Whip Hand

'Did you read it?' I said.

'No. Never got round to it. It was weeks ago.'

I picked up the book and opened it. On the fly-leaf someone had written 'John Viking' in a firm legible signature in black felt-tip. 'I don't know,' Louise said, anticipating my question, 'whether that is Nicky's writing or not.'

'Does Jenny know?'

'She hasn't seen this. She's staying with Toby in Yorkshire.' Jenny with Toby. Jenny with Ashe. For God's sake, I thought, what do you expect? She's gone, she's gone, she's not yours, you're divorced. And I hadn't been alone, not entirely.

'You look very tired,' Louise said doubtfully. I was disconcerted.

'Of course not.' I turned the pages, letting them flick over from under my thumb. It was, as it promised to be, a book about navigation, sea and air, with line drawings and diagrams. Dead reckoning, sextants, magnetism and drift. Nothing of any note except a single line of letters and figures, written with the same black ink, on the inside of the back cover.

Lift = 22.024 x V x P x (1/T1 – 1/T2)

I handed it over to Louise.

'Does this mean anything to you? Charles said you've a degree in Mathematics.'

She frowned at it faintly. 'Nicky needed a calculator for two plus two.'

He had done all right at two plus ten thousand, I thought.

'Um,' she said. 'Lift equals 22.024 times volume times pressure, times… I should think this is something to do with temperature change. Not my subject, really. This is physics.'

'Something to do with navigation?' I said.

She concentrated. I watched the way her face grew taut while she did the internal scan. A fast brain, I thought, under the pretty hair.

'It's funny,' she said finally, 'but I think it's just possibly something to do with how much you can lift with a gas bag.'

'Airship?' I said, thinking.

'It depends what 22.024 is,' she said. 'That's a constant. Which means,' she added, 'it is special to whatever this equation is all about.'

'I'm better at what's likely to win the three-thirty.'

She looked at her watch. 'You're three hours too late.'

'It'll come round again tomorrow.'

She relaxed into the armchair, handing back the book. 'I don't suppose it will help,' she said, 'but you seemed to want anything of Nicky's.'

'It might help a lot. You never know.'

'But how?'

'It's John Viking's book. John Viking might know Nicky Ashe.'

'But… you don't know John Viking.'

'No,' I said, 'but he knows gas-bags. And I know someone who knows gas-bags. And I bet gas-bags are a small world, like racing.'

She looked at the heaps of letters, and then at the book. She said slowly, 'I guess you'll find him, one way or another.'

I looked away from her, and at nothing in particular.

'Jenny says you never give up.'

I smiled faintly. 'Her exact words?'

'No.' I felt her amusement.

'Obstinate, selfish, and determined to get his own way.'

'Not far off,' I tapped the book. 'Can I keep this?'

'Of course.'

'Thanks.' We looked at each other as people do, especially if they're youngish and male and female, and sitting in a quiet flat at the end of an April day.

She read my expression and answered the unspoken thought. 'Some other time,' she said dryly.

'How long will you be staying with Jenny?'

'Would that matter to you?' she said.

'Mm.'

'She says you're as hard as flint. She says steel's a pushover, beside you.'

I thought of terror and misery and self-loathing. I shook my head.

'What I see,' she said slowly, 'is a man who looks ill being polite to an unwanted visitor.'

'You're wanted,' I said. 'And I'm fine.'

She stood up, however, and I also, after her.

'I hope,' I said, 'that you're fond of your aunt?'

'Devoted.'

She gave me a cool, half ironic smile in which there was also surprise.

'Goodbye… Sid.'

'Goodbye, Louise.'

When she'd gone I switched on a table light or two against the slow dusk, and poured a whisky, and looked at a pale bunch of sausages in the fridge and didn't cook them. No one else would come, I thought. They had all in their way held off the shadows, particularly Louise. No one else real would come, but he would be with me, as he'd been in Paris… Trevor Deansgate. Inescapable. Reminding me inexorably of what I would rather forget.

After a while I stepped out of trousers and shirt and put on a short blue bathrobe, and took off the arm. It was one of the times when taking it off really hurt. It didn't seem to matter, after the rest.

I went back to the sitting room to do something about the clutter, but there was simply too much to bother with, so I stood looking at it, and held my weaker upper arm with my strong whole, agile right hand, as I often did, for support, and I wondered which crippled one worse, amputation without or within.

Humiliation and rejection and helplessness and failure… After all these years I would not, I thought wretchedly, I would damned well not be defeated by fear.

CHAPTER NINE

Lucas Wainwright telephoned the next morning while I was stacking cups in the dishwasher.

'Any progress?' he said, sounding very Commanderish.

'I'm afraid,' I said regretfully, 'that I've lost all those notes. I'll have to do them again.'

'For heaven's sake.' He wasn't pleased. I didn't tell him that I'd lost the notes on account of being bashed on the head and dropping the large brown envelope that contained them in the gutter. 'Come right away, then. Eddy won't be in until this afternoon.'

Slowly, absentmindedly, I finished tidying up, while I thought about Lucas Wainwright, and what he could do for me, if he would. Then I sat at the table and wrote down what I wanted. Then I looked at what I'd written, and at my fingers holding the pen, and shivered. Then I folded the paper and put it in my pocket, and went to Portman Square deciding not to give it to Lucas, after all.

He had the files ready in his office, and I sat at the same table as before and re-copied all I needed.

'You wont let it drag on much longer, will you, Sid?'

'Full attention,' I said. 'Starting tomorrow. I'll go to Kent tomorrow afternoon.'

'Good.' He stood up as I put the new notes into a fresh envelope and waited for me to go, not through impatience with me particularly, but because he was that sort of man. Brisk. One task finished, get on with the next, don't hang about.

I hesitated cravenly and found myself speaking before I had consciously decided whether to or not.

'Commander. Do you remember that you said you might pay me for this job not with money, but with help, if I should want it?'

I got a reasonable smile and a postponement of the goodbyes.

'Of course I remember. You haven't done the job yet. What help?'

'Er… it's nothing much. Very little.' I took the paper out and handed it to him. Waited while he read the brief contents. Felt as if I had planted a landmine and would presently step on it.

'I don't see why not,' he said. 'If that's what you want. But are you on to something that we should know about?'

I gestured to the paper, 'You'll know about it as soon as I do, if you do that.'

It wasn't a satisfactory answer, but he didn't press it. 'The only thing I beg of you, though, is that you won't mention my name at all. Don't say it was my idea, not to anyone. I… er… you might get me killed, Commander, and I'm not being funny.'

He looked from me to the paper and back again, and frowned. 'This doesn't look like a killing matter, Sid.'

'You never know what is until you're dead.'

He smiled. 'All right. I'll write the letter as from the Jockey Club, and I'll take you seriously about the death risk. Will that do?'

'It will indeed.

'We shook hands, and I left his office carrying the brown envelope, and at the Portman Square entrance, going out, I met Eddy Keith coming in. We both paused, as one does. I hoped he couldn't see the dismay in my face at his early return, or guess that I was perhaps carrying the seeds of his downfall.