Decider

by Dick Francis

  ‘You remember, a week or so ago, that you learned about the precise distribution of shares among the Strattons, that they wouldn’t tell you before?’

  He flicked a glance at me, mentally a fraction off balance.

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘You noticed.’

  ‘Was it Forsyth who told you?’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘Was it?’ I asked.

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes. Why did you think it was him?’

  ‘He resents the way the others treat him, which makes him untrustworthy from their point of view. He knows he thoroughly earned the way they treat him. They think they control him, but they could compress him too far.’

  ‘Like plastic explosive.’

  ‘Yeah. Too close to home.’

  Roger nodded. ‘He told me in a moment of spite against them, and then said he was only guessing. He’s not very bright.’

  ‘Very unhappy, though.’

  ‘I don’t like him, don’t trust him and, no, I really don’t know what he did. When the Strattons hide something, they do a good job.’

  We walked out of the big top and found a van and a car parked near the entrance. The van, green with white lettering, announced ‘Stratton Garden Centre’. The car, door opening, disgorged Ivan.

  He stood with his hands on his hips, head back, staring up in utter amazement at the sunlit splendour of flags. I waited for his disapproval, forgetting the little boy in him.

  He looked at Roger, his eyes shiny with smiling.

  ‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘what fun.’ He transferred his gaze first to my walking stick and then up to my face. ‘Would you mind,’ he said awkwardly, ‘if I reconsidered a bit?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think Keith’s wrong about you, don’t you know.’ He turned away, embarrassed, and instructed his driver to get out of the cab and open the rear doors of the van. ‘I talked it over with Dolly – that’s my wife – last night,’ he went on, ‘and we thought it didn’t make sense. If you were meaning to blackmail the family, why would you help us by getting this tent? And then, don’t you know, you don’t seem a bad fellow at all, and Hannah has had bees in her bonnet about her mother – your mother – all her life. So we decided I might just, don’t you know, apologise, if the occasion arose.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  His face lightened, his errand achieved. His men opened the van’s rear doors and disclosed a packed blaze of colour inside. A whole army of flourishing pots.

  ‘Superb!’ Roger said, genuinely delighted.

  ‘You see,’ Ivan explained, pleased, ‘when I saw the big top yesterday I understood why you’d asked me for plants, and this morning I went along to the centre myself and told my manager to load not just green stuff, but flowers. Lots of flowers. The least I could do, don’t you know.’

  ‘They’re wonderful,’ I assured him.

  He beamed, a heavy-set man in his fifties, not clever, not charismatic, polished in a way, but at heart uncomplicated. He hadn’t been much of an enemy and wouldn’t be much of a friend, but any neutralised Stratton could, in my terms, be counted a blessing.

  Under Ivan’s happy direction, my children enthusiastically carried and positioned all the flowers. I guessed they would be missing when it became time to collect them up again, except that Ivan in good humour gave them a pound each for their labours, making anything possible.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Christopher told him earnestly, pocketing his coin, ‘but thanks very much.’

  ‘Forsyth,’ Ivan told me wistfully, ‘was a nice little boy.’

  I watched Toby stagger by with a huge pot of hyacinths. I would give almost anything, I thought, to have my own problem son grow into a well-balanced man, but it had to come from within him. He would make his own choices, as Forsyth had, as everyone did.

  The plants positioned, Ivan and his van drove away and Roger asked if I would like to see the burned fence rebuilt. I glanced down at Neil who happened to be holding my hand and Roger resignedly yelled ‘Boys!’ in his parade-ground voice and waited while they came running and piled into the jeep.

  Toby refused to get out when he found where we’d got to, but I and the others watched the ultimate in prefabrication.

  ‘It used to take days to put a new fence together,’ Roger said. ‘That was when we positioned poles as framework and filled the frame with bundle after bundle of birch, finally cutting the rough top edges into shape. Now we build fences in sections away in a separate area, take them to wherever’s needed, and stake them into the ground. We can replace a whole fence or part of one at very short notice. Today’s fire was at dawn and we don’t race over this fence until two-thirty this afternoon. Piece of cake!’

  His men, already having cleared the embers, were busy manhandling the first of the new sections into place.

  ‘All our fences are built like this, now,’ Roger said. ‘They’re good to jump but not as hard and unforgiving as the old sort.’

  I asked, ‘Did your men find any… well, clues… in the ashes to say who started the fire?’

  Roger shook his head. ‘We always have trouble with vandalism. It’s hopeless bothering to find out who did it. It’s nearly always teenagers, and the courts hardly give them a slap on the wrist. We simply write vandalism into the budget and find ways to minimise the nuisance.’

  ‘How many people would know you could replace a fence this fast?’ I asked.

  ‘Trainers might,’ he said judiciously. ‘Jockeys, perhaps. Not many others, unless they worked here.’

  Roger went to speak to his foreman who looked at his watch, nodded, and got on with the job.

  ‘Right,’ Roger said, returning and shepherding us back to his jeep. ‘Now, boys, muster at the jeep up by my office at eleven-thirty, right? I’ll drive you and your father down to the bus then, and go on to my house. We all change for racing. At noon precisely I drive you back to the paddock. Understand?’

  The boys were near to saluting. Roger, the peak of his tweed cap well pulled down over his eyes like a guards officer was, with his clipped, very civilised voice and his spare decisive manner, the sort of senior soldier it was natural to obey. I could see I was never going to achieve such effortless mastery of my children’s behaviour.

  We returned to Roger’s office to find a flourishing row in full progress out on the tarmac. All the protesters from outside the gate were now inside, all of them clustered round Henry who held Harold Quest’s elbow in an unyielding grip. The fierce woman was using a placard saying ‘ANIMAL RIGHTS’ to belabour Henry as with a paddle. Four or five others howled verbal abuse with stretched ugly mouths and Henry shook Harold Quest without respect or mercy.

  When he saw us Henry yelled, his voice as effortlessly rising above the screeching din as his height above everyone else, ‘This fellow’s an imposter! A bloody imposter. They all are. They’re rubbish.’

  He stretched out the hand not busy with shaking Quest and tweaked the placard away from the harpy attacking him.

  ‘Madam,’ he roared, ‘go back to your kitchen.’

  Henry stood eighteen inches above her. He towered over Quest. Henry’s beard was bigger than Quest’s, Henry’s voice mightier, Henry’s strength double, Henry’s character – no contest.

  Henry was laughing. Harold Quest, the scourge of entering vehicles, had met more than his match.

  ‘This man,’ Henry yelled, shaking Quest’s elbow, ‘do you know what he was doing? I went over to the Mayflower and when I came back I found him eating a hamburger.’

  My sons stared at him in perplexity. Eating hamburgers came well within normal behaviour.

  ‘Animal rights!’ Henry shouted joyously. ‘What about hamburgers’ rights? This man was eating an animal.’

  Harold Quest squirmed.

  ‘Three of these dimwits,’ Henry yelled, glancing at the screeching chorus, ‘were dripping with hamburgers. Animal rights, my arse.’

  My boy
s were fascinated. Roger was laughing. Oliver Wells came out of Roger’s office primed to disapprove of the noise only to crease into a smile once he understood Quest’s dilemma.

  ‘This jacket he’s wearing,’ Henry yelled, ‘feels like leather.’

  ‘No.’ Quest shook his head violently, tipping his woolly hat over one ear.

  ‘And,’ Henry yelled, ‘when I accused him of eating an animal he put the hamburger in his pocket.’

  Alan jumped up and down, loving it, his freckled face grinning.

  Henry flung the ‘ANIMAL RIGHTS’ placard far and wide and plunged his hand into the pocket of Harold Quest’s leather-like jacket. Out came a wrapper, a half-eaten bun, tomato ketchup and yellow oozing mustard and a half-moon of meat with the Quest bite marks all over it.

  Out of the pocket, too, unexpectedly, fell a second ball of plastic wrapper which had never seen a short-order cook.

  In the general mêlée, no one saw the significance of the second wrapper until Christopher, from some obscure urge to tidiness, picked it up. Even then it would have meant nothing to most people, but Christopher was different.

  ‘Come on,’ Henry yelled at his hapless captive, ‘you’re not a real protestor. What are you doing here?’

  Harold Quest didn’t answer.

  ‘Dad,’ Christopher said, pulling my sleeve, ‘look at this. Smell it.’

  I looked at the ball of wrapping material he’d picked up, and I smelled it. ‘Give it,’ I said, ‘to the Colonel.’

  Roger, hearing my tone of voice, glanced at my face and took the crumbled ball from Christopher.

  There were two brown transparent wrappers scrunched together, with scarlet and yellow printing on them. Roger smoothed one of them out and looked up at Henry who, no slouch on the uptake, saw that more had been revealed than a hamburger.

  ‘Bring him into the office,’ Roger told Henry.

  Henry, receiving the message, roared at Quest’s followers, ‘You lot, clear off before you get prosecuted for being a nuisance on the highway. You with the leather shoes, you with the hamburgers, next time get your act right. Shove off, the lot of you.’

  He turned his back on them, marching Quest effortlessly towards the office door, the rest of us interestedly watching while Quest’s noisy flock collapsed and deserted him, straggling off silently towards the way out.

  The office filled up again: Oliver, Roger, myself, five boys trying to look unobtrusive, Harold Quest and, above all, Henry who needed the space of three.

  ‘Could you,’ Roger said to Henry, ‘search his other pockets?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He must have loosened his grip a little in order to oblige because Quest suddenly wrenched himself free and made a dash for the door. Henry plucked him back casually by the collar and swung his arm before leaving go. With anyone else’s strength it wouldn’t have much mattered, but under Henry’s easy force Quest staggered across the room and crashed backwards against the wall. A certain amount of self-pity formed moisture round his eyes.

  ‘Take the jacket off,’ Henry commanded, and Quest, fumbling, obeyed.

  Roger took the jacket, searched the pockets and laid the booty out on the desk beside the blotter where Henry had parked the half-eaten hamburger. Apart from a meagre wallet with a return bus ticket to London, there were a cigarette lighter, a box of matches and three further dark brown transparent wrappers with scarlet and yellow overprinting.

  Roger smoothed out one of these flat on the desk and read the writing aloud.

  ‘ “Sure Fire”,’ he announced. ‘ “Clean. Non-toxic. Long-burning. Infallible. A fire every time. Twenty sticks.”’ He did brief sums. ‘Five empty wrappers; that means one hundred firelighters. Now what would anyone want with one hundred firelighters on a racecourse?’

  Harold Quest glowered.

  Henry stood over him, a threat simply by size.

  ‘As you’re unreal,’ he boomed, ‘what were you up to?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Quest weakly said, mopping his face with his hand.

  Henry’s loud voice beleaguered him, ‘People who burn fences can blow up grandstands. We’re turning you over to the force.’

  ‘I never blew up the grandstand,’ said Quest, freshly agitated.

  ‘Oh really? You were here, Friday morning. You admitted it.’

  ‘I never… I wasn’t here then.’

  ‘You definitely were,’ I said. ‘You told the police you saw Dart Stratton’s car drive in through the gates between eight and eight-thirty in the morning.’

  Harold Quest looked baffled.

  ‘And it was pointless,’ Roger added, ‘to be picketing the gates of a racecourse at that hour on a day none of the public would come.’

  ‘A day the TV cameras came, though,’ I said, ‘after the explosion.’

  ‘We saw you,’ Christopher said vehemently. ‘They said on the telly you’d done it. You nearly got my brother killed and you hurt my dad badly.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Who did, then?’ Henry roared. ‘You did it! You’ve been a bloody nuisance, you’re not a real protestor, you’ve destroyed racecourse property and you’re heading for jail. Colonel, fetch the police, they’re here already poking around behind that fence. Tell them we’ve caught their terrorist.’

  ‘No!’ Quest squealed.

  ‘Then give,’ Henry commanded. ‘We’re listening.’

  ‘All right then. All right. I did burn the fence.’ Quest was not confessing, but pleading. ‘But I never touched the grandstand. I didn’t, as God’s my witness.’

  ‘As to God, that’s one thing. You’ve got to convince us.’

  ‘Why did you burn the fence?’ Roger demanded.

  ‘Why?’ Quest looked around desperately as if the answer might be written on the walls.

  ‘Why?’ Henry bellowed. ‘Why? Why? Why? And don’t give us any shit about animal rights. We know that’s all crap as far as you’re concerned.’ He waved a hand at the hamburger relics. ‘So why did you do it? You’re in dead trouble unless you come up with the goods.’

  Quest saw hope. ‘If I tell you, then, will that be the end of it?’

  ‘It depends,’ Henry said. ‘Tell us first.’

  Quest looked up at the big man and at all of us staring at him with sharp hostile eyes and at the wrappers and the hamburger on the desk and, from one second to the next, lost his nerve.

  He sweated. ‘I got paid for it,’ he said.

  We met this announcement with silence.

  Quest cast an intimidated look round the accusing faces and sweated some more.

  ‘I’m an actor,’ he pleaded.

  More silence.

  Quest’s desperation level rose with the pitch of his voice. You don’t know what it’s like, waiting and waiting for jobs and sitting by the telephone forever and living on crumbs… you take anything, anything…’

  Silence.

  He went on miserably. ‘I’m a good actor…’

  I thought that none of us, probably, would refute that.

  ‘… but you have to be lucky. You have to know people…’

  He pulled off his askew woolly hat and began to look more credibly like Harold Quest, out-of-work actor, and less like Harold Quest, psyched-up fanatic.

  He said, ‘I got this phone call from someone who’d seen me play a hunt saboteur in a TV film… only a bit part, no dialogue, just screaming abuse, but my name was there in the credits, hunt saboteur leader, Harold Quest.’

  Extraordinarily, he was proud of it: his name in the credits.

  ‘So this phone caller said would I demonstrate for real, for money? And I wouldn’t have to pay any agents’ fees as he’d looked me up in the phone directory and just tried my number on the off-chance…’

  He stopped, searching our faces, begging for understanding but not getting much.

  ‘Well,’ he said weakly, ‘I was being evicted from my flat for non-payment of rent and I’d nowhere to go and I lived rough on the streets once before and
anything’s better than that.’

  Something in this recital, some tinge in the self-pity, reminded me sharply that this was an actor, a good one, and that the sob-stuff couldn’t be trusted. Still, I thought, let him run on. There might be truth in him somewhere.

  He realised himself that the piteousness wasn’t achieving an over-sympathetic response and reacted with a more businesslike explanation.

  ‘I asked what was wanted, and they said to come here and make a bloody intolerable nuisance of myself…’

  ‘They?’ Roger asked.

  ‘He, then. He said to try to get some real demonstrators together and persuade them to come here and rant and rave a bit, so I went to a fox hunt and got that loud-mouthed bitch Paula to bring some of her friends… and I tell you, I’ve spent nearly a week with them and they get on my wick something chronic…’

  ‘But you’ve been paid?’ I suggested. ‘You’ve taken the money?’

  ‘Well…’ grudgingly, ‘some up front. Some every day. Yes.’

  ‘Every day?’ I repeated, incredulously.

  He nodded.

  ‘And for burning the fence?’

  He began to squirm again and to look mulishly sullen. ‘He didn’t say anything about burning the fence, not to begin with.’

  ‘Who,’ Roger asked without threat, ‘is he?

  ‘He didn’t tell me his name.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ Roger said in the same reasonable voice, ‘that you mounted a threatening demonstration here for someone unknown?’

  ‘For money. Like I said.’

  ‘And you just trusted you’d get paid?’

  ‘Well, I was.’ His air of defiance was of no help to him; much the reverse. ‘If I hadn’t been paid, all I’d have laid out was the bus fare from London, but he promised me, and he kept his promise. And every day that I caused trouble, I got more.’

  ‘Describe him,’ I said.

  Quest shook his head, rear-guarding.

  ‘Not good enough,’ Roger said crisply. ‘The racecourse will lay charges against you for wilful destruction of property, namely burning down the fence at the open ditch.’

  ‘But you said…’ began Quest, impotently protesting.

  ‘We promised nothing. If you withhold the identity of your, er, procurer, we fetch the police across here immediately.’