The telephone bell rang sharply, sawing the dream in half. It was Mrs Woodward, Lancashire accent very strong under stress, sounding touchingly relieved that no unbearable disaster had happened to Elizabeth.
‘It’s me that’s not well,’ I said. ‘My wife’s spending a couple of days in the nursing home. If you’ll ring again I’ll let you know when she’ll be back...’
I put the receiver down in its cradle and started across to my bed. Took two steps, yawned, and wondered if I should tell Victor Roncey to go fetch Madge and the boys. Wondered if I should tell Willie Ondroy to slacken the ultra-tight security. Decided to leave things as they were. Only twenty-four more hours to the race. Might as well be safe. Even with Vjoersterod dead, there was always Charlie Boston.
Not that Tiddely Pom would win. After all the trouble to get him there his chances were slender, because the bout of colic would have taken too much out of him. Charlie Boston would make his profit, just as if they’d nobbled him as planned.
I retraced the two steps back to the telephone and after a chat with enquiries put through a personal call to Birmingham.
‘Mr Boston?’
‘Yers.’
‘This is James Tyrone.’
There was a goggling silence at the other end punctuated only by some heavy breathing.
I asked, ‘What price are you offering on Tiddely Pom?’
No answer except a noise half way between a grunt and a growl.
‘The horse will run,’ I commented.
‘That’s all you know,’ he said. A rough, bad tempered voice. A rough, bad tempered man.
‘Don’t rely on Ross or Vjoersterod,’ I said patiently. ‘You won’t be hearing from them again. The poor dear fellows are both dead.’
I put down the receiver without waiting for the Boston reactions. Felt strong enough to take off my jacket. Made it back to bed and found the friendly precipice still there, waiting. Didn’t keep it waiting any longer.
A long while later I woke up thirsty and with a tongue which felt woolly and grass green. The nepenthe had worn off. My shoulders were heavy, stiffly sore, and insistent. A bore. All pain was a bore. It was dark. I consulted my luminous watch. Four o’clock, give or take a minute. I’d slept twelve hours.
I yawned. Found my brain no longer felt as if it was sitting on a bruise and remembered with a wide-awakening shock that I hadn’t written my column for the Blaze. I switched on the light and took a swig of Tonio’s mixture, and after it had worked went to fetch a notebook and pencil and a cup of coffee. Propped up the pillows, climbed back between the blankets, and blew the roof off for Luke-John.
‘The lawyers will have a fit,’ he said.
‘As I’ve pointed out, the man who ran the racket died this week, and the libel laws only cover the living. The dead can’t sue. And no one can sue for them. Also you can’t accuse or try the dead. Not in this world, anyway. So nothing they’ve done can be sub judice. Right?’
‘Don’t quote Blaze dictums to me, laddie. I was living by them before you were weaned.’ He picked up my typed sheets as if they would burn him.
‘Petrified owners can come out of their caves,’ he read aloud. ‘The reign of intimidation is over and the scandal of the non-starting favourites can be fully exposed.’
Derry lifted his head to listen, gave me a grin, and said, ‘Our troubleshooter loosing the big guns again?’
‘Life gets tedious otherwise,’ I said.
‘Only for some.’
Luke-John eyed me appraisingly. ‘You look more as if you’d been the target. I suppose all this haggard-eyed stuff is the result of a day spent crashing about in cars.’ He flicked his thumb against my article. ‘Did you invent this unnamed villain, or did he really exist? And if so who was he?’
If I didn’t tell, Mike de Jong in his rival newspaper might put two and two together and come up with a filling-in-the-gaps story that Luke-John would never forgive me for. And there was no longer any urgent reason for secrecy.
I said, ‘He was a South African called Vjoersterod, and he died the night before last in the second of those car crashes.’
Their mouths literally fell open.
‘Dyna... mite,’ Derry said.
I told them most of what had happened. I left Gail and Ross’s truncheon out altogether but put in the threat to Elizabeth. Left out the drunken driving and the hands over Ross’s eyes. Made it bald and factual. Left out the sweat.
Luke-John thought through the problem and then read my article again.
‘When you know what you’ve omitted, what you’ve included seems pale. But I think this is enough. It’ll do the trick, tell everyone the pressure’s off and that they can safely bet ante-post again, thanks entirely to investigations conducted by the Blaze.’
‘That’s after all what we wanted.’
‘Buy the avenging Blaze,’ said Derry only half sardonically. ‘Racket-smashing a speciality.’
Luke-John gave him a sour look for a joke in bad taste, as usual taking the Blaze’s role with unrelieved seriousness. I asked him if he would ring up a powerful bookmaking friend of his and ask him the present state of the Lamplighter market, and with raised eyebrows but no other comment he got through. He asked the question, listened with sharpening attention to the answer, and scribbled down some figures. When he had finished he gave a soundless whistle and massaged his larynx.
‘He says Charlie Boston has been trying to lay off about fifty thousand on Tiddely Pom since yesterday afternoon. Everyone smells a sewer full of rats because of your articles and the Blaze’s undertaking to keep the horse safe and they’re in a tizzy whether to take the bets or not. Only one or two of the biggest firms have done so.’
I said, ‘If Boston can’t lay off and Tiddely Pom wins, he’s sunk without trace, but if Tiddely Pom loses he’ll pocket all Vjoersterod’s share of the loot as well as his own and be better off than if we’d done nothing at all. If he manages to lay off and Tiddely Pom wins, he’ll be smiling, and if he lays off and Tiddely Pom loses he’ll have thrown away everything the crimes were committed for.’
‘A delicate problem,’ said Derry judicially. ‘Or what you might call the antlers of a dilemma.’
‘Could he know about the colic?’ Luke-John asked.
We decided after picking it over that as he was trying to lay off he probably couldn’t. Luke-John rang back to his bookmaker friend and advised him to take as much of the Boston money as he could.
‘And after that,’ he said gloomily, as he put down the receiver, ‘every other bloody horse will fall, and Tiddely Pom will win.’
Derry and I went down to Heathbury Park together on the race train. The racecourse and the sponsors of the Lamplighter had been smiled on by the day. Clear, sunny, still, frosty: a perfect December morning. Derry said that fine weather was sure to bring out a big crowd, and that he thought Zig Zag would win. He said he thought I looked ill. I said he should have seen me yesterday. We completed the journey in our usual relationship of tolerant acceptance and I wondered inconsequentially why it had never solidified into friendship.
He was right on the first count. Heathbury Park was bursting at the seams. I went first to Willie Ondroy’s office beside the weighing-room and found a scattered queue of people wanting a word with him, but he caught my eye across the throng and waved a beckoning hand.
‘Hey,’ he said, swinging round in his chair to talk to me behind his shoulder. ‘Your wretched horse has caused me more bother... that Victor Roncey, he’s a bloody pain in the neck.’