Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

Jay Erskine’s smirk grew to a twisted smile of anticipation. I disliked intensely the cold eyes, the drooping moustache, his callous pen and his violent nature; and most of all I disliked the message in his sneer.

Pollgate opened the box and held it out to Jay Erskine, who took from it something that looked like the hand-held remote control of a television set. He settled it into his hand and walked in my direction. He came without the wariness one might have expected after I’d thrown him across a room, and he put the remote control thing smoothly between the open fronts of my jacket, on to my shirt.

I felt something like a thud, and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on my back on the floor, wholly disorientated, not sure where I was or what had happened.

Jay Erskine and Lord Vaughnley bent down, took my arms, helped me up, and dropped me on to a chair.

The chair had arms. I held on to them. I felt dazed, and couldn’t work out why.

Jay Erskine smiled nastily and put the black object again against my shirt.

The thud had a burn to it that time. And so fast. No time to draw breath.

I would have shot out of the chair if they hadn’t held me in it. My wits scattered instantly to the four winds. My muscles didn’t work. I wasn’t sure who I was or where I was, and nor did I care. Time passed. Time was relative. It was minutes, anyway. Not very quick.

The haze in my brain slowly resolved itself to the point where I knew I was sitting in a chair, and knew the people round me were Nestor Pollgate, Lord Vaughnley and Jay Erskine.

‘Right,’ Pollgate said. ‘Can you hear me?’

I said, after a pause, ‘Yes.’ It didn’t sound like my voice. More a croak.

‘You’re going to give us the wire-tap,’ he said. ‘And the other things.’

Some sort of electricity, I thought dimly. Those thuds were electric shocks. Like touching a cold metal doorknob after walking on nylon carpet, but magnified monstrously.

‘You understand?’ he said.

I didn’t answer. I understood, but I didn’t know whether I was going to give him the things or not.

‘Where are they?’ he said.

To hell with it, I thought.

‘Where are they?’

Silence.

I didn’t even see Jay Erskine put his hand against me the third time. I felt a great burning jolt and went shooting into space, floating for several millennia in a disorientated limbo, ordinary consciousness suspended, living as in dream-state, docile and drifting. I could see them in a way, but I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know anything. I existed. I had no form.

Whatever would be done, wherever they might take me, whatever God-awful crime they might plant me in, I couldn’t resist.

Thought came back again slowly. There were burns somewhere, stinging. I heard Lord Vaughnley’s voice saying something, and Pollgate answering, ‘Five thousand volts.’

‘He’s awake,’ Erskine said.

Lord Vaughnley leaned over me, his face close and worried. ‘Are you sure he’s all right?’

‘Yes,’ Pollgate said. ‘There’ll be no permanent harm.’

Thank you, I thought wryly, for that. I felt dizzy and sick. Just as well that with lunch in view I had missed breakfast.

Pollgate was looking at his watch and shaking his head. ‘He was dazed for twelve minutes that time. A three-second shock is too much. The two-second is better, but it’s taking too long. Twenty minutes already.’ He glared down at me. ‘I can’t waste any more time. You’ll give me those things, now, at once.’

It was he who held the electric device now, not Erskine.

I thought I could speak. Tried it. Something came out: the same sort of croak. I said ‘It will take... days.’

It wasn’t heroics. I thought vaguely that if they believed it would take days they would give up trying, right there and then. Logic, at that point, was at a low ebb.

Pollgate stepped within touching distance of me and showed me five thousand volts at close range.

‘Stun gun,’ he said.

It had two short flat metal prongs protruding five centimetres apart from one end of a flat plastic case. He squeezed some switch or other, and between the prongs leapt an electric spark the length of a thumb, bright blue, thick and crackling.

The spark fizzed for a long three seconds of painful promise and disappeared as fast as it had come.

I looked from the stun gun up to Pollgate’s face, staring straight at the shiny-bead eyes.

‘Weeks,’ I said.

It certainly nonplussed him. ‘Give us the wire-tap,’ he said; and he seemed to be looking, as I was, at a long, tiring battle of wills, much of which I would half sleep through, I supposed.

Lord Vaughnley said to Pollgate uncomfortably, ‘You can’t go on with this.’

A certain amount of coherence returned to my brain. The battle of wills, I thought gratefully, shouldn’t be necessary.

‘He’s going to give us those things,’ Pollgate said obstinately. ‘I’m not letting some clod like this get the better of me.’ Pride, loss of face, all the deadly intangibles.

Lord Vaughnley looked down at me anxiously.

‘I’ll give you,’ I said to him, ‘something better.’

‘What?’

My voice was steadier. Less hoarse, less slow. I moved in the chair, arms and legs coming back into coordination. It seemed to alarm Jay Erskine but I was still a long way from playing judo.

‘What will you give us?’ Lord Vaughnley said.

I concentrated on making my throat and tongue work properly. ‘It’s in Newmarket,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to go there for it. Now, this afternoon.’

Pollgate said with impatience, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I’ll give you,’ I said to Lord Vaughnley, ‘Maynard Allardeck.’

A short burst of stun couldn’t have had more effect.

‘How do you mean?’ he said; not with puzzlement, but with hope.

‘On a plate,’ I said. ‘In your power. Where you want him, don’t you?’

They both wanted him. I could see it in Pollgate’s face just as clearly as in Lord Vaughnley’s. I suppose that I had guessed in a way that it would be both.

Jay Erskine said aggressively, ‘Are our things in Newmarket, then?’

I said with an effort, ‘That’s where you left them.’

‘All right, then.’

He seemed to think that the purpose of their expedition had been achieved, and I didn’t tell him differently.

Nestor Pollgate said, ‘Jay, fetch the car to the side entrance, will you?’ and the obnoxious Erskine went away.

Pollgate and Lord Vaughnley agreed that Mario, whoever he was, should tell Icefall’s sponsors not to expect their guests back for lunch, saying I’d had a bilious attack and Lord Vaughnley was helping me. ‘But Mario can’t tell them until after we’ve gone,’ Lord Vaughnley said, ‘or you’ll have my wife and I daresay the princess out here in a flash to mother him.’

I sat and listened lethargically, capable of movement but not wanting to move, no longer sick, all right in my head, peaceful, extraordinarily, and totally without energy.

After a while Jay Erskine came back, the exasperating smirk still in place.

‘Can you walk?’ Pollgate asked me.

I said, ‘Yes’ and stood up, and we went out of the side door, along a short passage and down some gilded deeply carpeted backstairs, where no doubt many a Guineas visitor made a discreet entrance and exit, avoiding public eyes in the front hall.

I went down the stairs shakily, holding on to the rail.

‘Are you all right?’ Lord Vaughnley said solicitously, putting his hand supportively under my elbow.

I glanced at him. How he could think I would be all right was beyond me. Perhaps he was remembering that I was used to damage, to falls, to concussion: but bruises and fractures were different from that day’s little junket.