I walked off and left Peter standing with his mouth open and his eyebrows half way to his hair.
What Kemp-Lore had pulled down, I could try to rebuild, I thought. When I had arrived I had seen him in the distance, talking animatedly to one of the stewards, who was laughing. Slim, vital, and wholesome-looking, he seemed to attract the light of the day on to his fair head.
In the weighing-room after the fourth race I was handed a telegram. It said, ‘Pick me up White Bear, Uxbridge, 6.30 p.m. Important, Ingersoll.’ I felt like cursing Tick-Tock soundly because Uxbridge was in the opposite direction from home. But the car was half his, after all, and I’d had more than my fair share of it during the past week.
The afternoon dragged. I hated having to watch, hated it even more after my reassuring ride on Turniptop, but I tried to take my own advice to Peter and look cheerfuclass="underline" and I was rewarded, as time went on, with a definite thawing of the cold shoulder. It made life much easier not finding everyone still too embarrassed to speak to me; but I was also in no doubt that most final judgments were being reserved until after Template’s race. I didn’t mind that. I was confident that he was the fastest ’chaser in training and I had James’s promise that he would be guarded every second against being doped.
I dawdled after racing ended, with two hours to kill before turning up at Uxbridge to collect Tick-Tock. I watched the men from Universal Telecast erecting their scaffolding towers, ready to televise the Midwinter the next day, and recognised a man directing them as Gordon Kildare, still in navy-blue pin-stripe suiting and still looking like a rising young executive who knew the score. He passed by me with the practised half smile which from a man of his sort always means that he doesn’t know who he’s smiling at, but smiles all the same in case he should later find out it was someone important. However he had only gone two steps past me when he turned and came back.
‘We’ve had you on the programme,’ he said pleasantly. ‘No don’t tell me...’ His brow furrowed; then he snapped his fingers. ‘Finn, that’s it, Finn.’ But his smile at the triumph of his memory began ludicrously to slip and I knew he was also remembering what had been said about me on his programme a week ago.
‘Yes, Finn,’ I said, taking no notice. ‘All set for tomorrow?’
‘Eh, oh, yes. Busy day. Well now, I’m sorry to have to rush off but you know how it is... we’ve got the programme to put out tonight and I’m due back in the studios. Maurice went ages ago.’
He looked at his watch, gave me a noncommittal smile, and gracefully retreated.
I watched him drive off in the latest streamlined Ford, picturing the studio he was going to; the ranks of cameras, the dazzling lights, the plates of sandwiches; they would all be the same. And who, I wondered, who was to be Kemp-Lore’s victim this evening. For whom was the chopper poised, the false charm ready?
There was so little I could do against him. Pick up some of the pieces, start some counter rumours. Try to undermine his influence? All that, yes. But I didn’t have his sparkle, nor his prestige, nor yet his ruthlessness. I thrust my hands into my pockets, went out to the Mini-Cooper, and drove off to fetch Tick-Tock.
Mine was only the second car in the dark park beside the White Bear. It was one of those disappointing pubs built of tidy pinkish bricks with cold lighting inside and no atmosphere. The saloon bar was empty... The public bar held only a droopy-moustached old man pursing his lips to the evening’s first half-pint. I went back to the saloon bar and ordered a whisky. No Tick-Tock. I looked at my watch. Twenty to seven.
The green plastic seats round the walls were so inhospitable that I didn’t wonder the pub was empty. The dark-green curtains didn’t help. Nor the fluorescent strip-lights on the ceiling.
I looked at my watch again.
‘Are you by any chance waiting for someone, sir,’ asked the characterless barman.
‘Yes, I am,’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t be a Mr. Finn?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ve a message for you, sir. A Mr. Ingersoll telephoned just now and said he couldn’t get here to meet you, sir, and he was very sorry but could you go and pick him up from the station at six fifty-five. The station is just down the road, first turning left and straight on for half a mile.’
Finishing my drink, I thanked the barman and went out to the car. I climbed into the driving seat and stretched my hand out to turn on the lights and the ignition. I stretched out my hand... but I didn’t reach the lights.
My neck was gripped violently from behind.
There was movement then in the back of the car as the arms shifted to get a better leverage, a rustling of clothes and the scrape of shoe across the thin carpet.
I flung up my hands and clawed but I couldn’t reach the face of whoever was behind me, and my nails were useless against his gloves. Thick leather gloves. The fingers inside them were strong, and what was worse, they knew exactly where to dig in and press, each side of the neck, just above the collarbone, where the carotid arteries branched upwards. Pressure on one carotid, I remembered wildly from some distant first aid course, stops arterial bleeding from the head... but pressure on both at once blocked all blood supplies to the brain.
I hadn’t a chance. My struggles were hampered by the steering wheel and gained me nothing. In the few seconds before a roaring blackness took me off, I had time for only two more thoughts. First that I should have known that Tick-Tock would never meet me in a dreary pub like that. Second, angrily, that I was dead.
I couldn’t have been out very long, but it was long enough. When consciousness slowly and fuzzily returned, I found I could open neither my eyes nor my mouth. Both were covered with sticking plaster. My wrists were tied together, and my ankles, when I tried to move them, would only part a foot or two: they were hobbled together, like a gipsy’s pony.
I was lying on my side, awkwardly doubled up, on the floor in the back of a car which, from the size and smell and feel, I knew to be the Mini-Cooper. It was very cold, and after a while I realised that this was because I was no longer wearing either a jacket or an overcoat. My shirt-sleeved arms were dragged forward between the two front seats so that I couldn’t reach the sticking plaster to rip it off, and I was extremely, horribly uncomfortable. I tried once with all my strength to free my arms, lifting and jerking at the same time, but they were securely fastened, and a fist — I supposed — crashed down on them so brutally that I didn’t attempt it again. I couldn’t see who was driving, and driving fast, but I didn’t need to. There was only one person in the world who could have set such a trap; complicated but effective, like the Jaguar in the lane. Only one person who had any reason to abduct me, however mad that reason might be. I had no illusions. Maurice Kemp-Lore did not intend that I should win the Midwinter Cup, and was taking steps to prevent it.
Did he know, I wondered helplessly, that it was no accident that Turniptop had not eaten the doped sugar? Did he guess that I knew all about his anti-jockey activities? Had he heard about my trek round the stables or my enquiries about the Jaguar? If he did know these things, what was he going to do with me? To this last rather bleak question I was in no hurry to discover the answer.
When the journey had being going for some time, the car swung suddenly to the left and bumped on to an unevenly surfaced side road, increasing my discomfort. After a while it slowed, turned again, and rolled to a stop.