To the Hilt (36 page)

The horse scrunched and munched, the bit clinking.

What I had done had been irrational.

I should have told Grantchester where to find the list.

There was no saying, of course, that even if I’d told him the minute I’d set foot in his garden, he would have let me walk out of there untouched. I had seen the sickening enjoyment in his face ... I’d heard from Bernie’s confession to the police that Grantchester had burned Norman Quorn even though the frantic Finance Director would have told him anything to escape the fire. Grantchester’s pleasure in prolonging Quorn’s agony had directly led to Quorn’s sudden death ... from heart failure, from stroke or from shock; one or another. Grantchester’s pleasure had in itself denied him the knowledge he sought. The only bright outcome of the whole mess.

Poor Norman Quorn, nonviolent embezzler, had been sixty-five and frightened.

I’d been twenty-nine ... and frightened ... and irrational ... and I’d been let off in time not to die.

I’d been let off with multiple bars of first, second and third degree bums that would heal.

I’d been let off in time to know that burning had been a gesture for nothing, because whatever information Norman Quorn had entrusted to his sister in that benighted envelope, it hadn’t turned out to be an indication of what he’d done with the brewery’s money.

I could admit to myself that I’d burned from pride.

Harder to accept that it had been pointless.

Essential to accept that it had been pointless, and to go on from there.

I stood up stiffly and walked for a while, leading the horse.

If I’d been in Scotland I would have gone up into the mountains and let the wild pipes skirl out the raw sorrow, as they always had in turbulent history. Yet ... would a lament be enough? A pibroch would cry for the wounded man ... but I needed more—I needed something tougher. Something to tell me, Well OK, too bad, don’t whine, you did it to yourself. Get out the paints.

When I went back to the mountains, I would play a march.

I rode for a while and walked by turns through the consoling night, and when the first gray seeped into the dark sky I turned the horse westwards and let him amble that way until we came to landmarks we both recognized as the right way home.

Friday morning, Lambourn, Emily’s house. I telephoned Margaret Morden.

No, she said, no one had thought of any new way of finding the money. The list, if it held the secret, had humbled them so far, but ...

“It was a false hope,” I said. “Useless ... Forget it. Give it up.”

“Don’t talk like that!”

“It’s all right. Truly. Will you come to the races?”

“If you want me ...”

“Of course we want you. Without you, there would be no race.”

“Without
you
.”

“We’re brilliant,” I said, laughing, “but no one will give us our due.”

“You do sound better.”

“I promise you, I’m fine.”

I was floating on a recent pill. Well, one had to, sometimes.

Inspector Vernon telephoned. “Oliver Grantchester,” he said.

“What about him?”

“Someone viciously assaulted him last Saturday ... in his garage ... as you know.”

“The poor fellow.”

“Was it your girlfriend who kicked hell out of him?”

“Inspector,” I said reasonably, “I was lying in that pond. How could I know?”

“She might have told you who did it.”

“No, she didn’t ... but I don’t repeat what I’m told.”

After a moment he said, “Fair enough.”

I smiled. He could hear it in my voice. “I do hope,” I said, “that poor Mr. Grantchester is still in a bad way.”

“I can tell you, off the record,” he said austerely, “that the testicular damage inflicted on Mr. Grantchester was of a severity that involved irreparable rupture and ... er ... surgical removal.”

“What a shame,” I said happily.

“Mr. Kinloch!”

“My friend has gone abroad, and she won’t be back,” I said. “Don’t bother looking. She wouldn’t have attacked anyone, I’m sure.”

Vernon didn’t sound convinced, but apart from no witnesses, it seemed he had no factual clues. The unknown assailant seemed to be getting away with it.

“How awful,” I said.

I supposed that when Chris found out, the gelding of Oliver Grantchester would cost me extra. Money well spent.

I said to Vernon, “Give Grantchester my best regards for a falsetto future.”

“That’s heartless!”

“You don’t say.”

I slept on the pill for three or four hours. Out in the yard life bustled along in the same old way, and by lunchtime I found myself falling into the same old role of general dogsbody, “popping” down to the village for such and such, ferrying blood samples to the veterinary’s office, collecting tack from repairs.

Emily and I ate dinner together and went to bed together, and even though this time I easily raised the necessary enthusiasm, she lay in my arms afterwards and told me it broke her heart.

“What does?” I asked.

“Seeing you try to be a husband.”

“But I am...”

“No.” She kissed my shoulder above the bandages. “You know you don’t belong here. Just come back sometimes. That’ll do.”

 

 

Patsy had organized the race day. Patsy had consulted with tent erectors and caterers, out to please. At Patsy’s command the hundred or so commercial guests—creditors, suppliers, landlords of brewery-owned pubs—were given a big welcome, unlimited drinks, free racecards, tickets to every enclosure, press-release photographs, lunch, tea.

Cheltenham racecourse, always forward-looking, had extended to the King Alfred Brewery, in Ivan’s memory, every red-carpet courtesy they could give to the chief sponsor of one of their top crowd-pulling early-season afternoons. Patsy had the whole racecourse executive committee tumbling over themselves to please her. Patsy’s social gifts were priceless.

To Patsy had been allocated the sponsor’s box in the grandstand, next best thing to the plushed-up suite designed for crowned heads and other princes.

Patsy had organized, in the sponsor’s box, a private family lunch for my mother, her stepmother, so that Ivan’s widow could be both present and apart.

Having met my mother at the club entrance, I walked with her to the box. Patsy faultlessly welcomed her with kisses; Patsy was dressed in dark gray, in mourning for her father, but with a bright Hermès silk scarf round her neck. She looked grave, businesslike and in full control of the day.

Behind her stood Surtees, who would not meet my eyes. Surtees shifted from foot to foot, gave my mother a desultory peck on the cheek and altogether behaved as if he wished he weren’t there.

“Hello, Surtees,” I said, to be annoying.

He gave me a silent, frustrated look, and took two paces backwards. What a grand change, I thought, from days gone by.

Patsy gave us both a puzzled look, and at one point later in the afternoon said, “What have you said to Surtees? He won’t talk about you at all. If I mention you he finds some reason for leaving the room. I don’t understand it.”

“Surtees and I,” I said, “have come to an understanding. He keeps his mouth shut, and so do I.”

“What about?”

“On my side about his behavior in Oliver Grantchester’s garden.”

“He didn’t really mean what he said.”

I clearly remembered Surtees urging Jazzo to hit me harder, when Jazzo was already hitting me as hard as he could. Surtees had meant it, all right: his revenge for my making him look foolish in Emily’s yard.

I said, “For quite a while I believed it was Surtees who sent those thugs to my house in Scotland, to find the King Alfred Gold Cup.”

It shook her. “But why?”

“Because he said, ‘Next time you’ll scream.’ ”

Her eyes darkened. She said slowly, “He was wrong about that.”

I shrugged. “You were telling everyone that I’d stolen the Cup. Surtees of course believed it.”

“You wouldn’t steal.”

I listened to the certainty in her voice, and asked, trying to suppress bitterness, “How long have you known that?”

Obliquely she told me the truth, revealing to me her own long years of unhappy fear. She said, “He would have given you anything you asked for.”

“Ivan?”

She nodded.

I said, “I would never have taken anything that was yours.”

“I thought you would.” She paused. “I did hate you.”

She made no more admissions, nor any excuses; but in the garden she had called me her brother, and in the bank she had said, “I’m sorry.” Perhaps, just perhaps, things had really changed.

“I suppose,” she began, “that it’s too late ...” She left the sentence unfinished, but it was a statement of acceptance, not a plea.

“Call it quits,” I said, “if you like.”

 

 

When Himself and his countess arrived to keep my mother company I went down to find out how things were going in the hospitality tent, and found that the mood, in spite of the brewery’s troubles, was upbeat, alcoholic and forgiving.

Margaret Morden greeted me with the sort of embrace that would have been over the top in any office but seemed appropriate to the abandon of a race day. Dressed in soft blue, with a reliable-looking husband by her side, she said she knew nothing about horses but would back Golden Malt.

She followed my gaze across the tent to where Patsy, flanked not by Surtees but by the perfect lieutenant, Desmond Finch, was encouraging about everyone’s future.

“You know,” I said to Margaret, “Patsy will make a great success of running the brewery. She’s a born manager. Better than her father. He was conscientious and a good man. She can bend and manipulate people to achieve her own ends ... and I’d guess she’ll lug the brewery out of the threat of bankruptcy faster than you can imagine.”

“How can you
possibly
forgive her?”

“I didn’t say I forgave her, I said she would be a good manager.”

“It was in your voice.”

I smiled into the clever eyes. “Find out for me,” I said, “whether Oliver Grantchester suggested the embezzlement, or just stumbled across it and muscled in. Not that it really matters, I just wonder, that’s all.”

“I can tell you now. It was Grantchester’s idea all along. Then Norman Quorn did some fancy footwork to keep the loot himself, and misjudged the strength and cruelty of his partner.”

“How do you know?” I asked, entranced.

“That weasel Desmond Finch told me. I leaned on him the tiniest bit. I said that as a deputy manager he should have spotted irregularities in the finance department, and he fell over himself to tell me that Norman Quorn had practically cried on his shoulder. I think—and to be honest I don’t see how we can prove it unless Grantchester confesses, which I can’t see him doing—”

“He’s not the man he used to be,” I murmured.

“I think,” Margaret said, not hearing, or at least not understanding, “that Norman Quorn must have said in all good faith to Ivan’s trusted friend and lawyer, Oliver, how easy it would be in these days of electronic transfers to make oneself seriously rich. I think they worked it out together, maybe even as an academic exercise to begin with, and then, when the trial run succeeded, they did it in earnest, and then Quorn tried at the last minute to back out.”

“He did steal the money,” I said flatly. “He tried to cut his partner out.”

She agreed bleakly. “They both did.”

We drank champagne. Sweetish. Patsy was no spend-thrift fool.

I sighed. “I wish Tobe could have been here today,” I said.

Margaret hesitated. “He couldn’t bear that we hadn’t been able to find the money with that list, when you suffered so much to bring it to us.”

“Tell him not to be so soft.”

She bent forwards and unexpectedly kissed my cheek. “ ‘Soft,’ ” she said, “is the last word I would apply to Alexander Kinloch.”

 

 

Himself and I, as two of the executors in whose name the horse was running, stood by the saddling boxes and watched Emily fasten the racing-size saddle onto Golden Malt.

Himself said to me conversationally, “Word gets around, you know ...”

“What word?”

“What Oliver Grantchester put you through in his garden.”

“Forget it.”

“If you say so. But it is rippling outwards, and you can’t stop it.”

(He was right to the extent that a short while later I got a postcard from young Andrew at his prep school—“Is it true you were lying fully clothed in a goldfish pond one cold night in October?”—and I sent him back a single-word answer: “Yes.”)

Mad, weird Alexander. Who cared? Some have weirdness thrust upon them.

“Al,” Himself said, “would you have burned for the Kinloch Hilt?”

“It wasn’t for the list,” I said.

He smiled. He knew. He was the one person who wholly understood.

 

 

We stood in the parade ring with Emily, watching Golden Malt stride round, led by his groom.

Emily’s jockey joined us, dressed in Ivan’s racing colors, of gold, green blocks, gold cap.

Emily was all business, no excitement obvious, a shortness of breath the only sign. She told the jockey to be handy in fourth place all the way, if he could, and make his move only after he’d rounded the last bend and straightened up for the uphill run to the winning post.

“Don’t forget,” she said, “that he won’t accelerate on a curve. Wait, even though it hurts. He’ll deliver if you do. He’s a great fighter uphill.”

When the horses had gone out onto the track, Himself, Emily and I joined my mother up in the sponsor’s box.

My mother, in the black clothes she had worn to Ivan’s funeral, in the black sweeping hat with the white rose, gazed out over the autumnal racecourse and yearned for her lost consort, for the steadfast man of no great fire who had been all she needed as a companion.