When these two had first dined and slept together, their different interests and personalities had surprisingly meshed. Time had thoroughly cemented their coalition.
In England, Sandy Nutbridge’s mother packed her own suitcase with excitement and tried unsuccessfully to damp down the high spirits of her two grandchildren, Bob and Miranda (10 and 8), who were to accompany her to South Carolina to spend two weeks of the Easter school holidays with their father.
Sandy Nutbridge, divorced, seldom saw his children. The forthcoming visit, and that of his mother, filled him with genuine joy. Two whole weeks! He had told Ray Wichelsea not to line him up for any work during that time.
He had sent the money for all his family’s fares: his widowed mother lived on a meagre pension, and his ex-wife, remarried, had said if he wanted to have the children to stay, he could pay for them. He went to meet them at the airport and in hugs and kisses considered every dollar well spent. His mother, in new clothes, wiped tears from her eyes, and the children, who had never left England before, stared at the surprising spaciousness of America and were open-mouthed with ingenuous awe.
Sandy Nutbridge lived in a rented fourth floor two-bedroomed lakeside condominium apartment with entrancing views of sailboats, forests, blue-grey water and the setting sun. An hour’s drive over easy rolling roads took him to the centre of horse country where, in Ray Wichelsea’s office, he regularly put his feet up on a desk and drank coffee from disposable cups. Ray Wichelsea paid him by commission, not salary, and he collected his commissions in cash.
The Nutbridge life, on the day the children arrived, was coasting along comfortably at a fair standard of prosperity: the life of a reasonably honest operator with no political ambitions.
The children — and his mother — although tired from the transatlantic flight, were ecstatic over a real American fast-food chain supper of burgers and fries, learning the idiom ‘Hold the mayo’, with innocent glee.
That was Tuesday. At breakfast time on Wednesday morning, Sandy Nutbridge put on a thin dressing-gown over his pyjamas and, leaving his family exploring unfamiliar breeds of cereal, went down in slippers to the condominium lobby, as he always did, to buy a daily paper from the vending machine there.
Behind a desk in the lobby sat the blue-uniformed condominium many-job factotum, who acted as security guard, receptionist, lister of callers and message taker. Sandy Nutbridge casually said, ‘Hi, Bill,’ as he always did and turned to go back to the elevator, paying no attention to the two armed policemen leaning on Bill’s desk.
Bill, however, said, ‘That’s him,’ to the policemen who, as if galvanised by puppet strings, straightened up fast and pounced on Sandy Nutbridge, slamming him face first against the green-patterned wall paper and shouting at him to raise his hands and spread his legs apart.
Sandy Nutbridge had lived long enough in the United States to know that protest was futile. The policemen out of fear needed to know there were no hand-guns concealed in the sleeping pyjamas. Sandy might think it ludicrous that with maximum roughness they handcuffed his wrists behind his back and ‘read him his rights’, which mostly appeared to consist of a threat that if he said anything it would be held against him in court, but that seemed to be the American way of the world.
‘What am I supposed to have done?’ he asked.
The policemen didn’t know. They had been dispatched merely to ‘bring Nutbridge in for questioning’.
Sandy Nutbridge asked if they would accompany him upstairs so that he could dress and also tell his kids he would be gone for a couple of hours. The policemen didn’t bother to answer but shoved him towards the outside doors.
‘Tell my mother, Bill,’ Sandy called over his shoulder, but wasn’t sure his request would be granted. Bill couldn’t be relied on for the slightest favour.
Sandy Nutbridge still didn’t take the farcical arrest seriously and laughed a good deal to himself when the policemen drove in circles because they’d lost the way back to the main road into town. But stupidly hilarious or not, the situation hardened into seriously worrying when, at police headquarters, he was unceremoniously pushed into a barred cell and locked there.
Vigorously protesting, he was finally allowed one phone call, which he spent on alerting a friend who was also a lawyer to come at once to his aid after reassuring his no doubt frightened family.
Sandy Nutbridge had never before needed the services of a lawyer in criminal proceedings (had never in fact been arrested before) and wasn’t aware that his friend was a better drinking companion than advocate. Wasn’t aware either that his friend had got him arrested in the first place by sounding off within range of the wrong ears.
Patrick Green, the lawyer friend, saying he was trying to find out on what charge Sandy was being held, came no nearer pin-pointery than, ‘The IRS wants you on a three-year-old tax matter involving drug money deposits in your bank.’
Baffled and by then deeply alarmed, Sandy Nutbridge found himself in court on Thursday morning (after a wretched night in the cells) before a judge who seemed equally unsure of the evidence for his presence there but who had a solution for everything. To Patrick Green’s plea that Sandy be released at once, the public prosecutor responded that as Nutbridge was a British citizen with a resident alien ‘green card’ (which was in fact white) he might slip out of the country before the IRS completed its investigation. The public prosecutor, therefore, opposed setting Nutbridge free on bail.
The judge, with years of weary cases behind him, banged his gavel and set bail at one hundred thousand dollars.
Patrick Green had expected it, but to Sandy Nutbridge such a sum was a disaster. He didn’t have a hundred thousand dollars, nor would his bank lend it to him without collateral. Unless he raised the money, however, he would stay behind bars until he came up for trial, and as no one seemed to be able to say accurately what he was being accused of, no trial date could be set.
Patrick Green reassured his friend Sandy that the bail money could quickly be raised: it would, after all, be repaid to the people lending it as soon as a trial date was set and Sandy appeared in court.
Between them, they did sums: so much from Sandy himself, so much from his mother, who telephoned and borrowed from neighbours and against her pension from her sympathetic bank in England; and so much from Ray Wichelsea, who lent his own money, not his firm’s, because of his faith in Sandy’s strong declaration of his innocence of any crime he could think of.
When all was added up, by Thursday late afternoon, they were still ten thousand dollars short. The money so far on its way by wire from England and the amounts already collected in cashier’s cheques in South Carolina were considered by nightfall to be in the hands of the US District Clerk, who would authorise the setting free from custody of Sandy Nutbridge but only when he physically held the complete one hundred thousand. If, he added not unkindly, if the missing ten thousand dollars were in his hands by noon on Friday, he would alert the facility holding Sandy Nutbridge behind bars, and if they received the instruction by two o’clock they would do the necessary paperwork and free Nutbridge that afternoon so that he could spend the weekend and the rest of their intended stay with his mother and children.
Mrs Nutbridge, in tears, telephoned Ray Wichelsea, whom she had never actually met, and begged him to get Sandy out of jail. Ray Wichelsea could afford no more than the substantial sum he had already sent. ‘But...’ he said slowly, ‘if it’s a last resort, you might try a man to whom Sandy sold a horse a couple of weeks ago. He’s rich and he’s British. He might listen to you, you never know.’