Dick Francis - Shattered

The black unidentified videotape had gone as well. The wave of outrage common to anyone robbed of even minor objects shook me into a deeper anger. The tape’s loss was a severe aggravation, even if not on the same level as the money.

I telephoned the police without exciting them in the least. They were psyched up for bombs, not paltry theft. They said they would send a detective constable in the morning.

Lloyd Baxter stirred, moaned and lay still again. I knelt beside him, removed his tie, unfastened his belt and in general rolled him slightly onto his side so that he wasn’t in danger of choking. There were flecks of blood, though, around his mouth.

The chill of the deep night seeped into my own body, let alone Baxter’s. The flames of the furnace roared captive behind the trapdoor that rose and fell to make the heat available, and finally, uncomfortably cold, I went and stood on the treadle that raised the trap, and let the heat flood into the workshop to reach the showroom beyond.

Normally, even in icy winter, the furnace in constant use gave warmth enough, supplemented by an electric convection heater in the gallery, but by the time help arrived for Baxter I had wrapped him in my jacket and everything else handy, and he was still growing cold to the touch.

The ultra-efficient men who arrived in the prompt ambulance took over expertly, examining their patient, searching and emptying his pockets, making a preliminary diagnosis and wrapping him in a red warming blanket ready for transport. Baxter partially awoke during this process but couldn’t swim altogether to the surface of consciousness. His gaze flickered woozily once across my face before his eyes closed again into a heavier sleep.

The paramedics did some paperwork and had me provide them with Baxter’s name, address and as much as I knew (practically nothing) of his medical history. One of them was writing a list of all the things they had taken from Lloyd, starting with a Piaget gold watch and ending with the contents of a pocket of his pants — a handkerchief, a bottle of pills and a businesslike hotel room key in the shape of a ball-and-chain deterrent to forgetfulness.

I didn’t even have to suggest that I should return the key myself to the hotel; the paramedics suggested it themselves. I rattled it into my own pants without delay, thinking vaguely of packing Lloyd Baxter’s things into his much-traveled suitcase and more positively of sleeping in his bed, since the paramedics were adamant that he would have to stay in the hospital all night.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked. “Has he had a heart attack? Or a stroke? Has he been... well, attacked and knocked out?”

I told them about the money and the tape.

They shook their heads. The most senior of them discounted my guesses. He said that to his experienced eyes Lloyd Baxter wasn’t having a nonfatal heart attack (he would be awake, if so) nor a stroke, nor were there any lumpy bruises on his head. In his opinion, he announced authoritatively, Lloyd Baxter had had an epileptic fit.

“A fit?” I asked blankly. “He’s seemed perfectly well all day.”

The medics nodded knowledgeably. One of them picked up the pill bottle whose contents were listed as phenytoin and said he was certain that this was the preventative for epilepsy.

“Epilepsy” — the chief medic nodded — “and who’ll bet that he was overdue with a dose? We have all the other symptoms here. Alcohol.” He gestured to the depleted bottle of Dom. “Late night without sleep. Stress... isn’t he the one whose jockey was done for at the races today? Then there’s the slow pulse and bluish lips, the blood flecks from where he’s bitten his tongue... and did you notice that his pants are wet? They urinate, you know.”

The resident Dragon of the Wychwood Dragon Hotel being its fierce lady manager, I could ooze in and out of the halls unseen (as it were), owing both to the collection of small colored glass animals marching around her dressing table, and to her occasional invitations to bed. The glass animals weren’t so much trophies as apologies, however, as she was fortunately resigned to accepting that a thirty years’ difference in age was a fair enough reason for me to say no. Her habit of calling me “lover” in public was embarrassment enough, though, and I knew that most of Broadway believed she ate me with eggs for breakfast.

Anyway, no one questioned my takeover of Lloyd Baxter’s room. In the morning I packed his belongings and, explaining all to the Dragon, arranged for the hotel to send them to the hospital. Then I walked down and across to the workshop, where Martin, though vivid in my mind, refused to fly as a statement in glass. Inspiration operated at its own good speed, and many a time I’d found that trying to force it didn’t work.

The furnace roared in its firebox. I sat beside the stainless-steel table (called a marver) on which I should have been rolling eternity into basic balls of liquid glass, and thought only of Martin alive in the body, Martin laughing and winning races, and Martin’s lost message on videotape. Where was that tape, what did it contain and who thought it worth stealing?

These profitless thoughts were interrupted by the doorbell ringing early at nine o’clock, when we’d said we’d open at ten.

On the doorstep stood no recognizable customer but a young woman in a vast sloppy sweater hanging around her knees, topped by a baseball cap over a shock of brassily dyed streaky hair. We stared at each other with interest, her brown eyes alive and curious, her jaw rhythmic with chewing gum.

I said politely, “Good morning.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” She laughed. “Happy New Century and all that rubbish. Are you Gerard Logan?”

Her accent was Estuary, Essex or Thames: take your pick.

“Logan.” I nodded. “And you?”

“Detective Constable Dodd.”

I blinked. “Plainclothes?”

“You may laugh,” she said, chewing away. “You reported a theft at twelve thirty-two this A.M. Can I come in?”

“Be my guest.”

She stepped into the gallery spotlights and glowed. From habit I dramatized her in glass in my mind, an abstract essence as a conduit of feeling and light, exactly the instinctive process I’d tried in vain to summon up for Martin.

Oblivious, Detective Constable Dodd produced a down-to-earth warrant card identifying her in uniform and adding a first name, Catherine. I handed the warrant card back and answered her questions, but the police opinion was already firm. Too bad I’d left a bagful of money lying around, she said. What did I expect? And videotapes came by the dozen. No one would think twice about snapping one up.

“What was on it?” she asked, pencil poised over a notepad.

“I’ve no idea.” I explained how it had come to me originally in a brown-paper parcel.

“Pornography. Bound to be.” Her pronouncement was brisk, world-weary and convinced. “Unidentified.” She shrugged. “Would you know it from any other tape if you saw it again?”

“It hadn’t any labels.”

I dug the wrapping out of the rubbish bin and gave her the wrinkled and torn paper. “This came to me by hand,” I said. “There’s no postmark.”

She took the paper dubiously, enclosed it in a further bag, got me to sign across the fold and tucked it away somewhere under the extra-loose sweater.

My answers to her questions about the stolen money caused her eyebrows to rise over the amount, but she obviously thought I’d never again see the canvas bag or the mini-bonanza inside. I still had checks and credit card slips, of course, but most of my tourist customers paid in cash.

I told her then about Lloyd Baxter and his epileptic fit. “Maybe he saw the thief,” I said.