that you should phone Davis Tatum. Will he be in his office right now?”

“He might be. What do you want him for?”

“I want him to make sure the prosecutors don’t give up on the trial.”

“You told him that on Saturday.” He was humoring me, I thought.

“I’m not light-headed from bullets, Archie, if that’s what you think. Since Saturday I’ve worked a few things out, and they are not as they may seem.”

“What things?”

“Ellis’s alibi, for one.”

“But, Sid—”

“Listen,” I said. “This isn’t all that easy to say, so don’t look at me, look at your hands or something.” They showed no sign of doing so, so I looked at my own instead. I said, “I have to explain that
I
am not as I seem. When people in general look at me they see a harmless person, youngish, not big, not tall, no threat to anyone. Self-effacing. I’m not complaining about that. In fact, I choose to be like that because people then
talk
to me, which is necessary in my job. They tend to think I’m cozy, as your sister Betty told me, Archie. Owen Yorkshire considers me a wimp. He said so. Only... I’m not really like that.”

“A
wimp!”
Archie exclaimed.

“I can look it, that’s the point. But Ellis knows me better. Ellis calls me cunning and ruthless, and I probably am. It was he who years ago gave me the nickname of Tungsten Carbide because I wasn’t easy to... er... intimidate. He thinks I can’t be terrified, either, though he’s wrong about that. But I don’t mind him thinking it. Anyway, unlikely though it may seem, all this past summer, Ellis has been afraid of me. That’s why he made jokes about me on television and got Tilepit to set his paper onto me. He wanted to defeat me by ridicule.”

I paused. Neither of them said a word.

I went on. “Ellis is not what he seems, either. Davis Tatum thinks him a playboy. Ellis is tall, good-looking, outgoing, charming and
loved.
Everyone thinks him a delightful entertainer with a knack for television. But he’s not only that. He’s a strong, purposeful and powerful man with enormous skills of manipulation. People underestimate both of us for various and different reasons—I look weak and he looks frivolous—but we don’t underestimate each other. On the surface, the easy surface, we’ve been friends for years. But in our time we rode dozens of races against each other, and racing, believe me, strips your soul bare. Ellis and I know each other’s minds on a deep level that has nothing to do with afternoon banter or chit-chat. We’ve been friends on that level, too. You and Davis can’t believe that it is Ellis himself who is the heavyweight, not Yorkshire, but Ellis and I both know it. Ellis has manipulated everyone—Yorkshire, Tilepit,
The Pump,
public opinion, and also those so-smart lawyers of his who think they’re dictating the pace.”

“And you, Sid?” Norman asked. “Has he pulled your strings, too?”

I smiled ruefully, not looking at him. “He’s had a go.”

“I’d think it was impossible,” Archie said. “He would have to put you underground to stop you.”

“You’ve learned a lot about me, Archie,” I said lazily. “I do like to win.”

He said, “So why aren’t you disappointed that Ellis’s Shropshire alibi can’t be broken?”

“Because Ellis. set it up that way.”

“How do you mean?”

“Ever since the Northampton yearling was attacked, Ellis’s lawyers have been putting it about that if Ellis had an unbreakable alibi for that night, which I bet he assured them he had, it would invalidate the whole Combe Bassett case. They put pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service to withdraw, which they’ve been tottering on the brink of doing. Never mind that the two attacks were separate, the strong supposition arose that if Ellis couldn’t have done one, then he hadn’t done the other.”

“Of course,” Norman said.

“No,” I contradicted. “He made for himself a positively unbreakable alibi in Shropshire, and he got someone else to go to Northampton.”

“But no one
would.”

“One person would. And did.”

“But
who,
Sid?” Archie asked.

“Gordon. His father.”

Archie and Norman both stiffened as if turned to pillars of salt.

The nerves in my right arm woke up. I pressed the magic button and they went slowly back to sleep. Brilliant. A lot better than in days gone by.

“He
couldn’t
have done,” Archie said in revulsion.

“He did.”

“You’re just
guessing.
And you’re
wrong.”

“No.”

“But,
Sid . . .”

“I know,” I sighed. “You, Charles and I have all been guests in his house. But he shot me last night. See it in
The Pump.”

Archie said weakly, “But that doesn’t mean . . .”

“I’ll explain,” I said. “Give me a moment.”

My skin was sweating. It came and went a bit, now and then. An affronted body, letting me know.

“A moment?”

“I’m not made of iron.”

Archie breathed on a smile. “I thought it was tungsten?”

“Mm.”

They waited. I said, “Gordon and Ginnie Quint gloried in their wonderful son, their only child. I accused him of a crime that revolted them. Ginnie steadfastly believed in his innocence; an act of faith. Gordon, however reluctantly, faced with all the evidence we gathered from his Land-Rover, must have come to acknowledge to himself that the unthinkable was true.”

Archie nodded.

I went on. “Ellis’s wretched persecution of me didn’t really work. Sure, I hated it, but I was still
there,
and meanwhile the time of the trial was drawing nearer and nearer. Whatever odium I drew onto myself by doing it, I was going to describe in court, with all the press and public listening, just how Ellis could have cut off the foot of Betty’s colt. The outcome of the trial—whether or not the jury found Ellis guilty, and whether or not the judge sent him to jail—that wasn’t the prime point. The trial itself, and all that evidence, would have convinced enough of the population of his guilt to destroy forever the shining-knight persona. Topline Foods couldn’t have—and, in fact, won’t be able to—use those diamond-plated round-the-world ads.”

I took a deep couple of lungfuls of air. I was talking too much. Not enough oxygen, not enough blood.

I said, “The idea of the Shropshire alibi probably came about gradually, and heaven knows to which of them first. Ellis received an invitation to the dance. The plan must have started from that. They saw it as the one effective way to stop the trial from taking place.”

Hell, I thought, I don’t feel well. I’m getting old.

I said, “You have to remember that Gordon is a farmer. He’s used to the idea of the death of animals being profitable. I dare say that the death of one insignificant yearling was as nothing to him when set beside the saving of his son. And he knew where to find such a victim. He would have to have long replaced the shears taken by the police. It must have seemed quite easy, and in fact he carried out the plan without difficulty.”

Archie and Norman listened as if not breathing.

I started again. “Ellis is many things, but he’s not a murderer. If he had been, perhaps he would have been a serial killer of humans, not horses. That urge to do evil—I don’t understand it, but it
happens.
Wings off butterflies and so on.” I swallowed. “Ellis has given me a hard time, but in spite of several opportunities he hasn’t let me be killed. He stopped Yorkshire doing it. He stopped his father last night.”

“People can hate until they make themselves ill,” Archie nodded. “Very few actually murder.”

“Gordon Quint tried it,” Norman pointed out, “and all but succeeded.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but that wasn’t to help Ellis.”

“What was it, then?”

“Have to go back a bit.”

I’m too tired, I thought, but I’d better finish it.

I said to Norman, “You remember that piece of rag you gave me?”

“Yes. Did you do anything with it?”

I nodded.

“What rag?” Archie asked.

Norman outlined for him the discovery at Northampton of the lopping shears wrapped in dirty material.

“The local police found the shears hidden in a hedge,” I said, “and they brought them into the stud farm’s office while I was there. The stud farm’s owners, Miss Richardson and Mrs. Bethany, were there, and so was Ginnie Quint, who was a friend of theirs and who had gone there to comfort them and sympathize. Ginnie forcibly said how much she despised me for falsely accusing her paragon of a son. For accusing my
friend.
She more or less called me Judas.”

“Sid!”

“Well, that’s how it seemed. Then she watched the policeman unwrap the shears that had cut off the yearling’s foot and, quite slowly, she went white ... and fainted.”

“The sight of the shears,” Norman said, nodding.

“It was much more than that. It was the sight of the
material.”

“How do you mean?”

“I spent a whole day ... last Thursday, it seems a lifetime away ... I chased all over London with that little piece of cloth, and I finished up in a village near Chichester.”

“Why Chichester?” Archie asked.

“Because that filthy old cloth had once been part of some bed hangings. They were woven as a special order by a Mrs. Patricia Huxford, who’s a doll of the first rank. She has looms in Lowell, near Chichester. She looked up her records and found that that fabric had been made nearly thirty years ago especially—and exclusively—for a Mrs. Gordon Quint.”

Archie and Norman both stared.

“Ginnie recognized the material,” I said. “She’d just been giving me the most frightful tongue-lashing for believing Ellis capable of maiming horses, and she suddenly saw, because that material was wrapped round shears, that I’d been right. Not only that, she knew that Ellis had been in Shropshire the night Miss Richardson’s colt was done. She knew the importance of his alibi... and she saw—she understood—that the only other person who could or would have wrapped lopping shears in that unique fabric was Gordon. Gordon wouldn’t have thought twice about snatching up any old rag to wrap his shears in—and I’d guess he decided to dump them because we might have checked Quint’s shears again for horse DNA if he’d taken them home. Ginnie saw that
Gordon
had maimed the yearling. It was too big a shock ... and she fainted.”