Dick Francis - Shattered

Eddie, who seemed not to understand what had happened, was still on his knees beside the wall. Martin’s valet who, with his stubborn misconceptions, had accompanied Rose on this whole unholy tape hunt, now looked as though he were begging absolution. To my mind he certainly failed to deserve it.

Pamela Jane heaved herself from under me in a troubled dilemma as she couldn’t decide whether to thank me for saving her from razor-sharp damage since, in the chair, she’d been in a direct line to be peppered, or to revile me for leaving Hickory to take whatever came his way in the blast.

Pamela Jane, of course, had understood the physics of stress and strain in superheated glass, and she would now be sure I’d intended to shatter the horse from the moment I’d started to make it. She would be puzzling over the nonsense of the gold delivery, both the amount and the timing, because, as she confessed to me much later, it had all been so unlike me. She had believed every word I’d said to Rose, and now she felt a fool.

“Dear Pam J,” I contentedly said, “you were sincerely a great help.”

That was afterwards. At the time, during the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the trophy horse, she still worried over the outcome for Hickory.

When I stood up and looked over the half-wall to see what shape Rose and Hickory were in, I found Rose bleeding down one leg but still shaking with determined fury while she shoved a clean punty iron into the tank and drew out a second one already tipped with white-hot hate.

Hickory, who had finally succeeded in flinging himself out of the chair altogether, lay facedown on the smooth brick floor trying to rub the adhesive off his mouth. Tears from the pain of his damaged ear seemed to be running helplessly down inside his nose, and he was trying to deal with that by sniffing.

Sharply aware that at some point somewhere Rose had succeeded in drawing a line of fire across my own lower back ribs, I felt I’d already had enough for one morning of the unequal combat.

Rose hadn’t. Rose, it seemed, had energy in stock for a third world war. As she drew her loaded iron with speed from the fire, she told me that if I didn’t get back at once into the workshop the burn to Hickory’s ear would be only the beginning. She could have freed him. She could at least have helped him, but she didn’t.

I went around the half-wall. Hickory still lay facedown on the floor, but instead of rubbing his face raw without results, he was now thrashing his legs instead. Hurting and helpless, he was in no immediate danger from Rose, who chose to advance on me, holding the silvery black five-foot-long punty iron loaded and ready to strike if I didn’t dodge fast enough.

“Adam Force’s videotape,” she said. “Where is it?”

Short of breath from evading deep burns so long, I managed dry-mouthed to reply, “He said he’d rerecorded it with horse races.”

“Rubbish.” Rose advanced towards me with the white-hot ball of glass inexorably leading the way. Had we been armed the other way around, I could with two cuts of heavy scissors have sliced the ball into a pointed spear. The spear, if one thrust it fiercely, would burn a path right through a body, searing, cauterizing and killing. Rose had no spear but a ball was bad enough. Its effect would be the same.

With at least some sort of plan I backed away from Rose and her deadly fire, cursing that I couldn’t reach the five or six punty irons lying idle to one side, irons I could at least have used to fence with, because Hickory with his shocking wound lay suffering in my way.

Rose began again to enjoy compelling me to retreat step by backwards step. Backwards past the furnace, its trapdoor shut. Backwards across the workshop, faster as she increased her pace.

“The videotape,” she demanded. “Where is it?”

At last, at last, I saw Worthington again outside the gallery door, Worthington this time flanked by Tom Pigeon, Jim, Catherine and her hobo partner, Pernickety Paul.

Norman Osprey, suddenly not liking the odds, stood back to let them in and dived fast around them out into the street. I had a last glimpse of him as he set off down the hill with Tom and his three four-legged companions in pursuit.

The two plainclothes officers and, with Worthington and Jim, filled the doorway he’d left. Furiously seeing the advent of my friends as her last chance to make me remember her for life, Rose rushed recklessly at my abdomen. I sidestepped and dodged yet again and ran and swerved, and ended where I’d aimed for, beside the wide round pots of colored powders on the stock shelves.

It was the white color I wanted, the dust the Germans called Emaill weiss. I snatched off the lid and plunged my hand into the open pot, grabbed as much dust as I could in one handful and threw it at Rose’s eyes.

Emaill weiss — white enamel ground to dust — contained arsenic... and arsenic dust made eyes blur and water and go temporarily and effectively blind. Rose, her eyes streaming, her sight gone, went on sweeping around with her petrifying length of death-bearing punty iron.

Eddie seemingly rose from his prayers and walked around the half-wall pleading with her to be still. “Rose, dear girl, it’s over...”

But nothing would stop her. Blinded for a while she might be, but she lashed out with the killing iron at where she’d last seen me, trying still to penetrate my stomach or chest, then wildly slashing at where my head had been.

Missing me didn’t stop her being more dangerous blundering about than if she could see me, and finally, disastrously, the unimaginably hot glass connected twice with living flesh.

There were screams chokingly cut off.

It was Eddie, her father, that incredibly she had hit first. She had seared the skin from his fingers as he had held them in front of his face to defend himself. There were crashes of iron against walls and a fearful soft sizzling as the worst of all calamities happened.

Pamela Jane hysterically threw herself into my arms and hid her face, but it wasn’t she who had burned. From across the workshop, where the air again smelled of funeral pyre, Paul folded to the ground and lay motionless, his limbs sprawling in the haphazardness of death.

Catherine in a state of shock and anger stared hollow-eyed in disbelief. I stretched an arm towards her and hugged both girls as if I could never let them go.

Adam Force came to stand against the safe side of the wall into the workshop and begged Rose to stand still and let someone — like himself — come to help her and her father, with the only result that she changed direction towards his voice, lashing through the air in great sweeps of the punty iron.

Catherine, a police officer to the bone, stiffened after her first need for comfort and, with Rose following the sound of her voice, walked away from me and called her station urgently for backup. Stifling human terror, she spoke tightly on her personal radio. “Officer down,” she said, pushing the transit button. “Red call. Red call. Officer in need of immediate assistance.”

She reported the address of Logan Glass, and then and with less formality, and genuine extreme emotion, added, “Come at once. Dear God.”

She dodged Rose’s rushing speed and with incredible bravery knelt down beside her silent hobo partner. The plainclothes inhabitant of doorways, whose name to me had never been more than “Pernickety Paul,” would catch no more villains. Pernickety Paul had taken a long white-hot direct hit through his neck.

I disentangled myself from Pamela Jane and half ran across the room away from Catherine and called to Rose, “I’m here, Rose. I’m over here and you’ll never catch me.”

Rose turned half circle my way and pivoted once more when I jumped past her again and yelled at her. She turned again and again and finally began to tire enough with her blurring eyes for Worthington and Jim to reach my side and for Catherine to come up behind us, and for the four of us to grab Rose at high speed and immobilize her still-slashing punty iron arm. I wrestled the iron a good safe way away from her, feeling the heat of it near my legs, but not on my skin, and still she went on struggling in Worthington’s and Jim’s grasp.