Come to Grief (15 page)

She paid for her own drink as a matter of course. I wondered how much of her challenging air was unconscious and habitual, or whether she volume-adjusted it according to who she was talking to. I often learned useful things about people’s characters by watching them talk to others than myself, and comparing the response.

“You’re not playing fair,” she said, judging me over the wedge of lemon bestriding the rim of her glass. “It was
The Pump’s
hotline that sent you to Combe Bassett. Kevin says you pay your debts. So pay.”

“The hotline was his own idea. Not a bad one, except for about a hundred false alarms. But there’s nothing I can tell you this evening.”

“Not can’t. Won’t.”

“It’s often the same thing.”

“Spare me the philosophy!”

“I enjoy reading your page every week,” I said.

“But you don’t want to figure in it?”

“That’s up to you.”

She raised her chin. “Strong men beg me not to print what I know.”

I didn’t want to antagonize her completely and I could forgo the passing pleasure of banter, so I gave her the benign expression and made no comment.

She said abruptly, “Are you married?”

“Divorced.”

“Children?”

I shook my head. “How about you?”

She was more used to asking questions than answering. There was perceptible hesitation before she said, “The same.”

I drank my scotch. I said, “Tell Kevin I’m very sorry I can’t give him his inside edge. Tell him I’ll talk to him on Monday.”

“Not good enough.”

“No, well ... I can’t do more.”

“Is someone
paying
you?” she demanded. “Another paper?”

I shook my head. “Maybe Monday,” I said. I put my empty glass on the bar. “Good-bye.”

“Wait!” She gave me a straight stare, not overtly or aggressively feminist, but one that saw no need to make points in a battle that had been won by the generation before her. I thought that perhaps India Cathcart wouldn’t have made it a condition of continued marriage that I should give up the best skill I possessed. I’d married a loving and gentle girl and turned her bitter: the worst, the most miserable failure of my life.

India Cathcart said, “Are you hungry? I’ve had nothing to eat all day. My expense account would run to two dinners.”

There were many worse fates. I did a quick survey of the possibility of being deconstructed all over page fifteen, and decided as usual that playing safe had its limits. Take risks with caution: a great motto.

“Your restaurant or mine?” I said, smiling, and was warned by the merest flash of triumph in her eyes that she thought the tarpon hooked and as good as landed.

We ate in a noisy, brightly lit, large and crowded black-mirrored restaurant that was clearly the in-place for the in-crowd. India’s choice. India’s habitat. A few sycophantic hands shot out to make contact with her as we followed a lisping young greeter to a central, noteworthy table. India Cathcart acknowledged the plaudits and trailed me behind her like a comet’s tail (Halley’s?) while introducing me to no one.

The menu set out to amaze, but from long habit I ordered fairly simple things that could reasonably be dealt with one-handed: watercress mousse, then duck curry with sliced baked plantains. India chose baby egg-plants with oil and pesto, followed by a large mound of crisped frogs’ legs that she ate uninhibitedly with her fingers.

The best thing about the restaurant was that the decibel level made private conversation impossible: everything anyone said could be overheard by those at the next table.

“So,” India raised her voice, teeth gleaming over a herb-dusted cuisse, “was Betty Bracken in tears?”

“I didn’t see any tears.”

“How much was the colt worth?”

I ate some plantain and decided they’d overdone the caramel. “No one knows,” I said.

“Kevin told me it cost a quarter of a million. You’re simply being evasive.”

“What it cost and what it was worth are different. It might have won the Derby. It might have been worth millions. No one knows.”

“Do you always play word games?”

“Quite often.” I nodded. “Like you do.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“Ask Kevin,” I said, smiling.

“Kevin’s told me things about you that you wouldn’t want me to know.”

“Like what?”

“Like it’s easy to be taken in by your peaceful front. Like you having tungsten where other people have nerves. Like you being touchy about losing a hand. That’s for starters.”

I would throttle Kevin, I thought. I said, “How are the frogs’ legs?”

“Muscular.”

“Never mind,” I said. “You have sharp teeth.”

Her mind quite visibly changed gears from patronizing to uncertain, and I began to like her.

Risky to like her, of course.

After the curry and the frogs we drank plain black coffee and spent a pause or two in eye-contact appraisal. I expected she saw me in terms of adjectives and paragraphs. I saw her with appeased curiosity. I now knew what the serial reputation-slasher looked like at dinner.

In the way one does, I wondered what she looked like in bed; and in the way that one doesn’t cuddle up to a potential cobra, I made no flicker of an attempt to find out.

She seemed to take this passivity for granted. She paid for our meal with a
Pump
business credit card, as promised, and crisply expected I would kick in my share on Monday as an exclusive for Kevin.

I promised what I knew I wouldn’t be able to deliver, and offered her a lift home.

“But you don’t know where I live!”

“Wherever,” I said.

“Thanks. But there’s a bus.”

I didn’t press it. We parted on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. No kiss. No handshake. A nod from her. Then she turned and walked away, not looking back: and I had no faith at all in her mercy.

 

On Sunday morning I reopened the small blue suitcase Linda had lent me, and read again through all the clippings that had to do with the maimed Kent ponies.

I played again the videotape of the twenty-minute program Ellis had made of the child owners, and watched it from a different, and sickened, perspective.

There on the screen he looked just as friendly, just as charismatic, just as expert. His arms went around Rachel in sympathy. His good-looking face filled with compassion and outrage. Blinding ponies, cutting off a pony’s foot, he said, those were crimes akin to murder.

Ellis, I thought in wretchedness, how
could
you?

I played the tape a second time, taking in more details and attentively listening to what he had actually said.

His instinct for staging was infallible. In the shot where he’d commiserated with the children all together, he had had them sitting around on hay bales in a tack room, the children dressed in riding breeches, two or three wearing black riding hats. He himself had sat on the floor among them, casual in a dark open-necked jogging suit, a peaked cap pushed back on his head, sunglasses in-pocket. Several of the children had been in tears. He’d given them his handkerchief and helped them cope with grief.

There were phrases he had used when talking straight to the camera that had brought the children’s horrors sharply to disturbingly visual life: ‘pierced empty sockets, their eyesight running down their cheeks,“ and ”a pure-bred silver pony, proud and shining in the moonlight.“

His caring tone of voice alone had made the word pictures bearable.

“A silver pony shining in the moonlight.” The basis of Rachel’s nightmare.

“In the moonlight.” He had
seen
the pony in the moonlight.

I played the tape a third time, listening with my eyes shut, undistracted by the familiar face, or by Rachel in his comforting hug.

He said, “A silver pony trotting trustfully across the field lured by a handful of horse nuts.”

He shouldn’t have known that.

He could have known it if any of the Fernses had suggested it.

But the Femses themselves wouldn’t have said it. They hadn’t fed Silverboy on nuts. The agent of destruction that had come by night had brought the nuts.

Ellis would say, of course, that he had made it up, and the fact that it might be true was simply a coincidence. I rewound the tape and stared for a while into space. Ellis would have an answer to everything. Ellis would be believed.

In the afternoon I wrote a long, detailed report for Norman Picton: not a joyous occupation.

Early Monday morning, as he had particularly requested it, I drove to the police station in Newbury and personally delivered the package into the Detective Inspector’s own hands.

“Did you talk about this to anybody?” he asked.

“No.”

“Especially not to Quint?”

“Especially not. But...,” I hesitated, “they’re a close family. It’s more than likely that on Saturday evening or yesterday, Ginnie and Gordon told Ellis that you and I and Archie were sniffing round the Land-Rover and that you took away the shears. I think you must consider that Ellis knows the hunt is on.”

He nodded disgustedly. “And as Ellis Quint officially lives in the Metropolitan area, we in the Thames Valley district cannot pursue our inquiries as freely as we could have.”

“You mean, you can’t haul him down to the local Regents Park nick and ask him awkward questions, like what was he doing at three A.M. on Saturday?”

“We can ask him ourselves if the Met agrees.”

“I thought these divisions were being done away with.”

“Cooperation is improving all the time.”

I left him to sort out his problems and set off to drive to Kent. On the way, wanting to give Rachel Ferns a cheering-up present, I detoured into the maze of Kingston and, having parked, walked around the precincts looking for inspiration in the shops.

A windowful of tumbling puppies made me pause; perhaps Rachel needed an animal to love, to replace the pony. And perhaps Linda would
not
be pleased at having to house-train a growing nuisance that molted and chewed the furniture. I went into the pet shop, however, and that’s how I came to arrive at Linda Ferns’s house with my car full of fish tank, water weeds, miniature ruined castle walls, electric pump, lights, fish food, instructions, and three large lidded buckets of tropical fish.

Rachel was waiting by the gate for my arrival.

“You’re half an hour late,” she accused. “You said you’d be here by twelve.”

“Have you heard of the M25?”

“Everyone makes that motorway an excuse.”

“Well, sorry.”

Her bald head was still a shock. Apart from that, she looked well, her cheeks full and rounded by steroids. She wore a loose sundress and clumpy sneakers on stick-like legs. It was crazy to love someone else’s child so comprehensively, yet for the first time ever, I felt the idea of fatherhood take a grip.

Jenny had refused to have children on the grounds that any racing day could leave her a widow, and at the time I hadn’t cared one way or another. If ever I married again, I thought, following Rachel into the house, I would long for a daughter.

Linda gave me a bright, bright smile, a pecking kiss and the offer of a gin and tonic while she threw together some pasta for our lunch. The table was laid. She set out steaming dishes.

“Rachel was out waiting for you two hours ago!” she said. “I don’t know what you’ve done to the child.”

“How are things?”

“Happy.” She turned away abruptly, tears as ever near the surface. “Have some more gin. You said you’d got news for me.”

“Later. After lunch. And I’ve brought Rachel a present.”

The fish tank after lunch was the ultimate success. Rachel was enthralled, Linda interested and helpful. “Thank goodness you didn’t give her a dog,” she said. “I can’t stand animals under my feet I wouldn’t let Joe give her a dog. That’s why she wanted a pony.”

The vivid fish swam healthily through the Gothic ruins, the water weeds rose and swelled, the lights and bubbles did their stuff. Rachel sprinkled fish food and watched her new friends eat. The pet shop owner had persuaded me to take a bigger tank than I’d thought best, and he had undoubtedly been right. Rachel’s pale face glowed. Pegotty, in a baby-bouncer, sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed beside the glass. Linda came with me into the garden.

“Any news about a transplant?” I asked.

“It would have been the first thing I’d told you.”

We sat on the bench. The roses bloomed. It was a beautiful day, heartbreaking.

Linda said wretchedly, “In acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is what Rachel’s got, chemotherapy causes remission almost always. More than ninety percent of the time. In seven out of ten children, the remission lasts forever, and after five years they can be thought of as cured for life. And girls have a better chance than boys, isn’t that odd? But in thirty percent of children, the disease comes back.”

She stopped.

“And it has come back in Rachel?”

“Oh, Sid!”

“Tell me.”

She tried, the tears trickling while she spoke. “The disease came back in Rachel after less than two years, and that’s not good. Her hair was beginning to grow, but it came out again with the drugs. They re-established her again in remission, and they’re so good, it isn’t so easy the second time. But I know from their faces—and they don’t suggest transplants unless they have to, because only about half of bone-marrow transplants are successful. I always talk as if a transplant will definitely save her, but it only
might.
If they found a tissue match they’d kill all her own bone marrow with radiation, which makes the children terribly nauseous and wretched, and then when the marrow’s all dead they transfuse new liquid marrow into the veins and hope it will migrate into the bones and start making leukemia-free blood there, and quite often it
works
... and sometimes a child can be born with one blood group and be transfused with another. It’s extraordinary. Rachel now has type A blood, but she might end up with type O, or something else. They can do so
much
nowadays. One day they may cure
everybody.
But oh ... oh...”