There was enough pain everywhere to satisfy Joe Duke. My eyes watered with it and my skin sweated. I’d been injured now and then in racing falls, and I’d felt shivery and sore the night of the fire, but nothing had even begun to warn me that there was an unimaginable dimension far beyond cuts and breaks.
It didn’t really help that I knew the physics of high-velocity bullets and the damage they could do. I’d fired hundreds of them at targets. I shot in a world where all one hit was paper. I didn’t know that I’d ever be able to fire a rifle again.
My father was on his knees beside me, his face screwed up with anxiety. My right trouser leg was dark and saturated with blood. The crowd from The Sleeping Dragon were running now, with Polly at their head. I could hear her agonized voice: “George... oh, George.”
It was all right, I thought. It wasn’t George.
My father held my hand.
Besides the encompassing pain, I felt remarkably ill.
I wanted to lie down, to stand up, to move somehow, and I couldn’t. I wanted someone to come along and shoot me again, but in the head; to give me oblivion, like they did with horses.
Time passed. Nothing got better.
Although ordinary traffic was banned from the square, police cars, ambulances and fire engines weren’t. Two police cars and one ambulance arrived, roof lights flashing. People from the police cars went into the hotel. Someone from the ambulance came and, with large scissors, cut open my right trouser leg.
I went on wishing for oblivion.
My leg, exposed to the dim light in the square, looked literally a bloody mess. I gathered that the bullet hadn’t severed the femoral artery, because if it had I would have already bled to death. There was, however, somewhere in my mangled muscles, a hard white finger-shaped length of what I understood with shock to be bone. Femur. Uncovered, but also unbroken.
The man from the ambulance hid the devastation with a large padded dressing and went back to the ambulance. He’d gone to summon a doctor, my father said: there were all sorts of rules and regulations about gunshot wounds.
It didn’t cross my mind that I might lose my leg and, in fact, I didn’t. What I lost, once everything was stitched and repaired, was the strength to ride half-ton steeplechasers over the black birch. What I lost was speed.
People came out of the hotel and got into the police cars. One of them was Alderney Wyvern, in handcuffs.
When the cars had driven away, Joe Duke walked across the square and sat on his heels to talk to my father and me.
He said to me, “Can you take in what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
Joe said, “When I went up the stairs to position the walking stick, the hotel manager hurried up after me and caught me before I reached the little lounge. He said he didn’t know if it was just a coincidence, but not long before, in fact at about eleven o’clock, a man had booked in as a guest at the hotel and he too was carrying a bag of golf clubs. And what was slightly odd about him, the manager said, was that he was wearing gloves.”
Joe stood up to stretch his legs for a moment, and then sat back on his heels. “Are you taking in what I’m saying?” he said.
“Yes,” I groggily replied.
“We heard that cracking bang of the gun going off, and the manager used his passkey to open a bedroom door, and inside we found Alderney Wyvern coming towards the door carrying his bag of golf clubs, but when the manager snatched it from him and emptied them out onto the floor, all that was in it was golf clubs.”
Joe went on, “He hadn’t had time to put the rifle up in the gutter, but it was there with him, all right. He’d put the gun butt in the hanging basket with the geraniums, with the barrel pointing skywards, among the chains hanging the basket. I then used the room telephone to bring my colleagues from the police station. While we waited for them to arrive I asked, out of curiosity, how Wyvern had known about the reconstruction. How had he known that he would have a chance to shoot George Juliard?”
Joe smiled lopsidedly. “Wyvern had said Usher Rudd had phoned him and told him.” He stood up again.
My father said, “How did Wyvern think he would get away with it?”
Joe shrugged. “He did last time. In the commotion, he simply walked away. If it hadn’t been for the hotel manager, he quite likely would have done it again. But it was odd. He seemed just plain tired. There was no fight left in him. He could see he hadn’t managed to finish either of you, and he simply gave up. We had no trouble arresting him.”
“And what are you charging him with?” my father asked.
“Attempted murder,” Joe said.
I faintly smiled. “A 10-lb. penalty.”
“Ten years,” Joe said.
The next prime minister held my hand.
I gripped his tight, as if he would give me comfort and security when I needed them badly.
I gripped his hand as if I’d been a little boy.