Outside Chance

by Lyndon Stacey

  All in all, he felt pretty sure that someone had suspected he might return and had planned a little reception for him. The question was: were they waiting in the car, or in or around the hut? It seemed the only way to be certain was to try and get a closer look at the car, but it was obvious that he hadn’t a hope of reaching it by way of the lane without being seen; so, reluctantly, he returned to the hollow and began to search the adjacent hedge for thin patches.

  A couple of minutes and several more scratches later, Ben was in the field, level with the car. The wind was blowing across the lane towards him and it brought with it the low, monotonous jangle of a music radio station and a trace of smoke that wasn’t tobacco.

  Ben would have dearly liked to know how many people were in the car but the rampant hawthorn between him and the lane precluded that.

  There were two objectives for this night-time visit, one being to have a closer look at the contents of the Nissen hut; the other was to pay a call on the horse in the neighbouring field. Having no wish to traverse the hedge more than was strictly necessary, Ben decided to deal with the horse first.

  ‘Neighbouring’ was a loose term, he discovered, after negotiating a barbed wire fence and tramping for a good ten minutes across uneven ground, some of which was definitely on the damp side of marshy. Clouds, whipped along by the wind, intermittently covered the moon, leaving him stumbling in almost complete darkness and able to navigate only by keeping his eye on the small cluster of outbuildings outlined against the sky. When he finally reached them, he found himself on the wrong side of an extremely muddy gateway, which he discovered by plunging his foot ankle-deep into a rain-filled hoofprint. His boot, already soaked, immediately filled up with icy-cold water.

  Ben cursed under his breath but it was a little late to turn back, so, grimacing as his other boot filled too, he plodded on, nearly losing one of them altogether as he dragged his feet out of the mud to climb the metal five-bar gate.

  Moonlight, which would have been helpful a minute earlier, now flooded the scene, showing him four buildings in various stages of disrepair, the closest of which was recognisable by its half-door as a stable. Ben froze, feeling horribly vulnerable, but either he hadn’t been seen or there was nobody there to see, because the dreaded shout didn’t come, and a few seconds later the moon went behind a cloud again and blessed darkness returned.

  Moving closer to the building Ben made his way to the door and peered inside, almost jumping out of his skin as the horse had the same idea from the other side. It threw up its head and backed away, equally startled.

  Unsure how close the farmhouse was, Ben unlatched the top door and pulled it, creaking and protesting, to join its counterpart, then he opened both by eight inches or so, took a deep breath and slipped inside. Somewhere in front of him the horse moved restlessly on its straw bed, and Ben’s heart-rate accelerated into the hundreds. With shaking hands, he took a small, rubber-coated torch from his jacket pocket and switched it on.

  One glance was enough.

  It wasn’t Cajun King.

  It was the right colour and size but anyone who had been brought up with horses, the way Ben had, could tell at a glance that it wasn’t a thoroughbred. It was wearing a dung-stained, navy and red padded stable rug, but its visible parts – head, neck and legs – belonged to something more in the hunter line than to a racehorse. Unnerved by this unexpected late-night intrusion, the horse stood with its head high, showing the whites of its eyes as it watched Ben suspiciously. The stable wasn’t by any means large and the animal seemed to fill it as it shifted first forwards, then back, on the verge of panic.

  A few soothing words might have helped but Ben couldn’t conjure up anything even remotely calming. His priority was to get out and shut the door before the horse did something stupid.

  Within seconds he was out and leaning on the closed door, eyes shut, trying to steady his breathing.

  So it wasn’t Eddie Truman’s missing horse. To be honest, he hadn’t really expected it to be, but he had to be sure. If he’d had any real expectation, he’d have contacted the police and let them deal with it – scoop or no scoop.

  Another ten minutes or so was spent on the return journey and it took him a further five to locate the thin patch in the hedge that he’d forced himself through. Ben could hear the car radio still pulsing out its heavy beat but could no longer see it because by now the moon had deserted him, and he made his way to the door of the Nissen hut by guesswork and a fair amount of luck. Naturally, it was locked, but the whole affair was so flimsy and ill-fitting that a little judicious attention with the blade of his penknife, between door and jamb, soon had it swinging open. Swiftly he stepped inside and pulled the door to behind him. Then, swapping the knife for the torch, and shielding its light with his other hand, he moved towards the nearest desk.

  Suddenly, shockingly, the lights came on.

  5

  ‘LEAVE SOMETHING BEHIND, did yer?’ The voice came from near the door and Ben swung round to see the all-too-familiar head of dreadlocks.

  Baz.

  Damn! Why hadn’t he checked the car again?

  ‘What can I say? You made me so welcome,’ Ben said, lifting his hands expressively and stepping back so that he was touching the bench.

  ‘I knew you were a bastard! I told him.’

  ‘Clever you!’ In one fluid movement, Ben reached behind him, caught up a pot of assorted paperclips and corkboard pins and threw them in Baz’s face.

  Baz ducked, bringing his arms up to protect his eyes and, not wasting a moment, Ben lunged forward and gave him a powerful shove, sending him reeling back into the corner of the hut. Here, due to the contours of the building, his head connected rather firmly with the ceiling and he sat down, grabbing at the metal shelves to save himself but succeeding only in pulling one of the five-by-three-foot sections over on top of himself.

  The air turned blue.

  Ben didn’t offer to help him up. Taking advantage of the spectacular success of his spur of the moment attack he flicked the light switch off, whisked out the door and pulled it shut behind him.

  After the brilliance of hundred-watt bulbs and the cream interior he could see absolutely nothing outside, and he didn’t see whatever it was that landed a stinging blow across his shoulder and head, causing him to stumble and drop to his knees. He was, however, ready for it when it came again, throwing out his arm and grasping the weapon even as it cracked across his back a second time. Wrenching it from the hands of his assailant, Ben found himself holding what felt like a short length of partially decayed two-by-two timber.

  Robbed of this instrument the attacker laid into him with fists but, as with the timber, the blows were only moderately competent, and Ben was able to discard the wood and catch hold of the flailing arms. He discovered, from the size of bone, that he almost certainly had a female to contend with. It seemed likely that it might be the pink-haired artist, Della.

  To someone with ethics this presented a thorny problem, but when, a moment later, she made very efficient use of a set of surprisingly sharp teeth, Ben found his conscience liberated. Turning rapidly on his heel like a hammer thrower, he swung Della round through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees and released her in the general direction of the hedge. The crash of twiggery and muffled screaming that followed seemed to suggest that his efforts had been successful and, recovering his balance, Ben sprinted away.

  Unwilling to face the perils of the hawthorn yet again, he hoped he had enough of a head start to make it down the muddy track before Della and Baz could get their act together, get back to their vehicle and come after him.

  In the next instant he decided that as Baz had not yet reappeared it might be in his best interests to try and disable the car first, or even – as he was prepared to gamble that they wouldn’t have removed the keys – use it himself.

  This last idea strongly appealed to him and he altered course accordingly, feeling, as he did, the first few large drops of rain that probabl
y presaged a downpour.

  The car was there, unattended, and so too were the keys. Ben slid thankfully into the driver’s seat, almost choking on the lingering smoke, and gunned the engine. Old and shabby it might have been, but after turning over a few times, the car started as sweetly as he could have wished. At last, he felt, something was going his way.

  Standing on the accelerator Ben tried all the levers and switches, turning on not only the headlights but also the windscreen wipers, the indicators and the heating system in the process. As the lights lanced out through the rain, the first thing they illuminated was Baz’s running form. No more than thirty feet away, his stride faltered and stopped as he registered the oncoming car.

  Ben wouldn’t have run him down but Baz didn’t know that, and, though he held his ground for the space of a few heartbeats, his nerve broke, and he dived for the tangle of brambles and hawthorn that comprised the lane boundary. As he drove out into the hollow and skidded round the corner into the muddy track Ben thought, with amusement, that the surrounding hedges had taken quite a battering over the past hour or so.

  With the window wound right down to avoid becoming high on the car’s residual fug, he took the rough lane at a highly uncomfortable rate, bottoming the vehicle out several times on the ridges between the puddles before lurching, thankfully, on to the tarmac at the end.

  Transferring to the Mitsubishi moments later, Ben was about to drop the keys of the borrowed car in a ditch when an idea occurred. Retracing his steps, he tossed them through the open window of the car, on to the driver’s seat, before jumping into his own vehicle, backing out of the gateway and accelerating noisily away, leaving a trace of rubber behind him on the road surface.

  A couple of minutes later, he was back on foot, having tucked the Mitsubishi out of sight in yet another gateway twenty or thirty yards down the next turning he’d come to. Panting hard from his run, he hid himself behind the hedge and waited.

  He needn’t have hurried. It was a full five minutes before he heard Baz and Della approaching and they certainly weren’t hurrying. Ben could hear them from a long way off, bickering like a pair of children over whose fault it was that he’d managed to get away.

  ‘There’s the car. I told you the one we heard was a different one. This old heap of crap never sounded like that!’ That was Della.

  ‘I bet he’s taken the fucking keys! I’ll fucking kill him!’

  ‘Yeah? You and whose army? You haven’t exactly been impressive so far.’ Her voice was loaded with scorn.

  ‘Well, neither were you.’

  ‘At least I hit him. You just got dumped on your arse!’

  ‘I told you. He threw stuff in my fucking face!’

  Ben heard the car door open.

  ‘The keys are here. I’ll drive.’ Della again.

  ‘You fucking won’t!’

  ‘I will. You’re stoned out of your mind.’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘Not as much as you. That’s why he made a fool of you. No, come to think of it, you were a fool already!’

  ‘Oh, ha fuckin’ ha. At least he didn’t have a chance to start poking around. I knew he was trouble but Henry wouldn’t listen – oh, no. “We can trust him,” he says. Just wait till I tell him!’

  A door slammed, the car started up and, over the sound of the engine, Della said ‘Come on, get in.’

  Presumably he did, because after a moment Ben heard a second door slam and the car pulled away.

  In the silence that followed its departure, Ben stepped cautiously from his hiding place. Unwittingly, Baz had supplied the one bit of information that had been worrying him: whether or not they had already alerted Henry to the attempted breakin. As they hadn’t, now was undoubtedly the optimum time to pay a return visit. Throwing caution to the wind, he jogged back to his car and then drove it along the track to the Nissen hut.

  This was in darkness once more, and again Ben used his penknife to effect entry, pausing on the threshold this time, to switch the lights on before entering.

  The hut was empty, as he’d been pretty sure it would be, and, shutting the door behind him, he pulled a chair across the doorway. At least if anyone did turn up whilst he was there, they wouldn’t be able to creep in without him knowing. His search of the ALSA premises was brief and almost completely unrewarding. What little paperwork he found was mainly concerned with protest campaigns, both past and planned, fundraising, and newspaper advertising.

  The calendar and maps were dotted with what might have been interesting information, but as this was displayed in some sort of shorthand, it was of little or no use to Ben. On the day of Cajun King’s abduction there were no entries on the calendar, and nowhere could he find any reference to Eddie Truman or his stables, until he discovered, on one of the notice-boards, a newspaper cutting about the death of one of Truman’s horses on the gallops. Underneath this someone had written, ‘Murderer!’ in red capital letters. Looking forward through the next month or two was no more informative. At the beginning of March ‘Operation Big Top’ was announced but, although it sounded most likely to be a circus, Ben could find no further clue as to what the operation entailed.

  With growing frustration he turned his attention to the racks of metal shelves near the door. Someone, presumably Baz, had stood these upright again and piled the files, books and pamphlets untidily on them. A cursory glance through one pile wasn’t promising, and Ben was ready to admit defeat. In films and on TV he’d watched detectives calmly sorting through the contents of desks and address books, even taking photographs with miniature cameras and rock-steady hands, but Ben wasn’t a TV detective: his heart was pounding, he was perspiring freely and he was as jumpy as a cat.

  Regarding the remaining jumble of material with weary hopelessness, he gave up. Turning the lights off he removed the chair and cautiously opened the door, waiting silently for a moment or two before venturing across the threshold. If anyone was waiting they were holding their breath, just as he was. Half a minute later he was out of the door, had locked it, and was in the Mitsubishi. Nobody sprang from the shadows; in fact no one moved at all. It looked as though Ben had been completely alone in the clearing this time, but, even so, the thought of returning to continue his search held no allure whatsoever. Feeling suddenly dog-tired, he headed for home. Ben slept late the following morning and awakened, for the second morning running, to the sound of the telephone ringing.

  He put out a hand to locate it, picked it up and said, ‘Yeah, hello,’ without opening his eyes.

  ‘You lying shit!’ a voice greeted him.

  Ben’s eyes snapped open and he sat up, frowning.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘As if you didn’t know. I thought you were on the level. I persuaded the others to trust you, and you pay me back like this!’

  ‘Allerton? Henry?’

  ‘Yeah, Henry. Gullible Henry,’ came the bitter affirmation. ‘Why the hell did I trust a reporter? I must need my bloody head seen to. And now I’ve got Della and Baz on my case and the office looking like a bombsite. Why did you have to trash the place, Ben? After everything I told you. Christ, I really had you wrong, didn’t I?’

  ‘Hold on,’ Ben exclaimed, trying to take it all in. ‘Trash the place? I didn’t.’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap, Baz saw you.’

  ‘Oh, and he’d be a reliable witness, wouldn’t he? High as a kite half the time, I’d say.’

  ‘Are you denying you went back to the hut last night?’

  Ben hesitated. His inherent honesty had got him into trouble a number of times, and had almost certainly held back his career, but he just couldn’t seem to shake it. ‘I’m not denying that I was there, but whoever trashed the place, it wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I’d look a little closer to home.’

  The conversation with Allerton left him feeling a little unsettled. He seemed a decent, if misguided, sort and Ben hadn’t liked going behind his back in the first place, but, on top of that, to
be blamed for something that he had not and would never have done made it so much worse.

  A late breakfast was interrupted by yet another call, this time from the editor who had commissioned the piece on the Hungarian horsemen, checking on his progress. The idea of spending the day in and around Truman’s yard held little appeal for Ben in his current state of mind, and so he seized on this alternative with alacrity, promising that he was intending to spend the rest of the day with the troupe, who should by now have arrived and started to set up at their new venue.

  Deciding to put Eddie Truman and the whole Cajun King incident out of his mind for the day, Ben set off just before midday for West Sussex and the equestrian centre where the Csikós were to put on their show for the following three nights.

  In mainland Europe, the troupe rarely put on such a quantity of small-scale performances, their reputation being for spectacular equestrian son et lumière style shows, staged at historic outdoor venues on spring and summer evenings.

  The circumstances of their touring England at such a strange time of the year had come about precisely for that reason. When the millionaire promoter who had paved the way for this visit had first approached them they had turned him down, their diary for the year already full. But Ronnie Devlin was determined, finally convincing them that a series of smaller shows at indoor venues in the early part of the year was an ideal way to introduce their special magic to the English public. He planned a tour for them that would culminate in three full-scale spectaculars, shortly before they were due to start their season on the continent. He was, he told them, completely confident that at the end of it their troupe would be a hot property and able to push their performance fees sky-high when they returned the following year.

  After much persuasion the Csikós agreed. It had been their intention to extend their tour to England – one of them confided in Ben – just as soon as they had enough financial security to make a trip across the Channel a viable proposition. Devlin had provided that security and so the deal was struck, with all parties very content.