‘As you will see,’ I said, ‘those are photostat copies. More like them are in the post to the Senior Steward and to your boss at Universal Telecast, and to several other people as well. They will get them tomorrow morning. And they will no longer wonder why you failed to turn up for your programme tonight.’
He still seemed unable to speak, and his hands shook convulsively. I passed to him through the bars the rolled up portrait Joanna had drawn of him. He opened it, and it was clearly another blow.
‘I brought it to show you,’ I said, ‘so that you would realise beyond any doubt that I know exactly what you have been doing. All along you have found that having an instantly recognisable face was a big handicap when it came to doing things you couldn’t explain away, like ramming an old Jaguar across Peter Cloony’s lane.’
His head jerked back, as if it still surprised him that I knew so much.
I said calmly, ‘A ticket collector at Cheltenham said you were pretty.’
I smiled faintly. He looked very far from pretty at that moment.
‘As for that Jaguar,’ I said, ‘I haven’t had time yet to find out where it came from, but it can be done. It’s only a question of asking. Advertising its number in the trade papers... tracing its former owner... that sort of thing. Tedious, I dare say, but definitely possible, and if necessary I will do it. No one would forget having you for a customer.
‘You must have bought it in the week after the tank carrier blocked Cloony’s lane, because that is what gave you the idea. Do you think you can explain away the time sequence of acquiring the Jaguar and abandoning it exactly where and when and how you did? And disappearing from the scene immediately afterwards?’
His mouth hung open and the muscle twitched in his cheek.
‘Most of your vicious rumours,’ I said, changing tack, ‘were spread for you by Corin Kellar and John Ballerton, who you found would foolishly repeat every thought that you put into their heads. I hope you know Corin well enough to realise that he never stands by his friends. When the contents of the letter he will receive in the morning sink into that rat-brain of his, and he finds that other people have had letters like it, there won’t be anyone spewing out more damaging truth about you than him. He will start telling everyone, for instance, that it was you who set him at loggerheads with Art Mathews. There won’t be any stopping him.’
‘You see,’ I finished after a pause, ‘I think it is only justice that as far as possible you should suffer exactly what you inflicted on other people.’
He spoke at last. The words came out in a wheezing croak, and he was past caring what admissions he made. ‘How did you find it out?’ he said disbelievingly. ‘You didn’t know last Friday, you couldn’t see...’
‘I did know last Friday,’ I said, ‘I knew just how far you had gone to smash Peter Cloony, and I knew you hated me enough to give yourself asthma doping my mounts. I knew the dope business had gone sour on you when it came to Turniptop at Stratford. And you may care to learn that it was no accident that James Axminster jogged your arm and stepped on the sugar lumps; I asked him to, and told him what you were doing. I knew all about your curdled, obsessive jealousy of jockeys. I didn’t need to see you last Friday to know you... there wasn’t anyone else with any reason to want me out of action.’
‘You can’t have known all that,’ he said obstinately, clinging to it as if it mattered. ‘You didn’t know the next day when I interviewed you after the race...’ His voice trailed off in a wheeze and he stared at me hopelessly through the bars.
‘You aren’t the only one who can smile and hate at the same time,’ I said neutrally. ‘I learned it from you.’
He made a sound like a high-pitched moan, and turned his back towards me with his arms bent upwards and folded over his head in an attitude of the utmost misery and despair. It may be regrettable, but I felt no pity for him at all.
I walked away from his window, round the cottage and in at the front door, and sat down again on the hay in the front room. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two. The afternoon stretched lengthily ahead.
Kemp-Lore had another spell of screaming for help through the window, but no one came; then he tried the door again, but there was no handle on his side of it for him to pull, and it was too solidly constructed for him to kick his way through. Buttonhook grew restive again from the noise and started pawing the ground, and Kemp-Lore shouted to me furiously to let him out, let him out, let him out.
Joanna’s great fear had been that his asthma would make him seriously ill, and she had repeatedly warned me to be careful; but I judged that while he had enough breath for so much yelling he was in no real danger, and I sat and listened to him without relenting. The slow hours passed, punctuated only by the bursts of fury from the back room, while I stretched myself comfortably across the hay and day-dreamed about marriage to my cousin.
At about five o’clock he was quiet for a long time. I got up and walked round the outside of the cottage and looked in through the window. He was lying face down in the straw near the door, not moving at all.
I watched him for a few minutes and called his name, but as he still did not stir I began to be alarmed, and decided I would have to make sure he was all right. I returned to the hall, and having shut the front door firmly behind me, I unlocked the padlock on the back room. The door swung inwards, and Buttonhook, lifting her head, greeted me with a soft whinny.
Kemp-Lore was alive, that at least was plain. The sound of his high, squeezed breath rose unmistakably from his still form. I bent down beside him to see into just how bad a spasm he had been driven, but I never did get around to turning him over or feeling his pulse. As soon as I was down on one knee beside him he heaved himself up and into me, knocking me sprawling off balance, and sprang like lightning for the door.
I caught his shoe as it zipped across three inches from my face and yanked him back. He fell heavily on top of me and we rolled towards Buttonhook, with me trying to pin him down on the floor and he fighting like a tiger to get free. The mare was frightened. She cowered back against the wall to get out of our way, but it was a small room and our struggles took us among Buttonhook’s feet and under her belly. She stepped gingerly over us and made cautiously for the open door.
Kemp-Lore’s left hand was clamped round my right wrist, a circumstance which hindered me considerably. If he’d been clairvoyant he couldn’t have struck on anything better calculated to cause me inconvenience. I hit him in the face and neck with my left hand, but I was too close to get any weight behind it and was also fairly occupied dodging the blows he aimed at me in return.
After he had lost the advantage of surprise, he seemed to decide he could only get free of me by lacing his fingers in my hair and banging my head against the wall, for this he tried repeatedly to do. He was staggeringly strong, more than I would have believed possible in view of his asthma, and the fury and desperation which fired him blazed in his blue eyes like a furnace.
If my hair hadn’t been so short he would probably have succeeded in knocking me out, but his fingers kept slipping when I twisted my head violently in his grasp, and the third time my ear grazed the plaster I managed at last to wrench my right hand free as well.
After that, hauling off a fraction, I landed a socking right jab in his short ribs, and the air whistled out of his lungs screeching like an express train. He went a sick grey-green colour and fell slackly off me, gasping and retching and clawing his throat for air.
I got to my feet and hauled him up, and staggered with him over to the window, holding him where the fresh cold air blew into his face. After three or four minutes his colour improved and the terrifying heaving lessened, and some strength flowed back into his sagging legs.