I hadn’t specifically been keeping myself safe from Rollway, whatever he might believe, but from an unidentified enemy, someone there and dangerous, but unrecognized.
Irony everywhere...
I thought about Martha and Harley and the cocaine in Dozen Roses. I would ask them to keep the horse and race him, and I’d promise that if he never did any good I would give them their money back and send him to auction. What the Jockey Club and the racing press would have to say about the whole mess boggled the mind. We might still lose the York race: would have to, I guessed.
I thought of Clarissa in the Selfridge Hotel struggling to behave normally with a mind filled with visions of violence. I hoped she would ring up her Henry, reach back to solid ground, mourn Greville peacefully, be glad she’d saved his brother. I would leave the Wizard’s alarm set to 4:20 P.M., and remember them both when I heard it: and one could say it was sentimental, that their whole affair had been packed with sentimental behavior, but who cared, they’d enjoyed it, and I would endorse it.
At some point in the evening’s proceedings a highly senior plainclothes policeman arrived whom everyone else deferred to and called sir.
He introduced himself as Superintendent Ingold and invited a detailed statement from me, which a minion wrote down. The superintendent was short, piercing, businesslike, and considered what I said with pauses before his next question, as if internally computing my answers. He was also, usefully, a man who liked racing: who sorrowed over Nicholas Loder and knew of my existence.
I told him pretty plainly most of what had happened, omitting only a few things: the precise way Rollway had asked for his tube, and Clarissa’s presence, and the dire desperation of the minutes before she’d arrived. I made that hopeless fight a lot shorter, a lot easier, a rapid knockout.
“The crutches?” he inquired. “What are they for?”
“A spot of trouble with an ankle at Cheltenham.”
“When was that?”
“Nearly two weeks ago.”
He merely nodded. The crutch handles were quite heavy enough for clobbering villains, and he sought no other explanation.
It all took a fair while, with the pauses and the writing. I told him about the car crash near Hungerford. I said I thought it possible that it had been Rollway who shot Simms. I said that of course they would compare the bullets the Hungerford police had taken from the Daimler with those just now dug out of Greville’s walls, and those no doubt to be retrieved from Nicholas Loder’s silent form. I wondered innocently what sort of car Rollway drove. The Hungerford police, I told the superintendent, were looking for a gray Volvo.
After a pause a policeman was dispatched to search the street. He came back wide-eyed with his news and was told to put a cordon round the car and keep the public off.
It was by then well past dark. Every time the police or officials came into the house, the mechanical dog started barking and the lights repeatedly blazed on. I thought it amusing which says something for my lightheaded state of mind but it wore the police nerves to irritation.
“The switches are beside the front door,” I said to one of them eventually. “Why don’t you flip them all up?”
They did, and got peace.
“Who threw the flowerpot into the television?” the superintendent wanted to know.
“Burglars. Last Saturday. Two of your men came round.”
“Are you ill?” he said abruptly.
“No. Shaken.”
He nodded. Anyone would be, I thought.
One of the policemen mentioned Rollway’s threat that I wouldn’t live to give evidence. To be taken seriously, perhaps.
Ingold looked at me speculatively. “Does it worry you?”
“I’ll try to be careful.”
He smiled faintly. “Like on those horses?” The smile disappeared. “You could do worse than hire someone to mind your back for a while.”
I nodded my thanks. Brad, I thought dryly, would be ecstatic.
They took poor Nicholas Loder away. I would emphasize his bravery, I thought, and save what could be saved of his reputation. He had given me, after all, a chance of life.
Eventually the police wanted to seal the sitting room, although the superintendent said it was a precaution only: the events of the evening seemed crystal clear.
He handed me the crutches and asked where I would be going.
“Upstairs to bed,” I said.
“Here?” He was surprised. “In this house?”
“This house,” I said, “is a fortress. Until one lowers the drawbridge, that is.”
They sealed the sitting room, let themselves out, and left me alone in the newly quiet hallway.
I sat on the stairs and felt awful. Cold. Shivery. Old and gray. What I needed was a hot drink to get warm from inside, and there was no way I was going down to the kitchen. Hot water from the bathroom tap upstairs would do fine, I thought.
As happened in many sorts of battle, it wasn’t the moment of injury that was worst, but the time a couple of hours later when the body’s immediate natural anesthetic properties subsided and let pain take over: nature’s marvelous system for allowing a wild animal to flee to safety before hiding to lick its wounds with healing saliva. The human animal was no different. One needed the time to escape, and one needed the pain afterward to say something was wrong.
At the moment of maximum adrenaline, fight-or-flight, I’d believed I could run on that ankle. It had been mechanics that had defeated me, not instinct, not willingness. Two hours later, the idea of even standing on it was impossible. Movement alone became breathtaking. I’d sat in Greville’s chair for another two long hours after that, concentrating on policemen, blanking out feeling.
With them gone, there was no more pretending. However much I might protest in my mind, however much rage I might feel, I knew the damage to bones and ligaments was about as bad as before. Rollway had cracked them apart again. Back to square one... and the Hennessy only four and a half weeks away... and I was bloody well going to ride Datepalm in it, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone about tonight’s little stamping-ground, no one knew except Rollway and he wouldn’t boast about that.
If I stayed away from Lambourn for two weeks, Milo wouldn’t find out; not that he would himself care all that much. If he didn’t know, though, he couldn’t mention it to anyone else. No one expected me to be racing again for another four weeks. If I simply stayed in London for two of those and ran Greville’s business, no one would comment. Then once I could walk I’d go down to Lambourn and ride every day, get physiotherapy, borrow the Electrovet... it could be done... piece of cake.
Meanwhile there were the stairs.
Up in Greville’s bathroom, in a zipped bag with my washing things, I would find the envelope the orthopedic surgeon had given me, which I’d tucked into a waterproof pocket and traveled around with ever since. In the envelope, three small white tablets not as big as aspirins, more or less with my initials on: DF 118s. Only as a last resort, the orthopedist had said.
Wednesday evening, I reckoned, qualified.
I went up the stairs slowly, backward, sitting down, hooking the crutches up with me. If I dropped them, I thought, they would slither down to the bottom again. I wouldn’t drop them.
It was pretty fair hell. I reminded myself astringently that people had been known to crawl down mountains with much worse broken bones: they wouldn’t have made a fuss over one little flight upward. Anyway, there had to be an end to everything, and eventually I sat on the top step, with the crutches beside me, and thought that the DF 118s weren’t going to fly along magically to my tongue. I still had to get them.