‘And on Monday?’
‘Perhaps.’ It meant no.
‘If you’ll change it tomorrow and do it all next week, ‘I’ll do what you ask,’ I said, quaking at the thought of it.
‘You can’t,’ she said sadly. ‘I can see that you can’t.’
‘If you can, I must.’
‘But I shouldn’t have asked you… you work in a shop.’
‘Oh.’ That I had forgotten. ‘It won’t matter.’
An echo of her former excitement crept back.
‘Do you really mean it?’
I nodded. I had wanted to do something — anything — to help her. Anything. My God.
‘Promise?’ she said doubtfully.
‘Yes. And you?’
‘All right,’ she said, with returning resolution. ‘But I can only do it if I know you are in the same boat… I couldn’t let you down then, you see.’
I paid the bill, and although she said there was no need, I took her home. We went on the underground to Finchley. She made straight for the least conspicuous seat and sat presenting the good side of her face to the carriage. Then, laughing at herself, she apologised for doing it.
‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘the new era doesn’t start until tomorrow,’ and hid my hand like a proper coward.
Her room was close to the station (a deliberately short walk, I guessed) in a large prosperous looking suburban house. At the gate she stopped.
‘Will… er… I mean, would you like to come in? It’s not very late… but perhaps you are tired.’
She wasn’t eager, but when I accepted she seemed pleased.
‘This way, then.’
We went through a bare tidy garden to a black painted front door adorned with horrible stained glass panels. Miss Martin fumbled endlessly in her bag for her key and I reflected idly that I could have picked that particular lock as quickly as she opened it legally. Inside there was a warm hall smelling healthily of air freshener, and at the end of a passage off it, a door with a card saying ‘Martin’.
Zanna Martin’s room was a surprise. Comfortable, large, close carpeted, newly decorated, and alive with colour. She switched on a standard lamp and a rosy table lamp, and drew burnt orange curtains over the black expanse of french windows. With satisfaction she showed me the recently built tiny bathroom leading out of her room, and the suitcase sized kitchen beside it, both of which additions she had paid for herself. The people who owned the house were very understanding, she said. Very kind. She had lived there for eleven years. It was home.
Zanna Martin had no mirrors in her home. Not one.
She bustled in her little kitchen, making more coffee: for something to do, I thought. I sat relaxed on her long comfortable modern sofa and watched how, from long habit, she leant forward most of the time so that the heavy shoulder length dark hair swung down to hide her face. She brought the tray and set it down, and sat on the sofa carefully on my right. One couldn’t blame her.
‘Do you ever cry?’ she said suddenly.
‘No.’
‘Not… from frustration?’
‘No.’ I smiled. ‘Swear.’
She sighed. ‘I used to cry often. I don’t any more, though. Getting older, of course. I’m nearly forty. I’ve got resigned now to not getting married… I knew I was resigned to it when I had the bathroom and kitchen built. Up to then, you see, I’d always pretended to myself that one day… one day, perhaps… but I don’t expect it any more, not any more.’
‘Men are fools,’ I said inadequately.
‘I hope you don’t mind me talking like this? It’s so seldom that I have anyone in here, and practically never anyone I can really talk to…’
I stayed for an hour, listening to her memories, her experiences, her whole shadowed life. What, I chided myself, had ever happened to me that was one tenth as bad. I had had far more ups than downs.
At length she said, ‘How did it happen with you? Your hand…’
‘Oh, an accident. A sharp bit of metal.’ A razor sharp racing horse-shoe attached to the foot of a horse galloping at thirty miles an hour, to be exact. A hard kicking slash as I rolled on the ground from an easy fall. One of those things.
Horses race in thin light shoes called plates, not the heavy ones they normally wear: blacksmiths change them before and after, every time a horse runs. Some trainers save a few shillings by using the same racing plates over and over again, so that the leading edge gradually wears down to the thickness of a knife. But jagged knives, not smooth. They can cut you open like a hatchet.
I’d really known at once when I saw my stripped wrist with the blood spurting out in a jet and the broken bones showing white, that I was finished as a jockey. But I wouldn’t give up hope, and insisted on the surgeons sewing it all up, even though they wanted to take my hand off there and then. It would never be any good, they said; and they were right. Too many of the tendons and nerves were severed. I persuaded them to try twice later on to rejoin and graft some of them and both times it had been a useless agony. They had refused to consider it again.
Zanna Martin hesitated on the brink of asking for details, and fortunately didn’t. Instead she said, ‘Are you married? Do you know, I’ve talked so much about myself, that I don’t know a thing about you.’
‘My wife’s in Athens, visiting her sister.’
‘How lovely,’ she sighed. ‘I wish…’
‘You’ll go one day,’ I said firmly. ‘Save up, and go in a year or two. On a bus tour or something. With people anyway. Not alone.’
I looked at my watch, and stood up. ‘I’ve enjoyed this evening a great deal. Thank you so much for coming out with me.’
She stood and formally shook hands, not suggesting another meeting. So much humility, I thought: so little expectation. Poor, poor Miss Martin.
‘Tomorrow morning…’ she said tentatively, at the door.
‘Tomorrow,’ I nodded. ‘Move that desk. And I… I promise I won’t forget.’
I went home cursing that fate had sent me someone like Zanna Martin. I had expected Charing, Street and King’s secretary to be young, perhaps pretty, a girl I could take to a café and the pictures and flirt with, with no great involvement on either side. Instead it looked as if I should have to pay more than I’d meant to for my inside information on Ellis Bolt.
NINE
‘Now look,’ said Lord Hagbourne, amidst the bustle of Kempton races, ‘I’ve had a word with Captain Oxon and he’s satisfied with the way things are going. I really can’t interfere any more. Surely you understand that?’
‘No, sir, I don’t. I don’t think Captain Oxon’s feelings are more inportant than Seabury Racecourse. The course should be put right quickly, even if it means overruling him.’
‘Captain Oxon,’ he said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘knows more about his job than you do. I give more weight to his assurance than to your quick look at the track.’
‘Then couldn’t you go and see for yourself? While there is still time.’
He didn’t like being pushed. His expression said so, plainly. There was no more I could say, either, without risking him ringing up Radnor to cancel the whole investigation.
‘I may… er… I may find time on Monday,’ he said at last, grudgingly. ‘I’ll see. Have you found anything concrete to support your idea that Seabury’s troubles were caused maliciously?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘A bit far-fetched, if you ask me,’ he said crossly. ‘I said so to begin with, if you remember. If you don’t turn something up pretty soon… it’s all expense, you know.’
He was intercepted by a passing Steward who took him off to another problem, leaving me grimly to reflect that so far there was a horrid lack of evidence of any sort. What there was, was negative.