by Dick Francis
The deserted weighing room looked the same as ever: a large bare expanse of wooden board floor, with a table and some upright chairs in one corner, and the weighing machine itself on the left. Racecourse weighing machines were not all of one universal design. There weren’t any left of the old type where the jockeys stood on a platform while weights were added to the balancing arm. That whole process was much too slow. Now there were either seats slung from above, in which one felt much like a bag of sugar, or chairs bolted to a base plate on springs: in both these cases the weight was quickly indicated by a pointer which swung round a gigantic clock face. In essence, modern kitchen scales vastly magnified.
The scales at Seabury were the chair-on-base-plate type, which I’d always found simplest to use. I recalled a few of the before-and-after occasions when I had sat on that particular spot. Some good, some bad, as always with racing.
Shrugging, I turned away. I wouldn’t, I thought, ever be sitting there again. And no one walked over my grave.
Climbing into the car, I drove to the nearest town, looked up the whereabouts of Intersouth Chemicals, and an hour later was speaking to the personnel manager. I explained that on behalf of the National Hunt Committee I had just called in passing to find out if the driver of the tanker had fully recovered, or had remembered anything else about the accident.
The manager, fat and fiftyish, was affable but unhelpful. ‘Smith’s left,’ he said briefly. ‘We gave him a few days off to get over the accident, and then he came back yesterday and said his wife didn’t fancy him driving chemicals any more, and he was packing it in.’ His voice held a grievance.
‘Had he been with you long?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘About a year.’
‘A good driver, I suppose?’
‘Yes, about average for the job. They have to be good drivers, or we don’t use them, you see. Smith was all right, but nothing special.’
‘And you still don’t really know what happened?’
‘No,’ he sighed. It takes a lot to tip one of our tankers over. There was nothing to learn from the road. It was covered with oil and petrol and chemical. If there had ever been any marks, skid marks I mean, they weren’t there after the breakdown cranes had lifted the tanker up again, and the road was cleared.’
‘Do your tankers use that road often?’
‘They have done recently, but not any more after this. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember it was Smith himself who found that way round. Going over the racecourse missed out some bottle-neck at a junction, I believe. I know some of the drivers thought it a good idea.’
‘They go through Seabury regularly, then?’
‘Sure, often. Straight line to Southampton and round to the oil refinery at Fawley.’
‘Oh? What exactly was Smith’s tanker carrying?’
‘Sulphuric acid. It’s used in refining petrol, among other things.’
Sulphuric acid. Dense; oily; corrosive to the point of charring. Nothing more instantly lethal could have poured out over Seabury’s turf. They could have raced had it been a milder chemical, put sand or tan on the dying grass and raced over the top. But no one would risk a horse on ground soaked with vitriol.
I said, ‘Could you give me Smith’s address? I’ll call round and see if his memory has come back.’
‘Sure.’ He searched in a file and found it for me. ‘Tell him he can have his job back if he’s interested. Another of the men gave notice this morning.’
I said I would, thanked him, and went to Smith’s address, which proved to be two rooms upstairs in a suburban house. But Smith and his wife no longer lived in them. Packed up and gone yesterday, I was told by a young woman in curlers. No, she didn’t know where they went. No, they didn’t leave a forwarding address, and if I was her I wouldn’t worry about his health as he’d been laughing and drinking and playing records to all hours the day after the crash, his concussion having cured itself pretty quick. Reaction, he’d said when she complained of the noise, against not being killed.
It was dark by then, and I drove slowly back into London against the stream of headlights pouring out. Back to my flat in a modern block, a short walk from the office, down the ramp into the basement garage, and up in the lift to the fifth floor, home.
There were two rooms facing south, bedroom and sitting-room, and two behind them, bathroom and kitchen, with windows into an inner well. A pleasant sunny place, furnished in blond wood and cool colours, centrally heated, cleaning included in the rent. A regular order of groceries arrived week by week directly into the kitchen through a hatch, and rubbish disappeared down a chute. Instant living. No fuss, no mess, no strings. And damnably lonely, after Jenny.
Not that she had ever been in the place, she hadn’t. The house in the Berkshire village where we had mostly lived had been too much of a battleground, and when she walked out I sold it, with relief. I’d moved into the new flat shortly after going to the agency, because it was close. It was also expensive: but I had no fares to pay.
I mixed myself a brandy with ice and water, sat down in an arm-chair, put my feet up, and thought about Seabury. Seabury, Captain Oxon, Ted Wilkins, Intersouth Chemicals, and a driver called Smith.
After that I thought about Kraye. Nothing pleasant about him, nothing at all. A smooth, phony crust of sophistication hiding ruthless greed; a seething passion for crystals, ditto for land; an obsession with the cleanliness of his body to compensate for the murk in his mind; unconventional sexual pleasures; and the abnormal quality of being able to look carefully at a crippled hand and then hit it.
No, I didn’t care for Howard Kraye one little bit.
SEVEN
‘Chico,’ I said. ‘How would you overturn a lorry on a pre-determined spot?’
‘Huh? That’s easy. All you’d need would be some heavy lifting gear. A big hydraulic jack. A crane. Anything like that.’
‘How long would it take?’
‘You mean, supposing the lorry and the crane were both in position?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only a minute or two. What sort of lorry?’
‘A tanker.’
‘A petrol job?’
‘A bit smaller than the petrol tankers. More the size of milk ones.’
‘Easy as kiss your hand. They’ve got a low centre of gravity, mind. It’d need a good strong lift. But dead easy, all the same.’
I turned to Dolly. ‘Is Chico busy today, or could you spare him?’
Dolly leaned forward, chewing the end of a pencil and looking at her day’s chart. The cross-over blouse did its stuff.
‘I could send someone else to Kempton…’ She caught the direction of my eyes and laughed, and retreated a whole half inch. ‘Yes, you can have him.’ She gave him a fond glance.
‘Chico,’ I said. ‘Go down to Seabury and see if you can find any trace of heavy lifting gear having been seen near the racecourse last Friday… those little bungalows are full of people with nothing to do but watch the world go by… you might check whether anything was hired locally, but I suppose that’s a bit much to hope for. The road would have to have been closed for a few minutes before the tanker went over, I should think. See if you can find anyone who noticed anything like that… detour signs, for instance. And after that, go to the council offices and see what you can dig up among their old maps on the matter of drains.’ I told him the rough position of the subsiding trench which had made a slaughterhouse of the hurdle race, so that he should know what to look for on the maps. ‘And be discreet.’
‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ he grinned.
‘Our quarry is rough.’
‘And you don’t want him to hear us creep up behind him?’
‘Quite right.’
‘Little Chico,’ he said truthfully, ‘can take care of himself.’
After he had gone I telephoned Lord Hagbourne and described to him in no uncertain terms the state of Seabury’s turf.
‘What they need is some proper earth movi
ng equipment, fast, and apparently there’s nothing in the kitty to pay for it. Couldn’t the Levy Board…?’
‘The Levy Board is no fairy godmother,’ he interrupted. ‘But I’ll see what can be done. Less than half cleared, you say? Hmm. However, I understand that Captain Oxon assured Weatherbys that the course would be ready for the next meeting. Has he changed his mind?’
‘I didn’t see him, sir. He was away for the day.’
‘Oh.’ Lord Hagbourne’s voice grew a shade cooler. ‘Then he didn’t ask you to enlist my help?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t see that I can interfere then. As racecourse manager it is his responsibility to decide what can be done and what can’t, and I think it must be left like that. Mm, yes. And of course he will consult the Clerk of the Course if he needs advice.’
‘The Clerk of the Course is Mr Fotherton, who lives in Bristol. He is Clerk of the Course there, too, and he’s busy with the meetings there tomorrow and Monday.’
‘Er, yes, so he is.’
‘You could ring Captain Oxon up in an informal way and just ask how the work is getting on,’ I suggested.
‘I don’t know…’
‘Well, sir, you can take my word for it that if things dawdle on at the same rate down there, there won’t be any racing at Seabury next week-end. I don’t think Captain Oxon can realise just how slowly those men are digging.’
‘He must do,’ he protested. ‘He assured Weatherbys…’
‘Another last minute cancellation will kill Seabury off,’ I said with some force.
There was a moment’s pause. Then he said reluctantly, ‘Yes, I suppose it might. All right then. I’ll ask Captain Oxon and Mr Fotherton if they are both satisfied with the way things are going.’
And I couldn’t pin him down to any more direct action than that, which was certainly not going to be enough. Protocol would be the death of Seabury, I thought.
Monopolising Dolly’s telephone, I next rang up the Epping police and spoke to Chief-Inspector Cornish.
‘Any more news about Andrews?’ I asked.
‘I suppose you have a reasonable personal interest.’ His chuckle came down the wire. ‘We found he did have a sister after all. We called her at the inquest yesterday for identification purposes as she is a relative, but if you ask me she didn’t really know. She took one look at the bits in the mortuary and was sick on the floor.’
‘Poor girl, you couldn’t blame her.’
‘No. She didn’t look long enough though to identify anyone. But we had your identification for sure, so we hadn’t the heart to make her go in again.’
‘How did he die? Did you find out?’
‘Indeed we did. He was shot in the back. The bullet ricocheted off a rib and lodged in the sternum. We got the experts to compare it with the one they dug out of the wall of your office. Your bullet was a bit squashed by the hard plaster, but there’s no doubt that they are the same. He was killed with the gun he used on you.’
‘And was it there, underneath him?’
‘Not a sign of it. They brought in “murder by persons unknown”. And between you and me, that’s how it’s likely to stay. We haven’t a lead to speak of.’
‘What lead do you have?’ I asked.
His voice had a smile in it. ‘Only something his sister told us. She has a bedsitter in Islington, and he spent the evening there before breaking into your place. He showed her the gun. She says he was proud of having it; apparently he was a bit simple. All he told her was that a big chap had lent it to him to go out and fetch something, and he was to shoot anyone who got in his way. She didn’t believe him. She said he was always making things up, always had, all his life. So she didn’t ask him anything about the big chap, or about where he was going, or anything at all.’
‘A bit casual,’ I said. ‘With a loaded gun under her nose.’
‘According to the neighbours she was more interested in a stream of men friends than in anything her brother did.’
‘Sweet people, neighbours.’
‘You bet. Anyway we checked with anyone we could find who had seen Andrews the week he shot you, and he hadn’t said a word to any of them about a gun or a “big chap”, or an errand in Cromwell Road.’
‘He didn’t go back to his sister afterwards?’
‘No, she’d told him she had a guest coming.’
‘At one in the morning? The neighbours must be right. You tried the racecourses, of course? Andrews is quite well known there, as a sort of spivvy odd-job messenger boy.’
‘Yes, we mainly tried the racecourses. No results. Everyone seemed surprised that such a harmless person should have been murdered.’
‘Harmless!’
He laughed. ‘If you hadn’t thought him harmless, you’d have kept out of his way.’
‘You’re so right,’ I said with feeling. ‘But now I see a villain in every respectable citizen. It’s very disturbing.’
‘Most of them are villains, in one way or another,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Keeps us busy. By the way, what do you think of Sparkle’s chances this year in the Hennessy…?’
When eventually I put the telephone down Dolly grabbed it with a sarcastic ‘Do you mind?’ and asked the switchboard girl to get her three numbers in a row, ‘without interruptions from Halley’. I grinned, got the packet of photographs out of the plywood table drawer, and looked through them again. They didn’t tell me any more than before. Ellis Bolt’s letters to Kraye. Now you see it, now you don’t. A villain in every respectable citizen. Play it secretly, I thought, close to the chest, in case the eyes looking over your shoulder give you away. I wondered why I was so oppressed by a vague feeling of apprehension, and decided in irritation that a bullet in the stomach had made me nervous.
When Dolly finished her calls I took the receiver out of her hand and got through to my bank manager.
‘Mr Hopper? This is Sid Halley… yes, fine thanks, and you? Good. Now, would you tell me just how much I have in both my accounts, deposit and current?’
‘They’re quite healthy, actually,’ he said in his gravelly bass voice. ‘You’ve had several dividends in lately. Hang on a minute, and I’ll send for the exact figures.’ He spoke to someone in the background and then came back. ‘It’s time you re-invested some of it.’
‘I do have some investments in mind,’ I agreed. ‘That’s what I want to discuss with you. I’m planning to buy some shares this time from another stockbroker, not through the bank. Er… please don’t think that I’m dissatisfied; how could I be, when you’ve done so well for me. It’s something to do with my work at the agency.’
‘Say no more. What exactly do you want?’
‘Well, to give you as a reference,’ I said. ‘He’s sure to want one, but I would be very grateful if you would make it as impersonal and as strictly financial as possible. Don’t mention either my past occupation or my present one. That’s very important.’
‘I won’t, then. Anything else?’
‘Nothing… oh, yes. I’ve introduced myself to him as John Halley. Would you refer to me like that if he gets in touch with you?’
‘Right. I’ll look forward to hearing from you one day what it’s all about. Why don’t you come in and see me? I’ve some very good cigars.’ The deep voice was amused. ‘Ah, here are the figures…’ He told me the total, which for once was bigger than I expected. That happy state of affairs wouldn’t last very long, I reflected, if I had to live for two years without any salary from Radnor. And no one’s fault but my own.
Giving Dolly back her telephone with an ironic bow, I went upstairs to Bona Fides. Jack Copeland’s mud coloured jersey had a dark blue darn on the chest and a fraying stretch of ribbing on the hip. He was picking at a loose thread and making it worse.
‘Anything on Kraye yet?’ I asked. ‘Or is it too early?’
‘George has got something on the prelim, I think,’ he answered. ‘Anybody got any scissors?’ A large area of jersey disintegrated into ladders. �
�Blast.’
Laughing, I went over to George’s desk. The prelim was a sheet of handwritten notes in George’s concertinaed style. ‘Leg mat, 2 yrs. 2 prev, 1 div, 1 sui dec.’ it began, followed by a list of names and dates.
‘Oh, yeah?’I said.
‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘Kraye was legally married to Doria Dawn, née Easterman, two years ago. Before that he had two other wives. One killed herself; the other divorced him for cruelty.’ He pointed to the names and dates.
‘So clear,’ I agreed. ‘When you know how.’
‘If you weren’t so impatient you’d have a legible typed report. But as you’re here…’ He went on down the page, pointing. ‘Geologists think him a bit eccentric… quartz has no intrinsic value, most of it’s much too common, except for the gem stones, but Kraye goes round trying to buy chunks of it if they take his fancy. They know him quite well along the road at the Geology Museum. But not a breath of any dirty work. Clubs… he belongs to these three, not over-liked, but most members think he’s a brilliant fellow, talks very well. He gambles at Crockfords, ends up about all square over the months. He travels, always first-class, usually by boat, not air. No job or profession, can’t trace him on any professional or university lists. Thought to live on investments, playing the stock market, etc. Not much liked, but considered by most a clever, cultured man, by one or two a hypocritical gasbag.’
‘No talk of him being crooked in any way?’
‘Not a word. You want him dug deeper?’
‘If you can do it without him finding out.’
George nodded. ‘Do you want him tailed?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Not at present.’ A twenty-four-hour tail was heavy on man-power and expensive to the client, quite apart from the risk of the quarry noticing and being warned of the hunt. ‘Anything on his early life?’ I asked.