Dick Francis - Shattered

The police side of Catherine flowed in her like a strong tide. She sought and found the handcuffs carried by Pernickety Paul on a belt around his waist. She clicked them roughly onto Rose’s wrists behind her back, the metal bands squeezed tight against her skin.

Rose kicked.

“Take my belt,” Worthington shouted, and I unbuckled his pliable woven leather belt and tied it around one ankle and knotted it to the other, until she overbalanced and lay on her side on the floor, thrashing her legs still and cursing.

There was nothing about “going quietly” in the arrest of Rose Payne. An ambulance with paramedics and two cars full of bristling young police officers drew up outside the gallery and filled Logan Glass, crunching the fragments of the shattered horse to dust under their heavy boots. They talked with Catherine and fetched a blanket in which they rolled Rose like a baby in swaddling clothes and, with her struggling to the end, they manhandled her out through the showroom and gallery door and shoved her into the back of one of the police cars.

Spitting fury, she was soon joined there by the burly Norman Osprey, whose muscles had been no match for three sets of canine fangs. Tom told me later that the big man had sat in the road quivering with fear, his head and hands between his legs, begging for the police to rescue him from the black snarls circling around him.

In the workshop I watched as Catherine, dry-eyed, brought another blanket in from a police car to cover the silence of Paul.

More police arrived, some in uniform and others in plainclothes more suitable for a Sunday in front of the television than a trip to a fiery hell on earth. Off duty or not, some things demanded attendance. White overalls and gray plastic shoe covers were produced and soon the workshop took on the look of unreal science fiction.

I watched a policeman wearing surgical rubber gloves carefully lift the fallen syringe and place it gingerly in a clear plastic bag, which he sealed.

Methodically the police began to sort and list names, and it was the Dragon across the road who offered solace and recovery with a warm heart. One of the police officers removed the tape from Pamela Jane’s wrists, took her personal details, and then with a solicitous arm helped her to the hotel.

I knelt beside Hickory. I told him I was going to remove the sticky strips from his eyes and mouth. I asked him if he understood.

Hickory nodded and stopped struggling against the floor.

As humanely as possible I pulled the tape from his eyes. It painfully came off with eyelashes attached and it was several minutes before his long-obstructed sight cleared and he was staring straight at me beside him.

“I’m going to take the tape off your mouth,” I said.

He nodded.

One of the young police officers stretched a hand down over my shoulder and with a lack of sensitivity simply ripped the strong tape off. Hickory yelled and went on yelling, telling the police officer to free his taped-together hands, and to hurry up.

I left them for a moment and brought the first-aid box from the stock shelves to put a dressing on Hickory’s ear, and after a good deal of chat, the paramedics and the police decided together that he should go to the hospital along with Eddie, who was now deep in shock with hands that had already blistered badly.

Catherine stood by the ambulance’s open door watching Eddie being helped aboard for treatment.

I told her other things she ought to know, extra things about Blackmask Four that had come to me during the night, that I hadn’t mentioned in the dawn.

She said thoughtfully, “Our superintendent is that man standing beside Paul. I think you’d better talk to him. I have to go to the police station. I’ll come back here when I can...”

She took me across the room, introduced me as the owner of the place and left me to deepen the frown of the top brass.

I shook hands with Superintendent Shepherd of the West Mercia police.

First of all he looked with disenchantment at my singlet, now no longer white and clean but grubby from constant contact with workshop clutter. He took in the singed piece of cloth hanging loose in the lower ribs area where Rose’s relentless attentions had connected. He asked if the reddened skin beneath was painful and I tiredly said yes, it was, but I’d had worse burns in the past and would prefer to ignore it; but, I added to myself, burns had always before been accidentally self-inflicted.

I looked down at the blanket over Pernickety Paul, the fusspot who had cared like a father for Catherine’s safety in the violent streets.

“He was a good policeman,” I said.

The superintendent let a small silence ride by before mentioning comeuppance for the perpetrator. He would need me to proceed to the police station to make a statement which would be videotaped and in every way recorded. Judiciously he agreed I could cover the burns with dressings and restore my shirt on top, and then, reluctantly, he also agreed I could hang my coat over my shoulders so as not to freeze out of doors.

During this display of humanity George Lawson-Young arrived, and with his presence transformed the general police atmosphere from suspicion to common sense. He was the sort of deeply respected man that other men in authority instinctively trusted. When he greeted and treated me with noticeably high levels of deference, my standing with the super took a slow drift upwards. I thought he went so far after a while as to believe what I said.

George Lawson-Young asked me as if expecting the answer “Yes,” “Did you work out the identity of the fourth man who assaulted you outside here on the sidewalk two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

He knew that answer in advance, as I had told him that morning on the telephone. I had used his search-and-discard method to sort out truth from lies, and to go carefully down the cul-de-sacs, but however flatly I said the name, it would cause consternation.

The professor, tall, tidy and nearsighted, made a slow visual inspection of the damage to the most familiar of faces turned his way. No one tried to hurry him, not even the superintendent.

Adam Force, his facial bleeding down from Niagara to a trickle, had wandered dizzily into the workshop from the showroom and was standing beside Hickory, looking down on him as, on his knees, Hickory cradled his mutilated ear.

When Adam Force saw the professor he looked as if he would prefer to evaporate rather than be in the same room as his onetime boss, and George, usually the most forgiving of men, produced a thoroughly baleful glare with no pity component for his expert practitioner of treason.

One of the policemen in white overalls asked Doctor Force his name and address while another took his photograph. The flash seemed to startle him and, with a blood-red rivulet still meandering down his cheek into his beard, he looked far from the assured physician I had first met on the hill at Lynton.

A spent Force, I thought ironically.

The photographer moved on, snapping under the direction of the Scene-of-Crime Officer. Nothing was to be missed. Pernickety Paul would have been proud.

It was George Lawson-Young, saying he was hoping I’d done enough for him for the next thousand years, who related to the superintendent step by step how the data stolen from his research laboratory had caused me so much pain and trouble.

Naming each person in turn to identify them for the policeman’s sake, and referring back to me for confirmation when he needed it, George quietly threaded his way through the complexities of January 2000.

“Adam Force,” he said, pointing at Dr. Bright-Scarlet-Beard, “worked for me but jumped ship and stole the cancer research that just may be worth millions and would certainly be to the advantage of the whole world.”