by Dick Francis
Quest, looking hunted, caved in.
‘He told me,’ he said, seeking to persuade us, ‘to stop every car and be as much nuisance as I could, and one of the cars would be his, and he would wind down the window and tell me my telephone number, and I would know it was him, and I would put my hand into the car and he would put money into my hand, and I was not to ask questions or speak to him – as God’s my judge.’
‘Your judge will be a damn sight nearer than God,’ Henry bellowed, ‘if you’re not telling us straight.’
‘As God’s my…’ Quest began, and collapsed into speechlessness, unable to deal with so many accusers, with such complete disbelief.
‘All right,’ Roger told him prosaically, ‘you may not have wanted to look at him in the face, to be able to identify him, but there’s one thing you do now know, which you can tell us.’
Quest simply looked nervous.
‘Which car?’ Roger said. ‘Describe it. Tell us its number.’
‘Well… I…’
‘After the first payment,’ Roger said, ‘you’d have been looking out for that car.’
I suppose that rabbits might look at snakes as Quest looked at Roger.
‘Which car?’ Henry yelled in Quest’s ear.
‘A Jaguar XJ6. Sort of silver.’ He mumbled the number.
Roger, slightly aghast but not disbelieving, said to me succinctly, ‘Keith’s’.
He and I digested the news. Henry raised his eyebrows our way. Roger flapped a hand, nodding. Henry, perceiving that the really essential piece of information had surfaced, looked more benignly upon his demoralised captive.
‘Well, now,’ he said, at only medium fortissimo, ‘when did you get hold of the firelighters?’
After a moment, meekly, Quest said, ‘I bought them.’
‘When?’ Roger asked.
‘Saturday.’
‘On his instructions?’
Quest said feebly, ‘There was a piece of paper in with the money. He said to burn the open ditch fence, where a horse had been killed on the Saturday. He said dowse it with petrol, to make sure.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘I’m not daft.’
‘Not far off it,’ Henry told him.
‘Where do I get petrol?’ Quest asked rhetorically. ‘Buy a can from a garage, buy five gallons of petrol, then burn a fence down? I ask you! He took me for daft.’
‘Eating a hamburger was daft,’ Henry said.
‘Do you still have the paper with the instructions?’ I asked.
‘The paper said to burn the instructions.’
‘And you did?’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Silly,’ I said. ‘You’re not much of a villain. Who’s going to believe you, without those instructions?’
‘But,’ he spluttered, ‘I mean, but…’
‘How did you actually do it?’ I asked, ‘I mean, how did you position the firelighters?’
He said matter of factly, ‘I pushed them into the fence in bunches. Then I lit a roll of newspaper and went along lighting the bunches all at once.’ He almost smiled, ‘It was easy.’
He should have burned the wrappers as well, I thought, but then people were fools, especially actors who weren’t practised criminals.
‘I think,’ I said to Roger and Henry and Oliver, ‘that we might do a spot of Strattoning here.’
‘How do you mean, exactly?’
‘Could I borrow your typewriter?’
‘Of course,’ Roger said, pointing to the inner office. ‘In there.’
I went through to the machine, switched on the electricity and typed a short statement:
I, Harold Quest, actor, agreed that in return for money I would mount nuisance demonstrations at the main gates of Stratton Park racecourse, ostensibly but not actually in support of a movement to discredit the sport of steeplechasing. For this service I received payments on several occasions from a man driving a silver Jaguar XJ6, registration number as follows, To comply with instructions received from this driver I also bought one hundred ‘Sure Fire’ firelighters and, using them, burned to the ground the birch fence at the open ditch in the straight, at approximately six a.m. Monday, Easter Bank Holiday.
Roger, Oliver and Henry read it and presented it to Quest for signing. He was predictably reluctant. We told him to add the date and his address.
‘You might as well,’ I said, when he shrank from it, ‘as you’re in the phone book and we can find you any time, I should think, if your photo’s in Spotlight with the name of your agent.’
‘But this is an admission of guilt,’ he protested, not disputing our ability to track him down, as one could with any actor, through their professional publication.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but if you sign it, you can buzz off now, at once, and use your return bus ticket, and with luck we won’t give your confession to the police.’
Quest searched our faces, not finding much to reassure or comfort him; but he did sign the paper. He did, in his own handwriting, fill in the car registration (verified by Roger), and also his address and the date.
The others scrutinised the pages.
‘Is that everything?’ Roger asked me.
‘I’d think so.’
Roger said to Henry, ‘Let him go,’ and Henry opened the office door to freedom and jerked his thumb in that direction, giving Quest a last order, ‘Out!’
Quest, an amalgam of relief and anxiety, didn’t wait for a change of heart on our part but took himself off at the double.
Henry looked at the abandoned bits of hamburger and said disgustedly, ‘We should have rubbed the little shit’s nose in that mustard.’
I said with mock seriousness, ‘Quest’s not all bad. Remember, he did call Rebecca “ducky”.’
Henry guffawed. ‘So he did.’
Roger picked up the signed confession. ‘What do we do with this, then? Do we, in fact, give it to the police?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘we give it to Marjorie Binsham.’
CHAPTER 12
Notwithstanding our threats to Quest, the police presence behind the partitioning wall had by that morning fallen to two constables, both there more to prevent the public from entering and hurting themselves in the unstable building than to investigate further for evidence.
As far as Roger and Oliver had been able to discover the previous afternoon, after I’d left, the higher ranks and the bomb expert had completed their work with the discovery and reassembling of a blown-apart clock face, and had said their further enquiries would be conducted ‘elsewhere’, unspecified.
‘They don’t know who did it,’ Roger baldly interpreted.
In front of the boring and forbidding partition fence there now rose an inflated Sleeping Beauty’s Bouncing Castle, complete with fairytale towers and a child-minder in the shape of Henry’s one remaining maintenance man.
Ivan, in a flush of generosity, had returned with a second vanload of (free) plants, this time young bushy trees in pots, which he spread out on each side of the castle, making the fence in consequence a tamer, even decorative, part of the scenery.
By the time Roger drove us towards his house at eleventhirty, neither he nor I nor Henry could think of any improvements that could be managed in time for that afternoon, though many that could be achieved afterwards, before the next meeting.
The boys changed into tidy clothes with only medium grumbles. I changed from navvy to gentleman and with my walking stick clumsily managed to knock to the floor the pile of Carteret’s diaries that had been on the table by my bed. Edward obligingly picked them up for me, but held one awkwardly open, its pages tearing halfway along from the spiral wire binding.
‘Hey, careful!’ I said, taking it from him. ‘You’ll get me shot.’
I concentrated on closing the book to minimise the damage, and there, leaping out at me from the page, was the name I’d sought for unsuccessfully on the train.
Wilson Yarrow.
‘Wilson
Yarrow,’ Carteret had written, ‘that paragon we’ve had stuffed down our throats, they say he’s a fraud!’
The next paragraph didn’t explain anything but merely consisted of remarks about a lecture on miniaturisation of space.
I groaned. ‘They says he’s a fraud’ got me no further. I flicked forward a few pages and came to:
There’s a rumour going round that Wilson Yarrow won the Epsilon Prize last year with a design he pinched from someone else! Red faces on the staff! They’re refusing to discuss it, but perhaps we’ll hear less about the brilliant Wilson Yarrow from now on.
The Epsilon Prize, I remotely remembered, had been given each year for the most innovative design of a building by a senior student. I hadn’t won it. Nor had Carteret. I couldn’t remember ever having submitted an entry.
Roger banged on the bus door, stuck his head in and said, ‘Ready?’ and the Morris family, dressed to impress, trooped out for his inspection.
‘Very good,’ he approved. He gave us all racecards, entry badges and lunch tickets out of an attaché case.
‘I don’t want to go to the races,’ Toby said, suddenly frowning. ‘I want to stay here and watch football.’
Roger left the decision to me.
‘OK,’ I said to my son peaceably. ‘Get yourself some lunch, and if you change your mind, walk up later to the office.’
Toby’s worried frown turned to a more carefree expression. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said.
‘Will he be all right by himself?’ Roger asked, driving away with the rest of us, and Edward assured him, ‘Tobe likes being by himself. He hides from us often.’
‘He goes off on bike rides,’ Christopher said.
Roger’s mind switched to the day ahead. ‘We’ve done all we could,’ he said dubiously.
‘Don’t worry so much,’ I told him. ‘Do you know a rabbet from a raceway?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Testing a theory.’
‘Is it a riddle, Dad?’ Neil asked.
‘Sort of. But don’t ask, it hasn’t an answer.’
Roger parked the jeep at the end of the office building, where it would be ready if he needed to drive round the course. The boys paired off, Neil with Christopher, Edward and Alan together, with a rallying point near the office door for after the first, third and fifth races.
People were coming: a bus-load of Tote operators, the St John’s Ambulance people, the squad of policemen for traffic control and the general prevention of fights in the betting rings, the bookies with their soap boxes and chalk boards, the gate-men, the racecard sellers; and then the jockeys, the sponsors of the races, the Stewards, the trainers, the Strattons and, finally, the racegoers with all bets still to lose.
I stood near the main entrance, watching the faces, seeing on almost all of them the holiday pleasure we’d aimed for. Even the TV crew, invited by Oliver, seemed visibly impressed, cameras whirring outside the big top and within.
Mark drove the Daimler right up to the gate into the paddock so that Marjorie wouldn’t have to walk from the car park. She saw me standing not far away, and beckoned as one seldom refused.
Without comment she watched me limp, with the stick, to her side.
‘Flags,’ she said dubiously.
‘Watch the faces.’
She was sold, as I’d thought she would be, by the smiles, the chatter, the hum of excitement. A fairground it might be, but something to talk about, something to give Stratton Park races a more positive face than a bomb-blasted grandstand.
She said, ‘The Colonel promised us lunch…’
I showed her the way to the Strattons’ own dining room, where she was greeted by the same butler and waitresses who always served her at the races, and obviously she felt instantly at home. She looked around carefully at everything, at the table the caterers had brought and laid with linen and silver, and up at the shimmering tent-ceiling with its soft oblique lighting and hidden air-vents.
‘Conrad told me,’ she said slowly. ‘He said… a miracle. A miracle is saving us. He didn’t say it was beautiful.’ She stopped suddenly, swallowing, unable to go on.
‘There’s champagne for you, I think,’ I said, and her butler was already bringing her a glass on a salver and pulling out a chair for her to sit down – a collapsible plastic-seated chair at base, covered now, as were ten round the table, with flowery material tied with neat bows.
Since pleasing Marjorie herself would mean the success of the whole enterprise, nothing we could think of that would make her comfortable had been left undone.
She sat primly, sipping. After a while she said, ‘Sit down, Lee. That is, if you can.’
I sat beside her, able by now to do it without openly wincing.
Lee. No longer Mr Morris. Progress.
‘Mrs Binsham…’
‘You can call me Marjorie… if you like.’
My great old girl, I thought, feeling enormous relief. ‘I’m honoured,’ I said.
She nodded, agreeing with my assessment.
‘Two days ago,’ she said, ‘my family treated you shamefully. I can hardly speak of it. Then you do this for us.’ She gestured to the room. ‘Why did you do it?’
After a pause I said, ‘Probably you know why. You’re probably the only person who does know.’
She thought. ‘My brother,’ she said, ‘once showed me a letter you wrote to him, after Madeline died. You said his money had paid for your education. You thanked him. You did all this for him, didn’t you? To repay him?’
‘I’ suppose so.’
‘Yes. Well. He would be pleased.’
She put down her glass, opened her handbag, took out a small white handkerchief and gently blew her nose, ‘I miss him,’ she said. She sniffed a little, put the handkerchief away and made an effort towards gaiety.
‘Well, now,’ she said. ‘Flags. Happy faces. A lovely sunny spring day. Even those horrid people at the gate seem to have gone home.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I’ve something to show you.’
I took Harold Quest’s confession from my pocket and, handing it over, explained about Henry and the out-of-character hamburger.
She searched for spectacles and read the page, soon putting a hand over her heart as if to still it.
‘Keith,’ she said, looking up. ‘That’s Keith’s car.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you give a copy of this to the police?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s a copy too, incidentally. The original is in the safe in the Colonel’s office.’ I paused and went on. ‘I don’t think I can find out how much money Keith owes, or to whom, but I did think this might do for you as a lever instead.’
She gave me a long inspection.
‘You understand me.’ She sounded not pleased, nor displeased, but surprised, and accepting.
‘It took me a while.’
A small smile. ‘You met me last Wednesday.’
A long five days, I thought.
A woman appeared in the entrance to the dining room, with a younger woman hidden behind her.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I was told I could find Lee Morris in here.’
I stood up in my unsprightly fashion.
‘I’m Lee Morris,’ I said.
She was plump, large-bosomed, friendly-looking, about sixty, with large blue eyes and short greyish-blonde curly hair. She wore layers of blue and beige clothes with brown low-heeled shoes, and had an untidy multicoloured silk square scarf tied in a bunched knot round her neck. Under her arm she carried a large brown handbag with its gold shoulder-chain dangling down, and there was altogether about her an air of being at home with herself: no mental insecurity or awkwardness.
Her gaze casually slid past me and fell on Marjorie, and there was a moment of extraordinary stillness, of suspension, in both women. Their eyes held the same wideness, their mouths the same open-lipped wonder. I thought in a flash of enlightenment that each knew the identity of the other, even though
they showed no overt recognition nor made any attempt at polite speech.
‘I want to talk to you,’ the newcomer said to me, removing her gaze from Marjorie but continuing to be tinglingly aware of her presence. ‘Not here, if you don’t mind.’
I said to Marjorie, ‘Will you excuse me?’
She could have said no. If she’d wanted to, she would have done. She cast an enigmatic glance at the newcomer, thought things over, and gave me a positive ‘Yes. Go and talk.’
The newcomer backed out into the central aisle of the big top, with me following.
‘I’m Perdita Faulds,’ the newcomer said, once outside. ‘And this,’ she added, stepping to her right and fully revealing her companion, ‘is my daughter, Penelope.’
It was like being hit twice very fast with a hammer; no time to take in the first bit of news before being stunned by the second.
Penelope Faulds was tall, slender, fair-haired, long-necked and almost the double of Amanda: the young Amanda I’d fallen in love with, the nineteen-year-old marvellous girl with grey smiling eyes going laughingly to her immature marriage.
I was no longer nineteen. I felt as breathless, however, as if I still were. I said, ‘How do you do,’ and it sounded ridiculous.
‘Is there a bar in here?’ Mrs Faulds asked, looking round. ‘Someone outside told me there was.’
‘Er… yes,’ I said. ‘Over here.’
I took her into one of the largest ‘rooms’ in the big top, the members’ bar, where a few early customers were sitting at small tables with sandwiches and drinks.
Perdita Faulds took easy charge. ‘Was it champagne that Mrs Binsham was drinking? I think we should have some.’
Faintly bemused, I turned towards the bar to do her bidding.
‘My treat,’ she said, opening her handbag and providing the funds. ‘Three glasses.’
Penelope followed me to the bar. ‘I’ll carry the glasses,’ she said. ‘Can you manage the bottle?’
My pulse quickened. Stupid. I had six sons. I was too old.
The bar staff popped the cork and took the money. Mrs Faulds watched in good-natured enjoyment while I poured her bubbles.
‘Do you know who I am?’ she demanded.