Shattered (30 page)

I turned and took Bon-Bon out into the hotel lobby. I needed her to do me a favor. Certainly, she said, and trotted off to the telephone box beneath the stairs.

I went back into the sitting room to finish my tea and soon after Bon-Bon returned with a smiling nod.

I thought about the events of the morning, and wondered if there had been another way.

Punty irons in anyone's hand had to be swung around carefully. In Rose's hands a punty iron tipped with semi-liquid glass had been literally a lethal weapon, and it had seemed to me that as it was me she was after, however weird and mistaken her beliefs, it was I who ought to stop her.

I'd tried to stop her with the shattering horse and I hadn't succeeded. It had torn a hole in her lover and stoked her own anger, and I'd thought then, if I could blind her she would stop, so I'd thrown the powder, but blinding her had made her worse.

Paul had died.

If I hadn't tried to stop her, if instead I had surrendered at once to her as she'd demanded, then Paul would be alive. But, I reflected, searching for comfort, I couldn't have given her the tape she demanded as I hadn't known exactly where it was.

I'd done my best, and my best had killed.

 

The voice of the superintendent brought me back to the present. He said he was eager to get to the police station to interview his prisoners and also that he was less eager, but duty demanded it, to visit Detective Constable Paul Cratchet's family. “Would the professor and Mr. Logan come with me now, please, sirs?” he said.

“Another cup of tea?” I replied.

The super was not happy. “Contrary to popular belief, the tea at the station house is quite drinkable. So, if you please.”

I needed more time.

Settling into another deep armchair, I said, “Just a moment to sit down? I'm exhausted. How about something to eat before we go?”

“We have a canteen at the station. You can have something there.” The voice of authority had spoken and there seemed little else to do but comply.

I rose slowly to my feet and with relief found my expected guest hurrying at last through the door.

“Hello, Priam,” I said.

He looked past me towards the tall, elegantly suited George Lawson-Young. He flicked a glance at Bon-Bon as if to say, “Is this the one?”

“Priam,” I repeated, “it's so good of you to come. Priam Jones, can I introduce Superintendent Shepherd of the West Mercia police.”

Priam turned slowly my way and instinctively shook an offered hand.

“I'm sorry?” he said, puzzled. “I don't quite understand. Bon-Bon called me to say that she was with a potential racehorse owner and I should get down here pronto if I wanted the business. Interrupted a good lunch too, I can tell you.”

He looked around him still searching for the elusive owner.

“Priam,” I regained his attention, “that wasn't quite the truth. I asked Bon-Bon to make that call because I needed to talk to you.” He wasn't pleased. Far from it.

“What's wrong with the bloody telephone if you needed a chat, although about what I can't imagine.” He looked down at four sets of childhood eyes staring up at him.
“Hmp...
sorry.”

I said, “I needed a chat about a videotape.”

“Not that bl ... er ... videotape business again,” he said. “I have told you already, I don't have any videotape.”

Daniel said distinctly, “I know where there's a videotape.”

“Shhhh,
darling,” said Bon-Bon.

“But I
do
know where a tape is,” Daniel persisted.

I had learned to take Daniel very seriously indeed.

I squatted down to his level on the sofa. “Where is the videotape, Daniel?” I said.

“I think it must be worth at least three or four gold coins,” he replied.

“What does he mean?” asked Professor Lawson-Young.

“It's a game we have been playing,” I said. “I give Daniel treasure if he gives or finds me information.” I turned back to Daniel. “I think it might indeed be worth three or four gold coins.”

“A whole bagful of treasure,” said the professor, “if it's the right tape.”

Daniel looked positively delighted at the prospect.

“It's in Daddy's car,” he said. “It's in the pocket on the back of Daddy's seat. I saw it there yesterday when Mommy brought us to your shop.”

He looked at me questioningly and beamed when I told him, “Ten gold coins this time if the professor agrees.”

George Lawson-Young, speechless, nodded his head until it seemed it might fall off.

Daniel said, “I like finding things for Gerard. I'll always look for things for him.”

Priam shuffled uneasily beside me.

I said to him, “Why did you switch the tapes?”

“I told you ...,” he started.

“I know what you told me,” I interrupted. “It was a lie.” Discard the lies, the professor had told me in Bristol, and I would be left with the truth. I asked again, “Why did you switch the tapes?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I thought,” he said, “that the tape Eddie Payne passed to you was one showing the hiding place of an antique necklace. Worth millions I'd heard from someone. I found it in your raincoat that night and I thought, with Martin dead, no one would know if I kept it.”

Half-truths and misconceptions had woven a path to death and destruction.

Priam went on, “I took another tape from Martin's den, one with racing on it, and wrapped it in the paper and put it back in your raincoat pocket. When I played the original tape at home that night I discovered that it was all unintelligible mumbo jumbo with nothing about a necklace. So I just put it back in Martin's car when I drove it back to Bon-Bon's the next day.”

He looked around him. “No harm done. You have the tape back. No need for the police.”

No harm done. Oh God, how wrong he was.

 

It was four days before the police would allow me back into Logan Glass.

Broadway had been the center of a media circus. The Dragon from over the road had previously said, “You were always news in this town, lover” and, for filling her rooms, she allowed me use of her best suite and paraded her little glass animals along a shelf in the lobby with a notice offering duplicates for sale.

Marigold, her natural competitor in the matter of saris, caftans, eyelashes and “Darling,” wandered in and out waiting for me to start again on her trophy. Worthington, who had been upgraded from her chauffeur to her arm-in-arm companion, was dispatched with me to collect the necklace from the bank. Marigold secured total victory over the Dragon by wearing it day and night and finally buying it from me outright at huge expense.

Rose, Norman Osprey, Doctor Force and Hickory had been remanded in custody while Eddie had been remanded in the hospital, his hands a mess.

Priam, not understanding the fuss, had been given police bail, which meant that his passport had been confiscated. “Most inconvenient,” he had declared. “Why have I been treated like a common criminal?” Because he was one, Worthington had told him and anyone else who'd listen.

Professor George Lawson-Young had been given the tape from Martin's car. There had been a few ugly moments when the superintendent had tried to hang on to it as evidence. Having once lost the information it contained, Lawson-Young had no intention of allowing it out of his sight again. The police had reluctantly consented to his taking it away briefly to make a copy.

Catherine, cuddling in my arms every night, kept me up-to-date with the news from the police station.

Rose did little else but scream abuse, most of it in my direction it seemed.

Hickory blamed me, Rose and the world in general.

Doctor Force had said a little but denied most. He had revealed, however, that Martin Stukely had not been aware that the information on the tape had been stolen. Indeed the doctor had told Martin that he was protecting the research from others trying to steal the work from Force.

I was glad of that. Had I doubted it?

On Thursday we reopened. The showroom was busier than it had ever been on a weekday in January and sales boomed. But, in truth, there was far greater interest in the bloodstains, which had proved difficult to remove from between the bricks on the floor, than in the stock.

Pamela Jane had recovered sufficiently to return in time for the weekend although she preferred to work in the showroom and made rapid transits across the workshop to her locker only when she couldn't avoid it.

 

On Sunday, one week after the mayhem, I set out again to make the trophy horse.

Dependable Irish had agreed to act as my assistant and this time we had an audience of one. Catherine sat in her now familiar chair and watched as I again readied my tools and stripped down to my singlet.

I stood on the treadle to lift the door to the furnace and let the heat flood into the room.

Catherine took off her coat.

“Hang it in my locker,” I said, tossing her the locker keys.

She walked to the far end of the workshop and opened a door on the tall gray cabinet.

“What's on this?” she said, holding up a videotape. “It has a label, ‘How to make the Cretan Sunrise.' ”

I moved swiftly to her side. She had by mistake opened Hickory's locker, and there inside we found not just the necklace instruction tape but also, tucked into a brown paper bag, a pair of bright laces, green-and-white-striped.

I laughed. “A tale of three tapes and one of them was under my nose all the time.”

“Three tapes?” she asked. “Two were bad enough.”

“There were three,” I replied. “The only really important, valuable and perhaps unique tape was the one Force made from the stolen cancer research results. He gave it to Martin, who via Eddie gave it to me. Priam swapped it, mistakenly thinking it a treasure finder's dream to millions. When he found that it wasn‘t, he simply left it hidden in Martin's car. It's the tape that Rose and Doctor Force have been trying so hard to find.”

“And the necklace tape?” Catherine asked. “This one?”

I said, “I had lent the necklace instruction tape to Martin and it remained in his den at his house until Hickory stole it with all the others. Hickory kept it because, to him, the tape had some value. He thought he could make a copy of the necklace and obviously kept the tape in his locker.”

“What's the third tape then?” she asked.

“The tape,” I went on, “that Priam took from Martin's den before Hickory's theft. He put it in my raincoat pocket and it's that tape that Force stole at midnight on New Year's Eve thinking it was his cancer tape. I would have loved to see his face when he played it and found horse racing instead.”

 

I made the trophy horse. With Irish's help I gathered the

glass from the furnace and again formed the horse's body, its legs and tail. But this time I took time and care and applied the knowledge and talent both learned and inherited from my uncle Ron. I molded a neck and head of an intelligent animal, prominent cheekbones and a firm mouth. I gave it a mane flowing as if in full gallop and then applied it seamlessly to the body.

I had started out to make a commercial work for Marigold and Kenneth Trubshaw and his Cheltenham Trophy Committee.

In the event I made a memorial to a trusted and much missed friend. A memorial worthy of his skill and his courage.

The leaping horse stood finally on the marver table and Irish and I lifted it quickly but carefully into one of the annealing ovens. There it would cool slowly and safely, allowing the strains and stresses to ease gradually. This one was not for shattering.

 

I went with Catherine to the funeral of Pernickety Paul, but I abandoned her at the church door to her colleagues, uniformed or not. A small bunch of plainclothes enveloped her and mourned with her and it was a thoughtful and subdued police officer who mounted her motorcycle, paused before starting the engine, and said blankly to her future passenger, “The private cremation's tomorrow and there are drinks in his memory in the pub this evening. I've been given leave for the rest of the day, so where do you want to go now?”

“To bed,” I said without hesitation, and added that surely Pernickety Paul would have approved.

Catherine shed sorrow like melting snow.

I said, “I haven't seen where you live, remember? So how about now then?”

She smiled with a touch of mischief and then kicked down on the starter and invited me to step aboard.

Her home was maybe five minutes' walk or less than a one-minute motorcycle ride along a straight gray road from the district police station. She stopped outside a single-storied semi-detached bungalow in a row of identical stuccoed boxes, and I knew within a second blink that this was not the place for me. Going there had been a mistake but, as Catherine was my transport, I would smile and pretend to like it.

I actually did both, and not from politeness's sake.

Inside, the plainclothes's one-floor living space had been allied to
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
where a more-than-life-size March Hare and a same-size Mad Hatter sat at the kitchen table and stuffed a dormouse into a teapot. A white rabbit consulted a watch by the bathroom door, and a red queen and a cook and a walrus and a carpenter danced a quadrille around the sitting room. All the walls, everywhere, were painted with rioting greenery and flowers.

Catherine laughed at my expression, a mixture no doubt of amusement and horror.

“These people,” she said, “came to me from a closing-down fun fair when I was six. I've always loved them. I know they're silly but they're company.” She suddenly swallowed. “They have helped me come to terms with losing Paul. He liked them. They made him laugh. They're not the same now, without him. I think I've been growing up.”