by Dick Francis
I could probably ensure the boys a live father by leaving the arena.
I could… run away.
It was unrealistic, as I’d told Toby, to expect to be steadfast every day of the week. It would be prudent to go.
The trouble was that though I might long to, the part of me that ultimately decided things couldn’t go.
‘I wish,’ I said fervently, ‘that I were able to do as the Strattons do, and blackmail Keith into leaving me alone.’
‘What a thought, dear!’
‘No chance, though.’
She put her head on one side, looking at my face and thinking on my behalf.
‘I don’t know if it’s of much help, dear,’ she said slowly, ‘but Conrad might have something like that.’
‘What sort of thing? What do you mean?’
‘I never knew exactly what it was,’ she said, ‘but William did have a way of keeping Keith in order during the past few years. Only, for once he didn’t tell me everything. I’d have said he was too ashamed of Keith, that time. He sort of winced away from his name, even. Then one day he said there were things he didn’t want people to know, not even after he died, and he thought he would have to give the knowledge to Conrad, his heir, you see, dear, so that Conrad could use it if he had to. I’d never seen him so troubled as he was that day. I asked him about it the next time he came to see me, but he still didn’t want to talk about it much. He just said he would give a sealed packet to Conrad with very strict instructions about when or if ever it should be opened, and he said he had always done the best he could for his family. The very best.’
She stopped, overcome. ‘He was such a dear, you know.’
‘Yes.’
The secrets were out. Perdita wept a few tears of fondness and felt clearly at peace. I stood up, kissed her cheek, and went downstairs to collect my newly-shorn children.
They looked great. Penelope’s pleased professionalism liquified my senses. The boys laughed with her, loving her easily, and I, who ached for her body, paid for their haircuts (despite her protestations) and thanked her, and took my sons painfully away.
‘Can we go back there, Dad?’ they asked.
‘I promised, ‘Yes, one day,’ and wondered ‘Why not?’ and ‘Perhaps she would love me’ and thought that the children liked her anyway, and fell into a hopeless jumble of self-justification, and was ready to dump my unsatisfactory marriage, which so recently, on the train, I had prayed to preserve.
The Gardners picked us up and took the clean clothes, the apples, the new trainers and the haircuts back to the racecourse and ordinary life.
In the evening we telephoned Amanda. At eight o’clock, she sounded languorously sleepy.
‘I spent a long night unhappily, thinking both of my own obligations and desires, but also of Keith and whatever he might be plotting. I searched for ways to defeat him. I thought of fear and the need for courage, and felt unready and inadequate.
CHAPTER 14
By Wednesday morning Henry had gone home in his last truck, leaving everything so far accomplished ready for next time, and promising future improvements.
On Tuesday the flags over the big top had been furled into storage bags by ropes and pulleys and winches. The lights and the fans were switched off. The caterers’ side-tents were laced tight, giving no casual access. The fire extinguishers remained in place, scarlet sentinels, unused. Henry’s man and some of the groundsmen had scrubbed the tramp of a few thousand feet off the flooring with brooms and hoses.
On Wednesday morning Roger and I walked down the centre aisle, desultorily checking the big empty rooms to each side. No chairs, no tables; a few plastic crates. The only light was daylight from outside, filtering through canvas and the peach roofing, and changing from dull to bright and to dull again as slow clouds crossed the sun.
‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ Roger said.
A flap of canvas somewhere rattled in the wind but all else was silent.
‘Hard to believe,’ I agreed, ‘how it all looked on Monday.’
‘We had the final gate figures yesterday afternoon,’ Roger said. ‘The attendance was eleven per cent up on last year. Eleven per cent! And in spite of the stands being wrecked.’
‘Because of them,’ I said. ‘Because of the television coverage.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He was cheerful. ‘Did you see the papers yesterday? ‘Plucky Stratton Park.’ Goo like that. Couldn’t be better!’
‘The Strattons,’ I said, ‘said they were holding a meeting this morning. Do you know where?’
‘Not here, as far as I’ve heard. There’s only the office,’ he said doubtfully, ‘and it’s really too small. Surely they’ll tell you where, if they’re meeting.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
We walked slowly back towards the office, unusually idle; and Dart in his beaten-up car drove onto the tarmac.
‘Hello,’ he said easily, climbing out, ‘am I the first?’
Roger explained about his lack of instructions.
Dart’s eyebrows rose. ‘When Marjorie said meeting, I took it for granted she meant here.’
The three of us continued towards the office, amicably.
Dart said, ‘The police gave me my wheels back, as you see, but it’s a wonder I’m not in the slammer. A matter of time, I dare say. They’ve decided I blew up the stands.’
Roger paused briefly in mid-stride, astounded. ‘You?’
‘Like, my car came up positive for HIV, hashish, mad cow disease, dirty finger-nails, you name it. Their dogs and their test-tubes went mad. Alarm bells all over the place.’
‘Nitrates,’ I interpreted.
‘You’ve got it. The stuff that blew up the stands came to the racecourse in my car. Eight to eight-thirty, Good Friday morning. That’s what they say.’
‘They can’t mean it,’ Roger protested.
‘Yesterday afternoon they gave me a bloody rough time.’ For all his bright manner, it was clear he’d been shaken. ‘They hammered away at where did I get the stuff, this P.E.4 or whatever. My accomplices, they kept saying. Who were they? I just goggled at them. Made a weak joke or two. They said it was no laughing matter.’ He made a comic-rueful face. ‘They accused me of having been in the army cadet corps at school. Half a lifetime ago! I ask you! I said so what, it was no secret. I marched up and down for a year or two to please my grandfather, but a soldier by inclination I am definitely not. Sorry, Colonel.’
Roger waved away the apology. We all went into the office, standing around, discussing things.
Dart went on. ‘They said I would have handled explosives in the cadets. Not me, I said. Let others play at silly buggers. All I really remembered vividly of the cadets is crawling all over a tank once and having nightmares afterwards about falling in front of it. The speed it could go! Anyway, I said, talk to Jack, he’s in the cadets for the same reason as I was, and he’s still at school and hates it, and why didn’t they ask him where you could get boom boom bang bangs, and they practically clicked on the handcuffs.’
I said, when he paused, ‘Do you usually lock your car? I mean, who else could drive it at eight-thirty on a Good Friday morning?’
‘Don’t you believe me?’ he demanded, affronted.
‘Yes, I do believe you. I positively do. But if you weren’t driving it, who was?’
‘There can’t have been explosives in my car.’
‘You’ll have to face that there were.’
He said obstinately, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Well… er… do you lock your car?’
‘Not often, no. Not when it’s outside my own door. I told the police that. I said it was just sitting there and yes, probably I’d left the key in it. I said anyone could have taken it.’
Roger and I both looked away from Dart, not wanting to be accusatory. ‘Outside his own door’ wasn’t exactly in plain view of the general car-stealing public. Outside his own door was beside the back entrance of the family pile, Str
atton Hays.
‘What if it were Keith that took your car?’ I asked. ‘Would your family loyalty stretch to him?’
Dart was startled. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know who took my car.’
‘And you don’t want to find out.’
He grinned a shade uneasily. ‘What sort of pal are you, anyway?’
Roger said neutrally, ‘Keith swore to Lee only the day before yesterday that he would kill him. There’s no doubt he meant it. You can’t blame Lee for wanting to know if Keith blew up the stands.’
Dart gave me a long look. I smiled with my eyes.
‘I don’t think it was Keith,’ Dart said finally.
‘I search under my bus,’ I said to him. ‘I won’t let my children get into it before I’m as sure as I can be that it’s safe.’
‘Lee!’ It was a word full of shock. ‘No, he wouldn’t. Not even Keith. I swear to you…’ He stopped dead. He had, anyway, told me what I wanted to know. A fragment of truth, even if not whole knowledge.
‘From family feeling,’ I said, aiming at lightness, ‘would you consider helping me find a way of preventing Keith from carrying out his unpleasant threat? To save him and all of you, one might say, from the consequences?’
‘Well, of course.’
‘Great.’
‘But I don’t see what I can do.’
‘I’ll tell you a bit later. At the moment, where is your meeting?’
‘Holy hell, yes.’
He picked up the office telephone and got through, it was evident, to his parents’ home, where he talked to a cleaner who didn’t know where either Lord or Lady Stratton could be found.
‘Damn,’ Dart said, trying another number. ‘Ivan? Where’s this bloody meeting? In your house? Who’s there? Well, tell them I’m late.’ He put the receiver down and gave Roger and me the old carefree grin. ‘My parents are there, so are Rebecca and Hannah, Imogen and Jack, and they’re waiting for Aunt Marjorie. I could hear Keith shouting already. Tell you the truth, I’m not keen to go.’
‘Don’t then,’ I said.
‘It’s a three-line whip, Ivan says. The whole family. That means I have to.’
Carpe diem, they say. Seize the day. Seize the moment. I’d been handed an opportunity I had been wondering how to achieve.
‘How about,’ I said, ‘if you drive me to your parents’ house, tell the cleaner I’m a friend of the family, and leave me there while you go to the meeting?’
He said, puzzled, ‘What ever for?’
‘For luck,’ I said.
‘Lee…’
‘OK. For that look at the grandstand plans that I backed away from last time.’
Roger made the beginnings of a gesture to remind me I’d already seen the plans, and then, to my relief, subsided.
Dart said with furrowed brow, ‘I don’t honestly understand…’
As I didn’t want him to understand I said confusingly, ‘It’s for the sake of your family. Like I said, if you’re not keen for Keith to bump me off, just trust me.’
He trusted me more than anyone else in his family did, and his easy-going nature won the day.
‘If that’s what you want,’ he agreed, still not understanding – as how could he? ‘Do you mean now?’
‘Absolutely. Except, do you mind going down the back road, as I’d better tell my boys I’ll be off the racecourse for a while.’
‘You’re extraordinary,’ Dart said.
‘They feel safer if they know.’
Dart looked at Roger, who nodded resignedly. ‘Christopher, the eldest, told me that when they’re away from home, in that bus, they don’t mind their father leaving them, as long as they knows he’s gone, and roughly when he’ll be back. They look after themselves then without worrying. It does seem to work.’
Dart rolled his eyes comically at the vagaries of my domestic arrangements but accompanied me out to his car. Lying on the front seat, when I went round there, was a large glossy magazine entitled American Hair Club, with a young well-thatched model-type man smiling broadly on the cover.
Dart, removing it to the door pocket beside him, said defensively, it’s all about bonding hair on with polymers. It does seem to be a good idea.’
‘Follow it up,’ I suggested.
‘Don’t laugh at me.’
‘I’m not.’
He gave me a suspicious look, but drove me down amiably enough to report to my sons, who proved not to be in the bus, where I called to pick up a small tool or two, but to be elbow-deep in flour in Mrs Gardner’s kitchen, making her perfect pale fruit cake and eating most of it raw. She gave me a flashing smile and a kiss and said, ‘I’m having such fun here. Don’t hurry back.’
‘Where do you find a wife who’ll give you five sons?’ Dart asked moodily, driving away. ‘Who the hell wants a podgy going bald thirty-year-old with no talents?’
‘Who wants a good-natured easy-going nice guy not ridden by demons?’
‘Me, do you mean?’ He was surprised.
‘Yes.’
‘No girls really want me.’
‘Have you asked any?’
‘I’ve slept with some, but they all seem to have their sights on huge old Stratton Hays, and they tell me how great it would be for parties there, and one even talked about our daughter’s coming-out ball…’
‘And it frightens you?’
‘They want to marry a house.’
‘When I go home,’ I said, ‘you can come and stay, and I’ll see you meet people who’ve never heard of Stratton Hays, and don’t know about your father’s title or your own millions, and you can be Bill Darlington, or whatever name you like, and see how you go.’
‘Are you serious?
‘Yes, I am.’ I thought for a moment and said, ‘What will happen in your family when Marjorie dies?’
‘I don’t think about it.’
‘You should be married by then. You’ll be the head of the family one day, and the others should take that for granted, and respect you and your wife, and look ahead to a good well-rooted future.’
‘God,’ he protested, ‘you don’t ask much!’
‘You’re the best of the Strattons,’ I said.
He swallowed; reddened; fell silent. He drove between the gateposts of his parents’ ugly striped house and parked, and we walked round to the rear as before.
The back door was unlocked. We went past the plumbing and through into the black-and-white-floored hall, and Dart shouted out loudly, ‘Mrs Chinchee? Mrs Chinchee!’
A small middle-aged woman in a pink overall appeared at the top of a long flight of stairs saying, ‘Mr Dart, I’m up here.’
‘Mrs Chinchee,’ Dart called up to her, ‘this friend and I will be in the house for a while, but just carry on with the cleaning.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
Dart turned away and Mrs Chinchee retreated towards her upstairs tasks, any awkward curiosity well neutralised.
‘Right,’ Dart said. ‘Now what? I’m not going off to that meeting. You might need me here.’
‘OK,’ I said, vaguely relieved. ‘Now you go out to your car, and if either of your parents should come back sooner than we expect from the meeting, you put your palm on the horn and you give five or six urgent blasts to warn me.’
‘You mean… I’m just a look-out?’
‘If your parents come back, blow the horn, then tell them you’ve lent me the phone, or the bathroom, or something.’
‘I don’t like it,’ he frowned. ‘Suppose they find you looking at the plans?’
‘You didn’t mind before. You encouraged me, in fact.’
He sighed. ‘Yes, I did. I didn’t know you so well, then, or care. Look, don’t be too long.’
‘No.’
Still hesitantly he turned away and went back towards the rear door, and I went on into Conrad’s private room where horse pictures crowded the walls and endless shiny bric-à-brac suggested a magpie disposition. Miniature silver ho
rses, antique gold coins on a tray, a tiny gold hunting scene; every surface held treasures.
Without wasting time, I skirted the large cluttered desk and attended to the illegal act of picking someone else’s lock, the keyhole fortunately living up to the promise of easy access. The small flat tool I’d brought with me slid obligingly past the ward that guarded the simple works and moved the tongue back from the socket. For picking simple locks, any flat filed-down narrow version of an ordinary key will do the job; the simpler, the better.
The panelled door, so like the walls, pushed easily open, revealing a cupboard large enough to walk into. Leaving the walking stick lying on the desk I limped into the cupboard and pressed a light switch I found there, activating an overhead bulb in a simple shade.
Inside, the walls were lined throughout by shelves, on which stood endless boxes, all of different sizes, colours and shapes, and all unhelpfully unlabelled.
The drawings for the proposed new stands were in clear view, the large folder that Conrad and Wilson Yarrow had taken to Roger’s office standing on the floor, leaning against one of the shelf-walls. Untying the pink tape bow that held the folder shut, I took out the drawings, laying them flat, outside, on Conrad’s desk.
They were, I had to confess, a sort of window-dressing in case Dart came to find me, as the drawings were those I had already seen, without any additions.
The chief object of my risky enterprise had been to try to find the packet that Perdita had said William, Lord Stratton, third baron, had intended to entrust to Conrad, fourth baron; the packet containing enough dirt on Keith to keep him controlled. If I could but find it, I thought, I could use it perhaps to preserve my own life, promising for instance that if I should die violently, the packet’s contents would become public knowledge inexorably.
Faced with the actual array of random containers, I had to re-think. Finding any particular packet in those could take hours, not minutes, particularly as I’d been given no clear description of what sort of packet I was looking for.
I took the lid off a box straight ahead. The box was the size of a large shoe box, made of stiff decorative cardboard in a mottled maroon colour; the sort of box my mother had stored photographs in.