Dick Francis - Enquiry

‘He doesn’t really have to eat the crocuses, does he?’

‘No.’

‘O.K. then.’ Once his mind was made up he was jaunty and efficient. He shovelled my small change into his pocket, marched up to Charlie’s front door, and told Mrs West, who cautiously answered it, that she was losing her crocuses. She scolded him all the way down the path, and while she was bending down to search for the damage, my accomplice quietly vanished. Before Mrs West exactly realised she had been misled I had stepped briskly through her front door and shut her out of her own house.

When I opened the sitting-room door Charlie said, without lifting his eyes from a racing paper, ‘It wasn’t him again, then.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘It was.’

Charlie’s immature face crumpled into a revolting state of fear and Mrs West leaned on the door bell. I shut the sitting-room door behind me to cut out some of the din.

‘What are you so afraid of?’ I said loudly.

‘Well... you...’

‘And so you damn well ought to be,’ I agreed. I took a step towards him and he shrank back into his armchair. He was brave enough on a horse, which made this abject cringing all the more unexpected, and all the more unpleasant. I took another step. He fought his way into the upholstery.

Mrs West gave the door bell a rest.

‘Why did you do it?’ I said.

He shook his head dumbly, and pulled his feet up on to the chair seat in the classic womb position. Wishful regression to the first and only place where the world couldn’t reach him.

‘Charlie, I came here for some answers, and you’re going to give them to me.’

Mrs West’s furious face appeared at the window and she started rapping hard enough to break the glass. With one eye on her husband to prevent him making another bolt for it, I stepped over and undid the latch.

‘Get out of here,’ she shouted. ‘Go on, get out.’

‘You get in. Through here, I’m not opening the door.’

‘I’ll fetch the police.’

‘Do what you like. I only want to talk to your worm of a husband. Get in or stay out, but shut up.’

She did anything but. Once she was in the room it took another twenty minutes of fruitless slanging before I could ask Charlie a single question without her loud voice obliterating any chance of an answer.

Charlie himself tired of it first and told her to stop, but at least her belligerence had given him a breathing space. He put his feet down on the floor again and said it was no use asking those questions, he didn’t know the answers.

‘You must do. Unless you told those lies about me out of sheer personal spite.’

‘No.’

‘Then why?’

‘I’m not telling you.’

‘Then I’ll tell you something, you little louse. I’m going to find out who put you up to it. I’m going to stir everything up until I find out, and then I’m going to raise such a stink about being framed that sulphur will smell like sweet peas by comparison, and you, Master Charlie West, you will find yourself without a licence, not me, and even if you get it back you’ll never live down the contempt everyone will feel for you.’

‘Don’t you talk to my Charlie like that!’

‘Your Charlie is a vicious little liar who would sell you too for fifty pounds.’

‘It wasn’t fifty,’ she snapped triumphantly. ‘It was five hundred.’

Charlie yelled at her and I came as near to hitting him as the distance between my clenched teeth. Five hundred pounds. He’d lied my licence away for a handout that would have insulted a tout.

‘That does it,’ I said. ‘And now you tell me who paid you.’

The girl wife started to look as frightened as Charlie, and it didn’t occur to me then that my anger had flooded through that little room like a tidal wave.

Charlie stuttered, ‘I d... d... don’t know.’

I took a pace towards him and he scrambled out of his chair and took refuge behind it.

‘K... k... keep away from me. I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘That isn’t good enough.’

‘He really doesn’t know,’ the girl wailed. ‘He really doesn’t.’

‘He does,’ I repeated furiously.

The girl began to cry. Charlie seemed to be on the verge of copying her.

‘I never saw... never saw the bloke. He telephoned.’

‘And how did he pay you?’

‘In two... in two packages. In one pound notes. A hundred of them came the day before the Enquiry, and I was to get...’ His voice trailed away.

‘You were to get the other four hundred if I was warned off?’

He nodded, a fractional jerk. His head was tucked into his shoulders, as if to avoid a blow.

‘And have you?’

‘What?’

‘Have you had it yet? The other four hundred?’

His eyes widened, and he spoke in jerks. ‘No... but... of course... it... will... come.’

‘Of course it won’t,’ I said brutally. ‘You stupid treacherous little ninny.’ My voice sounded thick, and each word came out separately and loaded with fury.

Both of the Wests were trembling, and the girl’s eye makeup was beginning to run down her cheeks.

‘What did he sound like, this man on the telephone?’

‘Just... just a man,’ Charlie said.

‘And did it occur to you to ask why he wanted me warned off?’

‘I said... you hadn’t done anything to harm me... and he said... you never know... supposing one day he does...’

Charlie shrank still further under my astounded glare.

‘Anyway... five hundred quid... I don’t earn as much as you, you know.’ For the first time there was a tinge of spite in his voice, and I knew that in truth jealousy had been a factor, that he hadn’t in fact done it entirely for the money. He’d got his kicks, too.

‘You’re only twenty,’ I said. ‘What exactly do you expect?’

But Charlie expected everything, always, to be run entirely for the best interests of Charlie West.

I said, ‘And you’ll be wise to spend that money carefully, because, believe me, it’s going to be the most expensive hundred quid you’ve ever earned.’

‘Kelly...’ He was half way to entreaty. Jealous, greedy, dishonest and afraid. I felt not the remotest flicker of compassion for him, only a widening anger that the motives behind his lies were so small.

‘And when you lose your licence for this, and I’ll see that you do, you’ll have plenty of time to understand that it serves you right .’

The raw revenge in my voice made a desert of their little home. They both stood there dumbly with wide miserable eyes, too broken up to raise another word. The girl’s beige mouth hung slackly open, mascara half way to her chin, long hair straggling in wisps across her face and round her shoulders. She looked sixteen. A child. So did Charlie. The worst vandals are always childish.

I turned away from them and walked out of their cottage, and my anger changed into immense depression on the drive home.

At two o’clock in the morning the rage I’d unleashed on the Wests looked worse and worse.

To start with, it had achieved nothing helpful. I’d known before I went there that Charlie must have had a reason for lying about me at the Enquiry. I now knew the reason to be five hundred pounds. Marvellous. A useless scrap of information out of a blizzard of emotion.

Lash out when you’re hurt... I’d done that, all right. Poured out on them the roaring bitterness I’d smothered under a civilised front ever since Monday.

Nor had I given Charlie any reason to do me any good in future. Very much the reverse. He wasn’t going to be contrite and eager to make amends. When he’d recovered himself he’d be sullen and vindictive.

I’d been taught the pattern over and over. Country A plays an isolated shabby trick. Country B is outraged and exacts revenge. Country A is forced to express apologies and meekly back down, but thoroughly resents it. Country A now holds a permanent grudge, and harms Country B whenever possible. One of the classic variations in the history of politics and aggression. Also applicable to individuals.