by Dick Francis
‘Well, he isn’t my father-in-law. I’ve just been talking to him in his house in Oxfordshire. You collect a couple of helpers and chuck my visitor out.’
I put down the receiver sighing. A man up in my room meant everything I’d brought to Seabury would very likely be ripped to bits. That left me with just the clothes I stood in, and the car…
I fairly sprinted round to where I’d left the car. It was locked, silent and safe. No damage. I patted it thankfully, climbed in, and drove out to the racecourse.
FIFTEEN
All was quiet as I drove through the gates and switched off the engine. There were lights on – one shining through the windows of the Press room, one outside the weighing room door, one high up somewhere on the stands. The shadows in between were densely black. It was a clear night with no moon.
I walked across to the Press room, to see if the security patrols had anything to report.
They hadn’t.
All four of them were fast asleep.
Furious, I shook the nearest. His head lolled like a pendulum, but he didn’t wake up. He was sitting slumped into his chair. One of them had his arms on the table and his head on his arms. One of them sat on the floor, his head on the seat of the chair and his arms hanging down. The fourth lay flat, face downwards, near the opposite wall.
The stupid fools, I thought violently. Ex-policemen letting themselves be put to sleep like infants. It shouldn’t have been possible. One of their first rules in guard work was to take their own food and drink with them and not accept sweets from strangers.
I stepped round their heavily breathing hulks and picked up one of the Press telephones to ring Chico for reinforcements. The line was dead. I tried the three other instruments. No contact with the exchange on any of them.
I would have to go back and ring up from Seabury, I thought. I went out of the Press room but in the light pouring out before I shut the door I saw a dim figure walking towards me from the direction of the gate.
‘Who’s that?’ he called imperiously, and I recognised his voice. Captain Oxon.
‘It’s only me, Sid Halley.’ I shouted back. ‘Come and look at this.’
He came on into the light, and I stood aside for him to go into the Press room.
‘Good heavens. What on earth’s the matter with them?’
‘Sleeping pills. And the telephones don’t work. You haven’t seen anyone about who ought not to be?’
‘No. I haven’t heard anything except your car. I came down to see who had come.’
‘How many lads are there staying overnight in the hostel? Could we use some of those to patrol the place while I ring the agency to get some more men?’
‘I should think they’d love it,’ he said, consideringly. ‘There are about five of them. They shouldn’t be in bed yet. We’ll go over and ask them, and you can use the telephone from my flat to ring your agency.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s fine.’
I looked round the room at the sleeping men. ‘I think perhaps I ought to see if any of them tried to write a message. I won’t be a minute.’
He waited patiently while I looked under the head and folded arms of the man at the table and under the man on the floor, and all round the one with his head on the chair seat, but none of them had even reached for a pencil. Shrugging, I looked at the remains of their supper, lying on the table. Half eaten sandwiches on grease-proof paper, dregs of coffee in cups and thermos flasks, a couple of apple cores, some cheese sections and empty wrappings, and an unpeeled banana.
‘Found anything?’ asked Oxon.
I shook my head in disgust. ‘Not a thing. They’ll have terrible headaches when they wake up, and serve them right.’
‘I can understand you being annoyed…’ he began. But I was no longer really listening. Over the back of the chair occupied by the first man I had shaken was hanging a brown leather binoculars case: and on its lid were stamped three black initials: L.E.O. Leo. Leo.
‘Something the matter?’ asked Oxon.
‘No.’ I smiled at him and touched the strap of the binoculars. ‘Are these yours?’
‘Yes. The men asked if I could lend them some. For the dawn, they said.’
‘It was very kind of you.’
‘Oh. Nothing.’ He shrugged, moving out into the night. ‘You’d better make the phone call first. We’ll tackle the boys afterwards.’
I had absolutely no intention of walking into his flat.
‘Right,’ I said.
We went out of the door, and I closed it behind us.
A familiar voice, loaded with satisfaction, spoke from barely a yard away. ‘So you’ve got him, Oxon. Good.’
‘He was coming…’ began Oxon in anxious anger, knowing that ‘got him’ was an exaggeration.
‘No,’ I said, and turned and ran for the car.
When I was barely ten yards from it someone turned the lights on. The headlights of my own car. I stopped dead.
Behind me one of the men shouted and I heard their feet running. I wasn’t directly in the beam, but silhouetted against it. I swerved off to the right, towards the gate. Three steps in that direction, and the headlights of a car turning in through it caught me straight in the eyes.
There were more shouts, much closer, from Oxon and Kraye. I turned, half dazzled, and saw them closing in. Behind me now the incoming car rolled forward. And the engine of my Mercedes purred separately into life.
I ran for the dark. The two cars, moving, caught me again in their beams. Kraye and Oxon ran where they pointed.
I was driven across and back towards the stands like a coursed hare, the two cars behind inexorably finding me with their lights and the two men running with reaching, clutching hands. Like a nightmare game of ‘He’, I thought wildly, with more than a child’s forfeit if I were caught.
Across the parade ring, across the flat tarmac stretch beyond it, under the rails of the unsaddling enclosure and along the weighing room wall. Sometimes only a foot from hooking fingers. Once barely a yard from a speeding bumper.
But I made it. Safe, panting, in the precious dark, on the inside of the door into the trainers’ luncheon room and through there without stopping into the kitchen. And weaving on from there out into the members’ lunch room, round acres of tables with upturned chairs, through the far door into the wide passage which cut like a tunnel along the length of the huge building, across it, and up a steep stone staircase emerging half way up the open steps of the stands, and sideways along them as far as I could go. The pursuit was left behind.
I sank down, sitting with one leg bent to run, in the black shadow where the low wooden wall dividing the Members from Tattersalls cut straight down the steps separating the stands into two halves. On top of the wall wire netting stretched up too high to climb: high enough to keep out the poorer customers from gate-crashing the expensive ring.
At the bottom of the steps lay a large expanse of Members’ lawn stretching to another metal mesh fence, chest high, and beyond that lay the whole open expanse of racecourse. Half a mile across it to the London road to Seabury, with yet another barrier, the boundary fence, to negotiate.
It was too far. I knew I couldn’t do it. Perhaps once, with two hands for vaulting, with a stomach which didn’t already feel as if it were tearing into more holes inside. But not now. Although I always mended fast, it was only two weeks since I had found the short walk to Andrews’ body very nearly too much; and Fred’s well-aimed attentions on the previous day had not been therapeutic.
Looking at it straight: if I ran, it had to be successful. My kingdom for a horse, I thought. Any reasonable cowboy would have had Revelation hitched to the rails, ready for a flying leap into the saddle and a thundering exit. I had a hundred and fifty mile an hour little white Mercedes: and someone else was sitting in it.
To run and be caught running would achieve nothing and be utterly pointless.
Which left just one alternative.
The security patrol hadn’t been drugged f
or nothing. Kraye wasn’t at Seabury for his health. Some more damage had been planned for this night. Might already have been done. There was just a chance, if I stayed to look, that I could find out what it was. Before they found me. Naturally.
If I ever have any children, they won’t get me playing hide and seek.
Half an hour later the grim game was still in progress. My own car was now parked on the racecourse side of the stands, on the tarmac in Tattersalls where the bookies had called the odds that afternoon. It was facing the stands with the headlights full on. Every inch of the steps was lit by them, and since the car had arrived there I had not been able to use that side of the building at all.
The other car was similarly parked inside the racecourse gates, its headlights shining on the fronts of the weighing room, bars, dining-rooms, cloakrooms and offices.
Presuming that each car still had a watching occupant, that left only Kraye and Oxon, as far as I could guess, to run me to ground: but I became gradually sure that there were three, not two, after me in the stands. Perhaps one of the cars was empty. But which? And it would be unlikely to have its ignition key in place.
Bit by bit I covered the whole enormous block. I didn’t know what I was looking for, that was the trouble. It could have been anything from a plastic bomb downwards, but if past form was anything to go by, it was something which could appear accidental. Bad luck. A jinx. Open, recognisable sabotage would be ruinous to the scheme.
Without a surveyor I couldn’t be certain that part of the steps would not collapse the following day under the weight of the crowd, but I could find no trace of any structural damage at all, and there hadn’t been much time: only five or six hours since the day’s meeting ended.
There were no large quantities of food in the kitchen: the caterers appeared to have removed what had been left over ready to bring fresh the next day. A large double-doored refrigerator was securely locked. I discounted the possibility that Kraye could have thought of large scale food poisoning.
All the fire extinguishers seemed to be in their places, and there were no smouldering cigarette ends near tins of paraffin. Nothing capable of spontaneous combustion. I supposed another fire, so soon after the stables, might have been too suspicious.
I went cautiously, carefully, every nerve-racking step of the way, peering round corners, easing through doors, fearing that at any moment one of them would pounce on me from behind.
They knew I was still there, because everywhere they went they turned on lights, and everywhere I went I turned them off. Opening a door from a lighted room on to a dark passage made one far too easy to spot; I turned off the lights before I opened any door. There had been three lights in the passage itself, but I had broken them early on with a broom from the kitchen.
Once when I was in the passage, creeping from the men’s lavatories to the Tattersalls bar, Kraye himself appeared at the far end, the Members’ end, and began walking my way. He came in through the faint glow from the car’s headlights, and he hadn’t seen me. One stride took me across the passage, one jump and a wriggle into the only cover available, the heap of equipment the bookmakers had left there out of the weather, overnight.
These were only their metal stands, their folded umbrellas, the boxes and stools they stood on: a thin, spiky, precarious heap. I crouched down beside them, praying I wouldn’t dislodge anything.
Kraye’s footsteps scraped hollowly as he trod toward my ineffective hiding place. He stopped twice, opening doors and looking into the store-rooms which were in places built back under the steps of the stands. They were mostly empty or nearly so, and offered nothing to me. They were too small, and all dead ends: if I were found in one of them, I couldn’t get out.
The door of the bar I had been making for suddenly opened, spilling bright light into the passage between me and Kraye.
Oxon’s voice said anxiously, ‘He can’t have got away.’
‘Of course not, you fool,’ said Kraye furiously. ‘But if you’d had the sense to bring your keys over with you we’d have had him long ago.’ Their voices echoed up and down the passage.
‘It was your idea to leave so much unlocked. I could go back and fetch them.’
‘He’d have too much chance of giving us the slip. But we’re not getting anywhere with all this dodging about. We’ll start methodically from this end and move down.’
‘We did that to start with,’ complained Oxon. ‘And we missed him. Let me go back for the keys. Then as you said before we can lock all the doors behind us and stop him doubling back.’
‘No,’ said Kraye decisively. ‘There aren’t enough of us. You stay here. We’ll go back to the weighing room and start all together.’
They began to walk away. The bar door was still open, lighting up the passage, which I didn’t like. If anyone came in from the other end, he would see me for sure.
I shifted my position to crawl away along the wall for better concealment, and one of the bookmakers’ metal tripods slid down and clattered off the side of the pile with an echoing noise like a dozen demented machine guns.
There were shouts from the two men down the passage.
‘There he is.’
‘Get him.’
I stood up and ran.
The nearest opening in the wall was a staircase up to a suite of rooms above the changing room and Members’ dining-room. I hesitated a fraction of a second and then passed it. Up those steps were the executive’s rooms and offices. I didn’t know my way round up there, but Oxon did. He had a big enough advantage already in his knowledge of the building without my giving him a bonus.
I ran on, past the gent’s cloaks, and finally in through the last possible door, that of a long bare dirty room smelling of beer. It was a sort of extra, subsidiary bar, and all it now contained was a bare counter backed by empty shelves. I nearly fell over a bucket full of crinkled metal bottle tops which someone had carelessly left in my way, and then wasted precious seconds to dart back to put the bucket just inside the door I’d come in by.
Kraye and Oxon were running. I snapped off the lights, and with no time to get clear through the far door out into the paddock, where anyway I would be lit by car headlights, I scrambled down behind the bar counter.
The door jerked open. There was a clatter of the bucket and a yell, and the sound of someone falling. Then the light snapped on again, showing me just how tiny my hiding place really was, and two bottle tops rolled across the floor into my sight.
‘For God’s sake,’ yelled Kraye in anger. ‘You clumsy, stupid fool. Get up. Get up.’ He charged down the room to the far door, the board floor bouncing slightly under his weight. From the clanking, cursing, and clattering of bottle tops I imagined that Oxon was extricating himself from the bucket and following. If it hadn’t been so dangerous it would have been funny.
Kraye yanked the outside door open, stepped outside and yelled across to the stationary car to ask where I had gone. I felt rather than saw Oxon run down the room to join him. I crawled round the end of the counter, sprinted for the door I had come in by, flipped off the light again, slammed the door, and ran back up the passage. There was a roar from Kraye as he fumbled back into the darkened room, and long before they had emerged into the passage again, kicking bottle tops in all directions, I was safe in the opening of a little offshoot lobby to the kitchen.
The kitchens were safest to me because there were so many good hiding places and so many exits, but it wasn’t much good staying there as I had searched them already.
I was fast running out of places to look. The boiler room had given me an anxious two minutes as its only secondary exit was into a dead end store-room containing, as far as I could see, nothing but vast oil tanks with pipes and gauges. They were hard against the walls: nowhere to hide. The boiler itself roared, keeping the central heating going all through the night.
The weighing room was even worse, because it was big and entirely without cover. It contained nothing it shouldn’t have: tables, chair
s, notices pinned on the walls, and the weighing machine itself. Beyond, in the changing room, there were rows of pegs with saddles on, the warm, banked-up coke stove in the corner, and a big wicker basket full of helmets, boots, weight cloths and other equipment left by the valets overnight. A dirty cup and saucer. A copy of Playboy. Several raincoats. Racing colours on pegs. A row of washed breeches hanging up to dry. It was the most occupied looking part of the stands, the place I felt most at home in and where I wanted to go to ground, like an ostrich in familiar sand. But on the far side of the changing room lay only the wash room, another dead end.
Opening out of the weighing room on the opposite side to the changing room was the Stewards’ room, where in the past like all jockeys I’d been involved in cases of objections-to-the-winner. It was a bare room: large table, chairs round it, sporting pictures, small threadbare carpet. A few of the Stewards’ personal possessions lay scattered about, but there was no concealment.
A few doors here and there were locked, in spite of Oxon having left the keys in his flat. As usual I had the bunch of lock-pickers in my pocket and with shortened breath I spent several sticky minutes letting myself into one well secured room off the Members’ bar. It proved to be the liquor store: crates of spirits, champagne, wine and beer. Beer from floor to ceiling, and a porter’s trolly to transport it. It was a temptation to lock myself in there, and wait for the caterers to rescue me in the morning. This was one door that Oxon would not expect to find me on the far side of.
In the liquor store I might be safe. On the other hand, if I were safe the racecourse might not be. Reluctantly I left again; but I didn’t waste time locking up. With the pursuit out of sight, I risked a look upstairs. It was warm and quiet, and all the lights were on. I left them on, figuring that if the watchers in the cars saw them go out they would know too accurately where I was.
Nothing seemed to be wrong. On one side of a central lobby there was the big room where the executive held their meetings and ate their lunch. On the other side there was a sort of drawing-room furnished with light armchairs, with two cloakrooms leading off it at the back. At the front, through double glass doors, it led out into a box high up on the stands. The private box for directors and distinguished guests, with a superb view over the whole course.