‘Don’t joke about it.’
‘May as well,’ I said. ‘All I remember about them is someone saying, “If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.” ’
‘But that’s nonsensical!’
‘Mm.’
‘How many of them?’
‘There had to be two at least. If not, why bother to talk?’
‘Are you sure that’s what they said?’
‘Pretty sure.’
‘What sort of accent? Did you know the voice?’
‘No.’ I answered the second first. ‘Not an Eton accent. Rough, sort of.’
Lizzie said, ‘You’ll have to tell the police.’
I was silent, and she glanced at me too lengthily, even for light traffic.
‘You’ll have to,’ she said.
‘Keep your eyes on the road.’
‘You’re a shit.’
‘Yep.’
She drove, however, with more attention to getting us home safely and I wondered what good it might really do if I bothered to tell the police.
They would take a statement. They might check with the nightwatchman that I had in fact crawled out of Southampton Water. I could tell them that as I hadn’t known until five minutes beforehand that I was going along to the farmyard, there hadn’t been any sort of premeditated ambush. I’d walked in when I was unexpected and been smartly prevented from finding out who was there and what they were doing.
Taking me to Southampton must equally have been impulsive. Throwing me in alive but apparently unconscious meant they hadn’t much cared if I lived or died... almost as if they hadn’t made up their minds on that point and were leaving it to fate.
Nonsensical, as Lizzie’d said. Anyone, especially the police, would be sceptical. And what would the force do about it? They couldn’t and wouldn’t guard me day and night against illogical possible attempted murder. If I didn’t walk unexpectedly into shadows at night, why should anyone attack me again?
Probably a lot of that creaky reasoning was the result of concussion. More likely it stemmed from the usual aversion to less than friendly questioning, where crime was seen to be the fault of the victim.
I gingerly felt the back of my by then mutedly-throbbing head, wincing at the actual contact. Any blood that had been there had been washed away. My hair had dried. There was a lump and a soreness, but no gaping cut and no dent in my skull. As injuries went, compared with the assaults of steeplechasing, it was of the ‘it’ll be all right tomorrow’ kind. To have been knocked out racing meant to be grounded by the doctors for up to three weeks. I would ground myself for the rest of the night, I thought, and maybe I wouldn’t go to Cheltenham until Thursday. That should do it.
The Fourtrak hummed us home, the road direct. Southampton Docks was the nearest deep water to Pixhilclass="underline" the nearest tidal place where unseen bodies could wash out on the ebb before dawn.
Stop thinking about it, I told myself. I was alive and dry and nightmares could wait.
Lizzie turned into the driveway and curled round the house and we found something absolutely rotten had happened while we’d been away.
My Jaguar XJS, my beautiful car, had been run at full tilt into Lizzie’s Robinson 22. The two sweet machines were tangled together, locked in deep metallic embrace, both twisted and crushed, the Jaguar’s buckled bonnet rising into the helicopter’s cab, whose round bubble front had been smashed into jagged pieces. The landing struts had buckled so that the aircraft’s weight sank into the car’s roof; the rotor blades were tilted at a crazy angle, one of them snapped off on the ground.
All one could say was that nothing had caught fire or exploded. In every other way, the two fast engines, our pleasure, our soul-mates, were dead.
The house’s outside lights were on, raising gleams on the double wreck. It was spectacular, in a macabre sort of way; a shining union.
Lizzie braked the Fourtrak to a jolting halt and sat hand over mouth, disbelievingly stunned. I slowly stepped down from the passenger’s seat and walked towards the mess, but there was nothing to be done. It would take a crane and a tow-truck to tear that marriage apart.
I walked back towards Lizzie who was standing on the tarmac saying ‘Oh, my God, oh my God...’ and trying not to weep.
I put my arms round her. She sobbed dryly against my chest.
‘Why?’ She choked on the word. ‘Why?’
I had no answer, just an ache, for her, for me, for the wanton destruction of efficiency.
In Lizzie the grief turned quickly to rage and to hatred and to hunger for revenge.
‘I’ll kill the bastard. I’ll kill him. I’ll cut his throat.’
She walked round the helicopter banging it with her fist.
‘I love this bloody machine. I love it. I’ll kill the bastard...’
I felt much the same. I thought mutely that at least we ourselves were alive, even though in my case only just, and that perhaps, that was enough.
I said, ‘Lizzie, come away, there’s fuel in the tanks.’
‘I can’t smell any.’ She came to my side, however. ‘I’m so furious I could burst.’
‘Come inside and have a drink.’
She walked jerkily with me to the back door.
The door had a pane of glass broken.
‘Oh no!’ Lizzie said.
I tried the handle. Open.
‘I locked it,’ she said.
‘Mm.’
It had to be faced. I went into the big room and tried to switch on a light. The switch had been hacked out of the wall. It was only by moonlight that one could see the devastation.
At a guess, it had been done in a frenzy, with an axe. Things weren’t just broken, but sliced open. There was light enough to see the slashes in the furniture, the smashed table lamps, the ruin of the television set, the computer monitor sliced in two, the rips in my leather chair, the raw pieces gouged out of my antique desk.
Everything, it seemed, had been attacked. Books and papers lay ripped on the floor. The daffodils I’d picked for Lizzie had been stamped on, the Waterford vase that had held them crushed to slivers.
The framed photographs of my racing days were off the walls and beyond repair. Our mother’s rare collection of china birds was history.
It was the birds that seemed to upset Lizzie most. She sat on the floor with tears running into her mouth, holding the pathetic irreplaceable pieces to her lips as if to comfort them. Grieving for our childhood, for our parents, for life gone by.
I went on a wander round the rest of the house but no other rooms had been invaded: only the heart of things, where I lived.
The telephone on my desk would never ring again. The answering machine had been hacked in two. I went out to the phone in the Fourtrak and woke Sandy Smith.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
He came in his car with his uniform pulled on over his pyjamas, the navy blue jacket unbuttoned, hairy chest visible. He stood looking in awe at the amalgam of Jaguar and helicopter, and brought a torch with him into the house.
The beam shone on Lizzie, the birds, the tears.
‘Done you proper,’ Sandy said to me, and I nodded.
‘Morning, miss,’ he said to Lizzie, the polite greeting bizarre but the intention kind enough.
To me he said, ‘Do you know who did it?’
‘No.’
‘Vandalism,’ he said. ‘Nasty.’
I felt the most appalling, heart-bumping apprehension and asked him to drive down with me to the farmyard.
He understood my fear and agreed to go at once. Lizzie stood up, still holding a wing and a bird’s head and said she would come with us, we couldn’t leave her alone in the house.
We went in Sandy’s car, its lights flashing but its siren silent. The farmyard gates still stood open, but to my almost sick relief the horseboxes themselves were untouched.