Odds against

SEVENTEEN

I was barely two steps past the door of the Tattersalls bar when it opened and the lights blazed out on to my tiptoeing figure. In the two seconds it took Oxon to realise what he was seeing I was six running paces down towards the way out. His shouts echoed in the passage mingled with others further back, and I still thought that if Kraye too were behind me I might have a chance. But when I was within ten steps of the end another figure appeared there, hurrying, called by the noise.

I skidded nearly to a stop, sliding on one of the scattered bottle tops, and crashed through the only possible door, into the same empty bar as before. I raced across the board floor, kicking bottle tops in all directions, but I never got to the far door. It opened before I reached it: and that was the end.

Doria Kraye stood there, maliciously triumphant. She was dressed theatrically in white slender trousers and a shiny short white jacket. Her dark hair fell smoothly, her face was as flawlessly beautiful as ever: and she held rock steady in one elegant long-fingered hand the little.22 automatic I had last seen in a chocolate box at the bottom of her dressing-case.

‘The end of the line, buddy boy,’ she said. ‘You stay just where you are.’

I hesitated on the brink of trying to rush her.

‘Don’t risk it,’ she said. ‘I’m a splendid shot. I wouldn’t miss. Do you want a knee-cap smashed?’

There was little I wanted less. I turned round slowly. There were three men coming forward into the long room. Kraye, Oxon and Ellis Bolt. All three of them looked as if they had long got tired of the chase and were going to take it out on the quarry.

‘Will you walk,’ said Doria behind me, ‘or be dragged?’

I shrugged. ‘Walk.’

All the same, Kraye couldn’t keep his hands off me. When, following Doria’s instructions, I walked past him to go back out through the passage he caught hold of my jacket at the back of my neck and kicked my legs. I kicked back, which wasn’t too sensible, as I presently ended up on the floor. There was nothing like little metal bottle tops for giving you a feeling of falling on little metal bottle tops, I thought, with apologies to Michael Flanders and Donald Swan.

‘Get up,’ said Kraye. Doria stood beside him, pointing at me with the gun.

I did as he said.

‘Right,’ said Doria. ‘Now, walk down the passage and go into the weighing room. And Howard, for God’s sake wait till we get there, or we’ll lose him again. Walk, buddy boy. Walk straight down the middle of the passage. If you try anything, I’ll shoot you in the leg.’

I saw no reason not to believe her. I walked down the centre of the passage with her too close behind for escape, and with the two men bringing up the rear.

‘Stop a minute,’ said Kraye, outside the boiler room.

I stopped. I didn’t look round.

Kraye opened the door and looked inside. The light spilled out, adding to that already coming from the other open doors along the way.

‘Well?’said Oxon.

‘There’s more water on the floor.’ He sounded pleased, and shut the door without going in for a further look. Not all of my luck had departed, it seemed.

‘Move,’ he said. I obeyed.

The weighing room was as big and bare as ever. I stopped in the middle of it and turned round. The four of them stood in a row, looking at me, and I didn’t at all like what I read in their faces.

‘Go and sit there,’ said Doria, pointing.

I went on across the floor and sat where she said, on the chair of the weighing machine. The pointer immediately swung round the clock face to show my weight. Nine stone seven. It was, I was remotely interested to see, exactly ten pounds less than when I had last raced. Bullets would solve any jockey’s weight problem, I thought.

The four of them came closer. It was some relief to find that Fred wasn’t among them, but only some. Kraye was emitting the same livid fury as he had twelve days ago at Aynsford. And then, I had merely insulted his wife.

‘Hold his arms,’ he said to Oxon. Oxon was one of those thin wiry men of seemingly limitless strength. He came round behind me, clamped his fingers round my elbows and pulled them back. With concentration Kraye hit me several times in the face.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘where are they?’

‘What?’ I said indistinctly.

‘The negatives.’

‘What negatives?’

He hit me again and hurt his own hand. Shaking it out and rubbing his knuckles, he said, ‘You know what negatives. The films you took of my papers.’

‘Oh, those.’

‘Those.’ He hit me again, but less hard.

‘In the office,’ I mumbled.

He tried a slap to save his knuckles. ‘Office,’ I said.

He tried with his left hand, but it was clumsy. After that he sucked his knuckles and kept his hands to himself.

Bolt spoke for the first time, in his consciously beautiful voice. ‘Fred wouldn’t have missed them, especially as there was no reason for them to be concealed. He’s too thorough.’

If Fred wouldn’t have missed them, the bombs had been pure spite. I licked the inside of a split lip and thought about what I would like to do to Fred.

‘Where in the office?’ said Kraye.

‘Desk.’

‘Hit him,’ said Kraye. ‘My hand hurts.’

Bolt had a go, but it wasn’t his sort of thing.

‘Try with this,’ said Doria, offering Bolt the gun, but it was luckily so small he couldn’t hold it effectively.

Oxon let go of my elbows, came round to the front, and looked at my face.

‘If he’s decided not to tell you, you won’t get it out of him like that,’ he said.

‘I told you,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ said Bolt.

‘You’re hurting yourselves more than him. And if you want my opinion, you won’t get anything out of him at all.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Doria scornfully. ‘He’s so small.’

Oxon laughed without mirth.

‘If Fred said so, the negatives weren’t at his office,’ asserted Bolt again. ‘Nor in his flat. And he didn’t bring them with him. Or at least, they weren’t in his luggage at the hotel.’

I looked at him sideways, out of an eye which was beginning to swell. And if I hadn’t been so quick to have him flung out of my hotel room, I thought sourly, he wouldn’t have driven through the racecourse gate at exactly the wrong moment. But I couldn’t have foreseen it, and it was too late to help.

‘They weren’t in his car either,’ said Doria. ‘But this was.’ She put her hand into her shining white pocket and brought out my baby camera. Kraye took it from her, opened the case, and saw what was inside. The veins in his neck and temples became congested with blood. In a paroxysm of fury he threw the little black toy across the room so that it hit the wall with a disintegrating crash.

‘Sixteen millimetre,’ he said savagely. ‘Fred must have missed them.’

Bolt said obstinately, ‘Fred would find a needle in a haystack. And those films wouldn’t have been hidden.’

‘He might have them in his pocket,’ suggested Doria.

‘Take your coat off,’ Kraye said. ‘Stand up.’

I stood up, and the base-plate of the weighing machine wobbled under my feet. Oxon pulled my coat down over the back of my shoulders, gave a tug to get the sleeves off, and passed the jacket to Kraye. His own hand he thrust into my trouser pockets. In the right one, under my tie, he found the bunch of lock pickers.

‘Sit down,’ he said. I did so, exploring with the back of my hand some of the damage to my face. It could have been worse, I thought resignedly, much worse. I would be lucky if that were all.

‘What are those?’ said Doria curiously, taking the jingling collection from Oxon.

Kraye snatched them from her and slung them after the camera. ‘Skeleton keys,’ he said furiously. ‘What he used to unlock my cases.’

‘I don’t see how he could,’ said Doria, ‘with that… that… claw.’ She looked down where it lay on my lap.

A nice line in taunts, I thought, but a week too late. Thanks to Zanna Martin, I was at last learning to live with the claw. I left it where it was.

‘Doria,’ said Bolt calmly, ‘would you be kind enough to go over to the flat and wait for Fred to ring? He may already have found what we want at Aynsford.’

I turned my head and found him looking straight at me, assessingly. There was a detachment in the eyes, an unmoved quality in the rounded features; and I began to wonder whether his stolid coolness might not in the end prove even more difficult to deal with than Kraye’s rage.

‘Aynsford,’ I repeated thickly. I looked at my watch. If Fred had really taken his bombs to Aynsford, he should by now be safely in the bag. One down, four to go. Five of them altogether, not four. I hadn’t thought of Doria being an active equal colleague of the others. My mistake.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Doria, staying put.

Bolt shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I see that the negatives aren’t at Aynsford, because the thought of Fred looking for them there doesn’t worry Halley one little bit.’

The thought of what Fred might be doing at Aynsford or to Charles himself didn’t worry any of them either. But more than that I didn’t like the way Bolt was reasoning. In the circumstances, a clear-thinking opponent was something I could well have done without.

‘We must have them,’ said Kraye intensely. ‘We must. Or be certain beyond doubt that they were destroyed.’ To Oxon he said, ‘Hold his arms again.’

‘No,’ I said, shrinking back.

‘Ah, that’s better. Well?’

‘They were in the office.’ My mouth felt stiff.

‘Where?’

‘In Mr Radnor’s desk, I think.’

He stared at me, eyes narrowed, anger half under control, weighing up whether I were telling the truth or not. He certainly couldn’t go to the office and make sure.

‘Were,’ said Bolt suddenly.

‘What?’ asked Kraye, impatiently.

‘Were,’ said Bolt. ‘Halley said were. The negatives were in the office. Now that’s very interesting indeed, don’t you think?’

Oxon said, ‘I don’t see why.’

Bolt came close to me and peered into my face. I didn’t meet his eyes, and anything he could read from my bruised features he was welcome to.

‘I think he knows about the bombs,’ he said finally.

‘How?’ said Doria.

‘I should think he was told at the hotel. People in London must have been trying to contact him. Yes, I think we can take it for granted he knows about the bombs.’

‘What difference does that make?’ said Oxon.

Kraye knew. ‘It means he thinks he is safe saying the negatives were in the office, because we can’t prove they weren’t.’

‘They were,’ I insisted, showing anxiety.

Bolt pursed his full moist lips. ‘Just how clever is Halley?’ he said.

‘He was a jockey,’ said Oxon flatly, as if that automatically meant an I.Q. of 70.

Bolt said, ‘But they took him on at Hunt Radnor’s.’

‘I told you before,’ said Oxon patiently, ‘I asked various people about that. Radnor took him on as an adviser, but never gave him anything special to do, and if that doesn’t show that he wasn’t capable of much, I don’t know what does. Everyone knows that his job is only a face saver. It sounds all right, but it means nothing really. Jobs are quite often given in that way to top jockeys when they retire. No one expects them to do much, it’s just their name that’s useful for a while. When their news value has gone, they get the sack.’

This all too true summing up of affairs depressed me almost as deeply as my immediate prospects.

‘Howard?’ said Bolt.

‘I don’t know,’ said Kraye slowly. ‘He doesn’t strike me as being in the least clever. Very much the opposite. I agree he did take those photographs, but I think you are quite right in believing he doesn’t know why we want them destroyed.’

That, too, was shatteringly correct. As far as I had been able to see, the photographs proved nothing conclusively except that Kraye had been buying Seabury shares under various names with Bolt’s help. Kraye and Bolt could not be prosecuted for that. Moreover the whole of Seabury executive had seen the photographs at the meeting that morning, so their contents were no secret.

‘Doria?’ Bolt said.

‘He’s a slimy spying little creep, but if he was clever he wouldn’t be sitting where he is.’

You couldn’t argue with that, either. It had been fairly certain all along that Kraye was getting help from somebody working at Seabury, but even after knowing about Clerk of the Course Brinton’s unwilling collaboration at Dunstable, I had gone on assuming that the helper at Seabury was one of the labourers. I hadn’t given more than a second’s flicker of thought to Oxon, because it didn’t seem reasonable that it should be him. In destroying the racecourse he was working himself out of a job, and good jobs for forty year old ex-army captains weren’t plentiful enough to be lost lightly. As he certainly wasn’t mentally affected like Brinton, he wasn’t being blackmailed into doing it against his will. I had thought him silly and self important, but not a rogue. As Doria said, had I been clever enough to suspect him, I wouldn’t be sitting where I was.

Bolt went on discussing me as if I weren’t there, and as if the decision they would come to would have ordinary everyday consequences.

He said, ‘You may all be right, but I don’t think so, because since Halley has been on the scene everything’s gone wrong. It was he who persuaded Hagbourne to get the course put right, and he who found the mirror as soon as it was up. I took him without question for what he said he was when he came to see me — a shop assistant. You two took him for a wretched little hanger-on of no account. All that, together with the fact that he opened your locked cases and took good clear photographs on a miniature camera, adds up to just one thing to me. Professionalism. Even the way he sits there saying nothing is professional. Amateurs call you names and try to impress you with how much they know. All he has said is that the negatives were in the office. I consider we ought to forget every previous impression we have of him and think of him only as coming from Hunt Radnor.’

They thought about this for five seconds. Then Kraye said, ‘We’ll have to make sure about the negatives.’

Bolt nodded. If reason hadn’t told me what Kraye meant, his wife’s smile would have done. My skin crawled.

‘How?’ she said interestedly.

Kraye inspected his grazed knuckles. ‘You won’t beat it out of him,’ said Oxon. ‘Not like that. You haven’t a hope.’

‘Why not?’said Bolt.

Instead of replying, Oxon turned to me. ‘How many races did you ride with broken bones?’

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t remember anyway.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Doria scornfully. ‘How could he?’

‘A lot of them do,’ said Oxon. ‘And I’m sure he was no exception.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Kraye.

Oxon shook his head. ‘Collar bones, ribs, forearms, they’ll ride with cracks in any of those if they can keep the owners and trainers from finding out.’

Why couldn’t he shut up, I thought savagely. He was making things much much worse; as if they weren’t appalling enough already.

‘You mean,’ said Doria with sickening pleasure, ‘that he can stand a great deal?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’ It sounded like the plea it was. ‘You can only ride with cracked bones if they don’t hurt.’

‘They must hurt,’ said Bolt reasonably.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not always.’ It was true, but they didn’t believe it.

‘The negatives were in the office,’ I said despairingly. ‘In the office.’

‘He’s scared,’ said Doria delightedly. And that too was true.

It struck a chord with Kraye. He remembered Aynsford. ‘We know where he’s most easily hurt,’ he said. ‘That hand.’

‘No,’ I said in real horror.

They all smiled.

My whole body flushed with uncontrollable fear. Racing injuries were one thing: they were quick, one didn’t expect them, and they were part of the job.

To sit and wait and know that a part of ones self which had already proved a burden was about to be hurt as much as ever was quite something else. Instinctively I put my arm up across my face to hide from them that I was afraid, but it must have been obvious.

Kraye laughed insultingly. ‘So there’s your brave clever Mr Halley for you. It won’t take much to get the truth.’

‘What a pity,’ said Doria.

They left her standing in front of me holding the little pistol in an unswerving pink nailed hand while they went out and rummaged for what they needed. I judged the distance to the door, which was all of thirty feet, and wondered whether the chance of a bullet on the way wasn’t preferable to what was going to happen if I stayed where I was.

Doria watched my indecision with amusement.

‘Just try it, buddy boy. Just try it.’

I had read that to shoot accurately with an automatic pistol took a great deal of skill and practice. It was possible that all Doria had wanted was the power feeling of owning a gun and she couldn’t aim it. On the other hand she was holding it high and with a nearly straight arm, close to where she could see along the sights. On balance, I thought her claim to be a splendid shot had too much probability to be risked.

It was a pity Doria had such a vicious soul inside her beautiful body. She looked gay and dashing in her white Courreges clothes, smiling a smile which seemed warm and friendly and was as safe as the yawn of a python. She was the perfect mate for Kraye, I thought. Fourth, fifth, sixth time lucky, he’d found a complete complement to himself. If Kraye could do it, perhaps one day I would too… but I didn’t know if I would even see tomorrow.

I put the back of my hand up over my eyes. My whole face hurt, swollen and stiff, and I was developing a headache. I decided that if I ever got out of this I wouldn’t try any more detecting. I had made a proper mess of it.

The men came back, Oxon from the Stewards’ room lugging a wooden spoke-backed chair with arms, Kraye and Bolt from the changing room with the yard-long poker from the stove and the rope the wet breeches had been hung on to dry. There were still a couple of pegs clinging to it.

Oxon put the chair down a yard or two away and Doria waved the gun a fraction to indicate I should sit in it. I didn’t move.

‘God,’ she said disappointedly, ‘you really are a little worm, just like at Aynsford. Scared to a standstill.’

‘He isn’t a shop assistant,’ said Bolt sharply. ‘And don’t forget it.’

I didn’t look at him. But for him and his rejection of Charles’ usefully feeble Halley image, I might not have been faced with quite the present situation.

Oxon punched me on the shoulder. ‘Move,’ he said.

I stood up wearily and stepped off the weighing machine. They stood close round me. Kraye thrust out a hand, twisted it into my shirt, and pushed me into the chair. He, Bolt and Oxon had a fine old time tying my arms and legs to the equivalent wooden ones with the washing line. Doria watched, fascinated.

I remembered her rather unusual pleasures.

‘Like to change places?’ I said tiredly.

It didn’t make her angry. She smiled slowly, put her gun in a pocket, and leaned down and kissed me long and hard on the mouth. I loathed it. When at length she straightened up she had a smear of my blood on her lip. She wiped it off on to her hand, and thoughtfully licked it. She looked misty-eyed and languorous, as if she had had a profound sexual experience. It made me want to vomit.

‘Now,’ said Kraye. ‘Where are they?’ He didn’t seem to mind his wife kissing me. He understood her, of course.

I looked at the way they had tied the rope tightly round and round my left forearm, leaving the wrist bare, palm downwards. A hand, I thought. What good, anyway, was a hand that didn’t work.

I looked at their faces, one by one Doria, rapt Oxon, faintly surprised. Kraye confident, flexing his muscles. And Bolt, calculating and suspicious. None of them within a mile of relenting.

‘Where are they?’ Kraye repeated, lifting his arm.

‘In the office,’ I said helplessly.

He hit my wrist with the poker. I’d hoped he might at least try to be subtle, but instead he used all his strength and with that one first blow smashed the whole shooting match to smithereens. The poker broke through the skin. The bones cracked audibly like sticks.

I didn’t scream only because I couldn’t get enough breath to do it. Before that moment I would have said I knew everything there was to know about pain, but it seems one can always learn. Behind my shut eyes the world turned yellow and grey, like sun shining through mist, and every inch of my skin began to sweat. There had never been anything like it. It was too much, too much. And I couldn’t manage any more.

‘Where are they?’ said Kraye again.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t do it.’ I could hardly speak.

Doria sighed deeply.

I opened my eyes a slit, my head lolling weakly back, too heavy to hold up. Kraye was smiling, pleased with his efforts. Oxon looked sick.

‘Well?’ said Kraye.

I swallowed, hesitating still.

He put the tip of the poker on my shattered bleeding wrist and gave a violent jerk. Among other things it felt like a fizzing electric shock, up my arm into my head and down to my toes. Sweat started sticking my shirt to my chest and my trousers to my legs.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t.’ It was a croak; a capitulation; a prayer.

‘Come on, then,’ said Kraye, and jolted the poker again.

I told them. I told them where to go.