To the Hilt (32 page)

The brightly lit garden went on filling with noise and orange scarves and demands for beer. Surrealism, I thought.

Chris went away and came back and poured a container of cold water over me, and squatted down beside me and said, “Your sweater was smoldering, for God’s sake,” and I agreed with him silently that water was better than fire any day.

“Al,” he said worriedly, “are you OK?”

“Yuh.”

A goldfish flapped on the grass. Poor little bugger. A goldfish out of the pond. Pond water, that Chris had used.

Goldfish pond. Cold water.

Great idea.

I made an attempt to crawl and stagger there, and Chris, seeing the point, unwound the ropes from my arms and legs, hooked an arm under my armpit and gave me a haul, so that somehow or other I crossed the short distance of grass and lay down full-length in the cold pond, my head using the surrounding stones like a pillow, leaves of water lilies on my chest, the overall relief enormous.

“Did bloody Surtees do this?” Chris demanded with fury.

“Bloody Grantchester.”

He went away.

There were more people in the garden. Policemen. Uniforms. The monstrous front half of the bus rose over the scene like a giant incarnation of Chaos, yellow, white and silver with windows like eyes. I lay in the pond and watched the football fans scurry about looking for free beer and turning violent when they couldn’t find any, and I watched the police slapping handcuffs on everyone moving, including the four thugs, who had overestimated the window of escape, and I watched Patsy’s bewilderment and Surtees’s swings from glee to noncomprehension and back.

I heard one of the football crowd telling policemen that it was a girl who had stolen the bus from outside the pub, where they had pulled up for some refreshment; a girl who had yelled that there was free beer at the party along the road, a girl—“a bit of all right,” “a knockout” —who’d said she was up for grabs for the quickest pair of boots after her into the garden.

When they’d drifted away, Chris came back.

“I caught bloody Grantchester trying to sneak out through the garage,” he said with satisfaction. “He’ll be going nowhere for a while.”

“Chris,” I said. “Get lost.”

“Do you mean it?”

“The police are looking for the young woman who drove the bus.”

A shiny object splashed down onto my chest.

A set of brass knuckles, gleaming wetly. I swept them off my chest into deeper, concealing water.

Chris’s hand briefly squeezed my shoulder and I had only one more glimpse of his dark shape as he passed from the lit side of the bushes into the shadows.

The farce continued. A large uniformed policeman told me to get out of the pond, and when I failed to obey he clicked a pair of handcuffs on my wrists and walked off, deaf to protests.

It gradually appeared that a couple of people in the garden were neither uniformed police nor uniformed fanatics but the law in plain clothes, or in other words, tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.

The artificial waterfall splashed cold water over my throbbing head. I lifted my handcuffed hands and steered the water delicately over my face.

A new voice said, “Get out of the pond.”

I opened my closed eyes. The voice held police authority. Just behind him stood Patsy.

He was a middle-aged man, not unkind; but my occupancy of the pond, the length of my wet hair and the presence of the handcuffs could hardly have been encouraging.

“Get out,” he said. “Stand up.”

“I don’t know if he can,” Patsy said worriedly. “They were hitting him ...”

“Who were?”

She looked over to where bunches of handcuffed figures sat gloomily on the grass. No beer. No fun at all.

“And they burned him,” Patsy said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

The policemen looked at the barbecue with its glowing coals.

“No,” Patsy said, pointing, “on that grill thing, over there.”

One of the uniformed policemen bent down to pick the grill up and snatched his hand away, cursing and sucking his fingers.

I laughed.

Patsy said as if shattered, “Alexander, it’s not
funny. ”

The policemen said, “Mrs. Benchmark, do you know this man?”

“Of course I know him.” She stared down at me. I looked expressionlessly back, resigned to the usual abuse. “He’s ...
he’s my brother,”
she said.

It came nearer to breaking me up than all Grantchester’s attentions.

She saw that it did, and it made her cry.

Patsy, my implacable enemy, wept.

She brushed the tears away brusquely and told the policeman she would point out my attackers among the football crowd, and when they moved off, their place was taken by Surtees, who was very far from a change of heart and had clearly enjoyed the earlier entertainment.

“Where’s the horse?” he said. He sneered. His feet quivered, I thought he might kick my head.

I said with threat, “Surtees, any more shit from you and I’ll tell Patsy where you go on Wednesday afternoons. I’ll tell her the address of the little house on the outskirts of Guildford and I’ll tell her the name of the prostitute who lives there, and I’ll tell her what sort of sex you go there for.”

Surtees’s mouth opened in absolute horror. When he could control his throat, he stuttered.

“How ... how ... how ... ? I’ll deny it.”

I said, smiling, “I paid a skinhead to follow you.”

His eyes seemed to bulge.

“So you keep your hands to yourself as far as I’m concerned, and your mouth
shut,
Surtees,” I said, “and if you’re still what Patsy wants, I won’t disillusion her.”

He looked sick. He physically backed away from me, as if I’d touched him with the plague. I gazed up peacefully at the bright colored lights in the trees. Life had its sweet moments, after all.

 

 

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 ward and provided him with a doctor.

 

 

Patsy organized things, which she was good at.

Patsy organized me into a private hospital that specialized in bums 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 biosynthetic burn-healing artificial skin and large bandages and in her grandmotherly way inquired, “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 beeper 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 gray 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 coach, 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 lighthearted 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 anytime,” 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, but the next person through the door was a nurse with a syringeful of relief.

 

 

Around midmorning 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 gray: 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 southpaw puncher’s doing.

The bums 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.