Free Come to Grief by Dick Francis Page B

Foods at lunch at Aintree on the day before the Grand National.”
    The list contained the name of the angry Lancashire farmer, as was expected, but it was the top of the list that did the psychological damage.
    “Guest of Honor,” it announced, “Ellis Quint.”
    All the doubts I’d banished came roaring back with double vigor. Back too came self-ridicule and every defense mechanism under the sun.
    I couldn‘t, didn’t, couldn’t believe that Ellis could maim—and effectively kill—a child’s pony and three young racehorses. Not Ellis! No! It was impossible.
    There had to be dozens of other people who could have learned where to find all four of those vulnerable, unguarded animals. It was stupid to give any weight to an unreliable coincidence. All the same, I pulled my box chart out of a drawer, and in very small letters, as if in that way I could physically diminish the implication, I wrote in each “Who knew of victim’s availability” space the unthinkable words, Ellis Quint.
    The “motive” boxes had also remained empty. There was no apparent rational motive. Why did people poke out the eyes of ponies? Why did they stalk strangers and write poison-pen letters? Why did. they torture and kill children and tape-record their screams?
    I wrote “self-gratification,” but it seemed too weak. Insanity? Psychosis? The irresistible primordial upsurge of a hunger for pointless, violent destruction?
    It didn’t fit the Ellis I knew. Not the man I’d raced against and laughed with and had deemed a close friend for years. One couldn’t know someone that well, and yet not know them at all.
    Could one?
    No.
    Relentless thoughts kept me awake all night, and in the morning I sent Linda Ferns’s check back to her, un-cashed.
    “I’ve got no further,” I wrote. “I’m exceedingly sorry.”
    Two days later the same check returned.
    “Dear Sid,” Linda replied, “Keep the money. I know you’ll find the thugs one day. I don’t know what you said to Rachel but she’s much happier and she hasn’t had any bad dreams since you came last week. For that alone I would pay you double. Affectionately, Linda Ferns.”
    I put the check in a pending file, caught up with paperwork and attended my usual judo training session.
    The judo I practiced was the subtle art of self-defense, the shifting of balance that used an attacker’s own momentum to overcome him. Judo was rhythm, leverage and speed; a matter sometimes of applying pressure to nerves and always, in the way I learned, a quiet discipline. The yells and the kicks of karate, the arms slapped down on the padded mat to emphasize aggression, they were neither in my nature nor what I needed. I didn’t seek physical domination. I didn’t by choice start fights. With the built-in drawbacks of half an arm, a light frame and a height of about five feet seven, my overall requirement was survival.
    I went through the routines absentmindedly. They were at best a mental crutch. A great many dangers couldn’t be wiped out by an ability to throw an assailant over one’s shoulder.
    Ellis wouldn’t leave my thoughts.
    I was wrong. Of course I was wrong.
    His face was universally known. He wouldn’t risk being seen sneaking around fields at night armed with anything like a machete.
    But he was bored with celebrity. Fame was no substitute for danger, he’d said. Everything he had was not enough.
    All the same ... he couldn’t.
     
     
    In the second week after the Derby I went to the four days of the Royal Ascot meeting, drifting around in a morning suit, admiring the gleaming coats of the horses and the women’s extravagant hats. I should have enjoyed it, as I usually did. Instead, I felt as if the whole thing were a charade taking illusory place over an abyss.
    Ellis, of course, was there every day: and, of course, he sought me out.
    “How’s it going, Hotline?”
    “The hotline is silent.”
    “There you are, then,” Ellis said with friendly irony, “you’ve