Dick Francis: Proof

We found another Arab, alive, flat on his back, an arm bleeding, praying to Allah. We pulled him out and afterwards found his rifle lying blackly where he’d been.

‘They’re mad,’ said my companion.

‘It didn’t save their master,’ I said.

On our knees we both looked in silence at what we could see of the Sheik, which was his head, still in its white headdress with its gold cords. A fold of reddened canvas lay over the rest of him, and my companion, gripping my wrist, said, ‘Leave it. Don’t look. What’s the point.’

I thought fleetingly of the policemen and the ambulancemen who would soon be forced to look, but I did as he asked. We made our way silently back to the standing section and began a new tunnel round to the other side of the horsebox.

It was there that we came to Jack and also Jimmy, both with pulses, though both were unconscious and pinned to the ground by the thick tent pole, which lay across Jack’s legs and Jimmy’s chest. We scarcely touched the pole ourselves, but the tremor of our movements brought Jack up to semi-consciousness and to groaning pain.

My companion said ‘Hell’ through his teeth, and I said, ‘I’ll stay here if you go and get something to keep the canvas off them,’ and he nodded and disappeared, the heavy material falling behind, closing me in.

Jimmy looked dreadful; eyes shut above the long nose, a thread of blood trickling from his mouth.

Jack went on groaning. I held up a bit of tent on my shoulders like Atlas, and presently my fellow tunneller returned, bringing two further helpers and a trestle table for a makeshift roof.

‘What do we do?’ the first tunneller said, irresolutely.

‘Lift the pole,’ I said. ‘It may hurt Jack... but it may be killing Jimmy.’

Everyone agreed. We slowly, carefully, took the weight off the two injured men and laid the pole on the ground. Jack lapsed into silence. Jimmy lay still like a log. But they were both shallowly breathing: I felt their wrists again, one after the other, with relief.

We stood the trestle table over them and gingerly crawled on, and came to a girl lying on her back with one arm up over her face. Her skirt had been ripped away, and the flesh on the outer side of her thigh had been torn open and was sagging away from the bone from hip to knee. I lifted the canvas away from her face and saw that she was to some extent conscious.

‘Hello,’ I said inadequately.

She looked at me vaguely. ‘What’s happening?’ she said.

‘There was an accident.’

‘Oh?’ She seemed sleepy, but when I touched her cheek it was icy.

‘We’ll get another table,’ the first tunneller said.

‘And a rug, if you can,’ I said. ‘She’s far too cold.’

He nodded and said ‘Shock,’ and they all went away as it needed the three of them to drag the tables through.

I looked at the girl’s leg. She was fairly plump, and inside the long widely-gaping wound one could easily identify the cream-coloured bubbly fat tissue and the dense red muscle, open like a jagged book to inspection. I’d never seen anything like it: and extraordinarily she wasn’t bleeding a great deal, certainly not as much as one would have expected.

The body shutting down, I thought. The effects of trauma, as deadly as injury itself.

There was little I could do for her, but I did have a penknife in my pocket incorporating a tiny pair of scissors. With a sigh I pulled up my jersey and cut and tore one side from my shirt, stopping a few inches below the collar and cutting across so that from in front it looked as if I had a whole shirt under my sweater; and I thought that my doing that was ridiculous, but all the same I did it.

Torn into two wide strips the shirt front made reasonable bandages. I slid both pieces under her leg and pulled the flesh back into position, tying her leg together round the bone like trussing a joint of meat. I looked anxiously several times at the girl’s face, but if she felt what I was doing it must have been remotely. She lay with her eyes open, her elbow bent over her head, and all she said at one point was, ‘Where is this?’ and later, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘Oh... Is it...? Good.’

The tunnellers returned with a table and a travelling rug and also a towel.

‘I thought we might wrap that wound together, with this,’ said the first tunneller, ‘but I see you’ve done it.’

We put the towel round her leg anyway for extra protection, and then wrapped her in the rug and left her under her table roof and crawled apprehensively on; but we found no one else we could help. We found one of the waitresses, dead, lying over her tray of canapes, her smooth young face frosty-white, and we found the protruding legs of a different Arab: and somewhere underneath the horsebox there were dreadful red shapes we couldn’t reach even if we’d wanted to.

In accord the four of us retreated, hearing as we emerged into the blessed fresh air the bells and sirens of the official rescuers as they poured over the hill.

I walked along to where Flora was sitting on a kitchen chair that someone had brought out for her: there were women beside her trying to comfort, but her eyes were dark and staring into far spaces, and she was shivering.

‘Jack’s all right,’ I said. ‘The pole knocked him out. One leg is maybe broken... but he’s all right.’

She looked at me blindly. I took my jacket off and wrapped it round her. ‘Flora... Jack’s alive.’

‘All those people... all our guests...’ Her voice was faint. ‘Are you sure... about Jack?’

There was no real consolation. I said yes arid hugged her, rocking her in my arms like a baby, and she put her head silently on my shoulder, still too stunned for tears.

Things ran after that into a blur, time passing at an enormous rate but not seeming to.

The police had brought a good deal of equipment and after a while had cut away the marquee from an area round the horsebox, and had set up a head-high ring of screens to hide the shambles there.

Jack, fully conscious, lay on a stretcher with a pain-killer taking the worst off, protesting weakly that he couldn’t go to hospital, he couldn’t leave his guests, he couldn’t leave his horses, he couldn’t leave his wife to cope with everything on her own. Still objecting he was lifted into an ambulance and, beside a still unconscious Jimmy, slowly driven away.

The guests drifted into the house or sat in their cars and wanted to go home: but there was an enormous fuss going on somewhere over telephone wires because of the death of the Sheik, and the uniformed police had been instructed not to let anyone leave until other investigators had arrived.

The fuss was nonsense, really, I thought. No one could possibly have told where the Sheik would stand in that tent. No one could possibly have aimed the horsebox deliberately.

The brakes had given way and it had rolled down the hill... as selective in its victims as an earthquake.

The distraught young couple who had come in it and parked it were both in tears, and I heard the man saying helplessly, ‘But I left it in gear, with the brakes on... I know I did... I’m always careful... how could it have happened, how could it?’ A uniformed policeman was questioning them, his manner less than sympathetic.

I wandered back to my van, to where I’d dumped the case of champagne. It had gone. So had the sixth and seventh cases from inside. So had the back-up gin and whisky from the front seat.

Disgusting, I thought; and shrugged. After carnage, thieves. Human grade-ten sour age-old behaviour. It didn’t seem to matter, except that I would rather have given it away than that.

Flora was indoors, lying down. Someone brought my coat back. It had blood on the sleeves, I noticed. Blood on my shirt cuffs, blood on my pale blue sweater. Blood, dry, on my hands.