She stood up and came over and picked up the crutches which were lying beside the bed. They were black tubular metal with elbow supports and hand grips.
‘These are much better than those old fashioned under-the-shoulder affairs,’ she said. She fitted the crutches round her arms and swung around the room a bit with one foot off the floor. ‘Pretty hard on your hands, though.’
She looked unselfconscious and intent. I watched her. I remembered the revelation it had been in my childhood when I first wondered what it was like to be someone else.
Into this calm sea Tony appeared with a wretched face and a folded paper in his hand.
‘Hi,’ he said, seeing Roberta. A very gloomy greeting.
He sat down in the armchair and looked at Roberta standing balanced on the crutches with one knee bent. His thoughts were not where his eyes were.
‘What is it, then?’ I said. ‘Out with it.’
‘This letter... came yesterday,’ he said heavily.
‘It was obvious last night that something was the matter.’
‘I couldn’t show it to you then, not straight out of hospital. And I don’t know what to do, Kelly pal, sure enough I don’t.’
‘Let’s see, then.’
He handed me the paper worriedly. I opened it up. A brief letter from the racing authorities. Bang bang, both barrels.
‘Dear Sir,
It has been brought to our attention that a person warned off Newmarket Heath is living as a tenant in your stable yard. This is contrary to the regulations, and you should remedy the situation as soon as possible. It is perhaps not necessary to warn you that your own training licence might have to be reviewed if you should fail to take the steps suggested.’
‘Sods,’ Tony said forcefully. ‘Bloody sods.’
Chapter Eleven
Derek from the garage came while Roberta was clearing away the lunch she had stayed to cook. When he rang the door bell she went downstairs to let him in.
He walked hesitatingly across the sitting-room looking behind him to see if his shoes were leaving dirty marks and out of habit wiped his hands down his trousers before taking the one I held out to him.
‘Sit down,’ I suggested. He looked doubtfully at the khaki velvet armchair, but in the end lowered himself gingerly into it. He looked perfectly clean. No grease, no filthy overalls, just ordinary slacks and sports jacket. He wasn’t used to it.
‘You all right?’ he said.
‘Absolutely.’
‘If you’d been in that car...’ He looked sick at what he was thinking, and his vivid imagination was one of the things which made him a reliable mechanic. He didn’t want death on his conscience. Young, fair haired, diffident, he kept most of his brains in his fingertips and outside of cars used the upstairs lot sparingly.
‘You’ve never seen nothing like it,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t know it was a car, you wouldn’t straight. It’s all in little bits... I mean, like, bits of metal that don’t look as if they were ever part of anything. Honestly. It’s like twisted shreds of stuff.’ He swallowed. ‘They’ve got it collected up in tin baths.’
‘The engine too?’
‘Yeah. Smashed into fragments. Still, I had a look. Took me a long time, though, because everything is all jumbled up, and honest you can’t tell what anything used to be. I mean, I didn’t think it was a bit of exhaust manifold that I’d picked up, not at first, because it wasn’t any shape that you’d think of.’
‘You found something?’
‘Here.’ He fished in his trouser pocket. ‘This is what it was all like. This is a bit of the exhaust manifold. Cast iron, that is, you see, so of course it was brittle, sort of, and it had shattered into bits. I mean, it wasn’t sort of crumpled up like all the aluminium and so on. It wasn’t bent, see, it was just in bits.’
‘Yes, I do see,’ I said. The anxious lines on his forehead dissolved when he saw that he had managed to tell me what he meant. He came over and put the small black jagged edged lump into my hands. Heavy for its size. About three inches long. Asymmetrically curved. Part of the side wall of a huge tube.
‘As far as I can make out, see,’ Derek said, pointing, ‘It came from about where the manifold narrows down to the exhaust pipe, but really it might be anywhere. There were quite a few bits of manifold, when I looked, but I couldn’t see the bit that fits into this, and I dare say it’s still rusting away somewhere along the railway line. Anyway, see this bit here...’ He pointed a stubby finger at a round dent in part of one edge. ‘That’s one side of a hole that was bored in the manifold wall. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a few holes might have been drilled through the wall. I mean, some people have exhaust gas temperature gauges stuck into the manifold... and other gauges too. Things like that. Only, see, there weren’t no gauges in your manifold, now were there?’
‘You tell me,’ I said.
‘There weren’t, then. Now you couldn’t really say what the hole was for, not for certain you couldn’t. But as far as I know, there weren’t any holes in your manifold last time I did the service.’
I fingered the little semi-circular dent. No more than a quarter of an inch across.
‘However did you spot something so small?’ I asked.
‘Dunno, really. Mind you, I was there a good couple of hours, picking through those tubs. Did it methodical, like. Since you were paying for it and all.’
‘Is it a big job... drilling a hole this size through an exhaust manifold. Would it take long?’
‘Half a minute, I should think.’
‘With an electric drill?’ I asked.
‘Oh yeah, sure. If you did it with a hand drill, then it would take five minutes. Say nearer eight or ten, to be on the safe side.’
‘How many people carry drills around in their tool kits?’
‘That, see, it depends on the chap. Now some of them carry all sorts of stuff in their cars. Proper work benches, some of them. And then others, the tool kit stays strapped up fresh from the factory until the car’s dropping to bits.’
‘People do carry drills, then?’
‘Oh yeah, sure. Quite a lot do. Hand drills, of course. You wouldn’t have much call for an electric drill, not in a tool kit, not unless you did a lot of repairs, like, say on racing cars.’
He went and sat down again. Carefully, as before.
‘If someone drilled a hole this size through the manifold, what would happen?’
‘Well, honestly, nothing much. You’d get exhaust gas out through the engine, and you’d hear a good lot of noise, and you might smell it in the car, but it would sort of blow away, see, it wouldn’t come in through the heater. To do that, like I said before, you’d have to put some tubing into the hole there and then stick the other end of the tubing into the heater. Mind you that would be pretty easy, you wouldn’t need a drill. Some heater tubes are really only cardboard.’
‘Rubber tubing from one end to the other?’ I suggested.
He shook his head. ‘No. Have to be metal. Exhaust gas, that’s very hot. It’d melt anything but metal.’
‘Do you think anyone could do all that on the spur of the moment?’
He put his head on one side, considering. ‘Oh sure, yeah. If he’d got a drill. Like, say the first other thing he needs is some tubing. Well, he’s only got to look around for that. Lots lying about, if you look. The other day, I used a bit of a kiddy’s old cycle frame, just the job it was. Right, you get the tube ready first and then you fit a drill nearest the right size, to match. And Bob’s your uncle.’
‘How long, from start to finish?’
‘Fixing the manifold to the heater? Say, from scratch, including maybe having to cast around for a bit of tube, well, at the outside half an hour. A quarter, if you had something all ready handy. Only the drilling would take any time, see? The rest would be like stealing candy from a baby.’