Dick Francis: Straight

The futility of it shook me with weariness. Some punk had taken a chance that the dead man’s effects would be worth the risk, and the police would take notes and chalk it up among the majority of unsolved muggings. I reckoned I’d fallen into the ultra-vulnerable bracket which included little old ladies, and however much I might wince at the thought, I on my crutches had looked and been a pushover, literally.

I shuffled painfully into the washroom and ran cold water over my slowly bleeding hand, and found that the cut was more wide than deep and could sensibly be classified as a scratch. With a sigh I dabbed a paper towel on the scarletly oozing spots and unwound the cut-off pieces of white and brown plastic which were still wrapped tightly round my wrist, throwing them into the bin. What a bloody stupid anticlimactic postscript, I thought tiredly, to the accident that had taken my brother.

When I went outside Brad said with a certain amount of anxiety, “You going to the police, then?” and he relaxed visibly when I shook my head and said, “Not unless you can give them a detailed description of whoever attacked me.”

I couldn’t tell from his expression whether he could or not. I thought I might ask him later, on the way home, but when I did, all that he said was. “He had jeans on, and one of them woolly hats. And he had a knife. I didn’t see his face, he sort of had his back turned my way, but the sun flashed on the knife, see? It all went down so fast. I did think you were a goner. Then he ran off with the bag. You were dead lucky, I’d say.”

I didn’t feel lucky, but all things were relative.

Brad, having contributed what was for him a long speech, relapsed into his more normal silence, and I wondered what the mugger would think of the worthless haul of shoes, socks, handkerchief and jacket whose loss hadn’t been realistically worth reporting. Whatever of value Greville had set out with would have been in his wallet, which had fallen to an earlier predator.

I had been wearing, was still wearing, a shirt, tie and sweater, but no jacket. A sweater was better with the crutches than a jacket. It was pointless to wonder whether the thief would have dipped into my trousers pockets if Brad hadn’t shouted. Pointless to wonder if he would have put his blade through my ribs. There was no way of knowing. I did know I couldn’t have stopped him, but his prize in any case would have been meager. Apart from Greville’s things I was carrying only a credit card and a few bills in a small wallet, from a habit of traveling light.

I stopped thinking about it and instead, to take my mind off the ankle, wondered what Greville had been doing in Ipswich. Wondered if, ever since Friday, anyone had been waiting for him to arrive. Wondered how he had got there. Wondered if he had parked his car somewhere there and, if so, how I would find it, considering I didn’t know its license plate number and wasn’t even sure if he still had a Porsche. Someone else would know, I thought easily. His office, his local garage, a friend. It wasn’t really my worry.

By the time we reached Hungerford three hours later, Brad had said, in addition, only that the car was running out of juice (which we remedied) and, half an hour from home, that if I wanted him to go on driving me during the following week, he would be willing.

“Seven-thirty tomorrow morning?” I suggested, reflecting, and he said “Yerss” on a growl, which I took to mean assent.

He drove me to my door, helped me out as before, handed me the crutches, locked the car and put the keys into my hand, all without speaking.

“Thanks,” I said.

He ducked his head, not meeting my eyes, and turned and shambled off on foot toward his mother’s house. I watched him go; a shy difficult man with no social skills who had possibly that morning saved my life.

I had for three years rented the ground floor of an old house in a turning off the main road running through the ancient country town. There was a bedroom and bathroom facing that street and the sunrise, and a large all-purpose room to the rear into which sunset flooded. Beyond that, a small stream-bordered garden, which I shared with the owners of the house, an elderly couple upstairs.

Brad’s mother had cooked and cleaned for them for years; Brad mended, painted and chopped when he felt like it. Soon after I’d moved in, mother and son had casually extended their services to me, which suited me well. It was all in all an easy uncluttered existence, but if home was where the heart was, I really lived out on the windy Downs and in stable yards and on the raucous racetracks where I worked.

I let myself into the quiet rooms and sat on the sofa with icepacks along my leg, watching the sun go down on the far side of the stream and thinking I might have done better to stay in the Ipswich hospital. From the knee down my left leg was hurting abominably, and it was still getting clearer by the minute that falling had intensified Thursday’s damage disastrously. My own surgeon had been going off to Wales for the weekend, but I doubted that he would have done very much except say “I told you so,” and in the end I simply took another Distalgesic and changed the icepacks and worked out the time zones in Tokyo and Sydney.

At midnight I telephoned to those cities where it was already morning and by good luck reached both of the sisters. “Poor Greville,” they said sadly, and, “Do whatever you think best.”

“Send some flowers for us.”

“Let us know how it goes.”

I would, I said. Poor Greville, they repeated, meaning it, and said they would love to see me in Tokyo, in Sydney, whenever. Their children, they said, were all fine. Their husbands were fine. Was I fine? Poor, poor Greville.

I put the receiver down ruefully. Families did scatter, and some scattered more than most. I knew the sisters by that time only through the photographs they sometimes sent at Christmas. They hadn’t recognized my voice.

Taking things slowly in the morning, as nothing was much better, I dressed for the day in shirt, tie and sweater as before, with a shoe on the right foot, sock along on the left, and was ready when Brad arrived five minutes early.

“We’re going to London,” I said. “Here’s a map with the place marked. Do you think you can find it?”

“Got a tongue in my head,” he said, peering at the maze of roads. “Reckon so.”

“Give it a go, then.”

He nodded, helped me inch onto the back seat, and drove seventy miles through the heavy morning traffic in silence. Then, by dint of shouting at street vendors via the driver’s window, he zig-zagged across Holborn, took a couple of wrong turns, righted himself, and drew up with a jerk in a busy street round the corner from Hatton Garden.

“That’s it,” he said, pointing. “Number fifty-six. That office block.”

“Brilliant.”

He helped me out, gave me the crutches, and came with me to hold open the heavy glass entrance door. Inside, behind a desk, was a man in a peaked cap personifying security, who asked me forbiddingly what floor I wanted.

“Saxony Franklin,” I said.

“Name?” he asked, consulting a list.

“Franklin.”

“Your name, I mean.”

I explained who I was. He raised his eyebrows, picked up a telephone, pressed a button and said “A Mr. Franklin is on his way up.”

Brad asked where he could park the car and was told there was a yard round the back. He would wait for me, he said. No hurry. No problem.

The office building, which was modern, had been built rubbing shoulders to the sixth floor with Victorian curlicued neighbors, soaring free to the tenth with a severe lot of glass.

Saxony Franklin was on the eighth floor, it appeared. I went up in a smooth elevator and elbowed my way through some heavy double doors into a lobby furnished with a reception desk, several armchairs for waiting in and two policemen.