‘Well, that was done to stop me investigating. At least they thought I would stop. They thought that I would have had enough, that surely I would get the message and run away. What they didn’t understand was that I was going after them all the more, simply because of what they’d done to try and stop me. I really believe that nothing, short of actually killing me, would stop me if I thought it was right.’
‘Didn’t a man once threaten to cut off your right hand if you didn’t stop trying to nail him for something?’
‘Yes.’ I paused.
I remembered the paralysing fear, the absolute dread of losing a second hand. I remembered the utter collapse it had caused in me. I remembered the struggle it had taken to rebuild my life, the willpower required to face another day. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I remembered it all too well.
‘That didn’t stop you, either.’
No, I thought, not in the end, although it had for a while.
‘Nearly,’ I croaked. My tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of my mouth.
‘You are surely not going to be stopped by a couple of punches to the face.’
‘But it’s not my face that’s being punched. It’s not me that’s being hurt. I make the decision and someone else takes the pain, someone I love. I can’t do that.’
‘Shooting hostages never stopped the French Resistance killing Germans,’ he said profoundly.
‘It would have done if it had been their families.’
We finally went up to bed past two o’clock. By then, we had polished off the bottle and I had more than made up for the lack of calories in my missed dinner.
I slipped in next to Marina and kissed her sleeping head. How could I knowingly put this precious human being into danger? But how could I not? Suddenly, for the first time since I had started this caper, I was vulnerable to the ‘we’ll not get you, we’ll get your girl’ syndrome. What was the future? How could I continue? How could I operate if I were forever fearful of what ‘they’ might do to Marina?
I tossed this dilemma round in my whisky-fuzzed brain, found no acceptable solution, and finally drifted into an uneasy sleep.
Sure enough, I woke with a headache. My own fault.
Marina had a headache too, not hers. As I had expected, her face looked worse than it had last night. And it was nothing to do with the daylight.
A giant panda has white eyes in a black face, Marina had the reverse. But the skin around her eyes was not only going black, it was going yellow and purple too. Her left eye was heavily bloodshot and the sticking plaster over her eyebrow gave her a sinister appearance. She looked like a refugee from a horror film. But these injuries were real and not the handiwork of a make-up artist.
She sat up in bed and looked at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door that was cruelly at just the right angle.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked.
‘About as good as I look.’ She turned and gave me a lopsided smile.
That’s my girl, I thought and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek.
We both beat Charles to breakfast and found Mrs Cross busy in the kitchen.
‘Good morning, Mr Halley.’ I had never managed to get her to call me Sid.
‘Morning, Mrs Cross,’ I replied. ‘Can I introduce Marina van der Meer — Mrs Cross.’
‘Oh, my dear, your poor face!’
Marina smiled at her. ‘It’s fine, getting better every day. Car accident.’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Cross again. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’
‘Thank you, that would be lovely.’
I had coffee and dear Mrs Cross provided me, as always, with ready buttered and marmaladed toast.
Charles came in wearing his dressing gown and slippers and sat down at the long kitchen table. He rubbed his forehead and his eyes.
‘When I was a midshipman I could drink all night and then be wide awake and full of energy for duty at six in the morning. What have the years done to me?’
‘Good morning, Charles,’ I said.
‘Good morning to you, too,’ he replied. ‘Why did I allow you to keep me up half the night boozing?’ He turned to Marina. ‘Good morning, my dear, and how do you feel today?’
‘Better than you two, I expect.’ She smiled at him, which seemed to cheer him up no end.
‘Morning, Mrs Cross,’ said Charles. ‘Black coffee and wholemeal toast for breakfast, please.’
‘With or without Alka-Seltzer?’ I asked.
‘Without, I can’t stand all that fizzing.’
We sat and ate our breakfast for a while in silence, Charles poring over the Saturday papers.
‘It says here,’ he said, pointing at the paper with a slice of toast, ‘that the English are turning into a race of gamblers. It claims that more than nine million people in this country regularly gamble on the internet. Unbelievable.’ He drank some coffee. ‘It also says that on-line poker is the fastest expanding form of gambling. What’s on-line poker when it’s at home?’
‘Playing poker on your computer,’ I said. ‘You join a poker table with others on their computers.’
‘On their computers? Can’t you see their faces?’
‘No, just their names and those are simply nicknames. You have no idea who you are playing against.’
‘That’s crazy,’ said Charles. ‘The whole point of poker is being able to see the eyes of the other players. How can you bluff if you can’t see who you are playing against?’
‘The numbers playing it proves it must be attractive,’ said Marina.
‘How do you know that the players aren’t cheating if you can’t actually see the cards being dealt?’ asked Charles.
‘The cards are “dealt” by a computer,’ I said, ‘so the players can’t be cheating,’
But what if the computer is cheating, I thought. What if the player only thinks he is playing against others who, like him, log on to the game from their own computers? What if the website has a seat or two at each table for itself to play against the visitors? What if the website is able to fix the ‘deal’? Just a little, mind, so that the players don’t really notice. Just enough to make the new players win. Just until they are hooked. It’s a tried and tested formula: give away the cocaine just long enough to turn the users into addicts, and then charge them through the nose, as it were.
I had read that there were thought to be more than a quarter of a million gambling addicts in Britain. The resources needed to feed any compulsive habit increase at the same rate as the time and dedication to realising those resources decrease. The result is an insatiable appetite fed by unattainable provision. Something has to give and usually it’s lifestyle, honesty and self-respect. All of these go out the window in the endless craving for the next fix. Gambling compulsion may be different from alcohol or drugs in the immediate damage it does to health, but, in the long run, as with all untreated addictions, it destroys sure enough.
‘Still sounds crazy to me,’ said Charles. ‘Half the fun of playing poker is the banter between the players.’
‘The difference is, Charles,’ I said, ‘you don’t play poker where the winning and losing are important. You enjoy being with friends and the poker is an excuse to get together. Online poker is a solitary experience and winning and losing is everything, whether it’s fun or not.’
‘Well, it’s not for me,’ he said and went back to reading his paper.
‘Is it OK with you if I go to Newbury races?’ I asked Marina.
‘Yes, fine,’ said Marina, ‘but be careful. I’ll stay here and rest. Is that all right with you, Charles?’
‘Oh, yes, fine by me. I’ll stay here, too, and we can watch the racing on the telly together.’
Marina pulled a face and I suspected that ‘watching the racing on the telly’ wasn’t in her plans, but she would be too polite to say so.