Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,53

to limbo. People keep coming to read my notes to see why I’m here, and going away again, never to return.’

His arm was in a sling. He looked freshly shaved, hair brushed, very collected and in control. Hung on the foot of the bed was the clipboard of notes to which he’d referred, so I picked them off and read them also.

‘Your temperature’s ninety-nine, your pulse seventy-five, you’re recovering from birdshot pellets, extracted. No complications. Discharge tomorrow.’

‘None too soon.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Sore,’ he said. ‘Like you, no doubt.’

I nodded, put the notes back and sat on a chair.

‘Tina said this was the third time for you,’ I said.

‘Huh.’ He smiled lop-sidedly. ‘She’s never totally approved of my job. An embezzler took a pot at me once. Very unusual, that, they’re normally such mild people. I suppose it was true to form that he wasn’t altogether successful even at murder. He used too small a pistol and shot me in the thigh. Couldn’t hold the thing steady… I’d swear he shut his eyes just before he fired.’

‘He didn’t fire again?’

‘Ah. Well I was rushing him, you know. He dropped the pistol and started crying. Pathetic, the whole thing.’

I eyed Gerard respectfully. Rushing someone intent on killing you wasn’t my idea of pathos.

‘And the other time?’ I asked.

He grimaced. ‘Mm. Much closer to home. Touch and go, that time. Tina wanted me to promise to do office work only after that, but one can’t, you know. If you’re hunting out criminals of any sort there’s always the outside chance they’ll turn on you, even the industrial spies I’m normally concerned with.’ He smiled again, ironically. ‘It wasn’t anyway the disloyal little chemist who sold his company’s secrets to their chief rival who shot me, it was his father. Extraordinary. Father wouldn’t believe his precious son guilty. He telephoned about six times, shouting I’d sent the most brilliant man of a generation to jail out of spite and ruined his career to cover up for someone else… he was obsessed, you know. Mentally disturbed. Anyway, he was waiting for me one day outside the office. Just walked across the pavement and shot me in the chest.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll never forget his face. Evil triumph… quite mad.’

‘What happened to them?’ I asked, riveted.

‘The father’s in and out of padded cells. Don’t know what’s happened to the son, though he’ll have been out of jail long ago. Sad, you know. Such a clever young man. His father’s pride and joy.’

I was interested. ‘Do you ever try to find out what becomes of the people you catch… afterwards?’

‘No, not often. On the whole they are vain, greedy, heartless and cunning. I don’t care for them. One can feel sorry for them, but it’s with their victims my sympathies normally lie.’

‘Not like the old joke,’ I said.

‘What old joke?’

‘About the man who fell among thieves, who beat him and robbed him and left him bleeding and unconscious in the gutter. And along came two sociologists who looked down upon him lying there and said, the one to the other, “The mar who did this needs our help”.’

Gerard chuckled and made a face, putting his free hand to his shoulder.

‘You mustn’t think,’ he said, ‘that my record is normal. I’ve been unlucky. Only one other man in our firm has ever been wounded. And most policemen, don’t forget, go through their entire careers uninjured.’

Some didn’t, I thought.

‘Your bad luck this time,’ I apologised, ‘was my stupidity.’

He shook his head stiffly, with care. ‘Don’t blame yourself. I drove back into the yard of my own accord. Let’s leave it at that, eh?’

I thought gratefully that he was generous but I felt nonetheless still guilty. Absolution, it had always seemed to me, was a fake. To err was human, to be easily forgiven was to be sentimentally set free to err again. To be repeatedly forgiven destroyed the soul. With luck, I thought, I wouldn’t do anything else to incur Gerard’s forgiveness.

The word that best described Gerard, I thought, was decent. As a detective he wasn’t ‘colourful’ as understood in fiction: that’s to say a womaniser, unshaven and drunk. Goodness, easy enough to perceive, was as quicksilver to define, but that most difficult of virtues lived in the strong lines of his face. Serious, rational, calm, he seemed to be without the mental twitches which afflicted many: the bullying pleasure in petty power, the self regarding pomposity, the devouring anxiety of the insecure, all the qualities I saw at