Straight (3 page)

It took a long time to get anything done in the morning because it turned out to be Sunday.

I thought back, having lost count of time. Thursday when I broke my ankle, Friday when the scaffolding fell on Greville, Saturday when Brad drove me to Ipswich. It all seemed a cosmos away: relativity in action.

There was the possibility, it seemed, of the scaffolding constructors being liable for damages. It was suggested that I should consult a lawyer.

Plodding through the paperwork, trying to make decisions, I realized that I didn’t know what Greville would want. If he’d left a will somewhere, maybe he had given instructions that I ought to carry out. Maybe no one but I, I thought with a jolt, actually knew he was dead. There had to be people I should notify, and I didn’t know who.

I asked if I could have the diary the police had found in the rubble, and presently I was given not only the diary but everything else my brother had had with him: keys, watch, handkerchief, signet ring, a small amount of change, shoes, socks, jacket. The rest of his clothes, torn and drenched with blood, had been incinerated, it appeared. I was required to sign for what I was taking, putting a tick against each item.

Everything had been tipped out of the large brown plastic bag in which they had been stored. The bag said “St. Catherine’s Hospital” in white on the sides. I put the shoes, socks, handkerchief and jacket back into the bag and pulled the strings tight again, then I shoveled the large bunch of keys into my own trouser pocket, along with the watch, the ring and the money, and finally consulted the diary.

On the front page he had entered his name, his London home telephone number and his office number, but no addresses. It was near the bottom, where there was a space headed “In case of accident please notify” that he had written “Derek Franklin, brother, next of kin.”

The diary itself was one I had sent him at Christmas: the racing diary put out by the Jockeys’ Association and the Injured Jockeys’ Fund. That he should have chosen to use that particular diary when he must have been given several others I found unexpectedly moving. That he had put my name in it made me wonder what he had really thought of me; whether there was much we might have been to each other, and had missed.

With regret I put the diary into my other trousers pocket. The next morning, I supposed, I would have to telephone his office with the dire news. I couldn’t forewarn anyone, as I didn’t know the names, let along the phone numbers, of the people who worked for him. I knew only that he had no partners, as he had said several times that the only way he could run his business was by himself. Partners too often came to blows, he said, and he would have none of it.

When all the signing was completed, I looped the strings of the plastic bag a couple of times round my wrist and took it and myself on the crutches down to the reception area, which was more or less deserted on that Sunday morning. Brad wasn’t there, nor was there any message from him at the desk, so I simply sat down and waited. I had no doubt he would come back in his own good time, glowering as usual, and eventually he did, slouching in through the door with no sign of haste.

He saw me across the acreage, came to within ten feet, and said, “Shall I fetch the car, then?” and when I nodded, wheeled away and departed. A man of very few words, Brad. I followed slowly in his wake, the plastic bag bumping against the crutch. If I’d thought faster I would have given it to Brad to carry, but I didn’t seem to be thinking fast in any way.

Outside, the October sun was bright and warm. I breathed the sweet air, took a few steps away from the door and patiently waited some more, and was totally unprepared to be savagely mugged.

I scarcely saw who did it. One moment I was upright, leaning without concentration on the crutches, the next I’d received a battering-ram shove in the back and was sprawling face forward onto the hard black surface of the entrance driveway. To try to save myself, I put my left foot down instinctively and it twisted beneath me, which was excruciating and useless. I fell flat down on my stomach in a haze and I hardly cared when someone kicked one of the fallen crutches away along the ground and tugged at the bag round my wrist.

He—it had to be a he, I thought, from the speed and strength—thumped a foot down on my back and put his weight on it. He yanked my arm up and back roughly, and cut through the plastic with a slash that took some of my skin with it. I scarcely felt it. The messages from my ankle obliterated all else.

A voice approached saying, “Hey! Hey!” urgently, and my attacker lifted himself off me as fast as he’d arrived and sped away.

It was Brad who had come to my rescue. On any other day there might have been people constantly coming and going, but not on Sunday morning. No one else seemed to be around to notice a thing. No one but Brad had come running.

“Friggin’ hell,” Brad said from above me. “Are you all right?”

Far from it, I thought.

He went to fetch the scattered crutch and brought it back. “Your hand’s bleeding,” he said with disbelief. “Don’t you want to stand up?”

I wasn’t too sure that I did, but it seemed the only thing to do. When I’d made it to a moderately vertical position he looked impassively at my face and gave it as his opinion that we ought to go back into the hospital. As I didn’t feel like arguing, that’s what we did.

I sat on the end of one of the empty rows of seats and waited for the tide of woe to recede, and when I had more command of things I went across to the desk and explained what had happened.

The woman behind the reception window was horrified.

“Someone stole your plastic bag!” she said, round-eyed. “I mean, everyone around here knows what those bags signify, they’re always used for the belongings of people who’ve died or come here after accidents. I mean, everyone knows they can contain wallets and jewelry and so on, but I’ve never heard of one being snatched. How awful! How much did you lose? You’d better report it to the police.”

The futility of it shook me with weariness. Some punk had taken a chance that the dead man’s effects would be worth the risk, and the police would take notes and chalk it up among the majority of unsolved muggings. I reckoned I’d fallen into the ultravulnerable bracket which included little old ladies, and however much I might wince at the thought, I on my crutches had looked and been a pushover, literally.

I shuffled painfully into the washroom and ran cold water over my slowly bleeding hand, and found that the cut was more wide than deep and could sensibly be classified as a scratch. With a sigh I dabbed a paper towel on the scarlety oozing spots and unwound the cut-off pieces of white and brown plastic which were still wrapped tightly round my wrist, throwing them into the bin. What a bloody stupid anticlimactic postscript, I thought tiredly, to the accident that had taken my brother.

When I went outside Brad said with a certain amount of anxiety, “You going to the police, then?” and he relaxed visibly when I shook my head and said, “Not unless you can give them a detailed description of whoever attacked me.”

I couldn’t tell from his expression whether he could or not. I thought I might ask him later, on the way home, but when I did, all that he said was. “He had jeans on, and one of them woolly hats. And he had a knife. I didn’t see his face, he sort of had his back turned my way, but the sun flashed on the knife, see? It all went down so fast. I did think you were a goner. Then he ran off with the bag. You were dead lucky, I’d say.”

I didn’t feel lucky, but all things were relative.

Brad, having contributed what was for him a long speech, relapsed into his more normal silence, and I wondered what the mugger would think of the worthless haul of shoes, socks, handkerchief and jacket whose loss hadn’t been realistically worth reporting. Whatever of value Greville had set out with would have been in his wallet, which had fallen to an earlier predator.

I had been wearing, was still wearing, a shirt, tie and sweater, but no jacket. A sweater was better with the crutches than a jacket. It was pointless to wonder whether the thief would have dipped into my trousers pockets if Brad hadn’t shouted. Pointless to wonder if he would have put his blade through my ribs. There was no way of knowing. I did know I couldn’t have stopped him, but his prize in any case would have been meager. Apart from Greville’s things I was carrying only a credit card and a few bills in a small wallet, from a habit of traveling light.

I stopped thinking about it and instead, to take my mind off the ankle, wondered what Greville had been doing in Ipswich. Wondered if, ever since Friday, anyone had been waiting for him to arrive. Wondered how he had got there. Wondered if he had parked his car somewhere there and, if so, how I would find it, considering I didn’t know its license plate number and wasn’t even sure if he still had a Porsche. Someone else would know, I thought easily. His office, his local garage, a friend. It wasn’t really my worry.

By the time we reached Hungerford three hours later, Brad had said, in addition, only that the car was running out of juice (which we remedied) and, half an hour from home, that if I wanted him to go on driving me during the following week, he would be willing.

“Seven-thirty tomorrow morning?” I suggested, reflecting, and he said “Yerss” on a growl, which I took to mean assent.

He drove me to my door, helped me out as before, handed me the crutches, locked the car and put the keys into my hand, all without speaking.

“Thanks,” I said.

He ducked his head, not meeting my eyes, and turned and shambled off on foot toward his mother’s house. I watched him go; a shy difficult man with no social skills who had possibly that morning saved my life.

I
had for three years rented the ground floor of an old house in a turning off the main road running through the ancient country town. There was a bedroom and bathroom facing that street and the sunrise, and a large all-purpose room to the rear into which sunset flooded. Beyond that, a small stream-bordered garden, which I shared with the owners of the house, an elderly couple upstairs.

Brad’s mother had cooked and cleaned for them for years; Brad mended, painted and chopped when he felt like it. Soon after I’d moved in, mother and son had casually extended their services to me, which suited me well. It was all in all an easy uncluttered existence, but if home was where the heart was, I really lived out on the windy Downs and in stable yards and on the raucous racetracks where I worked.

I let myself into the quiet rooms and sat on the sofa with icepacks along my leg, watching the sun go down on the far side of the stream and thinking I might have done better to stay in the Ipswich hospital. From the knee down my left leg was hurting abominably, and it was still getting clearer by the minute that falling had intensified Thursday’s damage disastrously. My own surgeon had been going off to Wales for the weekend, but I doubted that he would have done very much except say “I told you so,” and in the end I simply took another Distalgesic and changed the icepacks and worked out the time zones in Tokyo and Sydney.

At midnight I telephoned to those cities where it was already morning and by good luck reached both of the sisters. “Poor Greville,” they said sadly, and, “Do whatever you think best.” “Send some flowers for us.” “Let us know how it goes.”

I would, I said. Poor Greville, they repeated, meaning it, and said they would love to see me in Tokyo, in Sydney, whenever. Their children, they said, were all fine. Their husbands were fine. Was I fine? Poor, poor Greville.

I put the receiver down ruefully. Families did scatter, and some scattered more than most. I knew the sisters by that time only through the photographs they sometimes sent at Christmas. They hadn’t recognized my voice.

Taking things slowly in the morning, as nothing was much better, I dressed for the day in shirt, tie and sweater as before, with a shoe on the right foot, sock along on the left, and was ready when Brad arrived five minutes early.

“We’re going to London,” I said. “Here’s a map with the place marked. Do you think you can find it?”

“Got a tongue in my head,” he said, peering at the maze of roads. “Reckon so.”

“Give it a go, then.”

He nodded, helped me inch onto the back seat, and drove seventy miles through the heavy morning traffic in silence. Then, by dint of shouting at street vendors via the driver’s window, he zig-zagged across Holborn, took a couple of wrong turns, righted himself, and drew up with a jerk in a busy street round the corner from Hatton Garden.

“That’s it,” he said, pointing. “Number fifty-six. That office block.”

“Brilliant.”

He helped me out, gave me the crutches, and came with me to hold open the heavy glass entrance door. Inside, behind a desk, was a man in a peaked cap personifying security, who asked me forbiddingly what floor I wanted.

“Saxony Franklin,” I said.