Gideon’s Sport - John Creasey

“No! Oh, God, no!”

The taxi was bumping along a cobbled road, which told Charlie that they were among the docks and warehouses, probably near the Old Steps. Now and again another car passed, but there was little sound; few people came along here in the evening. The rumble of the bumping drowned other sounds and in any case Charlie Blake was in such a state of mortal terror that the words he uttered were little more than hoarse whispers. But there was a tiny segment of his mind not frozen by the terror, and all his thoughts passed through this.

Who had told this man? Who was he? Why had they been watching him? How did he know about Lemaitre?

“Come on,” the man snapped. “Let’s have it! Who’s going to dope the horses?”

Charlie was gasping.

Then, with his other hand, the man in the corner gripped his vitals and squeezed, bringing a terrible pain. The sweat on Charlie’s forehead rolled down; into his eyes, his mouth, under his chin, and the pain spread all over his body, making anguish in his thighs, his legs, his stomach, his shoulders.

“Tell me what you know!” the man rasped.

“Let go!” Charlie choked out the words. “Let go! I’ll tell you! It-it’s Jackie Spratt’s, the whole company -they’ve got a fix ready-they can make a million. But I wasn’t going to tell Lemaitre! I was just going to make a packet for myself-Lemaitre’s a joke. Oh, God,” he pleaded. “Let me go!”

The man released him, and he doubled up on the floor.

As he did so, the driver turned in his seat and spoke through the glass partition.

“He’s there.”

‘He’ meant Lemaitre; ‘there’ meant the Old Steps.

“Sure?”

“I saw him go in.”

“Okay,” said the man in the corner. “You know what to do.”

“Sure, I know. Don’t do anything in my cab, though.”

“Nothing that will show,” the other promised.

Charlie was now leaning against the edge of the seat for support. His expression was one of piteous entreaty as for the first time, he saw the face of the man who was tormenting him. It was a hard, handsome face, with deep-set eyes, a deep groove between the heavy black brows and a deep cleft in the chin. In new and abject terror, he realised that it was John Spratt, one of the three brothers who owned the vast betting-shop network that was Jackie Spratt’s Limited.

“So you weren’t going to see Lemaitre at the Old Steps?” John Spratt said heavily.

“No — I swear I wasn’t! I was just going for a drink — a drink on the terrace  —  I love the river, and —”

“So you love the river?” John Spratt’s dark eyes glinted with a strange kind of merriment. “Okay, Charlie Blake, I’ll see you get plenty of river!”

Then he laughed. And his laughter sent a terrible chill through the man whom Lemaitre was waiting to see in the pub overlooking the Thames.

Gideon slept fitfully that night, as far away from Kate, his wife, as he could get in their big double bed. The merest touch of body against body created oven-heat. With every window and door wide open, there was still not a breath of air.

Lemaitre, moody and troubled because his informant had let him down, and not looking forward to making his report to Gideon tomorrow, was restless, too. But his wife in her bed, the clothes thrown off, lay outstretched and beautifully naked. There was enough light from a street lamp for Lemaitre to be acutely aware of her body, especially at certain moments; and he kept turning on his back. He would love to be with her, but it was too hot, everything would be spoiled. And it was a pity to wake her.

By God, she was lovely! Beautiful.

His thoughts slipped back to an earlier marriage; a beautiful bitch of a woman who had nearly driven him out of his mind. Chloe always, always, eased his mind. If he could talk to her at this very moment, he would feel better. But he mustn’t disturb her; it wasn’t fair.

He turned away from her again.

“Lem,” she asked, in a far from drowsy voice. “Can’t you sleep?”

His heart leapt as he turned towards her.

In the pleasant house in Wimbledon where he boarded, P.C. Bob Donaldson could not sleep either, and for some peculiar reason he kept thinking about Martha Triggett. Not deeply, not resentfully, not even suspiciously; he was simply aware of her and the month he had spent learning hair-dressing with her, and the Charm School of which he knew and yet to which he had never been admitted. Between these odd moments of thinking of her he kept tossing and turning, shifting his pillow to try to find a spot which was not damp. His hair needed cutting, and was almost soaking wet . . . that was why he kept thinking of old Aunty! Pleased with this understanding, he turned over and dropped off into a sound sleep.

Another man was sleeping very soundly, a few miles away from P.C. Donaldson; a man who was not at all troubled by the sticky heat. He was Barnaby Rudge, whose childhood — in fact, most of his twenty-three years — had been spent in summer heat and humidity much greater than this, in a small but spotlessly clean, cross-ventilated house near Montgomery in Alabama.

Rudge slept on his back. Just outside the window of this small house in Southfields, Surrey, was a street lamp which shone directly in on him. The light showed up the shiny darkness of his face and the stark whiteness of his pillow and the single sheet which covered him to his chest. One arm-his right arm, the arm with which he served -was outside the sheet, lying parallel with his body. His expression was absolutely peaceful; it would be easy to imagine that he was dreaming happily. In fact, he was not dreaming.

But before going to sleep, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling, he had been day-dreaming — of Wimbledon. Wimbledon: his Mecca! Wimbledon, which he had followed with such rapt attention in those boyhood days when he had played, unceasingly and nearly always alone, with an old racquet against the wall of his house; sometimes the wall of the mill where his father worked. As the years had passed, he had gone to work at the same mill, found others to play tennis, found it possible to play on a real grass court, found himself using a racquet which was properly strung . . .

There was much that he had not known, in those days. For instance, that a man who was building an extra store room for the mill often watched him. This man’s name was Willison, and in those days he had been a man in his early thirties, a very keen tennis player but much more keenly a master-builder in the business he had inherited from an uncle. And there at the mill, while the raw cotton was being unloaded from the great wire cages on the trucks, with the cotton and its dust flying lazily in the bright sunlight, and the great maws of the feeder taking the fluffy stuff to work and card and turn it into threads, he had seen the young negro play.

Barnaby Rudge had played tennis in every moment of his spare time; every moment when there was light enough to see. And Willison, passing by the mill some evenings, had seen the solitary figure, a silhouette against the red-tinged beauty of the after-glow, serving to an imaginary opponent. He served with utter and unbelievable precision, time after time, to hit a tiny circle-no larger than a tennis ball-placed in various spots inside the serving area.

Willison had been fascinated.

At that stage, some men might have found Barnaby Rudge a special ‘fixed’ job so that he could spend most of his time on the tennis court. In this way he could have been frequently tested in tournaments, and regularly exposed to players a little better and more experienced than himself. And in this way, many believed, champions were made. Willison had never quite understood what had held him back; but then, he had never quite understood himself. He had a flair, perhaps even a touch of genius, which told him when to act and when to bide his time. He had not been sure, in those early days, what to make of Barnaby Rudge, except that Barnaby was undoubtedly going to be a brilliant player; his reflexes were as remarkable as his physical strength and endurance. But how brilliant, and in what way it would be best to develop him, Willison did not know.

He gave Barnaby a job in his building organisation, one which would keep him fit as well as develop his body and leave him ample time for practice. And he soon discovered one strange characteristic about Barnaby which proved very helpful: Barnaby was a loner. The companionship of others did not mean much to him, and he took real pleasure in his constant search after perfection in placing a tennis ball exactly where he wanted it. In other things, he was no more than average, in some ways even less.

He had to be told what to do and how to do it time and time again. But once he got it into his head, nothing could shake it out and he became set on performing every task to the absolute limit of his capacity. He had a pleasant, humble home life. Besides working in the mill, his father was a Baptist minister, his mother was a midwife: there was no poverty and no hunger in his family.

One business friend of Willison’s, seeing Barnaby play one day, remarked: “That boy wants some real competition, Lou. He could make the big time.”

“He’s not ready, yet,” Louis Willison had demurred.

Barnaby sometimes drove him in a utility truck to one of the working sites: Willison invariably had half-a-dozen different building projects in hand at one time. (“He’ll stretch himself too fir one day,” the wiseacres said. But he made more and more money, and took on more and more projects.) Just after his friend’s comment he spoke more seriously than usual as Barnaby drove him to a site.

“What do you want to do as you get older, Barnaby?”

“Play more tennis, sir,” came the swift answer.

“Big   tennis?  Professional   tennis?”  asked  Willison.

“Only one place means anything to me in tennis, sir. Just one place-and that’s Wimbledon.” Barnaby uttered the name in awe.

“Wimbledon!” gasped Willison.

“That’s what you’ve been keeping me for, sir, isn’t it?” asked Barnaby, and Willison quickly recovered his poise and told his harmless white lie.

“Yes-but I didn’t think you realised it.” After a pause, he went on: “Wimbledon can be murder, Barnaby. You would need a lot of competition and match-practice to get anywhere near the final. You must know that.”

“I surely do, sir,” said Barnaby, humbly. “But I got one tiling I haven’t shown even you, sir — a surefire winner anywhere I use it. I wanted to wait until I had it perfect; you taught me the value of patience real well!”

Willison, half-amused, half-amazed, pondered; then asked, almost warily: “How near are you to perfection?”

“I can show you any time,” declared Barnaby. “All we need is a tennis court with no one looking on, Mr Willison. Maybe if one of your friends would let me show you on a private court —” He looked shyly hopeful.

Three days later, he gave his demonstration; and Willison was astounded.

Barnaby had a fireball service which no player in the world was ever likely to be able to return. He admitted that he didn’t know exactly how he did it: there was something in the way his biceps and forearm muscles flexed and merged in tremendous power at the moment of contact between gut and ball. But he could now use it with devastating accuracy, striking any part of the court he desired at will.

After the demonstration, shiny-faced, perspiring, he looked to his sponsor for comment.

“Barnaby,” Willison told him urgently, “don’t show that service to a soul. Not a single person, do you understand? Keep it in practice, but hide it from everyone except me.”

“I certainly will,” Barnaby promised fervently.

“And now we’ve got to get you some competition — you’ve got to work on the rest of your game. But understand: don’t let anyone so much as glimpse that service!”

“It sure is a fireball, isn’t it?” Barnaby said, with a fascinating mixture of humility and confidence. “It sure is a surefire winner, Mr. Willison. It sure is good.”

Only a few weeks later, when he had paid the substantial expenses of the trip, Willison had run head-on against his first business disaster. He put up a bottling and distributing plant for a new nation-wide soft drinks company, which went bankrupt. His losses were so great that he had to borrow to meet his obligations, and he came close to cancelling the trip to England. But the more he thought, the more he saw Barnaby as the means of recouping his losses. If he could get long odds on a substantial sum, and Barnaby won, he could not only repay his debts but have all the capital he needed for future business.

The venture which had started as a model of altruism had become absolutely vital to him.

CHAPTER FOUR

Morning Reports

Gideon dropped off to sleep in the small hours, and there was by comparison a touch of coolness in the air when he woke a little after seven o’clock. But the morning wasn’t really fresh; simply less hot and humid than the night had been. Kate had her back to him, one bare arm over the bedspread, dark hair with touches of grey in a hairnet, which was half-on, half-off. She was so sound asleep that he felt sure she hadn’t managed to drop off until summer’s early dawn, or thereabouts. He got out of bed, drew up the trousers of his pyjamas, and crossed to the door. The bedroom, with its high ceiling and big, old-fashioned wardrobe creaked as he trod on a loose board beneath the carpet, but the sound did not wake Kate.

Three other doors led off this landing, all open. Penelope, the Gideon daughter who was still unmarried and lived at home, should be in one room, but her bed was empty. Malcolm, their youngest son, who usually slept late and had to be rousted out of bed, was not in his room, either. Gideon finished in the bathroom, peeped in and saw Kate still sound asleep, and went cautiously down the stairs. As he opened the kitchen door, Penelope turned from the gas stove on which eggs were sizzling.

“Oh, hallo, Daddy! You up already?”

“What are you up to, that’s more to the point,” Gideon countered.

“I thought I’d make my own breakfast and get off without waking Mummy. You haven’t woken her, have you?” she demanded, suddenly accusing.

“Not yet.”

“Then don’t you dare!”

“Why not?” asked Gideon, feeling the brown earthenware tea-pot. He snatched his hand away, and picked up a padded pot-holder before pouring himself some tea.

“She’s tired out,” Penny said. “This hot weather’s almost finished her.”

“Now, don’t be-!” began Gideon, but he didn’t finish. That was not wholly because of the warning expression on his daughter’s pretty face. It had dawned on him that Penelope had simply pointed out to him what he had already subconsciously noticed yet hadn’t talked about: the fact that Kate was very tired these days.

“How bad is she?” he asked.

“I think she ought to see a doctor,” said Penelope, promptly.

“Have you suggested it to your mother?”

“She looks at me pityingly every time I do-as if she can’t understand what’s happened to her baby! Seriously, Daddy, she isn’t well. She really isn’t. She needs a rest or a change — surely you know that?”