Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

All the same, it looked horrible. Jockeys were eternally vulnerable to accusations of dishonesty and it took little to disillusion a cynical public. The assumption of guilt would be strong. He could try harder and more subtly to frame me for taking bribes, and certainly for things worse. What his paper had already set their hand to, they could do again and more thoroughly. A crime I would hate.

I could find no immediate words to reply to him, and while I stood there in the lengthening silence the door alarm buzzed fiercely, making Morse jump.

Sam Leggatt flicked a switch. ‘Who is it?’ he said.

‘Erskine.’

Leggatt looked at Pollgate, who nodded. Leggatt pressed the button that unlatched the door, and the man I’d shaken off the ladder came quietly in.

He was of about my height, reddish haired going bald, with a drooping moustache and chillingly unsmiling eyes. He nodded to the triumvirate as if he’d been talking to them earlier and turned to face me directly, chin tucked in, stomach thrust out, a man with a ruined life behind him and a present mind full of malice.

‘You’ll give me my stuff,’ he said. Not a question, not a statement: more a threat.

‘Eventually,’ I said.

There was a certain quality of stillness, of stiffening, on the far side of Leggatt’s desk. I looked at Pollgate’s thunderous expression and realised that I had almost without intending it told him with that one word that his threat, his promise, hadn’t immediately worked.

‘He’s yours, Jay,’ he said thickly.

I didn’t have time to wonder what he meant. Jay Erskine caught hold of my right wrist and twisted my arm behind my back with a strength and speed that spoke of practice. I had done much the same to him in Bobby’s garden, pressing his face into the mud, and into my ear with the satisfaction of an account paid he said, ‘You tell me where my gear is or I’ll break your shoulder so bad you’ll ride no more races this side of Doomsday.’

His vigour hurt. I checked the three watching faces. No surprise, not even from the lawyer. Was this, I wondered fleetingly, a normal course of events in the editor’s office of the Daily Flag ?

‘Tell me,’ Erskine said, shoving.

I took a sharp half-pace backwards, cannoning into him. I went down in a crouch, head nearly to the floor, then straightened my legs with the fiercest possible jerk, pitching Jay Erskine bodily forwards over my shoulders, where he let go of my wrist and sailed sprawlingly into the air. He landed with a crash on a potted palm against the far wall while I completed the rolling somersault and ended upright on my feet. The manoeuvre took a scant second in the execution: the stunned silence afterwards lasted at least twice as long.

Jay Erskine furiously tore a leaf from his mouth and struggled pugnaciously to right himself, almost pawing the carpet like a bull for a second charge.

‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘That’s bloody enough.’

I looked directly at Nestor Pollgate. ‘Compensation,’ I said. ‘Another of your banker’s drafts. One hundred thousand pounds. Tomorrow. Bobby Allardeck will be coming to Ascot races. You can give it to him there. It could cost you about that much to manufacture a crime I didn’t commit and have me convicted. Why not save yourself the trouble.’

Jay Erskine was upright and looking utterly malignant.

I said to him, ‘Pray the compensation’s paid... Do you want another dose of the slammer?’

I walked to the door and looked briefly back. Pollgate, Leggatt and Morse had wiped-slate faces: Jay Erskine’s was glitteringly cold.

I wondered fearfully for a second if the door’s unlatching mechanism also locked and would keep me in; but it seemed not. The handle turned easily, came smoothly towards me, opening the path of escape.

Out of the office, along the passage to the lifts my feet felt alarmingly detached from my legs. If I believed Pollgate’s threats I was walking into the bleakest of futures: if I believed Erskine’s malevolence it would be violent and soon. Why in God’s name, I thought despairingly, hadn’t I given in, given them the jackets, let Bobby go bust.

There were running footsteps behind me across the mock-marble hallway outside the lifts, and I turned fast, expecting Erskine and danger, but finding, as once before, Sam Leggatt.

His eyes widened at the speed with which I’d faced him.

‘You expected another attack,’ he said.

‘Mm.’

‘I’ll come down with you.’ He pressed the button for descent and stared at me for a while without speaking while we waited.

‘One hundred thousand,’ he said finally, ‘is too much. I thought you meant less.’

‘Yesterday, I did.’

‘And today?’

‘Today I met Pollgate. He would sneer at a small demand. He doesn’t think in peanuts.’

Sam Leggatt went back to staring, blinking his sandy lashes, not showing his unspoken thoughts.

‘That threat,’ I said slowly, ‘about sending me to prison. Has he used that before?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘On someone else.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘You and your lawyer,’ I said, ‘showed no surprise.’

The lift purred to a halt inside the shaft and the doors opened. Leggatt and I stepped inside.

‘Also,’ I said, as the doors closed, ‘the words he used sounded almost rehearsed. “You’ll go down, I promise you, dishonoured and reviled, with maximum publicity and disgrace.” Like a play, don’t you think?’

He said curiously, ‘You remember the exact words?’

‘One wouldn’t easily forget them.’ I paused. ‘Did he mean it?’

‘Probably.’

‘What happened before?’

‘He wasn’t put to the test.’

‘Do you mean, the threat worked?’ I asked.

‘Twice.’

‘Jesus,’ I said.

I absent-mindedly rubbed my right shoulder, digging in under the anorak with the left thumb and fingers to massage. ‘Does he always get his way by threats?’

Leggatt said evenly, ‘The threats vary to suit the circumstances. Does that hurt?’

‘What?’

‘Your shoulder.’

‘Oh. Yes, I suppose so. Not much. No worse than a fall.’

‘How did you do that? Fling him off you, like that?’

I half grinned. ‘I haven’t done it since I was about fifteen, same as the other guy. I wasn’t sure it would work with a grown man, but it did, a treat.’

We reached the ground floor and stepped out of the lift.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked casually.

‘With a friend,’ I said.

He came with me halfway across the ornate entrance hall, scopping beside the small fountain.

‘Why did Nestor Pollgate want to crunch Maynard Allardeck?’ I said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then it wasn’t your idea or Erskine’s? It came from the top?’

‘From the top.’

‘And beyond,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

I frowned. ‘I don’t know. Do you?’

‘As far as I know, Nestor Pollgate started it.’

I said ruefully, ‘Then I didn’t exactly smash his face in.’

‘Not far off.’

There was no shade of disloyalty in his voice, but I had the impression that he was in some way apologising: the chief’s sworn lieutenant offering comfort to the outcast. The chief’s man, I thought. Remember it.

‘What do you plan to do next?’ he said.

‘Ride at Ascot.’

He looked steadily into my eyes and I looked right back. I might have liked him, I thought, if he’d steered any other ship.

‘Goodbye,’ I said.

He seemed to hesitate a fraction but in the end said merely, ‘Goodbye’ and turned back to the lifts: and I went out into Fleet Street and breathed great gulps of free air under the stars.