Decider

by Dick Francis

  ‘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?’ 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 glass,’ 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 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 glass of water.

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

  The evening before, when I’d stood a glass 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 glass 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.

  *

  In the morning, a fine one, the boys opened all the windows to air out the bus, and I gave them the Easter presents Amanda had packed into the locker under my bed. Each boy received a chocolate Easter egg, a paperback book and a small hand-held computer game, and all spoke to their mother to thank her.

  ‘She wants to talk to you, Dad,’ Alan said, handing me the telephone, and I said, ‘Hi,’ and ‘Happy Easter,’ and ‘How’s Jamie?’

  ‘He’s fine. Are you feeding the boys properly, Lee? Sandwiches and tinned spaghetti aren’t enough. I asked Christopher… he says you didn’t buy fruit yesterday.’

  ‘They’ve had bananas and cornflakes for breakfast today.’

  ‘Fruit and fresh vegetables,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And can you stay out a bit longer? Say Wednesday or Thursday?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Yes. And take their clothes to a launderette, won’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Have you found a good ruin yet?’

  ‘I’ll keep looking.’

  ‘We’re living on savings,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I know. The boys need new trainers.’

  ‘You could get them.’

  ‘All right.’

  Conversation, as usual, confined itself mostly to child-care. I said, trying my best, ‘How did your sister’s party go?’

  ‘Why?’ She sounded almost, for a moment, wary: then she said, ‘Great, fine. She sends you her love.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Take care of the boys, Lee.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and ‘Happy Easter,’ and ‘Goodbye, Amanda.’

  ‘She asked us to phone her tomorrow night,’ Christopher said.

  ‘She cares about you. She wants us to go on hunting ruins for another day or two.’

  None of them objected, surprisingly. They were eyes-down, of course, to their bleep-bleeping flickering games.

  There was a bang on the door, which was opened without pause by Roger, who stuck his head in while still standing outside.

  ‘Your pal Henry,’ he told me, ‘has himself arrived with a crane on a low-loader and brought the big top on about six vast lorries and he won’t unload a thing without talking to you first.’

  ‘Henry’s big top!’ Christopher exclaimed. ‘The one we had over the pub, before you built our house?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The boys shut the windows instantly and presented themselves fast in the driveway, looking hopeful. Roger resignedly gestured towards the jeep and they all packed into the back, jostling and fighting for their favourite seats.

  ‘Sit down or get out,’ Roger commanded in his best parade-ground bark and, subdued, they sat down.

  ‘I’ll swop you the boys for Marjorie,’ I suggested.

  ‘Done.’ He careered in battle fashion up the private road, did a flourish of a four-wheel drift stop outside his office, and informed my progeny that any sign of disobedience would incur immediate banishment to the bus for the rest of the day. The troops, very impressed, took the warning respectfully, but ran off to greet Henry with out-of-school whoops.

  Henry, huge, bearded, always made me feel short. He lifted Neil effortlessly to sit on his shoulders and beamed in my direction, walking frame and all.

  ‘Nearly got yourself squelched, then?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Careless.’

  He gestured with a huge hand to his heavily laden monster trucks, currently cluttering the tarmac.

  ‘I brought the whole razzmatazz,’ he said, pleased with it.

  ‘Yes, but, look here –’ Roger began.

  Henry looked down on him kindly. ‘You trust Lee, here,’ he said. ‘He knows what people like. He’s a bloody wizard, is Lee. You let him and me set you up here for tomorrow, and six weeks from now, when you’ve got another Bank Holiday meeting – I looked it up, so I know – you won’t have enough room in the car parks. Word of mouth, see? Now, do you want crowds here, or don’t you?’

  ‘Er… yes.’

  ‘Say no more.’

  Roger said to me despairingly, ‘Marjorie…’

  ‘She’ll love it. She wants the racecourse to prosper, above all.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Hundred per cent. Mind you, she’ll take five seconds to get over the shock.’

  ‘Let’s hope it takes longer for her to drop down dead from a heart attack.’

  ‘Did you get those electrical cables laid?’ Henry asked him. ‘Heavy duty?’

  ‘As you specified,’ Roger said.

  ‘Good. Then… site plans?’

  ‘In the office.’

  For most of the day Roger directed his groundsmen to help where they could and himself stood in long spells of wonderment as Henry and his crew built before his eyes a revolutionary vision of grandstand comfort.

  First, they erected four pylon-like towers in crane-lifted sections, towers strong enough, Henry told Roger, for trapeze artists to swing from: then with thick wire cables and heavy electric winches they raised tons of strong white canvas and spread them wide. The final height and the acreage matched those of the old stands, and easily outdid them for splendour.

  Henry and I discussed crowd movement, racegoers’ behaviour, provision for rain. We set out the essentials, rubbed out the bottlenecks, made pleasure a priority, gave owners their due, allocated prime space for Strattons, for Stewards, for trainers’ bars. Throughout the big top we planned solid-seeming flooring, with a wide centre aisle, firm partition walls, and tented ceilings in each ‘room’ of pale peach-coloured thin pleated silk-like material, ‘I buy it by the mile,’ Henry assured a disbelieving Roger. ‘Lee told me sunlight shining through canvas and peach was more flattering to old faces than yellow, and it’s seniors who pay the bills, mostly. I used to use yellow. Never again. Lee says the right light is more important than the food.’

  ‘And what Lee says is gospel?’

  ‘Have you ever seen anyone transform a derelict no-customer pub into a human beehive? He’s done it twice before my eyes, and more times before that, so I’m told. He knows what attracts people, see? They don’t know exactly what attracts them. They just feel attracted. But Lee knows, you bet your sweet life he knows.’

  ‘Just what attracts people?’ Roger asked me curiously.

  ‘A long story,’ I said.

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘For years I asked hundreds, literally hundreds of people, why they’d bought the old houses they lived in. What was the decider, however irrational, that made them choose that house and no other? Sometimes they said bits of trellis, sometimes hidden winding secondary staircases, sometimes Cotswold stone fireplaces, or mill wheels, or sometimes split levels and galleries. I asked them also what they disliked, and would change. I simply grew to know how to rebuild near-ruins so that people hunger to live in them.’

  Roger said slowly, ‘Like your own house.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And pubs?’

  ‘I’ll show you one day. But with pubs, it’s not just rebuilding. It’s good food, good prices, fast service and a warm welcome. It’s essential to learn the customers’ faces and greet them as friends.’

  ‘But you always move on?’

  ‘Once they’re up and running,’ I nodded. ‘I’m a builder, not a restaurateur.’

  To Henry’s men, many of them circus people themselves and accustomed to raising magic from an empty field overnight, twenty-four hours to gate-opening time was a luxury. They heaved on ropes, they swung mallets, they sweated. Henry bought a barrel of beer from the Mayflower for his ‘good lads’.

  Henry had brought not only the big top but a large amount of the iron piping and planking that, bolted together, had formed the basis of the tiered seating round the circus ring.

  �
��Thought you might need it,’ he said.

  ‘Grandstands!’ I breathed. ‘You broth of a boy.’

  Henry beamed.

  Roger couldn’t believe it. His own workmen, under Henry’s circus men’s direction, erected all the steps not round a ring but in the open air alongside the rails of the track, their backs to the big top and their slanting faces towards the action, with a wide strip of grass for access between the bottom step and the racecourse rails.

  ‘We could do better given more time,’ Henry said, ‘but at least some of the customers will be able to see the races from here, without all squeezing onto the Tattersalls’ steps.’

  ‘We probably need planning permission,’ Roger said faintly. ‘Safety officers. Heaven knows what.’

  Henry waved a couple of licences under his nose. ‘I’m a licensed contractor. This is a temporary structure. Get who you like. Get them on Tuesday. Everything I do is safe and legal. I’ll show you.’

  Grinning, he waved a huge hand and hey-prestoed an army of fire extinguishers from one of the trucks.

  ‘Happier?’ he asked Roger.

  ‘Speechless.’

  Henry at one point drew me aside. ‘Who are those arseholes blocking the gates? We as near as buggery knocked one of them over when we came across with the beer. He walked straight out. Raving lunatic’

  I explained about Mr Harold Quest, his followers and their quest to get steeplechasing banned. ‘Weren’t they here when you first arrived?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they weren’t. Do you want them shifted?’

  ‘You mean physically shifted?’

  ‘What other way is there?’

  ‘Persuasion?’ I suggested.

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘If you stamp on one wasp, fifty come to the funeral.’

  He nodded. ‘See what you mean.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘What do we do, then?’

  ‘Put up with them.’

  ‘That’s pathetic.’

  ‘You could tell them that banning steeplechasing would mean hundreds of horses being killed, once there was no use for them. Not just one horse would die occasionally, but all of them within a year. Tell Harold Quest he’s advocating equine massacre and turning horses into an endangered species.’