10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [45]
The police investigation sauntered upwards from Joe, whose mother drove a school bus, to higher ranks at county level, but the firefighters couldn’t swear the two bow-fronts had been torched and no one found a .22 rifle to match the lost-again bullet, and Foster Fordham’s report on wax in the Range Rover’s sump was judged inconclusive.
George Juliard might have been the target of three attempts on his candidature, if not on his life, but again he might not. There were no obvious suspects.
In the August doldrums for news, London editors gave the puzzle two full days of wide coverage. George Juliard shone on television nationwide. Every single voter in the Hoopwestern constituency knew who JULIARD was.
While my father dealt with publicity people and Mervyn Teck drove around like an agitated bluebottle searching for inexpensive substitute headquarters, I spent most of the Sunday sitting in an armchair by the window of our Sleeping Dragon room, letting bruises and grazes heal themselves, and looking across the square at the burned-out building opposite.
From somewhere up here, I thought, from somewhere here among the many hanging baskets of geraniums (her Leonard, the nurseryman, had designed them, Mrs. Kitchens had told me with pride), from among all these big clusters of scarlet pompoms and little blue flowers whose name I didn’t know, and from among the fluffy white flowers that filled and rounded the bright living displays decorating the whole long frontage of The Sleeping Dragon, from somewhere up here someone had aimed a .22 rifle at my father.
The marksman probably hadn’t been in this room given to us in the night, which was much farther along towards the Town Hall than the main door of the hotel from which we’d walked. A shot from where I sat would have had to take into account that the target wasn’t walking straight ahead but moving sideways. A stalker’s shot, but not a stalker’s gun.
A ricochet could of course take a bullet anywhere, but I thought it unlikely that a ricochet from where I sat would have turned and hit the charity shop.
At one point, shuffling on the padded blisters, I explored the length of the hotel’s second floor, glimpsing the square through an open doorway or two and coming to a little lounge area furnished with armchairs and small tables that I reckoned lay directly above the front hall and main door, accessible to the world. Straight ahead through the window from there was the unmarked path I’d taken with my father across the cobbles.
Anyone ... anyone ... if one had the nerve, could have stood among the floor-length curtains, opened the window, rested the barrel of a .22 on the windowsill and shot through the geraniums and the warm night.
My father, interested, asked the manager for the names of the people sleeping in the bedrooms on Wednesday night, but although the register was freely opened, no one familiar appeared.
“Nice try, Ben,” my father sighed; and the police had the same nice try in due course, with similar results.
By Monday morning Mervyn had rented an empty shop in a side street and borrowed a desk for Crystal and some folding chairs. The campaign hiccuped for two days while he cajoled his friendly neighborhood printer into replacement leaflet and poster production at grand-prix speed and near-to-cost prices, but by late Tuesday afternoon the indefatigable witches, Faith, Marge and Lavender, had turned the empty shop into a fully working office complete with teapot and mobile phone.
On Monday and Tuesday George Juliard filled the newspapers, and enlivened some chat shows, and on Wednesday morning a miracle happened.
Mervyn had sticky-taped a new large-scale map