The technician, half in and half out of one of the lethal spaces, screamed.
Samson Frazer screamed at Usher Rudd.
The second technician sprinted for refuge in the smaller print room next door.
I, from instinct, leapt at Usher Rudd and yanked him backwards. He too started screaming. Still clutched by the overalls, the technician stumbled out of the fearsome gap, ingrained awareness keeping his hands close to his body: better to fall on the floor than try to keep his balance by touching the death-dealing machinery.
Usher Rudd let go of the overalls and rerouted his uncontrolled frenzy onto me. He was no longer primarily trying to stop the print run, but to avenge himself for the cataclysms he had brought on himself.
The glare in his eyes was madness. I saw the intention there of pushing me instead of the technician onto the rollers, and had we been alone he might have managed it. But Samson Frazer jumped to grab him while the technician, saved from mutilation, gave a horror-struck final shout as he made his terrified stumbling run for the door, and by unplanned chance barged into Usher Rudd on the way, unbalancing him.
Rudd threw Samson off him like an irrelevance, but it gave me time to get space between me and the nearest press, and although Rudd grasped and lurched in an effort to get me back again into the danger zone, I was fighting more or less for my life and it was amazing how much strength ultimate fear generated.
Samson Frazer, to his supreme credit — and maybe calculating that any death on his premises would ruin him — helped me struggle with the demented kicking and punching and clutching red-haired tornado: and it was Samson who delivered a blow to Rudd’s head with a bunched fist that half dazed his target and knocked him to the ground face downwards. I sat on his squirming back while Samson found some of the wide brown sticky tape used for parcels and, with my active help, circled one of Usher Rudd’s wrists, and then the other, and fastened his arms behind his back in makeshift handcuffs. Samson tethered the wildly kicking legs in the same way and we rolled Rudd onto his back and stood over him, panting.
Then, with each of us looping an arm under Rudd’s armpits, we dragged him into the comparative quiet of the secondary print room next door and propped him in a chair.
All of the technicians were in that room, wide-eyed and upset. Samson told them unemotionally to go back to work, there was a paper to be got out, and slowly, hesitantly, they obeyed him.
In his chair, Rudd began shouting, “It’s all his fault. Wyvern did it. Wyvern’s the one you want, not me.”
“I don’t believe it,” I contradicted, though I did.
Usher Rudd tried to convince me. “Wyvern wanted your father out of the way. He wanted Orinda in Parliament. He wanted to get her promoted, like Dennis. He would have done anything to stop your father being elected.”
“Like sabotaging his car?”
“I didn’t want to do it. I would write what he wanted. I trailed Paul Bethune for weeks to find his bimbo, to please Wyvern, so that people would vote for Orinda, but messing up a Range Rover, cutting the brake lines like Wyvern wanted, that was too much. I didn’t do it.”
“Yes, you did,” I told him conclusively.
“No, I didn’t.”
“What did you do, then?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Your cousin, Basil, knows what you did.”
Usher Rudd cursed Basil with words I’d hardly ever heard even on a racecourse, and somewhere in the tirade came a description of how he’d wriggled under the Range Rover in the black tracksuit he’d worn to the meeting after the dinner in The Sleeping Dragon. The brilliant performance my father had given that evening had convinced Wyvern that he wouldn’t get rid of my father without at least injuring him badly. Wyvern had been furious with Usher Rudd that his sabotage had been so useless.
Usher Rudd’s rage slowly ran down and he began first to whine and then deny that he had ever said what Samson and I had both just heard.
Samson phoned the police. Joe Duke was not on duty, but Samson knew all the force individually and put down the receiver, reporting a promise of immediate action.
Usher Rudd shouted, “I want a lawyer.”
He got his lawyer, passed a night in the cells and on Monday morning collected a slap on the wrist from a busy magistrate (for causing a disturbance indoors at the Hoopwestern Gazette) who had no real conception of the speed and noise and danger involved.
No actual damage had been done. The newspaper had appeared as usual. Usher Rudd, meek and respectful, walked out free.
I talked to Joe Duke.
I said, “It was Usher Rudd who stuffed wax in the sump drain of the Range Rover, and Leonard Kitchens who started the fire. Both of them were put up to it by Alderney Wyvern.”
Joe Duke slowly nodded. “But they didn’t stop your father, did they? And as for you” — he gave a half smile — “I’ll never forget you that night of the fire, sitting there half-naked on the cobbles with that red blanket over your shoulders and no sign of pain, though you’d burns on your hands and feet and you’d smashed down into the square. Don’t you ever feel pain?”
“Of course, but there was so much happening...”
“And you’re used to falling off horses?”
“Horses fall... Anyway, I suppose so. I’ve hit the ground quite a lot.”
The smile broadened. “Then why do it?”
“Speed,” I told him. “Nothing like it.” I paused. “If you want something badly enough, you can risk your life for it and consider it normal behavior.”
He pondered. “If you want Orinda Nagle enough to be an MP, you’ll risk...”
“Almost anything. I think it was Wyvern who shot at my father.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. He could have carried a rifle in his golf bag, with one of those covers on it that they use for clubs.”
“Yes.”
“And he’d had to have had murder in his mind to do that.”
“Uh huh. And when he heard and saw my father’s success at that meeting, he judged he needed to get rid of him at once.”
“He was crazy.”
“He still is.”
Joe Duke knew my father was engaged in a serious power struggle but was dismayed when I explained about Hudson Hurst.
“You don’t think,” Joe said, horrified, “that Wyvern would try again to kill your father?”
“Wyvern’s stakes are higher now, and my father still stands in his way. If my father is chosen to lead his party, I’m sure he’ll be in appalling danger. It frightens me badly, to be honest.”
Joe said thoughtfully, “You know what?”
“What?”
“Just in case we’re doing Wyvern a great injustice, thinking it was he that shot at you... I mean, so far we’ve only got theory to go on, really. Why don’t you and I do an unofficial walk through... a reconstruction? I’ll use a walking stick for a gun. I’ll transport it in a golf bag. And I’ll carry it up into the little lounge, and aim it at you while you’re crossing the square, like you did that night, and I’ll see how difficult it will be to put the walking stick up in the gutter. What do you think?”
“Can’t do any harm.”
“We might come across something we haven’t thought of. It often works that way with reconstructions.”
“OK.”
“We’ll have to do it at night,” Joe said.
“It was after midnight.”
“After midnight, then. I’ll be off duty. It will be just the two of us.”
I agreed that we would meet that evening in The Sleeping Dragon, and that Joe would tell the manager what we were doing.
I went to see Orinda, who had finally returned from her weekend and answered the telephone.
Five years had been kind to her. She looked as striking as ever, the green eyes black-lashed, the greasepaint makeup smooth and blended. She was less brittle, less stressed, more fulfilled.