“No one knows who put it there.”
“Leonard Kitchens?”
“He swears he didn’t. And he’s heavy and slow. It needed someone pretty agile to put that gun up high.”
“Did you ever find out where the rifle came from?”
“No. we didn’t,” he said. “They’re so common. They’ve been used in the Olympics for donkey’s years. They’re licensed and locked away and accounted for these days, but in the past... and theft...” He shrugged. “It isn’t as if it had killed anyone.”
I said, “What’s the penalty for attempted murder?”
“Do you mean a deliberate attempt that didn’t come off?”
“Mm.”
“Same as murder.”
“A 10-lb. penalty?”
“Ten years,” he said.
From the police station I drove out to the ring road and stopped in the forecourt of Basil Rudd’s car-repair outfit. I walked up the stairs into his glass-walled office that gave him a comprehensive view over his wide workshop below, only half-busy on Saturday morning.
“Sorry,” he said without looking up. “We close at noon on Saturdays. Can’t do anything for you till Monday.”
He was still disconcertingly like his cousin; red hair and freckles and a combative manner.
“I don’t want my car fixed,” I said. “I want to find Usher Rudd.”
It was as though I had jabbed him with a needle. He looked up and said, “Who are you? Why do you want him?”
I told him who and why. I asked him if he remembered the Range Rover’s questionable sump plug, but his recollection was hazy. He was quite sharply aware, though, of the political damage that could be done to a father by a son’s disgrace. He had a copy of SHOUT! on his desk, inevitably open at the center pages.
“That’s me,” I said, pointing at the photograph of the jockey. “Your cousin is lying. The Gazette sacked him for lying once before, and I’m doing my best to get him finally discredited — struck off, or whatever it’s called in newspaper-speak-for what is called dishonorable conduct. So where is he?”
Basil Rudd looked helpless. “How should I know?”
“Find out,” I said forcefully. “You’re a Rudd. Someone in the Rudd clan must know where to find its most notorious son.”
“He’s brought us nothing but trouble...”
“Find him,” I said, “and your troubles may end.”
He stretched out a hand to the telephone, saying, “It may take ages. And it’ll cost you.”
“I’ll pay your phone bills,” I said. “When you find him, leave a message on the answering machine at my father’s headquarters. Here’s the number.” I gave him a card. “Don’t waste time. It’s urgent.”
I went next to The Sleeping Dragon to see the manager. He had been newly installed there at the time of the by-election, but perhaps because of that he had a satisfactorily clear recollection of the night someone had fired a gun into the cobbled square. He didn’t, of course, remember me personally, but he was honored, he said, to be on first-name terms with my father.
“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.”