“I can only guess.”
“Go on, then. Guess. Because it wasn’t some old guy that gassed us with that cyclopropane. Young Daniel described the sneakers that the gas man wore, and nobody but a teenager, I don’t think, would be seen dead in them.”
I found I disagreed. Eccentric white-beards might wear anything. They might also make erotic tapes. They might also tell someone the tape was worth a fortune, and that it was in Gerard Logan’s hands. A few little lies. Diversionary tactics. Beat up Logan, make him ready to cough up the tape, or, failing that, whatever information had been on it.
What had Martin been going to give me for safekeeping?
Did I any longer really want to know?
If I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell. But if they believed I knew and wouldn’t tell... dammit, I thought, we’ve almost been through that already, and I couldn’t expect Tom Pigeon and Dobermans to rescue me every time.
Not knowing the secret on the tape was perhaps worse than knowing it. So somehow or other, I decided, it wasn’t enough to discover who took it, it was essential after all to find out what they expected as well as what they’d actually got.
Once Worthington’s hunger had retreated temporarily and we had lost our money on a horse Martin should have ridden, we walked back to where the serried ranks of bookmakers were shouting their offers for the getting-out stakes, the last race.
With Worthington’s well-known muscle as guarantee of immunity from onslaught, we arrived in the living-and-breathing space of the 1894 Arthur Robins operation 2000. Norman Osprey’s raucous voice soared unselfconsciously above his neighbors’ until he realized we were listening, at which point a sudden silence gave everyone else a chance.
Close enough to see the scissor marks on the Elvis sideburns, I said, “Tell Rose...”
“Tell her yourself,” he interrupted forcefully. “She’s just behind you.”
I turned without haste, leaving Worthington at my back. Rose glared, rigid with a hatred I didn’t at that point understand. As before, the dryness of her skin echoed the lack of generosity in her nature, but earlier, at our first and last racetrack encounter, neither of us held the subsequent memory of fists, stone walls, baseball bats, a smashed watch and a whole bunch more of assaults-to-the-person, all orchestrated and encouraged as Sunday evening entertainment for the troops.
Being as close to her as a couple of yards gave my outraged skin goose bumps, but she seemed to think a black mask and leotard had made her invisible.
I asked again the question she had already refused to answer.
“Who gave a videotape to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races?”
She answered this time that she didn’t know.
I said, “Do you mean you didn’t see anyone give Martin a parcel, or that you saw the transfer but didn’t know the person’s name?”
“Dead clever, aren’t you,” Rose said sarcastically. “Take your pick.”
Rose, I thought, wasn’t going to be trapped by words. At a guess she had both seen the transfer and knew the transferrer, but even Torquemada would have had trouble with her, and I hadn’t any thumbscrews handy in Logan Glass.
I said without much hope of being believed, “I don’t know where to look for the tape you want. I don’t know who took it and I don’t know why. I haven’t got it.”
Rose curled her lip.
As we walked away Worthington sighed deeply with frustration.
“You’d think Norman Osprey would be the ‘heavy’ in that outfit. He has the voice and the build for it. Everyone thinks of him as the power behind Arthur Robins 1894. But did you see him looking at Rose? She can make any blunder she likes, but I’m told she’s still the brains. She’s the boss. She calls the tune. My low-life investigator gave me a bell. He finds her very impressive, I’m afraid to say.”
I nodded.
Worthington, a practiced world traveler, said, “She hates you. Have you noticed?”
I told him I had indeed noticed. “But I don’t know why.”
“You’d want a psychiatrist to explain it properly, but I’ll tell you for zilch what I’ve learned. You’re a man, you’re strong, you look OK, you’re successful at your job and you’re not afraid of her; and I could go on, but that’s for starters. Then she has you roughed up, doesn’t she, and here you are looking as good as new, even if you aren’t feeling it, and sticking the finger up in her face, more or less, and believe me, I’d’ve chucked a rival down the stairs for less, if they as much as yawned in my presence.”
I listened to Worthington’s wisdom, but I said, “I haven’t done her any harm.”
“You threaten her. You’re too much for her. You’ll win the tennis match. So maybe she’ll have you killed first. She won’t kill you herself. And don’t ignore what I’m telling you. There are people who really have killed for hate. People who’ve wanted to win.”
Not to mention murders because of racism or religious prejudice, I thought, but it was still hard to imagine it applying to oneself — until one had felt the watch smash, of course.
I expected that Rose would have told Eddie Payne, her father, that I was at the races, but she hadn’t. Worthington and I lay in wait for him after the last race and easily am-bushed him in a pincer movement when he came out of the changing rooms on his way to his car.
He wasn’t happy. He looked from one to the other of us like a cornered horse, and it was as if to a fractious animal that I soothingly said, “Hi, Ed. How’s things?”
“I don’t know anything I haven’t told you,” he protested.
I thought if I cast him a few artificial flies, I might startle and hook an unexpected fish; a trout, so to speak, sheltering in the reeds.
So I said, “Is Rose married to Norman Osprey?”
His face lightened to nearly a laugh. “Rose is still Rose Payne but she calls herself Robins and sometimes Mrs. Robins when it suits her, but she doesn’t like men, my Rose. Pity, really, but there it is.”
“But she likes to rule them?”
“She’s always made boys do what she wants.”
“Were you with her yesterday evening?” I asked him the question casually, but he knew instantly what I meant.
“I didn’t lay a finger on you,” he said quickly. “It wasn’t me.” He looked from me to Worthington and back again, this time with puzzlement. “Look,” he said wheedlingly, as if begging for forgiveness, “they didn’t give you a chance. I told Rose it wasn’t fair...” He wavered to a stop.
With interest I asked, “Do you mean that you yourself wore a black mask in Broadway yesterday evening?” and almost with incredulity saw in his face an expression of shame that he had.
“Rose said we would just frighten you” He stared at me with unhappy eyes. “I tried to stop her, honest. I never thought you’d be here today. So it can’t have been as bad as it looked... but I know it was awful. I went to confession first to ask forgiveness...”
“So there was you and Rose.” I said it matter-of- factly, though stunned beneath. “And Norman Osprey, and who else? One of Norman Osprey’s bookmaking clerks, was it?”
“No. Not them.”
Horror suddenly closed his mouth. He had already admitted far too much from his daughter’s point of view, and if the other so far unidentified black-mask shape were one of the other two clerks working with Norman Osprey at Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, Eddie was no longer going to admit it easily.
I tried another fly.
“Do you know anyone who could lay their hands on anesthetics?”
A blank.
Try again.
“Or anyone with a white beard, known to Martin?”
He hesitated over that, but in the end shook his head.
I said, “Do you yourself know anyone with a white beard who looks like a university lecturer?”