And if I read it right, Kraye is in a hurry now because of the political situation. He won’t want to spend fifty thousand buying Seabury and then find building land has been nationalised overnight. If I were him, I’d want to clinch the deal and sell to a developer as quickly as possible. According to the photographs of the share transfers, he already holds twenty-three per cent of the shares. This is almost certainly enough to swing the sale of the company if it comes to a vote. But he’s greedy. He’ll want more. But he’ll only want more if he can get it soon. Waiting for February is too risky. So yes, I do think if we give him a chance that he will organise some more damage this week.’
‘It’s a risk,’ said Dolly. ‘Suppose something dreadful happens and we neither prevent it nor catch anyone doing it?’
They kicked it round among the three of them for several minutes, the pros and cons of the straight patrols versus cat and mouse. Finally Radnor turned back to me and said ‘Sid?’
‘It’s your agency,’ I said seriously. ‘It’s your risk.’
‘But it’s your case. It’s still your case. You must decide.’
I couldn’t understand him. It was all very well for him to have given me a free hand so far, but this wasn’t the sort of decision I would have ever expected him to pass on.
Still… ‘Chico and I, then,’ I said. ‘We’ll go along tonight and stay all day tomorrow. I don’t think we’ll let even Captain Oxon know we’re there. Certainly not the foreman, Ted Wilkins, or any of the other men. We’ll come in from the other side from the stands, and I’ll borrow the horse for mobility. Dolly can arrange official patrol guards with Oxon for tomorrow night… suggest he gives them a warm room, Dolly. He ought to have the central heating on by then.’
‘Friday and Saturday?’ asked Radnor, non-committally.
‘Full guards, I guess. As many as Lord Hagbourne will sub for. The racecourse crowds make cat and mouse impossible.’
‘Right,’ said Radnor, decisively. ‘That’s it, then.’
When Dolly, Chico, and I had got as far as the door he said, ‘Sid, you wouldn’t mind if I had another look at those photographs? Send Jones-boy down with them if you’re not needing them.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘I’ve pored over them till I know them by heart. I bet you’ll spot something at once that I’ve missed.’
‘It often works that way,’ he said, nodding.
The three of us went back to the Racing Section, and via the switchboard I traced Jones-boy, who happened to be in Missing Persons. While he was on his way down I flipped through the packet of photographs yet again. The share transfers, the summary with the list of bank accounts, the letters from Bolt, the ten pound notes, and the two sheets of dates, initials and figures from the very bottom of the attache case. It had been clear all along that these last were lists either of receipts or expenditure: but by now I was certain they were the latter. A certain W.L.B. had received regular sums of fifty pounds a month for twelve months, and the last date for W.L.B. was four days before William Leslie Brinton, Clerk of Dunstable Racecourse, had taken the quickest way out. Six hundred pounds and a threat; the price of a man’s soul.
Most of the other initials meant nothing to me, except the last one, J.R.S., which looked as if they could be the tanker driver’s. The first entry for J.R.S., for one hundred pounds, was dated the day before the tanker overturned at Seabury, the day before Kraye went to Aynsford for the week-end.
In the next line, the last of the whole list, a further sum of one hundred and fifty pounds was entered against J.R.S. The date of this was that of the following Tuesday, three days ahead when I took the photographs. Smith had packed up and vanished from his job and his digs on that Tuesday.
Constantly recurring amongst the other varying initials were two christian names, Leo and Fred. Each of these was on the regular pay-roll, it seemed. Either Leo or Fred, I guessed, had been the big man who had visited and frightened Mervyn Brinton. Either Leo or Fred was the ‘Big Chap’ who had sent Andrews with a gun to the Cromwell Road.
I had a score to settle with either Leo or Fred.
Jones-boy came in for the photographs. I tapped them together back into their box and gave them to him.
‘Where, you snotty nosed little coot, is our coffee?’ said Chico rudely. We had been downstairs when Jones- boy did his rounds.
‘Coots are bald,’ observed Dolly dryly, eyeing Jones-boy’s luxuriant locks.
Jones-boy unprintably told Chico where he could find his coffee.
Chico advanced a step, saying, ‘You remind me of the people sitting on the walls of Jerusalem.’ He had been raised in a church orphanage, after all.
Jones-boy also knew the more basic bits of Isaiah. He said callously, ‘You did it on the doorstep of the Barnes cop shop, I believe.’
Chico furiously lashed out a fist to Jones-boy’s head. Jones-boy jumped back, laughed insultingly, and the box he was holding flew high out of his hand, opening as it went.
‘Stop it you two, damn you,’ shouted Dolly, as the big photographs floated down on to her desk and on to the floor.
‘Babes in the Wood,’ remarked Jones-boy, in great good humour from having got the best of the slanging match. He helped Dolly and me pick up the photographs, shuffled them back into the box in no sort of order, and departed grinning.
‘Chico,’ said Dolly severely, ‘you ought to know better.’
‘The bossy-mother routine bores me sick,’ said Chico violently.
Dolly bit her lip and looked away. Chico stared at me defiantly, knowing very well he had started the row and was in the wrong.
‘As one bastard to another,’ I said mildly, ‘pipe down.’
Not being able to think of a sufficiently withering reply fast enough Chico merely scowled and walked out of the room. The show was over. The office returned to normal. Typewriters clattered, someone used the tape recorder, someone else the telephone. Dolly sighed and began to draw up her list for Seabury. I sat and thought about Leo. Or Fred. Unproductively.
After a while I ambled upstairs to Bona Fides, where the usual amount of telephone shouting filled the air. George, deep in a mysterious conversation about moth-balls, saw me and shook his head. Jack Copeland, freshly attired in a patchily faded green sleeveless pullover, took time out between calls to say that they were sorry, but they’d made no progress with Kraye. He had, Jack said, very craftily covered his tracks about ten years back. They would keep digging, if I liked. I liked.
Up in Missing Persons Sammy said it was too soon for results on Smith.
When I judged that Mark Witney would be back in his house after exercising his second lot of horses, I rang him up and asked him to lend me his hack, a pensioned-off old steeplechaser of the first water.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What for?’
I explained what for.
‘You’d better have my horse box as well,’ he commented. ‘Suppose it pours with rain all night? Give you somewhere to keep dry, if you have the box.’
‘But won’t you be needing it? The forecast says clear and dry anyway.’
‘I won’t need it until Friday morning. I haven’t any runners until Seabury. And only one there, I may say, in spite of it being so close. The owners just won’t have it. I have to go all the way to Banbury on Saturday. Damn silly with another much better course on my doorstep.’
‘What are you running at Seabury?’
He told me, at great and uncomplimentary length, about a half blind, utterly stupid, one paced habitual non- jumper with which he proposed to win the novice chase. Knowing him, he probably would. We agreed that Chico and I should arrive at his place at about eight that evening, and I rang off.
After that I left the office, went across London by underground to Company House in the City, and asked for the files of Seabury Racecourse. In a numbered chair at a long table, surrounded by earnest men and women clerks poring over similar files and making copious notes, I studied the latest list of investors. Apart from Kraye and his various aliases, which I now recognised on sight from long familiarity with the share transfer photographs, there
