‘How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘The crash, I mean?’
‘No one knows, really.’
‘But the driver? He wasn’t killed, was he?’
‘No, he wasn’t even hurt much. Just shook up a bit. But he couldn’t remember what happened. Some people in a car came driving along after dark and nearly ran into the tanker. They found the driver sitting at the side of the road, holding his head and moaning. Concussion, it was, they say. They reckon he hit his head somehow when his lorry went over. Staggers me how he got out of it so lightly, the cab was fair crushed, and there was glass everywhere.’
‘Do tankers often drive across here? Lucky it’s never happened before, if they do.’
‘They used not to,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘But they’ve been over here quite regularly now for a year or two. The traffic on the London road’s getting chronic, see?’
‘Oh… did it come from a local firm, then?’
‘Down the coast a bit. Intersouth Chemicals, that’s the firm it belonged to.’
‘How soon do you think we’ll be racing here again?’ I asked, turning back to look at the track. ‘Will you make it by next week?’
He frowned. ‘Strictly between you and me, I don’t think there’s a bleeding hope. What we needed, as I said to the Captain, was a couple of bulldozers, not six men with spades.’
‘I would have thought so too.’
He sighed. ‘He just told me we couldn’t afford them and to shut up and get on with it. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ll just about have cut out all the dead turf by next Wednesday, at this rate of going on.’
‘That doesn’t leave any time for new turf to settle,’ I remarked.
‘It’ll be a miracle if it’s laid, let alone settled,’ he agreed gloomily.
I bent down and ran my hand over a patch of brown grass. It was decomposing and felt slimy. I made a face, and the foreman laughed.
‘Horrible, isn’t it? It stinks, too.’
I put my fingers to my nose and wished I hadn’t. ‘Was it slippery like this right from the beginning?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Hopeless.’
‘Well I won’t take up any more of your time,’ I said, smiling.
‘I’ll tell Captain Oxon you came. Pity you missed him.’
‘Don’t bother him. He must have a lot to worry about just now.’
‘One bloody crisis after another,’ he nodded. ‘So long, then.’ He went back to his spade and his heart- breaking task, and I retraced the quarter mile up the straight to the deserted stands.
I hesitated for a while outside the weighing room, wondering whether to pick the lock and go in, and knowing it was mainly nostalgia that urged me to do it, not any conviction that it would be a useful piece of investigation. There would always be the temptation, I supposed, to use dubious professional skills for one’s own pleasure. Like doctors sniffing ether. I contented myself with looking through the windows.
The deserted weighing room looked the same as ever: a large bare expanse of wooden board floor, with a table and some upright chairs in one corner, and the weighing machine itself on the left. Racecourse weighing machines were not all of one universal design. There weren’t any left of the old type where the jockeys stood on a platform while weights were added to the balancing arm. That whole process was much too slow. Now there were either seats slung from above, in which one felt much like a bag of sugar, or chairs bolted to a base plate on springs: in both these cases the weight was quickly indicated by a pointer which swung round a gigantic clock face. In essence, modern kitchen scales vastly magnified.
The scales at Seabury were the chair-on-base-plate type, which I’d always found simplest to use. I recalled a few of the before-and-after occasions when I had sat on that particular spot. Some good, some bad, as always with racing.
Shrugging, I turned away. I wouldn’t, I thought, ever be sitting there again. And no one walked over my grave.
Climbing into the car, I drove to the nearest town, looked up the whereabouts of Intersouth Chemicals, and an hour later was speaking to the personnel manager. I explained that on behalf of the National Hunt Committee I had just called in passing to find out if the driver of the tanker had fully recovered, or had remembered anything else about the accident.
The manager, fat and fiftyish, was affable but unhelpful. ‘Smith’s left,’ he said briefly. ‘We gave him a few days off to get over the accident, and then he came back yesterday and said his wife didn’t fancy him driving chemicals any more, and he was packing it in.’ His voice held a grievance.
‘Had he been with you long?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘About a year.’
‘A good driver, I suppose?’
‘Yes, about average for the job. They have to be good drivers, or we don’t use them, you see. Smith was all right, but nothing special.’
‘And you still don’t really know what happened?’
‘No,’ he sighed. It takes a lot to tip one of our tankers over. There was nothing to learn from the road. It was covered with oil and petrol and chemical. If there had ever been any marks, skid marks I mean, they weren’t there after the breakdown cranes had lifted the tanker up again, and the road was cleared.’
‘Do your tankers use that road often?’
‘They have done recently, but not any more after this. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember it was Smith himself who found that way round. Going over the racecourse missed out some bottle-neck at a junction, I believe. I know some of the drivers thought it a good idea.’
‘They go through Seabury regularly, then?’
‘Sure, often. Straight line to Southampton and round to the oil refinery at Fawley.’
‘Oh? What exactly was Smith’s tanker carrying?’
‘Sulphuric acid. It’s used in refining petrol, among other things.’
Sulphuric acid. Dense; oily; corrosive to the point of charring. Nothing more instantly lethal could have poured out over Seabury’s turf. They could have raced had it been a milder chemical, put sand or tan on the dying grass and raced over the top. But no one would risk a horse on ground soaked with vitriol.
I said, ‘Could you give me Smith’s address? I’ll call round and see if his memory has come back.’
‘Sure.’ He searched in a file and found it for me. ‘Tell him he can have his job back if he’s interested. Another of the men gave notice this morning.’
I said I would, thanked him, and went to Smith’s address, which proved to be two rooms upstairs in a suburban house. But Smith and his wife no longer lived in them. Packed up and gone yesterday, I was told by a young woman in curlers. No, she didn’t know where they went. No, they didn’t leave a forwarding address, and if I was her I wouldn’t worry about his health as he’d been laughing and drinking and playing records to all hours the day after the crash, his concussion having cured itself pretty quick. Reaction, he’d said when she complained of the noise, against not being killed.
It was dark by then, and I drove slowly back into London against the stream of headlights pouring out. Back to my flat in a modern block, a short walk from the office, down the ramp into the basement garage, and up in the lift to the fifth floor, home.
There were two rooms facing south, bedroom and sitting-room, and two behind them, bathroom and kitchen, with windows into an inner well. A pleasant sunny place, furnished in blond wood and cool colours, centrally heated, cleaning included in the rent. A regular order of groceries arrived week by week directly into the kitchen through a hatch, and rubbish disappeared down a chute. Instant living. No fuss, no mess, no strings. And damnably lonely, after Jenny.
Not that she had ever been in the place, she hadn’t. The house in the Berkshire village where we had mostly lived had been too much of a battleground, and when she walked out I sold it, with relief. I’d moved into the new flat shortly after going to the agency, because it was close. It was also expensive: but I had no fares to pay.
I mixed myself a brandy with ice and water, sat down in an arm-chair, put my feet up, and thought about Seabury. Seabury, Captain Oxon, Ted Wilkins, Intersouth Chemicals, and a driver called Smith.
After that I thought about Kraye. Nothing pleasant about him, nothing at all. A smooth, phony crust of sophistication hiding ruthless greed; a seething passion for crystals, ditto for land; an obsession with the cleanliness
