“You weren’t supposed to find me,” he exclaimed, “and in any case, you’re dead.”
“I’m not Martin Stukely,” I said.
“Oh.” His face went blank. “No, of course, you aren’t.” Puzzlement set in. “I mean, what do you want?”
“First of all,” I said plainly, “I’d like to accept your mother’s invitation.”
“Huh?”
“To be warm.”
“Oh! I get you. The kitchen is warmest.”
“Lead on, then.”
He shrugged and stretched to close the door behind me, and then led the way down beside the staircase to the heart of all such terrace houses, the space where life was lived. There was a central table covered with a patterned plastic cloth, four attendant unmatched upright chairs and a sideboard deep in clutter. A television set stood aslant on a draining board otherwise stacked with unwashed dishes, and checked vinyl tiles covered the floor.
In spite of the disorganization there was bright new paint and nothing disturbingly sordid. I had an overall impression of yellow.
Mrs. Verity sat in one of the chairs, rocking on its back legs and gulping smoke as if she lived on it.
She said pleasantly enough, “We get all sorts of people here, what with Vic and his wretched Internet. We’ll get a full-sized genie one of these days, I shouldn’t wonder.” She gestured vaguely to one of the chairs, and I sat on it.
“I was a friend of Martin Stukely,” I explained, and I asked Vic what was on the videotape that he had sent or given to Martin at Cheltenham.
“Yes, well, there wasn’t a tape,” he said briefly. “I didn’t go to Cheltenham.”
I pulled his letter to Martin out of the envelope and gave it to him to read.
He shrugged again and handed it back when he’d reached the end.
“It was just a game. I made up the tape.” He was nervous, all the same.
“What knowledge was it that was dynamite?”
“Look, none.” He grew impatient. “I told you. I made it up.”
“Why did you send it to Martin Stukely?”
I was careful not to let the questions sound too aggressive, but in some way that I didn’t understand, they raised all his defenses and colored his cheeks red.
His mother said to me, “What’s all this about a tape? Do you mean a videotape? Vic hasn’t got any videotapes. We’re going to get a new video machine any day now, then it will be different.”
I explained apologetically. “Someone did give Martin a videotape at Cheltenham races. Martin gave it to Ed Payne, his valet, to keep safe, and Ed gave it to me, but it was stolen before I could see what was on it. Then all the videotapes in Martin Stukely’s house and all the videotapes in my own house were stolen too.”
“I hope you’re not suggesting that Vic stole anything, because I can promise you he wouldn’t.” Mrs Verity had grasped one suggestion wrongly and hadn’t listened clearly to the rest, so she too advanced to the edge of anger, and I did my best to retreat and placate, but her natural good humor had been dented, and her welcome had evaporated. She stubbed out a cigarette instead of lighting another from it, and stood up as a decisive signal that it was time I left.
I said amiably to young Victor, “Call me,” and although he shook his head I wrote my mobile number on the margin of a Sunday newspaper.
Then I stepped out of No. 19 Lorna Terrace and walked unhurriedly along the street pondering two odd unanswered questions.
First, how did Victor happen to come to Martin’s attention?
Second, why had neither mother nor son asked my name?
Lorna Terrace curved sharply to the left, taking No. 19 out of sight behind me.
I paused there, wondering whether or not to go back. I was conscious of not having done very well. I’d set off expecting to unearth the mysteries of the videotape, if not with ease, then actually without extreme trouble. Instead I seemed to have screwed up even what I’d thought I understood.
Irresolutely I wasted time and missed the train I’d thought of catching. I might be OK at glass, but not excellent at Sherlock Holmes. Dim Doctor Watson, that was me. It grew dark and it took me a long time to reach Broadway. Luckily, I found a willing neighbor on the train to give me a lift from the station.
Without Martin, I reflected with depression, I was either going to spend a fortune on cabs or thumb a thousand lifts. There were still eighty-one days before I could apply to get my license-to-speed out of the freezer.
I thanked my generous companion with a wave as he drove away, and fishing out a small bunch of keys, I plodded towards the gallery door. Sunday evening. No one about. Brilliant lights shining from Logan Glass.
I hadn’t learned yet to beware of shadows. Figures in black materialized from the deep entrance to the antique bookshop next door and from the dark line of the trash bins put out ready for collection on Monday morning.
I suppose there were four of them leaping about in the dark; an impression, not an accurate count. Four was profligate, anyway. Three, two, maybe only one could have done the job. I guessed they’d been waiting there for a long time and it hadn’t improved their temper.
I hadn’t expected another physical attack. The memory of the orange cylinder of cyclopropane had faded. The cylinder, I soon found, had delivered a less painful message than the one on my doorstep. This one consisted of multiple bashes and bangs and of being slammed two or three times against the lumpy bit of Cotswold stone wall that joined the bookshop to my own place.
Disorientated by the attack itself, I heard demands as if from a distance that I should disclose information that I knew I didn’t have. I tried to tell them. They didn’t listen.
All that was annoying enough, but it was their additional aim that lit my own inner protection furnace and put power into half-forgotten techniques of kickboxing left over from my teens.
It seemed that a straightforward pulping was only half their purpose, as a sharp excited voice specifically instructed over and over again, “Break his wrists. Go on. Break his wrists...” And later, out of the dark, the same voice exulting, “That got him.”
No, it bloody didn’t. Pain screeched up my arm. My thoughts were blasphemy. Strong, whole and flexible wrists were as essential to a glassblower as to a gymnast on the Olympic high rings.
Two of the black-clad agile figures waved baseball bats. One with heavily developed shoulders was recognizably Norman Osprey. Looking back later from a huddled sort of collapse on the sidewalk, I saw that only one of those two had the bright idea of holding my fingers tightly together in a bunch against the wall before getting his colleague to aim just below them with the bat.
I had too much to lose and I hadn’t been aware of how desperately one could fight when it was the real thing. My wrists didn’t get broken but my watch stopped in pieces from a direct hit. There were lumps and bruised areas all over everywhere. A few cuts. Torn skin. Enough. But my fingers worked, and that was all that mattered.
Maybe the fracas would have ended with me taking a fresh hole in the ground beside Martin, but Broadway wasn’t a ghost town in a western desert; it was somewhere that people walked their dogs on a Sunday evening, and it was a dog-walker who yelled at my attackers, and with three toothy Dobermans barking and pulling at their leashes, got the shadowy figures to change their minds smartly and vanish as fast as they’d come.
“Gerard Logan!” The tall dog-walker, astounded, bending to look at me, knew me by sight, as I did him.
“Are you all right?”
No, I wasn’t. I said, “Yes,” as one does.