Dick Francis - Under Orders

Damn, I thought. That was bloody careless.

‘I’ve come here to kill you,’ Peter said.

I didn’t doubt it.

‘Inside,’ he said.

We were standing outside my front door near the lift and, typically, there was no sign of my neighbours when you needed them.

We went in through the door and he locked it behind us. He took the key out of the lock and put it in his pocket.

He didn’t once allow me to get close to him. Never close enough to give me the chance of wresting the gun out of his hand before he had time to use it.

‘In there,’ he said, waving the gun towards the sitting room. He seemed to be looking for something.

‘She’s not here,’ I said, assuming it was Marina he was after.

He ignored me.

‘This way,’ he said, again waving the gun, this time directing me back into the hallway.

We proceeded to go all round the flat until he seemed satisfied that we were alone. I could see the clock in the bedroom. It was only ten to one, it would be at least an hour before Marina and Jenny came back. Would I still be alive by then?

‘Go in there,’ he said, pointing at the bathroom.

I went.

He turned on the light and the extractor fan began to emit a whine. I wished it could extract me from this situation.

The bathroom was a small room about six foot six square. It was built in the interior of the building and consequently had no windows. A bath ran down the wall on the right with a lavatory next to it and there was a wash-basin opposite the entrance. But Peter was most interested in what was behind the door attached to the left-hand wall — a shiny chrome three-bar centrally-heated towel rail about three feet long. There were three yellow towels neatly hanging on it.

‘Catch,’ he said and threw me a pair of sturdy-looking metal handcuffs that he had brought with him in his pocket. I caught them.

‘Put one on your right wrist and the other round the bracket of the towel rail where it is attached to the wall. Shut them tight.’

I managed it with some difficulty. My only real hand was now firmly attached to the heating system. Not a great improvement.

‘Now put your left hand out towards me,’ he said.

I wondered if and when I would not do as he said.

He seemed to sense the thought in me and raised his gun higher, taking deliberate aim at my head. I could see right down the barrel. I speculated about whether I would have time to see the bullet coming before it tore into my brain. I decided that I didn’t want to find out. I put my left hand forward.

He lifted the sleeve of my shirt and removed the battery from my false arm and put it in his pocket. He was very careful never to move the gun line away from my eye and I was equally careful not to make any sudden movement that might encourage him to pull the trigger.

‘Now take that thing off,’ he said, stepping back.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

He held the gun in his left hand and grasped my left wrist with his right. He pulled. I pulled back. I stressed my arm to prevent the false bit from coming off. He pulled harder. The arm didn’t shift.

‘You won’t remove it, it stays on permanently,’ I said. ‘You see those little rivets on either side? They’re the ends of the pins that go right through what’s left of my real arm to hold it in place.’

I wasn’t really sure why I told him the lie. The rivets were actually holding the sensors in place on the inside, the sensors that sat against my skin to pick up the nerve impulses that made the hand work. It was only a small act of defiance, but it was something.

He gave the arm one last violent tug but I was ready for him and the fibreglass shell didn’t budge.

He stood back and looked at me. Then he said, ‘Put the arm out again.’

I did so.

He took the battery out of his pocket and clipped it back into place. I moved my thumb in and out.

‘Grab hold of the towel rail,’ he said. ‘There.’ He pointed.

‘What?’ I said.

The gun came up a fraction.

‘Just do it,’ he said.

I placed my unfeeling fingers around the boiling hot rail and closed the thumb. He leaned forward and removed the battery, dropping it on the floor. Without the battery the thumb wouldn’t move. The hand and arm were locked in place.

I was standing in my bathroom with my back against a hot towel rail with both hands firmly attached to it at either end.

Peter Enstone seemed to relax a little. He had been as frightened of me as I was of him.

‘What does it take to stop you?’ he said.

‘Honesty,’ I said.

‘Don’t be so bloody self-righteous,’ he said. ‘You have ruined my life.’

‘You ruined it yourself,’ I said.

He ignored me.

‘Do you know what it’s like to hate your own father?’ he said.

‘No.’

I had never even known my own father.

‘And do you know what it’s like to spend your life trying to please someone only for them to despise the very ground you walk on?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Do you?’ he shouted.

‘No,’ I said.

‘It becomes your whole existence. Looking for things he will like but only finding things he hates. And all the time he thinks you’re an idiot, an imbecile, a helpless child, with no feelings.’

I stood there looking at the monster. This man was no helpless child.

‘Then I found a way of breaking out of the cage,’ he said. ‘I found a way to control his emotions. To make him happy, to make him sad, and especially to make him angry with someone else for a change.’

He came closer to my face. I could almost have leaned forward and kissed him. Provided, that is, I wanted to kiss the devil.

‘And now you have taken all that away, and worse still, he will now know that it was me that was controlling him. He’s going to be so angry with me again.’

He’s not going to be the only one, I thought. He sounded like a petulant schoolboy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin.

‘Do you know what it’s like to have someone angry with you all the time?’

‘No,’ I said. Actually I did. People were often angry with me for exposing their misdeeds. I had always rather enjoyed it, but I decided not to say so, not now.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘It eats away at your soul. When you’re a child, it’s frightening. I spent my whole childhood being frightened of him, every single minute. He would beat me for being naughty, and the harder I tried to be good, the more he saw me as naughty. “Hold out your hand, Peter,” he would say. Then he would hit me with a wooden bat. Then he would smile and say it was for my own good.’

He went quiet for a moment and stared off into space; I could tell he was reliving incidents elsewhere.

‘He used to hit my mother as well,’ he said. ‘He drove her away. At first, she used to protect me from him but then she left. She deserted me and he killed her.’ He paused then went on. ‘Well, he didn’t actually kill her, but as good as. She was desperate to get away from him and she agreed to everything he said so long as he would leave her alone. He saw to it that she left with nothing, no money, no home and no chance of ever seeing me again. I was twelve.’

She obviously hadn’t had a very good solicitor, I thought. Times had changed.

‘He never spoke about her. It was as if she had never existed. I found out much later that she had been absolutely destitute and had even been begging in the street.’ He made it sound like the most shameful thing in the world. I had occasionally seen my own mother beg. It had sometimes made the difference between life and death for us both.

‘She tried to get him to give her some money to live on but he refused. When she tried to take him to court to get access to me, his lawyers blocked her. They just tore to shreds the hardly qualified Legal Aid lawyer that my mother had to resort to.’