Shattered by Dick Francis

entertainment for the troops.
    Being as close to her as a couple of yards gave my outraged skin goose bumps, but she seemed to think a black mask and leotard had made her invisible.
    I asked again the question she had already refused to answer.
    â€œWho gave a videotape to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races?”
    She answered this time that she didn’t know.
    I said, “Do you mean you didn’t see anyone give Martin a parcel, or that you saw the transfer but didn’t know the person’s name?”
    â€œDead clever, aren’t you,” Rose said sarcastically. “Take your pick.”
    Rose, I thought, wasn’t going to be trapped by words. At a guess she had both seen the transfer and knew the transferrer, but even Torquemada would have had trouble with her, and I hadn’t any thumbscrews handy in Logan Glass.
    I said without much hope of being believed, “I don’t know where to look for the tape you want. I don’t know who took it and I don’t know why. I haven’t got it.”
    Rose curled her lip.
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    As we walked away Worthington sighed deeply with frustration.
    â€œYou’d think Norman Osprey would be the ‘heavy’ in that outfit. He has the voice and the build for it. Everyone thinks of him as the power behind Arthur Robins 1894. But did you see him looking at Rose? She can make any blunder she likes, but I’m told she’s still the brains. She’s the boss. She calls the tune. My low-life investigator gave me a bell. He finds her very impressive, I’m afraid to say.”
    I nodded.
    Worthington, a practiced world traveler, said, “She hates you. Have you noticed?”
    I told him I had indeed noticed. “But I don’t know why.”
    â€œYou’d want a psychiatrist to explain it properly, but I’ll tell you for zilch what I’ve learned. You’re a man, you’re strong, you look OK, you’re successful at your job and you’re not afraid of her; and I could go on, but that’s for starters. Then she has you roughed up, doesn’t she, and here you are looking as good as new, even if you aren’t feeling it, and sticking the finger up in her face, more or less, and believe me, I‘d’ve chucked a rival down the stairs for less, if they as much as yawned in my presence.”
    I listened to Worthington’s wisdom, but I said, “I haven’t done her any harm.”
    â€œYou threaten her. You’re too much for her. You’ll win the tennis match. So maybe she’ll have you killed first. She won’t kill you herself. And don’t ignore what I’m telling you. There are people who really have killed for hate. People who’ve wanted to win.”
    Not to mention murders because of racism or religious prejudice, I thought, but it was still hard to imagine it applying to oneself—until one had felt the watch smash, of course.
    I expected that Rose would have told Eddie Payne, her father, that I was at the races, but she hadn’t. Worthington and I lay in wait for him after the last race and easily am-bushed him in a pincer movement when he came out of the changing rooms on his way to his car.
    He wasn’t happy. He looked from one to the other of us like a cornered horse, and it was as if to a fractious animal that I soothingly said, “Hi, Ed. How’s things?”
    â€œI don’t know anything I haven’t told you,” he protested.
    I thought if I cast him a few artificial flies, I might startle and hook an unexpected fish; a trout, so to speak, sheltering in the reeds.
    So I said, “Is Rose married to Norman Osprey?”
    His face lightened to nearly a laugh. “Rose is still Rose Payne but she calls herself Robins and sometimes Mrs. Robins when it suits her, but she doesn’t like men, my Rose. Pity, really, but there it is.”
    â€œBut she likes to rule them?”
    â€œShe’s always made boys do what she