Come to Grief (26 page)

Obsession—fixation—was the most frightening of enemies and the hardest to escape.

I retreated, frankly scared, expecting him to see my movement, but he hadn’t thought of an approach by garden. From tree to tree, around the patches of open grass, I regained the far gate, eased through it, crossed the road and drifted up the alleyway, cravenly expecting a bellow and a chase and, as he was a farmer, perhaps a shotgun.

Nothing happened. My shoes, soled and heeled for silence, made no sound. I walked back to my underground car and sat in it, not exactly trembling but nonetheless stirred up.

So much, I thought, for Davis Tatum’s myth of a clever, unafraid investigator.

I kept always in the car an overnight bag containing the personality-change clothes I’d got Jonathan to wear: dark two-piece tracksuit (trousers and zip-up jacket), navy blue sneakers, and a baseball cap. The bag also contained a long-sleeved open-necked shirt, two or three charged-up batteries for my arm, and a battery charger, to make sure. Habitually around my waist I wore a belt with a zipped pocket big enough for a credit card and money.

I had no weapons or defenses like mace. In America I might have carried both.

I sat in the car considering the matter of distance and ulnas. It was well over two hundred miles from my London home to Liverpool, city of my birth. Frodsham, the base town of Topline Foods, wasn’t quite as far as Liverpool, but still over two hundred miles. I had already, that day, steered a hundred and fifty—Chichester and back. I’d never missed Chico so much.

I considered trains. Too inflexible. Airline? Ditto. Teledrive? I lingered over the comfort of Teledrive but decided against, and resignedly set off northwards.

It was an easy drive normally; a journey on wide fast motorways taking at most three hours. I drove for only one hour, then stopped at a motel to eat and sleep, and at seven o‘clock in the morning wheeled on again, trying to ignore both the obstinately slow-mending fracture and India Cathcart’s column that I’d bought from the motel’s newsstand.

Friday mornings had been a trial since June. Page fifteen in
The Pump—trial
by the long knives of journalism, the blades that ripped the gut.

She hadn’t mentioned at all seeing Tatum and me in the Le Meridien bar. Perhaps she’d taken my advice and pretended we hadn’t been there. What her column said about me was mostly factually true but spitefully wrong. I wondered how she could do it? Had she no sense of humanity?

Most of her page concerned yet another politician caught with his trousers at half-mast, but the far-right column said:

Christ, I thought, how much more? Why did it so bloody hurt?

My father had been killed in a fall eight months before my birth and a few days before he was due to marry my eighteen-year-old mother. She’d done her best as a single parent in hopeless surroundings. “Give us a kiss, John Sidney...”

I hadn’t ever run amok. I’d been a quiet child, mostly. “Have you been fighting again, John Sidney ... ?” She hadn’t liked me fighting, though one had to sometimes, or be bullied.

And when she knew she was dying she’d taken me to Newmarket, because I’d been short for my age, and had left me with the king of trainers to be made into a jockey, as I’d always wanted.

I couldn’t possibly go back to my Liverpool “roots.” I had no sense of ever having grown any there.

I had never envied Ellis Quint. I’d always liked him. I’d been a better jockey than he, and we’d both known it. If anything, the envy had been the other way around. But it was useless to protest, as it had been all along. Protests were used regularly to prove
The Pump’s
theories of my pitiable inadequacy.

My mobile phone buzzed. I answered it.

“Kevin Mills,” a familiar voice said. “Where are you? I tried your apartment. Have you seen today’s
Pump
yet?”

“Yes.”

“India didn’t write it,” he said. “I gave her the info, but she wouldn’t use it. She filled that space with some pars on sexual stress and her editor subbed them out.”

Half of my muscles unknotted, and I hadn’t realized they’d been tense. I forced unconcern into my voice even as I thought of hundreds of thousands of readers sniggering about me over their breakfast toast.

“Then you wrote it yourself,” I said. “So who’s a shit now? You’re the only person on
The Pump
who’s seen my Sheraton desk.”

“Blast you. Where are you?”

“Going back to Liverpool. Where else?”

“Sid, look, I’m sorry.”

“Policy?”

He didn’t answer.

I asked, “Why did you phone to tell me India didn’t write today’s bit of demolition?”

“I’m getting soft.”

“No one’s listening to this phone anymore. You can say what you like.”

“Jeez.” He laughed. “That didn’t take you long.” He paused. “You might not believe it, but most of us on
The Pump
don’t any more like what we’ve been doing to you.”

“Rise up and rebel,” I suggested dryly.

“We have to eat. And you’re a tough bugger. You can take it.”

You just try it, I thought.

“Listen,” he said, “the paper’s received a lot of letters from readers complaining that we’re not giving you a fair deal.”

“How many is a lot?”

“Two hundred or so. Believe me, that’s a lot. But we’re not allowed to print any.”

I said with interest, “Who says so?”

“That’s just it. The ed, Godbar himself, says so, and he doesn’t like it, either, but the policy is coming from. the very top.”

“Tilepit?”

“Are you
sure
this phone’s not bugged?”

“You’re safe.”

“You’ve had a bloody raw mauling, and you don’t deserve it. I know that. We all know it. I’m sorry for my part in it. I’m sorry I wrote today’s venom, especially that bit about your hand. Yes, it’s Tilepit. The proprietor himself.”

“Well ... thanks.”

He said, “Did Ellis Quint
really
cut off those feet?”

I smiled ruefully. “The jury will decide.”

“Sid, look here,” he protested, “you owe me!”

“Life’s a bugger,” I said.

Nine o‘clock Friday morning I drove into the town of Frodsham and asked for Topline Foods.

Not far from the river, I was told. Near the river; the Mersey.

The historic docks of Liverpool’s Mersey waterfront had long been silent, the armies of tall cranes dismantled, the warehouses converted or pulled down. Part of the city’s heart had stopped beating. There had been bypass surgery of sorts, but past muscle would never return. The city had a vast red-brick cathedral, but faith, as in much of Britain, had dimmed.

For years I’d been to Liverpool only to ride there on Aintree racecourse. The road I’d once lived in lay somewhere under a shopping mall. Liverpool was a place, but not home.

At Frodsham there was a “Mersey View” vantage point with, away to the distant north, some still-working docks at Runcorn on the Manchester Ship Canal. One of those docks, I’d seen earlier, was occupied by Topline Foods. A ship lying alongside bearing the flag and insignia of Canada had been unloading Topline grain.

I’d stopped the car from where I could see the sweep of river with the seagulls swooping and the stiff breeze tautening flags at the horizontal. I stood in the cold open air, leaning on the car, smelling the salt and the mud and hearing the drone of traffic on the roads below.

Were these roots? I’d always loved wide skies, but it was the wide sky of Newmarket Heath that I thought of as home. When I’d been a boy there’d been no wide skies, only narrow streets, the walk to school, and rain. “John Sidney, wash your face. Give us a kiss.”

The day after my mother died I’d ridden my first winner, and that evening I’d got drunk for the first and only time until the arrest of Ellis Quint.

Soberly, realistically, in the Mersey wind I looked at the man I had become: a jumble of self-doubt, ability, fear and difficult pride. I had grown as I was from the inside out. Liverpool and Newmarket weren’t to blame.

Stirring and getting back into the car, I wondered where to find all those tungsten nerves I was supposed to have.

I didn’t know what I was getting into. I could still at that point retreat and leave the field to Ellis. I could—and I couldn’t. I would have myself to live with, if I did.

I’d better simply get on with it, I thought.

I drove down from the vantage point, located the Topline Foods factory and passed through its twelve-feet-high but hospitably open wire-mesh gates. There was a guard in a gatehouse who paid me no attention.

Inside there were many cars tidily parked in ranks. I added myself to the end of one row and decided on a clothing compromise of suit trousers, zipped-up tracksuit top, white shirt, no tie, ordinary shoes. I neatly combed my hair forward into a young-looking style and looked no threat to anybody.

The factory, built around three sides of the big central area, consisted of loading bays, a vast main building and a new-looking office block. Loading and unloading took place under cover, with articulated semi-trailers backing into the bays. In the one bay I could see into clearly, the cab section had been disconnected and removed; heavy sacks that looked as if they might contain grain were being unloaded from a long container by two large men who slung the sacks onto a moving conveyer belt of rollers.

The big building had a row of windows high up: there was no chance of looking in from outside.

I ambled across to the office building and shouldered open a heavy glass door that led into a large but mostly bare entrance hall, and found there the reason for the unguarded front gates. The security arrangements were all inside.

Behind a desk sat a purposeful-looking middle-aged woman in a green jumper. Flanking her were two men in navy blue security-guard suits with Topline Foods insignia on their breast pockets.

“Name, please,” said the green jumper. “State your business. All parcels, carriers and handbags must be left here at the desk.”

She had a distinct Liverpool accent. With the same inflection in my own voice, I told her that, as she could see, I had no bag, carrier or handbag with me.

She took the accent for granted and unsmilingly asked again for my name.

“John Sidney.”

“Business?”

“Well,” I said, as if perplexed by the reception I was getting, “I was asked to come here to see if you made some horse nuts.” I paused. “Like,” I lamely finished, dredging up the idiom.

“Of course, we make horse nuts. It’s our business.”

“Yes,” I told her earnestly, “but this farmer, like, he asked me to come in, as I was passing this way, to see if it was you that made some horse nuts that someone had given him, that were very good for his young horse, like, but he was given them loose and not in a bag and all he has is a list of what’s in the nuts and he wanted to know if you made them, see?” I half pulled a sheet of paper from an inside pocket and pushed it back.

She was bored by the rigmarole.

“If I could just
talk
to someone,” I pleaded. “See, I owe this farmer a favor and it wouldn’t take no more than a minute, if I could talk to someone. Because this farmer, he’ll be a big customer if these are the nuts he’s looking for.”

She gave in, lifted a telephone and repeated a shortened version of my improbable tale.

She inspected me from head to foot. “Couldn’t hurt a fly,” she reported.

I kept the suitably feeble half-anxious smile in place.

She put down the receiver. “Miss Rowse will be down to help you. Raise your hands.”

“Eh?”

“Raise your hands ... please.”

Surprised, I did as I was told. One of the security guards patted me all over in the classic way of their job, body and legs. He missed the false hand and the cracked bone. “Keys and mobile phone,” he reported. “Clean.”

Green jumper wrote “John Sidney” onto a clip-on identity card and I clipped it dutifully on.

“Wait by the elevator,” she said.

I waited.

The doors finally parted to reveal a teenage girl with wispy fair hair who said she was Miss Rowse. “Mr. Sidney? This way, please.”

I stepped into the elevator with her and rode to the third floor.

She smiled with bright inexperienced encouragement and led me down a newly carpeted passage to an office conspicuously labeled Customer Relations on its open door.

“Come in,” Miss Rowse said proudly. “Please sit down.”

I sat in a Scandinavian-inspired chair of blonde wood with arms, simple lines, blue cushioning and considerable comfort.

“I’m afraid I didn’t really understand your problem,” Miss Rowse said trustingly. “If you’ll explain again, I can get the right person to talk to you.”

I looked around her pleasant office, which showed almost no sign of work in progress.

“Have you been here long?” I asked. (Guileless Liverpool accent, just like hers.) “Nice office. They must think a lot of you here.”

She was pleased, but still honest. “I’m new this week. I started on Monday—and you’re my second inquiry.”

No wonder, I thought, that she’d let me in.

I said, “Are all the offices as plush as this?”