10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [92]
All of the technicians were in that room, wide-eyed and upset. Samson told them unemotionally to go back to work, there was a paper to be got out, and slowly, hesitantly, they obeyed him.
In his chair, Rudd began shouting, “It’s all his fault. Wyvern did it. Wyvern’s the one you want, not me.”
“I don’t believe it,” I contradicted, though I did.
Usher Rudd tried to convince me. “Wyvern wanted your father out of the way. He wanted Orinda in Parliament. He wanted to get her promoted, like Dennis. He would have done anything to stop your father being elected.”
“Like sabotaging his car?”
“I didn’t want to do it. I would write what he wanted. I trailed Paul Bethune for weeks to find his bimbo, to please Wyvern, so that people would vote for Orinda, but messing up a Range Rover, cutting the brake lines like Wyvern wanted, that was too much. I didn’t do it.”
“Yes, you did,” I told him conclusively.
“No, I didn’t.”
“What did you do, then?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Your cousin, Basil, knows what you did.”
Usher Rudd cursed Basil with words I’d hardly ever heard even on a racecourse, and somewhere in the tirade came a description of how he’d wriggled under the Range Rover in the black tracksuit he’d worn to the meeting after the dinner in The Sleeping Dragon. The brilliant performance my father had given that evening had convinced Wyvern that he wouldn’t get rid of my father without at least injuring him badly. Wyvern had been furious with Usher Rudd that his sabotage had been so useless.
Usher Rudd’s rage slowly ran down and he began first to whine and then deny that he had ever said what Samson and I had both just heard.
Samson phoned the police. Joe Duke was not on duty, but Samson knew all the force individually and put down the receiver, reporting a promise of immediate action.
Usher Rudd shouted, “I want a lawyer.”
He got his lawyer, passed a night in the cells and on Monday morning collected a slap on the wrist from a busy magistrate (for causing a disturbance indoors at the Hoopwestern Gazette) who had no real conception of the speed and noise and danger involved.
No actual damage had been done. The newspaper had appeared as usual. Usher Rudd, meek and respectful, walked out free.
I talked to Joe Duke.
I said, “It was Usher Rudd who stuffed wax in the sump drain of the Range Rover, and Leonard Kitchens who started the fire. Both of them were put up to it by Alderney Wyvern.”
Joe Duke slowly nodded. “But they didn’t stop your father, did they? And as for you”—he gave a half smile—“I’ll never forget you that night of the fire, sitting there half-naked on the cobbles with that red blanket over your shoulders and no sign of pain, though you’d burns on your hands and feet and you’d smashed down into the square. Don’t you ever feel pain?”
“Of course, but there was so much happening ...”
“And you’re used to falling off horses?”
“Horses fall.... Anyway, I suppose so. I’ve hit the ground quite a lot.”
The smile broadened. “Then why do it?”
“Speed,” I told him. “Nothing like it.” I paused. “If you want something badly enough, you can risk your life for it and consider it normal behavior.”
He pondered. “If you want Orinda Nagle enough to be an MP, you’ll risk ...”
“Almost anything. I think it was Wyvern who shot at my father.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. He could have carried a rifle in his golf bag, with one of those covers on it that they use for clubs.”
“Yes.”
“And he’d had to have had murder in his mind to do that.”
“Uh huh. And when he heard and saw my father’s success at that meeting, he judged he needed to get rid of him at once.”
“He was crazy.”
“He still is.”
Joe Duke knew my father was engaged in a serious power struggle but was dismayed when I explained about Hudson Hurst.
“You don’t think,” Joe said, horrified, “that Wyvern would try again to kill your father?”
“Wyvern’s stakes are higher now, and my father still stands in his way. If my father is chosen to lead his party, I’m sure he’ll be in appalling danger. It frightens me badly, to be honest.”