10 lb Penalty (27 page)

“And you didn’t check.”

“If I had to check every word I print,” the editor had said with world-weariness, “our sales would plummet.”

On Wednesday, early evening, I’d phoned Samson Frazer, the editor of the
Hoopwestern Gazette.

“If you’re thinking of reprinting a story about me from
SHOUT!,”
I’d said, “don’t do it. Usher Rudd wrote it. It’s not true and it’ll get you into court for libel.”

Gloomy silence.

Then, “I’ll reset the front page,” he’d said.

On Thursday, with prudent speed,
SHOUT!’s
proprietors had acted to avoid the heavy expenses of a libel action and had written and mailed the retractions I’d asked for to the members of Parliament.

My father, attending a meeting at the House on Friday morning, found that several certified letters had already reached their targets. In addition, he gave everyone—from the prime minister downwards—a copy of Vivian Durridge’s letter to me, along with a brief confirmation from himself that he’d asked Durridge to think of a way of persuading me to leave. Apparently the general reaction had been relief and relaxation, though Hudson Hurst had insisted there had to be some truth in the dope story somewhere.

“Why do you think so?” my father related that he’d asked, and the only reply had been stutter and dismay.

My father said, “I asked Hudson Hurst if he himself had sent Usher Rudd to Vivian Durridge. He denied it. He looked bewildered. I don’t think he did it.”

“No, I agree.”

I now negotiated a roundabout. Fourteen more miles to Hoopwestern.

I thought about Hudson Hurst, the ugly duckling converted to swan by scissors and razor. On television he was smooth, convincing and read his speeches from a teleprompter. No inner fire. A puppet.

Alderney Wyvern pulled his strings.

How to prove it? How to stop him?

Attacking Alderney Wyvern could destroy the attacker. I sensed it strongly. History was littered with the laments of failed invasions.

I arrived in Hoopwestern at noon and parked in the car park behind the old party headquarters. Polly had told me that the charity, which had owned the whole of the burned double bow-fronted building, had chosen to rebuild it much as before, with new bow windows fronting onto the cobbled square and new shops matching the row at the rear. When I walked in from the parking lot, all that seemed different were heavy fire doors and a rash of big scarlet extinguishers.

Mervyn Teck was there, and greeted me with ambivalent open arms and wary eyes.

“Benedict!” He was plumper than ever. Rotund, nowadays.

“Hi, Mervyn.”

He shook hands awkwardly, and glanced past me to where, on his desk, lay two newspapers, both
SHOUT!
and the
Hoopwestern Gazette.

“I didn’t expect you,” Mervyn said.

“No, well, I’m sorry. I expect my father telephoned to say he couldn’t get down this weekend for the ‘surgery’?” Most Saturday mornings the public came to headquarters with their complaints. “I expect you’ll do fine without him.”

My father, in fact, was busy in London with secretive little lunches and private dinners, with hurried hidden meetings and promises and bargains, all the undercover maneuvering of shifts of power. I hoped and trusted that A. L. Wyvern was fully occupied in doing the same.

A young woman sitting behind a computer stood up with unaffected welcome.

“Benedict!”

I said, “Crystal?” tentatively.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said, edging around her desk to give me a kiss. “It’s such ages since you were here.”

A great change here too had taken place. She was no longer thin and anxious, but rounded and secure; and she wore a wedding ring, I saw.

They gave me coffee and local news, and I read with interest what the
Gazette
had made of
SHOUT!
“An unfair attack on our MP through his son. No truth in this allegation ... shocking ... libelous ... retractions and regrets are in the pipeline.”

“The by-line in
SHOUT!
says Usher Rudd,” Mervyn pointed. “Vicious little nerd.”

“Actually,” I said as their indignation boiled on, “I came hoping to see Orinda, but she doesn’t answer her phone.”

“Oh, dear,” Crystal said, “she isn’t here. She went away for the weekend. She won’t be back till Monday.”

They didn’t know where she’d gone.

I’d made a short list of people I aimed to see. Mervyn, helpful with addresses, knew where to find Isobel Bethune at her sister’s house in Wales, and as she—telephoned—was not only at home but would be glad to see me, I drove to Cardiff that afternoon and discovered Paul Bethune’s rejuvenated wife in a pretty town house in the suburbs.

I’d never before seen her happy. She, too, was a different woman: the gray lines of worry had smoothed into peaches and cream.

It was she, however, who exclaimed, “How you’ve changed. You’ve grown older.”

“It happens.” .

Her sister had gone shopping. I sat with Isobel and listened to her remembering for my benefit how Usher Rudd had uncovered her husband’s bimbo affair.

“Usher Rudd just dug away and wrote it up sensationally, but it was all Paul’s fault. Men are such bloody fools. He confessed to me in sniveling tears in the end that he’d boasted—
boasted,
I ask you—to some stranger that he was playing golf with, that he was having an affair his wife didn’t know about. Snigger, snigger. Can you believe it? And that stranger turned out to be that weird nobody that was always hanging about ’round the Nagles. He used to play golf with Dennis.”

“His name’s Wyvern.”

“Yes, I know that now. When Dennis died, that Wyvern person wanted to make sure Orinda got elected, so he arranged to play golf with Paul, to see where Paul was weakest. I hated Usher Rudd, but it wasn’t until after your father got elected that Paul broke down and told me what had happened.” She sighed. “I was shattered then, but I don’t care now, isn’t that odd?”

“How are your sons?”

She laughed. “They’ve joined the army. Best place for them. They sometimes send postcards. You’re the only one that was kind to me in those days.”

I left her with a kiss on the peaches-and-cream cheek and drove tiredly back to Hoopwestern for the night, staying in Polly’s house in the woods and eating potted shrimps from her freezer.

On Saturday morning I went to the police station and asked to see Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, whose mother drove a school bus.

Joe Duke appeared questioningly.

“George Juliard’s son? You look older.”

Joe Duke was still a detective sergeant, but his mother no longer drove a bus. “She’s into rabbits,” he said. He took me into a bare little interview room, explaining he was the senior officer on duty and couldn’t leave the station.

He thoughtfully repeated my question. “Do I know if that fire you could have died in was arson? It’s all of five years ago.”

“A bit more. But you must have files,” I said.

“I don’t need files. Mostly fires in the night are from cigarettes or electrical shorts, but none of you smoked and the place had been rewired. Is this off the record?”

“On the moon.”

A dedicated policeman in his thirties, Joe had a broad face, a Dorset accent and a realistic attitude to human failings. “Amy used to let tramps sleep above the charity shop sometimes, but not that night, she says, though that’s the official and easy theory of the cause of fire. They say a vagrant was lighting candles downstairs and knocked them over, and then ran away. Nonsense, really. But the fire did start, the firefighters reckoned, in the charity shop, and the back door there wasn’t bolted, and both shops of the old place were lined and partitioned with dry old wood, though they’ve rebuilt it with brick and concrete now, and it’s awash with smoke alarms. Anyway, I suppose you heard the theory that crazy Leonard Kitchens set light to the place to frighten your father off so that Orinda Nagle could be our MP?”

“I’ve heard. What do you think?”

“It doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

“But still ...”

“I think he did it. I questioned him, see? But we hadn’t a flicker of evidence.”

“And what about the gun in The Sleeping Dragon’s gutter?”

“No one knows who put it there.”

“Leonard Kitchens?”

“He swears he didn’t. And he’s heavy and slow. It needed someone pretty agile to put that gun up high.”

“Did you ever find out where the rifle came from?”

“No. we didn’t,” he said. “They’re so common. They’ve been used in the Olympics for donkey’s years. They’re licensed and locked away and accounted for these days, but in the past ... and theft ...” He shrugged. “It isn’t as if it had killed anyone.”

I said, “What’s the penalty for attempted murder?”

“Do you mean a deliberate attempt that didn’t come off?”

“Mm.”

“Same as murder.”

“A 10-1b. penalty?”

“Ten years,” he said.

 

From the police station I drove out to the ring road and stopped in the forecourt of Basil Rudd’s car-repair outfit. I walked up the stairs into his glass-walled office that gave him a comprehensive view over his wide workshop below, only half-busy on Saturday morning.

“Sorry,” he said without looking up. “We close at noon on Saturdays. Can’t do anything for you till Monday.”

He was still disconcertingly like his cousin; red hair and freckles and a combative manner.

“I don’t want my car fixed,” I said. “I want to find Usher Rudd.”

It was as though I had jabbed him with a needle. He looked up and said, “Who are you? Why do you want him?”

I told him who and why. I asked him if he remembered the Range Rover’s questionable sump plug, but his recollection was hazy. He was quite sharply aware, though, of the political damage that could be done to a father by a son’s disgrace. He had a copy of SHOUT! on his desk, inevitably open at the center pages.

“That’s me,” I said, pointing at the photograph of the jockey. “Your cousin is lying. The Gazette sacked him for lying once before, and I’m doing my best to get him finally discredited—struck off, or whatever it’s called in newspaper-speak-for what is called dishonorable conduct. So where is he?”

Basil Rudd looked helpless. “How should I know?”

“Find out,” I said forcefully. “You’re a Rudd. Someone in the Rudd clan must know where to find its most notorious son.”

“He’s brought us nothing but trouble. . . .”

“Find him,” I said, “and your troubles may end.”

He stretched out a hand to the telephone, saying, “It may take ages. And it’ll cost you.”

“I’ll pay your phone bills,” I said. “When you find him, leave a message on the answering machine at my father’s headquarters. Here’s the number.” I gave him a card. “Don’t waste time. It’s urgent.”

I went next to The Sleeping Dragon to see the manager. He had been newly installed there at the time of the by-election, but perhaps because of that he had a satisfactorily clear recollection of the night someone had fired a gun into the cobbled square. He didn’t, of course, remember me personally, but he was honored, he said, to be on first-name terms with my father.

“There were so many people coming and going on that night, and I was only beginning to know who was who. Someone left a set of golf clubs in my office and said they were Dennis Nagle’s but, of course, the poor man was dead and I didn’t know what to do with them, but I offered them to Mrs. Nagle and she said she thought they belonged to her husband’s friend, Mr. Wyvern, so I gave them to him.” He frowned. “It was so long ago. I’m afraid I’m not being much help.”

I left him and walked upstairs and from the little lounge over the main lobby looked down again onto the cobbled square where, on that first night, my father and I had by good luck not been shot.

Golf clubs ...

Mervyn Teck, at the end of a busy morning surgery, told me where to find Leonard and Mrs. Kitchens, and on Saturday afternoon, without enthusiasm, I found their semi-detached substantial house on the outskirts of the town.

The house, its lack of imagination, and the disciplined front garden were all somehow typical of a heavy worthiness: no manic sign of an arsonist.

Mrs. Kitchens opened the front door at my ring, and after a moment’s hesitation for recognition, said, “My Leonard isn’t in, I’m afraid.”

She took me into a front sitting room where the air smelled as if it had been undisturbed for weeks, and talked with bitterness and freedom about “her Leonard’s” infatuation for Orinda.

“My Leonard would have done
anything
for that woman. He still would.”

“Er ... ,” I said, “looking back to that fire at the party headquarters ...”

“Leonard said,” Mrs. Kitchens interrupted, “that he didn’t do it.”

“But
you
think ... ?”

“The silly old fool did it,” she said. “I know he did. But I’m not going to say it to anyone except you. It was that Wyvern who put him up to it, you know. And it was all pointless, as your father is much better for the country than Orinda would have been. Everyone knows that now.”

“People say,” I said gently, “that Leonard shot a rifle at my father and then put the gun up into the gutter of The Sleeping Dragon.”

Clumsy, large, unhappy Mrs. Kitchens wouldn’t hear of it. “My Leonard doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other!”

“And does your Leonard change the oil in his own car?”

She looked utterly bewildered. “He can make plants grow, but he’s hopeless at anything else.”

I left poor Mrs. Kitchens to her unsatisfactory marriage, and slept again in Polly’s house.

For most of Sunday I sat alone in the party’s headquarters wishing and waiting for Basil Rudd to dislike his cousin enough to help me, but it wasn’t until nearly six in the evening that the telephone rang.