She wandered through the showroom looking at the small colorful vases, the clowns, sailing boats, fishes and horses. She picked up a haloed angel and disapproved of the price sticker under the feet. Her swath of hair fell forward, framing her intent face, and I again clearly saw the bright analytical intelligence inside the sloppy hippie-type disguise. She was through and through a police officer, not primarily a come-hither female.
Replacing the angel with decision on the shelf, she folded her notebook, stored it out of sight and with body language announced that the investigation, despite its lack of results, was over. It was the go-to-work version of Constable Dodd that prepared to step into the street.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?” She concentrated on her change of character..
“Why the too-big sweater and the baseball cap?”
She flashed me an aware, amused glance and turned back to the world outside. “You happened to have been robbed on my allotted beat. My assignment in Broadway is to spot the gang stealing cars on bank holidays in this area. Thanks for your time.”
She grinned with cheerfulness and shuffled off down the hill, pausing to talk to a homeless-looking layabout sitting in a shop doorway, huddling against the chill of morning.
A pity the hippie and the hobo hadn’t been car-thief spotting at midnight, I thought vaguely, and telephoned to the hospital to inquire about Baxter.
Awake and grumbling, I gathered. I left a message of goodwill.
Bon-Bon next.
She wailed miserably into my ear. “But darling Gerard, of course I didn’t tell Priam not to bring you with him. How could you believe it? You are the first person Martin would want to come here. Please, please come as soon as you can, the children are crying and everything’s dreadful.” She drew a shaky breath, the tears distorting her voice. “We were going to a midnight party... and the baby-sitter came and said she wanted her full money anyway, even if Martin was dead, can you believe it? And Priam talked about the inconvenience of finding another jockey halfway through the season. He’s an old fool and he kept patting me...”
“He was seriously upset,” I assured her. “A matter of tears.”
“Priam?”
I frowned at the memory, but the tears had looked real.
“How long did he stay with you?” I asked.
“Stay? He didn’t stay long. Ten to fifteen minutes, maybe. My mother descended on us while he was here, and you’ve met her, you know what she’s like. Priam was mostly in Martin’s den, I think. He kept saying he had to be back for evening stables, he couldn’t sit still.” Bon-Bon’s despair overflowed. “Can’t you come? Please, please come. I can’t deal with my mother by myself.”
“As soon as I’ve done one job, and found some transport. Say... about noon.”
“Oh yes, I forgot your bloody car. Where are you? Did you get home?”
“I’m in my workshop.”
“I’ll come and fetch you...”
“No. First, fill your mama with gin and let the children loose on her, then shut yourself in Martin’s den and watch the tapes of him winning three Grand Nationals, but don’t drive anywhere while you’re so upset. I’ll find transport, but at the worst we could persuade your remarkable parent to lend me Worthington and the Rolls.”
Bon-Bon’s mother’s versatile chauffeur raised his eyebrows to heaven frequently at Marigold’s odd requirements, but had been known to drive a roofless Land Rover at breakneck speed at night across stubble fields, headlights blazing in the dark, while his employer stood balancing behind him with a double-barreled shotgun loosing off at mesmerized rabbits over his head. Martin said he’d been afraid to watch, but Worthington and Marigold had achieved a bag of forty and freed her land of a voracious pest.
Worthington, bald and fifty, was more an adventure than a last resort.
On New Year’s Day 2000 in England the world in general came to a stop. Saturday’s running of one of the best steeplechasing afternoon programs of the whole midwinter season was stuck in a silly halt because the people who worked the betting machines wanted to stay at home. There was no racing — and no football — to entertain the non-workers on or off the television.
Logan Glass astounded the other residents of Broadway by opening its doors to the day-before’s customers, who arrived to collect their overnight-cooled souvenirs. To my own astonishment two of my assistants turned up, even though bleary-eyed, saying they couldn’t leave me to pack the whole delivery job alone; so it was with speed and good humor that my new century began. I looked back later at the peace of that brief morning with a feeling of unreality that life could ever have been so safe and simple.
Pamela Jane, twittery, anxious, stick-thin and wanly pretty, insisted on driving me to Bon-Bon’s place herself, leaving me in the driveway there and departing with a wave, hurrying back to the shop, as she’d left Irish alone there.
Martin and Bon-Bon had agreed at least on their house, an eighteenth-century gem that Marigold had helped them buy. I admired it every time I went there.
A small van stood on the gravel, dark blue with a commercial name painted on it in yellow: THOMPSON ELECTRONICS. I supposed it was because I’d been working myself that I didn’t immediately remember that that day was a national holiday; definitely a moratorium for television repair vans.
Chaos was too weak a word to describe what I found inside Martin’s house. For a start, the front door was visibly ajar and, when I touched it, it swung wide, although it was only the kitchen door the family left hospitably unlocked, both for friends and for visiting tradesmen.
Beginning to feel a slight unease, I stepped through the heavily carved front doorway and shouted, but without response, and a pace or two later I learned why I had misgivings.
Bon-Bon’s mother, Marigold, frothy gray hair and floaty purple dress in disarray as usual, lay unconscious on the stairs. Worthington, her eccentric chauffeur, sprawled like a drugged medieval guard dog at her feet.
The four children, out of sight, were uncannily quiet, and the door to Martin’s room, his den, was closed on silence.
I opened this door immediately and found Bon-Bon there, lying full-length on the wood block floor. Again, as with Lloyd Baxter, I knelt to feel for a pulse in the neck, but this time with sharp anxiety; and I felt the living ga-bump ga-bump with a deeper relief. Concentrating on Bon-Bon, I saw too late in peripheral sight a movement behind my right shoulder... a dark figure speeding from where he’d been hiding behind the door.
I jerked halfway to standing but wasn’t quick enough on my feet. There was a short second in which I glimpsed a small metal gas cylinder — more or less like a quarter-sized fire extinguisher. But this cylinder wasn’t red. It was orange. It hit my head. Martin’s den turned gray, dark gray, and black. A deep well of nothing.
I returned slowly to a gallery of watchers. To a row of eyes dizzily in front of my own. I couldn’t think where I was or what was happening. It had to be bad, though, because the children’s eyes looked huge with fright.
I was lying on my back. Into the blank spaces of memory slowly crept the picture of an orange gas cylinder in the hands of a figure in a black head mask with holes cut out for eyes.
As a return to awareness grew clearer I focused on Bon-Bon’s face and tried to stand up. Bon-Bon, seeing this minor revival, said with great relief, “Thank God you’re all right. We’ve all been gassed and we’ve all been sick since we woke up. Totter to the loo next door, there’s a chum. Don’t throw up in here.”