'Where's Emily Cox?'
Safe. Same thing.
Bash.
'Where is Norman Quorn's sister?'
I was by then fairly breathless. It would have been difficult to tell him even if I'd wanted to.
He stepped forward to within three feet of me, and with quiet intensity said, 'Where's the list?'
The list.
The point of all the battering, I supposed, was to make it more likely that I would answer the one question that really mattered.
'Where's the list?'
He had never liked me, he had seen me always as a threat to his domination of Ivan. He had encouraged Patsy's obsessive suspicions of me. I remembered his dismay and fury when Ivan had given his powers of attorney to me, not to Patsy or himself. He hadn't wanted me looking into the brewery's affairs. He had been right to fear it.
His big body, his heavy personality faced me now with thunderous malevolence. He didn't care how much he hurt me. He was enjoying it. He might not be hitting me himself, but he was swaying in a sort of ecstasy as each blow landed. He wanted my surrender, but wanted it difficult; intended that I should crumble, but not too soon.
I saw the pleasure in his eyes. The full lips smiled. I hated him. Shook with hate.
'Tell me,' he said.
I saw it was my defeat he wanted almost as much as the list itself: and I saw also that he was wholly confident of achieving both. If I could deny him… then I would.
'Where's the list?'
The boxing gloves thudded here and there. Face, ribs, belly. Head. I lost count.
'Where's the list?'
Such a pretty garden, I groggily thought.
The punch-bag practice stopped. Grantchester went away. The four thugs stood around me watchfully, as if I could slide out of their ropes and knots, which I couldn't, but not for lack of trying.
Patsy's face swam into my close vision.
'What list?' she said.
It made no sense. Surely she knew what list.
I would have said she looked worried. Horrified even. But she'd lured me there. My own fault.
'Why,' she said, 'why did Oliver ask where your mother and Emily are?'
I dredged up an answer, 'How does he know they are not at home?' My face felt stiff. The rest just felt.
'Alexander,' Patsy said in distress, not working it out, 'whatever Oliver wants, for God's sake give it to him. This… this…' she gestured to my trussed state, and to the thugs,'… this is awful.'
I agreed with her. I also couldn't believe she didn't know what her friendly neighbourhood lawyer wanted. I'd done believing Patsy. Finished for life. Finished for what was left of life.
Oliver Grantchester was playing for millions, and boxing gloves were getting him nowhere. He returned from the direction of his house, pulling behind him a barbecue cooker on wheels.
Oh God, I thought. Oh no.
I can't do this. I'll tell him. I know I will. They're not my millions.
Grantchester took the grill grid off the barbecue and propped it against one of the wheeled legs. Then he went back into his bright conservatory and returned carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes and a bottle of lighter fuel. He poured briquettes from the bag into the fire-box of the barbecue and then poured the whole bottleful of lighter fuel over the briquettes.
He struck a match and tossed it onto the fuel.
Flame rushed upward in a roaring plume, scarlet and gold and eternally untamed. The flame was reflected in Grantchester's eyes, so that for a moment it looked as if the fire were inside his head, looking out.
Then, satisfied, he picked up the grill with a pair of long tongs and settled it in place, to get hot.
I could see the thugs' faces. They showed no surprise. One showed sickened revulsion, but still no surprise.
I thought: they've seen this before.
They'd seen Norman Quorn.
Norman Quorn… burned in a garden, with grass cuttings in his clothes…
Patsy looked merely puzzled. So did Surtees.
The briquettes flamed, heating up quickly.
I would tell him, I thought. Enough was enough. My entire body already hurt abominably. There was a point beyond which it wasn't sensible to go. There were out-of-date abstractions like the persistence of the human spirit, and they might be all right for paintings but didn't apply in pretty country gardens in the evening of the second Saturday in October.
Norman Quorn had burned down to his ribs, and died, and he hadn't told.
I wasn't Norman Quorn. I hadn't millions to lose. They were Patsy's millions. God damn her soul.
Grantchester waited with lip-licking anticipation for frightful ages while the heat built up, and when the briquettes glowed a bright searing red, he lifted the barred grill off the fire with his pair of long tongs and dropped it flat on the lawn, where it sizzled and singed the grass.
'You'll lie on that if you don't tell me,' he said. He was enjoying himself. 'Where's the list?'
Cussed, rebellious, stubborn… I might be all those by nature: but I knew I would tell him.
Defeat lay there at my feet, blackening the grass. Money was of no importance. The decision was a matter of will. Of pride, even. And such pride came too expensive.
Tell him… you have to.
'Where is it?' he said.
I meant to tell him. I tried to tell him. But when it came to the point, I couldn't.
So I burned.
Some of the marks will be there always, but I can't see them unless I look in a mirror.
I could hear someone screaming and I remembered Surtees promising 'next time you'll scream', but it wasn't I, after all, who was screaming; it was Patsy.
Her high urgent voice, screaming.
'No. No. You can't. For God's sake, stop it. Oliver. Surtees. You can't do this. Stop it. For God's sake. Stop it…'
The noise I made wasn't a scream. From deep inside, like an age-old recognition of a primeval torment, starting low in my gut and ending like a growl in the throat, the sound I heard in myself, that was at one with myself, that was all there was of existence, that unified every feeling, every nerve's message into one consuming elemental protest, that noise was a deep sort of groan.
I could hear him repeating, 'Where is it? Where is it?'
Irrelevant.
It all lasted, I dare say, not much more than a minute. Two minutes, perhaps.
Half a lifetime, condensed.
I'd gone beyond speech when the scene blew apart.
With crashes and bangs and shrieking metal the driving cab and entire front half of a large travelling coach smashed down the fence and gate between the drive and the garden. Out of the bus and onto the lawn poured a half-drunk mob of football supporters, all dressed in orange (it seemed) with orange scarves and heavy boots and raucous shouting voices.
'Where's the beer, then? Where's the beer?'
Scrambling through the demolished fence came more and more orange scarves. Hooligan faces. 'Where's the beer?'
The four thugs who'd been pinning down my arms and legs decided to quit and took their weight off me so that I was blessedly able to roll off the grill and lie face down on the cool grass: and a pair of long legs in black tights appeared in my limited field of vision, with a familiar voice above me saying, 'Jesus Christ, Al,' and I tried to say, 'What took you so long?' but it didn't come out.
The brightly lit garden went on fining with noise and orange scarves and demands for beer. Surrealism, I thought.
Chris went away and came back and poured a container of cold water over me, and squatted down beside me and said, 'Your sweater was smouldering, for God's sake,' and I agreed with him silently that water was better than fire any day.
'Al,' he said worriedly, 'are you OK?'
'Yuh.'
A goldfish flapped on the grass. Poor little bugger. A goldfish out of the pond. Pond water, that Chris had used.