by Dick Francis
He brought an old-fashioned microphone from a drawer, fitted plug to socket, and handed me the instrument.
‘Just speak,’ he said.
I took a breath and tried to sound urgent but not utterly frightening, though utterly frightened was what I myself felt.
‘This is Dad,’ I said as slowly as I could, so they could hear clearly. ‘Christopher, Toby, Edward, Alan, the grandstands are not safe. Wherever you’re hiding, leave the stands and go to the gate in the rails where we went through and down the course last Saturday. Go out in front of the stands, and gather by that gate. The gate is the rallying point. Go at once. The Bastille game is over for now. It’s urgent that you go at once to the gate where we went out onto the course. It’s quite near the winning post. Go there now. The grandstands aren’t safe. They might blow up at any moment.’
I switched off temporarily and said to Neil, ‘Do you remember how to get to that gate?’
He nodded and told me how, correctly.
‘Then you go there too, will you, so that the others can see you? And tell them what you saw.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
I said to Roger, ‘Have you the key to the gate?’
‘Yes, but–’
‘I’d be happier if they could go out through that gate and across to the winning post itself. Even that might not be far enough.’
‘Surely you’re exaggerating,’ he protested.
‘I hope to God I am.’
Neil hadn’t waited. I watched his little figure run.
‘We went to see an old factory chimney being blown up,’ I said to Roger. ‘The boys were fascinated. They saw some charges being set. It was only three months ago.’ I spoke again into the microphone. ‘Boys, go down to the gate. It’s very very urgent. The stands are unsafe. They might blow up. Just run.’ I turned to Roger. ‘Could you unlock the gate for them?’
He said, ‘Why don’t you?’
‘I’d better check those wires, don’t you think?’
‘But –’
‘Look, I’ve got to make sure Neil is right, haven’t I? And we don’t know when the charges are set for, do we? Maybe five minutes, maybe five hours, maybe after dark. Can’t risk it for the boys, though. Have to get them out at once.’
Roger swallowed and made no more objections. Together we ran from his office round to the front of the stands, he taking the key with him, I wanting to check that all five were safe.
The little knot by the gate grew to four as Neil reached them. Four, not five.
Four. Not Toby.
I sprinted back to Oliver’s office and picked up the microphone.
‘Toby, this is not a game. Toby, get off the stands. The stands are not safe. Toby, for Christ’s sake do what I say. This is not a game.’
I could hear my voice reverberating round and through the building and out in the paddocks. I repeated the urgent words once more and then ran round the stands again to check that Toby had heard and obeyed.
Four boys. Four boys and Roger, walking across the track to the winning post. Not running. If Toby were watching, he’d see no reason for haste.
‘Come on, you little bugger,’ I said under my breath. ‘For once in your life, be told.’
I went back to the microphone and said it loud and baldly. ‘There are demolition charges in the stands, Toby, are you listening? Remember the chimney? The stands can blow up too. Toby, get out of there quickly and join the others.’
I went back yet again to the front of the stands, and yet again Toby failed to appear.
I was not a demolitions expert. If I wanted to take a building down to its roots I usually did it brick by brick, salvaging everything useful. I’d have felt happier at that moment if I’d known more. The first priority, though, was obviously to look at what Neil had seen, and to do that I needed to enter and climb the central stairway, off which led the bar with the smelly floor; the members’ bar which should have been much busier than it was.
It was the same staircase, I’d noticed, that on one landing led off through double-doors to the Strattons’ carpeted and cosseted private rooms. According to the plans and also from what I myself remembered of it, that staircase was the central vertical artery feeding all floors of the grandstand; the central core of the whole major building.
At the top was a large windowed room like a control tower from where the Stewards with massive binoculars watched the races. A modern offshoot from there ran up yet again to an eyrie inhabited by race-callers, television equipment and the scribbling classes.
At other levels on its upward progress, the staircase branched off inwards to a members’ lunch room and outwards to ranks of standing-only steps open to the elements. A corridor on the first floor led to a row of private balcony boxes where prim little light white wooden chairs gave respite to rich and elderly feet.
I went into the staircase from the open front of the stands and sprinted up to the level of the smelly members’ bar. The door of the bar was locked, but along the white-painted landing wall outside, at about eighteen inches from the ground, ran a harmless looking thick white filament that looked like the sort of washing line used for drying laundry in back gardens.
At intervals along the wall the line ran into the wall itself and out again, and finally a hole had been drilled from the landing through into the bar, so that the white line ran into it, disappearing from view.
Neil had made no mistake. The white washing line look-alike was in fact itself an explosive known as ‘det cord’, short for detonating cord, along which detonation could travel at something like 18,000 metres a second, blowing apart everything it touched. At every spot where the cord went into the wall and out again there would be a compressed cache of plastic explosive. All explosives did more damage when compressed.
Det cord was not like old fuses spluttering slowly towards a bomb marked ‘BOMB,’ as in comics and ancient westerns. Det cord was the explosive; and it seemed to be winding up and down through the walls of the stairwell for at least one floor above me and another below.
I yelled ‘Toby’ with full lungs and whatever power I could muster. I yelled ‘Toby’ up the staircase and 1 yelled ‘Toby’ down the staircase, and got no response at all.
‘Toby, if you’re here, this place is full of explosive.’ I yelled it up the stairs, and down.
Nothing.
He had to be somewhere else, I thought. But where? Where? There could be det cord festooned throughout the length of all the buildings; throughout the Club, through the Tattersalls enclosure where on race days the bookies had their pitches, through the cheapest of three enclosures where there were almost more bars than viewing steps.
‘Toby,’ I yelled: and got silence.
There was no possibility that I could miraculously dismantle what looked like a thoroughly planned attack. I didn’t know enough, nor where to start. My first priority, anyway, was the safety of my son, so with silence continuing, I turned to go back out into the open air, to run further down the sprawling complex and try again.
I’d already pivoted to run when I heard the tiniest noise, and it seemed to me it came from above, from somewhere up the stairs, over my head.
I sprinted up two levels, to the landing outside the Stewards’ vantage point and yelled again. I tried the Stewards’ room door, but like so much else, it was locked. He couldn’t be in there, but I yelled anyway.
‘Toby, if you’re here, please come out. This place can blow up at any moment. Please, Toby. Please.’
Nothing. False alarm. I turned to go down again, to start searching somewhere else.
A wavery little voice said, ‘Dad?’
I whirled. He was climbing with difficulty out of his perfect tiny hiding place, a small sideboard with spindly legs beside an empty row of pegs meant for the Stewards’ hats and coats.
‘Thank God,’ I said briefly. ‘Now come on.’
‘I was the escaped prisoner,’ he said, slithering out and standing up. ‘If they’d found me they wou
ld have put me back in the Bastille.’
I hardly listened. I felt only urgency along with relief.
‘Will it really blow up, Dad?’
‘Let’s just get out of here.’
I reached for his hand and tugged him with me towards the stairs, and there was a sort of crrrump from below us, and then a brilliant flash of light and a horrendous bang and a swaying all about us, and it was like what I imagine it must be like to be caught in an earthquake.
CHAPTER 6
In the fraction of time when thought was possible, both knowledge and instinct screamed that the stairs themselves, wreathed and tied with explosive like a parcel, were the embrace of death.
Enclosing Toby in my arms I spun on the heaving floor and hurled us with slipping feet and every labour-trained muscle back towards Toby’s hiding-place cupboard beside the Stewards’ box door.
The core of Stratton Park racecourse imploded, folding inwards. The staircase ripped and cracked and crashed as its walls collapsed into the well, splitting open into jagged caverns all the rooms alongside.
The Stewards’ door blew open, its glass viewing walls splintering and flying in slicing spears. The terrifying noise deafened. The stands shrieked as they tore apart, wood against wood against brick against concrete against stone against steel.
With Toby beneath me, I fell forwards, scrabbling and seeking for footing so as not to slide back towards the gutted stairs; and the high precarious tower atop all else, the Press and television vantage point, came smashing down through the ceiling beams and plaster above us, plunging in sharpedged pieces at crazy angles across my back and legs. I seemed to stop breathing. Sharp stabs of passing agony stapled me to the floor. Movement became impossible.
Billowing black smoke poured up from the stairs, lung-filling, choking, setting off convulsive coughing when there was no room to cough.
The thunderous noise gradually stopped. Far below, small creaks and intermittent crashes. Everywhere black smoke, grey dust. In me, pain.
‘Dad,’ Toby’s voice said, ‘you’re squashing me.’ He was coughing also. ‘I can’t breathe, Dad.’
I glanced vaguely down. The top of his head, brown-haired, came up as far as my chin. Inappropriately, but how can one help the things one thinks, I thought of his mother’s once frequent complaint – ‘Lee, you’re squashing me’ – and I would raise my weight off her by leaning on my elbows and I’d look into her gleaming laughing eyes and kiss her, and she’d say that I was too big and that one day I would collapse her lungs and break her ribs and suffocate her from love.
Collapse her lungs, snap her ribs, suffocate… dear God.
With a good deal of effort I levered my elbows up into the familiar supporting position and spoke to Amanda’s twelve-year-old son.
‘Wriggle out,’ I said, coughing. ‘Wriggle up this way, head first.’
‘Dad… you’re too heavy.’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you can’t lie there all day.’ I meant, I didn’t know for how long I could lift myself off him, so as not to kill him.
I felt like Atlas, only the world lay not on my shoulders, but beneath them.
Incongruously, sunlight fell all around us. Blue sky above, glimpsed through the hole in the roof. The black smoke funnelled up through there, slowly dispersing.
Toby made convulsive little heaves until his face came up level with mine. His brown eyes looked terrified and, uncharacteristically, he was crying.
I kissed his cheek, which normally he didn’t like. This time he seemed not to notice and didn’t wipe it away.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s over. We’re both all right. All we have to do is get out. Keep on wriggling. You’re doing fine.’
He inched out with difficulty, pushing bits of masonry out of his way. There were some sobs but no complaints. He made it onto his knees by my right shoulder, panting quietly, coughing now and then.
‘Well done,’ I said. I let my chest relax onto the floor. Not an enormous relief, except for my elbows.
‘Dad, you’re bleeding.’
‘Never mind.’
A few more sobs.
‘Don’t cry,’ I said.
‘That man,’ he said, ‘the horse kicked his eyes out.’
I moved my shirt-sleeved right forearm in his direction. ‘Hold my hand,’ I said. His own fingers slid slowly across my palm. ‘Look,’ I said, gripping lightly, ‘dreadful things do happen. There’s never going to be a time in your whole life when you won’t remember that man’s face. But you’ll remember it less and less often, not all the time, like now. And you’ll remember us being here, with all the stands blown inwards. A lot of people’s memories are full of truly awful things. Any time you want to talk about that man, I’ll listen.’
He squeezed my hand fiercely, and let it go.
‘We can’t just sit here for ever,’ he said.
Despite our fairly disadvantaged state, I was smiling.
‘It’s quite likely,’ I remarked, ‘that your brothers and Colonel Gardner will have noticed the stands have been rearranged. People will come.’
‘I could go and wave out of those broken windows, to tell them where we are –’
‘Stay right here,’ I said sharply. ‘Any floor might collapse.’
‘Not this one, Dad.’ He looked around wildly. ‘Not this one, that we’re on, will it, Dad?’
‘It’ll be all right,’ I said, hoping I spoke the truth. The whole landing, however, now sloped towards where the stairs had been, and I wouldn’t have cared to jump up and down on it with abandon.
The pressures of the chunks of ceiling, roof and Press tower were unremitting across my back and legs, pinning me comprehensively. I could, though, move my toes inside my shoes, and I could certainly feel. Unless the building subsided more from accumulated internal stress, it looked possible I might escape with a clear head, an intact spinal cord, both hands and feet and an undamaged son. Not bad, considering. I hoped, all the same, that rescuers would hurry.
‘Dad?’
‘Mm?’
‘Don’t shut your eyes.’
I opened them, and kept them open.
‘When will people come?’ he asked.
‘Soon.’
‘It wasn’t my fault the stands exploded.’
‘Of course not.’
After a pause, he said, ‘I thought you were kidding.’
‘Yep.’
‘It’s not my fault you’re hurt, is it?’
‘No.’ He wasn’t, I saw, reassured. I said, ‘If you hadn’t been hiding right up here I could have been lower down the stairs when the explosion happened, and would now very likely be dead.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
It seemed very quiet. Almost as if nothing had happened. If I tried to move, different story…
‘How did you know the stands would explode?’ Toby said.
I told him about Neil seeing the det cord. ‘It’s thanks to him,’ I said, ‘that all five of you weren’t killed.’
‘I didn’t notice any cord.’
‘No, but you know what Neil’s like.’
‘He sees things.’
‘Yes.’
In the distance, at what seemed long last, we could hear sirens. One, at first, then several, then a whole wailing orchestra.
Toby wanted to move but again I told him to stay still, and before very long there were voices on the racecourse side, outside and below, calling my name.
‘Tell them we’re here,’ I told Toby, and he shouted with his high voice, ‘We’re here. We’re up here.’
After a brief silence a man’s voice yelled, ‘Where?’
‘Tell them beside the Stewards’ box,’ I said.
Toby shouted the information and got another question in return.
‘Is your father with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he talking?’
‘Yes.’ Toby looked at me and spontaneously gave them more news. ‘
He can’t move. Some roof fell in.’
‘Stay there.’
‘OK?’ I said to Toby. ‘I told you they would come.’
We listened to clanging and banging and businesslike shouting, all far away and outside. Toby was shivering, not with cold, as the midday sun still warmed us, but with accumulated shock.
‘They won’t be long,’ I said.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Putting up some sort of scaffolding, I should think.’
They came up from the racecourse side, where the reinforced concrete viewing steps on the steel girders had, it transpired, survived the onslaught pretty well unscathed. A fireman in a big hard hat and a bright yellow jacket suddenly appeared outside the broken windows of the Stewards’ box and peered inwards.
‘Anyone home?’ he cheerfully called.
‘Yes.’ Toby stood up joyfully and I told him abruptly to stay still.
‘But, Dad –’
‘Stay still.’
‘You stay there, young ‘un. We’ll have you out in no time,’ the fireman told him, and vanished as quickly as he’d come. Returning, he brought with him a colleague and a secure metal walkway for Toby to cross on to the window, and almost in no time, as he’d promised, he’d picked the boy out of the window and out of danger. As Toby disappeared from my view, I felt weak. I trembled from relief. A lot of strength seemed to drain away.
The colleague, a moment later, stepped through the window and crossed the walkway in reverse, stopping at the end of it, some several feet from where I lay.
‘Lee Morris?’ he asked. Dr Livingstone, I presume.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It won’t be long.’
They came in personal harnesses with jacks and cantilevers and slings and cutting equipment and a mini-crane, and they knew what they were doing, but the whole area where I was lying proved wickedly unstable, and at one point another big section of the Press box came crashing through the roof and, missing my feet by millimetres, bounced and plummeted down die five-storey hole where the stairs were meant to be. One could hear it colliding with wrecked walls all the way down until it reached the bottom with a reverberating disintegrating thud.