Decider. Part 18

Conrad looked affronted and Wilson Yarrow impatient, obviously thinking the old lady a no-account interruption.

'It is clear,' Marjorie went on in her crystal diction, 'that we have to have a new grandstand.'

'No!' Keith interrupted. 'We sell!'

Marjorie paid him no attention. 'I am sure Mr Yarrow is a highly competent architect, but for something as important as new stands I propose we put an advertis.e.m.e.nt in a magazine read by architects, inviting any who are interested to send us plans and proposals in a compet.i.tion so that we could study various possibilities and then make a choice.'

Conrad's consternation was matched by Yarrow's.

'But Marjorie ' Conrad began.

'It would be the normal course of activity, wouldn't it?' she asked with open-eyed simplicity. 'I mean, one wouldn't buy even a chair without considering several for comfort and appearance and usefulness, would one?'

She gave me a short, expressionless, pa.s.sing glance. Double bravo, I thought.

'As a director,' Marjorie said, 'I put forward a motion that we seek a variety of suggestions for a grandstand, and of course we will welcome Mr Yarrow's among them.'

Dead silence.

'Second the motion, Ivan?' Marjorie suggested.

'Oh! Yes. Sensible. Very sensible.'

'Conrad?'

'Now look here, Marjorie...'

'Use commonsense, Conrad,' she urged.

Conrad squirmed. Yarrow looked furious.

Keith unexpectedly said, 'I agree with you, Marjorie. You have my vote.'

She looked surprised, but although she may have reckoned, as I did, that Keith's motive was solely to impede the rebuilding, she pragmatically accepted his help.

'Carried,' she said without triumph. 'Colonel, could you possibly find a suitable publication for an advertis.e.m.e.nt?'

Roger said he was certain he could, and would see to it.

'Splendid.' Marjorie levelled a limpid gaze on the discomfited personage who'd made the error of condescension. 'When you have your plans ready, Mr Yarrow, we'd be delighted to see them.'

He said with clenched teeth, 'Lord Stratton has a set.'

'Really?' Conrad squirmed further under a similar gaze. 'Then, Conrad, we'd all like to see them, wouldn't we?'

Stratton heads nodded with various graduations of urgency.

'They're in my house,' Conrad informed her grudgingly. 'I suppose I could bring them to you sometime.'

Marjorie nodded. 'This afternoon, shall we say? Four o'clock.' She looked at her watch. 'My goodness! We're all terribly late for lunch. Such a busy morning.' She rose to her small feet. 'Colonel, as our private dining room in the stands is, as I suppose, out of action, perhaps you could arrange somewhere suitable for us on Monday? Most of us, I imagine, will be attending.'

Roger said again, faintly, that he would see to it.

Marjorie, nodding benignly, made a grande dame grande dame exit and, surrendering herself to Mark's solicitous care, was driven away. exit and, surrendering herself to Mark's solicitous care, was driven away.

More or less speechlessly, the others followed, Conrad taking an angry Yarrow, leaving Roger and myself in quiet occupancy of the combat zone.

'The old battleaxe!' Roger said with admiration.

I handed him his pay cheques. He looked at the signature.

'How did you do that?' he said.

CHAPTER 9.

Roger spent the afternoon with the racecourse's consultant electrician, whose men by-pa.s.sed the main grandstand while restoring power to everywhere else. Circuits that hadn't fused by themselves had been disconnected prudently by Roger, it seemed. 'Fire,' he explained, 'is the last thing we need.'

A heavy-duty cable in an insulating tube was run underground by a trenching machine to the Members' car park, for lights, power and refrigerators in the big top. 'Never forget champagne on a racecourse,' Roger said, not joking.

The investigators in the ruins had multiplied and had brought in scaffolding and cutters. At one point they erected and bolted together a long six-foot-high fence, replacing the cordoning tape. 'We could lose priceless clues to souvenir hunters,' one told me. 'Monday's crowd, left alone, could put piranhas to shame.'

I said to one of the bombfinders, 'If you'd been drilling upwards of thirty holes into the walls of a stairway, would you have posted a look-out?'

'Christ, yes.' He thought for a bit. 'Course, you know, when you have someone drilling, you mostly can't tell where the noise is coming from. Drilling's deceptive, like. You can think it's next door and it's a hundred yards away; and the other way round. If anyone heard the drilling, is what I'm trying to say, one, they wouldn't know where it was happening, and two, they wouldn't think nothing of it, not in a place this big.'

Only Roger, I thought, would have known drilling was wrong: and Roger had been in his house half a mile out of earshot.

I used my mobile phone, still in Roger's jeep, to try to locate friends and staff from my student days to ask about Yarrow, but almost no one answered. I raised one wife, who said she would give Carteret my number but, sorry, he was busy in St Petersburg, and I spoke also to a very young daughter who told me Daddy didn't live with them any more. This sort of thing, I thought ruefully, didn't happen to the best private eyes.

In the office, Roger and I drew up plans for the positioning of the big top and of the two Portakabins he'd been promised. Male jockeys were to change in one, with the scales and attendant officials given housing in the other. We placed both structures near the parade ring within a few steps of Roger's office, and agreed that if his men took down the fence between the paddock and the Members' car park, the access to the big top would be unhampered for the public. It meant rerouting the horses round the big top to get them out onto the course, but all, Roger promised, could be accomplished.

'Rebecca!' he exclaimed at one point, clapping palm to aghast forehead. 'Women jockeys! Where do we put them?'

'How many of them?'

'Two or three. Six, max.'

I phoned Henry, got an answering machine, and left a message begging for side tents of any description. 'Also send anything pretty,' I added. 'Send Sleeping Beauty's castle. We need to cheer people up.'

'This is a racecourse, not a fairground,' Roger said, a touch disapprovingly, as I finished the call.

'This is Easter Bank Holiday,' I reminded him. 'This is restore-confidence day. This is ignore-bombs day, feel-more-secure day, have-a-good-time day. On Monday people coming here are going to forget there's a frightening disaster lying behind that new fence.' I paused. 'And we're going to have lights over the whole area tonight and tomorrow night, and as many people patrolling the stables and Tattersalls and the cheap rings as you can possibly press gang.'

'But the expense!' he said.

'Make a success of Monday, and Marjorie will pay for the guards.'

'You're infectious, you know that?' He gave me an almost lighthearted smile and was about to hurry back to his electricians when the telephone rang.

Roger said, 'Hallo,' and 'Yes, Mrs Binsham,' and 'At once, of course,' and put down the receiver.

He relayed the news. 'She says Conrad and Yarrow are with her, and they've shown her his plans, and she wants a copy made here on the office copier.'

'And did Conrad agree?' I asked with surprise.

'It seems so, as long as we lock the copy in the office safe.'

'She's amazing,' I said.

'She's got Conrad in some sort of hammer-lock. I've noticed before. When she applies pressure, he folds.'

'They all blackmail each other!'

He nodded. 'Too many secrets, paid for and hushed up.'

'That's what Dart says, more or less.'

Roger pointed to the door of his secretary's office. 'Both the copier and the safe are in there. Conrad and Yarrow are coming straight over.'

'In that case, I'll vanish,' I said. 'I'll wait in your jeep.'

'And when they've gone back to your bus?'

'If you don't mind.'

'Long after time,' he said briefly, and opened the door for my clip-clomping progress outwards.

I sprawled sideways in the jeep and watched Conrad and Wilson Yarrow arrive with a large sized folder and later leave, both of them striding stiff-legged in annoyance.

When they'd gone, Roger brought the new copies over to the jeep and we looked at them together.

He said the plans had been on three large sheets, with blue lines on pale grey paper, but owing to the size of the office machine, the copies came on smaller sheets with black lines. One set of copies laid out a ground floor plan. One set showed elevations of all four sides. The third looked a maze of thin threadlike lines forming a three-dimensional viewpoint, but hollow, without substance.

'What's that that?' Roger asked, as I frowned over it. 'I've never seen anything like that.'

'It's an axonometric drawing.'

'A what?'

'An axonometric projection is a method of representing a building in three dimensions that is easier than fiddling about with true perspectives. You rotate the plan of the building to whatever angle you like and project verticals upwards... Well,' I apologised, 'you did ask.'

Roger was more at home with the elevations. 'It's just one big slab of gla.s.s,' he protested.

'It's not all that bad. Incomplete, but not bad.'

'Lee!'

'Sorry,' I said. 'Anyway, I wouldn't build it in Stratton Park, and probably not anywhere in England. It's crying out for tropical weather, vast air-conditioning and millionaire members. And even those aren't going to be ultra-comfortable.'

'That's better,' he said, relieved.

I looked at the top left-hand corner of each set of copies. All three were inscribed simply 'Club Grandstands', 'Wilson Yarrow, AADipl.' A lone job. No partners, no firm.

'The best racing grandstands ever built,' I said, 'are at Arlington Park, near Chicago.'

'I thought you didn't go racing much,' Roger said.

'I haven't been there. I've seen pictures and prints of the plans.'

He laughed. 'Can we afford stands like that?'

'You could adapt their ideas.'

'Dream on,' he said, shuffling the copies into order. 'Wait while I tuck these into the safe.' He went off on the short errand and returned to drive the scant half-mile to his house, which was quiet and empty: no children, no wife.

We found them all in the bus. The boys had invited Mrs Gardner to tea (tuna sandwiches with crusts on, crisps and chocolate wafer biscuits) and they were all watching the football results unwaveringly on television.

When the guest of honour and her husband had gone, Christopher gave her the highest of accolades, 'She understands even the off-side rule!'

Football coverage went on. I claimed my own bed, dislodging a viewer or two, and lay on my stomach to watch the proceedings. After the last possible report had been made (ad infinitum (ad infinitum re-runs of every goal that afternoon), Christopher made supper for everyone of tinned spaghetti on toast. The boys then chose a video from the half dozen or so I'd rented for the ruin-hunt journey and settled down to watch that. I lay feeling that it had been a pretty long day and, somewhere during the film, went to sleep. re-runs of every goal that afternoon), Christopher made supper for everyone of tinned spaghetti on toast. The boys then chose a video from the half dozen or so I'd rented for the ruin-hunt journey and settled down to watch that. I lay feeling that it had been a pretty long day and, somewhere during the film, went to sleep.

I awoke at about three in the morning, still face down, fully dressed.

The bus was dark and quiet, the boys asleep in their bunks. I found that they had put a blanket over me instead of waking me up.

On the table by my head stood a full gla.s.s of water.

I looked at it with grateful amazement, with a lump in the throat.

The evening before, when I'd stood a gla.s.s there, Toby, to whom, since the explosion, anything out of routine was a cause of quivering anxiety, had asked what it was for.

'The hospital,' I explained, 'gave me some pills to take if I woke up in the night and the cuts started hurting.'

'Oh. Where are the pills?'

'Under my pillow.'

They'd nodded over the information. I hadn't slept much and I had taken the pills, which they'd commented on in the morning.

So now, tonight, the gla.s.s of water was back, standing ready, put there by my sons. I took the pills, drinking, and I lay in the dark feeling grindingly sore and remarkably happy.