10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [89]
Clumsy, large, unhappy Mrs. Kitchens wouldn’t hear of it. “My Leonard doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other!”
“And does your Leonard change the oil in his own car?”
She looked utterly bewildered. “He can make plants grow, but he’s hopeless at anything else.”
I left poor Mrs. Kitchens to her unsatisfactory marriage, and slept again in Polly’s house.
For most of Sunday I sat alone in the party’s headquarters wishing and waiting for Basil Rudd to dislike his cousin enough to help me, but it wasn’t until nearly six in the evening that the telephone rang.
I picked up the receiver. A voice that was not Basil Rudd’s said, “Is it you that wants to know where to find Bobby Usher Rudd?”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter a damn who I am. Because of his snooping my wife left me and I lost my kids. If you want to fix that bastard Usher Rudd, at this very moment he is in the offices of the Hoopwestern Gazette. ”
The informant at the other end disconnected abruptly.
Usher Rudd was on my doorstep.
I’d expected a longer chase, but the Hoopwestern Gazette’s offices and printing presses were simply down the road. I locked the party headquarters, jumped in my car, and sped through the Sunday traffic with the devil on my tail, anxious not to lose Usher Rudd now that I’d found him.
He was still at the Gazette, though, in mid-furious row with Samson Frazer. When I walked into the editor’s office it silenced them both with their hot words half-spoken.
They both knew who I was.
Bobby Usher Rudd looked literally struck dumb. Samson Frazer’s expression mingled pleasure, apprehension and relief.
He said, “Bobby swears the dope story’s true.”
“Bobby would swear his mother’s a chimpanzee.”
Usher Rudd’s quivering finger pointed at a copy of Thursday’s Gazette that lay on Samson’s desk, and found his voice, hoarse with rage.
“You know what you’ve done?” He was asking me, not Samson Frazer. “You’ve got me sacked from SHOUT! You frightened Rufus Crossmead and the proprietors so badly that they won’t risk my stuff anymore, and I’ve increased their bloody sales for them over the years ... it’s bloody unfair. So now they say they’re the laughingstock of the whole industry, printing a false story about someone whose father might be the next prime minister. They say the story has back-fired. They said it will help George Juliard, not finish him. And how was I to know? It’s effing unfair.”
I said bitterly, “You could have seen Vivian Durridge didn’t know what he was saying.”
“People who don’t know what they’re saying are the ones you listen to.”
That confident statement, spoken in rage, popped a lightbulb in my understanding of Usher Rudd’s success.
I said, “That day in Quindle, when I first met you, you were already trying to dig up scandal about my father.”
“Natch.”
“He tries to dig up dirt about anyone,” Samson put in.
I shook my head. “Who,” I asked Usher Rudd, “told you to attack my father?”
“I don’t need to be told.”
Though I wasn’t exactly shouting, my voice was loud and my accusation plain. “As you’ve known all about cars for the whole of your life, did you stuff up my father’s Range Rover’s sump-plug drain with a candle?”
“What?”
“Did you? Who suggested you do it?”
“I’m not answering your bloody questions.”
The telephone rang on Samson Frazer’s desk.
He picked up the receiver, listened briefly, said “OK” and disconnected.
Usher Rudd, not a newspaperman for nothing, said suspiciously, “Did you give them the OK to roll the presses?”
“Yes.”
Usher Rudd’s rage increased to the point where his whole body shook. He shouted, “You’re printing without the change. I insist ... I’ll kill you ... stop the presses ... if you don’t print what I told you to, I’ll kill you.”
Samson Frazer didn’t believe him, and nor, for all Rudd’s passion, did I. Kill was a word used easily, but seldom meant.
“What change?” I demanded.
Samson’s voice was high beyond normal. “He wants me to print that you faked Sir Vivian’s letter and forged his signature and