‘Yes. Well, there’s only one more thing. What was he like, the man who came and threatened you?’
Brinton didn’t like even the memory of him. ‘He was very strong. Hard. When he pushed me it was like a wall. I’m not… I mean, I’ve never been good with my fists, or anything like that. If he’d started hitting me I couldn’t have stopped him…’
‘I’m not blaming you for not standing up to him,’ I pointed out. ‘I just want to know what he looked like.’
‘Very big,’ he said vaguely. ‘Huge.’
‘I know it’s several weeks ago now, but can’t you possibly remember more than that? How about his hair? Anything odd about his face? How old? What class?’
He smiled for the first time, the sad wrinkles folding for a moment into some semblance of faded charm. If he’d never taken his first useless step into crime, I thought, he might still have been a nice gentle innocuous man, fading without rancour towards old age, troubled only by how to make a little pension go a long way. No tearing, destructive guilt.
‘It’s certainly easier when you ask questions like that. He was beginning to go bald, I remember now. And he had big blotchy freckles on the backs of his hands. It’s difficult to know about his age. Not a youth, though; more than thirty, I think. What else did you ask? Oh yes, class. Working class, then.’
‘English?’
‘Oh yes, not foreign. Sort of cockney, I suppose.’
I stood up, thanked him, and began to take my leave. He said, begging me still for reassurance, ‘There won’t be any more trouble?’
‘Not from me or the agency.’
‘And the man who was shot?’
‘Not from him either.’
‘I tried to tell myself it wasn’t my fault… but I haven’t been able to sleep. How could I have been such a fool? I shouldn’t have let that young man set any trap… I shouldn’t have called in your agency… and it cost another chunk of our savings… I ought never to have tried to get money for that letter…’
‘That’s true, Mr Brinton, you shouldn’t. But what’s done is done, and I don’t suppose you’ll start anything like that again.’
‘No, no,’ he said with pain. ‘I wouldn’t. Ever. These last few weeks have been…’ His voice died. Then he said more strongly, ‘We’ll have to sell the house now. Kitty likes it here, of course. But what I’ve always wanted myself is a little bungalow by the sea.’
When I reached the office I took out the disastrous letter and read it again, before adding it to the file. Being neither the original nor a photocopy, but only a reproduction from memory, it wasn’t of the slightest use as evidence. In the older Brinton’s small tidy script, a weird contrast to the heart-broken contents, it ran:
Dear Mervy, dear big brother,
I wish you could help me, as you did when I was little. I have spent fifteen years building up Dunstable racecourse, and a man called Howard Kraye is making me destroy it. I have to frame races which nobody likes. Very few horses come now, and the gate receipts are falling fast. This week I must see that the race-card goes to the printers too late, and the Press room telephones will all be out of order. There will be a terrible muddle. People must think I am mad. I can’t escape him. He is paying me as well, but I must do as he says. I can’t help my nature, you know that. He has found out about a boy I was living with, and I could be prosecuted. He wants the racecourse to sell for housing. Nothing can stop him getting it. My racecourse, I love it.
I know I shan’t send this letter. Mervy, I wish you were here. I haven’t anyone else. Oh dear God, I can’t go on much longer, I really can’t.
At five to six that afternoon I opened the door of Zanna Martin’s office. Her desk was facing me and so was she. She raised her head, recognised me, and looked back at me in a mixture of pride and embarrassment.
‘I did it,’ she said. ‘If you didn’t, I’ll kill you.’
She had combed her hair even further forward, so that it hung close round her face, but all the same one could see the disfigurement at first glance. I had forgotten, in the days since Friday, just how bad it was.
‘I felt the same about you,’ I said grinning.
‘You really did keep your promise?’
‘Yes, I did. All day Saturday and Sunday, most of yesterday and most of today, and very nasty it is, too.’
She sighed with relief. ‘I’m glad you’ve come. I nearly gave it up this morning. I thought you wouldn’t do it, and you’d never come back to see if I had, and that I was being a proper idiot.’
‘Well, I’m here,’ I said. ‘Is Mr Bolt in?’
She shook her head. ‘He’s gone home. I’m just packing up.’
‘Finished the envelopes?’ I said.
‘Envelopes? Oh, those I was doing when you were here before? Yes, they’re all done.’
‘And filled and sent?’
‘No, the leaflets haven’t come back from the printers yet, much to Mr Bolt’s disgust. I expect I’ll be doing them tomorrow.’
She stood up, tall and thin, put on her coat and tied the scarf over her hair.
‘Are you going anywhere this evening?’ I asked.
‘Home,’ she said decisively.
‘Come out to dinner,’ I suggested.
‘Aunty’s legacy won’t last long, the way you spend. I think Mr Bolt has already invested your money. You’d better save every penny until after settlement day.’
‘Coffee, then, and the flicks?’
‘Look,’ she said hesitantly, ‘I sometimes buy a hot chicken on my way home. There’s a fish and chip shop next to the station that sells them. Would you… would you like to come and help me eat it? In return, I mean, for Friday night.’
‘I’d enjoy that,’ I said, and was rewarded by a pleased half-incredulous laugh.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
As before, we went to Finchley by underground, but this time she sat boldly where her whole face showed. To try to match her fortitude, I rested my elbow on the seat arm between us. She looked at my hand and then at my face, gratefully, almost as if we were sharing an adventure.
As we emerged from the tube station she said, ‘You know, it makes a great deal of difference if one is accompanied by a man, even…’ she stopped abruptly.
‘Even,’ I finished, smiling, ‘if he is smaller than you and also damaged.’
‘Oh dear… and much younger, as well.’ Her real eye looked at me with rueful amusement. The glass one stared stonily ahead. I was getting used to it again.
‘Let me buy the chicken,’ I said, as we stopped outside the shop. The smell of hot chips mingled with diesel fumes from a passing lorry. Civilisation, I thought. Delightful.
‘Certainly not.’ Miss Martin was firm and bought the chicken herself. She came out with it wrapped in newspaper. ‘I got a few chips and a packet of peas,’ she said.
‘And I,’ I said firmly, as we came to an off-licence, ‘am getting some brandy.’ What chips and peas would do to my digestion I dared not think.
We walked round to the house with the parcels and went through into her room. She moved with a light step.
‘In that cupboard over there,’ she said, pointing, as she peeled off her coat and scarf, ‘there are some glasses and a bottle of sherry. Will you pour me some? I expect you prefer brandy, but have some sherry if you’d like. I’ll just take these things into the kitchen and put them to keep hot.’
While I unscrewed the bottles and poured the drinks I heard her lighting her gas stove and unwrapping the parcels. There was dead quiet as I walked across the room with her sherry, and when I reached the door I saw why. She held the chicken in its piece of greaseproof paper absently in one hand: the bag of chips lay open on the table with the box of peas beside it: and she was reading the newspaper they had all been wrapped in.
