by Francis - TO THE HILT

No one had actually seen Oliver Grantchester being attacked and tied up securely in his own garage. He had been swiftly knocked out and had seen no one. He was found, when he recovered consciousness, to be suffering not only from a blow to the back of the skull but also from a broken nose, a broken jaw, and extensive damage to his lower abdomen and genitals, as if he'd been well kicked while knowing nothing about it.

Whoever would do such a thing! Tut tut.

The police put him in a prison hospital and provided him with a doctor.

Patsy organised things, which she was good at.

Patsy organised me into a private hospital that specialised in burns with an elderly woman doctor able to deal with anything on a Saturday evening.

'Dear me,' she said. 'Nasty. Very painful. But you're a healthy young man. You'll heal.'

She wrapped me in bio-synthetic burn-healing artificial skin and large bandages and in her grandmotherly way enquired, 'And a couple of cracked ribs, too, wouldn't you say?'

'I would.'

She smiled. 'I'll see that you sleep.'

She efficiently drugged me out until six in the morning, when I phoned Chris's bleeper and got his return call five minutes later.

'Where the hell are you?' he demanded aggrievedly.

I told him.

'That hospital's strictly for millionaires,' he objected.

'Then get me out. Bring some clothes.'

He brought my own clothes, the ones he'd borrowed for his departure from the wake at Park Crescent three days earlier, and he arrived to find me standing by the window watching the grey dawn return to the perilous earth.

'Hospital gowns,' he said, as I turned to greet him, 'shouldn't be visited even on the damned.'

'They cut my clothes off last night.'

'Sue them.'

'Mm.'

'To be frank,' he said, almost awkwardly, 'I didn't expect you to be on your feet.'

'More comfortable,' I said succinctly. "That bus, if I may say so, was brilliant.'

He grinned. 'Yes, it was, wasn't it?'

'Go on then, tell me all.'

He dumped the carrier bag with the clothes in and came over to join me by the window, the familiar face alight with enjoyment. High cheekbones, light brown hair, bright brown eyes, natural air of impishness. Solemnity sat unnaturally upon him, and he couldn't tell me what had happened without making light-hearted jokes about it.

'Those thugs that jumped out of the bushes at you, they were the real McCoy. Brutal bastards. There was no mistaking they were the ones I'd been looking for. And to be honest, Al, I couldn't handle four of them at once on my own, any more than you could.'

I nodded, understanding.

'So,' Chris said, 'I thought the best thing to do would be to find out how big a posse would be needed to round up the outlaws, so to speak, so I shunted round in the shelter of a sort of high wooden fence that's all round that garden, until I could see through the bushes. All those lights… and there they were, your four thugs, tying you up to that tree and bashing you about, and there were three other people there too, which made seven, and I couldn't manage seven…'

'No,' I said.

'There was that big fat slob, the lawyer from your stepfather's funeral.'

'Yes,' I said.

'And bloody Surtees…'

'Yes,' I said again.

'And his wife.'

I nodded.

'So,' Chris said again, 'I had to go for reinforcements, and I ran down the road to the pub and used their telephone and told the police there was a riot going on, and those bastards told me there were a dozen riots going on every Saturday evening, and they wanted to know where exactly, so I asked the barman in the pub if he knew whose house it was with all those lights in the garden, and he said it belongs to Mr Oliver Grantchester, a very well-known lawyer, so I told the police, but they didn't show up, or anything, and to tell you the truth, mate, I was jumping up and down a bit by that time.'

So would I have been, I thought.

'So then,' Chris said, 'this bloody big coachload of fervent psychos in orange scarves invaded the bar, and I thought then, "manna dropped from heaven", so I went outside where half of them were still in the bus, and I yelled at them that there was free beer down the road at a party, and I just got into the driver's seat and drove that damned jumbo straight through Grantchester's fence into the garden.'

'It did the trick,' I said, smiling.

'Yes, but… my God…!'

'Best forgotten,' I said.

'I'll never forget it,' he said, 'and nor will you.'

'You came, though.'

'So did the bloody police, in the end. Too many of them.'

'What exactly,' I asked him contentedly, 'did you do to Oliver Grantchester?'

'Kicked him a good many times in the goolies.' Chris had been wearing, I remembered, pointed black patent shoes, sharp enough even without heels. 'And I smashed him round the face a bit with the hard knuckles. I mean, there's villains, and there's villains. Boxing gloves is one thing, but burning people… that's diabolical. I could have killed him. Lucky I didn't.'

'The police asked me,' I said, 'if I knew who had tied him up. I said how could I possibly know anything. I was lying in the pond.'

Chris laughed. 'I'll work for you any time,' he said. 'Attending to Grantchester will be extra.'

Patsy arrived silently while I was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in trousers and shirt, head hanging, feeling rotten. Of all the people I would have preferred not to see me like that, she would have been tops.

'Go away,' I said, and she went, and the next person through the door was a nurse with a syringeful of relief.

Around mid-morning I had a visit from a Detective Inspector Vernon, whom I'd met, it transpired, in the garden.

'Mrs Benchmark said you were dressed,' he remarked, not shaking hands.

'Do you know her well?'

'She's a patron of local police charities.'

'Oh.'

He joined me by the window. There were scudding clouds in the sky. A good day for mountains.

'Mrs Benchmark says that Mr Grantchester, who is another of our patrons, was instructing four other men to ill-treat you.'

'You could put it like that,' I agreed.

He was a bulky short man, going grey: never, at that rank, at that age, going to climb high in police hierarchy, but maybe a more down-to-earth and dogged investigator because of it.

'Can you tell me why?' he said.

'You'll have to ask Mr Grantchester.'

'His lower jaw's badly broken. This morning he can't speak. He's badly bruised in the abdomen, too. Doubled over. Black and blue.'

Vernon asked me again if I knew who had attacked him. I'd been in the pond, I repeated. As he knew.

I said helpfully, however, that the same four thugs had battered me earlier in Scotland, and told him where I'd given a statement to the police there. I suggested that he might also talk to Chief Inspector Reynolds of the Leicestershire police about people being burned on barbecue grills on mown grass. Vernon wrote everything down methodically. If I had recovered enough, he said, he would appreciate it if I would attend his police station the following morning. They could send an unmarked car for me, he offered.

'See you down the nick,' Chris would have said, but all I raised was 'OK'.

The day passed somehow, and the night.

Bruises blackened. The cracked ribs were all on my right side: a south-paw puncher's doing.

The burns got inspected again. No sign of infection. Very lucky, I was told, considering the unsterile nature of goldfish ponds.

On Monday morning I discharged myself from the hospital against their advice. I had too much to do, I said.

A plain-clothes police car came to transport me to Vernon's official stamping ground, where I was instantly invited to look through a window into a brightly lit room, and to say if I'd seen any of eight men at any earlier time in my life.