Dick Francis - Shattered

He spoke in puzzlement, and Worthington, I thought, could explain a thing or two to Victor. Fatherly, steady and worldly, Worthington, a great fellow, simply couldn’t be Blackmask Four. And Victor? Surely not Victor, though Blackmask Four hadn’t been bodily substantial, like Worthington, but lithe, like Victor. But Victor couldn’t have bashed me about then, and asked me for help now.

Not Victor, not Worthington, but what about Gina? Was she muscular enough? I didn’t know for sure, and, I decided reluctantly, I would have to find out. I’d been through almost the whole register of cul-de-sacs and failed to find anyone that fitted a factor X. Yet there had indeed been a fourth black-masked attacker. I had felt the hands. I’d felt the blows. I’d seen the eyes within the mask. Blackmask Four was real.

According to the professor, there was a question I wasn’t asking, and if I didn’t ask the right question, how could I expect to be told the right answer? But what was the right question? And whom should I ask?

With a mental sigh I took Victor out of the station, and to his obvious pleasure reunited him with Tom and his three black canine companions. He told Tom that that day, the Sunday that we’d spent on the moor, had been one of his happiest ever. Happiest, that was, until his auntie Rose had ruined it.

He played with the dogs, plainly in their good graces, and spoke to them instead of us. The black ears heard him say, “I’ll bet people can still run away to sea.”

I said after a while, “I’ll go round to Victor’s house, and if his mother’s in I’ll ask her if he can spend the weekend with us.”

Tom protested, “I’ll go.”

“We’ll both go,” I said, and in spite of Victor’s fears we left him with Jim, and, taking the dogs with us, knocked on the door of the roughly repaired entrance to 19 Lorna Terrace.

Gina Verity came to our summons and failed to close her mended door against us fast enough. Tom’s heavy shoe was quicker.

In the five days since the previous Sunday, Gina had lost her looks, her serenity and her confidence. She stared at my slashed and mending jaw as if it were one straw too many. She said helplessly, “You’d better come in,” and with sagging shoulders led me down the now familiar passage to the kitchen. We sat, as before, at the table.

Tom and the dogs stood on guard outside the house because Gina didn’t know when either her sister or Adam Force would return.

“I would like to invite Victor to stay for the weekend,” I said.

Gina lit cigarette from cigarette, as before. “All right,” she agreed in a dull sort of way. “Pick him up from school.” She thought it over. “Better not let Rose find out, she wouldn’t let him go with you.”

Gina’s left-hand fingers were stained nearly orange with nicotine. The right-hand fingers were white. I stretched forward and lifted first her right hand and then her left, putting them down again gently. The muscles were flabby, with no tone. Too apathetic to complain, she merely looked at her own hands one by one, and said, “What?”

I didn’t reply. Blackmask Four’s left hand hadn’t been as intensely yellow as this one, even seen under the streetlights and even while actively punching. With those strongly muscled arms, Blackmask Four had been male.

Gina had not been Blackmask Four. The certainty was unarguable.

Time to go.

Out in front of the house Tom’s equivalent of my alarm whistle set up a howling, growling, barking clamor, which the dogs only ever did at their owner’s prompting.

Gina immediately stood and shrank away from the table, her eyes wide with unmistakable fear. “It’s Rose,” Gina said. “She’s come back. She always makes dogs bark. They don’t like her. She makes their hair stand on end.”

Mine too, I thought. The deep-throated Dobermans went on proving Gina right.

“Go,” Gina said to me, her tongue sticking on the words. “Go out. Out through the backyard... and out through the gate and down the lane. Go, go. Hurry.” Her urgency was for my own safety as much as hers.

It might have been prudent to go, but I’d never been a wise devotee of the “He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day” school of thought. Running away from Rose... I supposed that I’d already escaped three times from her traps, and once from Adam Force... With that amount of good luck, I thought, I might remain a bit longer undestroyed.

I stayed sitting at the table, though with chair pushed back and one knee over the other, while the front door creaked open and the purposeful footsteps came along the passage.

Not only Rose had come, but Adam Force with her. Rose had recognized Tom and his sidekicks, but the doctor was pinning his negative emotions entirely on me. He’d set me up two days ago as an insulin-dosed car crash hit-and-run victim — a scheme that had gone wrong. My presence in that house shook him.

Rose, interestingly, had bloomed as fast as Gina had faded. Her dry skin and frizzy hair seemed lubricated, and she was alight with what (thanks to Victor’s run-through) I could only interpret as satisfied sex.

Adam Force, good-looking and charming though he still might be, was to my mind a con man sliding towards self-inflicted destruction. If he’d kept anywhere a copy of what he’d stolen from Professor Lawson-Young’s laboratory, Rose in the end would have it. Rose would acquire whatever she set out to get, man, tape or power.

Rose had definitely worn one of the black masks, but Adam Force hadn’t. He hadn’t known who I was when I turned up at Phoenix House.

I said lazily, rising to my feet, “We’ll not have a repeat of last Sunday. I came to see Gina, principally, but I came also to leave a message for Rose.”

They listened attentively, to my amazement.

I said, “The fourth of your band of black-masked thugs has whispered in my ear.”

The possibility of my untruth being accurate froze Rose long enough for me to go forwards along the passage and into the Dobermans’ territory of safekeeping. Tom, eyebrows up, joined in step beside me once we were out in the road, and, unpursued, we walked along and around the bend towards the station, the dogs following in silence.

“However did you manage to get out of there unharmed?” Tom asked. “I was sure you would whistle.”

“I told them a lie.”

He laughed. But it hadn’t been funny. Adam Force’s sharply focused calculating assessment of me from neck to ankles had been too much like a matter of adding up the amount of deadly substance needed per kilo of body weight to finish me off. A lethal amount of insulin... a syringeful of “good-bye” threat, a cylinder of cyclopropane gas, a prelude to any sort of injected extinction... Rose would inflict instant damage, but Adam Force would more deliberately kill.

In a normal kitchen, though Rose could always slash with knives, Adam Force wouldn’t have at hand any poison, his weapon of choice. He would need more time than he had.

I kept a good distance from Rose on my way out, but it was the white beard and orange socks, the gracious manners and the Phoenix House pharmacy, the hunger for a million and the belief of infallibility, these were the long-term dangers that I had most to fear.

There were two particular videotapes missing, and both had at some time been in my care. Did Rose have the one detailing the necklace? Did Force after all retain the cancer research he’d stolen? I might believe the answers to be yes and no, but how the hell could I find out for sure?

On the way back to Broadway we veered into Cheltenham to call on Kenneth Trubshaw, the trophy committee man, who’d said on Jim’s car phone that he would be at home. Slightly surprised by our numbers, he nevertheless generously offered the warmth of the kitchen stove to my traveling companions, plus a large tin of crackers, and shepherded me alone into his much colder drawing room. It was a large room facing north, its daylight gray and carpet green, a combination I found depressing.