sessions and the departure of the late Mr Mays we had found ourselves finally alone.
It was already Sunday morning. The sun, with no sense of fitness, was brightly shining. Regent’s Park sparkled with frost and the puddles were glazed with ice.
‘Go to bed,’ I said to Owen.
He shook his head. ‘Think I’ll go home.’
‘Come back when you’re ready.’
He smiled. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘For a spot of sweeping up.’
When he’d gone I wandered aimlessly about, collecting coffee cups and emptying ashtrays and thinking disconnected thoughts. I felt both too tired and too unsettled for sleep, and it was then that I found myself going back to the devastation in the workshop.
The spirit of the dead man had gone. The place no longer vibrated with violent hate. In the morning light it looked a cold and sordid shambles, squalid debris of a spent orgy.
I walked slowly down the room, stirring things with my toe. The work of twenty years lay there in little pieces. Designs torn like confetti. Toys crushed flat. Nothing could be mended or saved.
I supposed I could get duplicates at least of the design drawings if I tried, because copies were lodged in the patents’ office. But the originals, and all the hand-made prototype toys, were gone for good.
I came across the remains of the merry-go-round which I had made when I was fifteen. The first Rola; the beginning of everything. I squatted down and stirred the pieces, remembering that distant decisive summer when I’d spent day after day in my uncle’s workshop with ideas gushing like newly-drilled oil out of a brain that was half child, half man.
I picked up one of the little horses. The blue one, with a white mane and tail. The one I’d made last of the six.
The golden barley-sugar rod which had connected it to the revolving roof was snapped off jaggedly an inch above the horse’s back. One of the front legs was missing, and one of the ears.
I turned it over regretfully in my hands and looked disconsolately around at the mess. Poor little toys. Poor beautiful little toys, broken and gone.
It had cost me a good deal, one way and another, to get Energise back.
Turn the handle, Charlie had said, and all the little toys would revolve on their spindles and do what they should. But people weren’t toys, and Jody and Macrahinish and Ganser Mays had jumped violently off their spindles and stripped the game out of control.
If I hadn’t decided to take justice into my own hands I wouldn’t have been kicked or convicted of drunkenness. I would have saved myself the price of Black Fire and a host of other expenses. I wouldn’t have put Owen at risk as a guard, and I wouldn’t have felt responsible for the ruin of Jody and Felicity, the probable return to jail of Macrahinish, and the death of Ganser Mays.
Pointless to say that I hadn’t meant them so much harm, or that their own violence had brought about their own doom. It was I who had given them the first push.
Should I have done it?
Did I wish I hadn’t?
I straightened to my feet and smiled ruefully at the shambles, and knew that the answer to both questions was no.
Epilogue
I gave Energise away.
Six weeks after his safe return to Rupert’s stable he ran in the Champion Hurdle and I took a party to Cheltenham to cheer him on. A sick tycoon having generously lent his private box, we went in comfort, with lunch before and champagne after and a lot of smiling in between.
The four newly-registered joint-owners were having a ball and slapping each other on the back with glee: Bert, Allie, Owen and Charlie, as high in good spirits as they’d been at the census.
Charlie had brought the bridge-playing wife and Bert his fat old mum, and Owen had shyly and unexpectedly produced an unspoiled daughter of sixteen. The oddly mixed party proved a smash-hit success, my four conspirators carrying it along easily on the strength of liking each other a lot.
While they all went off to place bets and look at the horses in the parade ring, I stayed up in the box. I stayed there most of the afternoon. I had found it impossible, as the weeks passed, to regain my old innocent enthusiasm for racing. There was still a massive movement of support and sympathy for Jody, which I supposed would never change. Letters to sporting papers spoke of sympathy for his misfortunes and disgust for the