Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,72

trying to pin her arms down to her sides. She shook me around like a sack of feathers, struggling to get to her feet.

She managed it, lifting me with her, plaster and all. She knew where I’d thrown the knife. She started to go that way, dragging me with her still fastened to her back like a leech.

‘Get that knife and run to the stables,’ I gasped to Roberta. A girl in a million. She simply ran and picked up the knife and went on running, out into the hall and out of the house.

Grace started yelling unintelligibly and began trying to unclamp the fingers I had laced together over her thin breastbone. I hung on for everyone’s dear life, and when she couldn’t dislodge them she began pinching wherever she could reach with fierce hurting spite.

The hair which she usually wore screwed into a fold up the back of her neck had come undone and was falling into my face. I could see less and less of what was going on. I knew only that she was still headed towards the doorway, still unimaginably violent, and mumbling now in a continuous flow of senseless words interspersed with sudden shrieks.

She reached the doorway and started trying to get free of me by crashing me against the jamb. She had a hard job of it, but she managed it in the end, and when she felt my weight fall off her she turned in a flash, sticking out her hands with rigid fingers towards my neck.

Her face was a dark congested crimson. Her eyes were stretched wide in a stark screaming stare. Her lips were drawn back in a tight line from her teeth.

I had never in all my life seen anything so terrifying. Hadn’t imagined a human could look like that, had never visualised homicidal madness.

She would certainly have lolled me if it hadn’t been for Tony, because her strength made a joke of mine. He came tearing into the hall from the kitchen and brought her down with a rugger tackle about the knees, and I fell too, on top of her, because she was trying to tear my throat out in handfuls, and she didn’t leave go.

It took all Tony could do, all Archie could do, all three other lads could do to unlatch her from me and hold her down on the floor. They sat on her arms and legs and chest and head, and she threshed about convulsively underneath them.

Roberta had tears streaming down her face and I hadn’t any breath left to tell her to cheer up, there was no more danger, no more… no more… I leant weakly against the wall and thought it would be too damned silly to pass out now. Took three deep breaths instead. Everything steadied again, reluctantly.

Tony said, ‘There’s a doctor on his way. Don’t think he’s expecting this, though.’

‘He’ll know what to do.’

‘Mother!’ Exclaimed Roberta suddenly. ‘I’d forgotten about her.’ She hurried past me into the drawing-room and I heard her mother’s voice rising in a disturbed, disorientated question.

Grace was crying out, but her voice sounded like seagulls and nothing she said made sense. One of the lads said sympathetically, ‘Poor thing, oughtn’t we to let her get up?’ and Tony answered fiercely, ‘Only under a tiger net.’

‘She doesn’t know what’s happening,’ I said wearily. ‘She can’t control what she does. So don’t for God’s sake let go of her.’

Except for Tony’s resolute six foot they all sat on her gingerly and twice she nearly had them off. Finally and at long last the front door bell rang, and I hopped across the hall to answer it.

It was the local doctor, looking tentative, wondering no doubt if it were a hoax. But he took one look at Grace and was opening his case while he came across the hall. Into her arm he pushed a hypodermic needle and soon the convulsive threshing slackened, and the high pitched crying dulled to murmurs and in the end to silence.

The five men slowly stood up and stepped away from her, and she lay there looking shrunk and crumpled, her greying hair falling in streaks away from her flacidly relaxing face. It seemed incredible that such thin limbs, such a meagre body, could have put out such strength. We all stood looking down at her with more awe than pity, watching while the last twitches shook her and she sank into unconscious peace.

Half an hour later Grace still lay on the floor