Дик Фрэнсис - Banker

‘They’ll come with a lorry... and a winch. Their job is dead horses.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘And an ambulance,’ Pen said. ‘I should think.’

I smiled at them with much love, my fairly incompetent saviours. They asked how I’d got where I was, and to their horror I briefly told them: and I in turn asked why they’d come, and they explained that they’d been worried because Calder’s television programme had been cancelled.

‘Micky Bonwith was taken ill,’ Pen said. ‘They just announced it during the evening. There would be no live Micky Bonwith show, just an old recording, very sorry, expect Calder Jackson at a later date.’

‘Pen telephoned and told us where you were going, and why,’ Judith said.

‘And we were worried,’ Gordon added.

‘You didn’t go home... didn’t telephone,’ Pen said.

‘We’ve been awake all night,’ Gordon said. ‘The girls were growing more and more anxious... so we came.’

They’d come a hundred miles. You couldn’t ask for better friends.

Gordon drove away to find a public telephone and Pen asked if I’d found what I’d come for.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Half the things had no labels.’

‘Don’t talk any more, ‘Judith said. ‘Enough is enough.’

‘I might as well.’

‘Take your mind off it,’ Pen nodded, understanding.

‘What time is it?’ I asked.

Judith looked at her watch. ‘Ten to eight.’

‘Calder will come back...’ And the lads too, I thought. He’d come when the lads turned up for work. About that time. He’d need witnesses to the way he’d found me.

‘Tim,’ Pen said with decision, ‘if he’s coming... Did you take any samples? Did you get a chance?’

I nodded weakly.

‘I suppose you can’t remember what they were...’

‘I hid them.’

‘Wouldn’t he have found them?’ She was gentle and prepared to be disappointed; careful not to blame.

I smiled at her. ‘He didn’t find them. They’re here.’

She looked blankly round the box and then at my face. ‘Didn’t he search you?’ She said in surprise. ‘Pockets... of course, he would.’

‘I don’t know... but he didn’t find the pills.’

‘Then where are they?’

‘I learned from Ginnie about keeping your hands free,’ I said. ‘They’re in a plastic bag... below my waistband... inside my pants.’

They stared incredulously, and then they laughed, and Judith with tears in her eyes said, ‘Do you mean... all the time...?’

‘All the time,’ I agreed. ‘And go easy getting them out.’

Some things would be best forgotten but are impossible to forget, and I reckon one could put the next half hour into that category: at the end of it I lay on a table-like stretcher in the open air, and my dead-weight pal was half up the ramp of the knacker’s van that Gordon with exceptional persuasiveness had conjured out at that hour of the morning.

The three lads who had at length arrived for work stood around looking helpless, and the two ambulance men, who were not paramedics, were farcically trying to get an answer on a radio with transmission troubles as to where they were supposed to take me.

Gordon was telling the knacker’s men that I said it was essential to remove a blood sample from the horse and that the carcass was not to be disposed of until that was done. Judith and Pen both looked tired, and were yawning. I wearily watched some birds wheeling high in the fair blue sky and wished I were up there with them, as light as air; and into this riveting tableau drove Calder.

Impossible to know what he thought when he saw all the activity, but as he came striding from his car his mouth formed an oval of apprehension and shock.

He seemed first to fasten his attention on Gordon, and then on the knacker’s man who was saying loudly, ‘If you want a blood sample you’ll have to give us a written authorization, because of calling in a vet and paying him.’

Calder looked from him to the dead horse still halfway up the ramp, and from there towards the horse’s normal box, where the door stood wide open.

From there he turned with bewilderment to Judith, and then with horror saw the bag Pen held tightly, the transparent plastic bag with the capsules, pills and other assorted treasures showing clearly inside.

Pen remarkably found her voice and in words that must have sounded like doom to Calder said, ‘I didn’t tell you before... I’m a pharmacist.’

‘Where did you get that?’ Calder said, staring at the bag as if his eyes would burn it. ‘Where...’

‘Tim had it.’

Her gaze went to me and Calder seemed finally to realise that my undoubted stillness was not that of death. He took two paces toward the stretcher and looked down at my face and saw me alive, awake, aware.

Neither of us spoke. His eyes seemed to retreat in the sockets and the shape of the upper jaw stood out starkly. He saw in me I dare say the ravages of the night and I saw in him the realisation become certainty that my survival meant his ruin.

I thought: you certainly should have hit harder; and maybe he thought it too. He looked at me with a searing intensity that defied analysis and then turned abruptly away and walked with jerky steps back to his car.

Gordon took two or three hesitant steps towards perhaps stopping him, but Calder without looking back started his engine, put his foot on the accelerator and with protesting tyres made a tight semi-circular turn and headed for the gate.

‘We should get the police,’ Gordon said, watching him go.

Judith and Pen showed scant enthusiasm and I none at all. I supposed we would have to bring in the police in the end, but the longer the boring rituals could be postponed, from my point of view, the better. Britain was a small island, and Calder too well-known to go far.

Pen looked down at the plastic store-house in her hands and i hen without actual comment opened her handbag and put the whole thing inside. She glanced briefly at me and smiled faintly, and I nodded with relief that she and her friends would have the unravelling of the capsules to themselves.

On that same Saturday, at about two-thirty in the afternoon, a family of picnickers came across a car which had been parked out of sight of any road behind some clumps of gorse bushes. The engine of the car was running and the children of the family, peering through the windows, saw a man slumped on the back seat with a tube in his mouth.

They knew him because of his curly hair, and his beard.

The children were reported to be in a state of hysterical shock and the parents were angry, as if some authority, somewhere or other, should prevent suicides spoiling the countryside.

Tributes to Calder’s miracle-working appeared on television that evening, and I thought it ironic that the master who had known so much about drugs should have chosen to gas his way out.

He had driven barely thirty miles from his yard. He had left no note. The people who had been working with him on the postponed Micky Bonwith show said they couldn’t understand it, and Dissdale telephoned Oliver to say that in view of Calder’s tragic death he would have to withdraw his offer for Sandcastle.

I, by the time I heard all this, was half covered in infinitely irritating plaster of paris, there being more grating edges of bone inside me than I cared to hear about, and horse-shoe-shaped crimson bruises besides.

I had been given rather grudgingly a room to myself, privacy in illness being considered a sinful luxury in the national health service, and on Monday evening Pen came all the way from London again to report on the laboratory findings.

She frowned after she’d kissed me. ‘You look exhausted,’ she said.

‘Tiring place, hospital.’