Proof

by Dick Francis

  I wasn’t good at this sort of thing, I thought miserably. I felt sick. Why couldn’t I have courage like my father?

  I stood in my corner while time stretched agonisingly and silently out… and I’d almost got to the point of thinking it would perhaps be safe to move, when I saw him. He was down below in front of the stands out on the far edge of the tarmac where the bookmakers raised their tempting racket on racedays. He had his back to the racecourse rails. He was scanning the length of stands, searching for movement… searching for a sight of me.

  Beside him, looking upward, was Paul Young.

  If I could see them they could see me… but to them I must be in darkness… I could see them through glass, through the glass of the doors leading from the box to the steps on the balcony.

  I stood frozen, afraid almost to blink. It was movement they would see, not a stock-still shadow in the angle of two walls.

  Why ever, I thought hopelessly, had I dived into such a small dead end so close to the lifts, so easy to track down and find? Why hadn’t I searched for a staircase and run downwards? Going upwards was fatal… one could run out of up. I’d always thought it stupid for fugitives in films to start climbing, and now I’d done it myself. Escape always lay downwards. I thought it and knew it, and couldn’t bring myself to move even though if I ran fast enough and if I could find the way, I might escape down the stairs and be away through some exit before they came in from the tarmac…

  Very slowly I turned my head to look along to where my car was parked by the paddock entrance. I could see it all right, elderly and serviceable, ready to go. I could see also a car parked next to it, where no car had stood when I arrived.

  My eyes ached with looking at the newly arrived car with its noble unmistakable lines and its darkened glass and sable paint.

  Black Rolls-Royce… ‘a black Roller with them tinted windows’… next to my way out.

  Reason told me that Paul Young didn’t know the car next to his was mine. Reason said he didn’t know it was I he was looking for, and that the urgency of his search must be relative. Reason had very little to do with lurching intestines.

  The two men gave up their raking inspection and walked towards the stands, going out of my line of sight below the outer edge of the balcony. If I’d been rushing downstairs I could have run straight into them… If they started searching methodically, and I didn’t move, they would find me. Yet I didn’t move. I couldn’t.

  For a whole hour I saw nothing, heard nothing.

  They were waiting for me, I thought.

  Listening for my footfall on a stairway, for the whine of a lift, for a door stealthily opening. The tension in my body went screaming along like a roller-coaster, winding up as soon as it began to die down, kept going only by my own wretched thoughts.

  Cat and mouse…

  This mouse would stay a long time in his hole.

  Orkney’s box, I thought; where the tartlets had waited so long in their wrapping and Flora had flushed uncomplainingly for Jack’s sake. The sideboard was emptier than ever. Orkney’s bad temper rested sourly in the memory. Breezy Palm had run in panic and lost. Dear heavens…

  When I’d been in Orkney’s box for two hours, Paul Young returned to his Rolls and drove it out of the car park.

  I should have been reassured that it no longer stood next to my Rover, but I wasn’t. I feared that he’d driven out, round and back through a service entrance from the main road, where the delivery vans must come in and out. I feared that he was still down there below me, claws ready.

  When I moved in the end it was out of a sort of shame. I couldn’t stand there quivering forever. If the cat was waiting right outside Orkney’s door… then all the same I’d have to risk it.

  I looked most delicately out… and there was no one in sight. Breathing shallowly with a racing pulse I stepped slowly into the gallery and looked down from the windows there into the wide tarmaced area behind the stands along which I’d walked to find the green door.

  The green door itself was round a corner out of sight, and from my angle I couldn’t see any delivery vans… or any Rolls-Royce.

  No one was out in the rear area looking up to the gallery, but I crabbed along it with my back against the walls of the boxes, sliding past their open doors nervously, ready at any moment to stop, to dive into any shelter, to freeze.

  No sound. I reached the place where the gallery opened into a wider concourse, and in the last yard of window and with my last glance downwards I saw Vernon walk into sight.

  He was still looking around him. Still looking upward. Still unsatisfied, still worried, still persistent.

  I watched him breathlessly until he began to walk back towards the buildings, then I ran through the concourse because at least he couldn’t see me at that point, and at the far end with trepidation approached the stairs to the next lower level; and I went down them in a blue funk and from there out to the huge viewing balcony where tiered rows of seats stretched away on each side, turning their blank tipped-up bottoms to the empty track.

  I walked along behind the top row of seats in the direction of the winning post and saw no one, and at the end hopped over a railing into a similar enclosure labelled firmly ‘Owners and Trainers Only’. Not an owner or trainer in sight. Nor Vernon, nor Paul Young.

  From the ‘Owners and Trainers’ a small staircase led downwards into the main bulk of the stands, and down there I went, heart thudding, trying to make myself believe that the smaller the place I was in, the less likely it was that I would be spotted from a distance.

  The Owners and Trainers’ staircase led into the Owners and Trainers’ bar. There were rattan armchairs, small glass-topped tables, sporting murals, not a bottle or glass in sight: and at the far end, a wide tier of steps allowed one to see through a wall of glass to the parade ring. Outside and to the left, before one reached the parade ring, lay the weighing room and the office of the Clerk of the Course. Beyond the parade ring lay the gate to the car park and to freedom.

  I was there. Nearly there. A door at the bottom of the Owners and Trainers’ enclosed viewing steps led straight out to the area in front of the weighing room, and if only that door like every one else in the building were unlocked, I’d be out.

  I approached the steps thinking only of that, and along from behind the stands, barely twenty paces away from me, marched Vernon.

  If he had walked up to the glass and looked through he would have seen me clearly. I could see even the brown and white checks of his shirt collar over his zipped jacket. I stood stock still in shuddering dismay and watched him walk along to the Clerk of the Course’s office and knock on the door.

  The man who had been writing there came outside. I watched them talking. Watched them both look across to the stands. The man from the office pointed to the way he’d told me to go to find the caterers. Vernon seemed to be asking urgent questions but the office man shook his head and after a while went back indoors; and with clearly evident frustration Vernon began to hurry back the way he’d come.

  The door at the bottom of the Owners and Trainers’ Bar steps proved to be bolted on the inside, top and bottom. I undid the bolts, fumbling. The door itself… the knob turned under my hand and the door opened inward towards me when I pulled, and I stepped out feeling that if Vernon or Paul Young jumped on me at that moment I would scream, literally scream with hysterics.

  They weren’t there. I shut the door behind me and started walking with unsteady knees, and the man from the office came out of his door and said, i say, do you know the caterer’s store manager is looking for you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. It came out as a croak. I cleared my throat and said again, ‘Yes. I just met him along there.’ I pointed to the way Vernon had gone… and I feared he would come back.

  ‘Did you? Righto.’ He frowned at me, puzzled. ‘He wanted to know your name. Most odd, what? I said I didn’t know, but mentioned that it was hours since you’d asked the way to his door. I’d have thought he wou
ld have known.’

  ‘Most odd,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, he knows now. I told him. Er… Peter Cash. Insurance.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Not a bad day,’ I said, looking at the sky. ‘After yesterday.’

  ‘We needed the rain.’

  ‘Yes. Well… good day.’

  He nodded benignly over the civility and returned to his lair, and I went shakily onwards past the parade ring, down the path, through the still open entrance gate and out to the Rover; and no one yelled behind me, no one ran to pounce and clutch and drag me back at the last moment. No one came.

  The keys went tremblingly into the locks. The engine started. There were no flat tyres. I pushed the old gear level through the ancient gears, reverse and forward, and drove away over the cindery grass and through the main gates and away from Martineau Park with Pan at my shoulder fading slowly into the shadows on the journey.

  When I went into the shop it was still only twenty-one minutes to four, although I felt as if I had lived several lifetimes. I headed straight through to the washroom and was sick in the washbasin and spent a long time wretchedly on the loo and felt my skin still clammy with shivers.

  I splashed water on my face and dried it, and when I eventually emerged it was to worried enquiries from Mrs Palissey and open-mouthed concern from Brian.

  ‘Something I ate,’ I said weakly, and took a brandy miniature from the shelves, and despatched it.

  Mrs Palissey and Brian had been too busy with customers to make even a start on the telephone orders. I looked at the pile of numbered lists carefully written in Mrs Palissey’s handwriting and felt absolutely incapable of the task of collecting each customer’s requirements into cartons for delivery.

  ‘Are any of these urgent?’ I asked helplessly.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Mrs Palissey said comfortingly. ‘Only one… and Brian and 1 will see to it.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘I know that. I do really.’

  I went and sat in the office and dialled Gerard’s number.

  Tina answered. Gerard had left his office to go home but would still be on his way to the train. He would telephone, she said, when he came in; and could it wait until after a shower and a drink?

  ‘Preferably not.’

  ‘All right. I’ll tell him. He’ll be tired.’ It was more a warning than a plea, I thought.

  ‘I’ll be brief,’ I said, and she said, ‘Good,’ and put her receiver down decisively.

  Mrs Palissey and Brian left at four-thirty and I locked the shop door behind them, retreating out of sight to my desk while I returned physically to normal and mentally to the accustomed morass of no self-respect.

  Gerard, when he telephoned, sounded very tired indeed.

  ‘How did you get on?’ he said, stifling a yawn. ‘Tina said it wouldn’t wait.’

  I told him what I’d heard of the conversation between Vernon and Paul Young and where I’d been when I heard it: everything in detail to that point but very little after.

  ‘Paul Young?’ he said aghast.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good grief. Look, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  i shouldn’t have sent you there.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid we’re no nearer discovering who Paul Young is or where he came from. Vernon didn’t call him by name from start to finish.’

  ‘We now know for sure he’s Larry Trent’s brother,’ Gerard pointed out. ‘And that’s not much help. Someone in our office traced Larry Trent’s birth certificate yesterday afternoon. He was illegitimate. His mother was a Jane Trent. Father unknown.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Do you want me to tell the police?’

  ‘No, not yet. Let me think it over and call you back. Will you be in your shop all evening?’

  ‘Until nine, yes.’

  ‘Right.’

  I opened my doors again at six, trying and failing to raise genuine interest in the customers’ needs. I felt limp and unsteady as if after illness and wondered how Gerard had survived a working lifetime of chasing villains with every nerve coolly intact.

  He didn’t telephone again until almost closing time, and by then he sounded exhausted.

  ‘Look… Tony… can you meet me in the morning at nine at Martineau Park?’

  ‘Er…’ I said feebly. ‘Well… yes.’ Going back there, I thought, was so low on my priority list as to have dropped off the bottom.

  ‘Good,’ Gerard said, oblivious. ‘I’ve had a good deal of trouble running to ground the proprietor of the caterers at Martineau. Why does everyone go away at weekends? Anyway, he’s meeting us there tomorrow morning. We both agree it’s best to find out just what’s been going on there in the stores before we say anything to the police. I said I’d bring you because you’d know the scotch and the wine if you tasted them, and he agreed you were essential. He himself is no expert, he says.’

  Gerard made the expedition sound perfectly regular. I said, ‘You won’t forget Paul Young’s going there tomorrow afternoon, will you?’

  ‘No. That’s why we must go early, before he removes anything.’

  ‘I meant… the police could arrest him and find out who he is.’

  ‘Once we’re sure the whisky is at Martineau, we’ll alert them.’ He spoke patiently but there were reservations in his voice. He would do the police’s work only when his own was completed.

  ‘Can I count on you?’ he said, after a pause.

  ‘Not to tell them anyway?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said.

  ‘Good.’ He yawned. ‘Goodnight, then. See you in twelve hours.’

  He was waiting in his Mercedes outside the main gates when I arrived, and sleep had clearly done a poor job on restoration. Grey shadows lay in his lean cheeks, with puffed bags under his eyes and lines of strain everywhere, aging him by years.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ he said as I approached. ‘Antibiotics make me feel lousy.’ He was still wearing his sling, I saw, for everything except actual driving. He yawned. ‘How do we get into this place?’

  We went in the way I’d gone the day before, all the gates again standing open, and walked as far as the Clerk of the Course’s office before being challenged. At that point the same man as on the previous day came out with bushy eyebrows rising and asked civilly if he could help us.

  ‘We’ve come to meet Mr Quigley… the caterer.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’m Gerard McGregor,’ Gerard said. ‘This is Tony Beach.’

  The busy eyebrows frowned. ‘I thought you said Cash,’ he said to me. ‘Peter Cash.’

  I shook my head. ‘Beach.’

  ‘Oh.’ He was puzzled, but shrugged. ‘Well, you know the way.’

  We smiled, nodded, walked on.

  ‘Who’s Peter Cash?’ Gerard asked.

  ‘No one.’ I explained about Vernon still searching for me the day before. ‘I didn’t want him to know it was Tony Beach who was there. Peter Cash was the first name which came into my head.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ he said, alarmed, ‘that this Vernon chased you all over the stands?’

  ‘Hardly chased.’

  ‘It must have felt like it to you.’

  ‘Mm.’

  We reached the green door, which on this occasion was firmly locked. Gerard looked at his watch, and almost immediately a proprietor-sized car appeared from behind the far end of the Tote building, pulled up near us outside the Celebration Bar, and disgorged a proprietor-shaped occupant.

  He had black hair, a moustache and a paunch. First impressions also included an air of importance, a touch of irritability and a liking for white silk scarves worn cravat-style under nautical blazers.

  ‘Miles Quigley,’ he announced briefly. ‘Gerard McGregor?’

  Gerard nodded.

  ‘Tony Beach,’ I said.

  ‘Right.’ He looked u
s over without cordiality. ‘Let’s see what all this is about, shall we? Although I’ll tell you again as I told you last night, I’m certain you’re wrong. Vernon has worked for our family for years.’

  I could almost feel Gerard thinking of a hundred clients who had said and believed much the same.

  ‘Vernon who?’ he said.

  ‘What? No, Vernon’s his last name. He’s always called Vernon.’

  The keyhole in the green door was round and uninformative. The key Miles Quigley produced was six inches long. The one inside the other turned with a good deal of pressure and the multiple click of a heavy mortice lock.

  ‘That’s the first locked door I’ve seen on this racecourse,’ I said

  ‘Really?’ Miles Quigley raised his eyebrows. ‘They do tend to open everything for easy maintenance between meetings in the daytime but I assure you everything’s locked at night. A security guard comes on duty after dark. We’re very security conscious of course because of all the alcohol stored here.’

  The green door opened outwards like that by my own storeroom: more difficult to break in. Miles Quigley pulled it wide and we went into the passage, where he importantly turned on the lights by slapping a double row of switches with his palm. Yesterday’s all too familiar scene sprang to life, the long corridor stretching away dimly to the bowels of the kitchens.

  In the wider passage leading to the drinks store Quigley opened a small cupboard marked First Aid and applied to the contents a second key, not as large as the first but equally intricate.

  ‘Security alarm,’ he explained with superiority. ‘A heat-sensitive system. If anyone goes into the store when the system is on, an alarm rings in the security office here on the racecourse and also in the main police station in Oxford. We test the system regularly. I assure you it works.’

  ‘Who has keys?’ Gerard asked, and Quigley’s irritated look was its own reply.