Decider. Part 13

'Tell that to the Jews,' Dart said.

It shocked them all, but not much.

Marjorie Binsham said, 'Go outside, the lot of you. I I will deal with Mr Morris, in here.' She turned her head to Roger. 'You too, Colonel. Out.' will deal with Mr Morris, in here.' She turned her head to Roger. 'You too, Colonel. Out.'

Conrad said, it's not safe '

'Rubbish!' Marjorie interrupted. 'Off you go.'

They obeyed her, shuffling out without looking at each other, losing face.

'Close the door,' she commanded, and Roger, last out, closed it.

She sat down composedly, wearing that day a narrow tailored navy blue overcoat with a white band of collar again showing beneath. The waved white hair, the fragile looking complexion and the piercing hawk eyes, all those were as before.

She inspected me critically. She said, 'You got yourself blown up yesterday and trampled today. Not very clever, are you?'

'No.'

'And get off the wall. You're bleeding on it.'

'I'll paint it, later.'

'From where, exactly, are you bleeding?'

I explained about the mult.i.tude of bruises, cuts and clips. 'Some of those,' I said, 'feel as if they've popped open.'

'I see.'

She seemed for a few moments undecided, not her usual force. Then she said, 'I will free you, if you like, from our agreement.'

'Oh?' I was surprised. 'No, the agreement stands.'

'I did not expect you to be hurt.'

I briefly considered things. Hurt, even if grievous, was in some ways immaterial. I ignored it as best I could. Concentrated on anything else.

'Do you know,' I asked, 'who set the explosive?'

'No, I don't.'

'Which Strattons could have the knowledge?'

'None of them.'

'What about Forsyth?'

Shutters came down in her, too.

'Whatever Forsyth is or isn't,' she said, 'he is not expert in blowing things up.'

'Does he have a motive for getting someone else to do it?'

After a pause, she said, 'I don't think so.'

My forehead was sweating. I put a hand up automatically to wipe it and started swaying, and regripped the walking frame urgently, fighting to regain balance and not to fall down. Too many crushed muscles, too many cut fibres, too much d.a.m.ned battering overall. I stood quietly, breathing deeply, crisis over, my weight on my arms.

'Sit down,' Marjorie commanded.

'That might be worse.'

She stared. I smiled. 'My children think it funny.'

'But not.'

'Not very.'

She said slowly, 'Are you going to charge Keith with a.s.sault? Hannah also?'

I shook my head.

'Why not? They were kicking you. I saw them.'

'And would you say so in court?'

She hesitated. She had used the police as a threat to end the fight, but that was all it had been, a threat.

I thought of the pact my mother had made with Lord Stratton, to keep quiet about Keith's violent behaviour. I had hugely benefited from that silence. My unthought-out instinct was to do the same as my mother.

I said, 'I will even things one day, with Keith. But not by embroiling you against your family in public. It will be a private matter, between him and me.'

With evident relief and formality, she said, 'I wish you well.'

There was a brief single wail of a siren outside the window, more an announcement of arrival than of hurry.

The police had arrived anyway. Marjorie Binsham looked not enchanted and I felt very tired, and presently the office door opened to let in far more people than the s.p.a.ce had been designed for.

Keith was making abortive attempts to persuade the law that I had caused actual bodily harm to his grandson, Jack.

'Jack,' observed Roger calmly, 'shouldn't try to kick people when they're down.'

'And you,' Keith said to him viciously, 'you can clear out. I told you. You're sacked.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Marjorie snapped. 'Colonel, you are not not sacked. We need you. Please stay here. Only by a majority vote of the board can you be asked to leave, and there will be no such majority.' sacked. We need you. Please stay here. Only by a majority vote of the board can you be asked to leave, and there will be no such majority.'

'One of these days, Marjorie,' Keith said, his voice heavy and shaking with humiliation, 'I will get rid of you.'

'Look here, Keith ' Conrad began.

'And you shut up,' Keith said with hatred, 'It was you or your blackmailing architect that put paid to the stands.'

Into the shocked silence, which left all Stratton mouths dropping open, the police with bathos consulted a notebook full of pre-arranged agenda and asked which of the family normally drove a dark green six-year-old Granada with rusted near wings.

'What's that got to do with anything?' Dart demanded.

Without answering that question the police presence repeated their own.

'I do, then,' Dart said. 'So what?'

'And did you drive that car through the main gates of the racecourse at eight-twenty yesterday morning, and did you oblige Mr Harold Quest to leap out of your path to avoid serious injury, and did you make an obscene gesture to him when he protested?'

Dart nearly laughed, and prudently thought better of it at the last moment.

'No, I didn't,' he said.

'Didn't do what, sir? Didn't drive through the gates? Didn't make Mr Quest leap out of the way? Didn't make an obscene gesture?'

Dart said unworriedly, 'I didn't drive through the main gates at twenty past eight yesterday morning.'

'But you identified the car, sir...'

'I wasn't driving it at eight-twenty yesterday morning. Not through the main gates, here. Not anywhere.'

The police asked the inevitable question, politely.

'I was in my bathroom, since you ask,' Dart said, and left his actual activity there to the collective imagination.

I asked, 'Is Mr Quest a large man with a beard, a knitted hat and a placard reading "HORSES RIGHTS COME FIRST"?'

The policeman admitted, 'He does answer to that description, yes, sir.'

'That man!' exclaimed Marjorie.

'Should be shot,' Conrad said.

'He walks straight out in front of one's car,' Marjorie told the policemen severely. 'He will, no doubt, achieve his aim in the end.'

'Which is, madam?'

'To be knocked down, of course. To fall down artistically at the slightest contact. To suffer for the cause. One has to be j rightfully careful with that sort of man.'

I asked, 'Are you sure that Mr Quest was actually outside the gates himself at twenty past eight yesterday morning?'

'He insisted that he was,' said the policeman.

'On Good Friday? It's a day when no one goes to racecourses.'

'He said he was there.'

I left it. Lack of energy. Dart and the car had gone in and out of the gates often enough for every picketer to be able to describe it down to its tattered rear b.u.mper-sticker, which read, if you can read this, drop back'. Dart had annoyed big beard the day I'd been with him. Big beard, Harold Quest, felt compelled to make trouble. Where lay the truth?

'And you, Mr Morris...' The notebook's pages were flipped over and were consulted. 'We were told you were to be detained in hospital but when we went to interview you they said you had discharged yourself. They hadn't officially released you.'

'Such punitive words!' I said.

'What?'

'Detained and released. As in prison.'

'We couldn't find you,' he complained. 'No one seemed to know where you'd gone.'

'Well, I'm here now.'

'And... er... Mr Jack Stratton alleges that at approximately eight-fifty this morning you attacked him and broke his nose.'

'Jack Stratton alleges nothing of the sort,' Marjorie said with certainty. 'Jack, speak up.'

The sullen young man, dabbing his face with a handkerchief, took note of Marjorie's piercing displeasure and mumbled he might have walked into a door, like. Despite Keith's and Hannah's protestations, the policeman resignedly drew a line across the entry in his notebook and said his superiors wanted information from me on the whereabouts of the explosive charges 'prior to detonation'. Where, they asked, could I be found?

'When?' I asked.

'This morning, sir.'

'Then... here, I suppose.'

Conrad, looking at his watch, announced that he had summoned a demolitions expert and an inspector from the local council to come to advise how best to remove the old stands and clear the area ready for rebuilding.

Keith, in a rage, said, 'You've no right to do that. It's my racecourse just as much as yours, and I want to sell it, and if we sell to a developer he he will clear away the stands at no expense to us. We are will clear away the stands at no expense to us. We are not not rebuilding.' rebuilding.'

Marjorie, fierce eyed, said they needed an expert opinion on whether or not the stands could be restored as they had been, and whether the racecourse insurance would cover any other course of action.

'Add the insurance to the profit from selling, and we will all benefit,' Keith obstinately said.

The policemen, uninterested, retired to their car outside and could be seen talking on their private phone line, consulting their superiors, one supposed.

I said doubtfully to Roger, 'Can the stands be restored?' the stands be restored?'

He answered with caution. 'Too soon to say.'

'Of course, they can.' Marjorie was positive. 'Anything can be restored, if one insists on it.'

Replaced as before, or copied, she meant. A mistake, I thought it would be, for Stratton Park's racing future.

The family went on quarrelling. They had all turned up early, it appeared, precisely to prevent any unilateral decisionmaking. They left the office in an arguing ma.s.s, bound together by fears of what any one could do on his own. Roger watched them go, his expression exasperated.

'What a way to run a business! And neither Oliver nor I have been paid since before Lord Stratton died. He used to sign our cheques personally. The only person empowered to pay us since then is Mrs Binsham. I explained it to her when we were walking round the course last Wednesday, and she said she understood, but when I asked her again yesterday after the stands blew up, when she came here with all the others, she told me not to bother her at such a time.' He sighed heavily. 'It's all very well, but it's over two months now since we had any salary.'

'Who pays the racecourse staff?' I asked.