Shattered (6 page)

He protested self-righteously that he'd given me Martin's tape in good faith. I insisted that I believed him. No more was said about Rose.

Eddie knew, as did the whole racing world after that day's newspapers, that Martin's funeral was planned for Thursday, provided no jinx upset Wednesday's inquest. Eddie, eyes down, mumbled a few words about seeing me there, he supposed, and in discomfort hurried away to the inner realms of the changing rooms, from where the public with awkward questions were banned.

Rose Robins and her enmity added complexity to an already tangled situation.

I caught a bus from the racetrack which wound its way from village to village and, in the end, to Broadway. In spite of my having spent all the time tossing around in my mind the unexpected involvement of Eddie's scratchy daughter I came to no more satisfactory or original conclusion than that someone had given some tape or other to Martin, who had given it to Eddie, who had given it to me, who had carelessly lost it to a thief.

Still drifting in outer space was whatever confidential data Martin had meant to entrust to me. In some respects that didn't matter, and never would, just as long as the hidden nugget of information didn't heat up or collide with an inconvenient truth. Additionally, as I had no road map to the ingredients of the nugget, I had no way of either foreseeing or preventing trouble.

Unrealistically, I simply hoped that Martin's secret would remain forever hidden in uncharted orbit, and all of us could return to normal.

It was after five-thirty by the time I reached the doors of Logan Glass, and again my assistants were there, two of them making paperweights with enthusiasm and the third keeping shop. Bon-Bon had telephoned, they told me, saying she was begging me to go on organizing her household in return for transport; at least until after the funeral, and, much to the amusement of my assistants, the transport she sent that afternoon wasn't her own runabout, but was Marigold's Rolls.

Whenever we were alone together, I sat beside Worthington as he drove. He had offered me the comfort and prestige of the rear seat usually taken by his employer, but I felt wrong there. Moreover, on the showing of the last few days, if I sat in the back he tended both to call me “Sir” and to favor respectful silence instead of pithy and irreverent observation. When I sat in the front, Marigold was “Marigold”; when in the back, “Mrs. Knight.” When I sat beside her chauffeur, he showed his inner self.

In addition to being bald, fifty and kind to children, Worthington disliked the police force as a matter of principle, referred to marriage as bondage and believed in the usefulness of being able to outkick any other muscle man in sight. It wasn't so much as a chauffeur that I now valued Worthington at my elbow, but as a prospective bodyguard. The Elvis lookalike had radiated latent menace at an intensity that I hadn't met before and didn't like; and for a detonator there was fierce, thorny Rose, and it was with her in mind that I casually asked Worthington if he'd ever placed a bet at the races with Arthur Robins, Est. 1894.

“For a start,” he said with sarcasm, fastening his seat belt as if keeping to the law were routine, “the Robins family don't exist. That bunch of swindlers known as Arthur Robins are mostly Veritys and Webbers, with a couple of Browns thrown in. There hasn't been a bona fide Arthur Robins
ever.
It's just a pretty name.”

Eyebrows raised in surprise, I asked, “How do you know all that?”

“My old man ran a book,” he said. “Fasten your seat belt, Gerard, the cops in this town would put eagles out of business. Like I said, my old man was a bookmaker, he taught me the trade. You've got to be real sharp at figures, though, to make a profit, and I never got quick enough. But Arthur Robins, that's the front name for some whizzers of speed merchants. Don't bet with them, that's my advice.”

I said, “Do you know that Eddie Payne, Martin's valet, has a daughter called Rose who says her last name is Robins and who's on cuddling terms with an Elvis Presley lookalike taking bets for Arthur Robins?”

Worthington, who had been about to start the car outside Logan Glass to drive us to Bon-Bon, sat back in his seat, letting his hands fall laxly on his thighs.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I didn't know that.” He thought for a while, his forehead troubled. “That Elvis fellow,” he said finally, “that's Norman Osprey. You don't want to mix with
him.”

“And Rose?”

Worthington shook his head. “I don't know her. I'll ask around.” He roused himself and started the car.

 

 

By Thursday, the day of Martin's funeral, the police as predicted hadn't found one identifiable videotape in a country awash with them.

On the day before the funeral a young woman on a motorbike—huge helmet, black leather jacket, matching pants, heavy boots—steered into one of the five parking spaces at the front of Logan Glass. Outside in the January chill she pulled off the helmet and shook free a cap of fair fine hair before walking without swagger into the gallery and showroom as if she knew the way well.

I was putting the pre-annealing final touches to a vase, with Pamela Jane telling a group of American tourists how it was done, but there was something attention-claiming about the motorcyclist, and as soon as I thought of her in terms of glass, I knew her infallibly.

“Catherine Dodd,” I said.

“Most people don't recognize me.” She was amused, not piqued.

With interest I watched the tourists pack somewhat closer together as if to elbow out the stranger in threatening clothes.

Pamela Jane finished her spiel and one of the American men said the vases were too expensive, even if they were handmade and handsome. He collected nods and all-around agreement, and there was relief in the speed with which the tourists settled instead on simple dolphins and little dishes. While Hickory wrapped the parcels and wrote out bills, I asked the motorcyclist if there were any news of my lost tape.

She watched me handle the vase in heatproof fiber and put it to cool in the annealing oven.

“I'm afraid,” said Detective Constable Dodd in plain—well, plainer—clothes, “your tape is gone for good.”

I told her it held a secret.

“What secret?”

“That's the point, I don't know. Martin Stukely told his wife he was giving me a secret on tape for safekeeping—that's a bit of a laugh—in case he was killed in a car crash, or something like that.”

“Like a steeplechase?”

“He didn't expect it.”

Catherine Dodd's detective mind trod the two paths I'd reluctantly followed myself since Norman Osprey and his Elvis sideburns had appeared on my horizon. First,
someone
knew Martin's secret, and second,
someone,
and maybe not the same someone, could infer that, one way or another, that secret was known to me. Someone might suppose I'd watched that tape during the evening of Martin's death, and for safety had wiped it off.

I hadn't had a tape player on the Logan Glass premises, but the Dragon over the road made one available generously to the paying guests, and she distributed brochures by the hundred advertising this.

“If I'd had a tape player handy,” I said, “I probably
would
have run that tape through early in the evening, and if I thought it awful I
might
have wiped it off.”

“That's not what your friend Martin wanted.”

After a brief silence I said, “If he'd been sure of what he wanted he wouldn't have fiddled about with tapes, he would just have
told
me this precious secret.” I stopped abruptly. “There are too many
ifs.
How about you coming out for a drink?”

“Can't. Sorry. I'm on duty.” She gave me a brilliant smile. “I'll call in another day. And oh! There's just one loose end.” She produced the ever essential notebook from inside her jacket. “What are your assistants' names?”

“Pamela Jane Evans and John Irish and John Hickory. We leave off John for the men and use their last names, as it's easier.”

“Which is the elder?”

“Irish. He's about ten years older than both Hickory and Pamela Jane.”

“And how long have they all worked for you?”

“Pamela Jane about a year, Irish and Hickory two to three months longer. They're all good guys, believe me.”

“I do believe you. This is just for the records. This is actually ... er ... what I dropped in for.”

I looked at her straightly. She all but blushed.

“I'd better go now,” she said.

With regret I walked with her as far as the door, where she paused to say good-bye as she didn't want to be seen with me too familiarly out in the street. She left, in fact, in the bunch of winter tourists, all of them overshadowed by the loud voice of a big man who judged the whole afternoon a waste of time and complained about it all the way back to the group's warm tour bus. His broad back obscured my view of the departure of Detective Constable Dodd, and I surprised myself by minding about that quite a lot.

 

 

On Bon-Bon's telephone, the night before Martin's funeral, I learned from the Dragon herself that Lloyd Baxter had deemed it correct to fly down for “his jockey's last ride” (as he put it) but hadn't wanted to stay with Priam Jones, whom he was on the point of ditching as his trainer. The Dragon chuckled and went on mischievously, “You didn't have to go all that way to stay with Bon-Bon Stukely, if you didn't fancy sleeping in your burgled house, lover boy. You could have stayed here with me.”

“News gets around,” I said dryly.

“You're always news in this town, lover, didn't you know?”

In truth I did know it, but I didn't feel it.

On the evening before Martin's funeral Priam Jones telephoned, meaning to talk to Bon-Bon, but reaching me instead. I had been fielding commiserations for her whenever I was around. Marigold, Worthington and even the children had grown expert at thanks and tact. I thought how Martin would have grinned at the all-around grade-A improvement in his family's social skills.

Priam blustered on a bit, but was, I gathered, offering himself as an usher in the matter of seating. Remembering his spontaneous tears I put him on the list and asked him if, before he'd picked me up from my home on Friday morning, Martin had by any chance mentioned that he was expecting delivery of a tape at the races.

“You asked me that the day after he died,” Priam said impatiently. “The answer is still yes, he said we wouldn't leave the racetrack until he'd collected some package or other to give to you. And I did give it to you, don't you remember? I brought it back to Broadway after you'd left it in your raincoat in the car ... Well, I'll see you tomorrow, Gerard. Give my regards to Bon-Bon.”

Also on the evening before Martin's funeral, Eddie Payne went to his local Catholic church and in the confessional recited his past and present sins, asking for pardon and absolution. He told me this with self-righteousness when I intercepted his condolences to Bon-Bon. He'd tried and tried to get someone else to do his racetrack work, he said, but such was life, he hadn't succeeded, and he'd have to miss the funeral, and it grieved him sorely as he'd been Martin's racetrack valet for six or seven years. Eddie, to my disparaging ear, had plucked up half a bottle of dutch courage before stretching out his hand to the phone, and wouldn't remain long in a state of grace owing to his distance from the fact that he could have more easily got stand-ins to free him to go to that particular funeral than if it had been for his own grandmother.

On the same evening, before Martin's funeral (though I didn't learn of it until later), Ed Payne's daughter, Rose, described to a small group of fascinated and ruthless knaves how to force Gerard Logan to tell them the secret he'd been given at Cheltenham races.

O
n the first Thursday of January, the sixth day of the next thousand years, I, with Priam Jones and four senior jump jockeys, carried Martin into church in his coffin and later delivered him to his grave.

The sun shone on frosty trees. Bon-Bon looked ethereal, Marigold stayed fairly sober, Worthington took off his chauffeur's cap, baring his bald pate in respect, the four children knocked with their knuckles on the coffin as if they could wake their father inside, Lloyd Baxter read a short but decent eulogy and all the racing world, from the Stewards of the Jockey Club to the men who replaced the divots, everyone crowded into the pews in church and packed the wintry churchyard grass outside, standing on the moss-grown ancient slabs of stone. Martin had been respected, and respects were paid.

The new burial ground lay on a hillside a mile away by hearse and heavy limousines. Among banks of flowers there Bon-Bon cried as the man who'd quarreled with her daily sank into the quiet embracing earth, and I, who'd stage-managed the second farewell party in a month (my mother the other), prosaically checked that the caterers had brought enough hot toddy and that the choristers were paid, along with other mundane greasings of the expensive wheels of death.

After the hundreds who had turned up for Martin had drunk and eaten and had kissed Bon-Bon and left, I sought her out to say my own good-bye. She was standing with Lloyd Baxter, asking about his health. “Do take the pills,” she was saying, and he with embarrassment promised he would. He nodded to me coldly as if he had never brought Dom Pérignon to me for company.

I congratulated Baxter on his eulogy. He received the praise as his due, and stiffly invited me to dine with him in the Wychwood Dragon.

“Don't go,” Bon-Bon exclaimed to me, alarmed. “Stay here one more night. You and Worthington have tamed the children. Let's have this one more night of peace.”