Dick Francis - 10 lb Penalty

Flash.

The cameraman from the local TV station arrived with his brighter light that was still outwatted by fire.

Mervyn wrung his hands over the lost heaps of JULIARDS. He’d barely been home half an hour before someone had phoned to warn him the charity shop was on fire.

Crystal Harley knelt beside me, dabbing bloody trickles with tissues and said worriedly, “Do you think I’d better come into work tomorrow?”

Paul and Isobel Bethune illicitly drove into the pedestrian-only precinct. Emergencies made new rules, the local councillor said, bustling towards my father, presenting a surface of urgent concern, all camaraderie for him and with hail-fellow greetings individually for the firemen.

Isobel asked me weakly if I was all right.

“Of course he’s not,” Crystal snapped. “He jumped through fire and hit the ground. What do you expect?”

“And... er... his father?”

“His father will win the seat,” Crystal said.

God bless politics, I thought.

“Paul was out at a meeting,” Isobel said. “He came home to collect me when he heard about the fire, to see if there was anything I could do to help. It always looks better if I’m with him, he says.”

Water plumed out of the huge appliance and sizzled on the flames and ran out of the building again, soaking the cobbles. I and my red blanket dripped and chilled.

Another vast tanker in the car park at the rear raised soaring fountains above the roof so that the two arcs of glittering Niagara met and married and fell together as monstrous rain. Leaflets and junk a fiery furnace; two vulnerable organisms shivering outside.

The yellow-helmets prodigally aimed their hoses at the still-dark buildings next to the blazing shops and, in time, inevitably, the ravaging tongues of fire ran out of fuel and began to diminish, to whisper instead of roar, to give up the struggle and leave the battlefield so that what fell from the sky into the square was no longer sparks but hot, clinging ash, and what assaulted the senses wasn’t heat but the acrid after-smell of burning.

Someone fetched the doctor who had seen to my father’s ankle three days earlier; he peered into my eyes with bright lights and into my ears and felt the bump on my head and bound up blisters in huge padded dressings so that they wouldn’t burst and get infected, and he agreed with my father that all a healthy boy needed was to see him in the morning.

My father solved the interim by enlisting the sympathy of the manager of The Sleeping Dragon, who gave us a bedroom and whose wife found me some clothes.

“You poor dears... you poor dears...” She mothered us, kind, but enjoying it, and both she and her husband happily welcomed the reporters from the London dailies who thronged through the doors the next day.

Usher Rudd’s admittedly brilliant photograph of my father in mid-leap with the flaming window behind him made the front pages, not only of the Hoopwestern Gazette and the next edition of the Quindle Diary (“Juliard Jinx”) but of every major paper in the land (“Juliard Jumps”) and hot on the heels of the factual news came endless comment and criticism and picking-to-pieces.

People will always tell you what you should have done. People will tell you what they would have done if they had woken in the night with fire underneath them. People will say that absolutely the first thing to do was call the fire brigade, and no one could be bothered to say how do I call the brigade when the only telephone is downstairs, surrounded by flames? How do you call a fire brigade when the telephone line has melted?

Everyone can think logically afterwards, but in the heat and the smell and the noise and the danger, analytical reasoning is more or less out of the question.

People tend to think that wildly unreasonable behavior in terrifying circumstances can be called “panic,” and forgiven, but it’s not so much panic, a form of ultimate illogical fear, but a lack of time to think things through.

Perhaps my father and I would have done differently if we had been presented with the situation as a theoretical exercise with a correct and an incorrect solution.

Perhaps we should have thrown the mattresses out of the window as a possible way of breaking our fall. Perhaps, if we could have got them through the window. As it was, we both nearly died and, as it was, we both lived, but more by luck than reason.

Don’t waste time with clothes, they’ll tell you. Better go naked into this world than clothed into the next. But they — “they,” whoever they are — haven’t jumped in front of the media’s sharpened lenses.

I thought afterwards that I should at least have dashed into the burning sitting room for my jacket and jockey’s helmet, instead of bothering with the taps. Also I should have wrapped towels around my hands and feet before grasping the window frame.

But I don’t think my father ever regretted the near-to-lethal seconds he spent in putting on his shirt and trousers. He knew in some way even in that life-or-death split second, that a photograph of him jumping half-naked from the flames would haunt his whole career. He knew, even in that fraught moment, that an orderly presentation was everything. Not even the worst that Usher Rudd could dredge up in the future ever showed George Juliard as anything but a fast-thinking headliner who was at his very best — who put his shoes on — in a crisis.

The police investigation sauntered upwards from Joe, whose mother drove a school bus, to higher ranks at county level, but the firefighters couldn’t swear the two bow-fronts had been torched and no one found a .22 rifle to match the lost-again bullet, and Foster Fordham’s report on wax in the Range Rover’s sump was judged inconclusive.

George Juliard might have been the target of three attempts on his candidature, if not on his life, but again he might not. There were no obvious suspects.

In the August doldrums for news, London editors gave the puzzle two full days of wide coverage. George Juliard shone on television nationwide. Every single voter in the Hoopwestern constituency knew who JULIARD was.

While my father dealt with publicity people and Mervyn Teck drove around like an agitated bluebottle searching for inexpensive substitute headquarters, I spent most of the Sunday sitting in an armchair by the window of our Sleeping Dragon room, letting bruises and grazes heal themselves, and looking across the square at the burned-out building opposite.

From somewhere up here, I thought, from somewhere here among the many hanging baskets of geraniums (her Leonard, the nurseryman, had designed them, Mrs. Kitchens had told me with pride), from among all these big clusters of scarlet pompoms and little blue flowers whose name I didn’t know, and from among the fluffy white flowers that filled and rounded the bright living displays decorating the whole long frontage of The Sleeping Dragon, from somewhere up here someone had aimed a .22 rifle at my father.

The marksman probably hadn’t been in this room given to us in the night, which was much farther along towards the Town Hall than the main door of the hotel from which we’d walked. A shot from where I sat would have had to take into account that the target wasn’t walking straight ahead but moving sideways. A stalker’s shot, but not a stalker’s gun.

A ricochet could of course take a bullet anywhere, but I thought it unlikely that a ricochet from where I sat would have turned and hit the charity shop.

At one point, shuffling on the padded blisters, I explored the length of the hotel’s second floor, glimpsing the square through an open doorway or two and coming to a little lounge area furnished with armchairs and small tables that I reckoned lay directly above the front hall and main door, accessible to the world. Straight ahead through the window from there was the unmarked path I’d taken with my father across the cobbles.