by Dick Francis
‘I might.’
He thought it over. ‘I do know where you could see the plans, but no one will want you to, except me. If I get you a look at them, will you tell just me what you think of them? Then at least I’d have some idea of whether new stands are a good idea or not. I mean, I don’t know how to vote about the future of the racecourse, because I don’t really know the significance of the options. So yes, you’re right, if I had to choose now it would be a gut reaction. I’d choose because of the way I am. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘How about taking a look-see at Conrad’s pet architect’s plans, then?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘This choice game’s a knock-out. Come on then, we’ll do a bit of breaking and entering.’ He stood up decisively and turned towards the door. ‘Can you pick locks?’
‘It depends on the lock. But given due warning and high need, possibly.’
‘Good.’
‘How long,’ I asked, ‘will it take?’
He paused, eyebrows rising. ‘Half an hour, maybe.’
‘OK.’
I followed him out of the Mayflower and into his runabout, and we set off with a jolt to a destination undisclosed.
‘How about I choose not to go bald?’ It amused him in a bitter sort of way.
‘Not a choice.’
We were heading east, Swindon behind us, Wantage, according to the signposts, ahead. Long before we reached there, however, Dart put his foot on the brake and swerved in through some open gates set in a stone wall. Up a short driveway he came to a halt in front of a large house built of smooth grey bricks with bands of smooth pink bricks and inset patterns of smooth yellowish bricks, all in all (to me) an eyesore.
‘I was brought up here,’ Dart said encouragingly. ‘What do you think of it?’
‘Edwardian,’ I said.
‘Near enough. Last year of Victoria.’
‘Solid, anyway.’
A turret. Big sash windows. A conservatory. Affluent middle-class display.
‘My parents rattle around in it now,’ Dart said frankly. ‘They’re out, by the way. Father was going to meet Mother from the racecourse. They won’t be back for hours.’ He pulled a bunch of keys out of the ignition and stood up out of the car. ‘We can get in round the back,’ he said, sorting out one key. ‘Come on.’
‘No breaking and entering?’
‘Later.’
At close quarters the walls were still repulsive and also slippery to the touch. The path round to the rear was edged with gloomy evergreen shrubs. At the back of the house, a red brick extension had been added to provide bathrooms: brown-painted drains zig-zagged over the exterior, an invitation to ice. Dart unlocked a brown-painted door and let us into the bowels (well, literally) of the house.
‘This way,’ he said, marching past a cloakroom and other plumbing, briefly glimpsed through half-open doors. ‘Through here.’ He pushed aside a swing door which led from utility to opulence; to the black-and-white tiled floor of a large entrance hall.
We made our way across this to a polished door and into a cluttered oak-panelled room whose chief eyecatchers were endless pictures of horses; some, in oil paintings, hanging thickly on the walls with individual lights on the frames, some in black-and-white photographs in silver frames standing on every surface, some on book jackets. Horse-head bookends supported leather-bound classics like The Irish R.M. and Handley Cross. A silver fox held down papers on a busy desk. Silver and gold coins were displayed in collections. A hunting crop lay casually coiled on a broken-springed chair. Copies of Horse and Hound and Country Life filled a magazine rack to overflowing.
‘Father’s sanctum,’ Dart said unnecessarily. He strolled unconcernedly across the room, skirted the desk and the large chair behind it, and stopped beside a section of panelling which he said was a cupboard door always kept carefully locked by his parent.
‘The racecourse plans are inside,’ Dart said. ‘How about opening it?’
‘Your father wouldn’t approve.’
‘I dare say not. Don’t tell me you’re going all moral and starchy. You pretty well said you could do it.’
‘This is too personal.’
I went round beside him, however, and bent to take a closer look at the lock. All that was to be seen from the outside was an inconspicuous keyhole: without Dart’s knowledge of its existence the door itself would have remained more or less invisible, particularly as a painting of a meet with huntsman and foxhounds adhered on it, to make it indistinguishable from the walls around.
‘Well?’ Dart asked.
‘What does its key look like?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, is it a small short key, or one with a longish narrow shaft with a clump of wards on the end?’
‘A long shaft.’
I straightened up and gave him the bad news.
‘I’ll not touch it,’ I said. ‘Won’t the key be somewhere in this room?’
‘I tried to find it for years in my teens. No good at all. How about a bit of force?’
‘Absolutely not.’
Dart fiddled around with things on the desk. ‘What about this paper-knife? Or this?’ He held up a long buttonhook. ‘It isn’t as if we’re going to steal anything. Just to take a look.’
‘Why does your father have the plans locked up?’
Dart shrugged. ‘He’s secretive by nature. It takes such a lot of energy to be secretive. I can never be bothered.’
The lock was an old and undoubtedly simple warded-bit key job, probably surface-mounted on the inside of the door. The keyhole itself was about an inch from top to bottom, a healthy size that made picking it a cinch. Failing a filed-down key, two wires would have been enough. I was not, however, going to undo it, on the grounds that Conrad would be legitimately furious if he found out, and also because my interest in seeing the plans was not uncontrollable.
‘Wasted journey, then?’ Dart asked.
‘Sorry.’
‘Oh, well.’ It seemed his appetite for the enterprise had easily subsided, as if commonsense had somewhere raised its wiser head. He looked at me assessingly. ‘I’ve a distinct feeling you could, but you won’t.’
The trip had been an anticlimax. I looked at my watch and asked if he would mind taking me back to the racecourse. He agreed, seeming to feel the same deflation. I had not, it was clear, come up to his expectations.
We set off again in his car and I asked where he lived now, himself.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘in Stratton Hays.’
‘Is that a village?’
‘Lord, no.’ He was amused. ‘A house. Though, come to think of it, it’s as big as a village. Grandfather’s house. The old fellow was lonely when Gran died, so he asked me to stay for a while. That was about ten years ago. Keith didn’t like it, of course. He tried to get me out and himself in. He’d lived there a lot of his life, after all. He said it wasn’t natural for a twenty-year-old boy to move in there, but Grandfather wouldn’t have Keith back. I remember all the shouting. I used to get out of the way whenever Keith was around. That wasn’t anything new, mind you. Anyway, I liked Grandfather, and we got on fine. We used to dine together every evening and I drove him most days round the estate and the racecourse. He ran the racecourse himself, really. That’s to say, the colonel that Rebecca was complaining about, Colonel Gardner, he’s the racecourse manager, he would do whatever Grandfather wanted. He’s an excellent manager, whatever Rebecca says. Grandfather had a real knack of picking people to run things, like Colonel Gardner, and those two that I depend on, the farm manager and the land agent. Just as well, because to be frank we only ever had one genius in the family and that was the first baron, who was a merchant banker with a super-plus Midas touch.’ His voice was light and self-deprecating, but there was a depth of feeling in his next statement. ‘I miss the old man rotten, you know.’
We droned along until the woolly-head marchers were again in sight.
‘Stratton Hays,’ Dart said, ‘is straight on past the gates. Not far. On the edge of the racecourse land. Do you want to see it? It’s where your mother lived with Keith. Where she dumped Hannah.’
I looked at my watch, but curiosity prevailed over parental responsibility. I said I would be very interested, and on we went.
Stratton Hays was everything Conrad’s house was not, an ancient homogenous pile in the manner of a smaller Hardwicke Hall. Early seventeenth-century stone and glass in light-hearted proportional harmony, built by the golden fortunes of the Elizabethan age, it looked exactly as it had done for almost four hundred years and certainly as it had forty years earlier when my mother had gone there as a bride.
She had spoken of ‘the Stratton house’ as a heartless heap, projecting her own unhappiness into its walls, so that I was unprepared for its easy-going grandeur. It looked friendly to me, and welcoming.
‘My great great grandfather bought it,’ Dart said off-handedly, ‘as being a suitable seat for a newly ennobled baron. The first baroness is on record as thinking it not aristocratic enough. She wanted Palladian pillars, pediments and porticos.’
As before, we went into the house via an unobtrusive side door, and as before found ourselves in a black-and-white hall, this time floored with marble. There was more space than furniture and no curtains at the high windows and, as my mother had said, it echoed with vanished generations.
‘Keith used to have the west corridor,’ Dart said, heading up a wide staircase. ‘After he divorced your mother he got married again, and Grandfather made him and his new wife take Hannah and find somewhere else to live. Before I was born, of course. It seems Keith didn’t want to go but Grandfather insisted.’
Dart headed across a large unfurnished area and turned a corner into a long wide corridor with a dark wood floor, a runner of crimson carpet and a tall window at the far end.
‘West corridor,’ Dart said. ‘The doors are all unlocked. The rooms get dusted once a month. Browse around, if you like.’
I browsed, feeling uncomfortable. This was where my mother had suffered beatings and what was now called marital rape. Time had stood still in their bedroom. I shivered there.
A dressing room, a boudoir, a study and a sitting room, all with tall uncurtained windows, also opened onto the corridor. A Victorian bathroom and a twentieth-century kitchen had been fitted into what had probably once been another bedroom. No sign of a nursery.
I went back along the corridor and thanked Dart.
‘Did these rooms never have curtains?’ I asked.
‘They rotted away,’ Dart said. ‘Grandfather got rid of them and wouldn’t let Gran replace them.’ He walked towards the stairs. ‘Grandfather and Gran lived in the east corridor. It’s the same architecturally but it’s a proper home. Carpets, curtains, pretty. Gran chose everything there. It feels so empty, now, without either of them. I used to spend most evenings with Grandfather in their sitting room, but I don’t go along there much any more.’
We went down the stairs.
‘Where do you live, then?’ I asked.
‘This house is E-shaped,’ he said. ‘I have the ground floor of the south wing.’ He pointed to a wide passage leading away from the main hall. ‘Father has inherited this house but he and Mother don’t want to live here. They say it’s too big. I’m negotiating with Father to be allowed to stay here as a tenant. Keith wants me out and himself in, sod him.’
‘It must cost a fortune to run,’ I commented.
‘There’s no roof on the north wing,’ he said. ‘Ridiculous, but if part of the house is uninhabitable, they reduce the tax on it. The north wing needed a new roof, but it was more economical to take the roof right off and let the weather do its worst. The north wing’s a ruin. The outside walls still look all right, but it’s a shell.’
I would come back one day soon, I thought, and ask to see the ruin, but at the moment was concerned only to relieve the Gardners of their extended baby-sitting.
Dart obligingly drove me the mile back to the main gate, where our way in was barred by a large bearded man in a woolly hat who stepped into the path of our car. Dart, swearing, jolted to a stop, his only option.
‘They were doing this earlier,’ he said. ‘They stopped Aunt Marjorie on her way to the shareholders’ meeting. And Father, and Keith. They were furious.’
Owing to Roger Gardner having directed me to his house through a down-the-course entrance, I hadn’t had to run the gauntlet myself. The boys, I knew, would have enjoyed it from the safe, high ground of the bus.
The large beard carried a red message on a placard – ‘HORSES RIGHTS COME FIRST.’ He stood without budging in front of the car while a sharp-faced woman rapped on Dart’s window, signalling that he should lower it. Dart stolidly refused, which made her screech her message, which was that all persons to do with racing were murderers. Her thin intensity reminded me vividly of Rebecca, and I wondered which came to them both first, a leaning towards obsession or an activity worthy of it.
She carried a black-edged placard saying ominously ‘DOOM TO RACEGOERS,’ and she was joined at the window by a jollier woman whose notice-on-a-stick read ‘SET HORSES FREE.’
Someone rapped peremptorily on the window my side, and I turned my head and looked straight into the glaring eyes of a fanatical young man showing the blazing fervour of an evangelist.
He yelled ‘Murderer’ at me and shook for my attention a blown-up photograph of a horse lying dead beside white racecourse rails. ‘Murderer’, he repeated.
‘They’re potty,’ Dart said, unconcerned.
‘They’re doing their thing.’
‘Poor buggers.’
The proselytising group had now all gathered round the car, but were staring balefully rather than making overtly threatening movements. Their dedication to the cause stopped short of physically harming us. Their kicks would be a nice warm glow that evening at having expressed their caring natures. They would be unlikely, by themselves, to close down an industry that employed the sixth largest workforce in the country, but that probably made them feel all the safer in attacking it.
So far, I thought, looking at their angry committed faces, they hadn’t been adopted by professional bully-boy saboteurs. A matter of time, perhaps.
Dart, having had enough, began edging his car forward. The bearded way-barrer leaned against the bonnet. Dart waved to the obstruction to remove itself. The obstruction shook its fist and continued leaning. Dart pushed his hand down irritably on the horn and the obstruction jumped to one side, galvanised. Dart rolled slowly ahead. The placard-bearer stalked beside us for several paces but stopped abruptly as we crossed through the gates themselves. Someone, it seemed, must have instructed them about trespass.
‘Such a bore,’ Dart said, accelerating. ‘How long do you think they’ll keep it up?’
‘For your race meeting here next Monday,’ I suggested, ‘I would get a police cordon.’
CHAPTER 5
‘Where’s your car?’ Dart asked. ‘I’m going out the back way. I’m tired of those hate merchants. Where’s your car?’
‘I came in the back way,’ I said. ‘Drop me somewhere down there.’
His eyebrows rose, but all he said was ‘Fine,’ and he headed on the inner way past the grandstands and down the narrow private inconspicuous road to the racecourse manager’s house.
‘What’s that monstrous bus doing there?’ he demanded rhetorically when he saw it.
I said, ‘It’s mine,’ but the words were lost in a sharp horrified exclamation from my driver who had seen, past the bus, the black parked shape of his great aunt’s chauffeured Daimler.
‘Aunt Marjorie! What the hell is she doing here?’
He braked his rusty runabout beside the gleaming ostentation and without much enthusiam decided to investigate. The view that presented itself as we rounded a corner of the manager’s neat modern house had me helplessly laughing, even if I laughed alone.
Double garag
e doors stood open. Within the garage, empty space, swept clean. Out on the drive, the former contents lay untidily in clumps of gardening tools, cardboard boxes, spare roof tiles and rolls of netting for covering strawberry beds. To one side a discard section included a gutted refrigerator, a rotted baby buggy, battered metal trunk, mouse-eaten sofa and a heap of rusty wire.
Standing more or less to attention in a ragged row stood five young helpers deep in trouble, with Mrs Roger Gardner, sweet but threatened by authority, trying ineffectually to defend them.
Marjorie’s penetrating voice was saying, ‘It’s all very well you boys carrying all that stuff out, but you’re not to leave it there. Put everything back at once.’
Poor Mrs Gardner, wringing her hands, was saying, ‘But Mrs Binsham, all I wanted was for them to empty the garage…’
‘This mess is insupportable. Do as I tell you, boys. Put it all back.’
Christopher, looking desperately around, latched onto my arrival with Dart as if saved at the eleventh hour from the worst horror movie.
‘Dad!’ he said explosively. ‘We cleared out the garage.’
‘Yes, well done.’
Marjorie swivelled on one heel and directed her disapproval towards Dart and me, at which point my identification as the father of the workforce left her temporarily speechless.
‘Mr Morris,’ Roger Gardner’s wife said hurriedly, ‘your children have been great. Please believe me.’
It was courageous of her, I thought, considering her husband’s vulnerability to the Stratton family’s whims. I thanked her warmly for keeping the children employed while I’d attended the shareholders’ meeting.
Marjorie Binsham stared at me piercingly but spoke to Dart, her displeasure a vibration in the air.
‘What are you doing here with Mr Morris?’
Dart said with cowardice, ‘He wanted to see Stratton Hays.’
‘Did he, indeed? Stratton Hays is no business of his. This racecourse, however, is yours, or so I should have thought. Yours and your father’s. Yet what have either of you done to look after it? It is I who have had to drive round to see that everything is in order. Colonel Gardner and I, not you and your father, have made a thorough inspection of the course.’