“I’m the one who should be sorry,” I said. “Is the treatment doing any good?”
“Not really. I’ll be lucky to see the year out. But I’m allowed to drink in moderation. What’s yours?”
We found a table. He asked what line of work I’d gone into and I told him I was a journalist.
“Sport?”
“No. Showbiz. I know why you asked,” I said. “That stint we did as ball boys would have been a useful grounding. No one ever believes I was on court with McEnroe and Borg, so I rarely mention it.”
“I made a big effort to forget,” Eddie said. “The treatment we got from that Brigadier fellow was shameful.”
“No worse than any military training.”
“Yes, but we were young kids barely into our teens. At that age it amounted to brain-washing.”
“That’s a bit strong, Eddie.”
“Think about it,” he said. “He had us totally under his control. Destroyed any individuality we had. We thought about nothing else but chasing after tennis balls and handing them over in the approved style. It was the peak of everyone’s ambition to be the best ball boy. You were as fixated as I was. Don’t deny it.”
“True. It became my main ambition.”
“Obsession.”
“OK. Have it your way. Obsession.” I smiled, wanting to lighten the mood a bit.
“You were the hotshot ball boy,” he said. “You deserved to win.”
“I doubt it. Anyway, I was too absorbed in it all to see how the other kids shaped up.”
“Believe me, you were the best. I couldn’t match you for speed or stillness. The need to be invisible he was always on about.”
“I remember that.”
“I believed I was as good as anyone, except you.” Eddie took a long sip of beer and was silent for some time.
I waited. It was obvious some boyhood memory was troubling him.
He cleared his throat nervously. “Something has been on my mind all these years. It’s a burden I can’t take with me when I go. I don’t have long, and I want to clear my conscience. You remember the match between the Russian and the Pole?”
“Voronin and, er...?”
“Stanski — the one who died. It should never have happened. You’re the one who should have died.”
Staring at him, I played the last statement over in my head.
He said, “You’ve got to remember the mental state we were in, totally committed to being best boy. It was crazy, but nothing else in the world mattered. I could tell you were better than I was, and you told me yourself that the Brigadier spoke to you after one of your matches on Ladies’ Day.”
“Did I?” I said, amazed he still had such a clear recollection.
“He didn’t say anything to me. It was obvious you were booked for the final. While you were on the squad, I stood no chance. It sounds like lunacy now, but I was so fired up I had to stop you.”
“How?”
“With poison.”
“Now come on, Eddie. You’re not serious.”
But his tone insisted he was. “If you remember, when we were in the first year, there was a sensational story in the papers about a man, a Bulgarian, who was murdered in London by a pellet the size of a pinhead that contained an almost unknown poison called ricin.”
“Georgi Markov.”
“Yes. We talked about it in chemistry with Blind Pugh. Remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“He said a gram of the stuff was enough to kill thirty-six thousand people and it attacked the red blood cells. It was obtained from the seeds or beans of the castor-oil plant, ricinus communis. They had to be ground up in a pestle and mortar because otherwise the hard seed-coat prevented absorption. Just a few seeds would be enough. Old Pugh told us all this in the belief that castor oil plants are tropical, but he was wrong. They’ve been grown in this country as border plants ever since Tudor times.”
“You’re saying you got hold of some?”
“From a local seedsman, and no health warning. I’m sorry if all this sounds callous. I felt driven at the time. I plotted how to do it, using this.”
Eddie spread his palm and a small piece of metal lay across it. “I picked it out of a litter bin after Stanski threw it away. This is the sewing machine needle he found. My murder weapon.”
I said with distaste, “You were responsible for that?”
“It came from my mother’s machine. I ground the needle to a really fine point and made a gelatine capsule containing the poison and filled the eye of the needle with it.”
“What were you going to do with it — stick it into my arm?”
“No. Remember how we were drilled to return to the same spot just behind the tramlines beside the umpire’s chair? If you watch tennis, that place gets as worn as the serving area at the back of the court. The ballboys always return to the same spot. My plan was simple. Stick the needle into the turf with the sharp point upwards and you would kneel on it and inject the ricin into your bloodstream. I’m telling you this because I want the truth to come out before I die. I meant to kill you and it went wrong. Stanski dived at a difficult ball and his arm went straight down on the needle.”
“But he went on to win the match.”
“The effects take days to kick in, but there’s no antidote. Even if I’d confessed at the time, they couldn’t have saved him. It was unforgivable. I was obsessed and it’s preyed on my mind ever since.”
“So all that stuff in the papers about Voronin being an assassin...”
“Was rubbish. It was me. If you want to go to the police,” he said, “I don’t mind confessing everything I’ve told you. I just want the truth to be known before I go. I’m told I have six months at most.”
I was silent, reflecting on what I’d heard, the conflicting motives that had driven a young boy to kill and a dying man to confess twenty years later.
“Or you could wait until after I’ve gone. You say you’re a journalist. You could write it up and tell it in your own way.”
He left me to make up my own mind.
Eddie died in November.
And you are the first after me to get the full story.
The Bookbinder’s Apprentice
Martin Edwards
As Joly closed his book, he was conscious of someone watching him. A feeling he relished, warm as the sun burning high above Campo Santi Apostoli. Leaning back, he stretched his arms, a languorous movement that allowed his eyes to roam behind dark wrap-around Gucci glasses.
A tall, stooped man in a straw hat and white suit was limping towards the row of red benches, tapping a long wooden walking stick against the paving slabs, somehow avoiding a collision with the small, whooping children on scooters and tricycles. Joly sighed. He wasn’t unaccustomed to the attentions of older men, but soon they became tedious. Yet the impeccable manners instilled at one of England’s minor public schools never deserted him; besides, he was thirsty. A drink would be nice, provided someone else was paying. The benches were crowded with mothers talking while their offspring scrambled and shouted over the covered well and a group of sweaty tourists listening to their guide’s machine-gun description of the frescoes within the church. As the man drew near, Joly squeezed up on the bench to make a small place beside him.
“Why, thank you.” American accent, a courtly drawl. “It is good to rest one’s feet in the middle of the day.”
Joly guessed the man had been studying him from the small bridge over the canal, in front of the row of shops. He smiled, didn’t speak. In a casual encounter, his rule was not to give anything away too soon.
The man considered the book on Joly’s lap. “Death in Venice. Fascinating.”
“He writes well,” Joly allowed.