Dick Francis - Shattered

No, we don’t think.

I knew that several people considered me heartless. Also promiscuous, also fickle. Catherine would be advised not to get herself involved with that fellow whose reputation was as brittle as his glass. I knew quite well what the gossips said, but it wasn’t going to be to please any gossip that the house and I one day would settle on a mate for life.

The burglars who’d taken all my videotapes hadn’t made a lot of mess. There had been television sets with video recorders in three rooms: in the kitchen, and in each of the sitting rooms in which for nearly ten years my mother and I had lived our semi-separate lives.

As I hadn’t yet done anything about the rooms since her death, it seemed as if she would soon come out of her bedroom, chiding me for having left my dirty clothes on the floor.

There wasn’t a single tape left anywhere that I could find. My parent had had a radically different taste from me in films and recorded TV programs, but it no longer mattered. Out of my own room I’d lost a rather precious bunch of glassblowing instruction tapes that I might be able to replace if I could find copies. I’d been commissioned to make some of them myself for university courses. Those courses were basic and mostly dealt with how to make scientific equipment for laboratories. I couldn’t imagine those teaching tapes being the special target of any thief.

In the kitchen there had been game shows, tennis, American football and cooking. All gone. The police had suggested I list them all. What a hope!

There wasn’t much left to tidy, except for patches of dust and a couple of dead spiders here and there, where once the TVs had stood.

With the Rose-induced bruises growing gradually less sore, I slept safely behind bolted doors, and in the morning walked (as usual while sans car) downhill to Logan Glass, getting there before Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane. Relief was the emotion I chiefly felt about the soaring wings; relief that somehow someone hadn’t managed to smash them overnight.

Irish’s pedestal and my lighting system had combined to make accidental breakage very difficult, but one couldn’t easily guard against hurricane or ax.

I made a fleet of little ornamental sailing ships all morning and bought a comfortable armchair at lunchtime which minimized every remaining wince. Followed by a brown-overalled chair pusher (with chair), I returned to Logan Glass and rearranged the furniture. My assistants grinned knowingly.

I straightened out the worst of Hickory’s growing hubris by giving him a sailing boat as an exercise, which resulted in a heap of sad lumps of stunted mast and a mainsail that no breeze would ever fill.

Hickory’s good looks and general air of virility would always secure him jobs he couldn’t do. In less than the first week of his attractive company I’d learned more of his limitations than his skills, but every customer liked him and he was a great salesman.

“It’s all right for you,” he now complained, looking from the little boat I’d made in demonstration to the heap of colored rubble he’d painstakingly achieved, “you know what a sailing boat looks like. When I make them they come out flat.”

Half the battle in all I did, as I tried to explain to him without any “cockiness” creeping in, was the draftsman’s inner eye that saw an object in three-dimensional terms. I could draw and paint all right, but it was the three-dimensional imagination that I’d been blessed with from birth that made little sailboats a doddle.

As Hickory’s third try bit the dust amid commiserating murmurs from the rest of us, the telephone interrupted the would-be star glass-blower’s explanation of how drops of water had unfairly fallen on his work at the crucial moment and splintered it, which was definitely not his fault...

I didn’t listen. The voice on the line was Catherine’s.

“I’ve been a police officer all morning,” she said. “Did you really get another chair?”

“It’s here waiting for you.”

“Great. And I’ve collected some news for you. I’ll be along when I go off duty, at six o’clock.”

To fill in time I e-mailed Victor, expecting to have to wait for a reply, as he should have been at school, but as before, he was ready.

He typed, “Things have changed.”

“Tell me.”

There was a long gap of several minutes.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“My dad’s in jail.”

E-mail messages crossed the ether without inflection. Victor’s typed words gave no clues to his feelings.

I sent back, “Where? What for? How long? I’m very sorry.”

Victor’s reply had nothing to do with the questions.

“I hate her.”

I asked flatly, “Who?”

A pause, then, “Auntie Rose, of course.”

I itched for faster answers but got only a feeling that if I pressed too hard I would lose him altogether.

Without the tearing emotion I could imagine him trying to deal with, he wrote, “He’s been there ten weeks. They sent me to stay with my uncle Mac in Scotland when the trial was on, so I wouldn’t know. They told me my dad had gone on an Antarctic expedition as a chef. He is a chef, you see. He got sent down for a year, but he’ll be out before that. Will you go on talking to me?”

“Yes,” I sent back. “Of course.”

A long pause again, then “Rose sneaked on Dad.” I waited, and more came. “He hit Mom. He broke her nose and some ribs.” After an even longer pause, he sent, “E-mail me tomorrow,” and I replied fast, while he might still be on-line, “Tell me about Doctor Force.”

Either he’d disconnected his phone line or didn’t want to reply, because Doctor Force was a nonstarter. Victor’s silence lasted all day.

I went back to the teaching session. Hickory finally fashioned a boat that might have floated had it been full-size and made of fiberglass with a canvas sail. He allowed himself a smirk of satisfaction, which none of us begrudged him. Glassblowing was a difficult discipline even for those like Hickory, who apparently had everything on their side — youth, agility, imagination. Hickory put the little boat carefully in the annealing oven, knowing I would give him the finished ornament to keep, in the morning.

By six I’d managed to send them all home, and by six plus twenty-three Detective Constable Dodd was approving the new armchair and reading Victor Waltman Verity’s troubles.

“Poor boy,” she said.

I said ruefully, “As he hates his aunt Rose for grassing on his pa, he might not tell me anything else himself. Sneaking appears to be a mortal sin, in his book.”

“Mm.” She read the printed pages again, then cheerfully said, “Well, whether or not you have Victor’s help, your Doctor Force is definitely on the map.” It pleased her to have found him. “I chased him through a few academic Who’s Whos with no results. He’s not a university lecturer, or not primarily, anyway. He is, believe it or not, a medical doctor. Licensed, and all that.” She handed me an envelope with a grin. “One of my colleagues spends his time chasing struck-off practitioners. He looked for him, and in the end he did find him.”

“Is he struck off?” It would make sense, I thought, but Catherine shook her head.

“No, not only is he not struck off, he was working in some research lab or other until recently. He took a lot of finding, because of that. It’s all in this envelope.”

“And is he fiftyish with a white beard?”

She laughed. “His date of birth will be in the envelope. A white beard’s expecting too much.”

Both of us at that point found that there were more absorbing facets to life than chasing obscure medics.

I suggested food from the takeout; she offered another pillion ride up the hill: we saw to both. I’d left central heating on for comfort, and Catherine wandered all over the house, smiling.