Rat Race

by Dick Francis

  ‘You have?’ Nancy said. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’

  He put the receiver down. ‘I rescue you from Chanter, now it’s your turn.’

  ‘Rescue my foot. You’re in and out of the weighing room all day. Fat lot of good that is.’

  ‘Do you want to come?’

  ‘Take Midge,’ she said. ‘It’s her turn.’

  ‘No, you go,’ Midge said. ‘Honestly, I find it tiring. Especially as it’s one of those rush from course to course days. I’ll go along to the meeting here next week. That will do me fine.’

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Naturally I will. I’ll lie in the sun in the garden and think of you all exhausting yourselves racing round in circles.’

  When it turned out that there were two other empty seats as well, in spite of Nancy being there, Annie Villars gave Colin a reproachful look of carefully repressed annoyance and said it would have been useful to have had along Fenella to share the cost. Why else did Colin think she had suggested it?

  ‘I must have miscounted,’ said Colin happily. ‘Too late to get her now.’

  We flew to Bath without incident, Nancy sitting in the right-hand seat beside me and acting as co-pilot. It was clear that she intensely enjoyed it, and there was no pain in it for me either. I could see what Larry had meant about practising short landings, as the Bath runways were incredibly short, but we got down in fair order and parked alongside the opposition’s Cessna.

  Colin said ‘Lock the aeroplane and come into the races. You can’t forever stand on guard.’

  The Polyplane pilot was nowhere to be seen. I hoped for the best, locked up, and walked with the others into the racecourse next door.

  The first person we saw was Acey Jones, balancing on his crutches with the sun making his pale head look fairer than ever.

  ‘Oh yes. Colin,’ Nancy said. ‘Do you want me to send a fiver to the Accident Insurance people? You remember, the leaflet which came yesterday? That man reminded me… he got a thousand pounds from the fund for cracking his ankle. I heard him say so, at Haydock.’

  ‘If you like,’ he agreed. ‘A fiver won’t break the bank. May as well.’

  ‘Bobbie Wessex is sponsoring it,’ Annie commented.

  ‘Yes,’ Nancy nodded. ‘It was on the leaflet.’

  ‘Did you see the bit about the bombs?’ I asked.

  Annie and Nancy both laughed. ‘Someone in insurance has got a sense of humour, after all.’

  Annie hustled off to the weighing room to see her runner in the first race, and Colin followed her, to change.

  ‘Lemonade?’ I suggested to Nancy.

  ‘Pints of it. Whew, it’s hot.’

  We drank it in a patch of shade, out on the grass. Ten yards away, loud and clear, Eric Goldenberg was conducting a row with Kenny Bayst.

  ‘… And don’t you think, sport, that you can set your guerrillas on me and expect me to do you favours afterwards, because if you think that you’ve got another think coming.’

  ‘What guerrillas?’ Goldenberg demanded, not very convincingly.

  ‘Oh come off it. Set them to cripple me. At Redcar.’

  ‘Must have been those bookmakers you swindled while you were busy double crossing us.’

  ‘I never double crossed you.’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap,’ Goldenberg said heavily. ‘You know bloody well you did. You twisty little bastard.’

  ‘If you think that, why the frigging hell are you asking me to set up another touch for you now?’

  ‘Bygones are bygones.’

  ‘Bygones bloody aren’t.’ Kenny spat on the ground at Goldenberg’s feet and removed himself to the weighing room. Goldenberg watched him go with narrowed eyes and a venomous twist to his mouth. The next time I saw him he was holding a well-filled glass and adding substantially to his paunch, while muttering belligerently to a pasty slob who housed all his brains in his biceps. The slob wasn’t one of the two who had lammed into Kenny at Redcar. I wondered if Goldenberg intended mustering reinforcements.

  ‘What do you think of Kenny Bayst?’ I asked Nancy.

  ‘The big little Mister I-Am from Down Under,’ she said. ‘He’s better than he used to be, though. He came over here thinking everyone owed him a living, as he’d had a great big successful apprenticeship back home.’

  ‘Would he lose to order?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Would he agree to lose to order, take the money, back himself, and try to win?’

  She grinned. ‘You’re learning fast.’

  We watched Colin win the first race. Annie Villars’ horse finished third from last. She stood glumly looking at its heaving sides while Kenny’s successor made the best of explaining away his own poor showing.

  ‘Annie should have kept Kenny Bayst,’ Nancy said.

  ‘He wanted out.’

  ‘Like Colin doesn’t want in,’ she nodded. ‘Annie’s being a bit of a fool this season.’

  Before the third race we went back to the aeroplane. The Polyplane pilot was standing beside it, peering in through the windows. He was not the stand off merchant from Redcar, but his colleague from Haydock.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Ross.’ He was polite in the way that is more insolent than rudeness. Not the best method, I would have thought, of seducing Colin’s custom back from Derry-downs. He walked away, back to his Cessna, and I went over the Cherokee inch by inch looking for anything wrong. As far as I could see, there was nothing. Nancy and I climbed aboard and I started the engine to warm it up ready to take off.

  Colin and Annie arrived in a hurry and loaded themselves in, and we whisked off across southern England to Shoreham. Colin and Annie again jumped into a waiting taxi and vanished. Nancy stayed with me and the Cherokee, and we sat on the warm grass and watched little aeroplanes landing and taking off, and talked now and then without pressure about flying, racing, life in general.

  Towards the end of the afternoon she asked ‘Will you go on being a taxi pilot all your life?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t look far ahead any more.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ve been happy, these last few weeks, with Midge being so much better. I wish it would last.’

  ‘You’ll remember it.’

  ‘That’s not the same.’

  ‘It’s only special because of what’s coming,’ I said.

  There was a long pause while she thought about it. At length she asked, disbelievingly, ‘Do you mean that it is because Midge is dying that we are so happy now?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She turned her head; considered me. ‘Tell me something else. I need something else.’

  ‘Comfort?’

  ‘If you like.’

  I said ‘You’ve all three been through the classic progression, these last two years. All together, not just Midge herself. Shock, disbelief, anger and in the end acceptance…’ I paused. ‘You’ve come through the dark tunnel. You’re out in the sun the other end. You’ve done most of your grieving already. You are a most extraordinarily strong family. You’ll remember this summer because it will be something worth remembering.’

  ‘Matt…’

  There were tears in her eyes. I watched the bright little dragonfly aeroplanes dart and go. They could heal me, the Ross family, I thought. Their strength could heal me. If it would take nothing away from them. If I could be sure.

  ‘What was Colin’s wife like?’ I asked, after a while.

  ‘Oh…’ She gave a laugh which was half a sniff. ‘A bit too much like Fenella. He was younger then. He didn’t know how to duck. She was thirty-three and bossy and rich, and he was twenty and madly impressed by her. To be honest, Midge and I thought she was fabulous too. We were seventeen and still wet behind the ears. She thought it would be marvellous being married to a genius, all accolades and champagne and glamour. She didn’t like it when it turned out
to be mostly hard work and starvation and exhaustion… so she left him for a young actor who’d just had rave notices for his first film, and it took Colin months to get back to being himself from the wreck she’d made of him.’

  ‘Poor Colin.’ Or lucky Colin. Strong Colin. Months… it was taking me years.

  ‘Yeah…’ She grinned. ‘He got over it. He’s got some bird now in London. He slides down to see her every so often when he thinks Midge and I aren’t noticing.’

  ‘I must get me a bird,’ I said idly. ‘One of these days.’

  ‘You haven’t got one?’

  I shook my head. I looked at her. Straight eyebrows, straight eyes, sensible mouth. She looked back. I wanted to kiss her. I didn’t think she would be angry.

  ‘No,’ I said absentmindedly. ‘No bird.’

  Take nothing away from them. Nothing from Midge.

  ‘I’ll wait a while longer,’ I said.

  Several days, several flights later I telephoned the Board of Trade. Diffidently. Sneering at myself for trying to do their job for them, for thinking I might have thought of something they hadn’t worked out for themselves. But then, I’d been on the flight with the bomb, and they hadn’t. I’d seen things, heard things, felt things that they hadn’t.

  Partly for my own sake, but mainly because of what Nancy had said about the bomb merchant still running around loose with his motives still rotting away inside him, I had finally found myself discarding the thought that it was none of my business, that someone else could sort it all out, and coming round to the view that if I could in fact come up with anything it might be a profitable idea.

  To which end I wasted a lot of brain time chasing down labyrinths of speculation, and fetched up against a series of reasons why not.

  There was Larry, for instance. Well, what about Larry? Larry had had every chance to put the bomb on board, right up to two hours before I set off to collect the passengers from White Waltham. But however strong a motive he had to kill Colin or ruin Derrydowns, and none had so far appeared bar a few trivial frauds, if it was true it was a radio and not a time bomb he couldn’t have set it off because when it exploded he was in Turkey. If it had been Larry, a time bomb would have been the only simple and practical way.

  Then Susan… Ridiculous as I thought it, I went over again what the Board of Trade man had said: she was going out occasionally with a demolitions expert. Well, good luck to her. The sooner she got married again the better off I’d be. Only trouble was, the aversion therapy of that last destructive six months seemed to have been just as successful with her as it had been with me.

  I couldn’t believe that any executive type in his right mind would bump off his occasional girl friend’s ex-husband for the sake of about six thousand pounds of insurance, especially as the longer I lived, the greater would be the sum she eventually collected. I had three years ago stopped paying any more premiums, but the value of the pay-off automatically went on increasing.

  Apart from knowing her incapable of the cold-blooded murder of innocent people, I respected her mercenary instincts. The longer I lived the better off she would be on all counts. It was as simple as that.

  Honey Harley… had said she would do ‘anything’ to keep Derrydowns in business, and the blowing up of the Cherokee had eased the financial situation. One couldn’t sell things which were being bought on the hire purchase, and if one couldn’t keep up the instalments the aircraft technically belonged to the H.P. company, who might sell it at a figure which did little more than cover themselves, leaving a molehill for Derrydowns to salvage. Insurance, on the other hand, had done them proud: paid off the H.P. and left them with capital in hand.

  Yet killing Colin Ross would have ruined Derrydowns completely. Honey Harley would never have killed any of the customers, let alone Colin Ross. And the same applied to Harley himself, all along the line.

  The Polyplane people, then? Always around, always belligerent, trying their damnedest to put Derrydowns out of business and win back Colin Ross. Well… the bomb would have achieved the first object but have put the absolute dampers on the second. I couldn’t see even the craziest Polyplane pilot killing the golden goose.

  Kenny Bayst… livid with Eric Goldenberg, Major Tyderman and Annie Villars. But as I’d said to Colin, where would he have got a bomb from in the time, and would he have killed Colin and me too? It didn’t seem possible, any of it. No to Kenny Bayst.

  Who, then?

  Who?

  Since I couldn’t come up with anyone else, I went back over the possibilities all over again. Larry, Susan, the Harleys, Polyplanes, Kenny Bayst… Looked at them up, down, and sideways. Got nowhere. Made some coffee, went to bed, went to sleep.

  Woke up at four in the morning with the moon shining on my face. And one fact hitting me with a bang. Up, down and sideways. Look at things laterally. Start from the bottom.

  I started from the bottom. When I did that, the answer rose up and stared me in the face. I couldn’t believe it. It was too darned simple.

  In the morning I made a lengthy telephone call to a long lost cousin, and two hours later got one back. And it was then, expecting a fiat rebuff, that I rang up the Board of Trade.

  The tall polite man wasn’t in. He would, they said, call back later.

  When he did, Harley was airborne with a pupil and Honey answered in the tower. She buzzed through to the crew room, where I was writing up records.

  ‘The Board of Trade want you. What have you been up to?’

  ‘It’s only that old bomb,’ I said soothingly.

  ‘Huh.’

  When the tall man came on the line, she was still listening on the tower extension.

  ‘Honey,’ I said. ‘Quit.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Board of Trade.

  Honey giggled, but she put her receiver down. I heard the click.

  ‘Captain Shore?’ the voice said reprovingly.

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘You wanted me?’

  ‘You said… if I thought of any angle on the bomb.’

  ‘Indeed yes.’ A shade of warmth.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, ‘about the transmitter which was needed to set it off.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How big would the bomb have been?’ I asked. ‘All that plastic explosive and gun powder and wires and solonoids?’

  ‘I should think quite small… you would probably pack a bomb like that into a flat tin about seven inches by four by two inches deep. Possibly even smaller. The tighter they are packed the more fiercely they explode.’

  ‘And how big would the transmitter have to be to send perhaps three different signals?’

  ‘Nowadays, not very big. If size were important… a pack of cards, perhaps. But in this case I would have thought… larger. The transmissions must have had to carry a fairly long way… and to double the range of a signal you have to quadruple the power of the transmitter, as no doubt you know.’

  ‘Yes… I apologise for going through all this the long way, but I wanted to be sure. Because although I don’t know why, I’ve a good idea of when and who.’

  ‘What did you say?’ His voice sounded strangled.

  ‘I said…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted. ‘I heard. When… when, then?’

  ‘It was put on board at White Waltham. Taken off again at Haydock. And put back on again at Haydock.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It came with one of the passengers.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘By the way,’ I said. ‘How much would such a bomb cost?’

  ‘Oh… about eighty pounds or so,’ he said impatiently.

  ‘Who…?’

  ‘And would it take a considerable expert to make one?’

  ‘Someone used to handling explosives and with a working knowledge of radio.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘look, will you please stop playing cat and mouse. I dare say it amuses you to t
ease the Board of Trade… I don’t say I absolutely blame you, but will you please tell me which of the passengers had a bomb with him?’

  ‘Major Tyderman,’ I said.

  ‘Major…’ He took an audible breath. ‘Are you meaning to say now that it wasn’t the bomb rolling around on the elevator wires which caused the friction which persuaded you to land…? That Major Tyderman was carrying it around unknown to himself all the afternoon? Or what?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘And no.’

  ‘For God’s sake…’ He was exasperated. ‘I suppose you couldn’t simplify the whole thing by telling me exactly who planted the bomb on Major Tyderman? Who intended to blow him up?’

  ‘If you like.’

  He took a shaking grip. I smiled at the crew room wall.

  ‘Well, who?’

  ‘Major Tyderman,’ I said. ‘Himself.’

  Silence. Then a protest.

  ‘Do you mean suicide? It can’t have been. The bomb went off when the aeroplane was on the ground…’

  ‘Precisely,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If a bomb goes off in an aeroplane, everyone automatically thinks it was intended to blow up in the air and kill all the people on board.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Suppose the real intended victim was the aeroplane itself, not the people?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know why.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. You are saying that Major Tyderman, intending to blow up the aeroplane for reasons unknown, took a bomb with him to the races.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Looking back… He was rigidly tense all day, and he wouldn’t be parted from his binocular case, which was large enough to contain a bomb of the size you described.’

  ‘That’s absurdly circumstantial,’ he protested.

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘Then it was the Major who borrowed the keys from me, to go over to the aircraft to fetch the Sporting Life which he had left there. He wouldn’t let me go, though I offered. He came back saying he had locked up again, and gave me back the keys. Of course he hadn’t locked up. He wanted to create a little confusion. While he was over there he unscrewed the back panel of the luggage bay and put the bomb behind it, against the fuselage. Limpet gadget, I expect, like I said before, which came unstuck on the bumpy flight.’