Dick Francis - 10 lb Penalty

“There were so many people coming and going on that night, and I was only beginning to know who was who. Someone left a set of golf clubs in my office and said they were Dennis Nagle’s but, of course, the poor man was dead and I didn’t know what to do with them, but I offered them to Mrs. Nagle and she said she thought they belonged to her husband’s friend, Mr. Wyvern, so I gave them to him.” He frowned. “It was so long ago. I’m afraid I’m not being much help.”

I left him and walked upstairs and from the little lounge over the main lobby looked down again onto the cobbled square where, on that first night, my father and I had by good luck not been shot.

Golf clubs...

Mervyn Teck, at the end of a busy morning surgery, told me where to find Leonard and Mrs. Kitchens, and on Saturday afternoon, without enthusiasm, I found their semi-detached substantial house on the outskirts of the town.

The house, its lack of imagination, and the disciplined front garden were all somehow typical of a heavy worthiness: no manic sign of an arsonist.

Mrs. Kitchens opened the front door at my ring, and after a moment’s hesitation for recognition, said, “My Leonard isn’t in, I’m afraid.”

She took me into a front sitting room where the air smelled as if it had been undisturbed for weeks, and talked with bitterness and freedom about “her Leonard’s” infatuation for Orinda.

“My Leonard would have done anything for that woman. He still would.”

“Er...” I said, “looking back to that fire at the party headquarters...”

“Leonard said,” Mrs. Kitchens interrupted, “that he didn’t do it.”

“But you think...?”

“The silly old fool did it,” she said. “I know he did. But I’m not going to say it to anyone except you. It was that Wyvern who put him up to it, you know. And it was all pointless, as your father is much better for the country than Orinda would have been. Everyone knows that now.”

“People say,” I said gently, “that Leonard shot a rifle at my father and then put the gun up into the gutter of The Sleeping Dragon.”

Clumsy, large, unhappy Mrs. Kitchens wouldn’t hear of it. “My Leonard doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other!”

“And does your Leonard change the oil in his own car?”

She looked utterly bewildered. “He can make plants grow, but he’s hopeless at anything else.”

I left poor Mrs. Kitchens to her unsatisfactory marriage, and slept again in Polly’s house.

For most of Sunday I sat alone in the party’s headquarters wishing and waiting for Basil Rudd to dislike his cousin enough to help me, but it wasn’t until nearly six in the evening that the telephone rang.

I picked up the receiver. A voice that was not Basil Rudd’s said, “Is it you that wants to know where to find Bobby Usher Rudd?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter a damn who I am. Because of his snooping my wife left me and I lost my kids. If you want to fix that bastard Usher Rudd, at this very moment he is in the offices of the Hoopwestern Gazette. ”

The informant at the other end disconnected abruptly.

Usher Rudd was on my doorstep.

I’d expected a longer chase, but the Hoopwestern Gazette’s offices and printing presses were simply down the road. I locked the party headquarters, jumped in my car, and sped through the Sunday traffic with the devil on my tail, anxious not to lose Usher Rudd now that I’d found him.

He was still at the Gazette, though, in mid-furious row with Samson Frazer. When I walked into the editor’s office it silenced them both with their hot words half-spoken.

They both knew who I was.

Bobby Usher Rudd looked literally struck dumb. Samson Frazer’s expression mingled pleasure, apprehension and relief.

He said, “Bobby swears the dope story’s true.”

“Bobby would swear his mother’s a chimpanzee.”

Usher Rudd’s quivering finger pointed at a copy of Thursday’s Gazette that lay on Samson’s desk, and found his voice, hoarse with rage.

“You know what you’ve done?” He was asking me, not Samson Frazer. “You’ve got me sacked from SHOUT! You frightened Rufus Crossmead and the proprietors so badly that they won’t risk my stuff anymore, and I’ve increased their bloody sales for them over the years... it’s bloody unfair. So now they say they’re the laughingstock of the whole industry, printing a false story about someone whose father might be the next prime minister. They say the story has back-fired. They said it will help George Juliard, not finish him. And how was I to know? It’s effing unfair.”

I said bitterly, “You could have seen Vivian Durridge didn’t know what he was saying.”

“People who don’t know what they’re saying are the ones you listen to.”

That confident statement, spoken in rage, popped a lightbulb in my understanding of Usher Rudd’s success.

I said, “That day in Quindle, when I first met you, you were already trying to dig up scandal about my father.”

“Natch.”

“He tries to dig up dirt about anyone,” Samson put in.

I shook my head. “Who,” I asked Usher Rudd, “told you to attack my father?”

“I don’t need to be told.”

Though I wasn’t exactly shouting, my voice was loud and my accusation plain. “As you’ve known all about cars for the whole of your life, did you stuff up my father’s Range Rover’s sump-plug drain with a candle?”

“What?”

“Did you? Who suggested you do it?”

“I’m not answering your bloody questions.”

The telephone rang on Samson Frazer’s desk.

He picked up the receiver, listened briefly, said “OK” and disconnected.

Usher Rudd, not a newspaperman for nothing, said suspiciously, “Did you give them the OK to roll the presses?”

“Yes.”

Usher Rudd’s rage increased to the point where his whole body shook. He shouted, “You’re printing without the change. I insist... I’ll kill you... stop the presses... if you don’t print what I told you to, I’ll kill you.”

Samson Frazer didn’t believe him, and nor, for all Rudd’s passion, did I. Kill was a word used easily, but seldom meant.

“What change?” I demanded.

Samson’s voice was high beyond normal. “He wants me to print that you faked Sir Vivian’s letter and forged his signature and that the story about sniffing glue is a hundred percent sterling, a hundred percent kosher, and you’ll do anything... anything to deny it.”

He picked a typewritten page off his desk and waved it.

“It’s Sunday, anyway,” he said. “There’s no one here but me and the print technicians. Tomorrow’s paper is locked onto the presses, ready to roll.”

“You can do the changes yourself.” Usher Rudd fairly danced with fury.

“I’m not going to,” Samson said.

“Then don’t print the paper.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Samson put the typewritten page into my hands.

I glanced down to read it and, as if all he’d been waiting for had been a flicker of inattention on my part, Bobby Rudd did one of his quickest getaways and was out through a door in a flash... not the door to the outside world, but the swinging door into the passage leading deeper into the building... the passage, it transpired, down to the presses.

“Stop him,” yelled Samson, aghast.

“It’s only paper,” I said, though making for the door.

“No... sabotage... he can destroy... catch him.” His agitation convinced me. I sprinted after Usher Rudd and ran down a passage with small, empty individual offices to both sides and out through another door at the end and across an expanse inhabited only by huge white rolls of paper — newsprint, the raw material of newspapers — and through a small print room beyond that with two or three men tending clattering machines turning out colored pages, and finally through a last swinging door into the long, high room containing the heart and muscle of the Hoopwestern Gazette, the monster printing presses that every day turned out twenty thousand twenty-four-page community enlightenments to most of Dorset.