Dick Francis - Shattered

Jim’s voice rose. “White-Beard’s got out of his car. What shall I do? He’s coming this way...”

“Jim,” I said flatly, “don’t panic. Also don’t look at Doctor Force if he comes near you and don’t open the window. Keep on talking to me, and if you have anything near you that you can read, read it aloud to me now.”

“Jeez.”

Lawson-Young’s eyebrows were up by his hairline.

I said to him, “Adam Force is in the road outside here, alarming my driver.” And I didn’t say that on our last encounter the doctor had seen me off with a poisonous-looking syringe.

Jim’s voice wobbled in my ear with the opening paragraphs of the Rover’s instruction manual and then rose again an octave as he said, “He’s outside my window, he’s rapping on it... Mr. Logan, what shall I do?”

“Keep on reading.”

I gave the receiver to the professor and asked him to continue listening, and without wasting time I hurried from the part of the laboratory where we’d been standing, along the hallway and out into the street. Along to my left Adam Force stood in the roadway tapping hard on the window of the gray Rover on the driver’s side and clearly getting agitated at the lack of response from Jim.

I walked fast along the sidewalk, and then, strolling the last part, crossed the road and came up quietly behind Doctor White-Beard and, as I’d done to Victor at Taunton station, said, “Hello,” at his shoulder.

Worthington and Tom Pigeon wouldn’t have approved. Adam Force spun around in astonishment.

“Are you looking for me?” I asked.

Inside the car Jim in great agitation was stabbing with his finger towards the lab’s front door and the road beyond. Traffic in this secondary road was light, but one of the approaching cars, Jim was indicating to me, was ultra-bad news.

“Adam Force,” I said loudly, “is too well known in this street,” and with a total lack of complicated advance planning, and with unadulterated instinct, I grabbed the charming doctor by the wrist, spun him around and ended with him standing facing the oncoming car with his arm twisted up behind him, held in the strongest grip resulting from years of maneuvering heavy molten glass.

Adam Force yelled, at first with pain and then, also, with bargaining surrender. “You’re hurting me. Don’t do it. I’ll tell you everything. Don’t do it... God... Let me go, please.”

In between the two phases, from defiance to entreaty, a small object fell from the hand I’d gripped. It lay in the gutter quite close to a storm-drain grating, and I’d have paid it no attention were it not for Force trying hard to kick it down through the grating into the sewer, to be forever lost.

I didn’t know what he meant when he said “everything,” but I didn’t in the least mind learning. He screeched again under my jerking pressure and I wondered whatever Professor Lawson-Young was making of it, if he were still listening. The advancing car stopped at the sight of Adam Force’s predicament and the four cars behind it exercised their horns, the drivers impatient, not knowing what was going on.

“Everything,” I prompted Force from behind his ear.

“Rose,” he began, and then thought better of it. Rose would frighten anyone.

I jerked his arm fiercely to encourage him and, with some dismay, I saw the big bruiser, now lumbering out of his car to come to his aid, to be Norman Osprey, with his gorilla-type shoulder development. Over my shoulder I could see the second car of the classic squeeze moving towards me. In consequence of these unwelcome surprises I jerked my captive’s arm yet again, then feared to break or dislocate his shoulder. There were tears of real pain in the doctor’s eyes.

Imploring for release, he half said, half sobbed, desperately, “I got the cyclopropane gas for Rose... I took it from the clinic’s pharmacy... I can’t see red from green, but I’m sure of orange... now let me go.”

It was hard to hear him distinctly because of the street noises and the blaring horns, and his “everything” only confirmed what had already seemed likely, but I kept the pressure on just long enough for him to shriek out the answer I badly wanted to the question, “How come you know Rose?”

To him it seemed unimportant. He answered impatiently, “Her sister Gina came with her mother-in-law to my clinic; I met Rose at Gina’s house.”

Satisfied, I was faced with a fast, unharmed disengagement. The cars had advanced until they were radiator to radiator and going nowhere. The driver of the second was hurriedly disembarking, and to my horror, I saw that it was Rose. Uninvolved cars made a constant cacophony. The busy parking warden, notebook to the ready, spotted the fracas from a distance and veered back towards Jim and his zone infringement.

Norman Osprey, a mountain on the move, charged towards Force and myself to release the doctor and maybe continue with the entertainment Tom Pigeon and his dogs had interrupted at Broadway.

Not seeing anything except straight ahead, the warden and Norman the bookmaker bumped into each other violently, which slowed their pace and purpose while they cursed their mutual carelessness.

Jim unhelpfully kept his eyes fixed faithfully down on his instruction manual, as I’d told him, and went on steadfastly reading.

I tried screaming at him to gain his attention, but uselessly, and in the end I let out the loudest possible London-rain taxi whistle, which pierced even Jim’s concentration.

“Window,” I shouted.

He at last understood, but it took him eons to switch on the ignition and press the window-lowering button. Rose started running. The warden unwound herself from Norman Osprey. Car horns deafened because of the blockage of the highway.

I shouted at my driver, “Jim, get the car out of here. I’ll phone you.”

Jim suddenly proved his stunt-driving skills weren’t a rumor. With not much more than two hand spans’ clearance he locked the wheels of his Rover and circled like a circus horse bumping over the sidewalk, brushing me and my captive strongly out of the way with the rear wing and leaving us standing where the car had been, with the white-bearded doctor no longer in agony but still not going anywhere while I held him gripped. Jim’s taillight flashed briefly at the first corner as he slid around it and left the scene.

Everyone else seemed to be running and shouting to no real purpose. I let go of Force’s wrist while at the same time shoving him heavily into the joint arms of the warden and Osprey, with a bounce-off weight that unbalanced them all.

In that disorganized few seconds I bent down, scooped up the small object Force had dropped and ran, ran as if sprinting off the starting blocks on an athletic track. It was only the unexpectedness of my speed, I thought, that made the difference. I ran, dodging cars and irate drivers, swerving around Rose’s grasp like a player evading a tackle in a football game, and believing — making myself believe — that I was fit enough to outrun them all, as long as no busybody stranger tripped me up.

I didn’t have to test fate too much. The front door of the laboratory house swung open ahead of me, with George Lawson-Young, still with the telephone clutched in his hand, coming out under the pillared porch, looking my way and beckoning me to safety. I fairly bolted through his heavy shining black-painted door, and ended breathless and laughing in his hall.

He closed the door. “I can’t see what there is to laugh about,” he said.

“Life’s a toss-up.”

“And today it came up heads?”

I liked the professor. I grinned and held out to him the small object I’d salvaged from the gutter, asking him with moderate urgency, “Can you find out what this contains?”