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.’
‘What?’
‘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.