Come to Grief (20 page)

“Yes.”

“But I told you ... it’s to your credit.”

“It’s a private thing. I don’t like
fuss.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. He said, “You have my assurance.” And I wanted to believe in it, but I wasn’t sure that I did. He was too intensely a club man, a filler of large armchairs in dark paneled rooms full of old exploded reputations and fruitily repeated secrets: “Won’t say a word, old boy.”

“Sid.”

“Mm?”

“Whatever the papers say, where it really counts, you are respected.”

“Where’s that?”

“The clubs are good for gossip, but these days that’s not where the power lies.”

“Power wanders round like the magnetic North Pole.”

“Who said that?”

“I just did,” I said.

“No, I mean, did you make it up?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Power, these days, is fragmented,” he said.

I added, “And where the power is at any one time is not necessarily where one would want to be.”

He beamed proprietorially as if he’d invented me himself.

There was a quick rustle of clothes beside my ear and a drift of flowery scent, and a young woman tweaked a chair around to join our table and sat in it, looking triumphant.

“Well, well, well,” she said. “Mr. Davis Tatum and Sid Halley! What a surprise!”

I said, to Davis Tatum’s mystified face, “This is Miss India Cathcart, who writes for
The Pump.
If you say nothing you’ll find yourself quoted repeating things you never thought, and if you say anything at all, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“Sid,” she said mock-sorrowfully, “can’t you take a bit of kicking around?”

Tatum opened his mouth indignantly and, as I was afraid he might try to defend me, I shook my head. He stared at me, then with a complete change of manner said in smooth, lawyerly detachment, “Miss Cathcart, why are you here?”

“Why? To see you, of course.”

“But why?”

She looked from him to me and back again, her appearance just as I remembered it: flawless porcelain skin, light-blue eyes, cleanly outlined mouth, black shining hair. She wore brown and red, with amber beads.

She said, “Isn’t it improper for a colleague of the Crown Prosecutor to be seen talking to one of the witnesses?”

“No, it isn‘t,” Tatum said, and asked me, “Did you tell her we were meeting here?”

“Of course not.”

“Then how ... why, Miss Cathcart, are you here?”

“I told you. It’s a story.”

“Does
The Pump
know you’re here?” I asked.

A shade crossly she said, “I’m not a child. I’m allowed out on my own, you know. And anyway, the paper sent me.”

“The Pump told you we’d be here?” Tatum asked.

“My editor said to come and see. And he was right!”

Tatum said, “Sid?”

“Mm,” I said. “Interesting.”

India said to me, “Kevin says you went to school in Liverpool.”

Tatum, puzzled, asked, “What did you say?”

She explained, “Sid wouldn’t tell me where he went to school, so I found out.” She looked at me accusingly. “You don’t sound like Liverpool.”

“Don’t I?”

“You sound more like Eton. How come?”

“I’m a mimic,” I said.

If she really wanted to, she could find out also that between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one I’d been more or less adopted by a Newmarket trainer (who
had
been to Eton) who made me into a good jockey and by his example changed my speech and taught me how to live and how to behave and how to manage the money I earned. He’d been already old then, and he died. I often thought of him. He opened doors for me still.

“Kevin told me you were a slum child,” India said.

“Slum is an attitude, not a place.”

“Prickly, are we?”

Damn, I thought. I will
not
let her goad me. I smiled, which she didn’t like.

Tatum, listening with disapproval, said, “Who is Kevin?”

“He works for
The Pump,”
I told him.

India said, “Kevin Mills is
The Pump’s
chief reporter. He did favors for Halley and got kicked in the teeth.”

“Painful,” Tatum commented dryly.

“This conversation’s getting nowhere,” I said. “India, Mr. Tatum is not the prosecutor in any case where I am a witness, and we may talk about anything we care to, including, as just now before you came, golf.”

“You can’t play golf with one hand.”

It was Tatum who winced, not I. I said, “You can watch golf on television without arms, legs or ears. Where did your editor get the idea that you might find us here?”

“He didn’t say. It doesn’t matter.”

“It is of the essence,” Tatum said.

“It’s interesting,” I said, “because to begin with, it was The Pump that worked up the greatest head of steam about the ponies mutilated in Kent. That was why I got in touch with Kevin Mills. Between us we set up a hotline, as a ‘Save the
Tussilago faifara’
sort of thing.”

India demanded, “What did you say?”

“Tussilago farfara,”
Tatum repeated, amused. “It’s the botanical name of the wildflower coltsfoot.”

“How did you know that?” she asked me fiercely.

“I looked it up.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, the minute I linked Ellis Quint, even tentatively, to the colts, and to Rachel Fems’s pony,
The Pump
abruptly changed direction and started tearing me apart with crusading claws. I can surely ask, India, why do you write about me so ferociously? Is it just your way? Is it that you do so many hatchet jobs that you can’t do anything else? I didn’t expect kindness, but you are ... every week ... extreme.”

She looked uncomfortable. She did what she had one week called me “diddums” for doing: she defended herself.

“My editor gives me guidelines.” She almost tossed her head.

“You mean he tells you what to write?”

“Yes. No.”

“Which?”

She looked from me to Tatum and back.

She said, “He subs my piece to align it with overall policy.”

I said nothing. Tatum said nothing. India, a shade desperately, said, “Only saints get themselves burned at the stake.”

Tatum said with gravitas, “If I read any lies or in nuendos about my having improperly talked to Sid Halley about the forthcoming Quint trial, I will sue you personally for defamation, Miss Cathcart, and I will ask for punitive damages. So choose your stake. Flames seem inevitable.”

I felt almost sorry for her. She stood up blankly, her eyes wide.

“Say we weren’t here,” I said.

I couldn’t read her frozen expression. She walked away from us and headed for the stairs.

“A confused young woman,” Tatum said. “But how did she—or her paper—know we would be here?”

I asked, “Do you feed your appointments into a computer?”

He frowned. “I don’t do it personally. My secretary does it. We have a system which can tell where all the partners are, if there’s a crisis. It tells where each of us can be found. I did tell my secretary I was coming here, but not who I was going to meet. That still doesn’t explain ...”

I sighed. “Yesterday evening you phoned my mobile number.”

“Yes, and you phoned me back.”

“Someone’s been listening on my mobile phone’s frequency. Someone heard you call me.”

“Hell! But you called me back. They heard almost nothing.”

“You gave your name ... How secure is your office computer?”

“We change passwords every three months.”

“And you use passwords that everyone can remember easily?”

“Well ...”

“There are people who crack passwords just for the fun of it. And others hack into secrets. You wouldn’t believe how
careless
some firms are with their most private information. Someone has recently accessed my own on-line computer—during the past month. I have a detector program that tells me. Much good it will do any hacker, as I never keep anything personal there. But a combination of my mobile phone and your office computer must have come up with the
possibility
that your appointment was with me. Someone in
The Pump
did it. So-they sent India along to find out ... and here we are. And because they succeeded, we now know they tried.”

“It’s incredible.”

“Who runs
The Pump?
Who sets the policy?”

Tatum said thoughtfully, “The editor is George Godbar. The proprietor’s Lord Tilepit.”

“Any connection with Ellis Quint?”

He considered the question and shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

“Does Lord Tilepit have an interest in the television company that puts on Ellis Quint’s program? I think I’d better find out.”

Davis Tatum smiled.

 

 

Reflecting that, as about thirty hours had passed since Gordon Quint had jumped me in Pont Square, he was unlikely still to be hanging about there with murderous feelings and his fencing post (not least because with Ginnie dead he would have her inquest to distract him), and also feeling that one could take self-preservation to shaming lengths, I left the Piccadilly restaurant in a taxi and got the driver to make two reconnoitering passes around the railed central garden.

All seemed quiet. I paid the driver, walked without incident up the steps to the front door, used my key, went up to the next floor and let myself into the haven of home.

No ambush. No creaks. Silence.

I retrieved a few envelopes from the wire basket clipped inside the letter box and found a page in my fax. It seemed a long time since I’d left, but it had been only the previous morning.

My cracked arm hurt. Well, it would. I’d ridden races—and winners—now and then with cracks: disguising them, of course, because the betting public deserved healthy riders to carry their money. The odd thing was that in the heat of a race one didn’t feel an injury. It was in the cooler ebbing of excitement that the discomfort returned.

The best way, always, to minimize woes was to concentrate on something else. I looked up a number and phoned the handy acquaintance who had set up my computers for me.

“Doug,” I said, when his wife had fetched him in from an oil change, “tell me about listening in to mobile phones.”

“I’m covered in grease,” he complained. “Won’t this do another time?”

“Someone is listening to my mobile.”

“Oh.” He sniffed. “So you want to know how to stop it?”

“You’re dead right.”

He sniffed again. “I’ve got a cold,” he said, “my wife’s mother is coming to dinner and my sump is filthy.”

I laughed; couldn’t help it. “Please, Doug.”

He relented. “I suppose you’ve got an analog mobile. They have radio signals that can be listened to. It’s difficult, though. Your average bloke in the pub couldn’t do it.”

“Could you?”

“I’m not your average bloke in the pub. I’m a walking midlife crisis halfway through an oil change. I could do it if I had the right gear.”

“How do I deal with it?”

“Blindingly simple.” He sneezed and sniffed heavily. “I need a tissue.” There was a sudden silence on the line, then the distant sound of a nose being vigorously blown, then the hoarse voice of wisdom in my ear.

“OK,” he said. “You ditch the analog, and get a digital.”

“I do?”

“Sid, being a jockey does not equip the modem man to live in tomorrow’s world.”

“I do see that.”

“Everyone,” he sniffed, “if they had any sense, would go digital.”

“Teach me.”

“The digital system,” he said, “is based on two numbers, zero and one. Zero and one have been with us from the dawn of computers, and no one has ever invented anything better.”

“They haven’t?”

He detected my mild note of irony. “Has anyone,” he asked, “reinvented the wheel?”

“Er, no.”

“Quite. One cannot improve on an immaculate conception.”

“That’s blasphemous.” I enjoyed him always.

“Certainly not,” he said. “Some things are perfect to begin with. E=mc
²
, and all that.”

“I grant that. How about my mobile?”

“The signal sent to a digital telephone,” he said, “is not one signal, as in analog, but is eight simultaneous signals, each transmitting one-eighth of what you hear.”

“Is that so?” I asked dryly.

“You may bloody snigger,” he said, “but I’m giving you the goods. A digital phone receives.eight simultaneous signals, and it is
impossible
for anyone to decode them, except the receiving mobile. Now, because the signal arrives in eight pieces, the reception isn’t always perfect. You don’t get the crackle or the fading in and out that you get on analog phones, but you do sometimes get bits of words missing. Still,
no one
can listen in. Even the police can never tap a digital mobile number.”

“So,” I said, fascinated, “where do I get one?”

“Try Harrods,” he said.

“Harrods is just round the corner from where you live, isn’t it?”

“More or less.”

“Try there, then. Or anywhere else that sells phones. You can use the same number that you have now. You just need to tell your service provider. And of course you’ll need an SIM card. You have one, of course?”

I said meekly, “No.”

“Sid!” he protested. He sneezed again. “Sorry. An SIM card is a Subscriber’s Identity Module. You can’t live without one.”

“I can’t?”

“Sid, I despair of you. Wake up to technology.”

“I’m better at knowing what a horse thinks.”

Patiently he enlightened me, “An SIM card is like a credit card. It actually is a credit card. Included on it are your name and mobile phone number and other details, and you can slot it into any mobile that will take it. For instance, if you are someone’s guest in Athens and he has a mobile that accepts an SIM card, you can slot your card into
his
phone and the charge will appear on your account, not his.”