Dick Francis - Shattered

The door from the kitchen brought Victor to a standstill of puzzlement and unease.

He said, “I’m sure I bolted the door before I went out.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I know I bolted that gate from the backyard into the lane. Mom gets furious if I forget it.”

He opened the unbolted kitchen door and stepped out into a small high-walled square of backyard. Across the weeds and dead-looking grass a tall brown-painted door was set into the high brick wall, and it was this door that freshly upset Victor by again not having its bolts, top and bottom, firmly slid into place.

“Bolt them now,” I said urgently about the door from the lane, but Victor stood still in front of me in puzzlement and dismay, and although understanding flashed like lightning through my mind, I couldn’t get around Victor fast enough. The door from the lane opened the moment I stepped towards it across the grass from the kitchen.

Rose had come into the backyard from the lane. Gina and the quasi gorilla Norman Osprey marched out triumphantly from the house. Both Rose and Osprey were armed with a cut-off section of garden hose. Rose’s piece had a tap on it.

Victor at my side stood like a rock, not wanting to believe what he was seeing. When he spoke, the words addressed to his mother were a scramble of “You’ve come back early.”

Rose prowled like a hunting lioness between me and the door to the lane, swinging the heavy brass tap on the supple green hose, and almost licking her lips.

Gina, for once without curlers and pretty as a result, tried to justify the prospect ahead by whining to Victor that his caged father had told her to eff off, he wasn’t in the mood for her silly chatter. In her anger she told Victor for the first time that his father was “inside,” and deserved it.

“He can be a mean brute, your dad,” Gina said. “And when we’d gone all that way! So Rose drove me home again, and that bitch next door told me you’d sneaked off craftily to the station, because she followed, as she was going that way anyhow, and you met that fellow, that one over there, that Rose says is stealing a million from us. How can you, young Vic? So Rose says this time she’ll make him tell us what we want to know, but it’s no thanks to you, Rose says.”

I heard only some of it. I watched Victor’s face, and saw with relief his strong alienation from Gina’s smug voice. The more she said, the more he didn’t like it. Teenage rebellion visibly grew.

The present and future scene here hadn’t been exactly one of the “what ifs” that Tom and I had imagined in the bushes, but now what if... if I could think it out fast enough... if I could use Victor’s horrified reaction to his mother’s outpouring... if I could put up with a bit of Rose’s persuasion... then perhaps — on top of the carefree day on the moor — perhaps Victor would indeed feel like telling me what I was sure he knew. Perhaps the sight of his aunt Rose’s cruelty in action would impel him to offer a gift in atonement... to offer me the one thing he knew I wanted. Maybe the prize was worth a bit of discomfort. So get on with it, I told myself. If you’re going to do it, do it fast.

Last Sunday, I thought, the black masks had jumped me unawares. It was different this Sunday. I could invite the assault head-on, and I did, at a run towards the door to the lane, straight towards Rose and her swinging tap.

She was fast and ruthless and managed to connect twice before I caught her right arm and bent it up behind her, her face close to mine, her dry skin and freckles in sharp focus, hate and sudden pain drawing her lips back from her teeth. Gina, yelling blasphemy, tore at my ear to free her sister.

I caught a glimpse of Victor’s horror an instant before Norman Osprey lashed out at me from behind with his own length of hose. Rose wrenched herself out of my grip, pushed Gina out of her way and had another swing at me with her tap. I managed a circular kickbox which temporarily put the gorilla Norman facedown on the grass, and in return got another fearful clout from Rose along the jaw, which ripped the skin open.

Enough, I thought. Far and away too much. Blood dripped everywhere. I used my only real weapon, the piercing whistle for help, which Tom and I in the bushes had agreed meant “come at once.”

What if I whistle and he doesn’t come...?

I whistled again, louder, longer, calling not for a taxi in the rain in London, but quite likely for life without deformity and certainly for self-respect. I couldn’t have told Rose from direct knowledge where to find that videotape, but if I’d needed to badly enough I would have invented something. Whether or not she would have believed me was another matter and one I hoped not to find out.

I fortunately also didn’t find out what conclusion Rose intended for her Sunday afternoon sports. There was a vast crashing and tinkling noise and Tom’s voice roaring at his dogs, and then three snarling Doberman pinschers poured like a torrent out of the house’s wide-open kitchen door into the confined space of the backyard.

Tom carried an iron bar he’d borrowed from local town railings. Norman Osprey backed away from him, his hose soft and useless in opposition, his Sunday pleasure no longer one long laugh.

Rose, the quarry of the dogs, turned tail and ignominiously left the scene through the gate into the lane, sliding through a small opening and pulling it shut behind her.

Trusting that the dogs knew me well enough to keep their fangs to themselves, I walked among them and slid the bolts across on the wall-to-lane door, blocking Rose’s immediate way back.

Gina screeched at Tom only once and without much conviction, Tom’s fierce physical closeness reducing her protests to nil. She was silent even when she discovered Tom’s mode of entry had been to smash open her front door. She didn’t try to stop her son when he ran past her along the passage from backyard to front, and called to me in the few steps before I reached the road.

Tom and the Dobermans were already out on the sidewalk on their way back to the car.

I stopped at once when Victor called me, and waited until he came up. Either he would tell me or he wouldn’t. Either the hose and tap had been worth it, or they hadn’t. Payoff time.

“Gerard...” He was out of breath, not from running but from what he’d seen in the yard. “I can’t bear all this. If you want to know... Doctor Force lives in Lynton,” he said. “Valley of Rocks Road.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Victor unhappily watched me use tissues scrounged from his mother’s kitchen to blot the oozing blood on my face. I said, “There’s always e-mail, don’t forget.”

“How can you even speak to me?”

I grinned at him. “I still have all my teeth.”

“Look out for Rose,” he warned me anxiously. “She never gives up.”

“Try to arrange to live with your grandfather,” I suggested. “It would be safer than here.”

Some of his misery abated. I touched his shoulder in parting and walked along Lorna Terrace to where Tom Pigeon waited.

Tom looked at my battered face and commentated, “You were a hell of a long time whistling.”

“Mm.” I smiled. “Silly of me.”

“You delayed it on purpose!” he exclaimed in revelation. “You let that harpy hit you.”

“You get what you pay for, on the whole,” I said.

Most bruises faded within a week, Martin had said, and also this time on the Monday I got a doctor to stick together the worst of the cuts with small adhesive strips.

“I suppose you walked into another black-masked door,” guessed Constable Dodd, horrified. “Rose may not frighten you but, from what I’ve heard, she’d terrify me.”

“Rose didn’t bother about a mask,” I said, putting together a spicy rice supper on Monday evening in the kitchen of my house on the hill. “Do you like garlic?”