Decider

by Dick Francis

  ‘You might not have agreed,’ I said, ‘to build new stands at all, let alone have Wilson Yarrow design them. And it was he, wasn’t it, who came to you and said, “I have the dirt on your daughter, and all you have to do to save her honour is give me this commission”?’

  Conrad didn’t answer directly, but he broke open his shotgun and with unsteady fingers pulled out both cartridges, the spent one, blackened and empty, and the unfired one, orange and bright. He put them both in his pocket and stood the gun by the wall.

  As he did so there was a quiet tap on the door. Conrad went to open it and found Marjorie’s manservant there, worried. ‘Nothing wrong,’ Conrad assured him fruitily. ‘Gun went off by accident. Bit of a nuisance to clear up, I’m afraid. We’ll see to it later.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  The door closed. I noticed for the first time that the spreading shot had smashed a mirror on the wall and torn pieces of gold silk upholstery from chairs. Much too damned close.

  I reached for the walking stick I’d laid beside the small sofa where I’d been sitting and, with its help, returned to my feet.

  ‘You must have said something to Keith about blackmail,’ I told Conrad. ‘He used that word in connection with Yarrow. You all heard him.’

  Conrad made a helpless gesture. ‘Keith went on and on at me to abandon the idea of new stands and I said I couldn’t.’ He paused. ‘But how did you find all this out?’

  ‘A lot of small things,’ I said. ‘For example, I went to the same school of architecture as Wilson Yarrow.’

  ‘Architecture!’ Marjorie interrupted.

  ‘Yes. When I saw him… heard his name… I knew there was something wrong about him. I only vaguely remembered, so I looked up a man I was at architectural school with, that I hadn’t heard from for ten years, and asked him. He kept a diary all those years ago and he’d written down a rumour he’d heard, that Wilson Yarrow had won a prestigious prize with an architectural design he’d sent in, while knowing that it wasn’t his own. The school took the prize away and hushed it all up a bit, but the stigma of cheating remained, and there must be several hundred architects, like me, who associate that name of Yarrow with something not right. The word goes around in professional circles, and memories are long – and better than mine – and the brilliant career once expected of Yarrow has not come to pass. There was his name alone on the plans he drew for you, which means he’s probably not employed in a firm. He may very well be unemployed altogether, and there’s a glut of architects now, with the schools every year training more than the market can absorb. I’d guess he saw the prestige of building new stands at Stratton Park as a way back into esteem. I think he was desperate to get that commission.’

  They listened, even Rebecca, as if spellbound.

  I said, ‘Before I ever came to Stratton Park, Roger Gardner told me there was an architect designing new stands who knew nothing about racing and didn’t understand crowd behaviour, and that as he wouldn’t listen to advice he would be the death of the racecourse, but that you, Conrad, wouldn’t be deflected from him.’

  I paused. No one said anything.

  ‘So,’ I went on, ‘I came to your shareholders’ meeting last Wednesday, and met you all, and listened. I learned what you all wanted for the racecourse. Marjorie wanted things to remain as they were. You, Conrad, wanted new stands, actually to save Rebecca from ruin, though I didn’t know that then. Keith wanted to sell, for the money. Rebecca, of course, wanted a clean sweep, as she said; new stands, new manager, new Clerk of the Course, a new image for old-fashioned Stratton Park. Marjorie managed that meeting in a way that would have had superpowers kneeling in admiration, and she manipulated you all so that she got her way, which was for Stratton Park to continue in its old manner for the foreseeable future.’

  Dart cast an admiring glance at his great aunt, the grin very nearly appearing.

  I said, ‘That was not good enough for Rebecca, nor for Keith. Keith had already enlisted the actor, Harold Quest, to make a nuisance of himself demonstrating against steeplechasing outside the main gates, so that people would be put off going to the races at Stratton Park and the course would lose its attraction and its income, and go bankrupt as a business so that you would have to sell its big asset, the land. He also got Harold Quest to burn a fence – the open ditch; symbolically the open ditch, as it was there that a horse had been killed at the last meeting – but that ploy was a dud, as you know. Keith isn’t bright. But Rebecca…’

  I hesitated. There were things that had to be said: I wished there were someone else… anyone else… to say them.

  ‘In the Stratton family, as it is now,’ I resumed, approaching things sideways, ‘there are two good-natured harmless fellows, Ivan and Dart. There’s one very clever person, Marjorie. There’s Conrad, more powerful in appearance than fact. There’s a strain of ruthlessness and violence in everyone else of Stratton blood, which has cost you all fortunes. When you ally those traits with stupidity and arrogance, you get Forsyth and his mowers. There is in many of the Strattons, as in him, a belief that you’ll never be found out, and if you should be, you believe the family will use its money and muscle to save you, as it always has done in the past.’

  ‘And will again,’ Marjorie said firmly.

  ‘And will again,’ I acknowledged, ‘if you can. You’ll need all your skills soon, though, in damage control.’

  Surprisingly, they went on listening, not trying to make me stop.

  I said carefully, ‘In Rebecca, that violence is chiefly controlled and comes out as a consuming competitiveness in a testing sport. In her, there’s splendid courage and will-to-win. There’s also a tremendous overpowering urge to get her own way. When Marjorie blocked her first plan for achieving new stands, she hit on a simple solution – get rid of the old ones.’

  This time, Conrad protested incredulously, and Marjorie also, but not Rebecca or Dart.

  ‘I’d guess,’ I said to Rebecca, ‘that you told Wilson Yarrow to do it, as, if he didn’t, he could kiss the commission goodbye.’

  She glared at me unblinkingly, a tigress untamed.

  I said, ‘Wilson Yarrow was in deep already with that blackmailing attempt. He saw, as you did, that destroying a part of the main grandstand would mean new ones had to be built. He knew those old grandstands and, as an architect, he saw how maximum damage could be achieved for minimum effort. The staircase in the centre was the main artery of the building. Collapse that core, and the rooms round it would cave in.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it,’ Rebecca yelled suddenly.

  Conrad jumped. Conrad… aghast.

  ‘I saw those charges before they exploded,’ I said to Rebecca. ‘I saw how they were laid. Very professional. I could have done it myself. And I know other dealers, not as responsible as my giant friend Henry, who’ll sell you anything, few questions asked. But it’s difficult, even for people whose whole job is demolition, to get right the amount of explosive needed. Every structure has its own strengths and weaknesses. There’s pressure to use too much rather than too little. The amount Yarrow used tore half the building apart.’

  ‘No,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘Yes,’ I contradicted her. ‘Between you, you decided it should be done early on Good Friday morning, when there would be no one about.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wilson Yarrow drilled the holes and set the charges, with you acting as look-out.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He couldn’t do it without a look-out. If you go in for crime, it’s much best to post a look-out you can trust.’

  Dart squirmed. Then he grinned. Irrepressible.

  ‘You sat on watch in Dart’s car,’ I said.

  Rebecca’s eyes opened wide, abruptly. The ‘no’ she produced lacked the fire of the other denials.

  ‘You thought,’ I said, ‘that if you went in your own bright scarlet Ferrari, and any stray groundsman, perhaps, saw it on the racecourse on that non-racing day, he would remember i
t and report it after the stands had exploded. So you drove to Stratton Hays, and parked your car there, and took Dart’s, which always has the keys left in, and you drove that car into the racecourse, because Dart’s car is so familiar there as to be practically invisible. But you didn’t reckon with Harold Quest, actor and busybody, who wouldn’t have been at the gates there anyway on that day if he’d been a genuine protestor, and you must have been shattered when he said Dart’s car had been there, and described it to the police. But not as shattered as you would have been if Harold Quest had reported your Ferrari.’

  ‘I don’t believe all this,’ Conrad said faintly; but he did.

  ‘I imagine,’ I said to Rebecca, ‘that somewhere you picked up Yarrow and took him and the explosive to the racecourse, because the police tested the car and found traces of nitrates.’

  Rebecca said nothing.

  I said, ‘Dart has known all along that it was you – or you and Yarrow – who blew up the stands.’

  ‘Dart told you!’ Rebecca shouted, furiously turning to Dart, who looked staggered and hurt. ‘You gave me away to this… this…’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ I said fiercely. ‘Dart was unswervingly loyal to you. He went through a considerable grilling from the police yesterday and didn’t say a word. They accused him of setting the explosives himself, and he’s still their chief suspect, and they’ll question him again. But he won’t tell them about you. He’s proud of you, he has mixed feelings, he thinks you’re crack-brained, but he’s a Stratton and he won’t give you away.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Dart wailed, agonised.

  ‘I stood next to you when she won on Tempestexi.’

  ‘But… you couldn’t tell from that.’

  ‘I’ve lived and breathed Strattons for a week.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Rebecca demanded of her brother.

  ‘I saw your Ferrari from my bathroom, parked where my old car was supposed to be.’

  She said helplessly, ‘It was there for less than an hour.’

  Conrad’s shoulders sagged.

  ‘I was back in Lambourn long before the explosion,’ Rebecca said crossly. ‘And Yarrow was putting himself about in London by then.’

  ‘I want to know,’ Marjorie said to me, after a silence, ‘what made you first suspect Rebecca?’

  ‘Such small things.’

  ‘Tell them.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘she fanatically wanted things changed.’

  ‘And?’ Marjorie prompted, when I stopped.

  ‘She mentioned new stands made of glass. There are stands in Britain with glassed-in sections, aren’t there, but not sheeted altogether in glass, as Yarrow’s plans are, and I wondered if she had seen the plans, which Conrad had locked away so secretively. And then…’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Rebecca said she was the only one in the family who knew a rabbet from a raceway.’

  They all, except Rebecca, looked uncomprehending.

  ‘I don’t follow,’ Marjorie said.

  ‘It’s not a racing term,’ I explained. ‘It meant nothing to Roger Gardner.’

  ‘Nor to me,’ Conrad interposed, ‘and I’ve owned and ridden horses all my life.’

  ‘It’s clear to an architect,’ I said, ‘and to a builder, to a carpenter, to an engineer. Not, I wouldn’t have expected, to a jockey. So I wondered, but not very conclusively at that point, if she’d been talking a good deal to an architect, and if that architect might not be Yarrow. Just a vague passing speculation, but that sort of thing sticks in your brain.’

  ‘So what are a rabbit and a raceway?’ Dart asked.

  ‘A rabbet, with an ’e’, is a tongue and groove joint, mostly in wood, to enable you to slot boards, say, together, as in a fence, or floorboards, without using nails. Like the floor in the big top, in fact.’

  Marjorie looked bewildered, Conrad not.

  ‘And a raceway?’ she asked. ‘Not a racecourse?’

  ‘I suppose it could be. But otherwise it’s either a sort of gully for draining fast-flowing fluids, or it could be a sort of collar that houses ball-bearings. In either case, it’s not common racecourse parlance.’

  ‘A rabbet from a raceway,’ Dart said thoughtfully. ‘Wasn’t your youngest son chanting that?’

  ‘Quite likely.’

  ‘I should have killed you when I had the chance,’ Rebecca said to me bitterly.

  ‘I thought you were going to,’ I agreed.

  ‘She was aiming straight at you,’ Dart said. ‘Father snatched the gun away from her. If you ask him, he’ll probably say that shooting you once in the chest might have been passed off as an accident, but putting a second shot into your back couldn’t be anything but murder.’

  ‘Dart!’ Marjorie remonstrated severely; but there was no doubt he’d got it right. Dart was one of them. He knew.

  Conrad had a question for his daughter. ‘Where did you meet Yarrow in the first place? How did you get to know him?’

  She shrugged. ‘At a party. He was doing stupid imitations in the accent you heard on the tape. Rebe-ah Stra-on, darlin’. Someone told me he was an exceptionally good architect, but flat broke. I wanted new stands. He wanted a job badly and he wasn’t fussy how he got it. We did a deal.’

  ‘But you don’t usually like men.’

  ‘I didn’t like him,’ she said brutally. ‘I used him. I despise him, as a matter of fact. He’s in a blue funk now, predictably.’

  ‘So… what next?’ Conrad asked me wretchedly. ‘The police?’

  I looked at Marjorie. ‘You,’ I said, ‘are the one who pulls the levers in the family. You’ve ruled them all for forty years. You ruled even your own brother, in the gentlest of ways.’

  ‘How?’ Dart said, avid.

  Marjorie beseeched me with wide open eyes, but it was for Perdita Faulds’ sake that I said to Dart, ‘Your grandfather’s secret was his alone, and died with him. I can’t tell you it.’

  ‘Won’t,’ Dart said.

  ‘Won’t,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, to go to the police or not must be Marjorie’s decision, not mine. My brief was to give her a lever against Yarrow, and she has it. That’s where I finish.’ I paused. ‘I’m sure,’ I said, ‘for what it’s worth, that the police haven’t got, and won’t find, enough for a prosecution against you, Dart. Just go on knowing nothing, and you’ll be all right.’

  ‘What about Yarrow, though?’ Dart asked.

  ‘Marjorie must decide,’ I said. ‘But if you prosecute Yarrow, you give away Rebecca’s schemes and your own involvement. I can’t see her doing it.’

  ‘But Keith?’ Marjorie said, not dodging the burden I’d placed on her. ‘What about him?’

  Keith.

  I turned to Conrad. ‘Did you tell Marjorie that Keith sent you here?’

  ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘Sent you… with a gun?’

  He looked faintly shamefaced. ‘You can’t really blame me. I mean, after you and Dart had gone, Keith and I were standing in my room talking about you breaking into my cupboard, and we found that key sort of thing of yours in the lock and I was saying what a risk you’d taken just for a look at some plans… and it simply flashed into my mind that you’d been so involved in things, and although I couldn’t believe you’d been searching for anything else, or that you knew enough, I went into the cupboard and looked into the box where I’d put the photograph and the tape, and I was so devastated that Keith asked what was the matter, and I told him. He said – we both thought – you would of course blackmail me.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘You all do it to each other; you think no one’s capable of anything else.’

  Conrad shrugged his heavy shoulders as if he believed that to be self evident. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘Keith asked me to give him the envelope our father had entrusted to me shortly before he died. I told Keith I couldn’t do that. We had a bit of an argument, but Father had given me very explicit instructions about
not letting anyone else see it. Keith asked me if I knew what was in it, but I don’t, and I said so. He said he had to have it. He began opening the boxes and tipping everything out. I tried to stop him, but you know what he’s like. Then he came to the box where I thought I’d put that letter but when he tipped everything out it didn’t seem to be there… but how could you have taken it when you couldn’t have known it existed? In the end, I helped him look for it. Everything’s out on the floor, it’s a terrible mess and I’ll never put it straight…’

  ‘But you did find the envelope?’ Marjorie asked anxiously.

  ‘No, we didn’t.’ He turned to me, insisting, ‘I know it was in there, in one special box, under a pile of out-of-date insurance policies. Keith told me to bring the gun and kill you…’

  ‘But he knew you wouldn’t,’ I said positively.

  Dart asked, ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘One twin,’ I said, ‘would kill the pilgrim. The other wouldn’t. They can’t change their natures.’

  ‘The fork in the road! You… you subtle bastard.’

  Marjorie looked at me forthrightly, not understanding or caring what Dart had said. ‘Did you take that envelope?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I said.

  ‘Did you open it? Did you see what was inside?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then give it to me.’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘This one…’ I took a breath, ‘this one I have to do alone.’

  The telephone shrilled beside Marjorie. Mouth tightening with annoyance at the interruption, she lifted the receiver.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her face going blank. ‘Yes, he’s here.’

  She held out the receiver to me. ‘It’s Keith,’ she said. ‘He wants to talk to you.’

  He knows, I thought, that I must have taken that letter; and he knows what is in it.

  With foreboding, I said, ‘Yes?’

  He didn’t speak at once, but he was there: I could hear him breathing.

  Long seconds passed.

  He said five words only before the line went dead. The worst five words in the language.

  ‘Say goodbye to your children.’