Dick Francis - Straight

“Subject to a vet’s certificate,” I said.

“Oh yes, dear,” Martha agreed, smiling. “As if you would ever sell us a lemon.”

Milo produced the “Change of Ownership” forms, which Martha and Harley and I all signed, and Milo said he would register the new arrangements with Weatherby’s in the morning.

“Is Dozen Roses ours, now?” Martha asked, shiny-eyed.

“Indeed he is,” Milo said, “subject to his being alive and in good condition when he arrives here. If he isn’t the sale is void and he still belongs to Saxony Franklin.”

I wondered briefly if he were insured. Didn’t want to find out the hard way.

With the business concluded Milo drove us all out to lunch at a nearby restaurant which as usual was crammed with Lambourn people: Martha and Harley held splendid court as the new owners of Gold Cup winner Datepalm and were pink with gratification over the compliments to their purchase. I watched their stimulated faces, hers rounded and still pretty under the blonde-rinsed gray hair, his heavily handsome, the square jaw showing the beginning of jowls. Both now looking sixty, they still displayed enthusiasms and enjoyments that were almost childlike in their simplicity, which did no harm in the weary old world.

Milo drove us back to rejoin the Daimler and Simms, who’d eaten his lunch in a village pub, and Martha in farewell gave Milo a kiss with flirtation but also real affection. Milo had bound the Ostermeyers to his stable with hoops of charm and all we needed now was for the two horses to carry on winning.

Milo said ‘“Thanks” to me briefly as we got into the car, but in truth I wanted what he wanted, and securing the Ostermeyers had been a joint venture. We drove out of the yard with Martha waving and then settling back into her seat with murmurs and soft remarks of pleasure.

I told Simms the way to Hungerford so that he could drop me off there, and the big car purred along with Sunday afternoon somnolence.

Martha said something I didn’t quite catch and I turned my face back between the headrests, looking toward her and asking her to say it again. I saw a flash of raw horror begin on Harley’s face, and then with a crash and a bang the car rocketed out of control across the road toward a wall and there was blood and shredded glass everywhere and we careened off the wall back onto the road and into the path of a fifty-seater touring coach which had been behind us and was now bearing down on us like a runaway cliff.

In the split second before the front of the bus hit the side of the car where I was sitting, in the freeze-frame awareness of the tons of bright metal thundering inexorably toward us, I totally believed I would be mangled to pulp within a breath.

There was no time for regrets or anger or any other emotion. The bus plunged into the Daimler and turned it again forward and both vehicles screeched along the road together, monstrously joined wheel to wheel, the white front wing of the coach buried deep in the black Daimler’s engine, the noise and buffeting too much for thinking, the speed of everything truly terrifying and the nearness of death an inevitability merely postponed.

Inertia dragged the two vehicles toward a halt, but they were blocking the whole width of the road. Toward us, round a bend, came a family car traveling too fast to stop in the space available. The driver in a frenzy braked so hard that his rear end swung round and hit the front of the Daimler broadside with a sickening jolt and a crunching bang and behind us, somewhere, another car ran into the back of the bus.

About that time I stopped being clear about the sequence of events. Against all catastrophe probability I was still alive and that seemed enough. After the first stunned moments of silence when the tearing of metal had stopped, there were voices shouting everywhere, and people screaming and a sharp petrifying smell of raw petrol.

The whole thing was going to burn, I thought. Explode. Fireballs coming. Greville had burned two days ago. Greville had at least been dead at the time. Talk about delirious. I had half a car in my lap and in my head the warmed-up leftovers of yesterday’s concussion.

The heat of the dead engine filled the cracked-open body of the car, forewarning of worse. There would be oil dripping out of it. There were electrical circuits... sparks... there was dread and despair and a vision of hell.

I couldn’t escape. The glass had gone from the window beside me and from the windshield, and what might have been part of the frame of the door had bent somehow across my chest, pinning me deep against the seat. What had been the fascia and the glove compartment seemed to be digging into my waist. What had been ample room for a dicky ankle was now as constricting as any cast. The car seemed to have wrapped itself around me in an iron-maiden embrace and the only parts free to move at all were my head and the arm nearest Simms. There was intense pressure rather than active agony, but what I felt most was fear.

Almost automatically, as if logic had gone on working on its own, I stretched as far as I could, got my fingers on the keys, twisted and pulled them out of the ignition. At least, no sparks. At most, I was breathing.

Martha, too, was alive, her thoughts probably as abysmal as my own. I could hear her whimpering behind me, a small moaning without words. Simms and Harley were silent; and it was Simms’s blood that had spurted over everything, scarlet and sticky. I could smell it under the smell of petrol; it was on my arm and face and clothes and in my hair.

The side of the car where I sat was jammed tight against the bus. People came in time to the opposite side and tried to open the doors, but they were immovably buckled. Dazed people emerged from the family car in front, the children weeping. People from the coach spread along the roadside, all of them elderly, most of them, it seemed to me, with their mouths open. I wanted to tell them all to keep away, to go farther to safety, far from what was going to be a conflagration at any second, but I didn’t seem to be able to shout, and the croak I achieved got no farther than six inches.

Behind me Martha stopped moaning. I thought wretchedly that she was dying, but it seemed to be the opposite. In a quavery small voice she said, “Derek?”

“Yes.” Another croak.

“I’m frightened.”

So was I, by God. I said futilely, hoarsely, “Don’t worry.”

She scarcely listened. She was saying “Harley? Harley, honey?” in alarm and awakening anguish. “Oh, get us out, please, someone get us out.”

I turned my head as far as I could and looked back sideways at Harley. He was cold to the world but his eyes were closed, which was a hopeful sign on the whole.

Simms’s eyes were half open and would never blink again. Simms, poor man, had developed his last one-hour photo. Simms wouldn’t feel any flames.

“Oh God, honey. Honey, wake up.” Her voice cracked, high with rising panic. “Derek, get us out of here, can’t you smell the gas?”

“People will come,” I said, knowing it was of little comfort. Comfort seemed impossible, out of reach.

People and comfort came, however, in the shape of a works foreman-type of man, used to getting things done. He peered through the window beside Harley and was presently yelling to Martha that he was going to break the rear window to get her out and she should cover her face in case of flying glass.

Martha hid her face against Harley’s chest, calling to him and weeping, and the rear window gave way to determination and a metal bar.

“Come on, Missis,” encouraged the best of British workmen. “Climb up on the seat, we’ll have you out of there in no time.”

“My husband...” she wailed.