So I stayed and looked after things, and because of that I saved myself at least another sore head, as thieves broke into my house on the hill that night and stole everything that could remotely be called a videotape.
On Monday, after an early-morning session in the workshop making new little items for stock, I went to Cheltenham races again (by taxi) to talk to Martin’s valet, Eddie Payne.
Ed or Eddie (he answered to both) was ready to help, he said, but he couldn’t. He’d spent all weekend thinking it over and he said, his gaze darting over my shoulder and back again to my face, he couldn’t — however hard he tried — remember any more than he’d told me on Friday. I thought back to the moment of empathy between us, when we had each realized what we’d lost. That moment of genuine emptiness had gone.
The difference between Friday and Monday was a fierce-eyed woman approaching forty, now standing a pace or two behind me, a woman Ed referred to as his daughter. He slid a second glance at her expressionlessly and like a ventriloquist not moving his lips, said to me almost too quietly for me to hear, “She knows the man who gave Martin the tape.”
The woman said sharply, “What did you say, Dad? Do speak up.”
“I said we’d miss Martin badly,” Eddie said, “and I’m due back in the changing room. Tell Gerard — Mr. Logan — what he wants to know, why don’t you?”
He walked away with a worried shuffle, apologetically saying to me as he went, “Her name’s Rose; she’s a good girl really.”
Rose, the good girl, gave me such a bitter flash of hate that I wondered what I’d ever done to annoy her, as I hadn’t known of her existence until moments earlier. She was angularly bony and had mid-brown hair with frizzy sticking-out curls. Her skin was dry and freckled, and although her clothes looked too big for the thin body inside, there was about her an extraordinary air of magnetism.
“Er... Rose...” I started.
“Mrs. Robins,” she interrupted abruptly.
I cleared my throat and tried again.
“Mrs. Robins, then, could I buy you some coffee, or a drink in the bar?”
She said, “No, you could not.” She bit the words off with emphasis. She said, “You’d do better to mind your own business.”
“Mrs. Robins, did you see who gave a brown paper-wrapped parcel to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races last Friday?”
Such a simple question. She primped her lips together tightly, swiveled on her heel, and walked away with an air of not intending to come back.
After a short pause, I followed her. Looking down from time to time at my racecard as any prospective punter would, I trickled along in her wake as she made for the ranks of bookmakers’ pitches in front of the open-to-the-public Tattersalls stands. She stopped at a board announcing ARTHUR ROBINS, PRESTWICK, ESTABLISHED 1894, and talked to an Elvis Presley lookalike with heavy black side whiskers, who was standing on a box, leaning down to take money from the public and dictating his transactions to a clerk, who was punching the bets into a computer.
Rose Robins, established long after 1894, had a fair amount to say. The Elvis lookalike frowned, listening, and I retreated: I might have strength and reasonable agility but Rose’s contact made my muscle power look the stuff of kindergartens. Whichever Robins filled the shoes of Arthur nowadays, if he were the Elvis lookalike, he weighed in with grandfather-gorilla shoulders.
Patiently I climbed the stands and waited while the Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, bookmakers — three of them — took bets on the final two races of the afternoon, and then I watched their chief, the Elvis lookalike, pack up the board and take charge of the money bag and walk towards the exit with Rose and his two helpers beside him. I watched them go out of sight. As far as I could tell, they all left the racetrack. As a group, they equaled an armored tank.
From experience with Martin, I knew that jockeys’ valets finished their work after most of the crowds had gone home. A valet was the man who helped the jockeys change rapidly between races. He also looked after and cleaned their gear, saddles, britches, boots and so on, so it was all ready for the next time they raced. Martin had told me that a single valet would look after a whole bunch of jockeys and the valets would work as a team to cover all the race meetings. While Eddie packed up his hamper of saddles, kit and clothes for laundering, I waited with hope for him to reappear out of the changing room at the end of his day.
When he came out and saw me, he was at first alarmed, and then resigned.
“I suppose,” he said, “Rose wouldn’t tell you.”
“No,” I agreed. “So would you ask her something, for Martin’s sake?”
“Well...” He hesitated. “It depends.”
I said, “Ask her if the tape Martin gave you was the one he thought it was.”
He took a few seconds to work it out.
“Do you mean,” he asked doubtfully, “that my Rose thinks Martin had the wrong tape?”
“I think,” I confessed, “that if Martin’s tape ever surfaces after all the muddle and thieving, it’ll be a matter of luck.”
He protested self-righteously that he’d given me Martin’s tape in good faith. I insisted that I believed him. No more was said about Rose.
Eddie knew, as did the whole racing world after that day’s newspapers, that Martin’s funeral was planned for Thursday, provided no jinx upset Wednesday’s inquest. Eddie, eyes down, mumbled a few words about seeing me there, he supposed, and in discomfort hurried away to the inner realms of the changing rooms, from where the public with awkward questions were banned.
Rose Robins and her enmity added complexity to an already tangled situation.
I caught a bus from the racetrack which wound its way from village to village and, in the end, to Broadway. In spite of my having spent all the time tossing around in my mind the unexpected involvement of Eddie’s scratchy daughter I came to no more satisfactory or original conclusion than that someone had given some tape or other to Martin, who had given it to Eddie, who had given it to me, who had carelessly lost it to a thief.
Still drifting in outer space was whatever confidential data Martin had meant to entrust to me. In some respects that didn’t matter, and never would, just as long as the hidden nugget of information didn’t heat up or collide with an inconvenient truth. Additionally, as I had no road map to the ingredients of the nugget, I had no way of either foreseeing or preventing trouble.
Unrealistically, I simply hoped that Martin’s secret would remain forever hidden in uncharted orbit, and all of us could return to normal.
It was after five-thirty by the time I reached the doors of Logan Glass, and again my assistants were there, two of them making paperweights with enthusiasm and the third keeping shop. Bon-Bon had telephoned, they told me, saying she was begging me to go on organizing her household in return for transport; at least until after the funeral, and, much to the amusement of my assistants, the transport she sent that afternoon wasn’t her own runabout, but was Marigold’s Rolls.
Whenever we were alone together, I sat beside Worthington as he drove. He had offered me the comfort and prestige of the rear seat usually taken by his employer, but I felt wrong there. Moreover, on the showing of the last few days, if I sat in the back he tended both to call me “Sir” and to favor respectful silence instead of pithy and irreverent observation. When I sat in the front, Marigold was “Marigold”; when in the back, “Mrs. Knight.” When I sat beside her chauffeur, he showed his inner self.
In addition to being bald, fifty and kind to children, Worthington disliked the police force as a matter of principle, referred to marriage as bondage and believed in the usefulness of being able to out-kick any other muscle man in sight. It wasn’t so much as a chauffeur that I now valued Worthington at my elbow, but as a prospective bodyguard. The Elvis lookalike had radiated latent menace at an intensity that I hadn’t met before and didn’t like; and for a detonator there was fierce, thorny Rose, and it was with her in mind that I casually asked Worthington if he’d ever placed a bet at the races with Arthur Robins, Est. 1894.