The spirit of the dead man had gone. The place no longer vibrated with violent hate. In the morning light it looked a cold and sordid shambles, squalid debris of a spent orgy.
I walked slowly down the room, stirring things with my toe. The work of twenty years lay there in little pieces. Designs torn like confetti. Toys crushed flat. Nothing could be mended or saved.
I supposed I could get duplicates at least of the design drawings if I tried, because copies were lodged in the patents’ office. But the originals, and all the hand-made prototype toys, were gone for good.
I came across the remains of the merry-go-round which I had made when I was fifteen. The first Rola; the beginning of everything. I squatted down and stirred the pieces, remembering that distant decisive summer when I’d spent day after day in my uncle’s workshop with ideas gushing like newly-drilled oil out of a brain that was half child, half man.
I picked up one of the little horses. The blue one, with a white mane and tail. The one I’d made last of the six.
The golden barley-sugar rod which had connected it to the revolving roof was snapped off jaggedly an inch above the horse’s back. One of the front legs was missing, and one of the ears.
I turned it over regretfully in my hands and looked disconsolately around at the mess. Poor little toys. Poor beautiful little toys, broken and gone.
It had cost me a good deal, one way and another, to get Energise back.
Turn the handle, Charlie had said, and all the little toys would revolve on their spindles and do what they should. But people weren’t toys, and Jody and Macrahinish and Ganser Mays had jumped violently off their spindles and stripped the game out of control.
If I hadn’t decided to take justice into my own hands I wouldn’t have been kicked or convicted of drunkenness. I would have saved myself the price of Black Fire and a host of other expenses. I wouldn’t have put Owen at risk as a guard, and I wouldn’t have felt responsible for the ruin of Jody and Felicity, the probable return to jail of Macrahinish, and the death of Ganser Mays.
Pointless to say that I hadn’t meant them so much harm, or that their own violence had brought about their own doom. It was I who had given them the first push.
Should I have done it?
Did I wish I hadn’t?
I straightened to my feet and smiled ruefully at the shambles, and knew that the answer to both questions was no.
Epilogue
I gave Energise away.
Six weeks after his safe return to Rupert’s stable he ran in the Champion Hurdle and I took a party to Cheltenham to cheer him on. A sick tycoon having generously lent his private box, we went in comfort, with lunch before and champagne after and a lot of smiling in between.
The four newly-registered joint-owners were having a ball and slapping each other on the back with glee: Bert, Allie, Owen and Charlie, as high in good spirits as they’d been at the census.
Charlie had brought the bridge-playing wife and Bert his fat old mum, and Owen had shyly and unexpectedly produced an unspoiled daughter of sixteen. The oddly mixed party proved a smash-hit success, my four conspirators carrying it along easily on the strength of liking each other a lot.
While they all went off to place bets and look at the horses in the parade ring, I stayed up in the box. I stayed there most of the afternoon. I had found it impossible, as the weeks passed, to regain my old innocent enthusiasm for racing. There was still a massive movement of support and sympathy for Jody, which I supposed would never change. Letters to sporting papers spoke of sympathy for his misfortunes and disgust for the one who had brought them about. Racing columnists, though reluctantly convinced of his villainy, referred to him still as the ‘unfortunate’ Jody. Quintus, implacably resentful, was ferreting away against me in the Jockey Club and telling everyone it was my fault his son had made ‘misjudgements’. I had asked him how it could possibly be my fault that Jody had made the misjudgement of taking Macrahinish and Ganser Mays for buddy-buddies, and had received no answer.
I had heard unofficially the results of the autopsy on Black Fire. He had been killed by a massive dose of chloroform injected between the ribs straight into the heart. Quick, painless, and positively the work of a practised hand.
The veterinary bag found beside the dead horse had contained a large hypodermic syringe with a sufficient length of needle; traces of chloroform inside the syringe and Macrahinish’s fingerprints outside.
These interesting facts could not be generally broadcast on account of the forthcoming trial, and my high-up police informant had made me promise not to repeat them.
Jody and Macrahinish were out on bail, and the racing authorities had postponed their own enquiry until the law’s verdict should be known. Jody still technically held his trainer’s licence.
The people who to my mind had shown most sense had been Jody’s other owners. One by one they had melted apologetically away, reluctant to be had for mugs. They had judged without waiting around for a jury, and Jody had no horses left to train. And that in itself, in many eyes, was a further crying shame to be laid at my door.
I went out on the balcony of the kind tycoon’s box and stared vacantly over Cheltenham racecourse. Moral victory over Jody was impossible, because too many people still saw him, despite everything, as the poor hardworking little man who had fallen foul of the rich robber baron.
Charlie came out on the balcony in my wake.
‘Steven? What’s the matter? You’re too damned quiet.’
‘What we did,’ I said sighing, ‘has changed nothing.’
‘Of course it has,’ he said robustly. ‘You’ll see. Public opinion works awful slowly. People don’t like doing about-turns and admitting they were fooled. But you trust your Uncle Charlie, this time next year, when they’ve got over their red faces, a lot of people will quietly be finding you’re one of their best friends.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Quintus,’ he said positively, ‘is doing himself a lot of personal no good just now with the hierarchy. The on dit round the bazaars is that if Quintus can’t see his son is a full-blown criminal he is even thicker than anyone thought. I tell you, the opinion where it matters is one hundred per cent for you, and our little private enterprise is the toast of the cigar circuit.’
I smiled. ‘You make me feel better even if you do lie in your teeth.’
‘As God’s my judge,’ he said, virtuously, and spoiled it by glancing a shade apprehensively skywards.
‘I saw Jody,’ I said. ‘Did you know?’
‘No!’
‘In the City,’ I nodded. ‘Him and Felicity, coming out of some law offices.’
‘What happened?’
‘He spat,’ I said.
‘How like him.’
They had both looked pale and worried and had stared at me in disbelief. Jody’s ball of mucus landed at my feet, punctuation mark of how he felt. If I’d known they were likely to be there I would have avoided the district by ten miles, but since we were accidentally face to face I asked him straight out the question I most wanted answered.
‘Did you send Ganser Mays to smash my place up?’
‘He told him how to make you suffer,’ Felicity said spitefully. ‘Serves you right.’
She cured in that one sentence the pangs of conscience I’d had about the final results of the Energise shuttle.
‘You’re a bloody fool, Jody,’ I said. ‘If you’d dealt straight with me I’d’ve bought you horses to train for the Classics. With your ability, if you’d been honest, you could have gone to the top. Instead, you’ll be warned off for life. It is you, believe me, who is the mug.’
They had both stared at me sullenly, eyes full of frustrated rage. If either of them should have a chance in the future to do me further bad turns I had no doubt that they would. There was no one as vindictive as the man who’d done you wrong and been found out.