Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

I put my arm around Holly. ‘Did his cheque go through?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, it bloody well did,’ Graves said furiously.

Holly nodded. ‘The feed-merchant told us. The cheque was cleared yesterday. He has his money.’

‘Just what is all this?’ Pollgate said heavily.

‘You keep out of it,’ Graves said rudely. ‘It’s you, Fielding, I want. You give me my bloody horses or I’ll fetch the police to you.’

‘Calm down, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘You shall have your horses.’

‘They’re not in their boxes.’ He glared with all his old fury; and it occurred to me that his total disregard of Pollgate was sublime. Perhaps one had to know one should be afraid of someone before one was.

‘Mr Graves,’ I said conversationally to the two proprietors and one journalist, ‘is removing his horses because of what he read in Intimate Details. You see here in action the power of the Press.’

‘Shut your trap and give me my horses,’ Graves said.

‘Yes, all right. Your grooms are going in the wrong direction.’

‘Jasper,’ Graves yelled. ‘Come here.’

The luckless nephew approached, eyeing me warily.

‘Come on,’ I jerked my head. ‘Round the back.’

Jay Erskine would have prevented my going, but Pollgate intervened. I took Jasper round to the other yard and pointed out the boxes that contained Graves’s horses. ‘Awfully sorry,’ Jasper said.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said, and I thought that but for him and his uncle we wouldn’t have rigged the bell, and but for the bell we wouldn’t have caught Jay Erskine up the ladder, and I felt quite grateful to the Graveses, on the whole.

I went back with Jasper walking behind me leading the first of the horses, and found them all standing there in much the same places, Jermyn Graves blustering on about not having faith when the trainer couldn’t meet his bills.

‘Bobby’s better off without you, Mr Graves,’ I said. ‘Load your horses up and hop it.’

Apoplexy hovered. He opened and shut his mouth a couple of times and finally walked over to his trailer to let out his spleen on the luckless Jasper.

‘Thank God for that,’ Holly said. ‘I can’t stand him. I’m so glad you’re here. Did you have a good time at your lunch?’

‘Stunning,’ I said.

They all heard and looked at me sharply.

Lord Vaughnley said, mystified, ‘How can you laugh...?’

‘What the hell,’ I said. ‘I’m here. I’m alive.’

Holly looked from one to the other of us, sensing something strongly, not knowing what. ‘Something happened?’ she said, searching my face.

I nodded a fraction. ‘I’m OK.’

She said to Lord Vaughnley, ‘He risks his life most days of the week. You can’t frighten him much.’

They looked at her speechlessly, to my amusement.

I said to her, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ and she shook her head slightly, half remembering but not sure.

‘This is Lord Vaughnley who owns the Towncrier. This is Nestor Pollgate who owns the Flag. This is Jay Erskine who wrote the paragraphs in Intimate Details and put the tap on your telephone.’ I paused, and to them I said, ‘My sister, Bobby’s wife.’

She moved closer beside me, her eyes shocked.

‘Why are they here? Did you bring them?’

‘We sort of brought each other,’ I said. ‘Where are Maynard and Bobby?’

‘In the drawing room, I think.’

Jasper was crunching across the yard with the second horse, Jermyn shouting at him unabated. The other groom who had come with them was scurrying in and out of the trailer, attempting invisibility.

Nestor Pollgate said brusquely, ‘We’re not standing here watching all this.’

‘I’m not leaving Holly alone to put up with that man,’ I said. ‘He’s a menace. It’s because of you that he’s here, so we’ll wait.’

Pollgate stirred restlessly, but there was nowhere particular for him to go. We waited in varying intensities of impatience while Jasper and the groom raised the ramp and clipped it shut, and while Jermyn Graves walked back several steps in our direction and shook his fist at me with the index finger sticking out, jabbing, and said no one messed with him and got away with it, and he’d see I’d be sorry. I’d pay for what I’d done.

‘Kit,’ Holly said, distressed.

I put my arm round her shoulders and didn’t answer Graves, and after a while he turned abruptly on his heel, went over to his car, climbed in, slammed the door, and overburdened his engine, starting with a jerk that must have rocked his horses off their feet in the trailer.

‘He’s a pig,’ Holly said. ‘What will he do?’

‘He’s more threat than action.’

‘I,’ Pollgate said, ‘am not.’

I looked at him, meeting his eyes.

‘I do know that,’ I said.

The time, I thought, had inescapably come.

Power when I needed it. Give me power, I thought.

I let go of Holly and lent into the car we had come in, picking up my anorak off the floor.

I said to Holly, ‘Will you take these three visitors into the sitting room? I’ll get Bobby... and his father.’

She said with wide apprehensive eyes, ‘Kit, do be careful.’

‘I promise.’

She gave me a look of lingering doubt, but set off with me towards the house. We went in by long habit through the kitchen: I don’t think it occurred to either of us to use the formal front door.

Pollgate, Lord Vaughnley and Jay Erskine followed, and in the hall Holly peeled them off into the sitting room, where in the evenings she and Bobby watched television sometimes. The larger drawing room lay ahead, and there were voices in there, or one voice, Maynard’s, continuously talking.

I screwed up every inner resource to walk through that door, and it was a great and appalling mistake. Bobby told me afterwards that he saw me in the same way as in the stable and in the garden, the hooded, the enemy, the old foe of antiquity, of immense and dark threat.

Maynard was saying monotonously as if he had already said it over and over, ‘... And if you want to get rid of him you’ll do it, and you’ll do it today...’

Maynard was holding a gun, a hand gun, small and black.

He stopped talking the moment I went in there. His eyes widened. He saw, I supposed, what Bobby saw: Fielding, satanic.

He gave Bobby the pistol, pressing it into his hand.

‘Do it,’ he said fiercely. ‘Do it now.’

His son’s eyes were glazed, as in the garden.

He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t...

‘Bobby,’ I said explosively, beseechingly: and he raised the gun and pointed it straight at my chest.

I turned my back on him.

I didn’t want to see him do it; tear our lives apart, mine and his, and Holly’s and the baby’s. If he was going to do it, I wasn’t going to watch.

Time passed, stretched out, uncountable. Danielle, I thought.

I heard his voice, close behind my shoulder.

‘Kit...’

I stood rigidly still. You can’t frighten him much, Holly had said. Bobby with a gun frightened me into immobility and despair.

He came round in front of me, as white as I felt. He looked into my face. He was holding the gun flat, not aiming, and put it into my hand.

‘Forgive me,’ he said.

I couldn’t speak. He turned away blindly and made for the door. Holly appeared there, questioning, and he enfolded her and hugged her as if he had survived an earthquake, which he had.

I heard a faint noise behind me and turned, and found Maynard advancing, his face sweating, his teeth showing, the charming image long gone. I turned holding the gun, and he saw it in my hand and went back a pace, and then another and another, looking fearful, looking sick.