Dick Francis - Silks

‘And next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll cut your balls right off. Understand?’

I lay there silently looking at him.

‘Do you fucking understand?’ he repeated staring back at me.

I nodded ever so slightly.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now you be a good little lawyer.’

Then he suddenly turned and walked away, leaving me lying in a puddle, curled up like a baby to lessen the ongoing agony between my legs. Could this really have happened in central London just yards from hundreds of respectable high-earning fellow professionals? This was the sort of thing that happened to some of my clients, not to me.

I was shaking and I didn’t know whether it was from fear, from shock or from the cold. Tears had come quite easily to me over the past seven years since Angela had died and I cried now. I couldn’t help it. It was mostly due to the relief of still being alive when I had been sure that I would die. It was the body’s natural reaction to intense emotion, and I had been frightened more than at any time in my life.

Only a few minutes had elapsedin real time since I had stepped out of the taxi but my life had changed from one of discipline and order to one of chaos and fear. How easily I had been castrated of my courtroom authority. How fearful I had so quickly become of castration of another kind.

In my line of work one encountered fear and intimidation on an almost daily basis. How self-righteous and condescending I imagined I must have been to potential witnesses too fearful to give evidence. ‘We will look after you,’ I would say to them. ‘We will protect you from the bullies,’ I would promise, ‘but you must do what is right.’ Only now did I appreciate their predicament. I should have told Julian Trent to go to hell but, in fact, I would have licked his boots if he had so asked, and I hated myself for it.

Eventually the intensity of the pain in my groin diminished, only to be replaced by a dull ache from the backs of my thighs where the baseball bat had first caught me. The shaking also gradually abated and I was able to roll over onto my knees. It didn’t seem to help much but at least I was looking at the world the right way up. My computer was well beyond repair and all my previously neatly ordered court papers were blowing along the road in the rain, hiding beneath parked cars and flying up into the branches of the leafless trees. My gown and wig, which had also beenin the box, were soaking up the water from another puddle. But I didn’t really care. It was as much as I could manage to stand approximately upright and stagger the few yards to the door of my chambers. And still nobody appeared.

I leaned up against the board with all the barristers’ names painted on it and looked at the blue front door. I couldn’t remember the code for the security lock. I had worked in these chambers for almost thirteen years and the code hadn’t been changed once in all that time, but still I couldn’t recall it now. So I pushed the bell and was rewarded with Arthur’s friendly voice from a small speaker.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

‘Geoffrey,’ I croaked. ‘Geoffrey Mason. Can you come and help?’

‘Mr Mason?’ Arthur asked back through the speaker. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ I said.

Almost immediately the door opened and Arthur, my rather tardy Good Samaritan, at last came to my rescue, half carrying me through the hallway into the clerks’ room. He pulled up a desk chair and I gratefully sat down, but carefully so as not to further inflame the problems below.

I must have been quite a sight. I was soaked through and both the knees of my pinstripe suit were torn where I had landed on the rough tarmac. My once starched white shirt clung like a wet rag to my chest and my hair dripped rainwater down my forehead. It is surprising how quickly one becomes wet from lying in persistent rain.

‘Goodness gracious,’ said Arthur. ‘What on earth happened to you?’

I hadn’t expected Arthur to be a ‘goodness gracious’ sort of chap, but he did spend his working life in close proximity to barristers who acted like they lived in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and some of it must have rubbed off.

‘I was mugged,’ I said.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Outside,’ I said. ‘My stuff is still on the road.’

Arthur turned and rushed outside.

‘Be careful,’ I shouted after him, but I didn’t really expect Julian Trent still to be there. It was me he had been after, not my clerk.

Arthur returned with my gown in one hand and my wig in the other, both dripping onto the light green carpet. He had just a few of my sopping papers stuck under his arm, and I suspected that most of the others had flown with the wind.

‘Is that your computer?’ he asked, nodding his head towards the door.

‘What’s left of it,’ I agreed.

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘Muggers normally steal things, not break them. Is anything missing?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said patting myself down. I could feel both my wallet and my mobile in the soggy pockets of my jacket.

‘I’m calling the police,’ said Arthur, moving round the desk and lifting the phone. ‘Do you need an ambulance?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But a change of clothes would be good.’

Arthur spoke to the police, who promised to send someone round as soon as possible, though it might be some time.

While we waited I changed out of my sodden clothes into a track suit that Arthur found in one of my colleagues’ rooms, and then I tried to make some sort of order from the saturated paperwork. After a second attempt, Arthur had recovered about half of what had been in the box and I spent some time laying the sheets out all over my room to dry. I couldn’t reprint them as nearly all the files had only been on my computer.

I thought that calling the police would be a waste of time and so it turned out. Two uniformed constables arrived about forty minutes after the call and they took a statement from me while I sat in the clerks’ room with Arthur hovering close by.

‘Did you see the mugger?’ one of them asked me.

‘Not at first,’ I said. ‘He hit me from behind with a baseball bat.’

‘How do you know it was a baseball bat?’ he asked.

‘I saw it later,’ I said. ‘I assumed it was what he hit me with.’

‘Whereabouts did he hit you?’

‘On the back of my legs,’ I said.

They insisted that I show them. Embarrassed, I lowered the track-suit trousers to reveal two rapidly bruising red marks half way up the backs of my thighs. Arthur’s eyes were almost out on stalks.

‘Funny place to hit someone,’ said the other policeman.

‘It knocked me over,’ I said.

‘Yeah, it would,’ he agreed. ‘But most muggers would have hit you on the head. Did you get a look at his face?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It was dark.’ Why, I thought, had I not told them that it had been Julian Trent who had attacked me? What was I doing? Did I not stand up for justice and right? Tell them, I told myself, tell them the truth.

‘Would you know him again?’ the policeman asked.

‘I doubt it,’ I heard myself say. Next time, I’ll smash your head, Trent had said. Next time, I’ll cut your balls right off. I had no wish for there to be a next time. ‘It was all a bit of a blur,’ I said. ‘I was looking mostly at the bat.’

‘But you were sure it was a man?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Black or white?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t say.’ Even to my ears, it sounded pathetic. I hated myself, again.

They asked me if I wanted hospital treatment for my injuries but I declined. I’d had bruising worse than this due to an easy fall in a steeplechase, and I had ridden again in the very next race. However, there was a big difference this time. Racing falls were accidents and, although the laws of chance might imply that they were inevitable, the injuries produced were not premeditated, or man made.