He couldn’t dispute it. Deadly revenge was as old as time.
We sat companionably in silence. I drank brandy and felt marginally saner. Knots of tension relaxed in my stomach. I made various resolutions to give up chasing the deadlier crooks — but I’d made resolutions like that before, and hadn’t kept them.
I’d stopped asking myself why I did it. There were hundreds of other ways of passing the time and earning one’s keep. Other ex-jockeys became trainers or commentators or worked in racing in official capacities, and only I, it seemed, felt impelled to swim around the hidden fringes, attempting to sort out doubts and worries for people who for any reason didn’t want to bother the police or the racing authorities.
There was a need for me and what I could do, or I would have sat around idle, twiddling my thumbs. Instead, even in the present general climate of ostracism, I had more offers of work than I could accept.
Most jobs took me less than a week, particularly those that involved looking into someone’s credit and credibility rating: bookmakers asked me to do that frequently, before taking on new account customers, and trainers paid me fees to assure them that if they bought expensive two-year-olds for new owners at the Sales, they wouldn’t be left with broken promises and a mountain of debt. I’d checked on all sorts of proposed business plans and saved a lot of people from confidence tricksters, and I’d uncovered absconding debtors, and thieves of all sorts, and had proved a confounded nuisance to imaginative felons.
People had sobbed on my shoulders from joy and deliverance: others had threatened and battered to make me quit: Linda Ferns would hug me and Gordon Quint hate me; and I also had two more investigations in hand that I’d spent too little time on. So why didn’t I give it up and change to a life of quiet, safe financial management, which I wasn’t bad at, either? I felt the effects of the iron bar from neck to fingers… and didn’t know the answer.
The mobile phone on my belt buzzed and I answered it as before, finding on the line the senior lawyer I’d talked to in the corridor in the law courts.
‘Sid, this is Davis Tatum. I’ve news for you,’ he said.
‘Give me your number and I’ll call you back.’
‘Oh? Oh, OK.’ He read off his number, which I copied as before, and also as before I borrowed Charles’s phone on the desk to get back to square one.
‘Sid,’ said Tatum, coming as usual straight to the point, ‘Ellis Quint is changing his plea from not guilty to guilty by reason of diminished responsibility. It seems his mother’s powerful statement of no confidence in his innocence has had a laxative effect on the bowels of the counsel for the defense.’
‘Jeez,’ I said.
Tatum chuckled. I imagined his double chin wobbling. He said, ‘The trial will now be adjourned for a week to allow expert psychiatric witnesses to be briefed. In other words, you don’t have to turn up tomorrow.’
‘Good.’
‘But I hope you will.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘There’s a job for you.’
‘What sort of job?’
‘Investigating, of course. What else? I’d like to meet you somewhere privately.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but sometime tomorrow I have to go to Kent to see the child, Rachel Ferns. She’s back in the hospital and it doesn’t sound good.’
‘Hell.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘The press are looking for you.’
‘They can wait a day.’
‘I told the people from The Pump that after the mauling they’ve given you they haven’t a prayer of you talking to them.’
‘I appreciate that,’ I said, smiling.
He chuckled. ‘About tomorrow…’
‘I’ll go to Kent in the morning,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll stay, it depends on Rachel. How about five o’clock in London? Would that do you? The end of your business day.’
‘Right. Where? Not in my office. How about your place? No, perhaps not, if The Pump’s after you.’
‘How about, say, the upstairs bar of Le Meridien restaurant in Piccadilly?’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘All the better.’
‘If I need to change it,’ he said, ‘can I still get you on your mobile phone?’
‘Always.’
‘Good. See you tomorrow.’
I replaced Charles’s receiver and sat on the gold armchair as before. Charles looked at the mobile instrument I’d laid this time on the table beside my glass and asked the obvious question.
‘Why do you ring them back? Why don’t you just talk?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘someone is listening to this gadget.’
‘Listening?’
I explained about the insecurity of open radio transmission, that allowed anyone clever and expert to hear what they shouldn’t.
Charles said, ‘How do you know someone’s listening to you?’
‘A lot of small things people have recently learned that I haven’t told them.’
‘Who is it?’
‘I don’t actually know. Someone has also accessed my computer over the phone lines. I don’t know who did that, either. It’s disgustingly easy nowadays — but again, only if you’re expert — to suss out people’s private passwords and read their secret files.’
He said with slight impatience, ‘Computers are beyond me.’
‘I’ve had to learn,’ I said, grinning briefly. ‘A bit different from scudding over hurdles at Plumpton on a wet day.’
‘Everything you do astounds me.’
‘I wish I was still racing.’
‘Yes, I know. But if you were, you’d anyway be coming to the end of it soon, wouldn’t you? How old are you now? Thirty-four?’
I nodded. Thirty-five loomed.
‘Not many top jump jockeys go on much after that.’
‘You put things so delightfully bluntly, Charles.’
‘You’re of more use to more people the way you are.’
Charles tended to give me pep talks when he thought I needed them. I could never work out how he knew. He’d said something once about my looking like a brick walclass="underline" that when I shut out the world and retreated into myself, things were bad. Maybe he was right. Retreat inward meant for me not retreating outwardly, and I supposed I’d learned the technique almost from birth.
Jenny, my loved and lost wife, had said she couldn’t live with it. She’d wanted me to give up race-riding and become a softer-shelled person, and when I wouldn’t — or couldn’t — we had shaken acridly apart. She had recently remarried, and this time she’d tied herself not to a thin, dark-haired, risk-taking bundle of complexes, but to a man to fit her needs, a safe, graying, sweet-natured uncomplicated fellow with a knighthood. Jenny, the warring unhappy Mrs Halley, was now serenely Lady Wingham. A photograph of her with her handsome, beaming Sir Anthony stood in a silver frame next to the telephone on Charles’s desk.
‘How’s Jenny?’ I asked politely.
‘Fine,’ Charles answered without expression.
‘Good.’
‘He’s a bore, after you,’ Charles observed.
‘You can’t say such things.’
‘I can say what I bloody well like in my own house.’
In harmony and mutual regard we passed a peaceful evening, disturbed only by five more calls on my mobile phone, all demanding to know, with varying degrees of peremptoriness, where they could find Sid Halley.
I said each time, ‘This is an answering service. Leave your number and we’ll pass on your message.’
All of the callers, it seemed, worked for newspapers, a fact that particularly left me frowning.
‘I don’t know where they all got this number from,’ I told Charles. ‘It’s not in any directory. I give it only to people I’m working for, so they can reach me day or night, and only to others whose calls I wouldn’t want to miss. I tell them it’s a private line for their use only. I don’t hand this number out on printed cards, and I don’t have it on my writing paper. Quite often I reroute calls to this phone from my phone in the flat, but I didn’t today because of Gordon Quint bashing away outside and preventing me from going in. So how do half the newspapers in London know it?’