10 lb Penalty (6 page)

I did tell a junior-looking uniformed policeman that the glass of the charity shop’s bow-front was broken, and he did come outside to look. But when I tentatively mentioned ricochets he looked quizzical and asked how old I was. I had done a bit of rifle shooting at school, I said. He nodded, unimpressed, and made a note. I followed when he returned to join his colleagues.

Dearest Polly stood at my father’s side and listened to everything worriedly. A man with a camera flashed several pictures. Considering that no one had actually been shot, the fuss went on for a long time and it was nearly two o’clock when I finally closed and bolted the doors, front and back, and switched off a few of the lights.

My father decided to go upstairs backwards, sitting down. He would accept only minimal help and winced himself in and out of the bathroom and into one of the single beds in the bedroom. I was to sleep on the pull-out sofa-bed in the small sitting room, but I ended up lying on the second single bed, next to my father, half-dressed and not at all sleepy.

I had in the past twenty hours hummed along from Mrs. Wells’s house on my bicycle and ridden a canter on grassy sunlit Downs. I’d had my life torn apart and entered a new world, and for long minutes I’d wondered if I would collect a bullet in the back. How could I sleep?

I switched off the bedside light.

In the dark, my father said, “Ben, why didn’t you run?”

After a pause I answered. “Why did you tell me to?”

“I didn’t want you to get shot.”

“Mm. Well, that’s why I didn’t run. I didn’t want you to get shot.”

“So you stood in the way... ?”

“More fun than patting babies.”

After a while, I said, “I’d say it was a .22 rifle, the sort used for target shooting. I’d say it was a high-velocity bullet. I know that noise well. If a .22 bullet hits you in the body, it quite likely won’t kill you. You need to hit the head or the neck to be most probably lethal. All I did was shield your head.”

There was a silence from the other bed. Then he said, “I’d forgotten you could shoot.”

“I was on the school team. We were taught by one of the country’s best marksmen.” I smiled in the dark. “You paid for it, you know.”

Before nine the next morning I went downstairs and unbolted the door to the parking lot at the shrill summons of a man who was standing there with his finger on the bell button. He was short, black haired, softly plump, held a bunch of keys in his hand and was very annoyed.

“Who are
you?”
he demanded. “What are you doing in here? Why is the door bolted?”

“Benedict ... ,” I began.

“What?”

“Juliard.”

He stared at me for a moment, then brushed past and began bad-temperedly setting to rights the untidiness left all over both front and back offices by the events of the night.

“You’re the son, I suppose,” he said, picking up scattered envelopes. “George wasted all of yesterday going to collect you. As you’re here, do something useful.” He gestured to the mess. “Where is George, anyway? The radio is red-hot. What did happen last night
^?
”

“Upstairs. He sprained his ankle. And... er... who are
you?”

“Mervyn Teck, of course.” He looked impatiently at my blank face. “I’m the agent. Don’t you know
anything?”

“Not much.”

“I’m running this election. I’m here to get George Juliard into Parliament. The radio says someone shot at him. Is that true?” He seemed unconcerned and went on straightening papers.

“Possibly,” I said.

“Good.”

I said, “Er ... ?”

“Free publicity. We can’t afford to buy airtime.”

“Oh.”

“It will get rid of Titmuss and Whistle.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Fringe candidates. We don’t need to worry about them.”

My father hobbled downstairs saying, “Morning, Mervyn. I see you’ve met my son.”

Mervyn gave me an unenthusiastic glance.

“Lucky he’s here,” my father said. “He can drive me around.”

I’d told him on the way from Brighton that I’d done errands to earn money for driving lessons and had held a full license by then for nearly five weeks.

“Good,” he’d said.

“But I haven’t driven since the test.”

“All in good time.” His bland expression now forbade me to reveal my inexperience. There was tolerance between the candidate and the agent, I saw, but no warmth.

A sharp-boned young woman arrived with disciplined hair and a power-dressing gray suit with a bright “Juliard” rosette pinned to one shoulder. She was introduced as Crystal Harley, Mervyn Teck’s secretary, and, as I learned during the morning, she was the only person, besides Mervyn himself, who received pay for running the by-election. Everyone else was a volunteer.

The three volunteer witches from the day before arrived one by one and smothered my father with cooing solicitude and endless coffee.

I had forgotten their names: Faith, Marge and Lavender, Faith chided me gently.

“Sorry.”

“A good politician remembers names,” Lavender told me severely. “You won’t be much use to your father if you forget who people are.” The thin lady with the sweet-smelling name was the one who had disapproved of Orinda Nagle. Difficult to please her, I thought.

Mervyn Teck and my father discussed streets and leaflet distributions. Crystal Harley entered endless details into a computer. Motherly Faith went around with a duster and Marge set the photocopier humming.

I sat on my stool and simply listened, and learned many surprising (to me) facts of electoral life, chief among which was the tiny amount of money allowed to be spent. No one could buy themselves into Parliament: every candidate had to rely on an army of unpaid helpers for door-to-door persuasions and the nailing of “vote for me” posters to suitable trees.

There were Representation of the People Acts, Crystal told me crisply, her fingers busy on the keyboard, her eyes unwaveringly turned to the screen. The acts severely limited what one could spend.

“There are about seventy thousand voters in this constituency,” she said. “You couldn’t buy seventy thousand half-pints of beer with what we’re allowed to spend. It’s impossible to
bribe
the British voters. You have
to persuade
them. That’s your father’s job.”

“Don’t buy a stamp, dear, for a local letter,” Faith said, smiling. “Get on a bicycle and deliver it by hand.”

“Do you mean you can’t buy stamps?”

“You have to write down every cent you spend,” Crystal nodded. “You have to make an itemized return after the election to show where the money went, and you can bet your sweet life Paul Bethune’s people will be hoping like hell they’ll find we’ve gone over the limit, just like we’ll be scrutinizing his return with a magnifying glass, looking for any twopenny wickedness.”

“Then last night’s dinner ... ,” I began.

“Last night’s dinner was paid for by the people who ate it, and cost the Local Constituency Association nothing,” Crystal said. She paused, then went on with my education. “Mervyn and I are employed by the Local Constituency Association of this party, not directly by Westminster. The local association pays for these offices here, and the whole caboodle relies on gifts and fund-raising.”

She approved of the way things were set up, and I wondered vaguely why, with everything carefully regulated to ensure the election of the fittest, there were still so many nutcases in the House.

The relative peace of just seven bodies in the offices lasted only until an influx of the previous night’s social mix trooped in through both doors and asked endless questions to which there seemed no answers.

Mervyn Teck loved it. The police, the media people, the party enthusiasts and the merely curious, he expansively welcomed them all. His candidate was not only alive but being perfectly charming to every inquirer. The TV cameraman shone his bright spotlight on my father’s face and taped the sincerity of his smile. Local newspapermen had been augmented by several from the major dailies. Cameras flashed. Microphones were offered to catch anything worth saying, and I, doing my bit, simply smiled and smiled and was terribly nice to everyone and referred every question to my parent.

Crystal, trying to continue working but having to cling physically to her desk to avoid being swept around the place like flotsam, remarked to me tartly that there would hardly have been more fuss if George Juliard had been killed.

“Lucky he wasn’t,” I said, wedging my stool next to her to keep us both anchored.

“Did the noise of the gunshot make him trip?” she asked.

“No. He tripped first.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because the bang of a high-velocity bullet reaches you after the bullet itself.”

She looked disbelieving.

“I learned it in physics lessons,” I said.

She glanced at my beardless face. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Seventeen.”

“You can’t even vote!”

“I don’t actually want to.”

She looked across to where my father was winning media allies with modesty and grace.

“I’ve met a fair number of politicians,” she said. “Your father’s different.”

“In what way?”

“Can’t you feel his power? Perhaps you can’t, as you’re his son. You’re too close to him.”

“I do sometimes feel it.” It stunned me, I should have said.

“Look at last night,” Crystal went on without pausing. “I was there in the hall, sitting at the back. He set that place alight. He’s a natural speaker. I mean, I work here, and he had my pulse racing. Poor old Dennis Nagle, he was a nice worthy man, pretty capable in a quiet way, but he could never have got a crowd cheering and stamping their feet, like last night.”

“Could Orinda?” I asked.

Crystal was startled. “No, she can’t make people laugh. But don’t judge her by last night. She’s done devoted work in the constituency. She was always at Dennis’s side. She’s feeling very hurt that she wasn’t selected to follow Dennis, because until your father galvanized the selection panel she was unopposed.”

“In fact,” I said, “if
anyone
had a motive for bumping off my father, it would be her.”

“Oh, but she wouldn’t!” Crystal was honestly dismayed. “She can sometimes be a darling, you know. Mervyn
loves
her. He’s quite put out that he’s not working to get
her
elected. He was looking forward to it.”

My first impression of Crystal’s sharp spikiness had been right only as regarded her outward appearance. She was kinder and more patient than she looked. I wondered if at one time she had been anorexic: I had known anorexic girls at school. The teeth of one of them had fallen out.

Crystal’s teeth were straight and white, though seldom visible, owing to an overall serious view of life. I thought she was probably twenty-five or -six and hadn’t had enough in life to smile about.

Mervyn Teck zigzagged to my elbow through the busy crowd and said it was time to think about driving my father to his day’s engagements in the outlying town of Quindle. The constituency was large in area with separate pockets of concentrated inhabitation: Mervyn gave me a map with roads and destination marked, but looked at me doubtfully.

“Are you sure you’re competent enough?”

I said “Yes” with more confidence than I felt.

“One incident like last night’s is a godsend,” he said. “A car crash on top would be too much. We don’t want any whiff of accident-prone.”

“No,” I said.

Across the room my father was dangling the Range Rover’s keys in my direction. I went over to him and took them and he, with the help of a walking stick, detached himself from the chattering well-wishers (the police and media had long gone) and limped through the office and out to the parking lot.

Crowds beget crowds. There was a bunch of people outside the rear door who clapped and smiled at my father and gave him thumbs-up signs. I looked across the parking lot to where we had left the Range Rover on our arrival from Brighton the previous afternoon, and my father asked me to fetch it over so that he wouldn’t need to hobble that far.

I walked across to the conspicuous vehicle and stopped beside it, the keys in my hand. The sun shone again that day, gleaming on the gold and silver painted garlands; and after a moment I turned away and went back to my father.

“What’s the matter?” he said, half-annoyed. “Can’t you drive it!”

“Is it insured for someone my age?”

“Yes, of course. I wouldn’t suggest it otherwise. Go and fetch it, Ben.”

I frowned and went back into the offices, ignoring his displeasure.

“It’s time you went,” Mervyn said, equally impatient. “You said you could drive George’s car.”

I nodded. “But I’d be better in a smaller car. Like you said, we don’t want an accident. Do you have a smaller one? Could I borrow yours?”

Mervyn said with obvious aggravation, “My car isn’t insured for drivers under twenty-one.”

“Mine is, though,” Crystal said. “My nineteen-year-old brother drives it. But it’s not very glamorous. Not like the Range Rover.”

She dug the keys out of her handbag and said that Mervyn (to his impatience) would give her a ride home if we were not back by five-thirty, and would pick her up again in the morning. I thanked her with an awkward kiss on the cheek, and with Mervyn Teck repeating his disapproval, went out to rejoin my father.

“I’m disappointed in you, Ben,” he said when Mervyn Teck explained. “You’d better practice in the Range Rover tomorrow.”

“OK. But today, now, before we go, would you arrange for some mechanics to come here and make sure there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Of course there’s nothing wrong with it. I drove it to Brighton and back yesterday and it was running perfectly.”