10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [24]
Mervyn Teck met us on the doorstep looking at his watch and checking, but by good luck and asking the way (less pride on my part than shame of arriving late) we had turned up on the exact minute advertised by a scatter of leaflets.
On the table on the platform, beside the temperamental microphone, there were a gavel for calling the meeting to order and two large plates of sandwiches secured by plastic wrap.
Two or three earnest lady volunteers crowded around the candidate with goodwill, but it was plain, ten minutes after start time, that apathy, and not enthusiasm, had won the evening.
I expected my father to be embarrassed by the small turnout and to hurry through the unsatisfactory proceedings, but he made a joke of it, abandoning the microphone, and sat on the edge of the platform, beckoning the sparse and scattered congregation to come forward into the first few rows, to make the meeting more coherent.
His magic worked. Everyone moved forward. He spoke to them familiarly, as if addressing a roomful of friends, and I watched him turn a disaster into a useful exercise in public relations. By the time the sandwiches had been liberated from the plastic even the few who had come to heckle had been tamed to silence.
Mervyn Teck looked both thoughtful and displeased.
“Something the matter?” I asked.
He said sourly, “Orinda would have drawn a much better house. She’d have packed the hall. They love her here: she presents prizes to the children here every term. She buys them herself.”
“I’m sure she’ll go on doing it.”
I meant it without irony, but Mervyn Teck gave me a glance of dislike and moved away. One of the lady volunteers sweetly told me that the time of the meeting had clashed with the current rave series on the television, and that even the pubs were suffering from it on Thursday nights. Tomorrow would be different, she said. Tomorrow the Town Hall will be packed.
“Er ...,” I said, “what’s happening in the Town Hall?”
“But you’re his son, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but ...”
“But you don’t know that tomorrow night your father goes face-to-face in a debate with Paul Bethune?”
I shook my head.
“Fireworks,” she said happily. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
My father, when I asked him about it on the short drive back to the center of Hoopwestern, seemed full of equal relish.
“I suppose,” I said, “there’ll be more point to it than the sort of fiasco tonight could have been.”
“Every vote counts,” he corrected me. “If I won only a few tonight, that’s fine. You have to win the floaters over to your side, and they have to be persuaded one by one.”
“I’m hungry,” I said as we passed a brightly lit take-away, so we backtracked and bought chicken wings with banana and bacon, and even there my father, recognized, fell into political chat with the man deep-frying chips.
In the early morning I went out and bought a copy of the Gazette. Sleaze and Paul Bethune filled pages four and five (with photographs) but the front-page topic of concern was headlined “Juliard Shot?”
Columns underneath said yes (eyewitnesses) and no (he wasn’t hurt). Statements from the police said nothing much (they couldn’t find a gun). Statements from onlookers, like the self-important gunshot expert, said Juliard had definitely been the object of an assassination attempt. He thought so and he was always right.
The consensus theory of the reporters (including Usher Rudd) was that resentment against Juliard was running high in the Orinda Nagle camp. The editor’s leader column didn’t believe that political assassination ever took place at so low a level. World leaders, perhaps. Unelected local candidates, never.
I walked through the town to the ring road looking for Rudd’s Repair Garage and found the staff unlocking their premises for the day. They had a large covered workshop and an even larger wire-fenced compound where jobs done or waiting stood in haphazard rows. The Range Rover was parked in