I said, ‘If Jonathan learns nothing, I’ll go myself on Monday.’
‘That will be too late,’ Davis said.
‘Not if you get your colleague to ask for one more day’s adjournment. Invent flu or something.’
Davis said doubtfully, ‘Are you totally committed to this trial? The Pump — or Ellis Quint — they haven’t got to you in any way, have they? I mean… the hate campaign… do you want to back out?’
Charles was offended on my behalf. ‘Of course he doesn’t,’ he said.
Such faith! I said plainly to Davis, ‘Don’t let your colleague back down. That’s the real danger. Tell him to insist on prosecuting, alibi or no alibi. Tell the prosecution service to dredge up some guts.’
‘Sid!’ He was taken aback. ‘They’re realists.’
‘They’re shit-scared of Ellis’s lawyers. Well, I’m not. Ellis took the foot off Betty Bracken’s colt. I wish like hell that he hadn’t, but he did. He has no alibi for that night. You get your colleague to tell Ellis’s lawyers that the Northampton colt was a copycat crime. If we can’t break Ellis’s alibi, copycat is our story and we’re sticking to it, and if you have any influence over your colleague the prosecutor, you make sure he gives me a chance in court to say so.’
Davis said faintly, ‘I must not instruct him to do anything like that.’
‘Just manage to get it dripped into his mind.’
‘So there you are, Davis,’ Archie said dryly, ‘our boy shows no sign of the hate campaign having been successful. Rather the opposite, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Our boy’ stood up, feeling a shade fragile. It seemed to have been a long day. Archie came out into the hall with Charles and me and offered his hand in farewell. Charles shook warmly. Archie lifted my wrist and looked at the swelling and the deep bruising that was already crimson and black.
He said, ‘You’ve had difficulty holding your glass all evening.’
I shrugged a fraction, long resigned to occupational damage. My hand was still a hand, and that was all that mattered.
‘No explanation?’ Archie asked.
I shook my head.
‘Stone walls tell more,’ Charles informed him calmly.
Archie, releasing my wrist, said to me, ‘The British Horseracing Board wants you to double-check some of their own members for loyalty. Ultra-secret digging.’
‘They wouldn’t ask me.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m not the new people’s idea of reliable.’
‘They asked me,’ he said, the eyes blazing with amusement. ‘I said it would be you or nobody.’
‘Nobody,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘You start as soon as the Quint thing is over.’
The trouble, I thought, as I sat quietly beside Charles as he drove to Aynsford, was that for me the Quint thing would never be over. Ellis might or might not go to jail… but that wouldn’t be the end for either of us. Gordon’s obsession might deepen. Ellis might maim more than horses. In both of them lay a compulsive disregard of natural law.
No one could ever be comprehensively protected from obsession. One simply had to live as best one could and disregard the feral threat lying in wait — and I would somehow have to shake Gordon loose from staking out my Pont Square door.
Charles said, ‘Do you consider that transferring Yorkshire’s secret files to your own computer was at all immoral? Was it… theft?’
He spoke without censure, but censure was implied. I remembered a discussion we’d had once along the lines of what was honorable and what was not. He’d said I had a vision of honor that made my life a purgatory and I’d said he was wrong, and that purgatory was abandoning your vision of honor and knowing you’d done it. ‘Only for you, Sid,’ he’d said. ‘The rest of the world has no difficulty at all.’
It seemed he was applying to me my own rash judgment. Was stealing knowledge ever justified, or was it not?
I said without self-excuse, ‘It was theft, and dishonourable, and I would do it again.’
‘And purgatory can wait?’
I said with amusement, ‘Have you read The Pump?’
After about five miles he said, ‘That’s specious.’
‘Mm.’
‘The Pump’s a different sort of purgatory.’
I nodded and said idly, ‘The anteroom to hell.’
He frowned, glancing across in distaste. ‘Has hell arrived, then?’ He hated excess emotion. I cooled it.
I said, ‘No. Sorry. It’s been a long day.’
He drove another mile, then asked, ‘How did you hurt your hand?’
I sighed. ‘I don’t want a fuss. Don’t fuss, Charles, if I tell you.’
‘No. All right. No fuss.’
‘Then… Ellis had a go at it.’
‘Ellis?’
‘Mm. Lord Tilepit and Owen Yorkshire watched Ellis enjoy it. That’s how they now know he’s guilty as charged with the colts. If Ellis had had shears instead of a wrench to use on my wrist, I would now have no hands — and for God’s sake, Charles, keep your eyes on the road.’
‘But, Sid…’
‘No fuss. You promised. There’ll be no lasting harm.’ I paused. ‘If he’d wanted to kill me today, he could have done it, but instead he gave me a chance to escape. He wanted…’ I swallowed. ‘He wanted to make me pay for defeating him… and he did make me pay… and on Monday in court I’ll try to disgrace him forever… and I loathe it.’
He drove to Aynsford in a silence I understood to be at least empty of condemnation. Braking outside the door, he said regretfully, ‘If you and Ellis hadn’t been such good friends… no wonder poor Ginnie couldn’t stand it.’
Charles saw the muscles stiffen in my face.
‘What is it, Sid?’ he asked.
‘I… I may have made a wrong assumption.’
‘What assumption?’
‘Mm?’ I said vaguely. ‘Have to think.’
‘Then think in bed,’ he said lightly. ‘It’s late.’
I thought for half the night. Ellis’s revenge brutally throbbed in my fingers. Ellis had tied my wrists and given me thirty seconds… I would be dead, I thought, if we hadn’t been friends.
At Aynsford I kept duplicates of all the things I’d lost in my car — battery charger, razor, clothes and so on — all except the mobile phone. I did have the SIM card, but nothing to use it in.
The no-car situation was solved again by TeleDrive, which came to pick me up on Sunday morning.
To Charles’s restrained suggestion that I pass the day resting with him — ‘A game of chess, perhaps?’ — I replied that I was going to see Rachel Ferns. Charles nodded.
‘Come back,’ he said, ‘if you need to.’
‘Always.’
‘Take care of yourself, Sid.’
Rachel, Linda told me on the telephone, was home from the hospital for the day.
‘Oh, do come,’ she begged. ‘Rachel needs you.’
I went empty-handed with no new fish or wigs, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Rachel herself looked bloodless, a white wisp of a child in the foothills of a far country. In the five days since I’d seen her, the bluish shadows under her eyes had deepened, and she had lost weight so that the round cheeks of the steroids under the bald head and the big shadowed eyes gave her the look of an exotic little bird, unlike life.
Linda hugged me and cried on my shoulder in the kitchen.
‘It’s good news, really,’ she said, sobbing. ‘They’ve found a donor.’
‘But that’s marvelous.’ Like a sunburst of hope, I thought, but Linda still wept.
‘He’s a Swiss,’ she said. ‘He’s coming from Swit zerland. He’s coming on Wednesday. Joe is paying his airfare and the hotel bills. Joe says money’s no object for his little girl.’