by Dick Francis
Litsi and Danielle went off in search of a drink and a sandwich in the old unrefurbished bar under the emerging dream, and I, sliding into nylon tights, breeches and boots, tried not to think about that too much. I pulled on a thin vest, and my valet neatly tied the white stock around my neck. After that, I put on the padded back-guard which saved one’s spine and kidneys from too much damage, and on top of that the first set of colours for the day. Crash helmet, goggles, whip, number cloth, weight cloth, saddle; I checked them all, weighed out, handed the necessary to Dusty to go and saddle up, put on an anorak because of the cold and went out to ride.
I wouldn’t have minded, just once, having a day when I could stand on the stands and go racing with Danielle like anyone else. Eat a sandwich, have a drink, place a bet. I saw them smiling and waving to me as I rode onto the track, and I waved back, wanting to be right there beside them on the ground.
The horse I was riding won the race, which would surprise and please Wykeham but not make up for Col’s losing the day before.
Besides Wykeham’s two runners I’d been booked for three others. I rode one of those without results in the second race and put Pinkeye’s red and blue striped colours on for the third, walking out in my warming anorak towards the parade ring to talk to the fussiest and most critical of all Wykeham’s owners.
I didn’t get as far as the parade ring. There was a cry high up, and a voice calling, ‘Help,’ and along with everyone else I twisted my head round to see what was happening.
There was a man hanging by one hand from the new viewing balcony high on the members’ stand. A big man in a dark overcoat.
Litsi.
In absolute horror, I watched him swing round until he had two hands on the top of the balcony wall, but he was too big and heavy to pull himself up, and below him there was a fifty foot drop direct to hard tarmac.
I sprinted over there, tore off my anorak and laid it on the ground directly under where Litsi hung.
‘Take off your coat,’ I said to the nearest man. ‘Lay it on the ground.’
‘Someone must go up and help him,’ he said. ‘Someone will go.’
‘Take off your coat.’ I turned to a woman. ‘Take off your coat. Lay it on the ground. Quick, quick, lay coats on the ground.’
She looked at me blindly. She was wearing a full-length expensive fur. She slid out of her coat and threw it on top of my anorak, and said fiercely to the man next to her, ‘Take off your coat, take off your coat.’
I ran from person to person, ‘Take off your coat, quick, quick … Take off your coat.’
A whole crowd had collected, staring upwards, arrested on their drift back to the stands for the next race.
‘Take off your coat,’ I could hear people saying. ‘Take off your coat.’
Dear God, Litsi, I prayed, just hang on.
There were other people yelling to him, ‘Hang on, hang on,’ and one or two foolishly screaming, and it seemed to me there was a great deal of noise, although very many were silent.
A little boy with huge eyes unzipped his tiny blue anorak and pulled off his small patterned jersey and flung them onto the growing, spreading pile, and I heard him running about in the crowd, in his bright cotton T-shirt, his high voice calling, ‘Quick, quick, take off your coats.’
It was working. The coats came off in dozens and were thrown, were passed through the crowd, were chucked higgledy-piggledy to form a mattress, until the circle on the ground was wide enough to contain him if he fell, but could be thicker, thicker.
No one had reached Litsi from the balcony side: no strong arms clutching to haul him up.
Coats were flying like leaves. The word had spread to everyone in sight. ‘Take off your coat, take off your coat, quick … quick …’
When Litsi fell, he looked like another flying overcoat, except that he came down fast, like a plummet. One second he was hanging there, the next he was down. He fell straight to begin with, then his heavy shoulders tipped his balance backwards and he landed almost flat on his back.
He bounced heavily on the coats and rolled and slid off them and ended with his head on one coat and his body on the tarmac, sprawling on his side, limp as a rag.
I sprang to kneel beside him and saw immediately that although he was dazed, he was truly alive. Hands stretched to help him up, but he wasn’t ready for that, and I said, ‘Don’t move him … let him move first … you have to be careful.’
Everyone who went racing knew about spinal injuries and not moving jockeys until it was safe, and there I was, in my jockey’s colours, to remind them. The hands were ready, but they didn’t touch.
I looked up at that crowd, all in shirt-sleeves, all shivering with cold, all saints. Some were in tears, particularly the woman who’d laid her mink on the line.
‘Litsi,’ I said, looking down and seeing some sort of order return to his eyes. ‘Litsi, how are you doing?’
‘I … Did I fall?’ He moved a hand, and then his feet, just a little, and the crowd murmured with relief.
‘Yes, you fell,’ I said. ‘Just stay there for a minute. Everything’s fine.’
Somebody above was calling down, ‘Is he all right?’ and there, up on the balcony, were the two men who’d apparently gone up to save him.
The crowd shouted, ‘Yes,’ and started clapping, and in almost gala mood began collecting their coats from the pile. There must have been almost two hundred of them, I thought, watching. Anoraks, huskies, tweeds, raincoats, furs, suit jackets, sweaters, even a horse rug. It was taking much longer to disentangle the huge heap than it had to collect it.
The little boy with big eyes picked up his blue anorak and zipped it on over his jersey, staring at me. I hugged him. ‘What’s your name?’ I said.
‘Matthew.’
‘You’re a great guy.’
‘That’s my daddy’s coat,’ he said, ‘under the man’s head.’
‘Ask him to leave it there just another minute.’
Someone had run to fetch the first-aid men, who arrived with a stretcher.
‘I’m all right,’ Litsi said weakly, but he was still winded and disorientated, and made no demur when they made preparations for transporting him.
Danielle was suddenly there beside him, her face white.
‘Litsi,’ she was saying, ‘Oh, God …’ She looked at me. ‘I was waiting for him … someone said a man fell … is he all right?’
‘He’s going to be,’ I said. ‘He’ll be fine.’
‘Oh …’
I put my arms round her. ‘It’s all right. Really it is. Nothing seems to be hurting him, he’s just had his breath knocked out.’
She slowly disengaged herself and walked away beside the stretcher when they lifted it onto a rolling platform, a gurney.
‘Are you his wife?’ I heard a first-aid man say.
‘No … a friend.’
The little boy’s father picked up his coat and shook my hand. The woman picked up her squashed mink, brushed dust off it and gave me a kiss. A Steward came out and said would I now please get on my horse and go down to the start, as the race would already be off late, and I looked at the racecourse clock and saw in amazement that it was barely fifteen minutes since I’d walked out of the weighing room.
All the horses, all the owners and trainers were still in the parade ring, as if time had stopped, but now the jockeys were mounting; death had been averted, life could thankfully go on.
I picked up my anorak. All the coats had been reclaimed, and it lay there alone on the tarmac, with my whip underneath. I looked up at the balcony, so far above, so deserted and unremarkable. Nothing suddenly seemed real, yet the questions hadn’t even begun to be asked. Why had he been up there? How had he come to be clinging to life by his fingertips? In what way had he not been careful?
Litsi lay on a bed in the first-aid room until the races were over, but insisted then that he had entirely recovered and was ready to return to London.
He apologised to the racecourse e
xecutive for having been so foolish as to go up to the balcony to look at the new, much-vaunted view, and said that it was entirely his own clumsiness which had caused him to stumble over some builders’ materials and lose his balance.
When asked for his name, he’d given a shortened version of his surname without the ‘prince’ in front, and he hoped there wouldn’t be too much public fuss over his stupidity.
He was sitting in the back of the car, telling us all this, Danielle sitting beside him, as we started towards London.
‘How did you stumble?’ I asked, glancing at him from time to time in the driving mirror. ‘Was there a lot of junk up there?’
‘Planks and things.’ He sounded puzzled. ‘I don’t really know how I stumbled. I stood on something that rocked, and I put a hand out to steady myself, and it went out into space, over the wall. It happened so fast … I just lost my footing.’
‘Did anyone push you?’ I asked.
‘Kit!’ Danielle said, horrified, but it had to be considered, and Litsi, it seemed, had already done so.
‘I’ve been lying there all afternoon,’ he said slowly, ‘trying to remember exactly how it happened. I didn’t see anyone up there at all, I’m certain of that. I stood on something that rocked like a see-saw, and totally lost my balance. I wouldn’t say I was pushed.’
‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘do you mind if we go back there? I should have gone up for a look when I’d finished racing.’
‘The racecourse people went up,’ Litsi said. ‘They came and told me that there was nothing particularly dangerous, but of course I shouldn’t have gone.’
‘We’ll go back,’ I said, and although Danielle protested that she’d be late for work, back we went.
Leaving Danielle and Litsi outside in the car, I walked through the gates and up the grandstand. As with most grandstands, it was a long haul to the top, up not too generous stairways, and one could see why, with a stream of people piling up that way to the main tier to watch the race, those going up to rescue Litsi from above had been a fair time on their journey.
The broad viewing steps of the main tier led right down to the ground and were openly accessible, on the side facing the racecourse, but the upper tier could be reached only by the stairways, of which there were two, one at each end.
I went up the stairway at the end nearest the weighing room, the stairway Litsi said he had used to reach the place where he’d overbalanced. Looking up at the back of the grandstand from the ground, that place was near the end of the balcony, on the left.
The stairway led first onto the upper steps of the main tier, and then continued upwards and I climbed to the top landing, where the refreshment room was in process of construction. The whole area had been glassed in, leaving only the balcony open. The balcony ran along the back of the refreshment room which had several glass doors, now closed, to lead eventually to the sandwiches. Inside the glass and without, there were copious piles of builders’ materials, planks, drums of paint and ladders.
I went gingerly forward to the cold, open, windy balcony, towards the place where Litsi had overbalanced, and saw what had very likely happened. Planks lay side by side and several deep along all the short passage to the balcony, raising one, as one walked along them, higher than normal in proportion to the chest-high wall. When I was walking on the planks, the wall ahead seemed barely waist-high and Litsi was taller than I by three or four inches.
Whatever had rocked under Litsi’s feet was no longer rocking, but several planks by the balcony wall itself were scattered like spillikins, not lying flat as in the passage. I picked my way among them, feeling them move when I pushed, and reached the spot where Litsi had fallen.
With my feet firmly on the floor, I looked over. One could see all the parade ring area beautifully, with magnificent hills beyond. Very attractive, that balcony, and with one’s feet on the floor, very safe.
I went along its whole length intending to go down by the stairway at the other end, nearest the car park, but found I couldn’t: the stairs themselves were missing, being in the middle of reconstruction. I walked back to the end where I had come up, renegotiated the planks, and descended to ground level.
‘Well?’ Litsi asked, when I was back in the car. ‘What did you think?’
‘Those planks looked pretty unsafe.’
‘Yes,’ he said ruefully, as I started the car and drove out of the racecourse gates. ‘I thought, after I’d overbalanced, and managed somehow to catch hold of the wall, that if I just hung on, someone would come and rescue me, but you know … my fingers just gave way … I didn’t leave go consciously. When I was falling, I thought I would die … and I would have done … it’s incredible that all those people took off their coats.’ He paused, ‘I wish I could thank them,’ he said.
‘I couldn’t think where you’d got to,’ Danielle reflected. ‘I was waiting for you on the stands, where we’d arranged to meet after I’d been to the ladies room. I didn’t imagine …’
‘But,’ said Litsi, ‘I went up to that balcony because I was supposed to meet you up there, Danielle.’
I stopped the car abruptly.
‘Say that again,’ I said.
THIRTEEN
Litsi said it again. ‘I got this message that Danielle was waiting for me up on the balcony to look at the view.’
‘I didn’t send any such message,’ Danielle said blankly. ‘I was waiting where we’d watched the race before, where we’d said we’d meet.’
‘Who gave you the message?’ I asked Litsi.
‘Just a man.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Well … an ordinary man. Not very young. He had a Sporting Life in his hands, and a sort of form book, with his finger keeping the place … and binoculars.’
‘What sort of voice?’
‘Just … ordinary.’
I let the brakes off with a sigh and started off towards Chiswick. Litsi had walked straight into a booby trap which had been meant either to frighten him or to kill him, and no one would have set it but Henri Nanterre. I hadn’t seen Nanterre at the races, and neither Litsi nor Danielle knew him by sight.
If Nanterre had set the trap, he’d known where Litsi would be that day, and the only way he could have known was via Beatrice. I couldn’t believe that she would have known what use would be made of her little tit-bit, and it occurred to me that I didn’t want her to know, either. It was important that Beatrice should keep right on telling.
Litsi and Danielle were quiet in the back of the car, no doubt travelling along much the same mental track. They protested, though, when I asked them not to tell Beatrice about the fake message.
‘But she’s got to know,’ Danielle said vehemently. Then she’ll see she must stop it. She’ll see how murderous that man is …’
‘I don’t want her to stop it just yet,’ I said. ‘Not until Tuesday.’
‘Why ever not? Why Tuesday?’
‘We’ll do what Kit wants,’ Litsi said, I’ll tell Beatrice just what I told the racecourse people, that I went up to look at the view.’
‘She’s dangerous,’ Danielle said.
‘I don’t see how we can catch Nanterre without her,’ I said. ‘So be a darling.’
I wasn’t sure whether or not it was the actual word which silenced her, but she made no more objections, and we travelled for a while without saying anything significant. Litsi’s arms and shoulders were aching from the strain of having hung onto the wall so long, and he shifted uncomfortably from time to time, making small grunts.
I went back to thinking about the man who had delivered the misleading message, and asked Litsi if he was absolutely positive the man had used the word ‘Danielle’.
‘Positive,’ Litsi said without hesitation. ‘What he said to me first was, “Do you know someone called Danielle?” When I said I did, he said she wanted me to go up the stairs to the balcony to look at the view. He pointed up there. So I went.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘
Then we’ll take a spot of positive action.’
Like almost everyone in the racing world, I had a telephone in my car, and I put a call through to the Towncrier and asked for the Sports Desk. I wasn’t sure whether their racing correspondent, Bunty Ireland, would be in the office at that time, but it seemed he was. He hadn’t been at Bradbury: he went mostly to major meetings and on other days wrote his column in the office.
‘I want to pay for an advertisement,’ I told him, ‘but it has to be on the racing page and in a conspicuous place.’
‘Are you touting for rides?’ he asked sardonically. ‘A Grand National mount? Have saddle, will travel, that sort of thing?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Very funny.’ Bunty had an elephantine sense of humour but he was kind at heart. ‘Write this down word for word, and persuade the racing page editor to print it in nice big noticeable letters.’
‘Fire away, then.’
‘Large reward offered to anyone who passed on a message from Danielle at Bradbury races on Thursday afternoon.’ I dictated it slowly and added the telephone number of the house in Eaton Square.
Bunty’s mystification came clearly across the air waves. ‘You want the personal column for that,’ he said.
‘No. The racing page. Did you get it straight?’
He read it over, word for word.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘if you were riding at Bradbury, perhaps you can confirm this very odd story we’ve got about a guy falling from a balcony onto a pile of coats. Is someone having us on, or should we print it?’
‘It happened,’ I said.
‘Did you see it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Was the guy hurt?’
‘No, not at all. Look, Bunty, get the story from someone else, will you? I’m in my car, and I want to get that ad in the Sporting Life and the Racing Post, before they go to press. And could you give me their numbers?’
‘Sure, hold on.’
I put the receiver down temporarily and passed my pen and notebook back to Danielle, and when Bunty returned with the numbers, repeated them aloud for her to write down.