Decider

by Dick Francis

  The great graceful pile, full of forgotten lives and quiet ghosts, stood peacefully in the mottled sunlight, a house built for hundreds, lived in by one.

  ‘What now?’ the one said; Darlington Stratton, fifth baron to be.

  ‘We’ve got almost an hour. Can we look at the north wing?’

  ‘But it’s a ruin. I told you.’

  ‘Ruins are my business.’

  ‘I forgot. Well, OK.’ He unlocked the rear door and took me again across the vast unfurnished, uncurtained front hall and along a wide windowed passage proportioned like a picture gallery, but with bare walls.

  At the end of it we came to a heavy door, unpanelled, unpolished and modern, fastened by bolts. Dart wrestled with the bolts and creaked open the door, and we walked into the sort of desolation I went looking for: rotting wood, heaps of debris, saplings growing.

  ‘They took the roof off sixty or more years ago,’ Dart said glumly, looking upwards to the sky. ‘All those years of rain and snow… the upper floor just rotted and fell in. Grandfather asked the National Trust and the Heritage people… I think they said the only thing to do was to demolish this wing and save the rest.’ He sighed. ‘Grandfather didn’t like change. He just let time run on and nothing got done.’

  I clambered with difficulty over a hillock of weathered grey beams and looked along a wide storm-struck landscape flanked by high, still standing, but unbuttressed stone walls.

  ‘Do be careful,’ Dart warned. ‘No one’s supposed to come in here without hard hats.’

  The space gave me no creative excitement, no desire to restore it. All it did give me, in its majestic proportions, and its undignified death, was an interval of respite, of nerve-calming patience, a deep breath-taking perception of life passing, a drawing-in of the faith and industry that had designed and built here four hundred years earlier.

  ‘OK,’ I said, stirring and rejoining Dart in the open doorway. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Your grandfather was given good advice.’

  ‘I was afraid so.’

  He rebolted the heavy door and we returned across the great hall to the rear entrance.

  ‘Can I borrow your bathroom?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  He continued on past the door, heading towards his own personal quarters, the ground floor of the south wing.

  Here, present life went on very comfortably with carpets, curtains, antique furniture and a fresh polished smell. He led me to the door of his bathroom, a mixture of ancient and modern, a room converted from perhaps a sitting room, with a large free-standing Victorian bath and two new-looking washbasins built into a marble-topped fitment. The surface of the fitment was covered with bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and every variety of snake oil.

  Sympathetically I went over to the window, which was curtained in lace, and looked out. Away to the left, Dart’s car stood in the driveway. Ahead, lawns and trees. To the right, open gardens.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, as I stood there. After a moment, when I didn’t move, he came over to stand beside me, to see what I was looking at.

  He came, and he saw. He switched his gaze to my face, searching, and without trouble read my thoughts.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  An appropriate word for a bathroom. I said nothing, however, but walked back the way we had come.

  ‘How did you know?’ Dart asked, following.

  ‘Guessed.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘Go to Marjorie’s house.’

  ‘I mean… what about me?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, ‘It’s not up to me.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘You were in the bathroom seeing to your hair,’ I said. ‘And through the window you saw who took your car on Good Friday morning. No one’s going to put you to the torture to find out who it was. Just pretend you saw nothing, as you’ve been doing so far.’

  ‘Do you know… who?’

  I half smiled. ‘Let’s go and see Marjorie.’

  ‘Lee.’

  ‘Come and listen.’

  Dart drove us to Marjorie’s house, which proved to be unadulterated early Georgian, as well-bred and trim as she was herself. Set four-square in weedless grounds at one end of Stratton village, it had sash windows in disciplined rows, a central front door and a circular driveway reached past gateposts with urns on.

  Dart parked near the front door and as usual left the key in the ignition.

  ‘Don’t you ever lock it?’ I asked.

  ‘Why bother? I wouldn’t mind an excuse to get a new car.’

  ‘Why not just buy one?’

  ‘One day,’ he said.

  ‘Like your grandfather.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. I suppose I’m like him, a bit. One day. Maybe.’

  Marjorie’s front door was opened to us by a manservant (‘She lives in the past,’ murmured Dart) who pleasantly guided us across a hall to her drawing room. As expected, faultless taste there in time-stands-still land, gentle colours overall in dim pinks, green and gold. The window embrasures still held the original shutters, but there were floor-length curtains as well, and swagged valances, and a view of sunlit spring gardens beyond.

  Marjorie sat in a wide armchair that commanded the room, very much and always the person in charge. She wore, as often, dark blue with white at the neck, looking doll-like and exquisite and temporarily hiding the tough cookie.

  ‘Sit down,’ she commanded, and Dart and I sat near her, I on a small sofa, Dart on a spindly chair – Hepplewhite, probably.

  ‘Things to tell me,’ she began. ‘That’s what you said, Lee.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Well, you asked me to find out two things.’

  ‘And on the subject of Keith’s finances, you’ve failed,’ she nodded decisively. ‘You’ve already told me.’

  ‘Yes. But… as regards your other assignment…’

  ‘Go on,’ she said, as I stopped. ‘I remember exactly. I asked you to find out what pressure that wretched architect was putting on Conrad to get his new stands built.’

  Dart looked surprised. ‘Assignment?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ His great aunt was impatient. ‘Lee and I had an agreement. We shook hands on it. Didn’t we?’ She turned her head to me. ‘An agreement you did not want to break.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Aunt Marjorie!’ Dart looked flummoxed. ‘You’ve had Lee working for you?

  ‘And what’s wrong with that? It was for the ultimate good of the family. How can we proceed, if we don’t know the facts?’

  The world’s politicians could learn from her, I thought with admiration. The clearest of brains under the waved white hair.

  ‘Along the way,’ I said, ‘I learned about Forsyth and the lawn mowers.’

  Dart gasped. Marjorie’s eyes widened.

  ‘Also,’ I went on, ‘I heard about Hannah’s bit of rough trade, and its results.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Dart asked me, lost.

  Marjorie enlightened him. ‘Hannah went off into the bushes with a gypsy and got herself pregnant, the silly ninny. Keith assaulted the gypsy, who demanded money, of course. My brother paid him off.’

  ‘Do you mean…’ Dart worked it out, ‘that Jack’s father was a gypsy?’

  ‘Near enough. Not even a Romany. A good-for-nothing tramp,’ Marjorie said.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Dart said, weakly.

  ‘And don’t speak of it again,’ Marjorie commanded severely. ‘Hannah tells Jack his father was a foreign aristocrat who would have been ruined by the scandal.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dart’s voice sounded faint. ‘Jack told me that himself.’

  ‘And let him believe it. I hope, Lee,’ she said to me, ‘that that’s all.’

  The telephone rang on the small table beside her chair. She picked up the receiver and listened.

  ‘Yes… when? Dart is here. So is Lee. Yes.’ She put the receiver down and said to
Dart, ‘That was your father. He says he is coming here. He sounds incredibly angry. What have you done?’

  ‘Is Keith with him?’ My words came out with a jerk, which she pounced on.

  ‘You’re afraid of Keith!’

  ‘Not unreasonably.’

  ‘Conrad said Keith told him to come here, but I don’t know if Keith was with him or not. Do you wish to leave now, at once?’

  Yes, I did, and no, I didn’t. I thought of murder in her quiet drawing room and hoped she wouldn’t allow it.

  I said, ‘I brought a photograph to show you. It’s in Dart’s car. I’ll just fetch it.’

  I stood up and walked to the door.

  ‘Don’t drive off and leave me here,’ Dart said, only half joking.

  The temptation bit deep, but where would I go? I picked the photograph, in an envelope, out of the door pocket, where I’d placed it, and returned to the drawing room.

  Marjorie took out the photograph and looked at it uncomprehendingly. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I’ll explain,’ I said, ‘but if Conrad’s coming, I’ll wait until he gets here.’

  The distance from Conrad’s house to Marjorie’s was short. He came very soon and, to my relief, without Keith. He came armed, though, carrying a shotgun, the landowner’s friend. He carried it not broken open, over his arm, as one should, but straightened, and ready.

  He brushed past the manservant, who had opened the door for him and was saying, ‘Lord Stratton, madam,’ punctiliously, and strode across Marjorie’s pale Chinese carpet, coming to a halt in front of me with the twin barrels pointing my way.

  I rose to my feet. Barely three paces lay between us.

  He held the gun not as if aiming at flying birds but down at his waist, easily familiar with shots from the hip. At that distance he couldn’t miss a mosquito.

  ‘You’re a liar and a thief.’ He was growling with fury, his fingers frighteningly unsteady in the region of the trigger.

  I didn’t deny the charge. I looked past him and his gun to the photograph Marjorie held, and he followed my gaze. He recognised the picture and the look he gave me was as murderous as any of Keith’s. The barrels aimed straight at my chest.

  ‘Conrad,’ Marjorie said sharply, ‘calm down.’

  ‘Calm down? Calm down? This despicable person broke into my private cupboard and stole from me.’

  ‘However, you may not shoot him in my house.’

  In a way it was funny, but farce was too close to tragedy always. Even Dart didn’t laugh.

  I said to Conrad, ‘I’ll free you from blackmail.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Marjorie demanded.

  ‘I’m talking about Wilson Yarrow blackmailing Conrad into giving him the go-ahead for the new grandstand.’

  Marjorie exclaimed, ‘So you did find out!’

  ’Is that gun loaded?’ I asked Conrad.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Would you mind… uh… pointing it somewhere else?’

  He stood four-square, bullish, unwavering: unmoving.

  ‘Father,’ Dart protested.

  ‘You shut up,’ his father said grittily. ‘You abetted him.’

  I said, risking things, ‘Wilson Yarrow told you that if he didn’t get the commission for the stands, he would see that Rebecca was warned off as a jockey.’

  Dart goggled. Marjorie said, ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘No. Not ridiculous. That photograph is a picture of Rebecca receiving a wad of money on a racecourse from a man who might be a bookmaker.’

  I tried to work saliva into my mouth. I’d never before had a loaded gun pointed at me in anger. Even though I clung to the belief that Conrad’s inner restraints existed where Keith’s didn’t, I could feel my scalp sweating.

  ‘I listened to the tape,’ I said.

  ‘You stole it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I stole it. It’s damning.’

  ‘So now it’s you who’ll blackmail me.’ His trigger hand tightened.

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Conrad,’ I said, almost exasperated. ‘Use some sense. I’ll not blackmail you. I’ll see that Yarrow doesn’t.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If you’ll put that bloody gun down, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘What tape?’ Dart asked.

  ‘The tape you helped him steal from my cupboard.’

  Dart looked blank.

  ‘Dart didn’t know,’ I said. ‘He was outside in his car.’

  ‘But Keith searched your jacket,’ Dart protested.

  I put my hand into my trousers pocket and brought out the tape. Conrad flicked a glance at it and went on scaring me silly.

  ‘This tape,’ I told Marjorie, ‘is a recording of a telephone call of Rebecca selling information about the horses she would be riding. It’s the worst of racing crimes. Sending it and that photograph to the racing authorities would end her career. She’d be warned off. The Stratton name would be mud.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t do that,’ Dart wailed.

  Conrad said, as if the words hurt his tongue, ‘She admitted it.’

  ‘No!’ Dart moaned.

  ‘I challenged her,’ Conrad said. ‘I played her the tape. She can be so hard. She listened like stone. She said I wouldn’t let Yarrow use it.’ Conrad swallowed. ‘And… she was right.’

  ‘Put the gun down,’ I said.

  He didn’t.

  I threw the tape to Dart, who fumbled it, dropped it and picked it up again.

  ‘Give it to Marjorie,’ I said and, blinking, he obeyed.

  ‘If you’ll unload the gun and put it against the wall,’ I said to Conrad, ‘I’ll tell you how to get rid of Yarrow, but I’m not doing it with your hand on the trigger.’

  ‘Conrad,’ Marjorie said crisply, ‘you’re not going to shoot him. So put the gun down in case you do it by accident.’

  Blessed bodyguard. Conrad woke to realities as if in a cold shower, looking down indecisively at his hands. He undoubtedly would have laid down his fire power were it not that Rebecca, at that moment, swept in like a whirlwind, having outrun the manservant altogether.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve a right to know!’

  Marjorie stared at her with her customary disfavour. ‘Considering what you’ve done, you’ve no right to anything.’

  Rebecca looked at the photograph of herself and the tape in Marjorie’s hand, and at the shotgun in her father’s, and at me, threatened.

  ‘Keith told me that this… this…’ she pointed at me, not finding words bad enough, ‘stole enough to get me warned off…’

  I said fiercely to Conrad, ‘That tape is a fake.’

  The effect on Rebecca was an increase in fury. While the rest of the family tried to understand what I’d said, she snatched the gun from her father, swung it round at shoulder height, took a quick aim at me and without pause pulled the trigger.

  I saw the intention in her eyes and flung myself sideways full length onto the carpet, rolling onto my stomach, missing the ball of fizzing pellets by fractions, conscious of two barrels, two cartridges, and no way of escaping a shot in the back.

  The room had filled with a thunderous cracking noise, with flame and smoke, with the acrid smell of cordite at close quarters. Jesus, I thought. God almighty. Not Keith, but Rebecca.

  The second shot didn’t come. I cringed on the floor – no other word for it. There was the smell, the ringing echo, and beyond that… silence.

  I stirred, turned my head, saw her shoes, crawled my gaze upwards as far as her hands.

  She was not pointing the second of the barrel holes at me.

  Her hands were empty.

  Eyes slowly right… Conrad himself held his gun.

  Dart came down on his knees by my head, saying, ‘Lee,’ helplessly.

  I said thickly, ‘She missed me.’

  ‘God, Lee.’

  I felt breathless, but I couldn’t stay there for ever. I rolled in
to a sitting position; felt too shaken to stand.

  The shot had shocked them all, even Rebecca.

  Marjorie, straightbacked, looked over-white, her mouth open, fixed, animation suspended. Conrad’s eyes stared darkly at a bloody mess too narrowly averted. I couldn’t… yet… look straight at Rebecca.

  ‘She didn’t mean to,’ Conrad said.

  But she had indeed meant it; an act beyond caution.

  I coughed once, convulsively. I said again, ‘The tape is a fake.’ And this time, no one tried to kill me for it.

  Conrad said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  I breathed deeply, slowly, trying to steady the racket of my pulse.

  ‘She couldn’t have done it,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t put in jeopardy the… the citadel of her most inner self.’

  Conrad said, in perplexity, ‘I don’t really follow.’

  I looked at last at Rebecca. She stared back, her face hard and expressionless.

  ‘I saw you race,’ I said. ‘You exalt in it. And the other day, I listened to you say you would be in the top five this year on the jockeys’ list. You were passionate about it. You’re a Stratton, you’re infinitely proud, and you’re rich and don’t need the money. There’s no way you’re ever going to sell sleazy information that could bring you unbearable disgrace.’

  Rebecca’s eyes slitted narrowly under lowered eyelids, her face rigid.

  ‘But she confirmed it was true!’ Conrad said again.

  I said regretfully, ‘She made the tape herself to put pressure on you to get new stands built, and she tried to shoot me to stop me telling you.’

  ‘Rebecca!’ Conrad couldn’t believe it. ‘This man’s lying. Tell me he’s lying.’

  Rebecca said nothing.

  ‘You’ve been showing all the signs of intolerable strain,’ I said to her. ‘I would think it seemed a good idea to you to begin with, to let your father believe he was being blackmailed to save you from being warned off, but once you’d done it, and he had in fact allowed himself to be blackmailed, I’d guess you regretted it sorely. But you didn’t confess that to him. You went straight on with your obsessive and drastic plan to modernise Stratton Park radically, and it’s been tearing you apart for weeks and making you… lose balance.’

  ‘The hangers!’ Dart said.

  ‘But why, Rebecca?’ Conrad begged, intensely disturbed. ‘I’d have done anything for you…’