Дик Фрэнсис - Come to Grief

I had this friend, you see, that everyone loved.

(My name is Sid Halley.)

I had this friend that everyone loved, and I put him on trial.

The trouble with working as an investigator, as I had been doing for approaching five years, was that occasionally one turned up facts that surprised and appalled and smashed peaceful lives forever.

It had taken days of inner distress for me to decide to act on what I’d learned. Miserably, by then, I’d suffered through disbelief, through denial, through anger and at length through acceptance; all the stages of grief. I grieved for the man I’d known. For the man I thought I’d known, who had all along been a façade. I grieved for the loss of a friendship, for a man who still looked the same but was different, alien… despicable. I could much more easily have grieved for him dead.

The turmoil I’d felt in private had on public disclosure become universal. The press, jumping instinctively and strongly to his defense, had given me, as his accuser, a severely rough time. On racecourses, where I chiefly worked, long-time acquaintances had turned their backs. Love, support and comfort poured out towards my friend. Disbelief and denial and anger prevailed: acceptance lay a long way ahead. Meanwhile I, not he, was seen as the target for hatred. It would pass, I knew. One had simply to endure it, and wait.

On the morning set for the opening of his trial, my friend’s mother killed herself.

The news was brought to the Law Courts in Reading, in Berkshire, where the presiding judge, enrobed, had already heard the opening statements and where I, a witness for the prosecution, waited alone in a soulless side room to be called. One of the court officials came to give me the suicide information and to say that the judge had adjourned the proceedings for the day, and I could go home.

‘Poor woman,’ I exclaimed, truly horrified.

Even though he was supposed to be impartial, the official’s own sympathies were still with the accused. He eyed me without favor and said I should return the following morning, ten o’clock sharp.

I left the room and walked slowly along the corridor towards the exit, fielded on the way by a senior lawyer who took me by the elbow and drew me aside.

‘His mother took a room in a hotel and jumped from the sixteenth floor,’ he said without preamble. ‘She left a note saying she couldn’t bear the future. What are your thoughts?’

I looked at the dark, intelligent eyes of Davis Tatum, a clumsy, fat man with a lean, agile brain.

‘You know better than I do,’ I said.

‘Sid.’ A touch of exasperation. ‘Tell me your thoughts.’

‘Perhaps he’ll change his plea.’

He relaxed and half smiled. ‘You’re in the wrong job.’

I wryly shook my head. ‘I catch the fish. You guys gut them.’

He amiably let go of my arm and I continued to the outside world to catch a train for the thirty-minute ride to the terminus in London, flagging down a taxi for the last mile or so home.

Ginnie Quint, I thought, traveling through London. Poor, poor Ginnie Quint, choosing death in preference to the everlasting agony of her son’s disgrace. A lonely slamming exit. An end to tears. An end to grief.

The taxi stopped outside the house in Pont Square (off Cadogan Square), where I currently lived on the second floor, with a balcony overlooking the central leafy railed garden. As usual, the small, secluded square was quiet, with little passing traffic and only a few people on foot. A thin early-October wind shook the dying leaves on the lime trees, floating a few of them sporadically to the ground like soft yellow snowflakes.

I climbed out of the cab and paid the driver through his open window, and as I turned to cross the pavement and go up the few steps to the front door, a man who was apparently quietly walking past suddenly sprang at me in fury, raising a long black metal rod with which he tried to brain me.

I sensed rather than saw the first wicked slash and moved enough to catch the weight of it on my shoulder, not my head. He was screaming at me, half-demented, and I fielded a second brutal blow on a raised defensive forearm. After that I seized his wrist in a pincer grip and rolled the bulk of his body backward over the leg I pushed out rigidly behind his knees, and felled him, sprawling, iron bar and all, onto the hard ground. He yelled bitter words; cursing, half-incoherent, threatening to kill.

The taxi still stood there, diesel engine running, the driver staring wide-mouthed and speechless, a state of affairs that continued while I yanked open the black rear door and stumbled in again onto the seat. My heart thudded. Well, it would.

‘Drive, ’ I said urgently. ‘Drive on.’

‘But…’

‘Just drive. Go on. Before he finds his feet and breaks your windows.’

The driver closed his mouth fast and meshed his gears, and wavered at something above running pace along the road.

‘Look,’ he said, protesting, half turning his head back to me, ‘I didn’t see nothing. You’re my last fare today, I’ve been on the go eight hours and I’m on my way home.’

‘Just drive,’ I said. Too little breath. Too many jumbled feelings.

‘Well… but, drive where to?’

Good question. Think.

‘He didn’t look like no mugger,’ the taxi driver observed aggrievedly. ‘But you never can tell these days. D’you want me to drop you off at the police? He hit you something shocking. You could hear it. Like he broke your arm.’

‘Just drive, would you?’

The driver was large, fiftyish and a Londoner, but no John Butt, and I could see from his head movements and his repeated spiky glances at me in his rear-view mirror that he didn’t want to get involved in my problems and couldn’t wait for me to leave his cab.

Pulse eventually steadying, I could think of only one place to go. My only haven, in many past troubles.

‘Paddington,’ I said. ‘Please.’

‘St. Mary’s, d’you mean? The hospital?’

‘No. The trains.’

‘But you’ve just come from there!’ he protested.

‘Yes, but please go back.’

Cheering a little, he rocked round in a U-turn and set off for the return to Paddington Station, where he assured me again that he hadn’t seen nothing, nor heard nothing neither, and he wasn’t going to get involved, did I see?

I simply paid him and let him go, and if I memorized his cab-licensing number it was out of habit, not expectation.

As part of normal equipment I wore a mobile phone on my belt and, walking slowly into the high, airy terminus, I pressed the buttons to reach the man I trusted most in the world, my ex-wife’s father, Rear Admiral Charles Roland, Royal Navy, retired, and to my distinct relief he answered at the second ring.

‘Charles,’ I said. My voice cracked a bit, which I hadn’t meant.

A pause, then, ‘Is that you, Sid?’

‘May I… visit?’

‘Of course. Where are you?’

‘Paddington Station. I’ll come by train and taxi.’

He said calmly, ‘Use the side door. It’s not locked,’ and put down his receiver.

I smiled, reassured as ever by his steadiness and his brevity with words. An unemotional, undemonstrative man, not paternal towards me and very far from indulgent, he gave me nevertheless a consciousness that he cared considerably about what happened to me and would proffer rocklike support if I needed it. Like I needed it at that moment, for several variously dire reasons.

Trains to Oxford being less frequent in the middle of the day, it was four in the afternoon by the time the country taxi, leaving Oxford well behind, arrived at Charles’s vast old house at Aynsford and decanted me at the side door. I paid the driver clumsily owing to stiffening bruises, and walked with relief into the pile I really thought of as home, the one unchanging constant in a life that had tossed me about, rather, now and then.