Dick Francis - Silks

I stepped through the doorway into the hall, rather wishing that the crutches didn’t make so much of a clink when I put them down on the hard wood-block floor. But I needn’t have worried about the noise. As I moved across the hallway I could clearly hear Julian Trent and his baseball bat systematically doing to my father’s home what he had previously done to mine. He was down the far end of the corridor causing mayhem in the bedrooms.

I looked into the sitting room. My father lay face down on the carpet, with blood oozing from his head. I quickly went over to him and bent down, using one end of the light blue sofa for support. He was not in great shape, not at all. I turned him over slightly and saw that he had been struck severely at least once across his face, and also that there was a nasty wound behind his right ear. I couldn’t really tell if he was breathing or not, and I tried unsuccessfully to find a pulse in his neck. However, the cuts on his head were still bleeding slightly, which gave me some hope. I checked that his mouth and airway were open by tilting his head back a bit and laying him more on his side.

Where were those damn police? I thought.

The noise of destruction in the bedrooms suddenly ceased and I could hear Trent’s footsteps coming back along the corridor. I struggled up and hid behind the open sitting-room door. Perhaps he would go past me. Perhaps he would go away.

My father groaned.

In truth, it was not much more than a sigh, but Trent heard it and he stopped in the doorway.

I looked down at my father on the floor and realized with horror that I’d left one of my crutches lying right next to him on the carpet.

It was too late to retrieve it now.

Trent came into the sitting room. I pressed myself back tight against the wall behind the door and sensed rather than saw him, but there was no doubt he was there. I could see the end of the baseball bat as he held it out in front of him. From where he stood, he would be clearly able to see my father, and the crutch.

‘OK,’ he said loudly into the silence, making me jump. ‘I know you’re here. Show yourself.’

Oh shit, I thought. I was hardly in any shape to fight a twelve-year-old cripple, let alone someone twice that age who was very fit and healthy, and who was holding a baseball bat to boot. I stayed exactly where I was.

The door was pulled away from me, exposing my hiding place. And there he was, in blue denim jeans and a short-sleeved dark green polo shirt, swinging his baseball bat back and forth. And, once again, he was smiling.

‘Time to complete some unfinished business,’ he said with relish.

‘It won’t do you any good,’ I said defiantly. ‘Your godfather was arrested in court this morning and the police are on their way here to arrest you.’

He hardly seemed to care. I glanced out of the window. Where were those wretched police?

‘I’d better make it quick, then,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘That’s a shame. I was planning to take my time and enjoy killing you.’

‘No handy pitchfork for you to use this time,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, still smiling. ‘That is a pity, but this will do instead.’

He swung the baseball bat at my head so fast that he almost caught me unawares.

At the last moment I ducked down and the wooden bat thumped into the wall, right where my head had been only a fraction of a second before. I dived away from him, hopping madly on one leg. I would just have to put the other foot down, I thought, and hope my knee would carry my weight. I tried it as I made my way across the room and without too much of a problem. But I was too slow, and Trent had time to turn and swing the bat again, landing a glancing blow on my left biceps, just above the elbow. It wasn’t a direct hit but it was enough to cause my arm to go completely dead, numb and useless.

I leaned up against the wall by the window, breathing heavily. Two months of inactivity since the races at Cheltenham had left me hopelessly unfit. This battle was going to be over much too soon for my liking.

The feeling and movement in my left arm began to return slightly, but I feared it was too little, too late. Trent advanced towards me, grinning broadly, and he raised the bat for another strike. I stood stock still and stared at him. If he was going to kill me he would have to do it with me watching him. I wasn’t going to cower down and let him hit me over the back of the head, as he had clearly done to my father.

I dived down to my left at the last instant and the bat thumped again into the wall above my right shoulder. I grabbed it with my good right hand, and also with my nearly useless left. I clung on to the bat for dear life. I gripped it so tight that my fingers felt as if they were digging into the wood.

With both hands up above my shoulders, my body was completely unprotected by my arms. Trent took his right hand off the bat and punched me as hard as he could in the stomach.

It was a fatal error on his part.

While, to him, myabdomen may have appeared to be defenceless, he clearly didn’t know, or perhaps he had forgotten, about the hard plastic body shell that I still wore out of sight beneath my starched white shirt.

He screamed. Along, loud, agonizing scream.

It must have been like punching a brick wall. The bones in his hand would have cracked and splintered from the impact.

He dropped the baseball bat from his other hand and went down on his knees in obvious agony, clutching at his right wrist.

But I wasn’t going to let him get off that easily.

I picked up the bat and hit him with it, audibly breaking his jaw and sending him sprawling on to the floor, seemingly unconscious.

I sat down on the arm of the sofa and looked out of the window. There was still no sign of the boys in blue, but now I wasn’t so worried, I was even a little bit pleased.

I leaned down to the telephone, picked up the dangling handset and used it to call for an ambulance. Then I went across to my father. He was definitely alive, but only just. His breathing was perceptible but shallow, and I still couldn’t find a pulse in his neck but there was a faint one in his wrist. I moved him properly into the recovery position and he obligingly groaned again. I stroked his blood-matted hair. I may have been a strange boy, and he was definitely a strange and stubborn father, but I still loved him.

Julian Trent moaned a little, so I went back and sat on the arm of the sofa and looked down at him lying on the carpet in front of me, the young man who had brought so much misery to so many innocent people.

He began to stir, pulling his knees up under him so he was kneeling on the floor facing away from me. He cradled his right hand in his left, and his head was bowed down in front. As I watched him, his head came up a fraction and he tried to slowly reach out with his left hand towards the baseball bat that I had put down on the sofa beside him.

Would he ever give up? I asked myself.

I leaned down quickly and picked up the bat before he could reach it. Instead, he used his left hand to push down on the blue upholstery, as if he were about to try and stand.

No, I suddenly realized. He would never give up, not ever.

Eleanor and I might make our life together but there would always be three of us in the relationship, the spectre of Julian Trent hovering nearby in the darkness, forever waiting for the chance to settle the score in his favour. Even if he was convicted of Scot Barlow’s murder, and past form gave no guarantee of that, I was under no illusion that a lengthy term of imprisonment would reform or rehabilitate him. He would simply spend the time planning the completion of what he thought of as his ‘unfinished business’.

Just like Josef Hughes and George Barnett, we would never be free of the fear. Not for as long as Julian Trent was alive.