Bonecrack - Страница 34

'Lancat-' he said hopelessly, with a sort of death in his voice. He looked across at me as a couple of helpful onlookers hauled me to my feet, and the despair on his face was bottomless and total.

'Why?' he said. 'Why did he do it?'

I didn't answer. Didn't need to. He already knew.

'I hate him,' he said.

The people around us began to ask questions but neither Alessandro nor I answered them.

From somewhere away to our right there was another loud unmistakable crack. I and half the gathering crowd involuntarily ducked, but the bullet would already have reached us if it had been coming our way.

One crack, then silence. The echoes died quickly over Waterhall, but they shivered for ever through Alessandro's life.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Enso had found Carlo and Cal hidden in a clump of bushes near the Boy's Grave cross roads.

We found them there too, when we walked along to the end of the Line gallop to flag down a passing motorist to take Etty quickly into Newmarket. Etty, who had arrived frantic up the gallop, had at first like all the other onlookers taken it for granted that the shooting had been an accident. A stray bullet loosed off by someone being criminally careless with a gun.

I watched the doubt appear on her face when she realised that my transport had been Lancat and not the Land-Rover, but I just asked her matter-of-factly to buzz down to Newmarket and ring up the dead horse removers, then to drive herself back. She sent Andy off with instructions to the rest of the string, and the first car that came along stopped to pick her up.

Alessandro walked off the training ground into the road with a stunned, stony face, and came towards me. He was leading Lucky Lindsay, which someone had caught, but as automatically as if unaware he was there. Three or four paces away, he stopped.

'What am I to do?' he said. His voice was without hope or anxiety. Lifeless. I didn't answer immediately, and it was then that we heard the noise.

A low distressed voice calling unintelligibly.

Startled, I walked along the road a little and through a thin belt of bushes, and there I found them.

Three of them. Enso and Carlo and Cal.

It was Cal who had called out. He was the only one capable of it. Carlo lay sprawled on his back with his eyes open to the sun and a splash of drying scarlet trickling from a hole in his forehead.

Cal had a wider, wetter, spreading stain over the front of his shirt. His breath was shallow and quick, and calling out loud enough to be found had used up most of his energy.

The Lee Enfield lay across his legs. His hand moved convulsively towards the butt, but he no longer had the strength to pick it up.

And Enso- Cal had shot Enso with the Lee Enfield at a range of about six feet. It wasn't so much the bullet itself, but the shock wave of its velocity: at that sort distance it had dug an entrance as large as a plate.

The force of it had flung Enso backwards, against a tree. He sat there now at the foot of it with the silenced pistol still in his hand and his head sunk forward on his chest. There was a soul-sickening mess where his paunch had been, and his back was indissoluble from the bark.

I would have stopped Alessandro seeing, but I didn't hear him come. I heard only the moan beside me, and I turned abruptly to see the nausea spring out in sweat on his face.

For Cal his appearance there was macabre.

'You-' he said. 'You- are dead.'

Alessandro merely stared at him, too shocked to understand, too shocked to speak.

Cal's eyes opened wide and his voice grew stronger with a burst of futile anger.

'He said- I had killed you. Killed his son. He was- out of his senses. He said- I should have known it was you-' He coughed, and frothy blood slid over his lower lip.

'You did shoot at Alessandro,' I said. 'But you hit a horse.'

Cal said with visibly diminishing strength, 'He shot Carlo- and he shot me- so I let him have it- the son of a bitch- he was out- of his senses-'

The voice stopped. There was nothing anyone could do for him, and presently, imperceptibly, he died.

He died where he had lain in wait for Tommy Hoylake. When I knelt beside him to feel his pulse, and lifted my head to look along the gallop, there in front of me was the view he had had: a clear sight of the advancing horses, from through the sparse low branches of a concealing bush. The dark shape of Lancat lay like a hump on the grass three hundred yards away, and another batch of horses, uncaring, were sweeping round the far bend and turning towards me.

An easy shot, it had been, for a marksman. He hadn't bothered even with a telescopic sight. At that range, with a Lee Enfield, one didn't need one. One didn't need to be of pinpoint accuracy: anywhere on the head or trunk would do the trick. I sighed. If he had used a telescopic sight, he would probably have realised that what he was aiming at was Alessandro.

I stood up. Clumsily, painfully, wishing I hadn't got down.

Alessandro hadn't fainted. Hadn't been sick. The sweat had dried on his face, and he was looking steadfastly at his father.

When I moved towards him he turned, but he needed two or three attempts before he could get his throat to work.

He managed it, finally. His voice was strained; different; hoarse: and what he said was as good an epitaph as any.

'He gave me everything,' he said.

We went back to the road, where Alessandro had tethered Lucky Lindsay to a fence. The colt had his head down to the grass, undisturbed.

Neither of us said anything at all.

Etty clattered up in the Land-Rover, and I got her to turn it round and take me straight down to the town.

'I'll be right back,' I said to Alessandro, but he stared silently at nothing with eyes that had seen too much.

When I went back, it was with the police. Etty stayed behind at Rowley Lodge to see to the stables, because it was, still, and incredibly, Guineas day, and we had Archangel to look to. Also, in the town, I made a detour to the doctor, where I bypassed an outraged queue waiting in his surgery, and got him to put the ends of my collar-bone back into alignment. After that it was a bit more bearable, though nothing still to raise flags about.

I spent most of the morning up at the cross-roads. Answered some questions and didn't answer others. Alessandro listened to me telling the highest up of the police who had arrived from Cambridge that Enso had appeared to me to be unbalanced.

The police surgeon was sceptical of a layman's opinion.

'In what way?' he said without deference.

I paused to consider. 'You could look for spirochaetes,' I said, and his eyes widened abruptly before he disappeared back into the bushes.

They were considerate to Alessandro. He sat on somebody's raincoat on the grass at the side of the road, and later on the police surgeon gave him a sedative.

It was an injection, and Alessandro didn't want it. They wouldn't pay attention to his objections, and when the needle went into his arm I found him staring fixedly at my face. He knew that I too was thinking about too many other injections; about myself, and Carlo, and Moonrock and Indigo and Buckram. Too many needles. Too much death.

The drug didn't put him out, just made him look more dazed than before. The police decided he should go back to the Forbury Inn and sleep, and steered him towards one of their cars.

He stopped in front of me before he reached it, and gazed at me in awe from hollow dark sockets in a grey gaunt face.

'Look at the flowers,' he said. 'On the Boy's Grave.'

When he had gone I walked over to the raincoat where he had been sitting, close to the little mound.

There were pale yellow polyanthus, and blue forget-me-nots coming into flower round the edge: and all the centre was filled with pansies. Dark dark purple velvet pansies, shining black in the sun.

It was cynical of me to wonder if he could have planted them himself.

Enso was in the mortuary and Alessandro was asleep when Archangel and Tommy Hoylake won the Guineas.

Not what they had planned.

A heaviness like thunder persisted with me all afternoon, even though there was by then no reason for it. The defeat of Enso no longer directed half my actions, but I found it impossible in one bound to throw off his influence. It was not until then that I understood how intense it had become.

What I should have felt was relief that the stable was safe. What I did feel was depression.

The merchant banker, Archangel's owner, was practically incandescent with happiness. He glowed in the unsaddling enclosure and joked with the Press in shaky pride.

'Well done, my boy, well done indeed,' he said to me, to Tommy, and to Archangel impartially, and looked ready to embrace us all.

'And now, my boy, now for the Derby, eh?'

'Now for the Derby,' I nodded, and wondered how soon my father would be back at Rowley Lodge.

I went to see him, the next day.

He was looking even more forbidding than usual because he had heard all about the multiple murders on the gallops. He blamed me for letting anything like that happen. It saved him, I reflected sourly, from having to say anything nice about Archangel.

'You should never have taken on that apprentice.'

'No,' I said.

'The Jockey Club will be seriously displeased.'

'Yes.'

'The man must have been mad.'

'Sort of.'

'Absolutely mad to think he could get his son to ride Archangel by killing Tommy Hoylake.'

I had had to tell the police something, and I had told them that. It had seemed enough.

'Obsessed,' I agreed.

'Surely you must have noticed it before? Surely he gave some sign?'