Goldfish pond. Cold water.
Great idea.
I made an attempt to crawl and stagger there, and Chris, seeing the point, unwound the ropes from my arms and legs and neck and hooked an arm under my armpit and gave me a haul, so that somehow or other I crossed the short distance of grass and lay down full-length in the cold pond, my head using the surrounding stones like a pillow, leaves of waterlilies on my chest, the overall relief enormous.
'Did bloody Surtees do this?' Chris demanded with fury.
'Bloody Grantchester.'
He went away.
There were more people in the garden. Policemen. Uniforms. The monstrous front half of the coach rose over the scene like a giant incarnation of Chaos, yellow, white and silver with windows like eyes. I lay in the pond and watched the football fans scurry about looking for free beer and turning violent when they couldn't find any, and I watched the police slapping handcuffs on everyone moving, including the four thugs, who had over-estimated the window of escape, and I watched Patsy's bewilderment and Surtees's swings from glee to noncomprehension and back.
I heard one of the football crowd telling policemen that it was a girl who had stolen the coach from outside the pub where they had pulled up for some refreshment; a girl who had yelled that there was free beer at the party along the road, a girl - 'a bit of all right', 'a knock-out' - who'd said she was up for grabs for the quickest pair of boots after her into the garden.
When they'd drifted away, Chris came back.
'I caught bloody Grantchester trying to sneak out through the garage,' he said with satisfaction. 'He'll be going nowhere for a while.'
'Chris,' I said. 'Get lost.'
'Do you mean it?'
'The police are looking for the young woman who drove the bus.'
A shiny object splashed down onto my chest.
A set of brass knuckles, gleaming wetly. I swept them off my chest into deeper, concealing water.
Chris's hand briefly squeezed my shoulder and I had only one more glimpse of his dark shape as he passed from the lit side of the bushes into the shadows.
The farce continued. A large uniformed policeman told me to get out of the pond, and when I failed to obey he clicked a pair of handcuffs on my wrists and walked off, deaf to protests.
It gradually appeared that a couple of people in the garden were neither uniformed police nor uniformed fanatics but the law in plain clothes or, in other words, tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.
The artificial waterfall splashed cold water over my throbbing head. I lifted my handcuffed hands and steered the water delicately over my face.
A new voice said, 'Get out of the pond.'
I opened my closed eyes. The voice held police authority. Just behind him stood Patsy.
He was a middle-aged man, not unkind, but my occupancy of the pond, the length of my wet hair and the presence of the handcuffs could hardly have been encouraging.
'Get out,' he said. 'Stand up.'
'I don't know if he can,' Patsy said worriedly. "They were hitting him…'
'Who were?'
She looked over to where bunches of handcuffed figures sat gloomily on the grass. No beer. No fun at all.
'And they burnt him,' Patsy said. 'I couldn't stop them.'
The policeman looked at the barbecue with its glowing coals.
'No,' Patsy said, pointing, 'on that grill thing, over there.'
One of the uniformed policemen bent down to pick the grill up and snatched his hand away, cursing and sucking his fingers.
I laughed.
Patsy said as if shattered, 'Alexander, it's not funny.'
The policeman said, 'Mrs Benchmark, do you know this man?'
'Of course I know him.' She stared down at me. I looked expressionlessly back, resigned to the usual abuse. 'He's… he's my brother,' she said.
It came nearer to breaking me up than all Grantchester's attentions.
She saw that it did, and it made her cry.
Patsy, my implacable enemy, wept.
She brushed the tears away brusquely and told the policeman she would point out my attackers among the football crowd, and when they moved off their place was taken by Surtees, who was very far from a change of heart and had clearly enjoyed the earlier entertainment.
'Where's the horse?' he said. He sneered. His feet quivered, I thought he might kick my head.
I said with threat, 'Surtees, any more shit from you and I'll tell Patsy where you go on Wednesday afternoons. I'll tell her the address of the little house on the outskirts of Guildford and I'll tell her the name of the prostitute who lives there, and I'll tell her what sort of sex you go there for.'
Surtees's mouth opened in absolute horror. When he could control his throat, he stuttered.
'How… how… how…? I'll deny it.'
I said, smiling, 'I paid a skinhead to follow you.'
His eyes seemed to bulge.
'So you keep your hands to yourself as far as I'm concerned, and your mouth shut, Surtees,' I said, 'and if you're still what Patsy wants, I won't disillusion her.'
He looked sick. He physically backed away from me, as if I'd touched him with the plague. I gazed up peacefully at the bright coloured lights in the trees. Life had its sweet moments, after all.
No one had actually seen Oliver Grantchester being attacked and tied up securely in his own garage. He had been swiftly knocked out and had seen no one. He was found, when he recovered consciousness, to be suffering not only from a blow to the back of the skull but also from a broken nose, a broken jaw, and extensive damage to his lower abdomen and genitals, as if he'd been well kicked while knowing nothing about it.
Whoever would do such a thing! Tut tut.
The police put him in a prison hospital and provided him with a doctor.
Patsy organised things, which she was good at.
Patsy organised me into a private hospital that specialised in burns with an elderly woman doctor able to deal with anything on a Saturday evening.
'Dear me,' she said. 'Nasty. Very painful. But you're a healthy young man. You'll heal.'
She wrapped me in bio-synthetic burn-healing artificial skin and large bandages and in her grandmotherly way enquired, 'And a couple of cracked ribs, too, wouldn't you say?'
'I would.'
She smiled. 'I'll see that you sleep.'
She efficiently drugged me out until six in the morning, when I phoned Chris's bleeper and got his return call five minutes later.
'Where the hell are you?' he demanded aggrievedly.
I told him.
'That hospital's strictly for millionaires,' he objected.
'Then get me out. Bring some clothes.'
He brought my own clothes, the ones he'd borrowed for his departure from the wake at Park Crescent three days earlier, and he arrived to find me standing by the window watching the grey dawn return to the perilous earth.
'Hospital gowns,' he said, as I turned to greet him, 'shouldn't be visited even on the damned.'
'They cut my clothes off last night.'
'Sue them.'
'Mm.'
'To be frank,' he said, almost awkwardly, 'I didn't expect you to be on your feet.'
'More comfortable,' I said succinctly. "That bus, if I may say so, was brilliant.'
He grinned. 'Yes, it was, wasn't it?'
'Go on then, tell me all.'
He dumped the carrier bag with the clothes in and came over to join me by the window, the familiar face alight with enjoyment. High cheekbones, light brown hair, bright brown eyes, natural air of impishness. Solemnity sat unnaturally upon him, and he couldn't tell me what had happened without making light-hearted jokes about it.
'Those thugs that jumped out of the bushes at you, they were the real McCoy. Brutal bastards. There was no mistaking they were the ones I'd been looking for. And to be honest, Al, I couldn't handle four of them at once on my own, any more than you could.'