To the Hilt (31 page)

I laughed. “What are in numbers one, two, three and four?”

“The skinhead. Various Mr. Youngs, various Mr. Uttleys.”

“And at present?”

“I’m in a jogging suit, in a rented car, reading a map.”

“I’ll pick up the secretary in the road at half past six.”

“Fair enough.”

I spent a couple of hours wondering if it was possible that Patsy had undergone a sea change. I had either to believe it or not believe it. I had either to try for peace or fear a trap.

I would go, I thought, and take Chris with me. Peace treaties had to start somewhere, after all. So, in the afternoon, I followed the map and arrived in Patsy’s village at dusk and came across a long black-legged figure thumbing a lift.

I stopped beside him and he oozed into the car, wafting billows of expensive scent and doubling up with chuckles.

“Is anything happening?” I asked.

“Half an hour ago Surtees and his missus came out of the house, got into the car and drove down the road, and I followed them in my car and I was just about to phone you when they turned into the gates of a house about half a mile away from here. They have got fairy lights all around the garden in the trees there, and several cars outside, and it looks as if it’s some sort of party. So what do you want to do, try the house where Surtees lives, or join the party?”

“The house,” I said.

I walked from the road to the front door with Chris a step behind me and rang the bell. A young woman opened it. Beside her stood Xenia, unforgiving as always, with, behind, two younger children.

“Mrs. Benchmark is expecting you,” the young woman said when I introduced myself. “She says that she is very sorry, but when she was talking to you earlier, she forgot that she and Mr. Benchmark were going to a drinks party. It’s through the village, past the pub, along on the right-hand side, and you can’t miss it. It is all decorated with lights. Mrs. Benchmark asked me just to phone when you got here, so that she can meet you when you arrive at the party.”

I thanked her, and Chris and I walked back to the car.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“A toss-up.”

I tossed up mentally, heads you win, tails you lose, and lost.

Chris and I drove along past the pub and came to the house with the lights. When we reached the driveway, which was full of cars, we parked in the roadway and climbed out, and Chris stumbled and broke the heel off one of his high-heeled patents.

He swore, stopped and said he would break off the other one to level himself up. I laughed, and set off towards the house a few steps ahead of him.

It was as if the bushes themselves erupted.

One moment I was walking unsuspectingly along, and the next I was being enmeshed in ropes and nets and being overwhelmed and pushed and dragged, not into the looming shadowy house but through some sort of rustic gate from the drive into a garden.

The garden, I was hazily aware, was lit by more festoons of fairy lights and by big multicolored bulbs installed against many trees, which, shining upwards, made canopies of illuminated branches and leaves; it was all strikingly theatrical, dramatically magnificent, a brilliant setting for a party.

No party that I’d been to before had started with one of the guests being tied to the trunk of a maple tree next to a bunch of red light bulbs that shone upwards into autumn-red leaves, creating a scarlet canopy above
his
head. My back was against the tree. There was rope round my ankles, and round my wrists, drawing them backward, and—worst—around my neck.

At no party that I’d attended before had there been four familiar thugs as guests, one of them busy putting on red leather boxing gloves.

The only other guests were Patsy and Surtees and Oliver Grantchester.

Surtees looked triumphant, Grantchester serious and Patsy astounded.

I looked round the garden for possible exits and could see precious few. There was a lawn ringed with bushes, lit on the garden side, shadowy beyond. There was a flower bed with straggling chrysanthemums. There was an ornamental goldfish pond with an artificial stream running down into it over a pile of rocks.

There was a big house to the left, mostly dark, but with a brightly lit conservatory facing the garden.

There was Oliver Grantchester.

Oliver Grantchester.

The one crucial piece of information I hadn’t learned was that he had a place in the country half a mile along the road from Patsy’s house. The only address and telephone number for Oliver Grantchester in Ivan’s address book had been in London.

Audrey Newton had firmly pointed to Oliver Grantchester’s sketched head as the person who had collected her brother on the day he left Wantage to go on vacation.

I’d known
who
would be looking for me, but not
where.

There weren’t swear words bad enough to describe my stupidity.

Patsy would never change. Why had I ever thought that she would?

I’d
wanted
to believe that she had. I’d wanted an end to the long pointless feud.

Served me right.

Grantchester stood six feet away from me and said, “Where is the Kinloch Hilt?”

I looked at him in bewilderment. I could think of no reason why he would want to know. He made some sort of signal to the wearer of the boxing gloves, who hit me low down, in the abdomen, which hurt. My neck jerked forward against the rope. Dire.

Grantchester said, “Where is the King Alfred Gold Cup?”

Golf bag. Locker. Clubhouse. Scotland. Out of his grasp.

A bash in the ribs. Reverberations. Altogether too much, and quite likely only the beginning. Shit.

“Ivan sent you the Cup. Where is it?”

Ask Himself.

Another fast, hard, pinpointed bash. Shudder country.

Where the hell, I wondered, was my bodyguard?

Surtees strode to Grantchester’s side.

“Where’s the horse?” he yelled. “Make him tell you where he’s put the horse.”

The thug with the gloves was the one who had been demanding, “Where is it?” at the bothy.

“Where’s the horse?” Grantchester said.

I didn’t tell him. Painful decision.

Surtees positively jumped up and down.

“Make him tell you. Hit him harder.”

I thought detachedly that I would quite likely prefer to die than give in to Surtees.

Oliver Grantchester hadn’t the same priorities as Patsy’s husband.

He said to me, “Where’s your mother?”

In Devon, I thought: thank God.

Bash.

He had to be mad, if he thought I would tell him.

“Where’s Emily Cox?”

Safe. Same thing.

Bash.

“Where is Norman Quorn’s sister?”

I was by then fairly breathless. It would have been difficult to tell him even if I’d wanted to.

He stepped forwards to within three feet of me, and with quiet intensity said, “Where’s the list?”

The list.

The point of all the battering, I supposed, was to make it more likely that I would answer the one question that really mattered.

“Where’s the list?”

He had never liked me. He had seen me always as a threat to his domination of Ivan. He had encouraged Patsy’s obsessive suspicions of me. I remembered his dismay and fury when Ivan had given his power of attorney to me, not to Patsy or himself. He hadn’t wanted me looking into the brewery’s affairs. He had been right to fear it.

His big body, his heavy personality faced me now with thunderous malevolence. He didn’t care how much he hurt me. He was enjoying it. He might not be hitting me himself, but he was swaying in a sort of ecstasy as each blow landed. He wanted my surrender, but wanted it difficult; intended that I should crumble, but not too soon.

I saw the pleasure in his eyes. The full lips smiled. I hated him. Shook with hate.

“Tell me,” he said.

I saw it was my defeat he wanted almost as much as the list itself: and I also saw that he was wholly confident of achieving both. If I could deny him ... then I would.

“Where’s the list?”

The boxing gloves thudded here and there. Face, ribs, belly. Head. I lost count.

“Where’s the list?”

Such a pretty garden, I groggily thought.

The punch bag practice stopped. Grantchester went away. The four thugs stood around me watchfully, as if I could slide out of their ropes and knots, which I couldn’t, but not for lack of trying.

Patsy’s face swam into my close vision.

“What list?” she said.

It made no sense. Surely she knew what list.

I would have said she looked worried. Horrified even. But she’d lured me there. My own fault.

“Why?” she said. “Why did Oliver ask where your mother and Emily are?”

I dredged up an answer. “How does he know they are not at home?” My face felt stiff. The rest just felt.

“Alexander,” Patsy said in distress, not working it out, “whatever Oliver wants, for God’s sake give it to him. This ... this ...” She gestured to my trussed state, and to the thugs. “This is
awful. ”

I agreed with her. I also couldn’t believe she didn’t know what her friendly neighborhood lawyer wanted. I’d done believing Patsy. Finished for life. Finished for what was left of life.

Oliver Grantchester was playing for millions, and boxing gloves were getting him nowhere. He returned from the direction of his house, pulling behind him a barbecue cooker on wheels.

Oh God, I thought. Oh no.

I can’t do this. I’ll tell him. I know I will. They’re not my millions.

Grantchester took the grill grid off the barbecue and propped it against one of the wheeled legs. Then he went back into his bright conservatory and returned carrying a bag of charcoal briquettes and a bottle of lighter fuel. He poured briquettes from the bag into the firebox of the barbecue and then poured the whole bottleful of lighter fuel over the briquettes.

He struck a match and tossed it onto the fuel.

Flame rushed upwards in a roaring plume, scarlet and gold and eternally untamed. The flame was reflected in Grantchester’s eyes, so that for a moment it looked as if the fire were inside his head, looking out.

Then, satisfied, he picked up the grill with a pair of long tongs and settled it in place, to get hot.

I could see the thugs’ faces. They showed no surprise. One showed sickened revulsion, but still no surprise.

I thought,
They’ve seen this before.

They’d seen Norman Quorn.

Norman Quorn ... burned in a garden, with grass cuttings in his clothes ...

Patsy looked merely puzzled. So did Surtees.

The briquettes flamed, heating up quickly.

I would tell him, I thought. Enough was enough. My entire body already hurt abominably. There was a point beyond which it wasn’t sensible to go. There were out-of-date abstractions like the persistence of the human spirit, and they might be all right for paintings, but didn’t apply in pretty country gardens in the evening of the second Saturday in October.

Norman Quorn had burned down to his ribs, and died, and he hadn’t told.

I wasn’t Norman Quorn. I hadn’t millions to lose. They were Patsy’s millions. God damn her soul.

Grantchester waited with lip-licking anticipation for frightful ages while the heat built up, and when the briquettes glowed a bright searing red he lifted the barred grill off the fire with his pair of long tongs and dropped it flat on the lawn, where it sizzled and singed the grass.

“You’ll lie on that if you don’t tell me,” he said. He was enjoying himself. “Where’s the list?”

Cussed, rebellious, stubborn ... I might be all those by nature: but I knew I would tell him.

Defeat lay there at my feet, blackening the grass. Money was of no importance. The decision was a matter of will. Of pride, even. And such pride came too expensive.

Tell him ... you have to.

“Where is it?” he said.

I meant to tell him. I tried to tell him. But when it came to the point, I couldn’t.

So I burned.

 

 

Some of the marks will be there always, but I can’t see them unless I look in a mirror.

 

 

I could hear someone screaming and I remembered Surtees promising, “Next time you’ll scream,” but it wasn’t I, after all, who was screaming; it was Patsy.

Her high urgent voice, screaming.

The noise I made wasn’t a scream. From deep inside, like an age-old recognition of a primeval torment, starting low in my gut and ending like a growl in the throat, the sound I heard in myself, that was at one with myself, that was all there was of existence, that unified every feeling, every nerve’s message into one consuming elemental protest, that noise was a deep sort of groan.

I could hear him repeating, “Where is it? Where is it?”

Irrelevant.

It all lasted, I dare say, not much more than a minute. Two minutes, perhaps.

Half a lifetime, condensed.

I’d gone beyond speech when the scene blew apart.

With crashes and bangs and shrieking metal the driving cab and entire front half of a large traveling bus smashed down the fence and gate between the drive and the garden. Out of the bus and onto the lawn poured a half-drunk mob of football supporters, all dressed in orange (it seemed) with orange scarves and heavy boots and raucous shouting voices.

“Where’s the beer, then? ... Where’s the beer?”

Scrambling through the demolished fence came more and more orange scarves. Hooligan faces. “Where’s the beer?”

The four thugs who’d been pinning down my arms and legs decided to quit and took their weight off me so that I was blessedly able to roll off the grill and lie facedown on the cool grass: and a pair of long legs in black tights appeared in my limited field of vision, with a familiar voice above me saying, “Jesus Christ, Al,” and I tried to say, “What took you so long?” but it didn’t come out.