‘Get stuffed.’
It was better when I could see him.
I said ‘What have you told the police?’
‘Nothing. Bloody nothing.’
‘Did they get you to make a statement?’
‘That they bloody did not.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That simplifies things.’
‘What the hell are you on about?’
I watched the violence and agitation in every physical movement. It was as if his muscles and nerves were acting in spasms, as if some central disorganisation were plucking wires.
I said, ‘What is upsetting you most?’
‘Most?’ he yelled. ‘Most? The fact that you’re bloody walking in here as cool as bloody cucumbers, that’s what. I tried to kill you. Kill you.’
He stopped as if he couldn’t explain what he meant, but he’d got his message across to me loud and clear. He had taken himself beyond the edge of sense in his compulsion to do me harm, and there I was, proving that it had all been for nothing. I guessed that he badly needed not to have failed entirely. I took off my jacket and explained about the strap and buckle saving my life. I undid my shirt, showed him the plaster, and told him what lay underneath.
‘It hurts,’ I said truthfully.
He stopped pacing and peered closely at my face. ‘Does it?’
‘Yes.’
He put out his hand and touched me. I winced.
He stood back, bent and picked up the chair he’d thrown, set it on its feet on the far side of the table, and sat down opposite me. He stretched for the packet of cigarettes and lighter which I’d left lying, and lit one with hands still shaking with tension.
I left my shirt undone and falling open. He sat smoking jerkily, his eyes flicking every few seconds to the strip of plaster. It seemed to satisfy him. To reassure. Finally to soothe. He smoked the whole cigarette through without speaking, but the jerky movements gradually quietened, and by the time he threw the stub on the floor and twisted his foot on it the worst of the jangle had disappeared.
‘I’ll make a bargain with you,’ I said.
‘What bargain?’
‘I’ll say the pitchfork was an accident.’
‘You know bloody well it wasn’t.’
‘I know. You know. The police know. But there were no witnesses... If I swear it was an accident there would be no question of you being even charged with attempted murder, let alone tried and convicted.’
He thought it over. There were a lot of little twitches in the muscles of his face, and the skin stretched gauntly over the cheekbones.
‘You don’t actually want to do time, do you?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Suppose we could get you off all the hooks... Assault, fraud, the lot.’
‘You couldn’t.’
‘I could keep you out of jail, that’s for sure.’
A long pause. Then he said, ‘A bargain. That means you want something in return.’
‘Mm.’
‘What, then?’
I ran my tongue round my teeth and took my time over replying.
‘I want...’ I said slowly, ‘I want you to talk about the way you and Vic tried to make me join your ring.’
He was surprised. ‘Is that all?’
‘It’ll do for a start.’
‘But you know. You know what Vic said to you.’
‘I don’t know what he said to you.’
He shrugged in bewilderment. ‘He just said if you wouldn’t go along with us, we’d break you.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘The price of your freedom is every word, every scrap of conversation that you can remember. Especially everything about that ally of Vic’s who got my stable burned.’
‘I told you... I don’t know.’
‘If you want to get out of here, you’re going to have to do better than that.’
He stared across the table. I saw his understanding of my offer deepen. He looked briefly round the bleak crowding walls of the little interview room and shivered. The last vestiges of the exalted murderous state evaporated. He looked smaller and colder and no danger to anybody.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I reckon I don’t owe Vic any more. I’ll not go to jail just to save his bloody skin. I’ll tell you what I can.’
It took three more cigarettes and a lot of pauses, but he did his best.
‘I reckon it started about six weeks ago. I mean, for some time before that Vic had said a few things about you being the biggest danger on the horizon, you were pretty good as an agent and dead honest, and he thought you might drain off some of the business which he’d otherwise corner.’
‘Room for us all,’ I murmured.
‘Not what Vic thought. Anyway, about six weeks ago he said it was time to bust you once and for all.’ He thought for a while, sucking deep on his cigarette. ‘See, Vic and I and some of the others had this thing going...’
‘The kick-backs systems,’ I said.
‘Ay. All right, so goody-goody sods like you can look down their noses and sniff, but it’s not illegal and it does a lot of people a lot of bloody good.’
‘Some people.’
‘All right, so the client pays over the odds, so what? Anyway, as Vic always says, the higher the prices the more commission the auctioneers get and the better they like it, so they’re just as bad, running things up as far as they bloody can.’
They also had a duty to the seller, I thought, but it wasn’t the time to argue.
‘Well, there we were, running this little ring and doing better and better out of it and then one day... I suppose it was just before the first yearling sales at Newmarket...’ He paused, looking back in his mind. His voice died away.
‘What happened?’ I prompted.
‘Vic was sort of... I don’t know... know and scared... both at once.’
‘Vic was scared?’ I said sceptically.
‘Ay, he was. Sort of. Sort of excited, though. Like someone had put him up to something he wanted to do but knew he shouldn’t.’
‘Like stealing apples?’
He brushed off the childish parallel. ‘These were no apples. Vic said we’d make so much money that what had gone before was only peanuts. He said there was a deal we could do with a breeder that had a colt by Transporter that was a perfect peach...’
‘Was it Vic’s own idea?’ I asked.
‘I thought so... I don’t know... Anyway, it worked a dream. He gave me five thousand quid just for bidding, and he made twenty out of it himself.’
‘By my reckoning he made thirty.’
‘Oh no...’ He stopped, surprised, then went on more slowly. ‘No... I remember him saying... ten thousand pounds went to the bloke who wrote the agreement that Vic got the breeder to sign. I said I thought it was a lot, but Vic says you have to pay for expert advice.’
‘Does he often pay for expert advice?’
He nodded. ‘All the time.’
‘Cheerfully?’
‘What? Of course.’
‘He isn’t being blackmailed?’
He looked scornful. ‘I’ll say not. You can’t see any piddling little blackmailer putting one over on Vic.’
‘No... but what it amounts to is that Vic is collecting huge kick-backs from breeders and other vendors, and out of that he is paying his own kick-backs to someone else for expert advice.’
He frowned. ‘I suppose you could say so.’
‘But you don’t know who?’
‘No.’
‘How long would you say he had been receiving this advice?’
‘How the hell do I know? A year. Two. About that.’
‘So what was different about the last six weeks?’
‘You were. All of a sudden Vic says it’s time to get rid of you. Either that or make you back down and take your cut with the rest of us. We all thought you’d come in with us with a bit of pressure. Well, see, it didn’t make sense you holding out. Only do yourself a lot of harm. Jiminy Bell, he says now he told us you’d never agree, but he bloody didn’t. That little sod, he said then that you were pretty soft really. A soft touch, he always said. Always good for a sob-story. So now he says he told us you were a tough nut, the squirmy little liar.’