Odds against

NINE

‘Now look,’ said Lord Hagbourne, amidst the bustle of Kempton races, ‘I’ve had a word with Captain Oxon and he’s satisfied with the way things are going. I really can’t interfere any more. Surely you understand that?’

‘No, sir, I don’t. I don’t think Captain Oxon’s feelings are more inportant than Seabury Racecourse. The course should be put right quickly, even if it means overruling him.’

‘Captain Oxon,’ he said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘knows more about his job than you do. I give more weight to his assurance than to your quick look at the track.’

‘Then couldn’t you go and see for yourself? While there is still time.’

He didn’t like being pushed. His expression said so, plainly. There was no more I could say, either, without risking him ringing up Radnor to cancel the whole investigation.

‘I may… er… I may find time on Monday,’ he said at last, grudgingly. ‘I’ll see. Have you found anything concrete to support your idea that Seabury’s troubles were caused maliciously?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘A bit far-fetched, if you ask me,’ he said crossly. ‘I said so to begin with, if you remember. If you don’t turn something up pretty soon… it’s all expense, you know.’

He was intercepted by a passing Steward who took him off to another problem, leaving me grimly to reflect that so far there was a horrid lack of evidence of any sort. What there was, was negative.

George had still found no chink in Kraye’s respectability, ex-sergeant Carter had given Bolt clearance, and Chico had come back from Seabury with no results all along the line.

We’d met in the office that morning, before I went to Kempton.

‘Nothing,’ said Chico. ‘I wagged me tongue off, knocking at every front door along that road. Not a soggy flicker. The bit which crosses the racecourse wasn’t closed by diversion notices, that’s for sure. There isn’t much traffic along there, of course. I counted it. Only forty to the hour, average. Still, that’s too much for at least some of the neighbours not to notice if there’d been anything out of the ordinary.’

‘Did anyone see the tanker, before it overturned?’

‘They’re always seeing tankers, nowadays. Several complaints about it, I got. No one noticed that one, especially.’

‘It can’t be coincidence… just at that spot at that time, where it would do most harm. And the driver packing up and moving a day or two afterwards, with no forwarding address.’

‘Well…’ Chico scratched his ear reflectively. ‘I got no dice with the hiring of lifting gear either. There isn’t much to be had, and what there was was accounted for. None of the little bungalows saw anything in that line, except the breakdown cranes coming to lift the tanker up again.’

‘How about the drains?’

‘No drains,’ he said. ‘A blank back to Doomsday.’

‘Good.’

‘Come again?’

‘If you’d found them on a map, the hurdle race accident would have been a genuine accident. This way, they reek of tiger traps.’

‘A spot of spade work after dark? Dodgy stuff.’

I frowned. ‘Yes. And it had to be done long enough before the race meeting for the ground to settle, so that the line of the trench didn’t show…’

‘And strong enough for a tractor to roll over it.’

‘Tractor?’

‘There was one on the course yesterday, pulling a trailer of dug up turf.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Yes, strong enough to hold a tractor… but wheels wouldn’t pierce the ground like a horse’s legs. The weight is more spread.’

‘True enough.’

‘How fast was the turf-digging going?’ I asked.

‘Fast? You’re joking.’

It was depressing. So was Lord Hagbourne’s shilly-shallying. So, acutely, was the whole day, because I kept my promise to Zanna Martin. Pity, curiosity, surprise, embarrassment and revulsion, I encountered the lot. I tried hard to look on some of the things that were said as tactlessness or bad manners, but it didn’t really work. Telling myself it was idiotic to be so sensitive didn’t help either. If Miss Martin hadn’t kept her side of the bargain, I thought miserably, I would throttle her.

Half way through the afternoon I had a drink in the big upstairs bar with Mark Witney.

‘So that’s what you’ve been hiding all this time in pockets and gloves,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Bit of a mess,’ he commented.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Does it hurt still?’

‘No, only if I knock it. And it aches sometimes.’

‘Mm,’ he said sympathetically. ‘My ankle still aches too. Joints are always like that; they mend, but they never forgive you.’ He grinned. ‘The other half? There’s time; I haven’t a runner until the fifth.’

We had another drink, talking about horses, and I reflected that it would be easy if they were all like him.

‘Mark,’ I said as we walked back to the weighing room, ‘do you remember whether Dunstable ran into any sort of trouble before it packed up?’

‘That’s going back a bit.’ He pondered. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t doing so well during the last year or two, was it? The attendances had fallen off, and they weren’t spending any money on paint.’

‘But no specific disasters?’

‘The Clerk of the Course took an overdose, if you call that a disaster. Yes, I remember now, the collapse of the place’s prosperity was put down to the Clerk’s mental illness. Brinton, I think his name was. He’d been quietly going loco and making hopeless decisions all over the place.’

‘I’d forgotten,’ I said glumly. Mark went into the weighing room and I leant against the rails outside. A suicidal Clerk of the Course could hardly have been the work of Kraye, I thought. It might have given him the idea of accelerating the demise of Seabury, though. He’d had plenty of time over Dunstable, but owing to a recent political threat of nationalisation of building land, he might well be in a hurry to clinch Seabury. I sighed, disregarded as best I could a stare of fascinated horror from the teenage daughter of a man I used to ride for, and drifted over to look at the horses in the parade ring.

At the end of the too-long afternoon I drove back to my flat, mixed a bigger drink than usual, and spent the evening thinking, without any world-shattering results. Late the next morning, when I was similarly engaged, the door bell rang, and I found Charles outside.

‘Come in,’ I said with surprise: he rarely visited the flat, and was seldom in London at week-ends. ‘Like some lunch? The restaurant downstairs is quite good.’

‘Perhaps. In a minute.’ He took off his overcoat and gloves and accepted some whisky. There was something unsettled in his manner, a ruffling of the smooth urbane exterior, a suggestion of a troubled frown in the high domed forehead.

‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘Whit’s the matter?’

‘Er… I’ve just driven up from Aynsford. No traffic at all, for once. Such a lovely morning, I thought the drive would be… oh damn it,’ he finished explosively, putting down his glass with a bang. ‘To get it over quickly… Jenny telephoned from Athens last night. She’s met some man there. She asked me to tell you she wants a divorce.’

‘Oh,’ I said. How like her, I thought, to get Charles to wield the axe. Practical Jenny, eager for a new fire, hacking away the dead wood. And if some of the wood was still alive, too bad.

‘I must say,’ said Charles, relaxing, ‘you make a thorough job of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of not caring what happens to you.’

‘I do care.’

‘No one would suspect it,’ he sighed. ‘When I tell you your wife wants to divorce you, you just say, “Oh.” When that happened,’ he nodded to my arm, ‘the first thing you said to me afterwards when I arrived full of sorrow and sympathy was, if I remember correctly, and I do, “Cheer up, Charles. I had a good run for my money.” ’

‘Well, so I did.’ Always, from my earliest childhood, I had instinctively shied away from too much sympathy. I didn’t want it. I distrusted it. It made you soft inside, and an illegitimate child couldn’t afford to be soft. One might weep at school, and one’s spirit would never recover from so dire a disgrace. So the poverty and the sniggers, and later the lost wife and the smashed career had to be passed off with a shrug, and what one really felt about it had to be locked up tightly inside, out of view. Silly, really, but there it was.

We lunched companionably together downstairs, discussing in civilised tones the mechanics of divorce. Jenny, it appeared, did not want me to use the justified grounds of desertion: I, she said, should ‘arrange things’ instead. I must know how to do it, working for the agency. Charles was apologetic: Jenny’s prospective husband was in the Diplomatic Service like Tony, and would prefer her not to be the guilty party.

Had I, Charles enquired delicately, already been… er… unfaithful to Jenny? No, I replied, watching him light his cigar, I was afraid I hadn’t. For much of the time, owing to one thing and another, I hadn’t felt well enough. That, he agreed with amusement, was a reasonable excuse.

I indicated that I would fix things as Jenny wanted, because it didn’t affect my future like it did hers. She would be grateful, Charles said. I thought she would very likely take it for granted, knowing her.

When there was little else to say on that subject, we switched to Kraye. I asked Charles if he had seen him again during the week.

‘Yes, I was going to tell you. I had lunch with him in the Club on Thursday. Quite accidentally. We both just happened to be there alone.’

‘That’s where you met him first, in your club?’

‘That’s right. Of course he thanked me for the week-end, and so on. Talked about the quartz. Very interesting collection, he said. But not a murmur about the St Luke’s Stone. I would have liked to have asked him straight out, just to see his reaction.’ He tapped off the ash, smiling. ‘I did mention you, though, in passing, and he switched on all the charm and said you had been extremely insulting to him and his wife, but that of course you hadn’t spoiled his enjoyment. Very nasty, I thought it. He was causing bad trouble for you. Or at least, he intended to.’

‘Yes,’ I said cheerfully. ‘But I did insult him, and I also spied on him. Anything he says of me is fully merited.’ I told Charles how I had taken the photographs, and all that I had discovered or guessed during the past week. His cigar went out. He looked stunned.

‘Well, you wanted me to, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘You started it. What did you expect?’

‘It’s only that I had almost forgotten… this is what you used to be like, always. Determined. Ruthless, even.’ He smiled. ‘My game for convalescence has turned out better than I expected.’

‘God help your other patients,’ I said, ‘if Kraye is standard medicine.’

We walked along the road towards where Charles had left his car. He was going straight home again.

I said, ‘I hope that in spite of the divorce I shall see something of you? I should be sorry not to. As your ex-son-in-law, I can hardly come to Aynsford any more.’

He looked startled. ‘I’ll be annoyed if you don’t, Sid. Jenny will be living all round the world, like Jill. Come to Aynsford whenever you want.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I meant it, and it sounded like it.

He stood beside his car, looking down at me from his straight six feet.

‘Jenny,’ he said casually, ‘is a fool.’

I shook my head. Jenny was no fool. Jenny knew what she needed, and it wasn’t me.

When I went into the office (on time) the following morning, the girl on the switchboard caught me and said Radnor wanted me straight away.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had Lord Hagbourne on the telephone telling me it’s time we got results and that he can’t go to Seabury today because his car is being serviced. Before you explode, Sid… I told him that you would take him down there now, at once, in your own car. So get a move on.’

I grinned. ‘I bet he didn’t like that.’

‘He couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough. Get round and collect him before he comes up with one.’

‘Right.’

I made a quick detour up to the Racing Section where Dolly was adjusting her lipstick. No cross-over blouse today. A disappointment.

I told her where I was going, and asked if I could use Chico.

‘Help yourself,’ she said resignedly. ‘If you can get a word in edgeways. He’s along in Accounts arguing with Jones-boy.’

Chico, however, listened attentively and repeated what I had asked him. ‘I’m to find out exactly what mistakes the Clerk of the Course at Dunstable made, and make sure that they and nothing else were the cause of the course losing money.’

‘That’s right. And dig out the file on Andrews and the case you were working on when I got shot.’

‘But that’s all dead,’ he protested, ‘the file’s down in records in the basement.’

‘Send Jones-boy down for it,’ I suggested, grinning. ‘It’s probably only a coincidence, but there is something I want to check. I’ll do it tomorrow morning. O.K.?’

‘If you say so, chum.’

Back at my flat, I filled up with Extra and made all speed round to Beauchamp Place. Lord Hagbourne, with a civil but cool good morning, lowered himself into the passenger seat, and we set off for Seabury. It took him about a quarter of an hour to get over having been manoeuvred into something he didn’t want to do, but at the end of that time he sighed and moved in his seat, and offered me a cigarette.

‘No, thank you, sir. I don’t smoke.’

‘You don’t mind if I do?’ He took one out.

‘Of course not.’

‘This is a nice car,’ he remarked, looking round.

‘It’s nearly three years old now. I bought it the last season I was riding. It’s the best I’ve ever had, I think.’

‘I must say,’ he said inoffensively, ‘that you manage extremely well. I wouldn’t have thought that you could drive a car like this with only one effective hand.’

‘Its power makes it easier, actually. I took it across Europe last Spring… good roads, there.’

We talked on about cars and holidays, then about theatres and books, and he seemed for once quite human. The subject of Seabury we carefully by-passed. I wanted to get him down there in a good mood; the arguments, if any, could take place on the way back; and it seemed as if he was of the same mind.

The state of Seabury’s track reduced him to silent gloom. We walked down to the burnt piece with Captain Oxon, who was bearing himself stiffly and being pointedly polite. I thought he was a fool: he should have fallen on the Senior Steward and begged for instant help.

Captain Oxon, whom I had not met before, though he said he knew me by sight, was a slender pleasant looking man of about fifty, with a long pointed chin and a slight tendency to watery eyes. The present offended obstinacy of his expression looked more like childishness than real strength. A colonel manqué, I thought uncharitably, and no wonder.

‘I know it’s not really my business,’ I said, ‘but surely a bulldozer would shift what’s left of the burnt bit in a couple of hours? There isn’t time to settle new turf, but you could cover the whole area with some tons of tan and race over it quite easily, like that. You must be getting tan anyway, to cover the road surface. Surely you could just increase the order?’

Oxon looked at me with irritation. ‘We can’t afford it.’

‘You can’t afford another cancellation at the last minute,’ I corrected.

‘We are insured against cancellations.’

‘I doubt whether an insurance company would stand this one,’ I said. ‘They’d say you could have raced if you’d tried hard enough.’

‘It’s Monday now,’ remarked Lord Hagbourne thoughtfully. ‘Racing’s due on Friday. Suppose we call in a bulldozer tomorrow; the tan can be unloaded and spread on Wednesday and Thursday. Yes, that seems sound enough.’

‘But the cost…’ began Oxon.

‘I think the money must be found,’ said Lord Hagbourne. ‘Tell Mr Fotherton when he comes over that I have authorised the expenditure. The bills will be met, in one way or another. But I do think there is no case for not making an effort.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that if Oxon had arranged for the bulldozer on the first day he could have saved the price of casual labour for six hand-diggers for a week, but as the battle was already won, I nobly refrained. I continued to think, however, that Oxon was a fool. Usually the odd custom of giving the managerships of racecourses to ex-army and navy officers worked out well, but conspicuously not in this case.

The three of us walked back up to the stands, Lord Hagbourne pausing and pursing his lips at their dingy appearance. I reflected that it was a pity that Seabury had a Clerk of the Course whose heart and home were far away on the thriving course at Bristol. If I’d been arranging things, I’d have seen to it a year ago, when the profits turned to loss, that Seabury had a new Clerk entirely devoted to its own interests, someone moreover whose livelihood depended on it staying open. The bungle, delay, muddle, too much politeness and failure to take action showed by the Seabury executive had been of inestimable value to the quietly burrowing Kraye.

Mr Fotherton might have been worried, as he said, but he had done little except mention it in passing to Charles in his capacity as Steward at some other meeting. Charles, looking for something to divert my mind from my stomach, and perhaps genuinely anxious about Seabury, had tossed the facts to me. In his own peculiar way, naturally.

The casualness of the whole situation was horrifying. I basely wondered whether Fotherton himself had a large holding in Seabury shares and therefore a vested interest in its demise. Planning a much closer scrutiny of the list of shareholders, I followed Lord Hagbourne and Captain Oxon round the end of the stands, and we walked the three hundred yards or so through the racecourse gates and down the road to where Captain Oxon’s flat was situated above the canteen in the stable block.

On Lord Hagbourne’s suggestion he rang up a firm of local contractors while we were still there, and arranged for the urgent earth-moving to be done the following morning. His manner was still ruffled, and it didn’t improve things when I declined the well-filled ham and chutney sandwiches he offered, though I would have adored to have eaten them, had he but known. I had been out of hospital for a fortnight, but I had another fortnight to go before things like new bread, ham, mustard and chutney were due back on the agenda. Very boring.

After the sandwiches Lord Hagbourne decided on a tour of inspection, so we all three went first round the stable block, into the lads’ hostel, through the canteen to the kitchen, and into all the stable administrative offices. Everywhere the story was the same. Except for the rows of wooden boxes which had been thrown up cheaply after the old ones burned down, there was no recent maintenance and no new paint.

Then we retraced our steps up the road, through the main gate, and across to the long line of stands with the weighing room, dining-rooms, bars and cloakrooms built into the back. At one end were the secretary’s office, the press room and the Stewards’ room: at the other, the first-aid room and a store. A wide tunnel like a passage ran centrally through the whole length of the building, giving secondary access on one side to many of the rooms, and on the other to the steps of the stands themselves. We painstakingly covered the lot, even down to the boiler room and the oil bunkers, so I had my nostalgic look inside the weighing room and changing room after all.

The whole huge block was dankly cold, very draughty, and smelt of dust. Nothing looked new, not even the dirt. For inducing depression it was hard to beat, but the dreary buildings along in the cheaper rings did a good job of trying.

Captain Oxon said the general dilapidation was mostly due to the sea air, the racecourse being barely half a mile from the shore, and no doubt in essence he was right. The sea air had had a free hand for far too long.

Eventually we returned to where my car was parked inside the gate, and looked back to the row of stands: forlorn, deserted, decaying on a chilly early November afternoon, with a salt-laden drizzle just beginning to blur the outlines.

‘What’s to be done?’ said Lord Hagbourne glumly, as we drove through the rows of bungalows on our way home.

‘I don’t know.’ I shook my head.

‘The place is dead.’

I couldn’t argue. Seabury had suddenly seemed to me to be past saving. The Friday and Saturday fixtures could be held now, but as things stood the gate money would hardly cover expenses. No company could go on making a loss indefinitely. Seabury could plug the gap at present by drawing on their reserve funds, but as I’d seen from their balance sheets at Company House, the reserves only amounted to a few thousands. Matters were bound to get worse. Insolvency waited round a close corner. It might be more realistic to admit that Seabury had no future and to sell the land at the highest price offered as soon as possible. People were, after all, crying out for flat land at the seaside. And there was no real reason why the shareholders shouldn’t be rewarded for their long loyalty and recent poor dividends and receive eight pounds for each one they had invested. Many would gain if Seabury came under the hammer, and no one would lose. Seabury was past saving: best to think only of the people who would benefit.

My thoughts stopped with a jerk. This, I realised, must be the attitude of the Clerk, Mr Fotherton, and of the Manager, Oxon, and of all the executive. This explained why they had made surprisingly little attempt to save the place. They had accepted defeat easily and seen it not only to be harmless, but to many, usefully profitable. As it had been with other courses, big courses like Hurst Park and Birmingham, so it should be with Seabury.

What did it matter that yet another joined the century’s ghost ranks of Cardiff, Derby, Bournemouth, Newport? What did it matter if busy people like Inspector Cornish of Dunstable couldn’t go racing much because their local course had vanished? What did it matter if Seabury’s holiday makers went to the Bingo halls instead?

Chasing owners, I thought, should rise up in a body and demand that Seabury should be preserved, because no racecourse was better for their horses. But of course they wouldn’t. You could tell owners how good it was, but unless they were horsemen themselves, it didn’t register. They only saw the rotten amenities of the stands, not the splendidly sited well-built fences that positively invited their horses to jump. They didn’t know how their horses relished the short springy turf underfoot, or found the arc and cambers of the bends perfect for maintaining an even speed. Corners at many other racecourses threw horses wide and broke up their stride, but not those at Seabury. The original course builder had been brilliant, and regular visits from the Inspector of Courses had kept his work fairly intact. Fast, true run, unhazardous racing, that’s what Seabury gave.

Or had done, before Kraye.

Kraye and the executive’s inertia between them… I stamped on the accelerator in a surge of anger and the car swooped up the side of the South Downs like a bird. I didn’t often drive fast any more: I did still miss having two hands on the wheel. At the top, out of consideration for my passenger’s nerves, I let the speedometer ribbon slide back to fifty.

He said, ‘I feel like that about it too.’

I glanced at him in surprise.

‘The whole situation is infuriating,’ he nodded. ‘Such a good course basically, and nothing to be done.’

‘It could be saved,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘A new attitude of mind…’ I tailed off.

‘Go on,’ he said. But I couldn’t find the words to tell him politely that he ought to chuck out all the people in power at Seabury; too many of them were probably his ex-school chums or personal friends.

‘Suppose,’ he said after a few minutes, ‘that you had a free hand, what would you do?’

‘One would never get a free hand. That’s half the trouble. Someone makes a good suggestion, and someone else squashes it. They end up, often as not, by doing nothing.’

‘No, Sid, I mean you personally. What would you do?’

‘I?’ I grinned. ‘What I’d do would have the National Hunt Committee swooning like Victorian maidens.’

‘I’d like to know.’

‘Seriously?’

He nodded. As if he could ever be anything else but serious.

I sighed. ‘Very well then. I’d pinch every good crowd-pulling idea that any other course has thought of, and put them all into operation on the same day.’

‘What, for instance?’

‘I’d take the whole of the reserve fund and offer it as a prize for a big race. I’d make sure the race was framed to attract the really top chasers. Then I’d go round to their trainers personally and explain the situation, and beg for their support. I’d go to some of the people who sponsor Gold Cup races and cajole them into giving five hundred pound prizes for all the other races on that day. I’d make the whole thing into a campaign. I’d get Save Seabury discussed on television, and in the sports columns of newspapers. I’d get people interested and involved. I’d make helping Seabury the smart thing to do. I’d get someone like the Beatles to come and present the trophies. I’d advertise free car-parking and free race cards, and on the day I’d have the whole place bright with flags and bunting and tubs of flowers to hide the lack of paint. I’d make sure everyone on the staff understood that a friendly welcome must be given to the customers. And I’d insist that the catering firm used its imagination. I’d fix the meeting for the beginning of April, and pray for a sunny Spring day. That,’ I said, running down, ‘would do for a start.’

‘And afterwards?’ He was non-committal.

‘A loan, I suppose. Either from a bank or from private individuals. But the executive would have to show first that Seabury could be a success again, like it used to be. No one falls over himself to lend to a dying business. The revival has to come before the money, if you see what I mean.’

‘I do see,’ he agreed slowly, ‘but…’

‘Yes. But. It always comes to But. But no one at Seabury is going to bother.’

We were silent for a long way.

Finally I said, ‘This meeting on Friday and Saturday… it would be a pity to risk another last-minute disaster. Hunt Radnor Associates could arrange for some sort of guard on the course. Security patrols, that kind of thing.’

‘Too expensive,’ he said promptly. ‘And you’ve not yet proved that it is really needed. Seabury’s troubles still look like plain bad luck to me.’

‘Well… a security patrol might prevent any more of it.’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have to see.’ He changed the subject then, and talked firmly about other races on other courses all the way back to London.