Shattered by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

7

I took the quiet old back way through the woods, climbing the overgrown gently sloping carriage road that thoughtful Sir George Newnes had had blasted through rock to save his horses having to haul a coach up a heart-straining incline to his house.

On that January Tuesday I walked alone through the trees. Traffic motored sparsely along a modern road on the other side of the hill, raising not even a distant hum on its way to the new complex that had risen on the memory of the old.

There were no birds where I walked; no song. It was dark even in daylight, the close-growing evergreens crowding overhead. My feet trod noiselessly on fallen fir needles and in places there were still bare upright slabs of raw gray blasted rock. Atmospherically the hundred-year-old path raised goose bumps. There were ruins of a tennis court where long ago people had laughed and played in another world. Eerie, I thought, was the word for it, but I saw no ghosts.

I came down to Hollerday Phoenix House from above, as “A Spokesman” had foretold, and saw that much of the roof was covered with large metal-framed panes of glass, which opened and closed like roofs of greenhouses. The glass of course interested me—it was thick float glass tinted to filter out ultraviolet A and B rays of sunlight—and I thought of the departed days of sanataria, where people with tuberculosis most unromantically coughed their lives away in the vain hope that airy sunshine would cure them.

Hollerday Phoenix House spread wide in one central block with two long wings. I walked around to the impressive front door and found that the building I entered at the conclusion of the spooky path was definitely of the twenty-first century, and in no way the haunt of apparitions.

The entrance hall looked like a hotel, but I saw no farther into the nursing home’s depths because of the two white-coated people leaning on the reception desk. One was female and the other grew a coat-colored beard, and did indeed wear orange socks.

They glanced briefly my way as I arrived, then straightened with resigned professional interest when I presented with cuts and bruises that actually, until they peered at me, I had forgotten.

“Doctor Force?” I tried, and White-Beard satisfactorily answered, “Yes?”

His fifty-six years sat elegantly on his shoulders, and his well-brushed hair, along with the beard, gave him the sort of shape to his head that actors got paid for. Patients would trust him, I thought. I might have been pleased myself to have him on my case. His manner held authority in enough quantity to show me I was going to have difficulty jolting him the way I wanted.

Almost at once I saw, too, that the difficulty was not a matter of jolting him but of following the ins and outs of his mind. All through the time I was with him I felt him swing now and then from apparently genuine and friendly responses to evasion and stifled ill will.

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