I fed in the first.

PASSWORD?

Second and third disks - PASSWORD?

Bugger, I thought.

Searching for anything helpful I lifted down a heavy white cardboard box, like a double-height shoebox, that filled the rest of the box-file shelf. In there was a row of big black high-impact plastic protective coverings. I picked out one and unlatched its fastening, and found inside it a video tape, but a tape of double the ordinary width. A label on the tape said 'Broadcast Quality Videotape'. Underneath that was the single word BETACAM. Under that was the legend 'Quint series. 15 x 30 sees.'

I closed the thick black case and tried another one. Same thing. Quint series. 15 x 30 sees. All of the cases held the same.

These double-size tapes needed a special tape player not available in Mrs Dove's office. To see what was on these expensive tapes meant taking one with me.

I could, of course, simply put one of them inside my tracksuit jacket and walk out with it. I could take all the 'PASSWORD' disks. If I did I was a) stealing, b) in danger of being found carrying the goods, and c) making it impossible for any information they held to be used in any later legal enquiry. I would steal the information itself, if I could, but not the software.

Think.

As I'd told Charles at Aynsford, I'd had to learn a good deal about computers just to keep a grip on the accelerating world, but the future became the present so fast that I could never get ahead.

Someone tried to open the door.

There was no time to restore the room to normal. I could only speed across the carpet and stand where I would be hidden by the door when it swung inwards. Plan B meant simply running -and I was wearing running shoes.

The knob turned again and rattled, but nothing else happened. Whoever was outside had presumably been either keyless or reassured: in either case it played havoc with my breathing.

Oddly, the pumping adrenalin brought me my computer answer which was, if I couldn't bring the contents of a floppy disk to the screen, I could transfer it whole to another computer, one that would give me all the time I needed to crack the password, or to get help from people who could.

Alongside the unconnected electric cable there had been a telephone cable, also unattached. I snapped it into the telephone socket on the computer, thereby connecting Mrs Dove's modem to the world-wide internet.

It needed a false start or two while I desperately tried to remember half-learned techniques, but finally I was rewarded by the screen prompting: 'Enter telephone number'.

I tapped in my own home number in the flat in Pont Square, and pressed 'Enter', and the screen announced nonchalantly 'dialling in progress', then 'call accepted', then 'transfer', and finally 'transfer complete'.

Whatever was on the first guarded 'Quint' disk was now in my own computer in London. I transferred the other two 'Quint' floppies in the same way, and then the disk from box-file No. 1, and for good measure another from Box 3, identified as 'Tilepit'.

There was no way that I knew of transferring the BETACAM tapes. Regretfully I left them alone. I looked through the paper pages in the 'Quint' box and made a photocopy of one page -- a list of unusual racecourses - folding it and hiding it within the zipped pocket of my belt.

Finally I disconnected the electric and telephone cables again, closed the computer compartment, checked that the box-files and BETACAM tapes were as they should be, relocked the white cupboard, then unlocked and gently opened the door to the passage.

Silence.

Breathing out with relief I relocked Mrs Dove's door and walked along through the row of cubby-hole offices and came to the first setback: the fire-door leading to brown-overalls territory was not merely locked but had a red light shining above it.

Shining red lights often meant alarm systems switched on with depressingly loud sirens ready to screech.

I'd been too long in Mrs Dove's office. I retreated towards her door again and went down the fire-stairs beside the lift, emerging into the ground-floor entrance hall with its glass doors to the parking area beyond.

One step into the lobby proved to be one step too far. Something hit my head rather hard and one of the beefy bodyguards in blue flung a sort of strap round my body and effectively pinned my upper arms to my sides.

I plunged about a bit and got another crack on the head which left me unable to help myself and barely able to think. I was aware of being in the lift, but wasn't quite sure how I'd got there. I was aware of having my ankles strapped together and of being dragged ignominiously over some carpet and dropped in a chair.

Regulation Scandinavian chair with wooden arms, like all the others.

'Tie him up,' a voice said, and a third strap tightened across my chest, so that when the temporary mist cleared I woke to a state of near physical immobility and a mind full of curses.

The voice belonged to Owen Yorkshire. He said, 'Right. Good. Well done. Leave the wrench on the desk. Go back downstairs and don't let anyone up here.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Wait,' Yorkshire commanded, sounding uncertain. 'Are you sure you've got the right man?'

'Yes, sir. He's wearing the identity badge we issued to him yesterday. He was supposed to return it when he left, but he didn't.'

'All right. Thanks. Off you go.'

The door closed behind the bodyguards and Owen Yorkshire plucked the identity badge from my overalls, read the name and flung it down on his desk.

We were in his fifth-floor office. The chair I sat in was surrounded by carpet. Marooned on a desert island, feeling dim and stupid.

The man-to-man all-pals-together act was in abeyance. The Owen Yorkshire confronting me was very angry, disbelieving and, I would have said, frightened.

'What are you doing here?' he demanded, bellowing.

His voice echoed and reverberated in the quiet room. His big body loomed over me, his big head close to mine. All his features, I thought, were slightly oversized: big nose, big eyes, wide forehead, large flat cheeks, square jaw, big mouth. The collar-length black waving hair with its grey-touched wings seemed to vibrate with vigour. I would have put his age at forty; maybe a year or two younger.

'Answer,' he yelled. 'What are you doing here?'

I didn't reply. He snatched up from his desk a heavy fifteen-inch-long silvery wrench and made as if to hit my head with it. If that was what his boys-in-blue had used on me, and I gathered it was, then connecting it again with my skull was unlikely to produce any answer at all. The same thought seemed to occur to him, because he threw the wrench down disgustedly onto the desk again, where it bounced slightly under its own weight.

The straps round my chest and ankles were the sort of fawn close-woven webbing often used round suitcases to prevent them from bursting open. There was no elasticity in them, no stretch. Several more lay on the desk.

I felt a ridiculous desire to chatter, a tendency I'd noticed in the past in mild concussion after racing falls, and sometimes on waking up from anaesthetics. I'd learned how to suppress the garrulous impulse, but it was still an effort, and in this case, essential.

Owen Yorkshire was wearing man-to-man togs; that is to say, no jacket, a man-made fibre shirt (almost white with vertical stripes made of interlocking beige-coloured horseshoes), no tie, several buttons undone, unmissable view of manly hairy chest, gold chain and medallion.

I concentrated on the horseshoe stripes. If I could count the number of horseshoes from shoulder to waist I would not have any thoughts that might dribble out incautiously. The boss was talking. I blanked him out and counted horseshoes and managed to say nothing.

He went abruptly out of the room, leaving me sitting there looking foolish. When he returned he brought two people with him: they had been along in the reception area, it seemed, working out table placements for Monday's lunch.

They were a woman and a man; Mrs Dove and a stranger. Both exclaimed in surprise at the sight of my trussed self. I shrank into the chair and looked mostly at their waists.

'Do you know who this is?' Yorkshire demanded of them furiously.

The man shook his head, mystified. Mrs Dove, frowning, said to me, 'Weren't you here yesterday? Something about a farmer?'

'This,' Yorkshire said with scorn, 'is Sid Halley.'

The man's face stiffened, his mouth forming an O.

'This, Verney,' Yorkshire went on with biting sarcasm, 'is the feeble creature you've spent months thundering on about. This! And Ellis said he was dangerous! Just look at him! All those big guns to frighten a mouse.'

Verney Tilepit. I'd looked him up in Burke's Peerage. Verney Tilepit, 3rd Baron, aged forty-two, a director of Topline Foods, proprietor - by inheritance - of The Pump.

Verney Tilepit's grandfather, created a baron for devoted allegiance to the then prime minister, had been one of the old roistering, powerful opinion-makers who'd had governments dancing to their tune. The first Verney Tilepit had put his shoulder to history and given it a shove. The third had surfaced after years of quiescence, primarily, it seemed, to discredit a minor investigator. Policy! His bewildered grandfather would have been speechless.

He was fairly tall, as India had said, and he had brown hair. The flicking glance I gave him took in also a large expanse of face with small features bunched in the middle: small nose, small mouth, small sandy moustache, small eyes behind large, light-framed glasses. Nothing about him seemed physically threatening. Perhaps I felt the same disappointment in my adversary as he plainly did about me.

'How do you know he's Sid Halley?' Mrs Dove asked.

Owen Yorkshire said disgustedly, 'One of the TV crew knew him. He swore there was no mistake. He'd filmed him often. He knows him.'

Bugger, I thought.

Mrs Dove pulled up the long left sleeve of my brown overalls, and looked at my left hand. 'Yes. It must be Sid Halley. Not much of a champion now, is he?'

Owen Yorkshire picked up the telephone, pressed numbers, waited and forcefully spoke.

'Get over here quickly,' he said. 'We have a crisis. Come to my new office.' He listened briefly. 'No,' he said, 'Just get over here.' He slammed down the receiver and stared at me balefully. 'What the sod are you doing here?'

The almost overwhelming urge to tell him got as far as my tongue and was only over-ridden by clamped-shut teeth. One could understand why people confessed. The itch to unburden outweighed the certainty of retribution.

'Answer,' yelled Yorkshire. He picked up the wrench again. 'Answer, you little cuss.'

I did manage an answer of sorts.

I spoke to Verney Tilepit directly in a weak, mock-respectful tone, 'I came to see you … sir.'

'My lord,' Yorkshire told me. 'Call him my lord.'

'My lord,' I said.

Tilepit said, 'What for?' and 'What made you think I would be here?'

'Someone told me you were a director of Topline Foods, my lord, so I came here to ask you to stop and I don't know why I've been dragged up here and tied up like this.' The last twenty words just dribbled out. Be careful, I thought. Shut up.

'To stop what? Tilepit demanded.

'To stop your paper telling lies about me.' Better.

Tilepit didn't know how to answer such naivety. Yorkshire properly considered it barely credible. He spoke to Mrs Dove, who was dressed for Saturday morning, not in office black and white, but in bright red with gold buttons.

'Go down and make sure he hasn't been in your office.'

'I locked it when I left last night, Owen.'

Mrs Dove's manner towards her boss was interestingly like Will Parrott's. All-equals-together; up to a point.

'Go and look,' he said. 'And check that cupboard.'

'No one's opened that cupboard since you moved offices up here this week. And you have the only key.'

'Go and check anyway,' he said.

She had no difficulty with obeying him. I remembered Marsha Rowse's ingenuous statement - 'Mrs Dove says never to make Mr Yorkshire angry.'

Mrs Dove, self-contained, confident, was taking her own advice. She was not, I saw, in love with the man, nor was she truly afraid of him. His temper, I would have thought, was to her more of a nuisance than life - or even job - threatening.

As things stood, or rather as I sat, I saw the wisdom of following Mrs Dove's example for as long as I could.

She was gone a fair time, during which I worried more and more anxiously that I'd left something slightly out of place in that office, that she would know by some sixth sense that someone had been in there, that I'd left some odour in the air, despite never using aftershave, that I'd closed the filing cabinets incorrectly, that I'd left visible fingerprints on a shiny surface, that I'd done anything that she knew she hadn't.

I breathed slowly, trying not to sweat.

When she finally came back she said, 'The TV crews are leaving. Everything's ready for Monday. The florists are bringing the Lady Mayoress's bouquet at ten o'clock. The red-carpet people are downstairs now measuring the lobby. And, oh, the man from Intramind Imaging says they want a cheque.'

'What about the office?'

'The office? Oh, the office is all right.' She was unconcerned. 'It was all locked. Just as I left it.'

'And the cupboard?' Yorkshire insisted.

'Locked.' She thought he was over-reacting. I was concerned only to show no relief.

'What are you going to do with him'?' she asked, indicating me. 'You can't keep him here, can you? The TV crew downstairs were talking about him being here. They want to interview him. What shall I say?'

Yorkshire with black humour said, 'Tell them he's all tied up.'

She wasn't amused. She said, 'I'll say he went out the back way. And I'll be off, too. I'll be here by eight, Monday morning.' She looked at me calmly and spoke to Yorkshire, 'Let him go,' she said unemotionally. 'What harm can he do? He's pathetic.'

Yorkshire, undecided, said, 'Pathetic? Why pathetic?'

She paused composedly halfway through the door, and dropped a pearl beyond price.

'It says so in The Pump.'

Neither of these two men, I thought, listening to them, was a full-blown criminal. Not yet. Yorkshire was too near the brink.

He still held the heavy adjustable wrench, slapping its head occasionally against his palm, as if it helped his thoughts.

'Please untie me,' I said. At last I found the fatal loquaciousness had abated. I no longer wanted to gabble, but just to talk my way out.

Tilepit himself might have done it. He clearly was unused to -and disturbed by - even this level of violence. His power base was his grandfather's name. His muscle was his hire-and-fire clout. There were only so many top editorships in the British press and George Godbar, editor of The Pump, wasn't going to lose his hide to save mine. Matters of principle were all too often an unaffordable luxury, and I didn't believe that in George Godbar's place, or even in Kevin Mills' or India's, I would have done differently.

Yorkshire said, 'We wait.'

He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out what looked bizarrely like a jar of gherkins. Dumping the wrench temporarily, he unscrewed the lid, put the jar on the desk, pulled out a green finger and bit it, crunching it with large white teeth.

'Gherkin?' he offered Tilepit.

The third baron averted his nose.

Yorkshire, shrugging, chewed uninhibitedly and went back to slapping his palm with the wrench.

'I'll be missed,' I said mildly, 'if you keep me much longer.'

'Let him go,' Tilepit said with a touch of impatience. 'He's right, we can't keep him here indefinitely.'

'We wait,' Yorkshire said heavily, fishing out another gherkin and, to the accompaniment of noisy munching, we waited.

I could smell the vinegar.

The door opened finally behind me and both Yorkshire and Tilepit looked welcoming and relieved.

I didn't. The newcomer, who came round in front of me blankly, was Ellis Quint.

Ellis, in open-necked white shirt; Ellis, handsome, macho, vibrating with showmanship; Ellis, the nation's darling, farcically accused. I hadn't seen him since Ascot races, and none of his radiance had waned.

'What's Halley doing here?' he demanded, sounding alarmed. 'What has he learned?'

'He was wandering about,' Yorkshire said, pointing a gherkin at me. 'I had him brought up here. He can't have learned a thing.'

Tilepit announced, 'Halley says he came to ask me to stop The Pump's, campaign against him.'

Ellis said positively, 'He wouldn't have done that.'

'Why not?' Yorkshire asked. 'Look at him. He's a wimp.'

'A wimp!'

Despite my precarious position I smiled involuntarily at the depth of incredulity in his voice. I even grinned at him sideways from below half-lowered eyelids, and saw the same private smile on his face: the acknowledgment of brotherhood, of secrecy, of shared esoteric experience, of cold winter afternoons, perils embraced, disappointments and injuries taken lightly, of indescribable triumphs. We had hugged each other standing in our stirrups, ecstatic after winning posts. We had trusted, bonded, and twinned.

Whatever we were now, we had once been more than brothers. The past - our past - remained. The intense and mutual memories could not be erased.

The smiles died. Ellis said, 'This wimp comes up on your inside and beats you in the last stride. This wimp could ruin us all if we neglect our inside rail. This wimp was champion jockey for five or six years and might have been still, and we'd be fools to forget it.' He put his face close to mine. 'Still the same old Sid, aren't you? Cunning. Nerveless. Win at all costs.'

There was nothing to say.

Yorkshire bit into a gherkin. 'What do we do with him, then?'

'First we find out why he's here.'

Tilepit said, 'He came to get The Pump to stop -'

'Balls,' Ellis interrupted. 'He's lying.'

'How can you tell?' Tilepit protested.

'I know him.' He said it with authority, and it was true.

'What, then?' Yorkshire asked.

Ellis said to me, 'You'll not get me into court, Sid. Not Monday. Not ever. You haven't been able to break my Shropshire alibi, and my lawyers say that without that the prosecution won't have a chance. They'll withdraw the charge. Understand? I know you do understand. You'll have destroyed your own reputation, not mine. What's more, my father's going to kill you.'

Yorkshire and Tilepit showed, respectively, pleasure and shock.

'Before Monday?' I asked.

The flippancy fell like lead. Ellis strode round behind me and yanked back the right front of my brown overalls, and the tracksuit beneath. He tore a couple of buttons off my shirt, pulling that back after, then he pressed down strongly with his fingers.

'Gordon says he broke your collar-bone,' he said.

'Well, he didn't.'

Ellis would see the remains of bruising and he could feel the bumps of callus formed by earlier breaks, but it was obvious to him that his father had been wrong.

'My father will kill you,' he repeated. 'Don't you care?'

Another unanswerable question.

It seemed to me as if the cruel hidden side of Ellis suddenly took over, banishing the friend and becoming the threatened star who had everything to lose. He roughly threw my clothes together and continued round behind me until he stood on my left side.

'You won't defeat me,' he said. 'You've cost me half a million. You've cost me lawyers. You've cost me sleep.'

He might insist that I couldn't defeat him, but we both knew I would in the end, if I tried, because he was guilty.

'You'll pay for it,' he said.

He put his hands on the hard shell of my left forearm and raised it until my elbow formed a right angle. The tight strap round my upper arms and chest prevented me from doing anything to stop him. Whatever strength that remained in my upper left arm (and it was, in fact, quite a lot) was held in uselessness by that strap.

Ellis peeled back the brown sleeve, and the blue one underneath. He tore open my shirt cuff and pulled that sleeve back also. He looked at the plastic skin underneath.

'I know something about that arm,' he said. 'I got a brochure on purpose. That skin is a sort of glove, and it comes off.'

He felt up my arm until, by the elbow, he came to the top of the glove. He rolled it down as far as the wrist and then, with concentration, pulled it off ringer by finger, exposing the mechanics in all their detail.

The close-fitting textured glove gave the hand an appearance of life, with knuckles, veins and shapes like finger nails. The works inside were gears, springs and wiring. The bared forearm was bright pink, hard and shiny.

Ellis smiled.

He put his own strong right hand on my electrical left and pressed and twisted with knowledge and then, when the works clicked free, unscrewed the hand round several turns until it came right off.

Ellis looked into my eyes as at a feast. 'Well?' he said.

'You shit.'

He smiled. He opened his fingers and let the unscrewed hand fall onto the carpet.

CHAPTER 13

Tilepit looked shocked enough to vomit, but not Yorkshire: in fact, he laughed.

Ellis said to him sharply, 'This man is not funny. Everything that has gone wrong is because of him, and don't you forget it. It's this Sid Halley that's going to ruin you, and if you think he doesn't care about what I've just done' - he put his toe against the fallen hand and moved it a few inches - 'if you think it's something to laugh at, I'll tell you that for him it's almost unbearable … but not unbearable, is it, Sid?' He turned to ask me, and told Yorkshire at the same time. 'No one yet has invented anything you've found actually unbearable, have they, Sid?'

I didn't answer.

Yorkshire protested, 'But he's only -'

'Don't say only,' Ellis interrupted, his voice hard and loud. 'Don't you understand it yet? What do you think he's doing here? How did he get here? What does he know? He's not going to tell you. His nickname's tungsten carbide - that's the hardest of all metals and it saws through steel. I know him. I've almost loved him. You have no idea what you're dealing with, and we've got to decide what to do with him. How many people know he's here?'

'My bodyguards,' Yorkshire said. 'They brought him up.'

It was Lord Tilepit who gave him the real bad news. 'It was a TV crew who told Owen that Sid Halley was in the building.'

'A TV crew!'

'They wanted to interview him. Mrs Dove said she would tell them he'd gone.'

'Mrs Dove!'

If Ellis had met Mrs Dove he would know, as I did, that she wouldn't lie for Yorkshire. Mrs Dove had seen me, and she would say so.

Ellis asked furiously, 'Did Mrs Dove see him tied in that chair?'

'Yes,' Tilepit said faintly.

'You stupid . . .' Words failed Ellis, but for only a few short seconds. 'Then,' he said flatly, 'you can't kill him here.'

'Kill him?' Tilepit couldn't believe what he'd heard. His whole large face blushed pink. 'I'm not … are you talking about murder?'

'Oh yes, my lord,' I said dryly, 'they are. They're thinking of putting your lordship behind bars as an accessory. You'll love it in the slammer.'

I'd meant only to get Tilepit to see the enormity of what Ellis was proposing, but in doing so I'd made the mistake of unleashing Yorkshire's rage.

He took two paces and kicked my unscrewed hand with such force that it flew across the room and crashed against the wall. Then he realised the wrench was still in his hand and swung it at my head.

I saw the blow coming but couldn't get my head back far enough to avoid it altogether. The wrench's heavy screw connected with my moving cheekbone and tore the skin, but didn't this time knock me silly.

In Owen Yorkshire, the half-slipping brakes came wholly off. Perhaps the very sight of me, left-handless and bleeding and unable to retaliate, was all it took. He raised his arm and the wrench again, and I saw the spite in his face and the implacably murderous intention and I thought of nothing much at all, which afterwards seemed odd.

It was Ellis who stopped him. Ellis caught the descending arm and yanked Owen Yorkshire round sideways, so that although the heavy weapon swept on downwards, it missed me altogether.

'You're brainless,' Ellis shouted. 'I said not in here. You're a raving lunatic. Too many people know he came here. Do you want to splatter his blood and brains all over your new carpet? You might as well go and shout from the rooftops. Get a grip on that frigging temper and find a tissue.'

'A what?'

'Something to stop him bleeding. Are you terminally insane? When he doesn't turn up wherever he's expected, you're going to get the police in here looking for him. TV crew! Mrs Dove! The whole frigging county! You get one drop of his blood on anything in here, you're looking at twenty-five years.'

Yorkshire, bewildered by Ellis's attack and turning sullen, said there weren't any tissues. Verney Tilepit tentatively produced a handkerchief; white, clean and embroidered with a coronet. Ellis snatched it from him and slapped it on my cheek, and I wondered if ever, in any circumstances, I could, to save myself, deliberately kill him, and didn't think so.

Ellis took the handkerchief away briefly, looked at the scarlet staining the white, and put it back, pressing.

Yorkshire strode about, waving the wrench as if jerked by strings. Tilepit looked extremely unhappy. I considered my probable future with gloom and Ellis, taking the handkerchief away again and watching my cheek critically, declared that the worst of the bleeding had stopped.

He gave the handkerchief back to Tilepit, who put it squeamishly in his pocket, and he snatched the wrench away from Yorkshire and told him to cool down and plan.

Planning took them both out of the office, the door closing behind them. Verney Tilepit didn't in the least appreciate being left alone with me and went to look out of the window, to look anywhere except at me.

'Untie me,' I said with force.

No chance. He didn't even show he'd heard.

I asked, 'How did you get yourself into this mess?'

No answer.

I tried again. I said, 'If I walk out of here free, I'll forget I ever saw you.'

He turned round, but he had his back to the light and I couldn't see his eyes clearly behind the spectacles.

'You really are in deep trouble,' I said.

'Nothing will happen.'

I wished I believed him. I said, 'It must have seemed pretty harmless to you, just to use your paper to ridicule someone week after week. What did Yorkshire tell you? To save Ellis at all costs. Well, it is going to cost you.'

'You don't understand. Ellis is blameless.'

'I understand that you're up to your noble neck in shit.'

'I can't do anything.' He was worried, unhappy and congenitally helpless.

'Untie me,' I said again, with urgency.

'It wouldn't help. I couldn't get you out.'

'Untie me,' I said. 'I'll do the rest.'

He dithered. If he had been capable of reasoned decisions he wouldn't have let himself be used by Yorkshire, but he wasn't the first or last rich man to stumble blindly into a quagmire. He couldn't make up his mind to attempt saving himself by letting me free and, inevitably, the opportunity passed.

Ellis and Yorkshire came back, and neither of them would meet my eyes.

Bad sign.

Ellis, looking at his watch, said,'We wait.'

'What for?' Tilepit asked uncertainly.

Yorkshire answered, to Ellis's irritation, 'The TV people are on the point of leaving. Everyone will be gone in fifteen minutes.'

Tilepit looked at me, his anxieties showing plainly. 'Let Halley go,' he begged.

Ellis said comfortingly, 'Sure, in a while.'

Yorkshire smiled. His anger was preferable, on the whole.

Verney Tilepit wanted desperately to be reassured, but even he could see that if freeing me was the intention, why did we have to wait.

Ellis still held the wrench. He wouldn't get it wrong, I thought. He wouldn't spill my blood. I would probably not know much about it. I might not consciously learn the reciprocal answer to my self-searching question: could he personally kill me, to save himself? How deep did friendship go? Did it ever have absolute taboos? Had I already, by accusing him of evil, melted his innermost restraints? He wanted to get even. He would wound me any way he could. But kill … I didn't know.

He walked round behind me.

Time, in a way, stood still. It was a moment in which to plead, but I couldn't. The decision, whatever I said, would be his.

He came eventually round to my right-hand side and murmured, 'Tungsten,' under his breath.

Water, I thought, I had water in my veins.

He reached down suddenly and clamped his hand round my right wrist, pulling fiercely upwards.

I jerked my wrist out of his grasp and without warning he bashed the wrench across my knuckles. In the moment of utter numbness that resulted he slid the open jaws of the wrench onto my wrist and tightened the screw. Tightened it further, until the jaws grasped immovably, until they squeezed the upper and lower sides of my wrist together, compressing blood vessels, nerves and ligaments, bearing down on the bones inside.

The wrench was heavy. He balanced its handle on the arm of the chair I was sitting in and held it steady so that my wrist was up at the same level. He had two strong hands. He persevered with the screw.

I said, 'Ellis,' in protest, not from anger or even fear, but in disbelief that he could do what he was doing: in a lament for the old Ellis, in a sort of passionate sorrow.

For the few seconds that he looked into my face, his expression was flooded with awareness … and shame. Then the feelings passed, and he returned in deep concentration to an atrocious pleasure.

It was extraordinary. He seemed to go into a kind of trance, as if the office and Yorkshire and Tilepit didn't exist, as if there were only one reality, which was the clench of forged steel jaws on a wrist and the extent to which he could intensify it.

I thought: if the wrench had been lopping shears, if its jaws had been knives instead of flat steel, the whole devastating nightmare would have come true. I shut my mind to it: made it . cold. Sweated, all the same.

I thought: what I see in his face is the full-blown addiction; not the cruel satisfaction he could get from unscrewing a false hand, but the sinful fulfilment of cutting off a live hoof.

I glanced very briefly at Yorkshire and Tilepit and saw their frozen bottomless astonishment, and I realised that until that moment of revelation they hadn't wholly believed in Ellis's guilt.

My wrist hurt. Somewhere up my arm the ulna grumbled.

I said, 'Ellis' sharply, to wake him up.

He got the screw to tighten another notch.

I yelled at him, 'Ellis,' and again, 'Ellis'.

He straightened, looking vaguely down at fifteen inches of heavy stainless steel wrench incongruously sticking out sideways from its task. He tied it to the arm of the chair with another strap from the desk and went over to the window, not speaking, but not rational either.

I tried to dislodge myself from the wrench but my hand was too numb and the grip too tight. I found it difficult to think. My hand was pale blue and grey. Thought was a crushed wrist and an abysmal shattering fear that if the damage went on too long, it would be permanent. Hands could be lost.

Both hands … Oh God. Oh God.

'Ellis,' I said yet again, but in a lower voice this time: a plea for him to return to the old self, that was there all the time, somewhere.

I waited. Acute discomfort and the terrible anxiety continued. Ellis's thoughts seemed far out in space. Tilepit cleared his throat in embarrassment and Yorkshire, as if in unconscious humour, crunched a gherkin.

Minutes passed.

I said, 'Ellis …'

I closed my eyes. Opened them again. More or less prayed.

Time and nightmare fused. One became the other. The future was a void.

Ellis left the window and crossed with bouncing steps to the chair where I sat. He looked into my face and enjoyed what he could undoubtedly see there. Then he unscrewed and untied the wrench with violent jerks and dropped the abominable ratchet from a height onto the desk.

No one said anything. Ellis seemed euphoric, high, full of good spirits, striding round the room as if unable to contain his exhilaration.

I got stabbing pins and needles in my fingers, and thanked the fates for it. My hand felt dreadful but turned slowly yellowish pink.

Thought came back from outer space and lodged again earthily in my brain.

Ellis, coming down very slightly, looked at his watch. He plucked from the desk the cosmetic glove from my false arm, came to my right side, shoved the glove inside my shirt against my chest and, with a theatrical flourish, zipped up the front of my blue tracksuit to keep his gift from falling out.

He looked at his watch again. Then he went across the room, picked up the unscrewed hand, returned to my side, and slapped the dead mechanism into my living palm. There was a powerful impression all round that he was busy making sure no trace of Sid Halley remained in the room.

He went round behind me and undid the strap fastening me into the chair. Then he undid the second strap that held my upper arms against my body.

'Screw the hand back on,' he instructed.

Perhaps because they had bent from being kicked around, or perhaps because my real hand was eighty per cent useless, the screw threads wouldn't mesh smoothly, and after three half turns they stuck. The hand looked re-attached, but wouldn't work.

'Stand up,' Ellis said.

I stood, swaying, my ankles still tied together.

'You're letting him go,' Tilepit exclaimed, with grateful relief.

'Of course,'Ellis said.

Yorkshire was smiling.

'Put your hands behind your back,' Ellis told me.

I did so, and he strapped my wrists tight together.

Last, he undid my ankles.

'This way.' He pulled me by the arm over to the door and through into the passage. My feet walked like automatons.

Looking back, I saw Yorkshire put his hand on the telephone. Beyond him, Tilepit was happy with foolish faith.

Ellis pressed the call button for the lift, and the door opened immediately.

'Get in,' he said.

I looked briefly at his now unsmiling face. Expressionless. That made two of us, I thought, two of us thinking the same thing and not saying it.

I stepped into the lift and he leaned in quickly and pressed the button for the ground floor, then jumped back. The door closed between us. The lift began its short journey down.

To tie together the wrists of a man who could unscrew one of them was an exercise in futility. All the same, the crossed threads and my fumbling fingers gave me trouble and some severe moments of panic before the hand slipped free. The lift had already reached its destination by the time I'd shed the tying strap, leaving no chance to emerge from the opening door with everything anywhere near normal.

I put the mechanical hand deep into my right-hand tracksuit trousers pocket. Surreal, I grimly thought. The long sleeve of brown overall covered the void where it belonged.

Ellis had given me a chance. Not much of one, probably, but at least I did have the answer to my question, which was no, he wouldn't personally kill me. Yorkshire definitely would.

The two blue-clad bodyguards were missing from the lobby.

The telephone on the desk was ringing, but the bodyguards were outside, busily positioning a Topline Foods van. One guard was descending from the driver's seat. The other was opening the rear doors.

A van, I understood, for abduction. For a journey to an unmarked grave. A bog job, the Irish called it. How much, I wondered, were they being paid.

Ellis's timing had given me thirty seconds. He'd sent me down too soon. In the lobby I had no future. Out in the open air … some.

Taking a couple of deep breaths, I shot out through the doors as fast as I could, and sprinted: and I ran not to the right towards my own car, but veered left round the van toward the open gates.

There was a shout from one of the blue figures, a yell from the second and I thought for a moment that I could avoid them, but to my dismay the gatekeeper himself came to unwelcome life, emerging from his kiosk and barring my exit. Big man in another blue uniform, over-confident.

I ran straight at him. He stood solidly, legs apart, his weight evenly balanced. He wasn't prepared for or expecting my left foot to knock aside the inside of his knee or for my back to bend and curl like a cannon ball into his stomach: he fell over backwards and I was on my way before he struggled to his knees. The other two, though, had gained ground.

The sort of judo Chico had taught me was in part the stylised advances and throws of a regulated sport and in part an individual style for a one-handed victim. For a start, I never wore, in my private sessions with him, the loose white judogi uniform. I never fought in bare feet but always in ordinary shoes or trainers. The judo I'd learned was how to save my life, not how to earn a black belt.

Ordinary judo needed two hands. Myoelectric hands had a slow response time, a measurable pause between instruction and action. Chico and I had scrapped all grappling techniques for that hand and substituted clubbing; and I used all his lessons at Frodsham as if they were as familiar as walking.

We hadn't exactly envisaged no useful hands at all, but it was amazing what one could do if one wanted to live. It was the same as it had been in races: win now, pay later.

My opponents were straight muscle men with none of the subtlety of the Japanese understanding of lift and leverage and speed. Chico could throw me every time, but Yorkshire's watchdogs couldn't.

The names of the movements clicked like a litany in my brain - shintai, randori, tai-sabaki. Fighting literally to live, I stretched every technique I knew and adapted others, using falling feints that involved my twice lying on the ground and sticking a foot into a belly to fly its owner over my head. It ended with one blue uniform lying dazed on its back, one complaining I'd broken his nose, and one haring off to the office building with the bad news.

I stumbled out onto the road, feeling that if I went back for my car the two men I'd left on the ground would think of getting up again and closing the gates.

In one direction lay houses, so I staggered that way. Better cover. I needed cover before anyone chased me in the Topline Foods van.

The houses, when I reached them, were too regular, the gardens too tidy and small. I chose one house with no life showing, walked unsteadily up the garden path, kept on going, found myself in the back garden with another row of houses over the back fence.

The fence was too high to jump or vault, but there was an empty crate lying there, a gift from the gods.

No one came out of any of the houses to ask me what I thought I was doing. I emerged into the next street and began to think about where I was going and what I looked like.

Brown overalls. Yorkshire would be looking for brown overalls.

I took them off and dumped them in one of the houses' brown-looking beech hedges.

Taking off the overalls revealed the non-existence of a left hand.

Damn it, I thought astringently. Things are never easy, so cope.

I put the pink exposed end of arm, with its bare electrical contacts, into my left-hand jacket pocket, and walked, not ran, up the street. I wanted to run, but hadn't the strength. Weak … Stamina, a memory: a laugh.

There was a boy in the distance roller-blading, coming towards me and wearing not the ubiquitous baseball cap but a striped woollen hat. That would do, I thought. I fumbled some money out of the zip pocket in my belt and stood in his way.

He tried to avoid me, swerved, overbalanced and called me filthy names until his gaze fell on the money in my hand.

'Sell me your hat,' I suggested.

'Yer wha?'

'Your hat,' I said, 'for the money.'

'You've got blood on your face,' he said.

He snatched the money and aimed to roller-blade away. I stuck out a foot and knocked him off his skates. He gave me a bitter look, and a choice of swear words, but also the hat, sweeping it off and throwing it at me.

It was warm from his head and I put it on hoping he didn't have lice. I wiped my face gingerly on my sleeve and slouched along towards the road with traffic that crossed the end of the residential street… and saw the Topline Foods van roll past.

Whatever they were looking for, it didn't seem to be a navy tracksuit with a striped woollen hat.

Plan B - run away. OK.

Plan C - where to?

I reached the end of the houses and turned left into what might once have been a shopping street, but which now seemed to offer only estate agents, building societies and banks. Marooned in this unhelpful landscape were only two possible refuges -- a betting shop and a place selling ice-cream.

I chose the ice-cream. I was barely through the door when outside the window my own Mercedes went past.

Ellis was driving.

I still had its keys in my pocket. Jonathan, it seemed, wasn't alone in his car-stealing skill.

'What do you want?' a female voice said behind me.

She was asking about ice-cream: a thin young woman, bored.

'Er … that one,' I said, pointing at random.

'Tub or cone? Large or small?'

'Cone. Small.' I felt disoriented, far from reality. I paid for the ice-cream and licked it, and it tasted of almonds.

'You've cut your face,' she said.

'I ran into a tree.'

There were four or five tables with people sitting at them, mostly adolescent groups. I sat at a table away from the window and within ten minutes saw the Topline van pass twice more and my own car, once.

Tremors ran in my muscles. Fear, or over-exertion, or both.

There was a door marked Gents at the back of the shop. I went in there when I'd finished the ice-cream and looked at my reflection in the small mirror over the wash basin.

The cut along my left cheekbone had congealed into a blackening line, thick and all too visible. Dampening a paper towel I dabbed gently at the mess, trying to remove the clotted blood without starting new bleeding, but making only a partial improvement.

Locked in a cubicle I had another try at screwing my wandering hand into place, and this time at length got it properly aligned and fastened, but it still wouldn't work. Wretchedly depressed, I fished out the long covering glove and with difficulty, because of no talcum powder and an enfeebled right hand, pulled that too into the semblance of reality.

Damn Ellis, I thought mordantly. He'd been right about some things being near to unbearable.

Never mind. Get on with it.

I emerged from the cubicle and tried my cheek again with another paper towel, making the cut paler, fading it into skin colour.

Not too bad.

The face below the unfamiliar woollen hat looked strained. Hardly a surprise.

I went out through the ice-cream shop and walked along the street. The Topline Foods van rolled past quite slowly, driven by one of the blue guards, who was intently scanning the other side of the road. That bodyguard meant, I thought, that Yorkshire himself might be out looking for me in a car I couldn't recognise.

Perhaps all I had to do was go up to some sensible-looking motorist and say, 'Excuse me, some people are trying to kill me. Please will you drive me to the police station?' And then, 'Who are these people?'

'The managing director of Topline Foods, and Ellis Quint.' 'Oh yes?? And you are …??'

I did go as far as asking someone the way to the police station - 'Round there, straight on, turn left - about a mile' - and for want of anything better I started walking that way; but what I came to first was a bus shelter with several people standing in a queue, waiting. I added myself to the patient half dozen and stood with my back to the road, and a woman with two children soon came up behind me, hiding me well.

Five long minutes later my Mercedes pulled up on the far side of the road with a white Rolls Royce behind it. Ellis stepped out of my car and Yorkshire out of the Rolls. They conferred together, furiously stabbing the air, pointing up and down the street while I bent my head down to the children and prayed to remain unspotted.

The bus came while the cars were still there.

Four people got off. The waiting queue, me included, surged on. I resisted the temptation to look out of the window until the bus was travelling again, and then saw with relief that the two men were still talking.

I had no idea where the bus was going.

Who cared? Distance was all I needed. I'd paid to go to the end of the line, wherever that was.

Peaceful Frodsham in Cheshire, sometime Saturday, people going shopping in the afternoon. I felt disconnected from that sort of life; and I didn't know what the time was, as the elastic metal bracelet watch I normally wore on my left wrist had come off in Yorkshire's office and was still there, I supposed.

The bus slowly filled at subsequent stops. Shopping baskets. Chatter. Where was I going?

The end of the line proved to be the railway station in Runcorn, halfway to Liverpool, going north when I needed to go south.

I got off the bus and went to the station. There was no Mercedes, no Rolls Royce, no Topline Foods van in sight, which didn't mean they wouldn't think of buses and trains eventually. Runcorn railway station didn't feel safe. There was a train to Liverpool due in four minutes, I learned, so I bought a ticket and caught it.

The feeling of unreality continued, also the familiar aversion to asking for help from the local police. They didn't approve of outside investigators. If I ever got into messes, besides, I considered it my own responsibility to get myself out. Norman Pictons were rare. In Liverpool, moreover, I was probably counted a local boy who'd been disloyal to his 'roots'.

At Liverpool station I read the well-displayed timetable for trains going south.

An express to London, I thought; then backtrack to Reading and get a taxi to Shelley Green, Archie Kirk's house.

No express for hours. What else, then?

The incredible words took a time to penetrate: Liverpool to Bournemouth, departing at 3.10 pm. A slow train, meandering southwards across England, right down to the Channel, with many stops on the way … and one of the stops was Reading.

I sprinted, using the last shreds of strength. It was already, according to the big station clock, ticking away at 3.07. Whistles were blowing when I stumbled into the last carriage in the long train. A guard helped thrust me in and close the door. The wheels rolled. I had no ticket and little breath, but a marvellous feeling of escape. That feeling lasted only until the first of the many stops, which I discovered with horror to be Runcorn.

Square one: where I'd started. All fear came flooding back. I sat stiff and immobile, as if movement itself would give me away.

Nothing happened. The train quietly rolled onwards. Out on the platform a blue-clad Topline Foods security guard was speaking into a hand-held telephone and shaking his head.

Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Leamington Spa, Banbury, Oxford, Didcot, Reading.

It took four hours. Slowly, in that time, the screwed-tight wires of tension slackened to manageable if not to ease. At every stop, however illogical I might tell myself it was, dread resurfaced. Oversize wrenches could kill when one wasn't looking … Don't be a fool, I thought. I'd bought a ticket from the train conductor between Runcorn and Crewe, but every subsequent appearance of his dark uniform as he checked his customers bumped my heart muscles.

It grew dark. The train clanked and swayed into realms of night. Life felt suspended.

There were prosaically plenty of taxis at Reading. I travelled safely to Shelley Green and rang Archie Kirk's bell.

He came himself to open the door.

'Hello,' I said.

He stood there staring, then said awkwardly, 'We'd almost given you up.' He led the way into his sitting-room. 'He's here,' he said.

There were four of them. Davis Tatum, Norman Picton, Archie himself, and Charles.

I paused inside the doorway. I had no idea what I looked like, but what I saw on their faces was shock.

'Sid,' Charles said, recovering first and standing up. 'Good. Great. Come and sit down.'

The extent of his solicitude always measured the depth of his alarm. He insisted I take his place in a comfortable chair and himself perched on a hard one. He asked Archie if he had any brandy and secured for me a half-tumblerful of a raw-tasting own-brand from a supermarket.

'Drink it,' he commanded, holding out the glass.

'Charles …'

'Drink it. Talk after.'

I gave in, drank a couple of mouthfuls and put the glass on a table beside me. He was a firm believer in the life-restoring properties of distilled wine and I'd proved him right oftener than enough.

I remembered that I still wore the soft stripey hat, and took it off; and its removal seemed to make my appearance more normal to them, and less disturbing.

'I went to Topline Foods,' I said.

I thought: I don't feel well; what's wrong with me?

'You've cut your face,' Norman Picton said.

I also ached more or less all over from the desperate exertions of the judo. My head felt heavy and my hand was swollen and sore from Ellis's idea of entertainment. On the bright side, I was alive and home, safe … and reaction was all very well but I was not at this point going to faint.

'Sid!' Charles said sharply, putting out a hand.

'Oh … yes. Well, I went to Topline Foods.'

I drank some brandy. The weak feeling of sickness abated a bit. I shifted in my chair and took a grip on things.

Archie said, 'Take your time,' but sounded as if he didn't mean it.

I smiled. I said, 'Owen Yorkshire was there. So was Lord Tilepit. So was Ellis Quint.'

'Quint!' Davis Tatum exclaimed.

'Mm. Well … you asked me to find out if there was a heavyweight lumbering about behind the Quint business, and the answer is yes, but it is Ellis Quint himself.'

'But he's a playboy,' Davis Tatum protested. 'What about the big man, Yorkshire?' Tatum's own bulk quivered. 'He's getting known. One hears his name.'

I nodded. 'Owen Cliff Yorkshire is a heavyweight in the making.'

'What do you mean?'

I ached. I hadn't really noticed the wear and tear until then. Win now, pay later.

'Megalomania,' I said. 'Yorkshire's on the edge. He has a violent unpredictable temper and an uncontrolled desire to be a tycoon. I'd call it incipient megalomania because he's spending far beyond sanity on self-aggrandisement. He's built an office block fit for a major industry - and it's mostly empty - before building the industry first. He's publicity mad - he's holding a reception for half of Liverpool on Monday. He has plans - a desire - to take over the whole horse-feed nuts industry. He employs at least two bodyguards who will murder to order because he fears his competitors will assassinate him … which is paranoia.'

I paused, then said, 'It's difficult to describe the impression he gives. Half the time he sounds reasonable, and half the time you can see that he will simply get rid of anyone who stands in his way. And he is desperate … desperate … to save Ellis Quint's reputation.'

Archie asked 'Why?' slowly.

'Because,' I said, 'he has spent a colossal amount of money on an advertising campaign featuring Ellis, and if Ellis is found guilty of cutting off a horse's foot, that campaign can't be shown.'

'But a few advertisements can't have cost that much,' Archie objected.

'With megalomania,' I said, 'you don't just make a few economically priced advertisements. You really go to town. You engage an expensive highly prestigious firm -- in this case, Intramind Imaging of Manchester -- and you travel the world.'

With clumsy fingers I took from my belt the folded copy of the paper in the Quint box-file in Mrs Dove's office.

'This is a list of racecourses,' I said. 'These racecourses are where they filmed the commercials. A thirty-second commercial gleaned from each place. The expense is phenomenal.'

Archie scanned the list uncomprehendingly and passed it to Charles, who read it aloud.

'Flemington, Germiston, Sha Tin, Churchill Downs, Woodbine, Longchamps, K.L., Fuchu …'

There were fifteen altogether. Archie looked lost.

'Flemington,' I said, 'is where they run the Melbourne Cup in Australia. Germiston is outside Johannesburg. Sha Tin is in Hong Kong. Churchill Downs is where they hold the Kentucky Derby. K.L. is Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Woodbine is in Canada, Longchamps is in Paris, Fuchu is where the Japan Cup is run in Tokyo.'

They all understood.

'Those commercials are reported to be brilliant,' I said, 'and Ellis himself wants them shown as much as Yorkshire does.'

'Have you seen them?' Davis asked.

I explained about the box of BETACAM tapes. 'Making those special Broadcasting Quality tapes themselves must have been fearfully expensive - and they need special playing equipment which I didn't find at Topline Foods, so no, I haven't seen them.'

Norman Picton, with his policeman's mind, asked, 'Where did you see the tapes? Where did you get that list of racecourses?'

I said without emotion, 'In an office at Topline Foods.'

He gave me a narrow inspection.

'My car,' I told him, 'is still somewhere in Frodsham. Could you get your pals up there to look out for it?' I gave him its registration number, which he wrote down.

'Why did you leave it?' he asked.

'Er … I was running away at the time.' For all that I tried to say it lightly, the grim reality reached them.

'Well,' I sighed, 'I'd invaded Yorkshire's territory. He found me there. It gave him the opportunity to get rid of the person most likely to send Ellis to jail. I accepted that possibility when I went there but, like you, I wanted to know what was causing terrible trouble behind the scenes. And it is the millions spent on those ads.' I paused, and went on, 'Yorkshire and Ellis set out originally, months ago, not to kill me but to discredit me so that nothing I said would get Ellis convicted. They used a figurehead, Topline Foods director, Lord Tilepit, because he owned The Pump. They persuaded Tilepit that Ellis was innocent and that I was all that The Pump has maintained. I don't think Tilepit believed Ellis guilty until today. I don't think The Pump will say a word against me from now on.' I smiled briefly. 'Lord Tilepit was duped by Ellis, and so, also, to some extent, was Owen Yorkshire himself.'

'How, Sid?' Davis asked.

'I think Yorkshire too believed in Ellis. Ellis dazzles people. Knowing Ellis, to Yorkshire, was a step up the ladder. Today they planned together to … er … wipe me out of the way. Yorkshire would have done it himself in reckless anger. Ellis stopped him, but left it to chance that the bodyguards might do it … but I escaped them. Yorkshire now knows Ellis is guilty, but he doesn't care. He cares only to be able to show that brilliant ad campaign, and make himself king of the horse-nuts. And, of course, it's not just horse-nuts that it's all about. They're a stepping stone. It's about being the Big Man with the power to bring mayors to his doorstep. If Yorkshire isn't stopped you'll find him manipulating more than The Pump. He's the sort of man you get in the kitchens of political clout.'

After a moment, Archie asked, 'So how do we stop him?'

I shifted wearily in the chair and drank some brandy, and said, 'I can, possibly, give you the tools.'

'What tools?'

'His secret files. His financial manoeuvrings. His debts. Details of bribes, I'd guess. Bargains struck. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Evidence of leverage. Details of all his dealings with Ellis, and all his dealings with Tilepit. I'll give you the files. You can take it from there.'

'But,' Archie said blankly, 'where are these files?'

'In my computer in London.'

I explained the internet transfer and the need for password cracking. I couldn't decide whether they were gladdened or horrified by what I'd done. A bit of both, I thought.

Charles looked the most shocked, Archie the least.

Archie said, 'If I ask you, will you work for me another time?'

I looked into the knowing eyes, and smiled, and nodded.

'Good,'he said.

CHAPTER 14

I went home to Aynsford with Charles.

It had been a long evening in Archie's house. Archie, Davis, Norman and Charles had all wanted details, which I found as intolerable to describe as to live through. I skipped a lot.

I didn't tell them about Ellis's games with my hands. I didn't know how to explain to them that, for a jockey, his hands were at the heart of his existence … of his skill. One knew a horse by the feel of the bit on the reins, one listened to the messages, one interpreted the vibrations, one talked to a horse through one's hands. Ellis understood more than most people what the loss of a hand had meant to me, and that day he'd been busy punishing me in the severest way he could think of for trying to strip him of what he himself now valued most, his universal acclaim.

I didn't know how to make them understand that to Ellis the severing of a horse's foot had become a drug more addictive than any substance invented, that the risk and the power were intoxicating; that I'd been lucky he'd had only a wrench to use on me.

I didn't know how near he had come in his own mind to irrevocably destroying my right hand. I only knew that to me it had seemed possible that he would. I couldn't tell them that I'd intensely lived my own nightmare and still shook from fear inside.

I told them only that an adjustable wrench in Yorkshire's hands had cut my face.

I told them a little about the escape by judo, and all about the boy on roller-blades and the ice-cream cone and catching the bus within sight of Yorkshire and Ellis. I made it sound almost funny.

Archie understood that there was a lot I hadn't said, but he didn't press it. Charles, puzzled, asked, 'But did they hurt you, Sid?' and I half laughed and told him part of the truth. 'They scared me witless.'

Davis asked about Ellis's Shropshire alibi. His colleague, the Crown Prosecutor, was increasingly concerned, he said, that Ellis's powerful lawyers would prevent the trial from resuming.

I explained that I hadn't had time to find out at what hour Ellis had arrived at the dance.

'Someone must know,' I said. 'It's a matter of asking the local people, the people who helped to park the cars.' I looked at Norman. 'Any chance of the police doing it?'

'Not much,' he said.

'Round the pubs,' I suggested.

Norman shook his head.

'There isn't much time,' Davis pointed out. 'Sid, couldn't you do it tomorrow?'

Tomorrow, Sunday. On Monday, the trial.

Archie said firmly, 'No, Sid can't. There's a limit … I'll try and find someone else.'

'Chico would have done it,' Charles said.

Chico had undisputedly saved my pathetic skin that day. One could hardly ask more.

Archie's wife, before she'd driven over to spend the evening with her sister-in-law Betty Bracken, had, it appeared, made a mound of sandwiches. Archie offered them diffidently. I found the tastes of cheese and of chicken strange, as if I'd come upon them new from another world. It was weird the difference that danger and the perception of mortality made to familiar things. Unreality persisted even as I accepted a paper napkin to wipe my fingers.

Archie's doorbell rang. Archie went again to the summons and came back with a pinched displeased expression, and he was followed by a boy that I saw with surprise to be Jonathan.

The rebel wings of hair were much shorter. The yellow streaks had all but grown out. There were no shaven areas of scalp.

'Hi,' he said, looking round the room and fastening his attention on my face. 'I came over to see you. The aunts said you were here. Hey, man, you look different.'

'Three months older,' I nodded, 'so do you.'

Jonathan helped himself to a sandwich, disregarding Archie's disapproval.

'Hi,' he said nonchalantly to Norman. 'How's the boat?'

'Laid up for winter storage.'

Jonathan chewed and told me, 'They won't take me on an oil-rig until I'm eighteen. They won't take me in the navy. I've got good pecs. What do I do with them?

'Pecs?' Charles asked, mystified.

'Pectoral muscles,' Norman explained. 'He's strong from weeks of water ski-ing.'

'Oh.'

I said to Jonathan, 'How did you get here from Combe Bassett?'

'Ran.'

He'd walked into Archie's house not in the least out of breath.

'Can you ride a motor-bike,' I asked, 'now that you're sixteen?'

'Do me a favour!'

'He hasn't got one,' Archie said.

'He can hire one.'

'But… what for?'

'To go to Shropshire,' I said.

I was predictably drowned by protests. I explained to Jonathan what was needed. 'Find someone - anyone - who saw Ellis Quint arrive at the dance. Find the people who parked the cars.'

'He can't go round the pubs,' Norman insisted. 'He's under age.'

Jonathan gave me a dark look which I steadfastly returned. At fifteen he'd bought gin for a truck-driver's wife. 'Hey,' he said. 'Where do I go?' I told him in detail. His uncle and everyone else disapproved. I took all the money I had left out of my belt and gave it to him. 'I want receipts,' I said. 'Bring me paper. A signed statement from a witness. It's all got to be solid.'

'Is this,' he asked slowly, 'some sort of test?'

'Yes.'

'OK.'

'Don't stay longer than a day,' I said. 'Don't forget, you may be asked to give evidence this week at the trial.'

'As if I could forget.'

He took a bunch of sandwiches, gave me a wide smile, and without more words departed.

'You can't,' Archie said to me emphatically.

'What do you propose to do with him?'

'But… he's…'

'He's bright,' I said. 'He's observant. He's athletic. Let's see how he does in Shropshire.'

'He's only sixteen.'

'I need a new Chico.'

'But Jonathan steals cars.'

'He hasn't stolen one all summer, has he?'

'That doesn't mean …'

'An ability to steal cars,' I said with humour, 'is in my eyes an asset. Let's see how he does tomorrow, with this alibi.'

Archie, still looking affronted, gave in.

'Too much depends on it,' Davis said heavily, shaking his head.

I said, 'If Jonathan learns nothing, I'll go myself on Monday.'

'That will be too late,' Davis said.

'Not if you get your colleague to ask for one more day's adjournment. Invent flu or something.'

Davis said doubtfully, 'Are you totally committed to this trial? The Pump - or Ellis Quint - they haven't got to you in any way, have they? I mean … the hate campaign … do you want to back out?'

Charles was offended on my behalf. 'Of course, he doesn't,' he said.

Such faith! I said plainly to Davis, 'Don't let your colleague back down. That's the real danger. Tell him to insist on prosecuting, alibi or no alibi. Tell the prosecution service to dredge up some guts.'

'Sid!' He was taken aback. 'They're realists.'

'They're shit-scared of Ellis's lawyers. Well, I'm not. Ellis took the foot off Betty Bracken's colt. I wish like hell that he hadn't, but he did. He has no alibi for that night. You get your colleague to tell Ellis's lawyers that the Northampton colt was a copycat crime. If we can't break Ellis's alibi, copycat is our story and we're sticking to it, and if you have any influence over your colleague the prosecutor, you make sure he gives me a chance in court to say so.'

Davis said faintly, 'I must not instruct him to do anything like that.'

'Just manage to get it dripped into his mind.'

'So there you are, Davis,' Archie said dryly, 'our boy shows no sign of the hate campaign having been successful. Rather the opposite, wouldn't you say?'

'Our boy' stood up, feeling a shade fragile. It seemed to have been a long day. Archie came out into the hall with Charles and me and offered his hand in farewell. Charles shook warmly. Archie lifted my wrist and looked at the swelling and the deep bruising that was already crimson and black.

He said, 'You've had difficulty holding your glass all evening.'

I shrugged a fraction, long resigned to occupational damage. My hand was still a hand, and that was all that mattered.

'No explanation?' Archie asked.

I shook my head.

'Stone walls tell more,' Charles informed him calmly.

Archie, releasing my wrist, said to me, 'The British Horseracing Board wants you to double-check some of their own members for loyalty. Ultra-secret digging.'

'They wouldn't ask me.' I shook my head. 'I'm not the new people's idea of reliable.'

'They asked me,' he said, the eyes blazing with amusement. 'I said it would be you or nobody.'

'Nobody,' I said.

He laughed. 'You start as soon as the Quint thing is over.'

The trouble, I thought, as I sat quietly beside Charles as he drove to Aynsford, was that for me the Quint thing would never be over. Ellis might or might not go to jail … but that wouldn't be the end for either of us. Gordon's obsession might deepen. Ellis might maim more than horses. In both of them lay a compulsive disregard of natural law.

No one could ever be comprehensively protected from obsession. One simply had to live as best one could and disregard the feral threat lying in wait: and I would somehow have to shake Gordon loose from staking out my Pont Square door.

Charles said, 'Do you consider that transferring Yorkshire's secret files to your own computer was at all immoral? Was it … theft?'

He spoke without censure, but censure was implied. I remembered a discussion we'd had once along the lines of what was honourable and what was not. He'd said I had a vision of honour that made my life a purgatory and I'd said he was wrong, and that purgatory was abandoning your vision of honour and knowing you'd done it. 'Only for you, Sid,' he'd said. 'The rest of the world has no difficulty at all.'

It seemed he was applying to me my own rash judgement. Was stealing knowledge ever justified, or was it not?

I said without self-excuse, 'It was theft, and dishonourable, and I would do it again.'

'And purgatory can wait?'

I said with amusement, 'Have you read The Pump?

After about five miles he said, 'That's specious.'

'Mm.'

'The Pump's a different sort of purgatory.'

I nodded and said idly, 'The anteroom to hell.'

He frowned, glancing across in distaste. 'Has hell arrived, then?' He hated excess emotion. I cooled it.

I said, 'No. Sorry. It's been a long day.'

He drove another mile, then asked, 'How did you hurt your hand?'

I sighed. 'I don't want a fuss. Don't fuss, Charles, if I tell you.'

'No. All right. No fuss.'

'Then … Ellis had a go at it.'

'Ellis?'

'Mm. Lord Tilepit and Owen Yorkshire watched Ellis enjoy it. That's how they now know he's guilty as charged with the colts. If Ellis had had shears instead of a wrench to use on my wrist, I would now have no hands -- and for God's sake, Charles, keep your eyes on the road.'

'But Sid..:

'No fuss. You promised. There'll be no lasting harm.' I paused. 'If he'd wanted to kill me today, he could have done it, but instead he gave me a chance to escape. He wanted …' I swallowed, 'he wanted to make me pay for defeating him … and he did make me pay … and on Monday in court I'll try to disgrace him for ever … and I loathe it.'

He drove to Aynsford in a silence I understood to be at least empty of condemnation. Braking outside the door he said regretfully, 'If you and Ellis hadn't been such good friends … no wonder poor Ginnie couldn't stand it.'

Charles saw the muscles stiffen in my face.

'What is it, Sid?' he asked.

'I … I may have made a wrong assumption.'

'What assumption?'

'Mm?' I said vaguely. 'Have to think.'

'Then think in bed,' he said lightly. 'It's late.'

I thought for half the night. Ellis's revenge brutally throbbed in my fingers. Ellis had tied my wrists and given me thirty seconds … I would be dead, I thought, if we hadn't been friends.

At Aynsford I kept duplicates of all the things I'd lost in my car - battery charger, razor, clothes and so on - all except the mobile phone. I did have the SIM card, but nothing to use it in.

The no-car situation was solved again by TeleDrive who came to pick me up on Sunday morning.

To Charles's restrained suggestion that I pass the day resting with him - 'A game of chess, perhaps?' - I replied that I was going to see Rachel Ferns. Charles nodded.

'Come back,' he said, 'if you need to.'

'Always.'

'Take care of yourself, Sid.'

Rachel, Linda told me on the telephone, was home from the hospital for the day.

'Oh, do come,' she begged. 'Rachel needs you.'

I went empty-handed with no new fish or wigs, but it didn't seem to matter.

Rachel herself looked bloodless, a white wisp of a child in the foothills of a far country. In the five days since I'd seen her, the bluish shadows under her eyes had deepened, and she had lost weight so that the round cheeks of the steroids under the bald head and the big shadowed eyes gave her the look of an exotic little bird, unlike life.

Linda hugged me and cried on my shoulder in the kitchen.

'It's good news, really,' she said, sobbing. 'They've found a donor.'

'But that's marvellous' Like a sunburst of hope, I thought, but Linda still wept.

'He's a Swiss,' she said. 'He's coming from Switzerland. He's coming on Wednesday. Joe is paying his air fare and the hotel bills. Joe says money's no object for his little girl.'

'Then stop crying.'

'Yes … but it may not work.'

'And it may,' I said positively. 'Where's the gin?'

She laughed shakily. She poured two glasses. I still didn't much care for gin but it was all she liked. We clinked to the future and she began talking about paella for lunch.

Rachel was half sitting, half lying, on a small sofa that had been repositioned in the sitting-room so that she could look straight and closely into the fish tank. I sat beside her and asked how she felt.

'Did my mum tell you about the transplant?' she said.

'Terrific news.'

'I might be able to run again.'

Running, it was clear from her pervading lassitude, must have seemed at that point as distant as the moon.

Rachel said, 'I begged to come home to see the fishes. I have to go back tonight, though. I hoped you would come. I begged God.'

'You knew I would come.'

'I meant today, while I'm home.'

'I've been busy since I saw you on Tuesday.'

'I know, Mummy said so. The nurses tell me when you phone every day.'

Pegotty was crawling all round the floor, growing in size and agility and putting everything unsuitable in his mouth; making his sister laugh.

'He's so funny,' she said. 'They won't let him come to the hospital. I begged to see him and the fishes. They told me the transplant is going to make me feel sick, so I wanted to come home first.'

'Yes,' I said.

Linda produced steamy rice with bits of chicken and shrimps in, which we all ate with spoons.

'What's wrong with your hand?' Linda asked. 'In places it's almost black.'

'It's only a bruise. It got a bit squashed.'

'You've got sausage fingers,' Rachel said.

'They'll be all right tomorrow.'

Linda returned to the only important subject. 'The Swiss donor,' she said, 'is older than I am! He has three children of his own. He's a school teacher … he sounds a nice man, and they says he's so pleased to be going to give Rachel some of his bone marrow.'

Rachel said, 'I wish it had been Sid's bone marrow.'

I'd had myself tested, right at the beginning, but I'd been about as far from a match as one could get. Neither Linda nor Joe had been more than fifty per cent compatible.

'They say he's a ninety per cent match,' Linda said. 'You never get a hundred per cent, even from siblings. Ninety per cent is great.'

She was trying hard to be positive. I didn't know enough to put a bet on ninety per cent. It sounded fine to me; and no one was going to kill off Rachel's own defective bone marrow if they didn't believe they could replace it.

'They're going to put me into a bubble,' Rachel said. 'It's a sort of plastic tent over my bed. I won't be able to touch the Swiss man, except through the plastic. And he doesn't speak English, even. He speaks German. Danke schon. I've learned that, to say to him. Thank you very much.'

'He's a lucky man,' I said.

Linda, clearing the plates and offering ice-cream for pudding, asked if I would stay with Rachel while she took Pegotty out for a short walk in fresh air.

'Of course.'

'I won't be long.'

When she'd gone, Rachel and I sat on the sofa and watched the fish.

'You see that one?' Rachel pointed. 'That's the one you brought on Tuesday. Look how fast he swims! He's faster than all the others.'

The black and silver angel fish flashed through the tank, fins waving with vigour.

'He's you,' Rachel said. 'He's Sid.'

I teased her, 'I thought half of them were Sid.'

'Sid is always the fastest one. That's Sid,' she pointed. 'The others aren't Sid any more.'

'Poor fellows.'

She giggled. 'I wish I could have the fishes in the hospital. Mummy asked, but they said no.'

'Pity.'

She sat loosely cuddled by my right arm but held my other hand, the plastic one, pulling it across towards her. That hand still wasn't working properly, though a fresh battery and a bit of tinkering had restored it to half-life.

After a long silent pause, she said, 'Are you afraid of dying?'

Another pause. 'Sometimes,' I said.

Her voice was quiet, almost murmuring. It was a conversation all in a low key, without haste.

She said, 'Daddy says when you were a jockey you were never afraid of anything.'

'Are you afraid?' I asked.

'Yes, but I can't tell Mummy. I don't like her crying.'

'Are you afraid of the transplant?'

Rachel nodded.

'You will die without it,' I said matter-of-factly. 'I know you know that.'

'What's dying like?'

'I don't know. No one knows. Like going to sleep, I should think.' If you were lucky, of course.

'It's funny to think of not being here,' Rachel said. 'I mean, to think of being a space.'

'The transplant will work.'

'Everyone says so.'

'Then believe it. You'll be running by Christmas.'

She smoothed her fingers over my hand. I could feel the faint vibrations distantly in my forearm. Nothing, I thought, was ever entirely lost.

She said, 'Do you know what I'll be thinking, lying there in the bubble feeling awfully sick?'

'What?'

'Life's a bugger.'

I hugged her, but gently. 'You'll do fine.'

'Yes, but tell me.'

'Tell you what?'

'How to be brave.'

What a question, I thought. I said, 'When you're feeling awfully sick, think about something you like doing. You won't feel as bad if you don't think about how bad you feel.'

She thought it over. 'Is that all?'

'It's quite a lot. Think about fishes. Think about Pegotty pulling off his socks and putting them in his mouth. Think about things you've enjoyed.'

'Is that what you do?'

'It's what I do if something hurts, yes. It does work.'

'What if nothing hurts yet, but you're going into something scary?'

'Well … it's all right to be frightened. No one can help it. You just don't have to let being frightened stop you.'

'Are you ever frightened?' she asked.

'Yes.' Too often, I thought.

She said lazily, but with certainty, 'I bet you've never been so frightened you didn't do something. I bet you're always brave.'

I was startled. 'No … I'm not.'

'But Daddy said …'

'I wasn't afraid of riding in races,' I agreed. 'Try me in a pit full of snakes, though, and I wouldn't be so sure.'

'What about a bubble?'

'I'd go in there promising myself I'd come out running.'

She smoothed my hand. 'Will you come and see me?'

'In the bubble?' I asked. 'Yes, if you like.'

'You'll make me brave.'

I shook my head. 'It will come from inside you. You'll see.'

We went on watching the fish. My namesake flashed his fins and seemed to have endless stamina.

'I'm going into the bubble tomorrow,' Rachel murmured. 'I don't want to cry when they put me in there.'

'Courage is lonely,' I said.

She looked up into my face. 'What does that mean?'

It was too strong a concept, I saw, for someone of nine. I tried to make things simpler.

'You'll be alone in the bubble,' I said, 'So make it your own palace. The bubble is to keep you safe from infection - safe from dragons. You won't cry.'

She snuggled against me; happier, I hoped. I loved her incredibly. The transplant had a fifty-fifty chance of success. Rachel would run again. She had to.

Linda and Pegotty came back laughing from their walk and Linda built towers of bright plastic building blocks for Pegotty to knock down, a game of endless enjoyment for the baby. Rachel and I sat on the floor, playing draughts.

'You always let me be white,' Rachel complained, 'and then you sneak up with the black counters when I'm not looking.'

'You can play black, then.'

'It's disgusting,' she said, five minutes later. 'You're cheating.'

Linda looked up and said, astounded, 'Are you two quarrelling?

'He always wins,' Rachel objected.

'Then don't play with him,' Linda said reasonably.

Rachel set up the white pieces as her own. I neglected to take one of them halfway through the game and with glee she huffed me, and won.

'Did you let me win?' she demanded.

'Winning's more fun.'

'I hate you.' She swept all the pieces petulantly from the board and Pegotty put two of them in his mouth.

Rachel, laughing, picked them out again and dried them and set up the board again, with herself again as white, and peacefully we achieved a couple of close finishes until, suddenly as usual, she tired.

Linda produced tiny chocolate cakes for tea and talked happily of the Swiss donor and how everything was going to be all right. Rachel was convinced, I was convinced, Pegotty smeared chocolate all over his face. Whatever the next week might bring to all of us, I thought, that afternoon of hope and ordinariness was an anchor in reality, an affirmation that small lives mattered.

It wasn't until after she'd fastened both children into the back of her car to drive to the hospital that Linda mentioned Ellis Quint.

'That trial is on again tomorrow, isn't it?' she asked.

We stood in the chilly air a few paces from her car. I nodded. 'Don't let Rachel know.'

'She doesn't. It hasn't been hard to keep it all away from her. She never talks about Silverboy any more. Being so ill … she hasn't much interest in anything else.'

'She's terrific.'

'Will Ellis Quint go to prison?'

How could I say 'I hope so'? And did I hope so? Yet I had to stop him, to goad him, to make him fundamentally wake up.

I said, dodging it, 'It will be for the judge to decide.'

Linda hugged me. No tears. 'Come and see Rachel in her bubble?'

'You couldn't keep me away.'

'God … I hope…'

'She'll be all right,' I said. 'So will you.'

Patient TeleDrive took me back to London and, because of the fixed hour of Linda's departure to the hospital, I again had time to spare before meeting India for dinner.

I again ducked being dropped in Pont Square in the dark evening, and damned Gordon for his vigilance. He had to sleep sometime … but when?

The restaurant called Kensington Place was near the northern end of Church Street, the famous road of endless antique shops, stretching from Kensington High Street in the south, up to Netting Hill Gate, north. Teledrive left me and my overnight bag on the north-west corner of Church Street where I dawdled a while looking in the brightly lit windows of Waterstone's bookshop, wondering if Rachel would be able to hear the store's advertised children's audio tapes in her bubble. She enjoyed the subversive Just William stories. Pegotty, she thought, would grow up to be like him.

A large number of young Japanese people were milling around on the corner, all armed with cameras, taking flash pictures of each other. I paid not much attention beyond noticing that they all had straight black hair, short padded jackets, and jeans. As far as one could tell, they were happy. They also surged between me and Waterstone's windows.

They bowed to me politely, I bowed unenthusiastically in return.

They seemed to be waiting, as I was, for some pre-arranged event to occur. I gradually realised from their quiet chatter, of which I understood not a word, that half of them were men, and half young women.

We all waited. They bowed some more. At length, one of the young women shyly produced a photograph that she held out to me. I took it politely and found I was looking at a wedding. At a mass wedding of about ten happy couples wearing formal suits and western wedding dresses. Raising my head from the photo I was met by twenty smiles.

I smiled back. The shy young woman retrieved her photo, nodded her head towards her companions and clearly told me that they were all on their honeymoon. More smiles all round. More bows. One of the men held out his camera to me and asked - I gathered - if I would photograph them all as a group.

I took the camera and put my bag at my feet, and they arranged themselves in pairs neatly, as if they were used to it.

Click. Flash. The film wound on, quietly whirring.

All the newly-weds beamed.

I was presented, one by one, with nine more cameras. Nine more bows. I took nine more photos. Flash. Flash. Group euphoria.

What was it about me, I wondered, that encouraged such trust? Even without language there seemed to be no doubt on their part of my willingness to give pleasure. I mentally shrugged. I had the time, so what the hell. I took their pictures and bowed, and waited for eight o'clock.

I left the happy couples on Waterstone's corner and, carrying my bag, walked fifty yards down Church Street towards the restaurant. There was a narrow side street beside it, and opposite, on the other side of Church Street, one of those quirks of London life, a small recessed area of pavement with a patch of scrubby grass and a park bench, installed by philanthropists for the comfort of footsore shoppers and other vagrants. I would sit there, I decided, and watch for India. The restaurant doors were straight opposite the bench. A green-painted bench made of horizontal slats.

I crossed Church Street to reach it. The traffic on Sunday evening was sporadic to non-existent. I could see a brass plate on the back of the bench: the name of the benefactor who'd paid for it.

I was turning to sit when at the same time I heard a bang and felt a searing flash of pain across my back and into my right upper arm. The impact knocked me over and round so that I ended sprawling on the bench, half lying, half sitting, facing the road.

I thought incredulously, I've been shot.

I'd been shot once before. I couldn't mistake the thud. Also I couldn't mistake the shudder of outrage that my invaded body produced. Also … there was a great deal of blood.

I'd been shot by Gordon Quint.

He walked out of the shadows of the side street opposite and come towards me across Church Street. He carried a hand-gun with its black round mouth pointing my way. He was coming inexorably to finish what he'd started, and he appeared not to care if anyone saw him.

I didn't seem to have the strength to get up and run away.

There was nowhere to run to.

Gordon looked like a farmer from Berkshire, not an obsessed murderer. He wore a checked shirt and a tie and a tweed jacket. He was a middle-aged pillar of the community, a judge and jury and a hangman … a raw, primitive walking act of revenge.

There was none of the screaming out-of-control obscenity with which he'd attacked me the previous Monday. This killer was cold and determined and reckless.

He stopped in front of me and aimed at my chest.

'This is for Ginnie,' he said.

I don't know what he expected. He seemed to be waiting for something. For me to protest, perhaps. To plead.

His voice was hoarse.

'For Ginnie,' he repeated.

I was silent. I wanted to stand. Couldn't manage it.

'Say something!' He shouted in sudden fury. The gun wavered in his hand, but he was too close to miss. 'Don't you understand?'

I looked not at his gun but at his eyes. Not the best view, I thought inconsequentially, for my last on earth.

Gordon's purpose didn't waver. I might deny him any enjoyment of my fear, but that wasn't going to stop him. He stared at my face. He didn't blink. No hesitancy there. No withdrawal or doubt. None.

Now, I thought frozenly. It's going to be now.

A voice was shouting in the road, urgent, frantic, coming nearer, far too late.

The voice shouted one despairing word.

'Dad.'

Ellis … Ellis … Running across the road waving a five-foot piece of black angled iron fencing and shouting in frenzy at his father, 'Dad … Dad … Don't… Don't do it.'

I could see him running. Nothing seemed very clear. Gordon could hear Ellis shouting but it wasn't going to stop him. The demented hatred simply hardened in his face. His arm straightened until his gun was a bare yard from my chest.

Perhaps I won't feel it, I thought.

Ellis swung the iron fencing post with two hands and all his strength and hit his father on the side of the head.

The gun went off. The bullet hissed past my ear and slammed into a shop window behind me. There were razor splinters of glass and flashes of light and shouting and confusion everywhere.

Gordon fell silently unconscious face down on the scrubby patch of grass, his right hand with the gun underneath him. My blood ran into a scarlet and widening pool below the slats of the bench. Ellis stood for an eternity of seconds holding the fencing post and staring at my eyes as if he could see into my soul, as if he would show me his.

For an unmeasurable hiatus blink of time it seemed there was between us a fusing of psyche, an insight of total understanding. It could have been a hallucination, a result of too much stress, but it was unmistakably the same for him.

Then he dropped the fencing post beside his father, and turned, and went away at a slow run, across Church Street and . down the side road, loping, not sprinting, until he was swallowed by shadow.

I was suddenly surrounded by Japanese faces all asking unintelligible questions. They had worried eyes. They watched me bleed.

The gunshots brought more people, but cautiously. Gordon's attack, that to me had seemed to happen in slow motion, had in reality passed to others with bewildering speed. No one had tried to stop Ellis. People thought he was going to bring help.

I lost further account of time. A police car arrived busily, lights flashing, the first manifestation of all that I most detested - questions, hospitals, forms, noise, bright lights in my eyes, clanging and banging and being shoved around. There wasn't a hope of being quietly stitched up and left alone.

I told a policemen that Gordon, though unconscious at present, was lying over a loaded gun.

He wanted to know if Gordon had fired the shots in self-defence.

I couldn't be bothered to answer.

The crowd grew bigger and an ambulance made an entrance.

A young woman pushed the uniforms aside, yelling that she was from the Press. India … India … come to dinner.

'Sorry,' I said.

'Sid …' Horror in her voice and a sort of despair.

'Tell Kevin Mills …' I said. My mouth was dry from loss of blood. I tried again. She bent her head down to mine to hear above the hubbub.

With humour I said, 'Those Japanese people took a load of photos … I saw the flashes … so tell Kevin to get moving. Get those photos … and he can have … his exclusive.'

CHAPTER 15

India wasn't a newspaperwoman for nothing. The front page of Monday's Pump bore the moderately accurate headline 'Shot in the Back', with, underneath, a picture taken of Gordon Quint aiming his gun unequivocally at my heart.

Gordon's half-backview was slightly out of focus. My own face was sharp and clear with an expression that looked rather like polite interest, not the fatalistic terror I'd actually felt.

Kevin and The Pump had gone to town. The Pump acknowledged that its long campaign of denigration of Sid Halley had been a mistake.

Policy, I saw cynically, had done a one-eighty U-turn. Lord Tilepit had come to such senses as he possessed and was putting what distance he could between himself and Ellis Quint.

There had been twenty eyewitnesses to the shooting of J.S. Halley. Kevin, arming himself with a Japanese interpreter, had listened intently, sorted out what he'd been told, and got it right. Throughout his piece there was an undercurrent of awe that no one was going to be able to dispute the facts. He hadn't once said 'It is alleged.'

Gordon Quint, though still unconscious, would in due course be 'helping the police with their enquiries'. Kevin observed that Ellis Quint's whereabouts were unknown.

Inside the paper there were more pictures. One showed Ellis Quint, arms and fence post raised, on the point of striking his father. The Japanese collectively, and that one photographer in particular, had not known who Ellis Quint was. Ellis didn't appear on the TV screens in Japan.

Why had there been so much photo coverage? Because Mr Halley, Kevin said, had been kind to the honeymooners, and many of them had been watching him as he walked away down Church Street.

I read The Pump while sitting upright in a high bed in a small white side-room in Hammersmith Hospital, thankfully alone except for a constant stream of doctors, nurses, policemen and people with clipboards.

The surgeon who'd dealt with my punctures came to see me at nine in the morning, before he went off duty for the day. He looked a lot worse for wear by then than I did, I thought.

'How are you doing?' he asked, coming in wearily in a sweat-stained green gown.

'As you see … fine, thanks to you.'

He looked at the newspaper lying on the bed. 'Your bullet,' he said, 'ploughed along a rib and in and out of your arm. It tore a hole in the brachial artery, which is why you bled so much. We repaired that and transfused you with three units of blood and saline, though you may need more later. We'll see how you go. There's some muscle damage but with physiotherapy you should be almost as good as new. You seem to have been sideways on, when he shot you.'

'I was turning. I was lucky.'

'You could put it like that,' he said dryly. 'I suppose you do know you've also got a half-mended fracture of the forearm? And some fairly deep trauma to the wrist?'

I nodded. 'And we've put a few stitches in your face.'

'Great.'

'I watched you race,' he said. 'I know how fast jockeys heal. Ex-jockeys too, no doubt. You can leave here when you feel ready.'

I said 'Thanks' sincerely, and he smiled exhaustedly and went away.

I could definitely move the fingers of my right hand, even though only marginally at present. There had been a private moment of sheer cowardice in the night when I'd woken gradually from anaesthesia and been unable to feel anything in my arm from the shoulder down. I didn't care to confess or remember the abject dread in which I'd forced myself to look. I'd awoken once before to a stump. This time the recurrent nightmare of helplessness and humiliation and no hands had drifted horrifyingly in and out, but when I did finally look, there was no spirit-pulverising void but a long white-wrapped bundle that discernibly ended in fingernails. Even so, they didn't seem to be connected to me. I had lain for a grim while trying to consider paralysis, and when at length pain had roared back it had been an enormous relief: only whole healthy nerves felt like that. I had an arm … and a hand … and a life.

Given those, nothing else mattered.

In the afternoon Archie Kirk and Norman Picton argued themselves past the NO VISITORS sign on the door and sat in a couple of chairs bringing good news and bad.

'The Frodsham police found your car,' Norman said, 'but I'm afraid it's been stripped. It's up on bricks -- no wheels.'

'Contents?' I asked resignedly.

'No. Nothing.'

'Engine?'

'Most of it's there. No battery, of course. Everything movable's missing.'

Poor old car. It had been insured though, for a fortune.

Archie said, 'Charles sends his regards.'

'Tell him thanks.'

'He said you would be looking as though nothing much had happened. I didn't believe him. Why aren't you lying down?'

'It's more comfortable sitting up.'

Archie frowned.

I amplified mildly. 'There's a bullet burn across somewhere below my shoulder blade.'

Archie said, 'Oh.'

They both looked at the tall contraption standing beside the bed with a tube leading from a high bag to my elbow. I explained that too.

'It's one of those 'painkiller on demand' things,' I said. 'If I get a twinge I press a button, and bingo, it goes away.'

Archie picked up the copy of The Pump. 'All of a sudden,' he commented, 'you're Saint Sid who can do no wrong.'

I said, 'It's enough to make Ellis's lawyers weep.'

'But you don't think, do you,' Archie said doubtfully, 'that Ellis's lawyers connived at the hate-Halley campaign?'

'Because they are ethical people?' I asked.

'Yes.'

I shrugged and left it.

'Is there any news of Ellis?' I asked. 'Or of Gordon?'

'Gordon Quint,' Norman said in a policemen's voice, 'was, as of an hour ago, still unconscious in a secure police facility and suffering from a depressed skull fracture. He is to have an operation to relieve the pressure on his brain. No one is predicting when he'll wake up or what mental state he'll be in, but as soon as he can understand, he'll be formally charged with attempted murder. As you know, there's a whole flock of eyewitnesses.'

'And Ellis?' I asked.

Archie said,'No one knows where he is.'

'It's very difficult,' I said, 'for him to go anywhere without being recognised.'

Norman nodded. 'Someone may be sheltering him. But we'll find him, don't worry.'

'What happened this morning,' I asked, 'about the trial?'

'Adjourned. Ellis Quint's bail is rescinded as he didn't turn up, and also he'll be charged with grievous bodily harm to his father. A warrant for his arrest has been issued.'

'He wanted to prevent his father from murdering,' I said. 'He can't have meant to hurt him seriously.'

Archie nodded. 'It's a tangle.'

'And Jonathan,' I asked, 'did he go to Shropshire?'

Both of them looked depressed.

'Well,' I said, 'didn't he go?'

'Oh yes, he went,' Norman said heavily. 'And he found the car-parkers.'

'Good boy,' I said.

'It's not so good.' Archie, like a proper civil servant, had brought with him a brief case, from which he now produced a paper that he brought over to the bed. I pinned it down with the weight of my still-sluggish left hand and took in its general meaning.

The car-parkers had signed a statement saying that Ellis Quint had dined with media colleagues and had brought several of them with him to the dance at about eleven-thirty. The parkers remembered him - of course - not only because of who he was (there had been plenty of other well-known people at the party, starting with members of the Royal Family) but chiefly because he had given them a tip and offered them his autograph. They knew it was before midnight, because their employment as car-parkers had ended then. People who arrived later had found only one car-parker - a friend of those who'd gone off duty.

Media colleagues! Damn it, I thought. I hadn't checked those with the duchess.

'It's an unbreakably solid alibi,' Norman observed gloomily. 'He was in Shropshire when the yearling was attacked.'

'Mm.'

'You don't seem disappointed, Sid,' Archie said, puzzled.

'No.'

'But why not?'

'I think,' I said, 'that you should phone Davis Tatum. Will he be in his office right now?'

'He might be. What do you want him for?'

'I want him to make sure the prosecutors don't give up on the trial.'

'You told him that on Saturday.' He was humouring me, I thought.

'I'm not light-headed from bullets, Archie, if that's what you think. Since Saturday I've worked a few things out, and they are not as they may seem.'

'What things?'

'Ellis's alibi, for one.'

'But Sid-'

'Listen,' I said. 'This isn't all that easy to say, so don't look at me, look at your hands or something.' They showed no sign of doing so, so I looked at my own instead. I said, 'I have to explain that I am not as I seem. When people in general look at me they see a harmless person, youngish, not big, not tall, no threat to anyone. Self-effacing. I'm not complaining about that. In fact, I choose to be like that because people then talk to me, which is necessary in my job. They tend to think I'm cosy, as your sister Betty told me, Archie. Owen Yorkshire considers me a wimp. He said so. Only … I'm not really like that.'

'A wimp!' Archie exclaimed.

'I can look it, that's the point. But Ellis knows me better. Ellis calls me cunning and ruthless, and I probably am. It was he who years ago gave me the nickname of tungsten carbide because I wasn't easy to … er … intimidate. He thinks I can't be terrified, either, though he's wrong about that. But I don't mind him thinking it. Anyway, unlikely though it may seem, all this past summer, Ellis has been afraid of me. That's why he made jokes about me on television and got Tilepit to set his paper onto me. He wanted to defeat me by ridicule.'

I paused. Neither of them said a word.

I went on. 'Ellis is not what he seems, either. Davis Tatum thinks him a playboy. Ellis is tall, good-looking, outgoing, charming and loved. Everyone thinks him a delightful entertainer with a knack for television. But he's not only that. He's a strong, purposeful and powerful man with enormous skills of manipulation. People underestimate both of us for various and different reasons - I look weak and he looks frivolous - but we don't underestimate each other. On the surface, the easy surface, we've been friends for years. But in our time we rode dozens of races against each other, and racing, believe me, strips your soul bare. Ellis and I know each other's minds on a deep level that has nothing to do with afternoon banter or chit-chat. We've been friends on that level too. You and Davis can't believe that it is Ellis himself who is the heavyweight, not Yorkshire, but Ellis and I both know it. Ellis has manipulated everyone - Yorkshire, Tilepit, The Pump, public opinion, and also those so-smart lawyers of his who think they're dictating the pace.'

'And you, Sid?' Norman asked. 'Has he pulled your strings too?'

I smiled ruefully, not looking at him. 'He's had a go.'

'I'd think it was impossible,' Archie said. 'He would have to put you underground to stop you.'

'You've learned a lot about me, Archie,' I said lazily. 'I do like to win.'

He said, 'So why aren't you disappointed that Ellis's Shropshire alibi can't be broken?'

'Because Ellis set it up that way.'

'How do you mean?'

'Ever since the Northampton yearling was attacked, Ellis's lawyers have been putting it about that if Ellis had an unbreakable alibi for that night, which I bet he assured them he had, it would invalidate the whole Combe Bassett case. They put pressure on the Crown Prosecution Service to withdraw, which they've been tottering on the brink of doing. Never mind that the two attacks were separate, the strong supposition arose that if Ellis couldn't have done one, then he hadn't done the other.'

'Of course,' Norman said.

'No,' I contradicted. 'He made for himself a positively unbreakable alibi in Shropshire, and he got someone else to go to Northampton.'

'But no one would.'

'One person would. And did.'

'But who, Sid?' Archie asked.

'Gordon. His father.'

Archie and Norman both stiffened as if turned to pillars of salt.

The nerves in my right arm woke up. I pressed the magic button and they went slowly back to sleep. Brilliant. A lot better than in days gone by.

'He couldn't have done,' Archie said in revulsion.

'He did.'

'You're just guessing. And you're wrong.'

'No.'

'But Sid…'

'I know,' I sighed. 'You, Charles and I have all been guests in his house. But he shot me last night. See it in The Pump.'

Archie said weakly, 'But that doesn't mean …'

'I'll explain,' I said. 'Give me a moment.'

My skin was sweating. It came and went a bit, now and then. An affronted body, letting me know.

'A moment?'

'I'm not made of iron.'

Archie breathed on a smile. 'I thought it was tungsten?'

'Mm.'

They waited. I said, 'Gordon and Ginnie Quint gloried in their wonderful son, their only child. I accused him of a crime that revolted them. Ginnie steadfastly believed in his innocence; an act of faith. Gordon, however reluctantly, faced with all the evidence we gathered from his Land-Rover, must have come to acknowledge to himself that the unthinkable was true.'

Archie nodded.

I went on, 'Ellis's wretched persecution of me didn't really work. Sure, I hated it, but I was still there, and meanwhile the time of the trial was drawing nearer and nearer. Whatever odium I drew onto myself by doing it, I was going to describe in court, with all the Press and public listening, just how Ellis could have cut off the foot of Betty's colt. The outcome of the trial - whether or not the jury found Ellis guilty, and whether or not the judge sent him to jail - that wasn't the prime point. The trial itself, and all that evidence, would have convinced enough of the population of his guilt to destroy for ever the shining-knight persona. Topline Foods couldn't have - and, in fact, won't be able to - use those diamond-plated round-the-world ads.'

I took a deep couple of lungfuls of air. I was talking too much. Not enough oxygen, not enough blood.

I said, 'The idea of the Shropshire alibi probably came about gradually, and heaven knows to which of them first. Ellis received an invitation to the dance. The plan must have started from that. They saw it as the one effective way to stop the trial from taking place.'

Hell, I thought, I don't feel well. I'm getting old.

I said, 'You have to remember that Gordon is a farmer. He's used to the idea of the death of animals being profitable. I dare say that the death of one insignificant yearling was as nothing to him when set beside the saving of his son. And he knew where to find such a victim. He would have to have long replaced the shears taken by the police. It must have seemed quite easy, and in fact he carried out the plan without difficulty.'

Archie and Norman listened as if not breathing.

I started again. 'Ellis is many things, but he's not a murderer. If he had been, perhaps he would have been a serial killer of humans, not horses. That urge to do evil - I don't understand it, but it happens. Wings off butterflies and so on.' I swallowed. 'Ellis has given me a hard time, but in spite of several opportunities he hasn't let me be killed. He stopped Yorkshire doing it. He stopped his father last night.'

'People can hate until they make themselves ill,' Archie nodded. 'Very few actually murder.'

'Gordon Quint tried it,' Norman pointed out, 'and all but succeeded.'

'Yes,' I agreed, 'but that wasn't to help Ellis.'

'What was it, then?'

'Have to go back a bit.'

I'm too tired, I thought, but I'd better finish it.

I said to Norman, 'You remember that piece of rag you gave me?'

'Yes. Did you do anything with it?'

I nodded.

'What rag?' Archie asked.

Norman outlined for him the discovery at Northampton of the lopping shears wrapped in dirty material.

'The local police found the shears hidden in a hedge,' I said, 'and they brought them into the stud farm's office while I was there. The stud farm's owners, Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany, were there, and so was Ginnie Quint, who was a friend of theirs and who had gone there to comfort them and sympathise. Ginnie forcibly said how much she despised me for falsely accusing her paragon of a son. For accusing my friend. She more or less called me Judas.'

'Sid!'

'Well, that's how it seemed. Then she watched the policeman unwrap the shears that had cut off the yearling's foot and, quite slowly, she went white … and fainted.'

'The sight of the shears,' Norman said, nodding.

'It was much more than that. It was the sight of the material.'

'How do you mean?'

'I spent a whole day … last Thursday, it seems a lifetime away … I chased all over London with that little piece of cloth, and I finished up in a village near Chichester.'

'Why Chichester?' Archie asked.

'Because that filthy old cloth had once been part of some bed hangings. They were woven as a special order by a Mrs Patricia Huxford, who's a doll of the first rank. She has looms in Lowell, near Chichester. She looked up her records and found that that fabric had been made nearly thirty years ago especially - and exclusively -- for a Mrs Gordon Quint.'

Archie and Norman both stared.

'Ginnie recognised the material,' I said. 'She'd just been giving me the most frightful tongue-lashing for believing Ellis capable of maiming horses, and she suddenly saw, because that material was wrapped round shears, that I'd been right. Not only that, she knew that Ellis had been in Shropshire the night Miss Richardson's colt was done. She knew the importance of his alibi … and she saw -- she understood -- that the only other person who could or would have wrapped lopping shears in that unique fabric, was Gordon. Gordon wouldn't have thought twice about snatching up any old rag to wrap his shears in -- and I'd guess he decided to dump them because we might have checked Quint shears again for horse DNA if he'd taken them home. Ginnie saw that Gordon had maimed the yearling. It was too big a shock … and she fainted.'

Archie and Norman, too, looked shocked.

I sighed. 'I didn't understand that then, of course. I didn't understand it until the night before last, when everything sort of clicked. But now … I think it wasn't just because of Ellis's terrible guilt that Ginnie killed herself last Monday, but because it was Gordon's guilt and reputation as well … and then the trial was starting in spite of everything … and it was all too much … too much to bear.'

I paused briefly and went on, 'Ginnie's suicide sent Gordon berserk. He'd set out to help his son. He'd caused his wife's death. He blamed me for it, for having destroyed his family. He tried to smash my brains in, the morning she'd died. He lay in wait for me outside my flat … he was screaming that I'd killed her. Then, last night, in the actual moment that the picture in The Pump was taken, he was telling me the bullets were for Ginnie … it was my life for hers. He meant … he meant to do it.'

I stopped talking.

The white room was silent.

Later in the day I phoned the hospital in Canterbury and spoke to the ward sister.

'How is Rachel?' I asked.

'Mr Halley! But I thought … I mean, we've all read The Pump.'

'But you didn't tell Rachel, did you?' I asked anxiously.

'No … Linda - Mrs Ferns - said not to.'

'Good.'

'But are you -'

'I'm absolutely OK,' I assured her. 'I'm in Hammersmith Hospital. Du Cane Road.'

'The best!' she exclaimed.

'I won't argue. How's Rachel?'

'You know that she's a very sick little girl, but we're all hopeful of the transplant.'

'Did she go into the bubble?'

'Yes, very bravely. She says it's her palace and she's its queen.'

'Give her my love.'

'How soon … oh dear, I shouldn't ask.'

'I'll make it by Thursday.'

'I'll tell her.'

Kevin Mills and India came to visit before ten o'clock the following morning, on their way to work.

I was again sitting up in the high bed but by then felt much healthier. In spite of my protests my shot and mending arm was still held immobile in a swaddle of splint and bandages. Give it another day's rest, I'd been told, and just practise wiggling your fingers: which was all very well, except that the nurses had been too busy with an emergency that morning to reunite me with my left hand, which lay on the locker beside me. For all that it didn't work properly, I felt naked without it, and could do nothing for myself, not even scratch my nose.

Kevin and India both came in looking embarrassed by life in general and said far too brightly how glad they were to see me awake and recovering.

I smiled at their feelings. 'My dear children,' I said, 'I'm not a complete fool.'

'Look, mate …' Kevin's voice faded. He wouldn't meet my eyes.

I said, 'Who told Gordon Quint where to find me?'

Neither of them answered.

'India,' I pointed out, 'you were the only person who knew I would turn up at Kensington Place at eight o'clock on Sunday evening.'

'Sid!' She was anguished, as she had been in Church Street when she'd found me shot; and she wouldn't look at my face, either.

Kevin smoothed his moustache. 'It wasn't her fault.'

'Yours, then?'

'You're right about your not being a fool,' Kevin said. 'You've guessed what happened, otherwise you'd be flinging us out of here right now.'

'Correct.'

'The turmoil started Saturday evening,' Kevin said, feeling secure enough to sit down. 'Of course, as there's no daily Pump on Sundays there was hardly anyone in the office. George Godbar wasn't. No one was. Saturday is our night off. The shit really hit the fan on Sunday morning at the editorial meeting. You know editorial meetings … well, perhaps you don't. All the department editors - news, sport, gossip, features, whatever, and the senior reporters - meet to decide what stories will be run in the next day's paper, and there was George Godbar in a positive lather about reversing policy on S. Halley. I mean, Sid mate, you should've heard him swear. I never knew so many orifices and sphincters existed.'

'The boss had leaned on him?'

'Leaned! There was a panic. Our lord the proprietor wanted you bought off .'

'How nice,' I said.

'He'd suggested ten thousand smackers, George said. Try ten million, I said. George called for copies for everyone of the complete file of everything The Pump has published about you since June, nearly all of it in India's column on Fridays. I suppose you've kept all those pieces?'

I hadn't. I didn't say so.

'Such poison,' Kevin said. 'Seeing it all together like that. I mean, it silenced the whole meeting, and it takes a lot to do that.'

'I wasn't there,' India said. 'I don't go to those meetings.'

'Be fair to India,' Kevin told me, 'she didn't write most of it. I wrote some. You know I did. Six different people wrote it.'

India still wouldn't meet my eyes and still wouldn't sit in the one empty chair. I knew about 'policy' and being burned at the stake and all that, yet week after week I'd dreaded her by-line. Try as I would, I still felt sore from that savaging.

'Sit down,' I said mildly.

She perched uneasily.

'If we make another dinner date,' I said, 'don't tell anyone.'

'Oh, Sid.'

'She didn't mean to get you shot, for Chrissakes,' Kevin protested. 'The Tilepit wanted you found. Wanted! He was shitting himself, George said. The Pump's lawyer had passed each piece week by week as being just on the safe side of actionable, but at the meeting, when he read the whole file at once, he was sweating, Sid. He says The Pump should settle out of court for whatever you ask.'

'And I suppose you're not supposed to be telling me that?'

'No,' Kevin confessed, 'but you did give me the exclusive of the decade.'

'How did Gordon Quint find me?' I asked again.

'George said our noble lord was babbling on about you promising not to send him to jail if you walked out free from somewhere or other, and you had walked out free, and he wanted to keep you to your promise. George didn't know what he was talking about, but Tilepit made it crystal that George's job depended on finding you within the next five minutes, if not sooner. So George begged us all to find you, to say The Pump would confer sainthood immediately and fatten your bank balance, and I phoned India on the off-chance, and she said not to worry, she would tell you herself … and I asked her how and where. There didn't seem to be any harm in it.'

'Any you told George Godbar?' I said.

Kevin nodded.

'And he,' I said, 'told Lord Tilepit? And he told Ellis, I suppose … because Ellis turned up too.'

'George Godbar phoned Ellis's father's house, looking for Ellis. He got an answering machine telling him to try a mobile number, and he reached Gordon Quint in a car somewhere … and he told Gordon where you would be, if Ellis wanted to find you.'

Round and round in circles, and the bullets come out here.

I sighed again. I was lucky to be alive. I would settle for that. I also wondered how much I would screw out of The Pump. Only enough, I decided, to keep his lordship grateful.

Kevin, the confession over, got restlessly to his feet and walked round the room, stopping when he reached the locker on my left side.

He looked a little blankly at the prosthesis lying there and, after a moment, picked it up. I wished he wouldn't.

He said, surprised, 'It's bigger than I pictured. And heavier. And hard.'

'All the better to club you with,' I said.

'Really?' he asked interestedly. 'Straight up?'

'It's been known,' I said, and after a moment he put the arm down.

'It's true what they say of you, isn't it? You may not look it, but you're one tough bugger, Sid, mate, like I told you before.'

I said, 'Not many people look the way they are inside.'

India said, 'I'll write a piece about that.'

'There you are then, Sid.' Kevin was ready to go. 'I've got a rape waiting. Thanks for those Japs. Makes us even, right?'

'Even,' I nodded.

India stood up as if to follow him. 'Stay a bit,' I suggested.

She hesitated. Kevin said, 'Stay and hold his bloody hand. Oh shit. Well … sorry, mate. Sorry.'

'Get out of here,' I said.

India watched him go.

'I'm really sorry,' she said helplessly, 'about getting you shot.'

'I'm alive,' I pointed out, 'so forget it.'

Her face looked softer. At that hour in the morning she hadn't yet put on the sharply outlined lipstick nor the matt porcelain make-up. Her eyebrows were as dark and positive, and her eyes as light blue and clear, but this was the essential India I was seeing, not the worldly package. How different, I wondered, was the inner spirit from the cutting brain of her column.

She too, as if compelled, came over to my left side and looked at the plastic arm.

'How does it work?' she asked.

I explained about the electrodes, as I had for Rachel.

She picked up the arm and put her fingers inside, touching the electrodes. Nothing happened. No movement in the thumb.

I swallowed. I said, 'It probably needs a fresh battery.'

'Battery?'

'It clips into the side. That box-like thing …' I nodded towards the locker. '… that's a battery charger. There's a recharged battery in there. Change them over.'

She did so, but slowly, because of the unfamiliarity. When she touched the electrodes again, the hand obeyed the signals.

'Oh,' she said.

She put the hand down and looked at me.

'Do you,' she said, 'have a steel rod up your backbone? I've never seen anyone more tense. And your forehead's sweating.'

She picked up the box of tissues lying beside the battery charger and offered it to me.

I shook my head. She looked at the immobilised right arm and at the left one on the locker, and a wave of understanding seemed to leave her without breath.

I said nothing. She pulled a tissue out of the box and jerkily dabbed at a dribble of sweat that ran down my temple.

'Why don't you put this arm on?' she demanded. 'You'd be better with it on, obviously.'

'A nurse will do it.' I explained about the emergency. 'She'll come when she can.'

'Let me do it,' India said.

'No.'

'Why not?'

'Because.'

'Because you're too bloody proud.'

Because it's too private, I thought.

I was wearing one of those dreadful hospital gowns like a barber's smock that fastened at the back of the neck and shapelessly covered the body. A white flap covered my left shoulder, upper arm, elbow, and what remained below. Tentatively India lifted and turned back the flap so that we both could see my elbow and the short piece of forearm.

'You hate it, don't you?' India said.

'Yes.'

'I would hate it, too.'

I can't bear this, I thought. I can bear Ellis unscrewing my hand and mocking me. I can't bear love.

India picked up the electric arm.

'What do I do?' she asked.

I said with difficulty, nodding again at the locker, 'Talcum powder.'

'Oh.' She picked up the prosaic white tinful of comfort for babies. 'In the arm, or on you?'

'On me.'

She sprinkled powder on my forearm. 'Is this right? More?'

'Mm.'

She smoothed the powder all over my skin. Her touch sent a shiver right down to my toes.

'And now?'

'Now hold it so that I can put my arm into it.'

She concentrated. I put my forearm into the socket, but the angle was wrong.

'What do I do?' she asked anxiously.

'Turn the thumb towards you a bit. Not too far. That's right. Now push up while I push down. That top bit will slide over my elbow and grip - and keep the hand on.'

'Like that?' She was trembling.

'Like that,' I said. The arm gripped where it was designed to.

I sent the messages. We both watched the hand open and close.

India abruptly left my side and walked over to where she'd left her handbag, picking it up and crossing to the door.

'Don't go,'I said.

'If I don't go, I'll cry.'

I thought that might make two of us. The touch of her fingers on the skin of my forearm had been a caress more intimate than any act of sex. I felt shaky. I felt more moved than ever in my life.

'Come back,'I said.

'I'm supposed to be in the office.'

'India,' I said, 'please …' Why was it always so impossible to plead? 'Please …' I looked down at my left hand. 'Please don't write about this.'

'Don't write about it?'

'No.'

'Well, I won't, but why not?'

'Because I don't like pity.'

She came halfway back to my side with tears in her eyes.

'Your Jenny,' she said, 'told me that you were so afraid of being pitied that you would never ask for help.'

'She told you too much.'

'Pity,' India said, coming a step nearer, 'is actually about as far from what I feel for you as it's possible to get.'

I stretched out my left arm and fastened the hand on her wrist.

She looked at it. I tugged, and she took the last step to my side.

'You're strong,' she said, surprised.

'Usually.'

I pulled her nearer. She saw quite clearly what I intended, and bent her head and put her mouth on mine as if it were not the first time, as if it were natural. A pact, I thought. A beginning.

Time drifted when she'd gone.

Time drifted to the midday news.

A nurse burst into my quiet room. 'Don't you have your television on? You're on it.'

She switched on knobs, and there was my face on the screen, with a newsreader's unemotional voice saying, 'Sid Halley is recovering in hospital.' There was a widening picture of me looking young and in racing colours: a piece of old film taken years ago of me weighing-in after winning the Grand National. I was holding my saddle in two hands and my eyes were full of the mystical wonder of having been presented with the equivalent of the Holy Grail.

The news slid to drought and intractable famine.

The nurse said 'Wait,' and twiddled more knobs, and another channel opened with the news item and covered the story in its entirety.

A woman announcer whose lugubrious voice I had long disliked put on her portentous-solemn face and intoned:

'Police today found the body of Ellis Quint in his car deep in the New Forest in Hampshire …'

Frozen, I heard her saying, as if from a distance, 'Foul play is not suspected. It is understood that the popular broadcaster left a note for his father, still unconscious after an accidental blow to the head on Sunday night. Now over to our reporter in Hampshire, Buddy Bowes.'

Buddy Bowes, microphone in hand, filled the foreground of the screen with, slightly out of focus in the distance behind him, woodland and activity and a rear view of a white car.

'This is a sad ending,' Buddy Bowes said, appearing at least to show genuine regret, 'to a fairytale life. Ellis Quint, thirty-eight, who gave pleasure to millions with his appearances on television, will also be remembered as the dashing champion amateur steeplechase jockey whose courage and gallantry inspired a whole generation to get out there and achieve. In recent months he has been troubled by accusations of cruelty to animals from his longtime colleague and supposed friend, Sid Halley, ex-professional top jockey. Quint was due to appear in court yesterday to refute those charges …'

There was a montage of Ellis winning races, striding about in macho riding boots, wowing a chat-show audience, looking glowingly alive and handsome.

'Ellis will be mourned by millions,' Buddy Bowes finished. 'And now back to the studio …'

The nurse indignantly switched off the set. 'They didn't say anything about you being shot.'

'Never mind.'

She went away crossly. The reputation Ellis had manufactured for me couldn't be reversed in a night, whatever The Pump might now say. Slowly perhaps. Perhaps never.

Ellis was dead.

I sat in the quiet white room.

Ellis was dead.

An hour later a hospital porter brought me a letter that he said had been left by hand on the counter of the hospital's main reception desk and overlooked until now.

'Overlooked since when?'

Since yesterday, he thought.

When he'd gone I held the envelope in the pincer fingers and tore it open with my teeth.

The two-page letter was from Ellis, his handwriting strong with life.

It said:

Sid, I know where you are. I followed the ambulance. If you are reading this, you are alive and I am dead. I didn't think you would catch me. I should have known you would.

If you're wondering why I cut off those feet, don't you ever want to break out? I was tired of goody goody. I wanted the dark side. I wanted to smash. To explode. To mutilate. I wanted to laugh at the fools who fawned on me. I hugged myself. I mocked the proles.

And that scrunch.

I did that old pony to make a good programme. The kid had leukaemia. Sob-stuff story, terrific. I needed a good one. My ratings were slipping.

Then I lusted to do it again. The danger. The risk, the difficulty. And that scrunch. I can't describe it. It gives me an ecstacy like nothing else. Cocaine is for kids. Sex is nothing. I've had every woman I ever wanted. The scrunch of bones is a million-volt orgasm.

And then there's you. The only one I've ever envied. I wanted to corrupt you too. No one should be unbendable.

I know all you fear is helplessness. I know you. I wanted to make you helpless in Owen Yorkshire's office but all you did was sit there watching your hand turn blue. I could feel you willing me to be my real self but my real self wanted to hear your wrist bones crunch to dust. I wanted to prove that no one was good. I wanted you to crumble. To be like me.

And then, you'll think I'm crazy, I was suddenly glad you weren't sobbing and whining and I was proud of you that you really were how you are, and I felt happy and higher than a kite. And I didn't want you to die, not like that, not for nothing. Not because of me.

I see now what I've done. What infinite damage.

My father did that last colt. I talked him into it.

It's cost my mother's life. If my father lives they'll lock him up for trying to kill you. They should have let me hang, back in June, when I tried with my tie.

They say people want to be caught. They go on and on sinning until someone stops them.

The letter ended there except for three words much lower down the page:

'You win, Sid.'

The two sheets of paper lay on the white bedclothes. No one else would see them, I thought.

I remembered Rachel saying how odd it would be to be dead. To be a space.

The whole white room was a space.

Good and evil, he had been my friend. An enemy: but finally a friend.

The sour, cruel, underside of him receded.

I had the win, but there was no one standing in the stirrups to share it with.

Regret, loss, acceptance and relief; I felt them all.

I grieved for Ellis Quint.