Straight. Part 37

In bemus.e.m.e.nt, I went along to the little sitting room and tidied up a bit more of the mess. If Brad enjoyed waiting for hours reading improbable magazines it was all right by me, but I no longer felt in imminent danger of a.s.sault or death, and I could drive my car myself if I cared to, and Brad's days as bodyguard/chauffeur were numbered. He must realize it, I thought: he'd clung on to the job several times.

By that Wednesday evening there was a rapid improvement also in the ankle. Bones, as I understood it, always grew new soft tissue at the site of a fracture, as if to stick the pieces together with glue. After eight or nine days, the soft tissue began to harden, the bone getting progressively stronger from then on, and it was in that phase that I'd by then arrived. I laid one of the crutches aside in the sitting room and used the other like a walking stick, and put my left toe down to the carpet for balance if not to bear my full weight.

Distalgesic, I decided, was a thing of the past. I'd drink wine for dinner with Clarissa.

The front door bell rang, which surprised me. It was too early to be Clarissa: Brad couldn't have done the errand and got to the Selfridge and back in the time he'd been gone.

I hopped along to the door and looked through the peep-hole and was astounded to see Nicholas Loder on the doorstep. Behind him, on the path, stood his friend Rollo Rollway, looking boredly around at the small garden.

In some dismay I opened the door and Nicholas Loder immediately said, 'Oh, good. You're in. We happened to be dining in London so as we'd time rto spare I thought we'd come round on the off-chance to discuss Gemstones, rather than negotiate on the telephone.'

'But I haven't named a price,' I said.

'Never mind. We can discuss that. Can we come in?'

I shifted backwards reluctantly.

'Well, yes,' I said, looking at my watch. 'But not for long. I have another appointment pretty soon.'

'So have we,' he a.s.sured me. He turned round and waved a beckoning arm to his friend. 'Come on, Rollo, he has time to see us'

Rollway, looking as if the enterprise were not to his liking, came up the steps and into the house. I turned to lead the way along the pa.s.sage, ostentatiously not closing the front door behind them as a big hint to them not to stay long.

'The room's in a mess,' I warned them over my shoulder, 'we had a burglar.'

'we?' Nicholas Loder said.

'Greville and I.'

'Oh.'

He said, 'Oh' again when he saw the chrysanthemum pot wedged in the television, but Rollway blinked around in an uninterested fashion as if he saw houses in chaos every day of the week.

Rollway at close quarters wasn't any more attractive than Rollway at a distance: a dull dark lump of a man, thickset, middle-aged and humourless One could only explain his friendship with the charismatic Loder, I thought, in terms of trainer-owner relationship.

'This is Thomas Rollway,' Nicholas Loder said to me, making belated introductions 'One of my owners He's very interested in buying Gemstones.'

Rollway didn't look very interested in anything.

'I'd offer you a drink,' I said, 'but the burglar broke all the bottles.'

Nicholas Loder looked vaguely at the chunks of gla.s.s on the carpet. There had been no diamonds in the bottles Waste of booze.

'Perhaps we could sit down,' he said.

'Sure.'

He sat in Greville's armchair and Rollway perched on the arm of the second armchair which effectively left me the one upright hard one. I sat on the edge of it, wanting them to hurry, laying the second crutch aside.

I looked at Loder, big, light-haired with brownish eyes, full of ability and not angry with me as he had been in the recent past. It was almost with guilt that I thought of the cocaine a.n.a.lyses going on behind his back when his manner towards me was more normal than at any time since Greville's death. If he'd been like that from the beginning, I'd have seen no reason to have had the tests done.

'Gemstones,' he said, 'what do you want for him?'

I'd seen in the Saxony Franklin ledgers what Gemstones had cost as a yearling, but that had little bearing on his worth two years later. He'd won one race. He was no bright star. I doubled his cost and asked for that.

Nicholas Loder laughed with irony. 'Come on, Derek. Half.'

'Half is what he cost Greville originally,' I said.

His eyes narrowed momentarily and then opened innocently. 'So we've been doing our homework!' He actually smiled. 'I've promised Rollo a reasonable horse at a reasonable price. We all know Gemstones is no world-beater, but there are more races in him. His cost price is perfectly fair. More than fair.'

I thought it quite likely was indeed fair, but Saxony Franklin needed every possible penny.

'Meet me halfway,' I said, 'and he's yours.'

Nicholas raised his eyebrows at his friend for a decision. 'Rollo?'

Rollo's attention seemed to be focused more on the crutch I'd earlier propped unused against a wall rather than on the matter in hand.

'Gemstones is worth that,' Nicholas Loder said to him judiciously, and I thought in amus.e.m.e.nt that he would get nte as much as he could in order to earn himself a larger commission. Trade with the enemy, I thought: build mutual-benefit bridges.

'I don't want Gemstones at any price,' Rollo said, and they were the first words he'd uttered since arriving.

His voice was harsh and curiously flat, without inflection.

Without emotion, I thought.

u Nicholas Loder protested, 'But that's why you wanted to come here! It was your idea to come here.'

Thomas Rollway, as if absentmindedly, stood and picked up the abandoned crutch, turning it upside down and holding it by the end normall.y near the floor. Then, as if the thought had at that second occurred to him, he bent his knees and swung the crutch round forcefully in a scything movement a bare four inches above the carpet.

It was so totally unexpected that I wasn't quick enough to avoid it. The elbow-rest and cuff crashed into my ieft ankle and Rollway came after it like a bull, kicking, punching, overbalancing me, knocking me down.

I was flabbergasted more than frightened, and then furious. It seemed senseless, without reason, unprovoked, out of any sane proportion. Over Rollway's shoulder I glimpsed Nicholas Loder looking dumbfounded, his mouth and eyes stretched open, uncomprehending.

As I struggled to get up, Thomas Rollway reached inside his jacket and produced a handgun; twelve inches of it at least, with the thickened shape of a silencer on the business end.

'Keep still,' he said to me, pointing the barrel at my chest.

A gun... Simms... I began dimly to understand and to despair pretty deeply.

Nicholas Loder was shoving himself out of his armchair. '

What are you doing?' His voice was high with alarm, with rising panic.

'Sit down, Nick,' his friend said. 'Don't get up.' And such was the grindingly heavy tone of his unemotional voice that Nicholas Loder subsided, looking overthrown, not believing what was happening.

'But you came to buy his horse,' he said weakly.

'I came to kill him.'

Rollway said it dispa.s.sionately, as if it were nothing.

But then, he'd tried to before.

Loder's consternation became as deep as my own.

Rollway moved his gun and pointed it at my ankle. I immediately shifted it, trying desperately to get up, and he brought the spitting end back fast into alignment with my heart.

'Keep still,' he said again. His eyes coldly considered me as I half-sat, half-lay on the floor, propped on my elbow and without any weapon within reach, not even the one crutch I'd been using. Then, with as little warning as for his first attack, he stamped hard on my ankle and for good measure ground away with his heel as if putting out a cigarette b.u.t.t. After that he left his shoe where it wal, pressing down on it with his considerable weight.

I swore at him and couldn't move, and thought idiotically, feeling things give way inside there, that it would take me a lot longer now to get fit, and that took my mind momentarily off a bullet that I would feel a lot less, anyway.

'But why?' Nicholas Loder asked, wailing. 'Why are you doing this?'

Good question.

Rollway answered it.

'The only successful murders,' he said, 'are those for which there appears to be no motive.'

It sounded like something he'd learned on a course.

Something surrealistic. Monstrous Nicholas Loder, sitting rigidly to my right in Greville's chair, said with an uneasy attempt at a laugh, 'You're kidding, Rollo, aren't you? This is some sort of joke?'

Rollo was not kidding. Rollo, standing determinedly on my ankle between me and the door, said to me, 'You picked up a piece of my property at York races When I found it was missing I went back to look for it. An offficial told me you'd put it in your pocket. I want it back.'

I said nothing.

d.a.m.n the official, I thought. So helpful. So deadly. I hadn't even noticed one watching.

Nicholas Loder, bewildered, said, 'What piece of property?'

'The tube part of the nebulizer,' Rollway told him.

'But that woman, Mrs Ostermeyer, gave it back to you.'

'Only the bulb. I didn't notice the tube had dropped as well. Not until after the race. After the Stewards'

enquiry.'

'But what does it matter?'

Rollway pointed his gun unwaveringly al where it would do me fatal damage and answered the question without taking his gaze from my face.

'You yourself, Nick,' he informed him, 'told me you were worried about Franklin, he was observant and too bright.'

'But that was because I gelded Dozen Roses'

'So when I found he had the nebulizer, I asked one or two other people their opinion of Derek Franklin as a person, not a jockey, and they all said the same.

Brainy. Intelligent. Bright.' He paused. 'I don't like that.'

I was thinking that through the door, down the pa.s.sage and in the street there was sanity and Wednesday and rain and rush hour all going on as usual. Saturn was just as accessible.

'I don't believe in waiting for trouble,' Rollway said.

'And dead men can't make accusations' He stared at me. 'Where's the tube?'

I didn't answer for various reasons. If he took murder so easily in his stride and I told him I'd sent the tube to Phil Urquhart I could be sentencing Phil to death too, and besides, if I opened my mouth for any reason, what might come out wasn't words at all but something between a yell and a groan, a noise I could hear loudly in my head but which wasn't important either, or not as important as getting out of the sickening prospect of the next few minutes.

'But he would never have suspected...' Loder feebly said.

'Of course he did. Anyone would. Why do you think he's had that bodyguard glued to him? Why do you think he's been dodging about so I can't find him and not going home? And he had the horse's urine taken in Lambourn for testing, and there's the official sample too at York. I tell you, I'm not waiting for him to make trouble. I'm not going to gaol, I'll tell you.'

'But you wouldn't.'

'Be your age, Nick,' Rollway said caustically, 'I import the stuff. I take the risks And I get rid of trouble as soon as I see it. If you wait too long, trouble can destroy you.'

Nicholas Loder said in wailing protest, 'I told you it wasn't necessary to give it to horses. It doesn't make them go faster.'

'Rubbish. You can't tell, because it isn't much done.

No one can afford it except people like me. I'm swamped with the stuff at the moment, it's coming in bulk from the Medellin cartel in Madrid . . . Where's the tube?' he finished, bouncing his weight up and down.

If not telling him would keep me alive a bit longer, I wasn't going to try telling him I'd thrown it away.

'You can't just shoot him,' Nicholas Loder said despairingly. 'Not with me watching.'

'You're no danger to me, Nick,' Rollway said flatly.

'Where would you go for your little habit? One squeak from you would mean your own ruin. I'd see you went down for possession. For conniving with me to drug horses. They'd take your licence away for that. Nicholas Loder, trainer of Cla.s.sic winners, down in the gutter.'

He paused. 'You'll keep quiet, we both know it.'

The threats were none the lighter for being uttered in a measured unexcited monotone. He made my hair bristle. Heaven knew what effect he had on Loder.

He wouldn't wait much longer, I thought, for me to tell him where the tube was: and maybe the tube would in the end indeed be his downfall because Phil knew whose it was, and that the Ostermeyers had been witnesses, and if I were found shot perhaps he would light a long fuse... but it wasn't of much comfort at that moment.

With the strength of desperation I rolled my body and with my right foot kicked hard at Rollway's leg. He grunted and took his weight off my ankle and I pulled away from him, shuffling backwards, trying to reach the chair I'd been sitting on to use it as a weapon against him, or at least not to lie there supinely waiting to be slaughtered, and I saw him recover his rocked balance and begin t' straighten his arm, aiming and looking along the barrel so as not to miss.

That unmistakable stance was going to be the last thing I would see: and the last emotion I would feel would be the blazing fury of dying for so pointless a cause.

Nicholas Loder, also seeing that it was the moment of irretrievable crisis, sprang with horror from the armchair and shouted urgently, 'No, no, Rollo. No, don't do it!'

It might have been the droning of a gnat for all the notice Rollo paid him.

Nicholas Loder took a few paces forward and grabbed at Rollway and at his aiming arm.