Proof

Three

Total communal disbelief lasted through about five seconds of silence, then someone screamed and went on screaming, a high commentary of hysteria on so much horror.

The horsebox had steam-rollered on over the canvas side-wall, burying people beneath; and it had plunged forward into one of the main supporting poles, which snapped under the weight. The whole of the end of the tent nearest me had collapsed inwards so that I stood on the edge of it with the ruin at my feet.

Where I had seen the guests, I now in absolute shock saw expanses of heavy grey canvas with countless bulges heaving desperately beneath.

The horsebox itself stood there obscenely in the middle, huge, dark green, unharmed, impersonal and frightful. There seemed to be no one behind the driving wheel; and to reach the cab one would have had to walk over the shrouded lumps of the living and the dead.

Beyond the horsebox, at the far end of the tent, in the still erect section, people were fighting their way out through the remains of the entrance and rips in the walls, emerging one by one, staggering and falling like figures in a frieze.

I noticed vaguely that I was still holding the case of champagne. I put it down where I stood, and turned and ran urgently to the telephone in the house.

So quiet in there. So utterly normal. My hands were shaking as I held the receiver.

Police and ambulances to Jack Hawthorn’s stables. A doctor. And lifting gear. Coming, they said. All coming. At once.

I went back outside, meeting others with stretched eyes intent on the same errand.

‘They’re coming,’ I said. ‘Coming.’

Everyone was trembling, not just myself.

The screaming had stopped, but many were shouting, husbands trying to find their wives, wives their husbands, a mother her son. All the faces were white, all the mouths open, all breaths coming in gasps. People had begun making slits in the canvas with penknives to free those trapped underneath. A woman with small scissors was methodically cutting the lacings of a section of side-wall, tears streaming down her face. The efforts all looked puny, the task so immense.

Flora and Jack and Jimmy, I knew, had all been in the part of the tent which had collapsed.

A horse was whinnying nearby and kicking wood, and it was with fresh shock that I realised that the noise was coming from the horsebox itself. There was a horse in there. Inside.

With stiff legs I went along to the standing section of tent, going in through a gap where other people had come out. The second pole stood upright, the potted chrysanthemums bright round its foot. There were many scattered and broken glasses, and a few people trying to lift up the folds of the heavily fallen roof, to let the trapped crawl from under.

‘We might make a tunnel,’ I said to one man, and he nodded in understanding, and by lifting one section only, but together, and advancing, he and I and several others made a wide head-high passage forward into the collapsed half, through which about thirty struggling people, dazedly getting to their feet, made their way out upright. Many of their faces and hands were bleeding from glass cuts. Few of them knew what had happened. Two of them were children.

One of the furthest figures we reached that way was Flora. I saw the red wool of her dress on the ground under a flap of canvas and bent down to help her: and she was half unconscious with her face to the matting, suffocating.

I pulled her out and carried her down to the free end, and from there gave her to someone outside, and went back.

The tunnel idea gradually extended until there was a ring of humans instead of tent poles holding up a fair section of roof, one or two helpers exploring continuously into the edges until as far as we could tell all the people not near the horsebox itself were outside, walking and alive.

The horsebox...

Into that area no one wanted to go, but my original tunneller and I looked at each other for a long moment and told everyone to leave if they wanted to. Some did, but three or four of us made a new, shorter and lower tunnel, working towards the side of the horsebox facing the standing section of the tent, lifting tautly stretched canvas to free people still pinned underneath.

Almost the first person we came to was one of the Arabs who was fiercely vigorous and at any other time would have seemed comic, because as soon as he was released and mobile he began shouting unintelligibly, producing a repeating rifle from his robes and waving it menacingly about.

All we wanted, I thought: a spray of terrified bullets.

The Sheik, I thought.... Standing against the side wall, so that his back should be safe.

We found two more people alive on that side, both women, both beyond speech, both white-faced, in torn clothes, bleeding from glass cuts, one with a broken arm. We passed them back into comfort, and went on.

Crawling forward I came then to a pair of feet, toes upwards, then to trouser legs, unmoving. Through the canvas-filtered daylight they were easily recognisable; pinstripe cloth, navy blue.

I lifted more space over him until I could see along to the buttoned jacket and the silk handkerchief and a hand flung sideways holding a glass in fragments. And beyond, where a weight pressed down where his neck should have been, there was a line of crimson pulp.

I let the canvas fall back, feeling sick.

‘No good,’ I said to the man behind me. ‘I think his head’s under the front wheel. He’s dead.’

He gave me a look as shattered as my own, and we moved slowly sideways towards the horsebox’s rear, making our tunnel with difficulty on hands and knees.

Above us, inside the box, the horse kicked frantically and squealed, restless, excited and alarmed no doubt by the smell; horses were always upset by blood. I could see no prospect all the same of anyone lowering the ramps to let him out.

We found another Arab, alive, flat on his back, an arm bleeding, praying to Allah. We pulled him out and afterwards found his rifle lying blackly where he’d been.

‘They’re mad,’ said my companion.

‘It didn’t save their master,’ I said.

On our knees we both looked in silence at what we could see of the Sheik, which was his head, still in its white headdress with its gold cords. A fold of reddened canvas lay over the rest of him, and my companion, gripping my wrist, said, ‘Leave it. Don’t look. What’s the point.’

I thought fleetingly of the policemen and the ambulancemen who would soon be forced to look, but I did as he asked. We made our way silently back to the standing section and began a new tunnel round to the other side of the horsebox.

It was there that we came to Jack and also Jimmy, both with pulses, though both were unconscious and pinned to the ground by the thick tent pole, which lay across Jack’s legs and Jimmy’s chest. We scarcely touched the pole ourselves, but the tremor of our movements brought Jack up to semi-consciousness and to groaning pain.

My companion said ‘Hell’ through his teeth, and I said, ‘I’ll stay here if you go and get something to keep the canvas off them,’ and he nodded and disappeared, the heavy material falling behind, closing me in.

Jimmy looked dreadful; eyes shut above the long nose, a thread of blood trickling from his mouth.

Jack went on groaning. I held up a bit of tent on my shoulders like Atlas, and presently my fellow tunneller returned, bringing two further helpers and a trestle table for a makeshift roof.

‘What do we do?’ the first tunneller said, irresolutely.

‘Lift the pole,’ I said. ‘It may hurt Jack... but it may be killing Jimmy.’

Everyone agreed. We slowly, carefully, took the weight off the two injured men and laid the pole on the ground. Jack lapsed into silence. Jimmy lay still like a log. But they were both shallowly breathing: I felt their wrists again, one after the other, with relief.

We stood the trestle table over them and gingerly crawled on, and came to a girl lying on her back with one arm up over her face. Her skirt had been ripped away, and the flesh on the outer side of her thigh had been torn open and was sagging away from the bone from hip to knee. I lifted the canvas away from her face and saw that she was to some extent conscious.

‘Hello,’ I said inadequately.

She looked at me vaguely. ‘What’s happening?’ she said.

‘There was an accident.’

‘Oh?’ She seemed sleepy, but when I touched her cheek it was icy.

‘We’ll get another table,’ the first tunneller said.

‘And a rug, if you can,’ I said. ‘She’s far too cold.’

He nodded and said ‘Shock,’ and they all went away as it needed the three of them to drag the tables through.

I looked at the girl’s leg. She was fairly plump, and inside the long widely-gaping wound one could easily identify the cream-coloured bubbly fat tissue and the dense red muscle, open like a jagged book to inspection. I’d never seen anything like it: and extraordinarily she wasn’t bleeding a great deal, certainly not as much as one would have expected.

The body shutting down, I thought. The effects of trauma, as deadly as injury itself.

There was little I could do for her, but I did have a penknife in my pocket incorporating a tiny pair of scissors. With a sigh I pulled up my jersey and cut and tore one side from my shirt, stopping a few inches below the collar and cutting across so that from in front it looked as if I had a whole shirt under my sweater; and I thought that my doing that was ridiculous, but all the same I did it.

Torn into two wide strips the shirt front made reasonable bandages. I slid both pieces under her leg and pulled the flesh back into position, tying her leg together round the bone like trussing a joint of meat. I looked anxiously several times at the girl’s face, but if she felt what I was doing it must have been remotely. She lay with her eyes open, her elbow bent over her head, and all she said at one point was, ‘Where is this?’ and later, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘Oh... Is it...? Good.’

The tunnellers returned with a table and a travelling rug and also a towel.

‘I thought we might wrap that wound together, with this,’ said the first tunneller, ‘but I see you’ve done it.’

We put the towel round her leg anyway for extra protection, and then wrapped her in the rug and left her under her table roof and crawled apprehensively on; but we found no one else we could help. We found one of the waitresses, dead, lying over her tray of canapes, her smooth young face frosty-white, and we found the protruding legs of a different Arab: and somewhere underneath the horsebox there were dreadful red shapes we couldn’t reach even if we’d wanted to.

In accord the four of us retreated, hearing as we emerged into the blessed fresh air the bells and sirens of the official rescuers as they poured over the hill.

I walked along to where Flora was sitting on a kitchen chair that someone had brought out for her: there were women beside her trying to comfort, but her eyes were dark and staring into far spaces, and she was shivering.

‘Jack’s all right,’ I said. ‘The pole knocked him out. One leg is maybe broken... but he’s all right.’

She looked at me blindly. I took my jacket off and wrapped it round her. ‘Flora... Jack’s alive.’

‘All those people... all our guests...’ Her voice was faint. ‘Are you sure... about Jack?’

There was no real consolation. I said yes arid hugged her, rocking her in my arms like a baby, and she put her head silently on my shoulder, still too stunned for tears.

Things ran after that into a blur, time passing at an enormous rate but not seeming to.

The police had brought a good deal of equipment and after a while had cut away the marquee from an area round the horsebox, and had set up a head-high ring of screens to hide the shambles there.

Jack, fully conscious, lay on a stretcher with a pain-killer taking the worst off, protesting weakly that he couldn’t go to hospital, he couldn’t leave his guests, he couldn’t leave his horses, he couldn’t leave his wife to cope with everything on her own. Still objecting he was lifted into an ambulance and, beside a still unconscious Jimmy, slowly driven away.

The guests drifted into the house or sat in their cars and wanted to go home: but there was an enormous fuss going on somewhere over telephone wires because of the death of the Sheik, and the uniformed police had been instructed not to let anyone leave until other investigators had arrived.

The fuss was nonsense, really, I thought. No one could possibly have told where the Sheik would stand in that tent. No one could possibly have aimed the horsebox deliberately.

The brakes had given way and it had rolled down the hill... as selective in its victims as an earthquake.

The distraught young couple who had come in it and parked it were both in tears, and I heard the man saying helplessly, ‘But I left it in gear, with the brakes on... I know I did... I’m always careful... how could it have happened, how could it?’ A uniformed policeman was questioning them, his manner less than sympathetic.

I wandered back to my van, to where I’d dumped the case of champagne. It had gone. So had the sixth and seventh cases from inside. So had the back-up gin and whisky from the front seat.

Disgusting, I thought; and shrugged. After carnage, thieves. Human grade-ten sour age-old behaviour. It didn’t seem to matter, except that I would rather have given it away than that.

Flora was indoors, lying down. Someone brought my coat back. It had blood on the sleeves, I noticed. Blood on my shirt cuffs, blood on my pale blue sweater. Blood, dry, on my hands.

A large crane on caterpillar tracks came grinding slowly over the hill and was manoeuvred into position near the horsebox; and in time, with chains, the heavy green vehicle was lifted a few inches into the air, and, after a pause, lifted higher and swung away onto a stretch of cleared grass.

The horse, still intermittently kicking, was finally released down a ramp and led away by one of Jack’s lads, and, closing the box again, two policemen took up stances to deter the inquisitive.

There was a small dreadful group of people waiting, unmoving, staring silently at the merciful screens. They knew, they had to know, that those they sought were dead, yet they stood with dry eyes, their faces haggard with persisting hope. Five tons of metal had smashed into a close-packed crowd... yet they hoped.

One of them turned his head and saw me, and walked unsteadily towards me as if his feet were obeying different orders from his legs. He was dressed in jeans and a dirty T-shirt, and he neither looked nor sounded like one of the guests. More like one of Jack’s lads on his Sunday off.

‘You went in there, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘You’re the guy who brings the drinks, aren’t you? Someone said you went in...’ He gestured vaguely towards the remains of the tent. ‘Did you see my wife? Was she in there? Is she?’

‘I don’t know.’ I shook my head.

‘She was carrying things round. Drinks and such. She likes doing that... seeing people.’

One of the waitresses. He saw the movement in my face, and interpreted it unerringly.

‘She’s there... isn’t she?’ I didn’t answer for a moment, and he said with pride and despair inextricably mixed. ‘She’s pretty, you know. So pretty.’

I nodded and swallowed. ‘She’s pretty.’

‘Oh, no...’ He let the grief out in a tearing wail. ‘Oh, no...’

I said helplessly, ‘My own wife died... not long ago. I do know... I’m so... so appallingly sorry.’

He looked at me blankly and went back to the others to stare at the screens, and I felt useless and inadequate and swamped with pity.

The horsebox had hit at shortly before one-thirty: it was after five before the new investigators would let anyone leave. Messages were eventually passed that all could go, but that each car would have to stop at the gate for the passengers to give their names.

Tired, hungry, dishevelled, many with bandaged cuts, the guests who had trooped so expectantly down the hill climbed slowly, silently up. Like refugees, I thought. An exodus. One could hear the engines starting in a chorus, and see the first movement of wheels.

A man touched my arm: the fellow tunneller. A tall man, going grey, with intelligent eyes.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Tony Beach.’

‘Mine’s McGregor. Gerard McGregor.’ He pronounced the G of Gerard soft, like a J, in a voice that was remotely but detectably Scots, ‘Glad to know you,’ he said. He held out his hand, which I shook.

We smiled slightly at each other, acknowledging our shared experience; then he turned away and put his arm round the shoulders of a good-looking woman at his side, and I watched them thread their way across to the gate through the roses. Pleasant man, I thought; and that was all.

I went into the house to see if there was anything I could do for Flora before I left, and found a shambles of a different sort. Every downstairs room, now empty, looked as if a full-scale army had camped there, which in a way it had. Every cup and saucer in the place must have been pressed into service, and every glass. The bottles on the drinks tray were all empty, open-necked. Ashtrays overflowed. Crumbs of food lay on plates. Cushions were squashed flat.

In the kitchen, locust-like, the lunch-less guests had eaten everything to hand. Empty soup tins littered the worktops, egg shells lay in the sink, a chicken carcass, picked clean, jostled gutted packets of biscuits and crackers. Everything edible had gone from the refrigerator and saucepans lay dirty on the stove.

There was a faint exclamation from the doorway, and I turned to see Flora there, her face heavy and grey above the creased red dress. I made a frustrated gesture at the mess, but she looked at it all without emotion.

‘They had to eat,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I’ll straighten it.’

‘No. Leave it. Tomorrow will do.’ She came into the room and sat wearily on one of the wooden chairs. ‘It simply doesn’t matter. I told them to help themselves.’

‘They might have cleaned up afterwards,’ I said.

‘You should know the racing world better.’

‘Is there anything I can do, then?’

‘No, nothing.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Do you know how many of them are dead?’ Her voice itself was lifeless, drained by too much horror.

I shook my head. ‘The Sheik and one of his men. Larry Trent. And one of the waitresses, married, I think, to one of your lads. Some others. I don’t know who.’

‘Not Janey,’ Flora said, distressed.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Young and pretty. Married Tom Wickens in the summer. Not her.’

‘I think so.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Flora grew if anything paler. ‘I don’t care about the Sheik. It’s a wicked thing to say, and we’ll lose those horses, but I’ve known about him for hours and I simply don’t care. But Janey...’

‘I think you would help Tom Wickens,’ I said.

She stared at me for a moment, then rose to her feet and walked out into the garden, and through the window I saw her go over to the man in the T-shirt and put her arms round him. He turned and hugged her desperately in return, and I wondered fleetingly which of them felt the most released.

I chucked all the worst of the litter into the dustbin, but left the rest of it, as she’d said. Then I went out to the van to go home, and found a very young constable by my side as I opened the door.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, holding pen and notebook ready.

‘Yes?’

‘Name, sir?’

I gave it, and my address, which he wrote down.

‘Where were you in the marquee, sir, when the incident occurred?’

The incident... ye gods.

‘I wasn’t in the marquee,’ I said. ‘I was here, by the van.’

‘Oh!’ His eyes widened slightly. ‘Then would you wait here, sir?’ He hurried away and returned presently with a man out of uniform who walked slowly, with hunched shoulders.

‘Mr... er... Beach?’ the newcomer said. A shortish man, not young. No aggression.

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘You were outside, here, is that right, when this happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did you... by any chance... see the horsebox on its way down the hill?’ He had a quiet voice and pronounced every syllable carefully, like talking to a lip-reader.

I nodded again. He said ‘Ah,’ with deep satisfaction, as if that were the answer he had long been seeking, and he smiled on me with favour and suggested we go into the house (where it would be warmer), accompanied by the constable, to take notes.

Among the litter in the drawing room we sat while I answered his questions.

His name was Wilson, he said. He was disappointed that I hadn’t seen the horsebox start down the hill, and he was disappointed that I hadn’t seen anyone in or near it before it rolled.

‘I’ll tell you one thing for certain, though,’ I said. ‘It was not parked in any prearranged place. I watched quite a few of the cars arrive. I could see them coming over the hill, the horsebox among them. They parked in a row just as they arrived, in the same order.’ I paused, then said, ‘The Sheik came to the stables a good hour before the other guests, which is why his Mercedes is first in the row. When he arrived he went to look round the yard, to see his horses. Then when several other guests came, he joined them in the marquee. No one manoeuvred him into any particular place. I was in there when he came. He was walking with Jack Hawthorn and Jimmy — Jack’s secretary. It was just chance he stood where he did. And he didn’t of course stand totally still all the time. He must have moved several yards during the hour he was there.’

I stopped. There was a small silence.

‘Did you get all that, constable?’ Wilson asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘According to your van, you are a wine merchant, Mr Beach? And you supplied the drinks for the party?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

‘And you are observant.’ His voice was dry, on the edge of dubious.

‘Well...’

‘Could you describe the position of any other of the guests so accurately? For a whole hour, Mr Beach?’

‘Yes, some. But one tends to notice a Sheik. And I do notice where people are when I’m anywhere on business. The hosts, and so on, in case they want me.’

He watched my face without comment, and presently asked, ‘What did the Sheik drink?’

‘Orange juice with ice and mineral water’

‘And his followers?’

‘One had fizzy lemonade, the other two, Coca-Cola.’

‘Did you get that, constable?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Wilson stared for a while at his toecaps, then took a deep breath as if reaching a decision.

‘If I described some clothes to you, Mr Beach,’ he said, ‘could you tell me who was wearing them?’

‘Uh... if I knew them.’

‘Navy pinstripe suit...’

I listened to the familiar description. ‘A man called Larry Trent,’ I said. ‘One of Jack Hawthorn’s owners. He has... had... a restaurant; the Silver Moondance, near Reading.’

‘Got that, constable?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And also, Mr Beach, a blue tweed skirt and jacket with a light blue woollen shirt, pearls round the neck, and pearl earrings?’

I concentrated, trying to remember, and he said, ‘Greenish, slightly hairy trousers, olive-coloured sweater over a mustard shirt. Brown tie with mustard stripes.’

‘Oh...’

‘You know him?’

‘Both of them. Colonel and Mrs Fulham. I was talking to them. I sell them wine.’

‘Sold, Mr Beach,’ Wilson said regretfully. ‘That’s all, then. I’m afraid all the others have been identified, poor people.’

I swallowed. ‘How many...?’

‘Altogether? Eight dead, I’m afraid. It could have been worse. Much worse.’ He rose to his feet and perfunctorily shook my hand. ‘There may be political repercussions. I can’t tell whether you may be needed for more answers. I will put in my report. Good day, Mr Beach.’

He went out in his slow hunched way, followed by the constable, and I walked after them into the garden.

It was growing dark, with lights coming on in places.

The square of screens had been taken down, and two ambulances were preparing to back through the gap the horsebox had made in the hedge. A row of seven totally covered stretchers lay blackly on the horribly bloodstained matting, with the eighth set apart. In that, I supposed, lay the Sheik, as two living Arabs stood there, one at the head, one at the foot, still tenaciously guarding their prince.

In the dusk the small haggard group of people, all hope gone now, watched silently, with Flora among them, as ambulancemen lifted the seven quiet burdens one by one to bear them away; and I went slowly to my van and sat in it until they had done. Until only the Sheik remained, aloof in death as in life, awaiting a nobler hearse.

I switched on lights and engine and followed the two ambulances over the hill, and in depression drove down to the valley, to my house.

Dark house. Empty house.

I let myself in and went upstairs to change my clothes, but when I reached the bedroom I just went and lay on the bed without switching on the lamps; and from exhaustion, from shock, from pity, from loneliness and from grief... I wept.