I said bitterly, “You could have seen Vivian Durridge didn’t know what he was saying.”
“People who don’t know what they’re saying are the ones you listen to.”
That confident statement, spoken in rage, popped a lightbulb in my understanding of Usher Rudd’s success.
I said, “That day in Quindle, when I first met you, you were already trying to dig up scandal about my father.”
“Natch.”
“He tries to dig up dirt about anyone,” Samson put in.
I shook my head. “Who,” I asked Usher Rudd, “told you to attack my father?”
“I don’t need to be told.”
Though I wasn’t exactly shouting, my voice was loud and my accusation plain. “As you’ve known all about cars for the whole of your life, did you stuff up my father’s Range Rover’s sump-plug drain with a candle?”
“What?”
“Did you? Who suggested you do it?”
“I’m not answering your bloody questions.”
The telephone rang on Samson Frazer’s desk.
He picked up the receiver, listened briefly, said “OK” and disconnected.
Usher Rudd, not a newspaperman for nothing, said suspiciously, “Did you give them the OK to roll the presses?”
“Yes.”
Usher Rudd’s rage increased to the point where his whole body shook. He shouted, “You’re printing without the change. I insist... I’ll kill you... stop the presses... if you don’t print what I told you to, I’ll kill you.”
Samson Frazer didn’t believe him, and nor, for all Rudd’s passion, did I. Kill was a word used easily, but seldom meant.
“What change?” I demanded.
Samson’s voice was high beyond normal. “He wants me to print that you faked Sir Vivian’s letter and forged his signature and that the story about sniffing glue is a hundred percent sterling, a hundred percent kosher, and you’ll do anything... anything to deny it.”
He picked a typewritten page off his desk and waved it.
“It’s Sunday, anyway,” he said. “There’s no one here but me and the print technicians. Tomorrow’s paper is locked onto the presses, ready to roll.”
“You can do the changes yourself.” Usher Rudd fairly danced with fury.
“I’m not going to,” Samson said.
“Then don’t print the paper.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Samson put the typewritten page into my hands.
I glanced down to read it and, as if all he’d been waiting for had been a flicker of inattention on my part, Bobby Rudd did one of his quickest getaways and was out through a door in a flash... not the door to the outside world, but the swinging door into the passage leading deeper into the building... the passage, it transpired, down to the presses.
“Stop him,” yelled Samson, aghast.
“It’s only paper,” I said, though making for the door.
“No... sabotage... he can destroy... catch him.” His agitation convinced me. I sprinted after Usher Rudd and ran down a passage with small, empty individual offices to both sides and out through another door at the end and across an expanse inhabited only by huge white rolls of paper — newsprint, the raw material of newspapers — and through a small print room beyond that with two or three men tending clattering machines turning out colored pages, and finally through a last swinging door into the long, high room containing the heart and muscle of the Hoopwestern Gazette, the monster printing presses that every day turned out twenty thousand twenty-four-page community enlightenments to most of Dorset.
The presses were humming quietly when I reached them. There were eight in a row with a tower in the center. From each end of four, the presses put first a banner in color — red, green, blue — on the sheets that would be the front and back pages, and then came the closely edited black-and-white pages set onto rollers in an age-old, but still perfectly functional, offset litho process.
I learned afterwards how the machines technically worked. On that fraught Sunday I saw only wide white paper looping from press to press and in and out of inked rollers as it collected the news page by page on its journey to the central tower, from where it went up in single sheets and came down folded into a publish-able newspaper, cut and counted into bundles of fifty.
There were two men tending the presses, adjusting the ink flow and slowly increasing the speed of the paper over the rollers and through the mechanism. Warning bells were ringing. Noise was building.
When I ran into the long thundering area, Usher Rudd was shouting at one of the men to turn everything off. The technician blinked at him and paid no attention.
His colleague activated another alarm bell and switched the presses to a full floor-trembling roar. Monday’s edition of the Hoopwestern Gazette, twenty thousand copies of it, flowed from press to press and up the tower and down at a speed that reduced each separate page to a blur.
Samson Frazer, catching up with me as I watched with awe, shouted in my ear, “Don’t go near the presses while they’re running. If you get your little finger caught in any of the rollers it would pull your whole arm in — it would wrench your arm right out of your body. We can’t stop the presses fast enough to save an arm. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I yelled.
Usher Rudd was screaming at the technician.
Samson Frazer’s warning was essential.
There was a space of three or four feet between each machine where one was wholly exposed to the revolving accelerating rollers. When the presses were at rest the printers — the technicians — walked with safety into these spaces to fit the master sheets onto the cylinders and to check the state of the inking rollers. When the presses, switched on, ran even at minimum inch-by-inch speed, the danger began. An arm could be torn out, not in one jerking terror but worse, inch by excruciatingly inevitable inch.
I asked later why no guarding gates kept people away. The machines were old, built before safety standards skyrocketed, Samson Frazer said, but they did indeed now have gates. It was illegal in Britain to operate without them. These gates pulled across like trellises and locked into place, but they were fiddly, and an extra job. People who worked around these presses knew and respected the danger, and sometimes didn’t bother with the gates. He didn’t approve, but he’d had no tragedies. There were computerized programs and printers to be had, but the old technology worked perfectly, as it had for a hundred years, and he couldn’t afford to scrap the old and to install the new, which often went wrong anyway, and one couldn’t guard against maniacs like Usher Rudd. No one had to insure against lunatics.
I could have sold him a policy about that, but on that particular Sunday evening what we needed for Usher Rudd was a straitjacket, not a premium.
He was still swearing at the technician, who looked over Rudd’s shoulder and saw Samson Frazer’s arrival as deliverance.
Stopping the presses, I learned later, meant hitting one particular button on one of the control panels to be found on the end of each press that regulated the overall speed of the printing. The buttons weren’t things the size of doorbells, but scarlet three-inch-diameter flat knobs on springs. Neither the technician nor Samson Frazer pushed the overall stop control, and neither Rudd himself nor I knew which of several scarlet buttons ruled the roost. The presses went on roaring and Bobby Usher Rudd completely lost control.
He knew the terrible danger of the presses. He’d worked for the Hoopwestern Gazette. He’d been in and out of newspapers all his adult life.
He grabbed the technician by his overalls and swung him towards unimaginable agony.